Wow

     It's harder and harder to jump back in the hopper of the daily grind.  I'm not sure if I'm more hopeful or more worried about November's elections and whatever follows.  I suppose if all that happens is an economic crash, we'll be getting out easy, but man, do I loathe interesting times.

It's Labor Day

     Anymore, I'm not all that sure what we mean by "labor," and to what extent a Federal holiday to celebrate it means anything.  Sure, sure, both big political parties will tell you they're the party of the working man (and, occasionally, woman) and the other guys are the party of the "elites," moneyed and/or intellectual.  Socialists and Communists and Labor -- and far-Right -- parties overseas will make similar claims (usually around May first in most countries, and you can ask the Communists to explain that one).

     But as a species, we don't actually like work all that much, and given a chance in literature or art to side with a sweat-of-his-brow farmer or the barbarian who shows up to steal from him or worse, a lot of people prefer Conan to the plodder behind the plow -- and we admire Tom Sawyer, half-covertly, and think the peers he gulls into doing his fence-painting are saps.  We keep coming up with ways to dodge even intellectual work; Socrates was none too sure about literacy and writing things down, fearing it would weaken memory and devalue being present in the moment, and we've kept on cheating -- log tables, printing presses with moveable type, typewriters, word processors, abacuses, slide rules, calculators, photography, computers, and now A.I.: forget tractors, why do the heavy gray-matter lifting when you can build a machine to do it for you?

     And yet -- we do still have gardeners, farmers, stonemasons, poets, singers, miners, men and women toiling in the kitchen or on the assembly line.  One of them might be able to do the work of ten of Socrates' students (or their wives or servants), but work they do.  (Alas, genius still resists force-multipliers; we don't get ten Greek philosophers of the price of one).

     Labor still matters.  It shouldn't be disparaged, not scrubbing floors or unpacking the mysteries of subatomic physics.  We must, still, work, and it's probably built right into our genes, long-haul hunter-gathers who stumbled out of Africa, ganging up to harvest tasty megafauna and sweet, sweet berries, singing before they went and telling each other stories about it afterward.

The Man Who Mugged Analogy

     Tam and I watch the Sunday political talk shows.  I wouldn't say we like watching them, but it's not a hate-watch either.  The programs are the lowest common denominator of American political discourse, available to the widest cross-section of the gen. pop., and because the big networks do have to keep their advertisers, viewers, the FCC and a smattering of basement lunatics* reasonably happy, they're as close to a big-picture look at the current scene as can be had.

     Today's snapshot comes from NBC.  Kristen Welker was interviewing Republican Senator John N. Kennedy of Louisiana, a politician who could out-awshucks Foghorn Leghorn or his inspiration even spotting them three "Ma'ams," one "I say," and a wilted magnolia.  Asked about the economy and specifically inflation, he had this to say:
     "I’m labor. I’m not management. I don’t run the show."

     He -- a U. S. Senator -- would have us believe he just works there.  To continue the parallel with business, that is as if a member of the Board of Directors pretended to have no more influence over how a company is run than some hourly person on the assembly line.  This is not the position of a member of the United States Congress, it's a neat summary of a Senator's job in Imperial Rome.  He's asking us to believe he's just a-watching the whole train run off the trestle, caboose over boiler, as he sweeps the floor in the railroad station waiting room, powerless, thinking if only: "...[W]e’d be on this issue like a hobo on a ham sandwich. We would be all over inflation passing bills."

     If he was my Senator, I'd be asking for my nickle back.

     The interview is a marvel of a man with money, power, influence and authority claiming he's just a little fellow caught up in the gears, a-doing whatever he can, which is nothing at all.  If that was true, why d'ya suppose he even bothered to appear on TV, or the TV people bothered to invite him?  You can find the whole thing here.  Don't eat first..
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* I'd like to be able to tell you that one "side" or the other, out at the fringes of our two-party system, has a definitive lead over the other when it comes to political violence.  But even though it's often more one than the other at any given time, metaphorical meteorologists blowing up Federal buildings or supposed law'n'order fetishists bushwhacking a talk-show host (or vice-versa), the truth is they're usually so far off the Left/Right horseshoe that their political "philosophies" are largely horseshit, and viewed as a whole over history, they're as likely to have gone galloping off from one end of the horseshoe as the other.

The Spider

     It's not a metaphor.  A large Orb Weaver has set up shop in our side yard, between one wall of Roseholme Cottage and a skinny wooden post for the temporary fence around the tree-smashed house south of us.

     I noticed her weeks ago, initially with a medium-large web between one of the pillars holding up the roof of our porch and the front wall of the house.  A gold-kneed Orb Weaver!  She'd weave a new web every evening, seine the air all night and take it down each morning.  A few days later, I blundered into an anchor strand in broad daylight between our house and the wreck of our neighbors, and didn't give it much thought.

     Thursday, Tam and I were taking the trash can to the curb.  The usual division of labor is that she wheels the bin and I stand watch;* it's large and heavy.  Even though it has wheels, it's an awkward thing and there are plenty of places to take a fall between the back yard and the curb out front.

     Tamara was in the lead, puffing with effort, and came to an abrupt stop.  "Uh-oh!"

     "What is it?  Are you okay?"  Our normal route follows the narrow sidewalk to the south of the house.  After the tree fell and was rapidly cleared up by a team of a half-dozen men, the usual bumps and little hollows were supplemented by more of the same, and they're big enough to catch a wheel.

     She paused before saying, "There's a huge spiderweb!"

     I walked around her, flashlight on.  There was indeed a huge spiderweb, at least a yard across and about five feet high, supported by a very heavy diagonal of silk from our gutter to a foot above the base of one of the neighbor's fence posts.  It was neatly signed with a white squiggle, and at the very center, a large, light-brown spider with pale knees, half again as big as last seen.  The fishing must be good.

     Tam was unhappy.  She's uncomfortable with spiders, especially big ones.  You know how some people who are nervous around cats or dogs seem to attract them?  She's like that for spiders.  If a spider's going to screw up rappelling, she's who it will fall on, panicked.  "We can't go this way."

     I like spiders.  They catch and eat noxious bugs, and often perform fancy dances (ever watch a zebra spider hunt?  They leap and spin like a cartoon ninja!) or weave elaborate nets in the process.  "I'll take the trash around the other side of the house," I said, "if you'll open the gate on that side."  I took the bin from her, backed it up and got it turned around, and horsed the heavy thing through the long detour.

     Once we'd got the bin to the curb, I went around to the south to see the spider and her web from the other side.  Her abdomen is marked with a pattern like snake scales, with a paler + right in the center.  She didn't seem to mind the attention -- an annoyed Orb Weaver will start to bob up and down while holding on to the web until the whole thing is rippling; they'll let you know when you're in the way.  I didn't want to spoil her fishing by getting too close.  The web is one of the largest I've seen in years, truly impressive work.

     When Tamara and I returned from our morning walk right before sunrise today, I had another look.  The anchor strand is still there, a good sign she still considers that spot her patch -- but she'd taken the web down.  There's plenty of room to walk under the anchor at the high end.

     I guess we've got a new helper!  Around here, the Orb Weavers usually fish a spot for a few weeks and then move on, folding their nets and slipping away.
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* While this may seem unfair, on Trash Day I clean out the fridge and change two of the three litterboxes, and usually buy the pizza as well.  It evens out.

Worse Than Crooks

     Lying and cheating is kind of expected of politicians -- but they're not supposed to embezzle millions; they're supposed to keep their lies small and personal, and stop at merely shading the truth about big things.  They're supposed to have some respect for the government of which they are a part, or at least to fake it in a convincing manner.

     The Trump administration's egregious nonsense about voting, and especially voting by mail, is far outside even these lax norms.  Their proposed "fix" for the non-existent problem appears to be designed to create chaos and disenfranchise the greatest number of legitimate mail-in voters.  It imposes a "zero error" requirement on outgoing ballots, in which a single mistake on one envelope would result in the rejection of an entire batch of thousands of them.  At least 24 states have pushed back, including some controlled by Republicans -- and even though pending court cases only blocked mandatory compliance with the proposed USPS mail voting requirements, not a single state has chosen to voluntarily comply and many report that they simply cannot.  Nevertheless, the administration has gone to the U. S. Supreme Court to ask for a ruling that will allow the scheme to proceed, even as the first states prepare to send out ballots within days.

     It's a huge, dirty Federal thumb on the scales of a balance the individual states are supposed to be looking after -- and they have done so from the first days of our republic.  No entity has ever produced evidence of statistically significant vote-by-mail fraud, despite a great deal of very diligent searching for it.  At this point, even a nursing-home worker helping the frailest of the people in their care fill out ballots must surely be aware that the slightest fudging will come under the microscope.

     Stealing from campaign funds for nice dinners and limo service, sending Federal business to your son-in-law's uncle's firm, ignoring constituent complaints while swapping votes with colleagues -- sure, we voters don't like it, but it's not unexpected.  Election interference largely aimed at the most helpless or isolated voters is far worse than ordinary crookedness.  It's a slow-motion, low-key coup attempt, an autogolpe under the thinnest veneer of pretended concern.

     You can help stop 'em.  No, I doubt the Supremes listen to anything but the ringing in their own ears these days, and the only thing the Trump administration listens to are its own worst members and the whims of the man at the top, but you can get out there and vote in November, in person if possible, and vote hard against the undermining of American democracy.  You might end up with a few farther-out Democrats than you'd prefer, but the Dems have demonstrated a willingness to accept being voted out, and voters can always remove the most egregious in the next cycle.  Mr. Trump's Republicans, especially the man himself, have repeatedly refused to accept defeat in fair and honest elections: vote 'em in one time too many and you may be stuck forever.  Consider the stakes.  It's not a safe gamble.

Geeking Out

     Here's a whole series of pages with old General Radio publications!  Great stuff if you like that kind of thing; GR built a lot of parts and lab equipment from the very early days on.  Eventually, they were divvied up and parted out.

Nightmare Logic

     Watching national and world events is like having a front-row seat to someone else's nightmare: not only does it not make sense, even the emotional resonances are off.  Jarring.  Or perhaps it's like a badly edited movie,* in which the storyline never quite gels and the various elements undercut one another.

     International affairs are askew at best; domestic politics seem to be headed for something wretched as the November elections approach.  Will there be fireworks or a damp squib?  Troops at the polling places or just the usual confusion of overworked volunteers?†  Will the outcome be rout or a coup?  Something muddled, leaving the House and Senate on an even closer balance?  (A divided legislature is often a silent legislature -- and silence, as Plato observed and Robert's Rules of Order reminds us, is consent.)  All I know for sure is that anyone who says they do know is talking through their hat.

     It's all sliding downhill and right towards us, like an avalanche viewed from the valley floor, and while it might seem slow or even graceful, it's moving a lot faster than appears and it's carrying chaos with it.
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* We've been watching Ride Or Die, a generally delightful series that can't quite make up its mind whether it's a spy spoof or a serious tale of friendship and international intrigue; but the acting, sets and photography are first-rate, and the editing is often brilliant -- especially the frequent and varied "match cuts" when going from one location to another.
 
† A reminder that almost everyone you interact with when you vote is either a volunteer or a low-paid temporary worker.  Whatever is going on, whatever party is in power in your precinct, whatever thuggish nitwittery is afoot on election day, Left, Right or lunacy, they didn't create it and they likely wish even more than you that it would just go away.  Please be courteous to the voter-facing poll workers, no matter your political affiliation or what you suspect to be theirs.  They're not nefarious villains.

About That Eye Infection

     I was diagnosed with an eye infection in my non-dominant eye some time back, and prescribed steroid-antibiotic eye drops to treat it.  My eye got better at first and then it started getting worse, so I kept using them and called my eye doctor.

     By the time of the appointment, I was over a week past when I ought to have stopped using the drops.  Turns out I should have.  They're pretty harsh.  They ended the infection, all right, then started attacking my cornea, producing much the same symptoms as the original infection.

     So now I'm on some other drops, steroid only, and they're helping, but I might not get everything back.  Could be that one's always going to be a little less sharp.  Plain eyedrops help.

     Being one of those little old ladies who always bugs the doctors was not among my ambitions, but I've got to stop figuring everything will work out.  Sometimes it doesn't.

We Lost Will Murray

     Will Murray was a pulp historian, literary agent for the estate of Doc Savage creator Lester Dent, and a pulp writer himself.  He'd written further adventures for Doc and associates, The Shadow and Tarzan, among others, and was well-regarded among pulp collectors and readers -- and writers.  Philip Jose Farmer had said Murray was the foremost expert on 1930s pulp heroes, and considering the depth and scope of Farmer's own scholarship on the topic (he dreamed up the "Wold Newton" grand unified theory of pulp and literary superheroes, linking Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, Doc Savage, The Shadow and a great many more to a fictional incident [and a real meteor impact] in 18th-Century Britain), we can take that as an authoritative assessment.

     Mr. Murray passed away August 24.  He was 73.

     An old nonsense riddle asks, "Why is a mouse when it spins?"  The answer is, "The higher, the fewer."  We're getting very far up these days, and very few.

Rewrenched

     Nope, not my back -- my toolbox.

     Working on my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna in its post-treefall location, I was using a 3/8" combination "ignition" wrench.  I'd had to buy a new set; the set in my workshop either never had a 3/8" or I lost it (memory claims it arrived with two 5/16" and no 3/8").

     I'd done without.  You can't buy just one ignition wrench.*  Sized for fine work -- like the ignition systems of older cars -- they're sold in sets, usually sized from 5/32" through 7/16" in either open end/box end combinations, or with open-ended wrench jaws at each end, set at different angles.  A decent set is inexpensive; if you use them a lot, you might want something better, but twelve dollars or less buys a usable set.  Most have all-over plating or polishing, including the jaws; pay more and you can avoid it.

     The combination kind are the most generally useful in electronics, and that's what I'd had.  "Had," because I'd bought another set when I needed a 3/8" wrench, used it to tighten the antenna wire connections to the impedance-matching balun, attempted to put the wrench in my pocket while balancing on an extension ladder, and been distracted by the effort of getting down, taking the ladder down without straining my back or putting it through a window, and carefully carrying the ladder to its storage spot.  I didn't think about the wrench until doing laundry the next day.  "Better check these slacks, I don't want to wash a wrench by mistake."  Nothing.  The little wrench was gone.

     While the washer was running, I checked all the places where I might have set the wrench down.  Nope.

     Over the next few days, off and on, I retraced my path in the back yard multiple times.  No sign of that shiny little wrench, even while the sun was beating down and the sparkle would stand out.  I kept looking as I went about my normal routines.  Friday, it occurred to me that if I had dropped the wrench while aloft, I was working right over the fence that separates the patio from my narrow side yard, and it might be on the other side.  But that realization came after dark, and I promptly forgot.

     While cleaning up outdoors after dinner -- the grill trays I use get a first scrub-down with vinegar over a weedy patch  -- I remembered, and had a peek over the fence.  Though the sun was setting, there was a gleam from the grass.  I didn't have my keys, so after I had the trays soaking in a sink of soapy water, I went out the front door with a penlight and walked right to the tiny wrench, unhurt by nearly a week outside.  Victory!
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* Strictly speaking, that's not  true.  Snap-On will sell onesie replacements for their open-ended sets.  The 3/8" ones are about $28 and yes, the sets are well over $100.  They will undoubtedly last forever, the warranty is first-rate and I'll bet the jaws are ever so slightly roughened, for a secure grip.  If you need really good ignition wrenches, they'd be the ideal choice.  At work, the North Campus has a few ignition and full-size Snap-On wrenches remaining from the original set of tools and they're outstandingly good.  My personal needs along those lines are more modest.     

Normal Entree Progression

     Tam and I enjoyed pork barbecue Friday night, the kind that consists of pork and a few vegetable cooked down in a smoky, tomato-based sauce with hints of sweet and spicy.  You ladle it onto buns, maybe add a little more sauce, and there you go.

     That's not the notable part.  What's worth writing about is why, and what else works that way.

     The reason we had barbecue is that we had a pork roast last Sunday, a Boston Butt (still $3.99 a pound) marinated overnight in vinegar, soy sauce, Worcestershire and spices, then roasted for at least an hour per pound in a covered pan on the grill.  I'd added an apple, carrots, celery, a potato, a red onion, diced multicolored bell peppers, a can of mild green chilies, a big fresh tomato (diced) and a bottle of shakshuka tomato sauce.  In parts of the Middle East/Mediterranean, they poach eggs in that sauce, and it's delicious, but the sauce is kind of like supercharged marinara but sweeter and hotter, a spice profile that works in a lot of contexts.

     There were, of course, leftovers.  It was a three-pound roast.  I sliced the meat, bagged it in a gallon freezer bag, and laid it flat in the freezer for later.  Friday night, I put the bag in the microwave to defrost while I squeezed a couple of chorizo sausages out of their casings, fried and drained them, then poured most of a bottle of dark, smoky barbecue sauce over it and let it simmer.  I added the thawed pork roast leftovers and snipped it up small with kitchen shears and a potato masher, adding some gumbo file to thicken it (a little bit of that stuff works really well!).  The end result passed nicely as barbecue.

     Leftover pork roast can end up as pasta sauce, Hoppin' John or "chili" (red stew) starter, too.  If there's more sauce and vegetables than meat, you can poach eggs in it, and incline the spices Italian (Eggs Pomodoro!) or Middle Eastern (a version of Shakshuka you'd better not mention in its hometowns).

     Other main dishes work the same way.  Tam and I don't make much of a dent in a rotisserie chicken -- a leg or two and a wing for her, some breast meat for me.  But afterward, it's a simple job to get the rest of the meat off the bones, skin and all, and freeze it for chicken soup or stew later.  Meat loaf (I occasionally buy one from the butcher counter, oven-ready) can be cooked on the covered grill in the summer (why heat up the kitchen?*), and the leftovers become hot or cold sandwiches, or the meat in spaghetti or red stew.  A beef roast without tomatoes becomes soup or stew later; with tomatoes, it works as well as the pork roast in various tomato-based dishes.

     Looking back, I really started doing this consistently during the pandemic, but with the prices for meat never having come back down, it makes sense to continue, and the end result is pretty tasty, too.
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* Having got the charcoal grill down to an easy process -- most starts take one match, and I'm only using lump charcoal, hardwood kindling and no accelerant, after a long, gradual learning process -- I have realized the old notion of a "summer kitchen" is absolutely brilliant.  Why heat up the house when you can cook outdoors?

Free Philip Glass Concert!

     Okay, maybe it's not exactly his style, but if you're not claustrophobic -- and I most definitely am not -- and you put in the earplugs and remember to ask for a blanket -- which I certainly did -- there's something restful about relaxing cozily inside an MRI in a loose-fitting hospital gown and scrub pants with your eyes shut while the machine does its thing:

     CLACK! Tick, Tick, Tick, Tick, Tock.
     Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
      Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
       Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)
        Brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt-brzzt (pause)

     CLACK. Tic-tic-tic-tic-tic-tic, clunk.
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  
     Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!   Braaap!  

     And so on, for nearly half an hour, while I drifted, toasty and half-asleep, trying to work out plot developments in a short story and counting repetitions.  This was all lower back, and while I did feel strangely warm from time to time, I didn't experience the thing that sometimes happens when they're looking at your skull: spinning rings of white light, apparently when the scanning RF beam intersects some part of the eye or optic nerve.  Anyway, I have been plenty magnetized to last me for awhile.

     MRI machines use a series of clever tricks to take a look at your innards, including the parts too soft and squishy to register in any detail on an X-ray, and while an MRI is generally louder and larger than an X-ray machine, the part that's actually scanning you is a little less intense.  The dodge is, the huge electromagnet you're inside has lined up each and every tiny proton in each tiny atom, and the detector is just looking to see how much they wiggle when the scanning beam zips by.  Each pass of the beam results in a series of data points, ρ (rho) much amplitude at an angle of φ (phi) over and over and over, and they slowly build an image in the form of a series of  "slices."  Smart processing software can turn that into a 3-D model or show flat projections at various angles, but it takes a lot of samples -- which is why it takes so long and you're not supposed to move while it's happening.

     If you're not much minded to panic, it's a good time to relax, half-dozing.  Might as well; you're not going anywhere until it is over.

     Despite my very best intentions, I walked to the room with a couple of metal clips in my hair.  The techs give you the once-over, twice, before you cross the threshold, and spotted them.  "Don't feel too bad about it," one of them told me, "I confiscated two lighters from a guy just last week.  I still can't figure out why he brought them."

     What they found out about my back, I don't know yet.  Maybe some time next week.

It's All About Image

      A part of my day will be about imaging -- they're going to stick me in an MRI machine* and look at my back.  It's still giving me some trouble; a week back at work has caused an increase in pain in my lower back, despite reduced physical activity and desk chairs that are far better than the old-fashioned wooden one I use at home.

     There might be some answers in a closer look.  Or not, and there's a limit to what they can do to fix spines anyway.  But at least they're looking -- and I'm still exercising.
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* They have not, despite what you may have heard, been renamed "America machines."

We're Going To Have To Be Weirder, Too

     His most famous role never held much interest for me, though I was happy that the more extroverted outcasts, oddballs and theater kids had the rollicking midnight movie as an outlet, and a joyous one at that.

     In his other roles, the late Tim Curry chewed up scenery with the best of them, with a unique kind of silken, outlandish glee.  He did a lot of fantasy and science fiction, sometimes heavily costumed, but the greasepaint was only decoration -- hardly anyone remembers his appearance in the single-season Earth 2 as the villain Gaal, but even playing that small role in an obscure series, he projected unnerving menace without any special makeup or props.  Fans and fellow actors say the man himself was anything but evil: charming, friendly, and modest about his own abilities; but he was a superbly talented actor.

     Tim Curry was an original.  There's no replacement.  You'll have to improvise your own strangeness -- and he'd've applauded you for it.

A Pig In A Poke

     If there's any carrier offering "Medigap" insurance who will tell you what their various plans cost before they sit you down with a fast-talking sales type, I'd love to hear about it.

     These are plans that fill in what Medicare doesn't cover, pay all or some of the deductibles, etc. rather than the plans that glom onto your Social Security check and Medicare coverage, and allow a pittance after taking their cut; I'm sure the latter are not much worse than company-provided health plans -- except for the part where they don't leave you enough to live on.

     The problem is that just about the entire system is selling their stuff without admitting how much it will cost.  Medicare itself will provide a guess about how big a bite they'll take, and it's pretty grim, but the commercial companies are all smoke and mirrors.

     Nothing personal, guys, but if it was an honest product, you'd set it out in trays with price tags, and let people wander the aisles, picking 'em up and evaluating price and quality.  Instead, there's a lot of well-fronted bullshit about what all it'll save us hapless customers from, and to what extent, with tables and charts and illustrations -- and not word one about the monthly bill.

     Look, I'm old.  From here on, the ride goes downhill.  Something -- or a few things -- are going to incapacitate me to a lesser or greater extent; something's going to kill me, eventually.  My sincere hope is to use up nearly all my money by the day before that happens, and leave just enough for a tidy disposal of my remains.  And, you know, maybe stiff the health insurance company for that last monthly bill, just as a final token of the esteem in which I have held them.  Presumably by then, they'll have told me how much it will be.

Going To Have To Be Better

     The net goodness of the world diminished a little yesterday, when Dolly Parton died.  In the face of a world filled with all manner of monstrous evil, she pushed back.

     You're going to hear a lot of talk about Dolly Parton being inherently good, a a simple country girl from a poor family* who rose to great heights -- but from the evidence, she worked at being good; once her success reached a point where a high and steady income was nearly certain (and it wasn't quick), she targeted charity along lines that aimed at the root of suffering, working to encourage literacy, support human rights, and fund medical research.  Initially a songwriter, her music and her occasional comments about religious philosophy reveal a Zen-like simplicity, a willingness to work down to root causes and tackle issues at the broadest level.  It was both a driver of commercial success (once she got to the top of the country charts, she actively sought out material with crossover potential, while staying true to her musical roots) and a source of the positive difference she made in the world.

     She was intelligent -- and knew that mental horsepower wasn't even half of what it takes; she had plenty of ambition and drive, but her "emotional IQ" was off the charts and I think it was the source of the deep and lasting goodwill she engendered.

     Dolly is gone.  Her legacy remains -- and the rest of us are going to have to be just a little bit better to one another to make up for her loss.
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* While she cultivated a fun and slightly zany public image, I have always liked a story from the set of Steel Magnolias: the director began berating her for a poor performance, saying he didn't even know why she had been hired for her role.  "They hired me because I'm Dolly Parton," she replied, "And it's your job to make me look like I can act."  He did, she did, and the film did right well at the box office.

They're What?

     How knowledge fades: Tam was playing back an interview about storm damage in our a neighborhood a couple of weeks ago, as in the tree that fell and crushed a neighbor's house (empty at the time).  Another neighbor was interviewed about the event, saying the sound "...was like one of those energy boxes up on a pole? When they go out."

     A what, now?

     I suppose some of my reaction is curse-of-knowledge stuff: my work is power distribution adjacent, since we're out of business when the juice stops flowing (and maintain our own MegaWatt-sized backups); and some of it is age: when I was young, most people knew that humming thing up on the pole was a transformer, and no few even knew it by its nickname, "pole pig," fat and round, with small insulators sticking out the sides and a bigger one at the top.  Rotate it ninety degrees, and it is indeed shaped like some kind of robotic pig.  They are the magic that makes big power grids possible: it's a lot easier to ship electricity around at high voltage and low current, but it's more useful in your home at a lower voltage.  The transformer's the middleware that makes it possible.

     Or, you know, the energy box.  They work the same no matter what you call them. (If your wall-socket juice travels underground, you'll have a warm, humming cube hiding in an out-of-the-way spot every few houses instead.  They work the same way, but are all buttoned up to keep curious fingers away.) 

Slow Horses

     Not the actual plodding kind of horse but the TV series Slow Horses, based on the book series, a kind of affectionate homage to the worlds of John le Carre (pretty directly) and Len Deighton (less so) and one that will be recognizable to fans of the Charles Stross Laundry Files novels and short stories.  Tam and I started watching it and ended up following the entire series to date, night after night

     There's none of Stross's cosmic horror in Slow Horses but lots of horrible office experiences at Slough House, where the ultra-polished UK MI-5 spy agency sends their screw-ups and burn-outs, hoping they'll quit quietly, or possibly fall down the stairs.  The place is run by Jackson Lamb, a very burnt-out Cold War relic with a knack for being in the right place that kept reminding me of someone -- it took watching the entire series before I figured it out: "Sam Sheepdog," from the sheepdog-and-wolf Loony Tunes cartoons: the wolf gets up to all manner of subterfuge and Sam's always right there when it counts, minimal effort, stopping him cold.  Sam -- and Jackson -- have seen it all before; they know the next five moves and they're not impressed.

     Of course, the thing about the screw-ups infesting Slough House is they're MI-5 screw-ups, which means they're pretty good at spying -- and operate outside (or at least at odds with) the agency's bureaucracy.  It makes for exciting viewing, with the callous, obnoxious and nevertheless competent Jackson Lamb managing to manage them largely by indirection and malice.

     Highly recommended, if you like that sort of thing.  Tam and I do. 

The B*stard Theory

     Still waiting on more examples, but so far, my theory about what it takes to run a successful human spaceflight program is holding water.

     Of course, it takes talented engineers, and plenty of them; of course it takes access to resources -- money will do, but money and actual materiel is even better.  And it takes a decent manufacturing base.  Countries with those things, and a will to send stuff into space, can and do run space programs: Japan, the European Union, India.

     To successfully send humans into space, and bring most of them back, you need one more thing: an utter bastard at the top.  Three of the four entities that have done so demonstrate this: The Soviet Union, the United States, and SpaceX.  Two of the principals were trained engineers, though the details of their spacecraft were designed by others; the third is a coder (or was; it takes about fifteen minutes away from that work to get out of date, and he's been a business promoter for decades now).  All three were or are relentless promoters.  All three accommodated the political environments in which they operated, without regard to moral hazard.  And all three were or are pretty much bastards.  They're not the precise same kinds of bastards: raw and relentless, charming and driven, or weird and unflagging, but they're all relatively amoral.  They all chugged on through anything that got between them and their goal.  And though they all got people into space, none of them quite got to where they wanted to be.

     I'm waiting on another example.  Obscurity still conceals China's guy(s); India's manned space program is supposedly still on track, but they're quiet about it.  But there's almost certainly some kind of bastard behind the scenes, driving the detail people, navigating bureaucracy, moving with little regard to the feelings and careers of others.

     I'm deeply skeptical of "Great Man" theories of history.  Getting human spaceflight programs up and running may be an exception. 

Star City

     I finished the first season of Apple TV's Star City a few weeks ago.  It's the Russian-side companion to their alternate history series For All Mankind, in which the Soviet Union barely beats the U.S. to the Moon and the Space Race never stops.

     The latter series shows events from the U.S. side, and the hardware is mostly familiar to anyone who grew up with NASA-inspired articles in the Sunday supplement and national magazines.  It provides about as much view into details of the USSR's space program as we ever got in real life: clunky, overbuilt equipment and cosmonauts who got the job done through grit and fatalistic determination -- or died trying.  Where America succeeded or failed in plain sight, the Russians announced results after the fact, or swept them under the rug when things went wrong.

      And that's what Star City is about: exploring space under paranoid totalitarianism and sometimes despite it, using improvised hardware, taking chances the West never would.  The hardware is...well, it's very Russian.

     Watching the series, I thought the clunkiness and improvisation was a little overplayed.  Surely the real-life Russians had better stuff, despite the awful politics?  Tamara's been reading The Wrong Stuff: How the Soviet Space Program Crashed and Burned, by John Strausbaugh.  He certainly looks to have done his homework, and the real Soviet space program was, if anything, even iffier than the TV series makes it out to be.  Oh, the Russians had (and still have) plenty of fine engineers, and Sergei Korolev was (and needed to be) even more determined an organizer, manager and overall rocket designer than Werner von Braun.  But circumstances far outside his control resulted in an effort that had to brute-force everything and accept huge risks.  One reason the R-7 launch system, direct ancestor to today's Soyuz, has been able to become ever more capable though incremental improvement is that it was a crude (but workable) mechanism to begin with; better alloys, better machining, better construction techniques and better electronics have kept it usable, and increased the payload carried on the large amounts of thrust originally needed just to get the stack of stages off the ground and headed for space.

     The Wrong Stuff makes an excellent companion volume to Star City, for all that it slightly undermines the big "what if..." of the series: what if Russia got there first?  But the real "what if..." is a different question: what if Korolev had not been so terribly abused under Stalin's purges that his time in the gulags left him physically damaged and headed for an early death?  If anyone could have led the way to getting the N-1 launcher working and pulled off a Moon landing with Russia's equipment, he would have been the guy; but as things went, he was gone long before the deadline.

     In For All Mankind's timeline, the USSR is still together by the early 2010s -- but it's not quite the same place it was, having loosened up just a little under the pressure to compete (and sometimes cooperate), largely peacefully, in space and at home.  But after one season of Star City, it's clear that even making that small amount of progress will be a long, hard road.

Distraction Screens

     It's no secret that I don't think much of Mr. Trump, or of how he and his gang of Republicans are running the federal government, ringing up unprecedented debt, yanking the rug out from under the poor at home and abroad, handing out tax breaks to their ultra-wealthy pals who do not pay it back in the form of increasing employment* and engaging in wars of choice with murky and/or immoral victory conditions.

     But I do try to limit myself to substantive criticism about issues of importance.  I might think the way he combs his hair looks stupid, but so what?  That hairstyle isn't picking anyone's pocket or breaking their leg, and in the course of a busy day, you can find five or six more at least as dumb.

     So the recent fuss about sneaking the President out of Turkey in the wake of a credible threat (and leaving the Press as sitting ducks -- the very same sitting ducks they'd be if they were sharing the plane with him) or an aide who appears to have an unhealthy devotion to the President (as have many, to many Presidents, and it's never a good sign) strikes me as silly-season distractions, running while there are at least two and half wars on, and our country is well involved with all of them, and while the economy continues to teeter dangerously.

     This August isn't a slow-news month.  There's plenty of real stuff to report on, none of it reflecting any glory on the clod infesting 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
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* The thing about trickle-down economics is, something's got to be trickling down for it to make sense, and I don't mean job cuts.  Otherwise, it's just a trick.

Radium Water! Now -- With Vitamins!

      The thing about "A.I." is that there's a lot of smoke over very little fire -- and every coat-tail riding grifter and half-baked amateur futurist is emitting their own clouds, huddled over the flames and seeing the Promised Land (or at least a fat bank account) in their glow.

     The latest comes from the very top: the current administration in Washington, DC* is pushing a "golden age of science" built around applying A.I. to, well, everything.  Exactly how anyone is supposed to do actual science -- which is based on working out the actual facts about actual things and ideas -- using a tool that has a great and apparently inherent tendency to just make up plausible bullshit, no one can say.  In practice, it hasn't worked out, and the scientific journals have the same problem with specious A.I-generated article as fiction publishers do with A.I. dross that falls short of human efforts (and takes several pages to do so†), and the same problem with made-up A.I. citations as the legal profession.

     A.I. doesn't create new stuff; it uses the old stuff we already knew to create patterns of plausible stuff.  It may be able to pick out patterns in data that elude humans, too; but those results must be evaluated very carefully by subject-matter experts to determine what's real and what is only another "hallucination."  A.I. fools us in much the same way we fool ourselves, so it's not a simple task.

     Poorly understood by most people, with characteristics even the people who work developing it are struggling to understand, A.I. today occupies the same cultural space that radium (and radioactivity in general) did over a century ago, or vitamins a few year later.  The radium thing did not turn out so very well; vitamins did better.  The hype and hoopla‡ lingered, as the hype and hoopla from A.I. is now.

     Maybe let's not be in such a hurry to gulp it down by the gallon.
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* Here's a question for later: if the District of Colombia ever achieves statehood, will we start calling the Pacific coastal state "Washington, AC," or "Washington, OG?"  Or something else?  Yeah, yeah, the new state would be called something like District of Colombia, or maybe just Capitol District (for all those Hunger Games fans out there), but the city is Washington and you know we'll keep on using the old, familiar synecdoche.
 
† The problem is not so much that the writing is lousy -- Sturgeon's Law predicts 95% of all unsolicited fiction people send in is unpublishable -- as it is the sheer volume.  Typewriters let us write faster than we can think, and word processors let us edit so quickly that getting it right in the first draft no longer matters, but A.I. churns out fiction in greater volume than any collection of editors and assistants can manage to read.  There are gems in the slushpile, and 5% of the total was a sufficiently productive return at the pittance paid "first readers" to sort through it.  0.5% is not, and if A.I. was capable of recognizing the flaws well enough to sort through it, it wouldn't be creating so much unusable work.
 
‡ Even for vitamins: for awhile, every breakfast cereal advertised itself as so packed with vitamins that between them and the sugar, there couldn't have been much room left for grain.

First Day Back

     And, oh shucks, nobody missed me.  (Well, hardly anyone.)  This, in my kind of Engineering Department, counts as a success: if we do our jobs right, fixing most things before they break, we're nearly invisible.

     On the other hand, nobody from Engineering has been to the North Campus for nearly ten weeks and I have no idea what I might find.  It's on a pretty wet patch of land, in an area that's had even more rain than we received in Broad Ripple, so I may end up taking the old entrance, which travels over higher ground to reach the slightly elevated spot where the building stands.

     I was pretty beat at the end of the day, but not in pain.  Tired enough to be grumpy, which I'm going to have to get used to and compensate for.

...And The Waters Receded. Very Slowly.

     The White River peaked through Indianapolis last night, having set new records at several measuring stations -- but never quite overtopped the levees.

     That was scant comfort to the people on the river side.  Oh, they knew the bet, but when it's your home, a once-in-a-century flood still feels unfair.  Ravenswood, Rocky Ripple and few other locations will be a long time drying out and taking stock of what they've lost.

     Successive waves of heavy rain keep sweeping through, keeping the flood higher than predicted.  It's still dropping, just not as fast as we'd all prefer.

     On the personal hobby front, I decided I could string my off-center-fed dipole ham antenna on the other side of the house from where I had planned, away from the neighboring house that got partially crushed.  There's going to be a lot of activity over there by and by, and one end of that antenna would have been barely inside the fence line.  It was a possible complication nobody needs -- especially not me.  I managed to get the antenna in place in the new location, but I haven't run coaxial cable to it yet.  That will take a little planning and a new hole in the wall with a special fitting.

     Tomorrow, I plan to go back to work.  Way back in June when all of this started, I tried twice on successive Mondays to go back, and had to give up before putting in a full day each time: too much pain, too little energy.  I'm doing better now.  Maybe not a hundred percent, but I may not get that again.  85%? 90?  I'll take it.

We Aten't Ded

     Despite rising floodwaters, Tam and I are, so far, nearly untouched.  Roseholme Cottage is about a mile away from the White River to the north and west; the river makes a kind of drain-trap bend to our north around Broad Ripple (and the old town of Wellington, long absorbed into the city).  It will peak early tonight, and we're probably going to be sufficiently protected by the levee finished a few years ago, and by our neighborhood's slight elevation above the flood plain.

     Spare a thought for the Broad Ripple Art Center, its grounds and outbuildings being on the river side of the levee along with a few residences and an apartment building; and for Ravenswood, upstream and low-lying (that neighborhood floods at the drop of the hat, and we're in a fumble-fingered milliner's convention), and for Rocky Ripple, the not-quite-an-island (and independent municipality) downstream, across from Butler University, between the river and the canal and also, in a cost-saving compromise that avoided removing multiple houses along the old river levee, on the wet side of the new levee.  Homes in those places are already awash or worse.

     Welcome to a hundred-year flood, after thousand-year rainfall levels.

The More You Know?

      Not only do most hairdressers support your right to self-expression by changing your hair color, many of them are willing to dye for it!

"Primary Results Muddled"

     That's the occasional headline: "Unclear Primary Results For Dems" is the most common version, but in fact, the Republicans are inconsistent, too -- sometimes Trump-endorsed candidates win, sometimes more old-school GOP politicians who are at some distance from Trumpism.

     And, oh gosh, it's true.  In some counties, cities or districts, DSA-affiliated or adjacent hopefuls are doing well; other places, it's your aunt's Democrat, with pictures of FDR, LBJ and Joe Biden on the mantle.  There are locales where the Christian Nationalist Republicans come out on top in primaries, and others where, well, Mike Lindell is firmly convinced some kind of skullduggerous Deep State made him lose by over 11 percent.*

     If you think of primary voters as some solid block of Party identity across the country, from sea to shining sea, majestic purple mountains and amber waves of grain (or is that floodwaters?) included, it does look pretty muddled.

     But it isn't.  Two big-tent parties dominate American politics and, under various names and historical shadings, they always have.  You might not like sharing your particular tent with the more wild-eyed candidates and their voters, yet there they are and there are some places where they do well, especially in primaries.  Rural Americans like hardcore conservatives, and a lot of 'em aren't any too sure about foreign people with foreign accents and foreign religions.  The details have varied over the years, but that stereotype exists for a reason.  Likewise, people crammed into big cities or enmeshed in a daily struggle against harsh climates often value highly organized cooperation, and see government as a natural way to create it.  You're going to get Lefty, socialist-leaning All-Cops-Are-Bastards candidates in giant metroplexes and parts of the Upper Midwest; you're going to get various kinds of Right-wing, xenophobic Christian Nationalist candidates in the vast swath of agricultural and ranch lands where the towns are small and widely spaced.  And you're going to get more "purple," center-leaning candidates in the industrialized places that draw population from these extremes.

     People, even people that look pretty loony to you or me or that dude over there and hold some far-out views, deserve a fair chance to select representatives, mayors, governors and so on that reflect their community.  I don't very much like Indiana's current Lieutenant Governor, a religious nutjob who thinks the Earth (and the Universe) is a little over six thousand years old (and that's one of his less objectionable notions), but his party put him on the Republican ballot for a reason, and I hope the Governor, state legislature and courts can keep a lid on the crazy little guy.

     While the Unitary Executive excesses of the Trump administration are not, in my opinion, at all normal or proper, running and sometimes electing a very mixed bag of elected officials is normal, and if you want to keep them within more reasonable limits, that power is in your hands: go vote in primary elections!  You can count on the extremists showing up; they've got an axe to grind and the ballot box is their whetstone.  You can make it more of a grindstone, and help hold the noses of our politicians to it, simply by showing up and making an informed choice.
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*  It did, in fact, not.  This would not be the first time Mr. Lindell has been plagued by imaginary spiders or the like, and in my opinion, it will not be the last.

Not Much Today

     About all I did today was struggle with paperwork.  The extended leave time and medical stuff involves two big and doctrinaire insurance companies; a large medical practice that includes hospitals, all manner of specialists, physical therapists and imaging specialists, and is singularly stubborn and uncooperative when it comes to filling out forms; and the very large and procedure-bound company I have ended up working for, after decades of working for a much smaller one in the same business where you could solve most problems by finding the one or two people who knew how to deal with it and having a short conversation.

     There are no short conversations now, and nobody's interested in helping solve someone else's problems.  There are only rules, and if they don't make sense, tough luck.

     At present, I need a form filled out by licensed experts so I can be allowed to return to work; or they can fill out another form that says I shouldn't.  I have to turn the form in five days before I return.  I can't come back without the form -- and if I don't come back, even if I don't have the form, they will assume I'm playing hooky and I'll be in quite a lot of trouble.  Nevertheless, I won't be allowed to return unless I have the form, and it needs to be filled out and signed by a doctor familiar with my treatment.  (No, I can't just find a shiny new MD who needs a chrome-plated dingus for his or her Benz and offer 'em $500 to fill the damn thing out.)  And there's no direct number or email for either the doctor or the form-filling-out center (yes, they have one), only voicemail and a frustratingly indirect messaging system.  Multiple messages over multiple days have gone without answer.

     The medical care I'm receiving is fine.  The doctor and physical therapists are, as near as I can tell, all competent and highly qualified.  But the whole outfit is not real big on other people's paperwork, especially when it's the patient asking.  And the insurance company who require the form before they will give my employer the all-clear won't ask them to fill out this one, even though they have already requested and received a lot of other documentation from the same medical practice.  Why?  I don't know, and apparently damn me for asking; they acted (politely) like I was trying to get them to cheat when I asked them to ask the medical practice to fill out the form, since they weren't responding to me.

     I have no idea how any of this will work out.  I went home with a gimpy back thinking I'd be out a week or two at the most, and I left my main toolbag in a cabinet at the North Campus with a few thousand dollars worth of my personal hand tools in it, some of them irreplaceable.  I left more of my tools in my desk at the Main Campus.  (I'm kind of picky about tools, and I'm even more picky about being able to do the job without having to wait for some other geek to remember to return the tools he got out of the company toolbox to work on his project.  I'm not going to impugn my peers over poor toolbox discipline, but it's not impossible that one or two of them might be a tiny bit forgetful about returning tools to the box after use.*)

     Presently, all this soap-opera stuff is up in the air, despite my having a letter from my back specialist on the practice's letterhead that says I can return to normal duty at a date in the not-too-distant future.  It's not the actual form, you see, and so therefore -- medical license and specialist certifications notwithstanding -- it may not count.

     I'll bet all of them just leave screwdrivers and staplers, etc. lying where the gadgets were last used, too.  I know the doctor does -- but he's got people whose job it is to clean them up and put them away.
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* One of the things I routinely do -- when I'm working -- is walk through the technical areas and see that all the widgets are lit up properly, picking up abandoned tools and materials as I go and putting them them back in their normal storage places where the next desperate slob can find them.  I don't know why other people don't do this, but I'm not the boss of them; I'm only in charge of how I deal with it, so I do.

A Rain Day With Rain -- And Wind, And Worse

     It wasn't worse for me, though it could have been.  I was on the standby list for physical therapy, and the called this morning with an opening at 1:30 p.m.  Was I interested?  The last set of exercises the therapist assigned me left my back sore, so you bet I was; he's been good about adjusting the therapy when it hurts.

     What with one thing and another -- I got absorbed in the last chapters of a book I was reading -- I rushed out the door at the last minute, ahead of the day's second wave of storms coming in from the north.  The first set hadn't been too bad, but there were thunderstorm and tornado warnings along the track of the second one.

     I checked in just in time, got the new exercises and ran through them, and all the while, the huge windows of the medical building gave everyone a front row seat to an ominous wall of dark-gray clouds.  I had my back to them, laying on a table and doing knee lifts, when the PT specialist said, "Better wrap up, this thing's about to hit.  You can go out the employee entrance, it's closer to your car."

     I sat up and turned around to look out the window as wind gusts bent the plantings outside over.  He handed me a printout and led me to the door.  I made it to my car barely ahead of the rain and drove home to the booming of thunder.

     Got out of the car, though the garage and to the back door as the rain picked up, and was inside before it started sheeting down.  The lights flicked a few times, and I started hearing sirens.  They got closer and closer, and I went out on the front porch to have a look.

     Next house to the north, a home health nurse scurried from her car to their porch, looked at me and said loudly, "I called it in."  Just then, two fire trucks pulled up, crews got out, and headed towards the house to the south.

     I hadn't looked in that direction until they did.  The last big tree on my lot (well, half on mine and half on my neighbor to the south's lot), a big oak, had toppled across the one-story house, smashing the living room and dining room, and coming to rest with limbs poking through the roof of the next house to the south.  It looked like someone had slammed a sledge hammer down on a dollhouse.  It took out the long dropwire from the alley to a streetlight along the road, tucking the wire under itself and into the house.

     The house was empty.  No one was hurt.  The guy who owns it lived there several years ago, got married and had a baby on the way shortly afterward, and the house was going to be too small.  He and his family moved to a bigger place and he's been a landlord ever since.  His most recent tenants moved out two weeks ago!  If the tree had fallen north instead of south, it would have done similar damage to my house.

     I think that house may be totalled.  The oak was pretty solid, but had deep splits at the base and shallow roots.  It fell like the wrath of Zeus, shattering the far wall, reducing the roof to pieces, and forcing the front wall to lean out several feet at the top.  The homeowner showed up shortly after the firemen left, having done a safety check and put up caution tape.  He was joined by a man from the gas company, who confirmed IFD had shut off the gas and checked for leaks, and before he was done, a representative from a commercial recovery company arrived.

     Within an hour, a large tree crew with large machines was cutting away the tree and lifting out the pieces.  Power & Light had shut off electricity to the streetlight and the house (update: or not; the streetlight still works, which is unsafe), and by twilight, the tree crew was gone (they've pretty well trashed my raised flowerbed; I haven't been able to do anything with it this year and the old, soft landscape timbers were knocked askew and battered, my front yard being the only place to stack the pieces of the fallen tree before loading them into a big truck.  They did their best to put it back together, but I'm going to need new 4x4s.) and a recovery crew was wedging in bracing 2x4s and nailing them to the sagging walls and stakes freshly hammered into the ground.  They tarped up the roof of the next house south, too.

     My former neighbor's not sure what he's going to do, rebuild or demolish, rent or sell, but the last big tree is gone.  (So's my G5RV ham antenna -- the oak provided support about 3/4 of the way along the east half of it.  The various supports for the antenna worked just as I had hoped; the wire snapped as the oak fell, and the unsupported pieces were too short to get into trouble.  I'm out of the G5RV business for awhile.)

     Next time, remind me not to complain about rain days without rain.  The alternative can be much worse!

A Rain Day With No Rain

     The rain missed us!  Storm warnings to the north but we dodged it.  But there's another chance tomorrow.

Slow Going

     Other than routine -- laundry, dishes and the network politics shows -- I spent today on antenna projects.  Between heat, humidity and my bad back, it's not quick.  I measured and assembled the long side of an off-center-fed dipole antenna, having already done the short side, made with heavy solid wire.  I'm not sure how well it will hold up, but I've always wanted to try, and I had a small stock of what once passed for industrial scrap, accumulated over decades.  It's cut for the 40 meter ham band, which means about 66 feet of wire overall -- some "scrap!"

     I'd had an older version once, taken down years ago when we had tree work done, coiled up and stashed in the flowerbed it used to hang above.  The insulators survived, and maybe the homemade matching transformer, but the stranded wire was greenish and the coaxial cable looked iffy once I located my antenna analyzer and tested it.  (My YouKits imported antenna analyzer is at least ten years old; modern "nano vector network analyzers" will run rings around it* for about what I paid, but it's simple and gives a quick indication if you've got an antenna or a lump, a good coaxial cable or a bad one.)

     This week promises rain, so progress may be even slower.  That's okay -- stringing up an antenna in a hurry is never a good idea, and that goes double when trying to avoid back strain.
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* Almost literally "rings," since they'll do the useful Smith Chart display, while mine only gives a plot of impedance and SWR over a selected frequency range, around a selected center frequency. 

Doc Savage Flashlight

     I've got my Doc Savage flashlight -- and they work just the way Lester Dent described!  Of course, he was writing pulp magazine stories in the 1930s, long before high-strength magnets, light-emitting diodes and supercapacitors.  Whatever kinds of dynamo flashlights were available in his time would have been bulky, clumsy things, eking out extra life from carbon-zinc batteries.

     The iFixit people sell an inexpensive hand-powered flashlight that is small and charged by squeezing a little lever whenever the beam starts to dim.  They're far from the only source -- the various big online retailers list a wide variety, from basic squeeze-charged units to fancy ones with a hand-crank, a radio receiver and a jack to charge your phone.  None of them are high-end tactical lights, but if you're looking for something to leave in useful places for jobs like finding your way to the basement when the lights go out, a few of these wouldn't be a bad choice.  The supercapacitor "battery" on most of them isn't going to turn crusty after a year or two of neglect, though it may need a quick charge by the lever.

     You've already got a better portable communications device than Doc and his associates ever had -- or even Dick Tracy! -- so why not add a flashlight like theirs, too?

Uncapped?

     FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has led the commissioners in a 2-1 vote to end the longstanding limits on how much of the broadcast media landscape any one company can control.

     Starting in 2004, no single entity was allowed to control what was (potentially) on the screens of more than thirty-nine percent* of the national over-the-air TV audience, and it may still be.  (Before that, the limit was lower.)  Those limits were not set by the FCC; Congress told 'em, back when George W. Bush was President and his party held the majority in both houses of Congress.  The number was a compromise among Republicans: some wanted it raised to 45% while others wanted it kept at 35% (set in 1996, up from an even lower limit) -- and part of the deal was that the FCC wouldn’t and couldn’t raise it higher on their own.  After all, Congress makes the laws and the FCC only makes rules to ensure the things within their purview are done lawfully.  Chairman Carr's opinion on Executive Branch agency deference to Congress seems to vary depending on who's in the White House.

     But before I continue, take another look at that 2-1 vote: the FCC began with seven commissioners in 1934 but quickly settled down to five, no more than three of them from the same party, appointed to staggered terms by Presidents and approved (or rejected) by the Senate; it was established by the various Communications Acts passed by Congress and the general notion is a balance between Presidential power and the need for stability in regulations for the regulated entities, mostly direct users of the radiofrequency spectrum and "common carriers," the latter being telephone and Internet providers.  What's at issue is a limited resource, bandwidth; just as there's a finite amount of land to build on, there are only so many signals you can usefully emit or cram into a given wire or fiberoptic cable.  Right now, we've got only three Commissioners on the FCC, one Democrat appointee and two Republicans.  We're short one of each and the current administration has shown no interest in digging up a couple more (and it's a paying job, too!  Hell, I'd take it.  I hear the benefits package is pretty decent).

      There are lots of specific effects from this possible change (court fights are sure to follow, and we already live in an age of media giants -- the regulatory question is really about their becoming even more gigantic or not), but it's the bigger picture we should be looking at: an understaffed Federal Communications Commission, acting in direct contravention of the clear intent of laws passed by the United States Congress.  The greater issue is one of Caesarism versus small-r republicanism, and you'd never guess which side many -- but not all! -- of the big-R Republican politicians are on.
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* It's more complicated than that, of course.  Get out your slide rule -- here's a simplified (!) explanation, still on the FCC's website as I write this, though that may change:
     "There is no limit on the number of television stations a single entity may own nationwide as long as the station group collectively reaches no more than 39 percent of all U.S. TV households. For the purpose of determining compliance with this National Television Ownership rule, television stations operating on UHF channels (14 and above) are attributed with only half (50 percent) of the number of TV households in the DMA, as opposed to 100 percent of the number of households attributed to stations operating on VHF channels (13 and below). This is known as the UHF Discount. Unlike the rules discussed above, the National Television Ownership rule is no longer subject to the FCC's quadrennial review."

Friday, Ugh

     I spent over two hours in the dentist's chair Friday morning.  Went in for three fillings, came home with four, a numb upper lip and a sore nose, and still had to get to physical therapy in the afternoon.  So you will, I hope, excuse me for not posting on Friday.

Hooray For Breakfast!

      Today, I managed to make it to Good Morning Mama's in time to enjoy their home-made corned beef hash, with a scrambled egg on top.  Between physical therapy and doctor appointments, I have only managed that once before during this extended leave.

     Speaking of doctors--  I've had a minor irritation in my left eye for weeks,  I thought it might be an ingrown eyelash (the ancient Romans, who would pluck an eyelash for luck much as you might knock wood, were so plagued by ingrown eyelashes that the tools to deal with the problem were part of every physician's instruments).  My family doctor, back in July, thought it was more likely an allergy and had me start using over-the-counter allergy-relieving eye drops, but the problem continued and was getting a little worse.  I finally called my eye doctor's office.  They wanted to see me the next day, if not sooner.

     After one of the more awkward eye exams I've had (it's not easy to get a good look at the inside of an eyelid), he told me it was an infection, with a couple of cloudy spots, and phoned in a prescription for steroid-antibiotic eye drops.  Even a single day later, I think they're working.  The infection caused a funny feeling along the edge of my eyelid, like there was a little something in there that wouldn't wash away.  If you get that kind of sensation, don't ignore it even if it's not that bad; it could be something that won't go away on its own.  (And no, it's not eyelash mites gone wild.  Those, the eye specialist tells me, have such distinctive symptoms that they're easy to diagnose.)

Shell Game

     I guess it appeals to a certain kind of mindset: the so-called "mass deportation rally" that was going to be in Fishers....wasn't in Fishers, just north of Marion County.  Instead, the $50-a-head would-be mass-deporters were sent to a parking lot in Greenfield, off to the east of the metro, and from there to a secret location in Boone County, to the northwest.  (After all, fuel is so cheap, what's another hour's drive in the rain?)

     This fancy double-shuffle was apparently because there was a march of about a thousand people in Fishers in support of immigrants.  And I'm not going to condemn anyone for conflict avoidance.  I'd rather have 'em dodging than fighting.  It's way less messy for everyone else.

     But the whole thing seems kind of skeezy, and prerecorded addresses by Micah Beckwith, our religious oddball Lieutenant Governor, and by the always opportunistic more-MAGA-than-thou Attorney General Todd Rokita did nothing to change the impression that the event was mostly a way to separate the credulous from their cash with minimal effort for the people collecting the take.  A lot of skulking around, self-directed Nacht und Nebel to enhance the experience.

     Press coverage was relatively thin, too -- here's the most complete story I have found.

Hair Of The Dog?

      Hair of the dogweed,* maybe?  I spent most of today playing an ultra-cautious version of Hiram Bingham in the back yard, slashing away months of growth an inch at a time along the north fence, where thorny vines and sweet, flowering weedy honeysuckle bushes are threatening to take over.  I carried along a folded thick-paper leaf bag, and when the weeds were trimmed so low I was tempted to bend over, I knelt or sat down instead.

     Did it work?  I got in a warm tub with Epsom salts afterward, did my back exercises before and after, and I'm not unusually sore as I write.  Ask me tomorrow.

     Yesterday, I did a different thing.  Near the fence, my long-abandoned DirecTV dish (standard definition -- the HD feed uses different hardware) has been occupying a driven metal post.  It's never going to be lit back up, since A) it's outmoded and B) through no fault of DirecTV, there's nothing on it I'd want to watch that I can't pick up over the air or stream via the internet.  So I took the dish off the post.  I've wanted to put up a simple vertical antenna† for my ham radio stuff for quite some time, and that post would do nicely.  However, it stuck up nearly five feet above the ground, a lot more than I needed or wanted.

     Swinging a sledgehammer can be hard work.  But it doesn't have to be.  I learned years ago, sinking ground rods, that unless you are John Henry setting out to beat a steam drill, you can let the hammer do most of the work.  Don't swing it!  Lift it, and then guide it down while letting the weight fall.  Yes, whatever you're driving only sinks a fraction an inch when the few pounds of hammer head strikes, but what do you care?  Bring a bottle of water and enjoy the slow thump, thump, thump, eight or ten or a dozen in a row, take a sip and start over.  It took me a couple of hours, off and on, to sink the heavy galvanized tubing until about thirty inches were still above ground, and I wasn't sore afterward.  (All the underground utilities come in from the street and this is behind the house -- "Be sure before you dig" includes hammering stuff into the ground.  If you're not sure, don't do it!)

     There was plenty of time to look around while I did that, which was when I realized the honeysuckle roots and nasty thorn vines were way out of control.  I'm probably going to have to pay someone to dig up those darned honeysuckles: there's no making a shovelful of dirt any lighter or the process any easier on my back, and no matter how close to the ground I trim them, they keep on growing.

     All of these activities go very slowly, and I no longer grab the big toolbox with a wide assortment of tools on my way out the door.  Only what is needed, and if I have to make extra trips, that's fine.  I don't like it, but I like the alternative a lot less.
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*Scrub oak, deadly nightshade, a little poison ivy (but less every year), what I think may be hemlock, and pokeweed.  The latter is poisonous, too; the berries can be squeezed to produce hot-pink ink that dries brown -- but don't lick the pen!  At least the scrub oak isn't poison.  (There's no part of pokeweed that isn't poisonous.  People used to make "poke salad," but it starts with young leaves and requires multiple boilings and rinses.  Your grandmother or great-grandmother knew how to do it safely, but I wouldn't want to try.  There's about a zillion different kinds of tasty, safe greens you can grow and enjoy before turning to that stuff.  Or to commercial iceberg lettuce, but that's another story.)
 
† Specifically, a quarterwave ground plane for the twenty-meter band.  Amazon sells an imported "multiband" vertical that is nothing but a hose-clamped 19-foot telescoping pole on an insulating mount with a balun transformer at the base.  With an antenna tuner and a long coaxial cable feeding it, I suppose it is technically a multi-band antenna, and certainly better than no antenna.  But the telescoping construction means I can shorten it to be resonant at 14 MHz, add ground radials, and have a single-band vertical antenna without having to buy and build all the hardware.  I don't know how well it will work, but the hardware looks adequate and it's an inexpensive experiment.

I'm Not Sure

     I don't know how well I'm recovering from my back problems, or adjusting to them, or whatever I'm supposed to be doing.

     The defect was there all along.  I just set it off, woke it up or irritated it with my efforts at yard work on the last day of May.  It's not going to heal; the bone was always wrong and it's not one a surgeon can fix.  Here it is August, and if I forget and bend over to pick up debris two or three times within a few minutes, I feel it.  The physical therapy exercises make my back hurt, too.

     Am I making progress?  I don't know.  The howl-at-the-Moon pain of the first few weeks hasn't come back, and I am grateful for that, but I can tell it's waiting in the wings, and it makes me timid.  Or maybe just careful.  It's frustrating.

Orb Weaver

      It appears we've got a Golden Orb Weaver spider putting up her nets in various spots around the front porch!

    I was delighted to go outside tonight around sunset, glance to my right, and see a large, yellow-kneed spider in the center of a barely-visible web between a pillar of the porch and the house, right at eye level.  It's a safe spot, to one side of the path from the front door to the step, and I wish her every success.  More spiders means fewer flies; they also put a dent in the June Bug population, but we don't seem to be at any risk of running out of them.

     The local Orb Weavers tend to be neatniks, who string a web for a few days, and then take it down before trying another location.  It's an admirable habit. I have often wondered if Penelope, wife of Odysseus, was modeled on a spider, patiently weaving every day and unpicking her work every night, buying time until her husband returns.  Of course, spiders do have their ways, and for the hero's sake, I hope she's not too much like the spider, or, well, you'd never guess what's for dinner when the clever man finally returns!  Was that why he took so long to get back?

Golden Glory Rice And Beans

      It was good, though it still needs fine-tuning: Yellow rice (Arroz Amarillo, if you will), blackeyed peas, fresh mushrooms and sausage.

     The ingredients list is mostly things I already had on hand.  The fine-tuning is to reduce the salt.  There was a box of dry seasoned yellow rice mix on the shelf from one of the Mexican-food outfits, which is always good stuff with pigeon peas and/or chicken; I had about ten whole fresh mushrooms (brown Agaricus bisporus, the most common domestic type, sold under multiple names and hues), a can of Amy's Mushroom Bisque Soup and a can of blackeyed peas, plus a whole chorizo sausage* in the fridge.  I had Tam pick up a couple more cased sausages on her way home, and a vegetable, which turned out to be ready-to-microwave baby asparagus, an excellent choice.

     She got a couple of mild Italian sausages.  I squeezed them out of the casing, added a little smoked paprika and Cajun seasoning for luck, and squeezed out the chorizo next to them.  While that was browning (and getting chopped up with a spatula), I washed and diced the mushrooms.  Then I drained the sausage, pushed it to the sides of the pot, poured the mushrooms into the center, added some dehydrated onion, garlic and chives, and covered it while I got out the rest of the ingredients.

     The yellow rice mix wanted two cups of liquid.  The bisque soup was about a cup and a quarter.  I decided to use the blackeyed pea liquor to fill out the rest, and that was a mistake: it's salty.  I should have used 3/4 of a cup of water instead.

     When the mushrooms looked a little cooked -- they get darker -- I stirred the pot and added the soup, bean liquid and beans, then covered it until it was boiling.  The rice directions say to stir it into boiling liquid (with a little oil or butter, which isn't needed here), give it a minute boiling uncovered, put the lid on, turn the heat to low and leave it for 25 minutes.  Easy enough! 

     Not quite a half-hour later, I zapped the asparagus and lifted the lid on the rice.  It smelled wonderful; if you're a beans-and-rice person, I think you'd like this stuff.  It even looks appealing, or at least it does to me.  As described, there's enough to feed at least four or five people.

     Fresh asparagus wants a pinch of salt to bring out the flavor.  I alternated bites of the rice dish and the (unsalted) asparagus and it all evened out.  Next time, I'll use water to fill out the liquid and rinse the canned beans to reduce the salt.  I might even use fresh onion and substitute plain ground pork (or turkey, but don't tell Tam!) for some of the sausage.
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* Two different versions of sausage with similar ingredients are sold as chorizo in most of the U.S. One kind is fairly dry and has been smoked until it's ready to eat.  The other kind is found in the butcher case with the other fresh sausages, and needs to be cooked first.  I had the second kind.

Valley Of The Shrieking Sky Kings?

     Today's title is beyond unlikely.  A few days ago, I exited the front door for my morning walk and discovered a large cicada had run out of gas and crash-landed right next to the door.  I flipped him over with a twig, but he was gone.

     Within a day, the ants had found him, forming a long procession to the remains and back.  The next day, it was closer to the edge of the porch.  This morning, it was gone.

     I have a mental image of a great mob of tiny ants bearing the relatively enormous ex-cicada away like people in Ancient Egypt carrying the sarcophagus of a Pharaoh, to be entombed at the heart of their nest, no doubt with goods for the next life heaped 'round it and chanting ant-priests keeping watch.  The reality is more like the ant collective having dim memories of the long, cold winter we recently endured, and wanting to keep their larder stocked.

     Either way, the cicada surely received fitting respects, and the darned ants now have something better to do (for a few days, at least) than sneak in and try to suss out crumbs in the hard-to-reach parts of Tamara's TV tray.  It annoys her no end to get it out and find that a work party has been mining the corners of the frame-like rim around the top of the thing and are still on the job, no matter how carefully she has wiped it down after the previous use.

Sociology? History?

      It'll be a PhD thesis subject some day, I'm just not sure in which department: Is Republican rage at Dr. Anthony Fauci primarily driven by his refusal to validate quackery during the Covid pandemic, or by his earlier work in helping find effective treatments for HIV/AIDS?

     There's a certain subset of the Right, especially the Religious Right, that was delighted they could cast gay sex as a death sentence, and Dr. Fauci played a huge part in taking that away.  He was a low-key villain for the nutjob Right ever after, and the more widespread craziness over Covid opened the door to spreading that loathing.

     Now they're promising to get him behind bars, one way or another -- for doing what was at the time his job.

     Sorry, horse dewormer is still not a miracle cure for viral illness.  Vaccination is an effective tool in stopping the spread of disease.  AIDS was not the wrath of God.  You can stick your fingers in your ears and chant, "No, no, no," all you like, but it's still true.

Red Stew Wednesday

     Because if I call it chili, the Texans get restive.  The various kinds of stuff we make in the Midwest are drastically different anyway, so I don't mind calling the genre by a different name.

     What I grew up with was a mild dish with ground beef, tomatoes, red kidney beans and elbow macaroni, with cumin-heavy seasoning.  What I make is...not that.

     Tonight's had lean ground beef, a cut-up strip of bacon, a chopped fresh white onion, red, fresh red,  yellow and green bell peppers, diced fresh mushrooms, a little grocery-store fresh pico de gallo, bright red peppadew peppers, two cans of mild green chilis, a little pickled red onion, some bell pepper bruschetta, hot pickled okra cut into rounds and a box of crushed tomatoes.

     That's a whole lot of stuff, which got browned and sauteed and stirred and simmered, with various spices along the way, mostly chili powder, Italian-mix seasoning, smoked paprika, a little celery salt on the ground beef, a dash of Cajun seasoning, and of course, three big bay leaves after everything was in the pot together and simmering.

     It looks like this:

   I liked it, and there's plenty left for later, probably with some different meat added and whatever else appeals to me.

What Are The Odds

     What, do you suppose, are the chances that a man who still denies he lost an election to the Presidency and incited a (dimwitted) insurrection to stop it after running through a great many legal-system gambits will try a rugpull on midterm elections that are likely to cost his party at least one house of the legislature and maybe both?

     This guy figures it's a likely bet.  He's probably right; losing will be somewhere between personally frustrating to catastrophic for the incumbent, who is not a man who will put up with that.  What form i will take and how well the effort is likely to succeed, that's another set of questions.

     We'll find out.

The Thing Is...

      "Every spot in history is the most dangerous," a commenter told me the other day.  Which is on one level a tautology: we're a species that floats on the edge of disaster.  Our genetic heritage tells the story of multiple narrow escapes; many of our legendary heroes, all around the globe, are clever tricksters who talk or connive their way out of trouble.

     Humanity spends a lot of time running right at the red line.

     On the other hand, we're got a regime in Washington right now that is an outlier in both degree and kind:

     Degree because they're profiting from holding office far in excess of the usual.  I have resigned myself to believing that with billions wooshing by overhead, Federal politicians all eventually conclude they'd be fools to not do as all around them are doing, and net a few million for themselves.  Okay; I don't like it but there it is.  But these guys are raking in billions, and most are not the least bit coy about it.

     Kind, because we haven't seen this level of racism from the party in power since Woodrow Wilson.  We haven't seen nativism so bullheaded since the Know-Nothings.  We've only seen this much division once before, and it didn't end well.  A little over two years ago, Kevin Roberts, the president of the rightwing Heritage Foundation, source of the Project 2025 agenda, told Steve Bannon on his podcast, "We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless -- if the Left allows it to be."

     That's not politics as usual.  That's not normal.  That's a promise to turn things over, to purge and remake not by compromise but in the likeness of just one party, just one part of the American electorate.

     So, yes, the present is always the most dangerous time -- but some presents are more dangerous than others, and they don't become less dangerous by pretending it's the same old same old.

Tam Takes A Chance

     For years, I've been buying Michaels of Brooklyn pasta sauce.  It's consistent and I like it, but I mostly stick to two versions: "Home Style Gravy," which has a long list of ingredients, and "Marinara," which is a more classic tomato-and-spices sauce.  I've tried their spicy Arrabbiata, which is good, but the Puttanesca....

     I admit it.  The anchovies scared me.  Put 'em on a pizza and they're overpoweringly fishy -- which is fine, if you're in the mood for it.  I didn't know how that would play out in pasta sauce.

     Tonight, I was going to make something we have every so often, fancy mixed fresh vegetables (mostly broccoli, cauliflower, asparagus, red onion, a little shredded carrot, zucchini and peapods) that the grocery packages with a little pat of Italian herb butter in a microwave-ready bag, with meaty pasta sauce poured over it.  I asked Tam to buy some sausage -- whatever looked good to her -- and a jar of sauce.  "Get the kind with the most ingredients," I said, not remembering if it was the Home Style Gravy or Marinara.

     As it happens, the Puttanesca sauce has the longest list of ingredients and she was happy to comply.  Dinnertime came, and I browned two mild Italian sausages and one hot one, all three squeezed out of their casings and crumbled as they cooked.  I drained it and added some fresh carrots cut into rounds and a half-dozen green onions, chopped, and cooked it a little more while I hunted up the sauce.  And it was....  Oh, my.  Well, it was what  we had.  I poured the Puttanesca in, gave it a stir and let the pot simmer, not knowing how it would turn out.

     It came out fine.  Better than fine -- there are green and black olives in Michaels Puttanesca, and capers, and if there are a few anchovies, well, think of 'em as Roman garum on the hoof (or fin): all they added was umami.

     I'll buy it again.

     The sauce-over-vegetables thing is an alternative to dinner with pasta noodles and salad.  It works very well, and anyone who has had that lecture from their doctor about limiting bread and rice and potatoes and pasta (and all those wonderful, lovely things) is advised to try it.  It's been a good way to serve zucchini as far back as I can remember, and adding a few other vegetables only broadens the appeal.