The About page for this blog says its topics might include “just about anything other than politics or religion”, and I have been pretty successful in keeping religion out of my blog and my life — less so politics. I’m pretty sure this post is the most blatant breaking of my own rule yet, but during a week when the internet is awash in political posts, perhaps no one will even notice.

Around Independence Day this year, I revisited the document at the heart of the holiday and was struck by a sentence containing the words “character” and “tyrant”. So much so that I soon made it part of my Facebook cover photo which is shown here.

Last Sunday, I replaced my Facebook profile picture with the one at left which I had used previously on the anniversary of the pictured assault on our capitol. I had wanted to do that sooner but was traveling and chose to keep an “on the road” picture in place until I was home. My intention was to replace both pictures on the day after the election. The cover photo would go back to the picture of the 1923 version of the Pledge of Allegiance in the Indiana War Memorial Shrine Room that the Declaration of Independence quote replaced, and the profile picture would become one of my previously used “at home” pictures. That has not happened because the day after the election did not feel like the “return to normalcy” I had expected and hoped for. My plans for replacing them are uncertain.

When I changed my profile picture a week ago, I included this text: “There are many reasons to vote against Donald Trump but for me, his actions of January 6, 2021, and the intentions they revealed are, by themselves, more than enough.”

I don’t participate in political discussions in real life much more than I do online but in the few I have had during the last year or so, I have noted my feeling that the disregard for the rule of law and the workings of U.S. democracy Donald Trump showed that day made virtually every other consideration in the presidential election insignificant.

One commenter on the profile picture told me that I was the one being “gaslighted” and that Pelosi was to blame. Another claimed that the assault was planned by “the Dems”. The comments came from good people who I assume really believe what they say. Why is their view so different from mine? Why is my view of Donald Trump so different from that of the majority of voters in Tuesday’s election? I don’t know the full answer to that but do believe that what Heather Cox Richardson referred to as “the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now” is a big part of it. I do on occasion respond to someone sharing disinformation online by pointing to a source that refutes it. Common reactions are “I don’t trust that source” or “It doesn’t matter if that evidence is fake because I know something is going on”.

Incidentally, Richardson is someone I follow and respect. If you don’t follow her yourself and have room for one more analysis of the election, I suggest her Letters from an American of November 6.

With Trump’s clear victory on Tuesday, I confess to briefly questioning my view of the man but it was over in a flash. All it took was remembering how many members of his first administration, including a chief of staff and his own vice president, also consider him unfit for office.

This post’s title comes from President Joe Biden’s speech on November 7. I listened to it live and was struck by the phrase “Setbacks are unavoidable but giving up is unforgivable.” Others were too as it seems to be quoted in the bulk of reports on the speech. In the speech, Biden, mentions some of his successes such as infrastructure investment and the seemingly unappreciated “soft landing” from high inflation. Understandably, he did not mention failures. The biggest, in my opinion, was the failure to quickly and aggressively prosecute Donald Trump for his words and actions related to that 2021 attack on the capitol. I agree, Joe, that we probably can’t avoid all setbacks. But I do think we could have avoided this one.

This series started in 2014 under the title “I Care Not How. Only If.” In 2018, I acknowledged that I did care how and changed the title to the one at the top of this post. In recent years, I’ve come close to acknowledging that I care a lot about how people vote and changing the title again. Two things have kept me from doing that. One is that the situation that prompted that first post ten years ago still exists — too many people eligible to vote in the USA don’t.

We are getting better. According to the Pew Research Center, 2020’s 66% turnout was the highest rate for any national election since 1900. Some people don’t vote because it is just too difficult and there have been recent efforts, often under the guise of “security” to make it more so even though voter fraud is so rare that it is almost non-existent. If you are in a position to help eliminate unjustified barriers to voting, do it. If you are capable of going over, around, or through unjustified barriers to voting, do that. If there are no unjustified barriers to your voting, vote.

The other reason I have stuck with and actually stand by this post’s title is one of the observations in an article I referenced in the 2018 post where the title was first used. That post is here, the article is here, and the observation I’m thinking of is that people are becoming more engaged in elections. Yes, in far too many cases engagement takes the form of personal insults and glib memes on social media. And yes, people seem to be doing a lot more talking than listening but I’d like to think that there are at least a few more people listening now than there were in 2014.

Ohio folks: Tomorrow, Oct 7, is the last day to register — in person, by mail, or online.

We fought a war to get this country going then gave every land-owning white male above the age of twenty-one the right to vote. A little more than fourscore years later, we fought a war with ourselves that cleared the way for non-whites to vote. Several decades of loud, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous behavior brought the granting of that same right to non-males a half-century later, and another half-century saw the voting age lowered to eighteen after a decade or so of protests and demonstrations.

Of course, putting something in a constitution does not automatically make it a practice throughout the land and I am painfully aware that resistance followed each of those changes and that efforts to make voting extremely difficult for “the other side” are ongoing today. I don’t want to ignore partisan obstructions and system flaws but neither do I want to get hung up on them. I meant my first paragraph to be a reminder that a hell of a lot of effort, property, and lives have gone into providing an opportunity to vote to a hell of a lot of people. Far too many of those opportunities go unused.

We may be getting slightly better, however. 2018 turnout set a record for midterm elections as reported in this Vox article. According to this Pew Research article, turnout was even better in 2020 although the United States continues to trail most of the world’s democracies. It was in the 2020 version of the Pew Research article that I noticed something that I simply hadn’t realized previously. The United States has the greatest difference between the percentage of voting-age population (VAP) actually voting and registered voters actually voting. In many countries, there is no difference at all since to be a citizen is to be allowed to vote. In other countries, the difference is trivial. In the U.S. presidential election of 2016, it was a whopping 31.1% (86.8-55.7). It was even a little bigger in 2020 at 31.3% (94.1 – 62.8). In 2020, I found that startling so I guess I can’t be startled by it again. However, I can be and am dismayed. The problem does not seem to be getting registered voters to the polls; 94.1% is an impressive turnout. The problem is getting people registered. That’s sinking in very slowly.

I first posted the core of this article in 2014. In the original title, I claimed to not care how anyone votes. That was never entirely true, of course. I have my favorite candidates and issues. I’ll be disappointed in anyone who votes differently than I do but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be in anyone who doesn’t vote at all. I’m reminded of parents working on getting their kids to clean their plates with lines like, “There are hungry children in China who would love to have your green beans.” I’m not sure what the demand for leftover beans is in Beijing these days but I’m pretty sure some folks there would like to have our access to ballots and voting booths.

I was mildly surprised when I hit 300 breweries but not so 400. I knew exactly when number 400 was on the horizon and just hoped it would be someplace cool. It was. Just like the place that surprised me in 2021 (Millstone Pizza and Brewery), there was food and good beer. The two even shared being recommended by friends although in the latest case, the friends were just a day old. The 400th brewery got some extra love from me by being one of those small operations that sit out in the country with lots of open space around them and some outside seating.

The first picture shows the front of Creekside Brewing Company but the entrance is around back. Just follow the bicycles. Pictures also show some of that open space and good food I mentioned. That’s an Afternoon Joe Porter behind the pulled pork. I was surprised by those new friends who recommended this brewery sitting at a nearby table. I’d met them the night before at another brewery and again earlier in the day at an airport open house which is where they recommended Creekside. That other brewery, Swing On Brewery (#399 9/20/23), was even more “out in the country”, had good beer and open space, and would have made a fine #400. I did get a picture. I also got a picture of Creekside’s tap area and its delightful owners, Rashaell and Eric.

When I did the post on reaching 300 Breweries, I included the start of the next 100 at Cowboy State Brewing, and I’ll do the same now. Sequatchie Valley Brewing Company was nearly as difficult to find as CSB had been. The only sign was the small hanging one in the picture and I drove by multiple times and double-checked the address before seeing it. There were only two SVBC beers on tap along with a hard lemonade and some beer from other breweries. I failed to read the fine print about the Märzen before I tried it and was surprised by the “touch of pumpkin spice”. I was kind of put off by it, too. The cream ale was better.

Breweries in this last one hundred I thought worthy of note include Studebaker Brewing Company (#308 7/11/21),  Scratch Brewing Company (#336 6/5/22), Sangamo Brewing (#350 10/23/22),  Wooly Pig Farm Brewery (#363 4/6/23), and Old Bridge Brewing Company (#389 9/10/23). Studebaker is in South Bend, IN, where it shares the former Clement Studebaker Mansion with the Tippecanoe Place Restaurant. Scratch, near Ava, IL, was recommended by a friend some time ago but it took me a while to get there. The rural establishment ticked all of my cool brewery boxes. I liked Sangamo in Chatham, IL, because it’s a combination brewery, restaurant, and sign museum.

Wooly Pig Farm was also recommended by a friend and also matched my cool brewery profile. The brewery shares the farm near Fresno, OH, with Mangalica pigs which are indeed wooly. Finding Old Bridge in McConnelsville, OH, was pretty much a stroke of luck. The 1919 Chevrolet garage is a great place for a brewery.

As I explained at the time, my surprise at hitting my 300th brewery when I did was partially due to Untappd, where I do my logging, recognizing some breweries that had not been classified as such when I logged them. That practice continues meaning that a brewery’s position on my list can change. The brewery that triggered the 200 Breweries post is now #204 and the one that triggered the 300 Breweries post is now #303. That means that I actually reached those landmarks a little earlier than announced and that it took me only 97 breweries to go from 300 to 400. Perhaps a little warping of statistics is to be expected when breweries are involved. The positions given above for breweries are based on the current list. Positions given in previous posts were accurate at the time of posting.

In reporting my 200th brewery, I wrote about a place that had definitely been a brewery when I visited in 2015 but was not identified as one by Untappd at the time. Now, as I looked into the minor shifts in my brewery list, I discovered that my check-in of Pinups and Pints, a brewery, had been replaced with a check-in of Baby Dolls, a strip club. Although I believe Untappd got the timing of the name change and classification wrong, I decided that the easiest way to get credit for a check-in at “The World’s Only Strip Club — Brew Pub” was to do it again. This time the house-brewed beer (There is only one at a time.) was Pin Up Pale Ale.  

Sorting through the various check-ins and list positions got me thinking about pace. I joined Untappd on January 29, 2014, and logged my first brewery two days later on January 31. The 100th was logged 999 days later on October 26, 2016. The 200th was logged on June 29, 2019, and the 300th on July 2, 2021. The 400th was logged on September 30, 2023. That’s 976, 734, and 820 days for the last three groups of 100 or 3529 days for all 400. The pace has varied some but not dramatically. The overall average is a new brewery every 8.8 days (roughly 0.79 breweries a week) during a period approaching ten years. I don’t know how much longer I can keep this up.

This week my world was once again too boring to provide a current event story. But it wasn’t too busy which is the other reason I sometimes use a canned post, as I most recently did on February 19 (Trip Peek # 122 Trip #84 Finding Holland), or recycle an older post, as I most recently did on January 29 (Happy Imbolc Again). So, instead of doing either of those things, I’m going to write about something on this website that I feel doesn’t get enough attention. That might really be saying something since I naturally feel that the entire website doesn’t get enough attention. I’m talking about the clickable collage of thumbnail images from completed trips.

I’ve had vague ideas about tooting this particular horn in the past but never pursued them very far. I thought of it again this week when I realized I had a little time to write a post but no real-time topic to write about. When that happened, I quickly realized that this was a pretty good time to write about the collage. You see the count of completed trips is currently a multiple of ten and the collage is ten images wide. That means I could produce the image above (which links to the real thing) without the uneven lower edge that it has 90% of the time.

For any that don’t know, this website came into being in 1999 to document a single road trip then hung around to document those that followed. Before long, a chronological list of completed trips appeared with highlights and such and links to the individual journals. This blog was added in 2011 to better support non-road trip postings and allow reader comments.

My 100th road trip occurred just a few months after the blog was started and there was a blog post noting it (The First One Hundred). I had already been selecting a single image from each trip to use in a now-retired feature on the home page and I included a collage of those images in that post. Just a couple of weeks later, the static collage was replaced with a clickable version that has grown as trips are completed and added. Hovering over an individual image will display the sequential number, year, and name of the trip. Clicking it leads to the associated journal.

I get great pleasure from just looking at the collage because each of those images has the potential for triggering tons of memories and together they remind me how much fun I’ve had over the last couple of decades. That will undoubtedly become even more valuable as more years go by. Of course, no one else has those memories to be triggered. I am very much aware of that but hope that others that look over the collage will see something they recognize or something they think interesting and worth a further look. There are 170 trips represented there now and it continues to grow slowly. I encourage you to take a look by clicking the opening image.

In addition to that 100th trip post where the collage first appeared, it was also mentioned a few years ago in a post on Some Subtle Stuff. A look at that might be worthwhile if that sort of thing interests you.

I’m embarrassed. After publishing an almost identical article for seven years, I dropped the ball in 2021. I was a little busier than usual in the weeks preceding the election so that may be partly to blame. The 2021 elections were rather low-profile contests, especially compared to 2020, so that could be part of the reason too. Or maybe all those people still trying to affect the results of the 2020 elections hid the fact that a new election season was upon us. Well, there’s no hiding that the 2022 election season is now REALLY upon us even as people are still trying to affect the election of 2020 and it’s starting to seem like campaigning is not a seasonal thing at all but a permanent condition.

The economy and abortion are understandably major issues in this election but neither is, in my opinion, the defining issue. When I made my first pre-election post in 2014, my concern was the scary percentage of Americans who were able to vote but did not. The post cited some historic steps in increasing the number of Americans able to vote. Today the direction those two items are moving seems to have reversed. The percentage of eligible voters voting has increased but so have efforts to reduce the number of eligible voters. In addition, all the tricks, such as gerrymandering, to reduce the effectiveness of some votes, are at least as common as ever. It’s natural, of course, for politicians to be concerned with winning but they shouldn’t be concerned only with winning.

“Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing,” is a quote attributed to more than one sports figure and often the more cynical among us pretend that it’s true. But even in professional sports, most of us want the winning to be done fairly. We do not, for example, allow the winner of the World Series to unilaterally make the rules for the next season. We should be at least as concerned with fairness in selecting who represents us in our government as in declaring game winners.

There have always been politicians to whom winning is more important than any principles they might hold but their numbers seem to have dramatically increased in recent years. That increase is at least partially behind a recent Adam Kinzinger quote I’ve been thinking about a lot. Adam and Liz Cheney, neither of which will return to congress next year, are the only Republicans on the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. When his response to the attack on Paul Pelosi was compared to some others he said, “By the way, Liz and I are not courageous. There’s no strength in this. We’re just surrounded by cowards. And then complete contrast to cowardism, it looks like courage when it’s just your bare duty.”

We fought a war to get this country going then gave every land-owning white male above the age of twenty-one the right to vote. A little more than fourscore years later, we fought a war with ourselves that cleared the way for non-whites to vote. Several decades of loud, disruptive, and sometimes dangerous behavior brought the granting of that same right to non-males a half-century later, and another half-century saw the voting age lowered to eighteen after a decade or so of protests and demonstrations.

Of course, putting something in a constitution does not automatically make it a practice throughout the land and I am painfully aware that resistance followed each of those changes and that efforts to make voting extremely difficult for “the other side” are ongoing today. I don’t want to ignore partisan obstructions and system flaws but neither do I want to get hung up on them. I meant my first paragraph to be a reminder that a hell of a lot of effort, property, and lives have gone into providing an opportunity to vote to a hell of a lot of people. Far too many of those opportunities go unused.

We may be getting slightly better, however. 2018 turnout set a record for midterm elections as reported in this Vox article. According to this Pew Research article, turnout was even better in 2020 although the United States continues to trail most of the world’s democracies. It was in the 2020 version of the Pew Research article that I noticed something that I simply hadn’t realized previously. The United States has the greatest difference between the percentage of voting-age population (VAP) actually voting and registered voters actually voting. In many countries, there is no difference at all since to be a citizen is to be allowed to vote. In other countries, the difference is trivial. In the U.S. presidential election of 2016, it was a whopping 31.1% (86.8-55.7). It was even a little bigger in 2020 at 31.3% (94.1 – 62.8). In 2020, I found that startling so I guess I can’t be startled by it again. However, I can be and am dismayed. The problem does not seem to be getting registered voters to the polls; 94.1% is an impressive turnout. The problem is getting people registered. That’s sinking in very slowly. 

I first posted the core of this article in 2014. In the original title, I claimed to not care how anyone votes. That was never entirely true, of course. I have my favorite candidates and issues. I’ll be disappointed in anyone who votes differently than I do but not nearly as disappointed as I’ll be in anyone who doesn’t vote at all. I’m reminded of parents working on getting their kids to clean their plates with lines like, “There are hungry children in China who would love to have your green beans.” I’m not sure what the demand for leftover beans is in Beijing these days but I’m pretty sure some folks there would like to have our access to ballots and voting booths.