In the far corner of my closet there is an old pair of wingtip shoes that I am going to get resoled soon.
And then I’m going to put red laces in them.
That was the look being walked around downtown Muscatine this morning by author Dan Buettner, who created the Blue Zone movement. He was in Muscatine for a walkability tour given by Dan Burden, executive director of the Walkable and Livable Communities Institute Inc. There was a lot of media there, so you should be able to find some news coverage of the event somewhere if you are interested.
I got to visit for a minute or two with Buettner, who seemed like a nice guy. And I’m really interested in the ideas he and Burden both promote. I really hope their movement takes off in Muscatine.
But it was later during the walking tour of downtown that I spied Buettner’s shoes. I can’t help but think my old wingtips are going to look pretty cool decked out like that with some bright, red laces.
Blue Zones author Dan Buettner visits this morning in Muscatine with Mary Odell, Muscatine director of public health.
It’s a rare day at MCSA when something amazing doesn’t happen.
For me, however, today will be more memorable than most days. Ray Verbraak of Verbraak Welding in Bettendorf arrived to install the four custom-made bike racks he built for MCSA. The wracks were purchased with a generous donation from the Melon City Bike Club and other private donations. But as is sometimes the case, once Verbraak started to hang them up on the Fourth Street side of the MCSA building, we discovered the fourth one wouldn’t fit where we had planned to put all of them. After a couple of quick huddles and conversations with Pam Collins, the director at Musser Public Library, we agreed to put the fourth rack there.
Ray Verbraak
A number of residents in the MCSA Men’s Dorms use bikes in nice weather as their primary mode of transportation. Because of that, we anticipate they will use most of the nine hooks now installed on the MCSA building. But all four of the racks are meant to be used by anyone who bikes downtown and needs a place to park. Combined, the four racks have spaces for 12 bikes. The bikes can be securely locked on to each rack. For what it’s worth, I would expect Greg Harper of Harper’s Cycling & Fitness to sometimes ride to church on Sunday and park his bike on one of these racks. And I won’t be surprised if the rack installed at the library is used more than the other three combined.
For this afternoon, I parked one of my bikes at the library so people could see how the new racks are used. Getting them today is exciting news, if you ask me.
For several years, several of my biking friends and I have been making an annual trip each fall on the Great River Trail from Rock Island, Ill., to Savanna. On these trips, we usually stop at It’s On The River in Port Byron, Ill., which is where we first saw and used Verbraak’s bike racks. It’s exciting to finally have something like them in Muscatine. And just in time for biking season.
Well, that’s true if bloviating is a sin and if my typing here ranks on the same level as the hot air generated this morning during a brief discussion on “Morning Joe” about the controversy swirling around Mike Rice, the men’s basketball coach at Rutgers University.
For those who don’t know, “Morning Joe” is the morning cable-TV chat fest hosted on MSNBC by Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Willie Geist. Along with a revolving door of pundits, they discuss the news of the day, which today included Rice, 44, who has coached at Rutgers since 2010.
Mike Rice Jr.
In a video released Tuesday by ESPN, Rice is shown shouting profanities at players in practice, shoving them and throwing basketballs at them. For his behavior, he was fined $50,000 by the university in December and suspended for three games, according to news reports.
I’ve just told you as much about this as anyone else learned by watching “Morning Joe.” But it’s what happened next on the panel discussion that was interesting and points to what’s wrong with these shows.
First, let me say I don’t know nearly enough about the situation at Rutgers to say what should happen to the coach.
But that must just mean I’m not as smart as Joe, who condemned Rice and then passed the billy club to the next panelist as the discussion moved around the table. By the time it got back to Joe, he was calling for Tim Pernetti, the Rutgers athletic director, to be fired.
The whole process repeated itself, getting back again to Joe, who then said Rutgers President Robert L. Barchi ought to be fired if he doesn’t step up and deal with both Rice and Pernetti.
The conversation was repeated at least two or three times as a new panelist joined the discussion so he, or she, could bloviate. I guess this was done because the world cares what Bob Herbert, a former columnist at the New York Times, thinks about the Rutgers basketball coach. Of course, this would be because Herbert usually writes about poverty, the Iraq war, racism, according to his Wikipedia page.
I’m glad I’m not likely to be “fired” from my job by someone as smart as Joe and Bob and the others who are there primarily to fill broadcast air time with hot hair. There must be better things they could do.
But for my saying so, please, Father, forgive me for passing a snap judgement after watching just a few minutes of something on TV. And please show the same forgiveness to Joe and Bob and the others.
An afterward from the writer:
I was thinking about all of this after I posted it, and what it proves is the wisdom of my friend, Larry, who is an engineer and is way smarter than I am.
“Don’t watch the angry people on the TV,” is something Larry often tells me.
But that’s exactly what I did this morning instead of going to the gym. I would have been much better off at the gym.
You and your iPhone might need to enter a 12-step program if, during one of the rare occasions in which you are listening to FM radio, you hear Rock ‘N Roll All Night by KISS.
That’s not really a problem until your first thought is to “share” the song on Facebook. And then you remember you can’t because you are listening to the radio instead of listening to Spotify on your phone.
In the far corner of my closet there is an old pair of wingtip shoes that I am going to get resoled soon.
