Tragic Start To 2025

     Like you, I'm monitoring the reports from the truck-ramming attack in New Orleans that has killed at least ten people and injured over thirty.  The bare facts are about all that has been released to the public.  It is known to have been a deliberate act, not a drunk or incapacitated driver.  The FBI is on the scene and is investigating it as a probable act of terrorism.

     There are, in fact, a lot of State and Federal agencies at work on this in the French Quarter, and during the first news conference this morning, MayorLaToya Cantrell used an interestingly specific term, referring to the "unified command."

     That tells me that it's not chaos; it's from the Incident Command System, originally developed to coordinate public safety agencies fighting wildfires in California, but adopted and greatly expanded by FEMA, which had already learned the hard way what doesn't work.  ICS does work, and pretty much anyone in a position of command at a public safety agency has at least had the short course on how to work it.  I've taken the online version -- it was required in order to be certified to access the various sites my where employer has equipment during an emergency situation.

     "Unified Command" comes right out of ICS, and lets me know that the highest-ranking members on the scene from every responding agency are metaphorically -- and probably literally -- sitting around the same table, pooling information, setting shared objectives and timetables, and sorting out who does what, within a framework they're all already familiar with.  It's a tool that prevents conflict and avoids wasted or duplicated effort, designed (perhaps uniquely, as things fed.gov go) to be flexible.  Internal chains of command are not disrupted: your boss is still your boss, but he (or his boss) is in steady contact with the bosses of every other department or agency working the incident.

     ICS command staff numbers expand and contract as the situation requires, task-oriented rather than position-oriented.  One person might wear many hats, or only one.  They may have a subsidiary staff or work solo.  And there are rules of thumb for figuring that out.  At its best, it's staggeringly effective; even when it's just clunking along, it ensures that the people out at the leading edge have ways to resolve conflict that run through their own communications and land in the laps of someone who can work it out with his or her opposite number(s).

     The system's working in New Orleans right now.  It's not magical, but it ensures FBI, the NOPD and the Louisiana State Police (etc.) are all on the same page.  There probably won't be a whole lot of details released to the Press until this evening; the next press conference* will be at noon and I don't expect to learn more from it than an update on the killed and injured, and perhaps early details on the perpetrator.  But the Mayor's use of one uncommon term has told me that the response is coordinated and organized, with clear goals.  They'll figure this crime out.
____________________
* "Public Information Officer" is one of the defined jobs of the ICS Command Staff, and you may see a spokesperson or just a quiet coordinator in the background of the next news conference, but count on someone having the official details, probably an FBI agent; the rest of whoever will be there are only present because it is expected of them -- Mayor, probably the police chief and so on.

Harrumpf!

     Yet again, our corner grocer -- part of a chain headquartered in the Southeastern U.S. -- has failed to stock corned beef brisket for New Years.

     It never occurs to them.  Cabbage?  Sure.  Blackeyed peas?  Absolutely.  But no corned beef.

     They were weirdly out of both eggs and eggnog, huge empty swathes in the cooler.  So today, I'll go on a last-minute search for both corned beef and eggs.  Hoping for a nice, big brisket but I'll eat the canned stuff if that's what it takes.  Beef that is; canned eggs are right out, and they never have the good sense to make up the pickled ones with beets as is right and proper.

Night Visitor

     I woke up about four this morning to a calling owl: "Who who who-who?  Who who who-who?" Over and over, with undertones of the sound of someone blowing air across the open top of a big ceramic jug, questioning and slightly spooky.  The sounds were deep enough to be a Great Horned Owl, but the pattern is more like the Barred Owl.

     We've had a family of owls in the neighborhood for several years.  In the spring and summer, they make an assortment of sounds that remind me of tropical birds, and I have seen them holding flying lessons for young owls in our alley, swooping from one power pole to the next.

     It's a gift to have these raptors in our neighborhood.  When I was young, any kind of owl or hawk was a rare sight.  Little screech owls would occasionally use the patio of my parents' house to stride around and raise a ruckus, but it was uncommon.  They've come back and now I often see red-tailed hawks at the North Campus and a half-dozen big, black vultures that soar over the intersection of Kessler and College Avenues in the evenings.

Unplanned Supper

     Holiday schedules have been askew this year.  Tam had a last-minute house-sitting job that put my Christmas week menus out of sync -- and gave me an excuse to grill a couple of nice steaks for us on Christmas day, a treat that has become rare since meat prices went high during the pandemic.

     The steaks were very good, which I will chalk up to our grocer and the use of hardwood lump charcoal.  But you probably know how to grill a steak to suit yourself, and if you don't, I encourage you to experiment.

     I stumbled into Saturday with hamburger stroganoff fixings -- except for the mushrooms; I'd planned it for earlier in the week, and the mushrooms had ended up as a side for the steaks.  I had a poound of nice ground chuck, carrots and celery left from earlier, and a couple of cans of mushroom bisque.  I asked Tam to pick up leeks; she's not a big fan of regular mushrooms and twice in one week would be too much.

     The ground chuck browned and drained, with a little salt and pepper; I pushed it to the sides of the pan and sauteed sliced carrots (three colors!) in the center, then sliced celery and finally the leeks.  There's a trick to leeks; they're muddy.  You rinse them off, trim them, cut off the root part of the bulb and finally split them lengthwise, rinsing each half from the root end towards the ends.  I chopped them up, added them and sauteed until translucent.  One can of mushroom bisque added moisture and flavor without being overwhelming.  I had mine with a little Peri-peri rice.  It was really good for such a simple group of ingredients.

Furniture!

     I'm presently busy replacing my bedside cabinet.  I had an inexpensive one with an engineered-bamboo frame and cloth-over-cardboard drawers.  It bordered on being too flimsy, despite added stabilizing pieces, but the worst problem was that Holden the cat found the fabric irresistible for scratching, far superior to his scratching post. Despite corrugated-carboard guards, he managed to demolish half of one drawer front.

     So when I found a slightly larger cabinet that appeared to be exactly as wide as the space between my bed and my bedroom bookshelf, I bookmarked the page and kept returning to it for a couple of months.  Eventually, my disposable income was far enough ahead of the (inexpensive) price and I bought it.

     It is all pine and arrived as a flatpack, with eight drawers to assemble and a lack of pilot holes for the screws.  I improvised a corner clamp and built it over the spare time of several days off, and today is installation day!  It is an exact fit to the space, and so far, I have been able to get my Kindle/iPad Mini boom (the base takes a 7/8" hole, easy enough with a brace and old-fashioned bit) and outlet strip installed, wires rerouted, and I'm sorting through the contents of the old drawers.  There's enough extra room that I can get all my only slightly defunct eyeglasses and spare clip-on sunglasses in one drawer -- important, because I rarely buy new frames: they're expensive and the kind of 1930s/40s wire frames I prefer go in and out of fashion these days, most often "out."  Also important because I lose track of the clip-ons in their anonymous black cases when they are scattered over my desk, dressing table and elsewhere.

     So far, I'm a wireless keyboard or two ahead, plus my spare pocketknife (needs repair), a couple of flashlights and a set of wired earbuds.*  I think my Freewrite Traveler will find a home in this cabinet, too.
_______________________
* I have used a number of storage solutions for corded earbuds and while the various cute cord-winders and cases are nice, the best way to store and carry them is in a medium-sized prescription pill bottle.  It protects them and keeps dust out; it can bounce around in your purse or briefcase, glovebox or desk drawer, and they're ready when you need 'em, as good as the day you packed them up.  You can hank the wires up neatly or just stuff 'em in the bottle. 

Fracture Lines

     Who would have thought the techbros and the populists would split over H-1B visas?

     One of the worst downsides to "move fast and break things" culture is that it often breaks people; as soon as computer software (and, earlier, hardware) moved from labor-of-love people who slept under their desks* to a profit-making venture, hard-crunch work with long days and no time off was more rule than exception.  It was expected.  At the best employers, it came with perks: outstanding and well-stocked break rooms, comfy "decompression areas," a tolerance for eccentricity that went way, way out.  But it does break people, and one of the reasons for the proliferation of tech firms in early/middle computers and software was people just getting up and leaving, to-hell-with-this-I'll-work-at-my-own-pace.  You can see it now in commercial rocketry/space exploration: the big core firms emit a constant churn of engineers, scientists, technicians and managers who have been ridden too hard for too long and bail out, taking their overlooked or lost in the scrimmage ideas with them.

     And to support that kind of turnover, you need a constant influx of talented, educated people willing -- happy! -- to work twenty-hour days and sleep under their desks.  Not all of them are from here, and it could be that a cozy sleeping bag under a desk looks better from Tashkent, Nairobi or Mumbai than it does from MIT.

     So the techbros are all about the H-1B visa and how it allows them "to hire nonimmigrant aliens as workers in specialty occupations or as fashion models of distinguished merit and ability." (Hint: they're probably not hiring fashion models.)  The populists, on the other hand, are not so happy about the folks from faraway places with strange accents, unfamiliar religions, unexpected complexions and unusual foods.  Besides, they themselves could have been rocket engineers or code hackers (et geeky cetera), if only it wasn't for the long hours, tricky mathematics and need to hyperfocus; it isn't fair!  --Their fathers, grandfathers and great-grandfathers stuffed the first generation of NASA nerds and card-tricking IBM-machine hackers into lockers, and gave suspicious looks to the likes of Feynman and Oppenheimer ("not our sort," you know), but never mind all that.

     There's big mad from the populists and snotty condescension from the techbros, while the nerds doing the actual work keep on doing the actual work.  They'd get a lot more done if their bosses weren't assholes and the locals didn't keep treating them like nerds.  I know what they'll do: sleep under their desks and put in long hours, doing the work; some of them will bail out, by and by, and hang up their own shingle, and some of them will be the basis for the next generation of people who get things done, probably becoming asshole bosses in the process.  I have no idea what the various factions and personalities of MAGAworld will do next, but I fully intend to pop myself some popcorn while I watch.
________________________
* I use "sleep under their desk" as shorthand for the kind of ludicrous devotion to the task at hand that goes way beyond any paycheck: you're doing it because you love it, you love the process and you want to see how it turns out.  BTDT, and the thing is, the task does not love you back, your boss has no real grasp of the nature of your devotion and finds it weird, and once it's done, it's not yours.  You've spent months or years at it and now it's someone else's; you have nothing to fall back on while you look for the next thing.

Radio Drama

     The NBC radio series X Minus One did an adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein's Requiem that is well worth listening to, a very good telling of the story.  Their version of Murray Leinster's First Contact, on the other hand, misses the point.  They make up for it with A Logic Named Joe, based on the 1946 Leinster story that describes massively networked desktop computing devices that have replaced telephones, televisions, encyclopedias and so on -- with, eventually, unexpected social consequences that the story solves but we're still living with.

Merry Christmas Day!

     Or whatever holiday wishes apply to you and yours.  I hope your celebrations are enjoyable.

     Several comments to my previous holiday post went a little political, and y'know what?  No.  Not for these couple of days.  Let us do as millions of our fellow Americans and billions of other Earthlings do, and put forth a convincing fake, at least, of getting along.  We will have plenty of time for helmet-fire freakouts in the coming 363 days, no matter who we are or what we believe.  You can count on it.

     The high road gets you to the destination just as well as the low road, and you stumble through a lot less mud along the way.

Leftover Ham

     Last night, one bag of leftover ham contributed to some of the best Hoppin' John I have made in some time.  With a double handful of assorted cherry tomatoes chopped up, half a red onion, diced, and multicolor bell peppers from the grocery ready-to-go cooler, two small cans of Hatch chilis, a box/large can of finely chopped tomatoes and a mostly-drained can of blackeyed peas, the ham thawed in the microwave while I sauteed the fresh vegetables with some Cajun spice mix, and once it all came together, ten minutes simmering with a bay leaf was all it took.

Merry Christmas Holidays!

     I'd like to take this Christmas Eve to wish each and every one of my readers -- yes, even the ones who send me angry and/or snarky comments -- the happiest of winter holidays, whichever one(s) they celebrate.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, Joyful Kwanzaa, best solstice wishes* and so on: Happy holidays!
__________________________
* The solstice has been and gone on the 21st, but it's the thought that counts.  The fact that the solstice falls so close to these winter holidays is no accident: the turning of the year has been important to humans for as long as we've been humans and we are darned well going to mark it.  It's an open feast: more holiday for the other guy doesn't mean any less for you.  Get out the good dinnerware and dig in!

Steamed Ham?

     Why not?  I bought a ham for Christmas, a big spiral-cut ham, intending to bake it in the grill.  Events led me to cook it this weekend instead of waiting until Christmas and the weather was cold and blustery, so I got out my biggest stewpot, set up the rack, and started the ham cooking over a half-inch of water.

     I added a little hot honey, garlic and ginger to the glaze, figuring it was mostly going to melt off and add to the steaming liquid.  The ham was precooked -- spiral-cut ones often are -- so it only needed two and a half hours.  I added potatoes, carrots, celery and onion for the last hour, and sliced mushrooms for the last half hour, and added water as needed.

     The meat thermometer showed it had reached the necessary temperature at the end of the cooking time.  About half the slices fell right off the bone when I went to lift it out.

     It was good, flavorful and tender.  The vegetables turned out well, too, not overly sweet but touched with ham flavor.  Tam and I enjoyed it.

     Cleanup was slow: a ten-pound ham is a lot of meat.  I saved a slice for breakfast and still ended up with three gallon-sized freezer bags of meat, each enough for Hoppin' John or bean soup, plus a bag of meat and vegetables that can be reheated for supper.

     It's not a conventional way to cook a ham, but it worked out.

Touched By Time

     There was a visitor to Roseholme Cottage yesterday, someone I had not seen since before the COVID-19 pandemic, the man I refer to here as the Data Viking.  We went to High School together.

     For years, he has lived in the far north of Indiana, driving down to Indianapolis to visit and go to the big gun shows.  Most of that went by the wayside while everything was screwed up.  We kept in touch via e-mail and I was looking forward to resuming our old routine.

     It's not going to happen.  A month and a half ago, his e-mails stopped arriving.  I've been increasingly busy at work and assumed he was, too.  Instead, he had an adverse health event that necessitated an abrupt retirement and relocation halfway across the country to live near his adult son.  He's in generally good health but his vision was affected.

     Three weeks ago, I got a short, "Call me at..." e-mail from him with an unfamiliar area code and thought, "Uh-oh, my old friend's e-mail has been hacked."  I called anyway, using my employer's firewalled, computer-based phone system: they've got super-duper antivirus, after all.  But it was indeed my old friend, who explained his changed circumstances.

     A death in his ex-wife's family brought him back through Indy with his son over this weekend, and they had a few hours to spare, so he arranged to be dropped off and we spent several hours getting caught up.

     It may be the last time I see my friend.  We'll stay in touch by telephone, though neither of us is much for long phone calls.

     For my generation, there is considerably more sand in the bottom of hourglass than in the top.  There is a lot I still want to do, and no better time than the present to start doing it.