I spent Memorial Day weekend building victory gardens

Here we have it, a map showing a bulk of the sites where we built raised bed gardens on Memorial Day weekend in 2009 and 2010. The blue and green sites are from 2009, and the purplish ones are this year’s. A majority are located in the north side central city areas. Some of the south side sites are not visible on this view on the map. You can’t see the sites in St. Francis, Cudahy, or Oak Creek.

I’ll have a link up as soon as we make it public. That way you can see for yourself how just many sites we did, and how broadly it reached.

2010 VGI Blitz to be on Wisconsin Foodie

This just came in from Victory Garden Initiative director Gretchen Mead:

I met with the producer of Wisconsin Foodie, Arthur Ircink, today. I’m excited to say that The Blitz will be its own episode of Wisconsin Foodie. Arthur and his crew will be following around Blitz Teams and interviewing people all day.  I hope you will all join us at 8:00 at the Urban Ecology Center this Saturday, May 29th, in this exciting endeavor to make change.  This event is nothing without dedicated volunteers that show up to impart the Victory Garden Initiative’s mission.  We are making real change, one garden at a time.  Show up and tell the world why this matters.

Heck yeah!

New look for the blog

I’m now using the Notepad theme. I like it better than the previous theme, save for that this theme doesn’t let me have an image at the top. But, so much else is good about it. It’s wider in the center, and makes the links much more accessible, They used to be buried at the bottom of the page. I hope you find it’s more readable thanks to the new theme — which is to say nothing of the content! That’s going to continue right on going.

Political revelations: Wall drops out of U.S. Senate race; Colón not seeking reelection; Plale to have a challenger?

I know I’d said “no politics till Monday” or something like that, but this stuff you just can’t overlook. A statement from the Feingold campaign saying something about Wall dropping out of the race landed in my inbox. A quick call confirmed that Terrence Wall is quitting the race against Senator Feingold. Here’s the WisPolitics story.

Notable language in the fourth paragraph: “Wall has struggled to gain traction in the race amid questions about the amount of personal taxes he’s paid in Wisconsin [...].” Lefty bloggers can take credit for making that the first thing out of people’s mouths when Wall’s candidacy was mentioned.

Let’s hope Ron Johnson’s paid his.

Second, Journal Sentinel is reporting that state Rep. Pedro Colón will not be running for reelection. He is the state’s first elected official who happens to be Hispanic. (Didn’t know that; cool.) I wish him luck with whatever he does next.

Third, the estimable Dan Cody broke word that my state senator Jeff Plale may face a strong challenger in the form of Milwaukee County Supervisor Chris Larson. Chris won a seat on the Milwaukee County Board of Supervisor in the 2007-08 election cycle, which is the same race that I was in. While we were technically “opponents” in the primary, our stances were virtually identical. When he resoundingly won the primary, I endorsed him. Supervisor Larson has built a strong reputation in his two years on the Milwaukee County Board. He’d be a terrific senator, and I would enthusiastically support him in that race.

Getting ready for the Victory Garden Blitz of 2010

The Blitz is coming! The Blitz is coming! And that’s a very good thing. For it’s the Victory Garden Blitz, which will bring home gardens and good food to the people of our Milwaukee world.

Before I get into that, a little digression: I’ve spent the past three days pouring over sets of addresses. making maps and plotting routes, all while using a mathematical trick technique I learned in Math 106 class at UWM called Dijkstra’s algorithm. With it, you can plot the optimal route between any number of stops. It’s the fancy name for a logical, or perhaps an intuitive way, to find the route with the least distance between each stop. Here’s how it works:

DIJKSTRA (G, w, s)

1. INITIALIZE SINGLE-SOURCE (G, s)
2. S ← { } // S will ultimately contains vertices of final shortest-path weights from s
3. Initialize priority queue Q i.e., Q ← V[G]
4. while priority queue Q is not empty do
5. u ← EXTRACT_MIN(Q) // Pull out new vertex
6. S ← S È {u}
   // Perform relaxation for each vertex v adjacent to u
7. for each vertex v in Adj[u] do
8. Relax (u, v, w)

Got that? There’ll be a quiz later.

Really, what it is says is, with points A, B, C, …, start at point A, and find the closest point. Then find the next point, which might be point C, or point F. Lather, rinse, repeat. Curiously, the closest point is not always what it appears to be. For instance, I found it shaved a significant distance to go from 74th Street to 107th Street, and then to 103rd, though intuitively, 103rd would seem closer than 107th. But in the “real world,” where streets are aligned in odd ways and traffic comes and goes, it’s quicker and more direct to go from this particular block of 74th Street to 107th, and then to 103rd.

Google Maps has been absolutely indispensable in this task. It’s evolved as I’ve been using it, as has my skill with it. I found that you can click and drag the stops between one another, moving stop G to be between B and C. Before, I thought you had to copy G, paste it on the left side of C, bump everything down, copy and paste and hope you didn’t forget anything. But they’ve made it very easy to swap stops. And that made my life a lot easier.

Anyway. This coming Saturday the 29th, teams of volunteers will be swarming to over 100 sites all around Milwaukee and the numerous burbs to build raised beds at people’s houses. They will look a lot like the five that were built at our house last year:

And I’ve posted a time or two about some of the great food we’ve grown in them.

While we’re not building any new beds at my house for the Blitz this year, I’ve made between two and six new beds at our house so far this year. They’re all unusual, made from tires, or filling a space along the alley. (See below.)

Anyhow, if you would like to participate in the Blitz, come to the Urban Ecology Center at 8 AM on Saturday for the big event kickoff, or call the UEC to find out where we’re at later in the day. We’ll need folks with shovels, power drills, wheelbarrows, and pickup trucks. And we will have volunteers working in all parts of the Milwaukee area. Whitefish Bay and Oak Creek are the polar extremities; most of the work will be going on in the central city. I’ll have the master map up in a day or two. It’s quite a sight.

Hope to see you there!

Oh, and I said there’d be a quiz…

Gene’s house is two miles from Jim’s house. Jim’s house is five miles from Tonya’s house. Tonya’s house is ten miles from Gene’s house. Starting at Betty’s house, which is eight miles from Gene’s house and four miles from Jim’s, what’s the best way to go according to Dijkstra’s algorithm?

I think that’s solvable.

An idea for spurring Park East development

As Dan Cody noted, the tracts of land in the Park East area just north of Downtown that are owned by the City of Milwaukee have been developed, and are producing property tax revenue. Specifically, they are the Flat Iron condos, aLoft Hotel, and the North End condos.

According to the Department of City Development, “The Park East Corridor consists of over 60 acres, 24 of which are prime sites for redevelopment. The properties are located within the Milwaukee Downtown, in close proximity to the Milwaukee River. Milwaukee County owns 16 acres and is currently selling their properties through a Request for Proposal (RFP) process.”

By Dan’s take on this, the County has not been at all proactive about getting the land developed. In fact, it’s gotten to the point where the City is talking to the County about doing something with it, as discussed in this JS article. It’s disappointing that the County-owned portions of land have not been developed, and strange, too. As the County needs more revenue, which it makes from property taxes, why wouldn’t it push harder for that land to be developed? Those answers are beyond me at the moment. But here’s my idea: why doesn’t the City buy the land from the County, and turn it around for resale and development? As the County has been quick to sell some of its finer assets, i.e. the County Grounds, a firm argument could be made for doing this. In these times of county budget deficits, that seems doubly enticing to me.

Dick Leinenkugel out of Wisc. GOP U.S. Senate primary

As famed lefty political seer Zach Dubya whispered through the incense yesterday, former Doyle cabinet member Dick Leinenkugel has dropped out of the Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senate primary race. That leaves just two millionaires, and Dave Westlake.

We still have not seen Westlake’s financial disclosure forms, so it’s impossible to say whether he is or is not a millionaire. Regardless of his actual level of wealth, he has not acted like a snotty millionaire who thinks he can buy his was into office. That’s what I like about him.

So, we have one millionaire out, and two in. That indirectly supports my hypothesis that millionaires cannot beat Senator Feingold. The real test will come in the September primary, when either Johnson, Wall, or Westlake will go on to face Senator Feingold, and then the general election in November. All bets are off at this point with regard to the primary, though my hunch is that Westlake may surprise us all. And Feingold is still incumbent for November.

Also: I just now noticed that the unknown Johnson got the state Republican Party’s endorsement at their this weekend convention. The comments on the JSOnline story are truly amusing. If the people who think referring to Senator Feingold as “Fein-ghoul” will do anything to tilt the race, they’ve got another thing coming. A clue, perhaps…

Pre-”bloated dinosaur” Pink Floyd: “Careful With That Axe Eugene” in 1973

In an old video of an interview with Steve Kilbey, who is the bassist, lyricist, and lead singer of my favorite band in the world, The Church, was asked by an interviewer about songs that influenced him. One he identified was that early underground Pink Floyd classic, “Careful With That Axe Eugene.” In that interview from around 1987, Kilbey identified that song as being from when Pink Floyd was still pushing the boundaries of rock and roll. Older Floyd certainly influenced Kilbey and his bandmates, and their band The Church has had the title of my favorite band in the world since I was introduced to them in 1998 — largely to get me off of listening to Pink Floyd nearly non-stop. (To be fair, later on I interspersed it with Dave Brubeck, Coleman Hawkins, KMFDM, Nine Inch Nails, Ministry, and Einsturzende Neubauten. You know, typical easy listening stuff. (And that was then; today I was kicking it to The Chicken Shack on WMSE.))

Thanks to YouTube, I can make myself feel a bit like I’m half my age for a few minutes by finding films of Pink Floyd that were made before I was born. It’s a good thing they didn’t have YouTube when I was 16 years old. I would have gotten even less done! Take, for example, Pink Floyd performing at Earl’s Court in London on 18 May 1973. This is long-haired Pink Floyd, not what Kilbey called the “bloated old band” playing to “hundreds of thousands of people, bass players jumping around” — that’s David Gilmour’s Pink Floyd on its 1987-1988 Delicate Sound of Thunder tour.

Watch with headphones on, in full screen mode, with the volume turned up, and while sitting alone in a very dark room…

A question for Wisconsin’s Tea Party candidates (and Libertarians, too)

By now you are no doubt wishing that Rand Paul’s remarks about the Civil Rights Act would be forgotten. Sorry, buddy, it’s not. And accusing the president of being “anti-American” won’t work as a distraction.

That said, I’m not here to talk about Rand Paul. I’m writing this to ask Wisconsin’s Tea Party-affiliated candidates, especially those hoping to win the U.S. Senate primary: Do you think that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 should be amended to modify the outlawing of discrimination by private institutions?

Dave Westlake, what say you? Terrence Wall, you’ve spoken at Tea Party rallies. Do you agree with Rand Paul, the tea party star du jour? Wouldn’t it be great if you could not have so many laws hovering over your development business? (Bet you do like the Citizens United decision, though.) And Ron Johnson, here’s a great chance to make yourself known. What say you?

Libertarians who came to the last Drinking Liberally Milwaukee, you want less government noodling in private affairs. What is your opinion on this?

Lively debate at last night’s Drinking Liberally

The past few DLs have been very invigorating as we’ve had people with ideas and stances that we don’t automatically agree with. And what a scene we had at last night’s Drinking Liberally! In addition to meeting Congressional candidate Paul Morel, who’s running against Rep. Gwen Moore in the primary, we had the unexpected pleasure of being joined by the masses from “Liberty on the Rocks.” I don’t think we’ve had such a raucous time at DL since firefighters chastised Mayor Barrett at a 2006 Milwaukee DL event!

In addition to a few very heated arguments over the nature of taxation, we had a lot of genuine discussion and debate over the role and nature of government, and the nature of efficacy of representative government. In short, there was some anti-incumbency in the air, though a lot of it seemed to be based in the very nature of representative democracy. Do we elect people to Congress to think for themselves, or to listen to their constituency and vote on their behalf? That question was never addressed. But it’s kind of hard to ask such heavy questions when you’re having such a fun time with all these people about having a grand time feeling their way about the very institution we’re discussing.

Anyway, pictures:

The man in the suit is Paul Morel. He will be running in the Democratic primary against Rep. Gwen Moore. For first-time candidate, he did very well under some intense questioning by the crowd!

Perhaps this picture is symbolic or representative of the overall feeling of anti-incumbency that is percolating amongst certain distributive aspects of our otherwise disintegrated society. Or maybe I’m just full of it.

Nick was not our “token libertarian” tonight — he was joined by a whole raft of libertarian-leaning folks! Still, no one can deliver quite like Nick.

Real debate happened at Drinking Liberally last night. It was an invigorating experience for all of us.