All Right, That's Enough

     Most people agree that Washington, D.C. is a semi-evil clown circus, or at least the parts that the fed.gov lurks in are.  They start to disagree when you get down to details -- this Administration or that one, one party more than another, and somehow it's almost never their guy or gal, just a prime clown or three and a hand-wavy bunch of "them."

     This general notion of buffoonery, wickedness and performative showpersonship gets applied with a high degree of freakoutery when control of Congress and/or the Presidency passes from one party to the other.*  Maybe that's as it should be.  Maybe with only two parties having a chance to frob (see Usage Notes at the link) around with the levers of power, a degree of viewing-with-alarm is useful in the same way as product-safety team trying to figure out all the ways a thing can go wrong.

     But it becomes tiresome, and never more so when speculation soars to third and fourth-order effects: If nominee W is confirmed for office X and if they proceed to remove department Y and rule Z, then....  Whoa, nelly!  One worry at a time.

     Some -- in my opinion, most -- of Mr. Trump's nominees are underqualified and overconfident, which is never a good combination.  Many of the things they might do, outlined in Agenda 47 or Project 2025, would negatively affect U. S. citizens and residents, and I'm opposed to those things.  But they have not done them yet; they have not reached a position from which they would be able to do them yet, and there is no certainty that they will.

     There are probably awful times coming.  We have never before elected a President who swore vengeance as a big part of his campaign (not that they were uniformly plaster saints).  But it has not happened yet and diving too deep into they-mights and what-ifs will only get in the way.  2025's House and Senate will be even more delicately balanced than 2024's, and those contentious, deliberative bodies can be counted on to do what they do best and were intended to do: contend and deliberate.  In public.  Loudly.

     Pop some popcorn.  The first couple of months will be interesting.  Yes, things could get pretty bad, but the roller-coaster is already clicking up the hill and there's no getting out until the end of the ride.  Might as well take each climb and swoop down as they come.
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* I'd love to tell you the United States is a multiparty democracy, mentioning the Greens, Libertarians, New Whigs and so on, with a nod to the handful of fiercely independent members of Congress, but as a practical matter, it ain't.  The little-party guys essentially never make it to the center ring and the Is all pick a party to caucus with.  If you want to get anything done, you'll have to choose the party that makes you hold your nose the least, and try to coax or shove them in the direction you want to go.

A Frustrating Pair Of Eyes

     In October, I had my regular eye exam and, of course, my vision had changed.  I own three frames (four counting sunglasses) and it was time for the round ones that I really like.  I left them with the eye doctor and they told me my glasses would be ready in three or four weeks.  My lenses require a complicated, multi-prism grind.  It's never fast.*

     Three weeks later, I picked them up, put them on and looked around the store, enjoying the sharpened vision.  I thanked the tech and clipped the matching sunglasses on.  They didn't fit as well as they had, but hey, new lenses.  Went out into the sunshine, drove to work and didn't take a good look at the new glasses in a mirror until I was washing my hands a couple of hours later.  One kind of round lens, one egg-shaped lens, the frames forced around them with some buckling for the least-round side.  They looked awful.

     I called the eye doctor immediately and took the glasses back the next day, where at first they saw only the frame damage, then realized neither lens was the right shape.  They sent the glasses back to their lab -- a different one than the one that has made my lenses for over a decade; the practice was sold some time ago and the new owners have their own lab.  That was almost a month ago.

     Monday, they called me.  "Our lab says they can't fix your glasses.  We're sending them to a different lab. Those frames are so old, you know, it's hard to put lenses in them...."  My round frames are maybe five years old.  There have been no major changes to the way eyeglass lenses for into frames in my lifetime, and hardly any in the last century.

     The frames are probably ruined.  My trust certainly is.  The "one-hour" place I went to when I needed vision correction in a hurry did okay and while I like the guy who has been doing my eye exams, I won't trust his employer to make me glasses again.

     My vision was terrible when I was a child.  I successfully faked it until third grade, when my teacher figured out that I couldn't read the blackboard at all, and that I thought it was just a cruel joke that everyone got except me.  (Mom: "So that's why you sit so near the TV!")  My world looked like an Impressionist painting, seen too close, all fuzzy blobs and smears.  It matters to me to be able to see clearly.
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* After cataract surgery, I had a "one-hour eyeglasses" place make up a pair of glasses that only corrected my greatly-changed nearsightedness, while I waited for the astigmatism to settle down.  A month later, I went back to have lenses for my full prescription made and the technician told me, "Okay, come back this afternoon and..." before doing a double-take at the prescription and apologizing, "Oh.  Sorry.  This will be two or three weeks.  We can't make these here."  Yep.

Another Pair Of Eyes

     The story ended up around 5970 words.  It's usually worthwhile to cut; early drafts have excess verbiage and little dead-end bits that don't advance the plot or shed light on the theme.

     Such cuts carry their own risks.  Extra words get left in; essential words get left out.  Tense and number shift.  It is very difficult to spot on the seventh or twelfth read-through.  I see what I intended to say, not what I wrote.

     I was very glad that Tam agreed to do a last-minute reading and markup.  Sure enough, she found a half-dozen glitches -- and one misuse of the subjunctive that still feels right me.  I changed it anyway; better to color inside the lines as much as possible, so you can scribble outside of them when it's necessary.

     Will the editors like it?  I don't know.  I do know that having extra eyes on the work has bailed me out many times.  Between the members of my fiction critique group to Tam's well-informed once-over, if the end result reads smoothly and makes sense, they played large parts in getting it there.

Writing....

     At present, I'm 6,712 words into finishing a 6,000 word short story to be submitted for an anthology -- and if that sounds off, consider that I started at 7,230.

     Two or three pages of cutting left to do.

Ipse Dixie

     House Speaker Mike Johnson might need to do a little homework.  In an interview Sunday, he griped, "I wish the Senate would simply do its job of advise and consent and allow the president to put the persons in his Cabinet of his choosing." [Emphasis mine.]

     Except that's not how it works, and you don't have to take my word for it.  Ask the arch-conservative Federalist Society.

     Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 does not mean "drop hints and go along."  It obliges the U. S. Senate to behave like the deliberative body they are, to openly discuss the nominee and vote on confirming their appointment, yes or no.  Getting the job is not guaranteed simply because the Chief Executive thinks you're the right disruptor for the position.

     Yes, it's awkward and inefficient to require the President and Senate to do some give and take over his choice of office-holders.  But those offices are, per the Constitution, created by Congress.  This back-and-forth is an attempt to fix two problems: the often-abused power of the British Crown and especially Royal Governors to create and fill high offices, and the post-Revolution (but pre-Constitution) arrogation by State Legislatures of those same powers.  By splitting them up and requiring some degree of debate, the Framers hoped to moderate and democratize the process.  You can think of it as a kind of grown-up version of the childhood method to fairly divide treats: one kid slices the pie, the other chooses who gets what piece.

     A large, powerful government had damned well better be slow and inefficient when it comes to appointive office like Cabinet members, Department Chairs and Ambassadors: those boys and girls can do a whole lot of damage, blow though budgets, mess up important projects, insult allies, stumble into wars with enemies and more.  Let's take our time.  Let's give the Senate, eyes and ears of the fifty States, a chance to look 'em over and put the matter to a vote.

Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The...Frying Pan?

     That's what I did.  Over the years, I have gone though many small skillets.*  They see heavy use.  They get dropped, or scratched or plain worn out.  When the warnings about PTFE-family non-stick coatings ramped up (you really don't want to keep using them after even one tiny scratch or ding), I bought alternatives.  And every single time I have done so, the stuff is better.

     When I bought my big "Always" pan, I knew it wasn't ideal for browning.  The coating was otherwise remarkable -- genuinely non-stick, easy to clean, relatively durable (they're on version 2.0 now, and also sell an enameled cast-iron model that browns well).  Around the same time, I replaced my smaller skillet with a dimestore purchase, and it was okay -- the ceramic coating was great for browning, not extraordinarily non-stick but very good, and it took a little effort to clean.  The finish on the outside tended to wear away.

     The little five-and-dime skillet got ugly, and I picked up a new frying pan a month ago.  It was a surprise!  The state of the art has advanced.  The ceramic coating is as non-stick as the Always (still going strong, btw), but it does great for browning.  It cleans up easily.

     None of these are especially dishwasher-friendly, but not needing to be soaked and scrubbed means that's not a problem -- and immaterial for me until I replace the dishwasher.

     The pros -- and high-end amateurs -- will likely keep on using cast iron and steel pans, for a number of good reasons.  But for daily use, modern non-stick cookware is better than it has ever been, and has shown remarkable improvement over the last few years.  If you're still using "old reliable" Teflon, you might want to give the newer stuff a try.
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* A term I grew up using interchangeably with "frying pan."  They're not quite the same thing, depending on where you live, and a saute pan is yet another thing, but other than a "spider," you can use them all for the same job. Oh, a spider pan?  A classic, but very uncommon  Generally handmade these days.

The Best And The Brightest?

      I was going to do a deep-dive think piece on the incoming President's Cabinet proposals and other high-level choices, but -- really?  Do I have to?  A guy who claims not to have washed his hands in ten years because "he's never seen a germ" and he is "inoculating himself;" another who doesn't believe in vaccines or fluoridation is put up to be in charge of public health; a woman who carries water for the Russians and Red China slated to oversee our intelligence agencies; a puppy-shooter to run Homeland Security* and a widely-rumored sex pest who barely dodged a House ethics investigation for Attorney General.

     Those are just highlights.  I expected partisanship; that's not unusual.  I expected he'd insist on personal loyalty bordering on devotion.  I did not expect slap-in-the-face incompetence and unqualification.

     If it wasn't happening in my own country, it would be fascinating to watch it all come unstuck.  Which it will.  What the price tag might be, in dollars and international standing, in the loss of domestic tranquility, that remains to be seen.  I can tell you who will pay it, and it won't be anyone in the halls of power.  It will be you and me, no matter who we voted for.
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* Hey, you can shoot your own dog.  Depending on circumstances, I will think ill of your for it, but you do generally have that right.  This nation's law enforcement agencies do not, however, have a real good record for not shooting other people's dogs, even when the dog is properly restrained or kenneled.  It's a small thing, but it's indicative of the general trend.

No Leaf Work Today

     We were busy with other things and, I have to admit, I have felt pretty yucky.  Better once the sun came out, but that was late in the afternoon.

     I did housework instead.  It is, after all, the work that is always there to do.

Autumn Time, Autumn Time...

     The leaves are falling and so is the rain.  Tam and I missed our chance to mow up the dried leaves last weekend, so it looks like we'll be mowing up wet ones this weekend.  It's no fun, and the bags can't be more than about half full without getting too heavy for the city's crews to lift.  (We only have to do a dozen or so; they'll be doing thousands -- if they don't tear up their backs.)

     The good news is, dry leaves are a lot dustier, and I don't get along well with it.  So I'm going to call it a win -- an icky, slimy, heavy win.

Hacking Congress

     Political commentators and professional viewers-with-alarm have been having a field day with President-elect (and convicted felon) Donald Trump's* nominees for key jobs in his Administration, especially Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense; former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence; and Representative Matt  Gaetz, Attorney General.

     All three have been subject to somewhat sniffy observations that they've got to get through Senate vetting and confirmation before assuming their posts, and the GOP has an extremely slim majority in a body that is traditionally quite protective of their power.  The Senate, we're told, will dig in their heels.  The GOP hasn't a single vote to give up in that body, and so these three have barely a chance of getting through the process.

     Not so fast.  The nominees appear to be quite confident.  Matt Gaetz even went so far as to resign from the U. S. House of Representatives.†  Mr. Trump has already posted on social media, calling for a workaround: "Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments [...]."  Charlie Sykes thinks the incoming President Pro Tem might do just that, tradition and Separation of Powers be damned.  --But you see, he doesn't have to.

     Here's how it works, with everyone ducking blame: Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution give the President the power to make appointments when Congress is in recess, appointments which stand until the end of the next session.  And Article I, Section 5, Clause 4 requires the House and Senate to mutually consent if they adjourn for more than three days.  If they cannot agree, if one body wants to cut school for a week and the other vows stubbornly to remain on the job?  Why, under Article II, Section 3, it falls to the President: "...in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper...."  This power has never been exercised, but all it takes is the House proposing an adjournment the Senate finds unacceptable and hey, presto: Mr. Trump's got the magic wand.  The Speaker can profess innocence -- his House members just wanted to go fishing, or hear from constituents; the President Pro Tem of the Senate can thunder and fume -- how dare the House treat this weighty matter so lightly!  The House and Senate fail to agree and Mr. Trump pulls the plug, after which they can all knock off work and repair to the bar, or perhaps somebody's yacht, free and clear.  Whatever happens after that is on Mr. Trump, not them.

     That's how it can work.  Or perhaps the threat alone will be enough.  Or maybe we've all been played, and these three particularly egregious choices are no more than distractions, slipped into the deal to be discarded while other, slightly less objectionable picks sail through.

     Our Constitution is hackable.  It was written by men who thought the people applying it wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one.  They did their best to not leave any openings, but nobody -- and no document -- is perfect.
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* After some thought, I have decided to give convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter Donald Trump a recognition I have accorded to only one or two other Presidents: I'm going to mention his worst behavior at least once whenever his name comes up.  Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson were virulent racists; in particular, Wilson resegregated the Federal civil service, which had become a colorblind meritocracy.  In so doing, he helped set the stage for the racial unrest that followed, over a generation later.  Mr. Trump is a scofflaw -- and we're about to see just how far he will follow that particular star.
 
† Credit where credit is due!  I'd like to thank Mr. Trump for doing what the courts and his House peers were unable to do: get Matt Gaetz out of Congress.  It's something.

Ungentlemanly Gloating

     I'm hearing a lot of reports -- some of them first-hand -- of men, mostly young, saying -- often, shouting -- rudely sexist things to women, also mostly young.

     There's no point in quoting any of it.  You can easily find that information online if you're curious.  The words are intended to demean, to disempower and to anger.

     A frequent justification for this behavior is "Trump won," implying that, by extension, an extreme social conservatism won.  And hey, he did win, with a definitive electoral college victory.  But that system is designed to produce decisive results with population-weighted winner-take-all outcomes in most states.  As a whole, your fellow Americans expressed a much closer opinion: 75,551,895 for Mr. Trump and 72,372,332 for Ms. Harris, a difference of two percent.*

     So for all practical purposes, even if you read the results as every Republican voter wanting the ladies limited to church, children and kitchen, that's only half of the voters -- and the other half, Democrat voters, opted for a female candidate who (among other issues) had pledged to support women's abortion rights as established under Roe v. Wade prior to Dobbs.  We're all locked in this room together, the debate is not over, and dunking on people doesn't advance anyone's argument.

     Approximately sixty percent turnout means we don't know the opinion of  forty percent of the voting age adults, and adjusts the results to be 30% one way, 29% the other and 40% wondering if it's lunchtime yet.

     A recurring trope in the 1960s-70s science fiction I grew up reading was War Between The Sexes and from Philip Wylie to Joanna Russ and beyond, it never ended well.  It won't if we run the experiment at full scale in real life, either.
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* Professional drivers, closed course; do not attempt to hand-tally the votes in your basement.  These results are not entirely final, but they're not going to change much.

Turning Over A New Leaf Briefcase

     A problem with a light-blue collar job like mine is you need all the things: a toolbox (my employer supplies tools, but they're often in use by others and I have more than a few specialized gadgets they don't provide) and a briefcase: a screwdriver and a laptop.  (And boy, have I needed the laptop!  My employer's computers are, sensibly enough, locked down six ways from Sunday: you don't install your own software on them, and you don't connect them to strange network ports.  I often need to do those things to work on their equipment, so I have carried my own aging Surface Pro.  In the last six months, I finally scored a company laptop with admin privileges, first time since the old Kaypro II in the late 1980s.)

     I'm only on my third toolbox; the first one was tackle box sized, a retro oak box I'd originally purchased for a portable ham radio setup.*  It was too heavy and too crowded.  Replaced with a nylon-canvas "doctor's bag," which I outgrew just as it was wearing out.  The larger version I replaced it with has held up well.  The sides are lined with pockets inside and out, and it opens wide, just like the doctor's bags of old, making it easy to find and get to the tools it carries.

     Briefcases are another story.  I've gone through a lot of them -- outgrew, worn out, infested by ants (don't keep sugar in your briefcase, kids).  None have been perfect.  Unlike the toolbox, which usually gets parked in my locker at the main location or in a cabinet at the North Campus depending on where I need it most, my briefcase travels with me every day.  Less than a year before the pandemic, I bought an inexpensive brown canvas messenger bag with lots of  pockets.  I decorated it with sarcastic "merit badges" (invisibility, telepathy with plants, soldering, mind control, coffee consumption, TV color bars in a red circle with a diagonal line across them, the Raspberry Pi logo and so on).  It held the Surface, my Macbook Air, headphones with attached microphone, serial adapter, USB network adapter, pens, pencils, highlighter pens, notebooks, a few tools that I need wherever I go (#3 Phillips screwdriver, 1/8" Allen driver, Euroblock screwdriver, backup flashlight), toothbrush, toothpaste and a change of socks and undies and more.  There was even a pocket for notebooks and manuscripts for whatever fiction I was working on.  It finally started to wear out.  My Surface has gone non-support; at that point it was barely acceptable to my employer as long as I kept the wifi off, and I have an Official Laptop now.  So I pulled a slightly smaller bag from the small collection of ones I have accumulated over years of looking, and loaded it with a reduced set of supplies and widgetry.  Yesterday was its first use.  So far, so good, though I miss the pen loops and merit badges on the old one.  I think I have a solution for the first, and as for the second, I'm working on it.

     I wonder how long this one will last?
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* A Ten-Tec 555 "Scout"  transceiver with plenty of band modules, power supply, tuner, key, headphones, logbook, a spool of just-in-case wire and all the parts of a end-fed windowsill antenna except the telescopic antenna itself.  There wasn't a bit of room left over.  I tested it at the North Campus and it interfered with the fire alarm system, oops.  But, hey, that was a fluke, right?  Got to the hotel (I was traveling to take a class for work) and there, behind the check-in desk, was the panel for the exact same model of fire alarm system!  I did a lot of listening that week.

The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

     It's Veteran's Day -- and I do thank you for your service.  It was Armistice Day to begin with, the end of a war that left a scar twisting across the face of Europe.  Some of the WW I battlefield is still uninhabitable.

     Someone who was my age when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour in 1918 would have had clear memories of the U. S. Civil war.  That includes some of the soldiers and sailors.  One officer is known to have served during both wars -- and the ones in between.  And the scars from the Civil War remain, too, not as dead or as deadly as France's Red Zones but they're still there, etched across the land, scrawled across history, written on gravestones and in family histories.  War extracts a terrible price and it falls most heavily on the young and strong.  Even in peacetime, most military service consists of long hours of hard work for low pay.

     Those people in uniform are us.  Just like you, your neighbors, the people you work with and the kids you went to school with.  They're a mixed bag -- smart, dumb, short, tall, liberals, conservatives and people who just don't care about politics.  They grew up poor, middle-class and wealthy.  They're every color and all the same color -- green or Navy blue or whatever.  What they have in common is they stepped up.  They are doing -- or they have done -- the job, often far from home, frequently in terrible weather, and, at times, with the understanding there are other people not too far away who intend to kill them.

     I try not to be too glib with, "Thank you for your service."  That service is not something you can nod at acknowledging one day a year and call it good enough.

Good News From Redmond

     My decade-old copy of Word 2010 does install in a Windows 11 machine.  It comes with the same caveats it had grown on the old computer -- you don't get the full panoply of features the latest version provides -- but it did install and run, and it looks like the things I need it for still work.

     All this thanks to Tam's saved-back DVD/CD-ROM drive.  I have one somewhere, but it's stashed in the back of one of several different desk drawers, and when she noticed me digging and asked what for, her drive was ready to hand.

     I hang well to the back of the technology curve.  This desktop computer, like its predecessor, cost a little over a hundred dollars.  Because I don't play computer games,* I don't need extreme speed or the latest graphics; most kinds of software don't need that much horsepower.
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* There's a story there.  I spent a lot of my time in college on a PLATO terminal (and the school's shared-time mainframes, a DEC-10 and a PDP-9), playing games and taking online learning modules that had little to do with my major.  I spent a lot more time at the campus radio station.  Between the two, classwork suffered.  The electronics classes weren't a problem; everything except circuit analysis was essentially review.  And first semester Applied Math For Technology was a delight.  It was when the university decided to save costs and fold that class into Calculus in the second semester that things got dicey -- especially since our working-engineer math professor was replaced by a pure-math guy who had been sent to our extension campus after getting crosswise with his department head.  It would have been a good time to buckle down and really apply myself.  19 year old Bobbi spent even more time on the PLATO terminal instead.  Pity it didn't offer a calculus course....  I did learn how to program in BASIC, which used to be handy.

Left-Handed Mouse

     Setting up a new computer always reaches an awkward phase for me, where the old computer keyboard and mouse are still where they always were, but I'm starting to use the new one.  I'm pretty good at using a mouse left-handed, ring finger doing the primary clicking, but it takes a little extra thought.

     Work required us to change to Windows 11 months ago.  Home has lagged, but my old computer was getting slower and slower, almost certainly a thermal issue compounded by an over-full hard drive.  So it was time.

     Who wants to bet my out-of-date (and non-subscription) version of Word won't install?  I'll probably buy the standalone version, since I don't like software that you never pay off.  Word lets me check my LibreOffice files for compatibility, and it does one thing I can't figure out how to get the open version to do: it lets you edit the normally-hidden formatting commands.

Making A Hash Of It

     Down the hall, Tam is enjoying the first of the Sunday morning political talk shows.  "They will be lit," she told me, which is apparently a good thing.  It's certainly going to give the pundit class something to other than hanging out on Washington, D.C. streetcorners, offering to debate passers-by for small change.

     Me, I'm onto food.  Having come into a little money thanks to a small across-the-board bonus at work,* on Friday I was at a Meijer store, which is sort of what Walmart would be if it was a little nicer, or a super Target with no sense of style and a much better grocery section.  And in that grocery section, they routinely stock corned beef brisket!

     It may not be gourmet fare, but if you bake one in a covered pan with a little water over a slow grill for three and a half hours, adding potatoes, carrots, celery and cabbage for the last half of that, you've got a meal to be reckoned with -- and leftovers!  Supper was fine last night.  We started in on the current season of The Diplomat, which is only a little weird for me: Keri Russell bears a strong resemblance to my older sister at the same age, and watching your own sister as the U.S. Ambassador to the UK is...disconcerting.  Big sis has been doing an okay job of it so far, though.

     This morning, a couple of Yukon Gold potatoes and about the third of the leftover corned beef, diced, made some of the best corned beef hash I've had in a long time.  And I've still got more corned beef in the freezer to do something else with, by and by.  Possibly soup.
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* I'm not entirely sure why, and rather than bite the hand that feeds me with unflattering speculation, I'll assume it's because we all took our unpaid furloughs during the pandemic without much complaint.

Reading

     Over the last week, I reread Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.   I always fret my way through the last part, when Estraven and Genly Ai make a daring escape through a daunting environment; somehow she wrote it in such a way that the outcome still feels in doubt, no matter how many times I read the book.

     On one level, it's the story of not-quite First Contact with not-quite aliens* on their home planet; on another, it's a tale of intrigue that weaves its way through two governments, one an all-encompassing bureaucratic state akin to the old Soviet Union, gulags and all, and the other a messy European-style monarchy with a strong Parliament and a very loose sense of national unity.  She is not a huge fan of either, though the first clearly comes through as the worst: they're not even good cooks!  On yet another level, it's a story of nearly incredible derring-do against terrible odds by a pair of unlikely allies.  It's also a chance for her to illustrate the remarkable uselessness of having accurate answers to the wrong questions.  And it's recursive; the telling, mostly in the first person by the protagonists, ends with one of them preparing to tell the story again, much as he (and others) have just told it to the reader.

     Le Guin was not the kind of writer who sits down and works out character, background and plot in excruciating detail before writing.  She tended to make it up as she went along, discovering in the first draft who these people were and what they were about.  It worked for her, thanks to a wide-ranging intellect and keen sense for character: she wrote about people, first and foremost, and for all that you can read much of her work as allegory, in her mature work, she never loses sight of the essential humanity of those she writes about.

     Stories are about people, about people to whom things happen and who make things happen.  All the rest of it is just decoration.
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* In the universe where much of her science fiction is set, the original human race is not from Earth.  The Hain have been around far, far longer humans have lived on Earth.  While their present civilization is portrayed as wise, gentle and driven by regret (and sometimes annoyingly superior about it), their starfaring culture has risen and fallen many times.  Some incarnations of it were heartlessly willing to employ genetic modifications on the people established in the colonies they left on planets all over the galaxy.  Now all those varied peoples are finding one another once again and it's not a smooth process.

The Way Forward

     I've been thinking about what to do next.  Four years of catastrophizing whatever comes out of the White House and Congress -- and the U. S. Supreme Court -- doesn't appeal to me.  Anyone who wants that can find it in plenty of places, often from subject-matter experts.  I'm not going to ignore it, either -- but no Commander in Chief is the boss of me.  All Presidents are temporary employees, hired for a term of four years with a possibility of four more, and then they're out.  And for those four years, the only time they're off the clock is when they're unconscious.  People figure Presidents they dislike are living large, but the job is its own punishment, especially if the office-holder works at it.

     In my opinion, the electorate just handed a machine gun to an angry chimp; but he's got it now and there's no pretending otherwise.  Life goes on nevertheless, with a new and worrying hazard.  There are still meals to be cooked, stories to be written, books to be read, carpentry and electronic projects to be built, maybe even a little sewing.*  I've got a retirement to figure out; I'll be poor no matter what, but if I work it right and the economy doesn't go too nuts, I won't go broke until after I'm dead.

     All of that is of more interest to me, and maybe to my readers, than politics.
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* I keep putting that off, I think for fear of being bad at it.  That's a silly reason; part of learning (or in this case, relearning) a skill is accepting that you're not going to be proficient right away.  The other part?  I bought my little Singer Featherweight folding portable sewing machine so I could easily carry it to visit Mom and sew.  That never happened; I was always too busy and all I have left is regret and memories of good advice. (Prices for these little machines have climbed steadily; Singer made around two million of them but they are in great demand from quilters and anyone who wants a small, full-featured sewing machine.)

Three Takes

 Staying Home:
     Despite the credit I have given Mr. Trump for driving up voter turnout, it was down this year.  The final numbers aren't in as I write; Arizona and Nevada are still counting.  But it looks like a little over 139 million people voted Red or Blue in 2024, while 155 million did so in 2020 -- and who stayed home Tuesday was significant: from 74 million Republican votes in 2020 to 72 million in 2024 isn't a big change -- but the Democrats fell from 81 million in 2020 to almost 68 million in 2024.

     Those missing numbers don't show up in the also-ran columns, either.  Apparently, 13 million Democrats looked at the race and said, "Meh," or "A pox on both of 'em."

     Pundits are busy mining and refining faint veins of "why" and partisans are touting it as a mandate, but it looks like blue apathy instead of a red surge to me.

El Camino Real:
     There is a throughline in the American Presidency that I can't quite trace.  It will take a real historian, preferably one with a couple of thousand years of hindsight.  But I have got the broad outline, and it runs from roots in Alexander Hamilton, to Andrew Jackson  and through Abraham Lincoln's wartime Presidency, lingers on Woodrow Wilson's expansion of Presidential powers (and loathing for Congressional vacillation and inefficiency), grows under Franklin D. Roosevelt coping with a global economic depression and global war, on to Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan (especially encouraged by the Federalist Society) and blooms during Donald Trump's first term of office.  The Unitary Executive Theory is alive and well -- and ready to do some kicking.

     There's a rough parallel in Roman history: the accretion of power and authority in their executive positions, both before Caesar and after.  The appeal of "Stroke of the pen, law of the land"* is undeniable; we're wired up to want quick, bold solutions to difficult problems.  But this is a problem in and of itself.  Wilson argued for top-down government modeled on the patriarchal families of Classical antiquity, the basis for everything from Kaiser Wilhelm the Second's Germany to Stalin's Soviet Union: it's got a strong bias toward autocracy.  For all Wilson's impatience with Congress and the separation of powers, those things exist for good reason.

     Most U. S. Presidents have run some version of the American cursus honorum: military service followed by a series of civic offices, both elected and appointed.  Not every President touches every base, but nearly all of them have worked their way up, usually with some kind of legislative experience, some exposure to the give and take governance, some direct contact with what happens when slogans and ideals encounter the art of the possible.  Mr. Trump did not.  Nearly all business enterprises operate with an inherently unitary executive and little or no input from majoritarian assemblies; voting stockholders are hardly legislators.  Business has a strong bias towards autocracy.

     Do you want kings?  Because this is how you get kings.

It Can Go Boom:
     Ukraine's got a lot to lose in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.  Ukraine is a country that could build a fission bomb over a long weekend and crank out fusion weapons in a matter of weeks.  And if you'd like more worries, with a few hours effort they could produce "dirty" bombs that render a patch of land uninhabitable for months, years or centuries.  Moscow's a target -- but Russian support centers and bases along the border are easier to reach, and a nuclear cordon sanitaire keeping Russian expansionism at bay could grow from there.  It's not a new idea; I cribbed it from Dean Ing, and he got the germ of it from Robert A. Heinlein.

     That's just one of the ways things could go sideways if Ukraine runs out of options.  I remain convinced that Russia's invasion is a festering boil that is more likely than not to erupt into global conflict and those odds are worse under Mr. Trump than they have been under Mr. Biden.  I hope I'm wrong.
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* People start fights over the context of this comment, but there's no denying it stuck.

Well, That's Over

     It wasn't the outcome I expected -- but I wasn't expecting it very strongly.  Hope is for saps, as the Greeks warned us in the story of Pandora.  One side or the other opens up the box every election, and what comes out is rarely never rainbows and unicorns.

     On social media, a few people have written, "This fundamentally changes my understanding of the American people," or similar notions and that's what hope gets you -- it was our response to the pandemic that put a spotlight on the American psyche for me, mostly our reactions to the measures that tried to limit it: a slim majority of us are ignorant idiots, suspicious and resentful of expertise and willing to ride "You ain't the boss of me" all the way to the ground like Slim Pickens on an atomic bomb, even when reason and logic clearly shows that going along leads to the best outcome (and you can kick the would-be bosses to the curb later).

     So Mr. Trump won, both in the Electoral College and (so far) the popular vote.  A majority of us chose anger over joy, rants over laughs, an inarticulate man over an articulate woman, a promise of mass deportation and high tariffs over taxing billionaires and oligarchs while providing paths to citizenship for sincere immigrants, the government (of mostly men) controlling women's bodies instead of minding their own business.  

     As I write, control of the next U. S. Senate will rest in Republican hands by the thinnest of margins; the balance of power in the House is still undecided but it, too, will be on a knife's edge.  That's not a mandate; it's a great big caution flag.  I doubt it will be heeded.

     If Mr. Trump gets his tariffs, look for economic hard times before the middle of his term.  Look for higher prices; tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, and are passed along to you and me.  Even when tariffs succeed in encouraging domestic production to replace imports, the heavy thumb of government remains on the scales, impeding the workings of the free market: the version made here only needs to be cheaper than the cost of the import plus the tariff.

     And about making that stuff here?  If Mr. Trump gets the mass deportations he and many of his supporters long for, it will rip out the bottom of the labor market.  Those low-wage workers will be gone, and it was never that they "did the jobs Americans won't do," it was that Americans won't do those jobs for such low pay.  Assuming the now-open jobs can be filled, they're not going to be filled as cheaply as they were, and you know where that shows up?  Mr. CEO and his Board of Directors aren't going to take a haircut over it!  You and I will pay more for those goods and services.  Of course, we'll want raises too, and when wages and prices chase one another, you know what you get?  Inflation.

     The darker side of mass deportation is that if it is carried out as described, the result will be a horror that will shame this nation for generations; the scale of the effort and the incarceration required will inevitably produce tragic results. 

     Between people who glory in chaos and violence (and/or grift), like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, between nutjobs like Robert R. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, between "Christian Nationalists" and "Dominionists" who are hoping to ride the multiply-divorced convicted felon to cultural control (look up what they say; the language is Biblical but their intent is clear: he's a means to an end), between men like Vivek Ramaswamy and J. D. Vance who have made themselves willing tools of democracy-skeptical oligarchs, Mr. Trump's second term will be fraught with wild notions, fringe theories, and cliques with interests greatly divergent from those of the country as a whole, if not downright inimical to them.  Elon Musk is brilliant promoter and a good judge of when to get into a line of business, but he couldn't manage or engineer his way out of an oversized boot with the instructions on the heel.

     A majority of my fellow citizens have chosen to run this experiment at full scale.  The party they voted for won the election.  That does not automatically mean it was the right choice.

     Time will tell. I remember how things were four years ago, how things were from 2016 to 2020, beginning with lies and ending in insurrection.  It was not a halcyon time, dripping with milk and honey.  Don't count on any nourishing sweetness this time either, not even if you're pale, hale, well-off and male.

We Didn't Take The Bus

     Tam and I react to stress in typical ways: we get snappish and prone to argue.  But that's not all of it.  I fret over my appearance (oh, the vanity!) and dawdle; she wants things done on the bounce, hup, hup!  She wants to get it o-v-e-r and move on.

     So of course we were running late and as I tried one more time to keep my bangs from looking as if a cat had slept in them (not unlikely), Tamara made a Command Decision: "I'll drive us to the polling place.  The bus will take too long."

     And in short order, thus it was done.  Of course there was nowhere to park in the small lot at the little neighborhood church where we usually vote.*  She dropped me off and went in search of a spot.  I walked over to the end of the line, got there and realized it was just a bend: the line was twice as long as I had thought!

     At the real end of the line, a woman with campaign literature greeted me.  She turned out to be the at-large school board candidate I had decided to vote for, who was very much at large: "This is my second stop and I have plenty more to visit before six this evening!"  Not especially well-funded, she was applying shoe leather to the problem, exactly the kind of initiative my research had led me to expect from her.

     Tam showed up after a few minutes and the line moved along briskly.  We were inside the building and getting our ID checked in less than thirty minutes, and had voted before another fifteen had passed.

     That's done.  Poll workers said turnout had been steady at about that level, with a little bump up during morning rush hour.  They were hearing that other sites were at least as busy and some were much busier.  As divided as opinions are about Mr. Trump, he's been a real boon to voter turnout: people are motivated to vote against him or for him, but they are certainly motivated.

     Now we'll wait for the results.
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* Indianapolis/Marion County took advantage of Indiana's voter ID laws to implement "vote anywhere:" your ID calls up the appropriate ballot for your address and you can go to any polling place.  Most people still vote at their old familiar spot, but even those move around.  While living in and near Broad Ripple, I've voted at a synagogue, a temporarily unused public school building, the gym of a private Catholic elementary/middle school and at least two different churches.  Voting in the United States remains a wonderfully amateur, slapdash affair, despite sophisticated machines and a small core of dedicated professionals: the poll workers are just plain folks, trying to maintain a little order in chaos without a whole lot of direction.  Lines snake around almost at random and you do end up getting what you need when you need it, but it often seems unlikely until it happens.  I trust this process: it hasn't got sufficient organization to enable cheating.

Desk Clearing

     It's not quite like tab clearing, though there are some similarities.  I'm the kind of person whose desk slowly accretes piles of stuff.  At work, it's forms and parts for projects (SP4T PIN-diode RF switch with a relay-diode matrix to go from 24-Volt 1x4 switching to binary at TTL levels?  I've got that, right down to the lunatic SMA connector for the 5 V rail to the PIN-diode switch.  Seriously, who does that?).

     At home, it's bills, printed-out manuscripts and medical stuff* -- doctor bills, mostly.  The bills are marked "PAID" (because they are) and put there awaiting being filed away, which does happen sometimes, but not nearly often enough.  Oh, that's not all: a three-year-old note, thanking me for taking care of the neighbor's cats during her first long time away; a rough floor plan for the Operational areas of the starship Lupine; a rough plan and elevation for a backyard writing shed that comes in just under the city's 10' x 12' limit for not needing a permit; a reminder that Indiana tech writer John T. Frye's "Carl and Jerry" stories from the 1950s and 60s -- about teenaged electronics hobbyists who get up to all manner of instructive hijinks -- were available again (and now they're again mostly not, but a web search will turn up a few); a 3-ounce bottle of teal ink that I barely remember buying; and my Western Electric 300-series desk phone, a gift from the Data Viking many years ago.  And so on.  It's a lot of stuff to sort through, right down to the exact order number for a style of jeans I liked and Carhartt no longer makes.

     Somehow, it's an effective distraction from election worries.  We're well up the first rise of the roller-coaster ride now, click-click-click, and we'll all be yelling and waving our hands in the air soon enough, one way or another.  There's no emergency exit from this ride.

     Tam and I will be taking the bus to vote in an hour or so, and then it's just the waiting.
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* Between bad knees, high blood pressure, chronic migraines, a history of rheumatic fever and a tendency to fall, I'm probably less sturdy than I care to admit.  I certainly interact with medical personnel more than I would prefer.

Match Cuts

     Tamara and I have been enjoying the current season of The Lincoln Lawyer.  (The TV series; I have yet to see the film, with a different cast.)  Taken from the novels starring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller by mystery writer Michael Connelly, not only are the stories first-rate, they're brilliantly shot and edited.  One of the best parts is the use of "match cuts," in which scene-to-scene transitions go from one similar thing to another.

     The simplest is a sky shot: characters are conversing, the camera tilts up to the sky, there's a quick dissolve to another image of the sky and the camera tilts back down on a new scene.  A little trickier is the not-quite-match: famously, in Lawrence of Arabia, the camera goes in close on a lit match (a literal match, and there's your double pun) and as Lawrence blows out the flame, the film cuts to sunrise on the desert horizon.  It's easy to overdo,* but the best match cuts are as smooth as silk.  In an example from the TV series, a group of attorneys around a conference table in their office discussing trial strategy cuts to them at the Defense table in court, using those strategies -- a leap that covers days if not weeks, and keeps the story moving.

     Scenes in the series are carefully composed and lit, and often lushly shot, moving to a more documentary style when the action happens in a prison or low-rent lawyer's office.  The visual style is as deft and inevitable-seeming as a dancer's movements.

     One of the most interesting things to me is that while Connelly's plots are intriguingly twisty and his storytelling is more than adequate, he's not a bowl-you-over prose stylist.  He was a newspaper reporter and he writes like a reporter, without fuss or flourish.  The TV series is very much on their own hook with the cinematography and editing; trying to show Mickey Haller's world, they have picked up a visual style that suits their protagonist and his Los Angeles like a well-tailored suit.
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* There's a version in which dialog carries across the cut, one character's sentence finished or answered by another, often to dramatic effect.  Occasionally, a film or TV show will cut back and forth between two parallel scenes multiple times to build tension, but it's difficult to pull off without being too obvious.  The animated spy comedy Archer frequently plays carried dialog for laughs.

Important Logical Principle

     Remember, a thing does not have to exist for no one to have seen it.

So, Yeah

     Yesterday, I managed to get moved out of my old desk at work, took the darned thing apart (because I'm in the Engineering Department, and we do that), picked the parts for a "new" desk (adjustable-height, because apparently that is now what we do), moved the parts of the old desk out of the way, moved the new one in, added a power strip (not standard because, I don't know, it's 1890 and we don't have any electronic gadgets on our desks?) and moved all of my stuff back into and onto it, with the remainder relegated to a couple of large plastic bins.

     This had to get done because the boss needs half the space of the (under-occupied) shared tech desk area to set up a big project, and I'm off all next week when that project begins.

     Today, I completed a story, which came in at a bloated 8200 words, and trimmed it to 7230 before sending it out to get looked over.  This is still too long but it's as much as I could manage today.

     I even got some laundry done, just like a grown-up.

Break A...Finger?

      I'm working on a short story for a competition.  It's taken me right down to a deadline to get the plot worked out (or mostly worked out, anyway), so today's post is just this.

Reminder To Myself

     "I will not read Ross Macdonald novels in the bathtub.  I will not read Ross Macdonald novels in the bathtub.  I will not read Ross Macdonald novels in the bathtub."

     The problem is that I start reading about the adventures of PI Lew Archer and the next time I look up from the book, it's forty minutes later, I'm soaking in cold water and I've made a good start on turning into a prune.

     I have the same problem with Terry Pratchett's "Discworld" books.

Chili And Leftovers

     Sunday, I made chili,* with ground sirloin (! on sale), chorizo sausage, a big red onion, crushed tomatoes, fresh red and green bell peppers, pickled piparra peppers, canned green chilis and fresh shishto peppers, seasoned with chili powder, a little extra cumin (a little goes a long way but it is essential to Midwestern chili), smoked paprika, basil, cilantro and bay leaves.  Plus a little garlic and whatever else looked interesting.

     It was good, and thick enough to stand a spoon in.  As usual, I made dinner for four and froze the remainder.

     Tuesday, I started the saved chili thawing in the microwave and heated up a small can of corn with red and green peppers, a small can of tomato sauce, a small can of mild green chilis and a couple of piparras, snipped into small sections, plus a bay leaf.  I added the frozen chili as soon as it was thawed enough to break up, and let it simmer for ten minutes with the lid on.

     It was an improvement -- a little more heat, a little more complexity, and still thick with ingredients.
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* Chili purists, consider it "red stew."  Midwestern chili varies widely from the original, from the Mediterranean-spiced Cincinnati stuff to the ubiquitous and mild red beans and elbow macaroni church potluck version to purist peppers-and-meat with spice levels that will make your hair line up to enlist in the Marines.  By Texas standards, a lot of it isn't "chili," but we've got to call it something.

Try This

     Smile at someone today.  Do them a small good turn.  Let them in in traffic or something.

     If you need motivation, bear in mind that they may spend a long time wondering why you'd do any such thing.

The Problem

     Okay, this one's kind of political.

     The one tiny little caveat to Jeff Bezos's claim that his decision to have the Washington Post refrain from endorsing a Presidential candidate had nothing at all to do with any worries about antagonizing former President Trump is that the two men had already crossed swords in the past.  There's plenty of reason to believe Amazon lost out in a big cloud computing contract with DoD during the Trump administration due to personal enmity between the two men.

     It's happened before.  If Mr. Trump wins in November, who could say it won't happen again?  Mr. Bezos has a lot to gain if his paper sits this one out -- and nothing to lose if Vice-President Harris wins.

     From a business standpoint, it's a no-brainer, and that holds no matter what high-minded justifications he puts forth.

     Newspapers often make candidate endorsements, and I doubt those endorsements move a lot of voters; it's usually pretty obvious where a paper's editors stand.  It's just an honest choosing of sides for the opinion pages.  Staying officially neutral is unusual.  We expect the front page to be neutral.  The opinion page has got to stand for something, even if it's something half the readers don't like.  (They'll probably find something on the op-ed page.)

     The Washington Post -- and the Los Angeles Times -- have chosen to stand for not getting beat up if the bully hits the big time again.  It's a choice, and one that gives readers valuable information about their papers: they're owned by spineless men.

Avoidance

     I'm trying to not write too much about politics in this week before election day.  Especially not in the "look what those people just said or did" vein.  You see the news.  Maybe you mostly get one-sided stuff, or not, but the most egregious examples break through.

     It's nitwit season.  The politicians will do or say whatever they think will get them the most votes; they'll hang out with people who they think will appeal to the voters they want.  It's kind of a concentrated X-ray view of who they are.  It's worth watching, and you don't need me as tour guide.  But keep your eyes open.  Read the fine print.  Read the big print, too.  There's always a core of truth in a politician's hyperbole about what they plan to do.  Even if you assume every word the candidates say about their opposition is overheated alarmism, pay attention what they have to say about themselves.

Knees And Other Things

     It's been almost four weeks since I fell, hard, on my left knee.  The scrapes have healed, the bruises have not quite faded and while the swelling persists, it's a little less every day.  (I also took damage to the heel of my right hand.  Midway through last week, that scrape had healed up enough to stop wearing a bandaid over it.)

     With that knee hurt, I was not very active.  When I did move, my already-injured right knee had to take up the slack, and that is having consequences.  With long-existing damage to the cartilage bearing surfaces and a handful of screws holding together a spiral fracture that started between the two knobs on the end of my thighbone and continues upward, it's never going to be entirely right.  All I can do is work to maintain range of motion and try to keep the network of muscles that hold the knee together in good shape.  Right now, it's pretty sore and a bit swollen.  I'm back to going up and down steps by letting my left knee do all the work, and movements that stretch the hamstring of my right leg can be painful.

     All that adds up to needing to run through simple physical therapy exercises over the coming weeks, to get that knee back into better shape.

     Yesterday was the regular online meeting of a writing-critique group that I chair, followed by a meeting of the larger writer's club.  I spent a lot of time sitting instead of exercising.  And took much of the afternoon napping because, introvert that I am, social interaction leaves me pretty drained.

     The day had one more bright spot, though: Friday, one of the smallish supermarkets I frequent had small steaks on sale!  I picked up a couple, and added vegetable kabobs from the other grocery on Saturday along with some nice little Yukon Gold potatoes.  All of it ended up over hardwood lump charcoal on the grill yesterday.  The spuds got a trip through the microwave before being wrapped in foil and stashed in the corners.  The kabobs -- mushrooms, onion, red and green bell peppers and pineapple --were drizzled with a little extra-virgin olive oil.  Steaks and kabobs were happy on little stainless-steel grill pans.  Well-perforated, they're a lot easier to clean than the grill bars themselves.  It was a meal I haven't enjoyed in quite awhile; locally, the price of steaks went stratospheric during the Covid pandemic and they've only come down a little since, much more slowly than poultry, pork and less-desirable cuts of beef.

     Today, I'm getting caught up on laundry, a good excuse to keep myself moving.

Oops, Wrong Pepper

     It's still pretty good.  It's right at the edge of "too hot" for me.  But I'd better start at the beginning--

     My corned beef hash experiments are ongoing.  The best of the modern brands (Hormel Mary Kitchen) isn't too different from the stuff I remember from childhood, but it's not quite the same.  Adding a simple cornmeal and (panko) breadcrumb crust is a big improvement, and having gotten that far, I wondered how it might work to add a small can of mild green chilis to the hash.

     Someday I'll know, but not today.  There were five cans of chilis in the cupboard: a larger can of fire-roasted ones, three 4-ounce cans from various brands, and one that wasn't: it was a small can of jalapeno peppers.

     Naturally, that was the one I laid hands on and opened without checking.  At that point, I was committed.  I don't dislike jalapenos, but their particular heat is a little too much for my palate except in very small quantities.  I added extra cornmeal to the hash and peppers mix (it's an excellent moderator of flavors), broke a couple of eggs over it, and snipped cheese on top right before serving.  I also chopped up some fresh cherry tomatoes, and put them on top of the cheese when I served it.

     It's good, but it's still hot-hot.  I'm alternating bites of toast with the hash, and that works out.  Tam wanted to try it, and she says corned beef hash with jalapenos is good.

     So if you're down with heat, that's something you might like.  I'll try mild green chilis next time.  Checking online, I've found some recipes that add a small amount of canned diced tomatoes and peppers to the hash, and that looks intereresting, too.

Carnivorous Sheets

     A load of sheets got washed this week as a "background process:" run 'em in the washer while doing other things, move them to the dryer and let it cycle, leaving the folding for later.

     This morning was later.  While the coffee water boiled, I spun up the dryer with a damp washcloth added.  By the time the coffee was ready, so were the sheets and pillowslips.

     I should have had a cup of coffee first.  Opening up the dryer was like looking into a long forgotten roach glue trap: there was just one suspiciously-fat fitted sheet, lurking in the bottom center of the dryer drum.  Two sets of sheets, a half-dozen colorful pillowcases, all eaten right up!

     One set of sheets was flannel.  The other was super-soft, high thread count cotton, with a fully-elasticized fitted lower, and over two tumble-drying runs, it had softly and gradually enveloped all of the other bedding and twined it all up.  It was a struggle to get everything out of the tangle without any of it ending up on the floor.  Folding it was another battle -- the space available is limited, just the tops of the washer and dryer side-by-side, and a space in front of them.  The soft sheets want to creep over the edge, and they want to fold in multiple places instead of just one.  The fine cotton is the worst, but flannel is equally determined to embrace gravity.

     They're all folded and stacked on top of the washer and dryer now, contemplating their crimes and preparing to be put away.

Tower Lights

     A commenter asked about this the other day: what's the deal with those red or white-strobe tower lights?  What do they have for backups?

     Obviously, the lights on tall structures are there to warn aircraft away.  Not just radio towers, but smokestacks, water towers, bridges, tall buildings, the taller power-line supports and sometimes even power lines.

     I'll stick to the ones I know.  The rules are similar for the rest, though you will find red (and occasionally yellow) spheres on power lines (and some guy wires) for daytime visibility, especially near airports and in crop-dusting regions.  But a typical red-and-white painted* radio tower over a hundred feet tall has a blinking beacon on top (a "code beacon," in that every aspect of it is determined by FAA rules), and maybe sets of steady-burning markers or "obstruction lights" down the side.  The marker lights are not always there -- research shows those are the lights that confuse migrating birds, and if the tower lighting is otherwise compliant with modern requirements, the owner can apply to turn them off.  There are rules for the arrangement of lights depending on height, rules which have changed over time.  Older towers are "grandfathered" until they replace their lighting system.  Currently, it is always beacon-obstruction-beacon-obstruction, etc, from the top down.  You'll see some older tall towers with a pair of marker levels below the top beacon.

     If the tower has white strobe lights, there will be a set on top and, depending on height, more lower down at regular intervals.  They are on all the time, at two different intensities (day/night) for "medium-power" strobe lights, and three (day/twilight/night) for the "high-intensity" strobes you're more likely to see on very tall towers.  Since they have bright lights all the time, towers with strobes don't have to have the red and white paint job.  There are also a few that split the difference, strobes by day and red lights at night, usually in areas where the bright white flash annoys the neighbors.

     Red lights or white strobes, the FAA defines what degree of "north sky illumination" calls for the lights to turn on and off.  You have to have a photocell with a clear view of the north sky (or, presumably, an operator on duty looking at a light meter who flips the switch).  You have to inspect it quarterly.  Most are sealed units these days, and they either work or they don't.  My "North Campus" site had a tube-type control until the late 1990s, with an adjustment, and yes, I would climb a ladder, holding a light meter, and sit out the sundown, seeing that the thing did its job correctly and adjusting the knob if it did not.  FAA-approved photoelectric sensors ran around $300 back then and when the tube unit finally conked out, I replaced it with a modern one and built an interface so the new unit could control the rest of the 1950s system.

     The lighting system must be monitored.  This is done either by having a person check it once a day after sunset by eyeball or remote telemetry (you monitor the current drawn, and the variation caused by flashing the code beacons) and logging the check (and if a beacon is out, calling the FAA reporting number so they can issue a NOTAM, a Notice To Air Missions, warning pilots of the failed light); or by an automatic system that calls, emails or texts a responsible party if there is a problem with the system.  Many tower owners do both.

     There is no general requirement to have backup power.  If the lights go out, you call the FAA, and they issue a NOTAM.  They always ask how long the problem will last; they won't issue "forever" NOTAMs.  They'll give you a week or two, but they're not happy about it.

     There are requirements for the lights themselves that result in redundancy.  All lights levels must be fully visible from 360 degrees around the tower.  Markers are often installed in pairs at each level in skinny, shorter towers, and tall ones usually have three or four, one per leg, mounted on the outside (where they can get whacked by falling ice, so sometimes there's a perforated "ice shield" a little way above them).  Each marker is a rugged, traffic light type 100 W+, 130V  bulb in a small red Fresnel-lens dome or a LED fixtures of the same shape and light output, including infrared.  Strobe lights are installed the same way, pairs, triplets or quads.

     The flashing code beacons are a whole other ball game.  The classic incandescent version is over a yard tall, a foot and a half wide, a metal framework supporting clear glass Fresnel lenses with red filters inside.  It hinges open in the middle, allowing access to a pair of 620 W bulbs almost as big as your head, one base down in the bottom section, one base up in the top.  They're wired in parallel, and as long as at least one is burning, it's in compliance with FAA requirements.  Old ones have asbestos-insulated wiring and asbestos in the gaskets between the sections of the Fresnel lens, so don't play with them if you find one by the side of the road.  (You probably won't.)
     The modern LED replacement code beacon -- about $5000.00, the last time I bought one -- looks nothing at all like this.  It's a short, white-and-clear cylinder loaded with super-bright, heavy-duty light-emitting diodes, and it will leave you literally dazzled if you wire it up in a workshop and turn it on with your back to it.  Ask me how I know!  They put out the same amount of light and IR as the older ones.
     Light-bulb versions are flashed from ground level, either with a motorized gadget based on a traffic-light flasher, or modern solid-state flashers, and all the lights on a tower have to flash in sync.  The old motorized flashers often used cams and sealed mercury switches.  When the flash-at-the-same-time rule was made, I synced up the set on our tower by carefully aligning the cams: you can't see the tower at all from the room where the thing was mounted on the wall.
     Code beacons have the same requirement for 360-degree visibility.  Below the top level, they are usually installed in pairs to ensure that at least one isn't blocked by the tower, no matter where you are.  And they often have ice protection, since the cost of replacement is high no matter if it is LED or incandescent.

     The big tower I am responsible for has a mixture of LED beacons and markers (the highest ones, where you have to shut important stuff off to send a tower guy) and incandescent.  We try to replace the incandescent bulbs once a year, in the fall.

     (P.S. Another commenter wonders if this was posted in response to the helicopter crash/tower collapse in Houston and posts a link to the video.  Nope, it was not; and that video has been widely shared elsewhere.  Video of people's deaths ought not be used idly and I will not post the link.  Many years ago, I was first on the scene of a fatal helicopter crash.  It's terrible to see the results and realize there is nothing you can do for the victims.)
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* The FAA defines the paint job, too, right down to the colors.  You can read about it and the lights here.

What's That Sound?

     There's an intermittent humming from the far side of the street -- sounds like it's in the next neighborhood over, and it sounds like a downed power line.

     There's a lot of juice behind the wires; even a drop to a single house from a stepdown transformer is deadly.  In our neighborhood, the power company gets "a lot of lights from a single match," and four or five homes might share a transformer.  It's protected on the primary side by a big, old-fashioned fuse, often a length of heavy fuse wire clamped inside a ceramic tube.  They're set to pop free of the clamps when they go, making a blown fuse easier to find, and they often let go with a bang.  But it's a big fuse.  It takes a lot of current to blow.

     Downstream, your house has breakers or fuses to protect the wiring.  Upstream, power companies use "reclosers" on the high-voltage wires: they open up on excessive current, wait a bit and try again.  The most common problem on a high-voltage line is a branch or an unfortunate creature, and those problems will usually clear.*

     I'm not sure what's going on across the street -- there's no smoke rising and the sound echoes and carries, but I know one thing: stay away!  Between that big fuse on the stepdown and the reclosers, a downed power line is often live.  It may arc, fall quiet, and then start arcing again, and it may or may not be "live" when it isn't visibly sparking.  There's a voltage potential in the ground under your feet, highest where the current goes to ground and diminishing over distance.  Get too close, take a long step and you're in danger before anything is obvious.

     The sound gnaws at me.  I have been too close to power problems a few times over the course of my work and the more you see what happens when it goes wrong, the less safe you feel.
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* There is a tradeoff between excessive "nuisance trips" and protecting the system.  Reclosers are one of the compromises, and one that works well more often than not.  But they're also why you can never assume that a downed power line is safe.

Oh, Come On

     I'm sitting on a comment.  It's not especially combative, but it's full of spin, and spin that's simply out of whack, with former President Trump and U. S. Senator J. D. Vance (a Peter Thiel protege) cast as outsiders who "owe no one"* and who "both parties dislike."

     We agree on one thing: the Democrats don't like Trump and Vance.  But the GOP loves them; party politicians skeptical of their Presidential candidate are very much on the outs and the party faithful flocks to rallies, even if a noticeable percentage then make an early exit.

     The same commenter tells me "Trump is a moderately successful businessman."  No, he isn't.  Ask the Baptists.  He's remarkably skilled at self-promotion; his "product" is himself and he sells it over and over again, leaving failed businesses in his wake.  Mr. Trump tried to run the Executive Branch like a fast-talking real-estate scheme (I'm being generous), and left a mess behind.

     Former U. S. Presidents include 20 ex-Governors, 9 retired Generals, 18 former U. S. Representatives,  17 former U. S. Senators, 15 Vice-Presidents -- and only five men who had never been elected to public office before becoming President.  (Lots more here.)  Historically, we're not after "outsiders."

     Pity's sake, the guy had the job already, and muffed it.  Don't fall for the flim-flam again.
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* Try telling that to the various contractors stiffed by the Trump Organization and associated enterprises, or the upper-crust techbros who have invested much in Vance and expect a ROI, and you'll get a hearty laugh in response.  Possibly you should ask Egypt, which seems to have misplaced $10 million in the direction of the top of the GOP ticket.

Not Exactly A Triumph

     But it's not a failure, either.  I bought some more time.

     The Ongoing Kitchen Appliance And Plumbing Disaster at Roseholme Cottage has many facets.  The appliances here when I moved in were mostly placeholders.  The electrical and plumbing was done by the previous homeowner and I have been (mostly) fixing it as it fails.  I seem to average one conked-out AC receptacle no matter what I do, but eventually I'll work my way through all of them.  The plumbing has received various professional and DIY fixes, and it's ongoing. 

     The original refrigerator was a floorspace-blocking disaster, and I replaced as I was moving in with search-engine-found wonder: cabinet-depth, freezer on the bottom, British-width.  It wasn't cheap and the only current match for size and arrangement is even less so, but it's the right fit for the space. The stove was old when I moved in and I hope to replace it eventually.

     The dishwasher was old, too.  Six months into the pandemic, it died and I started washing dishes by hand: replacements were hard to come by, service work was tricky to get, and....  I didn't want to deal with it.  Fresh meat and paper goods were scarce and rising in price and who knew what came next?

     Several weeks later, I discovered the drainer side of the double sink was backing up into the dead dishwasher through the garbage disposal (which we'd already stopped using: the drain pipe is long and smallish).  That was nasty to clean.  I did dishes in plastic dish tubs in the bathtub for a few days, working on my knees.*  I proved to myself that the other side of the sink didn't get into the dishwasher, thanks to the way flow is arranged, and graduated to a dish tub in the disposal side for washed dishes, a variation on single-sink dishwashing anyone who's lived in old apartments has used.  There was always a little spillage into the garbage disposal, but it wasn't enough to back up into the defunct dishwasher.

     That was a few years ago.  Lowe's treated me like crap the last time I went shopping for a new dishwasher (I was dressed for weekend woodworking, so that didn't help, but still...!) and I have kept on washing dishes by hand.  Recently, I noticed a little backup in the garbage disposal, but it was draining away eventually.  Until it wasn't.  I tried clearing it with a small plunger last night and made things worse.  Way worse.  I dumped some home-grade hydrogen peroxide in the nasty mess the plunger had brought up and left it overnight.  Today, well, the liquid was clearer.

     My oldest Shop-Vac, the smallest one they made thirty years ago, made short work of it.  I dumped the ick in the back yard, cleaned out everything I could reach in the disposal with strong cleaner, rinsed it and capped the drain.  That'll buy time.  I can mop up any spillage and now I'm going to have to replace the disposal and dishwasher.  It won't be easy.  Aside from the cost, I have to get a lot of books out of the way: the dining room library is an ongoing project, and another ongoing housekeeping disaster.  I've got one new set of shelves built and and about half moved into, and another set cut, measured for routing and ready to complete, stacked up in the garage.

     With the election so close, I think I will wait until afterward.  While I don't greatly expect there to be trouble, I'm not as sure as I used to be, and I'd just as soon flee screaming mobs with the price of a new dishwasher still in my pocket.

     It goes on and on.  I was so down about the sink mess that I slept very late today, with my Mother's voice in the back of my thoughts reminding me that not only does that not solve the problem, it uses up time that could have been spent solving it.
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* Something recent injuries have made impossible, at least for now.  It gets in the way of woodworking, too.  Lacking a nice big cabinetmaker's bench, I use the lovely flat slab of the garage floor, and you can't do that standing.  I can do a lot of it sitting on the floor, but some tasks take knee work or squatting, and those are both out.

Over The Line

     Childish violations of propriety have become a feature of one (1) our political parties, and it's the one that spent most of my life telling me it was "the party of grown-ups."

     Maybe it was, once upon a time.  But grown-up political candidates do not open a public event -- or a private one, for that matter -- by telling admiring stories about the size of a professional athlete's genitalia.

     You can tell me that it's yet another "brilliant, headline-grabbing move," and it's certainly getting a lot of attention, but it's misdirection at best, a distraction from serious issues of policy and plans.  It's bread-and-circuses bullshit, only without the bread (despite plenty of promises of bread tomorrow).

     It's as if a dumber version of Eddie Haskell grew up and went into politics, and darned near half the voters thought he was wonderful, so much cooler than any nose-to-the-grindstone striver, with most of his party's politicians emulating his odious behavior.

     Someone on social media shared a photograph of a drink that's already out at some trendy spots, a 50-50 mixture of lemonade and iced tea, with a swizzle stick made from a hot dog that's had a hole put through it lengthwise by a drinking straw.  And that's clever political commentary, as of October, 2024.

     Fates help us.

Tires

     Car tires have been much on my mind of late.  When I bought my current RX350 in 2019, the tires were well-worn.  It may even have been a bargaining point, "I'm going to have to replace these, you know...."

     Reader, I don't drive that much and while I was paying cash,* I was nowhere near so flush that I was going to be able to replace the tires right away.  I put it off and put it off, and really, were they that bad?  Then the pandemic arrived and I had other things to think about.  Meanwhile, the tires developed a few sidewall bulges.  The left front started a slow leak that required at least weekly topping up, and the rest had slower ones.  It was getting a little skatey on winter streets, but caution and anti-lock brakes cover a multitude of traction sins.  The tires now featured a certain absence of treads at the edges. 

     But I was coping.  Last weekend, I let the car sit for two days and drove to work Monday without a full preflight inspection, thinking the handling was a little mushy.  I walked out at the end of the day to find the right rear very low.  It measured at 5 psi.

     I texted Tam that my trip home might be dicey, babied my car over to my employer's very useful air hose, aired up the tire and listened for signs of leakage.  Nothing.  I checked the pressure at five-minute intervals, and when it was still stable after the third try, headed for home.

     Online, it didn't take a lot of looking to find replacement tires.  Of course, the car is a Lexus, and even at seventeen years old, a lot of the choices are...spendy.  Modern versions of what was already on it (Yokohama all-season something-or-others) were not direly painful, and that set had gone a lot of miles, so I found who had them in stock.  Nobody close, but one wasn't too far away from the North Campus.  I kept watch on the leaky tire, and got new tires a few days ago.

     It took time.  The tire place was busy -- I guess a lot of people had put off getting new tires, or maybe the onset of cooler weather had reminded them that slick roads were coming.  But the work was well-organized, and an hour and a half after I had arrived, a mechanic drove my car out of the bay and turned it towards where I was waiting outside the store lobby.

     The new tires squeaked.

     I laughed out loud and was still grinning when the guy stopped and got out.  He gave me an inquiring look.

     "Those tires squeak," I told him, "just like brand new sneakers!"

     He laughed, too.  "You're right, they sure do."

     I'd put the bill on my credit card, just under a week's net pay with the warranty.  We used to say new shoes squeaked until you paid them off,† but I swear I'll start running the card bill down ASAP.
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* Paying cash, even with a nice insurance settlement -- when my previous Lexus got totalled, the settlement was $90 more than I paid for the car a few years earlier -- there's not a lot left over and I give up luxuries like bacon for a while afterward.
 
† Yes, younger readers, for some of us, once upon a time, good Sunday shoes took time payments to afford.  They'd be bought a little large, so you could "grow into them."  And you had to be careful with them, too, no skipping through mud puddles or like that.

Tariffs Are Depressing

      This is a sloppy graphic.  I have overlaid a chart of U. S. (plus France and the UK) tariffs over time with the worst depressions and panics of the late 19th and 20th Centuries.  Not all of them had names.

     Increasing tariffs is often correlated with the start of hard times.  Reducing tariffs is correlated with ending them.  It's not perfect correlation, but it's close.  There are a number of variables I have not accounted for.  Nevertheless, as muddy as these waters are, they're full of alligators.  Still eager to jump in?

Oh, I Get Letters

     Yesterday's blog post about self-made cipher, Vice-Presidential candidate (and nearly-invisible U. S. Senator) J. D. Vance and his running mate and opponents got some comments.

     For instance: "good to know about you. goodbye."

     I have not made my opinion of Mr. Trump, and of Trumpism in general, a secret: I'd rather have almost anyone else as President.  As someone whose politics lean fiscally conservative and socially liberal, I accept that I'm usually only going to get one or the other -- but he managed to deliver the precise opposite, adding enormously to the deficit while turning the clock back on civil rights.  I never thought he was especially competent, but I thought the elders of his party would step up and keep him coloring inside the lines.  Instead, they knuckled under.  He still looked merely bad, a sore winner when he won and and an even sorer loser when he didn't.  Then came January 6, 2021, and after that, I didn't think he should ever be President again.  His party disagreed, and here we are, with the Presidential election neck and neck.

     That's a fact: Mr. Trump and Ms. Harris are in a dead heat.  Here's another fact: most people have made up their mind who they're going to vote for.  This late in the race, the candidates are courting a corporal's guard of undecided voters in a handful of states -- and they're trying to motivate voters who support them to get out and vote.  On November 6, we're all still going to be here together: Harris voters, Trump voters, Stein voters, Kennedy voters* and the great big block of non-voters.†  Maybe things will get spicy, but if 2022's any guide, probably not.

     I have spent my adult voting career trying to figure out which candidate had the skills to do the job, which of them had absolutely unacceptable policies or irredeemable personal flaws, if I could safely make a protest vote (sorry, kids, but in most races, that's all an LP vote does) and so on.  My vote is not a pledge of total agreement or undying devotion; I'm just trying to hire someone to mow the lawn and supervise the military who won't skimp on the work or steal the good silver.  And that's the thing you should know about me.
* * *
     On Mr. Trump: Aside from alcoholism, he has all the traits of every bad boss I have ever had.  I disliked him before he ran for President, I disliked him much more when his comments about grabbing women by their private parts came out, I disliked him while he was President, and I came to loathe him on January 6.  Some time that day between his weasel-worded encouragement of violence and letting Vice-President Pence swing in the breeze -- very nearly literally -- I grasped the recklessness of his disregard for the norms of decent behavior and of political campaigns.  (I'm not a huge fan of Mr. Pence but he's honest and rule-abiding, as politicians go, and he was unstintingly loyal to the then-President within legal limits.  The President stirring up a mob and shrugging when they threatened his own VP was staggeringly amoral.)
*  *  *
     Another commenter wrote, "I disagree with you on the ability of the Democratic canidate [sic]" and that's a real puzzler, since I did not address the ability of Governor Walz or Vice-President Harris.  In terms of government experience, both of them have more than Senator Vance (a bit under two years, vs. a little under 17 for Walz) or former President Trump (four years, against over 20 years for Ms. Harris): they've done the job longer.

     Senator Vance's book shows him to be a man without a strong identity, engaged in a search for a person to become.  A temporarily faithful son to his mother's succession of boyfriends and husbands, U. S. Marine, diligent student, devoted grandson, political centrist, venture capitalist, atheist, writer, pundit, conservative Catholic, hard-Right Republican.  He writes well and he's an intelligent man, but there's no telling who he may decide to be tomorrow.  He's a palimpsest, restlessly written, rewritten, erased and written over.  Inexperience aside, I do not think this is a personality who should be one heartbeat away from the Presidency.  His performance in interviews has shown a mealy-mouthed arrogance I find appalling.

     Mr. Walz and Ms. Harris are far steadier.  For me, the decision is a matter of "compared to what," and when the GOP runs an incompetent and declining Presidential candidate with a prospective VP who I think is a toady only too happy to reflect even the worst qualities of the top of the ticket, the list of people I'd rather see in the job is very long, and given that the Democratic candidates are experienced, willing to compromise and actually on the ballot, they're at the top of it.

     Your mileage may vary.  I've been wrong before -- at the start of the coronavirus pandemic, I predicted "we'd all pull together" and get the thing under control quickly.  I was wrong.  We made a mess of it.  People I had thought of as friends were insulting and inconsiderate to others, often to people who had no choice, berating store cashiers over their employer's mask requirements and so on.  But I'm not wrong about Mr. Trump's and Mr. Vance's manifest unfitness to serve as President and Vice-President.  They may win the election, but they'll still be the wrong people for the job.
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* He didn't manage to scamper off the ballot in every state.  If the official Indiana ballot guide is accurate, he's still on ours.
 
† "Oh, whatever" remains the largest single voting bloc in U. S. elections.  We had record turnout in 2020 -- which still meant a third of the eligible voters sat it out.  Typically, less than half of the people who could vote bother to make the effort.