Good Riddance, 2025

     There is no evidence the next year will be any better -- and it could be a great deal worse -- but the past year has, I think finished undermining my faith in the essential goodness of my fellow human beings.

     Those old postcard photos of lynch mobs, grinning and unkempt, posed around the bodies of their victims, aren't an outlier.  It's who an awful lot of people are.  I no longer trust them.

     When the COVID pandemic came along, the amount of denial and misinformation surprised me.  I thought we had fewer fools than that; I thought we had fewer demagogues and fewer people who didn't understand or believe in modern medicine.  Still, we muddled through: not great, not terrible. 

        The January 6, 2021 attack on Congress and the U.S. Capitol shook me, especially with the clear evidence of the violence having been egged on by Donald Trump and his allies, and allowed to proceed for hours without effective intervention; but it did fail, and Mike Pence and Congress stepped up to complete certifying the vote, and I thought the worst was over.  Then the reframing and retconning began, and way too many people were happy to go along with it.  The impeachment effort failed, stymied by weak-kneed Republicans.

     Joe Biden came in, and I continue to think he did an okay job.  We've had some colossally bad Presidents, and he wasn't that; the pandemic response continued effectively, the economy got a little screwed up, but the United States had a faster, stronger recovery than most nations.

     The January 6 Committee got off to a slow start but finally picked up steam -- and the GOP officially refused to join in, aside from a few Congresspeople who defied their party leadership.  That's not the act of a party confident their guys did nothing wrong.  The Committee came through with facts and figures -- and the same denial and retconning kicked in, with nothing to support it but vibes and bullshit.

     Still, it seemed for a little while as if the Republican party's experiment in personality cult was over, and they were going to deny it every amounted to anything.  --And then their demagogue came roaring back, Biden's age caught up with him, and 2025 loomed.  But how bad could it be?

     It's been bad.  The dismantling of Federal agencies, the ongoing, pernicious erosion of database firewalls that have protected our freedom from government meddling into the private lives of Americans, the demonization, harassment and persecution of disfavored groups -- it's Autocratic Rule 101, and the sole saving grace has been that much of it is being done in an inept, half-assed way, with many of the worst actors focused on lining their own pockets or pursuing individual ends without overall coordination.

     This has been an awful year.  Polling suggests the voting public, having Fucked Around disastrously, may now be Finding Out.  The tide may be turning -- slowly and far too late.  The once-useful conservative party -- the third to inherit that mantle, after the Federalists and then the Whigs -- may have done their reputation irreparable harm.  The often feckless and ineffectual liberal party (historically not consistently liberal; the split between parties has had a lot of regional and economic variation) had shied away from New Deal-era anti-fascism and support for broad democracy and it remains to be seen if they can claw their way back; they're got a long history of reinvention and it might come through again.

     2026 could be worse.  I hope it won't.  I hope the broad sweep of elected politicians will manage to find their spines and replace doing whatever they can get away doing with being upright and moral, and looking to the long-established ideals of our country and the dignity of humanity.  But I've given up on optimism.  It will be what it turns out to be, and I'll do my best to get through it.

     We were supposed to have settlements on the Moon and Mars by now!  Electricity was going to be (almost) too cheap to meter! We were cleaning up the air and the water, managing the land wisely....  The future isn't what it used to be.  I just hope it won't be too calamitously bad.

Visiting Outer Space

      I'm in the middle of another catch-as-can rewatch of The Expanse, and it annoys me that I've somehow gotten stuck in the ignorant nitwit future with the flat-Earthers and antivaxers.  This timeline isn't looking good for a glorious future in space.

     On the other hand, a recent episode pointed out what timeline The Expanse might be in: Amos Burton is in transit from Ilus/Medina Station/The Ring/The Belt to Earth, and he has a short stopover on the Moon.  While there, he walks past a poster advertising tours of "Jamestown Base" in an old-fashioned-looking font -- and Jamestown Base is the name of the 1970s U. S. Moon Base in the Apple TV alternate-history series For All Mankind.  I've commented before that they line up pretty nicely, with Mars in the early days of being settled in For All Mankind, and a Lunar establishment well underway.

     I'm glad they cleared that up, I guess, but yeah, not our timeline.  We get to visit outer space on TV but the odds keep looking worse for an affordable tourist ticket.

Plumbing

     A few days ago, the faucet in the washroom sink here at Roseholme Cottage stopped shutting all the way off.

     The fixture wasn't a design I liked much, separate knobs for hot and cold feeding a single low spout, with tight spaces that were difficult to clean.  There'd been evidence that the rubber washer in the hot side was failing, but as long as it was working, well, why mess with it?

     Then it stopped working.  A small stream of hot water adds up fast to higher bills, and the drain in that sink is susceptible to clogs.  (I don't care how careful you are, brushing and putting up your hair and -- usually -- remembering to swipe out the sink, it attracts hair clogs.) 

     There are two reasons plumbing work is expensive.

     1. Nearly every part of it is inconvenient and awkward.  Replacing faucets on built-in sinks is especially so, but none of it is easy to get to.  The frustration factor is high -- and so is the back strain.

     2. It is highly skilled work.  When plumbing goes wrong, it makes a huge, costly mess.  We pay plumbers to deal with the aftermath -- and to get repair work right the first time.  It takes a willingness to work with grime, a large number of specialized tools and the wit and experience to know how to use them.

     That said, if you will accept the risk and the difficulty, there's some plumbing you can do yourself, especially if you're wanting to save money and have parallel experience.  Shutoff valves and cartridge type control valves (or repairable designs) make basic sink faucet repair reasonably straightforward: ID the fixture, buy the parts, possibly a valve-seat wrench and/or reamer for older types, turn off the water and replace the cartridge or rebuild the valve, fussy little rubber washers and all.

     Me, I was tired of the tiny spout and hard to clean faucet; I hunted down a brand-new single-control fixture, medium-height, and bought new connection hoses, PTFE tape, plumber's putty (wrong!) and a pair of just-in-case replacement shutoffs.  The other issue leading me to do my own repairs when I can is that the previous homeowner did his own plumbing, with great enthusiasm and a sublime indifference to the directions and the traditions of the craft, along with the inflexible laws of electrochemistry.  There's a great admixture of copper and galvanized pipe even now, and I don't want professional plumbers thinking I did that work.

     Come Saturday, I got all cleaned up (in case I needed to make a parts run), scrubbed the sink, emptied the vanity cabinet and cleaned it, got out my plumbing tools and had a look.  One shutoff valve didn't have a knob and they both looked kind of...old.  Funky, even.

     A look up at the old fixture had worse news: one of the simplest ways to install these has half-inch threaded pipes sticking down below each valve.  The supply lines connect to the ends, but up above them, snug against the underside of the sink, big plastic flange nuts clamp the fixture to the sink itself.  The instructions always warn, "HAND TIGHTEN ONLY!" but between the gorilla-sized lunch hooks of the guys who install them and decades of exposure to a moist environment, they're never easy to remove.

     I shut off the supply lines, using pliers on the one without a handle.  For a wonder, they shut off all the way and neither one leaked at the valve.  I disconnected the supply lines and felt the copper pipe rotate just a few degrees on the hot side when I started to unscrew the fitting.  That could be a problem: if it was soldered to an adapter threaded into galvanized pipe and I had just unscrewed it, I was in trouble.  Such a combination corrodes and you don't want to disturb it unless you're going to replace it.

     A check in the basement found the line was copper, with push-in fittings.  The manufacturer swears they hold up as well as soldered or crimped connections -- but they will rotate, and I think you probably shouldn't turn them after they've been in place a few years. (Also, debur the pipe end!  The seal depends on a high-grade O-ring and if it gets nicked, all bets are off.  You'd never guess how I know.)

     Back upstairs, I finished unscrewing the lines at the shutoff valves and started on the connections at the faucet ends.  My long basin wrench would reach them, but the jaws were so big that there wasn't room to rotate it.  (I'll be shopping for a svelter one.)  My set of stubby combination wrenches didn't go up that far. (Already ordered a 7/8" -- those things are too handy.)  Adjustable wrench time!  Of course, that meant I was wedged in the cabinet, looking up at an comfortable angle, turning the nut a few degrees at a time.  I have a little clip-on rechargeable book light (similar to this, but there are a jillion different kinds; some "music stand" versions have two goosenecks!) that at least gave plenty of light without getting in the way.  It was a prime example of why plumbers earn their pay: a pro would have had the right tool, and still been stuck in the same awkward position.  (Also, always take the time to get an adjustable wrench tight on the nut.  They are engines of destruction if you don't.)

     Once both lines were off, an infinity later, I started in on the big plastic flanged nuts.  Of course, they wouldn't turn by hand, and the only grip was by four plastic fins.  I managed to get the adjustable wrench on them (in a completely wrong, don't-do-this-with-good-tools way) and slowly, slowly backed both nuts off.  I stopped to get a pair of work gloves, and several minutes and a couple of full turns later, I could reach in blind with both hands and just barely spin the nuts, a little at a time, until they were finally free.  The drain-stopper control needed a thumbscrew loosened, and then I could take the whole assembly off and throw it away.

     The top of the sink wanted cleaning where the old fixture had been, of course.  The new one mounted differently, skinny supply lines, short 1/4-20 threaded rods and a couple of big notched washers and nuts: the notches clear the supply lines, while the nuts, washers and threaded rod clamp it to the sink.  Simple, easy -- and you cannot install the darned supply lines ahead of time, because the nuts on the end of them are too fat to fit through the holes in the sink top!

     But first a bead of plumber's putty, to seal up the junction--

     Friends, I have lived in old houses with old plumbing most of my life.  Porcelain (well, enameled) sinks and tubs, plated-brass fittings.  You use plumber's putty to seal things.  Well, you did: The label on my can of putty said, NOT FOR USE ON PLASTIC.  The washroom sink top is a modern composite material: plastic. The instructions for my new faucet said to use plumbing-rated silicone sealant.

     Short, frantic searching turned up three tubes, all a bit past the best-by date.  Two had been opened.  The third was sealed, felt soft, and oozed out okay when opened, so it was back to the task.

     There's a plastic piece that does most of the sealing.  I laid beads of silicone on it, stuck it to the bottom of the new fixture, and set it in place.  Back inside the cabinet, I reached up with a washer and nut, and dropped the washer.  Fine, it's notched anyway.  I reached up to start the nut, and knocked the new fixture over.  After a few words, I reseated the fixture, got back under, took hold of one threaded rod while starting a nut on the other, getting it close, and installing the washer, then did the other side.  Took another look topside, squared everything up and then tightened the nuts with a hollow-shaft nutdriver without looking.  One of them didn't feel right.

     A look up from underneath showed the washer on that side had slipped way off-center.  I had to loosen the nut, which made the whole fixture go cattywompus until I loosened the other nut.  It took a slow process of going back and forth until I had it square, the nuts tight and the washers centered on the threaded rods. 

     Connecting the supply lines took two wrenches, one to hold the big fitting on the end of the little pipe into the fixture and the other on the nut.  I managed to get them pretty snug by hand first, then -- I hope! -- sufficiently tight with the wrenches.  The connections at the shutoff valves were practically a relief after all that fiddling around.

     And then it was time to find out!  I turned on the hot side first, checking for leaks, running the water to purge the new fixture; then the cold, and I had to turn the shutoff a little more on (they usually seal best at full off and full off), and checked more and ran it awhile.

     That was last night.  The job took about three hours, start to finish, and as of 12:30 this afternoon, it's still holding.  I won't count it done until twenty-four hours have passed, and I'll keep watching it, but so far, so good.

     The new fixture is an improvement, easier to get your hands under and with fewer dirt-collecting corners.

Th-um, The, er, The Expanse

     For fans of The Expanse and Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies: Tweety Bird has a Belter accent!  "Dat mean ol' Puddy Tat, him a wellwallah!"

     It's a re-imagining I'd like to see.  Some of the roles write themselves -- Granny as Avasarala, Bugs as Holden, Daffy as Alex, Taz as Amos.  Marvin the Martian won't even need costuming.  Naomi is a challenge -- she probably needs to be played by a rabbit, but most of Bugs's cartoon wives/girlfriends are minor characters.  Possibly the Queen of Mars as Bobbi Draper, Foghorn Leghorn as Fred Johnson -- which makes the hen Miss Prissy plausible as Juliet Mao, and other chicken/rooster characters to fill out the Mao family.  Porky Pig as Joe Miller and Elmer Fudd as bad guy Sadavir Enwright, and there you go.

     Oh, and Tweety? Surely Camina Drummer!

     Sylvester would of course play Marco Inaros, with Sylvester, Jr. as Filip.

     And that's only a start.

I Heard The Bells On Christmas Eve...

     Only they were red and blue lights, instead.

     As mentioned in the previous post, I went into work for a few hours late on Christmas Eve, to deal with the aftermath of an ugly equipment failure.  The initial problem had failed to default over to a backup, and finding someone in the building to look at the failed device, report status and push a button had taken longer than it should have.

     My boss was annoyed -- and even more annoyed that we now had no backup.  I volunteered that I had a replacement for the failed subassembly, bought as a spare the last time the other end of the thing had gone toes-up, and I could go put it in.  At that point, we would at least be no worse off than we had been before the excitement.

     So I did.  It took several hours (the replacement is not exactly a drop-in).  Heading home a half-hour before midnight on Christmas Eve, the streets are not entirely deserted, but you could roller-skate on most of them without too much danger.  A few cars going the other way, a few cars going my directed and, uh-oh, what was that ahead?  Flashing red and blue lights.

     College Avenue south of 38th Street is a interesting stretch, fixed-up and kept-nice old houses up against vacant lots, sagging rentals and old apartment buildings.  There were police lights in front of a four-story wood-siding apartment building, half a block deep and a quarter of a block wide.  As I got closer, the lights resolved into five IMPD cruisers, four with the lights running, all empty.

     No doors open on any of the cars or buildings.  No police officers looking around with flashlights.  No sound.

     Just a reminder that holiday shifts are worse in some jobs than in others.  And in some lives, too. 

How Much Ham?

     The Christmas ham turned out fine, despite trouble keeping one side of my indirect-heat divided fire going on the grill.

     You see, I was still getting over my cold or flu when I shopped for Christmas dinner on the 23rd, thinking I'd pick up last minute stuff the next day before work.  As it happened, I felt so awful on the 24th that I worked from home, napped, and then got paged into work in the evening dues to an emergency.  By then I felt at least halfway human -- but the stores were long closed.

     The previous evening, it was more like a quarter human when I hit the other foodiemart.  Maybe a third.  I looked at the hams, which were more or less sorted into a pile of sweeter ones and a pile of savory, and picked a likely-looking hunk of well-smoked hog from the savory side without reading the details.

     It was seven and a half pounds!  That left barely enough room in the big oval baking pan for a couple of cut-up potatoes, along with multicolored carrots, celery and an onion.  With a foil tent mostly covering it, the exit vent on my covered grill was partially blocked, and I ended up turning the pan every half-hour, while re-lighting the charcoal on the cool side with a split of kindling.  It never stayed burning for long.

     The good side is that it kept the temperature low enough to avoid burning; the grill can hit 400°F with a careful fire and you want more like 325° to bake a ham -- it's already cooked; you're just warming it all the way to the bone.

     Once it was done, Tam and I ate our fill and had, I don't know, probably seven pounds of ham left.  Two big freezer bags of ham and vegetables will reappear as soup or stew; another freezer bag of plain ham, with the bone, is going into fifteen-bean soup.  And the rest?  I had a ham, cheese and mushroom omelet this morning, and I just might make ham hash for breakfast tomorrow -- and there will still be plenty left.

     All this, and I still have to hunt up a corned beef brisket for New Years.

"Solve For Ham"

      I'd like to thank my math teachers and the book "Thinking With A Pencil" for today's meal planning: I bought a great big ham to bake (and have tasty leftovers later), and the darned thing is clean off the table of cooking times for given weight ranges on the label.

     A quick X-Y plot of times vs. weights, a fitted curve, and whattya know?  Two hours, plus or minus about ten minutes.  Most of the vegetables can go in early, and bask in the hammy goodness.

Happy Holidays!

     Also merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah (late), best wishes for Kwanzaa, blessed Solstice, Yule greetings, an early Happy New Year and season's greetings!

     I don't care what you call it; a lot of the world's peoples, by happy coincidence, religious guidance, the wobbling of the planet on its axis and/or conscious choice celebrate this time of year -- and whatever your celebrations may be, I wish you appropriate reverence and joy of them. 

The Imperfection Of Justice

     Justice is imperfect.  We are, after all, only mortal, and that includes police, perpetrators, victims, judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys, juries and legislators.  Sometimes the malefactor gets away with it; sometimes the innocent are punished.

     Perfect justice is like a frictionless surface or an ideal gas: it doesn't exist.  It's an abstraction, useful for addressing general principles.

     A general principle can be more practical; for centuries now, Western legal traditions have emphasized caution and restraint, that it is "better that ten guilty go unpunished than one innocent person suffer."  Bleeding-heart nonsense, you say?  It predates the American Revolution; the Founders and Framers were well aware of it and applied it.

     Quotas of arrests and prosecutions are not compatible with that approach; tell traffic cops they need to write a dozen tickets a day, and they will; tell prosecutors they need to file ten cases a week and they will.  And when the Federal government says they're looking to denaturalize 100 to 200 naturalized U/ S. citizens a month?  They'll do their best.

     If they'd said they were planning on yanking the papers and kicking out naturalized citizens who had committed grievous crimes, nobody'd bat an eye -- in fact, when the initial crackdown on people in this country illegally was framed as going after people who'd committed serious offenses, it wasn't especially contentious.  (When it turned out that any crime at all, or even the most vague suspicion of crime sufficed, then debate became acrimonious).  But setting a quota means A) the lowest-hanging fruit goes first and B) the bar of what constitutes a sufficiently-grave crime will be raised and lowered to match the quota.

     Kick out the truly bad folks?  Fine. Kick out some arbitrary -- and far higher than previous practice -- number of naturalized citizens so you can "make the numbers?"  That's not justice; that's the philosophy of a sweatshop paying workers by the piece.  Except the sweatshop's got a final inspection process before they box up the product and ship it out.

I Can't Keep Up

      It's looking like we're deep into the "Grandpa is crazy, humor him" stage of things, with the U. S. Navy supposedly about to resume building battleships (hello, Billy Mitchell! Hello, Isoroku Yamamoto!), increasingly questionable oil tanker seizures, and the Heritage Fundation shedding senior members, most of them decamping to Mike Pence's no less conservative (but far less willing to wink at Nazis and Nazi-adjacent types) think tank.

     In Imperial Rome, when Emperors went whimsical, it was often a prelude to things getting sporty.  The men who wrote and amended the U. S. Constitution did their very best to build in circuit breakers and spillways intended to keep "interesting times" from becoming a pandemic.  Did they succeed?  Better fasten your seat belt and return all tray tables to the upright and locked position.  The ride's liable to get bumpy.

How Does It Work Elsewhere?

     The Bulwark compares the health care system in Japan to ours.  We don't come off looking so great.

     I can only point out yet again that universal health care is apparently so terrifically difficult that the only modern, industrialized country that hasn't come up with some way (and there are many) to deliver it is...us.  If that was the cost of a few trips to the Moon, then, really, we should have stayed home.

Malicious Record-Keeping

      Reading about the history of health risks from asbestos and the things companies did to cover it up, I learned that not all of it was overt.  Sure, people were pressured to sign releases, or sworn to silence as part of settling lawsuits; research was hidden; misinformation was promulgated: all the usual Hollywood-villain stuff really did happen.  But as lawsuits started to pile up, there was another technique: malicious filing practices.  Rather than destroy records, which would have been a red flag, a crime and of itself, some of the bigger offenders began "storing" records by piling them up in random heaps, often in scattered warehouses without climate control.  They could argue it was expensive to keep all those files, and impossible to keep track.

     Of course, they'd let opposing counsel dig through all that -- but don't expect an index.

     I've been thinking about that as the Epstein files have been released, a great big digital heap of stuff, some of it withdrawn for further redaction and then reissued, with no tracking.  Is it all there?  Who can say, but there's certainly a lot of it, and the various journalists and activist organizations are digging through it all, many with their own axes to grind.  It's another six-day wonder for the news cycle, steeped in rumor, adorned with a few facts gleaned catch-as-can.

     More sound and fury, associated with horrendous crimes against vulnerable young women, buried in the noise, much of it self-created.

     Don't think it's not deliberate.