Here's Hoping...

     This is a pre-scheduled post, because I have to take my car to a specialist garage early this morning.

     I was up late last night, because I suddenly realized I, well, might have forgotten to renew my license plates.  Which expire the day after tomorrow.

     Got that done online -- thank you, Indiana BMV! -- and went to get out my insurance card.  Nope.  I had two cards for the Yamaha motorcycle, one for the motor scooter, and...one that expired in December for my Lexus.

     I dug through every mailing I had received from my insurer and it wasn't there.   I checked all the usual places and found some old mail and still, nothing.

     Oh, I have insurance.  I automated that payment several years ago.  But I couldn't prove it, and I'll be getting a loaner car, which means I ned proof of insurance.  So I logged on to the insurance company's site, and my computer started crashing.  Firefox isn't really stable at present.  Fine, I rebooted.

     But I hadn't saved my username and password.  So I had to get that and the first time, their system took too long to send me the reset link.  Started over, finally got it, and then I must have fumbled what I clicked on.  It set me up to get a copy of the motorcycle insurance card.  Backed up and started over and finally, I got a copy of my car insurance card!

     I sure hope the service shop accepts it.

Hoosier Reading

     Our native and imported Indiana writers are a mixed lot but many are markedly cynical.  Few have had as sharp a tongue as (Indiana-raised, for all that he was born a Buckeye) Ambrose Bierce.

      I've been reading Bierce's Write It Right, which is cheap or free for the Kindle. It's a list of misuses and abuses of English in his typical style, acerbic to the point of acidulousness. The book is fun, though it is a creature of its time (very late 19th century through early 20th) and of Bierce's own quirks, so it can hardly be taken as an absolute guide.

     He was capable of weapons-grade snark.  When critic William Dean Howells said, "Mr. Bierce is among our three greatest writers," Bierce wrote, "I am sure Mr. Howells is the other two." Ouch.

In Which I Take Up Fencing

     I got home about 7:30 last night, so sleepy that I didn't notice the backyard privacy fence was broken!  Tam asked me if I had noticed and I admitted I was so busy admiring her post windstorm clean-up work that I hadn't seen it.  She'd done a lot: trash cans stood back up, flattened-out cardboard boxes that had spilled out retrieved from where the wind had blown them, grill cover back on, water and ice dumped out of the utility wagon, and all shipshape.

     Except for the fence.

     The house next door was just sold; the former owner has moved out and the new owner has yet to move in, which means their gate isn't locked.  I don't know if a curious would-be owner gave the fence between us a shake to see how sturdy it was, or if the fence was so weak (it's pretty old) that the recent wind had it ready to break and it finally did.

     An entire section had sagged away from one of the 4x4 fence posts.  I didn't want the new owner to be greeted by that; it's no way to begin with a new neighbor.  Besides that, I think good fences make good strangers as well as good neighbors -- sagging fences and open gates send a message that might prove too tempting for some unfortunate person.

       I found some little 2 x 4blocks of wood and got out the good hammer,* salvaged the old nails and tacked the thing back together.  The repair was pretty quick and didn't fall apart overnight, which makes me happy.
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* The good hammer for this is a lightweight Japanese framing hammer with a long handle, a long nose and a redesigned claw.  It's also got a magnet to hold the nail for the first hit. Light enough for me to swing easily, it's heavy enough to sink nails in a few hits and has a waffle-pattern face that prevents slippage.

Writing Class

     Last night was the third one and it's impressive how much progress my fellow students have made.  (Me, I'm still struggling to keep up.)

     I'm reading genres I would not usually read, from YA horror to modern cowboy mystery, and having to provide useful feedback on them.  It's good mental exercise.

Dear TV News, Stop It

     Really.  Stop it.  You don't call Germany "Deutschland," do you?  Then stop trying to pronounce the names of places and people in the Americas as you and Associated Press fondly imagine they are pronounced in the original Spanish.  Especially stop it when it comes to Brazil.*  The thought behind the deed is friendly and well-meant but it's frequently cringeworthy.

     If you didn't grow up hearing and saying those phonemes, you're not going to get them right, not without years of study and immersion and even then?  You'll sound like a very fluent Anglo.  You're making elderly abuelitas frown at the TV screen, wondering if you really meant to say that word that way.

     Just to complicate matters, Spanish is at least as rich as English in national and regional accents; Cubans and Argentines can chat as readily as Americans and Australians -- and with about as much difference in vocabulary and sound.

     American English is relatively flat as accents go.  There's a reason Brits usually have better luck faking an American accent than the other way around: the majority of the sounds that comprise American English are present in most varieties of British English, while the Brit versions of our common tongue use many phonemes we do not.

     Look, if you're on TV and you grew up speaking the lingo (and no matter how you look), that's great and you should pronounce those words the way you learned at home.  But if you didn't, don't try to fake it.  It doesn't work.
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* I'll explain this later.  Some of you newspeople aren't going to believe it.

Busy All Day

     Worked on reviews for my class all day today and I still have some writing of my own to do tonight.  From bed, I think.  I'm sleepy.

Hunh

     Sat down at the computer with the clear intent to write and post something interesting.  Never did.  So much for that.

     A sudden-onset migraine cost me over an hour yesterday morning, which I really didn't have to spare.   Called in to clear a late start, took drugs, and managed to get to work only an hour late.  No lunch and worked an hour over. 

     Warmer weather probably won't help headaches but maybe it will make them easier to take.

About That Writing Class

     The writing class is keeping me busy.  The group of writers is congenial -- I think we all showed up on Day One determined to be -- and they have a remarkable degree of talent.

     They're also prolific.  Over the course of every week, each of us -- nine so far  -- has to review and critique the work of all the others, then summarize each critique to share aloud in class, and the critiques we share cannot take longer than a minute and a half to deliver!

     So you sit down in your spare time and go over each manuscript -- 2500 to 5000 words, with a few of my classmates pushing the upper limit -- and catch the obvious things, characters who walk through a door and then open it, William Vest changing names to Grigori West with no explanation, Varangians in toe shoes.  Then you go through and look for plot holes, lack of clarity (after the first 2500 words, we really ought to know what these characters are up to!), larger continuity errors, inconsistencies of style and tone.  And then you've got to decide which of these are sufficiently important to earn mention in your minute and a half!

     Of course, we share the annotated manuscripts as well, and having eight more people look over one's work is a quick (and humbling) education in where you go wrong that begins to illuminate why.

     It is a lot of work; it's what I am doing instead of watching television (I'm several episodes behind on The Orville) and Facebook.  The latter is probably small loss; oh, it's fun and I have a wide range of friends there, but it is ephemeral by design.

Meanwhile, On The Ice Planet

     The TV is playing in my room down the hall, tag-team coverage of the overnight snow and/or ice followed by sleet and/or rain.  Things could have been worse but it's still a non-stop litany of snow, slush, downed power lines and car crashes.

     Sections of the interstates are down to a one-lane crawl and smiling reporters, warned by the TV station's Traffic Center, report the worst live from the front passenger seat while driving around the mess on frontage roads.

     Tamara, as is her usual wont, has taken over the room for the morning.  She complains, "Spring will never come!  We're locked into an eternal hell of gray slush!"

     I'm at the computer with my breakfast, in the room at the other end of the short hallway.  "Shaddup!" I tell her, 'cos I'm classy like that, and I had just been thinking we were getting near the end of the worst of winter, or at least the beginning of the end.

     The next reporter up opens her spiel with the happy thought that Daylight Savings Time starts in just three weeks.

     Tamara sings out, "Hallelujah!  We're saved!" as earnestly as any churchgoer.

     I smile.  I loathe DST -- on the far western edge of the Eastern time zone, Indiana's already ahead of the sun by nearly an hour -- but Tam's dislike of winter overwhelms her at times and this one hasn't been one of the sunniest.  An extra hour of light at the end of the day when she's awake to appreciate it will do her a world of good.

The Future Is History

     The Future Is History.  That's the title of Masha Gessen's account of the years immediately before perestroika through the rise of  Vladimir Putin, told by following the lives of a number of real people in Russia.  It's fascinating reading so far -- Gessen is a talented writer and her subject matter is compelling.

     Gessen is a lifelong outsider, a Russian expatriate, returnee and re-expatriate.  She is well-placed to write this book, far enough Left that the New York Times and Guardian pay her serious heed while being sufficiently clear-eyed to see reality when she looks at recent history.  I'm perhaps a quarter of the way through and having difficulty setting the book down to do other things.

Loatheable

     Politicians.  As a group, they're obnoxious, attention-craving, fickle and deceitful. They involve themselves in the most amazing graft, scandal and petty-but-despicable behavior.  

     Yes, they're horrible.  I can think of no group of persons who would more deserve to be saddled with the dull, boring, messy and imperfect process of running government.  I don't much trust them to do it well, or to stay inside the limits they are supposed to observe -- but better them than some finer group of men and women, who would be taken away from doing useful and productive work in other fields of endeavor.

     Think of a Congressbeing of whom you disapprove -- would you want that person driving an 18-wheeler on the same highways you take?  Designing a skyscraper or passenger aircraft?  Doing brain surgery?

     No, we're better off with them where they are.  At least we can try to keep an eye on them, and work to vote out the worst of them.

But What About Mr. Trump's Wall?

     I haven't written much about the latest developments.  I think it has become one of those "team" things: if you're onboard with Team Trump, you're unreservedly okay with it and if you're not, you want no part of it, nohow, no way.

     That's certainly one way to look at it.  It's not the only way.

     Borders create opportunities -- good and bad.  It would be nice if borders could be managed in such a way that only good people got across them, and only in the officially-approved manner; it would be great if every willing immigrant could immigrate, find work and become productive citizens.

     That's not how borders work.  It's not even how they work when the border is a peaceful one between two very similar countries -- as was painfully discovered by one of my long-ago co-workers whose girlfriend turned out to be an illegal immigrant from Canada.  She got nabbed and sent back.

     When the two countries have radically different standards of living, radically different levels of lawfulness and a significant disparity in the availability of technology and of drugs?   People, money and goods are going to cross that border, no matter how high, wide and mighty a wall bars it.

     Oh, you can raise the stakes, and that will have its greatest effect on the most vulnerable.  As I have written before, if better border security prevents people from trying to cross in the places of greatest hazard, and funnels them towards actual border-crossing locations, that's a desirable outcome in terms of fewer lives lost.  At that point, people and their Congressthings can argue about the criteria for letting people in -- and there are legitimate arguments to be made on all sides -- and have it mean something more than mere shouting at the tide.

     Drugs will still cross.  Money will still cross.  Want to fix that?  About the only way to do it is arrange matters so a volume of marijuana doesn't go way up in value the moment it crosses that line.  Do the same for every other smuggled drug.  Legalize it and let Big Pot crush the foreign competition at the cash register.  Know why they're smoking Kools in the poor neighborhoods instead of hand-rolls of backyard tobacco?  Because even growing your own costs more than buying a pack at the 7-11!  Yes, this indeed radical and scary and Not At All What Our Parents Did.  And I'm not looking forward to the day when any trucker can buy a handful of Black Beauties at the Flying J and take his chances on getting caught -- except that day is already here.  Enacting Prohibition didn't make alcohol unavailable.  Ending Prohibition didn't make driving drunk any less a crime.

     Legalize drugs -- start with pot, several states and foreign countries are already running the experiment without collapsing -- and you can build a wall with a fraction of the steel and concrete.

     Why is the story of my former co-worker's lost love worth retelling?  Because it's unusual; for a young, single woman, there was nothing on this side of the border she didn't already have at home except for a few more days of summer.  There was no economic incentive.

     Remove the economic incentive.  Ideally, Mexico should become as prosperous and gang-free as the U. S. (noting that this country is neither universally wealthy nor lacking in a degree of crime, amateur and organized; we're just better off on both scales).  Don't ask me how, though starving their drug gangs for cash would probably help.  Ideally fewer substances would be prohibited in the two countries and the remaining restricted ones would be substantially the same on both sides of the border.

     Sure, you can build a better wall.  Look how well it worked in Berlin!  Or even China.  But it's not a long-term solution.  Neither is using the idea of a wall as a political football.