29 responses to
“It’s a tough town.”

1. Danny said on February 19th, 2008 at 10:54 am

   Wow, sorry about that, JohnC. I had the same thing hap­pen to my truck about 17 years ago. At work. Euca­lyp­tus tree. They have very shal­low root systems.

   That tree of yours looks pretty substantial.

2. john c said on February 19th, 2008 at 11:24 am

   Yep. The tree was 50-feet plus. But the root sys­tem was not too strong. and I’m told it was very windy. We were about three hours north at a friends house, get­ting ready for a day of ski­ing with the kids. Then we got the dreaded call from the neigh­bor.
   Ah well. It’s just stuff in the end. No one hurt. and so far State Farm is com­ing through.

3. Dorothy said on February 19th, 2008 at 11:52 am

   State Farm did an excel­lent job for us when we had a flood at the house in June last year (a part inside the mas­ter bath toi­let broke). They went after the man­u­fac­turer of the part and got us their $8,000 back AND our $500 deductible.

4. ashley said on February 19th, 2008 at 12:34 pm

   Tell Alan to tell the gun shop owner that he’s a bitch, and New Orleans is the mur­der cap­i­tal. I hate when we get dissed.

   State farm is semi-evil, but All­state is evil incar­nate. A pox on all who work for them.

5. Sue said on February 19th, 2008 at 1:27 pm

   I always won­dered how All­state could con­tinue to find cus­tomers, given their habit of can­cel­ing poli­cies. My brother had an acci­dent, one acci­dent, and they can­celed his poli­cies, his wife’s, and for some rea­son my sister’s. This was 25 years ago and I’ve heard so many sim­i­lar sto­ries since then. Then when Kat­rina came along, you have to won­der why would any­one trust them at all, ever.

6. Danny said on February 19th, 2008 at 1:38 pm

   The only rea­son I can think of is that they have Pres­i­dent David Palmer in their advertisements.

7. alex said on February 19th, 2008 at 2:47 pm

   Yeah, when Pres­i­dent David Palmer steps into traf­fic, every­thing stops. Just like your coverage.

8. kathy t said on February 19th, 2008 at 2:54 pm

   Where does it say she’s a white lady?

9. brian stouder said on February 19th, 2008 at 3:03 pm

   Kathy — there is a pic­ture (looks like a glamour-shot, in fact) of the woman, at the right.

   I like her red lip­stick — and the happen’n ear­rings; she looks like my high school eng­lish teacher

10. alex said on February 19th, 2008 at 3:12 pm

    She kind of reminded me of John Good­man play­ing Linda Tripp on SNL, only with bet­ter hair.

11. Dorothy said on February 19th, 2008 at 3:53 pm

    Alex I actu­ally snorted when I went to look at the pic­ture of the lady. Your descrip­tion was right on the mark.

12. colleen said on February 19th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

    accord­ing to police, the per­son or per­sons who stole her car reported it stolen from them.

    Per­haps that can be the new def­i­n­i­tion of chutzpah…

13. Jeff said on February 19th, 2008 at 4:47 pm

    Nancy, does the area where you live deal well with frozen pre­cip­i­ta­tion, or have you had lots of snow days? This has not been a good month for pro­duc­tiv­ity with a fourth grader at home on lots of days he should be off learn­ing “Every­day Math” or the exports of Bolivia (yes, i know, tin). Cen­tral Ohio seems to be flurry-panic cen­tral, or is this every­one in the Mid­west these days? (Danny, i don’t wanna hear about it. Yeah, yeah, schools closed for mud­slide alerts or somesuch.)

14. john c said on February 19th, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    So far so good with State Farm. I’ll let you know how it turns out, though. My favorite whin­ing insur­ance com­pany story goes back to my 20s. I was male and sin­gle and liv­ing in Chicago, so I was pay­ing through the nose. Over the course of a few years my car was bro­ken into four times (only three insur­ance claims) then stolen. My insur­ance com­pany stuck with me so I stuck with them. Then a few years later I was in my agent’s office sign­ing up for homeowner’s, or some­thing. While I was there we renewed my auto and, as he was typ­ing this and that, he idly said some­thing like: I don’t know why we even write insur­ance in Illi­nois. We just don’t make any money on it. As he kept typ­ing I chewed on that for a minute and finally said: “You know Jack, you have insured my car for five years. In that time you have replaced every win­dow at least once, bought me three new radios and two com­plete new dash­boards, AND you have replaced an entire car … AND YOU’VE STILL MADE MONEY ON ME!”

15. Dexter said on February 19th, 2008 at 5:24 pm

    I’ll chip in and share my sto­ries of trees, truck, and house.
    In 1994 I had just pumped 50 gal­lons of gaso­line into dual tanks on my pickup truck, and had my lit­tle grand­son with me and we got a pizza. I had just taken him out of his seat, grabbed the pizza box, scur­ried out of the oncom­ing storm…BOOM! The fierce wind blew over a tall maple, one of three on our ter­race by the street. My truck began leak­ing and I called the fire department…amazingly, they said “just let it drip out.“
    I never fig­ured that one out.
    My cab was smashed, wind­shield cracked, bed half-flattened, but I could still access the pas­sen­ger door and drive it.
    I drove the truck to Cleve­land to a ball game, a planned trip, the next day. Finally, on the way back, the punc­tured tank emp­tied.
    I had to junk the truck.
    Four years go by, and another storm was brew­ing. Car­ry­ing in some sweet Michi­gan cher­ries from the car, the winds picked up.
    I was rins­ing cher­ries when the cat jumped up from the floor to the sink, after a loud boom
    “Pretty loud thun­der­clap”, I thought.
    Wrong. The sec­ond maple had cracked my house like you cracked your break­fast egg this morn­ing. Water cas­caded in, ruin­ing the home fur­nish­ings. We were in a cheap motel for 10 weeks until our house was re-built.
    I screamed like a chain­saw at the city to take that last damn tree down. Those maples were their respon­si­bil­ity, but it turned out to be God’s fault my truck and house were destroyed by old-growth rot­ten maple trees. God is great and God is good, espe­cially to the insur­ance indus­try. The city paid $0. My insur­ance com­pany took care of us nicely, thank god.

16. Dexter said on February 19th, 2008 at 5:27 pm

    “Car­ry­ing in some sweet Michi­gan cher­ries from the car, the winds picked up.”

    I can get away with this sen­tence struc­tur­ing most places, but I GOTSTA proof­read my posts here! Damn! [cringing]

17. Danny said on February 19th, 2008 at 5:59 pm

    (Danny, i don’t wanna hear about it. Yeah, yeah, schools closed for mud­slide alerts or somesuch.)

    

18. sue said on February 19th, 2008 at 6:04 pm

    Re: snow days. Like many com­mu­ni­ties, we can’t get a school ref­er­en­dum passed to save our lives, but for my com­mu­nity I add another rea­son to the usual list of “how­comes”. I believe an unrec­og­nized demo­graphic, which doesn’t exist in such large num­bers else­where, votes against refs in our area — angry par­ents of alumni. While their chil­dren, like all chil­dren, come out of the school sys­tem relieved, these angry par­ents come out roy­ally pissed and never get over it. Sur­pris­ingly, a big rea­son for this is weather deci­sions. Not just snow, but stu­pid things like mak­ing the kids go out when there’s light­ning. Last year, after the dis­trict was the only one in the county not to close on a dan­ger­ous win­ter day, they were embar­rassed enough to pay a lit­tle atten­tion to the out­cry. They have closed twice this year, but since I know some­one in the dis­trict, I also know that one of the closed days was because the bus com­pany refused to put its peo­ple on the road. I used to think that an involved parental com­mu­nity could bring about changes, but sadly in some places the prob­lems are so entrenched that they will never change. Inci­den­tally, I still vote for the refs, even though I am in the angry par­ent demographic.

19. nancy said on February 19th, 2008 at 6:08 pm

    Jeff, not one snow day this year. Partly because the win­ter hasn’t been too bad, but the main rea­son is: No buses. Every­one gets to school under their own steam, and as long as cars are mak­ing it with­out improper delay, well, then, get to school, kiddies.

    Last year we had two days off for cold. Yes, cold. Go figure.

    Fort Wayne called school for any damn rea­son, and I never under­stood why. They were fond of the one-hour or two-hour delay (usu­ally for fog, or frozen pre­cip likely to melt later, or to give the plows time to work). The most rural dis­trict might as well have not attended school dur­ing win­ter, they got so much time off. As long as coun­try roads were still being drifted shut, they stayed home. And that could last for days after a major snowstorm.

20. michaelj said on February 19th, 2008 at 6:13 pm

    Back in those wan­ing of the 70’s and the 80s, which had some seri­ously good music against all odds, and the 90s, my least favirite for being linked to hip­pies though they were pretty much bet­ter than the poseurs and salse­men that fol­lowed, Boston was the car theft cap­i­tal of the world. Dif­fer­ent alto­gether than treat­ing the SUV like Travolta’s bounc­ing bull.

    In those days, the vic­tim knew in that dark mid­night of the soul’s what­ever it was Hades, the car­nap­ping was arranged by a phone call to the rag­tags of Whitey Bulger’s min­ions, the car was in Fort Point Chan­nel or a Blue Hills quarry in Can­ton, and the insur­ance check was on the way. I guess there’s greed and then theirs homi­ci­dal psycopathy.

    Detroit used to have bosses, mostly sur­named Giacalone, and those good fel­las lived in what passed for some gor­geous Grosse Pointe man­sions. Boston was the Wild West end of Somerville. No more threat­en­ing yo the aver­age cit­i­zen, but surely more enter­tain­ing. The boss was, after all, the blood on blood brother of the unlikely lit­tle dic­ta­tor that Newt moved in for as the more telegenic Lit­tle Hitler in the Rev­o­lu­tion. Joyrid­ing would have been cleaned up with some ulti­mately incon­se­quen­tial phys­i­cal harm, and the boys would have promised never to repeat their trans­gres­sions. In Detroit, they would more likely have been float­ing in Lake Ste. Claire for the sin of inde­pen­dent behavior.

    Broth­ers Bul­ger is a won­der­ful story of Amer­i­can pol­i­tics. Whitey’s still at large, far as I know, but he’d be creakin’. Billy ought to come clean about his nefar­i­ous attacks on, oh, Uni­ver­sal Health Care.

    But any­way, why do peo­ple steal cars? Chop ‘em and sell the parts? Put the pri­mos in con­tain­ers and send ‘em to Europe. Ride around like Cody Jar­ret and crash and burn in glory?

    Per­haps when you’re faced with a polit­i­cal mono­lith entirely lack­ing in a human com­po­nent, you just have to say “Fuckit”. And I sure as shit don’t mean that weasle Tom Cruise. I mean Bulworth.

    In my esti­ma­tion, being pretty old here, and hav­ing told the Kick­ing Ass DNC blog after his con­ven­tion speech that Obama was inevitable, He might be get­ting JFK right. JFK never got RFK right, and Obama’s not Bobby by any means. Neither’s Hilary. This great divide is man­u­fac­tured. Obama doesn’t no dick com­pared­with Ms. Clin­ton as far as health care is con­cerned, and it’s the most impor­tant sub­ject as faras the gen­eral econ­omy is concerned.

    Didn’t FDR put every­body to work, includ­ing artists and glib son­s­abitches? I’ll take one of those sec­ond jobs. ThinkI’m qual­i­fied. Didn’t the Repub­li­cans descend into heinous Recon­struc­tion prac­tice? The Repub­li­can Party did one good thing and descended into odi­ous self-interest 150 years ago.

    It’s a recent topic, edi­tors. There are all sorts of edi­tors. I can turn engineer’s gib­ber­ish and architect’s CYA crap into some­thing that moves projects fore­ward, gets build­ings built, and min­i­mizes post-construction law­suits so things get built that ought to.

    Then there are lit­er­ary edi­tors, and even more inter­est­ing, trans­la­tors. Was Maxwell Thomas Wolfe’s edi­tor or his col­lab­o­ra­tor? How impor­tant to the Amer­i­can legacy of Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez is Gre­gory Rabassa? When it comes to poets, I’m at a total loss on this sub­ject, but I think I need a sec­ond language.

    Now there is the sub­ject of news­pa­per edi­tors. In Jschool, I edited a one-off cam­pus paper (caper), for a 101 sort of class. I took this seri­ously, but always felt loath to stymie the ini­tial impulses of the writ­ers. Didn’t see how it could hurt back in those days to just let the bud­ding writ­ers just let it rip.

    Nancy has brought up the idea of keep­ing you’re ass from get­ting sued. I wrote a col­umn about an annoy­ing cam­puus rev­o­lu­tion­ary I thought of as par­tic­u­larly self-aggrandizing. I was the edi­tor, so there was nobody to edit my copy. I’d say I tore him a brand new one in the instance of his spec­tac­u­lar self-importance, his den­i­gra­tion of women’s opin­ions, and his over­all wee­nie appear­ance and intellect.

    There was no edi­to­r­ial con­trol. I was the edi­tor. Every­thing in the col­umn was sourced. The guy was spec­tac­u­larly a jerk, and he was in it more to get laid than any­thing else. But, you know, I just found him such a despi­ca­ble toad, I couldn’t help myself. And this jerk threat­ened the Henry W. Grady School of Jour­nal­ism with a lawsuit.

    This scummy jack­ass said I’d defamed him in the name of the UGA, and it was that cash his idiot claim was enti­tled to. Jackas.

    Now, I sure as shit didn’t defame this jerk. But I found myself threat­ened with expul­sion by my Dean, who was some­body I revered. Welll or maybe. If it had been Ralph McGill, maybe.

    Now, what are news­pa­per edi­tors sup­posed to do. First place do no harm, kind of like doc­tors. You know, first place I’ve always thought is to keep any­body with­out a lot of expe­ri­ence from embar­ras­ing herself.

21. michaelj said on February 19th, 2008 at 8:02 pm

    What are news­pa­per editor’s
    ? So so we do no harm? sup­posed we do do? So I ask the sone­how slightly clev­erer than I. How do we put up with edi­tors? I tell you, I’m such a good edi­tor you’d just go along with what­ever I said. no, it’d just kind of scary. Sup­posed to think every­thing is scary. Guess its not. ia ever­ry­thing seri­ously weird? Sup­posed to make things things come up all right. Here’s where we get into this. I know it’s sup­posed to be stu­pid. I .THINKS EVERYTHINGS NUTW

22. Dexter said on February 19th, 2008 at 8:25 pm

    Thought I’d share my feel­ings on another topic. You may have dif­fer­ent feelings…I hope there’s room for every­body here.
    Too young to fol­low la rev­olu­cion en Cuba, I never real­ized what went down until a few years later, and that was from read­ing on my own as a teen.
    Che Gue­vara was not men­tioned in my school, and Fidel was described as a ter­ri­ble com­mu­nist.
    MSM really tried to con­vince us Fidel was an ani­mal when Fidel came to NYC…he was cheered like Lindy as he rode through Harlem, but the media por­trayed Fidel as a dirty chicken-bone lit­ter­ing lunatic, as he pre­pared to address the UN.
    I remem­ber being invited by some fel­low Young Democ­rats to hear an anti-Castro speaker at our courthouse…he was speak­ing harshly of Fidel, of course.
    I became increas­ingly politi­cized, and the more I heard about la rev­olu­cion, the more I came to under­stand Batista, the Habana gam­bling and whor­ing, the US mob pres­ence en Habana, and the right­eous­ness of Fidel’s takeover.
    I was never invited to Vencer­e­mos Brigade, but I have met peo­ple who went, helped with the cane har­vest, and had an audi­ence with Fidel. I learned the truth as I see it. It is a fas­ci­nat­ing story, no mat­ter which way you feel about Fidel Cas­tro. He’ll be missed.

23. LAMary said on February 19th, 2008 at 8:34 pm

    After twenty two years of cov­er­age and one claim for under $1000, All­state can­celled my home­own­ers insur­ance because I was five days late with my pay­ment. They are not writ­ing poli­cies in Cal­i­for­nia any­more, and I got the impres­sion they were look­ing for what­ever rea­son they could to dump me. I switched my auto insur­ance when I got new home­own­ers insur­ance, because I got a much bet­ter deal, and my All­state agent actu­ally acted sort of hurt about it.

24. basset said on February 19th, 2008 at 10:52 pm

    for some rea­son this reminds me of the joke about the two old wid­ows sit­ting out on the retirement-home porch and one asks the other if she would answer a per­sonal question…

    “How long were you and Fred married?”

    “Forty-three years.”

    “Did you ever have mutual orgasm?”

    (she thinks a minute)

    “No, we always had State Farm.”

25. del said on February 19th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

    In Michi­gan, Allstate’s got the worst rep­u­ta­tion. At a wed­ding I once sat next to a med­ical defense expert (whose spe­cialty I won’t reveal) and gen­tly asked him about All­state. His wife turned to him and asked, “Honey, isn’t that the com­pany that you said we should NEVER get insur­ance from?“
    I also shared office space with an attor­ney who was rep­re­sent­ing an All­state insured in his case against the com­pany. The attor­ney told me the day before trial he was ner­vous … he had no idea what Allstate’s defense was going to be. It owed the money. And the jury agreed and All­state was made to pay penalty inter­est. But of course Amer­ica only hears of the rapa­cious plain­tiffs bar …

26. michaelj said on February 20th, 2008 at 1:46 am

    0h. I think the idea was simul­ta­ne­ous. Which hap­pens occa­sion­ally and serindip­i­tously. I think it hap­pens when you’ve been prac­tic­ing. The rapa­cious trial liars are much like claim­ing there are lions on the Amer­i­can savanahs, munch­ing on oth­er­wise benif­i­cent com­pa­nies like Wal­mart, that want noth­ing but the best things for con­sumers, and there are sharp lawyers try­ing to take advan­tage of these hon­est consumers.

    I’d say, that’s Bun­gle in the Jun­gle. These ass­holes are after your cash. That’s what they do. Hillary? Barack? Both are try­ing to make every­thing bet­ter for every­body. Repub­li­cans, well some­bodys going to be saved, shether it’s rich peo­ple or rich peo­ple that buy into the rap­ture. If the vot­ing pop­u­lace screws this up, the way they they did with the creepy draft-dodger vs. the actual war hero, (if they actu­ally did, because any­body not a moron knows Kerry won Ohio) well fuck this country.

    Seri­ously, every­thing out of the mouth of the pres­i­dent shits on the Con­sti­tu­tion. Does a sin­gle Amer­i­can elieve in a sin­gle sign­ing state­ment. Was George III nuts? How does this shit go on? He hasn’t been run­ning any­thing for years, and Cheney is so clearly cer­ti­fi­able, it just seems like he needs to find some sort of Geli to go in the bunker. But it doesn’t seem like there’s a female on the face of the earth that would go any­where with Cheney.

    And I seem loony? These ass­holes are run­ning the coun­try, and they’re spend­ing $10bil a month with­out it show­ing up in the bud­get. That WMD shit? They made that up. They made it up in 1998 and tried to talk Clin­ton into it. It’s dif­fi­cult to under­stand how what seems to be a good peo­ple could be led so wrong.

    It seems to me this is all the log­i­cal con­clu­sion of Newt and the 1994 Repub­li­can Rev­o­lu­tion. Newt is awe­some. He served his wife with divorce papers while she was tak­ing can­cer news. They despised Health Care Change. It doesn’t take a genius to under­stand that the Clin­ton Health Care Plan would have put the coun­try on path that would have cut off the cur­rent eco­nomic black hole. The prob­lem seems to have been been that it was pro­posed by a Demo­c­rat. If you can’t see that you’re an idiot. If some sort of the Clin­ton plan had been put in place, things would be spec­tac­u­larly bet­ter. But she was just a woman. And those are facts jack.
    And if her ideas don’t count because shes a woman, well I’d say this. There is no sin­gle issue other than health care that bears on the the over­all econ­omy of this coun­try. Any­body that doesn’t doesn’t under­stand this is an idiot. Or at least some­body with­out a clue.

    The econ­omy of health care includes some­thing like $80bil. Are you nuts? Wheres that money going? You Ass­hole? Down a gottdum hole, you stu­pid insen­si­tive piece o shit. There’s a guy that’s sup­posed to be the com­man­der in chief. Does he know where this money is going? Well he has no clue. You gonna put this on? Pure stu­pid­ity on the part of the pret­zeldenet. Look ass­holes he’s dum­mer than grunt. You cant get stu­pider than this asshole.

    Oh, excuse me. I was think­ing about the Pret­zeldent. In my world, this ass­hole pulled the black bas­tard ao McC­cain which McCain seems to have writ­ten off as just a good joke about darkeyism.

    /

    oh

27. michaelj said on February 20th, 2008 at 1:47 am

    Could I make a comment?

28. michaelj said on February 20th, 2008 at 1:54 am

    No joke.

    Look, most of y’all are are
    democ­rats. Most of y’all made up your minds.

    First thing I’ve got to to say, if you think you’re gonna pull that john mccain bull­shit your an asshole.

29. del said on February 20th, 2008 at 9:40 pm

    I liked your line about “rich peo­ple wait­ing for the rapture.”