I am on my way back to Milwaukee again. To get home I have 2 choices (if I decide to go last minute.) There is the $12 (plus $0.50 processing fee) ‘MegaBus’ or the $21 Amtrak ‘Hiawatha’ train service. Both run about the same number of round trips daily. I know the Hiawatha runs 7 round-trips daily, with the early morning one (one leaves Chicago at 6:00 AM and the other one leaves Milwaukee at 6:15) not running on Sundays. That means that at any one time there is one train going to Chicago and one going to Milwaukee. The nice thing about the Hiawatha cars is the wide seats, ample legroom and power plugs at every seat. The nice thing about the MegaBus is that it costs $8.50 less per one way.

Today I took the Hiawatha.

I always wondered why the Hiawatha takes about the same time to get to Milwaukee as the MegaBus does. The Hiawatha runs a good chunk of its trip at 80 miles per hour, and rarely is there traffic on the rails (I believe that they have to yield to freight trains, but I’m not 100% sure.) So I opened up my cell phone and launched Google Maps. It turns out that the train goes out west before it goes east. Sort of like a < shape. It stops in Glenview, Illinois, which is significantly west of the lake.

It isn’t that there is a lack of track from the Amtrak station directly north. Union Pacific owns a line that goes right along the lake that they lease to Metra heavy-rail city-suburb service. And it isn’t that the Hiawatha cannot share Metra track, because for a good amount of the current Illinois Amtrak route already shares track with the Metra. In fact, the Glenview station is also a Metra station. To get to the Sturtevant, WI/Racine stop the train has to turn east again, towards the lake, to continue its route to Milwaukee. Who designed this damn thing?

I know that the line is paid for by funds from both the State of Wisconsin and the State of Illinois, but there are a ton of great stops near the lake in Illinois.

I am a little biased here as the near-lake track is somewhat close to Loyola, but putting that aside… what the hell happened here? You would reduce transit time and saves expensive fuel.

Add to that the fact that it takes freaking forever to get from Loyola to Union Station to pick up this train. Depending on the time of day it can take from an hour to two hours to get to and from Union Station to my apartment via public transit whereas it only takes 2 hours 30 minutes to get from Union Station to Milwaukee. 1/3rd of my entire transit time is getting from downtown to my apartment. Now I can take a cab it costs me $25, which takes a half hour to get to and from Union Station. Not to mention the cost for a cab from Loyola to Union Station is $25 with tip.

I solved this problem today… I think. I took one of the buses that runs ‘express’ down lakeshore drive. I take this bus from time-to-time to get down to Loyola’s water-tower campus as it takes less time to get downtown (even with stops) as it does to wait for a seat on a shuttle that runs every 15 minutes (and has to deal with the same traffic.) With my new solution I get to the water-tower campus (on the magnificent mile right in front of the John Hancock building,) I get off the bus, and flag a taxi. There are taxis all over where the first bus stop is, so flagging one down is super-easy. All of a sudden my transit time goes from an hour with one transfer to 40 minutes with a transfer from a bus to a cab. And costs about $12 less after you take into account the cost of the pass.

Besides the fact that I didn’t know there were 75,000 people in Portland total, much less Democrats with a free Sunday to go see Barack Obama speak, there were 75,000 people at a Barack Obama rally in Portland Sunday.

Wow, just… wow. The Washington Post has more specific details

But I have to wonder what was going through the minds of the advance staff and secret service when they started seeing that crowd.

In other news, Electoral-Vote.com is back up, tracking polls state-by-state for the 08 election. I was addicted to that site in 2004, so this should be fun.

I have come to a conclusion recently:

Black men can pull off a shaved head without glasses. In fact, with glasses it seems… not as appealing as without them
White men cannot pull off the bald head look without glasses. With glasses it looks good, no glasses just doesn’t work

That is one thing you can’t get away from when it comes to race: What a man looks good in. I mean, you have so many things to take into account. Especially with suits and tuxes.

If I was going bald I would totally do the ’shaved head with glasses’ look instead of trying for a comb over. Although if genetics serves me right I will go gray instead of bald. Not sure if I would dye my hair or not… I guess if it was single strands of gray mixed in with brown i would look i would dye it… Kinda depends on how ‘respectable’ I look with the gray.

I should go work at Macy’s in the suit department. Some of the guys there have to be the most amazing people I have ever met when it comes to menswear. I was picking out a tie a few months ago and was unsure about what color to get. I had the best customer service experience of my life and I came home with a kickass tie at just the right price. It even works with both a blue collared shirt and a white one with the same suitcoat. The same tie with two colors. I sent Macy’s an email saying how awesome my tie is. Hopefully that guy got a raise.

Try getting that kind of service at Target.

Now that I have a bunch of time on my hands I am going to do something I should have done years ago: Actually design a theme for this site.

Right now I am using a modified form of the default theme for WordPress called Kubrick (after Stanley Kubrick, in my opinion one of the best directors of all time.) All I did was take the default theme and make my own header images. The top of the design is fun to mess with and I have about 15 different versions I have played around with.

Some of the headers were topical to posts or pages (this one was about movie posts and this one was about the music page) and some where just stupid (this one had a picture of JFK and this one was cut out of an image I found online)

But none of these things were truly ‘original.’ They made this blog look like every other blog out there, and while this is pretty much like every other blog in the world (run by a single narcissistic person with wayyy too much time on their hands… wait… nevermind) it is also something of a journal that I decided to post to the internet. Some people document their entire lives, I try to document what I think I should document so perhaps someone would learn something from it. Perhaps myself…

Or the entire Loyola mock trial team, family members, a few random people who seem to enjoy reading it, a spattering of colleagues, people who find stuff on Google/AOL/MSN, people who read it on Facebook, people who forward posts and just about everyone who searches for “ghetto prom pictures” for some reason. And some of it has become REALLY useful. Like a post I did about Vector Marketing and their misleading mail. Which has a bunch of comments from people who needed to search for information about this sham company. You never know when something is going to be useful to somebody…

But such a personal thing can not be put on just any old theme. There needs to be a theme that is kickass and really expresses my intent with this thing. It has been around for 3 years, so I am going to scrub through old posts and go through some statistics software to see where people are visiting and from where and start work on a new theme.

Update: Here are all the headers

In the past 7 or so years I do not remember being asked: “What is your opinion of President Bush.” I guess there have been polls I have taken, but usually I just respond to questions with “Dissatisfied” or “Unfavorable.” I don’t go into much detail about it. If you search this blog you won’t find much in the way of criticism of Bush or his policies. In fact, this may be the first post I have ever done that has much to do with my opinion on the current president.

I guess if I am going to have a blog where I post my opinion about things I should probably have an opinion about the current administration. But to be honest, I’m just too exhausted to really focus on it. I know we cannot have 4 or 8 more years of this crap, but I don’t know that we can leave Iraq as it is now. I have something of a “you broke it, you bought it” mentality about the war.

This administration just really sucks at cleaning up its own messes.

Will an Obama administration be better? God I hope so. But can we just leave tomorrow? No. Would I vote for someone who took every troop out tomorrow? Besides that being completely impossible to do I would have a hard time answering that

My cousin is going to Afghanistan in a few months (or a month, I don’t have the details.) He signed up for the Illinois National Guard and got called up. At least he is going to a place I support us being in. The way the Taliban treated their people was unacceptable and the way they supported those that want to hurt us is… obvious. It is good to know that it isn’t ‘America’ that is at war in Afghanistan, it is ‘NATO’ (in ‘’ because I believe Australia is there, and they don’t have much to do with the North Atlantic ocean) that is fighting.

I was reading newsman Keith Olbermann’s book “Truth and Consequences.” Olbermann has a show ‘Countdown with Keith Olbermann’ on MSNBC every night. He ‘counts down’ the top stories of the day, with #5 being the most vital and #1 being the most stupid. Sorta like “start you with the difficult stuff, end on a lighter note.” He is considered ‘liberal’ in a lot of ways, towing the democrat’s line much of the time. Of course, he is a member of the extremist left compared to his competition on Fox News. When he first started ‘Countdown’ he started seeing some things that really… disappointed… him about America and this administration. Starting with Hurricane Katrina.

My definition of ‘Hurricane Katrina’: 1: Deadly humanitarian disaster caused by extreme inexcusable malice at all levels of government following a massive failure of poorly maintained and designed federally managed infrastructure; 2: a display of no comprehensive disaster preparedness and response

In other words “everybody, especially the administration, fucked up. And people died because of it.” Olbermann points out the first words out of ‘Homeland Security’ Secretary Michael Chertoff’s mouth at a press briefing immediately following the disaster: “The city of Louisiana is under water…” Olbermann rightly claims ‘There is the problem right there.’ That (hopefully) unintentional gaff sums up the administration’s response to the disaster: one of absolute incomprehension.

So that is what I think of this administration: A group of people who simply cannot comprehend the real problems of the world around them as anything other than ‘possible security threat.’ A city underwater isn’t a ‘security threat.’ I don’t think that Bush is ‘dumb’ or that his administration is ‘horrible’, I mean, we haven’t been attacked again so they seem to be doing something right. But they are going about it the totally wrong way… I think that Bush and his administration think its ONLY responsibility is to prevent another terrorist attack on the United States and they must do so at all costs. And every other responsibility of the executive branch is best left to people who don’t know what they are doing. Except damage control… obviously not physical damage control… just damage control when the people they put in charge of things fuck up.

Thank god we only have a few more months of this shit. Hopefully.