SUBURBAN SPRAWL WAS A LONG TIME IN THE MAKING.

I'll start 2025's attempt to post fifty book reviews with John Stilgoe's Metropolitan Corridor: Railroads and the American Scene.  Although the book features a train on the dust jacket, and railroads in the subtitle, it's not ferroequinology.  Nor is it urban planning, although I intend to argue that amateur or professional urbanists will gain a great deal from a close reading.

Professor Stilgoe served the faculty of landscape architecture at Harvard at the time Metropolitan Corridor was published.  He also has experience in military intelligence and an affinity for vintage O Scale modelling.  The preface to Metropolitan Corridor engages in a great deal of product differentiation, concluding with "This book offers only an introduction, an addition to the vocabulary of visual analysis of the built environment."  That follows a disclaimer, "The following pages look as closely as possible at the physical presence of the railroad industry and its infrastructure and seek to interpret the public attitude toward them.  Dividing object from creating system may be unwise, but to research the origin, growth, and place of corporate finance in this period is to produce another book."  Presumably inter alia Alfred Chandler and Ken Galbraith had that covered.

I intend to focus Book Review N^o. 1 on supporting the outrageous claim of the post's title.  First, though, let me note that there's a lot in Metropolitan Corridor for culture-studies and assorted humanities types to learn from.  My elaborations will come after the jump.

First, where do you find the metropolitan corridor?  Do you look in Lionel catalogs?  Do you read pulp magazines?  Perhaps today's "theorists" might rediscover inductive pattern-recognition rather than arguing, on the basis of tight and empirically empty priors, that Sir Topham Hatt is a tyrant, or that there's too much sex-stereotyping in the toy department at Christmas.

Second, how do you describe the metropolitan corridor?  Do you paint it "with mixed emotions"?  Depict it as a smoky despoiler of all that is beautiful?  Sneak a pickpocket into the Gare St-Lazare?  Or show the giant conquerors of space, time, and drudgery?  Most of the artistic establishment might accentuate the despoilation, although there is enough celebration of the accomplishments to fill Milwaukee's Grohmann Museum with such paintings.  Do you write of it as soul-crushing, or do you affirm it?  Yes, the high school American Literature curriculum is a heavy dose of Upton Sinclair and Sinclair Lewis and general "bourgeois bland sucks" and yet, concurrent with the publication of Babbitt, p. 77, came civic boosters establishing "Babbitt clubs."  Les deplorables, an echo in time.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

Reality bats last.  Reality thinks not.  (Even Charlie Sykes occasionally gets something right.)  "Dementia Joe would have been crushed by an even larger margin than Kamala Harris was."  No fraud needed, only a vote of no confidence.  “The popular vote result was almost entirely a collapse in support for Harris and Democrats, not an increase in support for Trump and MAGA.”

Farewell, Jarrett regency.  "Biden’s presidency had been a sham from its very first day, a project managed by a group of advisers rather than an actual president, and that cabal couldn’t fire anyone who might reveal the secret."  We can't run him.  "I just was at a meeting with him with several other senators and he couldn’t even function"  It is all an inglorious coda to five decades in public office.  Speaking of inglorious codas, "Joe Biden's advisory opinion that he thinks the Equal Rights Amendment ratified is empty, vain, given to the winds."

No kidding.  "The world will not end on January 20."  The squandering of the peace dividend might have.  "We had started electing cool presidents after the Cold War ended, when it suddenly felt as if the stakes of the American presidency were much less consequential—less nuclear.  Cool never ages well."

The time for cool has passed.  "Donald Trump is glaring because he means bidness. His bidness is to shift the paradigm on the mendaciously sanctimonious managerial class of the USA, of which The New York Times is the principal mouthpiece."  Has nearly 40 years of unserious presidents been enough?

America is done being guilted into accepting the crazy.  The hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.  Go figure.  "Young men don’t like being ruled over by neurotic — and sometimes psychotic — women."

CRISIS + BIPARTISAN = STUPID.   "Whenever there's a crisis and a bipartisan push to DO SOMETHING, the odds are about six out of five that the SOMETHING will turn out to be too big, too expensive, and corrosive to liberty."  With the rent-seekers cleaning up.

Reality dawns on the Woke.  "Despite living nowhere near working-class black and brown people, this do-gooder somehow knew he spoke for them.  'What happens if your social experiment of abolishing the police ends badly?  What happens if it causes an outbreak of gun violence, gang violence, and youth violence?  You lead an ivory-towered existence in a wealthy white neighborhood whereas my constituents, poor people of color, will be forced to live with the consequences of your social engineering.  Is that truly progressive—to have white progressive luxury beliefs whose costs are primarily borne by people of color?'"  Somewhere George Wallace is nodding.

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

NO THANK YOU.

Tennessee Republican proposes amendment to allow Trump to serve third term.  You have to be careful what you ask for, the XXII Amendment took effect in 1951 and the first president whose term was thus limited was Dwight Eisenhower, who I suspect many Republicans would have preferred to run in 1960, rather than turning to Richard Nixon.

Moreover, I prefer that Constitutional amendments have the clarity of train orders, which this proposed amendment is not.

[Andy] Ogles proposed an amendment Thursday that says, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

As written, it would only apply to Grover Cleveland and Donald Trump and it would have prevented Theodore Roosevelt from seeking a third term.  Donald Trump will be in his eighties in 2028.  Perhaps Representative Ogles and the rest of the Trumpian populists ought work on developing a bench in both houses of Congress and among the governors in order to continue the policies they seek to continue without making the presidency even more of a cult than it currently is.

SHOW US YOUR LARK TICKETS.

Last year, I called attention to a private venture working with Union Pacific to run an overnight train between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

That venture is at the stage of issuing renderings of their latter-day Pullmans.

Dreamstar Lines, which hopes to launch luxury overnight train service between San Francisco and Los Angeles, has released conceptual renderings of Art Deco-inspired interiors for its equipment.

The company commissioned Designworks, a BMW Group company, to create initial concepts for its plan to retrofit cars with four types of accommodations, in addition to a lounge car.

Accommodations would include standard class, which the company compares to first class on an international flight, and three types of rooms with a private bathroom and shower:  bedrooms, sleeping two; suites, sleeping two in a queen bed with extra space;  and family, sleeping six (including two children).

The plan is to refurbish "existing bilevel cars," which could refer to former suburban gallery cars or to the remaining Santa Fe High Level coaches that have not gone to museums.  Standard class looks to be private spaces, not the extra-large reclining seats of airline first class or the old Canadian National Dayniter coaches.  No rolling tenements these.

Current plans are to have trains rolling sometime this year. I repeat, from last year.

We'll see whether a rolling upscale hotel is a meaningful value proposition in California.  If we had a bracket for Passenger Rail projects, I pick this one to turn a wheel before California's environmentally and politically hampered high speed rail project does.  "One small step in the right direction would be for Washington to stop bilking taxpayers for the sake of rail projects that might never be completed, let alone come close to being worth the cost."

Whether a regularly-scheduled high end sleeping car train, rather than de luxe cars for use on package tours as required, is a good idea anywhere remains open for debate.

As I finish this post, though, almost all the Amtrak overnight trains originating in Chicago are delayed or running late.

PRAVOSLAVIE.

Young, single men are leaving traditional churches. They found a more ‘masculine’ alternative.

WALKER'S TRAVELS.

That used to be about the peregrinations of Walker Ashley, Northern Illinois University storm chaser.

Retired geologist James A. Walker stands accused of creative peregrinations.

For more than nine months, police received complaints of someone littering from a vehicle, according to the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office. Each littering incident involved a vehicle slowing down and throwing a plastic bag of cat feces onto the yards of the victim’s homes.

Each incident involved the victim displaying a Donald Trump flag in their yard.

According to the press release, the locations of these incidents were in DeKalb, Genoa and Kingston counties. Five homes were targeted and three were targeted on multiple occasions.

The most recent incident took place on New Year’s Day. Two different vehicles were identified as involved in the incidents. Police linked the incidents to Walker after the New Year’s Day victim recorded the license plate of one of the vehicles and police identified Walker as the vehicle’s owner.

Walker is expected to appear in court on Feb. 24 at the DeKalb County Courthouse.

It's a large university, I never met the man.  We'll see what happens in court.

I note only that such antics from university faculty, whether true or not, do nothing either to change the minds of Trump voters or to restore the academy's standing among Militant Normals who have for too long been on the receiving end of scorn from Our Intellectual Betters.

NEVER CHANGE, BERKELEY.

The university's newsroom asked its faculty to describe, using their discipline's conventions, the ways in which Donald Trump is awful.  Seriously.  "UC Berkeley scholars say the economy, sexism and conspiracies fueled Trump’s reelection."

I offer excerpts below the jump, with wisecracks to suit.  It might be prudent to finish your coffee first.

SHIVER FOR YOUR LUXURY BELIEFS.

New Orleans and Pensacola are among the cities that have recorded more snowfall this winter than DeKalb or Rockford.  Often the snow comes in before the polar highs, but all winter the polar high has been so positioned as to move the snow bands to the south.  Thus Indianapolis and St. Louis got the Christmastime panhandle hook storms, and that snow cover well might have enabled the polar high to nudge the next set of snow bands along the Gulf (of Mexico, or of America?) Coast.

Meanwhile, in Naperville, the citizens are doing their citizenly thing by directing the city power utility to boycott coal-fired suppliers.  "The Say No To Coal consortium wants to pack seats at the Naperville City Council meeting Tuesday night to raise awareness that a big decision looms over the city:  whether now’s the time for a contract extension with its current electricity provider, the coal-heavy Illinois Municipal Electric Agency (IMEA)."

HOW BAD DID IT GET?

Pretty bad, according to my Chicago Boyz colleague Mike.  "Biden, Scandals, and His Place in History: A First Look."  There are five dimensions.

1.  The Cover-Up of Biden's Physical and Mental Disabilities.
2.  The Biden Family Corruption.
3.  Lawfare Against Political Opponents.
4.  Censorship of American Citizens.
5.  Abuse of the Pardon Privilege.

No doubt that fifth point is going to call forth deflection on an intergalactic scale.  And yet it is hard for someone who has compromised his integrity to point out somebody else doing the same.

Militant Normals had better hope that Donald Trump keep up his Energizer Bunny ways.

[P]residential administrations are by nature entropic with power drifting to the bureaucracy. It takes a lot of energy from the West Wing, and from the president specifically, to keep things on track. From Day 1 Biden’s team was limiting him to what amounted to a six-hour daily schedule. In all likelihood, given the terms under which he got the nomination in March 2020, that was a feature and not a bug of his presidency. Biden was attractive to the Democrats not only because he was willing to be a figurehead but because he had little ability to be anything else.

The tell-alls I expect to come out as assorted functionaries seek plausible deniability in their participation in that trashing of constitutional government might answer two questions Mike poses.  "So who was exercising executive power in the federal government? Who was enabling the Biden regency?"

NO, MR TRUMP, YOU CANNOT BE A DICTATOR ON DAY ONE.

Volokh Conspirator Ilya Somin counts the ways.

1.  Denying birthright citizenship to children of undocumented immigrants.  (Unconstitutional)
2.  Using the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 as a tool of mass deportation. (Requires a declaration of war.)
3.  Declaring a national emergency at the southern border.  (A chronic condition isn't the same as an emergency.)
4.  Declaring a national energy emergency.  (See infra point 3.)
5.  Designating Latin American drug cartels as terrorist organizations.  (Kurt Schlichter, call your office.)
6.  "Taking back" the Panama Canal.  (Is another nation-building war in Central America wise?)

I'd note, further to what Mr Somin elaborates in his essay, that Woodrow Wilson was not able to toss all the German nationals out of the country during his war, and that the government euphemism for "chronic condition" is crisis, and the bureaucrats and process-worshippers prefer that the chronic condition go on, in order that the agency goes on.

As far as the drug-runners, would you put it past Team Trump to produce evidence, as the roundups of illegal aliens takes shape, of someone with terrorist ties (noted by Interpol would be even better) being brought to the border along with the shipments of fentanyl?  Buckle in.

DEANLETS HAVE TO JUSTIFY THEIR EXISTENCE.

Maybe they should just go away.  "Students Feel ‘Spammed’ by ‘Overload’ of University Emails."

A new paper says that an “overload” of emails sent from universities to students means important emails are getting “buried” and that students simply disengage from their inboxes.

The article, based on interviews with students, senior academics and professional staff who typically distribute emails, found that students were more likely to read emails sent by course tutors, whereas they were likely to ignore mass emails sent from unknown senders.

“Students spoke positively about the messages that related to modules they were studying but were critical of the ‘dear student’ mass communications, which most described as ‘irrelevant’ and some described as ‘spam’,” says the paper published in Perspectives: Policy and Practice in Higher Education.

It found students were “remarkably consistent” when filtering their emails, explaining, “They read all the emails relating to their modules, then prioritized the rest using the name of the generator and the subject line. Messages from teaching staff were welcomed, but students rarely read messages from unknown generators, messages sent to all students or newsletters.”

Good.  By the time the kiddos hit middle school they should have developed a working knowledge of what is important and what is not and they likely heard Mom or Dad grouse about junk mail.  And really, a "Turn out for football on a school night" or "Wear red on Friday" coming from some functionary in Student Affairs or the Director of Athletics Himself isn't as relevant as that "Assignment posted on Blackboard" is.

The case for turfing all those deanlets out follows immediately.

Student services staff said they felt “uncomfortable [and] even guilty” about some of the messages they were asked to distribute, and one student told the researchers, “In my first year, like, there were so many emails being sent out that I basically just gave up.”

However, report co-author Judith Simpson, lecturer in material culture at the University of Leeds, told Times Higher Education that while institutions were “a long way away from optimal communication,” it was “important to note that we measured student perception of email.”

“Some students definitely feel as if they are being spammed, but we don’t actually know how many emails it takes to create that effect. A small number of emails asking you to do life admin might feel like a horrible burden if you haven’t done life admin before,” she said.

Seriously?  The kiddos picked up the elements of "life admin" from their parents or from those middle school teachers.  All the deanlets are doing is creating twentyish infants with all the communications.

WILL JESSICA YOGAMAT ACCEPT NIKKI HALEY?

In the aftermath of Donald Trump's first presidential victory, Rod Dreher, still with The American Conservative, took stock of Democrat Deep Thinkers taking stock of how The Most Qualified Woman in History could have lost.  One of the Deep Thinkers was Mark Lilla, author of The Once and Future Liberal.

Lilla has a knack for pithy, stinging phrasing. Look around, he says to fellow liberals, and see that the Republican Party, at the state level, dominates. They keep winning elections. They do so in large part because “they have successfully persuaded much of the public that they are the party of Joe Sixpack and Democrats are the party of Jessica Yogamat.”

If liberals really want to improve the lots of minorities within their broad coalition, they have to first win elections. But the way they think of politics all but guarantees that they won’t. Lilla visits the Democratic Party’s website, with its pages and pages for various identity constituencies, and moans, “You might think that, by some mistake, you have landed on the website of the Lebanese government — not that of a party with a vision of America’s future.”

It hasn't gotten any better when a Historic Woman ran against the same Donald Trump.  The same sort of identitarian stuff was on the Harris campaign website, and their nod to Joe Sixpack was Bernie Sanders in Elmer Fudd rig.  And being tossed into the leading role with little preparation to placate the Pillage Party whilst keeping the Freakshow Party from staying home did her no good.

Not that the lesson registered on a real-life Jessica Yogamat, er, Mackler.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss was a deeply devastating one for so many of us—and certainly one of the hardest I’ve had to swallow throughout my career in Democratic politics—but skepticism about the viability of a woman becoming president in our lifetimes has added even further insult to injury.

As the president of EMILYs List, one thing I know with certainty is this: Underestimating the strength of women candidates based on the outcome of the presidential race is a grave mistake. The results of this election cycle proved that investing in women is not only central to creating a more representative government; it’s also a strong electoral strategy.

Across the ballot this year, women candidates were key to winning races under even the most difficult of circumstances and up against tremendous headwinds. Democratic women held onto highly competitive Senate seats in three battleground states that were won by Trump and won in four House districts that Trump carried. They flipped key Republican-held House seats from coast to coast—in Oregon’s 5th and New York’s 4th congressional districts. They broke Republican supermajorities in states across the country, and they protected and flipped vital state Supreme Court seats that are going to be essential to protecting our freedoms in years to come.

It’s clear: Women have what it takes to win. And Americans are ready and fired up to elect them.

Indeed they are, as Elise Stefanik and Kristi Noem and Pam Bondi are concerned.  But from her yogamat, Jess is quite capable of underestimating the strength of women candidates based on party affiliation.

Men lose campaigns all the time, particularly in the last 40 years as EMILYs List has grown, yet we never question whether another man can win in the future. We don’t debate their electability or the shortcomings of their gender—and we don’t let those limitations stand between them and the highest levels of our government.

To let gendered biases overshadow women’s extensive qualifications, their ability to best represent our communities, and their demonstrable strength as candidates, is a disservice to the American people and to our future. Misconceptions about women’s electability become a self-fulfilling prophecy only if we let them.

Kamala Harris herself said it best: It hurts to break glass ceilings. But just because we haven’t broken our nation’s highest and hardest glass ceiling yet doesn’t mean we won’t.

The women who won in 2024 reinforced a vital lesson: investing in women candidates is a winning strategy for the Democratic Party. So now is not the time to doubt, question, or give up on them. It’s time to double down on them—because women are our best pathway to taking back power. And with their leadership, we will undoubtedly shatter our nation’s last glass ceiling.

Should that first president bust through that glass ceiling on the back of an elephant, the reaction of the women of the fevered brow will be worthy of all the adjective-spinning skills of the greatest circus impresarios.

COMING OFF THE WORKBENCH.

This Sunset model of the Boston and Maine Lima Berkshire has been on hand for years.  It's probably fifteen to twenty years ago I attempted to install a selector switch in order to run it on command control track or on track energized with the traditional direct current.  Here it goes through some running-in.

I took out the selector switch and replaced some wires that had worn thin.  That ended some annoying shorts.  I did not essay rewiring the headlight and class lights to illuminate separately.

For what it's worth, 4019 went to Santa Fe just before the end of the War.  My layout is notionally set in the summer of 1952.  Model railroading is supposed to be fun.

HERE WE GO AGAIN.

Megyn Kelly hails a new ukase from Our President.

BEHOLD!! pic.twitter.com/XXcWlKWgdm

— Megyn Kelly (@megynkelly) January 20, 2025

Twitchy's Sam J. carps, "It's insane that this is not just common sense, absolutely."

The ukase, sort of, recognizes that people overwork the word, "gender."

I cannot resist the temptation to mock the anthropology establishment.  "Dear reader, we begin thus.  'Is it that difficult to understand that sex is binary, while personality is a continuum?'  The idea is so difficult to understand that it takes an academic discipline to screw it up."

The screw-ups just keep on coming.  "Anthropology groups cancel all-female panel defending biological sex as ‘necessary category.’"

Maybe the practitioners of what we used to call abnormal psychology will get around to clarifying when personality is personality rather than some sort of pathology.

HIGHER EDUCATION, LOWERING ITSELF.

The house organ for all wokeness, all the time, in higher education anticipates the second Trump presidency.  "We asked some of academia’s sharpest minds to identify their highest hope—and biggest worry—for the sector in the next four years. Their responses may surprise you."

A HOCKEY MOM SINGS.

The Capitol rotunda isn't big enough for a military band, which meant the instrumental accompaniment to America the Beautiful was planned as a recording.

What's that line about plans not surviving their first encounter?

Here is the splendid @carrieunderwood performance at the Trump Inauguration. This is what a professional looks like. With grace, when the military band audio failed, she sang her song with the audience. All American and perfect. pic.twitter.com/Qce0AHj6fJ

— Raymond Arroyo (@RaymondArroyo) January 20, 2025

"You know the words, help me out here."

A Navy chorus was already on hand, having previously made a processional singing The Battle Hymn of the Republic, and they helped out with all the parts.  The past two months have been eventful for Navy singers, first singing second, then singing Eternal Father for former president Jimmy Carter, and now participating in the weather-modified inaugural events.

THEIR INCOMPETENCE IS THEIR DIVERSITY.

Hot Air contributor David Strom calls attention.  What's that line about one man with courage making a majority?

Once Elon Musk broke the taboo of working with Trump, the barrier to doing so fell to dust.

Perhaps I am too optimistic about the seeming collapse of support for progressive ideas in the general public, but it sure looks like Trump's magic has been working once again. Elizabeth Warren has always been a crazy leftist harridan, but now she seems to be a crazy leftist harridan with no ability to intimidate.

Sam Altman, who will likely shoot up the ranks of the world's wealthiest men due to his leading-edge position in the AI market, clearly isn't scared of her. I doubt any of the companies and men she is targeting are either.

Protection rackets only work if the victims are intimidated, and the intimidation seems to be wearing off.

The world is healing, although it has taken it long enough. One of the most frustrating things, I find, is predicting disaster, watching it unfold, and only after the maximum damage is done does anybody start paying attention, as if it was all a shock.

Trump warned that California would burn down years ago, and the Democrats laughed. Now it's happening, and Californians are waking up to the wages of leftism and noticing that backing leftists might not have been such a good idea.

Los Angeles elected an actual communist, and now they are surprised to see she is incompetent?

Who could have guessed?

The Hot Air editorial staff, however, are too committed to a presidential cult simply because it's their cult.

President Trump’s triumphant return to the Oval Office is just the first step in our fight to restore America’s greatness.

The Biden-Harris administration has left nothing but turmoil in its wake. Our economy has stalled, Americans across the country are reeling from natural disasters, our enemies are emboldened and the southern border is wide open, our college campuses and Ivy League universities have become safe havens for antisemitism and terrorist sympathizers, and our reputation on the world stage has been tarnished. That all changes next week, but it won’t be easy.

Democrats and their leftist lapdogs in the mainstream media are going to spend every minute of the next four years lying about the new administration and trying to block President Trump’s agenda, an agenda that more than 77 million Americans voted for. Here at HotAir, we fight back against their false narratives.

President Trump is the right man to bring America back from the precipice of disaster, and just like him, HotAir has a mission: to report the truth and deliver news you can trust.

That might be, but a presidential directive on day one that flags shall fly at full staff on inauguration day?  Yes, seriously.   “By the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and in honor of Inauguration Day and everything good and noble that it represents about our Nation, our people, and our form of Government, I hereby order that, on this and all future Inauguration Days, the flag of the United States shall be flown at full-staff.” Does a God who has a sense of humor call Donald Trump home shortly before a future inauguration?

ADVANTAGE, COLD SPRING SHOPS.

Shortly after Russia kicked off in Ukraine, I responded to the reactions of our now former president with a tweet.

For God's sake, this man cannot be allowed to remain in power. #BidenWorstPresidentEver pic.twitter.com/1tX2SSVkNK

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) March 27, 2022

Yes, it set off some of the usual conscience-cowboys, although it got a favorable ratio.  "Whether any minds get changed on social media, or if it exists to be cathartic, and everybody understands it as such, is more thinking than I want to do right now."

WAITING FOR THE REAL DEBT CEILING TO CRASH IN.

And it will, as Veronique de Rugy cautions.  "For all the excitement about the incoming administration and a return to the 2019 economy, market stability rests on the precarious assumption that the government will eventually put its fiscal house in order."

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The End!  "Our favorite moment of the Biden presidency has arrived."  "Moderate" Joe Biden?  "He blew it."  Joe’s legacy is to be sandwiched by Trump in history.

I'm proud to be an American.  "We despise being bullied by our government."  Let this nation have a new birth of freedom.  "I’ve been a Trump skeptic all along. But if I’d known that Trump’s win eight years ago were going to bring out Big Left’s true inner nature this hard, I might have opened my mind up a little earlier."

The progressive left is discredited.  Good.  "Trump is in as strong a position to finish the work the Gipper started that will terminate the New Deal and the Great Society."  He'll have to be.  "Those are the seeds Biden planted — poison ivy where once a lush lawn grew.  That's his legacy.  That's what Trump must somehow undo."

Shock events are margin calls on governance.  California's margin is gone.  "After over a decade of one-party rule, California has become the testing ground for the left’s most extreme ideas — and we are seeing the results in real time now."  Surf City to that perfect petri dish of failed policies in half a century!  "It was a middle-class state in the 70s and 80s, but today’s California is a feudal society with an affluent aristocracy – their castles and keeps were the ones burned in this fire – lording over a huge caste of serfs. The middle class is either gone or leaving."  With nary a sewer socialist to be found.  "The Palisades had three million gallons of water in a local system that can hold up to 120 million gallons, if it’s maintained and operational. Everything else is just noise."

The weekly round-up of mostly pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.