Leftovers? Barbecue!

     Last weekend, I made a vindaloo-ish pork roast ("boneless Boston butt," supply your own punch line), marinated overnight in a mixture of apple cider vinegar, balsamic vinegar, ginger and curry powder.  I roasted it with turnips, apple, hot pickled cherry peppers, two kinds of cherry tomatoes, potatoes, celery, carrots, onion, shishito peppers, shitake  mushrooms and canned crushed tomatoes.  Cooked until it was almost falling apart, it made a nice meal -- and there were plenty of leftovers.

     It seemed like most of it might make a nice start on the kind of barbecue that consists of shredded meat in a thick sauce, usually eaten on a bun, so I saved it.

     Tonight, I started with a little sweet Italian sausage, browned, and added a small can of tomato paste to it with a little water.  While it cooked, I defrosted the pork roast, vegetables and broth and added them to the meat and tomatoes with a little curry powder and some smoky barbecue sauce.  I fished out the big chunks of potatoes and set them aside, then used round-ended kitchen shears to shred the meat, while mashing the remaining vegetables.

     The end result was shredded pork and sausage in a sauce thick enough to stand up a spoon in.  I added some more barbecue sauce and a little ketchup as it cooked, checking for taste.

     It simmered while I microwaved the potatoes and mashed them with milk, butter and salt.  They came out okay, though they were not the prettiest-looking mashed potatoes -- they looked like mashed yams.

     We had some store-bakery hamburger buns, unsliced and pretty substantial.  I cut them and loaded them up with the meat and sauce, added potatoes on the side and there was dinner, just as tasty as I had hoped. 

Cruft

     Yesterday, I removed around five Gigabytes of junk from my computer, most of it left from the recent Windows update, the one that tried to jam Copilot, their latest Clippie/Cortana* thing, into my ancient, steam-powered Analytical Engine.

     Of course it gummed things up.  It might as well have been a wooden shoe.  The removal process appears to have left some scars, too, in the form of a series of browser crashes.  These usually get better over time, as the usual level of cached nonsense rebuilds.

     When color came to BBSing, I was not a fan.  When GUIs came to text editors, I was extremely not a fan.  (I'm still not, but it's the standard.)  When the World Wide Web's pictures and Hypertext shoved the old Internet down the basement stairs and locked the door, I was not a fan.

     Oh, it's pretty.  And a well-designed GUI or webpage can be remarkably easy to use.  But it runs on cruft: layers and layers of code that does not do the thing, but which does the stuff that reads or displays the stuff that talks to the stuff that calls up the stuff that shoves the other stuff into the hopper of the part that does the thing and spews out the result -- into the waiting arms of more stuff that calls up the stuff that loads the result into other stuff that massages it and filters it and hands it off to stuff that pushes buttons and turns knobs in order to show you the stuff that displays some stuff that reports the results of the thing -- and it does that over and over and over, very quickly, for everything from the most trivial to the most vital part of the display on the screen and wherever else the input comes from and the result goes.  It's monkey motion, set up to keep you entertained rather than perform the task.  In terms of writing, WordPerfect (should have looked it up!) PerfectWriter running under CP/M does everything MS Word can do except embed and edit images, often in less-awkward ways, with 64 Kilobytes of memory and a pair of single-sided 40-track 5.25" floppy discs that held a few hundred K -- but it requires the user to learn or look up a large number of inline commands and keyboard shortcuts.  The cruft was in the user's head, where it fit right in with all the other cruft we think with, self-deleting if unused.

     The useless cruft on my PC just builds up and up.  I have to rely on utilities from the operating system and software makers to try to clear it out (or, in one case, deleting a file folder known to cause problems as it grows) and in the meantime, the operationally-necessary cruft never goes away, and will eventually force me to replace this computer.

     I suppose if I had a real Babbage, I'd be griping about backlash in the gear trains or a sticky carry adder.
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* I'm starting to C a pattern here.  I blame Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Apathy Magic?

     I don't quite get it, but after yesterday's post titled "I Don't Care," somehow the promised thunderstorms never made it here.

     The only possible comment is, "Whatever."

     Elsewhere, the campaign season's various tempests rage, in venues ranging from teapots to Bobby Lee's wife's old family home,* replete with everything misidentified dogs to chainsawed whales and a guy who apparently doesn't know that for much of the history of public education, spinsters were preferred as schoolteachers and marriage was often the end of a woman's teaching career (after all, the thinking went, she'll have her own family to look after now).†  And that last is the "traditional values" guy, not the sort of progressive who might be expected to miss such large-print historical footnotes.

     It ain't over yet and you can expect more of the same -- much, much more, with plenty of mud and strangeness for everyone.  I'm still backing the team that promises to not burn it all down.  That's a preposterously low bar, but here we are, in another election with a very wide swath of voters working out who they dislike least.
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* The history of what is now Arlington National Cemetery is very nearly a capsule history of the United States, from cold, hard fact to myth-making that is variously rosy, horrific and vengeful.
 
† The writing-critique group I chair often takes me to task for sentences so long that Faulkner and Henry James would look askance at them.  I'm certainly glad neither of them -- and my crit-group peers -- are here to read this one.

I Don't Care....

     You can call it climate or you can call it weather.  Either way, it's too darned hot.  95°F* or more yesterday and the day before, and today?  More of the same, with thunderstorms.  Thursday, the meteorologists are calling for a cold snap, probably no more than 85°F at the worst.  I'd better break out my winter coat.
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* That's like, what, 355° Centigrade or 356° Celsius (old style), right?

"Don't Know Much About History..."

     Or even about Constitutionality (with apologies to the songwriters).  While most people would agree that the First Amendment protects some of the most fundamental of human rights, not everyone agrees.

     Take the GOP's Presidential candidate, speaking yesterday at the 146th General Conference and Exhibition of the National Guard Association of the United States,* a lobbying and general membership organization of and for National Guard members: "I want to get a law passed.  Everyone tells me, oh sure, it's very hard. You burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year.  Got to do it, we got to do it.  They say, 'Sir, that's not constitutional.'  We'll make it constitutional."

     It doesn't work that way.  Don't take my word for it; ask the experts.  Ask the United States Supreme Court.†  You can't make it constitutional without undermining basic rights.

     I think our flag should be treated with respect.  I think our government ought to conduct itself in such a way that only the most desperate or ill-intentioned of persons or groups would ever burn our flag with disrespect, or otherwise mistreat it.  But to do so is indeed "expressive conduct," and it should not -- per the Court, cannot -- be made illegal.

     Burning your draft card was a violation of 50 U.S.C. § 462(b)(3), carrying a fine of $10,000 and up to five years in a Federal jail.  The Supreme Court ruled that bit of fire-setting was more than free speech (it also bollixed the draft process) and let the law stand.  And yet the burning of draft cards during the Vietnam War, often very publicly, did not cease.  So I'm doubtful of the deterrent effect of a year in jail for flag-burning, especially since an exception would have to made for the proper disposal of U. S. flags, a process which also involves (respectful) burning.
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* It took me several minutes to track this down.  News reports mostly left it at "spoke before the National Guard," which is not at all accurate and gives a misleading impression of the circumstances.
 
† And read the fine print.  In at least one of the cases covered, the accused were said to have stolen the U. S. flag they burned from a post office.  Whoops -- that'd be "destruction of government property," for which they were convicted and fined.  A couple of them did (minor) jail time.  Free speech?  Sure, but you're going to have to supply your own props, not steal them. 

Got Morality?

     An interesting essay -- it's a chapter from a book -- on the basic elements of morality, shared across our cultures.  The piece presents itself as addressing the need for religion as a basis of morals (or at least of moral behavior), but I'm not sure that's something that lends itself to rational debate.

     While moral behavior as the article defines it is shown to be its own reward, people are strongly motivated by punishment/reward structures.  Assuming you believe the religion you practice -- and surely you do -- the idea of some kind of cosmic scorekeeping and reckoning-up is a very strong impetus to do right.

     While I will happily argue that it's not the only source or foundation for moral behavior, no religion that I know of is inherently immoral, at least towards co-religionists and most often towards other people as well.  I'll join with the Founders and Framers in believing religious faith in general to be of public utility, while refraining from singling any out.  I don't happen to practice one (and I like to believe my behavior is nevertheless moral) but I'd sure hate to live someplace where religions were banned.

A Sure Sign

     Summer must be starting to wind down, because I have made refrigerator pickles!

     I'd bought a couple of cucumbers to slice and add to a salad-in-a-bag, and used only half of one.  That left a nice big stack of cucumber slices that I didn't want to waste.

     I made the brine "by ear," which is my usual approach, and I always make it too strong.  I started with white vinegar,  balsamic vinegar, sugar, salt, onion powder (didn't have fresh onions) and salt, enouh to cover and float the slices.  That sat in the fridge overnight.  After a taste-check the next morning, I cut the brine 50/50 with bottled water and added more sugar and a little balsamic vinegar.  By yesterday evening, the pickles had taken on color and flavor.  This morning, I cut the brine with water again and added a dash of sugar: they're ready!  Still cucumber-y, with sweetness, sour and a little spice.

It Takes A Toll -- And Pays One

     Yesterday was online writing-critique group day.  Chairing it is an effort for me.  Oh, the members of the group are nice and as well-behaved as any group of writers, possibly better than many; but I'm just not that social.  The group starts pretty early for a Saturday, and I get ready for it in some haste.  Often, I've been up late the night before, polishing my own written critiques.*  The meeting runs an hour and afterward, I'm worn out: an introvert has to make an effort at that kind of thing.  It's still fun, like mountain-climbing is fun, but I do have to take time to recover afterward.

     After an hour break, the full mystery-writer's organization meets, a combination of online and in-person, and I can sit back and watch the business meeting and whatever speaker or other presentation we have afterward.  But I don't plan for much afterward; I'm still winding down.

     Most of my life, I've felt guilty about this kind of reaction -- what kind of miserable ingrate is tuckered out after hanging out with interesting friends?  Only in the last several years have I begun to admit to myself that yes, that's just how it is for introverts, and yes, I am one.
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* This sounds fancier than it is.  A "critique" in that context is a set of marginal notes about things as dull as sentence structure and grammar, nuts and bolts matters like "Please add more speech tags here -- I can't figure out if it's Thomas Edison or Gypsy Rose Lee talking," or continuity/accuracy notes, "Lincoln gets into a Ford Model T at the White House, but arrives at Gettysburg in a DC-3.  Do you think that's right?" and only rarely high-level stuff about plot and theme.  Especially good writing gets pointed out, and most manuscripts get a paragraph of reaction at the beginning or end.  

Frantic Catch-Up Day

     Coming up on the end of my vacation and I'm trying to get some more of the stuff done that I was planning to do.  Oh, I have done quite a lot of it, but I hoped to do more.  Instead, I have slept, and I don't regret it.  I've been short on sleep for a long time.  Since the start of the pandemic, I have not slept as well as I once did; there's too darned much to worry about.

     But today, there's lots to do.

Out, AI, O-U-T!

     Microsoft snuck "Copilot" onto my computer when I wasn't looking.  They didn't even ask first.  Since the machine is old, slow and short on storage space, it bollixed everything up and had to be removed.

     It's probably time for a "new" computer.*  For interoperability, it'll need to run Windows.  I'd like to move to Linux, but writing these days requires .doc or docx files most of the time, and my experience with the Rasberry Pi showed that it's awkward at best to get compatible files off a *nix box with any certainty that they'll play nice on an editor's copy of Word.
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* I have, in fact, purchased exactly two brand-new desktop computers in my long string of machines going back to MS-DOS and before: a Coleco Adam and, about a decade back, a nice little Acer package from Woot! that eventually succumbed to a nasty virus that neither I nor the IT experts at work could scrub.  Everything else has been used/refurb/open box.  Laptops, I've done better, a couple of Eee minis (one great, one sluggish) and the MacBook Air, which is probably the single most expensive computer I have purchased. But the Macbook Pro and Surface Pro were used, and my Surface RT -- now about as dead-ended a product as the Adam -- was a new-in-box but superseded model.  The little Surface Pro recently scrolled off the support roster; I've kept it off wi-fi so it doesn't find out and I'm looking at it with an eye to *nix installation.

Shelf-Building

     I'm off this week, and I have spent several hours over the last three days working on an addition to my book shelves -- one day of cutting the wood, one day of routing slots in the vertical sides for the shelves themselves, and today I assembled it.  Tomorrow, I plan to clean up pencil marks with mineral spirits and sand it.

     Each day's task uses a different set of tools (with some overlap) and each one ends with the project in a form that can be set aside easily and picked up without having to backtrack.

     If these shelves work out, they'll finish closing the sides of the window seat with a three-shelf alcove on each end.  I have more plans for the library/dining room, but I'm taking it one step at a time.

I'd Rather Watch Sausage Being Made....

     See history in the making?  You'd probably have more fun touring a sausage factory.  At least they have to hose the place out regularly and pass out free samples after the tour.

     We've got one major party political conventional done and another is running and from twenty thousand feet, I wish 'em all a good time.  Conventions these days are mostly rah-rah exercises in boosterism for the party faithful, and it keeps them out of trouble.

     If I was talking about politics seriously these days, I would have to spend endless hours explaining, yet again, that no, the U. S. Constitution says exactly zero about the nominating process.  Parties can pull their starting pitcher and send a reliever out right up, to, well, h'mm, the Constitution doesn't even mention a cut-off date.  The political parties and states have got rules about that, with an effective deadline at the end of August for ballot access to a sufficient number of states to have a chance of winning.  Up to the party conventions, it's wide open; afterwards, if there's an unexpected vacancy in their candidate for President or Vice-President, each party has ways of getting enough movers and shakers together to pick some poor sap who's acceptable to a majority of them and shove him or her onstage -- as long as they don't do it too late to ensure ballot access, which might get a little sticky.  So if any candidate, pundit or politician claims it's "unconstitutional" for the Democrats to replace President Biden with Vice-President Harris at the top of their ticket, laugh at 'em; they don't know what they are talking about.

     Likewise, complaints about "unfairness" over candidates, tactics, leaks, etc. are silly, preschoolers whining that they're not getting enough time in the sandbox.  It's politics; it's not especially "fair" and the throwing of dirt at one's opponents dates back to Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the 1800 Presidential election.  Like parts of the sausage factory, it may not be especially nice to watch, but that's the process.

     I think this is an important election, possibly the kind of watershed moment historians point to afterward.  Living in boring times would be a lot nicer, if you ask me; I'd prefer an election in which we're mostly concerned about what the incoming Presidential spouse is going to do about holiday decorations and if the next President prefers fishing, golf or natural history for relaxation.  But that's not what we've got, and as long as the contenders stick to spirited debate with a side of mud-slinging and name-calling, I'm okay with it; we've seen what happens when a candidate doesn't stop there, and it wasn't good.

I Got Your AI Ap

     Here's what I want: AI that plays podcasts while I'm in the bathtub, and pauses them whenever my ears are below water.  It's got to do so in a way that keeps creeps from peeping, because I refuse to be blamed for an outbreak of uncontrollable nausea in the sicko-hacker community.

     Get your AI solving that, and maybe I'll consider it something more than an investor-scamming BS machine.

Thanks, Googie

     A little while ago, I discovered I couldn't comment on my own blog.  They've changed how comments display, which may be related, and it gives me an error when I try to say something back to the people who said things to me.

     How fascinating.*
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* In charm school, we learned to say "how fascinating" instead of "m-----f------s" when referring to the annoying actions of our fellow humans.  People can be so very fascinating, don't you think?

How Did I Do It?

     Some years back, before the pandemic, I decide to learn to touch-type.  I found an online tutorial, followed it, and, lo -- I learned to touch-type.

     It's a good idea to run through such a course occasionally, and this one was exceptionally good, moving the student along at a fast pace and helping the feel of the keys stick in memory.  It's easy to develop bad habits in everyday typing and running through the exercises helps correct that.

     I could swear that I blogged about the course and linked to the website.  But I can't find it.  Somehow, if I did so at all, I wrote about it without using the term "touch type," or the words "keyboard," "course,"  "tutorial" or "class."

     Back to square one, I suppose.

     Update: found it!

We Had A Storm This Morning

     It came through this morning  a couple of hours before sunrise: a late-summer morning storm.

     First thunder like distant kettledrums, booming, looming, a far-off sizzle of lighting; then closer, elephants on the march, thumping, pounding, broken by zaps as the bolts found targets.  Rain next, a few drops hurled against the window like sand, the screen rattling, more rain rushing like surf and spraying the window, hissing like eager cobras hunting a way in, and behind it the thunder and searchlight-blinks of lightning.  Wave after wave of rain, walls of pure noise above the thunder's hammered anvil, finally fading.  The storm went stalking away, thunder muted, the rain less and less and then near silence; just the downspouts, ringing faintly with the last drops of water seeking the earth, and an occasional distant by-the-way thud of thunder from the backside of the front.

     It was worth losing an hour of sleep.  I had time for a quick nap before the sun started hauling itself over the far edge of the planet and the cats demanded breakfast.

     The early light was an electric silver-blue, barely enough to pick out water beaded on every twig, tree limb and wire, along all the gutters and fences.

Dr. Zarkov? Dr. Huer, Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine, Dr. Howard?

     My reference to "Dr. Zharkov" yesterday prompted a response -- I'd combined Buck Rogers with Flash Gordon!  It wouldn't be the first time those two science fictional universes have crossed paths; parts of sets and costumes from one character's 1930s serials showed up in the other's.

     For the record, Buck Rogers gets his fancy tech from Dr. Huer in the books and TV show; Flash Gordon's scientific wizard is Dr. Zarkov, no h.

     Dr. Howard, Dr. Fine and Dr. Howard?  I'll let them answer for themselves.

"Honeymoons," Hacks, Halfwits And Haters

     The campaign trail has gotten interesting, in much the same manner as the trail over Donner Pass. The campaign of Kamala Harris a basking in mostly-positive press, which the pundits have labeled a "honeymoon" and are whispering like the fellow behind a general being feted in ancient Rome, "This, too, shall pass."

     They're probably right.  All politicians have feet of clay -- all, one hundred percent, each and every one.  Being human, your guy or gal has done something stupid, thoughtless or awful, something suspect or shady at some point in their life.  Maybe a little, maybe a lot; maybe on purpose, maybe unknowingly.  But they did it, and it probably will come out.

     Meanwhile, some entity, probably Iran (who are known to be up to something) is probing the Donald Trump and Harris campaigns, looking to hack in.  Somebody succeeded with the GOP, and the buzz is that Roger Stone fell for the kind of trick your IT department warned you about: a plausible-looking email with a link in it.  The ancient wisdom claims that nobody's easier to trick than a trickster and Stone certainly qualifies; but he's also in an age group that gets tripped up by online scams.*  Social media's all abuzz that news providers who were given some of the hacked material aren't sharing it; but they've been burned before and they're still stinging over it.  They have decided it's better to report solemnly on those wicked folks who tried to sell stolen information than to look like a tool of some foreign interest.

     Over on X, Elon Musk has once again staged a failstacular for a political candidate he favored, almost exactly as he did for Ron DeSantis.  Here's a tip: when you fire most of the engineers, you may find you can't pull off the big-deal, high-visibility stunts.  There's no Buck Rogers without an army of Dr. Zharkovs behind the scenes making the magic happen.  It turns out that unlike building rockets to outer space, a social media company doesn't attract a pack of talented people willing to work long hours under bad conditions for industry-average wages.

     And I have to tell you, there's plenty of criticism of both party's offerings for the act in the center ring this November.  While Kamala Harris doesn't attract the same kind of loathing Hillary Clinton drew out, the people who don't like her really don't; and Donald Trump's detractors are legion.  I'll never like him, and while I find his personality and behavior repugnant, my primary objection remains as it has always been: he's the distilled essence of every bad manager I ever worked for, men who wrought chaos, caused turnover, dissension and discontent in underlings, and treated everyone who was fool enough to work for them as fools indeed, and disposable to boot.  I don't think that's any way to run a country, and I thought very little of his previous attempt at the job.  I'd vote for a guy who wears a boot on his head, if I thought he had the best chance of preventing another Trump Presidency.
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* Here's free advice to everyone's campaign for political office: keep the old people isolated from the Internet.  Yes, this is harsh and condescending, but they'll never click on a bad link in a printed out email and compromise the servers holding all your important data.  If you can't do that, stop putting the actionable/salacious/vulnerable stuff online!  Make the bad guys have to show up in person and pop a lock to get at it, and they may remember Watergate and think twice before proceeding.

Waitstaff Tipping

     Apparently, waitperson tipping has nothing at all to do with cow tipping, and, really, you'd think that would be clearly spelled out somewhere.  Also, some people have just got no sense of humor.

     But with that little misunderstanding cleared up, dropping the Federal tax on tips started out as one of Donald Trump's talking points and has now been embraced by the Kamala Harris campaign. This is almost predictable, given the amount of time political reporters and candidates spend in diners and coffee shops.  Somewhere between two and three percent of the workforce take part of their income in tips and with both sides on board, the usual rush of contrarian pundits have rushed to calculate the possible lost Federal tax intake and explain why is it either moot or significant, a great idea when their side puts it forward and mere pandering when the other side follows suit.

     I listened to one expert explain that if a waitress is making the same as cashier but losing less of it to the IRS, why, suddenly that cashier's job is less appealing -- and never mind that "cashier" is liable to be an app on a waiter's phone these days, linked to a cash drawer, or that when punching a register is a full-time position, it involves a lot less running around and possibly even a chair, and it tends to pay better.

     But put all that to one side and gather 'round, because not one of these people has figured out what's up.  Back in the old days, before a global pandemic laid a near-knockout punch on dining out, a whole lot of people tipped in cash, even when they paid their bill with plastic.  Remember that stuff?  Billfold sized, mostly-green paper rectangles with pictures of dead Presidents on the front, and similarly-decorated shiny metal rounds that make a happy jingling sound?  You left a stack of 'em at your table, ten percent* of your bill if you're a cheapskate, twenty percent or more if you're not, and it was up to the server to decide if they told Uncle Sam about it or not.

     Flash forward to 2020.  Waitstaff, if they are working at all, are running orders out to cars or even making home deliveries, and nobody wants to touch cash.  Who sneezed on that stuff last?  Yuck.  They're using apps and cards for everything -- including tips.  In 2024, we're sitting down in restaurants more, but we're still getting out a card or reaching for our phone when it comes time to pay, tip and all.

     Those electronic payments leave a paper -- well, digital -- trail.  They show up on the waitress's W-2.  They get taxed.  There's no dodging it, no friendly little oopsie dropping the day's tips into one's pocketbook and heading off to the five-and-dime without first writing it all down for April 15th.

     The change from making tips non-taxable is likely going to be a blip compared to previous years, other than whatever bump it might have taken during the pandemic -- and only "might," since a lot of wait-whatever jobs went all the way away when we were trying to avoid gathering with a bunch of strangers and swapping viruses.  I'm not calling waitpeople tax scofflaws -- most of those jobs pay so little (base rates less than minimum wage in many states) that once they did the math, they were taxed lightly if at all -- but in a cash economy, it's easy to more or less innocently forget to keep track.

     It's nice the candidates and talking heads have something to fuss over that isn't creepy, threatening or a dire crisis, but this one has already burned more in the cost of ink, paper and electricity than it ever gained or loss in Federal taxes.
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* Bear in mind that I'm old and these figures are undoubtedly low.  Tip well, these people are handling your food.

The Eyeglasses Of Time

     These days, they can correct for a lot of vision problems.  Can't focus up close, can't focus far away, look at things sideways and starbursty?  They can fix that.  I grew up with severe nearsightedness, bad to begin with and worse every year, with a side of astigmatism and by my early forties, I needed reading glasses with contacts, and eventually bifocals.  They'd fixed some of my nearsightedness when I had cataract surgery, but left me with worse astigmatism (had I known that it would be worse, and how much the not covered by insurance upcharge for astigmatism correction was going to be, I would have paid the extra two grand; day of surgery is maybe not the right time to tell the patient).  My eyeglasses deal with it, and now I have to layer on magnification for close work -- but I miss non-blurry reading without glasses.

     There's another kind of vision problem that no lens can fix.  I ran into it just this morning: seeing over time.  I opened my browsers and found a typo in the first line of yesterday's post!

     But -- I'd checked it.  Multiple times.  Blogger's defaults these days mean I write posts in "compose" mode, then go over to "HTML view" to review what the robot thought I wanted in the way of hypertext commands.  That gets me a look at the text in two different fonts, which is usually enough to catch the misspelling, homonyms (bane of fast typists) and typos.  Usually, but not every time.

     Manuscripts -- fiction, mostly -- are even worse.  Thanks to decades of hammering out mostly-unpublishable fiction on typewriters, I typically compose in a typewriter-like font (Courier), because that looks right to my eye, then change to Times New Roman, replace all my two-spaces-between-sentences with a single space,* turn all the five-space paragraph indents† into half-inch ones (locating and correcting every instance where the word processor sneaked in a plain carriage return instead of a proper paragraph marker‡), and then run them through two different word processing programs and let spellcheck and grammar check point out what they think is wrong.  I don't always agree with the software's suggestions, but it's another set of eyes -- and even after all that, if I let the manuscript sit for a week or a month and then go back to it, I will find things that are obviously wrong.

     Time gives you distance from your words.  In the first day or two, you're still looking at the screen or pages through what you intended to write instead of what's there, and your eye will slide right by missing letters, wrong words and punctuation that appears to have been dropped from orbit by creatures who do not use language in the ways that we do.

     I can't entirely explain it.  Surely the eye can't miss what's right before it?  But it does, slick as a magic trick, unless you let the piece sit a spell and become a little less familiar before you take another look.
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* Two spaces after a full stop is a habit I can break only a little easier than I can give up breathing.  It's automatic.
 
† And this one is nearly as ingrained.  New thought, new paragraph, thumb hits the spacebar five times and I am already composing before that last thwack.
 
‡ Most WYSIWYG word processors have a button or command to let you look behind the scenes; in Word and LiberOffice, it's marked with a paragraph sign or pilcrow, ¶.  Both have some provision to edit these hidden commands when you've made them visible, though figuring it out can be very frustrating.  Older programs used inline commands, a series of incantations the user had to learn, which could be very flexible once you had them down.  But J. Random Manager could not be handed that kind of tricky, opaque tool and be expected to crank out memos and sales orders fifteen minutes later, and so we got Word and its competitors.

Improving A Day

     Successful cooking gives me a lift.  I had a largeish pork roast (over two pounds) yesterday, which meant less room in the roasting pan for vegetables, and I'd ended up with a nice assortment of vegetables: A good-sized turnip, potatoes, a banana pepper and a yellow bell pepper, carrots, celery, diced red onion and -- technically not a vegetable -- sliced Shiitake mushrooms.

     I sat the pork in some balsamic vinegar, soy sauce, coarse salt, curry powder and Cajun seasoning to ponder its fate while I decided what to leave out.  The onion had to stay -- diced onion has a limited lifespan.  Besides, it keeps trying to infiltrate and subvert everything else in the fridge.  Peppers and celery* don't last all that long, either, and the mushrooms wanted used--  Potatoes, however much I love them (and I do), are a moderator.  Spuds soak up excess salt and spice.  They help thicken the broth.  But you can leave 'em out, as long as you get everything else right.

     So I started the pork in my little roasting pan, over indirect heat on the covered grill.  When I have time, this is my go-to method for every season but Winter; it takes minimal attention and doesn't heat up the house.  I gave it a bit more curry powder and a pinch of sugar, drew a wide streak of coarse Dijon mustard down the top, poured a little of the marinade over it and put it on the heat.  Turnip next; they take a fair amount of cooking and are almost as interested in soaking up the spices as a potato.  Carrots, peppers, a big bay leaf, onion, celery, mushrooms and a couple of small cans of tomato sauce followed at a leisurely pace; the last ingredient went in with an hour and a half left in the two hour, thirty minute cooking time.

     The end result had a deep, smoky flavor with tender turnips and vegetables that were just done enough.  The tomato-based broth was wonderful!  Tamara cleared her entire plate, and she's no fan of pork.  There was a hint of heat from the banana pepper, but it was only a grace note.
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* The trick with celery is to give it an airtight wrapping of aluminum foil before putting it in the fridge.  This will buy a week or more, if you start with celery that hasn't gone too soft. 

Irony

     The weather today was lovely, really wonderful.  I felt lousy all day.

That Didn't Take Long

      Seen on my way to work yesterday, a new business with what appears to be a keen awareness of just how things in their line are going:

Yes, it's Healthcare Chaos Management.  About time, if you ask me.

The Lessons They Learned

     Medical labs are their own industry.  I have a long history of minor medical mishaps and as a result, I've had a front-row seat to the change from "labs" being a matter of going off to Local General Hospital for them, to your doctor's nursing staff drawing a few vials of blood and something happens offstage, to in-office labs run by a third party (still a lot of that around), to needing to drive to one of the lab company's many locations and walking in.

     The pandemic hit the labs hard; they needed to do a lot of testing while keeping their staff and patients healthy.  Office staff jobs were cut to the minimum and made remote or at least moved well away from patient contact; phlebotomists worked alone or in teams of two and they encouraged making appointments, so waiting room occupancy could be kept down.  They rolled out a sleek automated check-in process that used a touchscreen kiosk that scanned your ID and insurance card like something out of a sci-fi film.  As Covid transitioned from being pandemic to endemic, the number one lab company (at least around here) bought the number two lab company.  They kept all of their offices as long as social distancing was mandated, and then--

     Then they did the obvious thing.  They started shutting down the least-used locations, consolidating offices in close proximity, moving out of high-rent locations to cheaper spaces.  They kept the electronic check-in and never brought back human receptionists.  And they consulted efficiency experts on just how many patients a staff of two or three should be able to process per hour, what number of no-shows and walk-ins could be expected, and how much annoyance patients would tolerate.

     --I don't know for sure about that last one, but it seems likely.  If you work the system by its own rules, current medical labs aren't too bad; I signed up online two days in advance, arrived at my appointment time and was in and out in about forty-five minutes.

     Forty-five minutes?  Yeah, I'd be a little irked, too; a half-hour would have been okay, but nearly an hour?  Except for one tiny little thing: the efficiency experts didn't count on human nature.  Three lab techs (one of whom was, I gathered, stuck on the phone, trying to untangle a terrific mess involving scrambled logistics before it became an even bigger mess), nobody on the front desk, two kiosks -- and a lobby full of unscheduled people who were hoping to walk in and get their labs without any effort.  Many of them interrupted the tech as she opened the door to summon the next patient; a few would just pry it open (no handle on the outside)  and walk in, peering into blood-draw stations until they found someone with an employee ID badge and slowing down the work.  Why, their draw would only take a minute and then they'd be out of the way, but that darned machine was telling them to come back in two hours!

     The phlebotomists are not in charge of the kiosk system; it assigns walk-ins to the next available slot, with an option to take the next no-show if that happens any sooner, and that's all there is.  There's no slipping someone in -- the test-tube labels are printed up when your assigned time arrives and the tech has them at the blood-draw station when she calls your name.  And she's working at a pace that leaves very little room for distractions and pointless conversation.

     It would be easy to blame the lab staff, but they're on the same treadmill as the patients; it's easier still (though less immediately satisfying) to blame the lab company, only we'll probably find they bled money through the Covid years (profit margins aren't great and everything shifted under them) and the suits making the decisions are layers and layers (and miles and miles) away from the point of human contact at the lab -- where people are still arriving, wanting to chat with the long-gone nice lady behind the desk and conveniently sneak their quick blood draw in between Pilates and grocery-shopping.  Ain't gonna happen and you might as well think of it as being right back to the time when you had to drive to Local General Hospital and patiently wait your turn.  Look, if you need lab work, you might want to treat that as more important than popping into the Rexall for a roll of Lifesavers.

     I found myself apologizing to the tech for people's behavior while she struggled with my rollaway vein (the obvious one inside my right elbow is uncooperative).  She sighed as if a weight had been lifted and said, "It's like this all day, every day.  They hate those kiosks."

     Might want to start figuring out how to get used to them.

Parasocial

     Elsewhere, and in a context in which I would not have expected it (a fairly heated discussion thread about which of several mostly-interchangeable possible candidates would be best for a relatively useless office), a stranger observed, "We've got to stop forming parasocial relationships with politicians."

     And that's the heart of it.  Mr. or Mrs. or Ms. Candidate/Officeholder is not your pal, your hero, or even your nemesis.  They don't know you, they don't recognize your individual five, fifty or five hundred dollar donation to their campaign, and they're not going to, past, if you are indeed fortunate, a quick handshake and a vague glance, forgotten like yesterday's chewing gum as soon as the flavor fades.  No matter who they are, I can assure you that they don't care about you personally.  Oh, a really fat wad of cash will get you their ear, and maybe even some favorable legislation, but emotional engagement?  Buy a dog!

     Politics is not about selecting a saviour king.  It's about making the least-bad choice.  You're choosing between feral tomcats dragging dead rats, trying to pick the one with the least-smelly rat and the best behavior.  Hailing any of them -- ex-President Trump, Vice-President Harris, or whatever the hell it is RFK, Jr. is supposed to be -- as The Answer is a huge mistake.  At best, they're an answer; not a great one, but maybe one that will work for awhile.

     They're not Your New Pal.  They don't reciprocate your feelings.  You're a blur in the crowd.  Stop playing pretend.  Don't get emotionally invested. 

Bit Of Advice

     If you're going to present yourselves as Defenders of Western Civilization -- or Civilisation, even -- it might not be a good look to be trashing and burning libraries.  Maybe take a step back from that, along with looting and beating people up.

     Frickin' barbarians.

The Siblings

     My older sister, younger brother and I  get together for a weekend brunch every so often, usually instigated by our baby brother, who is well aware that my sister and I tend to keep our distance.

     Why are we distant?  At this point, it's no more than habit.  We're very different people, who have a mild tendency to trip one another up without meaning to, and why should we risk it?

     But brunch is relatively harmless and the food is good where we meet, though the coffee's lousy.

     I shared a couple of stories I had written, crime stories involving Indiana and our good old sugar cream pie, the state pie.  A local T-shirt shop has mocked up a movie poster or book cover with that as the topic, which they are selling on T-shirts, fridge magnets and stickers, and I'm hoping to get some of my fellow writers to contribute to an anthology on the theme.  Unlike stories and artwork, titles and topics are not copyrightable; so I'll offer the T-shirt shop a piece of the action in exchange for using the art, and if they demur, I can proceed with different artwork and, out of courtesy, a different title.  If I can get two short stories out of it, my peers are sure to do much better.

     Why would I show those stories to my siblings?  Both use incidents and activities from our shared pasts: the big multi-family reunions our father's side used to hold, filling a large private park, and a remarkable, terrifying happening from Dad's youth.  Not the time he fitted one of his younger brothers with a gunny-sack parachute and sent him hurtling down from the haymow doors of the family barn (his brother survived, surprisingly unscathed) but about as bad.

A Hungarian Pepper

     Our nearest -- and fairly "foodie" -- grocer doesn't stock them.  But the one up in Broad Ripple proper often has nice, pale-green Hungarian peppers.  They're either cousins of the banana pepper or the same thing, and fairly hot raw with an intense, quick bite.

     I bought one Friday without much of a plan for it,  I was frying some cubed potatoes for breakfast today -- I serve them with crumbled bacon and scrambled eggs -- and I thought since Tam and I usually put hot sauce on the breakfast hash, why not cook the pepper right in it?  I diced it and gave it a taste: pretty hot.  I added about half before scrambling the eggs, and the end result was tasty and mild.  A bit of the raw pepper perked it up.  Good stuff -- and good to know they cook down to less heat.

P. T. Barnum

     You're saying his name now, aren't you?  Not Barnum, the other guy.  Maybe you deplore his crude racism and rudeness to women; maybe you believe he's holding the feet of a hostile news media to the fire.  Perhaps you think mass deportations are the right response to illegal immigration, or one of the worst ideas ever.  It doesn't matter to him, as long as his name leads the newscasts and his name underpins the water-cooler buzz.

     Long before Edward Bernays took up the torch and offered women a light, P. T. Barnum had worked out the principle: publicity is publicity.  Good, bad -- it barely matters.  You might remember Barnum as a promoter of hoaxes like the "Fiji Mermaid," but you do know his name.  His contemporary competitors? Not even a ripple.

     A genius for self-promotion does not imply talent or knowledge in other areas; but in the world of 2024, a product is its advertising.  And he's got you -- and the media talking heads -- saying his name.

Speaking Of Broadcasting

      I have long preferred to listen to radio news in the morning while I catch up on dishes,* make breakfast and rearrange the kitchen clutter.  These days, there's not a lot of news on the radio in Indianapolis, so it's the local NPR station† or nothing, unless I dig out a shortwave receiver and go hunting.

     This morning, closing a long story about an Olympic field hockey player who had part of a broken finger amputated rather than repaired so he could make it to the Paris Olympics, NPR played nearly all of what sounded like the John Williams arrangement of Leo Arnaud's "Bugler's Dream," the inspiring fanfare used for most U. S. network TV coverage of the Olympics since 1964, across two different networks.  The TV networks are protective of it; NBC was a few years getting the rights to the music after they wrestled Olympic coverage away from ABC and if you decide it'd be a great accompaniment to your "Olympics tire sale" commercial, better lawyer up and buckle in for a bumpy ride that will end in a crash.  Public radio sometimes gets a pass, on a "You wouldn't hit a skinny kid with glasses, would you?" basis and a tenuous extension of Fair Use: even big corporations don't like to get caught looking like a bully.  Or they may have worked something out with NBC, which is effectively out of the radio network business these days.

     One thing for sure: every time I hear those big kettledrums lead into that uplifting theme from the brasses, it chokes me up.  And I'm not even much of a sports fan. (Here's an interesting piece on music for the Olympics, with plenty of examples.)
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* Judge me if you must, but several dropped ceramic mugs, drinking glasses and nice plates back, I decided that if I was sleepy, I wasn't going to do the dishes after dinner, just scrape them, rinse them and let them soak until morning.  It was the trying to sort out razor-sharp shards from slippery, soapy silverware while sleepy that convinced me.
 
† They've got a local news department as least as good as the best county-seat AMs had forty years ago, which counts as pretty darned good these days. Without a subscription to the crumbling, tattered remains of the local newspaper, how else would I find out about scandals involving city government officials?