Best job in Baltimore?

     Thursday was a gorgeous spring day in Charm City---perfect for a stroll through the Inner Harbor followed by lunch at the American Visionary Art Museum's amazing restaurant.  (Which included a hard-earned bottle of superb Victory Pilsner from Downingtown, Pa.) While wandering around the harbor Uncle Jack came upon two city employees hard at work removing trash from the waters adjacent to the walkways.  (Other larger and more mechanized trash removers operate in the open harbor).  Their combined efforts are needed year-round to keep the picturesque harbor from completely filling up with detritus inasmuch as it receives the outflow from several polluted rivers which empty into it 24 hours a day. Even with all the city's pollution control efforts the harbor gets extremely ripe during the summer months and has been known to give off exceedingly unpleasant odors.  Not so yesterday when working conditions on the water were idyllic as the picture suggests.
     If you haven't done it already, take a minute to get acquainted with the Humble Farmer's website.  He will put you on his mailing list if you like and let you know when he has posted a new set of rants.  Funny man and serious, too. Click on the link. http://www.thehumblefarmer.com/ThisWeek.html

Death and Taxes

     Uncle Jack is working on his taxes this week so he is not in a very good mood.  He has already done enough preliminary number crunching to know approximately how much he is going to have to fork over to the IRS and the Maryland treasury and it is just as depressing this time as it was last year.  He knows that paying taxes is a duty of all citizens in a democracy but he can't help thinking that his taxes, which seem so burdensome to him, will not be enough to keep the government behemoth fed for even a nanosecond. His check, with which he could have gone out to Best Buy and bought something nice to stimulate the economy, will vanish into the government money pit, never to be seen again.  Eventually it might help to cover a tiny part of the annual subsidy payment to a corporate farm in Iowa or some such but he will never know.
     At the local level he has discovered that his real estate tax on his diminutive condo in Baltimore is more than twice as high as the combined city and county tax on his house in Nags Head which is worth twice as much as the condo.  He is not sure exactly where all his Baltimore tax money goes but he suspects that endlessly repairing broken 200-year-old water mains eats up a lot of it along with filling potholes in the 200-year-old streets.  Removing 6.5 feet of snow from said streets this winter must have drained the treasury at least as much as the usual  graft and corruption which is as much a part of the local political scene as it is in most other big cities.
      Uncle Jack was delighted to receive a number of cheery comments this week from readers who had patiently waited for him to return from his self-imposed hiatus from blogging.  One comment on his "Aorta" blog was particularly heartwarming, to wit:  "You'll be dead within a year.  Your BP will spike at some point brought on by stress or surprise and then you'll take a dirt nap".  Uncle Jack had been ruefully contemplating the possibility that he might have to live out his final days in a nursing home or on life support in an intensive care facility somewhere but now, thanks to "Anonymous" he can look forward to a quick and dirty demise.
P.S.  If anybody knows "Anonymous" try to get him or her some help, ASAP.