This week I write to you from Berlin,

where Hampton Roads is but a distant dream and where even the best bookstores don’t carry the Virginian-Pilot. That’s one of several reasons why my report will be shorter than usual; another is that on German keyboards the Z and Y are switched, the punctuation marks are all in the wrong places, there’s an O with an umlaut where the semicolon should be, the apostrophe is tucked unreachably in a corner, and it’s a cruel IQ test to figure out how to use the @ key. (Every time I’ve gone to Europe I’ve spent several minutes doing trial-and-error to figure it out all over again.) I’m having to make a lot of adjustments. Life is hard.

Poll Question

Canto XXXIV, Dore.

I’ve spoken quite a bit about the budget shortfall, because it’s easier to crack jokes about it than about murders and assaults. (If I wrote about those, my blog entries would each be ten thousand words long. My father asked me before I left for Berlin if it’s safe here. “Safer than Norfolk,” I replied.) Today it seems even Governor McDonnell has come out to himself about the need for more revenue, and suggested that user fees should be increased for certain, mostly unspecified government services. Accompanying the story is an online poll that asks, “Should fees be raised to help close the $4.2 billion shortfall in the state’s two-year spending plan?” Sixty percent of resondents say no. Thirty-five percent say yes and five percent are “not sure.” I’ve always been curious why one bothers to fill out an online poll in response to a question about which one is “not sure.” Dante said the hottest part of hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of crisis. If you go to this poll, you can click on “vote in other polls,” which opens a portal to a virtually endless reservoir of questions. Should the Defense Department reinstate a tuition assistance program for military spouses? Which team will be the most dangerous in the state basketball tournament? Should the postal service stop delivering mail on Saturday? Should Virginia have discrimination protection for gay and lesbian state workers? Of recent polls, this last one has the most votes (over 1100 when I visited the page), and fifty-seven percent say no. This makes me want to move all the companies I own to Maryland. It’s little consolation that the polls are unscientific and that a few enterprising bigots have probably figured out some way of disabling the function that keeps you from voting twice from the same IP address. (I’m guessing this is also why “The Blind Side” is in the lead in the Oscars Best Picture poll with thirty-one percent of the vote. I watched this movie on the plane yesterday, and I can’t say I support the notion that we should be giving it “special rights.” Movies like this can do what they want as long as they don’t try to do it on me.)

Bake sales aim to find money to plug budget gap

This makes me want to cry.

Senator warns against $1B deal with Xe services

Senator Carl Levin thinks we shouldn’t give Xe, formerly Blackwater, a billion dollars to train Afghan police. Maybe Xe could hold a bakesale? One is reminded of that old bumper sticker about how it will be a great day when our schools get the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber. That in turn reminds me of how the other night I parked on Shirley Avenue behind a red sports coupe with two bumper stickers: one that read “BLACKWATER” and another that read “I Heart Republican Boys.” (I can’t find the heart key on this German keyboard.) I worry that after a few more years in Hampton Roads I won’t deem this a noteworthy enough sight to snap a photo of.

City Employee Salaries

This is great fun: a searchable database of the salaries of nearly 16,000 city employees in South Hampton Roads. As someone whose salary is public information that’s printed every year in ODU’s student paper, the Mace & Crown–whose articles I really should start commenting on here–I applaud this feature, because it’s a step toward our knowing the salary of everyone, everywhere, which is good because I like life best when it works like Life the board game. The things one learns, writing for AltDaily! I just looked up Life to find out who created it, and it turns out it’s been around since 1860. Apparently Milton Bradley was a successful lithographer whose major product until that time was a portrait of Lincoln with a clean shaven face, which did not do very well once the subject grew his now-famous beard. (I pretty much plagiarized that sentence from Wikipedia, in case anyone goes there to learn more.) To replenish his dwindling coffers, Bradley came up with Life. (I wrote that one myself.) How I would love to play one of the pre-1900 editions of Life. Please write in if you own one.

And that’s all I have for you today. I think it’s First Friday back home. Go out and have fun. Drive fast. Take risks.

Editor’s Note: If you like what John does here, you should try his fiction.