The Test Results Are Back

      In fact, when I called yesterday, results turned out to have been back, and for several days.  I don't have the virus.  Somehow they neglected to call or e-mail, oh dear, they hadn't the foggiest how that happened.

      I can guess.  There were at least two cars with people in them waiting for tests when I showed up; three more arrived while I was waiting and two more were  pulling into the lot as I was leaving.  It's a small sample, but the whole thing took a little under ten minutes; call it two minutes or less per test, eight hours a day -- at minimum, 240 a day, six days a week, week after week.  And it's a small office.  They've outsourced their test scheduling since my previous visit but the person who spoke with me when I called to ask about my test results sounded busier than most of us would like to be.

       What this means is that I have been dealing with a bad cold, and I can go deal with it at my isolated worksite about as well as I can at home.

Familiar Name

      Thanks to Tamara's Disney+ account, I'm getting caught up with The Mandalorian.  I think it owes as much to the tightly-written half-hour episodes of Have Gun -- Will Travel* as it does to Clint Eastwood's "Spaghetti Westerns," storytelling with no room for self-indulgence by the screenwriter or director.  Oh, it's still a little hardware-happy; from the first film, the Star Wars franchise has tended to an ever-so-subtle nod to Gerry Anderson's SF work.  But there's no wasted screentime, no point where you'd feel okay dashing to the kitchen to bring back a snack.  It's all working, all the time.

      Like the Richard Boone series, most episodes come to a morally satisfying (but not saccharine) conclusion, something that has become uncommon in a day of TV programs featuring cheap laughs, cheap thrills and cheap sensation. 

      But what caught my eye last night at the end of the first episode of the second season was a familiar and unusual name in the credits.  Had I really seen it?  Sure enough, Shawna Trpcic, costume designer for Firefly, was in charge of costuming for the second season of The Mandalorian!  Her work added a lot to the older series and I'm happy to see her on this job.

      "Pretty cunning, don't you think?"
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* If you enjoy episodic genre fiction, I highly recommend this series.  Yes, it's black-and-white, old-timey TV, but the writing is at least up to the standards of the best pulps, the directing and editing is outstanding, the cinematography is never less than competent and usually far better, and the acting is generally first-rate.  Richard Boone inhabits his character comfortably.

Counterpart

      Tamara and I finished Season Two of the SF/spy series Counterpart the other day.  The series held up all the way to the (far too early) end.  Series creator Justin Marks managed to resolve major narrative lines while leaving openings for subsequent seasons.

      We won't get them; Starz pulled the plug, citing a shift in the network's audience targeting.  But don't let that stop you from enjoying brilliant performances from J. K. Simmons and Olivia Williams -- both remarkably likeable performers, playing four complicated and at times not-so-likeable roles -- plus a talented cast.  There's considerable depth to the characterization and the plot is twisty.

      This one is worth watching.

Imaginary Reading

      Picture my surprise at receiving a copy of Tom Swift And His Air Befouler, only to discover it's a chili cookbook!  Mostly with beans.

Could Not Have Made Him Up

      Alexander G. Weygers was a man right out of the Hidden Frontier.  Have a look -- and scroll down for his fabulous flying vehicles.

Hi!

      Busy day, with frequent breaks to nap.  We're definitely not one hundred percent.

Merry Christmas!

ARTWORK FROM CHRISTMAS 2018

     Merry Christmas, Seasons Greetings or whatever kind of wish suits you as the days begin to get longer and we can all look forward, hoping for a better New Year.

So, Yesterday

      Skipped posting.  Felt blah and very tired.  Did a telemeeting for work, went and got my nose swabbed, went to my (isolated) workplace, got a few things done and, per my boss, took alcohol and wiped down all the doorknobs, faucet handles, keypads and so on at the end of my day.

      Today is a work-from-home day, then a three-day weekend and at some point, I should get my test results.

      Whatever is going on, there's a lot of fatigue here at Roseholme Cottage.

Feeling Ill

       Not sure what it is -- probably just my seasonal sinus awfuls.  But I'm very unsteady, temperature up and down, (etc., etc.) and should not be behind the wheel of a car.

     Yes, I'll go get tested.

     Comments are off, it being too great a temptation to too many people to play doctor.

Not Today, Either

      I feel lousy.  Some kind of a cold?  Emotional exhaustion?  I don't know.

     Also, people are still crazy.

Not Today

      Please talk quietly among yourselves.

Of Shots And Doubts

      Still thinking about the accusation that I was conflating chip-fearing kooks and "people who have serious doubts about rushed vaccines."

     Nope, I'm not; if you don't want to be at the the head of line because you'd like for there to be more testing before you are vaccinated (though the test groups are huge and testing started very early), I have great news for you: unless you're a medical worker or in a nursing home (or one of a very small number of Continuity-of-Government people who don't really get a choice), you're not at the head of the line.  Nobody's likely to push you there, either.  Hundreds of thousands of people will have already been vaccinated by the time they get around to middle-aged adults who aren't working in health care or other high-exposure jobs.

     Consider, too, the benefits of front-line medical personnel getting the vaccine first: not only are they some of the most at risk and keeping them healthy benefits every patient they will help, they're also a group that will quickly recognize any side effects and they'll be well-connected to receive treatment and provide useful feedback.

     So I don't worry about people with legitimate doubts; by the time their turn comes, we're all going to have a much better idea of what to expect and the convincable will be convinced  I'm also confident that the people in the fancy offices at Pfizer and Moderna (et al) understand that the consequences of bad outcomes will be dire even though they are shielded from lawsuits; and yet they released the vaccines.  So those shots are extraordinarily likely to be safe.

     Meanwhile, the chip-fearing loonies are loud and shiny and it is very much lunatic season.  They're getting a lot of press and they're all over social media.  People who are still making their minds up can be swept along with them.  The crazies can do a lot of harm while reality plods along.  A glittering lie can circle the globe while the the truth is just putting its shoes on.

It's Good Enough For The Veep

      Vice-President Mike Pence got his vaccine shot on live TV this morning, which ought to be proof enough for the skeptical (and gives them a high-visibility public figure to watch for side effects as a bonus).

     With that in mind, I can now safely predict that anything the Vice-President subsequently does to further rather than obstruct finalizing the Presidential election and the smooth transition from this Administration to the next will be ascribed by the kooky fringe to the controlling effects of the Bill Gates-George Soros microchips they believe are now swirling around in his bloodstream, no doubt operated by chemtrail-guided microwave commands.

A Falsehood Repeated Does Not Become More True

      I receive more blog comments than I publish.  How do I decide what to publish or not?  It's very simple, really:

     1. Comments containing threats against persons or institutions never get published. 
     2. Comments that make obscure references get fact-checked.  If they turn out to be innocent and not too obscure, they'll get published, once I work out that you're talking about a baseball pitcher and not a figure from the Third Reich.  (Yes, both have shown up.)
     3. Comments making claims that turn out to be factually wrong when fact-checked do not get published.  Sometimes they will prompt blog posts that explain the facts -- not the politics, not the "oh, wouldn't it be grand if--" assumptions but the plain, unvarnished facts.  I try to include links to neutral sources.  If I can't find neutral ones, I give preference to ones that "show their work" with footnotes and/or links, so they can themselves be fact-checked.

     Loudness and conviction are not measures of truth.  Saying something over and over does not make it true.  Truth is the stuff we can independently verify from multiple original sources, based on research and not opinion.

     Federal law and regulation has no magical, abracadabra component: it is as dull as dishwater and every bit as tedious as doing your own income tax, for the unsurprising reason that the tax code is a part of the same body of rules. There is no Santa Claus, folks, the tooth fairy is just your Mom or Dad taking your baby tooth from under the pillow and leaving a shiny coin.  Grow up and smell the disillusion.

*  *  *
     With that out of the way, here's the overnight cull of untruths, half-truths and imaginary magic for the last couple of days:

     "Multiple studies indicate that the total number of deaths this year is exactly in line with the total number of deaths that have trended over the past decade."
     Nope!  One study by a non-medical Ph.D. purported to show something of the sort, sort of, and on discussion, it does not.  (Heavy reading here.) Actual death counts over time are easy to compare -- this article has overlaid graphs for the U. S. over the last five years -- and the spikes or peaks on the 2020 graph lead rather than follow "stay-home" orders.  Now, possibly all those people are dying due to fits of pique, but it's more likely that the spikes in overall mortality show the effect of COVID-19 deaths. 

     "Hospitals are cheerfully raking in $7,000.00 to $42,000.00 a patient for simply checking a box on a form that indicates a person who died from COPD or cancer or heart disease or liver disease or an auto accident or falling off of a roof or whatever had Covid at time of death."
     Nope!  First off, it's not check boxes, and it's not either-or; most people die of multiple things.  There are plenty of comorbidities that will kill you quicker if you come down with a respiratory illness, and guess what?  It's the combination that kills: both are the cause. The only "free money from the government" was for Medicare and uninsured patients anyway; per Factcheck.org,  "The Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act,or CARES Act, created a 20% add-on to be paid to hospitals treating Medicare patients with COVID-19; Medicare is the federal health insurance program for those 65 years and older. The law also set aside some money to reimburse hospitals for treating uninsured patients."  Medicare fraud is a serious matter and playing fast and loose will cost a hospital dearly when, not if, they are caught.

     One reader hopes the President, "declares foreign interference in the 2020 Presidential election, orders the existing mess null and void, requires the state legislatures to appoint a new slate of EC electors, and let the process carry itself out as the US Constitution provides."
     Wrong!  The President -- any President of the United States -- does not have the power to declare an election "null and void," nor does he have the power to require State legislatures to appoint a new slate of electors (the manner of their choosing is, in fact, explicitly reserved to the States themselves, and has been all along).  EO 13848 is not a magic wand, and sets well-defined trigger conditions for foreign interference in U. S. elections before any action can be undertaken. You will search it in vain for any "Presidential declaration" to invoke any process that would invalidate an election.

     The same reader asks, "Is there anyone so innocent as to believe that Mike Pence will count the legal (and necessarily alternate) [sic] electoral college slate of votes for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, as opposed to the other equally legal [sic] alternate slate of votes submitted by the legislatures of 7 states in favor of himself and Donald Trump?"
     Yes, there is -- me and many U. S. Senators and Representatives of both major parties.  Nor is there any other "equally legal slate of votes;" each state gets (and their Governor certifies) exactly one (1) group "equal to the whole number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress."  They don't get two, and in the case of a dispute, it's not up to the Vice-President to sort that out; the House and Senate resolve it by separating, debating for up to two hours, voting and then they can only remove some set of electors if both bodies voted to do so.  No mystery, no magic, no double-secret probation and Mike Pence is not the Keymaster in this task, just President of the Senate.
     This is how it works.  This is how it will work.  No citizen is obliged to be happy about the result of a Presidential election -- but we are generally expected to refrain from seditious behavior.  You can count on the Vice-President to do so, no matter how much he may dislike the outcome of the 2020 Presidential election.
*  *  *
     Please, start looking this stuff up before you repeat what some blogger wrote or some partisan commentator said.  I put in links, but they're just a starting point.  Dig deep.  Look for original source documents, not someone's interpretation of them.  And if what you're reading doesn't include links or footnotes, ask yourself what that person's trying to put over.

     The truth is out there.  So is an awful lot of flim-flam.  The truth is usually more boring and often disappointing but it offers the salient advantage of being actual reality.

Not How That Works

      This concerns the recent Presidential election.  So I'm going to do my best to address this on the basis of fact, not opinion -- including my own opinions.  I won't debate opinions in comments, either -- pro, con or zany.  Nope, this is about how the machinery works, period.

      The latest "make it didn't happen" meme going around* lays out a scenario in which the joint session of Congress to count the votes of the Electoral College, overseen by Vice-President Pence, instead throws out enough of them that the House will pick the new President and the Senate will select the V.P.  The meme assures us that the outcome is a sure thing, since the House will vote by State and not by Representative, which supposedly will give the GOP a majority.  And thus, it claims, President Trump and Vice-President Pence will remain in office.

      The problem here is that the meme conflates two things: resolving disputed Electoral College votes and selecting a President and Vice-President if no candidate has won a majority of Electoral votes. They are not the same process.

      If a member of the House and and member of the Senate both object in writing to the same Electoral college vote -- and this has happened already, in 2005 -- then the two bodies separate, debate the matter for up to two hours, and the House and Senate each have a roll-call, per-member vote.  If they both vote to reject the contested vote(s), out they go; if there is any other result, they stay in.  The House does not vote on this by state.  For those who have not been keeping score, at present and in 2021 the Democrats hold a majority in the House of Representatives.  The GOP are in the majority in the Senate now; the Senate majority in 2021 will depend on the result of the upcoming election in Georgia.  Getting the House and Senate to agree that some Electoral votes should be thrown out is highly unlikely

      Should the House end up picking a President, then they would be voting by state, and someone else can go predict the result by toting up Party memberships of each state's delegation and assuming -- reasonably enough -- that they would vote along Party lines, the majority in each state thus determining the vote of their state.  But remember, to get there would require a situation in which neither candidate had received a majority of Electoral College votes, and that's unlikely to happen. 
__________________________
* Here's the gist of the invidious thing, and a reminder: any time you see anything like this, from any source, go look it up for yourself. Obfuscation and nonsense abounds.
      "Today, the electoral college votes will be sealed and sent by special carrier to Washington where they will remain sealed until January 6th when the House and Senate will come into a joint session to open the votes. The media is going to make you believe that it's all over and Joe Biden is now officially president...
[...]... Vice President Mike Pence will have all the authority as president of the Senate for that day and will accept or reject motions to decide the next steps by the assembly.
      "Remember... Mike Pence is in full authority that day as written in the Constitution. The ballots will be certified today but that means nothing...
The votes will be opened and at that point one House member could, and most likely will, raise their hand to object to the Vice President on the state of elector's votes. That objection could cover fraud or any other reason, and with the seconding of that objection everything changes. Everything!!
      "The House and Senate will divide for two hours (at least) to debate, then vote. The vote will be per Senator with the Vice President being the deciding vote if needed in the Senate, while the vote in the House will be only be ONE vote per delegation, per state, not per House member!!! The Republicans have 30 delegation votes compared to the Democrats 20 delegation votes.
      "If this scenario runs true, President Trump gets re-elected.[...]"
      Someone must have not been paying close attention in Civics or U. S. Government class.

Digging Deeper

      An interesting blog if you'd like to learn about the security of voting machines from people who have actual subject-matter-expert knowledge of the topic: Freedom to Tinker.  Andrew Appel is especially informative.

All Three Monkeys At Once

      Me, last Friday:

     This is actually "See less evil, hear less evil, exhale less evil," and every bit of it is there for a reason.

     The big, round "glacier glasses" are prescription sunglasses, the best I have owned.  Being blue-eyed and nearsighted meaning being very sensitive to bright light and UV, so I wore fairly dark sunglasses with side shields for years, back when I wore contact lenses.  I had a pair of this style, purchased on closeout (the maker, Julbo, were changing distributors or exiting the U. S. market at the time) and after returning to eyeglasses once I needed bifocals, I kept an eye open for anything similar and planned to have prescription lenses made for them with the tint matched to the originals.  The exact model showed up online and I did just that.  (Mine are from one of those "group buy" sites.  Amazon sells them now.)

     Friday was a sunny day, and I was in and out of the building, so sunglasses were required.

     Next layer, the building at what I call "North Campus" is very noisy.  Both big rooms have high-power, air-cooled equipment in them, with closed-loop air-conditioning.  I've lost hearing to that noise and suffer tinnitus, so hearing protection is a must.  I often "double up," with foam earplugs and the over-ear protectors.

     The reason I was in and out of the building was because we had a tower crew doing some work.  State orders and company policy -- as well as my own opinion -- calls for a two-layer mask covering nose and mouth.  Once you've got sunglasses and earmuffs on over the mask, there's no point in taking it off when not working with the crew.

     The first time the manager of the tower crew encountered this look, he asked me, "How do I even know that's you?"

     I didn't have an answer for that.  Maybe I should have my ID photo updated.

     Oh, "How bad is my eyesight?"

     I managed to get my phone to focus through one of these lenses -- notice how fuzzy the view outside it is, and how much the road seen through the lens diverges from the uncorrected view.  That's how bad.

I Can Now Verify...

      ...To my total horror, the dispute over the honesty or not of the 2020 Presidential election is a perfect Shiri's Scissor.  It absolutely cleaves discussion and cannot be resolved by further talk.

      Mind you, Americans are an untrusting lot, taken as a whole; in both of the last two elections, a third of registered voters thought the process was not free and fair. Previous contests don't get much better, especially if you lump in the "not sure" responses as showing a lack of trust.  Only two-thirds to three-quarters of registered voters are and have been confident the tally is honest, no matter who won.

      Another collection of charts and graphs show the partisan divide -- and several that include "independent" voters, a group in which I count myself, have us off on our own tack as well.

      My advice, from practical experience?  Don't get into arguments over it.  Whatever your side is, support 'em by fund-raising, waving signs or writing letters to the Editor, but accept that face-to-face or online debate will not change hearts and minds, and will create barriers.

20202020

     Last night, the dishwasher ran its first cycle and...sat there.  Drain pump never started.  I shut it off and set it to drain and it did...nothing.  Well, the lights lit up, but the soapy water just stayed there.

     Dipping out some of the water, working the float valve and restarting caused it to begin to fill.  That part still worked.  The emptying, not so much, and not a peep out of the motor.

      So it's not a blocked drain.  The pump isn't running, period.

      I unloaded the dishes and put them in a sink of hot water, then spent an hour dipping out the dishwasher and sopping up the last with towels.  Today, I did dishes by hand.  A lot of dishes, and me with no dish drainer.

    It'll take professional attention to fix the dishwasher (If we can: it's at least ten years old -- this being 2020, having to replace it is probable, despite being a Maytag) and before that, I have to rearrange the basement  You see, the changes we made to ease installation of the new furnace blocked access to the main water shutoff valve, and I trust the ones under the sink not at all.

      After that, vanity commands redding up the kitchen and mopping the floor, and practicality means it's time to review all the stuff stored under the sink, right next to the dishwasher, and ready it for rapid removal as needed.

      Looks like I'm going to be doing dishes by hand for awhile.

Vaccine

      News this morning is that Emergency Use Approval is all but assured for the first vaccine in the pipeline.  Logistics are being arranged so that the first mass inoculations will follow approval almost immediately.

      There still seems to be a lot of misinformation floating around about the vaccine and my usual response would be to provide accurate information to counter it.  You know what?  I'm not going to do that.  Even with distribution limited to health care workers and the very elderly, supplies are small and will increase slowly at first.  There aren't enough shots for the people who need them and want them, let alone the reluctant.

      So skip it, doubters.  You think Bill Gates and Red Chinese will zotz you with a tracker chip in the vaccine?  Then avoid it.  Oh, there's one exception, kind of: if you are a healthcare worker and you don't trust the vaccine, I beg you to find another line of work, something like lighthouse keeper or work-from-home data entry, where you won't have much human contact.

      Some percentage (a large and increasing one) of the vaccine-avoiders will contract the virus and fall ill, just like the general population of not-yet-vaccinated people.  But the avoiders will have, at least, chosen it.  Some percentage (a small but stable share) of the avoiders who fall ill will die, and that's a set of shots saved for someone who needed and wanted them.  It's a public service.  Please, avoiders, do your part to help out and try to die quietly at home, without wasting medical resources and exposing doctors, nurses and hospital workers to even more risk.

      I am sick and tired of rumor-mongers spreading nonsense and black/gray propaganda, most of it from outlets known to be controlled by nations hostile to our own.  I am sick and tired of people who think their opinion and semi-anonymous social media postings outweigh expert testimony, people who won't bother to fact check anything that agrees with their position.*  It's a real pandemic, with real doctors, nurses and drug companies trying to do something to mitigate it.  For all its failings, Big Pharma wants you to live a long, long life: once you're dead, they can't sell you any more pills.  You don't want to take your medicine?  Then don't, and don't complain when Nature takes its course.
_________________________________
* I'm going between multiple authoritative sources of statistical data for things like infection rate and hospital occupancy in my own state.  They don't always agree, but it is interesting that the trendlines track closely.  There's metadata in that, even without number-crunching, and it clearly reveals when things are improving or getting worse.  But note well: I am checking up on the veracity of data that tends to confirm my beliefs, and looking into sources that disagree.  It's the only way I know to keep from following expectations instead of reality. 

Disappointed? What's The Next Level Worse?

      Right now, there's a pandemic raging in the United States with a death toll of one Antietam every day.  One 9-11 of Americans killed by it every twenty-four hours, yet people I know are still calling it a "fake" and scorning basic public health precautions.  It's looking like less than two-thirds of Americans will even consider getting vaccinated when a vaccine becomes widely available, along about the middle of 2021.

      Right now, there's a truculent segment of the Right threatening civil unrest over a fantasy spun by a real-estate huckster turned politician.  The Republican Attorney General and the Republican (former) Director of the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency agree the 2020 election was fair and honest, but that doesn't make any difference to the folks who haven't seen enough blood.

      And there's a lot of overlap between the two groups.  Apparently, not enough of us are dead yet to suit them.

      Throw in another bunch on the Left who are all in favor of rioting in the streets and wouldn't take a vaccine delivered via a program run out of Washington under any circumstances, all the more so since it started under a GOP Administration, and we've got the potential for one hell of a mess.

      So much for gliding into my retirement years with a Hilton in orbit and vacations on the Moon.  Who needs a flying car when you can cough your lungs out in a frozen trench just like a WW I doughboy?  Who needs rationality and reason when you can get higher than a kite on rage and loathing?

      Our very good, good pals in government office in Moscow and Beijing must be laughing themselves sick.  At least there's a more than even chance they'll choke on it, but that's cold comfort at best.

      We were supposed to have built L-5 by now.  There were going to be colonies on Mars.  We got the stupid future instead.

What I'm Reading

      Orders Of Battle, the latest installment of the Frontlines series by Marko Kloos, was released earlier this week and I am well into it.  Looks like the hero's about to run into some Lankies and I expect things will go sideways from there.

Of Falls And Food

      I took a fall in the shower yesterday morning -- rinsing out hair conditioner, I got a foot off the tub mat without noticing.  Off the tub mat and on the drain side, so what was underfoot was a nice slick of conditioner and water.  Shifted my weight and the loss of control was immediate and irreversible.  I went into the shower curtain (on a friction-fit rod, pulled the whole thing down on my back and whacked my shins into the edge of the tub.

     It could have been much worse.  As it was, I was a little bit figuring out what happened and had some clean-up to do before I washed away the rest of the super-duper, why'd-they-discontinue-the-kind-I-liked* hair gunk.  Fiddling with the gimcrack curtain rod took even more time and it's still not quite right.

*  *  *

     With a start like that, the day pretty much required a better ending.  I had some boneless pork chops and wanted to do something vaguely stir-fry.

     With two pork chops, a Lucy Rose apple (it's redder on the inside than the outside!), eight scallions (green onions, and more would have been better, but I cheated), four "baby" carrots (they're not), King Trumpet mushrooms, eight small-to-medium multicolored sweet peppers (usually sold in a bag), five or six Shishito peppers and a dollop of savory umami paste you can have some fun.  I can, anyway.

     I cut the pork chops into half-inch cubes (you do not need to measure) and dropped them into a big zip-type plastic bag that had some soy sauce, a little balsamic vinegar and a bit of garlic powder in it.  Once the chops were chopped, I closed the bag and shook it until the pieces were well-coated.  Then the meat and whatever liquid remained went into my Always pan, over medium heat.

     Apple next.  The lovely color of the Lucy Rose was a surprise to me.†  The flavor was fantastic!  (Had to take a sample to Tam, in fact.  At first, she wasn't sure what it was.)  I sliced and peeled it, and cut the slices crosswise into small triangles.  They joined the pan on top of the meat.

     I washed and prepped the scallions, cutting them into short segments.  Gave the pan a stir, added the scallions, and gave it another stir before putting the lid on.

     Diced up the carrots into quarter-inch pieces, and added them.  King Trumpet mushrooms followed -- cut off and quarter the tops, cut the thick stems into rounds and toss them in.  I hadn't had them before but they're mild, with a nice texture.

    The little sweet peppers take more prep time -- I cut off the tops, winkled out the core and seeds, and sliced them into slim rings in two batches.  Time spent here is not wasted; pork needs awhile to cook.  I added a little water to the pan, too.  You don't want it to be too dry; pork will get very dry in a hurry if you let it.

     Killed a little time refreshing what I remembered about thickening up stir-fry sauce; gave the pan a sniff and decided to lump in a dollop of savory umami paste (this stuff just showed up at the grocery, in three or four versions and is well worth having around) and a little granulated onion (cheating, but useful).  Then it was on to the Shisto peppers.  As near as I can tell, if you are looking for a little gentle heat, look for a bag of them with some that are showing color, yellow-to-orange.  The greener they are, the milder.  But even the hot ones aren't super-hot; it's just a little zing.

     Shishitos don't take much prep or cooking -- cut off the top and slice them into rings.  If the core is really thick, you can remove it, but unlike most peppers, it's not at all bitter.  Into the pan they went, lid back on.

     Thickening up the sauce calls for a teaspoon of cornstarch mixed into cold water, then some soy and vinegar, not a lot of either.  It'll turn tan.  Pour it in, stir and keep stirring over medium heat until it's as thick as you like; if it gets too thick, add water.  Once I was happy with it, I shut off the heat, nuked a bag of rice, and rang the dinner bell.  Savory, mildly spicy, just a hint of sweet.  Tam and I liked it a lot.
________________________
* Garnier Fructis "Brazilian Smooth," which is supposedly a hair-straightening shampoo and conditioner.  What it does for me is tame my frizz to smooth waves -- not the advertised effect, but exactly right.  They dropped it and there's no direct replacement.
 
† Readers will be unsurprised that my reaction to an unfamiliar new fruit or vegetable, even just a new variety at the grocers is to buy one and see what they're like.

Writing About Politics?

      I'm about ready to give up writing about politics.  There's no longer enough common ground between the two big parties -- and too many of my once-libertarian friends have decided to choose one or the other.

     In and of itself, that would simply give me more opportunities to poke fun and look askance.  As organized parties and bodies of politicians (well, groups of politicians, let's not scare the poor, sensitive dears with figurative language before the first cocktail of the day*), the GOP and Dems alike aren't much interested in ideological consistency, the rules to be found in the U. S. and State Constitutions, history or long-term planning that extends past the next election, but that's nothing new and has long been fodder for commentary.  Nope, the problem is that the parties, pols and voters have all, to a greater or lesser extent, bought into fantasies that are divorced from reality.

     The first and worst concerns the two more recent Presidential races, in which the winner (or putative winner)† is deemed to have won by virtue of his surpassing virtue.  It's a lovely thought but they were close races and loathing appears to have outweighed love; Mr. Trump won in 2016 because he wasn't Hilary Clinton and Mr. Biden won† in 2020 because he wasn't Donald Trump.  If one or the other of those observations makes you angry, I have great news for you: you've got plenty of company, many of them howling or barking mad.

     Secondary effects include "make it didn't happen," found weakly among Democrats in 2016, protesting their woman won the popular vote (true and irrelevant) and much more strongly among 2020 Republicans, with allegations of voter fraud coming from the top down, and the remarkable claim of a "coup" followed by urging state legislatures or Governors to appoint a slate of electors who will vote differently than the outcome of the election has directed.  What makes this remarkable is that course of action is in contravention of Federal and many State laws and would select a different Chief Executive: pretty much the textbook definition of a coup.  (Don't like my links?  Tough.  I try to stick with the ones near the middle-top of the Ad Fontes Media chart; if you're spending lots of time way out to the left or right side of it, you're mainlining mental junk food -- and if you're not aware that yes, even the ones way up there in the green box lean a bit one way or the other, you're not paying attention.)

     The Democrats have their own fantasy, a gentler one: that Joe Biden is a strong, widely-loved figure instead of a run-of-the-mill high-level Democrat, gone a bit frail with age.

     Criticizing either man risks ire from their adherents.  It is massively unpopular to point out -- as I often do -- that the President of the United States is just some guy we pick to go shake hands with crowned heads, autocrats and his elected peers, to sign checks and make sure the heads of the various Departments and Bureaus get to work on time and don't slack off more than is usual in D. C., to pick up the phone in the middle of the night when things go badly wrong and improvise frantically while hoping Congress will back him or her up.  But that is the job; the part of government that decides how taxed, regulated and hemmed-in and screwed-over you will be, especially long-term, is not the Presidency but Congress. Presidents get only four years at a whack; Congress goes on and on, designed to have institutional inertia.

     Nevertheless, it's Presidents who get people all wound up.  Right now, we have an epistemological divide right out of the Daybreak trilogy and there's no room at the margins for snark or semi-impartial observation.  If you don't pick a side, you'll be hammered over to one or the other.  I try and try to encourage reason over emotion, Mencken-style skepticism over uncritical acceptance, but it's an uphill struggle and a thankless one.
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* Mimosas with brunch, of course.

† I'm going with what the State governments and current vote counts are saying.  Yes, it's not as exciting as the fantasy version.

Sunday Morning Breakfast

      Currently enjoying my part of a three-egg omelet, stuffed with mushrooms, bacon, Swiss cheese and just a little pickled cauliflower.

     The batter was propped up by four crushed crackers,* parsley, a little togarishi and a generous teaspoon of some wonderful Italian spice blend put together by one of Tam's friends; mix all that up and add enough warm water to make a fairly thick slurry, then let it stand for a bit before beating in the eggs.  (I crushed the crackers and added the spices while frying bacon, then added water and let it sit while I fried mushrooms in the bacon fat.)  The eggs need a serious beating -- the idea is to get them in the mood for building new bonds.

     This results in a fairly substantial basic omelette, all the better to hold up to a heavy payload of two and a half strips of bacon,† a slice of Swiss cheese and (the times being what they are) most of a small can of mushrooms. 

     Tam enjoyed her portion -- and the usual tribute -- while watching the Sunday morning political shows.  They are -- as usual these days -- as entertaining as an H. P. Lovecraft (or Lovecraft-adjacent) story, and for similar reasons.
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* Three Townhouse and one Ritz, if you're keeping track.  Use what you have -- saltines are traditional; I like crushed corn chips but not everyone in this household does.  

† When one fries bacon around Tamara, the Tamgeld is one half strip of it.  Always. 

Arrgh, Grr, Etc.

     My desktop computer having been afflicted with a world-class case of the slows for reasons unknown, I'm coming to you live and direct from the MacBook on my bedroom dressing-table/desk.

     This is supposed to be my quiet place for writing anyway, an escape from frustration that I badly need just now.  So it is serving its intended purpose.

     The I Work On A Starship universe is badly overdue for more stories. The good news is that I am working on them -- the bad news being that it is going very, very slowly. I ran aground on a reef called "seat-of-the-pants," writing with no plot or outline. When it works, it works well -- and "Another Day" is a good example of that -- but when it doesn't, or if you lose the thread, it's a struggle getting back on track.

Too Much 2020: Arecibo Collapse

      If you haven't seen the video of the final guy-wire failure that smashed the antenna platform into the radiotelescope dish, here it is, fixed camera and drone views.

     This is a truly crappy year.

Let Me Get Back To You Later

      Just kinda watching it all go by this morning.

TV Viewing: Counterpart

      My Amazon Prime Video home screen suggested TV show over the holiday weekend.  I'd never heard of it, but it looked interesting: Counterpart.

      The show even starred an actor I like, J. K. Simmons, perhaps most widely known from his appearances in Farmer's Insurance commercials. 

      So I gave it a look.  In the opening scene, a man is pushed out of a high apartment window to his death in a Berlin that appears to be just a year or two into the future -- and the small crowd of rubberneckers who show up are all wearing cloth masks.  There were two seasons of the show and yet I was wondering if it has been shot after the pandemic began?

      Nope.  The series was made in 2017 and 2018.  It's set in a divided Berlin, but not the divide we -- well, some of us -- remember.  A Berlin in which a Cold War lab experiment somehow branched off two diverging realities but left a single shortcut between them.  One looks a lot like our familiar world.  One appears to be more advanced and yet something's gone badly wrong.  Just what isn't quite clear, but relations between the two sides are tense.  Tam and I are four episodes in now and it's as tangled an SF spy story as I have seen.  (Imagine a Len Deighton-William Gibson collaboration.)  We 're really enjoying it.

     Starz aired the series originally, but pulled the plug after two seasons.  They were repositioning the cable channel to aim for a greater share of women viewers and felt the show was "too convoluted" for us silly girls.  Gee, thanks, pal.  But there are two seasons to enjoy.

     Edited to add: This series is definitely rated R, and I think the scenes that make it that way at least border on gratuitous; they don't tell us anything about the character (one of the, I'm pretty sure, baddies) that couldn't've been shown without nudity.  But they are used sparingly so far and many of the male viewers will probably enjoy them. 

Fantasy Tectonics League

      Tamara keeps sharing increasingly unhinged takes on current events that she finds on the Internet.  They worry me.  They worry me in a way that Nixon vs. McGovern or Ford vs. Carter never did, in ways that Obama vs. McCain or Romney never did.

      Because it's stopped being just politics.  It's stopped being about if this or that brushfire war/nation-building is justified* or if the fed.gov ought to try helping the poor or automakers or banks.  Those were all things about which more-ore-less reasonable people could more-or-less reasonably disagree. Both sides often had valid points to make and quite often, the disagreement was not over the notion that something was wrong, but the best way and instrumentality to go about trying to fix it.

      What's going on now is different.

      There's a split over the nature of reality itself -- and both sides can't be right.  Either the election was as fair and honest as the preceding dozen, or it was rife with fraud and cheating that changed the outcome; either there's a shadow war -- with real guns -- between branches of the Feds going on between the Deep State and its enemies, or there isn't.  The pandemic is real or an illusion with a vast, power-grabbing conspiracy behind it.  The President-elect either broke his foot playing with his dog, or he's hiding a house-arrest ankle bracelet as the result of a complicated criminal immunity deal that will result in a second term for President Trump. Either someone in the Administration has been dropping hints of a strange conspiracy and efforts to counter it, or a hoax has spawned a large-scale delusion.  These are not simple disagreements; they show a fundamental fracture over the nature of our (supposedly) shared reality.

      I'm not expressing an opinion about any of these items here.  Because opinion is so entrenched and so irreconcilable, there's no point in arguing one over the other.  But they can't both be right and sooner or later, as a society we'll have to collapse the wave function, open up the box and see what's inside.  What happens after that, I don't know.

      If you see either vision as a kind of doomsday cult, they tend to rebound from contradiction -- they recalculate, reinterpret and keep moving -- but not always.  If it's just a matter of politics, they represent incompatible conceptions of the nature and function of our federal republic.

      What are we counting down to?
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* Almost certainly not, though there may be weltpolitik considerations that involve warfare as a tool -- just don't claim to me it's moral to blow up some poor slob's house and family because he happened to be born and grow up in the wrong place.