Odds & Ends 011

Odds & Ends 010

For most of my life, replacing a car battery meant loosening two cables, swapping batteries, and driving away.

Then came start-stop systems.

Many modern vehicles have a second battery—an auxiliary (start-stop) battery—that keeps the electronics alive and helps restart the engine after it shuts off at stoplights. It’s surprisingly small, which makes it easy to underestimate.

The irony is that the battery may cost less than the labor to replace it.

On some vehicles, mechanics have to remove air intake parts, wiring, brackets, and other engine components just to reach a battery that’s barely larger than a motorcycle battery. You look at the pile of parts and wonder if they rebuilt the engine.

Nope.

They just replaced a little battery.

There’s a good engineering reason for this. Modern engine compartments are packed with emissions equipment, electronics, safety features, and plumbing. Something has to occupy the hard-to-reach spaces, and sometimes that’s the auxiliary battery.

So if your vehicle has a start-stop system, don’t forget there’s probably a second battery hiding somewhere. It may be one of the smallest parts under the hood—but when it fails, it can create one of the biggest repair surprises.

Note: One of the first things I did with my Gladiator was install a start-stop eliminator or memory module. It is reversible, requires no ritual at every startup, and does not depend on fooling hood switches or disconnecting wiring. One important distinction: disabling engine stop-start does not make a weak auxiliary battery harmless. The battery remains electrically connected and can still discharge or damage the main battery.

Odds & Ends 009

Arkansas Senator John Boozman found himself in a rather strange position last week.

He was voting for Mitch McConnell.

Literally.

McConnell has been absent from the Senate for weeks while dealing with health problems. But that didn’t stop Boozman, chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, from announcing that he had talked with McConnell the night before and had McConnell’s permission to cast proxy votes for him during the committee meeting.

And, to be fair, proxy voting is allowed for some things in Senate committees.

So Boozman wasn’t just making up a vote and pretending McConnell had cast it.

But then came the vote that actually mattered.

The committee was trying to advance its new farm bill. Republicans needed the votes to get it out of committee, and McConnell wasn’t there.

Boozman tried to cast McConnell’s vote by proxy.

There was just one little problem.

That vote didn’t count.

Committee rules require senators to actually be present when determining whether a majority has voted to report legislation out of committee.

Imagine that.

Apparently there are still occasions in Washington when a senator has to actually show up to be a senator.

Without McConnell’s proxy vote, the farm bill failed to advance, 10-11.

What makes the whole episode especially interesting is that McConnell hasn’t been seen publicly in nearly two months. Boozman said he spoke with him the night before the committee meeting and that McConnell authorized him to vote on his behalf.

I have no particular reason to doubt Boozman talked to him.

But the whole spectacle illustrates something increasingly strange about Washington.

Mitch McConnell is 84 years old. He’s been away from the Senate for weeks, recently left a rehabilitation hospital, and is continuing physical therapy at home.

Yet Republicans were still trying to use his vote to move major legislation through a Senate committee.

At some point you have to ask a pretty simple question:

If somebody else has to show up and vote for you, are you really doing the job anymore?

And then there is John Boozman.

Arkansas sent him to Washington to represent Arkansas.

Last week he was standing in a Senate committee meeting trying to represent Kentucky, too.

Maybe we should be impressed.

Arkansas apparently gets two senators, and John Boozman occasionally moonlights as Kentucky’s third.

Odds & Ends 008

Senator Tom Cotton voted for the 2025 budget reconciliation law — the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill.”

There are a lot of things buried in that enormous piece of legislation, but two deserve particular attention in Arkansas: Medicaid and SNAP.

And these aren’t abstract Washington programs.

They pay doctors. They keep rural hospitals operating. Medicaid pays a huge share of nursing-home bills. SNAP buys groceries for families who don’t have enough money to buy them otherwise.

So what did Congress do?

It made major cuts and added new restrictions. [continue reading…]

The man in the picture came from Missouri.

His name apparently wasn’t recorded, or at least it didn’t make it into the caption that followed Dorothea Lange’s photograph into the archives.

What we do know isn’t much.

He was a drought refugee from Polk, Missouri.

It was November 1936.

He was in Porterville, California.

And he was waiting for the orange harvest to begin.

That’s it.

I recently took two of Lange’s black-and-white photographs and reimagined them in color, in the style of one of Norman Rockwell’s magazine illustrations. There’s something about seeing him that way that changes the photograph a little. The Depression suddenly doesn’t seem quite so safely tucked away in black-and-white history.

He looks more like a man you might actually have known. [continue reading…]

There are some injuries you read about differently after you’ve had a similar serious one yourself.

While filming The Unforgiven in Mexico in 1959, 30-year-old Audrey Hepburn was thrown from a horse during rehearsal and broke her back. Accounts vary somewhat on the exact injuries, but contemporary and biographical sources describe multiple fractured vertebrae—one detailed biography says four broken vertebrae, along with two sprained ankles, a sprained wrist, and torn lower-back muscles.

Production stopped while she recovered. Remarkably, after about six weeks she returned to the set and finished the movie, wearing a back brace beneath her costume.

There was a much sadder consequence. Hepburn was pregnant at the time and later suffered a miscarriage. The miscarriage has often been attributed to the accident, although whether the fall actually caused it is unclear.

The story caught my attention for obvious reasons.

Before my own accident, “broken back” brought to mind paralysis or somebody unable to walk. I now know firsthand that it isn’t necessarily that simple. In a fall, I fractured multiple thoracic vertebrae and cracked several ribs, yet I could still walk. A neurosurgeon in Sherwood, Arkansas, used titanium rods and screws, connecting multiple vertebrae combined with bone graft material for long-term stabilization.

So I look at Hepburn’s story differently today.

I can imagine the difficulty getting comfortable, the fatigue, the movements that suddenly aren’t simple, and the realization that recovery doesn’t happen all at once.

Then I think about Audrey Hepburn putting on a costume over a back brace and going back to work on a set in Mexico.

I am at about the same point in my recovery, and it’s hard to imagine doing that.

Broken backs have a way of changing your perspective.

Odds & Ends 005

Note: The image was generated by ChatGPT AI. It is a Norman Rockwell-style work based on 1959 black-and-white photographs.

Fifteen years ago, we were in the left-hand lane on US 24 in Colorado Springs when I noticed the driver in the next lane holding up a card trying to get my attention. I don’t remember exactly what it said on the card, but it basically told me I should be driving in the right-hand lane.

Now I understand why people get upset when others abuse traffic rules, including the one where slower vehicles are supposed to stay to the right.

I was driving a 25-foot motorhome towing a car, so, yes, I was going slower than some others.

However, I also had a GPS telling me that about a mile down the road I had to make a left turn to get on the freeway, and with the heavy morning traffic, I was in the left-hand lane early to make sure I didn’t miss it.

The guy made a right turn shortly after that, so I wasn’t really delaying him at all.

Just a control-freak jerk, I guess.

Odds & Ends 004

Note: The image was generated by ChatGPT AI.

Every once in a while, a poll tells you something more interesting than who is ahead and who is behind.

That’s what caught my attention about a recent Arkansas Senate poll.

The headline was that Tom Cotton and Democratic challenger Hallie Shoffner are much closer than many people expected. Whether that turns out to be true in November is almost beside the point. Polls come and go, and we’ve all seen elections where the “can’t lose” candidate suddenly found himself in a real contest.

What interested me was something else entirely.

The poll suggested that after twelve years in the U.S. Senate, Tom Cotton still hasn’t become particularly well-liked.

Think about that for a minute.

An incumbent usually has one huge advantage: everybody knows who he is. The problem is that once people know you, they’ve also formed an opinion. If that opinion isn’t improving after more than a decade in office, that’s a difficult problem to solve.

This isn’t really about ideology.

There are plenty of politicians whose policies I disagree with but who seem genuinely likable. Likewise, there are politicians I agree with on many issues who leave me completely cold. Personality matters whether we like to admit it or not.

Tom Cotton has always struck me as someone who projects competence but very little warmth.

He is obviously intelligent. He’s disciplined. He served his country honorably in the Army, and I don’t question his work ethic. Those are all legitimate strengths.

But whenever I see him interviewed, I come away with the same impression.

He seems… mechanical.

Everything appears carefully calculated. Every answer sounds as though it has already been written. Every appearance feels like a mission briefing rather than a conversation.

I’ve often wondered whether that’s simply his personality or whether it’s an image he deliberately cultivated over the years.

Either way, it has consequences.

People don’t expect every politician to be funny. They don’t expect them to be everyone’s best friend. But they do want some indication that there’s an actual human being behind the talking points.

That has never seemed to be Cotton’s strongest suit.

One phrase from the article describing the poll made me smile because, while it was obviously written for effect, it captured the image many people seem to have of him: a “charisma-deficient automaton.”

That’s harsh.

It’s also memorable.

Political reputations are funny that way. Once a particular image takes hold, every public appearance either reinforces it or chips away at it. In Cotton’s case, I think each interview tends to reinforce it.

Could he still win comfortably?

Absolutely.

Arkansas remains a Republican state, and incumbents usually have significant advantages. One poll doesn’t rewrite political reality.

But I do think the poll highlights something that has been easy to overlook.

For years, Tom Cotton has concentrated on projecting strength, certainty, and toughness. Those qualities appeal to many voters. At the same time, he has never seemed very interested in projecting humor, humility, or approachability.

That may not matter to his strongest supporters.

It may matter to everyone else.

Politics is often described as a battle of ideas. Sometimes it is.

More often, it’s a choice between people.

And being respected is not always the same thing as being liked.

Odds & Ends 003