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 the back, and no matter how close to the ground I trim them, they keep on growing back.

     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.