@mertzigzag
Madison, WI. - Professional destroyer of software. Sewer Socialist. Queer geek. Wannabe polyglot. Car avoider/Walker/Cyclist/Transit Enthusiast. 🦩🍻 same handle on Fedi @urbanists.social and (formerly) Xitter...
Remember that dedicated Brewers bus line that picked up on Wisconsin Ave. and dropped off at the stadium? Anyway, here's a press release about the Brewers paying for extra Sheriff squads and towing services because of traffic and construction.
Currently working through Nicholas Dagen Bloom’s excellent book “The Great American Transit Disaster” and this is definitely an underlying thread… private owners either underinvested, exited aggressively at the slightest hint of adversity, or were treated by shortsighted cities as tax cows to milk.
BOTH PAULIES ARE ON THE SCORESHEET 🚨
BOTH PAULIES ARE ON THE SCORESHEET 🚨
BOTH PAULIES ARE ON THE SCORESHEET 🚨
Important context for my Madison followers: when I refer to “The Pauls” it’s usually in a negative local context (Fanlund and Soglin👎), but if soccer is involved, “The Pauls” refers positively* to these guys from that other city on an isthmus 👍.
(*unless they’re playing Portland)
Loved that they followed this with the Paul (Rothrock) for Paul (Arriola) sub. All my favorite Pauls working in harmony. 😍
Yup. Recently picked up my old iPhone 4S off the shelf and was reminded that damn that was the perfect form factor for a phone. RETVRN.
Watching far too many competitions involving the Whitecaps over several weeks and I just can’t put my finger on why Berhalter absolutely annoys the shit out of me. I should plan a trip to Vancouver to investigate. 🌊⚽️
(Oh look, that’s right, I have a ticket to Vancouver to go investigate. 😏)
I should make a rezzie at the Moxy or Indigo just in case I get stranded on the east side. Involuntary staycation. ☃️
Might need to open one of those Kalshi things on the over/under of me actually getting to see Rise Against on Sunday night… ❄️
Forest City? That's my *other* Cascadian team kit.
(shhhh... hopefully my Portlandian colleagues aren't paying attention to this thread)
Tennessee grandmother spent nearly six months in jail after AI facial recognition mistakenly linked her to a North Dakota bank fraud case
Of course the day I pick my *other* kit, this is the one they go with. 😂🐳
I love how meat, cheese, and ice cream stores are like a standard feature of Big 10 campuses. UW runs its own little retail ice cream empire out of Babcock Hall… babcockdairystore.wisc.edu
“Black Flag” in one of its more recent incarnations… definitely for worse: Greg Ginn was running the show and seemed to have just the most obvious disdain for the audience. Just there to cash the checks. Sure was a long way off from the talent and ethos of the Rollins era.
The Ambassador is basically doing the bit from “Comrade Detective,” where they show up at the U.S. Embassy and find a Burger King in the lobby filled with fat Americans chomping down burgers. That show was severely under appreciated. 😂
Excel: I see you pasted something that slightly resembles a URL. Let me persistently turn that into a useless hotlink you will struggle to stop auto formatting.
Also Excel: I see you pasted in a list of obviously real URLs. Let me refuse to turn these into hotlinks no matter how much you try. 🤔
Just saw the forecast for Sunday and it was quite a “what the fucking fuck?!?” moment—basically this post, but expand the blob to include Madison. C’mon March, I got shit to do this Sunday, nobody wants this. 🚫❄️
My gut feeling this morning was “sleep in an extra half hour, take the late E connection” and I really should have followed that instinct because now I get to stand around for a half hour waiting for that very same connection. 🫠
Baffled by this morning’s hell commute… apart from dealing with the usual bad drivers & a missed connection, someone literally walked into me on a *wide-open* sidewalk because they were so nose down on their phone. 🤦 I hope they looked up when they got to the intersection full of bad drivers. 🤷♂️
Something I kind of like about the median bus stations is its very in your face for drivers. Hard to say "no one uses the bus" when you watch 5 people cross the street in front of you.
...and "The Intersect" isnt even open yet!
The Italian dugout espresso machine about to reward another home run.
MVP of the World Baseball Classic is gonna be the Italians’ espresso machine. ☕️⚾️
Excellent, my ‘honkbalhoed’* showed up just in time for NL to be thoroughly out of contention. 🇳🇱⚾️
(*they don’t actually call it that, but that’s a fun sort of literal construction… idiomatically it’s a “baseball pet” because the Dutch love combining loan words with false-friend Dutch words. 🤷♂️)
real estate investment trusts, or reits, have been crucial to the expansion of u.s. private prisons and immigration jails.
but what actually is a reit? and how can you make sure your retirement savings aren't invested in one that owns prisons?
check out this guide from @jamieludwig.bsky.social:
Appreciated this piece from @danshafer.bsky.social today -
Growing up in the WOW counties, I felt this part:
"Over the last 10 years when I’ve been knocking on doors... people are like, ‘Don’t tell anybody, but I’m the Democrat on the street.’ And I was like, ‘Actually, there are 5 of you.’"
Owner occupied houses good. Owner occupied apartments bad. Corporate owned rental houses THE WORST. Corporate owned apartments meh.
The folk morality around housing type and tenure in American cities:
I also spoke with folks in Boston, Montgomery County MD, Chapel Hill NC, Columbus, Spokane WA, & Madison WI. All received Congressional $.
But all also said:
1—They need more time to be ready to sign a grant with the FTA
2—They need the FTA to sign the grant to receive their Congressional $
A cartoon by Ron Cobb (1975), showing a shadow of US B-52 bomber above cratered landscape. Two people who look like Vietnamese peasants look up; one says “they’re having problems with their economy again.”
This is from 1975.
today at the World Metaphors Classic the leader of the USA didn't bother to find out the details of the situation his team was in and blindly assumed they would win a matchup they ended up losing, jeopardizing their long-term standing for no good reason
SOMEONE MAKE A USA/MEXICO/ITALY TIEBREAKER TABLE
This World Baseball Classic is baseballing so hard. 😂