West Lafayette is among the top 10 “brainiest” places to retire according to U.S. News and World Reports.

West Lafayette, Ind., is home to Purdue University, which hosts lectures and brings in ballets and plays—”a variety of different programs that you wouldn’t necessarily normally get in this size community,” says Joann Wade, president of the Lafayette-West Lafayette Convention and Visitors Bureau. The city’s nearly 29,000 permanent residents can also get “bigger-city opportunities,” Wade says, by driving an hour to Indianapolis or two hours to Chicago.

Never fear, potential retirees, I live on the other side of the river.

(H/t Fort Wayne Observed) DNR has announced the 2008 trail grants. The full list is here. For my county:

Farm Heritage Trail Award: $700,000.00. Approximately 26 miles of former railroad property consisting of approximately 299 acres in Boone, Clinton and Tippecanoe Counties will be acquired for future trail development.

Update The Lafayette Journal & Courier has more on the Lafayette part of the trail grant.

Strange Maps has a map up about an ongoing story that, inexplicably, makes me happy: The Friendly Floatees. Wikipedia also has an entry.

The short version is that, in 1992, a shipment of rubber ducks bound from China to Tacoma, Washington, washed overboard in the Pacific Ocean. Since then, oceanographers have used them to track currents as they’ve made their way around the world and through the arctic ice.

Bud: Credit is a sacred trust, it’s what our free society is founded on. Do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia? I said, do you think they give a damn about their bills in Russia?
Otto: They don’t pay bills in Russia, it’s all free.
Bud: All free? Free my ass. What are you, a fuckin’ commie? Huh?
Otto: No, I ain’t no commie.
Bud: Well, you better not be. I don’t want no commies in my car. No Christians either.

—Repo Man (1984)

According to an article in the New York Times, times are good for Repo Men.

When a boat owner defaults on his loan, the bank hires Jeff Henderson to seize its property. The former Army detective tracks the boat down in a backyard or a marina or a garage and hauls it to his storage area and later auctions it off. After nearly 20 years in the repossession business, Mr. Henderson has never been busier.

“I used to take the weak ones,” he said. “Now I’m taking the whole herd.”

Henderson has another paragraph devoted to him that I liked as well:

Tied up on the canal in back, just visible from the street, is a 40-foot Silverton yacht. As Mr. Henderson surveyed the area the other day, something nagged at his memory.

Finally he remembered: “I’ve taken this boat before.” Owners of repossessed boats have a few weeks to redeem them, and this fellow had availed himself of the opportunity. Now, a few years later, he was in trouble again. Mr. Henderson shrugged. “I took it before, I’ll take it again. After I take it a few more times, he’ll be eligible for a Christmas card. One guy, I took his boat four times.”

As a guy in the collections industry, I can tell you that this indifference creeps into you. It reminds me of John Cusack in Grosse Pointe Blank saying, “It’s not me. If I show up at your door, chances are you did something to bring me there.” I try to combat it to a certain degree. Frequently, a debtor I’m pressing for money will say something like, “I don’t blame you. I know it’s your job.” I tell them, “Feel free to blame me; I could do something else for a living.”

The New York Times article basically goes on to describe the fact that, as they say in Repo Man, “the life of a Repo Man is intense.” Violence is always a possibility. But, the following paragraphs captures more of what I’ve experienced in the collections industry:

But when he steered Toy Box up to his dock, no fisticuffs ensued. Robert Dahmen, a lanky 49-year-old, was peaceful, even apologetic. He wanted to salvage whatever he could off the boat, and offered in return to detail its history to any possible buyers. Mr. Henderson was polite but distant. Hard-luck stories have ceased to interest him.

There is a terrible sameness about a lot of folks’ individual tragedies. They got sick, they overcommitted, their situation changed, they didn’t plan ahead. At this point, debt scares me a bit. I have a fear of one day having to talk to someone like myself – friendly enough, but generally implacable and ready to grind me through the gears of the law to salvage a few bucks for a creditor.

Indiana’s branch of the American Civil Liberties Union has sued the Family and Social Services Administration over Mitch Roob’s privatization and automation efforts. The problem appears to be that people who are entitled to welfare benefits under our system are being thwarted in their efforts to gain access to those benefits by the automation of the system.

In one case, a woman with hearing problems and other disabilities lost her Medicaid and food stamps after being told she could not meet in person with a state case worker, the lawsuit alleges. In another, a mother of two lost her food stamps and subsidized health care for her children when the tax return she provided didn’t include one attachment.

“There are a thousand of these stories,” Gavin Rose, an ACLU of Indiana attorney, said Monday. “I’m sure there are cases out there where people are quite literally facing a life-or-death situation.”
. . .
Rose said that automation creates obstacles for people with mental disorders and other disabilities, or those with limited schooling, further complicating an eligibility process with dozens of hurdles for each of Indiana’s 1.1 million welfare recipients.

. . .

Before privatization, Indiana welfare clients had individual case workers who closely monitored a household’s eligibility for benefits and intervened when necessary, Rose said. Now, a household’s welfare records are stored electronically and available to any case worker in the state.

The lawsuit claims FSSA denied or terminated benefits to each of the plaintiffs when the agency was missing some document such as a birth certificate or a medical record – documents that the plaintiffs had delivered previously. In each case, benefits were cut off with a letter citing “failure to cooperate,” with no further explanation.

“You cannot deny someone for ‘failing to cooperate.’ They get this letter, and they have absolutely no idea what they did wrong,” Rose said.

It looks like they’re using sort of an insurance company model where you create layers of bureaucracy, shift a lot of compliance burdens on to the potential recipient of benefits, and deny the benefits not because the person isn’t entitled to the benefits under the stated criteria, but because the person didn’t successfully navigate the system.

For the bureaucrat interested in the bottom line and not interested in whether people actually get help, it’s win-win. You save money on one end by eliminating customer service types and on the other end by denying claims for people who can’t navigate the paperwork.

I’m a big fan. There was a time when I resisted coffee, figuring it for an addiction I didn’t need. I’d generally drink a lot of soda for my caffeine delivery needs. Boy was that a miscalculation. Coffee is tastier and most likely a lot healthier.

Probably the nature of the coffee bean ensures that Indiana can’t develop a decent coffee industry the way it seems to be developing some good local beers. Speaking of beer, a couple of recommendations: 1) The Hoosier Beer Geek. 2) Three Floyds Robert the Bruce Scottish Style Ale. 3) Oaken Barrel’s Indiana Amber. Three Floyds is a brewery out of Munster. Oaken Barrel is out of Greenwood.

Hey, look at that, my coffee post turned into a beer post. Sort of a metaphor for a good day.

It’s Friday night, and I’m not feeling especially insightful. The kids are in bed, and I’m sitting out on our front porch, drinking a beer enjoying some nice weather. We haven’t had much of it, and rumor has it this weekend won’t be all that great either. The air is a little cool, and the smell of fresh cut grass is in the air. Sometimes you have to take a pause from the continuous bitch-fest that tends to be the blogosphere and admit that things aren’t half bad sometimes.