So I decided to drive old Route 66, the mother road. The road was a major way to drive from Chicago to Los Angeles. I live directly on Route 66 in downtown Bloomington, Illinois. I will fly to Marine Corps Air Station Yuma, Arizona for a Marine Corps reunion. I rented a car, and will drive back along the road back to Bloomington.
I will log my travels on:
Get Your Kicks On Old Route 66
getyourkicksonoldroute66.blogspot.com
The map above shows Gross Development Productivity per Capita by nation. You can see that Russia is quite low, despite having great energy exports and natural resources. Their poor performance is largely due to corruption and incompetence. They are smart and well educated people - if they can ever develop free enterprise and honest government they could do as well as western Europe. A shame.
And of course their incompetent war with Ukraine highlights their ineptitude. Despite having three times the population of Ukraine, and an enormous military, they have only been able to conquer 20% of Ukraine after three years.
After my wife Beth died in September 2024, my daughter Leigh Ann and I decided we should live closer together. I lived in Bradenton, Florida, and Leigh Ann lived in Seattle. She was living in a small condo, and wanted to buy a single family home, but these are far too costly in Seattle.
We looked at numerous communities and developed a spreadsheet evaluating the communities. Housing in Florida and Washington State was expensive. Our original home of Illinois was much more affordable.
Macomb, Illinois had the lowest cost housing of the communities we considered, but it was smaller than Bloomington, which offered more job opportunities. Craig liked Peoria since he had lived there before. The Bloomington Normal metro area also had two Universities which figured into our decision. Illinois State University and Illinois Weslyan are located in the metro area. And Leigh Ann was a graduate of Illinois State University.
We liked the idea of a smaller metro area - large enough to have services but small to keep traffic low.
In the end we chose the metro area of Bloomington, Illinois. Leigh Ann bought a small single family home, and Craig purchased a small condo in a rehabbed building in Downtown Bloomington. We are very satifisfied with our decision.
●The older I get, the tighter companies are putting lids on jars.
●My top 3 assumptions when the doorbell rings:
https://www.mcleancountyil.gov/375/Understanding-e911-Addresses
More info about Wards in Bloomington, Illinois at
https://www.bloomingtonil.gov/government/city-council/ward-map
Understanding this grid system can significantly help in navigating Bloomington. Remember to pay attention to the directional prefixes and the block numbering to locate addresses efficiently. Bloomington has several zip codes, including 61701, 61704, 61705, 61709, 61710, 61791, and 61799, which are used for mail delivery within the city.
The map above shows the large drainage basins of North America. It is interesting how small the drainage basin that drain to the great lakes. And of course the Chicago River, which originally drained into the Great Lakes, was reversed with locks to drain south to the Mississippi.
Watersheds of North America are large drainage basins which drain to separate oceans, seas, gulfs, or endorheic basins. There are six generally recognized hydro-logical continental divides which divide the continent into seven principal drainage basins spanning three oceans (Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific) and one endorheic basin. The basins are the Atlantic Seaboard basin, the Gulf of Mexico basin, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin, the Pacific basin, the Arctic basin, the Hudson Bay basin, and the Great Basin. Together, the principal basins span the continent with the exception of numerous smaller endorheic basins.
The Atlantic Seaboard basin in eastern North America drains to the Atlantic Ocean; the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence basin in central and eastern North America drains to the Gulf of St. Lawrence on the Atlantic Ocean or to the Labrador Sea; the Gulf of Mexico basin in the southern United States drains to the Gulf of Mexico, a basin of the Atlantic Ocean; the Pacific basin in western North America drains to the Pacific Ocean or the Gulf of California on the Pacific Ocean; the Arctic basin in northwestern North America drains to the Beaufort Sea of the Arctic Ocean or directly to the Arctic Ocean; the Hudson Bay basin in central northern North America drains to Hudson Bay on the Labrador Sea (which may be considered part of either the Arctic Ocean or Atlantic Ocean), or to the Arctic Sea via Foxe Basin and Fury and Hecla Strait; the Great Basin in western United States is an endorheic basin which does not drain to any ocean.
The Atlantic Seaboard basin is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean to the east, the Eastern Continental Divide to the west, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Divide to the north, and the Lake Okeechobee endorheic basin to the south. The Gulf of Mexico basin is bounded by the Gulf of Mexico to the south, the Eastern Continental Divide to the east, the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence Divide to the northeast, the Laurentian Divide to the North, and the Continental Divide to the west. The Pacific Basin is bounded by the Continental divide to the east and Pacific Ocean to the west; the basin excludes the endorheic Great Basin in the west. The Great Basin has a closed loop boundary encompassing substantially all of Nevada, the western half of Utah and parts of Oregon, California, Idaho, and Wyoming.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watersheds_of_North_America
We erected the Corn Cob on the historic Bloomington Illinois Court House today April 30, 2025.
U.S. soldiers carry a wounded comrade through a swamp. National Archives photoA group of Atlanta veterans has produced a documentary film to counter what it calls “decades of misinformation” about U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
Featuring commentary by historians and those who served, “Truths and Myths of the Vietnam War” examines the treatment of returning veterans, media influence, the antiwar movement and humanitarian acts by U.S. troops – and challenges the predominant view that the war was unwinnable.
“None of us had any experience making a film, writing a script or any of this,” says Jim Dickson, secretary of the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association (AVVBA) Foundation and a member of American Legion Post 201 in Alpharetta, Ga.
“It was something we believed in strongly, though, and put our hearts into …. We'd seen things written (about the Vietnam War) and movies and so forth, and thought, ‘Gee, that isn't really the way it was.’ We knew there was a strong need for it.”
On March 29 – National Vietnam War Veterans Day – the documentary was screened at the National Infantry Museum in Columbus, Ga. “Truths and Myths of the Vietnam War” has also aired twice on public television in Georgia and once in South Carolina, boosting AVVBA’s hopes to get it on the air in every state.
The biggest audience, however, has been online, where the 47-minute film can be watched or downloaded at
So far, it’s topped 477,000 views and received nearly 1,600 comments, mostly positive.
“I would say the primary response we’ve been getting is, ‘Thank you,’” says David Naglieri, the Emmy Award-winning filmmaker who steered “Truths and Myths of the Vietnam War” from paper to screen.
Among the emails he’s received are messages from sons and daughters of Vietnam veterans “who saw their dads suffer because of the scarlet letter imprinted on them due to their service,” and widows wanting to thank Naglieri and the film team for “presenting a different narrative, something you don’t hear about or read about in school.”
Approached by Dickson and his team in 2022, Naglieri saw an opportunity to help the veterans refute what they see as lies and distortions in popular films and books.
“I really believe in presenting historic truth and presenting voices that have been suppressed, and so this for me kind of became a passion project,” he says.
Actor Sam Elliott introduces the film, noting that “we owe it to these veterans to listen to what they have to say about the war they served in” – about 2.7 million Americans during 16 years of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia. More than 58,000 were killed, and some 300,000 were wounded.
Roughly three in 10 Vietnam veterans are living today, the last of a generation of warriors that President Ronald Reagan, in 1981, said “fought as bravely and as well as any Americans in our history. They came home without a victory not because they’d been defeated, but because they’d been denied permission to win.”
James Robbins, dean of academics at the Institute of World Politics and author of “This Time We Win: Revisiting the Tet Offensive,” says Reagan’s words reflect the feelings of most Vietnam veterans, nearly 90% of whom say they’re proud of their service. Yet they’re concerned that much of what has been reported or presented in films and schools and universities about the war “is neither factual nor complete,” he says.
Rarely mentioned are the “unprecedented humanitarian acts” by U.S. troops, according to retired Army Maj. Gen. Patrick Brady, who received the Medal of Honor in 1969 for risking his life to evacuate 51 seriously wounded men in four separate missions and using three different UH-1H helicopters.
As an example, he points to the 54th Medical Detachment, a helicopter ambulance unit that evacuated 21,435 patients – including 8,904 civilians and 531 enemy soldiers – in a period of 10 months. Beyond that, between 1964 and 1970, civilian action missions by the 5th Special Forces Group alone built 1,003 schools, 398 medical clinics, 6,436 wells, 1,939 kilometers of road, 670 bridges and 129 churches.
“I’ve often said humanitarianism was our great victory in that war,” Brady says.
Yet returning U.S. troops were, in some places, vilified. A Marine Corps veteran recalls landing in California and being pelted by garbage and feces thrown from a “hippie bus.” A former Army captain describes being surrounded in a San Francisco terminal by a group of six or seven men yelling insults. One stood a foot from him and spat on his chest.
“People would look at you, but they wouldn’t make eye contact with you,” says Army veteran Bryan Tate about his arrival at Chicago O’Hare. “If you were walking down the ramp or the hallway, they would get way over to one side. You felt like a stranger. Here you’re so glad to be back in the U.S., and yet it was extremely uncomfortable with the chilly reception.”
“Truths and Myths” also looks at the war’s political front. Where the North Vietnamese could not or did not win on the battlefield, they sought victory through propaganda. This, combined with Soviet and U.S. Communist Party funding of antiwar organizations at home, had an outsized effect on Congress and media coverage.
Finally, the documentary argues that the Vietnam War could have been won at several points using sensible strategies, saving thousands of lives. Rather than employing forceful measures at the outset, the Johnson administration chose a policy of “gradual escalation” – strongly opposed by military leadership. In addition, U.S. troops had to fight under highly restrictive rules of engagement, protecting civilian lives but leading to more American casualties.
The success of operations Linebacker I and II in 1972 brought North Vietnam to the peace table, but Congress soon sharply reduced funding for South Vietnam. Meanwhile, China and the Soviet Union had increased their support for North Vietnam by 50% between 1973 and 1975, and the North invaded the South again in violation of the treaty. What followed was a massive wave of refugees fleeing the country, many perishing at sea. Hundreds of thousands of others were murdered, executed or starved.
More people died in the decade after the communist takeover than in the previous 20 years of war, says Leonard Scruggs, author of “Lessons From the Vietnam War: Truths the Media Never Told You.”
The team behind “Truths and Myths” wants this information to contribute to, and perhaps even reshape, public perception of the war – and why Americans fought.
“I think this film will stand the test of time and hopefully, slowly, make an impact,” Naglieri says.
Dickson adds, “We often hear that this is something that's long overdue. We don't want to make one penny on it. We consider the film our enduring legacy for future generations.”
He adds, “This isn't about what we each did. This is about what we all did, and to try to tell that there was a purpose to our service – that it was for a noble cause, an important cause.”
