(Image attached for identification from Baltimore Sun).

Author’s Note: The Baltimore Sun published this image to go along with reports indicating the City of Baltimore is demonstrating a few weaknesses in smooth and efficient management. All our footnotes stipulating respectful commentary are posted on our website, and we reiterate our respect for all policy-makers in office at the moment.

We did not intend to be disparaging in our treatment of a great American city just up the road. This caught us yesterday, though, as a couple liner-notes for things that the Pandemic has imposed. We tried to limit those to activities to those that once were common and now are not. One of those is education, of course. We made a note about the almost two dozen schools in which only a small percentage can perform at grade level in math.

We could as easily have started with Baseball, since that was probably the main drawing card to get us to pile up in a couple SUVs and head up the turnpike along the river to see the Orioles. We have not tried to do that in a few years, and considered Major league Baseball to be one of those activities consigned to the Dust Heap of History.

You are aware of that disparity between Things We Used To Do and things we don’t do now, although they might be things we would consider. Working at Work is one of them. Excellent Education is another. Shopping? You have to put that one in the stack. Our opinion is fairly well set on that one. We watch the mass flash shop-lifting events and want no part of them. Which has lead directly to abandoning the old ritual of departing the residence, driving over to the Harris-Teeter grocery store ten blocks away to re-stock what has rested quietly in the fridge since the last time.

That is linked to the commercial real estate bubble that is going to pop in Baltimore and right here in Arlington, Virginia. It is not as bad as San Francisco, of course, but some argue that California is having some parallel problems to Wuhan, the city that contributed so much to the pandemic panic. We heard the POTUS talking about setting up 3% mortgages to ensure everyone can afford to buy a home.

It also may ensure that a ton of American’s may be able to afford ruinous foreclosure, like the Congress did for us back in 2008. They gave that economic construct a name, to remind us of how idiotic the policies were that pumped up the bubble. “The Great Recession” was what they settled on. We accept that, even though it reminds us of the Really Big One that occurred nearly a century ago.

We could throw some of the medical miracles on that pile of issues. In addition to the explosion of pandemic-related discontinuities, there is the emergence of the Nurse Practitioner as the new sort of General Practitioner who used to be an MD. We had a general intent to take some of these profound changes to our social lives and perform a quick but detailed appreciation of what the changes mean.

Are these changes transitory or permanent? We had two movies out this summer that made some news. Will those be the last ones to capture cinema the way it used to be?

We are not going to get to anything that detailed this morning, except to again note the Charm City’s place of prominence in another phenomenon of daily life. Based on data compiled from the number of resident complaints filed within the city limits, Baltimore is also America’s Dirtiest City.

There were 47,295 sanitation-related complaints made for every 100,000 people living there over calendar 2022. That can be addressed by postal identification code for additional specificity. That would be “21213,” with just shy of 90-thousand cleanliness complaints and an apparent aversion to public modesty and potty booths.

We didn’t mean to just get out of bed and start castigating a town afflicted with what we hope are some transitory problems. We would love to close out this summer season with some pub-crawling up in Fells Point in the Charm City’s inner harbor. It was an old neighborhood, going back to Colonial times.

It is a question of what is “transitory” and what is apparently under discussion to make “permanent.’We wonder what we would have to do to try and get it back?

Copyright 2023 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com