Found It

     Space Service, the book I was after, showed up at a well-known online auction site for slightly more than the dust jacket I almost bought.  It's on the way to me now.

     Better still (but to the detriment of my lunch money), the suggested purchases included another anthology edited by Andre Norton, Space Pioneers.  The same publisher, cover art very similar in theme and style -- and another case of collector rather than reader prices.  A check of Alibris and AbeBooks found better deals, and why not order it now?  I'll be skipping the expensive vending machine treats at work for a while to make it up.

     I'm curious to find out more about the series.  There was a third, Space Police, but I'm not finding any others.  The books don't seem to be very well known.

Nice Of Him

     The other day, I almost bought an obscure anthology edited by the late Andre Norton* that I wanted to read.  Space Service is long out of print.  I recognized most of the authors and a few of the stories.  Norton's judgement of what make a good SF story is trustworthy† and it looked like the kind of good old stuff I'd enjoy.

     The book was never published in paperback as far as I can tell, and the print runs might not have been very large.  Used copies are expensive -- but a seller at one of the big aggregators listed it for $10.00.  I ordered it on sight.

     Five minutes later, an email arrived directly from the seller: "Did you notice that you ordered a dust jacket, no book?"

     I had not.  It was there in the description, if I'd read that far.  I told him so and he helped arrange cancellation of the order.  The guy was even gracious about it.

     Of course, I'm still looking.  The cheapest copies are almost within reach of my somewhat skinflint sensibilities, but I can't justify it until payday.  If then.  Who knows, maybe one will turn up at a better price in the meantime.

     And if it doesn't have a dust jacket, I'll know where to go to buy one.
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* Andre Alice Norton, changed from Alice Mary Norton...so she could cash the checks for her first few novels, published under her pen name!  Starting with fantasy books, by the time her first magazine SF story was published, she was using "Andrew North" as her byline but getting checks with her right name on them.  Why all the names?  The past was a different country even in SF, and it took a long time for women writers to get much traction.  See also C. L. Moore and C. J. Cherryh.
 
† Her story sense in general was outstanding.  She turned out a number of engrossing and entirely credible Westerns, sagebrush, horse sweat, six-shooters and all, which is particularly impressive for a librarian from Cleveland, Ohio who was of somewhat fragile health.

Oh, Goodness!

     The day is almost over and I haven't posted anything!

     Look, we warmed up to temperatures in the teens today and there's three inches of snow on the ground, over a layer of ice.  I think I did well to get out of the house.

Omelette-Topped

     Corned beef hash is a favorite of mine, though presently available canned versions fall short of the mark in my opinion.

     The best kind is home made, with fresh potatoes and left-over corned beef brisket, both of them diced and fried together.  Next-best is served at SoBro's Good Morning Mama's, with their hash browns, onions and shredded corned beef brisket.

     But my quick home version has been evolving.  Mary Kitchen brand over a breadcrumb (Panko) and/or cornmeal* crust is pretty good.  Mixed with diced onions and/or fresh or canned peppers is even better, and I like to top it with an egg or two.

     Tam's no fan of the eggs, which, in fairness, can be a little thick and rubbery.  So this morning, I was thinking about brunch, and that she does like omelettes, and how would it work out to top the canned hash with omelette batter?

     I started with the usual, a heavy sprinkling of cornmeal with some onion powder and Italian-mix seasoning, and spread the hash over it and turned the burner on, medium heat.  Next, I made basic omelette batter: mashed a couple of saltines in a measuring cup, added a little water, let it sit a bit and then stirred in a couple of large eggs (egg$?)† slowly: you want to get them very well mixed without beating a lot of air into the batter, at least if you don't want it to come out fluffy.  (Not that fluffy topping would be bad -- I'll have to try that sometime, with three eggs and a lot of fork work.)

     With the corned beef hash starting to sizzle, I poured the omelette batter over it and snipped a Pippara pepper into rings scattered across the surface.  I covered it and gave it five minutes, then alternated stretches of three minutes uncovered with five minutes covered until the bottom crust was browned.  After the first 5-3-5, it should be firm enough to lift up with a spatula and check.

     How did it turn out?  I liked it; Tam didn't want to try.  Maybe next time.  (She's holding out to walk over for slow-cooked ribs at Fat Dan's, one of her favorite lunch choices. The sidewalks and streets have a few inches of wet snow over a glaze of ice and it's plenty cold, so that's not a walk I'll risk, not with two bad knees.)
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* Masarepa cornmeal is my preference. It is pre-cooked, and browns to a nice crunch.
 
† Y'know, I'm starting to think neither Mr. Trump nor Mr. Musk's "DOGE" cares about or can do anything about the price of eggs.  Gee, thanks.  But we've got 'em now and it's not like you can stuff 'em in the mattress to save for later.  Eggs, I mean.

Yeech

     Today was a miserable cold, wet day, and tonight all that dampness is going to freeze.  The rain will turn to snow and Sunday with stay below freezing all day.

     And there's no one to blame for it.  It's just plain old winter weather, in an especially inconvenient form.  It's kind of a relief, really.

Keyboard: Back

     Taking my coffee-splashed keyboard as far apart as possible without prying at the switches uncovered pockets of coffee and gave me a chance to scrub the chassis and keycaps.  After drying overnight, I put it back together yesterday morning and tested it last night.

     So far, so good.

Forget It

     I admit it: I have lost all hope for the immediate future.  Things will continue to get worse, not better, and the most we can hope for is a valiant rearguard action against a rising tide of not just authoritarianism, but ignorant, meme-level authoritarianism.

     The future is here and it is staggeringly stupid.

     At 66, I may not live to see the end of it, especially if the current Administration crashes the economy or stumbles into a world war.  Even if all they manage to do is hose Social Security, Medicare and ACA-driven insurance markets, they'll do me real harm.

     This is not to say our Federal bureaucracy is a model of perfection; it's messy.  It's slow.  It is undoubtedly wasteful -- but you don't fix that with a handful of 20-something software engineers and deep, uninformed cuts.

     Every government that has prided itself on "efficiency" has been heedless of human cost, indifferent to human suffering, injurious to individual freedom and dignity.  The Trump Administration's unwarranted vandalism to USAID has already cost lives and will cost many more.  They're dinking with the military, with the VA, with Education, and they're lurching towards a Constitutional crisis with the potential to do immense harm.

     And some of you are still cheering for this.

     Me, I'm resigned to hanging on with no prospect of a better life and scant odds it will stay even as good as it is.

     You wanted King Stork.  Well, you got him.

Clumsy

     Things aren't going great this morning.  I've been using a Qwerkywriter II keyboard for several years.  I really like it, and since I bought it during the funding phase of the maker's Kickstarter, the price was substantially lower than what they cost now.

     This morning, I knocked about a third of a cup of coffee into it.  I usually put my coffee cup on an elevated coaster between the mousepad and the keyboard and today, a little distracted while moving my right hand from the mouse to the keyboard, I caught the upper edge of the cup and over it went.  (I have to pay close attention to where my hands are in relation to external objects; starting out severely nearsighted seems to have left me with a lousy sense of where things are unless I slow down and look right at them.)

     There's a lithium battery in the keyboard.  To make matters worse, I take my coffee with cream and sugar.  So immediate action was required.

     Once I had the keyboard draining and cleared off the desk to wipe up the worst of the spill, my computer crashed and started an update!  I had to ignore it while I got the battery out (only a little coffee on it), wiped up the coffee on the desk, rinsed off some small items and started opening up the rest of the keyboard.  It's got several tricky screws and I've only accessed the worst-soaked part so far.  Full disassembly will have to wait.

     I can't afford to replace it at present.  The exact model is no longer made, but the current version is a functional equivalent.  So I'll see how the cleaning process goes.

A Tune For These Times

     Round and round and round it goes -- mostly.

Reading For Our Times

     While many people have read and enjoyed the Narnia books by C. S. Lewis, his "Space Travel Trilogy" is less well known.

     The first book, Out of the Silent Planet, is, at first sight, a straightforward space adventure of its day: our hero stumbles into a secretive mission departing for the planet Mars and is abducted.  Arriving at Mars, he and his captors are separated, have various adventures and are reunited.  --But all is not as it seems.  Like the Narnia books, there is considerable Christian allegory at work.  It's entertaining fiction, and is probably the most widely read book of the trilogy.

     The next two are...different.  Perelandra is a fairly overt struggle between Good and Evil, in which Lewis treats in some detail the banality and pettiness of evil.  I was reminded of it when I read Adam Serwer's 2018 essay "The Cruelty is the Point" in The Atlantic.  While C. S. Lewis devotes considerably more wordage to the topic and addresses it within an explicitly Christian context, the parallels are indeed striking. Professor Weston, the villain of both Perelandra and Out of the Silent Planet, has many counterparts in current politics, willing and even eager to commit cruelties both great and small, allegedly for the greater good but in fact, largely for their own sake, artifacts of a corroded soul.

     The third book, That Hideous Strength, is a cautionary tale and one the years have brought into ever sharper outline.  Combining elements of Arthurian legend with the mythos established by the preceding two books, it investigates both the risks of reducing of the human experience to a series of algorithms and the perils of AI simulating human behavior.  You do not need to share the religious spin Lewis gives these themes to follow along -- and the entire story is set within the exciting tales of a young academic who is drawn into and the ultimately rejects the machinations of the antagonists.  I won't spoil the story with too many details, but it's well worth the read, full of tension and excitement.

     Lewis saw trends well in advance of his time.  He filtered his impressions through his own education and religious beliefs, but his unwavering belief in the value of the dignity of the human soul shines through his work in a way impossible to ignore.

     Those three books offer a perspective sorely lacking at present.

Buttered Saltines

     I had a good one all lined up, a blistering piece about how the protege of a billionaire who doesn't think freedom and democracy are compatible was pushing an extreme version of the unitary executive theory in which the courts must never, ever review the Constitutionality or reasonableness of Presidential decisions.

     It's a notion that runs counter to the principle of judicial review, the Major Questions Doctrine and the Administrative Procedure Act.  Perhaps it's exactly what you might expect from a man whose membership in the ruling elite is highly contingent.  He was, after all, willing to exploit his own mother's addiction and dysfunction to further his ambition, an act roughly on a par with sending her out to walk the streets for his own gain -- although at least then, she would have been better able to refuse to go along with it.

     But no, never mind.  If that could reach you, you have already been reached, and if it cannot, you're a lost cause.  Or at least a lost symptom, netted, reeled in and and ready to be sold.  Realization will arrive with the filleting knife, if it ever dawns at all.

     So I'll stop and instead remember the simple joy of a little butter slathered between two saltines.  It was a treat when I was a child and it's still a treat now -- and still, so far, an affordable one.

Hamfest Missed

     There's a hamfest near Indianapolis today and I was going to go -- but there's also flu and worse circulating, and I kinda didn't want to give my fellow hams a chance to disappoint me, either.

     At an outdoor flea market, there's more space to avoid germs and more chances to overlook the politics that were starting to infect hamfests even before the pandemic.  It used to be just looking askance at CBers* and griping about the FCC and the ARRL (and whatever feuds were infesting the local repeaters), but people started drawing partisan lines.  Me, I just want to look at interesting old junk in person, and swap signal and weather reports over the air.
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* And refusing to sell them linear amps.  4 Watts is plenty, guys.  If you want more, study up for a ham ticket.