INVISIBLE ENEMIES...

...Would appear to have invaded my bloodstream after all. I have sat, only a little smugly, pleased with myself for having managed to stay healthy through this ferocious flu epidemic that has swept our valley, figuring it was my turn to weather the storm unscathed, for once, after bouts with every other goddamned bug that has come to town since I did...

But it would seem that my schedule is catching up with me, and this last breakneck week finally weaked my resolve, in body and mind. I feel the first chills, the first headache, the first body aches of the crud (though I can't discount the terrifyingly bad breakfast I had this morning during our hideously early [especially after a late night class the night before] meeting... restaurants, I am still convinced, are not places to have breakfast. Cook it yourself or do without).

And I have another big fat hairy meeting that I can't get out of tonight.

So, I bid you adieu for now, with the following parting shot: HB 264 has yet to get out of committee, and HB 91 has yet to come up for debate. You know what to do.

MARCHING ORDERS

House Bill 264, a measure to help create "Business-Ready Communities", as previously reported here, in the Red-Star Trombone, and other publications, made it out of the House of Representatives and into the Senate last week, subtantially altered as per the wishes of LIANT and its many allies. Thanks to all of you who tweaked the tails of committee members and House members in general (and to those of you who couldn't be bothered, phooey on you and yours for seven generations).

But of course it ain't over. The bill now awaits the pleasure of the Senate Minerals, Business and Economic Development Committee, who have had it since last Wednesday. There is no evidence that they've really even looked at it yet, but that doesn't mean it's too soon to give them their marching orders: let it out and recommend Do Pass, little chickadees.

The committee members in whose hands the fate of this bill currently rests are as follows (click on the names to link to instantly e-mail them if your browser is so enabled):

CHAIRMAN Bill Hawks - bhawks@trib.com

John Barrasso - barrasso@senate.wyoming.com

Ken DeCaria - kdecaria@senate.wyoming.com

Jayne Mockler - jmockler@senate.wyoming.com

But wait, there's more!

House Bill 91, creating a sales tax exemption for agricultural implements, has made it out of the Senate Revenue Committee on a unanimous vote, BUT at least two of the "yes" votes did not seem terribly enthusiastic to witnesses. Now, I've been asked not to name who the near-naysayers were, but I imagine many of my more astute/cynical experienced readers already know who they are (hint: same gender as YHB), and I believe that information is available elsewhere.

Regardless... It's time to start talking to the general Senate membership, urging them to make sure this bill gets its hearing on the Senate Floor as well as a passage! So, once again, click HERE to access a complete list of legislator e-mail addresses. There are other ways to contact them, yes, such as leaving them phone messages through the Senate's receptionist (307-777-7711) (it shouldn't suprise any of you to learn that the good folks at that number and the House's know my voice from the second I say hello. Sigh), but e-mail is quick. One click and you've got a direct pipeline to the legislator him or herself (gotta love Wyoming, folks!). And most of them, even the ones you think are kind of arrogant jerks, check e-mail pretty frequently, and many even respond!

I've had a fun and spirited E-discussion with Rep. Pete Illoway, for instance, and so even though we still disagree on some things, I think he's a helluva guy whom I'm proud to know.

Plus, well, put it this way: the sooner we get the fates of these two bills settled, the sooner I'll stop nagging you, dear readers, to do your part.

So come on, guys, do your part!

BELATED MORAL QUALMS

It was Sunday afternoon as I found myself, my Enabling Assistant, and several other assorted hangers-on hooting “Tent of Decadence” at everyone who came to visit us during the 23rd Annual Donald E. Erickson Memorial Chariot Races this weekend that I first really began to ponder some of the less morally salutory aspects of my job as your chamber chick (having long ago surrendered any pretence of moral or other authority as Your Humble Blogger).

Here I was, worn out from a week of hard partying that did not fail to include horrible things like shots of tequila, encouraging others to even greater feats of alcoholism than I had achieved, plying them also with massages, the EA’s sybaritic black bean chili, the Moon Massage Mama’s “cowboy caviar” and, oh yes, the prospect of betting and losing the family fortune on the outcome of a mule race. For a living.

Many years ago, a different chamber of commerce event landed me with the title of Governor of Vice at the tender age of 16. We had, for the purposes of celebrating Saratoga’s 100th anniversary, declared “The Good Times Valley” its own state, and we decided, quite properly, that a state needed a governor, and we decided to elect ours based solely on photographs of the various candidates’ knees. I wrapped my knees in paper bags in tribute to then-famous (this was 1986) “Unknown Comic” and ran as “The Unknown Candidate.” I did not make governor – one of the previously mentioned medical bombshells drew a cute smiley face on her shapely crossed knee and ran away with the election – but as the person who got the fewest votes, I became the Good Times Valley’s Governor of Vice.

At the time it was considered quite an irony because I was such a nerdy little goody-two-shoes, speech team, Students Against Drunk Driving, designated dork – I mean driver – at the few parties I managed to locate by dead reckoning because certainly no one was going to tell the cop’s kid, etc. This was our Governor of Vice, everyone said, skeptically? Whatever.

But it turned out to be pretty prophetic, didn’t it? Because now I make my living tempting people from far away to come out here and spend all their money tooling around the mountainside on snowmobiles and hoping they don’t get lost, freezing half to death as they shiver over an ice hole in Saratoga Lake, paying $10 a head for unlimited sampling at Wyoming’s state microbrew competition, and betting, betting, betting on chariot and mule races.

Betting! On mule races!

And drinking, always drinking, because of course as your chamber chick I run the beer tent! Made extra appealing by the addition of a masseuse!

Tent of Decadence! Tent of Decadence!

Strongly contrasting with the Trailer of Virtue next door, where the boy scouts were serving up wholesome fare like hamburgers and hot dogs and hot chocolate and coffee.

But even that wasn’t so virtuous, since the Trailer of Virtue was also a Trailer of Vice, where all that calcutta money changed hands all weekend long...

Oh, I just can’t win! My entire lifestyle is drenched in sin!

I repent in dust and ashes, and vow to reform all. It’s going to be nothing but straight shooting for me and my chamber from now on. Clean living, milk-drinking, mom-and-apple-pie, maybe some hymn singing...

Oh man, that sounds like a drag!

Good god, what was I thinking?

I really probably just need a nap, don’t I? I mean, listen to me! I almost had myself convinced to start a Saratoga chapter of like the WCTU or something. What’s next, marching around with signs like “Gin is poison?”

OK, false alarm. Tent of Decadence it is.

Thank you for calling the Saratoga/Platte Valley Cham-beer of Commerce. No, that’s not a typo.

I’m on the job!

AH, CURST, CURST CLEVERNESS!

I have already taken my lumps for sic'ing the Squawkers on the Sewer King; as I stood out in the messy drizzle that can't decide whether it is rain or snow, hauling mightily on the canvas of the chamber's 14x14 tent, my cell phone rang.

"You have a Valentine's Day greeting," my Enabling Assistant proclaimed on the other end, with an ominous snicker.

And so the Squawkers launched into, what else, "Rock of Ages" over the phone.

Curse the cleverness of whomever deduced that I was reachable after all; I thought I had timed it all perfectly: nail the King, abscond into busy work outside the city limits, and then just wait out the afternoon. Curses!

But I still think I came out ahead. After all, they called from the Empire of Hardware, which means the Sewer King had to listen to them twice. In a row. And the second time, he even had to pay for it.

Some days it's great to be me.

WEIRD ENOUGH

Readers often ask me if the stuff I print on this website is really true. Can one person’s life possibly be this weird? Am I demented? Where can they get some of whatever it is the Sewer King, the Lord Macklebrains and I have all been accused of smoking? Etc.?

And how weird does something have to be before I’ll write about it.

Oh, anything will do, really. Sometimes, even just lunch.

But what a lunch!

I lunched today with the kooky, kooky core of the Saratoga club of Soroptimists International, who rightly discovered many years ago, along with FTD and Godiva and Hallmark, that Valentine’s Day is money in the bank if it is exploited correctly.

Enter the Sweetheart Squawkers, a group that, were it not composed mostly of sweet little grey-haired (or almost grey-haired) ladies and the odd certifiable medical bombshell (our own dear Dr. Di and her assistant, Mrs. Sketch, definitely qualify in this category), would certainly be prosecutable under RICO. For a mere five dollars American, anyone in town can aim them like a guided “musical” missile at anyone else in town for a special V-Day serenade, which serenade will continue unabated until the recipient also pays the crew five dollars American.

This isn’t exactly the Saratoga Community Choir, either, folks, though in terms of sheer goofy exuberance many of these girls could perhaps qualify for honorary membership in the Propeller Beanie Club (a.k.a. the tenor section).

Since I am of the disposition to patronize this group quite a lot on Valentine’s Day (a holiday I otherwise loathe, of course) – I sent them to both the Sewer King and his brother the Oracle last year, and wound up playing a lusty game of Squawker Ping-Pong with the Sewer King – they graciously invited me to lunch, to help them giggle and plot and, well, practice.

My Enabling Assistant was there with... oh god... the horror, the horror!... a Casio SK-1 keyboard. I know that one of the medical bombshells traditionally deploys a clarinet, but she was unable to lunch with us... And then there was My Own Dear Personal Mother and our Walking Partner... who both had combs and wax paper.

And were trying to figure out how to play them without getting the lip buzz of their lives.

And giggling.

And trying again.

And finally developing the knack for the placement of the wax paper, the proper tautness of the grip on the comb, the volume at which to hum. A great deal of work went into this.

So now that I know what’s coming, I deeply, deeply regret the fact that I have egged them on so very enthusiastically again this year.

And I hope that the Sewer King will someday find it in his heart to forgive me for being subjected to, what else, “Rock of Ages.”

IN CASE ANYBODY IS INTERESTED...

There's some good news on the Legislature's web site. One of those bills I'm always on about, HB 91, creating a sales tax exemption for the purchase of agricultural implements, made it out of the Senate Revenue Committee today and is on the Senate's General File.

Thanks to everyone who wrote to the committee members. But it's not done yet. Keep calling and writing, everybody.

APOPHENIA

Once in a while, the world outside that I left behind when I returned home to “Brigadoon” still manages to intrude into mine. Usually it does so in very weird ways that leave me pinching myself and suspicious, or confused and bleary-eyed, or peeking over my shoulder every few minutes to see if David Lynch is hiding behind a curtain, directing the scene.

This morning before I set down to beaver away some more at the chamber’s web page, I took a moment to peek at one of the many online magazines I sample at odd intervals throughout the day (this, probably, explaining much of why the intrusions of the real world come at such odd intervals, in such precise and tiny bites, and are, on the whole, so weird: I am choosing to let the real world in via controlled bursts, choosing the sources, and I have very odd and esoteric taste in sources) and saw an interview with one of my favorite living authors, William Gibson, he whose 1984 novel Neuromancer rocked my little 14-year-old world and taught me to see it in terms of data flow, cutthroat technological innovation, cultural melange...

Gibson has published a new book, Pattern Recognition and my first shock was realizing that the fact that he has written a new novel was news to me. My second was that he’s no longer extrapolating current trends into a sci-fi future. My third was learning that Gibson, who, while one of the original writers (along with Vernor Vinge) who coined the term “cyberspace” in his fiction, has long been a noted non-computer user of the Oracle’s caliber, is now keeping a blog, just like me (well, sort of)! My fourth was that I was being seduced into apophenia - or, actually, seducing myself into apophenia (for actually whenever one is seduced, it is the self seducing the self, seeking excuses for engaging in behavior or thought patterns in which one wanted to engage anyway, and not in any way the actions of another agent triggering the behavior), “the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness in unrelated things” as Gibson defined the word in his interview.

Gibson’s last couple of books have dealt, in some ways, with this phenomenon, which I have noted at odd times in this here blog when I catch myself becoming fixated on what appear to be leitmotifs for a day, a week, an event. Gibson has foreseen this as a species-wide tendency in his creation of characters who have uncanny, intuitive knacks for finding patterns in vast accumulations of data from which they can extract all kinds of useful knowledge; one character, cyberspying on a minor celebrity’s shopping and media consumption habits, suddenly deduces that she is about to commit suicide, even though he’s never met her, for example.

I’m not quite there yet, but I have today found myself plunged right into the soup. And it’s hard not to see it as weird or meaningful, when Gibson is talking in his magazine interview about how Cornell boxes of various kinds keep turning up in his fiction (at one point in his third novel he even has a slightly crazed Artificial Intelligence constructing them in an orbiting space station) and then a few hours later, in another stray moment, reading a completely different magazine with a completely different slant on things I find myself reading a brief “Hit and Run” reference to an appreciative retrospective on, who else, Joseph Cornell that appears in another magazine and so of course I go and read the retrospective because I’ve always liked Cornell anyway (fun and funky to learn, in reading that article, that I’m not the only one who looked at Cornell’s boxes and thought of one of my favorite poets, fellow New Yorker Hart Crane. Now, of course, I feel stupid for having felt like the only one, but before I hit the nodal point of that article, I didn’t realize just how natural and obvious that connection really was!)...

A few hours later, taking a break from bean counting and answering the same freaking question six times an hour – no, folks, I’m sorry, there are no motel rooms left in Saratoga for the chariot races – I hit upon a different article in a different magazine, one in defense of being a less than perfect housekeeper (which definition anyone who has visited the Unabomber Cabin unannounced would bestow on me in a New York minute), and here’s this woman going on and on about how much more interesting it is to have a car that friends of mine tend to call a “white trash storage shed,” how debris within it, left undisturbed, becomes kind of a time capsule, and oh my God, I’ve been making Cornell boxes all along!

Of course, we all are, whenever we deposit a bit of trash in a wastebasket in a room we don’t use much, or put the less important papers on our desks aside on the “stuff I’ll get to someday” pile, or put our grandfather’s weirdly eclectic mix of valuable antiques and stunningly pointless junk onto a bookcase shelf, so this is really nothing radical, but there it is, anyway.

Apophenia.

William Gibson’s new book. Cornell boxes. Cornell’s career. Messy houses. Messy cars. Cornell boxes.

I’m just waiting now for William Gibson to come back.

Probably, I’ll just make that happen by reading some more of his blog.

GETTING OUR ROCKS OFF

“Holy sh*t, it’s bigger than I thought!”

“Mmm... Much more magnificent in person!”

“That’s a big ***ing rock.”

No, no, no, get your minds out of the gutter, dear readers. I’m actually talking about a rock. As in bones of the earth, pre-dirt, giant hunks of granite and lichen that poke out of the soil like icebergs in the North Atlantic.

And, Titanic-like, my Co-Conspirator In Everything (aka, of course, The Sewer King) and I have struck a doozy, though it’s still anybody’s guess if this Rock of Ages will sink us. As it stands, it’s become rather an unhealthy obsession with the pair of us, turning us into wild-eyed maniacs at the mere mention of the construction project on the Snowy Range Road, bridges, digging, playgrounds, anything, really that could be connected by even the wildest leaps of logic (and the pair of us are quite capable of those) to the general, Platonic ur-idea of rocks and thus to “Our Rock.”

“Have you seen it?” we demand of anyone who is dumb enough to trigger this Pavlovian reaction in us. “That rock, that beautiful rock, that hugewonderfulgorgeousworldclassrock sticking out where they’re carving out a section to straighten the road after the bridge?” (pause to wipe drool off our chins, to smooth down hair that has stood up on end, to shift back onto the chairs or barstools abandoned in our excitement to discuss The Rock).

Oh, Sweet Pan-Fried Jesus, we’ve got to have that rock. We know right where to put it, smack in the middle of Kathy Glode Park for the little tykes to climb all over in place of those giant truck tires that leave said tykes well vulcanized at day’s end, to the dismay of mothers everywhere. It would look magnificent there, remarkable, a monument to what this town was, is and could be (or could not be, if we don’t find a way out of our current economic mess... that rock could be all that is left of us, someday) and to its Creator, and yes, I, the Manichaen, the heretic, invoke the Creator in glory as I contemplate this rock.

Choirs of angels sing in soaring harmonies as one beholds this rock. A shimmering, blinding ray of sun has been specially assigned to pierce the clouds and illuminate this rock’s glory.

And we want to move it to town.

All of this is, of course, old news to our coffee buddies, our friends and neighbors and relatives and lackeys.

But this week, we stopped flapping our jaws, realized we’re the only people who really care about this project, and decided to see what we could do about it.

Can it be removed whole and entire or will LeGrand Johnson, the prime contractors widening the road out there, have to blow it to smithereens?

Once it’s removed, can it be transported to town (some 15 miles)?

Once it’s transported, how do we get it laid in at the park (at least the Sewer King, being in truth the king of all manner of things hydrological, geological, and paralogical, knows where the sprinker system runs underneath the park’s soil)?

Our coffee buddies finally convinced us that they didn’t know. Our Minister of Fun has stopped returning our calls. Our contractor buddies tap their foreheads at each other at the mere mention of our names*

So today, my CCIE and I climbed into his truck and went out to harass the people whose job it will be, ultimately, to deal with this gorgeous behemoth.

I had caught one of the sub-contractors at Happy Hour the night before, and he had promised to introduce me to the Big Boys today, so it shouldn’t have been a complete surprise to the nice young men in clean white coats who are coming to... I mean, the guys widening the highway.

Shouldn’t have been, but probably was.

Still, the nice foreman from LeGrand Johnson was very nice to us, hardly cracking a smirk at all as we outlined to him our grand, King Ludwig-like scheme for The Rock, and dutifully headed up the road a piece to contemplate the thing directly.

Hence the bits of dialog which begin today’s blog entry. See, my partner and I had only before glanced longingly at it from within the pickup. It really is bigger in person. A lot bigger.

According to Contractor Man, it may well weigh 300,000 pounds!

That’s a lot of granite.

And that’s only if we are actually seeing most of the rock. If it truly is iceberg-like... if it truly is... underneath that soil which surrounds and partly covers it may be more stone than was used to build the works of Ozymandias, King of Kings, in which case, Contractor Man will have to drill little holes in it, shove in big pieces of dynamite, and we shall have to look upon them and despair.

But while there’s rock, there’s hope. We haven’t bothered everyone there is to bother just yet. We know people who know people who have truly formidable equipment. And we are persistent, yes, and patient.

And it’s probably going to be a couple of months yet before the contractors have to do anything with the thing. Probably.

So, nobody’s safe for months yet. Months. Or more.

And regardless, we’ll be telling his grandchildren about this rock. I may write poems about this rock. It shall go down in local lore or we will die trying to put it there.

Go see it while ye may.

*Authorial postulate

HEH HEH HEH...

So after a weekend of celebrating an apparent victory – the House of Representatives passed HB 296 on the first reading, and approved Rep. Latta’s amendments – and Winter Carnivaling (registration tent for the nordic ski races, one of many unofficial assistants at the Sewer King’s craps table at the casino night*, slogging along on my skis through the poker run), I came to work Monday feeling my oats.

A web search for the internet home of Recreationists of the Bow, a group dedicated to preserving all current uses of the Medicine Bow National Forest (but especially motorized recreation), turned up some interesting stuff that got me thinking more seriously in the direction a lot of my pals have as far as what to do about the current economy-wrecking Draft Management Plan for the Medicine Bow National Forest.

The tools and techniques of an opponent are often as effective against that opponent as against oneself. The stump humpers have proven themselves masterful litigators and petitioners (though pretty shitty scientists, on the whole), and we are going to have to become so as well.

So, as I clicked over to a silly and emotion-fraught petition to “Save the Bow” I saw that a perfect tool for this was easily available: a website called, what else, ThePetitionSite.com that is run by an organization called Care2, which, as you might guess from the name, is, well, Stump Humper Central.

Hey, I can do this, too! I don’t know ultimately how effective e-mail petitions really are in getting results, but if one side is using that tool, the other side ought to as well, to provide balance in the universe if for no other reason!

So, I made a silly and emotion-fraught petition of my own, emphasizing that the current management program has already put more than 200 people out of work and that the new plan in its current state poses an even greater threat to the livelihoods of some really nice people who actually love this particular forest way more than a bunch of college kids who’ve never even been to Wyoming do, and submitted it.

There is, however, something slightly ominous called an “approval process.” Someone from Care2 is going to “review” my petition and let me know if it is “acceptable” within a few days. Hmm. Big skeptical eyebrow raising, this.

I’m now taking bets on whether my petition makes the cut or not. What are the odds? Better ask the Sewer King.

*A deeply deceptive experience, that craps table: I am known far and wide as a person who will never in her life be able to rely on luck. If an element of chance is present in an activity, I fail it every time. But somehow, somehow, I was “hot” on the dice playing SKC (Sewer King Craps, which differs from regular craps in a few important respects, because the Sewer King was trying to run the whole table by himself AFTER a hard day’s skiing and so some of the finer points – like what pays “two for one” and what pays “30 for one” – tended to get ignored until we crapsolytes caught on to the basic stuff like the pass line). Blazingly hot. Nobody ever bet against me. I won a million dollars and hardly ever lost anything. Terrifying, terrifying stuff.

MATCHING, SCHMATCHING

As I mentioned yesterday, I am paying particular attention to a couple of bills currently under consideration in the Wyoming State House, HB 264 and HB 302, both of which are intended to set aside a chunk of the state’s Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for helping communities become “business ready” in the current jargon.

Each bill creates a fund, to be administered by the Wyoming Business Council as a grant program to allow towns like ours to make significant investments in their own economic development on a physically tangible, brick-and-mortar basis, and it’s high time something like this was made a reality. I’ve been studying economic development almost since the day I came back to Wyoming, and the realities of it are harsh and inescapable: businesses who are seeking to relocate have been trained to expect facilities that are in “move-in” condition. If they have to wait around for something to be built... if they have to pay to have something built or renovated... if they have to go through the giant flaming hoops of permits and easements and utilities development themselves, they’re not going to come. They’ll go where this work and the financial burdens accompanying it have been done for them. And there are, dear readers, cities and counties and economic development corporations all over this company who have and will do it for them.

Our new governor, Dave Freudenthal, knows this all too well, which is why one of his significant campaign pledges – and yes, I’m talking about the very one which finally decided me to become a supporter – was the very program HB 264 and 302, in their slightly different ways, would implement.

So what’s the difference between these two bills?

The two significant issues are the amount of money to be set aside to start this program, and whether or not the towns and counties who will apply for grants under this program will be required to put up matching funds in order to secure the money.

Now, it’s not the amount that concerns me so terribly much – 302 has a dollar amount of $15 million, which is chapter and verse Governor Freudenthal’s original proposal, while 264 currently has only $5 million (I say currently because I know Rep. Latta and some of my other friends in Cheyenne are planning to submit an amendment to bump this figure up to $10 million) – although I would naturally be happy to see more money in the original pot because that just means there’s an opportunity there to help more communities. Saratoga has taken a huge hit this year, but there are lots of other towns in Wyoming who are facing hard times because of the drought, the brain drain, the Forest Plan, etc.

But this matching issue is a bad, bad deal, folks.

Think back to two years ago, when you were hearing a lot of your local elected officials and other cranks complaining about a little thing called legislative de-earmarking.

See, before the year 2000, a certain percentage of state mineral royalties, gasoline taxes, etc. was earmarked for local governments, to help equalize those local governments’ abilities to deliver basic services to the residents they serve. Every single town in Wyoming has a basic responsibility to its citizens by state law, custom, and the Social Contract, to provide things like potable water, sewer, police and fire protection, emergency medical care, safe streets and bridges, etc. And there are bottom-line, fixed costs associated with these whether a town is serving 2000 or 10,000 people.

But all local governments are not created equal when it comes to their abilities to raise the revenue needed to pay for all of this stuff. Different towns, different counties, have different property values (on which property taxes/mill levies are based), different ways of digging money out of the ground (Campbell County is sitting on all that CBM; Goshen County... grows some cheap crops), different visitor bases and different business communities, which means different levels of sales tax income.

Enter earmarking, a way for the State of Wyoming, which is bringing in significant revenue from all over the state, to help level the playing field and make sure that everyone gets the basics no matter where in Wyoming he or she lives.

But in 2000, the Wyoming State Legislature were looking at about a $125 million shortfall (largely because of severence tax reductions they themselves had granted, and, too, because there wasn’t a lot of mineral auditing going on, something else GovDave is fixin’ to try and fix) and started looking around for what could be done about it. Cutting spending on state level stuff, of course, was not desirable to them. So they decided on de-earmarking those revenues that were supposed to be guaranteed to local governments and school districts.

[And, to soften the blow and delay its effects a little bit, they generously bestowed a one-time “rainy day” payment on each affected local government according to the size of the population served (Saratoga got a whopping $208,000)]

Now, de-earmarking didn’t out and out take that money away from local governments and school districts, it just removed the requirement that a certain portion of those revenues go there. If the legislature so chooses, it can still share that money with us, and it is, after a fashion, but...

Oh, there’s always a “but”!!!

But... now when we need money for a water project, or a building project, or to buy a new firetruck or ambulance, or whatever, we have to go begging to the state bureaucracies for it. Usually, we have to write grants. And usually, we have to put up matching funds in order to receive these grants.

Trickle, trickle, trickle.

Now, making matters worse, with an ever worsening economic climate (really, the only people in Wyoming who are doing well are the people who brought their own money from other states, and a few very well compensated minerals workers and the like. The rest of us are flipping burgers, running cash registers, and ranting on web pages because we can’t afford the paper and printing costs to become real pamphleteers) most of the cities and towns already hurting and reeling from this also received another blow when the 2000 census figures came in.

Saratoga, for example, lost nearly 300 people between 1990 and 2000.

And remember, our share of state and county sales tax, fuel taxes, cigarette taxes, etc. is based on, yes, population.

So those revenues are going down, down, down, too.

(And we’re not even in the same league as poor Riverside, down something in the neighborhood of 33% of its population, but still trying to run the same basic infrastructure it did when there were officially more than 80 residents!)

So, dear readers, especially those of you who are or are personally acquainted with Wyoming legislators, how the hell are we supposed to come up with even more matching funds, when the communities who need the help proposed by HB264 and HB302 most are the ones who are also feeling de-earmarking and population loss the most?

Longtime LIANT readers know what’s coming next. A call to action.

My sources tell me that HB264 is due to come to the House floor either today (Thursday) or tomorrow (Friday). Rep. Latta, as I said, is going to propose amendments to make it more effective and worthwhile. Folks, support for these amendments is needed.

I haven’t heard back from our own Representative, but Latta sounds pretty sure that Mr. Bucholz is with him on this.

But there are lots of other House members out there who need to hear from YOU, folks. The program these bills would create could be an important part of Saratoga’s effort to pull itself out of its current economic slump and begin recovering from our loss of the mill, but it ain’t going to happen without help.

HERE is the legislator e-mail list for the 2003-04 legislature. They all have computers now, and a lot of them have demonstrated to me over the last few days that they really do read their e-mail, and respond.

Send some messages their way, while there’s still time, folks.

If you don’t have time to bug all of them, here’s a few key people that need a little persuading on the matching issue (click on the name to send a message):

Pete Illoway

Fred Parady

Kurt Bucholz

THERE ARE SOME DANGEROUSLY SEXY...

...New features on the Wyoming State Legislature's web page. And they are newly cause for concern for Your Humble Blogger.

Just now, I was consulting this page to check up on a few bills in which I am interested (those being HB 264 and 302, which concern an effort to implement Governor Freudenthal's economic development idea of pulling $15 million out of the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund for a grant program to help Wyoming towns and cities improve their business development chances, about which, if I know me, and I do, more anon), I happened to notice that there is a whole new realm of presentation attached to the Bills Index.

I'm talking about those little old "Fiscal Notes" you can click on next to the other information about each bill.

These are prepared by the Department of Revenue (click on a Fiscal Note, any Fiscal note, and you can even see which bureaucrat did the analysis) and show that bureau's expert analysis on each bill's implications for the state government's finances. Looks pretty nifty, doesn't it? Might help that huge passel of freshman legislators, especially, make some better-informed decisions, mightn't it?

Ah, but as ever, the devil is in the details.

For example: There is a measure, House Bill 91, that would create a sales and use tax exemption for agricultural implements (i.e. tractors, balers, etc.), which even my dear friend the Oracle, who assures me on a daily basis that he is the most conservative person I know, supports heartily, as do I*

Take a look at HB91's Fiscal Note. It appears to show, in stark and scary terms, that if HB91 were passed the state would lose a little more than $1 million a year in sales and use tax.

Of course, what it doesn't show is anything even remotely acknowledging what money all of us, not just the state government, lose when people skip across the border to save a few bucks on taxes. That is, I'll grant you, hard to quantify, but think of it in the common terms we all know, how "one dollar spent in the community turns over at least seven times before it leaves." When a fella heads down to Colorado to buy a tractor, all that money he is spending to buy the thing (and gasoline to get there... and lunch for the trip... oh, and as long as he's there, why not get a sack of groceries... or a lottery ticket?... how about stopping for another meal? maybe a little movie?)... turns over in Colorado.

In other words, that projected loss of $1 million a year in state revenue doesn't tell the whole story. How much are we all, as a people, losing by adhering to the status quo?

These questions need to be considered, folks. The legislature is voting on this issue (and many others, of course) right now. House Bill 91 passed the House this week (with some shocking no votes... this should have been a no-brainer, guys!) and is on the way to the Senate. Your input, dear readers, can still help.

Fight the power. Or something.

*This may seem odd for two tremendous fans of Sam Western's PUSHED OFF THE MOUNTAIN, SOLD DOWN THE RIVER, a tome which takes Wyoming rather severely to task for coddling its ag producers in various absurd ways, but that tome also advocates bringing our state and its policies in line to maybe share in a little of the stunning prosperity all of our neighboring states (note for the geographically challenged: Wyoming borders Idaho, Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Colorado, and Utah) - all of which have a sales and use tax exemption on ag equipment. Which, yes, class, sends a whole lot of ranchers and other implement buyers out of state to do their shopping. Is this looking inward? Is this grassroots business development? NO. It's leaving the bung out of the barrel and letting more of our resources pour across our already hideously porous borders.

MOSTLY TRUE

The Sewer King has given me kudos for producing a "mostly true" account of yesterday's events.

And so I am conscience stricken, and must 'fess up so that I might sleep tonight the sleep of the just, the sleep of the untroubled soul, the sleep of the mostly accurate chronicler who has done her humble duty and done it well.

I didn't really make those witty geometrical allusions.

And the King doesn't really look that much like the Roadrunner when he skis off into the distance. More like a cat burglar on skis; I always have to fight the urge to check his pockets for ill-gotten booty after each adventure.

Poetic license. Poetic license, my dear readers.

ADVENTURES IN APPLIED PHYSICS

So, my ski partner, known to LIANT readers also as The Sewer King, got tired of my having to turn back early every Sunday because I kept developing dauntingly hideous and painful blisters on my heels no matter what combination of socks, moleskin and bandages I applied as prophylactics, and furthermore, got tired of my also occasionally having to turn back because my “trailpacker” skis were not stiff enough or thick enough to keep me up on the really deep snow he prefers to muck about in.

His solution? Stick me on some different skis, skis with different bindings, skis that would a) require the acquisition of different boots and b) support me better in the gnarly deep snow, etc. etc.

Fine. Great. Fabulous. It is pretty embarrassing to be the one lagging behind, and limping on skis is bad for the body as well as the dignity, and trying to free onself from the mess when one has sunk hip deep into the snow with a big pair of skis on burns up energy that could otherwise be spent going the extra mile.

But oooohhhh... I didn’t know from embarrassing until yesterday.

Just to give you a hint of the flavor, I present an encapsulation of a typical verbal exchange between my cloacal ski partner and myself from our latest Sunday outing.

SK: OK, you’re going to have to really dig your skis into the –

YHB (wobbling and sliding like Bambi on the ice): YELP!

SK (gently mocking): Yelp!

YHB (getting back up again with much effort): Grunt.

SK: OK, really dig that ski in. Here, perpendicular to the fall line...

YHB: There’s a fall line? Looks like a whole fall plane to me... YELP!

SK (gently mocking): Yelp!

Collie of Folly: Lick, lick, lick.

YHB: Molly, not now. (Finally hauls herself back up just to get out from under the barrage of doggie kisses).

SK: OK, now really PLOP down that ski. OK, lean hard into it. Look! You’re standing!

YHB: YELP!

SK (gently mocking): Yelp!

Etc.

You see, before yesterday, I’d been tooling around on a pair of touring skis, made, as the Sewer King sneered, for farting around on very groomed, well-maintained trails in Colorado. These skis have style (my dear partner forgets, methinks, how he originally admired them on our first outing last December. “Those are some good looking skis,” he remarked then as he loaded them and the Collie of Folly into his pickup), and, more importantly, serious traction, so I never even had to execute the dreaded “herringbone” maneuver when heading up hills, and didn’t have to pay much attention to my technique at all. But... therein lay my downfall.

A very sloppy skier I was, I now realize.

Very sloppy.

As I realized immediately when I bound my new NNNBC boots to a pair of SK’s backcountry skis and fell down. And fell down again. And again. Even though the ground was level and I had shown no previous signs of inner ear disorders or other problems with balance. It had even been, oh, at least six hours since I’d pounded back my last glass of the cooking wine at the Minister of Fun’s house.

No, this was all physics. As in the importance of downward pressure and exquisite balance to provide the friction that my flimsy trailpackers had led me to take for granted in the three or so years I’ve been skiing as an adult but these other skis, skis coated in weird, sticky wax and a bit skinnier than my others, did not in and of themselves provide.

The watchword of the day, repeated like the refrain of some borderline-obscene Anglo-Saxon campfire song by the Sewer King, was “PLOP.”

If there is any slope at all, I learned, I would continue to yelp in freaked-out amazement as my skis slid right out from under me until I learned to PLOP – plant each ski very decisively into the snow, leaning slightly forward and putting all of my strength and weight into that plopping motion and plopping for keeps. And when the slope was at all challenging, my poles must go behind me to prop me up and keep me stable.

All of this is, as I’ve said, a bit more work than I was used to. Fortunately for me, I’m stubborn as hell, and so with only about twelve hours of patient encouragement from the Sewer King, shivering in the cold of an approaching snowstorm because he dresses to allow for the warmth of serious exercise and not for standing around in crappy weather watching someone fall down a lot, at last I managed to stay upright, crowing in triumph and yelling at my dog to stop nudging me in the knees because it wasn’t really that funny to make momma fall, was it?

Then it was time to (GASP) start trying to make actual forward progress, and once again I found I’ve been doing it all wrong. But here’s the thing: when I started doing it right, the movement felt so much better, so much more graceful and closer to being effortless kind of like... kind of like the way my partner looks just before he zooms off, Roadrunner like, around the corner and beyond the horizon.

Oh, wait, I can do it too! Sort of! As long as I pay attention and concentrate on the new, correct movement, and don’t slack off into the lazy old movement. But that, too, was easy, because the penalty for slacking off was immediate: the slacking foot and ski would slip backwards, my leg would snap back and I would teeter on the brink of falling (again, yelping amusingly) and feel like a perfect ass.

What’s that? What’s he saying to me? OK, try it without poles. Carry the poles uselessly in one hand and skate along... it really is like skating! Much more so than the old way, in the old boots, on the old skis. Oh, it feels good, gliding along, whistling a happy tune between the backslide-induced yelps... but then... but then...

The first real slope. It’s not long, and I would have trudged easily up it on my trailpackers (if they didn’t betray me and sink me hip-deep into the snow) but now... now... time for the ultimate PLOPstep, and heavy work for my arms and shoulders because a) the poles become crucial for balance as I try correctly to place my skis and b) the poles are even more crucial for pulling myself up out of the snow after I’ve slid backwards a few feet and fallen down with a resounding... PLOP.

I therefore wound up working harder than I’ve yet done on one of our outings this winter, and skied a shorter distance than I’ve done since our first day out, and my muscles as I type this Monday afternoon are quite sore, but I’ve yet to wipe the silly, happy grin off my face... not just over the bliss of blister-free feet (though that is bliss indeed), but also over the memory of feeling I might finally get this ski thing right.

The Skiwer King now thinks maybe I would have been better off, that most people would be better off, learning the whole thing on slick backcountry skis from the get-go, comparing such to the practice of teaching a kid to drive on a stick-shift vehicle; you have to learn everything, can’t rely on any crutches of technology or convenience, and master techniques that will always serve you well no matter how harsh or marshmallow-y the conditions.

(Of course, my walking buddy remarks, by the same analogy, it’s best to throw someone into the English Channel during a seastorm to teach him to swim... but that’s maybe taking analogy to extremes)

I say better late than never... and know myself well enough to know also that when I was younger I would not have had quite the right stubbornness and patience to keep falling and rising and sticking my tongue out at my even more patient pal, who finally taught me to ski after all.

THE THOUSAND-EYED GODDESS

I usually leave the job of stating the obvious to those media entities that get paid to do so, but an important truth seems to have fallen by the wayside in our little valley in recent months, and so I find myself forced to remind everyone that...

...If something sounds too good/weird/unlikely/impossible to be true, then it probably is not true.

Is that really so hard to grasp?

So difficult to comprehend?

Or maybe it sounds... too good to be true?

The Greeks were right to depict Rumor as the goddess with a thousand eyes and a million tongues, but they didn’t go far enough with that.

The Goddess Rumor has a thousand very, very near-sighted eyes, a million ears with severe and daunting ear wax problems, and a thousand thick and cleft and otherwise deeply impaired tongues. Regard her not as an authority to be feared or respected, but as a creature worthy of your deepest pity and compassion, like a sick old dog that keeps trying to attack a table leg, thinking it the offending limb of a vandal or burgler trying to invade the family home.

Scary economic times like we’re facing, when we’ve taken it in the shorts in so many ways and are poised, if we sit here and continue to do nothing about the Forest Plan and other delights, to get creamed even worse, do not bring out the best in us as a polis even before the bullshit factory cranks up.

And it only gets worse if we don’t remember to take the output of said factory with all of the seriousness it deserves, a.k.a. none at all, most of the time.

If it sounds at all plausible, by all means investigate it and see if it’s true. Is there physical evidence? Documentation? Horse’s mouth testimony?

But for pity’s sake, if there’s none of that, shut the hell up and find something constructive to do with all of that worry and angst and air. The Forest Plan beckons. Oh, and we’re probably going to war. Remember the outside world, people? There’s a president and a Congress out there who do.

LOOK WHO FINALLY CARES!

I promise that sooner or later I'll stop being so pissed off, but another person has made the official LIANT shit list, for being the ultimate Babsy-Come-Lately to the Saratoga pity party.

I refer to no less a person than Representative Barbara Cubin, our favorite Congresswoman from Wyoming.

Or her press secretary, at least.

OK, disclosure time: Part of why I'm cranky is that today was supposed to be my day off as compensation for the very long hours I worked to bring you the 2003 Saratoga Ice Fishing Derby, but instead I spent most of it in my office anyway, because my enabling assistant's dog managed to get hit by a car, and both dog and EA are too distraught to make public appearances.

SO ANYWAY, I will leave it to you, dear readers, to decide if I'm overreacting to the message that greeted me on the chamber's answering machine this A.M.:

In brief, Babs' press secretary (or a lackey thereof), "Joe" saw on TV last night that something seems to be happening with our local sawmill that doesn't sound too good, and he would really like, on Babs' behalf, to get details on that, on what's happening and why and how it's affecting us (HELLOOOOOO????) for some newspaper columns and the like that Babsy Baby might like to write.

In other words, her staff has finally deigned to notice that we're in a bind here, and sees in it potential to make some political hay picking on the pro-NAFTAites and the Forest Service, holding us up as your poster children.

Of which I shall surely be one, as I am to appear this very evening on the KTWO Wyoming news giving my two cents on what's next for us in Saratoga and trying really hard not to blubber (I got to thinking about how many of my friends who are leaving, and also about certain assholes who have never, ever spoken to me on the matter but have somehow concluded that I don't give a shit about those people who are going to have to leave, and couldn't help but look a little pathetic, I guess) about "a tripod with only two legs."

God, I hope "Joe" doesn't see that.

I ask again, where were all of these people last year, when we actually asked for their help?

MAYBE MORE THAN 25 POUNDS…

So, as several members of our local Soroptimist Club are faithful LIANT readers, they graciously invited me to heat up the oil and help them boil our District Forest Ranger. OK, maybe boil is a bit harsh, but they did hope to grill him on some of the finer and scarier points of the Forest Plan…

What he said was not quite as interesting as what he didn’t say… For instance, when he was asked (by My Own Dear Personal Mom) if the closure of the Louisiana Pacific mill here in Saratoga was factored into the Plan’s calculations regarding “loss of forest-related jobs” (stated in his nifty Power Point presentation to be “insignificant”), he, um, err, changed the subject.

He also said the Forest Service “needs mills” to buy and use the trees removed in the management of our forest, but neglected to say which mills were needed, or if this Important and Interesting Fact was in any way part of last month’s deliberations between the Forest Service and the two companies (formerly) interested in buying LP-Saratoga.

And he didn’t say who was going to process what few trees are allowed to be removed. The Log Fairy, perhaps.

He also didn’t know a bleeding thing about these little “sub-nievian” voles that are being used as “indicator species” for deciding the fate of snowmobile use in the Snowy Range, mimicking the behavior of…pretty much everyone who is just asking us to take his or her word for it that snowmobiles “impact” these voles (betraying, as always, a shocking disrespect for the English language in using “impact” as a transitive verb, but as that sin is widespread within and without government circles, I can’t directly fault him for that, though I still had to snort at it. Call it a reflex. I’m only human).

Nor did he have much to say on the subject of doing business locally, after I shared with him his agency’s PR problem in that regard (our two largest remaining employers in the Platte Valley are the Forest Service and the school district, neither of whose employees are often seen shopping in our local grocery, hardware or other stores, but would most certainly have Frequent Shopper Cards at WalMart if such things existed) and encouraged him to encourage his employees to use Carbon Bucks to prove me wrong, if indeed I was wrong on this Important and Popular fact.

Meanwhile, the last long went through our mill this very morning, and my neighborhood is eerily silent without the mill’s low hum, occasional industrial creaking and cranking, and all of the other oddly soothing sounds that lulled me to sleep each night, a constant aural reminder that at least some aspect of our local economy flourished still.

No more, no more.

Now, I can’t lay this entirely at the Forest Service’s door; this is also a NAFTA issue (Canadian lumber flooding the market at impossibly cheap prices is what finally drove LP to sell off its lumber division in the first place), but I also can’t praise this agency and it’s hangers-on and tale-bearers for going out of its way to help keep this vital sector of our economy functioning, either.

I was alarmed by one other thing: When I brought out the foot-thick excretion and thumped it on the table at lunch, our guest speaker eyed it and remarked that even THAT is not the entire plan.

At least, as I remarked when the luncheon broke up, the Forest Service is doing its bit to support the paper industry.

Too bad it wasn’t a paper mill that closed down today.

SHORT AND SWEET AND SOUR

Where the fuck were all of these geniuses a year ago when there was still time to pursue all of these brilliant schemes (which all boil down to whining to the governor and Wyoming's congressional delegation) for "saving the mill"?

Oh yes. Without even the gumption to pursue the bandwagon upon which they are jumping only now, they were waiting for it to trundle past their homes so they could embark at their leisure.

But by all means, yes, continue bitching and making inaccurate accusations at one another. We are most entertained.

TELLING MBNF FOREST PLAN FACT #1

All I have seen so far regarding the towns living under the long dark shadow of the U.S. Forest Service's PROPOSED REVISED LAND AND RESOURCE MANAGEMENT PLAN is contained in the following paragraphs, and contains some interesting omissions therein:

Social and Economic Environment

"More than half of Wyoming's population lives in the vicinity of the Medicine Bow National Forest. The state capital, Cheyenne, population 50,000, is 50 miles from the Supervisor's Office and 30 miles from the Forest boundary. Populations of other Medicine Bow area communities are: Laramie, 27,000; Casper, 50,000; and Douglas, 5700. The state's only four-year university is in Laramie, and most of the population of Colorado's Front Range lives within several hours of the Medicine Bow. Interstate 80 crosses the Forest; in fact, the Medicine Bow National Forest and its ranges are the Rockies are the first mountains encountered on I-80 by westbound travelers from population centers in the Midwest. Interstate 25 is nearby and is within sight of much of the Laramie Range."

Notice a few towns that have been omitted from this list? Any idea why?

WE'RE NOT EVEN A BLIP ON THEIR RADAR SCREENS, folks! Not even worth mentioning, even though it's OUR economy more than anyone else's that is being affected by this plan.

Cheyenne, Cheyenne made the list because, of course, that's where all the big bureaucrats are.

Laramie? Where all the Friends of the Bow are, and the University that shelters them.

Casper? Where the rest of the bureaucrats are.

Douglas? Well, they had to name something close to Thunder Basin National Grassland, which is technically part of Medicine Bow National Forest.

Saratoga, Encampment and Riverside don't even exist, so far, in this plan. Of course, I'm not done reading it and they may throw us a bone somewhere in the small print, but...

Interesting, no?

More to come, dears, more to come...

HIT AND RUN...

OK, raise your hand if you are currently plagued with hilarious visions of twelve bundled up, slightly toasted ice fishermen engaged in a stumbling, bumbling, moderately violent, Thunder Road-like footrace from the shores of Saratoga Lake to the Chamber's brand spanking new tent, beating each other off with hand-cranker ice augers, golden rainbow trout tucked under their arms.

Anyone? Anyone?

Well, I'm used to being a majority of one.

Yup, it's ice fishing derby time again, and in a fit of sheer schnapps-inspired madness last year, we decided to add a new prize category, which we dubbed "bounty fish." A secret variety of fish not normally found in Saratoga would be introduced, in very small numbers (12), and the first one of these brought in to the headquarters tent during derby hours would win $500, the second $250, and any more that came in would be worth $50.

In other words, if you catch one of these babies, haul ass to the tent.

To try to prevent, or at least drastically minimize, sneaky cheater types from bringing along examples of their own to try to pass off as something they caught in our lake, we kept what kind of fish it would be secret until the last minute, then spammed everybody with images and descriptions of the quarry.

Hence the above described scenario, currently on constant repeat in my mind's eye. I can just see it happening at, say 7:05 a.m. tomorrow, just as we're up and out and open for business.

Blood may flow. Egos may be bruised. Prats may fall.

There's still time to join the fun, by the way. We'll be selling tickets throughout the tournament out there in the tent.

You can do it, too; it's not a show!

WHAT'S IT GOING TO TAKE...

...To convince you people that there is, in fact, ice on Saratoga Lake? And plenty of it. Honestly. Really. Umm... what do you think is holding up the skiff of snow currently falling not-so-gently on our heads?

I'll repeat it again, for those of you who care. There is between eight and 14 inches of ice on the lake. Just go look HERE to see some PROOF!

I give up. I'm going home. I've got journalists to shepherd around town tomorrow. They're finally interested in the fact that the saw mill is going kaput!