Somebody Get Him Off Twitter

     Or, what the hell, leave him there.  It's a window into Mr. Trump's mind.

     In the run-up to the November election -- a "choice" between root canal and having a toenail removed -- I remarked that major-party voters were being asked to choose between a candidate who knew exactly what laws she wanted to get around and how to do so, or one who was unfamiliar with the Constitution in general and the Bill of Rights in particular.

     So thus we come to the President-elect's recent Twittering that flag-burning should not be allowed, and so doing ought to lead to loss of citizenship or maybe a year in jail (a rather interesting spectrum of choices).  This is wrong -- don't take my word for it, ask the Supreme Court -- for reasons fundamental to the very nature of the government the U. S. flag signifies.  Worse, the cockeyed notion that U. S. citizens are "allowed" various actions by their government is an inversion of the very nature of the relationship and assumes anything not permitted is prohibited.  That's not how it works around here.

     The flag is just a piece of cloth -- a symbol.  A deeply meaningful symbol.  One of things it symbolizes is freedom of speech.  Even obnoxious speech or expression.  Even disrespectful expression.  Burning the flag, for example. A flag you can't burn is a symbol protected by the force of the State, a limit on a citizen's free and peaceful expression.*  A flag for which respect must be enforced by men with clubs and guns does not stand for anything worthy of respect. And yet, when a protester (or a vandal) burns that piece of cloth, the symbol remains -- unless we besmirch it by damnfool infringements of the freedom of speech.

     "A republic, if you can keep it."
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* Interestingly, a very strong case can be made against flag-burning in areas with a high risk of fire; if you set a flag on fire during a drought or in the middle of a crowded theater, the issue is a little more basic than freedom of speech.

Abite. Abscondas. Bellum.

     It looks better in Latin, though Tam points out it needs the imperative:* "Run.  Hide.  Fight."  This useful advice is getting more and more coverage in the wake of the latest outrage, a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University that was originally reported as a mass shooting by over-eager mass media.

     As chastened as they ever get by this mistake, reporter after reporter has been standing outside of the nearest higher educational institutional building, solemnly telling me what I already knew: when the unexpected strikes, you have three choices: Get away, get out of sight, or put up your dukes.

     None of these well-groomed talking heads have yet managed to point out that you must make a choice: "Freeze where you are" is how you get killed.   Observe, Orient, Decide, Act -- and do so with alacrity.  The order is important: if you can get away, you'll buy time summon help and/or take the subsequent options, if necessary.  At OSU, one student reported that after the cellphone warning, "military people" who were fellow-students in her classroom shut the door, directed the other students to get well away from it, and arrayed themselves to ambush anyone entering.  Unable to flee, they hid and prepared to fight.

     "Be Prepared."  "Semper Paratus."  What'll you do?  Take a little while to think about it now, so you can decide more quickly later if trouble comes your way.
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* No Latin scholar, I get the too-verbose, "Oportet te currere. Tu oportet absconditus. Aut necesse est bellum," which I suspect (to the point of near certainty) makes a hash of the grammar.

That Glow Of Homeownerly Virtue

     Seven Eight bags of leaves on the porch.  Tam was a huge help in clearing the greater part of the back yard. Gutters cleaned and I have once more promised myself I'll install leaf screens.  More Northern Creeper pulled up and the heaped vines will probably fill four bags -- if I can bag it at all.  If not, it'll go in the Bagster we still haven't set up.

     The Northern Creeper is trying a desperation gambit: leaves on the driest parts are turning a brilliant scarlet!  Very lovely but it still has to go.  Without much in the way of a hard freeze so far (but just wait!), the ground is still soft and it's easier to pull up the long, wandering roots and runners of these vines.

It's The End Of November And I'm Still Raking Leaves

     Three bags of leaves yesterday and still a small pile of leaves in the street, plus three big piles of them in the back yard.  And the gutters still need to be cleaned!

     Say what you will, it's better than snow.  Way better.

Fidel Castro Is Dead And I'm Supposed To Care

    Thing is, I don't. Yeah, yeah, the dude handed the former USSR their very own version of Airstrip One and together, they and JFK cruised to the brink of nuclear war, along about the time I lay in bed with rheumatic fever clawing at my joints, shrieking in pain any time footsteps made the floor move even a little (and what a treat that must have been for my parents, an annoyingly-sick kid plus the possibility of atomic annihilation. Or maybe Khrushchev dangling that sword overhead helped make it bearable: at least if the commies started WW III, my parents and pre-teen sister wouldn't have had to tiptoe every time they went down the hall).

     Thing is, civilization blundered through and past that and Cuba settled down to a long, hungry stretch of irrelevance.  Sure, there was the occasional airliner hijacking, misfit revolutionaries trying to export themselves to a country that had already had its revolution and didn't want any more, no thank you Mister yanqui.  And there was the far larger flow of people headed the other way on whatever they could manage to get floating or, tragically, not quite.

     But that was it.  Cuba was no worker's paradise, but then, it never had been.  Poor as it was, the inadequate provisions of a communist regime were still more than the majority of Cubans had known.  Propped up by Soviet largess, exporting sugar and a few luxury consumables to the Warsaw pact, Cuba tottered on.  Michael Moore praised Potemkin-villiage hospitals and missed the struggling, undersupplied health-care providers serving the vast majority of Cubans; the country exported doctors and revolutionaries wholesale and retail, and it still never much mattered.  Castro handed off the reins to his slightly younger brother and so what?

     Castro's dead and so what?

     The TV is treating him like a movie star.  It wasn't a movie, people.  It was real and it still is.  You want to know the truth about economic systems?  Compare Florida and Cuba, 90 miles apart at their closest approach.  90 years and a century of progress; the difference between the poorest Cuban and the poorest Floridian can be measured by the dumpsters they dive into seeking dinner -- well, the Floridian does; Cubans still can't afford to throw edible food away.

     Capitalism, much like democracy, sucks; but in practice, it sucks way less than any other economic system the human race has devised.

     Castro's dead.  The only-slightly-better-off-than-before Cuba he built remains.  Talk about that, TV.  Even just a little.

'Twas The Day After Thanksgiving

     Or, as I often know it, the Day I Work While My Family Does Thanksgiving -- but bear in mind that every other member of the family has children and we're at a point in the generational cycle where the kids are all at diapers-through-grade-school ages, so the holidays are built around them.  Which I think is as it should be.  I'm especially pleased their parents don't try visiting all of their extended families in one day; that's no fun even for adults.

     For me and Tam, the day started with a couple of mashed-potato pancakes and a slice of delicious applewood-smoked bacon.  I added a fried egg.  There may better breakfasts, but none of them are very much better.  I even had a small glass of eggnog!

We Ate This

     Tam's plate, Tam's photo:

     Turducken, skin-on mashed potatoes (with a few other root vegetables added) with bacon-mushroom gravy, smoky and rich; green beans and store-bought biscuits.  I have Vernor's Ginger Ale to drink and she had... Gose?  Okay.

     I liked it.  She seemed to, too.

Yes, It's Thanksgiving

     So why are you on the Web?

     Oh, that.  Alone.  Been there, done that.  Hey I'm thankful you stopped by; at least there's that.  For whatever comfort is in it (rather a lot) with the Internet, with modern mass media, no one needs to be entirely alone; it takes effort to get away unless you're already in the back of the beyond, past the end of the streetcar lines and out from under the RF footprint of the last cellphone tower.

     Here at Roseholme Cottage, I am fixing to prepare to put the turducken in the oven -- no idle string of words, that, since I store baking pans and a couple of specialized skillets in the oven, all of which need temporary locations elsewhere, and I want to recheck under the stovetop after The Great Grease Spill Of Several Weeks Ago.  I think I got it all but it's better to be sure.

     Coffee and toasted cinnamon-raisin bread first, along with a little blogging.  

Gotta Be Thankful

     A recent quote I encountered on the web points out, "...There is no 'cause:' poverty is the default state.  We should be figuring out what causes prosperity," or words to that effect.

     It's got a visceral reality for me because I have been poor, "working poor" as they put it, which is a kind of prosperity in and of itself.  At one point, I was working two full-time jobs that paid barely above minimum wage: two different shifts, four eight-hour days, three 16-hour days, and no days off except for the occasional holiday.  I was able to keep my nice rented house on the outskirts of Broad Ripple and my nice (no it wasn't) Chevy Cavalier and so on.  You come to appreciate 24-hour supermarkets and extended-hours "doc-in-a-box" places when you work like that, but it's a delicately-balanced thing and when my Chevy got rear-ended about 1:00 a.m. one weekday (by an AAA-contractor's wrecker, no less), it unraveled.  A month later, I was down to one job and living in a 400-square-foot apartment, mostly on ramen noodles and hot dogs.  I did that for nearly a year, and then they laid everyone off from that job--

     Yeah, life's tough and at no point was I living in a cardboard box; I ended up in the spare room of my parents house, with all my things stacked up in their garage and did that for six months, working weekends at a radio station for gas money.

     My present job is what pulled me from what looked like a dead end.  This job has been better than it is now -- and it's been worse, too.  I'm thankful to have a job when so many people don't.  There are plenty of people who'd find instant noodles and a hot dog a huge upgrade from their regular diet. 

Not Quite How It Was

     Good Girls Revolt is an Amazon Original fiction series loosely based on a factual book by Lynn Povitch (who was there for it all) about the ground-breaking lawsuit filed by researchers at Newsweek over the magazine's sex-based employment practices* -- and you've frowned. haven't you?  Wait, wait--

     Good Girls Revolt is a lush and generally faithful recreation of a news magazine's office in 1969-70, with a cast better-looking than real people ever are; the women all pretty and the men seem to have been picked for period-actor looks, with a Robert Redford-ish reporter front and center and Martin Landau copy in a supporting role.  Costuming is remarkable, at least to my eye: I was twelve in 1970 and the cast is wearing what I remember as "grownup clothes," note-perfect and often a bit fashion-forward for the time.   They're behaving very much as an office-ful of mostly-young, bright, newsy-type people would have behaved, too.† The office looks about right, too, clunky metal desks, rolodexes, dial telephones and typewriters--

     Then, jarringly, the camera serves a close-up of someone dialing a telephone -- with the writing end of a clicker-type ballpoint.  No, no, you didn't do it that way, because it would scratch the numbers on the dial plate; you used the rounded end where the clicker is and you were more likely to use the eraser end of a pencil or the rounded plastic end of a cap-type ballpoint (boys, you do this to spare your manicure -- still do, in fact).  But there was something else that bugged me about the reporter area and the "pit" where researchers toiled.  Last night the light finally dawned: nearly everyone has their typewriter sitting front and center on their desk, just where you'd put a computer keyboard!

     No, no, a thousand times no.  Those desks have, I'll bet, perfectly good pull-out or swing-out typewriter shelves, set lower than the desktop and with good reason: typewriters are way taller than computer keyboards.  Many of the reporters have IBM Selectrics, the ne plus ultra of its day and still mighty desirable, if your desires turn that way.  But the Selectric's spacebar alone is a good three inches above the surface it sits on, if not more!  Nobody who writes for a living (and most who do so for fun) can comfortably use one on top of a thirty-inch high office desk for long.   And yet every foregrounded character in the series does just that, with Selectrics or full-sized manual typewriters, even researchers who can't be more than five feet tall in high heels.  So here's this wonderful set dressed with new-appearing period pieces and filled with wonderful people in 1969-70 clothing, a past recreated with nearly otaku-level devotion on three levels plus staircases, and on every level, you will need to look carefully to find a typewriter in its proper place. You might not find even one.  

     Story and cast deserve a lot of credit: I didn't consciously notice this until idly watching an episode for the second time as "background noise" while I had supper, when suddenly realization jelled -- and jarred.

     How many things do historical dramas get wrong that we never even notice?
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* Men wrote.  Women "researched," which could consist of a full first draft of a story and at a minimum was a file of information they'd hunted up, and then did a full fact-check of the finished story, citing a source for every assertion. This process was routine at news magazines at that time, and yet they could still get things wrong: all reporting is subjective. What wasn't routine was the institutionalized segregation of task by sex; Time did so from the outset and Newsweek followed suit.  By 1969, it was "the tradition."  It was also illegal and had been since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but no one had noticed.  It mostly got ironed after the EEOC complaint and subsequent lawsuit but institutional habits linger and Povitch's book, by no means a screed or polemic, sheds interesting light on just that.

† Well, mostly.  Some of the the people who worked at the real-life Newsweek during that time have suggested the TV series may have downplayed the amount of sleeping around that went on -- which is surprising, considering there's a lot of it at the fictional News Of The Week by modern standards.

The Luggage?

     Decades before Terry Pratchett, I seem to have encountered The Luggage in Harry A. Franck's Vagabonding Down The Andes:*

     If only Edison would take a day off to invent a baggage on legs that would trot, dog-fashion, after its owner -- just a modest little baggage of, say, fifty pounds -- it would revolutionize life.

     [ibid, pg. 197]
     Yes, there it is, The Luggage, give or take a few pounds, extra legs and a more-truculent attitude, trotting along in Mr. Franck's imagination.  Who knew?
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* I should warn 21st-Century readers that Franck, writing in 1916 or so, was very much a man of his time, which is to say causally and by default racist, and willing to attribute to ancestry any number of traits we would today lay to poverty, poor nutrition, isolation or lack of opportunity.  That said, he's a fairly keen observer once his prejudices are taken into account, and his story of a walking trip though areas about a remote as any that could claim to be civilized in a day before radio and with only the slenderest threads of communication with the wider world is eye-opening.

Home Made Hash Browns

     C'mon, there's just about nothing in them -- oh, I added a little pepper, dehydrated onion, chives and a dash of salt, but really, all it takes is potatoes, an old-fashioned kitchen grater* and some manner of cooking "grease:" oil, butter, bacon fat, lard, duck fat (!) or perhaps a modern synthetic (do they still sell olestra? I never took to it).   Shred the potatoes coarsely into a bowl, drain it if you'd like (less liquid makes for slightly faster cooking and a crunchier texture). Form into patties, mash flat and fry in a lightly greased skillet until golden brown, or darker if you prefer, turning as needed (the thicker they are, the more times you'll flip them).  I sprinkle a tiny bit of flour on the top before the first turning, I guess for luck.

     I shredded and drained a couple of left-over Russets that were in danger of going soft and fried them up four patties at a time.  My four are still in the skillet; Tam says hers were plenty tasty.  (Update: and mine are done and mostly eaten.  Not bad, I must say.)
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* The one I use is so primitive -- a sheet of stainless steel bent over a thick wire formed into a rectangle that serves as a handle at the short ends, the sheet stamped with coarse, medium and fine graters plus a simple slicer -- that I can't even find an example in Wikipedia or at Amazon.  It's inexpensive and works well enough, if you mind what you're about.  Whatever you use, all of these graters trace back to a 16th-Century cheese grater, invented by a fellow who presumably figured there were better things to do than finely chop hard cheese by hand with a knife.  Box graters are an upgrade and can be had for under ten dollars.