Reading List

     While Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth's supposedly butched-up military machine is stumbling its way through a war of choice in the Middle East, incompetently led and sometimes reluctantly (but competently) served, it might be time for touch of perspective on current events.  So here are some suggested readings:

     "The Screwfly Solution," by Racoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon, more famous as "James Tiptree, Jr.")
     The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
     Practically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin -- I'm presently enjoying The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a 2002 collection of her short fiction.

     All of them examine power, and how things break, and how helpless so many people are willing to be while it happens, and (in some cases), how it might begin to heal.  We're presently oversupplied with boys who like the sound of smashing altogether too well -- social norms, people's lives, economies, edifices, anything that looks even a little fragile.  But there is a season for all things, and they mustn't be allowed to pursue ruin forever.

Justice?

     This is your regular reminder that nobody "has it coming," unless what's coming is a fair trial and an honest verdict.  Satisfying as tales of vigilante justice or the workings of Fate may be, the real world is rarely that simple.  Sometimes, a bad thing is about to happen and the only way to stop it is immediate, violent action -- but don't mistake that for justice; it's simply a choice aimed at the least-bad solution.

     There are some loathsome people out there, but you can't fix it by becoming loathsome yourself.

Free Cable!

     Okay, not exactly cable, and there may be a little upfront cost; or not, if you or the previous people who lived in your place were lazy enough.

      See, the other thing about over-the-air digital TV is that in addition to providing video good enough to show on a giant screen (seriously, guys, when I was in my teens, we thought a 25" color screen across the living room was huge and now that's the size of my computer monitor), there was bandwidth left over -- as the technology has improved, a lot of it.  So now every over-the-air-channel has multiple extra "dot channels" to fill.*  You can watch them free for nothing -- if you've got an antenna.

     Some of the TV stations put together newswheels or local weather services for their additional channels, but there were already a few companies providing programming to low power TV stations, and a few independent TV channels in the largest cities that weren't quite the size of Chicago's WGN or Atlanta's WTBS but provided a similar mix of old and new.  Those stations and not-quite-networks saw an opportunity and stepped up, making most of their money from commercials and offering their programming to fill the otherwise unused dot channels.

     That was over a decade ago.  In and around a big city, like, oh, Indianapolis, these days you have the usual ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC/PBS, but also MeTV (a kind of homage to a well-run independent local station, complete with Perry Mason and Andy Griffith reruns, Saturday morning cartoons and a Saturday night monster-movie host), a  science fiction channel, two different Western channels, a full-time cartoon channel, a channel of action/adventure programming, one aimed at Black audiences, one for Indian/Southeast Asian viewers, scads of religious channels, a local newswheel and at least two classic-movie channels.  It's better than you used to get from cable TV without the premium channels (and those are all available on streaming).

     Tam mentioned this on her blog recently.  If you live outside the big city and its bedroom communities, you'll probably need something better than old fashioned rabbit ears or a modern flat-panel indoor antenna (bigger is better for those -- you can hide it behind a picture if need be).  You may find a spiky Yagi antenna hiding in your attic or on a pole strapped to your chimney, left over from the days before most people got cable TV.  They work just as well with digital TV signals as they did with analog ones; the only difference is that if you had a lot of "snow" back then, digital TV will either come in great now or not at all; there's not much in-between with a digital signal.  (If you do have to buy an antenna, all I can tell you is the brand I have stashed away in case the well-worn one on our chimney doesn't survive the raccoon removal process: Winegard has been making home TV antennas since way, way back.  I'm sure there are other good brands, and there are still contractors around who install them.)

     Rabbitears lets you look up TV stations serving your location, and lists the channel they transmit on ("Digital Channel") as well as the one your screen displays; it's not always the same.  (This was supposed to be a clever idea to let stations maintain their established identity while everything got shuffled around during the analog-to-digital transition, but I have my doubts.)  There are still a lot of stations on the VHF channels, even low-VHF, so in many locations, you want an antenna that picks them up as well as UHF.  The channel information will help you figure that out.

     Indianapolis has a staggering number of free channels, well over 70 depending on how fancy an antenna you have and if you're willing to point it in other directions than at the main cluster of towers on the northwest side of town.  And that's about average.  It's not "500 channels and nothing on," but these channels have to sing for their supper and there's probably something on one or two of them that'll hold your interest.
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* People call them "subchannels," which is technically inaccurate, or "dot channels," though the main channel is always "[Channel Number].1" and the others are 2, 3, 4, etc., so they're all dot channels.  The channel changer on your remote clicks through them in order, same as always.

On Knowledge And Ignorance

     I frequently encounter -- and loathe -- invincible ignorance, the kind of weaponized not knowing that denies anyone could know anything and therefore, one person's uninformed opinion is exactly as good as another person's deep understanding.

     Well, it ain't, and knowing what you don't know is the beginning of wisdom.

     I am far from the only person who keeps running into self-made fools.  Another of the frustrated has written about it eloquently and in depth.  It's worth a look.

Enough With The Tapdancing

     It's annoying.  It's terrifying, and most people are nowhere near concerned enough: the President of the United States spent a good part of the weekend just past angrily posting on his social media platform, complaining about not being allowed to rule however he sees fit.  I've been looking for neutral coverage about it and of course, it's difficult to find.  You can go straight to the horse's mouth, though.

     Most of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell came in for harsh criticism, as has D.C. Federal Court Judge James Boasberg.  For those of you keeping score at home, that'd be senior members of a co-equal branch of the Federal government and the chair of a Federal agency whose independence most economists say is key to financial stability. The same series of posts claims, falsely, that the 2020 elections were rigged.

     News media also came in for threats; during a 20-minute briefing on Air Force One, the President accused U.S. media of promoting false stories and "not wanting the U.S. to win," cutting off ABC reporters from asking further questions about halfway through.  On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcast license-holders over their coverage of President Trump's war-in-all-but-name with Iran, posting on X, the former Twitter: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions -- also known as the fake news -- have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. [...] The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."   The law might be clear but Chairman Carr is not:  Most national and international coverage is done by networks and the Associated Press,* while FCC licenses are held by individual stations and group owners; ABC/CBS/NBC and Fox own only a few TV stations, while NPR, PBS, CNN and AP own none.  But threats are threats, and the Chairman is hoping station owners will act as his catspaws against the networks and wire service -- and there's a good chance at least some of them will.

     This is all the stuff of dictatorial rule, of "moving towards the Leader" on the part of underlings, and when you throw in the President's announcement that the fight against Iran will end "when I feel it in my bones," and giving his "feeling" that they were planning to attack as one of the Administration's reasons for starting the "excursion" in the first place, it forms a very ugly picture.  President Trump wants to rule like a Roman emperor or a modern autocrat, unfettered by the petty concerns of courts or legislatures, indifferent to public opinion, steered by his own whims.  And much as he rails against the Press, they have continued to sanewash and normalize his dictatorial aspirations, to whitewash his tirades, racism and incoherence, apparently in the vain hope that if they pretend everything is normal, it will all eventually go back to normal.  Just keep throwing raw meat to the beast and pray it will go away?

     Appeasement never works.  Hope is nothing if you won't get out and push towards your goal.  Rust never sleeps -- and neither does the authoritarian impulse and the willingness to be ruled, the will to power and the lazy desire to let somebody else do the heavy lifting.
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These days, AP is also a software company: as computer-centric "electronic newsrooms" emerged, AP became a leading supplier of newsroom systems.  Think of it as Windows Office scaled so an entire newsroom can share it, with GUI conventions markedly different to those of Windows and Apple, though slowly converging.

Easy Listening

     When I was young and (some) regular household electronic devices still had genuine light-up vacuum tubes inside, I took Radio-TV Production classes for all three years of High School.

     The man who taught that subject was middle-aged and very heavy.  He'd worked his way through college as a jazz and middle-of-the-road music deejay before getting into news (and part-time police work, but that's another story), and told stories of the days when even a medium-sized directional AM station was a Big Deal, with full-time engineers on duty to turn the knobs.*

     One day, a particularly apple-polishing student lamented that there was hardly any jazz at all on the radio any more, and he chuckled.  "You watch TV, don't you?  Listen to the theme music.  Nearly all of it is light jazz of one kind or another."

     He was right.  Most of it still is, with some notable exceptions, and if you want background music and have an Alexa or similar widget that only needs a single song to go searching for more of the same but different, you can spin up a nice fifteen minutes or half an hour of undemanding entertainment by asking it to play the theme from "Mannix," "The Wild, Wild West" (TV show) or something along those lines.

     Semi-relatedly, when I was even younger, I was a fan of both "The Wild, Wild West" and "Love, American Style," and it wasn't until years later that I realized what they had in common was that they were as close as TV ever got to newsstand pulp magazines.  There are other good examples, but those two had taken the essentials and run right from pulp-paper page to the camera lens.
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* That's not all they were doing.  Directional antenna arrays for AM radio are large, from two to as many as nine towers in the 100-foot to 700-foot range and spaced about that far apart, with a large, complex gadget called a "phasor" (no, really) to feed the right amount and phase angle of radio-frequency energy to each one, and a smaller gadget called a "phase monitor" to ensure it was all working as it should.  They were drifty, and regular readings had to be made, along with occasional adjustments.  Over time, the change to transistors and then integrated circuits meant the phase monitors got better and better, and as computers replaced log tables and slide rules, the design of phasors and antenna arrays became less art and more science.  Eventually, it became obvious even to the FCC that most of the drifting was not, in fact, the big hardware, but the little gadgets we used to check it every half hour.  30-minute checks became three-hour checks; engineers on duty 24/7 were replaced by a requirement for one full-timer with the right license and, eventually, "whoever," a part-timer to occasionally look over the automated monitors and make sure the EAS tests ran.  But oh, it used to be a thing, once upon a time.

Connections

     Most people are familiar with organization charts, graphics showing lines of control and responsibility; most people have seen the overthought/paranoid version stereotypes in films and on TV, too, tangled spiderwebs of colorful string connecting photos and newspaper clippings, sometimes three-dimensional.

     There's an outfit that's been tracking the connections between modern conservative authoritarian organizations, finding unlikely linkages between strict Islamic regimes and the Christian Nationalist far Right, obvious ones between authoritarian-inclined European governments with anti-LGBTQ laws and organizations that seek to roll back the rights of women in the Third World, between the current incarnation of the Republican Party and their counterparts in Europe, South America and Africa -- and it's much more of an organization chart than a parody maze of neon-hued yarn.  And one of the most connected nodes has a familiar name: Project 2025.

     Read it or don't.  Believe it or deny it.  But over here on the distaff side, I'm not seeing a dime's worth of difference between a bunch of bearded religious authorities who want me to shut up and focus on making the menfolk happy in Texas and in Tehran or Kabul, except one group has a very firm grasp on power and the other is still groping for it.  (Oh, and different hats.  How very nice.)

     Things are bad and there are a whole lot of folk out there, foreign and domestic, doing their level best to make them even worse.  And they're sharing notes, in some cases while fighting each other.

How A Bill Becomes Law (In Indiana)

     With the 2026 legislative session wrapping up this weekend, it's a little late, but the Chamber of Commerce has a nice PDF with a flowchart graphic that explains the Hoosier process of turning a bill into law.  It's not an easy procedure, and combined with our part-time legislature, I'm sure it spares us no end of trouble.  Every new law creates a new kind of crime -- and not every bad, distasteful or unpopular thing needs to be outlawed.

Hey, Look

     It's eleven at night and the cat wants me to go to bed so much that he's trying to steal things off desks so I'll chase him down the hall to my bedroom.  And if you don't mind, that's what I'm going to do.  He's positively indignant that I haven't laid down so he's got a warm place to sleep.

A Roaring March Day

      This morning, it was over 70 degrees outside and dark, as thunderstorms -- even a tornado or two, farther north -- rumbled across the state.  By midday, clouds and sunlight were chasing one another, pushed by strong and gusty winds, and in late afternoon, it poured down rain.

     A little before sunset, I had to go outside at the North Campus to check on a client's equipment just as the rain was tapering off; I'd worn a zip-up sweatshirt, since temperatures were supposed to hit 30 overnight.  It would surely still be 40 or higher at the end of the workday, right?  The inside of the front door of the building was fogged up.  It was above freezing outside, barely.

     I'd had enough foresight to bring an insulated vest but I'd left it in my car.  It was still better than nothing.  I walked around to the client installation to the whistling of wind through the pine trees, wishing I'd brought a coat.

     That's Indiana in March.  The whole month will go back and forth like this.  We're in for a slow warm up through the weekend, with another swift drop starting late Sunday, probably with more storms.

     Meanwhile, my raccoon man had to cancel.  Something about not wanting to be on a steep roof during a thunderstorm, a decision that speaks well for his judgement.

Not A Euphemism

      We have raccoons in our chimney.  There is no fireplace at Roseholme Cottage, but there used to be a coal-burning furnace, with a flue ten inches in diameter feeding the chimney at a point about four feet above the floor, well below where the gas furnace and water heater now connect with standard four-inch flues.

     The big, capped flue and empty lower chimney must have looked like a good deal to the raccoons this Fall.  They came and went fairly quietly, with occasional scrabbling sounds; the main gang (the official collective nouns include a nursery, a mask or a gaze) in our neighborhood lives in the storm drains, and relocates during heavy rain.  But a few of them favor rooftops, and they'd spent some time on our neighbor's roof and chimney a couple of years ago.

     They began using our radon vent pipe as a handy ladder to our roof, and getting in the chimney.  I figured the furnace fumes would force them out this Winter, but apparently once they're lower than the connection point, the draft draws in sufficient fresh air.

     Now they're living in there, coming and going at all hours, making various raccoon noises, and being worrisome.  It's gotten to be too much.  I've scheduled a raccoon relocator to stop by tomorrow, look the situation over and give us a quote, and there's a chimney firm lined up to follow him with a genuine raccoon-proof cap, or proof until the raccoons figure it out, and clean the chimney out before they install it.

     Ahh, Nature!  This is at least less strange than the squirrel that had apparently become addicted to furnace fumes, and would wriggle into the flue and lay there, inhaling hot carbon monoxide and shutting down the furnace by obstructing the draft.  That was quite a few years ago and I eventually installed a hardware-cloth barrier in the flue.  There's no easy fix for raccoons -- clever, strong and dexterous, they call for heavier forces than I can bring to bear.

Public Relations

1. Local, Local, Local
     Indianapolis had its very own electric power utility for decades, and people liked Indianapolis Power & Light.  Rates were low; while the other large utilities in the state served mostly rural customers, IPL's customer base was the dense Indianapolis metro, and they leveraged efficiencies of scale and Hoosier frugality to deliver reliable power at low rates.  They put one of the city's first radio stations on the air, and followed it up in the late 1950s with the first or second commercial TV station*

     By 1957, IPL was out of the broadcasting business -- and very firmly in the Power & Light business.  They made money for their investors and kept on delivering power to customers at some of the lowest rates in the state, while maintaining and expanding their generating stations.  In 2000 or 2001 (sources differ), international power giant AES bought IPL, and in 2021, they retired the IPL branding in favor of their own name.

     Now AES itself is being snapped up by "a consortium led by BlackRock subsidiary Global Infrastructure Partners and Swedish private equity firm EQT AB [...] for a total enterprise value of $33.7 billion [...]."

     AES has never been quite as well-liked as IPL; rates have gone up and reliability is not quite what it was, at least in part thanks to a growing population and aging infrastructure.  The sale to the consortium is even less popular; recent announcement of public open houses resulted in what are being described as "credible threats" on social media.  Events were rescheduled, and have now been postponed indefinitely.  The goodwill IPL built by being the all but invisible, affordable suppliers of wall-socket juice is gone, just when the company most needs it.  And the state regulator is feeling the heat.

2. National and International
     Meanwhile, I'm hearing an old familiar tune: "Now the President has finally gone too far!  His supporters will turn on him!"

     Gasoline prices are skyrocketing and stocks are tumbling as I write this, and the surprise-war against Iran is leaving the usual piles of dead and injured in its wake.  I still wouldn't get too excited about the prospects for a man whose public image has already survived a bungled pandemic response, an attempted and ugly coup, two impeachments, felony convictions, civil sexual assault conviction, an unpopularly harsh ramp-up of immigration enforcement and a sprawling sex-crimes scandal, not to mention his own rambling and semi-coherent speechmaking.  While he's shed supporters here and there, the people who love President Trump really, really love him, and by now they have years of practice rationalizing away any negatives.  If the economy tanks hard, Donald Trump may yet succeed in Hoovering himself off the national stage just like Herbert did, but A) I would not count on it and B) a hard crash is a lousy thing to wish on your fellow citizens.

     Unlike nearly all of his predecessors, this President can't be steered much by public opinion, especially in this second term, and to the extent that he is, it's by crowd reaction at his events, which are not a balanced cross-section of the American electorate.  I don't know how we and our country are getting out of this -- if we manage to get out at all -- but expecting a miracle is a recipe for disappointment.
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* Supporters of competing WTTV and WRTV (then WFBM) claims to be first are still duking it out -- in May, 1949 IPL's WFBM was inarguably on the air first, but their transmitter promptly failed, and they were still repairing it that November, when WTTV came on and stayed on.  But the joke's on them: in 1944, experimental W9XMT was the first TV station on the air in town, and the Wm. H. Block Co. department store received a license for WWHB in 1947 and got as far as transmitting test patterns before deciding the television business was too iffy for them.