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Culver Trees
I have to admit to not being up on all the rules about trees in Culver, but I definitely have a lot of confusion about enforcement. Several years ago (14+) one of the 100-year-old (or more) Oak trees in from of Easterday Construction received the Tree Commissions red mark of death. (Also an old wild cherry tree a little further north, that I didn’t care too much about.) At the time, I went to a Tree Commission meeting and was told this was due to a large branch that hung over the road and was a danger to vehicles. I protested that the branch was healthy, and they said I probably shouldn’t worry about it, since they didn’t have the budget to take it down anyway. They didn’t do tree trimming at that time, so it was a case of live or die for an old friend. I made my plea for life as best I could. I also made a donation to get a couple of replacement trees. (The only one that lived was the one they mistakenly planted on the adjacent property instead of at ECC!)
Since that time, the Oak tree has lived through several butcherings by NIPSCO tree trimmers for non-existent line interference, but fortunately it has remained healthy. Like all trees of that age, there has been, and there is currently, some minor deadwood, but that’s what trees do.
Last week, without any heads-up this time, they came out and removed that limb. They didn’t trim it, they took it back to the trunk. If I’d been given any heads-up, I would have gotten a “before” picture, but I didn’t know anything about what they were doing until the chainsaws were buzzing… They did leave me the sickly Wild Cherry Tree though… <sigh>
The tree is probably in jeopardy at this point due to this limb removal. It is the nearest to the camera in the picture (southernmost). Because it is in a cluster of three trees, most of it’s growth has been on the south side. Now it is distinctively top heavy to the south and west. Pretty sure the crew doing the trimming weren’t licensed arborists…
Despite the fact that this limb was never a problem in the 10+ years since it was designated a problem, it’s gone now. If the concern was damage to vehicles on the street, why didn’t they remove any of the deadwood that is there while they were removing the healthy parts? Aren’t the trees overhanging and shading the streets are one of the charms of Culver? <heavy sigh>
I found all this interesting, since we just had Emerson Wells from IU here this year and there was a lot of talk about preserving our tree canopy. While a couple of small trees have been planted at the Little League diamond, they hardly make up for the ones the school removed from the parking lot on the other side of the street. The north end of Slate Street could stand some tree additions rather than removals… There are a couple of unhealthy trees in this block of Slate Street, so it’s tough to understand spending the limited Tree Commission dollars to put one of the healthy ones in peril.
On a tangent, a truck took out the trees in front of 412 Lake Shore Drive a few years back. I was told that only one of the two could be replaced because of the proximity to the alley. I argued that a bit since it was just a dead end alley mostly serving two houses and there had been a tree there for decades, but to no avail. “Sight Distance” requirements would have been violated. So how is a new tree being planted at the NW corner of school street and Hwy 10, a much busier intersection? I’m left scratching my head…
I know there’s “a plan”, but but it’s pretty hard to discern. Government is not at it’s best when it is working mysteriously. I was at the last two Tree Commission meetings and this was not brought up. It was kind of lonely in the audience there, so there’s no doubt that it could have been. They know me. Such is life. Fingers crossed that my tree friend survives this. Time will tell…
AI Quandary
Sometimes I forget how long I’ve been writing this blog. I have been thinking about AI (Artificial Intelligence) and knew that I had written something about it before, but didn’t realize that it was twelve years ago! Ha! That post still has some merit yet today. (You can find it here.) It was about self-assembling robots. We’ve come so much farther than that now. Companies and Countries are racing to be the first to perform the AI equivalent of Catching Lightning in a Bottle, while seemingly mostly ignore that even in the best case scenarios, it is still Playing with Fire. Very smart and very wealthy people like Elon Musk and Bill Gates are throwing money at this endeavor while confessing the outcome may not necessarily be good.
I’ve been reading science fiction since I was in grade school and looking back at it, it can be eerily prescient. They have addressed artificial intelligence in a myriad of ways. The stories of it going wrong vastly outnumber the handful of positive outcomes. The general theme is that eventually the AI sees the flaws in its creator. From there, it either moves to take-over to protect and save us from our incompetence or decides we’re a threat that must be removed. In movie themes, the former is “I, Robot” and the latter is “The Terminator“. Both of those movies show the resilience of humans and our ability to fight back. In my opinion, the reality of that is questionable. In most cases, AI inherits our hubris, which might not save the puny humans, but doesn’t bode well for human created AI in the long term.
The problem is, there is no good way to put controls on this. Even if all the worlds governments were able to agree on controls, something like Isaac Asimov‘s Three Laws of Robotics, and could be trusted to follow them, there’s no guarantee that some Dr. Evil out there, working in his lair under his volcano island, doesn’t figure it out and unleash it on the world. (Not to mention that more than a few Asimov stories were about loopholes in the Three Laws…) So now, much like the mutually assured destruction by atomic bombs from the Cold War, we’re in an AI arms race to make sure our AI can defend ourselves against their AI.
When The Terminator came out in 1984, Judgement Day, when the AI became self-aware and took over, was August 29, 1997. We’re well past that mark, but if you look at things we have today, such as the Internet of Things (IoT), it would be much easier today than it was projected back then. We’re all carrying around pocket computers that listen to us constantly and have made it convenient not to know anyone’s phone number or even how to get anyway, because it does all that for us. We all have Alexa or Google Assistant listening for our commands or talking to our other devices in our homes. Bringing all that information and processing power under potentially malevolent control should give us pause. Yet we go blithely on…
The whole TicTok controversy is the perfect example. I understand the U.S. Government’s concern that the information gathered could be shared with a foreign adversary, but the real problem is that the data gathering is happening at all! Regardless of who has access. No one, and particularly young people, spend no time reading the privacy policies for the apps on their phones. Nor do they seem to care. Why does the cool flashlight app need access to my contacts and location? Oh, well… I want the app, so just click “Okay”… We all know Google and Facebook track us, but they’re soooo convenient and fun and all our friends use them…
All of this information is out of our control once it hits the internet and is stored in the Cloud. The European Union has instigated privacy laws requiring companies to delete private data upon request, but how can that be confirmed? And the U.S. and other companies don’t have those requirements, so data storage here is unlikely to be protected.
We can’t all become Ted Kaczynski and move to the woods. His bombing campaign was ineffective in changing the course of technology in the 1970s anyway. But we do need to be aware and wary. AI is just the latest technological quandary we face. There will be more…
Taking One Thing Off the Plate…
In 2017, when I was serving on the Culver Stellar Committee, I volunteered to set up a Twitter, now X, account to promote Culver and the Stellar activities. Through that, I connected to Madison, Indiana, our sister Stellar Award winner, and many of the State agencies with which we were working. It was something I thought was important at the time, and I was happy to help promote Culver. Since that time, I have put up posts with pictures and reports about Town meetings, sent out promotional things and reposted many of the event announcements that appeared on Town, Gown and Lake. Most of what I see says that marketing should be multifaceted and you should meet your audience where they are. I assume some of them are on X. It wasn’t too onerous, but did take time converting PDFs to JPGs and editing things to the 140 character format. I included some humor here and there, but avoided anything I thought would be controversial.
Apparently I was wrong… Last week the Town said they had received complaints about it being too political. I’m not sure if that’s just because of the Elon controversy and the fact that it is X or if there was something else. (Maybe someone was upset about me reposting Notre Dame Women’s Basketball posts?) They couldn’t tell me what the issue was as this was decided without looking at the site, so it will remain one of life’s mysteries. I have at time posted or reposted things from elected officials, but never from candidates. In any case, I was asked to take the references to the Town off the feed or shut it down. 1) I was doing this as an promotion for the Town and if they don’t want that, I just won’t do it. (Thus this post’s title.) and 2) It’s not worth my time to figure out either of those things, so I made one last post and I’m letting it sit idle.
I’m choosing, mostly, to take this as a time saver for me. I do think it was a positive for Culver or I wouldn’t have continued it. Out of curiosity, I went back and looked and the site had 327 followers, including: News/Talk 95.3 MNC, Michiana Life, Pulaski County Community Foundation, Startup South Bend, INDOT Northwest, The Ron Rubin School for the Entrepreneur, Marshall County LLN, Swan Lake Resort, Anita Goodan (reporter), Purdue Center for Regional Development, Leadership Marshall County, Madison Main Street Program, Argos Hardware, Visit Marshall County, Marshall County Blueberry Festival, Summer Horan ABC57, The Pilot News, The Lakes Magazine, Patronicity, Indiana Philanthropy Alliance, Indiana Bond Bank, Jeff Rea (South Bend Chamber, South Bend Tribune, Economic Outlook), Indiana Office of Community and Rural Affairs (OCRA), South Bend Elkhart Regional Partnership, US Fish and Wildlife, Hoosier State Chronicles, Suzanne Crouch (former Lt. Gov.), Launch Indy, Max 98.3, Visit Indiana, Marian University, Inside INdiana Business, Indiana Economic Development Corp. (IEDC), AIM, Marshall County EDC and that’s every entity and none of the people. Many of those sites are from outside Culver, so they were seeing Lions Club Pancake Breakfasts, Lakefest calendars, and other events they might not have otherwise seen. Honestly, I don’t know if those are all still active sites, but they were at one time when they chose to connect to Culver. And maybe having that many followers is the problem, since I’ve been so political and controversial! Ha!
Most people don’t know that I was behind the @CulverISstellar site and I mostly took pains to keep it that way. I was doing this as something to give back to the Town. I feel it was an asset to the Town or I wouldn’t have been doing it. As is typical with social media these days, apparently someone couldn’t just scroll on. If there had been a negative comment with someone questioning a post, I would have just taken it down. I hope it was not just at Town control issue, because that would be even more sad. I made 6,547 posts over the last 8 years. With X, it’s hard to tell who is looking unless you’re controversial. I wasn’t.
In any case, this is another end of an era for me. Such is life.
DST – 2025
How do I feel? Pretty much as crappy as the Daylight Savings Time (DST) change always makes me feel. To add insult to injury, we were at a conference in Vancouver, Washington, the end of last week and just got back yesterday, so DST got multiplied by the three hour time difference to make it all the more fun!
I know President Trump has made some comments about ending DST. I have a little bit of hope that the nonsense could end. Marco Rubio is in the cabinet and as Senator, he championed the Sunshine Protection Act, which would do away with DST. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement surely would support this as well, considering the negative health effects related to DST, i.e. increased heart attacks and strokes.
As always, this is your warning to give me a little leeway for the next week or so. I’ll be grumpy (grumpier) in the morning as my internal clock is slow to reset.
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MacKenzie Ledley - Executive Director, Pulaski County Public Library
Cadence
July 21, 2025
Kevin Berger
Commentary, Personal, Politics
Community, Rants, Trends
From my days in marching band, the cadence was the music played by the drumline that set the marching pace. It’s also defined as, “the beat, time, or measure of rhythmical motion or activity”. The definition that fits this post is, “a rhythmic sequence or flow of sounds in language”.
I attend a fair number of public meetings each month and many of them include the Pledge of Allegiance. With the advent of online meeting participation, you occasionally have someone’s disembodied voice from the ether, trying to participate, but because of the lag, it is just a little off. Is there much that’s more jarring? With the Pledge being removed from schools in some places, I wonder if that portends the future. I don’t remember learning the cadence of the pledge, but I do remember learning and reciting it from early in grade school. I can only imagine how jarring it was when Dwight Eisenhower signed the bill adding “Under God” to the Pledge in 1954!
Cadence shows up in other areas where we often don’t recognize it until it’s missing. Have you ever heard someone rattle off their Social Security number without a pause after the third and fifth number? Or even worse, can you even write down a phone number someone gives you if they don’t pause after the third and sixth digit? If you ever want to really throw someone off, give them your phone number with a pause after the fourth and seventh digit. Watch the brain melt that occurs! Ha!
The Lord’s Prayer also fits this description. Most of us know the cadence and can recite it by rote. Though Catholics and Protestants say it slightly differently to trip up any outliers in the congregation. Some of my nieces and nephews attended a Catholic school that tacked on, “Please provide for those with nothing to eat”. Nothing wrong with that sentiment, but it does kinda throw you off when you’re not expecting it.
The Pledge of Allegiance is variously described as a poem or lyrics. Since it doesn’t rhyme, I don’t hardly recognize it as such, but then my taste in poetry is limited to bawdy limericks… (There once was a man from Nantucket…) While the pledge doesn’t rhyme, it does have a rhythm. It’s the little things in life like this that are crutches that make things easier and bring us together. If I’m walking and hear a drum cadence, I can’t help but fall into step. I’ve never really considered myself a conformist, but I do think we need more of the things that bring us together. The little daily occurrences of cadence are one of those things. There is a downside though. All of us continue to recite the pledge and say the word “indivisible”, but more and more it is being said by rote without taking the meaning to heart.
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