I'm Sorry, Who?

      When word came yesterday (or was it the day before? Time moves quickly when governments are flirting with genocide) that Vice-President James David "JD" Vance* was going to Pakistan to negotiate with Iran and Israel, I was shocked.

     Politics aside, he seems like a poor choice.  It's not that he isn't smart; I'd stack him up against nearly anybody in Jeopardy or solving brain teasers.  It's not that he isn't well-educated; a Yale lawyer with a BA in PolySci and Philosophy from Ohio State and a USMC military journalist before that has indeed soaked up a few things.  It's not even that he isn't experienced; the rise from Ohio poverty through military service to an elite university is a path sure to give a wide overview of the human experience.

     Nope, the problem is one of personality.  JD Vance can be an arrogant ass.  He usually comes across as condescending.  At best, he's patronizing.  And hey, maybe people like that.  It seems like the kind of attitude GOP voters look for in a leader.  But it's the last thing you should bring to the negotiating table.  It's A-okay to be hardnosed.  Pride is pretty much a given, especially pride in one's country.  You can even believe you're the smartest guy in the room -- but you can't talk down.  You can't lay down unilateral pronouncements and then bow up when the other side challenges them.

     I'm not a big fan of Marco Rubio, but he knows how to play this game.  Send him.  Send someone who has the right skill set!  MAGA is at least as full of hectoring lecturers as the Dems are at their most nannying, but they can still scrape up a few people who know how to play euchre without annoying the other side so badly they flip the table over and go home.

     Or is that the whole point?
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* Born James Donald Bowman.

Missed One

     I should have known better, but I skipped posting yesterday: if it was going to be the start of WW III, there was no point, and if it wasn't -- well, here I am.  It wasn't.  That was always the most likely outcome, but in recent years, I've become skeptical of the odds; it feels as if we're always on the edge of Heinlein's "The Year of the Jackpot."

     No three-lemons sour payoff yet.  Humanity has spent most of our existence dancing on the edge of a volcano but I swear, some of us are starting to get into deliberately jostling everyone else.

It's Spring

     Rather than belabor the horrors and outrages of the current war, or the "interesting" leadership, I will instead point to the lovely Spring we're having.  It still gets pretty chilly; there's even a freeze warning out for tonight, though only barely.  But the yard is thick with unusually large dog-violets and Spring Beauty, not to mention a few ambitious dandelions, and some other wildflowers are sneaking in.  The bees are already at work, which is why I haven't gone after the dandelions yet -- they bloom early, and give the bees a good start until the fancier flowers bloom.

     Elsewhere, we've had four people out beyond the Moon.  They're on the return leg now, and I wish them every success.

     There's apparently a fortune waiting for the person or group who invents a reliable, small, low-mass microgravity toilet: the current mission is having trouble with theirs, the crew of last long-duration Dragon flight pretty much gave up on the one aboard in favor of more primitive arrangements, and WCs on the various space stations are large, awkward contraptions that nobody's going to stuff into a spacecraft smaller than a Winnebago.  This may end up being a good reason to pursue spinning "wheel" type space stations or large O'Neill cylinders: aside from Coriolis Effect, the plumbing operates normally.  For short-duration spaceflight, there's always the Russian solution: eat small, low-bulk meals for a couple of days before, make a pit stop prior to boarding, and exercise willpower until you arrive.  Come to think of it, that was my Dad's theory for vacation travel, too.

No, As In No

     Not just no, but hell no.

     A young man knocked on the front door yesterday.

     "I'm a student?  At IU?  I'm majoring in entrepreneurship, and I noticed the paint on your house could use a touch-up--"

     "Thank you for stopping by.  Goodbye."

     Look, if I want my house painted and I can't do the job myself, I'll hire a house-painter, not a entrepreneur.  What I want is someone, or a small firm, who has been painting houses well enough and long enough to earn a living at it, not someone who is studying how to separate fools from their money and will try anything that looks plausible to do so.

     Don't lead with "entrepreneur."  That isn't the right pitch.  Customers are interested in results, not motivations.

     Back in the old days, house painters tended to be drinkers or users of other substances.  You looked for guys with a few daubs of paint on them, not too shaky, not too skinny, and you looked for a clear and somewhat overbearing boss; or you hired family members.  If you were lucky, they mostly showed up on time, mostly were still able to do the job after lunch, didn't steal and didn't leave a mess.  You were usually better off supplying the paint unless they had a really good reputation.

     There is no "entrepreneur" on that list.  It's not a hugely profitable business.  Done honestly, it's a decent living for a small crew if they don't have much overhead.  Done dishonestly, it doesn't work out well for anyone -- crews get ripped off, customers get lousy paint jobs, bosses skip town with a rattly truck and a few supplies, to start over in the next town.

     I don't need to add in a kid looking to add to his resume, with no interest in the actual work and a head full of glib notions.

     A couple of my nephews are brilliant house painters when they have time.  They did the initial paint job on Roseholme Cottage a few years after I moved in and I'd love to have them back on the job.  It's unlikely.  They've got plenty of work at their day jobs.  I'm hoping to put a decent coat of heavy-duty outdoor primer on the windows and frames by myself this summer, and maybe touch up the trim.  Anything else will have wait.

Entertainment, We Got

      It turns out if you go looking up an SF writer from the golden age (and it's always somebody's golden age in SF), you might get an unexpected bonus.

     William Tenn was one of the best humorists the genre has yet produced, from biting satire to gentle comedy.  In real life, he was Philip Klass,* electronics geek, technical editor and, later, a professor of English, teaching writing to a number of students who would go on to fame, or at least decent incomes.

     And one of his last published stories, On Venus, Have We Got A Rabbi! is a classic of at least two genres.  He read it on the radio back in 2002: his voice, and very much the voice of his narrator, a humble TV repairman.  On Venus.  A few hundred years in the future.  And oh, the trouble they have had there!

     Absolutely worth your listening time.  Or your reading, you'd prefer.
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* And not, as it happens, Philip J. Klass, aerospace and electronics geek and UFO debunker.  That's a whole other guy. 

Ahistorical, Antifreedom, Agitprop

     Indiana's Lieutenant Governor is at it again: Micah Beckwith is making things up, claiming the Founders and Framers who set up a secular government were all about Christian Nationalism.

     He's talking nonsense.  These men represented a mix of beliefs -- Unitarian, Quaker, Congregationalist, Universalist, Deist, Methodist, Catholic, Judaism and others -- and they knew history.  They had read of and in some cases observed the damage a State Church can cause.

     And they were open to the good religious faith can create, too.  You'll find them writing of the "public utility" of religion as a beacon of individual morality.  They had no problem with individual legislators looking to their own beliefs for guidance -- but they were wary of any faith leading the government, and of any government running and requiring adherence to a church.

     This is not a difficult concept.  It's not at all hard to find in the historical record -- and even then, a few men wanted one religious sect or another upheld and enforced -- or suppressed.  (John Jay was an ardent advocate of Christianity in government -- and bitterly opposed to allowing Catholics to hold office, vote or even immigrate, calling for "a wall of brass around the country for the exclusion of Catholics.")  Their views did not prevail then, and should not prevail now.

     Look to your faith to your heart's content.  Express it in your words and deeds.  But don't use the blunt instrument of the State to make everyone else do so -- or claim it, and it alone, should be enshrined in our government.

     America's tradition of religious freedom and tolerance was a rare and precious thing when the country was new, and it still is.

Naw

      Why beat a dead horse?  Look, I'm just worried that we've got people headed out for a trip aound the Moon in one of the dumbest times in U. S. history, and the bulging brains in Washington are gonna decide trigonometry or calculus is too "woke" and then smash 'em into Earth or the Moon by trying to get some slop-ass AI to do the trajectory calculations and issue course corrections.

     "Yes, I see what I did wrong there and it was of course an error to send the Orion in on a straight ballistic reentry and delay parachute deployment by five minutes to get a better photo op, but you have to admit, it looked beautiful in the moments before it impacted the water at seven miles a second and broke apart.  I'll be sure to be more careful next time."

Yuck

     I woke a little after midnight with a headache, and never got back all the way asleep, wandering instead through a series of half-lucid nightmares, hurting and hoping to fade into real sleep.  I knew I'd hurt worse if I woke all the way up, and sure enough, when the alarm went off at six, the 10 Watt bulb in my reading light was too bright and the phone was too hard to work to turn the alarm off.  I stumbled my way through feeding the cats, clumsy as a dancing bear, took a couple of acetaminophen and went back to bed with the light off.  I finally got a couple of hours of real sleep but my head was still a mess, achy and dizzy.  And I was still unsteady, klutzy.  I called in sick.  There's no way I should be operating a motor vehicle.

     Hours later, I'm still unsteady.  A couple of round of OTC painkillers have taken the edge off, but walking still feels like trying to rollerskate, and I'm not a skater.

     Not recommended.

     Clumsiness is a sure-enough migraine effect, and I get it sometimes, but this bout is especially bad.

Pop Goes The Starlink?

     I'm reading this morning that another Starlink satellite has fallen apart in orbit, cause unknown.  Just a sudden cloud of debris.

     It's not believed to be of any risk to the Artemis circumlunar mission set to launch soon -- but every loose bolt in orbit is a potential problem until its orbit decays and it falls back to Earth (if it ever does), usually burning up in a blaze of glory.  Starlink satellites orbit low enough that a few shooting stars are the most likely outcome -- but I have to admit, more and more, it appears that heedless fools are filling up the sky with overly-fragile junk, and that's not a good situation.

     And none of them are more prolific at it -- or more heedless -- than Elon Musk's SpaceX.  Look, I wish he was a combination of Tony Stark and Robert Goddard, too, but the reality is, he's a talented promoter who isn't otherwise qualified to do so much as polish either man's shoes, fictional or real.

     Progress advances on the backs of flashy mountebanks at least as much as it is carried by brilliant engineers and scientists, and some men are even both at once.  (Edison, Tesla, this part is about you.)  But we need to be clear-eyed about it; one interval of tetraethyl lead was way more than enough.

--

     As for the Artemis mission itself, I wish them godspeed and good fortune, but I'm not kidding you, I'm going to worry the entire time from launch to splashdown.  There's a reason the term "moonshot" is a synonym for high risk/high reward ventures.

Over $5.00 A Gallon

     I had put off filling up my car.  I started out the non-war war with a full tank and who knew, maybe it would all be over before I ran out.

     It isn't.  I nearly did.  I had too much fun this weekend to remember to get gas, and when I set out for work today, the tank was much lower than I like.  The only name-brand station on my way downtown that I'm comfortable at is at 49th St., and it's rarely the cheapest.

     But an $85.00 refill is painful.  Gotta have it, and it's not like I can't cover the cost, but it's a bigger bite than I'm used to and indications are that the price of oil isn't done going up.  Almost anything that happens in the Middle East right now, especially around Iran, is going to reduce the availability of oil.  Some events will have longer lasting results, but over the next thirty days, you can count on the stuff costing more, even if there's a sudden outbreak of peace, goodwill and brotherhood: damaged refineries and seagoing traffic jams don't get sorted out overnight.

     My present bet is that we're headed for a recession at best.  Oh, our country and the planet keep lurching towards them, and dodging at the last minute by shoving one industry or sector into the mud for awhile as everything else goes roaring past; but sooner or later, someone's going to miss a step, and the damage will become widespread.  Wars, declared or not, have a tendency to break the rhythm.  That can be helpful if things are already really bad; but if they're on edge, not so much.

     Me, I'm going to get my motorcycle tuned up, and shop for saddlebags so it can be more a commuter vehicle.  Mechanic's fees are a one-time cost; gas just keeps on going up.  The motor scooter will follow -- I love it, but 10" wheels and Indiana roads after a harsh winter aren't a great match.  Unlike my car, the motorcycle and scooter will burn regular gas, too.

Fencing the Fences

      Or maybe I should title this "Dancing With Termites, Mold and Rot."  I have now spent part of the last two weekends working on the fence around Roseholme Cottage's back yard (and clearing away underbrush on the fencelines, too).

     The long fences along the property lines belong to my neighbors, one of whom knows it.  But the short runs that connect those fences to the house and garage, each one with a gate, are mine and they're in sad shape.  Over the last two weekends, I have hammered in reinforcing bars for the two wobbly posts in the stretch that has the gate we use most and it's stable enough to last another year.  Maybe two.*  Today, I trimmed the bottom of the gate where it was scraping the sidewalk, and reset the latch and padlock hasp.

     Then it was off to the big gate in the back fence.  The gateposts are massive; I replaced one last year, and the other one is a 6"x6" and still solid.  But it's got a tiny bit of fence hanging off it, 15" to a 4"x4" post and that post has an airgap at ground level.

     Or it did.  When I realized what was going on, I looked around and found they make yard-long tapering spikes, with a socket at the top for a 4"x4".  I bought one spike and a pressure-treated post, and proceeded to hammer the thing in where the old post had stood,  It ended up far more solid than I expected.  The company that makes the spikes warns you to not expect too much, but once I replaced the 2"x4" cross ties near the top and bottom, linking it to the gatepost, it was very stable.  I screwed the old fence boards in places and it looks as good as it ever did -- only it doesn't sway.

     With all that accomplished, I reset the latch and hasp on one more gate, and refastened more crosspieces and boards that had come loose over the winter. 

     It was hours of work, but the fence and gates are in better shape now.  In celebration, I aired up the tires on my highwheel bicycle, got it out, and...  I can't mount it.  My knees have been bothering me for some time, and I'd about worn myself out with the outdoor work.  I just couldn't get it up to speed and make the big push to get in the saddle.  I aired up the mini-highwheel instead, and give it a quick run up and down the alley.  Clearly, I have some conventional bicycling and honest exercise ahead of me before I can climb up on the big 36" wheel and go for a ride.
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* I have two different versions of these in place and they're clever, four-foot-long steel bars that you hammer in between the wobbly post and the concrete or packed earth it's set in.  You end up with a bit more than a foot of it exposed, which has a zigzag pattern of holes for long screws to hold it to the post.  Set them on three sides, and unless there's nothing but mud under the post, it's pretty steady.  It's not as good as digging everything out and starting over, but it's much better than the other fixes I have tried.

Hoppin' Turkey?

     It's Rich Person's Hoppin' John, with a lot of meat and a whole array of vegetables, and it's what I had for supper Saturday.

     There's a strip of bacon in there, and a couple of mild Italian sausages squeezed out of the casing, but also a pound of ground turkey, because they had it at the grocery and why not?  That got Cajun seasoning and some curry powder sprinkled on it while it all browned and the fat was drained off.

Shown right before adding the bay leaves and covering it to simmer.

     Then  it was step by step: diced carrots, slices of celery, some dice red, orange, yellow and green bell pepper (at least two pepper's worth; the grocer sells it sliced), followed by red onion; each addition was sauteed in the center of the cookpot before being stirred in and pushed to the side.  Then a couple of cans of mild Hatch chilies, some sliced organic (low salt but flavorful) Kalamata olives and a couple of big hot/sweet pickled okra, followed by a box (the equivalent of a large can) of crushed tomatoes and a can of blackeyed peas with about half the liquid.  All that got to simmer with three bay leaves, some dried garlic flakes, a little more Cajun seasoning and some this and that.

     It was almost too good.  I ate a bowl and a half and would have had more, if I had even less self-control.

     There was plenty left to freeze in three meal-sized bags for later.