WobblyReport

Letter to the editor, submitted to info@northernexpress.com Monday, Aug. 29, 2022. Update: published Friday, Sept. 2, 2022. "Are northern Michigan workers being paid what they're worth?" a recent Express article asks. Sources included the Networks Northwest Chief Program Officer, the CEO of Traverse Connect and the president of the Northern Lakes Economic Alliance.  Workers being paid less than we are worth are easy to find. Please talk with us for your newspaper articles. Thank you,  [WobblyReporter]

The supposed benefits of running government like a business have been roundly debunked many times over. Woodrow Wilson unsuccessfully pitched the idea  in 1887. But the myth is nowhere more enduring than in rural and small-town America. Here, dividing lines between family, business and government tend to dissolve, leaving us to wonder how real they ever were or are – here or elsewhere. On a rural or semi-rural township board of trustees, several seats are typically held by salaried municipal administrators: clerks, supervisors, treasurers and the like. Most have other significant business interests in the area in some combination to their municipal income. The boards and commissions for Whitewater Township oversee the northeastern corner of Grand Traverse County. Farm pastures, orchards and protected state lands constitute a lot of space in the community, to the general liking of many. Development has been slow more than steady, with regular construction of luxury homes amidst the ...

Very pleased that this labor of love came to be published in three parts at industrialworker.org Part 1 Western Federation of Miners and the founding of the IWW Colorado and the IWW’s early years The Mountain West and the Fall of the IWW Part 2 A.S. Embree returns to Colorado The rise of IWW Industrial Union 210-220 The Colorado Coal Strike of 1927 begins Part 3 The Colorado Coal Strike of 1927 The Columbine Mine Massacre The end of the Colorado Coal Strike of 1927 IWW in Colorado: Then to now

Letter to the editor, submitted to info@northernexpress.com and letters@record-eagle.com Saturday, Aug. 6, 2022. Published Aug. 12 and 14, respectively. Public discourse around abortion policy ignores the elephant in the room. To wax righteously about this inalienable right versus that moral principle is to deliberately avoid material reality. A U.S. policy regime without federal abortion protections is one in which some poor people are losing access to abortion, while no rich people are.

I replied to a call for April 1 articles for a small, local paper. My piece was rejected on the grounds that it too directly referenced a local personage. Skirt's vs Short's: battle of sexes brewing in craft beer scene By Imbibio DeBeers The vast majority of the history of beer belongs to women. Take the case of the witch – one of the most powerful icons of magical femininity. A 2020 study reported that everything from cats and brooms to pointy hats and enchanted potions are all related to women’s dominance in the brewing activities of prehistoric civilizations. Cats were kept to guard the grain used in beer production from rodents. Brooms propped open doors where fermented beverages were available and tall hats marked heads of women associated with ales sales. “Women, or alewives or brewsters, were historically the primary producers of beers/ales for about 20,000 years,” says the research from the International Journal of the Sociology of Leisure . After millennia of doing t...

"Mayor Duff L--- commented that W---- and his staff had taken the prospect of running the airport at a profit from a pie-in-the-sky fantasy to a distinctly feasible horizon," said the reporter's final line at the local newspaper. Leave them wanting more, he thought. Who can possibly get enough quippy wordplay in mundane municipal board meeting stories? He took his child to say goodbye to her friends at the preschool. She played like it was any other day. The now former reporter suppressed his emotions as best he could.  A sad man casts a long shadow. When the farewells were said and the blame mislaid for a bathtub that was most certainly that same color when he had moved in, all that was left was to pack all the possessions that had accrued in the 900 square foot apartment into 360 cubic feet of rented box truck cargo space and stoically haul them down from the mountains and across the vast plains of U.S. flyover country. Boop boop be doop. During the drive his old cowork...

This was not submitted for publication and is personal correspondence. It does contain information about the possible future direction of this blog. Dad and Trout, Glad the holiday circular is going over well. The initial development was fun, working with so much more space than in years past. But as with most creative endeavors the fun gradually transformed – first to annoyance after I bought out the town's stock of 9x12" envelopes and then also the town to the south's, then to drudgery as I meticulously folded each unit in half and inserted into envelopes, then to supreme frustration as I tried to interface various computers with the office printer and the address label sheets that caused it to choke repeatedly, and finally to the anxiety that attends a near lynching when, on an unassuming Saturday morning, I dumped well over 100 envelopes in front of the sole clerk at the local post office and caused a rather impressive backup. I offered some time back to work for their...