Tulip City Dispatch

 The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...

 

On November 10, 1975, the Edmund Fitzgerald was lost in Lake Superior.  With her, the souls of 29 sailors were lost as well. Lakeshore Drive, Marquette Michigan, autumn 2009 Being a graduate of Northern Michigan University, I learned to respect Lake Superior and the weather she brings with her.  There's something awe-inspiring about seeing waves cresting over a 5' tall breakwall and breaking over a road.  There's something awe-inspiring about seeing waves crash over the Black Rocks geologic formation at Presque Isle.  There's something awe-inspiring about SCUBA diving beneath those waves and feeling the chilling water swirl around you.  Lake Superior can be beautiful and serene; she can also be a tempestuous bitch.  But, I guaran-dam-tee you that if I could arrange a job back in the UP, I'd take it in a heartbeat. The reason the Edmund Fitzgerald is so important is because of how modern it is.  This ship was lost in 1975!  We had RADAR and color t...

 Congratulations to Abby Klomparens and Tim Marroquin for unseating the incumbents on the Holland City Council, and congratulations to Tim Vreeman and Scott Corbin for retaining their seats!  Mayor Nathan Bocks held on to his seat, roundly defeating his challenger, Brian Everitt.  Sources cited are 2 MLive articles .  It's been fun following Ms. Klomparens and Mr. Bocks on Instagram for the past few years.  I loved Bocks' "...and we get to live here" hashtag on his posts especially during the CoVid era.  Klomparens ran against former mayor Nancy DeBoer in the Michigan State House election last year (2024). It's always interesting to see the more  progressive  candidates winning Holland city elections, while outerlying Ottawa County tends to swing HARD right-wing most of the time. 

 Spooky season is upon us, so I thought I'd look at haunted or supernatural occurrences in and around Holland, Michigan.  Early on in my blog journey, I spoke with Mr. Nick McNamara, who was a custodian/building & grounds technician at Hope College, who shared the following stories with me:   *Dimnent Chapel: Fall 2017 I was cleaning the chapel very early in the morning (around 3:00 am when this happened) in preparation for Christmas Vespers. I heard one of our locked entrance doors shut, but heard nobody else in the building. I was expecting a student to come help but he wasn’t coming until 5, so this freaked me out. Around 5:30 I had a light flash in front of me, like a camera flash, but the student was down in the handicap entrance and no lights around me had burnt out or blown. Right after that I heard a thump in the balcony above me, but when the student went up there and came back he never mentioned seeing anything that might have fallen.   *Voorhees Hall, ...

 In early August, my wife and I took a long weekend to Nashville.  I wrote the little poem here about it , because I realized that I was in a creative rut.  I've been mulling over the whole thing for over 2 months now, and sorta realized that Holland, in essence, has no culture. We stayed in a hotel near Midtown Nashville, not far from Vanderbilt and not far from the main drag of Broadway.  The hotel we were in was built in the 70s, but renovated and doubled in size in the 2010s.  We walked to the Exit/In for a show and walked past an entire block of businesses that was burned out, graffitied over, and in general disrepair.  But, they almost all had old gig posters and stickers all over the windows.  The reason I was drawn to the Exit/In was because of the book Outlaw (ISBN 0062038192) and the stories of the venue that Kris Kristofferson, in particular, told . We walked from our hotel past Vanderbilt University and saw The Parthenon...got to readi...