To be able to say "Noggle," you first must be able to say "Nah."
Dungeons & Dragons immersive fantasy restaurant, amusement experience proposed for Lake Geneva
Strangely enough, I have not been to Lake Geneva. I’d never been to the Wisconsin Dells, either, 2015.
Buy My Books!
Matt Flynn rejects call by two Democratic lawmakers to exit governor’s race.
You know, he almost beat the Patriots. He would be just the man Wisconsin Democrats need to almost beat Scott Walker.
Wait a minute.
Two Assembly Democrats called on former party leader Matt Flynn to exit the governor’s race over his role in shielding priests accused of sexual misconduct.
Never mind, that’s a different guy.
Which is a good thing, because a former Green Bay Packer could probably beat Scott Walker. Well, maybe not Greg Jennings.
Buy My Books!
The “quiz” list? Wisconsin bucket list: 20 things you have to do.
Brian’s score? Not so good:
Although, in my defense:
Still, not a very good showing.
But I have ridden the 23 bus through The Core in Milwaukee daily. Which is something not many people can say.
Buy My Books!
Is this the place where you stay when you go to the Wisconsin Dells, Brian J.?
Wisconsin Dells water park melee erupts after chair taken from group’s table:
A brawl that broke out at a Wisconsin Dells area water park on Mother’s Day with people throwing chairs, garbage cans and food started when someone took a chair from another group’s table.
The melee at Mount Olympus Water and Theme Park was captured on cellphones and video of the mayhem over something so minor was posted on social media.
Yes, yes, it is.
I’ve always maintained that I always live on the bad side of town because it automatically becomes the bad side of town when I move in. Well, I’ve always said that about my brother, but it probably holds true for me, too.
(Link via Knuckledraggin.)
Buy My Books!
Sometimes, when I try to say:
It comes out sounding more like:
This actually happened to me on Saturday, when I threw an elbow that was more like a forearm club, and I tried to say, “Just like Nitschke.” But it sounded like the philosopher.
Which was just as well. The white belt was not from Wisconsin, but was familiar with the philosopher. And if you’re in a martial arts school, you’re supposed to spout off on Eastern philosophy, but Existentialism? Truly, I am a black belt, and studied in alternate forms of thought.
Buy My Books!
River of red Skittles coats Dodge County highway:
A rain-soaked box aboard a flatbed pickup truck ruptured in Dodge County, coating a stretch of County Highway S in Beaver Dam with hundreds of thousands of red Skittles, the sheriff’s office reported Wednesday.
. . . .
The Dodge County Highway Department was called to clean up the candy-coated shells – packed with such yummy ingredients as sugar, corn syrup, hydrogenated palm kernel oil, tapioca dextrin, sodium citrate and carnauba wax – which were intended to be cattle feed because they did not make the cut for packaging, according to the sheriff’s office.
I’ll get back to you when I think of an appropriate punchline.
No, wait, I’ve got it!
So this is where Uncle Herb’s Flavored Milk comes from! Except they don’t call the flavored milk booth at the Wisconsin State Fair Uncle Herb’s these days.
Buy My Books!
This book is a collection of Wisconsin place names with pronunciations for each. It has been published in three editions starting in the 1930s; this edition is from 1968, and it’s a product of the University of Wisconsin Extension Office. So it’s not unlike the provenance of David Burton’s A History of Rural Schools in Greene County, Missouri.
At any rate, I flipped through the book while watching a Packers football game, and I tried to say the names before I read the pronunciations, and I did fairly well, I think. Of course, the names are all said relatively like they look (and I’m steeped from my youth in saying Native American Indian place names). So it’s quite unlike Missouri place names, where even when you think you should know how to pronounce it, you’re wrong (see Boliver, Cuba, Nevada, and so on).
I did have a couple of disputes with it, though. Here’s a sample page, by the way, with one of the disputed pronunciations:
Wisconsin does not have an O sound in it; it is wisKHANsin. Also, there is no L in Mi’WAHkee.
But a quick and interesting flip through during the football game, as I said.
Buy My Books!
A Milwaukee license to kill is when you throw two gutter balls in a frame in bowling.
Personally, I call it “bowling with a calf strain.”
Buy My Books!
20 Things Wisconsinites Always Have To Explain To Out-Of-Towners.
However, the article does not mention cannibal sandwiches. Which Wisconsinites can’t actually explain without making the out-of-towners lose their appetites. But if they do, hey, more cheese curds for us.
Buy My Books!
I found an article called Top 5 places for a Wisconsin cheese pilgrimage.
You know how I can tell it’s not a real top list? It does not include Mars Cheese Castle.
Instead, it identifies five places all in Monroe, Wisconsin to visit.
Given all the cheese in Wisconsin, this seems a rather tightly focused list. Almost as though the “journalist” merely regurgitated a list of places from a Monroe Chamber of Commerce brochure.
Not that there’s anything wrong with Monroe, Wisconsin, or its effective outreach that has gleaned national attention.
But, come on. All five destinations are in the same town? Who would fall for that? Right. People not from Wisconsin. Who read the newspaper.
Buy My Books!
An awesome poster of Danica Patrick with an encouraging sentiment aimed at elementary school children:
Word of advice, though, Trog: Sometimes persistence in pursuit of your dream just gets you a snootful of pepper spray from a deputy enforcing a court order.
Or so I heard.
Buy My Books!
I forget where I saw this link, but the Business Insider’s story is entitled Wisconsin Republican: Women Are Paid Less Because ‘Money Is More Important For Men’, and it’s about how the state of Wisconsin no longer has an equal pay law.
According to the Business Insider, this is Scott Walker’s doing:
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker opened up a new front in the GOP’s war against women last week when he overturned his state’s equal pay law, which made it easier for workers to sue their employers for wage discrimination.
Business Insider links to its earlier piece, entitled The Governor Of Wisconsin May Have Just Blown The Election For Mitt Romney, which puts the repeal on the governor of Wisconsin again:
The Democrats “GOP War On Women” rallying cry got a major lift from Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker today, with the news that the Republican darling repealed a Wisconsin law that made it easier for women to fight wage discrimination.
The Huffington Post reports that Walker quietly overturned Wisconsin’s Equal Pay Enforcement Act last night, bowing to pressure from the state’s Republican lawmakers. The equal pay law was designed to deter wage discrimination by making it easier for workers to press charges against their employers.
Got that? Walker overturned the law, and Walker quietly overturned the law. How did he do this? Fiat? Diktat? Executive order? We have to go to the Huffington Post story linked in the second story to learn how Walker acted unilaterally:
A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.
The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.
In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.
SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.
Wait a minute: The executive branch of government did not act unilaterally, but merely signed a bill passed by both houses of Wisconsin’s legislature? That is, the elected representatives of Wisconsin debated and passed a bill, Scott Walker unilaterally declared war on Women by performing his duty and signing it?
Although the body of the article gets it right, the Huffington Post still pins it on Scott Walker in the headline, “Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Wisconsin Equal Pay Law”.
I realize that, with a Federal executive who ignores the legislature and the courts, that is, the co-equal branches of government, the whole Constitutional civics thing gets purposefully murky.
But can’t “journalists” bother to know the difference between signing a bill and an executive acting like a lone wolf? Or would that threaten the new order, where executives are more than figureheads and have sweeping powers that they should only use for good, or what passes for good in Democrat minds?
Buy My Books!
Republicans take 4 of 6 in recall elections, hold Senate:
Democrats won two state Senate seats in Tuesday’s historic recall elections, but failed to capture a third seat that would have given them control of the chamber.
By keeping a majority in the Senate, Republicans retained their monopoly on state government because they also hold the Assembly and governor’s office. Tuesday’s elections narrowed their majority – at least for now – from 19-14 to a razor-thin 17-16.
If only there were some way the people could have voiced their opinions!
Aside from the election in 2010, the Supreme Court election, the recall elections….
(More from Wisconsonites Troglopundit and Ann Althouse.)
Buy My Books!
I just heard a radio ad on the WISN Internet stream wherein Accunet home mortgage company that said it’s time to refinance your mortgage because of the debt limit crisis.
If the US defaults, mortgage rates are going to go up, the saying goes.
Way to keep your eyes on your ball, boys.
Buy My Books!
Bill could change how Supreme Court chooses chief justice:
Wisconsin’s Supreme Court would be given the power to elect its chief justice under a constitutional amendment that could be introduced to the state Legislature as early as next week.
The bill authored by Rep. Tyler August, R-Walworth, would end a longstanding rule that gives the court’s highest seat to the person with the most seniority. Instead, the seven justices would gather to choose their own chief following any Supreme Court election.
They go by seniority? I thought they selected the chief justice in a fight.
(Link seen on Boots and Sabers.)
Buy My Books!
If I were at the Wisconsin counterprotests, I’d carry this sign:
IF YOU THINK
WALKER=HITLER
WALKER=STALIN
WALKER=MUBARAK
You’re politically and historically ignorant
THANK A TEACHER!
I know, I know, it’s a little long for a sign. But it’s a valid point, I think.
Buy My Books!
In Wisconsin, the sky is bluer, the grass is greener, and the flood waters are browner. And the clouds, they are bigger:
I guess I need to work on my image program’s color compression settings.
Still. I’m not kidding about the sky, by the way. The St. Louis area must have extra haze or something, because it has a slightly greyer cast to its sky than home.
Buy My Books!
As I told everyone I saw this weekend, Milwaukee is very odd in that its metropolitan area is small and drops off abruptly into farmlands. You can drive from the south end of the area to the north end of the area in a little over 30 minutes on the freeway. In St. Louis, by contrast, just starting from downtown (which doesn’t include the eastern suburbs because they’re in Illinois and although they like to pretend they count, they don’t), you can drive for well over an hour one its freeways and still travel through well-developed suburbs.
However, in that sprawling farmland just beyond the reaches of Milwaukee’s metropolitan area, there are signs that the development juggernaut is coming. This photo, taken along US 60 just outside of Jackson proves it. I passed fields, tractors driving on the side of the road, tractors for sale, and a sign:
It isn’t the farmers moving into CONDOS in the middle of nowhere.
Based on my experience with the St. Louis area and how my former area in northwestern Jefferson County has grown, I expect the way of life of those people in Jackson and in Richfield and in Hubertus and around those parts will change drastically in the next 20 years. If Milwaukee has the population to support it.
It’s progress, I guess, but I’m still sad. Perhaps I should be like John D. MacDonald, Carl Hiaasen, et al, and write poetic crime fiction novels to lament it.
Buy My Books!
A Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel watchdog report finds that some school districts have been funding pension plans and whatnot with risky investment schemes:
Five Wisconsin public school districts have made an investment gamble that could force taxpayers to finance multimillion-dollar bailouts.
The districts – Kenosha, Kimberly Area, Waukesha, West Allis-West Milwaukee and Whitefish Bay – have piled up debt in deals to help fund health insurance and other non-pension benefits for retirees. But as global financial markets have seized up, the districts have been told the value of their investments has fallen so much that they might need to come up with a combined $53 million to avoid default.
Ah, what the heck, it’s funny money anyway, right? The taxpayers always have more.
Buy My Books!
Brett Favre Set to Retire After 17 Years.
Report: Gary Gygax, ‘Father of D&D,’ Dies at 69.
Seriously. What’s left for a Wisconsin boy? Governor Doyle and high tax rates? The Aaron “Mr. Glass” Rodgers era in Packers football?
You know, I once met Gary Gygax when GenCon was still in Milwaukee, as nature intended it. It was after TSR sued Game Designers Workshop into oblivion for including trademarked properties like elves and hit rolls into the Dangerous Journeys system. Gygax looked like an old biker and regaled me and a couple of friends with some stories about another system he was developing and some weird role-playing anecdote about carnivorous trees.
I never met Brett Favre, though, and I actually foolishly turned down a chance to see him play the last year. However, I think that the conversations would have been similar.
Buy My Books!
