"[Browsername] Is Installing Updates And Will Crash In A Few Minutes"

      Any more, I approach browser software updates with trepidation.  About half the time, the improvements break or substantially change functions I have become used to.

     The one I use most often is in some kind of slow-motion war with Windows; I paralleled it with an in-ecosystem browser I don't like as well, so that I'll have something as an immediate backup, with my Macworld devices (used mostly for writing and other fun) as the reserve.

     MDM730 or Telix, it's not.

"Robin Hoodie" Was Never Going To Be A Folk Hero

     It wasn't in the cards.  The UHC CEO assassin wasn't going to be a folk hero or even a comic-book (graphic novel!) vigilante.  Sane people, good people, don't shoot another person in the back unless that person presents an imminent threat to human life.

     Americans kill one another quite often, and on little provocation.  We're doing so less these days -- but we're still doing it.  And if it seems even a little justified -- how many stats have I seen about insurance claim denial rates in the last few days, with United Health Care heading the list -- a lot of us will chime in, or at least nod, or maybe just shrug.

     The fact remains that you've got to be seriously off-axis to commit that kind of murder; in fact, being some kind of nut (not to get too technical) appears to improve the odds of success, as I have written about before when discussing political assassination attempts.

     Did the killer's actions hold up a distorting mirror to the feelings of many Americans about the health-insurance industry?  Undeniably.  Just don't confuse the myth/legend/story with the facts.

     Murder is wrong.

     Running your business in such a way that a plurality (at least) of the people who hear about your murder express positive or neutral feelings about the crime is wrong, too.  It doesn't justify the murder -- but it ought to be food for thought.

He's Doing It Again

     In a recent TV interview, his first since winning election to the Presidency, Donald Trump opined that the members of the House January 6 Committee ought to be in jail for "what they did."  When pressed, he accused them of destroying evidence.

     That would indeed be awful and potentially unlawful behavior -- if they had done so.  In fact, they did not.  You can go browse most it for yourself.

     Some things are under review and may be redacted -- in addition to the public spaces, the U. S. Capitol building is a warren of back corridors, unobvious private offices, hidey-holes, connecting tunnels and so on, including the places where members of Congress and staffers took refuge on January 6, 2021.  There are obvious security concerns with publishing specific data.  Many people still don't realize how close we came to having a Congressperson, staff member or even the Vice President beaten up or strung up that day, but there's nothing to be gained and much to be lost by providing a map for the next attempt.

     Pardoning the rioters is undeniably one of the powers of the office of the President.  I think it would be regrettable, but it wouldn't be illegal.  Going after then-members of the U. S. House of Representatives for doing something well within the powers and purview of their branch of the Federal government is a very different matter.  You may find the J6 Committee infuriating, heroic or boring, but it wasn't illegal.  They didn't kick down any doors, break any windows or take a steaming dump on a House member's desk.  None of them assaulted Capitol police.  The J6 rioters did that, at the instigation, if not the direct behest, of Donald Trump, who was at the time President of the United States of America.

     Pretending otherwise is a fool's game.

One Down, 87 To Go

     It depends on how you count them, but there were almost 90 autocratic governments on Earth yesterday, and today there's one less: Assad isn't running Syria any more.  (Present whereabouts unknown; a plane carrying him may have gone down, and no one is looking very hard.  Update: The Russians say he's been granted asylum in Moscow.  He was their boy in the Middle East for a long time, so it's not unlikely. )

     What comes next?  It's hard to say.  What newscasts are calling "Syrian rebels" is a a polyglot bunch, and the largest bloc, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, has palled around with both the "Islamic State" and al-Qaida in the past.  They haven't run with either since 2016; guessing if that was a matter of wanting less crazy or more is an exercise for pundits and intel professionals.  Junior partner is the Syrian National Army, a collection of at least twenty-eight groups;* some sources say at least twenty-one of them have received U. S. assistance in the past, against IS and related threats, but we've been known to hand out goodies to almost anyone who'd smile and promise to fight Communists, Islamic extremists and the like.†  Some of SNA's roots go back to the "Free Syrian Army," and Turkey has been one of their main sources of support, despite the occasional armed squabble.

     You can tie yourself up in knots trying to sort all this out, and by the time you have, the situation will have changed.  None of them liked Assad, or the way he was running the country, and it appears that became a strong enough motivation that they were able to work together.

     It's an open question if they'll be able to continue working together, but we can at least hope.  If you're expecting the Syrian James Madison will come running down from the hinterlands, waving a draft Constitution well-suited to the people of that nation, don't hold your breath.  They might -- and it would be good news if they can -- manage to cobble something together that will hold long enough to make serious inroads against the starvation and misery that part of the world has become famous for.

     It says something about our species that the very cradle of human civilization has become a nightmare of failed states and warlordism, with refugees as the prime regional export.  It says something about us, and it's nothing pleasant.
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* At this point, the better-informed might be wondering, "What of the Kurds?"  They're wondering that, too.  They appear to have very little presence in the SNA.  Kurds are about ten percent of Syrian population and are likely to get what they usually get: short shrift.  The French, the British, the various Allied and UN powers, the local potentates and so on all overlooked them when they drew lines on maps, and it's one more smoldering problem in a place that has an oversupply of tragedies.
 
† And that's nothing new -- go read some early 19th-Century Letters of Marque issued by Congress for examples. A proxy war is a cheap war for everyone except the proxies.

Grist For The Mill

     I'm not alone in suspecting the extinct megafauna of North America were delicious -- and that humans may have played a part in making them extinct.  There's new evidence that tends to support the notion that big critters were what's for dinner.

     Woolly mammoth, giant sloth -- you get just one of those, and you've fed the whole tribe, and probably gained enough leather to clothe half of them or make a new tent.  Lots of useful bone and sinew, too.  Those hunts may have been our first team sport and maybe that's why spending a weekend afternoon watching the Big Game is so appealing to so many people.  Almost as good as a big hunt with all your pals, and the feast afterward.  Go team mammoth-hunter!

Packrattery

     A recent article about famous (infamous)* SF writer and screenwriter Harlan Ellison included a few photos of the late author's home, "Ellison Wonderland."

     Between that, the Bradbury Center's re-creation of Ray Bradbury's workspace and few pictures I have seen of Doc Savage creator Lester Dent's Missouri "House of Gadgets" home and Theodore Sturgeon's place, I'm convinced writers are packrats, gadgeteers and book accumulators.

     And if that's a requirement, I'm well on my way.
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* Ellison was a man of prodigious gifts, stunning feuds, deep friendships and absolutely over-the-line behavior.  He had a great many fans -- and so many sincere enemies that they formed an actual club.

So, About These Picks...?

     Is it just me, or is the incoming Administration largely a government of drunken (etc.) frat boys?  The Press keeps telling me they're "loyalists," or "Trump conservatives," but the real unifying factor appears to be a willingness to drink heavily, and to disregard social norms as applied to themselves while being harsh enforcers of conventionality for everyone around them (at least until they make unwanted advances on women, at which point all notions of modesty and fidelity cease to apply).

     This is a crew that gives every sign of believing Eddie Haskell was the real hero of Leave It To Beaver.

     Look, you may find elitist technocrats and nose-in-the-air PolySci wonks offputting, but a large proportion of them are earnest strivers, who put in a full day's work, a little overtime and keep thinking about the job on their commute home and all through dinner.  They're morally consistent.  When your staff has to carry your inebriated self back to your hotel room, fending off your pawing hands all the way, you're probably not Cabinet material -- in fact, you're probably not Assistant Manager at the corner store material.

     I guess we'll find out how things work with leering, "beer o'clock," C students at the helm.  P. J. O'Rourke tried to warn us.

"Num-bah, Plea-yiz?"

     I have had occasion to use my employer's fancy in-your-computer telephone system a few times recently (instead of my own cellphone, for which they pay a nice chunk of my bill) .

     It is about as unlike using a telephone as using a telephone could be.  I grew up on rural telephones, not too far removed from party lines.  I grew up with limited bandwidth, optimized for speech; with a certain amount of whooshing white noise in the background, not to mention blips and bleep from crosstalk, sometimes even distorted speech from another call muttering quietly.  And I grew up with "sidetone," the faint sound of your own voice from the earpiece of your phone, which you don't notice until it's gone.

     Every bit of that is gone with the app they use.  You can bring up a conventional keypad on the screen to dial numbers with, but the sound from the headset is pure hi-fi.  And the connection is so quiet that if you're in a still-enough place, you can hear your own heartbeat during pauses in the conversation.  What you won't hear is your own voice.  Maybe there's an adjustment for that; I haven't looked, but if I'm going to use this thing much, I'd better, because it's distracting.

     Living in the future is okay, but I'm glad I'm not a big desk telephone user.  The modern version is making me feel like I may have time-traveled a little farther than I'm comfortable with.

Colorful Alerts?

     This morning, I went to the Indiana legislature website, to see what they're going to be up to next year.  Remember, this is the deliberative body that toyed with setting pi to three; they're something like a too-trusting elderly relative, who must be diverted from answering the door when traveling salesmen come to call, or you'll find out the driveway has been "top-coated" with used crankcase oil or the front steps have been repaired with a mixture of sand, flour and water.

     It's too soon for the 2025 litany of pork, posturing and puffery.  Looking over what they tried and sometimes pushed forward in 2024, I came across a well-meaning example of...something.

     The idea behind it has merit, but it suggests we ought to step back and take another look: the legislature's got a bill in progress to introduce a "Green Alert" for missing veterans and service members.

     You might ask, why not?  We already have Amber Alerts for missing or abducted children, Silver Alerts for missing, at-risk seniors (and it's sometimes used for other people who need care) and Blue Alerts for police (no, I am not making this up -- presumably it's for hostage situations).  Most of these are embedded in the nationwide EAS system that goes over broadcast stations and the WEA (Wireless Emergency Alert) system that communicates with cellphones.  They use three-letter "Event Codes," generally defined by Congress, like "CAE" (Child Abduction Emergency) for Amber Alerts.  CAE is the oldest code of this type, and it works; it's helped locate many missing children.  One of 26 letters in three positions means there are a lot of possible codes.  Not all are mnemonic.

     Some of the proposed codes are intended to make a point: missing people get disproportionate media attention if they're young, white and female, so "Ebony Alert" and "Feather Alert" codes have been proposed.  This can be read as government signalling to media, more than joggling your elbow: when it lights up an EAS codec, radio and TV stations have to either pass it along automatically* or actually sit down and read the thing before making a decision about sharing it, an effort that often results in a news story, and the specialized code is intended as a reminder.  How you or I -- or a news editor -- react to it is highly subjective, and this might not be an area for subjectivity: lost, at-risk individuals deserve to be found, period, and that is worth lighting up your phone for half a minute or airing a twenty-second broadcast news story, no matter who they are.

     As a practical matter, all that is needed are alerts for "lost child" and "lost adult."  Details should go in the accompanying text message, to tell you and me if we should be looking for a four-year-old Native American child or a 60 year old law enforcement officer: it's supposed to be way to help out, not an overloaded "thin blue line" flag with a special stripe for each and every sliver of the population who might be at risk.

     P.S.  There are highly-specific geocoding numbers in the systems, too, which as a practical matter are steerable down to the level of counties.  (The code gets even more localized but cellphones and EAS codecs generally do not.)  Just like weather alerts, alerts for lost and missing persons are supposed to be coded for a limited area.  This helps reduce people getting alerts that don't apply to their location.

     P.P.S.  I am reminded that the Federal guidelines for issuing this type of alert on EAS or WEA are specific and strict, so while your Mayor or local law enforcement may hold a news conference and say they're issuing a gray and yellow-striped alert, a genuine, official version with its own event code is supposed to be a rare thing that had to meet well-defined criteria before it was sent.  Will that stop state and Federal legislators from making up new ones?  I sure wouldn't want to bet money on it.
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* Remarkably few EAS event codes are required to go on the air automatically, just national-level emergencies, a system that has been used for a "live code" test or two but never in earnest.  Most of the boxes treat national-level tests the same way, but the rest of it is set up for a human to look at and decide -- if there's a human around to do so.  If your local radio station is running every darned beep-beep-beep alert that comes across, there's probably a robot at the wheel.

Sandhill Cranes

     Of course, the cranes I heard Sunday were the Sandhill Cranes that pass through every Fall.  They stop for several weeks at the Jasper-Pulaski Fish and Wildlife Area before continuing on from Wisconsin (etc.) to Florida.

     The Wildlife Area is up north of Lafayette, so the ones we see in Indianapolis have probably started the next leg of their migration.  From the posted DNR numbers, they haven't reached this year's peak population yet, so if you live around here, listen for their song when you're outdoors -- and look up!

Politicommentary

     You probably think I have something trenchant and/or pithy to say about Mr. Trump's picks or Mr. Biden's pardons, but here's the thing: it's all sideshow.

     These things don't have anything to do with the day to day running of the country right now, and even the parts that could affect it in the future are only possibilities.  I could probably start a nice helmet fire about all or part of it, but what good would that do?

     Time enough for the Senate to show me how they're going to react.  Time enough to find out who's going to pardon whom and how that's going to work out.

     Right now, the House needs to start looking under the Federal sofa cushions for spare change before the current piggy bank goes dry.  They've got to get it done before Christmas, or they're going to be sending out cards to their constituents in the dark.  I'm pretty sure the Pentagon has a back-up plan before they have to start working by candlelight, and I'm hoping the over-the-horizon radars and earth stations for the DOD spy satellites have all got fat UPSs on standby.  But you'd never know to watch the news: it's all clowns and animal acts.

Brunch Again

     Today was Brunch With Siblings day, and I'm pleased to report they are both as sibilant as ever.  We went to Good Morning Mama's, which for my money has better coffee and better service than where we'd been going, and a more interesting menu -- but I'm biased in favor of a place that serves home made corned beef hash.

     On the way home, I kept hearing what I'm pretty sure were cranes, a high-pitched, fluting, musical call, and could not spot them  Finally saw them in multiple vees and strings high, high overhead, so far up they were little more than dots.  But their song carries for miles, a marvel of the late Fall.

Historical Analysis

     An outsider's look at U. S. politics through the lens of history, and why the parties you remember aren't the parties we have now.

     I'm not saying the article is a hundred percent right -- but it's food for thought.

     I hate living in interesting times.  Make the government boring again!

The Chair

     My nice wooden office chair is nearly five years old and something has gone wrong.  It has a seat angle/leaning resistance adjustment, but the seat has picked up a slight forward tilt that cannot be corrected.  I'm going to have to flip it over and see what can be done.

     Short term, I can move the flat and lock washers on the bolts holding the front of the seat to the metal tilt and swivel gadget to between the seat and that part.  Long-term, I hate to replace it, but I will if I have to.

     The "skate wheel" casters I put on it have proven their worth.  Larger and a little more resilient than a standard office-chair wheel, they have resisted getting jammed-up with cat hair and roll well.  My other office-type chair, a more typical metal one with a padded seat and back at the desk/dressing table in my bedroom has the same kind of casters, which work as well on the rug in that room as they do on the chair mat in the office.

     Update: It's a broken weld, one that holds the collar for the top of the adjustable pneumatic vertical support to the metal cradle that does the leaning pivot.  The support's a force-fit into the collar, so this is chair-ending damage.

No Room For Pie

     It was a good Thanksgiving dinner -- even though we had it for supper.  (I slept in.)

     We have a favorite main dish and side.  A five-pound turducken roll, with a little spicy sausage inside the chicken, surrounded by duck and enveloped in turkey.  I put it on a rack in an oval roasting pan over a slow fire in the covered grill, and once it was up to temperature, added big chunks of turnip and parsnip and about a cup of chicken bone broth.  I topped the turducken roll with a sliced, peeled orange and a couple of pickled piparra peppers, and eventually added carrots, celery and a red onion.

     I did other things for an hour and a half.

     That left plenty of time to cut up some baking potatoes into medium-sized pieces (unpeeled; YMMV) and stack them on paper toweling to dry while I fried up six slices of lightly peppered applewood-smoked bacon, producing about a quarter-cup of fat.  I started microwaving the potatoes in a big Pyrex bowl.  With the bacon draining, I added a quarter-cup of flour and kept stirring while it got darker and darker.  When I thought it was ready, I added about two cups of mushroom-chicken bone broth* and kept stirring.  It got a little thicker than I wanted, so I used up the remainder of the plain chicken bone broth and kept stirring.  When I was happy with the consistency, I snipped all the bacon into it.  Made with the broth, it's a dark-brown gravy, rich and smoky.  I'd kept zapping and stirring the potatoes; I went after them with a sharp knife, added some butter, used a knife a little more, then added milk and switched to large dinner fork.  This is more work than a masher or a mixer but I like the results.  It took an entire container of UHT milk, call it one cup, to get them the way I liked.

     The turducken was nicely done by then; I brought it in and stashed it in the oven while Tam and I rounded up the cats and set up tray tables.  (We've been watching, of all things, a somewhat-debunking documentary on the Stanford Prison Experiment that may show a bit more about human nature -- and "permission structures" -- than it purports to.  Either way, it leaves rather a lot to be thankful for.)

     Potatoes, meat, vegetables and gravy: there was no room for dessert.  But it sure was good!
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* No, I have no idea how that works with mushrooms, either.  They sell the stuff in boxes.  The smallest size is just under two cups.  The chicken-mushroom version is ideal for bacon gravy.

Surprise!

     It was a surprise: a late-morning text from my boss, apologizing for having messed up the schedule this holiday week, when cut-and-pasting a month or more in advance.  (Like all the rest of us, he's doing three or four jobs these days.)

     "SO DOES THAT MEAN I'M WORKING?"  The automated holiday-and-vacation scheduler had confirmed my time off request last week, which usually means a Responsible Party has looked at it and given it the nod.

     "NO, YOU'RE OFF TODAY.  IT JUST WASN'T ON THE SCHEDULE SPREADSHEET."

     There's some reason, connected to the fixes put in place after a widely popular hours-recording app was hacked a year or two ago and down for months, why the time-off scheduler and the spreadsheet that shows upcoming hours and assignments can't be allowed to communicate.  It means extra busywork for the managers, and a degree of ambiguity in whether you're getting holidays and vacations off or working them.

     They used to scribble all this on a whiteboard.  You couldn't check it online -- but if we went back to the whiteboard, all we'd need to do to add that feature would be a webcam.

Breakfast By Expiration Date

      It is worth the extra effort to make a three-egg omelet with sliced cherry tomatoes, chopped black olives -- and the nice Provelone cheese and two kinds of salami you bought two days ago and need to use up before it expires?

     You sure bet it is!  One of the best omelets I have made.

     Our corner market occasionally puts together "sandwich packs" pairing meat and cheese, and they've usually a good combination.  If it'll work on rye bread, it'll work in an omelet.

Thankful

     It's hard not to be bitter.  I'm stumbling into my Golden Years and the first-wave Boomers are busy screwing over the economy again.  They keep doing it.  They keep finding new ways to do it.

     There are things I want to do -- write, mess with old radios, woodworking projects, gardening, and so on -- but little time to do them.  I've got to keep on scuffling, keep on working for other people to bring in money while getting less and less meaningful human contact in the doing.

     Maybe that last is for the best.  Maybe it's better to be at arm's length from everyone, where their virtues usually shine more brightly than their flaws and the surfaces hint at depths that are rarely there.

     Maybe.  What is certain is that in terms of material goods, freedom from hunger, protection from the cold, the rain, the snow, brigands, bandits and brutes, I am better off than 99.9999% of the human race has ever been.  Wealth -- real wealth, three square meals a day, a warm bed, the ability to banish darkness at the flip of a switch and hear from people halfway across the world on a whim -- is not a zero-sum game: every year, more and more people have access to it.  Things would be even better if even more of them did, and faster; but we're getting there.  Progress is lumpy and uneven.  It continues nevertheless.

     So there's reason to be thankful.  I'm personally pessimistic at present, but zoom out and, well, it's been worse in the past and there's every reason to expect it will be better in the future.

     Short-term?  Maybe not so much.  Time will tell, as it always does.

We Invented Our Way Out Of It

     Humans are clever primates.  Faced with a problem, we invent our way out.  As hunter-gatherers, we lived in small bands, with everyone a general specialist.  When we learned more things, we started figuring out some people were better at chipping flint, others at hunting, collecting edible plants, building shelter, cooking or guarding our homes through the long night.

     We befriended dogs and they befriended us.  We invented cities and agriculture not quite side-by side: many hands make light work.  Cats showed up, hunting the mice in our granaries.  We learned to preserve leather, spin thread, to knit and weave.  We developed pottery.  We started working metal: copper for tools and utensils, humble and dangerous lead, rare silver and gold,* useful bronze, brass and iron.

     And we learned about plumbing and sewers -- not once, but over and over again.  We learned about illness and epidemics, too: a bug that would wipe out a mostly-isolated hunter-gatherer band and stop, stymied by a lack of hosts, could smolder and flare in our cities, sweeping through like a wildfire.  We invented isolation, harsh and fairly effective.  We learned about cross-contamination the hard way (yet again!) and the lesson didn't stick.

     Eventually, we invented vaccines.  Vaccines are how you stuff a few hundred thousand, or a million, or millions of clever primates in a tight-packed city and avoid -- or at least control -- epidemics.  Ever since the first smallpox immunizations, some people have been skeptical.  It was gross, they cried; or it smacked of magic; or who knew what else might happen...?

     We know.  We've been running the experiment at scale, over and over, since the 19th Century.  We know what happens with communicable diseases we don't have vaccines for (epidemics), we know what happens when a sizeable segment of the population doesn't get vaccinated (outbreaks), we know the side-effects of vaccines, and they are evaluated and re-evaluated for safety and effectiveness.  Don't take my word for it, and don't follow internet memes and rumors, either -- you can go look this stuff up on Wikipedia, in the abstracts (summaries) of articles in reputable scientific journals or full articles in mass-market science magazines.  This is not a matter of debate except out at the weirdo fringe: vaccines work.  They're safe.

     Putting a "vaccine skeptic" in charge of this country's Federal health infrastructure is insane.
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* Speaking of humble and dangerous, and of gold: the ancient Egyptians apparently worked out the use of mercury and fire in refining gold, a job with such grave consequences for the people doing it that it was usually assigned to slaves taken in war.  "Mad as a hatter" (also the result of working with mercury) had nothing on an Egyptian gold-smelter.  Eventually we invented our way around that, too.

Library Work

     This evening, I worked my way backwards from Gibson though Bujold and into Brunner (including Shockwave Rider, a proto-cyberpunk future that almost happened), leaving room for the Octavia Butler books I own but have not yet shelved.  I started out with about fifteen feet of added shelf space, saved back three and now I'm down to five feet available, shelving additional books as I go.

     Along the way, I rediscovered some lost gems: Mildred Clingerman and Rosel George Brown, talented writers of SF and fantasy a bit out of the usual line.  Neither was especially prolific, but what they wrote is worth reading.

It's Their Expressions That Bug Me

     The current Congressional* tempest in a chamberpot is beneath notice and I wasn't going to notice it, until a certain U. S. Representative from South Carolina started showing up on every blamed screen, along with occasional appearances from the current and likely future Speaker of the House.  And every time, they had the smug little smiles of grade-school children who have found a context in which they can say a naughty word and get away with it.

     That bothers me.  Okay, the House is the "Junior Chamber," but I never thought it was that junior.  I have suggested in the past that we put up Congressthings in same accommodations as the military slaps together for unmarried junior officers, to spare the poor dears the worry of keeping up with the Washington social scene (and maybe teach 'em a little humility, like that's possible).  Now I'm realizing they're going to need supervised bathroom breaks while in session, with the Sergeant-at-Arms sorting them out into groups who won't get into fights with one another.

     Or not.  See, there's a new Representative from Delaware, who looks enough like her peer from the Palmetto State that I can't consistently tell them apart: low-maintenance straight brown hair, squarish reading glasses, well-practiced smile, understated politician skirt-and-jacket outfits with flag pins in the lapels.  But the Delawarian has a biography with details in common with musician Wendy Carlos, and their overlap isn't playing a keyboard synthesizer.

     The incoming House has a lot to deal with; after the 2024 election, there were 219 Republicans to 213 Democrats, with three seats still counting.  Now three Republicans have stepped down and until their seats are filled and the remaining counts finished, it's 216 - 213.  The GOP will be in the minority if four members get stuck in a card game -- or traffic.  There's a lot of unfinished business and plenty of new business -- and instead, they're fussing about which washrooms Delaware's sole Representative will be allowed to use.

     That Representative hasn't joined in the fray.  She knows something that any tourist could figure out: the U. S. Capitol building is riddled with single-occupancy washrooms, the result of efforts to make the very old and much-remodeled building ADA-compliant with the least amount of bother.  They put them in the areas the public can tour, and they put them in the parts that are normally limited to Congresscreatures, staff and people on official business.  No one is going to perish for lack of access to a washroom -- nor are they going to fade away if they don't get maximal face time on the various news networks and websites, despite what some of the incumbents appear to believe.

     House districts are entitled to the Representative they elect.  The rest of us don't get a veto and, barring truly egregious miscounduct, that's that.   Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's New York district picked her; Marjorie Taylor Greene's Georgia district selected her.  Delaware has sent Sarah McBride.  In 1870, South Carolina sent Joseph Hayne Rainey to the House, and somehow, the planet did not lurch to a stop in its tracks.  I've searched, but I can't find any mention of which washroom they made him use, or if the Representative from Delaware at that time objected and staged a series of indignant, preening news conferences about it.

     I'd suggest that some House members ought to try growing up, but I suppose I should just accept that their districts chose to send politicians in need of maturing.  I sure hope their time in the junior chamber helps.
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* Originally typoed as "Congrossional," which is about right.

Oops

     Yesterday at work about did in my legs.

     It should have been no big deal.  I've done it dozens of times: we change all the replaceable light bulbs on the tower in late Fall, breathing on the dice to shade the odds of having to send a rigger up there in the worst of winter to relamp a dead beacon.  The steady-burning sidelights are almost optional.  Each level has three of them and we don't even have to report them if they fail.  A single one out can safely be left for better weather.  But the flashing beacons are a different thing.  They're the brightest lights on the tower, each one with a pair of 640 Watt light bulbs the size of a child's head.  You can lose one of a pair and it's still okay, but if both go out, they've got to be replaced as soon as it is practical.

     So the workers go up with a big bag of new bubs and work their way down.  It takes a few minutes at each level, working in the chill wind, opening the red glass covers on the small side lights, unlatching and hinging open the big beacons, hundreds of feet in the air, careful to not drop anything, swapping the new for the old.

     The tower has an elevator, but the elevator doesn't have any controls in the car.  It's barely got a door, just a scissors gate that pulls across the open side like an old-time baby barrier.  Down at the base of the tower, in the big box that houses the 1950s relays that control the hoist, there's a narrow panel that opens to reveal a disconnect switch and three big push buttons with molded-in labels: UP, DOWN, STOP.  The crew carries radios and I get one of my own.

     Under normal circumstances, once the initial long ride to the highest light is done, I clip the radio to my belt and go on about my other work.  When it's time to move, they call me and I doubletime outside to the controls.  "Ready to move?"
     "Down!"
     "Heading down," and I push the button.
     There's a reason for all that back and forth: there aren't any second chances.  Clearance is tight, with the ladder zipping past a couple of feet from the scissors gate.  Any bit of kit sticking out, a big clip, a loop of rope, can become lethal.

     This time, the crew had three radios.  Two were charged up and ready to go.  One had a bad battery, or maybe it hadn't been seated quite right in the charger overnight.  It worked okay sitting in the charger, but it had to be in the charger or it was inert.  I needed to be within earshot of it.  Outdoors.

     The tower crew layered up before they climbed: long johns, work pants, T-shirt, a heavy shirt over it, coveralls and short jackets, knit caps, gloves.  I was dressed for the site, where the inside temperature runs 60 to 65°F, and I had a winter coat, about mid-thigh length.  My work pants are pretty good, but I haven't had nice heavy ones since Carhartt redesigned their women's double-fronts with lighter denim.  My legs got very cold and I dealt with it by ignoring it.  I was pretty creaky by the time the relamping was done.

     I wasn't in much better shape at the end of the day.  I limped through the grocery picking up stuff for supper.  Pain in my knees woke me up a couple of times overnight.

     This morning I limped my way through a quick shower and snack ahead of the online writing critique group, and had a nice brunch (a cheese, sausage and piparra pepper omelet) between it and the Zoom-session main meeting of the writer's club.  Stood up from my chair after the business meeting and ahead of the month's speaker -- and just about didn't get vertical.  I used the break to take acetaminophen.

     For the speaker, it's cameras and microphones off.  I adjourned to my bed and listened from there.  Dozed off afterwards, woke up pinned down by cats, had supper (Tam ordered in), and have not moved a whole lot.  The damp, chilly weather hasn't helped any.

     Tomorrow is supposed to be nicer.  I'll work on some projects involving motion and see if that helps.  Today, it's OTC painkillers and rest.  

Out The Door

     An important thing was supposed to arrive up at the North Campus at noon.  Then it was going to show up at eight a.m.  Now it's back to noon.  --But it doesn't matter, because I have a crew that will arrive to do some tower work between ten and eleven.

     It all adds up hello and goodbye for this morning.

All Right, That's Enough

     Most people agree that Washington, D.C. is a semi-evil clown circus, or at least the parts that the fed.gov lurks in are.  They start to disagree when you get down to details -- this Administration or that one, one party more than another, and somehow it's almost never their guy or gal, just a prime clown or three and a hand-wavy bunch of "them."

     This general notion of buffoonery, wickedness and performative showpersonship gets applied with a high degree of freakoutery when control of Congress and/or the Presidency passes from one party to the other.*  Maybe that's as it should be.  Maybe with only two parties having a chance to frob (see Usage Notes at the link) around with the levers of power, a degree of viewing-with-alarm is useful in the same way as a product-safety team trying to figure out all the ways a thing can go wrong.

     But it becomes tiresome, and never more so when speculation soars to third and fourth-order effects: If nominee W is confirmed for office X and if they proceed to remove department Y and rule Z, then....  Whoa, nelly!  One worry at a time.

     Some -- in my opinion, most -- of Mr. Trump's nominees are underqualified and overconfident, which is never a good combination.  Many of the things they might do, outlined in Agenda 47 or Project 2025, would negatively affect U. S. citizens and residents, and I'm opposed to those things.  But they have not done them yet; they have not reached a position from which they would be able to do them yet, and there is no certainty that they will.

     There are probably awful times coming.  We have never before elected a President who swore vengeance as a big part of his campaign (not that any previous holders of that office were plaster saints).  But it has not happened yet and diving too deep into they-mights and what-ifs will only get in the way.  2025's House and Senate will be even more delicately balanced than 2024's, and those contentious, deliberative bodies can be counted on to do what they do best and were intended to do: contend and deliberate.  In public.  Loudly.

     Pop some popcorn.  The first couple of months will be interesting.  Yes, things could get pretty bad, but the roller-coaster is already clicking up the hill and there's no getting out until the end of the ride.  Might as well take each climb and swoop down as they come.
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* I'd love to tell you the United States is a multiparty democracy, mentioning the Greens, Libertarians, New Whigs and so on, with a nod to the handful of fiercely independent members of Congress, but as a practical matter, it ain't.  The little-party guys essentially never make it to the center ring and the Is all pick a party to caucus with.  If you want to get anything done, you'll have to choose the party that makes you hold your nose the least, and try to coax or shove them in the direction you want to go.

A Frustrating Pair Of Eyes

     In October, I had my regular eye exam and, of course, my vision had changed.  I own three frames (four counting sunglasses) and it was time for the round ones that I really like.  I left them with the eye doctor and they told me my glasses would be ready in three or four weeks.  My lenses require a complicated, multi-prism grind.  It's never fast.*

     Three weeks later, I picked them up, put them on and looked around the store, enjoying the sharpened vision.  I thanked the tech and clipped the matching sunglasses on.  They didn't fit as well as they had, but hey, new lenses.  Went out into the sunshine, drove to work and didn't take a good look at the new glasses in a mirror until I was washing my hands a couple of hours later.  One kind of round lens, one egg-shaped lens, the frames forced around them with some buckling for the least-round side.  They looked awful.

     I called the eye doctor immediately and took the glasses back the next day, where at first they saw only the frame damage, then realized neither lens was the right shape.  They sent the glasses back to their lab -- a different one than the one that has made my lenses for over a decade; the practice was sold some time ago and the new owners have their own lab.  That was almost a month ago.

     Monday, they called me.  "Our lab says they can't fix your glasses.  We're sending them to a different lab. Those frames are so old, you know, it's hard to put lenses in them...."  My round frames are maybe five years old.  There have been no major changes to the way eyeglass lenses for into frames in my lifetime, and hardly any in the last century.

     The frames are probably ruined.  My trust certainly is.  The "one-hour" place I went to when I needed vision correction in a hurry did okay and while I like the guy who has been doing my eye exams, I won't trust his employer to make me glasses again.

     My vision was terrible when I was a child.  I successfully faked it until third grade, when my teacher figured out that I couldn't read the blackboard at all, and that I thought it was just a cruel joke that everyone got except me.  (Mom: "So that's why you sit so near the TV!")  My world looked like an Impressionist painting, seen too close, all fuzzy blobs and smears.  It matters to me to be able to see clearly.
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* After cataract surgery, I had a "one-hour eyeglasses" place make up a pair of glasses that only corrected my greatly-changed nearsightedness, while I waited for the astigmatism to settle down.  A month later, I went back to have lenses for my full prescription made and the technician told me, "Okay, come back this afternoon and..." before doing a double-take at the prescription and apologizing, "Oh.  Sorry.  This will be two or three weeks.  We can't make these here."  Yep.

Another Pair Of Eyes

     The story ended up around 5970 words.  It's usually worthwhile to cut; early drafts have excess verbiage and little dead-end bits that don't advance the plot or shed light on the theme.

     Such cuts carry their own risks.  Extra words get left in; essential words get left out.  Tense and number shift.  It is very difficult to spot on the seventh or twelfth read-through.  I see what I intended to say, not what I wrote.

     I was very glad that Tam agreed to do a last-minute reading and markup.  Sure enough, she found a half-dozen glitches -- and one misuse of the subjunctive that still feels right me.  I changed it anyway; better to color inside the lines as much as possible, so you can scribble outside of them when it's necessary.

     Will the editors like it?  I don't know.  I do know that having extra eyes on the work has bailed me out many times.  Between the members of my fiction critique group to Tam's well-informed once-over, if the end result reads smoothly and makes sense, they played large parts in getting it there.

Writing....

     At present, I'm 6,712 words into finishing a 6,000 word short story to be submitted for an anthology -- and if that sounds off, consider that I started at 7,230.

     Two or three pages of cutting left to do.

Ipse Dixie

     House Speaker Mike Johnson might need to do a little homework.  In an interview Sunday, he griped, "I wish the Senate would simply do its job of advise and consent and allow the president to put the persons in his Cabinet of his choosing." [Emphasis mine.]

     Except that's not how it works, and you don't have to take my word for it.  Ask the arch-conservative Federalist Society.

     Article II, Section 2, Clause 2 does not mean "drop hints and go along."  It obliges the U. S. Senate to behave like the deliberative body they are, to openly discuss the nominee and vote on confirming their appointment, yes or no.  Getting the job is not guaranteed simply because the Chief Executive thinks you're the right disruptor for the position.

     Yes, it's awkward and inefficient to require the President and Senate to do some give and take over his choice of office-holders.  But those offices are, per the Constitution, created by Congress.  This back-and-forth is an attempt to fix two problems: the often-abused power of the British Crown and especially Royal Governors to create and fill high offices, and the post-Revolution (but pre-Constitution) arrogation by State Legislatures of those same powers.  By splitting them up and requiring some degree of debate, the Framers hoped to moderate and democratize the process.  You can think of it as a kind of grown-up version of the childhood method to fairly divide treats: one kid slices the pie, the other chooses who gets what piece.

     A large, powerful government had damned well better be slow and inefficient when it comes to appointive office like Cabinet members, Department Chairs and Ambassadors: those boys and girls can do a whole lot of damage, blow though budgets, mess up important projects, insult allies, stumble into wars with enemies and more.  Let's take our time.  Let's give the Senate, eyes and ears of the fifty States, a chance to look 'em over and put the matter to a vote.

Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The...Frying Pan?

     That's what I did.  Over the years, I have gone though many small skillets.*  They see heavy use.  They get dropped, or scratched or plain worn out.  When the warnings about PTFE-family non-stick coatings ramped up (you really don't want to keep using them after even one tiny scratch or ding), I bought alternatives.  And every single time I have done so, the stuff is better.

     When I bought my big "Always" pan, I knew it wasn't ideal for browning.  The coating was otherwise remarkable -- genuinely non-stick, easy to clean, relatively durable (they're on version 2.0 now, and also sell an enameled cast-iron model that browns well).  Around the same time, I replaced my smaller skillet with a dimestore purchase, and it was okay -- the ceramic coating was great for browning, not extraordinarily non-stick but very good, and it took a little effort to clean.  The finish on the outside tended to wear away.

     The little five-and-dime skillet got ugly, and I picked up a new frying pan a month ago.  It was a surprise!  The state of the art has advanced.  The ceramic coating is as non-stick as the Always (still going strong, btw), but it does great for browning.  It cleans up easily.

     None of these are especially dishwasher-friendly, but not needing to be soaked and scrubbed means that's not a problem -- and immaterial for me until I replace the dishwasher.

     The pros -- and high-end amateurs -- will likely keep on using cast iron and steel pans, for a number of good reasons.  But for daily use, modern non-stick cookware is better than it has ever been, and has shown remarkable improvement over the last few years.  If you're still using "old reliable" Teflon, you might want to give the newer stuff a try.
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* A term I grew up using interchangeably with "frying pan."  They're not quite the same thing, depending on where you live, and a saute pan is yet another thing, but other than a "spider," you can use them all for the same job. Oh, a spider pan?  A classic, but very uncommon  Generally handmade these days.

The Best And The Brightest?

      I was going to do a deep-dive think piece on the incoming President's Cabinet proposals and other high-level choices, but -- really?  Do I have to?  A guy who claims not to have washed his hands in ten years because "he's never seen a germ" and he is "inoculating himself;" another who doesn't believe in vaccines or fluoridation is put up to be in charge of public health; a woman who carries water for the Russians and Red China slated to oversee our intelligence agencies; a puppy-shooter to run Homeland Security* and a widely-rumored sex pest who barely dodged a House ethics investigation for Attorney General.

     Those are just highlights.  I expected partisanship; that's not unusual.  I expected he'd insist on personal loyalty bordering on devotion.  I did not expect slap-in-the-face incompetence and unqualification.

     If it wasn't happening in my own country, it would be fascinating to watch it all come unstuck.  Which it will.  What the price tag might be, in dollars and international standing, in the loss of domestic tranquility, that remains to be seen.  I can tell you who will pay it, and it won't be anyone in the halls of power.  It will be you and me, no matter who we voted for.
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* Hey, you can shoot your own dog.  Depending on circumstances, I will think ill of your for it, but you do generally have that right.  This nation's law enforcement agencies do not, however, have a real good record for not shooting other people's dogs, even when the dog is properly restrained or kenneled.  It's a small thing, but it's indicative of the general trend.

No Leaf Work Today

     We were busy with other things and, I have to admit, I have felt pretty yucky.  Better once the sun came out, but that was late in the afternoon.

     I did housework instead.  It is, after all, the work that is always there to do.

Autumn Time, Autumn Time...

     The leaves are falling and so is the rain.  Tam and I missed our chance to mow up the dried leaves last weekend, so it looks like we'll be mowing up wet ones this weekend.  It's no fun, and the bags can't be more than about half full without getting too heavy for the city's crews to lift.  (We only have to do a dozen or so; they'll be doing thousands -- if they don't tear up their backs.)

     The good news is, dry leaves are a lot dustier, and I don't get along well with it.  So I'm going to call it a win -- an icky, slimy, heavy win.

Hacking Congress

     Political commentators and professional viewers-with-alarm have been having a field day with President-elect (and convicted felon) Donald Trump's* nominees for key jobs in his Administration, especially Fox News talking head Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Defense; former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Director of National Intelligence; and Representative Matt  Gaetz, Attorney General.

     All three have been subject to somewhat sniffy observations that they've got to get through Senate vetting and confirmation before assuming their posts, and the GOP has an extremely slim majority in a body that is traditionally quite protective of their power.  The Senate, we're told, will dig in their heels.  The GOP hasn't a single vote to give up in that body, and so these three have barely a chance of getting through the process.

     Not so fast.  The nominees appear to be quite confident.  Matt Gaetz even went so far as to resign from the U. S. House of Representatives.†  Mr. Trump has already posted on social media, calling for a workaround: "Any Republican Senator seeking the coveted LEADERSHIP position in the United States Senate must agree to Recess Appointments [...]."  Charlie Sykes thinks the incoming President Pro Tem might do just that, tradition and Separation of Powers be damned.  --But you see, he doesn't have to.

     Here's how it works, with everyone ducking blame: Article II, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution give the President the power to make appointments when Congress is in recess, appointments which stand until the end of the next session.  And Article I, Section 5, Clause 4 requires the House and Senate to mutually consent if they adjourn for more than three days.  If they cannot agree, if one body wants to cut school for a week and the other vows stubbornly to remain on the job?  Why, under Article II, Section 3, it falls to the President: "...in Case of Disagreement between them, with Respect to the Time of Adjournment, he may adjourn them to such Time as he shall think proper...."  This power has never been exercised, but all it takes is the House proposing an adjournment the Senate finds unacceptable and hey, presto: Mr. Trump's got the magic wand.  The Speaker can profess innocence -- his House members just wanted to go fishing, or hear from constituents; the President Pro Tem of the Senate can thunder and fume -- how dare the House treat this weighty matter so lightly!  The House and Senate fail to agree and Mr. Trump pulls the plug, after which they can all knock off work and repair to the bar, or perhaps somebody's yacht, free and clear.  Whatever happens after that is on Mr. Trump, not them.

     That's how it can work.  Or perhaps the threat alone will be enough.  Or maybe we've all been played, and these three particularly egregious choices are no more than distractions, slipped into the deal to be discarded while other, slightly less objectionable picks sail through.

     Our Constitution is hackable.  It was written by men who thought the people applying it wouldn't be trying to pull a fast one.  They did their best to not leave any openings, but nobody -- and no document -- is perfect.
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* After some thought, I have decided to give convicted felon and adjudicated sexual assaulter Donald Trump a recognition I have accorded to only one or two other Presidents: I'm going to mention his worst behavior at least once whenever his name comes up.  Woodrow Wilson and Andrew Jackson were virulent racists; in particular, Wilson resegregated the Federal civil service, which had become a colorblind meritocracy.  In so doing, he helped set the stage for the racial unrest that followed, over a generation later.  Mr. Trump is a scofflaw -- and we're about to see just how far he will follow that particular star.
 
† Credit where credit is due!  I'd like to thank Mr. Trump for doing what the courts and his House peers were unable to do: get Matt Gaetz out of Congress.  It's something.

Ungentlemanly Gloating

     I'm hearing a lot of reports -- some of them first-hand -- of men, mostly young, saying -- often, shouting -- rudely sexist things to women, also mostly young.

     There's no point in quoting any of it.  You can easily find that information online if you're curious.  The words are intended to demean, to disempower and to anger.

     A frequent justification for this behavior is "Trump won," implying that, by extension, an extreme social conservatism won.  And hey, he did win, with a definitive electoral college victory.  But that system is designed to produce decisive results with population-weighted winner-take-all outcomes in most states.  As a whole, your fellow Americans expressed a much closer opinion: 75,551,895 for Mr. Trump and 72,372,332 for Ms. Harris, a difference of two percent.*

     So for all practical purposes, even if you read the results as every Republican voter wanting the ladies limited to church, children and kitchen, that's only half of the voters -- and the other half, Democrat voters, opted for a female candidate who (among other issues) had pledged to support women's abortion rights as established under Roe v. Wade prior to Dobbs.  We're all locked in this room together, the debate is not over, and dunking on people doesn't advance anyone's argument.

     Approximately sixty percent turnout means we don't know the opinion of  forty percent of the voting age adults, and adjusts the results to be 30% one way, 29% the other and 40% wondering if it's lunchtime yet.

     A recurring trope in the 1960s-70s science fiction I grew up reading was War Between The Sexes and from Philip Wylie to Joanna Russ and beyond, it never ended well.  It won't if we run the experiment at full scale in real life, either.
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* Professional drivers, closed course; do not attempt to hand-tally the votes in your basement.  These results are not entirely final, but they're not going to change much.

Turning Over A New Leaf Briefcase

     A problem with a light-blue collar job like mine is you need all the things: a toolbox (my employer supplies tools, but they're often in use by others and I have more than a few specialized gadgets they don't provide) and a briefcase: a screwdriver and a laptop.  (And boy, have I needed the laptop!  My employer's computers are, sensibly enough, locked down six ways from Sunday: you don't install your own software on them, and you don't connect them to strange network ports.  I often need to do those things to work on their equipment, so I have carried my own aging Surface Pro.  In the last six months, I finally scored a company laptop with admin privileges, first time since the old Kaypro II in the late 1980s.)

     I'm only on my third toolbox; the first one was tackle box sized, a retro oak box I'd originally purchased for a portable ham radio setup.*  It was too heavy and too crowded.  Replaced with a nylon-canvas "doctor's bag," which I outgrew just as it was wearing out.  The larger version I replaced it with has held up well.  The sides are lined with pockets inside and out, and it opens wide, just like the doctor's bags of old, making it easy to find and get to the tools it carries.

     Briefcases are another story.  I've gone through a lot of them -- outgrew, worn out, infested by ants (don't keep sugar in your briefcase, kids).  None have been perfect.  Unlike the toolbox, which usually gets parked in my locker at the main location or in a cabinet at the North Campus depending on where I need it most, my briefcase travels with me every day.  Less than a year before the pandemic, I bought an inexpensive brown canvas messenger bag with lots of  pockets.  I decorated it with sarcastic "merit badges" (invisibility, telepathy with plants, soldering, mind control, coffee consumption, TV color bars in a red circle with a diagonal line across them, the Raspberry Pi logo and so on).  It held the Surface, my Macbook Air, headphones with attached microphone, serial adapter, USB network adapter, pens, pencils, highlighter pens, notebooks, a few tools that I need wherever I go (#3 Phillips screwdriver, 1/8" Allen driver, Euroblock screwdriver, backup flashlight), toothbrush, toothpaste and a change of socks and undies and more.  There was even a pocket for notebooks and manuscripts for whatever fiction I was working on.  It finally started to wear out.  My Surface has gone non-support; at that point it was barely acceptable to my employer as long as I kept the wifi off, and I have an Official Laptop now.  So I pulled a slightly smaller bag from the small collection of ones I have accumulated over years of looking, and loaded it with a reduced set of supplies and widgetry.  Yesterday was its first use.  So far, so good, though I miss the pen loops and merit badges on the old one.  I think I have a solution for the first, and as for the second, I'm working on it.

     I wonder how long this one will last?
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* A Ten-Tec 555 "Scout"  transceiver with plenty of band modules, power supply, tuner, key, headphones, logbook, a spool of just-in-case wire and all the parts of a end-fed windowsill antenna except the telescopic antenna itself.  There wasn't a bit of room left over.  I tested it at the North Campus and it interfered with the fire alarm system, oops.  But, hey, that was a fluke, right?  Got to the hotel (I was traveling to take a class for work) and there, behind the check-in desk, was the panel for the exact same model of fire alarm system!  I did a lot of listening that week.

The Eleventh Day Of The Eleventh Month

     It's Veteran's Day -- and I do thank you for your service.  It was Armistice Day to begin with, the end of a war that left a scar twisting across the face of Europe.  Some of the WW I battlefield is still uninhabitable.

     Someone who was my age when the guns fell silent at the eleventh hour in 1918 would have had clear memories of the U. S. Civil war.  That includes some of the soldiers and sailors.  One officer is known to have served during both wars -- and the ones in between.  And the scars from the Civil War remain, too, not as dead or as deadly as France's Red Zones but they're still there, etched across the land, scrawled across history, written on gravestones and in family histories.  War extracts a terrible price and it falls most heavily on the young and strong.  Even in peacetime, most military service consists of long hours of hard work for low pay.

     Those people in uniform are us.  Just like you, your neighbors, the people you work with and the kids you went to school with.  They're a mixed bag -- smart, dumb, short, tall, liberals, conservatives and people who just don't care about politics.  They grew up poor, middle-class and wealthy.  They're every color and all the same color -- green or Navy blue or whatever.  What they have in common is they stepped up.  They are doing -- or they have done -- the job, often far from home, frequently in terrible weather, and, at times, with the understanding there are other people not too far away who intend to kill them.

     I try not to be too glib with, "Thank you for your service."  That service is not something you can nod at acknowledging one day a year and call it good enough.

Good News From Redmond

     My decade-old copy of Word 2010 does install in a Windows 11 machine.  It comes with the same caveats it had grown on the old computer -- you don't get the full panoply of features the latest version provides -- but it did install and run, and it looks like the things I need it for still work.

     All this thanks to Tam's saved-back DVD/CD-ROM drive.  I have one somewhere, but it's stashed in the back of one of several different desk drawers, and when she noticed me digging and asked what for, her drive was ready to hand.

     I hang well to the back of the technology curve.  This desktop computer, like its predecessor, cost a little over a hundred dollars.  Because I don't play computer games,* I don't need extreme speed or the latest graphics; most kinds of software don't need that much horsepower.
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* There's a story there.  I spent a lot of my time in college on a PLATO terminal (and the school's shared-time mainframes, a DEC-10 and a PDP-9), playing games and taking online learning modules that had little to do with my major.  I spent a lot more time at the campus radio station.  Between the two, classwork suffered.  The electronics classes weren't a problem; everything except circuit analysis was essentially review.  And first semester Applied Math For Technology was a delight.  It was when the university decided to save costs and fold that class into Calculus in the second semester that things got dicey -- especially since our working-engineer math professor was replaced by a pure-math guy who had been sent to our extension campus after getting crosswise with his department head.  It would have been a good time to buckle down and really apply myself.  19 year old Bobbi spent even more time on the PLATO terminal instead.  Pity it didn't offer a calculus course....  I did learn how to program in BASIC, which used to be handy.

Left-Handed Mouse

     Setting up a new computer always reaches an awkward phase for me, where the old computer keyboard and mouse are still where they always were, but I'm starting to use the new one.  I'm pretty good at using a mouse left-handed, ring finger doing the primary clicking, but it takes a little extra thought.

     Work required us to change to Windows 11 months ago.  Home has lagged, but my old computer was getting slower and slower, almost certainly a thermal issue compounded by an over-full hard drive.  So it was time.

     Who wants to bet my out-of-date (and non-subscription) version of Word won't install?  I'll probably buy the standalone version, since I don't like software that you never pay off.  Word lets me check my LibreOffice files for compatibility, and it does one thing I can't figure out how to get the open version to do: it lets you edit the normally-hidden formatting commands.

Making A Hash Of It

     Down the hall, Tam is enjoying the first of the Sunday morning political talk shows.  "They will be lit," she told me, which is apparently a good thing.  It's certainly going to give the pundit class something to other than hanging out on Washington, D.C. streetcorners, offering to debate passers-by for small change.

     Me, I'm onto food.  Having come into a little money thanks to a small across-the-board bonus at work,* on Friday I was at a Meijer store, which is sort of what Walmart would be if it was a little nicer, or a super Target with no sense of style and a much better grocery section.  And in that grocery section, they routinely stock corned beef brisket!

     It may not be gourmet fare, but if you bake one in a covered pan with a little water over a slow grill for three and a half hours, adding potatoes, carrots, celery and cabbage for the last half of that, you've got a meal to be reckoned with -- and leftovers!  Supper was fine last night.  We started in on the current season of The Diplomat, which is only a little weird for me: Keri Russell bears a strong resemblance to my older sister at the same age, and watching your own sister as the U.S. Ambassador to the UK is...disconcerting.  Big sis has been doing an okay job of it so far, though.

     This morning, a couple of Yukon Gold potatoes and about the third of the leftover corned beef, diced, made some of the best corned beef hash I've had in a long time.  And I've still got more corned beef in the freezer to do something else with, by and by.  Possibly soup.
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* I'm not entirely sure why, and rather than bite the hand that feeds me with unflattering speculation, I'll assume it's because we all took our unpaid furloughs during the pandemic without much complaint.

Reading

     Over the last week, I reread Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness.   I always fret my way through the last part, when Estraven and Genly Ai make a daring escape through a daunting environment; somehow she wrote it in such a way that the outcome still feels in doubt, no matter how many times I read the book.

     On one level, it's the story of not-quite First Contact with not-quite aliens* on their home planet; on another, it's a tale of intrigue that weaves its way through two governments, one an all-encompassing bureaucratic state akin to the old Soviet Union, gulags and all, and the other a messy European-style monarchy with a strong Parliament and a very loose sense of national unity.  She is not a huge fan of either, though the first clearly comes through as the worst: they're not even good cooks!  On yet another level, it's a story of nearly incredible derring-do against terrible odds by a pair of unlikely allies.  It's also a chance for her to illustrate the remarkable uselessness of having accurate answers to the wrong questions.  And it's recursive; the telling, mostly in the first person by the protagonists, ends with one of them preparing to tell the story again, much as he (and others) have just told it to the reader.

     Le Guin was not the kind of writer who sits down and works out character, background and plot in excruciating detail before writing.  She tended to make it up as she went along, discovering in the first draft who these people were and what they were about.  It worked for her, thanks to a wide-ranging intellect and keen sense for character: she wrote about people, first and foremost, and for all that you can read much of her work as allegory, in her mature work, she never loses sight of the essential humanity of those she writes about.

     Stories are about people, about people to whom things happen and who make things happen.  All the rest of it is just decoration.
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* In the universe where much of her science fiction is set, the original human race is not from Earth.  The Hain have been around far, far longer humans have lived on Earth.  While their present civilization is portrayed as wise, gentle and driven by regret (and sometimes annoyingly superior about it), their starfaring culture has risen and fallen many times.  Some incarnations of it were heartlessly willing to employ genetic modifications on the people established in the colonies they left on planets all over the galaxy.  Now all those varied peoples are finding one another once again and it's not a smooth process.

The Way Forward

     I've been thinking about what to do next.  Four years of catastrophizing whatever comes out of the White House and Congress -- and the U. S. Supreme Court -- doesn't appeal to me.  Anyone who wants that can find it in plenty of places, often from subject-matter experts.  I'm not going to ignore it, either -- but no Commander in Chief is the boss of me.  All Presidents are temporary employees, hired for a term of four years with a possibility of four more, and then they're out.  And for those four years, the only time they're off the clock is when they're unconscious.  People figure Presidents they dislike are living large, but the job is its own punishment, especially if the office-holder works at it.

     In my opinion, the electorate just handed a machine gun to an angry chimp; but he's got it now and there's no pretending otherwise.  Life goes on nevertheless, with a new and worrying hazard.  There are still meals to be cooked, stories to be written, books to be read, carpentry and electronic projects to be built, maybe even a little sewing.*  I've got a retirement to figure out; I'll be poor no matter what, but if I work it right and the economy doesn't go too nuts, I won't go broke until after I'm dead.

     All of that is of more interest to me, and maybe to my readers, than politics.
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* I keep putting that off, I think for fear of being bad at it.  That's a silly reason; part of learning (or in this case, relearning) a skill is accepting that you're not going to be proficient right away.  The other part?  I bought my little Singer Featherweight folding portable sewing machine so I could easily carry it to visit Mom and sew.  That never happened; I was always too busy and all I have left is regret and memories of good advice. (Prices for these little machines have climbed steadily; Singer made around two million of them but they are in great demand from quilters and anyone who wants a small, full-featured sewing machine.)

Three Takes

 Staying Home:
     Despite the credit I have given Mr. Trump for driving up voter turnout, it was down this year.  The final numbers aren't in as I write; Arizona and Nevada are still counting.  But it looks like a little over 139 million people voted Red or Blue in 2024, while 155 million did so in 2020 -- and who stayed home Tuesday was significant: from 74 million Republican votes in 2020 to 72 million in 2024 isn't a big change -- but the Democrats fell from 81 million in 2020 to almost 68 million in 2024.

     Those missing numbers don't show up in the also-ran columns, either.  Apparently, 13 million Democrats looked at the race and said, "Meh," or "A pox on both of 'em."

     Pundits are busy mining and refining faint veins of "why" and partisans are touting it as a mandate, but it looks like blue apathy instead of a red surge to me.

El Camino Real:
     There is a throughline in the American Presidency that I can't quite trace.  It will take a real historian, preferably one with a couple of thousand years of hindsight.  But I have got the broad outline, and it runs from roots in Alexander Hamilton, to Andrew Jackson  and through Abraham Lincoln's wartime Presidency, lingers on Woodrow Wilson's expansion of Presidential powers (and loathing for Congressional vacillation and inefficiency), grows under Franklin D. Roosevelt coping with a global economic depression and global war, on to Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan (especially encouraged by the Federalist Society) and blooms during Donald Trump's first term of office.  The Unitary Executive Theory is alive and well -- and ready to do some kicking.

     There's a rough parallel in Roman history: the accretion of power and authority in their executive positions, both before Caesar and after.  The appeal of "Stroke of the pen, law of the land"* is undeniable; we're wired up to want quick, bold solutions to difficult problems.  But this is a problem in and of itself.  Wilson argued for top-down government modeled on the patriarchal families of Classical antiquity, the basis for everything from Kaiser Wilhelm the Second's Germany to Stalin's Soviet Union: it's got a strong bias toward autocracy.  For all Wilson's impatience with Congress and the separation of powers, those things exist for good reason.

     Most U. S. Presidents have run some version of the American cursus honorum: military service followed by a series of civic offices, both elected and appointed.  Not every President touches every base, but nearly all of them have worked their way up, usually with some kind of legislative experience, some exposure to the give and take governance, some direct contact with what happens when slogans and ideals encounter the art of the possible.  Mr. Trump did not.  Nearly all business enterprises operate with an inherently unitary executive and little or no input from majoritarian assemblies; voting stockholders are hardly legislators.  Business has a strong bias towards autocracy.

     Do you want kings?  Because this is how you get kings.

It Can Go Boom:
     Ukraine's got a lot to lose in the aftermath of the 2024 Presidential election.  Ukraine is a country that could build a fission bomb over a long weekend and crank out fusion weapons in a matter of weeks.  And if you'd like more worries, with a few hours effort they could produce "dirty" bombs that render a patch of land uninhabitable for months, years or centuries.  Moscow's a target -- but Russian support centers and bases along the border are easier to reach, and a nuclear cordon sanitaire keeping Russian expansionism at bay could grow from there.  It's not a new idea; I cribbed it from Dean Ing, and he got the germ of it from Robert A. Heinlein.

     That's just one of the ways things could go sideways if Ukraine runs out of options.  I remain convinced that Russia's invasion is a festering boil that is more likely than not to erupt into global conflict and those odds are worse under Mr. Trump than they have been under Mr. Biden.  I hope I'm wrong.
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* People start fights over the context of this comment, but there's no denying it stuck.

Well, That's Over

     It wasn't the outcome I expected -- but I wasn't expecting it very strongly.  Hope is for saps, as the Greeks warned us in the story of Pandora.  One side or the other opens up the box every election, and what comes out is rarely never rainbows and unicorns.

     On social media, a few people have written, "This fundamentally changes my understanding of the American people," or similar notions and that's what hope gets you -- it was our response to the pandemic that put a spotlight on the American psyche for me, mostly our reactions to the measures that tried to limit it: a slim majority of us are ignorant idiots, suspicious and resentful of expertise and willing to ride "You ain't the boss of me" all the way to the ground like Slim Pickens on an atomic bomb, even when reason and logic clearly shows that going along leads to the best outcome (and you can kick the would-be bosses to the curb later).

     So Mr. Trump won, both in the Electoral College and (so far) the popular vote.  A majority of us chose anger over joy, rants over laughs, an inarticulate man over an articulate woman, a promise of mass deportation and high tariffs over taxing billionaires and oligarchs while providing paths to citizenship for sincere immigrants, the government (of mostly men) controlling women's bodies instead of minding their own business.  

     As I write, control of the next U. S. Senate will rest in Republican hands by the thinnest of margins; the balance of power in the House is still undecided but it, too, will be on a knife's edge.  That's not a mandate; it's a great big caution flag.  I doubt it will be heeded.

     If Mr. Trump gets his tariffs, look for economic hard times before the middle of his term.  Look for higher prices; tariffs are paid by the importer, not the exporter, and are passed along to you and me.  Even when tariffs succeed in encouraging domestic production to replace imports, the heavy thumb of government remains on the scales, impeding the workings of the free market: the version made here only needs to be cheaper than the cost of the import plus the tariff.

     And about making that stuff here?  If Mr. Trump gets the mass deportations he and many of his supporters long for, it will rip out the bottom of the labor market.  Those low-wage workers will be gone, and it was never that they "did the jobs Americans won't do," it was that Americans won't do those jobs for such low pay.  Assuming the now-open jobs can be filled, they're not going to be filled as cheaply as they were, and you know where that shows up?  Mr. CEO and his Board of Directors aren't going to take a haircut over it!  You and I will pay more for those goods and services.  Of course, we'll want raises too, and when wages and prices chase one another, you know what you get?  Inflation.

     The darker side of mass deportation is that if it is carried out as described, the result will be a horror that will shame this nation for generations; the scale of the effort and the incarceration required will inevitably produce tragic results. 

     Between people who glory in chaos and violence (and/or grift), like Steve Bannon and Stephen Miller, between nutjobs like Robert R. Kennedy, Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, between "Christian Nationalists" and "Dominionists" who are hoping to ride the multiply-divorced convicted felon to cultural control (look up what they say; the language is Biblical but their intent is clear: he's a means to an end), between men like Vivek Ramaswamy and J. D. Vance who have made themselves willing tools of democracy-skeptical oligarchs, Mr. Trump's second term will be fraught with wild notions, fringe theories, and cliques with interests greatly divergent from those of the country as a whole, if not downright inimical to them.  Elon Musk is brilliant promoter and a good judge of when to get into a line of business, but he couldn't manage or engineer his way out of an oversized boot with the instructions on the heel.

     A majority of my fellow citizens have chosen to run this experiment at full scale.  The party they voted for won the election.  That does not automatically mean it was the right choice.

     Time will tell. I remember how things were four years ago, how things were from 2016 to 2020, beginning with lies and ending in insurrection.  It was not a halcyon time, dripping with milk and honey.  Don't count on any nourishing sweetness this time either, not even if you're pale, hale, well-off and male.

We Didn't Take The Bus

     Tam and I react to stress in typical ways: we get snappish and prone to argue.  But that's not all of it.  I fret over my appearance (oh, the vanity!) and dawdle; she wants things done on the bounce, hup, hup!  She wants to get it o-v-e-r and move on.

     So of course we were running late and as I tried one more time to keep my bangs from looking as if a cat had slept in them (not unlikely), Tamara made a Command Decision: "I'll drive us to the polling place.  The bus will take too long."

     And in short order, thus it was done.  Of course there was nowhere to park in the small lot at the little neighborhood church where we usually vote.*  She dropped me off and went in search of a spot.  I walked over to the end of the line, got there and realized it was just a bend: the line was twice as long as I had thought!

     At the real end of the line, a woman with campaign literature greeted me.  She turned out to be the at-large school board candidate I had decided to vote for, who was very much at large: "This is my second stop and I have plenty more to visit before six this evening!"  Not especially well-funded, she was applying shoe leather to the problem, exactly the kind of initiative my research had led me to expect from her.

     Tam showed up after a few minutes and the line moved along briskly.  We were inside the building and getting our ID checked in less than thirty minutes, and had voted before another fifteen had passed.

     That's done.  Poll workers said turnout had been steady at about that level, with a little bump up during morning rush hour.  They were hearing that other sites were at least as busy and some were much busier.  As divided as opinions are about Mr. Trump, he's been a real boon to voter turnout: people are motivated to vote against him or for him, but they are certainly motivated.

     Now we'll wait for the results.
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* Indianapolis/Marion County took advantage of Indiana's voter ID laws to implement "vote anywhere:" your ID calls up the appropriate ballot for your address and you can go to any polling place.  Most people still vote at their old familiar spot, but even those move around.  While living in and near Broad Ripple, I've voted at a synagogue, a temporarily unused public school building, the gym of a private Catholic elementary/middle school and at least two different churches.  Voting in the United States remains a wonderfully amateur, slapdash affair, despite sophisticated machines and a small core of dedicated professionals: the poll workers are just plain folks, trying to maintain a little order in chaos without a whole lot of direction.  Lines snake around almost at random and you do end up getting what you need when you need it, but it often seems unlikely until it happens.  I trust this process: it hasn't got sufficient organization to enable cheating.

Desk Clearing

     It's not quite like tab clearing, though there are some similarities.  I'm the kind of person whose desk slowly accretes piles of stuff.  At work, it's forms and parts for projects (SP4T PIN-diode RF switch with a relay-diode matrix to go from 24-Volt 1x4 switching to binary at TTL levels?  I've got that, right down to the lunatic SMA connector for the 5 V rail to the PIN-diode switch.  Seriously, who does that?).

     At home, it's bills, printed-out manuscripts and medical stuff* -- doctor bills, mostly.  The bills are marked "PAID" (because they are) and put there awaiting being filed away, which does happen sometimes, but not nearly often enough.  Oh, that's not all: a three-year-old note, thanking me for taking care of the neighbor's cats during her first long time away; a rough floor plan for the Operational areas of the starship Lupine; a rough plan and elevation for a backyard writing shed that comes in just under the city's 10' x 12' limit for not needing a permit; a reminder that Indiana tech writer John T. Frye's "Carl and Jerry" stories from the 1950s and 60s -- about teenaged electronics hobbyists who get up to all manner of instructive hijinks -- were available again (and now they're again mostly not, but a web search will turn up a few); a 3-ounce bottle of teal ink that I barely remember buying; and my Western Electric 300-series desk phone, a gift from the Data Viking many years ago.  And so on.  It's a lot of stuff to sort through, right down to the exact order number for a style of jeans I liked and Carhartt no longer makes.

     Somehow, it's an effective distraction from election worries.  We're well up the first rise of the roller-coaster ride now, click-click-click, and we'll all be yelling and waving our hands in the air soon enough, one way or another.  There's no emergency exit from this ride.

     Tam and I will be taking the bus to vote in an hour or so, and then it's just the waiting.
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* Between bad knees, high blood pressure, chronic migraines, a history of rheumatic fever and a tendency to fall, I'm probably less sturdy than I care to admit.  I certainly interact with medical personnel more than I would prefer.

Match Cuts

     Tamara and I have been enjoying the current season of The Lincoln Lawyer.  (The TV series; I have yet to see the film, with a different cast.)  Taken from the novels starring criminal defense attorney Mickey Haller by mystery writer Michael Connelly, not only are the stories first-rate, they're brilliantly shot and edited.  One of the best parts is the use of "match cuts," in which scene-to-scene transitions go from one similar thing to another.

     The simplest is a sky shot: characters are conversing, the camera tilts up to the sky, there's a quick dissolve to another image of the sky and the camera tilts back down on a new scene.  A little trickier is the not-quite-match: famously, in Lawrence of Arabia, the camera goes in close on a lit match (a literal match, and there's your double pun) and as Lawrence blows out the flame, the film cuts to sunrise on the desert horizon.  It's easy to overdo,* but the best match cuts are as smooth as silk.  In an example from the TV series, a group of attorneys around a conference table in their office discussing trial strategy cuts to them at the Defense table in court, using those strategies -- a leap that covers days if not weeks, and keeps the story moving.

     Scenes in the series are carefully composed and lit, and often lushly shot, moving to a more documentary style when the action happens in a prison or low-rent lawyer's office.  The visual style is as deft and inevitable-seeming as a dancer's movements.

     One of the most interesting things to me is that while Connelly's plots are intriguingly twisty and his storytelling is more than adequate, he's not a bowl-you-over prose stylist.  He was a newspaper reporter and he writes like a reporter, without fuss or flourish.  The TV series is very much on their own hook with the cinematography and editing; trying to show Mickey Haller's world, they have picked up a visual style that suits their protagonist and his Los Angeles like a well-tailored suit.
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* There's a version in which dialog carries across the cut, one character's sentence finished or answered by another, often to dramatic effect.  Occasionally, a film or TV show will cut back and forth between two parallel scenes multiple times to build tension, but it's difficult to pull off without being too obvious.  The animated spy comedy Archer frequently plays carried dialog for laughs.