It Is True

     Or at least it's true for me: the older I get, the less I like snow.

     We've got a bit of it, and cold temperatures to go with it all week.  The temperature will only occasionally take a quick look above freezing and then duck right back down.

Giardiniera

     The Italian pickled vegetable mix is a favorite of mine, but our corner grocer doesn't stock the brand I like best.  They've got a nice Chicago-style, which is pickled, the brine poured off, and smothered in good olive oil, wonderful stuff in a sandwich or (the hotter kind especially) added to lean-meat chili, and they carry a vinegar brine version that is a bit mushy.  My guess is the maker cans it up hot, ideal for preservation but not what I'm after.

     But even those have a particular flavor profile that appeals to me.  Still...  I was looking up the spelling of "giardiniera" a few days ago and happened across a refrigerator-pickle version that appeared to be well within my abilities: no worries about putting it up and having a jar explode or go worse.  A good strong brine, half white vinegar and half water, boiled with plenty of pickling salt, seasoned with coriander, mustard seed, peppercorns and oregano, and a little fresh garlic in every jar.

     So I made the stuff -- cauliflower, red onion (I'll get back to that), celery, three hues of bell peppers and purple, white and orange carrots.  You chop the vegetables quite coarsely, boil the brine, load up several canning jars with the mix, a bay leaf and a couple of chunks of garlic,* then fill them not quite all the way with the hot brine, let it cool to room temperature, put the lids on and refrigerate it.  After a couple of days, the result is spot on: the precise flavor and plenty of crunch.  They'll hold up okay in the fridge for several weeks; the salty brine's got an acidity of about 2.5%.  I used some in an omelet for brunch today, with bacon and Swiss cheese: the very thing for a cold morning!

I'm not enough of a photographer to get a really good picture of the stuff.  Yes, that's a bay leaf.

     The red onion means the brine goes pale lavender and the cauliflower turns pink.  If you'd rather it didn't, use a white onion, or even peeled pearl onions.
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* The recipe calls for three jars and two cloves of garlic.  The only way to do that is to cut them in thirds and put two in each jar.  As things worked out, I had extra vegetables and brine, so I made up one more jar without garlic.

Traditions

     Thanksgiving, Tam and I had the traditional Roseholme Cottage* meal: turducken baked on the grill with roast vegetables and bacon-mushroom gravy.

     These are treats that usually come only once a year (one year, I had picked up a "safety" turducken roll at the grocer's in case the one I had ordered didn't arrive, and we had it for Christmas dinner) and we're happy to have them.

Turducken roll, fresh from the pan, freed of its netting. (Tam Keel photo)

Turducken roll being sliced: turkey, duck, chicken, sausage stuffing. (Tam Keel photo)

Bacon-mushroom gravy: a roux of bacon fat and flour, cooked golden-brown, to which chicken-mushroom broth is added. Once it begins to thicken, the bacon is snipped into it.  This isn't health food but it's certainly good!  There's a knack to making smooth gravy, but it's easier to learn than to teach. Cook the roux well; keep the broth, water or milk cold; don't stop stirring.
(Tam Keel photo)

     The day was bitterly cold and blustery, which made the grill a little more of a challenge.  But it worked out.
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* The name comes from the English grant of arms to someone who had the same last name as my family -- a "naturally-colored" rose on a gray or silver background.  Red or white?  I don't know.  The title that came with it amounted to a GI Bill, way down in the lesser peerage: the grantee gets the title, his firstborn gets a lesser one and the next generation, well, by then they're supposed to have land, a big house and a steady income from rents, and there you go, Squire.  I have no idea if that guy was an ancestor; the name is more of a toponym.

Giving Thanks

     Today, I'm working to embrace the thought that as bad as I think things are, they could be a great deal worse.  While I'm apprehensive about the future, the present is not really all that bad -- and for that, I am thankful indeed.

     Tam's away today, working, though she hopes to stop by for the holiday meal.  It's getting to be time to start the turducken.  Bacon gravy and roasted vegetables will accompany the nested birds and their sausage stuffing.  (I don't do a whole turducken -- maybe someday! -- just a smaller subset, a kind of turducken roll, better suited to two people and a few days of leftovers.)

Suspended Judgement

     Fulton County, Georgia is dropping the sweeping election interference case against Donald Trump and a number of co-defendants, stemming largely from the then-President's phone call to state officials, asking them to "find" sufficient votes to ensure his victory on the 2020 Presidential election.

     Now it will never be resolved.  And look, there are all kinds of problems with the case, especially now: there's no way a sitting President can be hauled into court; they can be impeached by Congress, and I presume they're still liable for traffic tickets, but anything in between is Constitutionally off the table.  And the case wasn't well handled by prosecutor Fani Willis in several different ways.

     But having the charges dropped, especially over side issues and Constitutional preemption, is nowhere near equivalent to being found innocent (or for that matter, found guilty) in a trial.  Assume everyone involved was as pure and guileless as the driven snow and it was all a matter of misinterpretation of highly figurative speech along with an earnest diligence to ensure no vote went uncounted and it still leaves a loophole that a subsequent unscrupulous President facing an uncertain election could drive an armored column through.

     This is the kind of swerve that brings down empires.

     In my opinion -- and this will make some readers boiling mad, if they're still bothering to read, though if they are, they're clearly not coming to the forest for the hunting -- there's one chance left: if the Democrats win control of both houses of Congress in 2026, they can impeach President Trump, haul evidence and eyewitness testimony into the light, and come to a decision, one way or another.  That would bring the mess and ambiguity to an end.  Oh, we'd still argue about it; there will be hard feelings no matter the outcome.  But it'd be done and not hanging out there, a festering sore of a brass ring for the next would-be autocrat to take a grab at.

     The American Experiment is teetering in the balance.  The formation of our constitutional republic, a remarkable democratic step, marked a change that swept through Western civilization and beyond, ending royal rule even in places where the Crown remained as a ceremonial head of state.  Whatever comes after the end of rule by the ongoing guidance and consent of the governed is unlikely to be an improvement for the common man.

Speaking About Deep Weirdness

     It's well known that tech zillionaire and all-around oddball Peter Thiel is a major backer of U.S. Vice-President J. D. Vance -- and look, I'm not the boss of him; he can spend his money any way he likes.

     But he's got some far-out notions, and he's happy to share them in front of a sympathetic audience, stuff that seems like it would be a better fit in a Jack Chick tract than in a speech from a supposedly forward-looking, high-tech Silicon Valley figure: he's thinking the Pope might be the antichrist.

     Religion is not my beat; I'm not going to tell anyone how they should be practicing theirs when I have never figured out my own.  Nevertheless, this old and highly-charged trope, from a major backer of a politically prominent adult convert to Catholicism, is way over the top.

     Much of this article is paywalled; you can noodle around and find most of the details of Thiel's talk online.  The Veep needs to hear some pushback.  I'm sure his good buddy (and sometime employer) has a smooth line of stuff, but it's a line that diverges radically from the mainstream of American thought, and we are better off with politicians who aren't being towed along in the wake of one set of outré opinions.

     Make Dr. Strangelove a dark fantasy again.  Kubrick wasn't supposed to be a prophet, just a storyteller. 

Lack Of Posting

     I haven't posted much this week -- current events leave me struggling to keep up with the craziness of it all, from a Russian-inspired peace plan for Ukraine that's surrender in all but name to the Department of Defense* deciding the Scouts are no longer okay† to pal around with, it's an unending string of preposterous stuff, most of it at the hands of comic-opera boobs; or it would be comedy, if it wasn't all too real and therefore only sad at best to tragic at worst.

     You don't need me to point it out and mocking it is pointless.
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* Congress named it, Congress renamed it, and if it wants to be renamed again, Congress is the only part of the Federal government that can do so.  If it wants to go by a tougher-sounding nickname in social settings until then, that's fine, but no one is obliged to go along.
 
† Yes, let's see, an organization for young people that is devoted to the notions of community service, patriotism, preparedness, physical fitness, outdoors and camping skills, respect for established institutions and competent adults, why would any decent military organization want anything at all to do with that?  Scouts have had their controversies but their aim remains noble.

The Ipcress File...Again?

     I found Len Deighton's not-quite-Everyman spy Harry Palmer the long way 'round and in reverse, starting with the book series by Charles Stross, a crossover between British spy novels and Lovcraftian horror,* The Laundry Files.  That led to Deighton's books (well worth reading) and from there to the films starring Michael Caine (well worth watching), and when one of our streaming services offered a preview of the updated, reimagined TV series version of the first novel some months back, of course I watched it.

     But it was one more streaming service, and expensive at the time, and there wasn't much else on it I wanted to see, so--  Maybe later.

     Much later, AMC finally re-released the series 1990s Remember WENN, (set in a small, independent radio station between 1939 and 1941 or so) and the first two seasons were available with ads on a free streamer.  I watched those, found it to be just as good as I remembered and wanted more.  The last two seasons were only on a couple of pay services, and one of them seemed like a better deal than the other.

     It wasn't until I'd signed up for it and saw their line-up that I realized why: they've got the TV series version of The Ipcress File, too.  So I've been watching it.

     The director and actor's Harry Palmer isn't Micheal Caine's.  The plot isn't exactly Deighton's either -- but he hadn't bothered to name the character to begin with, and the new guy is as delightfully competent and cynical as his predecessors in print and on film.  It's very stylish fun, set in a lovingly recreated 1960s (minus a few anachronisms most viewers will never notice) and I'm not entirely sure many of the reviewers figured out we're getting Harry's take on the story -- and Harry's looking up from fairly low on the class-system totem pole, with a complete lack of respect for the people who are supposedly his betters.  This is very much not James Bond, without bothering to sneer at the Bonds of fiction; Harry's much too busy to bother with that sort of thing.  He'll leave it to the empty suits who came from proper families and went to the right schools.

     They've taken such liberties with the plot that I'm not sure how it will end -- and I'm looking forward to finding out.
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* And also between computing history, a bit of math theory and a stack of D&D-type gaming, as things go on.

There Is Still No Antimemetics Division

     I read and enjoyed There Is No Antimemetics Division in both text forms, and it turns out there's a short film, as well.

     It's well done, and if you enjoy this sort of thing, here you go.

Great Moments In Geography

     This morning, a BBC World Service news anchor interviewed Mandy Gunasekara about her thoughts on the COP30 UN Climate Change Conference winding down in Belem, Brazil.  She was Chief of Staff at the EPA during the first Trump administration and more recently, an employee at the Heritage Foundation, where she helped write parts of "Project 2025" addressing climate.

     With that setup, the Beeb on one side, Heritage Foundation on the other and COP30 under the lens, you can well imagine how the interview went.  There were no surprises.

     Except for one thing; when the recent uptick in the size and scale of natural disasters came up, Ms. Gunasekara mentioned the current administration's work in the U.S., "building stronger, more resilient coastal cities all across the country."

     That, I think, merits parsing.  It's not coal vs. solar or CO/CO2 vs. particulates, well-trod ground with well-worn arguments.

     1. If the Trump administration is "building...cities," anywhere in the U.S., it's news to me.  I suspect it would be news to them.

     2. If they're "building stronger....cities," I'd sure like to see the details.  Does an infusion of National Guard picking up litter and showing the flag count?  Does sending in what appear to be poorly-disciplined ICE/Border Patrol squads to round up people for being too brown in public, demand papers, detain them (often in poor conditions) until their status is resolved and ship them out if they sneaked in count?  'Cos you can argue the legal side of it all you like, but roving raid teams don't do anything to make a community stronger or more resilient against natural disasters and shrinking the labor pool is more likely to make preparation, clean-up and rebuilding more difficult.

     3. Last but most saliently, how, exactly, does she think they're "building...coastal cities all across the country?"  The United States has a lot of coastline, but we've got a lot more interior.  And while I used to joke that I didn't need to move to Florida when I retired because rising sea levels and unpredictable New Madrid fault meant warm Gulf waters were headed for me right where I am, the Feds throwing up a series of shiny new bouncy coastal cities against need would be...impractical.  Not to mention the last thing I would expect from an administration that argues the climate is perfectly A-OK, and a worse tomorrow will never come.

     It has been said the Flat Earth Society has chapters and members all around the globe.  I think we'd better sponsor Ms. Gunasekara's membership.  And maybe check to see if she needs a new hot water heater or some pretty plaid polka-dot curtains for her office, possibly in sky-blue pink.

     It's not too much to require that a person's words make sense, no matter what their politics are.  Alas, the BBC interviewer was out of time, and probably far too polite to insist. 

Winter Again

     I think the thing that bugs me most about Daylight Savings Time is that it makes wintertime darkness hit abruptly instead of sneaking up.  One day it's still light at dinnertime and the next day, bang!  Dark!

     Every year, I realize all over again how poor my night vision is.  I'm grateful there are streetlights along most of my routes to and from the various work locations.

     The other interesting thing is that darned thermostat. The house used to be only a little chilly at 65°F.  Now even 68° feels too cold.  It must be out of calibration.  Yes, that's got to be it.

Attention, Mike Johnson

     Yes, Mike, you're Speaker of the House.  Bear in mind that it is not the senior legislative body.

     Speaker Johnson had opined that the U. S. Senate should "fix" undefined shortcomings in the House bill to release the Epstein files that made it to the floor over his efforts to stop it.  The Senate took note -- and unanimously voted to approve the measure exactly as passed by the House.  Which it was, and there you go.

     The House and Senate aren't supposed to be telling one another what to do -- and the Senate in particular is touchy about its prerogatives.  They are, after all, the more august collection of legislators (though these days, picking "white" as the natural hair color of any member of Congress will win handily on percentages), and they never lose sight of that.  Ancient Rome had a Senate, after all, and our Senators get pretty sure they were born to the purple.

     I'll give the Speaker credit for one thing, though: he sure doesn't know when he's whupped.

     By and by -- the Department of Justice has thirty days to let their fingers do the walking and they may take every one of them -- there will be plenty of people sieving through the Epstein files slime, looking to see what kind of dirt they can get and who they can get it on.  My guess is there won't be many surprises, and it will be a series of small icks in the face of the greater awfulness of the whole scheme; True Believers will be able to maintain their happy illusions and the Truly Appalled will find plenty of awful things to point at.  Hey, remember when politics was a little less like a tour of the sewers?

     The French occasionally shove huge spheres through the main drains in Paris, pushing all the big, nasty chunks to the outflow where they can be safely removed.  We get the chance to do so in Washington, DC every even-numbered year, and too often we decide to just leave it all where it fell.

No Shortcuts

     "Make it didn't happen" is one of our great human weaknesses.  When things occur that make us unhappy, we want to find some path back to the status quo ante.  It's rarely there.

     I mention this because there were some expressions of pleasure on social media that parts of the GOP's MAGA alliance was unraveling over the Epstein files.  Yeah, don't get too comfy and start singing the Munchkin song.  These sands are shifty indeed.  They kept shifting all weekend and into today.

     It sure would be nice if the two big parties would go back to being the same old Republicans and Democrats of my early adulthood, aging New Dealers and younger progressives against rock-ribbed conservatives and their louder, not so gray allies, but it's not going to happen.  It's especially not going to happen with Mr. Trump's stalwarts suddenly freezing, their hard shells crumbling away, and besuited Reagan-Bush-Goldwaterish hybrids emerging blinking into the light of a new day while the Dems magically grow spines and they all walk towards the rising sun in spirited, earnest debate, almost safe to ignore between elections.  Dream on.

     The only way through the present mess is through it, and there aren't any promises about what we are when we get to the other side.

House-To-House Incivility

     I saw the film "Civil War" last night and...wow. Reviewers got it wrong; they focused on the lack of clarity in who's rebelling and over what (we barely know the first and never learn the second*).  Genuine soldiers on both sides come off okay; the danger is always from combatants with no flag.

     On one level, the basic plot is "A Star Is Born" with street combat; on another, the divided future, with real war burning, people far behind the lines ignoring it, power cuts and water shortages nearer the lines, with quiet atrocities and fighters hardened to them feels only too real and only too likely.  This is the future some of our fellow citizens think they want, bloody, divided and lawless, where "what kind of American are you?" is a life or death question and it's fatal to be too foreign in the wrong place at the wrong time.

     Arguably, the ending is a little too easy -- but it's miles and years from the ending of the larger (and, I hope, fictional) story it is told within, a story whose beginnings we never learn but can see all around us, a story written in blood and fire and loss.  This deadly chaos is the enemy, even more than the politicians and fools who long for it.  If it comes, it will leave damage for generations afterward.† I'm no longer sure we will prevent it but we had damned well better try.
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* There are vague hints that suggest water issues in the states mentioned as seceding -- California, Texas and Florida -- and the film shows water shortages in New York city; but water appears plentiful elsewhere and prolific water use sets the tone for a visit to a town largely untouched by war.  While Washington, DC is said to be a place where journalists are shot on sight and the movie's President is apparently a bad guy, we only hear him uttering broad and harmless platitudes in speeches while refusing to hold talks with advancing secessionist forces.  Who started the fighting, over what, and who made it worse rather than negotiating an end is simply beside the point of the story.
 
 † Most American lack recent experience of war, or even recent experience of the scars warfare leaves behind.  Most of the real Civil War's battlegrounds are softly eroded and grown over, a century and a half later.  Look at Ukraine, look at Gaza; look and ask yourself what it's going to take to fix just the physical damage, if and when.

Inhumanly Talented?

     I don't think "talent" is the right word for Mixmastering vast amounts of stolen intellectual property, but didja hear the story about the singing cowboy whose Microsoft Copilot ran off with his ChatGPT account in OpenAI's truck?  It's playing out right now on the country music charts, as least in the ratings for downloads.

     Country music has long been a rich source of parody, and is not above self-parody; the best of it is as deep and rich as any genre, sharing roots with blues and folk music, cross-pollinating with rock again and again, sharing bits of swing and occasional jazz riffs.  At its worst, Nashville's Music Row turns out stuff as homogenized as anything from Tin Pan Alley or the Brill Building; but we don't remember any of them for their worst or even average music.  We remember their best work.  AI only creates an average of hit songs, empty, catchy sound as disposable as a gum wrapper.

Speculative Fictions

     There are a couple of comments sitting in the "to be screened" stack that I'm probably not going to publish.  Not because they're insulting or threatening; not because I disagree with their content, which I mostly don't.

     Nope.  The problem is that they indulge in a mental game that I think is pointless, one that I speak out against: they're trying to project the future.  They're trying to play serious chess with politics.

     I'm a lousy chess player, but even I know those sixty-four squares and thirty-two* pieces add up quickly to a staggering number of possibilities, and the more moves ahead you're looking, the more there are. And that's with only a limited number of motions available.  Politics is played on a much bigger board with many more pieces, and every one of them, even the pawns, decides its own moves.

     The next move, maybe -- rarely -- even the next two, might be obvious.  Try to predict too much further and you're unlikely to be right.  And it's rarely necessary; you can find out by waiting and watching.  Things that are genuinely unworkable aren't going to work; policies and actions that prompt widespread protests are worth investigating: why are they being promoted?  Why is there protest against or (also rarely) for them?  Who likes the notion?  Who hates it?  Find out as the thing moves.

     And learn the lesson of Cassandra: There's rarely any award for being right.  Work on being nimble instead.  Saying "I told you so" as the boulder crashes down is a distant second to dodging the damned thing before it hits you.
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* Or, if you're on my side of the board, sixteen, fifteen, fourteen, more...checkmate....

Keyboard In The Gutter

     Was it only yesterday that a big tranche -- or perhaps a splatter -- of Jeffrey Epstein's emails were made public?  Politicians are circling the fetid mess; most Republican politicians say the contents contain nothing significant, showing only that President Trump and the late sex offender moved in the same elite circles, while their Democrat counterparts are highlighting passages and conversations that put Mr. Trump in a bad light.

     Absolute smoking-gun evidence or sweeping exoneration has yet to be unearthed and I doubt it will.  The emails do show Epstein and most of his correspondents were shockingly shallow, banal and unconcerned with the fiddling details of spelling, grammar or even coherence, reveling in sleazy innuendo and treating women as property: America's financial and social elite is riddled with mentally-lazy creeps.

     What did the President know and when did he first learn of it?  I have no idea.  I doubt these emails will reveal it.  What they do show is a bunch of emotionally stunted, manipulative men whose lives are lubricated by gobs of money, sliming their way through life along and over the edges of moral behavior with no regard for boundaries, scorning probity as a scam for chumps.

     A few online commenters have cautioned, "What if there are Democrats among Epstein's circle?"  I'm sure there were; I'm sure many of them are still in public life and they deserve to be removed from office just as much as any Republican running with that crowd.  Turf 'em all out.  Primary them.  Get some new crooks in there, people with fewer connections.  They may still be terrible people, but it'll take them awhile to pick up the game, and if we keep voting the old ones out and new ones in, they'll have less time to wallow in the ooze.

     Another question the emails don't answer is how Jeffrey Epstein funded his decadent lifestyle; at times, they imply something on the very edge of blackmail or extortion, but -- yet again -- hard evidence isn't there.  Just a lot of skin-crawling stuff, hints and nudges.  He's clearly trading in influence and access.

     If you're happy making excuses for gazillionaires with stomach-churning private lives, nothing in the emails will change your mind.  If you were looking sidelong at this sort of thing already, here are steaming piles of the same ick.

     This isn't the big chunk of files that Congress may yet release, but those are probably going to be pulled from the same cesspool.

     F. Scott Fitzgerald's, "The very rich are different from you and me," wasn't written in admiration (or even in quite that way) but in disappointment; and Hemingway's rejoinder, "Yes, they have more money," is far too glib.  An excess of money lets people people be even more who they already were.  Freed from the necessity of earning a living by the sweat of their brow, a lot of people turn out to be self-indulgent moral cripples for whom other individuals aren't quite real -- especially those others who work for wages.  We live in a representative democracy; why are we letting these wretches run our government?

Word To The Wise

    A reminder for anyone who needs it: having voted for a politician does not make you complicit in his (or her) crimes and missteps. You're not stuck with them to the bitter end. You can always say, "Hell, no," and walk away at any time.

      Today would be a great day for that.

     Repudiating one politician and their circle over horrific behavior doesn't require you to abandon your political ideals, either.  You can keep right on favoring small government or large, being a hawk or a dove, a rugged individualist or a deep believer in community.  None of those notions is attached to any one politician.

Veteran's Day

     Today marks the end of fighting in the first really big mechanized war, one that left scars twisting across the face of Europe still visible today.  Today, the guns fell silent -- and today is the day we chose to honor all who serve in uniform.  Not the date of a tremendous battle, or of an occasion of valiant heroism.  No invasion hit a beach or border on this date.  This isn't even the date the treaty that officially ended that war was signed; that wouldn't come for months later.

     No, today is the day the warriors laid down their weapons, and began the long road home to try to rebuild the peace.  That peace barely held for a generation, and they were back fighting again; but that war came to an end, too.

     All wars come to an end, but the men and women who fight them, who train for them, who hold the line in peace and in war, go on and on, overworked, underpaid and often underappreciated.  Think of them on this day, not as the pawns of generals and admirals or arrows on a map, but as people, doing a difficult job, often under terrible conditions, persisting.  Don't take them for granted.

Let's Make An (Or)Deal!

     The Federal government is on track to re-open, possibly as soon as late Wednesday afternoon.  Senate Democrats made a deal with the GOP, in which the Dems get...  Well, let's see...  Oh, here it is, a vague promise of a vote on extending COVID-years ACA subsidies that will almost certainly be DOA in the House.

     What went on behind the scenes is unclear.  The eight Democrats who voted with Republicans were headed for retirement, or won't be on the ballet until 2028, and/or from states where they can't possibly lose an election, and there's a message in that.  In my opinion, neither party has been covering themselves in special glory in this fight -- but we're not paying them to go roll in glory like a dog wallowing in a festering deer carcass anyway; we're paying them to not make too big a mess of things, and...yeah, they're not great at that.  From the outside, they were stuck unless somebody blinked, and with House members mostly out of town and needing to fly back, and the FAA starting the throttle back on air travel, blinking was certainly on the menu.

     Now we're back to the original mess, with the added fillup of screwed-up SNAP payments and overtaxed food pantries, and Thanksgiving is just over two weeks away.  Don't look for anyone affected by that to be adding their Senators and Representative to the prayer before the holiday meal.  Primary season starts in March, only four months away: voters will remember, and primaries keep on cranking through until well into August, by which time Fall election campaigns will already be underway.  Could be kinda ouchy; the only question is if elephants or donkeys get the biggest pinch.

Souped Up

     We've had over an inch of snow in Indianapolis and it's been cold, with overnight lows in the twenties and highs barely breaking freezing.  So I wanted something warm for supper.

     I work later than most people and I'd just as soon get to bed early, so anything fancy was off.  A bottle of almost-homemade vegetable soup, a half-pound of ground beef and a sausage squeezed from its casing made a good start.  Preparation is easy, just brown and drain the meat, add the soup and a bay leaf and let it simmer for five minutes or more.

     The soup is tomato-based, with okra, corn, onion, lima beans (trust me, you'll hardly notice) and I don't know what all else.  The sausage was andouille, and it was a little strong for the mild vegetable soup.  Not unpleasant, but I wanted something to pair with it -- and remembered the Chicago-style giardiniera in the fridge.  That turned out to be just the thing; a few forkfuls stirred into a bowl of the thick soup added a nicely savory flavor.  (It's not the spicy-hot version of pickled vegetables -- YMMV and if you like heat, that's an option.)

     Next time, I'm going with mild Italian sausage, or even a genuine "banger," but I'll keep the pickled vegetables in mind.

Well, That Was Fun....

     Except it wasn't fun.  I was watching the Sunday morning political shows, mostly, and dozing, a little, and eventually decided to make some brunch.

     It was going to be pretty good brunch, too -- roast beef hash with canned mild chilies, a little onion, a dab or more of Chicago-style Giardiniera, a bread-crumb crust and eggs cooked on top, served with cheese.  But it wasn't to be.  I turned on the kitchen TV and the channel I wanted wasn't there.  It was one of the ones I'm responsible for, though not one of the big ones.

     So much for breakfast!  After a little more checking, I fired up my computer and started troubleshooting remotely, texting my boss at the same time.  He was aware of the problem, but busy with other things.

     I didn't find anything easy, so I brushed my teeth, got dressed, packed some snacks and went to the transmitter.  A redundant communications link had half-failed, which should be a minor problem, something that makes no impact and you solve during regular business hours.

     Yes, it's no problem -- unless the automatic switch that makes it redundant happens to have been hooked up backwards.  I looked and looked, and it didn't occur to me for a long time, until I was peering at the back of the conglomeration, seeing green lights where there should have been red lights, and red lights where they should have been green!

     You see, if you have two identical widgets, call them A and B, and a smart switch that selects between them, it's all well and good; if A is running and it conks out, the switch goes to B, and vice versa.  But if it was connected backwards?  A keels over, and the switch, automatically, selects what it thinks is B -- but is in fact A, and A, being dead, does nothing.  And the switch, while it is pretty smart as such things go but not quite as smart as one might hope, assumes it is not being lied to, and B must be as defunct as A.  So it does nothing.

     We have backups on our backups, and that kicked in -- losing a few minor channels in the process.

    I moved the connections to where they should have been all along, the two ends did a complicated handshake, and hey, presto! Everything was working, with the failed part safely sidelined for later.  And it only took three hours.  Well, four.

Oyster Stew

     I haven't lost the knack of making oyster stew.  There's not much to it, and the big brand name in condensed soups has their own mild version, though I haven't found it in stores around here for some time.  But there's a knack to it, and multiple places to go wrong.

     Canned oysters were scarce for a long while, too.  They're back now, at least some of the time (months with R in them?)  So I was determined to give it a try.

     You start by making a thickener of flour, water, a little salt,* a dash of hot sauce or Worcestershire sauce and a glob of butter.  Stir that up to a smooth paste and add it to the contents of a couple of 8-ounce cans of oysters, liquid and all.  Simmer over low heat until the oysters start to curl and set aside.  Scald four cups of milk and a little butter, or three cups of milk and one of cream, then add the oysters and let it sit a spell, over very low heat if you like (but keep an eye on it!).

     Serve with a dash of paprika, parsley or chives, hot sauce and pepper on the table, and crusty bread or crackers.

     Variations: add cooked potato and/or sauteed onion and/or celery, cut small.

     It's warm and filling on a chilly evening.  Oysters aren't for everyone; if you're curious but unsure, look for a ready-made version and give it a try.  The scratch version is strong and has more zing, with big, meaty oysters.

     The gotchas: blend the thickener smooth, not lumpy.  That means cold, cold water and plenty of stirring before you add it to the oysters and their liquid (and then turn on the heat).  Don't overcook the oysters -- and really, really don't overcook the milk.  It's done when it's bubbly around the edges and steam is rising from it.  You can cook both at the same time, and old recipes assume you will, but that means dividing your attention.

     Depression-era bread and milk can be this recipe without the oysters -- and you can still find people who were happy to get even that much.
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* One and a half tablespoons of flour, two tablespoons of cold water, a teaspoon or so of salt -- old recipes have even more salt, but even a teaspoon was plenty for me.  It does need a little, but you can always add more to your bowl.

Oh, Noooooes!

     I'm still hearing a little freakout over New York City's Mayor-elect.  Thing is, he's not the first socialist to get himself elected mayor of an American city; he's not even the first one to win in NYC, and the city's still there.  Wikipedia's got a list, starting with John C. Chase in 1898.  There's a whole clutch of them in the early decades of the 20th Century, food for thought if you're pining for "the good old days."*

     Milwaukee had a nearly unbroken fifty-year run of them, from 1910 through 1960: that's two World Wars and a Great Depression.  I'm sure they all said and did things that I'd disagree with (not an unusual distinction among politicians) but the city survived and even thrived.  (It took heavy lifting to interrupt the string: a Democrat-Republican fusion candidate won and served from 1912 to 1916.)

     U. S. mayors do not serve in a vacuum.  They're working in concert with a legislative body and a court system; everybody in town knows where their office is and can look up their number, and all it takes is a faltering trash-collection system, faulty sewers or a botched response to a bad snowstorm to get them tossed out on their ear in the next election.  We vote mayors in, we vote mayors out, and when they lose, they hand over the keys and combination for the safe to the next officeholder in due order. 

     Mayors from one of the major parties are closely watched by their political opposition; Mayors who have expressed leanings towards the edges of one or the other big parties get even more scrutiny (this is where most of the recent socialists fall, being both Democrats and DSA members) and mayors affiliated only with a third party (or none at all) can expect to get it from both sides.

     So I'm not worried.  There are plenty of people and groups to do the watching and start yelling if he goes off the rails, and they're already on the job.
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* They weren't quite as halcyon as some people like to claim, and you can chop your own wood or shovel your own coal for a winter if you'd like to find out for yourself.  My parents grew up on the trailing edge of that technology, and even through the rosy-hued spectacles of childhood, it didn't look that great to them.  Even spending time in the disused attic of a house that had been heated by coal is a marked education -- pun intentional.  Coal soot takes considerable scrubbing!

They Won

     Democrats won resoundingly yesterday, from Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani in New York to centrist Dems in New Jersey and Virginia. Down-ballot races also went Democrat; school board elections, largely nonpartisan, rejected book-banners and candidates endorsed by "Moms for Liberty," the conservative group that made headlines when their Noblesville, Indiana chapter approvingly quoted Hitler's opinions on education in their newsletter.

     Politicians (and pundits) tend to over-read election results and this will be no exception.  The common threads of the last two elections are the cost of living (rent, groceries, utilities) and the general unwillingness of  Americans to be bossed around; go too much deeper than that and you're on thin ice.

     Mamdani, for all that he's made out to be a boogeyman,* has more in common with Indiana's Eugene V. Debs than Karl Marx.  He has been sharply critical of the governments of Venezuela and Cuba, especially their dictatorial leaders.  As Mayor of New York City, he'll be working with a 51-member City Council.  Unsurprisingly, the Council membership is overwhelmingly, though not exclusively, Democrat.  But New York City being as assorted as it is, they're an unusually wide range of Democrats, so don't expect the new Mayor to make a bunch of drastic changes.  (At least one prominent online opinionator lamented that in NYC, "women will be forced to cover themselves from head to toe...and hot dogs will be replaced by goat meat."  I can only conclude he's never seen Mrs. Mamdani, and doesn't grasp that goat meat would be a significant -- and not inexpensive -- upgrade from the mysterious contents of lower-grade frankfurters.  And all that along with not understanding that the City Council makes NYC's laws, not the Mayor.)

     All of these newly elected officials will be operating in the same old framework, in which (despite what certain politicians appear to believe) we don't elect Czars or dictators who rule by fiat (or even Chevy), but politicians who must negotiate and compromise with their peers and whatever other branches or units of government their own interacts with, politicians who must answer to their constituents via direct contact, the press, and eventually the ballot box.  The truly awful ones will reveal themselves in due course, either by trying to enact lousy notions into law or via an inability to work and play well with others, and some of those will discover they are "one-term wonders" or laughingstocks consigned to the sidelines.  This is entirely normal, and the system has survived all manner of wild and crazy ideas and people.

     Truly transgressive behavior in American politics consists of trying to unduly expand the powers of an office, of ruling unilaterally, of not understanding that Americans are at heart a mob, and a mob with a very wide range of ideas and beliefs.  We can all agree that we don't agree on much, and we should all agree that we ought to give one another as much latitude as we can manage.  Our worst failings begin when we forget or ignore that.
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* He is, as has been pointed out by more insightful people, exactly what President Obama was accused of being: a socialist Muslim born in Africa.  I guess we'll all get to see how that goes.  Maybe he'll even read the newspaper funny pages on the radio!

"Running Board"

     I used a slang term the other day, one that might not be entirely clear outside of my line of work, "running board."  No, not those things along the bottom sides of an old car that make it easier to get in and out, where Doc Savage rides when he and his intrepid crew speed to the scene of another exotic crime in Depression-era NYC.

     "Running" as in "operating," and "board" as in "audio board," which is to say an audio mixer or audio console.  Nowadays, most people have seen a sound-mixing board, the kind of thing used at a concert or in a recording studio, often a vast and confusing array of controls, knobs and lights.  It's literally the heart of the effort, where all the microphones and other sound pick-ups connect, their levels are adjusted and mixed, and the end result goes out to the amplifiers, recorder, streaming box and/or broadcast transmitter.

     The technology grew up slowly, from a rack filled with amplifiers, volume controls, switches and maybe a jackfield like an old-time telephone operator's panel.  Eventually, the control arrangements became more or less standardized, first in homebuilt systems (some of which might be mounted through a single slab of wood or Bakelite, a "board," or built into a freestanding desk, a "console").  Those early efforts still had most of the electronics mounted in a row of tall equipment racks, with only the controls in front of the operator.  Western Electric and RCA, along with a little company in Quincy IL called Gates, were among the first to put the whole works into a large, desktop enclosure with a row of knobs along the front.

     Those early audio boards were the center of small radio stations: every audio signal that came and went would flow through it, and mastering the controls, in all their arcane variations, was an essential skill for the technicians -- "engineers" by convention if not degree -- and eventually the disc jockeys who replaced them and the studio announcers they'd worked with.  (Big stations and networks would have a "master control" setup, an audio switching system that selected among multiple studios and mixing consoles, but that was big-time stuff indeed.)

     As time went on and electronics got cheaper, stations might have a multitude of audio consoles -- one for the newsroom, one for recording commercials and local programs, one for on-air operations -- along with their associated equipment.

     And then a funny thing happened: audio went digital.  Digital audio works like any other big computer network: there are central computers that do the work, mixing, recording and playing back, and screen/keyboard/mouse or specialized hardware "control surfaces" where humans work the controls.  The big or small "audio board" of today still looks a lot like the old 1940s ones, if you'll allow for slide faders instead of rotary controls and push buttons instead of a fancy lever switches, but not a single note of audio passes through it.  Nope, that all happens in equipment mounted in tall racks down the hall; only the controls are in front of the operator.  Just like it was when the idea was first starting out.

Maybe People Elect Who They Want

     There will be fuming over the results of today's elections.  There always is.  National elections can be confounding -- the popular vote is often close, the Electoral College tends to amplify the margin of victory, and some bickering is inevitable.

     But regional elections, even statewide elections?  Look, the people of AOC and MTG's House districts knew what they were getting when they voted.  In New York City, the three frontrunners in the Mayor''s race had clear platforms and didn't do much hedging.  Nobody walked into a voting booth and rolled a three-sided dice.  Gubernatorial candidates in Virginia and New Jersey were similarly forthright, and here's the thing: if the individual states are indeed "50 experiments in democracy," if the people of cities get to pick their own Mayors and so on, you're going to get an assorted collection.  Virginia isn't Ohio.  NYC isn't Dallas.  Get 'em into office and see what they do.

     Indiana's Micah Beckwith certainly lost no time showing who he is after Election Day.  Cruising into office on Governor Mike Braun's coattails, I think Hoosiers hoped for a safe, pro-business Republican* in the hot seat and didn't pay much attention to the malicious imp riding shotgun alongside him.  Said imp's latest has been to chortle that the interruption in SNAP benefits is "a great opportunity for the church."  --Most candidates come with a pretty clear label, but you can't be sure until you uncork 'em and get a good whiff.

     If people elected skunks or roses Tuesday, it'll be obvious soon enough.  Let's see how the latest crop does before freaking out.
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* Oh, well.  Like a lot of GOP Governors, he's trying to be a mini-Trump.  And like most of them, the act's not ready for Broadway.

It's Still The Economy, Stupid

     Governments have a pretty good history when it comes to screwing up economies.  Fixing them, that's another story.  Herbert Hoover (eventually) and Franklin Roosevelt expended enormous effort trying to claw their way out of the Great Depression, and only blunted the worst of it while the whole planet rode the roller-coaster.  Subsequent presidencies bobbed around like a cork on stormy seas as various economic troubles came and went, and frequently lost elections over them.  The government -- any government -- doesn't run the economy, but the economy sometimes runs government, and can run it right out of town.

     Viktor Orban's experiment in "illiberal democracy" in Hungary, which has looked a lot like a more-polite version of one-party autocracy with fancy trimmings to keep the EU from more than mild disapproval, may be about to relearn that lesson.

     Here at home -- how 'bout that promised prosperity?  Have groceries gotten any cheaper?  How about utility bills?  Has anyone's gazillionaire boss handed out big, fat raises, or are most of us fretting over our chances of being swept up in an Amazon-style massive layoff?

     Promises of pie in the sky only work until the pie fails to arrive.  And wow, is it ever failing.  When the AI/data center bubble pops -- which it will -- the fallout is liable to be messy.  Just ask SNAP beneficiaries, presently unbenefited thanks to the government shutdown. 

Not A Fan, But

     They pulled me in: I didn't watch the World Series, but by the fourth game, I was keeping track of how it was going.  Some of the greatest baseball players of all time were battling it out, and despite an early adulthood spent listening to Cincinnati Reds games with an ear only for upcoming commercial breaks,* even I can tell we will not see their like again soon.
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* "Running board" for a sporting event can be a great time to work on small engineering projects, but you have to spare half an ear for the game.  Baseball is especially good; basketball and football can slam to a sudden halt without much warning and you'd better not stray too far from the controls, but the end of an inning is telegraphed in advance.  Most play-by-play and "color"/stats teams sum up significant moments before the ads begin, leaving the board op plenty of time to stroll down the hall, push a button, flip a few switches, log the break and put the game back on.  And if you missed it?  In my 20s, alone in a big studio building, it was very convenient that the network amplifiers were in a rack just outside of the Engineering Shop/transmitter room, along the hallway back to the control room. The CBS and Reds amplifiers had great big knobs on them and if you had noticed the commercial cue at the last minute, you could knock the volume down to zero on your way past (so you didn't get network "filler" on the air), race down to the control room, hit the Start button for the commercial, turn off the network audio on the audio mixer, then walk back up the hall and return the amplifier volume setting to normal.  Those big knobs -- and the heavy-duty attenuators they controlled -- weren't stock; one of my predecessors had set it all up for exactly that situation.
     So if you're listening to the big game, and a local commercial starts a little late?  --I don't know; these days, the people doing the radio play-by-play can start their own commercial breaks, and like as not, there's no one minding the store back at the station.

Alas

     One of the problems with figurative language is that you set out to describe a regime composed of cranks, crooks and grifters, and instead find yourself insulting noxious, loathsome toads, a largely harmless class of amphibians who benefit us by consuming deleterious insects.

     Linguistic flights of fancy can be great fun, but bad and dangerous people are what they are; comparing them to other dislikeable things only obscures the evil acts they enable and commit.

     If prominent members of the Trump maladministration would commit themselves to consuming at least their own weight in harmful insects every year, I might grudgingly find they were of some use.  This, however, is unlikely; they are indeed useless excrescences at best, like warts or skin tags.