Wasn't That Fun?

     There I was yesterday, with a distressingly swollen and tender shin, lurid bruising extending down to my foot, concerned I might have cracked the bone....

     I made an appointment at the closest drive-through doc.  We've got one in Broad Ripple again, and they've been businesslike and easy to deal with, the couple of times I've gone there.

     They got me in quickly, checked my temperature, blood pressure (just fine -- the "white coat syndrome" that used to overwhelm the good effects of my blood pressure medicine at any doctor's office is doing better these days), and had a look at my leg.  There was a fair amount of cogitation on the part of the doctor and nurse.  The conclusion was that it was a sure-enough clot, and maybe rather more than might be expected from the accident as I described it.  (I fell up the basement stairs and took the edge of a sturdy step right on that shin.)  My left ankle was over twice as big around as the right.

     The thing to do was to get an ultrasound -- and to go do so at an ER.  I expressed doubt at going to the hospital over this.  Say "stroke risk," and they bring out the fancy toys, much excitement, high cost--*

     Oh, no, says the doc, not that.  Go to one of the standalone ER/urgent care combinations.  They're quicker anyway.

     So I did.  The closest place was halfway across town, a long drive with me thinking all the time how very interesting it will be if the big blob breaks loose and fries my brain, right there along Westfield Avenue or one of the crowded east-west numbered roads in the hundreds, where the northern suburbs have just continued Indianapolis street numbers past the county line.  Got there with skull contents intact, boiled same slightly stuck in traffic gridlocked by dog-in-the-manger drivers and eventually checked in and got led back to a comfy exam room forthwith.  Physical exam followed: "Yes, yes, probably a hematoma, but.  Um, that's pretty far down on your calf, in front.  The big veins are around back, and they're branched out and skinny that far down.  I guess I see why they sent you but the risk is low.  It's not that kind of clot."

     Sonogram next, to confirm there were no chunky bits up where they'd make trouble.  X-ray after that, and hey hurrah, the bone's okay.  But there is a big, ugly splotch, a hematoma right on the bone, almost certainly under the layer of tissue normally next to the bone.  "That's going to be a long time going down, weeks and weeks.  And it's gonna hurt the whole time.  Normal recommendation is compression, but as you already observed, it'll be painful."

     He was talking about socks with that last line.  I usually wear knee-high compression stockings; I'm an old lady on blood-pressure meds that make my ankles swell.  The fix is easy, cheap and supposedly good for you, but I hadn't been able to wear them for a couple of days.

     The doctor's conclusion was that I wasn't at any risk of a stroke from that clot.  It was going to stay right where it was, slowly being nibbled away by the normal process of healing, and it was going to remind me it was there the entire time, all day and all night.  I'm not a fan, but it beats having my brain scrambled by leaps, bounds and miles.

     I took today off, to elevate my calf (also recommended), complain online, and, ouch, wear compressions stockings.  I peeled a set on last night and they can darned well stay on all day today.  I'm in no hurry to slide anything over the big bruise again until I have to.
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* It also bugs me that you jump the triage line in a hospital ER with this kind of thing, at least for the initial diagnosis, and I worry that they're going to be poking at me and my stable situation when someone gets wheeled in, smashed up after an auto accident or whatever.  I have been that person and I don't want to be the reason they have to lay there bleeding and hurting before anyone gets around to them. 

Skipped A Day

     While working on the dryer, with frequent trips up and down the basement stairs, I fell.  Tam and I are convinced one step is slightly off, because it's easy to trip about two-thirds of the way up those stairs.

     Whatever the reason, I took a worse fall than usual, going up the stairs.  Caught my right foot and fell forward, with plenty of time to get my hands up -- but I banged my left shin against the thick step, good and hard.  They are open steps, without risers.  I slammed my shin squarely into the two-inch-thick step and it was extremely painful.

     But I have fallen there before.  You pick yourself up and keep going, right?  So I did.

     I didn't sleep well the night before last.  Couldn't get comfortable.  Kept waking up.  It was my shin.  Yesterday morning, I soaked in hot water with Epsom Salts and got dressed, wincing at the pressure of my knee-high sock on the bruise, gathered together everything for the day -- and realized I'd run out of steam.  Just nothing left.  I was maxed out on OTC pain meds by that point.  I ended up calling in sick and feeling like a whiny nitwit about it, but I was wiped out.  I rested most of the day and managed a quick trip to the grocery that evening.  I made supper with big plans for after, but fell asleep in front of the TV instead.

     My shin is just as painful today and the bruising is most visible well below the impact site, with colorful markings along the inside of my foot around the ankle and heel.   I think I'd better go get a professional opinion -- it's probably nothing, but I'm not getting any younger.  Or, apparently, any more graceful.

Automat Soup

     Last night, after wrestling with the dryer for a lot longer than I realized,* I found myself hungry and with limited time and resources to do anything about it.  There were a couple of sandwich-sized slices of deli ham in the fridge, but I'd had a ham and egg sandwich for breakfast....

     There was a microwavable rice-and-beans pouch in the cupboard, good brown rice and black-eyed peas, and the maker called it "Hoppin' John" on the label.  Why not give it a try?  I snipped up the ham while the rice and beans were nuking, and mixed it all together in a bowl with a dash of Cajun-style seasoning.  Not bad, but it needed something.  I gave it a generous shake of dried onion flakes and a dash of hot water, but it was still not quite right.  A big dollop of Heinz Chili Sauce (just revved-up catsup) did the trick.  That was when it hit me: I'd just reinvented Automat soup.

     See, Automats -- coin-operated cafeterias, where you paid for each item as you went, unlocking little windowed compartments, a nickel in the slot for a sandwich, a nickel for a slice of pie, and so on -- generally had free hot water, condiments and crackers.  For the price of a cup of coffee, you'd end up with an empty mug, a spoon and fixings for rough tomato soup: ketchup, hot water, salt, pepper and saltines.  Dinner!  (You could pull the same trick at a regular cafeteria, too, though it was best done when they were too busy to notice.)

     Good ol' "red lead" didn't make the greatest tomato soup in the world, and it doesn't make prize-winning Hoppin' John, either.  But it wasn't bad, it was quick to make and the price was right.  Tam had already gone to off to sleep by then, so I can't give you a second opinion.
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* The dryer works now, though it runs a bit rough.  And a test run smelled slightly of burned hair.  I vacuumed the dryer out while I had it open (so much lint!), but there's always some you miss and it inevitably ends up in the wrong place.  We'll have to keep an eye on it.

Thump.

     Weekends are for laundry here.  Tam does hers Friday, I do mine Saturday, and Sunday is for catching up and washing big items -- towels, bedding, etc.  Or that's the general intent.

     I'd run one load of wash yesterday and had a second one in the dryer, with a third just starting in the washer.  Just T-shirts and not too many, a "catching-up" batch.  I was doing other things upstairs when I heard something in the basement go, "Thump."  After that, the dryer seemed quieter.  Odd.

     Once I'd reached a stopping point, I went down to check.  The dryer was humming along, but--  I opened the door.  The dryer did not slow to a stop.  It didn't have to.  The drum wasn't turning.  Uh-oh.

     The classic clothes dryer is a frustratingly simple device.  A single electric motor runs a blower that moves air over the heating element (gas or electric) and, via a long belt, that same motor turns the drum.  If the blower runs but the drum doesn't turn, the belt is broken.  Oh, it might be other things; at least one end of the drum is supported by two or more small wheels, and they can jam up; but that usually breaks the belt.  It's the simplicity that makes them frustrating: parts count is down to the minimum and after you have opened them up for service, it can be tricky to put them back together.*

     After some research in how to open up the dryer (easier than I thought) and replace the belt (not so easy; you take off the front and work around the now partially unsupported drum), I unplugged it, opened it up and had a look: yes, the belt is broken. I ordered a belt and some wheels.  The belt should arrive today, so I'll try that first.

     Meanwhile, I filled up the clothesline with T-shirts and washcloths, and ended up bringing them inside after sunset to finish drying indoors.
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* There's no margin for being half right.  The kinds of things I work on for a living come with detailed drawings and a lot of them will run at least a little when partially disassembled.  Consumer goods are not that way.

Corncakes

     There's been a box of cornbread mix in the cupboard for quite some time.  The oven in my old-but-not-antique gas range is questionable at best.  It's not usually a problem for me, since I enjoy cooking on the covered grill; roasts and curries and holiday turducken or corned beef work out well in a graniteware pan over hot coals.

     I haven't tried to bake in the grill.  Breads are tricky and home baking was a high art until the introduction of thermostatic controls*.  There are ways around it -- most breads and small cakes can be microwaved, though you don't end up with much in the way of crust.

     The cornbread mix microwaves well enough, but I wanted to do something different.  Can't you make cornmeal pancakes?

     Of course you can!  A little more milk and some melted butter, and there you go.  I cooked up a batch this morning, golden brown and slightly crumbly, and when it comes to rising pancakes, I think they're better than the all wheat-flour version, a little sweet (as the boxed cornbread mix tends to be; modern people put sugar in it, having no idea how to make proper cornbread) and full of flavor.

     It's a nice change from the usual.
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* You can bake bread in a clay-dome oven, fireplace-side oven, or a cast-iron wood or coal stove, and plenty of people did.  But it's a skill with a long learning curve, especially judging and maintaining the correct temperature.  Both of my grandmothers would have grown up learning how to run a cast-iron stove with an oven, the latter addition patented in 1867, a decade or more before either of them was born.  They adopted improved stoves eagerly. (Unlike an earlier generation; Mom spoke of her grandmother's irritation at her grandfather, who would mark up the wood-stove blacking by flipping slices of potato onto the sides of it, to stick, sizzle and fall clear when cooked! Caught on a plate, the proto-chips were a treat for him and his grandchildren.†)  Later versions of those stoves included a dial thermometer in the oven door, but a number of methods were used to check temperature from early on -- the boiling point of water at 212°F gives you a low oven, and the ignition temperature of paper, 451°F (a number made famous later) a high oven.  While my covered grill offers the same air-and-damper controls as a cast-iron range, it has far lower thermal mass and is difficult to refuel while burning.  --Oh, I'll try some day, just to see how it goes.  The kitchen is a workshop with a highly-developed set of tools, prosaic though it may appear.
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† So what's in stove-blacking? Plumbago -- graphite, that is -- lampblack -- which is carbon -- and a binder, like fat or paraffin grease.  Tasty!  I don't suppose small amounts of pencil-lead and carbon are all that immediately bad for you, but the state of California has probably already checked and found they are carcinogenic.

The Mysterious Door

     It wasn't so much the door that was mysterious.  It was the way it kept opening uncommanded.  About a month ago, the overhead garage door here at Roseholme Cottage kept opening itself for no reason.

     At first, I thought it must be old leaves, caught in spiderwebs, fluttering in front of the floor-level safety photocell that keeps the door from closing on objects, people and other critters.  I cleared out the corners and checked if breaking the beam would open the door when it was fully closed and in "lock" mode.  Nope.

     And yet it kept opening.  There's a green led in the middle of the big "open" switch on the hard-wired control panel, and it flickers in a particular way when you have the remote opener disabled.  I finally noticed that while it was indeed flickering, the speed of the flicker had become very different.  Odd.  There are three buttons on it, a great big one with a led to open and close the door, one to turn the lights in the opener on and off, and one to lock out the remote.

     Our control panel has been missing the cap on the lockout button for years.  When I bought the house, the previous owner warned me to "be careful with that panel.  They're fragile, and really expensive to replace."  So when the button popped off, too worn out to stick back on, I just used the tiny switch it had actuated -- carefully.  Maybe I had broken it?

     I went online, identified the make and model of our opener, and priced out a replacement control panel.  They were not expensive.  And they're connected with only two wires, to light up one led and perform three functions.  This seemed like something that could go wrong.  So I bought one.

     The thing showed up and I looked it over.  The parts count was very low: three momentary switches, two capacitors, one resistor, one light-emitting diode.  It kind of makes sense; I can think of a couple of ways to do what they're doing with those parts and there's probably an even simpler answer.  But whatever; I shut down the power,  took the old one off the wall (a bit tricky) and installed the new one.

     When I plugged the system back in, the led flickered the right way, the garage door opened on command, and after a week of careful watching and unplugging it when away or asleep, it hadn't randomly opened.  Weeks later, it still hasn't.  I'm hoping it's solved --but I'm going to go have a look before I click on "Publish."

I Just Realized

     I haven't yet weighed in on the most recent iteration of the many trials of former President and promoter of conspiracy theories, Donald J. Trump.

     Hunh. How about that.

Nota Bene

     If you're going to write as if you slept on a thesaurus, you'd better not hit a single wrong note.  Use the right word, not one that smells vaguely like the word that ought to be there.  Remember, Mr. Roget is not big on nuance; that part is up to you.  If all the words in that great big heap on the page meant the exact same thing, most of them wouldn't exist.  Those puppies might be in the same litter but they've each got their own set of spots.

     One of Lester Dent's characters from "Doc Savage" is known for his fondness for feature-length words.  Dent had great fun having the character apply them in a slightly askew way around everyone except Doc -- presumably because he knows Doc wouldn't tolerate being BSed.  Unless your name is William Harper Littlejohn and you're confident you can get away with BSing the people you're nattering at, stick to using plain old everyday words.

     They work just fine.

Elon Musk And The Car Biz

     Much has been made of the floundering-at-best Tesla Cybertruck, of layoffs at Tesla, top management bailing out, and so on.

     We're used to having relatively stable big car companies; Japanese automakers were disrupters in the 1970s, with Korean ones in their wake, but the dust settled and there were still just a few names making cars.  You could set your watch by them.  And that's how it has always been, right?  That whole Tesla messiness, it's an outlier, isn't it?

     Wrong.  Here in Indiana, I grew up among the remains of the first --and second -- generation of car makers, and of ideas that came and went.  Driven a Stutz lately?  Ridden in a nice, luxy Haynes?  A zippy Apperson?  Jay Leno produced a segment showing off his 1920s steam car, a gorgeous piece of sophisticated engineering that made running a steamer almost as simple as a gasoline-engine car, and in quiet comfort.  Indianapolis once had an entire fleet of electric taxis loaded up with lead-acid batteries.  Gone, all gone; step down the row, past name after name, and marvel at the Tucker, come and gone in the blink of an eye, with a tang of shady dealing hanging in the air.

     Maybe Tesla's one with them, and all it'll leave behind is a robust charging infrastructure and collectibles.  Maybe it'll have a few ups and downs, like Ford did; the big, dominating car company was his second or third try.

     Elon Musk is mostly a money and PR guy, and a little bit an idea guy.  He didn't start Tesla or SpaceX or Twitter, he bought into struggling enterprises and they will rise and fall however they do, in part due to his input and in part based on their staff and management.  It's fun to muse on the great Captains of Industry who forge the future -- but there are a whole lot of ships sailing that sea under a great many leaders, a whole horde of forge-fires flaring, and most of 'em aren't gonna run the entire course.  We only know who the big ones are in retrospect.  Haynes and Stutz and all the rest helped to build an industry and it wouldn't be what it is if they hadn't been there.  The foundations of the future are built on a lot of crushed dreams, but they do keep on piling higher.

     Someone's got to pioneer the rear view mirror; someone's got to try out hydraulic brakes or stick a Diesel engine under the hood, boil up steam or make one of the thousands of efforts at electric cars.  Even the companies that first apply the ideas that last do not necessarily thrive themselves.

"Brainwashed"

     With the U. S. Supreme Court set to take up the question of just how actively obstructionist a person needs to be before the behavior rises to something that counts as "obstructing an official proceeding,"* I was reminded yet again of my longtime friend, a lifetime moderate Democrat, who was horrified when one of his family members and their spouse were arrested for actions in the Capitol on 6 January 2021.  "I don't know how they got so brainwashed," he told me.

     The answer is that they didn't.  Nobody put them under psychological or physical duress and worked on their opinions.  No one deliberately "love bombed" them, whisking them away from their established connections in a sea of overwhelming positivity.  From rioters to graffiti-scrawling kids, from crowds shouting down their foes to people trying to break heads or break into government buildings, from Right to Left and back again, all of these individuals have agency.  Nobody brainwashed them.  They did it to themselves.  They freely chose their opinions -- and they freely chose violence.

     Violence carries a price, both personal and societal.  Participation in violence will mark you -- yes, even if you're the perpetrator.  And perpetrating violence quite often begets official violence in return.  Maybe you won't get shot by a cop, or bopped over the head (or painful joint) or pepper-sprayed or proned out with force; you're still likely to experience arrest, jail, criminal charges and a fine and/or prison time.  And those things will happen as the end result of choices you have made.

     That's the way it is for grown-ups.  You don't get to blame the other kids.  You don't even get to blame whatever handy-dandy group label you've picked, no matter how good their graphic artist might be.  You did it, not your T-shirt or sleeve patch.  You did it, not your Great Leader or Big Idea or long, painful history.

     I'd love to tell you that bad choices are the result of broken homes, cheap hooch and bad companions, but that fact is that little J. Random Citizen is still in charge of their own actions.
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* Someone else can try reading those tea leaves; I gave up relying on the sober legal scholarship of the Justices outweighing their partisan and/or personal interests at some time over the last couple of years, and boy, do I ever miss that confidence.

An Ancient Dilemma

     Those of us who have had outside cats, or barn cats, or have fed ferals know that many cats regard snakes, especially small to medium ones, as A) great fun; B) a dire and traditional enemy; or C) all of the above.  And you you will find yourself, from time to time, with a cat in one hand and a snake in the other, trying to decide which one to let go first.

     You're not alone:

     Yes, that's the real deal.  Of course, the ancient Assyrians put together an entire legend, with gods and lions and serpents, but I think the story behind it is pretty obvious. (And speaking of legends, the "holding back the cat while accepting a pizza delivery" statue dates from dim, ancient 1987.  I still love it.)

Set

     The cover of "Holly Holy" I posted day before yesterday was reminding me of something else, just a little.  It wasn't until this morning that I picked it up: it has some structural similarities to theme from The Mandalorian.

     The TV theme goes off in its own direction, picking up cues from big-orchestra Western theme music, (like "Old Trails" from Gunsmoke); and that leads to another interesting performance from a smaller ensemble: Pink Martini's "Andalucia."

     Play them one after another -- you decide in what order -- and you've got an interesting set, perhaps something for my "Wrong Elevator" music format.

History

     Here's an interesting blog about the history of Indianapolis -- especially the quirky, obscure, oddball parts that are hard to suss out.

Music To Smuggle Elephants By

     An unexpected arrangement of a classic pop hit.

Bricking Up A Non-Existent Loophole

     The "Gun Show Loophole," as commonly understood, doesn't exist.  If you have a Federal Firearms License (FFL), you've got to run a federal background check and keep proper records no matter where you're doing the selling.  It doesn't make an iota of difference if you're selling them across the counter at a brick and mortar store or off a folding table at a gun show.

     If you are buying and selling firearms as a business, you've got to have an FFL, period.*  The BATFE has long had considerable discretion in deciding just who is trading in arms as a source of income and who's a hobbyist, swapping or selling the occasional firearm.  The Feds rarely go after the guy at a gunshow with a table full of uncommon or specialized examples unless his behavior is particularly egregious; it's a bit arbitrary but in recent years, this has worked without excessive friction.  (The person selling guns out of their trunk on a streetcorner [etc.] is a whole other thing, and deliberate edge cases like 80% receivers -- so-called "ghost guns" -- operate in an area of considerable legal jeopardy and contention.)

     Gun sales are regulated.  They have been probably all of your life; the Federal Firearms Act of 1938 introduced the requirement for dealers to be licensed and the system was revised and made more stringent under the Gun Control Act of 1968.  The NICS "instant check" began in 1998.  You may dislike these laws, or question the constitutionality of some or even all of their provisions, but they're what we've got and if you own guns, you have almost certainly filled out a 4473 form and had a background check run.  Like it or not, it's routine.

     All that background is explaining why I was looking sideways at the radio this morning when a newscaster said the Biden administration had "fixed the gun show loophole."

     Yeah, no.  That's how it's being sold to low-information audiences, which I am sorry to say includes a lot of news coverage.  That's not what it is.  Like most such things, you can go look in the horse's mouth, and what's in there are...horseteeth.

     The fact sheet linked above explains the long-standing reality I covered in my first paragraph: location doesn't matter, the rules apply, and it's been that way all along.  The remainder of it takes the "considerable discretion" BATFE already had and gets more specific about just what constitutes acting as a dealer and not a hobbyist, what differentiates selling some items from a collection from being a dealer, and so on.  It appears they're going to be looking very narrowly at the ability of a former FFL to sell off their last inventory, which was already legally messy, and it concludes with some press-release talk about other efforts to enforce existing law and exhorts Congress to do more.

     It's not a nothingburger, but if you were looking for red meat, you'll have to look pretty hard.  It's a self-goal for an election year and no doubt I'll be getting glossy ads from the usual suspects about "gun-grabbers" from one side and "keeping our kids safe" from the other.  These changes do neither.  They're minor, and the main people who will be affected are the non-FFL traders with a gunshow table full of semi-random assortments of guns, show after show after show; and I've got to tell you, probably half of those folks were already on the hook with BATFE, serving as bait to catch far worse offenders.

     I suppose in a world where the political Right is peeing all over their shoes with craziness about abortion (and contraception, et Comstock cetera) that is mostly going to motivate voters to push back, cosmic balance requires the political Left to find an issue that only plays well in their own echo chambers.  This is certainly one, but there's far less to it than shows up in the headlines.
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* Hobbyists who collect odd, unusual or historical firearms that the law defines as "Curio & Relic" guns are eligible for their own special FFL; they are not dealers, but the license lets them buy, sell and swap their collectibles with other "C&R" licensees without running afoul of Federal regulations.  The record-keeping is somewhat onerous -- but a serious collector is already keeping track, so....

Change Is The Only Constant

     When I moved to Indianapolis over forty years ago, the city was a wonderful place to do electronics.  Small computer-supply stores were all over, Radio Shack was ubiquitous, and there were multiple parts suppliers serving industry and the TV repair trade.  Graham Electronics downtown; RaDisCo on the near West side; ESP (Electronic Service Parts), King Electronics and Meunier Electronic Supply all East of downtown; Broad Ripple had a Heathkit store, and a few of the nationwide suppliers like Hamilton/Avnet had offices or even stocking locations scattered around town.

     Over the years, it faded away.  Graham was the first, sometime in the late 1980s or early 90s.  The Heathkit store closed when the parent company went under.  ESP was family-owned and the next generation wasn't interested; they served mostly the repair shops and that business was fading.  They closed over twenty years ago.  King Electronics held on for a long time, selling TV antennas, tools and classic radio parts along with the full line of modern components, but things dropped off after the 2009 digital TV change over.  In 2020, Meunier Electronics, a full-line stocking distributor with a magical showroom of odds and ends closed.  Radio Shack is long gone.

     There was an electronic surplus joint in town, too.  Milo Associates, Inc. (later MAI/Prime Parts) was in an old company office off Millersville Road when I first came to Indianapolis, with a small sign and not much publicity.  My co-workers at the radio station took me there, explaining "that guy has everything!"  They did, too -- logic ICs, op-amps, metal-film resistors, monolithic-film capacitors, stacks of defunct GRiD laptop computers, a zillion different control knobs, a few shelves of ancient test gear and old ham radio equipment, and on and on, all crowded onto rows of tall shelving or stacked on the floor.  They became my "source of last resort," and often first resort, too, a place where you could go in and lay hands on the actual stuff.  They moved a few times over the years, always in search of the lowest rent, and ended up in a drafty pole barn on Michigan Road.  Business fell off; they started selling repair parts for the heating and cooling trade, mostly as a middleman, but kept the electronic stuff, selling off the existing stock.  By the time the pandemic began, they were the last electronic parts place left in town.  I was there either right before March 2020, or during an early lull later that year, and picked up some parts for work and some "just in case" stock for my hobby supplies.  I stayed away during the pandemic.

     Yesterday, I thought to stop by after a dental appointment.  Their website was still up, mostly a line card and contact information.  I've got a project at work that needs some specific connectors, and it's always interesting to wander the aisles.  There were more cars parked in front of the shabby old building than I've become used to seeing over the last decade, and I perked up.  Maybe business was picking up!

     The glass door has always had dark film on it, I pushed it open -- on a vast and mostly empty room, with a workbench at the far end and power tools scattered around.  Men were working, and a guy in a vest and hardhat near the door asked, "Can I help you, Miss?"
     "Probably not.  I was looking for the business that used to be here."
     "Oh, they left."
     I thanked him and left, too.

     Later on, I called the number on their website and a familiar voice answered,  "Prime Parts."
     "Hey, it's Bobbi, from the TV station."
     "How ya doing?"
     "I'm okay, but where are you?"
     "Oh, we're just doing the HVAC parts now.  Been out on the far East side for a couple of years."
     "No electronics?"
     "Nope."

     So that's that.

     Looks like there a smallish hobby-parts place in Indianapolis near Park 100, and if you want anything else, well, there are still plenty of suppliers who can ship it to you in a few days -- as long as you know exactly what you want.  Digi-Key and Newark, Mouser and RS-Online (formerly Allied) are still there, online and over the phone; Antique Electronic Supply has parts for the old stuff (and there's a smattering of tube-audio enthusiast suppliers, the best of whom are very good), and between McMaster-Carr and the electrical-supply wholesalers, the bigger items aren't hard to come by.  But if you want to go somewhere and comb through bins of parts, hoping for inspiration?  Better find a hamfest.  And good luck with that.

Indescribable Light

     The chaos at work was well-managed and I managed to take several trips outdoors during the eclipse, including all of totality.

     The reports are right: it's difficult to describe.  It's moving.  Well ahead of totality, the light takes on otherworldly feeling and the sky darkens.  Even at totality, with a couple of planets visible, our sky remained a deep blue, with the shadowed side of the Moon the only true black, the wispy solar corona slowly waving around it.

     I'm happy I was able to see it.

Eclipse Day

     Here we are, eclipse day.  It's a work day for me and I have no idea what kind of chaos I'll be walking into.

     Online, some people have been telling one another that there's no need at all for special sunglasses to look at the Sun before and after totality, occasionally citing their religious faith in justification (or claiming the sunglasses are some dire plot) -- this, in a world that includes poison ivy and deadly mushrooms alongside many beneficial plants.*  I'm not here to argue theology or debunk lunatic conspiracy theories; a bright light will harm your eyes and the Sun is the brightest natural light we get on Earth.  If you're in the path of totality, I am given to understand you can look at the eclipse once the Sun is fully covered, at which point the corona is too dim to be seen through eclipse glasses, but you'll need those glasses to find out when it's safe to peek.

     Emotionally, logically, I'm still where I was during the pandemic.  I'm not the boss of you.  Don't want to wear a mask, don't want to get a vaccine, won't isolate?  Fine -- don't come crying to me when you get sick, don't come crying to me when you infect those around you.  I saw skeptical friends and professional acquaintances die.  I couldn't save them.  I can't stop people damaging their eyes by staring at the Sun, either.  I still sure wish you wouldn't, but you're not a starfish trapped in a draining tidal pool.  You've got to choose to save yourself.
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* Or, if you like your examples mixed: Pokeweed or inkweed grows wild in most of the country, and will make candles, good ink, or -- properly picked and prepared! -- delicious greens or kill you quickly and painfully.  (The stems and attractive dark berries are the most poisonous part.  I'm told the tender young leaves must be boiled and drained multiple times to be eaten with any chance of safety, and I've never been tempted.  There's a knack to it and if you get it wrong, the best outcome is you end up in the hospital.  Get kale or spinach instead, or turnip greens.)

Napped

     Rode my bicycle to brunch with my siblings this morning, chatted for a couple of hours, spent a few minutes in a nearby bookstore on my way home -- and sat down for "just a minute" when I got home.

     Woke up two hours later, still sleepy.  No, not the stress of hanging out with my closest relatives.  I haven't been on my bike much this year.  Nor do I spent much time in crowded, noisy restaurants.  Since the pandemic began, I barely go out to eat.  Once the risk was down, the prices were way up.  I like my own cooking just fine; I'm not as fond of doing the dishes, but it's a fraction of the price.

     So, okay.  I clearly need to get more exercise -- and perhaps practice being around people more, too.

Exception

     Does it really count as agoraphobia when you have a migraine so bad that just looking out the window at the beautifully sunlit lawn makes you wince away?

Uninformed

     The headline says that people who only get their news from an ideologically aligned source  -- Fox News or MSNBC, in particular -- aren't well-informed on actual news.  Viewers of the Sunday-morning political-interview shows do better; the people who listen to NPR newscasts do better still.

     But the statistics accompanying the story show that even the best-informed are batting below .500 on their knowledge of current events.  That's not great.

     When I worked in radio, I absorbed five minutes of network news every hour, mostly by osmosis. Back then, five radio networks and two wire services were providing short hourly newscasts, and the majority of stations ran them.  What CBS, NBC, ABC (in four or five versions!), Mutual, NPR, AP and UPI offered was a Cliff's Notes version of the first draft of history -- but it was current, fact-based and largely personality-free.  Five minutes (or less) doesn't leave time to be anyone except a newscaster.  It left me well-informed enough to ace news quizzes -- and I rarely paid particular attention to the newscast; it was a five-minute break from playing records and commercials.

     There's a whole lot of personality out there and no matter who you are, one of them is probably focused on the stuff that gets your blood boiling.  Try and get yourself some news, too.  You need some greens to provide what all that red meat fails to give.

The Opposite Of...Working

     The sober advice of our history assures us, "That government which governs least, governs best."*  The old joke points out that "Con-gress is the opposite of pro-gress."

     The 118th Congress, currently sitting, is trying to run the experiment in the real world at full scale.  It's not going well.

     Like it or not (and I often don't), Congress has to crank out a vast number of routine bills to keep the Federal government paying what it owes, fulfilling international treaty obligations, coming through on whatever it has worked out with individual states of the union (and smaller civic units) and so forth and so on, right down to keeping the lawn mowed at all the various Federal facilities.  The 118th is barely managing that.  The House and Senate have been pretty good at introducing all manner of  "stunt" bills favoring special interests, slamming disfavored causes, groups and persons, and at making impassioned speeches, often to nearly-empty chambers.  They've been diligent about using their various kinds and sorts of committees to haul in public figures from business, politics, sports and show business, and alternately praise them and make them sweat.

     But by any yardstick, they haven't been getting much actually done.  The House can barely keep a Speaker -- and the Speakers, so far, have barely been able to keep things moving.  The Senate is somnolent.  Congress keeps dilly-dallying their way right up to the last minute on budget bills, and blasting one another over the horse-trading it takes to get even that far.

     So all that government governing least has led to way too much free time to stage impromptu clown shows, mischaracterize and attack the other two branches as well as (nominal) friends and foes in their own branch, and generally behave like frat boys and sorority girls with an open bar and a napping chaperone.  If that's best, we may be better off shopping for the Kirkland Signature version instead; at least it will have a smaller price tag.
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* Except it kind of doesn't assure us.  There's no evidence Thomas Jefferson, who usually gets credit, ever said it.  Nor did Thoreau; he came close but he was quoting someone else, and they (anonymously) put it, "The best government is that which governs least," a subtle difference.

The Problem Is...

     It's not just that the future is stupid -- c'mon, we already knew that.

     It's that the future more and more looks to be irredeemably stupid and incomprehensibly cruel, cocooned in vast numbers of people and institutions eager to make excuses for whatever they can't manage to cover up.

     There is no shortage of blunt instruments, both real and metaphorical, and a profound lack of anyone with the blacksmithing skills necessary to wield them for anything constructive.

Making The Right Choice

     Going into WW II, it was RADAR time, and everyone knew it.  Watson-Watt and his team get a lot of well-deserved credit for demonstrating the principle and dreaming up the hardware, but people had been messing around with various forms of "radio ranging" for quite some time even then.

     It was obvious early on that higher frequencies -- meaning shorter wavelengths -- gave better resolution.  It's like the "pixels" that make up a video display: for a given screen size, more and smaller ones give you a better picture than fewer larger ones.

     So with all that knowledge and experience, why on earth did Britain's Chain Home radar warning system use shortwave radio frequencies?  The antennas were immense, clusters of towers hundreds of feet tall, separate sets for transmitting and receiving, far too large to be pivoted for scanning.  The operator didn't get a nice plan position indicator display like modern weather radar, just a screen with a series of "pips."  She (and it was almost inevitably "she") had to turn a large knob to line up an indicator with a pip to get direction, then flip switches and go through the same process again to get altitude -- and even then, she wasn't done: bearing and altitude gives you "slant distance" and you need to do a little trigonometry to plot the location on a map, going from polar (bearing and distance) to Cartesian (X,Y) coordinates in the process.  Only then can anyone to begin to do something about the incoming threat.

     The hardware was mostly haywire, jack-leg, kludged.  The transmitters were based on a BBC shortwave broadcasting design, uprated for higher power and with an improvised pulse generator; the radar receivers were built from readily available, consumer-grade parts.  When the British coast was lined with radar stations, they were found to interfere with one another and the UK fixed that by using the country's power grid to synchronize the stations, each one in turn operating in its own fraction of a second.

     Chain Home was manpower-intensive (mostly womanpower): operators, calculators, runners, collators, technicians to maintain the cantankerous equipment, riggers to do the same for the antennas, and a network of filterers and map-plotters to turn the data from all the stations into a cohesive picture of incoming bombers.  It started out as a massive kluge and they just kept adding on.

     The system was, in the words of one of the men who helped design it, "third best."  What it had going for it was that it was a thing they could build then and there, mostly using what was already available.

     The very best system ("which might never arrive" according to the same expert) would have required the invention of entirely new hardware.  The Brits eventually did just that, with the cavity magnetron and scanning antennas matched to plan position indicator displays, but it was a long time coming.  Even second-best had a long development timeline.  They went with what they knew worked, with what they could manufacture without major invention.

     Once it was up and running, they applied inventive skills to making it work better.  "Fruit machine"* analog computers automated the process of calculation, correction and coordinate conversion, letting a single operator and a wall of electronics replace five or six people.  The complex process of integrating the information and directing fighters called for remarkable innovation in command and control -- innovations that the Germans never worked out; indeed, the lack of that structure in the U. S. military doomed the detection of incoming Japanese airplanes at Pearl Harbor to an historical footnote instead of a striking example of a successful early warning.

     The Brits slapped together little more than junk to build Chain Home.  It was barely good enough for the task at hand, especially early on -- but it was just good enough, and they learned as they went.

     It was the right choice.  Germany built sophisticated radars, more slowly and without developing the mapping/directing infrastructure to make good use of them: wrong choice.

     There are tradeoffs between good enough and quick enough, and knowing how much weight to give each one can make all the difference.
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* That was the nickname for the thing.  It had a nice, big "go" lever like a slot machine for the operator to pull once they'd got the range and altitude information into it.  The console looks like a radar crossed with a pinball machine, installed in a telephone exchange by workers in a hurry to finish -- but it did the job.

Another Lazy Weekend

     Yet another weekend in which I did nearly nothing -- caught up on laundry and dishes, cooked a meal on the grill.  I tell myself I'm tired; I tell myself the increasing arthritis in my knees and hands is reason enough to vegetate until warmer and less windy weather comes along.

     There's truth in that, but it is increasingly obvious to me that the larger issue is burnout.  After five years or a decade of history that feels more and more like being strapped into a deranged roller coaster with my eyelids held open, I'm all screamed out.  I'm overloaded by horror.  Terror attacks, a pandemic that shattered my faith in the good sense of the average citizen, politics that took the ruins of that faith and plowed it under with radioactive salt, bombs and missiles raining down on a modern, civilized country and more terror spurring an even worse response: it's overwhelming.

     I don't know what our planet's variegated crop of neo-barbarians will break next.  I do know it will be precious and probably irreplaceable.

Holidays

     Today is Easter, and I'd like to share appropriate wishes to all my observing Christian friends.  Many of the more-secular celebrate this day, too, at least as far as big family dinners, candy baskets and Easter Egg hunts.

     Spring 2024 is a real pile-up of holidays; Easter falls roughly two-thirds of the way through Ramadan* this year and we're about a few weeks away from the beginning of Passover.  Each of these religious holidays is a "movable feast," rather than a fixed calendar date.  There are other commemorations, too: today is Cesar Chavez day, if you'd like to get irked about a labor organizer, and it's International Transgender Day of Visibility, for those who would prefer a more recent culture-war item to gripe about.  It's also the day the Dali Lama reached the first Tibetan Buddhist monastery outside Chinese-occupied Tibet in 1959 and the PRC is still annoyed about that.

     What all these events have in common is that here in the U.S., celebrating or complaining about them is not compulsory.  Pick and choose, and let your fellow citizens do the same.  It's Springtime and flowers are sprouting, and if you can't find something to be happy about this time of year, you probably never will.

     I guess rage is fun, but I can assure you happiness is a hell of a lot better for your blood pressure and digestion, and makes you nicer to have around.  Me, I'm not going to worry; it's a great big world and it's full of choices.
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* Determined by a Lunar calendar, Ramadan steps backwards through the solar calendar, resulting in interesting effects: the holiday appears twice in 2030.

Just Asking Questions

     Y'know, if I told you one of my cousins was facing 88 felony charges across four different jurisdictions, and had recently lost some big civil cases as well, would you be inclined to loan him your car?  Or would you be thinking up polite excuses while trying to remember if you'd left the keys in plain sight?

     It's worth pondering.

Whiskey, Alpha, Tango, Foxtrot, Over

     This morning, it appears that the general unhappiness of my desktop computer may, in fact, be something more than Mozilla and Microsoft not wanting to play nice.  It's been a good, long run -- seven years -- but it's looking like my security software, one that is a notorious resource hog, is becoming too much for the system to run while any foreground application is running as well.

     Rats.

Some Kind Of A Milestone. Or A Millstone.

     Firefox and the online version of Outlook have now become so mutually hostile that trying to read my home or work e-mail crashes the browser.

     This usually results in a Firefox update in a week or so that fixes it, but I'm not sure which side drives it.  I have workarounds -- Outlook runing as a standalone, a different browser, or just moving to my Apple-family platforms -- so it's rarely more than a slight inconvenience.  But it's annoying.  The struggle seems to be more bitter and active than even the format-fight between Microsoft Office and upstart LibreOffice, in which the little open-source competitor chases after every change the market-dominating company makes while supporting its own alternatives, the ISO-standard ODF family.

     Presumably, while the word-processing, spreadsheet, etc. market is dominated by Microsoft to the point of effective exclusion of alternatives, browser wars continue, Chrome vs. Edge vs. Firefox vs. whatever, and they continue to actively trip one another up with "improvements."

Oh, Boy

     An opponent* of Eric Doden, one of many Republican Gubernatorial hopefuls, has found something on him that can be spun scurrilous, some purported conflict of interest.  At this point, the men (or most of them) running for a chance at the office are smearing one another with the happy glee of small boys scrawling dirty words on a freshly-painted wall.

     I wonder if any of them remembers how this plays back in the general election?  But gee, I wouldn't want to interrupt their fun.
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* A "Paid for..." graphic, essentially a video footnote, credits Mike Braun.  So I will, too.

Political Ads, Pivot

     There's a slight pivot in some local political advertising, with a few candidates dropping the trans/immigrant/fentnyl fear-mongering in favor of talking about what a great state Indiana is and how they plan to make it even better.  In the Governor's race, Lieutenant Governor Suzanne Crouch only recently started running television ads that are pretty much the old normal-Republican: positive, socially and fiscally conservative, stressing continuity.

     Other candidates have gone another way.  Eric Doden had moved from "my grandpappy was a preacher" to scare-stories about the border and fentanyl, but now he's found a worse enemy: our current junior U. S. Senator, Mike Braun.  It is easy to forget, but early on, the Senator had toyed with notions that leaned a bit centrist -- including some reforms to qualified immunity.   That won him mentions and a hostile interview in 2020 by Tucker Carlson, which has proven a fertile resource for shocking pull quotes that now headline Mr. Doden's ads.  Viewers are left with the impression the hard-Right Senator is out to defund the police, if not worse.  Meanwhile, Sen. Braun's commercials laud the virtues of the hardworking men (and women) of law enforcement and express his deep and apparently unconditional support of them.  Sometimes one ad will run right after the other.  I'm not sure which is more disorienting, Mr. Doden's wild mood swings or Sen. Braun's unplanned turn in the role of Harvey Dent.

     Elsewhere, Chuck Goodrich is looking to move up from the State Legislature and unseat U. S. Representative Victoria Spartz in the 5th District, and he's sticking to the fear-and-loathing/strong leadership model, complete with below chin-level camera angles.  Perennial candidate Jefferson Shreeve is running much the same play in the 6th District, though he has finally retired his red, white and black campaign livery for red, white and a touch of blue.  It's all "bold leader/stop the alien hordes" stuff, which still plays a bit off to my ear, not quite the kind of things I heard from a GOP dominated by WW II veterans and Cold Warriors while I was growing up.  I'm not looking for a Siegfried or a Caesar; I'd rather have Just Some Guy (or Gal), not notably stupid (even slightly glib), well-informed on current events, skilled in the give and take of legislative work and willing to put in long hours at it.  Will I get that from any of today's Republicans?  Probably not.

     The way politics is being played at present amounts to a suicide pact.  Congress keeps flinching at the last minute but some of them are getting far too comfortable with the idea.
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     In other news, the ants are back in my kitchen.  So much for the last blueberry muffin, which they had swarmed alarmingly.  Now all the snack foods and sugar will live in large zip-seal plastic bags for the duration, or until we stop 'em.  There's usually slight traffic all summer, but if we're careful, they don't find much and mostly just send scouts.  If only candidate craziness was as easy to get under control!

This Is Not Lamb-Like

     We've had a return to cold.  Now it's warming up, but high winds and possibly thunderstorms are coming along with the warmth.

     I was at my employer's main campus today.  The public entrance to the building is angled and was exposed to the wind.  It was whistling around that corner with a sound like a cheap sound effect, the sort of thing that you'd discount as hokey in a film or TV show.  It's less so when you look out and see the trees shivering in the gusting wind.

     April isn't far away.  Will we get gentle rains or spring storms?  Probably a little of both.

A Happier Topic

     Food!  I had some theories about Spam and potato hash, and gave them a try for brunch:

     I put the diced potato and a little olive oil, one layer thick in a covered skillet and set it cooking over medium heat with some dried onion flakes.  I diced a can of Spam and put the diced meat in a bowl of cold water (I used a couple of small paper bowls for less clean up) and let it soak, then poured off the water and rinsed it a couple of times.  I diced up the equivalent of a large carrot and set it aside.

     When the potatoes looked just about cooked through, I added the carrot and the Spam on top, spread them out in an even layer, put the lid back on and gave it several minutes to cook while I diced a couple of small bell peppers, red and orange.  Then I took the lid off, turned the heat up, and stirred everything together, adding the peppers.  I stirred and turned it uncovered until the potatoes and meat were browned enough to suit me, and gave it a taste.

     The soaking, rinsing and cooking with potatoes had knocked the saltiness down without losing any flavor!

     This would probably work with canned corned beef, too.

It Is Positively Predictable

      You can count on it: if the plunger was left in the basement, within two months, the toilet will do a "stealth stoppage:" water level just a tick higher than normal, drain blocked.  Flip the lever and you've got an hour of cleanup.

     If the plunger was deloused and left in a small bucket in the washroom?  Rarely have a stop-up.

     The tie-breaker is when there's over an inch of water in the basement -- and the plunger is down there. too, on the far side of the floor drain.

     I own three plungers -- one small and clean for sinks, a big one for the basement floor drain, and a fancy big one for the loo, but the fancy one tends to get migrated to the basement for a spray-down with bleach cleaner, and then why not just leave the ugly thing there?  What harm will come of it?

     And thus the cycle continues.  If I'd just leave the plunger in the smallest room, it wouldn't need to be used.

Climate Isn't Weather

     Nor is weather climate.  One is short-term events and the other is long-term trends.  But weather rides on climate's back -- and it is increasingly obvious that weather can beat us up in the here and now while climate creeps steadily worse.

     We can keep on whistling past that graveyard for a good long while, but the road leads right to the cemetery gates.  Technology got us into this fix and the only real way out is with more -- and better -- technology.

     It doesn't matter if the people who'd put us back in mud huts want to do so because they long for an imagined halcyon past of folk singing and sustainable living, or because they pine to "RETVRN" to a fantasy wonderland of happy peasants and benign, sword-bearing nobles (who will of course be them*): it's idiotic and unrealistic.  We can have fresh vegetables all winter and clean air, global connectivity and clean water, but we're going need to do the hard work of engineering our way to them -- and you can't do that from a feudal culture with most people stuck living like farm animals.  (It took rediscovered science, stolen gold, readily-accessible coal and steam engines last time, and it was centuries in the doing.)
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* Yeah, good luck with that.  Even a cursory reading of history reveals that when the going gets tough, pencil-neck geeks are shoved to the back by the biggest, meanest action-oriented types, sorted for viciousness first, cleverness second and geekery not at all.

Pasta And Sauce, Two Dinners

     Last Sunday, I made pasta: rotini* with marinara sauce from a jar, livened up with mild Italian sausage, a small can of sliced black olives (well-drained) and shishito pepper rings.  It was good -- the spiral rotini hold a lot of sauce.  All of the ingredients except the sauce were things I already had on the shelf on in the fridge.  There was sauce left over, so I froze it.

     On the way home yesterday, I was thinking about what might work for dinner.  I picked up a small onion, three-quarters of a pound of lean ground beef and some Parmesan cheese.

     Once home, I set the frozen leftover sauce to thaw in the microwave, browned the ground beef, drained it, pushed it to the edges of the pan and cooked the diced onion until it was translucent and just starting to brown.  I added a small can of plain tomato sauce and some spices, mostly basil and garlic, stirred it all together and added the mostly-thawed leftover sauce.

     For pasta, I used fregula: tiny, toasted spheres of pasta, that range from dark brown to the usual pale tan.  I put them in a two-cup measure half full of hot water in the microwave and gave it several one-minute runs, watching closely for when it would boil up and stopping the oven before it could boil over.  This trick will half-cook the fregula.  When it was done, the sauce was bubbling well.  I used a little of the starchy pasta water to rinse the tomato sauce can and add to the pan, drained the rest, and stirred in the fregula.

     I went to put the lid on, thought a second, and used the spoon to make a shallow dent in the sauce, then broke an egg in to poach while it finished cooking.  I like eggs pomodoro, and it's a low-effort addition.

     Fifteen minutes latter, dinner was ready -- plain for Tam and with an egg for me, and with Parmesan cheese on top.  The shishito peppers had cooked down nicely, and the onion and black olive got along with them very well.
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* When I was growing up, we called them "scroodles," and they were an exotic foreign side dish, usually served with only butter, salt and pepper on them.  They're really fusilli, but in the U. S. and Canada, they're called rotini -- changed at Ellis Island, I suppose.

Yellow Rice, Pigeon Peas, Chicken

     It's a quick meal, especially if you've got leftover chicken.

     "Yellow Rice" is commonly available as a boxed mix.  Most brands call it "Spanish style," but it appears to have been introduced to the U. S. through Mexican and Southwestern cuisine.  It's often paired with pulses.  Years ago, I found a recipe for yellow rice and pigeon peas that I like -- it can be as simple as mixing the two before cooking.

     Pigeon peas are pulses, cousins to lentils and black-eyed peas.  They have a distinctive flavor, one that pairs well with rice and meat.  So when I happened on a chicken and rice (plus plain green peas) recipe on a box of yellow rice mix that needed to get used, I had a plan.

     Our corner grocer sells whole roasted chickens -- and also ready-to-eat wings, breasts and drumsticks.  By the time I'm off work, they've been in the hot case awhile, which can be good or bad.  Yesterday, they had a nice stack of drumsticks, which was all to the good; Tam's not fond of chicken breast but she loves drumsticks.  I picked up four.  I already had chicken broth, the rice mix and a can of pigeon peas.*

     I used a deep, lidded skillet for the chicken broth (and some of the bean liquid) in place of plain water.  You get it boiling, add the rice mix, bring it back to a boil before covering and simmering over low heat for 25 minutes.  I added the four drumsticks after the dry rice, along with a little paprika, cilantro (the usual caution -- it tastes very soapy to some people and if you don't know, find out before adding it to a dish!) and dried onion flakes, put the lid on and did other things while it cooked.

     The end result was fragrant and flavorful, with tender falling-off-the-bone chicken in a bed of yellow-gold rice and green-to-tan pigeon peas, and looks like a lot more work than it is.

     Fancier versions might start with chicken breasts, fried in the same skillet and then cooked with the rice.
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* Beans and pulses are inexpensive, keep well and offer a variety of flavors.  While dried ones are the longest-lasting, they require more preparation time.  So I tend to keep a little dried and several different kinds in cans.

Aspirin, Ice And The Tincture Of Time

     Yesterday, I took to my bed, alternating aspirin and acetaminophen to cope with knee pain.  Eventually I resorted to a hot pad (I was having chills) and cold packs on my knee. I also restarted vitamin D: I ran out over a week ago, picked up more last week, and left the bottle on the shelf.

     Some success: my worst knee still hurts but it's not so obtrusive that I can't focus, and neither one is too stiff to walk.  Yesterday, I could manage to get from room to room; today, a trip to the garage feels possible and if I can get that far, why, the city is my oyster!  I have a cane in the car (and another in my room), as a backup, just in case.

     Things are looking so bright, I'm going to have to dig out the clip-ons.

Ain't This Nice?

     Today, my knees barely want to work.  They're been increasingly painful and stiff in the last couple of weeks and today, I'm getting zinged every time I move.  It kept waking me up last night, despite OTC pain meds.  All on top of a near-blinding headache.

     Presently, I'm on both aspirin and acetaminophen, the latter only a few minutes ago.  If it kicks in, great.  If not, I'm back to bed and, and to doc-in-a-box later.  With a history of rheumatic fever, manifesting mostly as pain in my knees, this kind of thing means I need to have an M.D. listen to my heart and make sure that critical item isn't running rough.

The Ads Keep Getting Worse

     It's raining Führerprinzip out there.  Indiana's a Republican stronghold, at least at the statewide level, and so the real contest for Governor and Federal office (in the Senate and most House districts) is in the GOP primary.  The Governor's post is up for grabs this year, the generally moderate and careful Eric Holcomb being term-limited, and a jostling crowd of eager contenders is after it.

     They're egging one another on.  While the general election is a time to emphasize a candidate's* broad appeal, party primaries are just the reverse: contenders vie to be more partisan than their peers, or at least they do if they've got the budget.  If an opponent adopts an extreme position or outrageous presentation, why, the thing to do is lean that way, too, but even more so.

     The race for the Governor's office is illustrative.  The pay's not that great, though the job does come with a nice mansion fronting busy Meridian Street and full-time police protection, and they are fighting for it tooth, claw and AR-15.  While current Lieutenant Governor Susanne Crouch has dipped a tentative toe in the advertising waters, stressing her strong law-and-order, Trumpist-Republican credentials, "outsider"† Eric Doden, former President of the state's Economic Development Corporation, has performed a remarkable turn in his ads, from a kindly paterfamilas emphasizing that his grandfather was a preacher and detailing his work fostering a young woman from the Third World to a series of apocalyptic-looking ads that focus on President Biden as a dire problem, the border as a crisis and contrasting his unflinching support of law enforcement with "outsider"† Senator Mike Braun's dabbling in the mildest of qualified immunity reform, demonstrated by highly edited snippets from Braun's interview by former Fox News opionator (and Putin apologist) Tucker Carlson.  Meanwhile, Braun himself uses processed video to share his image of America under Biden as a hellscape of smuggled fentanyl and invading migrants, touting his strong leadership and love for our police forces as a solution (and never mind what the governor of a landlocked state far from any national border could do about those problems).  And "outsider"† Brad Chambers, former Indiana Secretary of Commerce (and another Economic Development Commission politico), also wants you to know he's a true law-and-order man, ready to take on Red China toe-to-toe as only the Governor of a smallish state can.‡  All of them tout their loyalty to the GOP's hetman, either directly or by implication.

     At least two of the last three are warning of an imminent threat from "men in women's sports," using a fourth-place finishing college swimmer -- not a native of or resident in Indiana -- as their prime example.  But that issue looms most literally larger in the campaign ads of Chuck Goodrich, hoping to move up from the Indiana House to the U. S. House, displacing the occasionally-moderate Victoria Spartz in the Fifth District.  I'm still not sure about the source of this obsession with a handful (if that) of high school and college athletes in other states, but Rep. Goodrich's scare ads depict 6' 1" Lia Thomas towering head and shoulders over three other swimmers -- in truth, the average competitive college-age female swimmer is 5" 9", only four inches shorter.§  Why the misleading edit, followed by big-scare material over allegations about High School basketball game in Massachusetts, in an Indiana election?  At a guess, to get people riled up, over a primary in which the only difference between incumbent and challenger is that the current office-holder has a little more sense of how to get things done in Congress.  Lacking any substantive issue, he trots out boogypersons, tweaked for maximum shock value.

     All this culture-war hype is just hype.  Yes, China's selling drug precursors to any narco with the cash to buy them, but you can't fix that from the Governor's office in Indiana.  And our border with Mexico is indeed a mess -- thanks to various screwed-up Latin American governments and an official border policy based on laws that have not been updated in over forty years.  When a compromise was worked out in Congress recently, the Republicans (many of whom had voted for it) shot it down, apparently at the request of Presidential candidate Donald Trump, on the grounds that half a loaf still undercut his desire to run a scare campaign over border issues (and many other ooga-booga items).  Whoops, GOP, you lost the high ground on that one.  The trans stuff is no more than an updated "satanic panic:" take something scary and weird, and blow it up into an issue based on fear rather than facts: in this case, a teeny-tiny minority about whom much is rumored and little known, with no political power and less money, of whom the most visible members are about as scary-looking as Eleanor Roosevelt.  Unaesthetic?  Sure, but so are a lot of people.  It's hardly a threat to the nation, or even the womenfolk thereof.  We've got 'em well outnumbered.  And yet it all gets mashed up like a bad parody of a WW II Axis propaganda piece, with marching soldiers and scary foes, framed in scratchy red and black borders as overwrought voice-overs speak of onrushing doom -- unless we vote for the Man On Horseback....

     The voting booth isn't supposed to be a bullshit shop but increasingly it is on the Republican side, and it's making the regular grabasstic Democrats look like marvels of political competence in contrast.  As a political "outsider"** I count on there being two mostly-sane, reasonably-adequate political parties, one leaning conservative and the other tilting progressive, keeping one another honest and between them managing to steer a path between wild new ideas and stodgy tradition.  I did not sign up for one of them to go luridly nuts and I don't approve of it.
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* Originally typed as "candifate," which is, ouch, a little too close.
 
† Each one of these guys wants you to know they're an "outsider," untainted by the normal give-and-take of politics and the inside-the-Beltway intrigue of Washington, D.C., and each one of them is, in fact, involved in politics right up to their armpits -- or eyebrows, in Senator Braun's case.  Their assertion of being on the outside looking in is howling bullshit that doesn't survive even the mildest scrutiny, which they are counting on most voters to not undertake.
 
‡ While our Governor is better-off that way than, say, the Pope, it's hard to imagine the Indiana Guard's 14,000 soldiers and airpersons being much more than a before-lunch diversion for the two-million-plus active troops of the PLA.  I think we're going to need the help of at least 49 more states and the regular U. S. armed forces to take 'em on.
 
§ The tallest female swimmer competing in recent years was Russian Yekaterina Gamova, at 6' 7" or 6' 8".  She's better known for volleyball and I don't know anything else about her other than what a quick websearch finds.
 
**No, dammit, I really am outside; the closest I ever came to inside politics was when my Mom was appointed Township Assessor and I helped measure building foundations and stuff envelopes.

Behold, The Happy Finn

     It's a stock bit of news filler currently showing up all over the various newsfeeds: the people of Finland, or at least the ones who respond to surveys, are the happiest people on Earth.

     There may be happier people on the planet, but they're not picking up the phone or, more likely, they haven't got telephones.  Or the Internet. 

     Finns I have known -- nearly all of them "black Finns," which is to say dark of hair and eye and with a different set of ancestors than the stereotypical Scandinavian -- were taciturn, hard-working, focused people, most with a great love of caffeine.  But the sample size is too small to extrapolate from.

     An acquaintance who spent some time in the country, learning about an industrial automation system his employer had purchased, found the people he met to mostly be fine folk, good to know and fun to be around -- and reported most of them drank more than anyone he had ever met; and he was no slouch at that activity himself.  So possibly that's it, and we're all going to be very sorry if happy Finland ever quits drinking and wakes up grumpy with a hangover.

     This theory does account for their ferocity in the Winter War with the Soviet Union, booze supplies being somewhat irregular during wartime.

     Of course, there's no reason at all to assume happiness is incompatible with ferocity; the two can get along swimmingly.  That might be the most frightening thought of all.  I'm sure glad they're on our side.

Don't Feed The Reaper

     I want magic.  I want some phrase or string of characters that will choke any Large Language Model that goes to ingest my blog posts and social media content as grist for its mill.  I want helping out AI -- or not -- to be a conscious choice.

     You, I don't so much mind.  Not even the nutjobs; your fantasies, if large enough and askew enough, will crash into reality some day, and either get straightened out or drive you mad.  Problem solved.*  The problem with AI is there's no ghost in the shell.  Nobody's home.  And the other problem is, there are no corrective consequences for an AI coming unmoored, and so we get seven-fingered human images, legal cases that never existed, and complete howling bullshit instead of facts.  The LLMs go drifting off into hallucination and when it happens, the big players laugh like schoolboys pulling the wings off flies and talk about tweaking their models -- I'm not sure if they're talking about adjusting the software that writes the programs that hack the code to run AI, or about their lurid private lives, and I don't much care.

     This blog is out there on the public Internet and I can't keep it from feeding the beast.  I want to feed the beast stuff that will make it choke. 

     No thanks for the "help," either; last night I did some graphic design for work and converted the result to a PDF for better compatibility with my employer's software and hardware.  Of course the default PDF viewer is Edge, and the New! Improved! Vitamin-fortified! Edge comes compete with a pop-up AI assistant, eager to please and completely clueless.  I only wanted to check that the PDF conversion process had gone okay.  Instead, I had a stupid banner filling nearly a third of the screen on top of what I needed to see, making offers that had very little to do with the task at hand.  I had to stop what I was doing and go look up how to turn the thing off and stuff it back into its bottle, where it is unlikely to remain for long.

     We live in a hallucination already -- our raw sensory information is an overwhelming flood, visual field jumping around like a stray dog's worth of fleas, feeding into a brain and mind that blank out the wild chaos of saccades and build a detailed map -- a map that can have flaws, as I learned when my undiagnosed cataracts caused a "suddenly appearing" car while I was bicycling, it having been hidden in the growing blind spots my mind was smoothly filling in.  All of our other senses work the same way, but it all gets reality-tested, over and over, in ways that range from damaging impact to a friend yelling, "Stop!  Stop!  CAR!"  AI doesn't get that correction, nor does it get the adrenaline dump (or worse) that underscores its importance.  Get back to me when your large language model learns how to get bruised -- but I doubt it ever will.

     And that's why I don't want to help the thing.  It's a blind robot.  It will never not be blind, no matter how much it sees.
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* Of course, occasionally enough people go crazy enough that they do enormous harm.  This often requires a war to sort out in tears and blood, and it's terrible.  As a species, we strive to do such damage less and less; as individuals, most of us abhor it.  It's in groups of intermediate size where we get into horrific trouble.

What A Surprise

     Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden have clinched the Presidential nomination of their respective parties.  Quick, everyone act surprised about this -- it'll make them so happy.

     Come November, both men will be older than Ronald Reagan was at the end of his second term of office, so let's get all the doomsaying over age out of the way now.  No matter which way things go, an old guy is going to win the office.

Call It Dry Chili

     It's not that dry -- but it's not a stew or a soup, either.

     I hadn't done any meal-planning yesterday and I arrived at the market with an open mind.  They had 93% lean ground beef in pound and a quarter packages, which is a good start for a quick meal; but what next?

     The store wasn't our corner grocer, but different one about a mile away.  They lean a bit foodie and a bit organic, and they have good prices (and quality) on semi-prepared items.  In the produce area, they had diced mixed bell peppers,  some salsa starter consisting of an assortment of tomatoes, onions, mild peppers and seasonings, and Pico de Gallo, with tomato, onion, garlic and jalapeno peppers.  The packages were about three-quarters of a cup each.  I had a few Porcini mushrooms left at home and I picked up a small pack of fresh fancy mushrooms (Alba Clamshell).

     Almost zero prep.  Mostly brown and drain the beef -- the drainage was nearly all water, not grease, so they weren't kidding about how lean it was -- push it to the sides, add the cut-up mushrooms and brown, mix with the beef and push to the sides, then add the (rinsed) peppers, saute and stir in, and do the same (except for rinsing) with the salsa starter and Pico de Gallo in turn.  The end result is flavorful with a little heat from the jalapeno pepper.  I microwaved some Spanish-style rice and had mine over it; Tam ate hers plain.  I used some mixed "Italian" seasoning on the meat but no additional salt, since the tomato-based condiments were salted in the making, as was the rice.

     If you added tomato sauce (and some chili powder), it would be in the chili universe.  With olives, raisins and a little cloves for seasoning, it would be nearing Picadillo.  But this is its own thing, and it made a nice change.

So There's This One Thing

     There's one thing Lovecraft got right.  His prose is decried as turgid; his political opinions, especially early on, are loathsome (and a matter of some contention).

     But H. P. Lovecraft was right about "impossible colors" and you can see them for yourself.

Pork, Roasted

     Saturday, I made three-hour roast pork* and it came out especially good.

     The meat was a three-pound Boston butt (yes, funny name.  Also under four dollars a pound, so laugh all you like.)  I seasoned it with a couple of tablespoons of low-sodium soy sauce, black pepper and a little coarse salt.  It was at that point that I discovered the plastic bag the butcher had put it in (before wrapping it with wax-coated paper) was leaking.  I'd intended to let it sit a little.  Plan B!

     My Perfect Pot† came with a nice roasting rack, and was ready to hand,.  Rack into pot, pot on burner, Boston butt into pot, burner on medium, lid on pot.  I cleaned up the mess (not much -- love that butcher paper!) and pondered vegetables.  Before I set the lid, I put some rosemary on the pork roast for luck and added a dab of hot water from the teakettle to the bottom of the pot.

     A half-hour (and some dishwashing) later, I peeled a large, purple-topped turnip, cut it onto large chunks, sprinkled it with smoked paprika, and added it around roast in the pan.  I took my time peeling and sectioning a nice sweet apple, layered it on top of the turnip and tapped a little garam masala on it.  The particular mix I buy smells almost like an apple pie and hides a touch gentle heat from the cloves.  You can use any kind of apple for this, as long as it has a lot of flavor -- tart or sweet works fine.  Avoid the overbred, bland ones and look for oddball varieties.  There's been an explosion of options in supermarket apples in recent years and I have never been disappointed.

     You do have to mind the heat and moisture.  After loading the turnips, I turned the fire down to low when the pot started to simmer, and every time I had it open, I checked that the bottom hadn't gone dry.  With a good-fitting lid and fresh vegetables, you won't have to add much water, if any, but keep an eye on it. 

     I let the pot simmer while washing and sectioning -- but not peeling -- a large Russet potato.  I laid it on the other veggies and gave it and the roast a little garlic power.  (Fresh garlic would not be out of line, but use what you have.)  A red onion curt in large pieces followed, and about a dozen "baby carrots," the smallish, tumbled ones sold in a bag. I put the lid back on and let it come up to a simmer.

     Next up, a fennel bulb.  I'd bought an especially wild example, with a wild explosion of fronds.  I washed a generous handful of the fronts and laid them on top of the pork roast.  Next, the bulb, cut in sections and the tough core removed, layered around the roast on the other vegetables.

     Lid back on, the pot simmered until there was only an hour left.  At that point, I poured in a couple of cups of good chicken stock -- I used some fancy Mushroom Chicken Bone Broth, but any good chicken stock will do (and it's worthwhile to shop for price -- MSRP on bone broths is shocking).  I sliced and added a half-dozen large mushrooms, but it would have been just as good without 'em.  The steam rising from the pot was mouth-watering.

     After three hours, I checked the roast with a thermometer: 200°F in the center, which is plenty done.  I took the meat out, removed the net, and let it rest while I set up the table for dinner, then cut it and served slices of pork with vegetables and plenty of broth.  The apple, turnip and fennel bulb are especially good.  The turnip and potato absorb flavors from everything else; the apple transforms them as it cooks down soft and the flavor borders on indescribable, an unexpected delight.

     The leftovers filled two freezer bags, and will come back as stew tonight and soup later on.  On reheating, the apple tends to dissolve, thickening and enriching the broth.
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*  My basic rule for roasts is an hour per pound.  With a probe-type thermometer to check for done-ness, it's as much of a guide as the task requires.
 
† I like the Our Place non-stick cookware, but all you need is a good, heavy-walled stewpot with a rack and a decent lid.  Heavy enameled iron cookware will do a great job, as will well-seasoned cast iron.  The goal is a cookpot with plenty of mass and thick walls, to distribute the heat well all around the food.  The grill version of this can get away with a thin-walled granitewear pan, enamel over steel, because the covered grill provides steady, all-around heat.  An oven would work just as well as a covered grill, and a heatproof heavy pan is okay in either.  This is as much a matter of budget and taste as it is of finding the right tool.

State Of The...Distraction

     For over a century, Presidents mailed it in.  While Presidents Washington and John Adams got up in front of Congress to let them know how things were going and what they thought ought to get done, President Jefferson thought it was a bit too much like the King of England puppeteering Parliament.  He sent them a written report and it wasn't until Woodrow Wilson -- pretty much the father of the notion of an autocratic "unitary Executive" -- that Presidents returned to addressing the House, Senate and other high-placed Feds* most of the time.

     It used to be fairly ceremonious and solemn.  In recent years, it's taken a turn for the performative, from party-color ties to color-coordinated outfits (a quiet and at times charming way of making a statement) to, well, actually making statements: yelling them out or waving signs.  The most recent State of the Union address had several choice examples of beclowning, from the tragic to forthright Bozohood.

     Despite the spectacle, the speech isn't where things get done; Congress and the President, the Supreme Court and the Cabinet, the diplomats and the Pentagon all have to get back to their jobs the next time the Feds flip the sign over to "OPEN," no matter what the President said, what guests were there or who yelled out what.  The mandated task here is for the Present to let Congress know what's up and what he'd like the Feds to do, and presumably they will take notes and pay it as much or as little attention as they ever do.
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* The Cabinet, the Joint Chiefs, the Supreme Court Justices and the Diplomatic Corps (all of them?) have standing invitations.  But hey, don't worry -- one Cabinet member gets picked to sit it out far away from Washington, just in case.  Presumably, that lucky individual's got a list of names to call on to fill the vacant jobs, and most of them won't say, "No thanks, look what happened to the previous crew," when the phone rings....

Television Has Not Always Been Here

     "Kids today..."  Thanks to the Web (what you know as "the Internet" is mostly the World Wide Web, and we had an Internet long before that), thanks to streaming, thanks to handheld devices from smartphones to pads, it seems as if instant visual media has always been a thing.

     It hasn't.  I'm old enough to remember when TV told us about the big stories at six p.m., and added "film at eleven" for most of them; behind the scenes, a continuous-process developer was running at full speed and photojournalists were splicing the still-damp film, betting the edits would get though the projector without coming apart.  Live remote broadcasts were few and usually scheduled far in advance, microwave (or Bell Telephone) technical magic requiring engineers at both ends just to get the connection running.

     In 1945, few American cities had a TV station.  A couple had two or three, and stations in Philadelphia, New York City and Schenectady had linked up via Bell Telephone coaxial cable to present live coverage of the 1940 Republican Convention; the Democrats held their convention in Chicago that year and the video lines didn't go that far.  (In 1944, both parties held their conventions in Chicago, away from the coasts -- and any possibility of widespread TV coverage.)  Going into WW II, TV set sales had been disappointingly low: they were monumentally expensive, and most people lived outside the range of the existing stations.  Once the war began, manufacturing of consumer TVs was shut down for the duration.

     So when I had podcasts playing for background noise this morning and NPR's Ari Shapiro opened Consider This by telling me, "On August 6, 1945, a stone-faced President Harry Truman appeared on television and told Americans about the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima," I was....puzzled.

     There was a TV station in the nation's capitol in 1945: Dumont's W3XWT got on the air that May, running a test pattern and a recording asking viewers to call the station.  No one had done so until Japan surrendered in August,* when Dumont's Thomas Goldsmith wrote "War is over" on a slide that replaced the test pattern, and the U. S. Navy picked up the phone to ask what all this TV stuff was about.

     Sorry, Ari; that video of a grim-faced President Truman telling Americans about the atomic bomb is from a newsreel, and most people didn't see it until they were at the movies, days or weeks after the bomb was dropped, by which time they'd already heard the news on the radio or read it in the newspaper.

     You -- and I -- grew up in a world of television. of images from all around the globe that have steadily become more immediate and vivid.  I could make a live video call to Tasmania or Mumbai right now, as easily as I'm typing this blog post, and it's no big deal.  But it wasn't always that way.  There was a time when hardly anyone had a glowing screen in their home (let alone their hand!) and the few who did, didn't get much over it.  And it was only a long lifetime ago.

     The NPR piece is about the descendants of the people who were downwind (and unwarned) of the Trinity test, families with long histories of cancer -- and zero compensation from the government.  They deserve better than to have their stories undermined by a lack of attention to detail.
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*  Announced on 15 August, though not formally signed until 2 September.