As The Hound was standing in line at the Post Office for one-cent stamps to match up with the leftover 41-cent stamps which no longer are valid, steam was coming out of those big ears. It was just last year that the U.S. Postal Service raised stamp prices to 41 cents and now the cost of mailing a first-class letter is 42 cents.
Then, The Hound remembered that this is the same USPS whose employees rang up a $13,500 tab at a five-hour feast at a Ruth's Chris Steak House in Orlando, Fla. That's when the steam started pumping like an old Baltimore & Ohio coal train.
This postal order sort of made news last month after the Government Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, discovered the charges made to government credit cards. As far as The Hound is concerned, the national media dropped the ball on this story.
GAO investigators called the 2006 meal "abusive" in its extravagance, according to The Associated Press. That's too kind. How about piggish.
The order included more than $3,000 in drinks, including top-shelf beverages such as Courvoisier cognac, Belvedere vodka and Johnnie Walker Gold Label scotch. Then there was the $500 in shrimp cocktails and $900 in crab cakes --- that's a lot of appetizers. But then again, Ruth's Chris is no late-night diner. It's a classy joint.
According to the GAO breakdown, the diners also had 81 steakhouse salads at $588, and 130 jumbo scallops which totaled $422. Yum, jumbo scallops! Ninety-five people attended the feast and ordered 81 entrees, which the GAO figured averaged $160 per person. That's eating high off the hog!
The USPS defends the dinner, contending it was held to land corporate clients from privately run FedEx and UPS. Taxpayer money, they say, was not involved; the feast was funded by products and services of the USPS.
Uh, aren't stamps products? And they wonder why Americans go postal when the price of stamps rise.
One mother The Hound knows got a Mother's Day gift over the weekend. It was a digital picture frame.
We're all familiar with them and if you're not, the idea is to replace all those picture frames hanging on the walls or sitting on coffee tables with a media card plugged into the digital frame. This mom noted the photos are there to view until she gets bored with looking at them. Then in goes another media card.
This got The Hound to thinking how many other mothers got digital frames on Mother's Day. Plenty, right? Which is taking a step back from this ongoing push to be green and save energy, resources and materials, isn't it. The Hound believes that if miraculously oil drops to $90 a barrel tomorrow, talk of going green will disappear quicker than a bad movie at the box office.
According to the Consumer Electronics Association, digital picture frames are just one of the 25 consumer electronics devices the average U.S. household owns. That would include televisions, radios, CD players, cell phones, printers, computers, portable and stationary DVD players, VCRs, MP3 players, videogame players, digital cameras, camcorders, GPS devices. Yikes, Americans do own a lot of stuff!
The association also notes that two billion DVDs, 30 million digital cameras and 41 million MP3 players are sold annually in the U.S. On top of that, there's about 150 million used cell phones stockpiled in U.S. households.
The Hound's Gurnee correspondents are still tittering over the latest issue of "Keeping Posted", the village's newsletter. What has them guffawing is Mayor Kristina Kovarik's monthly message .
"The winter did expose some flaws in our ability to deal with heavy snowfalls," her honor notes with a straight pen. "I'm happy to report that Village staff has taken the initiative to conduct some intense planning sessions that will correct deficiencies in our snow removal operations."
What the mayor doesn't address is why the public works director resigned suddenly and that two long-time public works employees were disciplined. Did it have to do with the poor street-clearing performance during the winter of ought seven and eight? That would be the winter when the village ran out of salt --- not that Gurnee was the only governmental agency to be caught short of sodium chloride. Or is is calcium chloride they use on Midwest roads? Or is there something more to the issues with the three public works guys?
The copy of "Keeping Posted" The Hound saw has Mayor Kovarik concluding: "We listened to the feedback received and the message was loud and clear --- pristine roads and optimal driving conditions are of the utmost importance."
Nothing gets past some public officials, eh?
Despite bad snowplowing, Gurnee does have some of the best fireworks in the county on July 4 and during Gurnee Days. Maybe bread and circuses will get the chill off village residents.
Whooee! Those North Chicago cops certainly have been busy the last few days.
The latest police presence in the city was a raid at Stack's House of Style the other day. Cops allegedly were looking for drugs, although no narcotics were found even after police trashed the beauty shop. However, a police spokesman said "evidence" was removed from the salon at 1800 Sheridan Road.
After the raid, though, city inspectors discovered 24 building code violations. On top of that, according to police, some barbers allegedly didn't have the required state licenses to cut hair.
Good to know police are concerned if barbers are licensed to give hair cuts. The Hound wasn't aware police academies touched on violations of state Department of Professional Regulation rules in the course work. Anything in police class about pedicure procedures?
Surprisingly, Police Chief Mike Newsome's dad owns a barbershop in North Chicago, Dave's Barbershop in the 2300 block of Martin Luther King Jr. Drive. No word if police checked on barber licenses in that shop.
Presidential candidate John McCain and soon-to-be-also-ran Hillary Clinton have proposed suspending the federal gas tax --- 18.4 cents a gallon --- from Memorial Day to Labor Day as a way of bringing relief to Americans at a time when folks take to the highways for summer vacation or cruisin' dates at various county locales. Presidential hopeful Barack Obama dismisses this idea, calling it a "classic Washington gimmick." He's wrong.
So we won't get that much relief at the pump and we may diminish the highway road fund. Yet, it is something government can do for the little people among us. Dismissing the gas tax holiday and siding with those economists is making the Illinois senator sound even more elitist.
The latest poll on the topic, a Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey released this week, shows 46 percent of likely voters favor a federal gas tax holiday this summer. The survey found that 42 percent are opposed and 12 percent unsure.
According to Rasmussen Reports, most voters who earn more than $75,000 a year oppose the gas tax holiday. Most who make less than $60,000 a year favor that policy change. Those making less than $60,000 a year are the ones Obama has had a hard time connecting with in the Democratic primaries and are voters he needs for victory in November.
Clinton's idea to replace the highway transportation fund, which will probably be picked up by McCain once she decides to drop out of the presidential derby, is putting an excess-profits tax on Big Oil. It's not like they don't have some profits to spare.
Tax holidays are not new. Some states even have tax holidays for school supplies and for a few years, Florida had a tax holiday for supplies purchased to be used during hurricane season, June to November in the Sunshine State.
Perhaps it's not the monetary amount, but the fact that voters see government as doing something instead of always taking or doing nothing.
The Hound wasn't aware that North Chicago Mayor Leon Rockingham had issued a shoot-to-kill order in the city. But, 40 years after Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley issued a similar edit to police, that looks like what happened the other day on North Chicago streets.
Maybe Cease Fire, the anti-violence group, needs to march around North Chicago City Hall after Aaren Gwinn, 21, was gunned downed by undercover drug dicks in the 1400 block of Jackson Street.
North Chicago police, in press releases, say Gwinn attempted to run from, or maybe over, the plainclothes officers. That's their story and they're, no doubt, sticking to it. Not surprisingly, Mayor Rockingham and Police Chief Michael Newsome have not returned calls to News-Sun reporters on the shooting, preferring to control the flow of information.
Perhaps North Chicago citizens can get information at the next City Council meeting. Then again, knowing the penchant for secrecy by North Chicago officials, they may not.
Even a spokeswoman for the NAACP pointed out: "We never get any information from City Hall."
While there are plenty of citizen witnesses, police have mainly issued press releases on the shooting.
One thing is certain: This is the first killing in North Chicago in a while where the perps can be identified, even though police will not name the officers, or their race. Gwinn is, or was, an African American.
The family of Aaren Gwinn can take some comfort in the fact North Chicago isn't New York City. Instead of two fatal gunshots, he could have been shot 50 times by police.
The Hound feels safer already since Gov. Rod "The Mod" Blagojevich has named an Illinois Seismic Safety Task Force. This from the guv who took nearly a year to iron out a mass transit package with state lawmakers.
Just goes to show, an Elvis fan will move it and shake it when the Prairie State rocks and rolls.
Since the April 18, 5.2 magnitude temblor in way downstate Wabash County, the Land of Lincoln has received 29 aftershocks measuring as high as a 4.6 magnitude. Yikes, that sounds like Cali tremors to The Hound.
While some of us were shaken from sleep at 4:37 a.m. April 18, if we were Californians, we would have slept through the quake, let alone it's aftermath. Fortunately, there isn't much in downstate Illinois besides coal mines, some cricket pumps, a few prisons and Shawnee National Forest.
Wake The Hound when there's a 5.2 quake in Lake County.
Anyway, His Hairness has directed state agencies to review and enhance the state's earthquake damage prevention strategies. It's not like state officials weren't aware of the potential for earthquakes downstate. Afterall, one of the most powerful quakes occurred downstate on the New Madrid fault back in the late 1700s. The quake was so powerful, it changed the course of the Mississippi River. Or so The Hound's relatives have said.
The governor certainly moved quickly on this earthquake panel. Perhaps that's his constituency in for his 2010 re-election bid. We can only hope.
The Hound has noticed a lot of those "recyclable" bags at area food and retail stores. But here's the question that has been bothering The Hound: Is it OK to take a Jewel bag into, say, Dominick's or a Wal-Mart bag into Target?
The Hound has heard of one Dominick's where a manager gave a customer two free bags (theirs are black) rather than seeing her use Jewel bags (dark green).
So, what is the etiquette here? Is it OK to use any bag you have because they are environmentally sound (or so we are told)? Or do your bags have to be store-specific?
Life is just full of questions, right? Next week The Hound will tackle organic foods. Then again, maybe not.
Those red-light cameras in Waukegan and soon to be in Gurnee and other county locales may enlighten, so to speak, motorists if a central Florida study is any indication.
The town of Apopka, near Orlando, installed red-light cameras in July 2007 at two highly traveled intersections, according to the report The Hound saw. That first month recorded 289 infractions. In August 2007, there were 262 ticket issued.
Fast forward to January 2008 and the number of tickets dropped to 26. As of March, 21 tickets --- at two intersections --- were given out.
So much for a revenue maker. That is if those figures translate up North. Remember, most drivers in the South think they can compete on the NASCAR circuit. They respect that caution flag.
The Hound was off his feed on Sunday. It was the first Sunday in more than a month that HBO's "John Adams" wasn't on. Who knew one could be enthralled by our second president? Just think what HBO can do with Franklin Pierce!
Mr. Miller's history class certainly didn't spend much time on John Adams, but if the cast and program doesn't sweep the Emmys and Golden Globes next year in the miniseries category, there is no justice. If that doesn't happen, the Alien and Sedition Act should be reintroduced. Wait, isn't that what the Patriot Act is all about?
Whatever. While hoping there was more to the Adams legacy, The Hound stumbled upon The History Channel's latest offering, "Ax Men." This program has legs, unless the housing market really goes South. Much better than "Ice Road Truckers." At least it's filmed in Oregon and not Canada, where the loonie is doing much better than the greenback.
Perhaps there is a lesson in "John Adams". After all, John Adams begat John Quincy Adams. George H.W. Bush begat George W. Bush. Not all sons of presidents leave a legacy.
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