Star City

     I finished the first season of Apple TV's Star City a few weeks ago.  It's the Russian-side companion to their alternate history series For All Mankind, in which the Soviet Union barely beats the U.S. to the Moon and the Space Race never stops.

     The latter series shows events from the U.S. side, and the hardware is mostly familiar to anyone who grew up with NASA-inspired articles in the Sunday supplement and national magazines.  It provides about as much view into details of the USSR's space program as we ever got in real life: clunky, overbuilt equipment and cosmonauts who got the job done through grit and fatalistic determination -- or died trying.  Where America succeeded or failed in plain sight, the Russians announced results after the fact, or swept them under the rug when things went wrong.

      And that's what Star City is about: exploring space under paranoid totalitarianism and sometimes despite it, using improvised hardware, taking chances the West never would.  The hardware is...well, it's very Russian.

     Watching the series, I thought the clunkiness and improvisation was a little overplayed.  Surely the real-life Russians had better stuff, despite the awful politics?  Tamara's been reading The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, by John Strausbaugh.  He certainly looks to have done his homework, and the real Soviet space program was, if anything, even iffier than the TV series makes it out to be.  Oh, the Russians had (and still have) plenty of fine engineers, and Sergei Korolev was, if anything, even more determined an organizer, manager and overall rocket designer than Werner von Braun.  But circumstances far outside his control resulted in an effort that had to brute-force everything and accept huge risks.  One reason the R-7 launch system, direct ancestor to today's Soyuz, has been able to become ever more capable though incremental improvement is that it was a crude (but workable) mechanism to begin with; better alloys, better machining, better construction techniques and better electronics have kept it usable, and increased the payload carried on the large amounts of thrust originally needed just to get the stack of stages off the ground and headed for space.

     The Wrong Stuff makes an excellent companion volume to Star City, for all that it slightly undermines the big "what if..." of the series: what if Russia got there first?  But the real "what if..." is a different question: what if Korolev had not been so terribly abused under Stalin's purges that his time in the gulags left him physically damaged and headed for an early death?  If anyone could have led the way to getting the N-1 launcher working and pulled off a Moon landing with Russia's equipment, he would have been the guy; but as things went, he was gone long before the deadline.

     In For All Mankind's timeline, the USSR is still together by the early 2010s -- but it's not quite the same place it was, having loosened up just a little under the pressure to compete (and sometimes cooperate), largely peacefully, in space and at home.  But after one season of Star City, it's clear that even making that small amount of progress will be a long, hard road.

Distraction Screens

     It's no secret that I don't think much of Mr. Trump, or of how he and his gang of Republicans are running the federal government, ringing up unprecedented debt, yanking the rug out from under the poor at home and abroad, handing out tax breaks to their ultra-wealthy pals who do not pay it back in the form of increasing employment* and engaging in wars of choice with murky and/or immoral victory conditions.

     But I do try to limit myself to substantive criticism about issues of importance.  I might think the way he combs his hair looks stupid, but so what?  That hairstyle isn't picking anyone's pocket or breaking their leg, and in the course of a busy day, you can find five or six more at least as dumb.

     So the recent fuss about sneaking the President out of Turkey in the wake of a credible threat (and leaving the Press as sitting ducks -- the very same sitting ducks they'd be if they were sharing the plane with him) or an aide who appears to have an unhealthy devotion to the President (as have many, to many Presidents, and it's never a good sign) strikes me as silly-season distractions, running while there are at least two and half wars on, and our country is well involved with all of them, and while the economy continues to teeter dangerously.

     This August isn't a slow-news month.  There's plenty of real stuff to report on, none of it reflecting any glory on the clod infesting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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* The thing about trickle-down economics is, something's got to be trickling down for it to make sense, and I don't mean job cuts.  Otherwise, it's just a trick.

Radium Water! Now -- With Vitamins!

      The thing about "A.I." is that there's a lot of smoke over very little fire -- and every coat-tail riding grifter and half-baked amateur futurist is emitting their own clouds, huddled over the flames and seeing the Promised Land (or at least a fat bank account) in their glow.

     The latest comes from the very top: the current administration in Washington, DC* is pushing a "golden age of science" built around applying A.I. to, well, everything.  Exactly how anyone is supposed to do actual science -- which based on working out the actual facts about actual things and ideas -- using a tool that has a great and apparently inherent tendency to just make up plausible bullshit, no one can say.  In practice, it hasn't worked out, and the scientific journals have the same problem with specious A.I-generated article as fiction publishers do with A.I. dross that falls short of human efforts (and takes several pages to do so†), and the same problem with made-up A.I. citations as the legal profession.

     A.I. doesn't create new stuff; it uses the old stuff we already knew to create patterns of plausible stuff.  It may be able to pick out patterns in data that elude humans, too; but those results must be evaluated very carefully by subject-matter experts to determine what's real and what is only another "hallucination."  A.I. fools us in much the same way we fool ourselves, so it's not a simple task.

     Poorly understood by most people, with characteristics even the people who work developing it are struggling to understand, A.I. today occupies the same cultural space that radium (and radioactivity in general) did over a century ago, or vitamins a few year later.  The radium thing did not turn out so very well; vitamins did better.  The hype and hoopla‡ lingered, as the hype and hoopla from A.I. is now.

     Maybe let's not be in such a hurry to gulp it down by the gallon.
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* Here's a question for later: if the District of Colombia ever achieves statehood, will we start calling the Pacific coastal state "Washington, AC," or "Washington, OG?"  Or something else?  Yeah, yeah, the new state would be called something like District of Colombia, or maybe just Capitol District (for all those Hunger Games fans out there), but the city is Washington and you know we'll keep on using the old, familiar synecdoche.
 
† The problem is not so much that the writing is lousy -- Sturgeon's Law predicts 95% of all unsolicited fiction people send in is unpublishable -- as it is the sheer volume.  Typewriters let us write faster than we can think, and word processors let us edit so quickly that getting it right in the first draft no longer matters, but A.I. churns out fiction in greater volume than any collection of editors and assistants can manage to read.  There are gems in the slushpile, and 5% of the total was a sufficiently productive return at the pittance paid "first readers" to sort through it.  0.5% is not, and if A.I. was capable of recognizing the flaws well enough to sort through it, it wouldn't be creating so much unusable work.
 
‡ Even for vitamins: for awhile, every breakfast cereal advertised itself as so packed with vitamins that between them and the sugar, there couldn't have been much room left for grain.

First Day Back

     And, oh shucks, nobody missed me.  (Well, hardly anyone.)  This, in my kind of Engineering Department, counts as a success: if we do our jobs right, fixing most things before they break, we're nearly invisible.

     On the other hand, nobody from Engineering has been to the North Campus for nearly ten weeks and I have no idea what I might find.  It's on a pretty wet patch of land, in an area that's had even more rain than we received in Broad Ripple, so I may end up taking the old entrance, which travels over higher ground to reach the slightly elevated spot where the building stands.

     I was pretty beat at the end of the day, but not in pain.  Tired enough to be grumpy, which I'm going to have to get used to and compensate for.

...And The Waters Receded. Very Slowly.

     The White River peaked through Indianapolis last night, having set new records at several measuring stations -- but never quite overtopped the levees.

     That was scant comfort to the people on the river side.  Oh, they knew the bet, but when it's your home, a once-in-a-century flood still feels unfair.  Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and few other locations will be a long time drying out and taking stock of what they've lost.

     Successive waves of heavy rain keep sweeping through, keeping the flood higher than predicted.  It's still dropping, just not as fast as we'd all prefer.

     On the personal hobby front, I decided I could string my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna on the other side of the house from where I had planned, away from the neighboring house that got partially crushed.  There's going to be a lot of activity over there by and by, and one end of that antenna would have been barely inside the fence line.  It was a possible complication nobody needs -- especially not me.  I managed to get the antenna in place in the new location, but I haven't run coaxial cable to it yet.  That will take a little planning and a new hole in the wall with a special fitting.

     Tomorrow, I plan to go back to work.  Way back in June when all of this started, I tried twice on successive Mondays to go back, and had to give up before putting in a full day each time: too much pain, too little energy.  I'm doing better now.  Maybe not a hundred percent, but I may not get that again.  85%? 90?  I'll take it.

We Aten't Ded

     Despite rising floodwaters, Tam and I are, so far, nearly untouched.  Roseholme Cottage is about a mile away from the White River to the north and west; the river makes a kind of drain-trap bend to our north around Broad Ripple (and the old town of Wellington, long absorbed into the city).  It will peak early tonight, and we're probably going to be sufficiently protected by the levee finished a few years ago, and by our neighborhood's slight elevation above the flood plain.

     Spare a thought for the Broad Ripple Art Center, its grounds and outbuildings being on the river side of the levee along with a few residences and an apartment building; and for Ravenswood, upstream and low-lying (that neighborhood floods at the drop of the hat, and we're in a fumble-fingered milliner's convention), and for Rocky Ripple, the not-quite-an-island (and independent municipality) downstream, across from Butler University, between the river and the canal and also, in a cost-saving compromise that avoided removing multiple houses along the old river levee, on the wet side of the new levee.  Homes in those places are already awash or worse.

     Welcome to a hundred-year flood, after thousand-year rainfall levels.

The More You Know?

      Not only do most hairdressers support your right to self-expression by changing your hair color, many of them are willing to dye for it!

"Primary Results Muddled"

     That's the occasional headline: "Unclear Primary Results For Dems" is the most common version, but in fact, the Republicans are inconsistent, too -- sometimes Trump-endorsed candidates win, sometimes more old-school GOP politicians who are at some distance from Trumpism.

     And, oh gosh, it's true.  In some counties, cities or districts, DSA-affiliated or adjacent hopefuls are doing well; other places, it's your aunt's Democrat, with pictures of FDR, LBJ and Joe Biden on the mantle.  There are locales where the Christian Nationalist Republicans come out on top in primaries, and others where, well, Mike Lindell is firmly convinced some kind of skullduggerous Deep State made him lose by over 11 percent.*

     If you think of primary voters as some solid block of Party identity across the country, from sea to shining sea, majestic purple mountains and amber waves of grain (or is that floodwaters?) included, it does look pretty muddled.

     But it isn't.  Two big-tent parties dominate American politics and, under various names and historical shadings, they always have.  You might not like sharing your particular tent with the more wild-eyed candidates and their voters, yet there they are and there are some places where they do well, especially in primaries.  Rural Americans like hardcore conservatives, and a lot of 'em aren't any too sure about foreign people with foreign accents and foreign religions.  The details have varied over the years, but that stereotype exists for a reason.  Likewise, people crammed into big cities or enmeshed in a daily struggle against harsh climates often value highly organized cooperation, and see government as a natural way to create it.  You're going to get Lefty, socialist-leaning All-Cops-Are-Bastards candidates in giant metroplexes and parts of the Upper Midwest; you're going to get various kinds of Right-wing, xenophobic Christian Nationalist candidates in the vast swath of agricultural and ranch lands where the towns are small and widely spaced.  And you're going to get more "purple," center-leaning candidates in the industrialized places that draw population from these extremes.

     People, even people that look pretty loony to you or me or that dude over there and hold some far-out views, deserve a fair chance to select representatives, mayors, governors and so on that reflect their community.  I don't very much like Indiana's current Lieutenant Governor, a religious nutjob who thinks the Earth (and the Universe) is a little over six thousand years old (and that's one of his less objectionable notions), but his party put him on the Republican ballot for a reason, and I hope the Governor, state legislature and courts can keep a lid on the crazy little guy.

     While the Unitary Executive excesses of the Trump administration are not, in my opinion, at all normal or proper, running and sometimes electing a very mixed bag of elected officials is normal, and if you want to keep them within more reasonable limits, that power is in your hands: go vote in primary elections!  You can count on the extremists showing up; they've got an axe to grind and the ballot box is their whetstone.  You can make it more of a grindstone, and help hold the noses of our politicians to it, simply by showing up and making an informed choice.
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*  It did, in fact, not.  This would not be the first time Mr. Lindell has been plagued by imaginary spiders or the like, and in my opinion, it will not be the last.

Not Much Today

     About all I did today was struggle with paperwork.  The extended leave time and medical stuff involves two big and doctrinaire insurance companies; a large medical practice that includes hospitals, all manner of specialists, physical therapists and imaging specialists, and is singularly stubborn and uncooperative when it comes to filling out forms; and the very large and procedure-bound company I have ended up working for, after decades of working for a much smaller one in the same business where you could solve most problems by finding the one or two people who knew how to deal with it and having a short conversation.

     There are no short conversations now, and nobody's interested in helping solve someone else's problems.  There are only rules, and if they don't make sense, tough luck.

     At present, I need a form filled out by licensed experts so I can be allowed to return to work; or they can fill out another form that says I shouldn't.  I have to turn the form in five days before I return.  I can't come back without the form -- and if I don't come back, even if I don't have the form, they will assume I'm playing hooky and I'll be in quite a lot of trouble.  Nevertheless, I won't be allowed to return unless I have the form, and it needs to be filled out and signed by a doctor familiar with my treatment.  (No, I can't just find a shiny new MD who needs a chrome-plated dingus for his or her Benz and offer 'em $500 to fill the damn thing out.)  And there's no direct number or email for either the doctor or the form-filling-out center (yes, they have one), only voicemail and a frustratingly indirect messaging system.  Multiple messages over multiple days have gone without answer.

     The medical care I'm receiving is fine.  The doctor and physical therapists are, as near as I can tell, all competent and highly qualified.  But the whole outfit not real big on other people's paperwork, especially when it's the patient asking.  And the insurance company who require the form before they will give my employer the all-clear won't ask them to fill out this one, even though they have already requested and received a lot of other documentation from the same medical practice.  Why?  I don't know, and apparently damn me for asking; they acted (politely) like I was trying to get them to cheat when I asked them to ask the medical practice to fill out the form, since they weren't responding to me.

     I have no idea how any of this will work out.  I went home with a gimpy back thinking I'd be out a week or two at the most, and I left my main toolbag in a cabinet at the North Campus with a few thousand dollars worth of my personal hand tools in it, some of them irreplaceable.  I left more of my tools in my desk at the Main Campus.  (I'm kind of picky about tools, and I'm even more picky about being able to do the job without having to wait for some other geek to remember to return the tools he got out of the company toolbox to work on his project.  I'm not going to impugn my peers over poor toolbox discipline, but it's not impossible that one or two of them might be a tiny bit forgetful about returning tools to the box after use.*)

     Presently, all this soap-opera stuff is up in the air, despite my having a letter from my back specialist on the practice's letterhead that says I can return to normal duty at a date in the not-too-distant future.  It's not the actual form, you see, and so therefore -- medical license and specialist certifications notwithstanding -- it may not count.

     I'll bet all of them just leave screwdrivers and staplers, etc. lying where the gadgets were last used, too.  I know the doctor does -- but he's got people whose job it is to clean them up and put them away.
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* One of the things I routinely do -- when I'm working -- is walk through the technical areas and see that all the widgets are lit up properly, picking up abandoned tools and materials as I go and putting them them back in their normal storage places where the next desperate slob can find them.  I don't know why other people don't do this, but I'm not the boss of them; I'm only in charge of how I deal with it, so I do.

A Rain Day With Rain -- And Wind, And Worse

     It wasn't worse for me, though it could have been.  I was on the standby list for physical therapy, and the called this morning with an opening at 1:30 p.m.  Was I interested?  The last set of exercises the therapist assigned me left my back sore, so you bet I was; he's been good about adjusting the therapy when it hurts.

     What with one thing and another -- I got absorbed in the last chapters of a book I was reading -- I rushed out the door at the last minute, ahead of the day's second wave of storms coming in from the north.  The first set hadn't been too bad, but there were thunderstorm and tornado warnings along the track of the second one.

     I checked in just in time, got the new exercises and ran through them, and all the while, the huge windows of the medical building gave everyone a front row seat to an ominous wall of dark-gray clouds.  I had my back to them, laying on a table and doing knee lifts, when the PT specialist said, "Better wrap up, this thing's about to hit.  You can go out the employee entrance it's closer to your car."

     I sat up and turned around to look out the window as wind gusts bent the plantings outside over.  He handed me a printout and led me to the door.  I made it to my car barely ahead of the rain and drove home to the booming of thunder.

     Got from the car, though the garage and to the back door as the rain picked up, and was inside before it started sheeting down.  The lights flicked a few times, and I started hearing sirens.  They got closer and closer, and I went out on the front porch to have a look.

     Next house to the north, a home health nurse scurried from her car to their porch, looked at me and said loudly, "I called it in."  Just then, two fire trucks pulled up, crews got out, and headed towards the house to the south.

     I hadn't looked in that direction until they did.  The last big tree on my lot (well, half on mine and half on my neighbor to the south's lot), a big oak, had toppled across the one-story house, smashing the living room and dining room, and coming to rest with limbs poking through the roof of the next house to the south.  It looked like someone had slammed a sledge hammer down on a dollhouse.  It took out the long dropwire from the alley to a streetlight along the road, tucking the wire under itself and into the house.

     The house was empty.  No one was hurt.  The guy who owns it lived there several years ago, got married and had a baby on the way shortly afterward, and the house was going to be too small.  He and his family moved to a bigger place and he's been a landlord ever since.  His most recent tenants moved out two weeks ago!  If the tree had fallen north instead of south, it would have done similar damage to my house.

     I think that house may be totalled.  The oak was pretty solid, but had deep splits at the base and shallow roots.  It fell like the wrath of Zeus, shattering the far wall, reducing the roof to pieces, and forcing the front wall to lean out several feet at the top.  The homeowner showed up shortly after the firemen left, having done a safety check and put up caution tape.  He was joined by a man from the gas company, who confirmed IFD had shut off the gas and checked for leaks, and before he was done, a representative from a commercial recovery company arrived.

     Within an hour, a large tree crew with large machines was cutting away the tree and lifting out the pieces.  Power & Light had shut off electricity to the streetlight and the house (update: or not; the streetlight still works, which is unsafe), and by twilight, the tree crew was gone (they've pretty well trashed my raised flowerbed; I haven't been able to do anything with it this year and the old, soft landscape timbers were knocked askew and battered, my front yard being the only place to stack the pieces of the fallen tree before loading them into a big truck.  They did their best to put it back together, but I'm going to need new 4x4s.) and a recovery crew was wedging in bracing 2x4s and nailing them to the sagging walls and stakes freshly hammered into the ground.  They tarped up the roof of the next house south, too.

     My former neighbor's not sure what he's going to do, rebuild or demolish, rent or sell, but the last big tree is gone.  (So's my G5RV ham antenna -- the oak provided support about 3/4 of the way along the east half of it.  The various supports for the antenna worked just as I had hoped; the wire snapped as the oak fell, and the unsupported pieces were too short to get into trouble.  I'm out of the G5RV business for awhile.)

     Next time, remind me not to complain about rain days without rain.  The alternative can be much worse!

A Rain Day With No Rain

     The rain missed us!  Storm warnings to the north but we dodged it.  But there's another chance tomorrow.

Slow Going

     Other than routine -- laundry, dishes and the network politics shows -- I spent today on antenna projects.  Between heat, humidity and my bad back, it's not quick.  I measured and assembled the long side of an off-center-fed dipole antenna, having already done the short side, made with heavy solid wire.  I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but I've always wanted to try, and I had a small stock of what once passed for industrial scrap, accumulated over decades.  It's cut for the 40 meter ham band, which means about 66 feet of wire overall -- some "scrap!"

     I'd had an older version once, taken down years ago when we had tree work done, coiled up and stashed in the flowerbed it used to hang above.  The insulators survived, and maybe the homemade matching transformer, but the stranded wire was greenish and the coaxial cable looked iffy once I located my antenna analyzer and tested it.  (My YouKits imported antenna analyzer is at least ten years old; modern "nano vector network analyzers" will run rings around it* for about what I paid, but it's simple and gives a quick indication if you've got an antenna or a lump, a good coaxial cable or a bad one.)

     This week promises rain, so progress may be even slower.  That's okay -- stringing up an antenna in a hurry is never a good idea, and that goes double when trying to avoid back strain.
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* Almost literally "rings," since they'll do the useful Smith Chart display, while mine only gives a plot of impedance and SWR over a selected frequency range, around a selected center frequency. 

Doc Savage Flashlight

     I've got my Doc Savage flashlight -- and they work just the way Lester Dent described!  Of course, he was writing pulp magazine stories in the 1930s, long before high-strength magnets, light-emitting diodes and supercapacitors.  Whatever kinds of dynamo flashlights were available in his time would have been bulky, clumsy things, eking out extra life from carbon-zinc batteries.

     The iFixit people sell an inexpensive hand-powered flashlight that is small and charged by squeezing a little lever whenever the beam starts to dim.  They're far from the only source -- the various big online retailers list a wide variety, from basic squeeze-charged units to fancy ones with a hand-crank, a radio receiver and a jack to charge your phone.  None of them are high-end tactical lights, but if you're looking for something to leave in useful places for jobs like finding your way to the basement when the lights go out, a few of these wouldn't be a bad choice,  The supercapacitor "battery" on most of them isn't going to turn crusty after a year or two of neglect, though it may need a quick charge by the lever.

     You've already got a better portable communications device than Doc and his associates ever had -- or even Dick Tracy! -- so why not add a flashlight like theirs, too?

Uncapped?

     FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has led the commissioners in a 2-1 vote to end the longstanding limits on how much of the broadcast media landscape any one company can control.

     Starting in 2004, no single entity was allowed to control what was (potentially) on the screens of more than thirty-nine percent* of the national over-the-air TV audience, and it may still be.  (Before that, the limit was lower.)  Those limits were not set by the FCC; Congress told 'em, back when George W. Bush was President and his party held the majority in both houses of Congress.  The number was a compromise among Republicans: some wanted it raised to 45% while others wanted it kept at 35% (set in 1996, up from an even lower limit) -- and part of the deal was that the FCC wouldn’t and couldn’t raise it higher on their own.  After all, Congress makes the laws and the FCC only makes rules to ensure the things within their purview are done lawfully.  Chairman Carr's opinion on Executive Branch agency deference to Congress seems to vary depending on who's in the White House.

     But before I continue, take another look at that 2-1 vote: the FCC began with seven commissioners in 1934 but quickly settled down to five, no more than three of them from the same party, appointed to staggered terms by Presidents and approved (or rejected) by the Senate; it was established by the various Communications Acts passed by Congress and the general notion is a balance between Presidential power and the need for stability in regulations for the regulated entities, mostly direct users of the radiofrequency spectrum and "common carriers," the latter being telephone and Internet providers.  What's at issue is a limited resource, bandwidth; just as there's a finite amount of land to build on, there are only so many signals you can usefully emit or cram into a given wire or fiberoptic cable.  Right now, we've got only three Commissioners on the FCC, one Democrat appointee and two Republicans.  We're short one of each and the current administration has shown no interest in digging up a couple more (and it's a paying job, too!  Hell, I'd take it.  I hear the benefits package is pretty decent).

      There are lots of specific effects from this possible change (court fights are sure to follow, and we already live in an age of media giants -- the regulatory question is really about their becoming even more gigantic or not), but it's the bigger picture we should be looking at: an understaffed Federal Communications Commission, acting in direct contravention of the clear intent of laws passed by the United States Congress.  The greater issue is one of Caesarism versus small-r republicanism, and you'd never guess which side many -- but not all! -- of the big-R Republican politicians are on.
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* It's more complicated than that, of course.  Get out your slide rule -- here's a simplified (!) explanation, still on the FCC's website as I write this, though that may change:
     "There is no limit on the number of television stations a single entity may own nationwide as long as the station group collectively reaches no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households. For the purpose of determining compliance with this National Television Ownership rule, television stations operating on UHF channels (14 and above) are attributed with only half (50 percent) of the number of TV households in the DMA, as opposed to 100 percent of the number of households attributed to stations operating on VHF channels (13 and below). This is known as the UHF Discount. Unlike the rules discussed above, the National Television Ownership rule is no longer subject to the FCC's quadrennial review."

Friday, Ugh

     I spent over two hours in the dentist's chair Friday morning.  Went in for three fillings, came home with four, a numb upper lip and a sore nose, and still had to get to physical therapy in the afternoon.  So you will, I hope, excuse me for not posting on Friday.

Hooray For Breakfast!

      Today, I managed to make it to Good Morning Mama's in time to enjoy their home-made corned beef hash, with a scrambled egg on top.  Between physical therapy and doctor appointments, I have only managed that once before during this extended leave.

     Speaking of doctors--  I've had a minor irritation in my left eye for weeks,  I thought it might be an ingrown eyelash (the ancient Romans, who would pluck an eyelash for luck much as you might knock wood, were so plagued by ingrown eyelashes that the tools to deal with the problem were part of every physician's instruments).  My family doctor, back in July, thought it was more likely an allergy and had me start using over-the-counter allergy-relieving eye drops, but the problem continued and was getting a little worse.  I finally called my eye doctor's office.  They wanted to see me the next day, if not sooner.

     After one of the more awkward eye exams I've had (it's not easy to get a good look at the inside of an eyelid), he told me it was an infection, with a couple of cloudy spots, and phoned in a prescription for steroid-antibiotic eye drops.  Even a single day later, I think they're working.  The infection caused a funny feeling along the edge of my eyelid, like there was a little something in there that wouldn't wash away.  If you get that kind of sensation, don't ignore it even if it's not that bad; it could be something that won't go away on its own.  (And no, it's not eyelash mites gone wild.  Those, the eye specialist tells me, have such distinctive symptoms that they're easy to diagnose.)

Shell Game

     I guess it appeals to a certain kind of mindset: the so-called "mass deportation rally" that was going to be in Fishers....wasn't in Fishers, just north of Marion County.  Instead, the $50-a-head would-be mass-deporters were sent to a parking lot in Greenfield, off to the east of the metro, and from there to a secret location in Boone County, to the northwest.  (After all, fuel is so cheap, what's another hour's drive in the rain?)

     This fancy double-shuffle was apparently because there was a march of about a thousand people in Fishers in support of immigrants.  And I'm not going to condemn anyone for conflict avoidance.  I'd rather have 'em dodging than fighting.  It's way less messy for everyone else.

     But the whole thing seems kind of skeezy, and prerecorded addresses by Micah Beckwith, our religious oddball Lieutenant Governor, and by the always opportunistic more-MAGA-than-thou Attorney General Todd Rokita did nothing to change the impression that the event was mostly a way to separate the credulous from their cash with minimal effort for the people collecting the take.  A lot of skulking around, self-directed Nacht und Nebel to enhance the experience.

     Press coverage was relatively thin, too -- here's the most complete story I have found.

Hair Of The Dog?

      Hair of the dogweed,* maybe?  I spent most of today playing an ultra-cautious version of Hiram Bingham in the back yard, slashing away months of growth an inch at a time along the north fence, where thorny vines and sweet, flowering weedy honeysuckle bushes are threatening to take over.  I carried along a folded thick-paper leaf bag, and when the weeds were trimmed so low I was tempted to bend over, I knelt or sat down instead.

     Did it work?  I got in a warm tub with Epsom salts afterward, did my back exercises before and after, and I'm not unusually sore as I write.  Ask me tomorrow.

     Yesterday, I did a different thing.  Near the fence, my long-abandoned DirecTV dish (standard definition -- the HD feed uses different hardware) has been occupying a driven metal post.  It's never going to be lit back up, since A) it's outmoded and B) through no fault of DirecTV, there's nothing on it I'd want to watch that I can't pick up over the air or stream via the internet.  So I took the dish off the post.  I've wanted to put up a simple vertical antenna† for my ham radio stuff for quite some time, and that post would do nicely.  However, it stuck up nearly five feet above the ground, a lot more than I needed or wanted.

     Swinging a sledgehammer can be hard work.  But it doesn't have to be.  I learned years ago, sinking ground rods, that unless you are John Henry setting out to beat a steam drill, you can let the hammer do most of the work.  Don't swing it!  Lift it, and then guide it down while letting the weight fall.  Yes, whatever you're driving only sinks a fraction an inch when the few pounds of hammer head strikes, but what do you care?  Bring a bottle of water and enjoy the slow thump, thump, thump, eight or ten or a dozen in a row, take a sip and start over.  It took me a couple of hours, off and on, to sink the heavy galvanized tubing until about thirty inches were still above ground, and I wasn't sore afterward.  (All the underground utilities come in from the street and this is behind the house -- "Be sure before you dig" includes hammering stuff into the ground.  If you're not sure, don't do it!)

     There was plenty of time to look around while I did that, which was when I realized the honeysuckle roots and nasty thorn vines were way out of control.  I'm probably going to have to pay someone to dig up those darned honeysuckles: there's no making a shovelful of dirt any lighter or the process any easier on my back, and no matter how close to the ground I trim them, they keep on growing.

     All of these activities go very slowly, and I no longer grab the big toolbox with a wide assortment of tools on my way out the door.  Only what is needed, and if I have to make extra trips, that's fine.  I don't like it, but I like the alternative a lot less.
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*Scrub oak, deadly nightshade, a little poison ivy (but less every year), what I think may be hemlock, and pokeweed.  The latter is poisonous, too; the berries can be squeezed to produce hot-pink ink that dries brown -- but don't lick the pen!  At least the scrub oak isn't poison.  (There's no part of pokeweed that isn't poisonous.  People used to make "poke salad," but it starts with young leaves and requires multiple boilings and rinses.  Your grandmother or great-grandmother knew how to do it safely, but I wouldn't want to try.  There's about a zillion different kinds of tasty, safe greens you can grow and enjoy before turning to that stuff.  Or to commercial iceberg lettuce, but that's another story.)
 
† Specifically, a quarterwave ground plane for the twenty-meter band.  Amazon sells an imported "multiband" vertical that is nothing but a hose-clamped 19-foot telescoping pole on an insulating mount with a balun transformer at the base.  With an antenna tuner and a long coaxial cable feeding it, I suppose it is technically a multi-band antenna, and certainly better than no antenna.  But the telescoping construction means I can shorten it to be resonant at 14 MHz, add ground radials, and have a single-band vertical antenna without having to buy and build all the hardware.  I don't know how well it will work, but the hardware looks adequate and it's an inexpensive experiment.

I'm Not Sure

     I don't know how well I'm recovering from my back problems, or adjusting to them, or whatever I'm supposed to be doing.

     The defect was there all along.  I just set it off, woke it up or irritated it with my efforts at yard work on the last day of May.  It's not going to heal; the bone was always wrong and it's not one a surgeon can fix.  Here it is August, and if I forget and bend over to pick up debris two or three times within a few minutes, I feel it.  The physical therapy exercises make my back hurt, too.

     Am I making progress?  I don't know.  The howl-at-the-Moon pain of the first few weeks hasn't come back, and I am grateful for that, but I can tell it's waiting in the wings, and it makes me timid.  Or maybe just careful.  It's frustrating.

Orb Weaver

      It appears we've got a Golden Orb Weaver spider putting up her nets in various spots around the front porch!

    I was delighted to go outside tonight around sunset, glance to my right, and see a large, yellow-kneed spider in the center of a barely-visible web between a pillar of the porch and the house, right at eye level.  It's a safe spot, to one side of the path from the front door to the step, and I wish her every success.  More spiders means fewer flies; they also put a dent in the June Bug population, but we don't seem to be at any risk of running out of them.

     The local Orb Weavers tend to be neatniks, who string a web for a few days, and then take it down before trying another location.  It's an admirable habit. I have often wondered if Penelope, wife of Odysseus, was modeled on a spider, patiently weaving every day and unpicking her work every night, buying time until her husband returns.  Of course, spiders do have their ways, and for the hero's sake, I hope she's not too much like the spider, or, well, you'd never guess what's for dinner when the clever man finally returns!  Was that why he took so long to get back?

Golden Glory Rice And Beans

      It was good, though it still needs fine-tuning: Yellow rice (Arroz Amarillo, if you will), blackeyed peas, fresh mushrooms and sausage.

     The ingredients list is mostly things I already had on hand.  The fine-tuning is to reduce the salt.  There was a box of dry seasoned yellow rice mix on the shelf from one of the Mexican-food outfits, which is always good stuff with pigeon peas and/or chicken; I had about ten whole fresh mushrooms (brown Agaricus bisporus, the most common domestic type, sold under multiple names and hues), a can of Amy's Mushroom Bisque Soup and a can of blackeyed peas, plus a whole chorizo sausage* in the fridge.  I had Tam pick up a couple more cased sausages on her way home, and a vegetable, which turned out to be ready-to-microwave baby asparagus, an excellent choice.

     She got a couple of mild Italian sausages.  I squeezed them out of the casing, added a little smoked paprika and Cajun seasoning for luck, and squeezed out the chorizo next to them.  While that was browning (and getting chopped up with a spatula), I washed and diced the mushrooms.  Then I drained the sausage, pushed it to the sides of the pot, poured the mushrooms into the center, added some dehydrated onion, garlic and chives, and covered it while I got out the rest of the ingredients.

     The yellow rice mix wanted two cups of liquid.  The bisque soup was about a cup and a quarter.  I decided to use the blackeyed pea liquor to fill out the rest, and that was a mistake: it's salty.  I should have used 3/4 of a cup of water instead.

     When the mushrooms looked a little cooked -- they get darker -- I stirred the pot and added the soup, bean liquid and beans, then covered it until it was boiling.  The rice directions say to stir it into boiling liquid (with a little oil or butter, which isn't needed here), give it a minute boiling uncovered, put the lid on, turn the heat to low and leave it for 25 minutes.  Easy enough! 

     Not quite a half-hour later, I zapped the asparagus and lifted the lid on the rice.  It smelled wonderful; if you're a beans-and-rice person, I think you'd like this stuff.  It even looks appealing, or at least it does to me.  As described, there's enough to feed at least four or five people.

     Fresh asparagus wants a pinch of salt to bring out the flavor.  I alternated bites of the rice dish and the (unsalted) asparagus and it all evened out.  Next time, I'll use water to fill out the liquid and rinse the canned beans to reduce the salt.  I might even use fresh onion and substitute plain ground pork (or turkey, but don't tell Tam!) for some of the sausage.
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* Two different versions of sausage with similar ingredients are sold as chorizo in most of the U.S. One kind is fairly dry and has been smoked until it's ready to eat.  The other kind is found in the butcher case with the other fresh sausages, and needs to be cooked first.  I had the second kind.