- Sometimes, love has a dark side.
That was a hard-learned lesson for many residents and businesses on the north side of Mishawaka on Sunday night, when a malfunction at an electrical substation cut power to more than 2,100 Mishawaka [Indiana] Utilities customers.
....in the spirit of the season, the culprit of Sunday's outage was a heart-shaped metallic Mylar balloon bearing a familiar February legend.
"It said 'I Love You' on it," Mishawaka Utilities General Manager Phil Miller said. "It looks like someone didn't hold onto their Valentine's gift tightly enough."
Miller said the balloon, trailing a wet string, drifted into the University Park substation near the mall shortly after 7:30 p.m. The string caused a short circuit in a bank of capacitors
....As for the person who might be looking for the lost balloon, he or she might want to check with Miller. But after the balloon's encounter with the capacitors, that person could find that his or her heart may be broken.
"(The balloon) didn't look too pretty when we pulled it out of there," he said. [South Bend Tribune]
1988 - I had trepidations about this party from the beginning. It was a Pledge Active: planned, executed and paid for by the pledges - no longer civilians, not yet full fraternity brothers.
Like military recruits, the pledges were (and are) regarded as brain-damaged vermin. Through some strange process of absorption, many otherwise intelligent individuals become blithering idiots under the barrage of abuse that is pledging.
The pledges - as a result of insults, fatigue and fear - become mistrustful. The rationale for the abuse is to break down the individuals into a cohesive unit, and a multiheaded beast is to emerge from this chrysalis of adversity. This same attitudenal alchemy creates mistrust toward outsiders: "How could anyone on the outside understand what we are going through, let alone what it all means?"
If pledging succeeds at nothing else, it succeeds in creating an "us" vs. "them" attitude in the pledges - "them" being everyone else.
I had worked regularly with many fraternities at all the big SoCal campuses and so was regarded as something of an insider by many of the regular members. Therefore, the pledge's business attitude toward me, the DJ, careened between obsequious bootlicking (because I was an insider) and paranoid hucksterphobia (because I wasn't a pledge). To further complicate matters, there wasn't one pledge in charge, which inevitably led to too many chiefs and much spoiled broth.
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