About Those Supposed Communists

     The President of the U. S. has been fuming about "communists"* winning primaries in New York City and Colorado.  He appears to be peeved about a subset of Democratic candidates for Congress, who go by "Democratic Socialists of America" and whose politics is, generally, considerably less socialist than Upton Sinclair, Eugene V. Debs or the general trend of the governments of Nordic countries. (All of which just happen to have capitalist economies.)

     We've already got a couple of DSA-affiliated Representatives in the House, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and here's the thing: voters are entitled to pick their representatives.  Indiana regularly sends an assorted bouquet of conservative Republicans to the House, along with one or two big-city Democrats for contrast.  You might deplore the politics of some or all of that delegation, but the majority of people in their districts wanted them, and so off they go to Congress, to butt heads or collude with their opposite numbers from the various states.  That's how it works.

     In a country with a strong two-party system, and ours is about as entrenched as they come, you're going to find a diversity of opinion within the parties.  Maybe not as much as there used to be; my parents used to shake their heads over that wild liberal (but nominally Republican) Nelson Rockefeller, and express concern at the most stick-in-the-mud of the conservative Southern Democrats.  It really does take all kinds, and ideally, we're going to get all kinds in Congress, where -- maybe! -- they'll actually address substantive issues and try to find some path to accomplishing the things that really need doing.

     I'm not especially hopeful that the members of the House and Senate are going to do much besides make pretty speeches for their bases and assume various traditionally partisan postures, but if sending in a few younger people, who owe less to lobbyists and big business and aren't in lockstep with their party's orthodoxy, will shake 'em up and at least produce some substantive debate, I'll be happy to see it, no matter what it takes.  I'm not too worried they'll pocket the good silver, not while the Executive Branch is all but looting the Treasury and daring anyone to notice, and with all of their seniors in the Legislature giving them the hairy eyeball.

     It's high time we stopped giving away special tax breaks to the rich, especially on Social Security and Medicare.  Chumps like you and me, the more we earn, the more we pay -- but there's a threshold, low by millionaire standards, where those withholdings plateau, and as fewer and fewer people hold more and more money (and income), the shortfalls in those programs grow in direct proportion.  Removing or at least modifying those limits on Medicare and Social Security pay-in for big incomes isn't making the one or two percent pay extra, it's just asking them to pay the same rate as the rest of us.  If it takes a few firebrands with wacky notions to move the needle in that direction, hooray.  If they get too obstreperous, they can always be voted right back out. Try that with a sticky-fingered gazillionaire, and see how far you get!
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* He used the term "godless communist," which is an oldie from 1950s or earlier, popular during the Red Scare, but the two DSA reps presently holding office consist of one Muslim and one Catholic, neither of which faith lacks in a Supreme Being.  Atheists are screamingly rare among American office-holders and whoever wins in November, you can all but count on 'em being a member of some theistic religion.  Our Congressthings have many flaws, severally and each, but an insufficiency of God ain't among 'em. 

Pork Chops

     The grocer had nice-looking boneless pork chops and I had most of a bottle of sweet chili sauce.  I took this as a sign, and picked up an apple and a yellow onion, along with fresh mushrooms.  The chops got marinated in cider vinegar, soy sauce and a little Worcestershire sauce, with smoked paprika, coriander,* mustard seed, oregano, cilantro,* ginger, garlic and some mild hot-pepper blend.

     The meat spent several hours with the marinade in a big ziplock bag in the fridge (squeeze as much air out of the bag as you can!) before being lifted out and set in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium heat.  I had peeled and cut up the apple, and put the pieces into the marinade as I got them cut, then added them, and cut up and added the onions, followed by a generous pour of the sweet chili sauce, mostly over the meat.  I put the lid on while I sliced six decent-sized mushrooms, and added them, followed by a half-dozen or more bright red "pepper drop" pickled Peruvian peppers and a few chili-tangerine olives, sliced.  I thought a little more sweet chili sauce was in order, so I added some more.  Yes, this is "cooking by ear."  It's a fairly restrained sweet/hot sauce, and works well with apple and onion.

     I put the lid back on and let it simmer, checking a few times and turning the heat down if it was boiling vigorously.  45 or 50 minutes later, it was looking pretty good, and temperature checks confirmed the meat was done (you want to get it over 170°F).  I microwaved some prepared fresh broccoli, with red bell pepper and spices, and there was dinner.  There was a lot of liquid with the meat, not quite gravy-thick, but very nice spooned over the chops and onion.  The apple was mostly cooked down.

     That's it for much actual cooking until the current heatwave is over -- we're having salad tonight, with peanut better and sweet orange marmalade on whole wheat as a backup if we're still hungry.  Next time, I'll marinate the chops overnight; more time is usually better.
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* Coriander and cilantro are the seeds and leaves, respectively, of the same plant, Coriandrum sativum, and people are either okay with it or they really don't like it.  This appears to be largely genetic (there's a little disagreement), so find out which you are before you cook with the stuff!

New Symptom!

     Or not new so much as one I've had before returning, and way more painful.  Nope, not gonna talk about it, but it's really affecting my mobility.  Fun!

     It's as if I have taken Instant Old pills.

Overdid It

      I did too much yesterday, cooking the steaks.  Woke up achy and went back to sleep -- three times!  Only the first was when the alarm went off (and I did feed the cats then).

     Things I can do without making my back hurt: Sleep, bathe, do small grocery trips (no heavy stuff!), wash dishes if there aren't too many, and cook small meals.  I can read on an e-reader in bed.  I can get on the computer some.  TV, really, more than an hour is too long on the low futon couch.  I can do laundry if I move slow and don't try to pick up too much at a time.  I can pick up the cats (one at a time) if I'm sitting down and it's a straight lift.

     I disconnected some of the support for my ham antenna months ago and I can't get back up on the roof to fix it.  There's no way I can move the ladder.

Steaks

     It was a crazy idea.  But I already had hardwood kindling left over from the last time I used the grill, and the lump charcoal bag was nearly empty and therefore lightweight.

     Tam picked up a couple of New York Strip steaks, I puttered around and got the grill going, and by golly, we had steaks and microwaved new potatoes and a bagged salad for Sunday supper!  It's a rare treat these days, and what with one thing and another, it will be a while before we can do it again.

     Might as well enjoy it.

Yes, Still

     I woke up yesterday with a sharp increase in my back soreness.  It wasn't a surprise.  Thursday night is Trash Night and no matter how careful I am, there's a certain amount of lifting and bending to be done.  I kept the weight down to under my fifteen-pound limit and sat on the floor for low work as much as possible: no bending over!

     Nevertheless, there's a price.  Tam and I took a walk around the block soon after we were both awake, which is something that's been helping, but I was still achy.

     And Friday morning, Holden the tomcat was due for a checkup and rabies shot.  I got ready and loaded him into the carrier, which Tam took to my car.  I carried him into the vet, with great care.  He was brave but scared throughout his exam, hiding under a towel most of the time -- a fourteen-pound tomcat!  They are among Nature's great fighters, but they pick their battles and as far as Holden Wu is concerned, the veterinarian is like Sauron or Attila the Hun, far too terrifying a foe for one creature to handle alone.  The folks at the vet were kind enough to carry him to the car and Tam brought him in when we returned home.

     Afterward, I was still sore -- and hungry!  Addressing those needs might as well be a combined task; Good Morning Mama's diner is several blocks away, so I got my ultra-light purse (I'm down to pocketbook, keys, sunglasses, lipstick, hankie, one [1] pen and a backup phone) and headed out.  An hour later, I was back home, fed, feeling a little better, and tired.  I stayed vertical but I didn't do much.  The paperwork for work is at an impasse and I'm getting a little pressure over it, but I can't make doctors fill out forms or insurers process them any more quickly than they already are; I sent out another round of pleas via phone and e-mail.  Presently I am in limbo, neither on official leave nor allowed to return to work without a 100% all-clear from the doctor.

     "When I get better" is a will-o-wisp, and I'm done chasing it.  There are things I can do, things I need to be doing more of (gentle walks and recommended exercises) and things I need to stop fretting over being unable to do.  I may never carry another boatanchor radio up or down the basement stairs, and that's that; there are plenty of lightweight widgets along those lines and I can fiddle with them, if I am careful about it.

     By bedtime, the pain was much reduced and I slept on a cold pack.  This morning I am, at least, no worse.  

I'm....

     ...Frustrated.  Yes.  I'm frustrated.  The whole mess with my back, medical treatment, dealing with being off work, trying to get cleared to work without making my back worse, it's all frustrating.

Reflecting Fool

     While the rule of law (national and international) and long-established government functions come crashing down, I'm hearing a lot of news about the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

     It's a distraction.  Was the repair work graft-laden?  Probably.  Was the previous condition and repair effort over-hyped?  Almost certainly.  But look -- this is a big, shallow hard-surface pool in warm-climate city.  It's filled from the Tidal Pool and/or city water sources,* and in recent decades, every time it gets drained and refilled for whatever reason, it ends up full of green gunk for a while.  You can't have a shallow, slow-moving pool of water in a Washington, DC summer without stuff growing in it, no matter what you have done to the thing.  They'll solve the current mess, including the self-created elements, by and by, and yeah, probably someone's going to line their pockets over it (again!) to the tune of millions or tens of millions.

     But there are people within the Federal government or closely connected to it, ripping off the public coffers or cheating private-spending suckers and rubes of billions of dollars; the destruction of USAID has resulted in deaths on an enormous scale and helped fuel the present ebola outbreak in Africa, which is on the edge of breaking containment.  The only thing that keeps ebola in check is that it kills infected people pretty quickly, and even those who survive it are usually too sick to travel far until they have recovered.  The present version appears to have a slightly longer period of ambulatory-but-infectious, and that's a problem.

     A little bit (or a lot) of green algae in a (usually) pretty part of DC's memorial landscape is insignificant compared to the infectious dead and burial efforts that are barely keeping up.  Millions of dollars are way smaller than billions.  Yes, it's one more embarrassing farce -- but Europe's melting in the summer heat, disease is way up in Africa, and screwworms are infesting American cattle and pets.  We've got more urgent business than pointing at the green water and snickering.
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* Various infographics show a system of nearly Byzantine complexity.  Make what metaphors of it you will. 

Tuesday

     Yes, well.  Um.  Nothing to report.  I feel like low-grade awful.

Monday

     I went to some effort to return to work, and got chided for it.  Because the doctor put restrictions on my activity, there are more Forms to be Filled Out and approved, via a not very obvious procedure with a third party, and until they are, I cannot go back.

     It's not deliberately Kafkaesque, it's just a ramshackle structure put together to deal with the various contracts, rules and laws that apply, or that might apply, or that some attorney woke up thinking would be a problem unless....  But it falls to me, the person with the back problem, to lift it and carry it, and I'm not as good at it as I probably should be.

     Where does it leave me?  I don't know.

Father's Day

     If you've got one, I hope you made contact.  Yeah, yeah, someone's going to tell me about an awful, awful father, and I'll ask 'em, "Worse than Saturn?" but most fathers do their best, or however close to it they can manage.  One day a year to recognize it isn't too much to ask, and who knows?  You might even end up as friends.

     In the end, my father was my friend, same as in the beginning and a lot of times in between, and I still miss him.

Got Through The Day

     Chaired the online meeting, did a couple loads of laundry and even washed dishes.  That's plenty.  I kind of napped a few times, too.

     Healing takes longer and longer as the years add up.

Conversations With A Doctor

     So I show up at the ortho specialist's this morning, trudge up the stairs to check in just past the dot, and they ask which doctor, then tell me, "He'll see you downstairs."

     The old lady probably needed the exercise anyway, despite what my knees are telling me and my back is hinting at.  Down to the other waiting room, and after a short wait, they take me back, weigh me (under 14 stone, which is awful but improving) and tell me to change to be X-rayed.

     Zap, zap, and I'm sitting in an exam room, glowing slightly and looking over someone else's manuscript when the doctor comes in, introduces himself and asks, "Has anyone ever discussed the defect in your spine with you?"

     The which in my what?  I tell him no and he sits down, calls up the images, and proceeds to show me in today's images and in a set from 2021 when I did something stupid that I have since forgotten, how the important very last bone at the bottom of my spine is, in fact, two bones, a big one carrying the weight and a little one, floating around, more or less linked up as it should be.  They start out as two bones, but should fuse well before your first breath.  Mine did not.

     It turns out that this biological miracle is so rare, so dire, so weird that, per the doctor, "If I X-rayed the spines of a hundred people at random, around seven of them would have this."  It's not a problem, unless it is, and then...yeah.  Technicolor pain, if you do it wrong.*

     He wrote a couple of new prescriptions, one of which the pharmacist wants to talk to me about (get enough daily prescriptions, the darned things gang up on you), has me in line to schedule physical therapy (oh, joy) and says I can go back to work -- if I refrain from twisting, bending, twerking or trying to pick up anything heavier than a full-grown tomcat.  I didn't ask about parachuting or rock-climbing but they're probably off for awhile, too.
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* The correlation between this and the share of people with glitchy backs isn't perfect, but it's not insignificant.

And Thursday

     Thursday is the same, except Tam and I did the trash-day stuff.  Very slowly, for my part.  But the catboxes have been renewed and fridge has been cleaned, and that's something.  And tomorrow, the city will take the trash away.  Probably.  Wait a minute....

     I just checked.  Tomorrow is Juneteenth.  It's a city holiday.  So that would be a No.  They'll get it Saturday.

New Day, Same Stuff

     Yesterday afternoon, I had an unbreakable obligation that meant driving to the far west side of Indy on 38th Street.  I did it, and was merely exhausted and mildly sore later.  I guess that's a good sign, but it's frustrating -- an hour in the car ought not result in needing to go lie down for a few hours. 

     It should have been less than a hour driving, but the city's patching some ugly potholes on eastbound 38th street at a point where the only way to do the job is by creating rolling, alternating lane closures, and shutting traffic down altogether when they cross over.  This would be easy to become vexed about, but the fact is, the crew was in constant motion, a flurry of a half-dozen men shoveling out steaming hot mix and tamping it down while a big truck crawled along pulling the heated trailer of mix, and one guy managed traffic.  Seeing them, it was obvious that if there was a quicker way to do the job, they'd be doing it.  And this was along just enough of a curve to be a surprise, as traffic came off the short section of 38th that's merged with I-65.*  Drivers were taking it with surprisingly good humor.  Possibly the fact that potholes in that stretch had become nearly cataclysmic, combined with the obvious effort on the part of the road crew, kept people from getting too annoyed.

     I got my errand done (I'd bought a National VHF receiver through a proxy months ago, and while it's not very large, the collection of fragile polystyrene-form coils for the thing made commercial shipping a nightmare, so it was passed from hobbyist to hobbyist to reach me as people traveled for various purposes) but that was it for the day, and today has been mostly horizontal.  If Past Me had bought something like an R-390 instead (a tank of a communications receiver built for the military, designed by Collins), I would have had to pass it along to whoever else wanted it; I could not have lifted it, let alone carried the thing.  Next life, I'm gonna collect stamps.  But when you're doing this kind of hand-to-hand, you've got to show up when the baton comes your way.

     A feature of the my present issues is allergy-like symptoms: sore throat, scratchy eyes, runny nose.  This only makes horse sense with back trouble if those indicators came first and I have vaccines for all the likely causes, but after thinking it over, I ordered a flu and covid test last night and took it this morning, just to be sure.  Nope, nothing but the "control" line that shows the nasal sample and reagent diffused up the indicator okay.  So I guess that's a relief.  The doctor can figure it out; that's his job.
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* I don't know what genius came up with the idea, which seems nuts at first but actually works, getting both traffic arteries through a narrow spot in the landscape -- with a certain amount of lane-swapping.  It's spicy at rush hour but it's akin to a stretched-out traffic circle: there are no sharp intersections, no traffic lights or left turns, and while there's a certain amount of hurt feelings, forced merges and the occasional scraped fender, drivers manage to stay out of each other's way better than on most other busy city streets.

Whoa, Nellie!

     I should've held my horses.  I felt better in the morning, so I went back to work yesterday and by late afternoon, I was in serious amounts of pain.  I wrote an email that seemed all right when I wrote it, and when I looked again, it was half gibberish; stood up to get a cup of water and got a nasty jolt from the small of my back, above and beyond the dull aching radiance.  Things did not improve from there.

     Got home, limped through the corner grocery on the way and managed to pick up a rotisserie chicken and a couple of salads along with a small bag of oranges -- and "managed to pick up" isn't just figurative language, it was almost too much weight.  I unloaded the car by leapfrogging burdens -- dinner, lunchbox, briefcase -- and stayed on my feet long enough to free up a wing and a drumstick for Tam, some chunks of white meat for me, and strip the rest of the bird for soup later.

     Last night was a low-grade nightmare of alternating cold-gel packs and heating pad (and one late-night call) interspersed with dreams about hurting and this morning, I'm better but far behind where I was yesterday morning.  I shouldn't have gone in. Paperwork and a few trips up and down the stairs were all it took to screw up my back again.

     Not a fan of this present state of affairs.

Hoo Boy

     Everyone out there who thought they were ringing in a Caesar and either didn't care or were actively hoping he'd ring down the curtain on the American Republic has now been conclusively shown to have latched onto a dollar-store Nero instead -- and this one can't even play the lyre!

     I don't suppose any of his blood-and-soil fans will mind, and no doubt they loved Sunday's blood and blather.  Say the word "culture" to 'em and they reach for a club (no, I don't mean the 1980s band).

Sunday Night

     I should post something, maybe pithy commentary about whatever in the hell it is that's going on at the White House, but it's past my bedtime and a stripy yellow tomcat keeps walking into the office and rearranging things to suggest I ought to go to bed.  He's right.

Lack Of Adulthood

      Let me weigh in on something I'm not all that qualified to write about: the renaming and denaming of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

     It's been a thing most of my life, and other than scale and influence, it's not any different to whatever artsy Foundation-with-buildings your city has, and they tend to be a thing apart, deeply rooted in the city and regional arts community, especially the performing arts: esthetic pleasures, a bit class-conscious in spots (and a bit overtly not in others), but for most events, a spot check of car radios in the parking lot is going to find more set for the NPR station than country, rock or right-wing talk.  The venue often hosts things of less upscale appeal, touring Broadway shows, popular musical acts, speakers* and so on, too, but it's got its lane.

     They're generally named after a local patron of the arts -- the Honeywell Center in Wabash, Indiana is a good example, a fine venue in a moderate-sized county seat.  The name tends to stick, too.

     So when President Trump decided to add his name to the Kennedy Center, that was a bit incongruous.  Not atypical of him; he loves to put his name on stuff.  But it felt...off.  And then they stuck the letters on the marble wall:
THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
     And that was just messed up.  Not only was the wording flat-out awkward, a low-bidder rush job on a fancy marble-clad building, the fonts didn't match.  Not even close, other than both being serif fonts on roughly Classical models.  It  looked like crap.  It looked, in fact, like something big-city people might expect to see on a building serving a similar purpose in an Indiana County seat, except that I'm here to tell you, nobody in Wabash (etc.) would've stood for such a hack job on their nice performing arts center.  If you're gonna change the name, they'd thunder, do it right!  Match the old lettering or, if you can't, take it all off and start over.  And try to follow the rules of grammar, too.

     That didn't happen at the Kennedy Center.  What did happen was, the new name went up like a bird splat on a wedding cake, a lot of exhibits and displays were put into "storage," present whereabouts unknown to the public.  The membership of the Board that runs it changed, which is a thing that Presidents can do, and a lot of the staff quit, retired or were laid off.  As time went on and acts kept canceling, there were plans to shut the Center down for a couple of years of renovation, and rumors of deep and serious problems with the building itself.  Are they true?  Who can tell.

     Now the courts have pulled the plug on the new name and the closure.  The President has pulled the plug on his involvement, saying he's "returning responsibility to Congress" for running the place, a responsibility Congress has never had.  And there are apparently "poison pills" in the Board's present funding arrangements, clauses that take money away if President Trump's name is removed from the Center.  That'll go back the court system, you can count on it.

     And this entire mess is over...ballet.  Opera.  Orchestral concerts.  Touring shows.  Or, at least, over who gets his name associated with those things, matters that, lovely and fine and uplifting though they are, have nothing to do with the average American sweating the price of gasoline and electricity or jingling coins nervously as the grocery store cash register beeps and the total increases alarmingly.  Real wages are level or declining; real prices are up.  Changing the name on the Kennedy Center -- again -- is only going to affect income for the people doing that particular job, and maybe not even them; they probably already had plenty of other things to do at the same hourly rate.

     It's just childish BS.  In the middle of a not-a-war in the Middle East, a one-side-won't -call-it-a-war in Ukraine and a generous scattering of armed unrest, economic uncertainty and serious disease outbreaks all around the world.  Does the country really have the time, money and energy to spare to keep on diddling with trivial Presidential whims?
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* The county seat where I grew up didn't have much of a venue until the renovation of a semi-decrepit early 20th-Century Colosseum (honest, that's what it was called) in the late 20th and (again!) early 21st Centuries, but we had an arts & culture crowd who did things like make sure the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra gave local concerts and Buckminster Fuller came to give a talk, and rented whatever place they could find for it -- often, the big theater at the local High School.  I was happy to listen; for just a little while, you were dreaming with Prokofiev or thinking Big Thoughts right along Fuller, at least until the final notes rang out or he said goodnight and you were still stuck in the corn-fed tail end of nowhere.  Corn- and soybean-fed, maybe.

Good Fun

     Marvel has spun, well, webs with all the permutations of their "Spider-Man" character.  The core character was popular with my male peers in Junior High and High School: here was this wisecracking kid like them, except he usually knew the right thing to say and he had superpowers!  I thought he was fun, if implausible.  Given similar powers, the zit-faced boys I knew were unlikely to rise to his level of heroism -- or verbal cleverness.

     I admit it: I was never a huge fan of comic books, not even when they started to call themselves graphic novels.  The horror/SF comics were screamingly derivative, often "borrowing" SF plots or entire stories without so much as a nod to the original and I found that offputting.  For pure mindless fun, "Doc Savage" reprints were a better value for my money.

     But Spidey was his own thing, not a sanctimonious stuffed shirt.  Not a millionaire, or invulnerable, or a rebooted Norse god, just Some Guy who stumbled into superpowers, and that was kind of cool.  The thing is, he kind of wasn't entirely original; he had a pulp precursor, much darker: The Spider was the alias of the entirely human (if slightly gadgety) crimefighter Richard Wentworth, maybe the number three hero pulp after The Shadow and Doc Savage.  The Spider ran to greater moral ambiguity (and bloodthirstiness) than the other two and gave rise to a movie-serial version of the protagonist with a much more spidery look, and between the pulp and the films, helped inspire the later comic-book hero.  The teen angst was all from Stan Lee, though, and that's really the emotional driver of the graphic novel character.

     All this is to set up writing about the entirely entertaining Amazon Video streaming series, Spider-Noir.  It's spun from the "Spiderverse" notions Marvel's been shoveling through a kaledeoscope in recent years, but what's come out this time* is a back-crossing between the modern-day four-color hero and his pulp ancestor that's half film noir and half graphic novel (and about ten percent Republic-type serial).  Seedy PI Ben Reilly struggles to make a living, having put away his past as a costumed superhero after personal tragedy, and then....  Then, of course, plot happens.  It's not any more plausible than any other superhero tale, or most film noir for that matter, but it's as engaging as any of them, with a reasonably good take on the 1930s setting and nice acting, cinematography, effects and editing.  It's good fun.  They've managed to explain or at least lampshade most of the incongruities, too.  It's unlikely to alter your worldview, but it's at least as good a value for money as an old pulp magazine or a modern graphic novel.
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* They'd already done a similar thing, "Spider-Man Noir," in print and animation, the latter with the same actor (Nicholas Cage) as the TV series.

Grazin' In The Grass

     There is no reason to threaten any elected or appointed official with any level of violence.  Vote 'em out, impeach 'em, stick them in front of a Congressional committee and (try) to make them answer questions or get 'em hauled into court if they can be (it depends on the office).

     And, sure, criticize 'em.  It's right there in the Constitution that you can do that. This can include very harsh criticism.  "Throw the bum out" isn't especially harsh, as such things go.

     All that said, some critic or group of critics decided the National Mall, that big patch of grass in Washington, DC that stretches from the Washington Monument to the pool in front of the Capitol building could do with some commentary, and they have inscribed -- or tried to -- "86 47" in huge numbers, using something to discolor the grass.  The 8 and 7 are easily visible in photographs; you can trace the 6 but it takes imagination to see a 4. 

     There are about a zillion ways to pull this off, using everything from weedkiller to picnic blankets to fertilizer or even just coordinated dancing.  Make no mistake, it's vandalism however it is accomplished, but it's got more in common with crop circles than, say, the Weather Underground.

     What "86" might mean is presently disputed.  I always thought it was old diner/bar slang that meant "throw out," with a contextual secondary meaning of "not available" and dictionaries generally agree.  DOJ is claiming it means "to murder" in their case against former FBI Director James Comey.

     Defacing grass is hardly likely to amount to a "true threat" in the legal sense, but it's sure to rouse the administration's ire.  There's a big event coming up on the mall, and the setup and crowds will obliterate any marking on the grass: The "86" is going to get 86ed itself.

The More Fool Me

     Maybe I should be less trusting.  I skipped my muscle relaxer yesterday so I could drive to the orthopedic specialists.  My back hurt pretty bad despite OTC pain reliever but I could take it, because I was going to make some progress.  It wasn't easy to find the place, a building ticked behind other buildings, nestled between busy Shadeland Avenue and the freeway.  After a couple of false turns, I was there.

     The office is on the second floor and out of habit, I started up the stairs.   By the landing, I was sure that had been a mistake, but it was too late to turn back and take the elevator.

     Up to the office.  No one in line, a couple of people in the waiting room.  To the receptionist window.
     "Date of birth?"
     I told her.
     "Do you have an appointment?"
     "No, I'm a walk-in.  The online nurse said it was okay?"
     "What are you here for?"
     "My back.  I strained it a week ago Sunday and it still hurts.  Pretty bad."  The small of my back was, in fact, a knot of fire at that point.  Taking the stairs wasn't a wise choice.
     "Oh, we don't do back pain walk-ins."
     "What?"
     She repeated the statement.
     "But the nurse--  Here, I can show you."  Which I did -- called up the conversation on my phone and handed it to her.
     She agreed the nurse had told me to go that office for my back pain.  Unfortunately -- and she wasn't unsympathetic -- the nurse was wrong.  They could maybe see me on the 18th?
     That was a week away.  By that point, as the Stoics put it, either the pain would come to an end or I would figure something out.  I thanked her and left.  Since I had the app open, I texted to the online help system that the ortho clinic didn't accept walk-ins for back problems.  They expressed sympathy.  You will not be surprised how very little pain relief there is in sympathy, no matter how sincerely meant.

     I took the elevator downstairs.

     I've got an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Friday, I'm going to grovel for four more sets of twice-a-day anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxers.  What I have will run out Sunday and I'm not confident my back will be better by then. 

     Update: I do not, in fact, have an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Either I misunderstood the nurse at the clinic last weekend or she misspoke.  It's for July 14, and now I can't see the ortho specialist until June 22.  I went ahead and scheduled it, but I'm going to try for the regular clinic tomorrow.  I'd go today (Friday as I revise this) but the muscle relaxer has me way too out of it to drive.

I'm Off To See The Ortho....

     After three days of the big pills and no better, I got hold of the medical practice that my doctor (and the drive-thru clinic too, these days) is with.  Their online real person (bit of a luxury!) read my tale of woe, opined a week and a half was Too Long to not see significant improvement and directed me to the walk-in ortho clinic tomorrow.

     It's almost an oxymoron, but the notion is that it's for people hale enough to get through the door on their own -- but not so comfy in the doing.  If you can't get in by yourself, the usual path to an ortho specialist is through the door of the ER, and conversely, followups get scheduled in the usual way.  This office deals with issues that are neither this nor that. 

     Back problems, maybe I'm never going to be all that comfortable again, but at least these people will have the gadgets to find out and the experience to know what the pictures mean.

Models Of Leadership

     Vice President James David Vance is a weirdo who believes UFOs are demons.   He's right up there with Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, though he appears to be slightly less bloody-minded than our local talent.

     Look, I get the GOP's hangup with wanting Executive Branch leaders in the general mold of a stern paterfamilias/grouchy grampa, some of whom will even try to run interference for their junior partners.  In a party bending to authoritarianism, "hetman" principle is inevitable.  But where do they get this string of freakish thinkers for the Number Two spot?

     It used to be the great weakness of the GOP was that they stank on ice at mentorship.  Presidents, Governors, even Senators tended to pick "safe" seconds and helpers, Party-line fools or sycophants who could be counted on to be no threat to the guy with the big desk.  But they were rarely way out there -- they left that to the Democrats on one side and the John Birchers on the other (and the Dems tended to marginalize their whackiest, too).

     Anymore, the kids are letting their freak flags fly, and heaven help the Union.  It's for sure they won't.

The Weight Of It

      "I'll just stand this 24-pack of water on end, keep my arm straight and lift with my knees to get it over the threshold and into the house.  How bad can it be?"

     Readers, it was bad.  Back spasm.  I once again saw the logo of the company that owned* whatever is left of RCA's technical IP, rotating and strobing.  I'd as soon see the old 1920s RCA meatball, myself, but what I get is far more colorful and I do not recommend it. 
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* They were Thomson when they ate RCA and that entity is gone now, bankrupt, split up and some of the parts recombined -- including one big chunk, back under the famous technichromatic name. RCA barely kept their patent pool corralled when they existed and it's no surprise the successors never quite managed.  Their pro gear was a wild mix of in-house, contracted out and rebadged products, and you kept it running by keeping track of where the parts had been sourced.

Status Report

     I am in sufficient pain and of such restricted mobility that my temper has no fuse at all.  Every minor annoyance or household mishap triggers anger bordering on rage.  This is nothing I am proud of.  It's annoying.  It's embarrassing.

     One of those remote-grabby things is on its way to me, along with a front-porch delivery of bottled water.  I have a 24-pack, but it's in the back hatch of my car, on the far side of the garage, and I can no more carry it in than I could fly.  Getting those should help with some of the frustration: I'll be able to pick things up from the floor without a heart-pounding series of scary moves to get down to floor level and, far worse, back up.  And Indianapolis city water is nothing to write home about.  It's okay fresh out of the tap but carries the faintest aroma of wet dog after it sits a spell.  (It has been this way for years, no matter how well our reservoirs are doing.  Is it that hint of canal water?  The scattering of city wells?  Some purifying chemical or process?  Our water company draws on a variety of sources and they do honest work, but it's a bulk business, not a boutique bottler.  It's clean water and plenty of it.)

     Just took the second muscle relaxer pill and the first anti-inflammatory.  The latter is some turbocharged prescription-only relative of naproxen, so I had to wait for the previous dose of aspirin to time out; you can't take both at the same time.  Fortunately, acetaminophen is still okay, and I'm watching the clock for my next dose.  Such excitement!

     First commenter to suggest horse-paste, moxibustion or a chiropractor gets punched in the face as soon as I'm feeling better.

Progress?

     Went to the doc, got checked out, got the meds.

     Five hours later, I'm still miserable.  I can't pick stuff up from the floor.  It's a gymnastic exercise to stand up.  But I'm hopeful.  It beats not being hopeful.

Almost

     I rested well overnight, got up and took a walk, napped more, did a little laundry very carefully and almost convinced myself I was getting better.

     Almost.  I relaxed eating dinner and stood up incautiously to clear away my take-out platter.  My lower back went into a spasm that nearly buckled my knees.  Technicolor pain.

     Time to stop pretending.  Tomorrow, I'll get washed up well enough to face the world and go to the doc-in-a-box. 

"Oops?"

     Between work yesterday (trying to rebuild a portable camera tripod that has had a hard life, typical of them; they're extremely difficult to take apart after a few years of heavy use) and my contributions to Trash Night last night (cleaning out the freezer and fridge, a bending-heavy activity, and changing two litter boxes, a task I have long done while sitting on the floor due to bad knees), I am back at square one with my back.  Maybe square -1.  Or -2.

     Hello, Dial-A-Doc?

     Update: The the dickens with them.  They never connected.  Waited an hour, with the little reminder that someone would be along Any Time Now blinking away at the top of the screen.  Oh well.  They don't prescribe muscle relaxers and I won't take them, so what was the point?

Walking

      During the pandemic, Tam and I got into the habit of taking a walk around the block every morning.  Or, by and by, two blocks, or three....  It was decent exercise for a couple of spinsters, and we don't actually spend much time in one another's company otherwise; I work, she's always got writing projects underway, and a lot of our interaction consists of keeping out of the other person's way.  We're usually watching a TV series over supper -- 45 minutes or an hour of staring at the same screen.

     So walking around the block is a good way to find out what's going on with the other person living in Roseholme* Cottage, as well as exercise.  We'd stopped our walks at the worst of winter, and as that damn virus became endemic and the vaccines made it far less a problem, we eventually came to a spring when we didn't start our walks back up.

     That was a mistake.  We're getting old; we need the exercise.  We're getting grouchy, too, and it helps to have a little time to go talk about inconsequentials: Oh, look, a cardinal, a squirrel, the Moon; what lovely flowers! what kind of bush† is that? and so on.

     So we're walking again, this time with our smartphones keeping track.  I need it, especially after the way I strained my back last weekend.  It's getting better, but still a little sore.  And some one of these days, our track will go as far as the place that sells breakfast pastries -- maybe it's not the most healthy goal I could have, but at least it's a goal.
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* This name of my house is not a reference to the similarly-named university but a mocking allusion to the heraldry supposedly associated with my family name, a "naturally-colored" rose on a silver-grey background.  Oh, the arms are real enough, a minor title that faded over three generations, apparently a War of the Roses version of the GI Bill, but my last name is a toponym, and so far there's no evidence I'm related to that long-ago soldier/squire.
 
† I'd sure like to know.  Feathery, reddish-green needles, gnarly branches, dense and no more than three or four feet tall.  Interesting-looking shrubbery. 

That Was...

     Monday wasn't fun.  Tuesday wasn't great, either: my back.  I've been living on aspirin and sleeping on an ice pack, walking as much as I can manage, and I'm getting better, but oh, jeepers.  I did not see this coming.

     I mean, it could be worse.  I could be stuck in a country rapidly sliding down into competitive authoritarianism, in which one party's politicians were uniformly crooks, cranks and grifters, while the other party distinguished itself by fielding many more plain old hacks and allowing the occasional idealist to slip though, counterbalanced by a scattering of outright weirdos; not that their opposite numbers didn't have a few of those, too.

     Oh, wait.

     The United States may be the only two-party democracy (in the broadest sense) that does itself in by the two parties leaping off a precipice, one shouting, "Hey, everybody, lookit me!  I can fly!" while the other party mutters, "Oh dear," and frantically tries to improvise a parachute from a pocket handkerchief all the way down.  They'll both make identical splatters when they hit the ground.

     The next person who gives me a version of "Same old same-old" in response to our present crisis is going to get the unexpurgated version of this diatribe, because no, it's not.  I'm looking back on LBJ and Nixon and both Bushes and Bill Clinton with fond regret: we didn't realize how good we had it at the time.

We Did It!

      Actually, we have almost done it.  For, well, years, Tam and I -- mostly me -- have been accumulating fallen branches and twigs on the front porch, and trimmed saplings in a pile out back.

     Some of it is decent firewood and we do have a fire pit.  I have sorted that out in batches and stacked it in small crates.  The brushpiles remained.  A couple of months ago,* I picked up a canvas mini-dumpster.  They're sold folded up flat, of course, and the package sat in the garage, in mute recrimination.

     Or it did until yesterday.  The weather was nice, the heaps were annoying, and even if we only made a little progress, it would be worth it.

     The work went much better than expected, and after a couple of hours, what do you know?  The porch was clear.

     I felt so good about it that I went out after supper, added a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes, and there was still room for the back yard brushpile.

     Still to come, calling up the provider and paying a little more to have it taken away.

     Maybe we'll even plant some flowers again this year.

     Downside?  My back feels pretty awful.  Too much bending over, not enough proper squatting.  Price of age -- and of getting rid of some of the mess.  And my creaky knees are, at least., not any creakier this morning than they were yesterday morning.
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* Yes, I do have only two speeds, but they're not Dead Slow and Full Stop, only Slow and Slower.

Clever Cicero, Time Traveler?

      The Roman lawyer, writer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is greatly admired for his command of language.  Like Shakespeare centuries later, he introduced new words and conventions of form that persisted ever afterward.

     And like the Bard, he was fond of wordplay -- but how could he possibly have invented a riddle that works the same in English as it does in Latin?  Sheer luck, of course, the same chance that preserved his words and Shakespeare's.

     A greeting:
     "Mitto tibi 'navem' prora puppique carentum."*

     In English:
     "I send you a 'ship' lacking stern and bow."

     Something of an "Aenigma a patre," I suppose.
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* I have here taken the cheapest/easiest transcription of written Latin.  For Romans vowel "u" and the consonant "v" were distinguished only by context, as readily as we skip through the myriad inconsistencies of English orthography.  While contemporary fancy inscriptions and (probably) professional scrolls would have written MITTO TIBI NAVEM PROPRA PVPPIQVE CARENTVM at best and probably abbreviated many of the words in standardized ways, Cicero himself probably jotted it down in a chicken-scratch cursive not too unlike a modern doctor's handwriting, with a character like a cross between a "v" and "u" and what looks to our eyes like a ruthless disregard for getting the letters on the same line; Romans didn't see 'em the same way we are taught. 

When An "Idiot Plot" Isn't, Maybe

     Writing -- and chairing the critique group -- has me in the habit of taking a critical look "under the hood" of books and TV/movies/radio shows.  One of the gotchas is what SF writer (and critic) Damon Knight called an "idiot plot," though he gave credit to James Blish for originating the term

     Simplest form, it means a plot that only works if one or more of the characters ignores something that is obvious to the audience.  Now, that's one thing if the plot is just an excuse for razzle-dazzle (the Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire film Top Hat is often cited, but nobody cares: you're there for the dancing), and something entirely different in a serious work.

     No spoilers, but-- The most recent season of For All Mankind has a crucial plot development that only works if a very smart character misses a point that should be entirely clear to the audience and perhaps the other characters involved, based on past behavior.  They miss it, and keep on missing it, several times.

     Now, the individual involved has been set up as a deeply focused and somewhat neurotic person, probably neuroatypical* and everyone else in a position to work out what happened has a vested interest in staying mum -- so is it really an "idiot plot," or were the writers playing a deeper game?

     Flip a coin.  Much as I love the big, rich story, I've got to admit I'm there for the sets and the characters, for the broad sweep of an alternative history, one in which the Space Race went on and on.

     Moral?  You can get away with it -- if you're as quick on your feet as Fred and Ginger, if you're that gifted at choreography (in the broadest sense), if you're willing to subtly lampshade it, if you've got the sets and costumes and skilled photographers and editors (and/or literary chops) to pull it off.  I think For All Mankind managed the trick, but it's there if you look for it.
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* It's not original with me, but inclinations and skill sets that make for good scientists have a lot of overlap with some autism-spectrum behavior patterns, so much so that it has often been pointed out that while there's zero evidence that vaccines cause autism, there's a pretty good case to be made that autism causes vaccines.

In Other News

     Odds are pretty good that I'm in a recurrence of rheumatic fever.  It's an autoimmune ailment, triggered by strep, and sure enough, I had a sore throat a few weeks back.  The sore throat ran its course and went away, as such things do, and....

     And I've had creeping fatigue, and aching knees, and figured I needed to move more, so I did.  And I kept on being tired and started to have eyelid twitches around my left eye, and sore knuckles, and wow, was I tiring easy, getting other aches and pains here and there, and oh, gosh, did my knees ever hurt, and...

     This morning, I went back to sleep for an hour after I fed that cats.  When I got up again, I was moving slower and slower.  It hurt like the dickens to go down the basement stairs and hurt worse to head back up.  Those darned knees!  Because I can (eventually) take a hint, I loaded up on aspirin* and kept moving, but things did not get better and I ended up back in bed by and by.  I managed to do my part in the Trash Day festivities (cleaning out the refrigerator and changing two catboxes, in that order) but it was slow going and left me worn out.

     Is it or isn't it?  This collection of symptoms lines up pretty well; if I was twitchier or had a bit of a rash, it'd be more likely.  But even physicians differ on diagnosing  mild cases, so darned if I know, but it sure feels like the last couple of bouts I have had with the stuff.

     Tam and I did watch the last episode of this season of For All Mankind tonight, and I would happily watch more if there was any more.  So far, they have done nothing to shake my theory that the series can be taken as a prequel to The Expanse.
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* If the underlying strep infection is gone, aspirin is still the hot ticket for treatment: it's one of the best anti-inflammatories around.  I usually use it as my backup pain relief, since it's a bit harsh on the stomach and acetaminophen in milder, but until this either settles down or drives me to the doctor, I'll do steady aspirin and take the other as-needed.

Gearless Ratchet

     Multitool maker Leatherman sells a gearless ratchet about the size of a fountain pen, and nobody told me.  There was apparently a lot of hype when they first showed up, probably driven by scarcity -- it was a few years back, when supply chains were still shaky, and availability was variable on the manufacturer's website and elsewhere.  Not so much now; you can find 'em anywhere that stocks a good assortment of the maker's tools. 

     What the thing has going for it is that A, it's a ratchet, which makes the slightly awkward Leatherman bit-driver less so; B, it's an extension, which is often less awkward; C, it's also a bit adapter.

     For those who don't know, a very long time back, Leatherman started including a double-ended "precision bit" on most of their multi-tools, a flat, double-ended straight/Phillips gadget that is held in a receptacle by a flat spring.  It's a mixed blessing -- the bits are considerably better than the usual multitool fodder, and you can swap 'em out, but it's one more item to lose and small enough to fumble when you're changing it.  Critically, though the bits are very flat, the shape is a subset of a standard quarter-inch hex drive: the short sides are "pointy" and fit into the widest part of the hexagon recess!  (A downside is that the amount of torque you can apply with the modified drive is lower.  In practice, it has never been a problem for me.) 

     The specialized shape means a plain Leatherman extension -- and this ratchet -- has a flattish end that plugs into the driver receptacle, but the bit end is standard hex.  They'll fit any bit, and it works with any driver.*

     I wanted one of those ratchets on sight, and wouldn't you know it, Tam and I tend to give one another gift certificates on our birthdays.  So that's what she got me for my birthday.  It arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it.
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* Or almost any.  There was an outfit in New England, the Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company, who made one of the neatest and most compact sets of bits and drivers imaginable, with a straight-knurl quarter-inch drive that formed part of a 3-degree ratchet.  Their ratchet drive system was deliberately compatible with quarter-inch hex -- but that ratchet won't work with Leatherman's "slice-of-hex" bits.  The company appears to be fading or gone now, and more's the pity.  There are alternatives but nobody makes 'em as small. 

Happy Birthday, I'm Old

     Oh, I'm not as old as old, but I'm really quite an age, and I had thought I would be spending more time at my own keyboard and less time punching someone else's clock by now.

     That's not how it has worked out.  Bad knees and bad luck have me hanging on, looking at Wall Street and Washington, wondering when the bubble will pop.  (Probably first in my knees, though it feels more like rust and grit.)

     Having grown up in an unacknowledged but overwhelmingly real tradition in which birthdays were far more for painful reappraisal and remorse than celebration, I have to wonder if I missed my stop.  Most of my friends at work already stepped off, and the four techs who remain, we're all bouncing around like peas in a bucket and are about as effective.  But here I am, no matter where I go.

     I'd like to thank everyone who has shared birthday wishes, especially my friend from the 8th call district who sent a card!  They really are nice to receive.

     Be well, all of you.

Seen In A Glass, Darkly....

     There's no darker glass, at least in metaphor, than a monitor or TV screen.  I had occasion to rewatch the film Civil War recently and, juxtaposed with radio and video coverage of the current mess in the Middle East, especially Israel's ongoing invasion of Lebanon, it makes for sobering viewing.  And the movie's deliberately incoherent conflict (it's about war correspondents, after all, not war) looks less and less so as time goes by.  Even the alliance between Texas and California as the "Western Forces:" if you had told an American or Russian in 1932 that they were going to end up fighting on the same side of a major war within a decade, they would have laughed at you.  A separatist California and a Texas "taking back its Lone Star" might find themselves with as much in common as Churchhill and FDR did with Stalin.

     The United States of Civil War aren't united. Some regions are in denial; a vast sweep of states are, apparently, largely untouched.  Others are less fortunate, crowded by internal refugees or wracked by war, buildings bombed, populations decimated, civil government gone or powerless.

     The second Trump administration has shown a marked propensity to route FEMA disaster relief (and similar aid) to GOP-supporting states and cites, and not to Democrat areas.  This is entirely aside from any overall reductions in aid: whatever there is to be had, you're a lot less likely to receive it if you live in a blue region than if you live in a red one, no matter how you chose to vote.

     ICE and CBP enforcement has shown a similar pattern, leaning more heavily on cities and states with Democrats in power and far less where the Republicans hold a majority of elected offices.

     Depending on where you live, it's life as usual, and what's all the fuss about -- or it's anything but usual.

     Civil War?  You're already soaking in it, in the slow, nightmare preliminary steps.

     There's still time; we may yet wake up, get a sip of water or take a trip down the hall, and return to blissful rest.  Or the nightmare could turn for the worse.

     None of us can be sure how this movie, these very American dreams, will play out.

     The 2026 and 2028 elections are crucial.  Choose wisely.

Memorial Day

     It's Memorial Day -- and like pretty much every Memorial Day of my entire life, U. S. troops are in danger.  Soldiers and sailors, Marines, aircrew and Guardians.  Fifteen serving military personnel have been killed in the last few months in our ongoing conflict with Iran: undeclared wars are no less deadly than declared ones, and it doesn't matter to the dead or their survivors if it was a war of choice or an unavoidable clash.

     They served and died.  Remember them, not as faceless statistics but as individuals no different from you, your family and your friends.  It's all you can do.  It's little enough to ask.

Oh, Hey

     I forgot to post today. Distracted by the race -- the Sunday morning political shows are usually a rich source of fodder, but pre-Indy 500 coverage preempted all of them except CBS, and it was apparently guest-hosted by "Flo" from the insurance-company commercials 

A Capsule Illustration

      Here's how ostensibly neutral journalism goes wrong -- though this example isn't journalism nearly so much as it is stenography: The Hill covered Secretary of Defense "Pete" Hegseth's commencement address at West Point this morning.

     One the face of it, it's straightforward reporting: who, what, where, when.  His remarks are quoted extensively -- with zero historical context.  In the Secretary's opinion, West Point was adrift in a sea of horrific wokery until he came along and freed officers from having to worry their decisions might be second-guessed by higher-ups, that there might be consequences to bad decisions, and -- oh, hurrah -- he's returned the painting of Robert E. Lee in full Confederate uniform to the academy's library.*

     There is passing mention of the coalition of Democratic federal legislators who spoke out to remind military officers of their duty to refuse illegal orders -- but even that leans heavily into the President declaring such a statement "treason" (it isn't) and the Department of Justice's attempt to have them indicted, which was refused by the grand jury -- and remember, "a halfway decent prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

     The Secretary's wild notions and wilder orders and rearrangements at the Department of Defense are not normal, and trying to normalize them with reporting that parrots his talking points without showing their imaginary basis won't make them okay.  
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* Complete, it should be noted, with a slave holding his horse.  Not that readers of The Hill got any of that context.  Nope, all they read was Secretary Hegseth's celebratory quote, "...you've seen...statues taken down, paintings placed in the basement."  Statues and paintings of whom, Mr. Secretary?  And what could they possibly have done to deserve such ignominy?

Tulsi Gabbard Out...

     Tulsi Gabbard is out, and what are the odds that her old job will become one more hat for Marco Rubio to wear?

     I don't agree with Mr. Rubio's positions on, well, anything, but he's one of the few competent people they've got.  One of these days, he's going to wake up to the way in which he's the smart kid being strongarmed into doing the difficult homework for the jocks and sons of privilege and connection.  Or maybe he already knows, and figures it's the price he has to pay for a seat at that table.

     That only plays out one way, and it's not him being invited in as an equal.

A Government Of Smart-Assed Punks

      The current collection of ne'er-do-wells, failsons, solipsistic opportunists, toadies, religious extremists and other vile nutjobs and crooks -- see the list from Blazing Saddles -- running things in Washington D.C. and throughout the Federal government includes a great many men and women of a familiar type, one that comes tagging along no matter what party is in power: arrogant punks, secure in their access to authority and/or knowledge of how to manipulate the law.  They sneer and wink their way through Congressional hears and press conferences, not just lacking in humility but contemptuous of it.

     Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced they have issued an indictment against six Cubans allegedly involved in shooting down two unarmed U. S. private airplanes in 1996.  The planes were operated by Brothers To The Rescue, an effort to help people fleeing Cuba by sea.  There are genuine questions of fact -- Cuba says the planes were in their airspace, the U.S. says they were over international waters.*  There are genuine issues of the Cuban government being repressive and generally awful, of the need to help people who got to sea in inadequate vessels; there's a lot of go work out in court, and plenty of room to argue over what court it should be, or if diplomacy is a better way to sort things out; or even if thirty years is too long to wait.

     But one of the Cubans is Raúl Castro.  He was in charge of their defense department at the time, and later served at President and leader of the Cuban Communist party, positions from which he has since stepped down.  He's 94 now.  Age is no shield from criminal prosecution (though you do have to wonder what the courts could do to him that Time has not already done or is about to do).  He's charged in the U.S.; we don't have an extradition agreement with Cuba, naturally enough, and there the matter sits.

     Or does it?  Acting U. S. Attorney General Todd Blanche, speaking at the press conference announcing the indictment yesterday, said this to reporters: "There was a warrant issued for his arrest. So we expect that he will show up here, by his own will or by another way."  Nudge-nudge, wink-wink.

     Cuba's government is far from admirable.  Raul Castro is no teddy bear.  The incident in question was tragic at best.  But the acting AG is hinting and shrugging his way through the kidnapping of a former foreign head of state, in his own country.  That's fine for the movies, but in the real world?  It's not.  Oh, we've probably all got lists of leaders and former leaders we'd like to see nabbed and hauled before a court (if not worse), but that's not how it works.  It's how wars start, and there are plenty enough of them simmering already.  Regular, ordinary Cubans are already suffering and the kind of military intervention it would take will only make things worse for them.

     But to the smart-assed punks of the world, the "little people" don't matter.  They're up there parading on the world stage, all suits and uniforms, legal writs and jet planes, bombs falling clean, high above the dust and blood and tears.  People getting killed are just a handy prop to them, to be pulled out and put to use decades after the fact.
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* All things being equal, I'm a lot more inclined to trust the accuracy of U.S. radar than Cuba's; but unless you were staring at those screens at the time, it's a matter of opinion.

Crazy Pills? Voters Eat Them Like Candy

      Apparently, crazy wins.  At least in some elections.

     This post could have been called, "Why I'm no longer a Libertarian," except I never was a big-L Libertarian.  The state party was always too welcoming to people whose ideas skirted racism, eugenics and/or religious extremism.  It might have been called "Why I stopped being a default Republican voter," since it used to be that most of Indiana's GOP politicians were safe choices: they didn't support change.  Cautious to the point of stodginess, when the state did manage to change the laws and regulations, they stayed changed.  Progress was slow but it didn't go backwards.

     The problem was, some voters wanted something different -- and it wasn't classical libertarianism.  It wasn't steady-on conservatism.  It wasn't New Deal progressivism, either; it wasn't even old-time machine politics, with cigars (and and more substantial rewards) for party workers and the well-connected and damn-all for individuals, groups and organizations on the outs.  No, what voters wanted was--

     But why should I try to formulate it, when Kentucky's Thomas Massie put it so well in 2017?

     "All this time, I thought they were voting for libertarian Republicans. But after some soul searching I realized when they voted for Rand and Ron [Paul] and me in these primaries, they weren't voting for libertarian ideas—they were voting for the craziest son of a bitch in the race. And Donald Trump won best in class, as we had up until he came along."*

     So far, what voting for crazy has got us is gas over $4.00 a gallon -- over $5.00 in seven states, fueled by a simmering war of choice with Iran; ballooning measles cases in the U.S., a hantavirus outbreak that officials assure us is bottled up, a rare strain of ebola without any vaccine or specific treatment erupting in Africa not far from overcrowded and under-sanitized refugee camps, and a President who just got immunity from federal income tax enforcement, while building himself a combination bunker/ballroom and declaring, "I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation, I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon. That’s all. That’s the only thing that motivates me."

     I'm not too keen on a nuclear-armed Iran† -- who, other than some Iranians, is? -- but bombing their nuclear program flat whenever it got too busy seemed to be working.  Not as well as the enforced treaty they were under for a few years, but it worked.  At present, they've got more incentive than ever to be building a Bomb, and I think only the fact that they can shut down the Strait of Hormuz and dare the world to do anything about it has distracted them from whatever remains of their nuke effort.  Naval mines are cheaper than Manhattan Projects, and there's less to worry about downwind if one goes off unexpectedly.

     The thing about leaving out big bowls of crazy pills is that eventually everyone either freaks out or passes out.‡  I don't know if we've reached that point yet, and I'm worried about just what form it will take if we do.

     After World War Two, the United States took on, however imperfectly, the role of the world's designated driver.  We've now given up on it and joined the partying.  It's fun, fun fun -- until we wrap the T-Bird around a tree.
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* Massie tried to keep up, but as of this morning, he's no longer the craziest S.O.B running for U. S. House in Kentucky, having lost his primary to Ed Gallrein.
 
† I'm not especially happy with a nuclear-armed anybody.  We're stuck with the countries that already are, but expanding membership in that club is a very bad idea.
 
‡ Or, in fact, leaves.

Do Your Homework, Politicians

      I usually run radio news in the morning as I clean up the kitchen and make breakfast, and this morning, they were interviewing a U. S. Congressman on a recent mass shooting in his district.

     Not knowing the man, not even knowing his party when I heard the interview, I was struck by how much he sounded like a schoolkid called on to deliver a book report when they had not read the book, right down to desperately riffing on the title.

     "Congressperson" is essentially an impossible job if you make an honest effort at it.  A good staff can help, knowing or at least looking up the things the officeholder needs to know and feeding them just enough information, right before they need to know it.  It's not even dishonest: it's effective staff command.  Nobody can know everything that job requires 'em to know; the best we can hope for is that they dig in and learn the most salient stuff, and get good support for the rest.

     But this morning's guy?  At a guess, he'd seen news reports; he had some idea of the location, might have shaken hands or given a campaign speech there, but he hadn't even hit Wikipedia for more information.

     I'd have to know more about him before I made my mind up, but if I lived in his district, I'd sure be finding out.  House and Senate seats are not sinecures.  They're not supposed to phone it in.  Do the darn homework!  Is it a hard job?  Yes, it's extraordinarily hard, and if they do it right, the paycheck-to-effort ratio is lousy.

     I'm sick and tired of Senators and Representatives who won't do the work.  I dislike 'em more than the few whose politics I dislike who actually show up to interviews and events -- and their Chamber -- with a good grasp of what's going on (or even the mere appearance of understanding): at least they put in the effort.  Even if it's glib, facile and based on a quick sheet of talking points a staffer handed 'em at the last minute, better that than trying to get by on BS and blather. 

Maybe Later

     This morning, I'm just tired of the chaos and stress.  Which is, of course, what the forces of oppression want.

     Too bad, authoritarian losers: I'm not giving up.  But this morning, I'm denying you my specific attention.  Go play in traffic or something.  Go harass the birds for singing, the butterflies for being too colorful, the ants for being too organized.  (Y'all are coming in a distant third to ants on "regimentation," which I'd think would be a good strong sign that humans aren't wired up to do a whole lot of it; but you've already shown you won't be convinced by evidence, so....)

Got Through Another Day

     I even managed to finish up the laundry, do some vacuuming, change my sheets and grill a couple of little steaks for dinner, with mixed tiny potatoes, fancy mushrooms and a bagged salad.

     That's about as low-effort a nice meal as can be had.  Sure, I had to build a charcoal fire (even emptied all the ash from the grill!), any clean and cut up the mushrooms -- but the purple (all the way through!), red (only on the outside) and brown (ditto) potatoes get microwaved in their bag along with the pat of seasoned butter they're sold with, and the mushrooms go in a covered pan over low heat with a little olive oil, a smidgen of butter, some truffle zest and a hint of salt -- you just put 'em in there and ignore them for ten minutes or so.  I would have cooked them in a grill pan, but I forgot about them until the last minute and stovetop is easier to prepare.

     Tomorrow, back at it!  I've had a project going downtown at work that I might be able to make some progress on.  It involves working on the rooftop, which is good (no adult supervision!) and bad (a long climb up a fixed ladder and people tend to forget you're up there).

     Anyway, in 2026, with the world a mess and seriously askew people in leadership at home and abroad, today was about as good as it gets. 

Lookit Me! I'm Almost Human!

     I chaired the critique group this morning, and that went well.  It's usually pretty draining -- the cost of being an introvert -- but afterwards, I actually managed to get nerved up to walk over to Fat Dan's and enjoy a late lunch with Tam.  (Adequate coleslaw -- look, I'm judgemental about that dish because I like it -- and a very good toasted pastrami and corned beef sandwich on rye, with Swiss cheese and brown mustard.)

     It might not sound like much, but it's been months since I had a meal out -- and months since I walked that far.  I'm having a lot of trouble with social anxiety these days, and with my knees, and it's much too easy for me to just avoid it all: to have minimal social interaction, not go to new places, order online as much as possible and avoid physical exertion.  I'm trying to break those habits, reinforced during the pandemic (except for walking -- Tam and I were taking daily walks around the block for a couple of years), and it's slow going.

     One step at a time.  I can do this.  I've done it in the past.  The knees get better when I get out there and interact with the world, and so does my ability to deal with people.

Nuttier Than Ever

     Indiana's Lieutenant Governor continues to express peculiar opinions -- now he's concerned "Marxist Democrats" are going to lay the groundwork for an "Islamic Caliphate," right here in River Cit- er, Indiana.

     Take this as your regular reminder that not even our arch-conservative Governor Mike Braun wanted to run with this guy as his Number Two; the state GOP leadership made him do so.  And Indiana Democrats, while they're certainly Democrats, run more in the Evan Bayh mold, Lefty-Centrist or even a little Right, depending on the issue and the individual.  (Our actual Hoosier socialists -- Eugene V. Debs, for instance -- never hid it.)

     I'm not at all sure why he thinks there's any love or collusion between Islamic fundamentalists and Marxists; history suggests they're not exactly compatible, from Afghanistan to Chechnya to the Uyghurs.*  He appears to be just piling up scary things so he can warn everyone of the terrible, terrrrrible dangers that he's sure only an application of the exact right kind of Jesus to civil government can protect against -- I'm surprised he didn't throw feminism or transgender people in, as well.  Oooga-booga!  Guys like him live their life as if it's an episode of Scooby-Doo, never realizing that they're not the good-hearted "meddling kids" but the man in the monster mask.

     Bonus: Ohh, friend, either you're closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated....

     Always doubt the motives of a man who's pushing you for a quick emotional reaction; he's reaching for your wallet -- or your fundamental freedoms. 
________________
* Largely but not entirely Muslim.

A Return To Space

      The next season of For All Mankind is out.  On Apple TV, it's an "alternate history" in which the Russians beat the U.S. to the Moon (barely) and the Space Race never stops, forcing technological advancements.

     It's a world both familiar and strange.  In some ways, it's the future the adults promised us during my childhood -- but in the real world, we'd stopped going to the Moon before I started High School.  Because of that, at times it's almost painful to watch the show: they've got science bases on the Moon and a settlement on Mars!

     In other ways, it's clearly fiction -- and remains on a timeline that would result in the setting of The Expanse.  Politicians exhort, "Earth first!" in both shows, Martian settlers are determined and resentful, asteroids are mined for minerals (just beginning in For All Mankind and an ongoing industry in The Expanse). Some of the fractious nations of Earth have come together in the Apple TV series as the "M-7," which runs Mars and oversees the exploitation of space-based resources.

     It's a timeline based on the Sunday-supplement articles and TV specials of my childhood, but the showrunners aren't looking through rose-colored glasses.  "If only..." is a wistful dream and the TV series eschews wistfulness for a sprawling cast, a storyline as wide as history and a past that feels like a future.  The story hasn't quite leapfrogged the calendar -- the current season is set in the 2010s -- but the technology certainly has.

Television Of Interest

     Tamara and I recently watched the entire run of the CBS-carried show Person of Interest, finishing last night.  Despite ending nearly a decade ago, the show is surprisingly current, addressing the rise of "machine intelligence," pervasive surveillance, government (and government contractor) corruption and the morality of power.

     Heavy stuff -- but carried along with no small amount of action and adventure, by a group of competent characters who will beat you at chess or in hand-to-hand combat.  The series begins as one more entry in the "mysterious strangers help good people and stymie evil" genre, along the general lines of, say, The Pretender, Mission: Impossible, Quantum Leap, Have Gun Will Travel, Danger Man, The Avengers and so on: drama in the Gothic mode, with a clear conflict between good and evil, in which good triumphs just in time for the credits to roll, usually by the skin of its teeth.

     That would have been more than enough to carry a TV series, but Person of Interest didn't stop there.  A smart underlying concept and strong characters pushed it more and more along science-fictional lines, in a near-future, near-cyperpunk world of corrupt cops, honest cops, warring criminal gangs, computer geniuses, super-spy/assassins -- and a number of surprisingly human touches, throughlines of love and loss.  From season to season, the story deepens, the bad guys get bigger and badder, and our small band of heroes rise to the occasion or die trying.  There are Classical mappings to most good drama, and if you ever wondered what might happen if clever, lame Hephaestus; bold, handsome Apollo; wise, cryptic Pallas Athena; implacable Nemesis; Artemis the huntress; the Delphic Oracle and a gritty NYC police detective* faced off against Hera, Zeus and Hermes (with a small army of giants and Titans on their side, all answering to Colossus the Forbin Project), this is an answer, with enough side characters and conflicts left over to fill out any collection of ancient gods or a modern rogues' gallery. 

     This is a series well worth watching while it is still fiction.  Don't wait too long.
_________________
* Even I can only strain a metaphor so far, though impulsive Ares is a not-unreasonable analog for Detective Lionel Fusco.  But I will still argue that most ensemble-cast dramas (and not a few comedies) can be mapped onto the various pantheons of the past, for a very simple reason: our stories still deal in archetypes and in human emotion writ large.  Good casting helps; the actors in Person of Interest were as varied as their characters, people of divergent inclinations and career paths who all brought something of themselves to their roles. 

Eggs Pomodoro, Sort Of

     Last night, I made a kind of soup or ragout with ground turkey, mushroom, onion, carrot, celery and mushroom-chicken broth.  It was quick, fresh and easy to make, and there was a little left, which I froze.

     This morning, looking at the choices -- bacon and eggs, oatmeal, Malt-O-Meal,  toast -- I was unimpressed.  All good, but all the same old stuff.

     I had three mushrooms left over, and a little celery and....h'mm, a can of crushed tomatoes.  So I fried up a strip of bacon and drained off most of the fat, diced and cooked the mushrooms in the same pan along with a little celery, and defrosted the leftovers in the microwave.

     The broth had been okay at best.  I poured it off, then added the turkey and vegetables to the skillet with the can of crushed tomatoes and "Italian blend" seasoning, crumbling in the bacon.  Once it was bubbling, I broke a couple of eggs into it and let it simmer, covered.  (I have clear "universal" pan lids in a couple of sizes, very useful for this kind of thing.)

     A dozen minutes later, it was done.  A "fancy" breakfast from this and that.

Omininousity

      Things didn't end well for Cassandra, but they were bad long before they got worse: the thing about prophecies of doom is, even if they're right, they're a downer.

     The downer at present is that we're in a "K-shaped economy," which feels preposterous to most Americans: how can a rising tide not be lifting all boats?

     But that's how it's working: if you were well-off to begin with, came out of the pandemic with money to play the stock market and not worry, a bit in crypto, maybe dabble in prediction markets, you're doing fine.  The trade war (wars?) haven't bothered you; the un-war with Iran hasn't been an issue, and while there's a whole lot of oil and gas (and aluminum and ammonia plus nitrates for fertilizer) bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz, those chickens are still scratching in the yard, and aren't due home to roost for weeks yet.  The top half of the K is going up, up, up!

     But this K is a fancy font: the bottom half is a quarter circle.  If you started out just okay, you're still mostly okay; if you were worse off, you can already feel the pinch of high gas prices and grocery prices that have barely budged down or even gone up, of rising energy costs....  And the people near the bottom, where the curve is getting steep?  They're hosed.  (Welcome to Calculus 001, by the way.  Oh, we've reached my stop already.)

     There are a lot more of us in the bottom of the K than the top, but we don't make colorful news copy; we're not part of the "AI boom" and some of us have lost jobs to it; still, one of the biggest groups is right there where the curve is barely sloping: they're not feeling it much so far.

     But the big dip in the road is coming.  There is no magic restart for the lost months of global trade in oil and all the stuff you can make with it.  Fertilizer is in short supply and expensive, and that's what grows the crops you and your entree eat.  Aluminum -- beer cans, soft drink cans, all manner of consumer and industrial goods -- is getting scarce and costly.  And oil prices -- well, you buy gas; you know how that's trending.  There will be a "capture transient" as it ends, prices ramping up beforehand, undercut by the sudden bump in supply that may result in a nasty fall.  A saving grace as the problem continues is that idled refineries and oil wells (etc.) don't start up quickly; but it's a bitter pill, since it will mean lingering shortages and higher prices until it's all back up to speed.

     Nobody liked Cassandra very much.  They liked her predictions less.  And in a K-shaped economy, you can see the party is roaring!  Look at 'em, in their Rollses and Bentleys, with BMWs and Mercedeses (Mercedii?) for the kids, and all their outrageous costumes -- surely you, too, will soon join them!  It's right there, online and on TV, glittering and shiny, nearly close enough to touch.

     Thing is, you're not gonna get there.  In a K-shaped economy, very few cross over.  The odds it'll be you or me are lousy.   I'm not Cassanda; I'll be happy to have missed my mark.  But that's not how I'm betting. 

Slow-Roasted Skirt Steak

      They've had skirt steaks at the grocer's for some time at a price that is only a little unreasonable and today, I decided to go for it.  It's probably going to cost more later, after all.

     They don't take well to rapid cooking.  You want to go at a skirt stake low and slow, or apply some interesting culinary trickery, or perhaps both.  I picked up some diced red onion, a Poblano pepper and a couple of containers of oyster mushrooms.  (And a box of beef broth, just in case, but I didn't need it.)

     I have just the pan for the job.  As winter ebbed and I started using the grill more, I was thinking about cookware.  I used cheap Teflon pans for years until that started looking like a bad idea, and Revere Ware (copper-bottom stainless steel), which is great to cook in but so very not non-stick. I love my skillet and stewpot from Our Place, but they don't like high temperatures.  My graniteware oval roasting pans are nice, but too thin for direct heat....

     Graniteware is enamelware, and there's a famous, colorful brand of enamel-finished cast-iron pots and pans that has long tempted me.  The Our Place people have a whole line it, too.  Both are first-rate cooking hardware -- and priced to match.  I went looking for something closer to entry-level, to give it a try with a little less commitment.  It turns out that Lodge, a company which makes all kinds of plain cast iron, also does enameled versions.  I've had a round 12" roasting pan with a lid for a while now, and it's working well.  (Bright red with a cream-colored interior!)

     It was just the thing for the skirt steak.  I applied unsalted "steakhouse" rub to it and let it sit while I melted a half-teaspoon of butter and a splash of light olive oil in the pan, just enough to coat the bottom.  I left the fire very low and once the pan was warmed up, I laid the skirt steak in it in a big circle,  covered it and started doing dishes.

     After ten or twelve minutes, it was cooking pretty well and smelled good when I lifted the lid.  I added about half an onion on the meat and put the lid back, and went back to my dishwashing.  When the sink was clear, I washed the Poblano, cleaned out the seeds and white pulp, and diced it finely, then added it, mostly on the steak.  There was now plenty of liquid around the meat; I wasn't going to need the broth.  I puttered around for another fifteen minutes, then washed, cut the stems away and added all the oyster mushrooms (you could use ordinary Porcinis, but we like the fancy ones).

     I let it simmer, covered, for about a half hour while I cleaned up the kitchen and set up for supper.  The total cook time was out an hour and a half start to finish.

     It was good -- the skirt steak is sliced into thin strips crosswise to serve, and with a generous helping of the mushrooms and vegetables and a bit of the liquid, it only needed the least touch of salt.  We had salad on the side, too.

     I am pretty sure hard times are coming.  The effects of the long closure of the Straits of Hormuz haven't hit yet, and when they do, it's not going to be the politicians or the high-rollers playing Wall Street who will feel the pain.  It'll be you and me.  Might as well enjoy a few small luxuries now, while we can.

     (I wrote this on the big iPad last night, and as the post got longer, the keyboard became laggier and laggier.  By the last couple of paragraphs, it was nearly impossible to edit, trying to chase the cursor around.  Better now, but there are probably still a few left.)