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.

Valley Of The Shrieking Sky Kings?

     Today's title is beyond unlikely.  A few days ago, I exited the front door for my morning walk and discovered a large cicada had run out of gas and crash-landed right next to the door.  I flipped him over with a twig, but he was gone.

     Within a day, the ants had found him, forming a long procession to the remains and back.  The next day, it was closer to the edge of the porch.  This morning, it was gone.

     I have a mental image of a great mob of tiny ants bearing the relatively enormous ex-cicada away like people in Ancient Egypt carrying the sarcophagus of a Pharaoh, to be entombed at the heart of their nest, no doubt with goods for the next life heaped 'round it and chanting ant-priests keeping watch.  The reality is more like the ant collective having dim memories of the long, cold winter we recently endured, and wanting to keep their larder stocked.

     Either way, the cicada surely received fitting respects, and the darned ants now have something better to do (for a few days, at least) than sneak in and try to suss out crumbs in the hard-to-reach parts of Tamara's TV tray.  It annoys her no end to get it out and find that a work party has been mining the corners of the frame-like rim around the top of the thing and are still on the job, no matter how carefully she has wiped it down after the previous use.

Sociology? History?

      It'll be a PhD thesis subject some day, I'm just not sure in which department: Is Republican rage at Dr. Anthony Fauci primarily driven by his refusal to validate quackery during the Covid pandemic, or by his earlier work in helping find effective treatments for HIV/AIDS?

     There's a certain subset of the Right, especially the Religious Right, that was delighted they could cast gay sex as a death sentence, and Dr. Fauci played a huge part in taking that away.  He was a low-key villain for the nutjob Right ever after, and the more widespread craziness over Covid opened the door to spreading that loathing.

     Now they're promising to get him behind bars, one way or another -- for doing what was at the time his job.

     Sorry, horse dewormer is still not a miracle cure for viral illness.  Vaccination is an effective tool in stopping the spread of disease.  AIDS was not the wrath of God.  You can stick your fingers in your ears and chant, "No, no, no," all you like, but it's still true.

Red Stew Wednesday

     Because if I call it chili, the Texans get restive.  The various kinds of stuff we make in the Midwest are drastically different anyway, so I don't mind calling the genre by a different name.

     What I grew up with was a mild dish with ground beef, tomatoes, red kidney beans and elbow macaroni, with cumin-heavy seasoning.  What I make is...not that.

     Tonight's had lean ground beef, a cut-up strip of bacon, a chopped fresh white onion, red, fresh red,  yellow and green bell peppers, diced fresh mushrooms, a little grocery-store fresh pico de gallo, bright red peppadew peppers, two cans of mild green chilis, a little pickled red onion, some bell pepper bruschetta, hot pickled okra cut into rounds and a box of crushed tomatoes.

     That's a whole lot of stuff, which got browned and sauteed and stirred and simmered, with various spices along the way, mostly chili powder, Italian-mix seasoning, smoked paprika, a little celery salt on the ground beef, a dash of Cajun seasoning, and of course, three big bay leaves after everything was in the pot together and simmering.

     It looks like this:

   I liked it, and there's plenty left for later, probably with some different meat added and whatever else appeals to me.

What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

The Thing Is...

      "Every spot in history is the most dangerous," a commenter told me the other day.  Which is on one level a tautology: we're a species that floats on the edge of disaster.  Our genetic heritage tells the story of multiple narrow escapes; many of our legendary heroes, all around the globe, are clever tricksters who talk or connive their way out of trouble.

     Humanity spends a lot of time running right at the red line.

     On the other hand, we're got a regime in Washington right now that is an outlier in both degree and kind:

     Degree because they're profiting from holding office far in excess of the usual.  I have resigned myself to believing that with billions wooshing by overhead, Federal politicians all eventually conclude they'd be fools to not do as all around them are doing, and net a few million for themselves.  Okay; I don't like it but there it is.  But these guys are raking in billions, and most are not the least bit coy about it.

     Kind, because we haven't seen this level of racism from the party in power since Woodrow Wilson.  We haven't seen nativism so bullheaded since the Know-Nothings.  We've only seen this much division once before, and it didn't end well.  A little over two years ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, source of the Project 2025 agenda, told Steve Bannon on his podcast, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless -- if the Left allows it to be."

     That's not politics as usual.  That's not normal.  That's a promise to turn things over, to purge and remake not by compromise but in the likeness of just one party, just one part of the American electorate.

     So, yes, the present is always the most dangerous time -- but some presents are more dangerous than others, and they don't become less dangerous by pretending it's the same old same old.

Tam Takes A Chance

     For years, I've been buying Michaels of Brooklyn pasta sauce.  It's consistent and I like it, but I mostly stick to two versions: "Home Style Gravy," which has a long list of ingredients, and "Marinara," which is a more classic tomato-and-spices sauce.  I've tried their spicy Arrabbiata, which is good, but the Puttanesca....

     I admit it.  The anchovies scared me.  Put 'em on a pizza and they're overpoweringly fishy -- which is fine, if you're in the mood for it.  I didn't know how that would play out in pasta sauce.

     Tonight, I was going to make something we have every so often, fancy mixed fresh vegetables (mostly broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, red onion, a little shredded carrot, zucchini and peapods) that the grocery packages with a little pat of Italian herb butter in a microwave-ready bag, with meaty pasta sauce poured over it.  I asked Tam to buy some sausage -- whatever looked good to her -- and a jar of sauce.  "Get the kind with the most ingredients," I said, not remembering if it was the Home Style Gravy or Marinara.

     As it happens, the Puttanesca sauce has the longest list of ingredients and she was happy to comply.  Dinnertime came, and I browned two mild Italian sausages and one hot one, all three squeezed out of their casings and crumbled as they cooked.  I drained it and added some fresh carrots cut into rounds and a half-dozen green onions, chopped, and cooked it a little more while I hunted up the sauce.  And it was....  Oh, my.  Well, it was what  we had.  I poured the Puttanesca in, gave it a stir and let the pot simmer, not knowing how it would turn out.

     It came out fine.  Better than fine -- there are green and black olives in Michaels Puttanesca, and capers, and if there are a few anchovies, well, think of 'em as Roman garum on the hoof (or fin): all they added was umami.

     I'll buy it again.

     The sauce-over-vegetables thing is an alternative to dinner with pasta noodles and salad.  It works very well, and anyone who has had that lecture from their doctor about limiting bread and rice and potatoes and pasta (and all those wonderful, lovely things) is advised to try it.  It's been a good way to serve zucchini as far back as I can remember, and adding a few other vegetables only broadens the appeal.

Don't Know Much About History?

     Have I got a guy for you!  A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry will take you on deep dives into history with a genuine scholar, footnotes and all, often answering those questions that gnaw at perceptive students getting a view-from-orbit look at history.

     Wear comfy shoes and pack a lunch.  You're going to be awhile.

Letter To An Auto-Peddler

Dear Bedroom Community Chevrolet Dealer Who Keeps Mailing Me Offers To Buy My Car:

     Please take this to heart: The only circumstance under which I would purchase a new car would be if someone was holding a gun to my head.  That is, unless they insisted that I buy a Chevy.  If they did, I would ask them to please hurry up and pull the trigger.

     Sincerely,
     Fool Who Purchased A Brand-New Cavalier (in the first year the model was offered and regretted it for ten years.  While I was having the engine rebuilt after the heads warped, I bought a rusty 1974 MGB for $300, and found it to be more fun and more dependable than the Chevy.  I parked the Cavalier and drove the MG.)

     You could not give me a Chevy.  I'm sure they make plenty of fine cars, but that wretched little hatchback soured me on 'em for good. 

If It's Good Enough For a Plowman....

     ...It's good enough for anyone.  Thanks to physical therapy and some very mild yard work afterwards, I was hungry around midday, which I usually am not.

     Breakfast was a three-meat (a little bacon, ham and pastrami) and egg sandwich on rye toast.  Lunch needed to be at least nominally more healthy.

     Behold:

     It's a "Ploughman's Lunch" and a very fancy one, with buttered multigrain bread, Brie and Babybel (very similar to Edam) cheese, dark-red fresh cherries, pickled red onions, hot pickled okra, umami-rich bell pepper bruschetta, Kalamata and Castelvetrano olives, and "half-done" dill pickles with lots of flavor and crunch, plus a few roasted cashews not seen in the photograph.

     A meal like that, light though is it, leaves your palate amused and senses satiated.

Current Events

     The thing about commenting on current events is, right now, we have got a whole bunch of men -- and it's mostly men, you boys gotta own that -- who are busily setting the world on fire, like an entire gang of firebug nitwits creeping around California at the height of dry season with boxes of strike-anywhere matches and aiming to do just that: strike anywhere.

     I can keep on pointin' 'em out, but there are so many and they are so determined in their efforts that there are not enough fire hoses, and none of them fat enough, to prevent some damage.  Sooner or later, one or another is going to get something major going and the winds of history will fan the flames.  The Middle East?  Ukraine?  The Atlantic overturning current?  Most of Canada burning to the waterline (hey, don't we have a state up that way, and a lot of it also covered in woods?)?  Stock market crashing, Africa overrun by infectious disease...?

     Don't know.  Can't say.  The human race perpetually dances on the rim of a volcano, and we have got us a crop of boys who are choosing the more overhanging parts of it for our dance floor and doing a lot of jumping up and down.  Eventually, something's going to give.

     Better be ready to leap for safety -- and to know which direction will do you the most good, 'cos they are just looking for the rush when it crumbles.

Hoppin' John, Skippin' Jenny

     I started with some pretty good Hoppin' John -- ham, mild Italian sausage, green peppers, onion, canned diced mild chilis, a box of crushed tomatoes blackeyed peas and a little this and that.  We had it last week and I froze the leftovers in two batches.

     Then I picked up some pickled mild banana pepper rings, sliced pickled hot cherry pepper, pickled red onions and spicy pickled okra, plus the usual green Castelvetrano olvies and black Kalamata olives.  Handy stuff to have.

     Tonight, Tam brought home bulk sweet Italian sausage (it's not sweet-sweet, just a different herb profile than the mild).  I browned it in olive oil with a little gumbo filé (I should have held that back for later, to help thicken the broth), Cajun seasoning and smoked paprika, added pickled peppers and onions as it was about done and drained it, then added a little more of the onions and pepper, plus five big okra cut into rounds, along with a few of each kind of olives, a small can of tomato sauce, a big can of fire-roasted green chilis and half a can of pinto beans.  Meanwhile, I defrosted the half-batch of Hoppin' John and added it, plus some dried chives, cilantro, a little oregano, some dried garlic and a big bay leaf.  Plus a little more Cajun seasoning after it came up to a boil and I had a taste.  I let it simmer a bit before serving.

     Reheated Hoppin' John is Skippin' Jenny, and this pot skipped as nicely as you please!  This combination is rich in pantothenic acid and other B-complex vitamins, which may be why I have picked up a craving for it: it's one of the building blocks for all the things that help our joints work.  Or, whatever, maybe I just like the flavor.

Sleepy

     I'd post something, but I keep nodding off.  I haven't been sleeping well -- my back wakes me more often than I'm used to.

The Doctor Says

     I'm off for four more weeks.  Well, the doctor actually prescribed light duty, still not lifting any more than fifteen pounds, and that's a downcheck for work, where they require us to be able to lift fifty pounds -- or at least be able to try.

     That's a lot of weight, and far more than I routinely lift.  There are plenty of good workarounds.  The kicker is, there's a possibility of overhead work, and you really don't want to be dropping expensive, heavy equipment, especially when expensive people are working not too far away.  I don't like it but I understand it.  I'll do my exercises and hope for improvement.

One Nothingburger, All The Trimmings

     NPR has cogent analysis of last night's Presidential speech.  Tl;dr? A nothingburger with cheese, pickles, lettuce (oh, lots and lots of fine Taylor Farms lettuce), tomato, mushrooms, Ranch dressing, onion, mustard, ketchup, toothpaste, horseradish, grill-toasted sesame-seed buns and a dead mouse -- but no burger.

     China illicitly stole voter rolls?  Those are a matter of public record.  In many cases, you can make just like a Ministry of State Security spook, and download 'em yourself over the Internet, free for nothing!  No skull or duggery required, Mao jacket optional.

     Foreign countries -- notably China, Russia and Iran -- have tried to interfere in our elections, at least as far back as 2020?  You bet they have; we knew about it then and we know about it now, and they still haven't got into the election machinery to yank levers.  They mostly do indirect things, like fund influencers and leak damaging real information and disinformation, and the state and Federal governments are well aware of it, since they're constantly playing Whack-A-Mole against 'em -- and winning.

     OMG, there are 250,000+ non-citizens registered to vote?  Guess what, there kind of are, and there are two main sources.  The first is paperwork screwups, things like asylum-seeker Hector interacts with state or city governments in some way, getting permission to drive or signing up to pay his sewer bill and so on, and there's one more form to fill out, thanks to voter-registration outreach efforts.  The person behind the counter neither knows or cares if he's a citizen, oops.  Or, and this is a gotcha, Hector follows all the rules, and eventually becomes a shiny new U.S. citizen, Social Security number and all.  Of course he registers to vote -- unlike you, Hector is fresh off Civics classes, and he wants to be a good citizen.  But Homeland Security doesn't have any automatic mechanism to connect new-citizen Hector with asylum-seeker or Temporary Protected Status Hector, and when their SAVE list of non-citizens is compared with lists of registered voters, there he is.  (If he gets snatched by ICE, he will have to prove he's a citizen, and they're very picky about what counts as proof, something that has happened over and over in the past 18 months.)  And there are rather a lot of overlapping names with incomplete data; do they match, or not?  Well, maybe; ICE and CPB appear to be finding out in ways that are often quite rough.  Oops, wrong Hector.

     On and on the claims went, and it was all stuff with a relatively high ooga-booga-scary quotient and little real substance.  None of it was new.  And he capped it off by calling ABC and NBC "complicit" with his enemies in not carrying the speech, and suggesting their licenses to use the high-value public airwaves free for nothing should be taken away.  (TV networks as such don't have licenses, other than for the handful of stations they own directly.  Outside of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, odds are the ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC station you watch is owned by a company other than a network.  PBS doesn't own any at all.)

     I watched the speech on CBS, who cut away before the President was done speaking and were surprisingly critical of the content, with extensive on-the-spot debunking from experts.  I don't know if Tony Dokoupil and Margaret Brennan still have jobs as of this morning, but they didn't pull any punches last night.  (I listened to NPR's coverage a little, too, with similar fact-based debunking.  They were both very careful to do their homework, shedding lots of light with little or no heat.)

Alea Iacta Maybe

     There's a Presidential address tonight, which the White House says will be be about "free and fair elections"* and "a couple of other things."

     If the sitting President manages to cover only three topics in the course of a speech, it'll be a first.

     But the stuff about elections puts news media in a quandary: provide a platform for yet more falsehoods about elections (including, according to credible sources, the 2020 Presidential election), or ignore it, and incur the wrath of an Administration with a history of striking back?  Brendan Carr's FCC has been uncommonly pugnacious, so we'll probably see and hear the spectacle all across radio and TV.

     Depending on what he says and takes action on, it could be a crossing of the Rubicon -- if that means anything at all under an Administration that crosses rivers-not-to-be-crossed as if they were taking commuter bridges in and out of Washington DC.  I'll be watching, if only because power-grabbing regimes count on burnout and over-familiarity with awfulness to enable their encroachments.

     Pundit after pundit, editorial after editorial has asked, "When will it get to be too much?"  I think that's the wrong question, one based an overly-simplified version of history.  There is very rarely a moment when everything changes like a flipped light switch, especially for the people in the moment; Ralph Waldo Emerson may have "heard the shot fired 'round the World" at the Old North Bridge, but he was listening in 1837, when the issues of 1775 were long settled.  Conflict had been ongoing; British troops and Colonial militias had been on the move long before.  Conversely, a lot of Americans didn't find out they were in the middle of a shooting war until long afterward.

     One day, everyone will have been against this.  One day, the current mess won't just be something happening on your computer or television screen.

     Tonight?  Who knows.  That's why I'll watch.

     Update: As a commenter pointed out, half of the Big 4 over-the-air networks won't be carrying the speech: ABC and NBC have said "No, thanks" to over-the-air; they'll stream it online, as will PBS.  CBS and Fox are unknown, but likely.  NPR will carry it on radio.  I'm mildly surprised.
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* Which, by the way, they're all been here in the United States, for at least all of your lifetime and probably long before.  Claims to the contrary (especially for 2020) have been unequivocally shown to be lies, distortions and/or bullshit-laden hot air, by everyone from investigating Feds to international observers, as well as journalists who stand to get a lot more attention from bombshells about cheating than a dull report that everything went according to routine.

The Men Who Built The Torment Nexus*

     It's a trope from The Onion and like a lot of satire, it's realer than real.  The essay linked below explains how zillionaire techbros have looted science fiction for settings and widgets while discarding the philosophy and warnings to rot.  Is the future not what you were promised?  Yeah, me, too, and here's one big reason why.
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* Title riffed from Alfred Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which you should read if you haven't.  It's almost reassuring.  Or is it? 

Doctor Today, Dentist Tomorrow

      Saw my regular doctor today for general follow-up on my back and some discussion of long-term prognosis.  It is, as I suspected, partially a dice roll: I should avoid undue stress, but even then, it may flare up from time to time.  I've got a glitchy back now.

     I did very well on blood pressure (see what six weeks off gets you?).

     Tomorrow, the dentist will probably not give me good marks for tooth-grinding.  It's been a problem all my life, and some times more than others.  These are tooth-grinding times, and I bear the marks.

Antenna!

     After checking out the ladders I already own, I realized I had one that was light enough to carry and the right size to reach the roof, so with only one extra trip (had the wrong size of paracord), my ham antenna is back to the usable condition it was in before the raccoons-in-the-chimney excitement.  It was slow going, but I did the job.

     That was Saturday, and it left me pretty worn out.  Still, it's progress.

Looking Back

     The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*

     Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed.  His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy.  It's worth reading.
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* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.

"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot feel pain or loss, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up! 

Bear In Mind

      The words "Senator" and "senility" have the same Latin root, senex -- and yes, it means just what you think, only more so: "old, old man."

     U. S. Senators were supposed to be in those years between the attainment of mature wisdom and aimlessly wandering the halls in a bathrobe, and while you can't really mark them off on a calendar (well, kind of: nobody 29 or younger need apply), they're probably supposed to heed the wise council of their peers as they approach the upper limit, and step down gracefully.

     Increasingly, this is seen not to happen.  It's not an especially partisan phenomenon.  Neither are those other chief occupations of a U. S. Senator: lining their own pockets (stock markets and other investments, "campaign contributions" and so on) and getting their state (or pals and benefactors in other states) larded up at the ol' pork barrel.  I guess that's too engrossing to leave time for looking after their colleagues when they start to struggle.  (They cannot even be arsed to revise and pass -- or not pass -- laws, either, which was supposedly the entire point of the job.)

     As ever, the U. S. House runs their own Junior Varsity version of it; I remain convinced that their biggest problem is not too much dissension but a lack of tumult. If House debate were a little more spirited, it'd sort the dispirited right out, but it seems like you can't hardly get a good honest harrumph out of any of 'em on the chamber floor these days.  It's all weirdness and/or weasel-wording any more.

Bicycling

     A couple of cautious trials have shown me that I can ride my bicycle without irritating my back.  Maybe I would irk it if I tackled much of a grade or tried to go really fast, but regular pedaling a modern safety bicycle (as opposed to an Ordinary) is fine.  It's no longer a might-as-well-be-fixed gear, though.  I used to leave it in 21st gear all the time; these days, I'm hunting up and down -- but that's an old lady with a bad back, in 85°F and above heat, so I'll take it.

Warning!

     Tam keeps chuckling when she puts something in the kitchen wastebasket.

     A few days ago, me and my bad back managed to fumble our way to breaking the treadle of the step can in the kitchen, at least a year ahead of the usual lifespan of these.

     So I ordered a new one, and per my usual rule, bought the cheapest of that model; the various colors have different prices, possibly due to popularity, and I am not that particular about kitchen decor.  They're the exact right size for the available space, and in a household with cats, if you can't keep the trash can behind a door with a latch, you want a step-lid can: the cats can't get into them, or anyway, ours haven't figured it out.

     As it happened, "dark gray" is still the lowest price, so the new can was an exact match to the old one, which I had left in place (and we were lifting the lid by hand, like barbarians), so I decided I'd better mark it.  I didn't want to surprise Tam, and if you have hold of the lid when you step on the treadle -- well, guess how I managed to break the previous one.

     I used my largest Post-It note, and stuck it right on the lid at the front:

     You can see why she snickers.  Oh, the shock of the new!

Hooray, Hoo... Oops?

      Got my FMLA paperwork today,* which is good.  It's got me covered through my next ortho doctor's appointment.

     Then I read on down, seeing which boxes are ticked.  Like this one: "Due to the condition, incapacity is permanent or long term and requires the continuing supervision of a health care provider (...)."

     Yeah.  See, per the specialist, my back was never right, and having been riled up once,† from here on it's a matter of managing it.  I'm not a candidate for any kind of hardware (or knifework, and I'm happy about that), but I will never again dance the maskirovka while balancing a 25-pound sack of potatoes on my head.  Or is it dance the mashed potatoes while balancing a 11.34-kilogram matryoshka?  It doesn't matter, they're both out.  Along with some other stuff.  I'm going to have to go a little slower and more carefully now.  If they'll let me.

     Guess I need to save up for a lightweight telescoping ladder.  That ham antenna isn't going to fix itself.
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* Wait, I'm in the Five-Meter Liberation Army now?
 
† Unfortunately for me, they've got X-rays from 2021 to compare the current set to, and things have, in fact, moved a measurable amount, no squinting required.  I'm not gonna be able to BS my way out of this and take more Tylenol to cover, the way I do with most migraines.  It's spondylolisthesis, which until last month, I thought was the name of a general who marched an army out of Greece and fought the Persians to a faretheewell. 

Scenes From An Independence Day Cookout

     Tam, before grilling begins: "Oh, just a small patty for me, please."

     Tam, after I have brought in steaming smashburgers, grilled over hardwood and hardwood charcoal, with rain-damp fresh garlic chive steaming on the coals: "Um, two would be good, with cheese."

     The garlic chives were a freebie -- they grow wild now, and have partially escaped from the raised bed where I first planted them, years ago.  You lay a few stalks on the coals and it adds a nice touch.

     I served up the burgers on spicy hamburger buns with black sesame seeds, a slice of Havarti cheese between the thin burgers.  I had (store-bought) chunky salsa on mine along with ketchup and mustard; Tam eschewed the salsa.  Good either way!

     Tam, this morning:  "Those were the best smashburgers I've had in a long time -- of course, the others weren't grilled over hardwood."

     It does make a difference.  At this point, I'm cooking with my grill-saved stock of charcoal (just close the vents and it goes out) and the remaining hardwood firewood that I bought for kindling last year.  I could not safely lift a bag of lump charcoal at present; I'm going to have to draft Tam to help me buy more of the good stuff.  We're still using the $20.00 covered grill, and it's at least sixteen years old.

Flashback To 2017

     Nine years ago, a series of tweets (and they were still tweets then) that did nothing but quote the Declaration of Independence got angry, defensive responses from supporters of the then (and now) President.

     At the time, it seemed like silly overreaction.  Ah, memories!  Good times.

The Orginal Fireworks

     I haven't felt much like celebrating this Independence Day; it seems to me that our Republic is on the ropes, and the next three or four years will restore it or break it.  I'll be on tenterhooks until the trend is clear.

     But I certainly don't begrudge anyone's celebration of this historic day.  John Adams was right: "It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

     Our neighborhood, like many cities and towns in the U.S., sounds like some kind of a battlefield tonight; man-made shooting stars light up the sky, and a series of short, soaking rains in late afternoon should mitigate many of the usual hazards.  I grilled hamburgers for dinner, and cleaning up, I noticed an unusually large number of lightning bugs, fireflies, flashing their own beacons as they hover above the back yard.  It's as if, seeing the lights in the sky, they are determined not to be left out.

     Field Notes, purveyors of fine pocket notebooks and related items, is giving away a pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution all day today, with any purchase; or you can buy one for $4.95.  It's good reading.  It's essential reading, and on this day of all days, they're worth looking over.

Idiotic Posturing

      So, the Mayor of NYC asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats no lower than 78° through these hot days -- and the Federal Department of Energy, which has given the generic version of the same advice on their website for a long time, took those pages down.

     Elsewhere, conservative politicians grumbled about "socialism."

     Of course, the Mayor of New York has no authority over people's thermostats.  Nor does he run that city's electric utility which, like most of 'em, struggles to maintain adequate infrastructure.  Power companies can usually keep up, but extreme weather events -- here's looking at you, Texas -- stress the grid, and it doesn't make any difference what flavor the local politicians are.  You can only draw X much current before it's too much, at which point the system breaks at the weakest points.  Power companies stock parts and size staff for the normal failure rate and a little more when possible, but there's a limit.

     Nature has a way of testing limits.  Nature doesn't take politics into account.

     There's nothing especially political about managing your air conditioning (or heating), either.  People who are careful about money have been doing so for as long as fuel has had a cost, which is forever (the cost of cutting your own firewood is pretty high, just not in dollars).  The poor insulation and undersized cooling here at Roseholme Cottage means we ran for years at 75° in the summer* and 65° in the winter, though I have cheated up to three degrees on the winter setting as I have gotten older.  The main positive effect of air conditioning is to lower the humidity and move the air, and if you get too far off the outside air temperature, you can start to have problems -- the A-coil may freeze up, the motors for the fan and compressor in the outdoor unit could overheat, and so on.  And boy, will your electric bills soar.  (You can also have personal problems -- going from 70° or 68° dry air into a 95° wall of wet air is physically stressful.)

     I keep the fan running in our HVAC system nearly all the time.  In summer, I add a small floor fan in the dining room/library to blow air from the floor register up, because the return intake is in that room, and there's no point to letting it suck low level cold air right back in.  In the office and living room, simple home-made extensions sit on top of the registers, and discharge cold air about four feet above floor level.  A similar trick in my bedroom makes use of existing shelves to channel the air up, and in the very worst weather, a clip-on fan pushes cool (or heated) air towards my bed.

    Some of those tricks are compensating for the 1990s upgrades to the 1920s system design, which left floor registers near room doors instead of at the farthest corner on an outside wall.  In 1920, a big coal furnace with "gravity" thermosiphon air circulation through ducts would have also kept the basement almost too warm for comfort in the winter, with air warmed by radiated heat from the furnace flowing up the outside walls to slit vents under the eaves (and up a few inside walls to the attic as well).  Forced-air climate control doesn't work that way, and the original furnace replacement was done when energy was cheap and labor to relocate registers and run all-new ductwork wasn't.  (In winter, I also run an oil-filled electric heater in the basement whenever I'm home and awake; but plug-in electric heat isn't something to turn on and ignore, and it'll never do the same job as the the smelly, sooty old coal furnace did.)  

     Big-city downtowns are full of this kind of relic infrastructure, electric wiring that was adequate in 1920 or 1930, cooling that relied on open transoms, windows and getting outside -- and people expiring from the heat.  You can stick a modern split-system air conditioner just about anywhere, but running big enough wires from the pole to the outlet to actually power it is another story.  There might not even be enough room in the conduits to do that in an old apartment building, and copper is costly.  And how big is the stepdown transformer on the pole or in a manhole vault?  How fat are the wires that feed it? 

     There are tricks.  The 110-Volt wall-socket juice my then very modern home had in 1924 is now 125 V most places in the U.S., because they have turned up the voltage on the high-voltage distribution side.  You see, the power available through a wire is the voltage multiplied by the current -- the current is limited by the "ampacity" of the wire, which is proportional to how big it is.  Big wires can carry more current.  Voltage limits rely on how good the insulators are -- and they have always been far better than they had to be.  Ceramic and glass are relatively cheap, power-line insulators aren't all that tricky to replace when they fail (if you happen to be a power company lineman -- don't try it on your own!).  So Power & Light turns up the voltage and hey, presto, they can supply 15 or 20 percent more power!

     That's something, but in a bad heat wave, it's not enough.  It helps run your TV and computer and automatic shiatsu massager and super-slice-o-matic self-cleaning air fryer with vacuum cleaner attachment on a system designed to operate a handful of light bulbs and a coffeepot, but when you and everyone else in Manhattan, or Washington D.C., or Pigsley's Corner turns on the air-conditioning and sets it to "Arctic," something will pop.  Maybe your breaker.  Maybe the pole fuse or transformer that feeds your house, and the Smith's, Jones's, Brown's and Doe's apartment house and the bungalow of old Ms X next door.  Maybe it trips a disconnector that keeps cycling, or a transformer's regulating tap-setter at a substation that gets hung up, and a whole neighborhood flickers, goes dark or browns out.  Multiply by a hundred, a thousand--  A power company crew can keep ahead of a few outages, clearing them in mere hours (hours, at 95°), but there is no politics on this planet that will make skilled electrical workers magically appear from the air, along with fuse wire, replacement transformers, and all of the massive, slow-to-replace stuff that fills up a substation.

     There's also no politics that has ever managed to overbuild power grids (etc.) to always hold up to extreme events.  Oh, Ukraine has had a little advantage from hardened Cold War substations, but only if you happened to live in area Soviet planners had deemed critical, and it was never as capacious as its Western counterpart.  Central planning won't save you -- and neither will capitalism.  If you want your power company to turn a profit, you figure out how to price it in such a way that people can afford it;  you build it for the routine loads you have, and you count on having enough staff to keep it going.  For rare localized trouble that gets too much to handle, you hire outside help. But a heat wave isn't like a tornado; it doesn't affect just a few townships at a time.

     The DOE's former advice pages and the lefty-Democrat Mayor of New York City were telling people the same thing because that's how you deal with this intersection of physics, economics and weather, period.  It doesn't matter who you are or, which party or person you voted for or how you think things ought to be done.  We have the power grids we have.  We have the outdoor temperature and humidity we have.  City cliff-dwellers in particular aren't going to be installing rooftop solar, home generators or water wheels, and the choice is to turn up the 'stat a few notches now or sweat like pigs by and by, and shovel out the vulnerable dead afterward.

     Freaking out because your side gave the same advice as the other side for coping with this is simply bullshit, practiced by people who are insanely out of touch with what it's like to live a normal life on an average income. 
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* That's not entirely accurate. I chase 15° to 20° below ambient in summer and will settle for 10° on the worst days, guided by condensation on the older windows, state of the A-coil (once it has iced up, you're done until the ice melts), and experience.

Reality

     I found the article, but I didn't bookmark it: it would appear that the state DSA in New York is somewhat at odds with the wider Democratic Socialists of America. (Found it.)

     The reasons why are a microcosm of how political parties work, especially when they are forced to be "big tents," despite the DSA not being a freestanding party.  The tl;dr is that in New York, and NYC especially, the DSA's got a pretty good chance of influencing the Democratic platform and of affiliated politicians winning office, so they're focused on pragmatic goals with some chance of achievement -- it is a city that had a radio station (WEVD) named after Eugene V. Debs for three-quarters of a century, after all.  The dog occasionally catches the car it chases and New York's DSA has learned what to do about it.

     Elsewhere, DSA-linked candidates stand less of a chance; their local Democrat organization is less likely to listen and as a result, True Believers outnumber pragmatists within most of those DSA groups.  Politics is run by Those Who Show Up; ask me, ask Robert Heinlein, ask any of your local Party organizations and you'll get the same answer.  And True Believers are often very good at showing up.

     So outside of NYC, you're much more likely to find the kind of wild-eyed DSA candidates that rate scare headlines and flaming-letter quotes -- in broad outline, the kind of fringe stuff that all fringe parties and movements generate.  Antisemitism's always popular on the horseshoe ends and in various nooks and crannies of U. S. politics, just as it is in Europe, along with broadsides about bosses and cheaters.  But don't read too much into it; in the wider major-party organization, there are a lot more plain old Democrats showing up in the hinterlands.  I stand by my previous post: the function this sort of outside-insider activism serves is to shake up the big parties when they get too comfortable running things, and I'm never especially sorry to see 'em get a good shaking.

     This is very nearly orthogonal to "leader principle" effects, which can take over a party, at least for a time, and sometimes bend it (see Jackson, Andrew).  I don't like it when any individual politician starts being touted as the Great Hope, especially when they buy into it themselves, and it doesn't matter which party.  The U. S. has a pretty good history of reminding such leaders that they are no more than mortal men, but we've often taken our own sweet time at it and the present run is longer and messier than any.  (FDR got longer at it, but he also got a lot more criticism and outright correction.)  If a sprinkling of DSA-connected Dems will help level the scales, I'm all for 'em -- especially in the U. S. House of Representatives, the (supposedly) fastest-moving and (on paper) highest-turnover collection of elected Federal officeholders we've got.  Reflecting the will of the people, shaking things up, trying even crazy stuff is their job; it's how the Federal government was built from the very start.

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 won in very blue districts and 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 voters 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 in Congress 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.