A Citizen's Guide to Indiana

Masson's Blog

General Assembly Sneaks in School Library Obscenity Language at Last Minute

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Casey Smith, writing for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, reports on the last minute amendment to HB 1447 in the waning hours of session to combat the non-existent “problem” of obscenity in school libraries. There just isn’t a scourge of obscene material floating around our school libraries. The idea that we need to adopt a law creating a procedure to deal with obscenity in school libraries is one of those “the question is an accusation” kind of dynamics. “They wouldn’t need a process if there wasn’t a significant problem would they?”

The language slipped into the bill requires a school to have a process to handle complaints by a parent or community member requesting that a school library remove material that is obscene or is harmful to minors under the respective statutory definitions for each. “Harmful to minors” largely tracks the obscenity language but is slightly broader, so I’ll quote it here:

A matter or performance is harmful to minors for purposes of this article if:

(1) it describes or represents, in any form, nudity, sexual conduct, sexual excitement, or sado-masochistic abuse;

(2) considered as a whole, it appeals to the prurient interest in sex of minors;

(3) it is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the adult community as a whole with respect to what is suitable matter for or performance before minors; and

(4) considered as a whole, it lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.

It’s good that the new language limits the complaint process to community members or parents of students. It’s also good that the standard is basically an obscenity standard rather than merely something that a person finds offensive.

But the obnoxious element is that it requires the process include a public hearing at the governing body at its next public hearing. So, it encourages grandstanding and, by setting a limited time table for the hearing, discourages deliberation.  I think my inclination would be to set up a system with a rigorous screening process that requires the person making the complaint to make an initial showing in their complaint filing that the material of which they complain meets the “harmful to minor standards.” In other words, you have to make a credible presentation showing that the material you’re complaining of meets all four of those elements necessary for something to be “harmful to minors.” If you can’t make the initial showing and you’re just complaining about non-obscene material that you happen to find offensive, then this process is not for you; and you don’t get your complaint elevated to the level of a public hearing in front of the school board.

Just thinking outside the box, I wonder if you could create some kind of opt-in mailing list of community members who want to know when someone is trying to remove materials from the library and, as part of the process, the person making the complaint has to send notice of their intention to everyone on that list so that those concerned citizens would have an opportunity to attend the hearing.

Anyway, this is another entirely unnecessary law. In this case, it seems designed to reinforce the unfounded notion that our kids are under attack by shadowy, lurking forces that would corrupt them. Maybe in the school library! (Incidentally, I was just watching a documentary on Judy Blume. People lost their damn minds about her books 50 years ago. So, history may not repeat, but it rhymes.)

State Budget: $1.1 Billion in Private School Subsidies; Public School Funding Won’t Keep Up with Inflation

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Casey Smith, writing for the Indiana Capital Chronicle, has a report on the nearly final state budget’s impact on education. Some of the key take aways:

  • The General Assembly will appropriate $1.1 billion over the two year budget cycle to subsidize private schools. A family of four making $220,000 per year will be eligible for the subsidy.
  • The public school appropriation, increasing by 5.1% over two years, likely won’t even keep up with inflation (assuming inflation will be more than 2.6% per year.)
  • A pilot program in Lake, Marion, St. Joe, & Vanderburgh requires schools passing referendum funding in those counties after June 30 of this year to share their referendum taxes with charters. I’ll be shocked if that doesn’t expand statewide in the very near future.
  • Somewhat good news is that when eliminating text book fees, instead of making schools absorb those costs, the budget includes $160 million per year for those fees. (Back of the napkin math – Indiana has somewhat over 1 million students, so I guess that’s something like $150/student for fees depending on the details of how that’s allocated.)

With the inclusion of people in the $154,000 – $220,000 income bracket and elimination of some other barriers, the private school subsidy is expected to increase from 53,000 students to 95,000. (Compare this to 4,500 back in 2011.) Keep in mind, vouchers do nothing to improve educational outcomes.

Although small, pilot-phase programs showed some promise two decades ago, new evaluations of vouchers in Washington, D.C., Indiana, Louisiana, and Ohio show some of the largest test score drops ever seen in the research record—between -0.15 and -0.50 standard deviations of learning loss. That’s on par with what the COVID-19 pandemic did to test scores, and larger than Hurricane Katrina’s impacts on academics in New Orleans.

While failing in its stated goals, the Indiana General Assembly’s approach to privatizing public education is accomplishing its actual goals: 1) subsidize religious education; 2) weaken teacher’s unions; and 3) redirect public money to private interests.

Public schools are going to need referendums so the General Assembly can subsidize Brebeuf.

Hicks on Quality of Life and Economic Opportunity

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Economist Michael Hicks (who you should follow on Twitter if other aspects of that platform have not yet driven you away) has an eye opening column in the Muncie Star press on the connection of quality of life to economic opportunities entitled “Economic opportunity now in high quality of life places.” As I summarize this, any errors are my own, so you’d be well served to read the piece. But, in the past, quality of life was tied into other variables (e.g. housing capacity and availability of jobs that pay well) in terms of attracting population. In the Midwest, our housing capacity situation is better than what’s usually available in other locations. And jobs are more mobile than they once were — when manufacturing was booming, people had to come to the plant. The types of jobs that tend to be growing these days are easier to do remotely or to move to locations having a lot of qualified people. So, quality of life is the main thing attracting people.

And it seems to be those quality of life issues important to younger people which would be more significant; because they’re the ones more likely to move. The kinds of things that stand out: great schools, low crime, a welcoming social climate, and local recreational opportunities. Oceans, a warm climate, or mountains would probably help, but: a) we can’t do much about that; and b) they don’t seem critical. A business-friendly tax climate isn’t the make or break issue that a number of our politicians would like us to believe. In fact, if it’s a choice between low taxes or high quality of life, the smart money is spending it on quality of life.

A lot of this resonates with the points of emphasis in the Greater Lafayette’s “Good to Great” report from 2012. I haven’t tracked these things, but I’m sure it’s a mixed bag in terms of how well we’ve implemented the recommendations in the report. But having had the study and having moved forward on some of the recommendations probably puts Tippecanoe County ahead of the curve. I’ll surely be drawing on these resources when I start banging the drum again on West Lafayette school referendum which has to be renewed in the near future. Meanwhile, Indiana as a whole is shooting itself in the foot by adopting ever more restrictive social policies, eroding the quality of our schools with privatization schemes, and lowering taxes in the hopes that we can do “cheap” better than other places that are also racing to the bottom.

Berlin Day 6: Tempelhof Airport and Adjusted Travel Plans

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The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 6 (March 16, 2023)

Outdoor dining.

We once again got a late start, this time on account of our late return from Barsinghausen the night before. On today’s (Thursday, March 16) agenda was the Tempelhof Airport tour and some doner kebab. The weather was as nice as it had been all week. This was scheduled to be our last day in Berlin. While we were waiting for the kids to get going, Amy was checking information for our flight out on Friday. But it was odd. The information wasn’t showing up. She called the credit card benefits division through which we’d bought our flights. They agreed that something wasn’t checking out, but they’d have to wait until the American division of Scandinavian Air (SAS) was open. The U.S. was 5 hours behind us at that point, so it would have to wait until 1 or 2.

We ate the scraps left in the apartment for breakfast and then headed out. We stopped at a kebab place called Bistro Nazar which was a little trailer with maybe one outdoor table. Cole did the ordering for us. They asked if we wanted ketchup with the fries. He said yes, and they put a fair amount of it on top of the fries. It was a little sweet for my tastes, and in retrospect it would have been better just plain. But the kebabs were good. Amy found a place to mail some post cards while the kids and I hung out in the sun.

More or less across the street was an air lift monument. It’s an impressive concrete structure “reminiscent of a hungry hand reaching up.” Apparently there are identical monuments in Celle and Frankfurt. However, the area is not well maintained. There was graffiti on the monument and trash in the area. I was put in mind of the Captain Cook monument in Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii. But the comparison is probably not apt. The neglect of that monument pretty clearly reflects ill-will toward the monument and what it represents. I don’t think there is anything like that kind of hostility. Germans might have some mixed feelings about Americans, but the airlift was a pretty impressive feat. Soviets had cut off ground access to West Berlin for 322 days in 1948 and 1949. The Americans and the British performed the astounding feat of supplying the city from the air.

Not sure what “Rerum Cognoscere Causas” (“to know the causes of things”) has to do with the airport, but it looked cool.

The monument is near the entrance to Tempelhof Airport which was the site of our tour. The place stopped operating as an airport since 2008 and is just an immense, mostly unused structure surrounded by open space which has been devoted to public use. The site of the airport was originally Knights Templar territory (hence the name) and then a Prussian parade field. It then became a pre-war airfield, and Hitler had plans, never fully realized, to turn the place into a showpiece. The side by the runways and tarmac is shaped in a semi-circle where they were going to build stadium seating on the roof with an intended capacity of 100,000. On the opposite side, there were plans to install a sloped grass area that could accommodate another million.

Wide open spaces

There were also some political prison space there which pre-dated the Nazis but which they took advantage of until they had built more industrial facilities for that sort of thing. Armaments were manufactured there. The airport sustained some bombing damage during the war but maybe not as much as I would have expected – me not being a war planner or anything, but it seems like devastating an airfield would be a high priority. After the war, the Americans kept half and let the Germans use the other half. The Germans resumed commercial flights from Tempelhof. On the American side, there was apparently an attempt to create amenities that would limit the temptation to go out into the broader city. Cold War spying was rampant and the less Americans mixed with the general population the better. So, among other things, I appreciated the basketball court on one of the upper floors, complete with a “Berlin Braves” logo.

Berlin Braves

After the tour, we found a quiet space and Amy tried to deal with our flight situation. The original itinerary was to fly out of Berlin on Friday morning to Stockholm and then catch the flight from Stockholm to Chicago on Saturday. But the Stockholm – Chicago flight, SAS flight SK945 was just … gone. Nobody seemed to have much information about why or when. Supposedly an email had gone out, but when she was able to check, no email had been sent to Amy about this flight being canceled. It was made more difficult by having to go through the ticket vendor rather than straight through SAS. But the SAS person told the vendor maybe something about a strike. Trying to piece it together later, there doesn’t seem to have been a strike. They just sold us the tickets in January, and then – maybe sometime in February – eliminated the route from February 28 through March 21. And failed to tell us. We had no place to stay on Friday and, now, no way to get home. As Amy was trying to navigate this with the vendor, Tempelhof was closing down. She actually managed to stay on the phone as we worked our way through the U-Bahn and tram system. But, ultimately, this was mostly wasted time. Nobody was getting us on another flight. When we got home, Amy was able to fire up her laptop and make arrangements. We ended up with a “bonus day” in Berlin, a hotel room, and flights through a different airline via Brussels. And a big price tag. International travel on short notice for four people isn’t cheap. We tried to claw some of the money back from SAS and our travel insurance, but so far the results are limited. We’re ridiculously privilege to have this be an annoyance rather than a catastrophe.

Cole at the Hoffbrau Hause

When in Berlin

Fortunately, all of that was settled in time for us to head back out to dinner where we had reservations at the Hofbrau House. When we’d been planning the trip, this had been Cole’s request. I loved this dinner. But the place is not some kind of authentic local institution. The vibe was maybe a cross between Applebees and EPCOT. For all that, there was great energy. Wide open spaces with big picnic tables, servers schlepping beers, and a band playing polka. People at the various tables all seemed to be having a good time. The table next to us was doing a bunch of Jaeger shots. Along with the beer, I had sausages, sauerkraut and potatoes. It was delicious. Since we were right there at Alexanderplatz, we checked out the World Clock, built in 1969. It’s a 24 sided clock with a side for each time zone and it lists major cities in that zone. We also took in a pretty good view of the Berlin TV Tower, originally intended as a symbol of communist power. With the Cold War won and time having passed, the TV tower has a Jetsons/Venture Brothers/Carousel of Progress sensibility.

Does anyone really know what time it is? Does anyone really care?

Another view of the TV tower.

We headed home. Cole and I thought we’d head out to one of the bars in the neighborhood for a beer. Amy was gassed from the stress of our travel snafu. Harper passed. So it was just me and the boy. The first place, I believe it was called Moloko, was just right. It was comfy and they had Zeppelin II playing on the stereo. Unfortunately, they closed at 10. Before and after Moloko, we had stuck our head into a place next door called Wohnzimmer. It was: a) too crowded; and b) not at all our vibe – fancy drinks and a hipper crowd. Still, we weren’t quite ready to be done, so we went to a Japanese restaurant called Oishinbo that was pretty close. That wasn’t great, so we tried one more which ended up being smokey and which we should have just skipped. Even so, it was nice to have some one-on-one time, shooting the breeze with Cole. A rare treat with him off at college. When we got back, we put the clothes we had been wearing out on the balcony to air out. There was a day when I was a lot more tolerant of bar smoke, but that day has definitely passed.

Hanging out with my boy.

Next time: Bonus day in Berlin and travel home.

Western Wayne News: More on the Richmond Fire

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Per the Western Wayne News:

“It’s his fault.”

Mayor Dave Snow blames Seth Smith, owner of Cornerstone Trading Group LLC, for hazardous conditions at a three-property complex that burned for more than three days last week. Smith stored tons of plastics in six buildings that total nearly 255,000 square feet on the 13.8-acre complex.

The article indicates that Smith and Cornerstone ignored clean up orders. The city lacked the resources to undertake a multi-million dollar clean up on its own.

The City had at least begun the process of securing an EPA grant to clean the place up and had entered into an agreement whereby Smith, as owner of the plastics, would remove the plastics and other materials and sell them.

“This was a multi-million-dollar undertaking, and for a city government to redirect millions of dollars away from city services and into cleaning up someone else’s mess is not a precedent we should ever set,” [Mayor] Snow said. “He was made very aware through various processes that this is his mess. He has a court order, and he disregarded these orders. He left the mess in place and everyone’s worst fears came to light, and he is responsible for this.”

Cost was just one factor in a possible city cleanup. The scope of clearing away the plastics would be incredibly large, beyond city capability; the plastics need a place or places for disposal, something Smith could provide with his overseas buyers; and First Bank Richmond had a security interest on the plastics inventory as loan collateral.

“We would have been taking materials technically owned by the bank,” [City Attorney] Sickmann said, adding there was a process with the bank to try and resolve the issue.

House Passes SB 486 stripping teachers of discussion rights with school administration

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Yesterday, the House passed, by a vote of 63-46, SB 486 which contains, among other things, a provision that removes the requirement that school administration discuss certain items with teachers.The mandatory discussion provision has been in place, I am told, since the 1970s and was adopted as a way to head off strikes. (I’m vaguely remembering a strike in 1977 or 1978 that kept us out of school in Richmond for some period of time. I wonder if the two things are connected.) Current law provides at IC 20-29-6-7:

Sec. 7. A school employer shall discuss with the exclusive representative of certificated employees the following items:

(1) Curriculum development and revision.

(2) Selection of curricular materials.

(3) Teaching methods.

(4) Hiring, evaluation, promotion, demotion, transfer, assignment, and retention of certificated employees.

(5) Student discipline.

(6) Expulsion or supervision of students.

(7) Pupil/teacher ratio.

(8) Class size or budget appropriations.

(9) Safety issues for students and employees in the workplace, except those items required to be kept confidential by state or federal law.

(10) Hours.

(11) Funding for a plan for a remediation program for any subset of students enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12.

(12) The following nonbargainable items under IC 20-43-10-3.5:

(A) Teacher appreciation grants.

(B) Individual teacher appreciation grant stipends to teachers.

(C) Additions to base salary based on teacher appreciation grant stipends.

(13) The pre-evaluation planning session required under IC 20-28-11.5-4.

(14) The superintendent’s report to the governing body concerning staff performance evaluations required under IC 20-28-11.5-9.

(15) A teacher performance model.

(16) The use of adjunct teachers permitted under IC 20-28-5-27.

The new law would strip the requirement that a school discuss the matters at all. It would now say that the school employer may conduct discussions and, furthermore, may do it with a non-representative group of teachers behind closed doors if it so chooses. That last part gives away the game. Cherry pick your teachers, hot box them, and/or play them off against each other to get the answers you want.

School privatization has three main goals: subsidize religious education, weaken teacher’s unions, and divert public funds to private interests. This isn’t privatization, but it’s clearly in support of goal #2. Requiring discussion with someone who represents teachers as a group has been in place for 40+ years. Having teacher representatives and administrators talk regularly is a good way to make sure that issues don’t turn into problems and that small problems don’t turn into big problems. During my stint on the West Lafayette school board, I was one of the board representatives to a discussion group that met once a month. It was not uncommon for those discussions to, among other things, allow administrators to float plans they had and to tweak those plans in a way that helped teachers do their jobs better.

This is anti-teacher, union busting; plain and simple.

Berlin Day 5: Trip to Barsinghausen

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The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 5 (March 15, 2023)

March 15 took us out of Berlin. When she was in high school, Amy became friends with a German exchange student. I had heard about him from time to time over the years, but mainly I remembered that he really liked Taco Bell. Amy gave him rides to and from school with Taco Bell stops en route. Sometime in 1996 or thereabouts, Amy took a trip to Germany and visited. After that, I don’t think there was a great deal of contact over the years. But, we were going to be in Germany, so she reached out and made plans to visit him in Barsinghausen, a village close to Hanover.

A street in Barsinghausen.

Our train didn’t leave until a little later, so we slept in before getting breakfast at a restaurant called Ewig Freunde. It was a little fancy for my breakfast tastes, but not bad. The server was friendly. Honestly, for all I like about Europe, I think breakfast is something the U.S. tends to do a little better. Properly fortified, we made our way to the central train station. “Hauptbahnhof” (main train station) was one of the few German terms I actually picked up during our trip. Once again, train travel is something that America just doesn’t do very well. We covered the approximately 170 miles from Berlin to Barsinghausen in a couple of hours. I can’t imagine trying to get from Lafayette to, say, St. Louis, via public transport without a lot more time, hassle, and expense. Our trip was smooth and uneventful. Got on the train, settled in a bit, wandered up to the restaurant car, grabbed a couple of beers, and enjoyed the ride.

Amy’s friend picked us up at the station which was less than a mile from his house. I like the tourist places, but just hanging out with some new people was a nice change of pace. Amy delivered a gift of Girl Scout Cookies by way of greeting. She had spent a good bit of time trying to think of something that was portable, American, not easily available in Germany, and that our hosts (and their kids) would enjoy. Hit the nail on the head, I thought.

The friend’s wife’s native language is Russian and German is her second language. She was worried about her English, but it was fantastic. Their seven year old, who doesn’t speak any English, quickly adopted Cole and wrangled him into playing chess, some kind of train building set, and video games. Cole took four or five years of German in high school. He’s not at all fluent, but he knows a fair bit. Still, whenever he’d start a conversation in German, the kind and/or efficient German listener would immediately shift to English. Here was an audience who wasn’t going to short-circuit Cole’s German! Cole said there was a fair amount he didn’t understand, but they both seemed to communicate well; and it was fun to watch. There is some legitimate criticism about Americans not learning other languages. But, in fairness, it’s a whole different dynamic when you live in a country the size of a continent where you are unlikely to encounter very many people who speak other languages and in a world where your language has become one of the defaults. Learning new languages simply doesn’t have the same utility for most Americans as it often does for people living in other places. If people in Ohio spoke a different language, I might be apt to pick up a little Buckeye because it would be useful.

The Masson kids establishing dominance.

After hanging out a bit, chatting, and enjoying some baked goods, we took a walk around the neighborhood and paused for a good while at the local soccer field. Cole and Harper mostly took on the seven year old who stood in goal. The kid had some good keeper instincts! Just the way he’d go to ground for the ball was a lot more fluid and natural than what I ever saw in my rec soccer kids, particularly at that age. My guess is that’s the influence of starting the sport early and having it on TV in a big way. Kids in the U.S. probably have a more intuitive grasp of some of our big sports just from it permeating the culture. There was one moment where the ball kind of got away from Cole and he ripped a hard shot into the top of the net. If it had been a little lower, there might have been injuries. Rather than tragic, it ended up being funny. Cole big footing the seven year old to show dominance.

Beer, glorious beer. So frosty and delicious!

After our walk, it was time for dinner. They made us some spectacular goulash with German noodles. This was probably my favorite meal of the week. Amy’s friend had also laid in a nice selection of beer. I don’t think that’s normally what he had around the house, but they were putting on the dog for us as guests; which was really kind of them. He sent us home with a few of the beers which were nice to have at the Airbnb. After some dessert and a little more conversation, we said our goodbyes and headed back to the train station. Once again, the public transport was great. We navigated a combination of inter-city train, S-bahn, and tram, returning to the apartment at about 1 a.m. Without a lot of tourist stops, there maybe wasn’t as much to write about, but getting to visit with real people in a different country is a rare experience for us, and I’m glad we were able to do it.

Next time: We visit the Tempelhof Airport and our flight home disappears.

Hillsdale Official Holds Educators in Low Regard; Tries to Take Root in Pike Township

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This is from last year, but I kept thinking about it and only had it up on Facebook. I don’t want to rely on social media for things I might want for posterity, so I’m throwing up a quick blog post. This is relevant because Pike Township in Marion County is fighting a Hillsdale charter school that Carmel successfully excluded.

“Teachers are dumb. Give us some tax money and let us teach your kids.”

Last summer, in Tennessee, video surfaced of Hillsdale’s president showing the contempt he has for teachers.  From the article:

Among Arnn’s provocative remarks:

  • “The teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”
  • “They are taught that they are going to go and do something to those kids…. Do they ever talk about anything except what they are going to do to these kids?”
  • “In colleges, what you hire now is administrators…. Now, because they are appointing all these diversity officers, what are their degrees in? Education. It’s easy. You don’t have to know anything.”
  • “The philosophic understanding at the heart of modern education is enslavement…. They’re messing with people’s children, and they feel entitled to do anything to them.”
  • “You will see how education destroys generations of people. It’s devastating. It’s like the plague.”
  • “Here’s a key thing that we’re going to try to do. We are going to try to demonstrate that you don’t have to be an expert to educate a child because basically anybody can do it.”

The article also said Arnn said “teachers are trained in the dumbest parts of the dumbest colleges in the country.”

The “Valor” charter school trying to take root in Pike Township is a Hillsdale affiliate.

Berlin Day 4: Museum Island, River Cruise, and the Ice Bar

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The Berlin Series:

Berlin Day 4 (March 14, 2023)

March 14 was a relatively more leisurely day than the previous several days. We’d been going pretty hard, so that was fine. We slept in a little, had our meager breakfast of yogurt and leftover snacks, and made our way to Museum Island. It’s an island in the River Spree in the central part of the city with six museums: Altes (Old), Neues (New), Alte Nationalgalerie (Old National Gallery), Bode, Pergamon, and Humboldt Forum. There’s no way to cover it all in one go, so we settled – somewhat arbitrarily – on the Pergamon and the Neues Museums.

Harper between some pilfered lions.

The Pergamon contains artifacts obtained during a period of time when the looting of other people’s stuff by European powers was particularly vigorous. I’m sure someone has done a study and offered social commentary on this, so I’m perfectly prepared to be wrong, but I think the acquisitiveness in this area was a combination of the rise of an academic-scientific mindset in the West, Germany looking for its place in the sun, and a decline in the Ottoman Empire. I kept thinking of the time and place where Raiders of the Lost Ark was set – although, a lot of the acquisition at the Pergamon would have been pre-Nazi. The Market Gate of Miletus and the Ishtar Gate of Babylon were especially striking to me. The Ishtar Gate was excavated between 1904 and 1914 and put on in display around 1918. It was apparently shipped out of the Middle East more or less in secret and its reconstruction was one of the more complicated architectural reconstructions in archaeological history.

Gates of Ishtar. “Telling the truth can be dangerous business.” (There is maybe one person who will get that reference.)

Miletus was a Greek city on the west coast of Anatolia that was eventually abandoned (in the 1400s?) when its harbor silted up. The Market Gate was built around 200 AD and destroyed about 800 years later. The Germans excavated it at the beginning of the 20th century and shipped it up to Berlin where the fragments they recovered were mixed with new construction to create the display at the Pergamon.

Market Gate of Miletus

After making our way through the Pergamon, we had lunch at the Cu29, a restaurant at the museum complex. It was a little pricey, but the beers were tall, and the food was good. (I went with more currywurst). Cole joined me in having a pilsner. College kids, am I right? The most entertaining part was a robot waiter with a cat display for a face. It would periodically declare, “meow.” A cat seems like a really bad choice for a waiter though. They could have added some realism by programming it to arbitrarily go up to people and knock stuff off their tables.

Our Robot Cat Waiter

Our second museum for the day was the Neues. The museum is “new” only because the Altes was built thirty years earlier. Its main draw is its Egyptian artifacts. The star attraction is the bust of Nefertiti of which they’re pretty serious about not allowing guests to take pictures. It’s an image I’d seen in any number of history books over the years. Nefertiti was the wife or consort of Akhenaten who was significant in trying to initiate a monotheistic religion around the sun god Aten. The bust on display is believed to have been created about 3,300 years ago. Which is, I don’t need to tell you, a long time ago.

We cut our visit to the Neues a little short because we had a river cruise scheduled. While the weather had been mostly decent all day, the sun even gracing us a couple of times, it started to turn ugly about the time our cruise was starting. Cold, heavy rain. It’s a cruise up and back along the River Spree, looking at the historic district of Berlin. The best way to enjoy the tour would have been on top of the boat where the views were better. But, the below decks had plenty of seats and tables with windows and a little cafe/bar.

Actually, the sequence of events was that we settled into the below deck table, got some beers (Berliner Kindl Pils), and enjoyed ourselves for a bit. However, enough people were up top, and the views were limited enough out the windows below, that we were briefly lured upstairs. We couldn’t have been up there more than two minutes before the rain really started to let loose. We went back downstairs and reclaimed our table. The top deck was closed for the remainder of the tour. We didn’t miss a great deal because we’d seen a lot of what there was to see on the river cruise during our previous two days in town.

Ridin’ the Storm Out

While we were there, we encountered another family from Indiana. Hoosiers generally travel pretty well. However, despite Cole and I wearing IU gear as Hooser beacons non-stop the whole week, I think that was the only Indiana encounter we had while we were in Berlin. (A couple of times when people would ask where we were from, I’d say something like “Indiana – United States. It’s near Chicago.” I don’t know how familiar anyone would necessarily be with the geography of the United States, but Chicago is a pretty solid reference point).

When the cruise let out, the weather was really bad. It was the first time we had to break out the umbrellas. But the wind was whipping and the temperature was getting close to the freezing point. Dinner wasn’t for another couple of hours. There was an “ice bar” not too far away. We had intended to go there after dinner, but walking anywhere else at that point seemed like a bad idea.

Cole and Harper at the Ice Bar

The Berlin Ice Bar is a cheesy, touristy kind of thing, but it was a lot of fun. You wait in a regular bar until your group is up, then they give you coats and gloves and take you into a cold room, decorated in an arctic theme, and serve you drinks in a glass made of ice. During the wait, the kids and I all got “Desperado” beer, a Mexican beer with a tequila flavoring. Add a lime to it, and it’s a sweet, tasty drink. Harper especially liked that one. In the ice bar, two drinks came as part of the package. You could get beers or a variety of shots. One issue was that, because you were getting a glass made of ice, you only got one. So, if you wanted a beer and a shot, you had to get the beer first – because your beer wasn’t going to fit into a shot glass. I’m not sure exactly what my rationale was, but for my second drink, I got a shot of vodka. I haven’t had a shot of vodka in probably a decade, and I don’t especially like it (it’ll probably be another decade before my next one), but something about the icy set up made me think it was appropriate. It wasn’t good, but it wasn’t too terrible.

Sporting the IU gear everywhere we went.

We cut the ice bar maybe a little shorter than we would have otherwise because we had dinner reservations at YOSOY, a Spanish tapas restaurant. Fortunately, by the time we got out of the ice bar, the weather had cleared up so that we didn’t need our umbrellas and had a pleasant walk. The food was decent. I kind of liked the energy of the place – fairly tight quarters with a lot of people. But if I had to choose a least favorite dinner on the trip, that was probably it. On our way home, we swung by the Ampelmann Shop. The Ampelmänchen is “the stop light man.” In addition to being cute on his own, he’s notable for being one of the relatively few East German cultural things that the West Germans adopted when the country reunified. There’s a shop devoted to trinkets with him on there, and we picked up – among other things – a Christmas ornament. Amy had the excellent inspiration several trips ago to get ornaments while we travel. That way, we can remember our various trips when we decorate the tree.

We ended the day by returning home and watching TV. We have a couple of shows that we started watching as a family. With Cole away at college, we have to wait until we’re reunited to catch up on episodes. In this case, we had a final episode of “Mythic Quest” to watch. And, because season 3 of Ted Lasso was premiering the next day, we also re-watched the last episode from season 2. (We didn’t end up watching any of season 3 on our trip.) Honestly, as much fun as I had doing all the stuff, I enjoyed just hanging out and watching TV with the whole family as much as any of the other stuff.

Next time: Trip to Barsinghausen to see Amy’s friend from high school.

2019 Hearing on Richmond Unsafe Building is Prescient

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Richmond had a big fire yesterday at 358 NW F Street that has required evacuation orders as various kinds of plastic are burning.

I don’t pretend to know a lot about the situation, but I’m looking at the transcript of a 2019 unsafe building hearing, and it looks like they saw a lot of the risk. My understanding is that, in the interim, the property was sold at tax sale and the City acquired the property from the County. The City or the previous owner may have done work to mitigate some of the hazards since 2019, but clearly some (or all) of the risk remained!

From the 2019 transcript:

MR. GARDNER: So on the properties that’s listed (inaudible) today, they’ve done an incident pre-plan from the fire department’s perspective on resources needed.· Some of our concerns on these is access in and around the structures.· Let me back up here so you understand what I’m talking about. So in getting access around to the rear parts of the structure, this right here is a railroad track, which renders it impossible just about to come in the backside here.· This is Northwest F Street.· From this aerial photograph, there’s no access to the sides of the building.· And this is continued through all the properties. We look at fire flow, fully involved, gallons per minute needed, resources needed, water available, evacuation areas, depending on wind direction.· It’s a multi-agency possibility with, you know, the health department, emergency management, local departments outside the City of Richmond.· Looking at toxins and stuff like that. And the way we do this is by this and also in recent history of incidents throughout the country or around the world.· And in the  recent years — the past couple years, there’s been a fire at a storage recycling facility in Australia that had a lengthy fire ground operation upwards to close to two weeks of that. There was one in Parkersburg, West Virginia, that lasted for over eight days.· The one in Australia was June this year. We look at the after-effects and we look at runoff of contaminated water from the suppression efforts.· And then we also look at the lack of fire protection and fire detection.

In a situation like this with the 358 building, it was designed and intended with a suppression system and a detection system.· Those work to get ahead of the game if a fire did occur. With no detection system, that’s a delay in notification, meaning that it could possibly be through the roof, through the windows, or whatever before somebody called it in.· A suppression system is designed to suppress the fire and slow the spread of fire once detected.· So, therefore, with no detection system, we don’t have that or fire protection system and it allows that fire to grow more rapidly than (inaudible).

MR. HEETER:· So there’s nothing to contain it and then you don’t find out about it  very quickly, it sounds like?

MR. GARDNER:· Right.·

…

·MR. HEETER:· Are there other properties that are around it that you would consider in danger in that case?· I mean, it’s spreading, you know, to businesses or other properties?

MR. GARDNER:· Anything in the immediate area.· It’s weather-dependent, also.· You know, wind travel, wind speed, you know, that plays into it.· If it’s contained in the building or it’s on the lot, you know, all of that, it’s all taken into effect.· And depending on the size of the fire (inaudible) then would determine what we determine would be an immediate threat.

…

MR. JORDAN:· 358 is a Type 1 structure that’s been used as a business without any utilities.· I mean, the sprinkler system is down.· I mean, it’s got —

MR. HEETER:· That’s the one with the fire suppression system — that’s been gutted?

MR. JORDAN:· It has.· And, you know, by the rules of the commission, you know, for him to occupy that building, he should have electric power.


MR. HEETER:· It doesn’t have power at all?

MR. JORDAN:· It doesn’t have — any electric.· The sprinkler system should be up and running.· All the emergency — lighting should be on.

MR. HEETER:· It’s a safety issue for  the community, not just the neighborhood,

Again, that’s all from a hearing on September 24, 2019. (It was later filed as an exhibit in a 2019 case challenging the orders of the City’s Unsafe Building Commission.) My understanding is that the owner of the recycling operations had maybe acquired the property from an outfit called Hoffco Comet, which made lawn and garden equipment. Back in 2009-2010, they lost John Deere as a customer and shut their doors. According to information in the hearing transcript, they (or whoever owned the building at the time) had salvaged the copper in the building, including the sprinkler systems before abandoning the structure.