Robert Downes

Random Thoughts Robert Downes The Last Daze of Summer
Robert Downes 8/31/09

Remember the “Year Without A Summer”? Neither do I, because it happened in 1816. It was also called the “Year Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.”
Crops failed throughout the U.S. and Europe -- killed off by frost and two huge snowstorms in June. Ice was reported on the lakes and rivers of Pennsylvania in July and August, and (if Wikipedia can be believed) there were temperature swings from as high as 95 degrees to near-freezing within the space of a few hours.

Features Robert Downes Under the Eightball
Tim Hall honors his sister Lori with a documentary on Lyme Disease

By Robert Downes 8/31/09

Filmmaker Tim Hall will see his labor of love up on the screen at the State Theater in Traverse City this Monday, Aug. 31, with Under the Eightball, which promises to be a hard-hitting documentary.
A director, musician and activist in progressive causes, Tim is the brother of Traverse City writer Lori Hall-Steele, whose death at an early age last year inspired his film tribute. Here’s what he had to say about the film on the eve of its premiere:

Books Robert Downes The One to Read this Summer
The Living Great Lakes by Jerry Dennis
By Robert Downes 8/24/09

Informative, wise, funny -- and an adventure story to boot -- The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas by Jerry Dennis is a page-turner that reads like a novel while informing you on par with a college education on the history, geology and biology of our region’s greatest resource.
Published in 2003 to widespread acclaim, The Living Great Lakes is this summer’s selection by TC Reads, a community book club sponsored by the Friends of the Traverse Area District Library that takes a crack at a different title each year from April-October, followed by a public event with the author.
The book delves Michener-style into the natural history of the Great Lakes, taking you back 600 million years or so to a time when Northern Michigan lay beneath a saltwater sea, filled with critters whose exoskeletons would someday become our Petoskey stones.
But before you can grow bored with the Paleozic Era, Dennis skips to the recent past and his adventures getting seasick on his first tack with the Chicago-Mackinac Race; or the fun of crewing on the Malabar on its cruise along the St. Lawrence Seaway.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts
Robert Downes 8/24/09
A Bear Trap for Homegrown Terrorists

When Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Alfred E. Murrah Building in April, 1995, Americans were rattled and outraged by photos of 168 deaths, including children killed in a nearby daycare. But the Oklahoma City Bombing was nowhere near the bee’s nest kicked up by the fall of the Twin Towers in 2001.
That’s because America has always had a tolerance for paramilitary types, white supremacists, skinheads and political extremists dating back to the raiders of Bloody Kansas in the 1850s and the Ku Klux Klan. We’ve tossed Arab farmers into Guantanamo Prison for eight years without trial on the mere suspicion of being terrorists, yet there is no Gitmo for our own home-grown terrorists.
In contrast to the Muslims, America’s domestic terrorists are largely considered to be colorful characters playing soldier, whose stockpiling of weapons and talk of bringing down the government is not only tolerated like a post-Kindergarten version of ‘show and tell,’ but even tacitly encouraged and egged on by the Rush Limbaugh Jrs. of talk radio or the Glenn Becks of Fox News.
So when one of these guys shoots a doctor in church, as was the case with George Tiller in May; or kills a guard at the Holocaust Museum, as was the fate of museum guard Stephen Johns in June, it makes the news for a couple of days and then people move on until the next school massacre, or whatever.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes When the Mob Rules, the People Lose
Robert Downes 8/17/09
When the kings and queens of Europe heard of the American Revolution in the 1770s, they doubted that our experiment in democracy would succeed because they assumed our government would fall prey to anarchy and mob rule.
Given what we’ve seen on television with organized activists disrupting the town hall talks on health care reform, perhaps those royals were right.
Apparently, the protesters all have solid gold Blue Cross/Blue Shield coverage and think our health care system is fine and dandy the way it is, without a concern for their fellow Americans being raked over the coals by the insurance industry. Armed with Internet advice on how to disrupt public meetings, they‘re getting a lot of attention on TV, while Americans who lack health insurance are ignored.
But when the mob rules, the people lose.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts
Banking promises broken
Robert Downes 8/10/09

Banks have been given billions of dollars over the past year to help lower the mortgages of homeowners in danger of foreclosing. But, as noted in the financial news last week, those funds aren‘t being used as intended. And while banks are making record profits and dishing out billions in bonuses to their employees, the pain in Main Street, America continues.
Take the case of William, a 41-year-old single dad who bought his home near East Bay in Traverse City three years ago for $145,000.
Last week, William (that‘s his middle name) saw his dream of home ownership threatened when his house went up for a foreclosure auction in a sheriff‘s sale.
The good news for William is that no one bid on his house, partly, he says, because mortgage holder, Wells Fargo, tacked on $15,000 in interest as well as fees and penalties for an asking price of $164,000, pricing the modest house out of the market. Now, he says, the home goes back to the note-holder and will be relisted by a realtor friend of his. William‘s parents plan to buy the home and sell it back to him in a year or so when he‘s back on his feet.
Complicated? Yes. Unnecessary? Probably, considering William‘s eight-month struggle with Wells Fargo to try lowering his 9.9 percent mortgage.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Pearls Before Swine
Robert Downes 8/3/09
Back at my first newspaper job in 1979, there was a woman in the graphic
design department who often worked until midnight on deadline, typing our
junk into long strips of plasticized paper which were then waxed and
pasted on sheets to send to the printer.

Books Robert Downes Ripping the Lid Off the Writing Racket

By Robert Downes

How I Became a Famous Novelist
By Steve Hely
Black Cat Books
322 pages - $14

“When my career as a novelist began, my ambitions were simple: to learn
the con, make money, impress women, and get out.”

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts 7/27/09
Robert Downes
Trust & Consequences
If your spouse was caught fooling around under the covers with someone else, would you go on national TV and stand behind him (or her) and make like it’s all nicey-nicey now and you’re on the road to “healing”?
We’ve seen a parade of political ‘Stepford Wives’ standing behind their men at press conferences over the past few years. Consider the rogue‘s gallery:
• New York Governor Eliot Spitzer spends $7,000 a pop to have sex without a condom with a call girl.
• New Jersey Gov. Jim McGreevey drops the bomb on TV (and his wife) that he’s gay.
• Idaho Sen. Larry Craig is caught seeking sex with other men in a Minneapolis airport bathroom.
• Presidential candidate John Edwards is caught making a baby with his “videographer.”

Music Robert Downes Music on Mt. Holiday
New concert venue offers dinner & a show
Robert Downes 7/20/09
Local musicians will hit a high note -- literally -- at a new dinner and concert series atop Mt. Holiday Ski Hill on the east side of Traverse City, beginning this week.
The new gig is called “Music in the Hills with Northern Michigan Songwriters in the Round,” to be hosted every Wednesday at the Mt. Holiday Lounge.
“This grew out of a music series we had last winter,” says manager Rick VanTongeren. “During the winter, a number of folksingers came in every Sunday evening and played in the lounge. It was a really popular event and a big hit with everyone.”

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thought
There aughta‘ be a law...
Robert Downes 7/20/09
Here‘s another idea for marketing Michigan out of its troubles. Allow every restaurant in the state to sell Michigan-made beers and wines without a liquor license.
A bright spot in Michigan‘s economy is the success of our wineries and microbreweries. We have more than 50 wineries in the state, and as Rick Coates has noted in his “Bottoms Up“ column, Michigan is now considered one of the top destinations in America for the quality of its brewpubs and microbrews.
So what is Lansing doing to coax this goose into laying more golden eggs? Lip service.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Random Thoughts
Robert Downes 7/13/09
Our Magic Bubble
The recession doesn‘t seem to be putting much of a dent in Northern Michigan this summer, where cool weather has driven tourists off the beaches and into stores and restaurants to benefit the region‘s economy.
Anecdotally, we‘ve heard from our writers that tourism is down in some of the smaller towns around Northern Michigan, but you wouldn‘t know that in Traverse City, where we‘re recovering from the National Cherry Festival and its 500,000 visitors, while bracing for the TC Film Festival to start at the end of the month. The sidewalks in town were packed in early July as we weathered temperatures that seemed more in line with October. Rest assured, tourists, we locals also look forward to beach weather, since we‘re barely out of our winter coats.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes The Old Boat
Robert Downes 7/6/09
I bought an old sailboat a few years ago and have since been soaked with the thrill of discovering the ‘other’ side of Northern Michigan that starts at the waterline.
“Missbehavin’” is a 31-year-old junker with an appalling number of broken, missing, loose or frayed parts. Since I don’t know enough about sailboats to know exactly what should go where or how, I’ve taken to patching Missbehavin’ up with bungee cords, the greatest invention known to man this side of duct tape.
Built in 1978, Missbehavin’ is a CL-16 dinghy, meaning a Canadian version of the 16-foot Wayfarer, which was a popular racing boat prior to the invention of the catamaran and the Laser. I bought it used from the Traverse Area Community Sailing club; apparently the dinghy once belonged to a well-loved sailor who used to ply it up and down Lake Leelanau. Since it‘s bad luck to rename a boat, I’ve kept the original name, even though she’s been behaving pretty good so far.
Since I’ve only had a couple of lessons from my much braver brother Mike, I approach the idea of sailing with a healthy sense of cowardice. Forget racing. The truth is, I’m mostly a self-taught sailor, and when the boat heels way over with the wind, I’m more likely to be filled with the terror of tipping over, than the exhilaration of ripping through the waves.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes Healthcare reform hell: one way out
Robert Downes 6/29/09
Recently, a writer from Vogue magazine caused a stir on the Oprah Winfrey Show by noting that people in Minnesota looked like “little houses” during her visit to that plump and voluptuous state.
“I’d just been on a trip to Minnesota, where I can only kindly describe most of the people I saw as little houses,” Anna Wintour said. “There’s such an epidemic of obesity in the United States, and for some reason, everybody focuses on anorexia.”
Wintour is right: on the whole, we Americans don’t do a very good job of taking care of ourselves, and that’s the 900-lb. hog on the table of healthcare reform in our country that no one’s talking about.
Who is going to pay for our sins, and how?
Consider that 60 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. The federal Centers for Disease Control reports that obesity will soon be the number one killer in America. Overeating also contributes to diabetes, hypertension, heart disease and cancer.

Random Thoughts Robert Downes U.P. Supermax Deserves a Look
Robert Downes 6/22/09
Recently, U.S. Rep. Bart Stupak came up with an idea for pumping an extra
$1 billion or so into the economy of the Upper Peninsula. He was turned
down flat.
The idea? Turn one of the U.P.‘s prisons into a supermax facility and
transfer the detainees of Guantanamo there in exchange for a fat check
from Uncle Sam each year.
Stupak wrote a letter to President Obama in February, suggesting that the
30-acre Camp Manistique be converted to a high-security prison to house
the Gitmo prisoners.