Backup Laptop, Backup Skull

     I'm stuck with the original-issue Mark I head -- which is a pity, since I have a migraine of remarkably dizzying intensity.  I have taken OTC pain and allergy medicine and promised myself that as soon as the symptoms fade a little, I will rinse out my sinuses.  The wave after wave of rain and the pressure fronts that drive them are playing a big part this, I hope, and clearing things out should help.

     Meanwhile, I managed get my desktop to run long enough to grab essential Firefox stuff and the Downloads, Documents and Pictures folders.  I'm on my backup (Windows-lite) laptop and my pandemic-indulgence MacBook Air for now, which gets me just about everything except the big screen.  Fiction and writing-related stuff was already on Dropbox, since it allows me to go between Windows and the MacBook almost seamlessly.  I've got a replacement desktop machine on the way, and there will be a certain amount of rebuilding once it arrives.

And..."Your Computer Has Encountered A Problem And Needs To Restart"

     Over and over, and the longer it runs, the worse it gets.  I thought I had solved the problem, but nope.  My current desktop computer was like a hundred and a half when I bought it, used/refurbished, almost three years ago.  So I guess I have got my money's worth, and nearly all my writing is saved elsewhere.

     Not everything else is.  I'll recover what I can and keep moving, but it's annoying and unexpected.  And yes, once I have a replacement up and running, I'll be checking for thermal issues and other simple stuff.

Punished For Retroactive Bad Taste

     There was a time when you didn't mess with The Mouse.  Used to be, if legislators started talking about the need for copyright reform, you knew one or more of the copyrights covering a certain famous animated cartoon rodent and his pals was about to expire.

     Back when every major TV network changed hands and ended up belonging to one huge corporation or another,* Disney got hold of ABC.  They've never let go.

     And they had deep pockets.  TV networks in the United States own only a few of the stations that carry them, with the remained being independently-owned "affiliates."  ABC's got seven stations that are all theirs at present.  And in the U.S., the FCC regulates stations: anyone using up over-the-air RF spectrum has to have a license.  Networks themselves don't get a lot of FCC regulatory interaction; the individual stations do have to promise to be honest and fair, friendly and helpful, considerate and caring, courageous and strong, and responsible for what they say and do, and to respect themselves and others, respect authority, use resources wisely, make the world a better place, and....  No, wait,  that's Girl Scouts; but the FCC regs for broadcast stations are almost the same thing, plus a pile of technical stuff.

     ABC was a latecomer among radio networks; NBC had "Red" (primo stuff) and "Blue" (B-grade, things they were trying out, some highbrow shows that didn't make a profit) networks serving different stations and went into WW II under an anti-trust cloud because of it.  Once the war was over, Uncle Sam made 'em sell one off, and of course it was Blue that went.

     A candy company bought it up and eventually changed the name from "Blue" (c'mon, the word already had that connotation) to ABC, the kid brother of networks, gamely charging after the older, larger NBC and CBS (and Mutual), doing their best to keep up.  The first two were already into TV and as television bloomed, ABC leapt in after them, underfunded, scrappy, willing to try almost anything.  (After a few experiments, including developing Meet The Press, Mutual stuck with good, dependable radio.  They're gone now.)

     ABC remained the upstart network for decades, until Fox (entertainment, not News) came along and showed there were realms of edginess yet to be explored.

     And with that as background, their evening talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel, a few days before the White House Correspondents Dinner, made a tasteless joke about the First Lady and how she'd look at the dinner, referencing the 23-year age gap between her and Mr. Trump (and perhaps her usually-serious expression): he said she had "a glow like an expectant widow."

     It's funnier if you don't see public figures you dislike as quite human.

     It's not funny in hindsight after a guy apparently tried to make her a widow at the dinner.

     It's much less funny if you react in an all-too-human way: the Trumps aren't laughing.  FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, who has crossed swords with Kimmel and ABC once already, and blinked, announced the handful of TV stations directly owned by ABC are now up for license renewal, well ahead of schedule.  They've got thirty days to get their paperwork together and filed (and there's rather a lot of it), and they're going under the microscope.

     This is bureaucracy-as-punishment, and it is punishment not so much for a crass joke but for failing to predict the future when the joke was told.  It's a clear violation of the First Amendment, which protects even cruel and insensitive speech.

     The Mouse still has deep pockets, and though they have, finally, let the earliest version of their well-loved Mickey slip out from beneath copyright protection, Disney may decide to fight this one out; knuckling under will just get them more of the same, and the burden is likely to be laid more heavily on them than the three other major networks.  Or they may try judo: those "O&O" TV stations represent the smallest part of ABC's income; running them, mostly in major metropolitan areas, is more for prestige and ready access to newsmakers and they could easily sell them off and stand back, largely insulated from the wrath of Chairman Carr and the President he serves.
____________________
* Arguably, when General Electric bought RCA, NBC wasn't their main interest: RCA had a nice collection of lucrative government contracts, including plenty with the Department of Defense, plus an array of patents to warm the cockles of shareholder's hearts -- or wallets.  Nevertheless, GE held on to the network through some years of David Letterman ribbing that kept the company name front and center, before selling it off and making money on the deal.

Idiots

     Did we -- as in our Federal government -- not already know this?  Late word from the White House is that if the White House Correspondents Dinner gets a do-over, maybe -- just maybe -- Vice-President James David "JD" Vance won't be there.

     No, not because he doesn't like the Press; not because they tend to loathe him, either.  And like him or not, we can reasonably assume that a Marine would not flinch from either the prospect of violence or the rubbery chicken and overcooked vegetables common to such dinners.  A serving politician is going to eat a lot of lousy food and sit in an exposed position in a lot of large, crowded rooms.

     But Saturday night, a remarkable lot of the line of succession to the Presidency was at the dinner, an event of zero diplomatic or government importance, where a remarkably inward-looking (if sometimes confrontational) collection of people look even more inward, and if the would-be assassin had completed his aim, Iowa's Chuck Grassley could well be President today.

     Senator Grassley was apparently the designated survivor (or not; there are contradictory reports, including that with the President Pro Tem of the Senate and a few Cabinet members not at the dinner, nobody got the official designation).  He's also the last elected official in the order of succession and maybe -- just maybe -- the Executive Branch might want to hold one more high-level player in reserve.  Most of the Cabinet was at the dinner, possibly because the President's people were hinting he was going to say scathing things about and to the assembled reporters and they do so enjoy that.  And the problem is, the Cabinet fills out the list of successors.  Hey, I think they're a pack of incompetent clods -- but even when it appears the Executive Branch is running around like a chicken with its head cut off, the result of a successful decapitation-level attack would be immeasurably worse.

     There were eleven known attempts against Barack Obama's life during his Presidency, more than one and a third a year.  Mr. Trump is on pace to beat that rate rather resoundingly, but all Presidents are targets and one way to limit the possible damage is to limit who else in the line of succession is exposed to the same threat at the same time and place.

     The Daybreak series by John Barnes explores some of the ways Presidential succession and Continuity of Government plans can get tangled up.  He used a science-fiction setting, with an (ultimately) external threat -- but internal factors do much of the damage.  I'd prefer not running the experiment in real life.

     "Idiot" comes to us from Ancient Greece, where it came to mean something very much like "rube."  The present Administration likes to bring in relative outsiders to politics, to government, and that means they don't necessarily have all of the situational savvy the insiders have got, things like the importance of not putting all of the eggs in one basket -- or the yeggs, either.

"We're All Looking For The Person Responsible...."

     Who's most likely to commit politically-motivated violence, the Left or the Right?

     It is unlikely to surprise you that the answer is "people askew from reality," close to a wash between Republican-or-farther-right and Democrat-or-leftier, with "fricking incoherent" in close third place.

     Most people, including the ones with political opinions that many Americans find reprehensible, know you can't assassinate your way to a better world, and a little selective murder produces only more dead people and grieving families.  While major political upheaval often involves killings, it doesn't work the other way (and most Americans are not looking for major upheaval -- again, not even a majority of the ones you disagree with most).

     Don't get sucked into the nitwittery.

I Suppose I Should Comment

     It's appropriate to make some comment about the disruption at the White House Correspondents Dinner.

     It was something of a fiasco long before it started; the famously touchy President Trump has -- unusually for a sitting President -- never attended while in office until last night.  The event is often something of a mutual roast, it's always been a little too cozy, and mostly it's a rare fancy dinner for the White House Press corps, many of whom will who wallow in it while affecting disdain.  The entertainment this year was going to be a mentalist instead of the typical comedian, a transparent shying away from discord.  It was widely anticipated that Mr. Trump was going to go hard on the assembled reporters.

     And--  Most of it never happened.  Someone with a gun tried to crash the party, and failed.

     Security at events featuring high-ranking Federal politicians is always pretty tight, and the professionals do their best to manage every rational threat they can think of.  This means an irrational assailant has an advantage, and indeed, every known attempt on the lives of Presidents since John Wilkes Booth, successful or not, has been made by someone who was, in some way or another, not rational; they appear to have acted alone* in every case.  Add someone else to that kind of a plan, and it leaks -- and should.

     There's generally some distance in well-controlled space between the security gate(s) with metal detectors, suspicious Secret Service types, etc. and the room itself, and that's on purpose.  (I've had to pass though that exact kind of gantlet† on a couple of occasions.  It's serious business.)  It buys some time.  It worked just as it should last night; the would-be attacker -- whose precise target(s) remain unknown, but there's only one way to bet -- was stopped long before he got through the last set of doors.

     And I'm glad he was.  I happen to think Donald Trump is a loathsome human being, and his inner circle are no better.  They are doing immense harm to the proper functioning of the Federal government, to American society in general, and to both our country's stranding in the world and to world peace in general.  But nobody -- nobody -- not presenting an imminent mortal threat rates extrajudicial killing by some random guy with a grudge and/or a screw loose (or by anyone else, for that matter).  Impeachment, criminal trials, 25th Amendment, losing big at the ballot box?  I wish all of it on him.  But not what was successfully headed off last night.

     Of course, I have also been hearing claims it was all faked, or "allowed to happen."  I wouldn't count on it.  Everything about the sequence of events suggests very strongly one more Lone Gunman, getting as far as he got because he started out well askew.  And I think Trump and company are enormously more reactive than proactive.  They'll make hay with this; they already started to within the first hour.  But they didn't set it up.

     In a time of chaos, this is just more damnable chaos, and the worst people will proceed to turn it to their own ends as much as they can.
_______________________
* The Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists are welcome to debate that among themselves, but as far as can be proven, it is true.  (IIRC, there has been one attempt by a pair of desperate and borderline men working together, which failed.)
 
† Although the words are so widely misused that most dictionaries have given up, a gauntlet is a kind of glove, one that once upon a time was occasionally flung down in challenge.  A gantlet is a double row of your nominal peers, or perhaps Native Americans, who are going to whale the tar out of you as you run between them.  This does not sound like a good time, and heavy gloves aren't going to be much help.

LARPing His Faith

     It's been three days and I almost forgot -- or perhaps I should say that it is so preposterous that I nearly dismissed it out of hand.  But it's true: Indiana's delusional nutjob Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith continues to behave as if he's a supporting character in a Left Behind prequel film.

     The latest installment was prompted by his outrage that the Virginia legislature and voters had the temerity to redistrict the state's Congressional districts to favor Democratic candidates -- this in response to--  It's kind of a long checkers game.  I'd better review it.

     In late 2025, Donald Trump, frustrated by his party's bare majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, called on Republican-led states  ("About four," per the President) to gerrymander themselves.  The effort began with Texas, despite worries by some of that state's GOP politicians that it might dilute solidly-red districts.
     In August 2025, the Texas legislature approved a map that gave the state five more Republican-leaning districts than it previously had.  This was promptly challenged in court and worked its way up to the U.S. Supreme Court, who let the new maps stand in December of this year.
     Meanwhile, California's Governor Gavin Newsom called on their legislature to counter the move.  That's not so easy as in Texas: California has an Independent Redistricting Commission that draws their U.S. House maps.  So the legislature had to put a referendum before voters in a tearing hurry: would they approve bypassing the Commission for the next set of maps?  The referendum was successful.  California's new maps moves five districts into the safely-Democrat column.
     Over in Missouri, Republicans planned to split up a Democrat-held district centered on Kansas City.  That's still in process, having cleared the legislature, been challenged in court and upheld, and challenged by petition, which might result in a referendum to overturn the new maps.  Or it might not; that's still up in the air.
     The North Carolina legislature successfully redrew their maps and will probably replace a Democratic Congressperson with a Republican.
     Utah's been going back and forth.  Anti-gerrymandering provisions of state law limit the amount of juggling either party can do, and attempts to carve up Salt Lake City into four districts that combine with the surrounding areas to create safe spaces for GOP candidates have failed after a court challenge.  SLC is likely to continue to be represented in the House by a Democrat.
     Indiana, four-square Republican, MAGA as can be, lacking any kind of independent board or commission to decide House districts and having no anti-gerrymandering laws, should have been a shoo-in.  But Hoosiers are muleish -- and cautious.  Redistricting can water down "safe" districts.  Confronted with an informal directive from Washington, DC, the State Senate mustered enough votes to stand pat: Indiana districts remain unchanged, and the dissenting Republicans who kept it that way are being primaried.
     Maryland has tried to redraw their maps to favor Democrats, an effort which appears stalled.   New York has had the same general result.
     Florida has changes in the works; their intent is to give Republicans an edge.  It's a multistep process with commissions, committees and a special legislative session, and it has only just begun.
     And that brings me, at least, to Virginia.  Remember Virginia?  That state has also cot an independent commission to draw up their House maps; the legislature managed to pass a proposed amendment to bypass it, and put the notion before the state's voters to decide: partisan maps for 2026, or not?  They voted to redistrict.

     And that effort in Virginia, that result at the end of all the preceding back-and-forth, is what drew Micah Beckwith's ire: "Democrats aren't necessarily all dark, but they are being led by the minions and the voices of darkness—they're going to win. They're playing to win. And so we have to wake up and guys step up. If we go on the battlefield, we will win. The question is, will we enter the battlefield?"

     Got it?  In a fight they didn't start, on a "battlefield" where the Democrats had to get voter approval to redraw maps while the Republicans can just let the various state legislatures rip,* he's still worried about the "voices of darkness," and warns Republicans, "Evil will find you."

     Better yet?  Ignoring polls showing increasing voter unhappiness with Republicans, all of this shifting around is pretty much a wash.  The balance lies in the few remaining competitive districts -- and in public sentiment.  I wouldn't advise either party to count those chickens before they have all come home to roost, no matter how much they want to believe someone's goose is cooked.  I know which side I'd like to see lose, but the results remain to be seen.
________________
* It is nevertheless not a bug but a feature that states decide how to draw their own maps.  Nor is it Federally prohibited to draw 'em up to favor one party or another.  "Fifty experiments in democracy" doesn't promise they'll all be noble, fair-minded efforts at uplift, or even especially wise.  Don't like it?  Vote in a new set of crooks!  

Friday, Trash Day

     Hooray, hooray, Friday's here -- and the trash isn't.  In fact, it just left.  Or at least the contents of the city-supplied bin did.  They switched 'em out a month or two back, after nearly a decade of big yellow and blue plastic containers.  It was the result of a new contract, but the old ones were starting to get pretty battered.

     The new ones are gray -- and (for a fee) there's still recycling, with its own green bins.  But something interesting happened: with the old bins, you got one for free, and paid a nominal recurring charge for a second one if needed.  There weren't enough new bins to replace all the "extra" ones and as a result, as a stopgap, you can use whatever you've got, as long as it's got the right tapered-rectangle shape the collection apparatus* can pick up and dump.  And they're not checking too closely.

     After a couple of weeks of noticing the neighbors set out various trash cans, I wheeled out the one we'd been collecting cardboard in, and lo, it was emptied.  This morning, the other one is out there, full of bagged yard waste.  It's almost impossible to throw away a trash can, and we have been stuck with these ever since the city started issuing Official Bins, back when the century was still dewy-fresh.  It's about time they got back to work!

     I expect the honeymoon will be over sooner or later, but for now, it's a time for disposal.
_________________
* You should see it!  --If you live in a city of any size, you probably already have, or something like it: a set of hydraulically-operated forks off to the left right side of the truck on a fancy "arm" that can be quickly steered (by a skilled operator) to pick up the bin, gripping just tightly enough to secure it but not break it, and dump it into a big steel box on the front of the truck.  When the box fills up, the driver pushes a button and the big box arcs up and is emptied into the far larger container on the back of the truck, which has a cover that retracts out of the way as the box swings toward it.  Rube Goldberg would be green with envy!  I'm sure watching it delights small children all over Indianapolis.  And, since they added trucks when they stopped carrying a helper to manually empty trash cans into the truck, collection is faster.  I hope the helpers got first crack at the new driver jobs, but the inner workings of trash collection in Indianapolis are as opaque as any large city's.  They've done a good job of it all along, at least. 

The Blanding

      I eat semi-healthily.  My weaknesses are a sweet tooth and a fondness for ham, sausge and beef.  Oh, and pasta.

     Salads are great -- they're better with a good vinaigrette, which includes, oh dear, salt, fat and often sugar.

     Oatmeal?  Yum -- if it's sweetened.

     And so on.  I've cut the amount of sugar in my coffee (again) to half a teaspoon, and all but given up Reese's Cups.  Salty crunchy snacks are harder to give up -- unsalted and half-salted mixed nuts help.  Bacon's got to be more of an occasional treat than it has been.

     Backing away from refined white flour is not a problem for me, other than pasta (and, okay, saltines -- oh, with a little peanut butter on them, is there a better treat?); I grew up with good rye bread and Roman Meal whole wheat, and have always preferred them to squishy, tasteless white bread.  (Our national preference for what amounts to brioche will never cease to amaze me.)

     I'm trying.  The last doctor lecture was just short of scathing; I'd not been eating as well as I should have been, and it showed.  I got worse about it during the pandemic, especially because I was keeping canned meat on the shelf and rotating through it to maintain a consistently dependable supply: Spam and corned beef hash are delicious, but....

     There are ways in which I'll never get out from under pandemic habits; I keep paper goods and hygiene supplies stocked in depth, and canned foods, too.  But I can and will eat better, and I have been doing my best for the last few months.

     I've got a lot of spices, and I'm always looking for something new.  A little more herbs and seeds, a little less salt; a little more pepper, a bit less sugar.  It's got to help!

Okay, I Did It

     I'm not thrilled about it, but there is so little good information available for older people trying to navigate the governmental and financial bureaucracy that I gave in and joined AARP.  I still think they're kind of manipulative, but probably less so than the fast-talking insurance hucksters and pettifogging bureaucrats, and I'm tired of it taking me two hours to figure out if I can rollover my work 401(k) into my personal (and embarrassingly thin) conventional IRA without taking a bath on income taxes.

     (Apparently, no, though the IRS presents the information in a confusing enough manner that it it might mean no taxes.  I'm still not entirely sure -- but me needing to pay them is probably the way to bet.  But if it was a Roth...?  I don't know, especially since I get taxed if pull money out of the existing IRA, so doesn;t that make it a Roth?  I may have to go ask the bank, though the last time I did that, they tried to refinance my house and rope me into some high-risk/high yield investment scheme and it took a rather tense meeting with a couple of suits in nice offices to convince them that I do not like gambling, I do not want all my financial stuff in the same bank, and what I wanted was an account that going to still have some money in it even if Wall Street decided October, 1929 might be fun to replay.  The number of people I knew who had their retirement plans wiped out in the dotcom bust has me convinced it's better to plan poor and be able to collect on it.  Think of it as choosing known mild disappointment over lasting regret.)

     This is going to at least double my junk mail, mostly "retirement planners" and great deals on funeral services.  Since I plan to be cremated as cheaply as possible and have most of the dust dumped out at radio towers (some are really easy to get to -- just sneak in and pour it out!), and my "retirement planning" doesn't include enough surplus to pay a planner, it's all just more trash.

Monday? There Was A Monday?

     There was a Monday, and I didn't post anything.  Sunday was a fairly busy day, once I got moving, but action has consequences:  grilling and doing a tiny bit of yard work left my knees sore, stiff and aching.

     Add in migraines and allergy symptoms despite taking the OTC pills, and I maxed out on acetaminophen and had added aspirin by Monday evening.  I have long known I was headed for arthritis in my knees; childhood rheumatic fever did a little damage, my 2006 motorscooter wreck did more (a lot more) to my right knee, and falling hard on my left knee over a year ago added to it.  The bill is coming due and all I can do is take my pills and try to move more.  Might have to go back to physical therapy.

     It was a distraction yesterday.  Who is this old person I'm riding around in, and why is she having so much difficulty standing and walking?  Oh, right.  Still me.  She's gonna have to keep at it.

     Current events keep on currenting.  I note with interest but without much comment that the President's "Liquor Cabinet" has shed another member.  All women so far -- but remember, "Women and children first," leaves plenty of leeway for SecDef, the FBI director and possibly the Secretary of State to hit the lifeboats in the first round.  There's probably a betting pool -- but don't you have better things to do with your money?

Fancy Pork Roast

     The thing about pork is, it's cheap -- and it's good, especially if you can cook it low and slow.  The grocer had Boston Butt, a nice size for roasting, and I had ideas.  I bought one and when Sunday turned out partly sunny and cold, I put my plans into action.

     I almost didn't.  It's a nice skill to start a charcoal fire with a single match.  It's a lot more difficult on a windy day and it took me six matches before I got one to burn long enough to catch the kindling.  That may be a record for me.

     The meat got marinated (not long) in about a half-cup of cider vinegar with a couple of tablespoons of soy sauce and Worcestershire, a couple tablespoons of hot dog relish and a couple of tablespoons of spicy brown mustard, plus a little black pepper, Bragg's herb mixture, dash of curry powder and smoked paprika and some parsley.  That's not a lot of marinade -- a large ziplock freezer bag with air squeezed out makes the most of it, and I poured the marinade into the pan when I set the meat on the rack.

     Once the coals were smoldering, I spared them into two piles along the sides of the grill and loaded the meat onto a rack in my oval roasting pan, with a box of chicken-mushroom broth almost up to the rack level.  I covered it with foil (the lid is too high to fit the grill) and let it get started while I peeled a turnip and a Cosmic Crisp apple and cut them into thick slices and quartered them, with a little more paprika and oregano on the turnips and garam masala on the apple (it smells like apple-pie spice, but has a little more zing on the palate).  The meat was going to get an hour per pound, about three hours and twenty minutes.

     I added the turnip and apple after the roast had been cooking for about a half-hour; you want the apple to cook right down and turnips are slow-cooking.  Next up, about an hour and a half in, was a layer of sliced spring onions, parsnips, carrots and fennel bulb.  The parsnips need a light peeling and are cut into good-size sections; the carrots I buy are peeled and cut into sections an inch and a half long, ready to go.  I washed, sliced and cut up the fennel bulb, adding a few of the feathery fronds.  The stalks are woody, better cooked in a mesh bag to add flavor and removed, but I didn't mess with that.  I added the vegetables and covered the pan back up.  By then it was bubbling and starting to smell pretty good.

     Tam had picked up a basket of assorted exotic mushrooms -- a big King, clusters of gray oyster and hen-of-the-woods or maitake.  I washed and cut them up, and added them to the pan with a little over an hour of cooking time left.

     The end result was moist pork that was falling-apart tender with lots of flavor, and the vegetables were wonderful -- Tam went back for seconds of the veggies.  It didn't need any seasoning except for the least pinch of salt, and that wasn't really necessary.  Savory, earthy and with just a hint of apple-sweetness, I think it turned out as good as any of my pork roasts.

     Most of the cooking consists of just letting the grill do the work.  I ran a weed-trimmer along part of the back yard fence between prepping and adding vegetables, a chance to spend a little outdoor time while staying active enough to keep warm.

Sneaky Ragù

      Last week, I tried a dehydrated "Lazy Food" one dish dinner, a Sicilian ragù with chickpea-flour rotini and vegetable-protein "meat" in a thick tomato sauce with peas.  I added a dab of real Italian sausage and a couple of sliced fresh mushrooms, which is an easy cheat to liven up this kind of thing.

     It wasn't bad, not at all, filling and a little spicy.  The chickpea rotini were surprisingly good; the dried peas...well, they never quite recover the original texture; they were a weak point.

     But as I ate, I thought about how I'd make a richer version.  The wheatless pasta worked, so I figured I'd keep that.  A little spiced tomato sauce with garden vegetables, a little ground beef and/or Italian sausage, canned or frozen peas.  But the sauce?  That was tricky.

     Ideally, such sauces are best made from scratch and simmered for hours.  I rarely have hours.  It was thicker than canned spaghetti sauce, and spicier, with a different flavor profile from Arrabbiata.  Elements of it were familiar....  There had to be some way to fake it!

     You can buy Moroccan Shakshuka sauce in little bottles; it's typically used to poach eggs* for a dish of the same name.  It's like a thicker version of the full-vegetable Italian tomato gravy, with a North African spice profile.  A bottle of that and a like-sized (small) bottle of Michael's of Brooklyn combine like someone hoped they'd get together, and when simmered with meat, mushrooms and peas, it's pretty much the same flavor as the dehydrated stuff, only better, and thick enough to stand a spoon in.

     Alas, the brand of chickpea rotini I bought took awhile to cook up in the sauce, and never had quite the right texture (there are a lot of different kinds).  But the end result was good nonetheless.

     I served it for dinner tonight.  Tam's not a big fan of peas, and wondered if zucchini might not be a good replacement for the peas and noodles.  I'm pretty sure it would work just fine, since zucchini is used in many closely related dishes.  So we'll try that next time.  It's still a low-prep, quickly-cooked meal, and a change from the usual.
_________________
* There's an Andalusian version that adds both chorizo and serrano ham to the spicy tomato sauce and eggs, which sounds like an amazing breakfast to me.  The Moroccan tomato sauce is less expensive than the brands of Italian-style sauces I like, and can be thinned down to the same consistency with a little added plain tomato sauce.  I keep small cans of the plain stuff on hand all the time -- it's useful and stores well.

Critique Group

     The critique group I chair met this morning, and I continue to enjoy the level of talent the members have, both natural gifts and a willingness to put in the hard work of turning a string of interesting ideas into an engaging story.  There's a fair amount of skull sweat involved, and like the lovely swan gliding across the smooth surface of a pond, there's considerably more thrashing around taking place under the surface than you'd ever expect.

     The members of the group are putting in the effort and their stories and chapters show it.  Going over their manuscripts with an eye open for what works and what needs work is an education in and of itself.

Kerosene Burners

     The war between the United States, Israel and Iran has bumped up fuel unavailability and prices.  Some of it it is easy to understand: crude oil is traded globally, and tends to flow to where the dollars are.  Gasoline works the same way, and a lot of that crude oil input comes out the other end of the refinery as gas for your car.  We expect diesel to work the same way, and mostly it does, but there's a catch.

     See, diesel's down at the heavy end, with jet fuel, kerosene and home-heating oil (and past that to bunker oil, the tarry stuff they burn in big ships and old steam locomotives that didn't run on wood or coal).  And much of that gets "pre-bought" in bulk.  Airlines especially prefer to hedge their bets by buying months and months of jet fuel in advance (it's rarely a bad bet that fuel prices will go up over the long term), and a lot of it gets refined not too far from the source -- which for a lot of Europe, is in the Middle East, and you'd never, ever guess where those refineries are.... No, I'm kidding.  Of course they're located around or near the Strait of Hormuz.  There's not a lot of jet fuel refining capacity within the EU itself.  Why should they bother when Middle Eastern countries are happy to host those big, smelly, polluting refineries?  The answer to that question is coming home to roost.

     Jet fuel is a knotty problem.  The airlines have already bought it; it just can't be delivered.  And the refineries away from the conflict zone that are set up to make jet fuel are well able to make diesel -- which is not a clunky bulk-sold-in-advance market, and where the free flow of fuel to where prices are highest* leaves companies chasing after a distribution network and customers who are, however unhappily, already set up for and accepting of highly variable prices.

     Meanwhile, the economics of airlines are screwy.  Outside the U.S., many of the largest carriers are subsidized by their governments, instruments of national prestige as well as effective transportation.  By some measures, the U.S. airline industry as a whole never makes a profit: there are few losers every year, often cannibalized by their peers or propped up by past earnings, a handful of winners, and the rest break even.  Disruption in fuel supplies throws a wrench into this tipsy balance -- and prolonged disruption tosses in a stick of dynamite after it, the fuse fizzing.

     You will note an absence of hand-wringing assignment of blame.  Sure, Donald Trump's a bull in a china shop on his best days, his Secretary of Defense is a bloodthirsty pinhead with a weird take on religion, and the majority of Congress is a craven bunch of spineless losers being led around by the nose (not to mention the pompous ambition and negative charisma of the Vice President, which I won't) -- but the Middle East is a powder keg with a load of lit candles on top.  If it wasn't Mr. Trump's "splendid little war," it would be some other war in the region, and if it wasn't right now, it would happen next week, or next month, or next year.  It's going to happen, and it's going to keep on happening, as long as a politically unstable region produces such a large amount of the crude oil and its refined products that our entire civilization runs on.  The network of global trade in oil cannot be disassembled by any amount of domestic production: oil will always flow towards money.  Smart politicians would be working to reduce dependence on oil, especially as a primary energy source; this is the only controllable variable.  And guess what?  Our politicians are no smarter than the rest of us -- and our business leaders may be even less so.

     Get ready to ante up.  Again.  And if you were planning to fly anywhere soon, better count pennies.

     Update: The Strait of Hormuz is now, according to the Trump administration Iranian government, "completely open."  We'll see if everyone with a practical veto agrees -- but don't expect the worst parts of the mess to magically clear up overnight even if it's olly-olly-oxen-free.

     Further Update: No, it's a day later and the Strait is closed again.  And apparently the U. S. blockade -- as opposed to the Iranian closure -- never stopped.  They can keep this up all year folks, and they might.  This doesn't bode well for the price of pretty much everything.
______________________
* This simplistic formulation ignores that it's a gradient, with high prices but excellent supply at one end and lower prices but low supply at the other.  The U.S. is (on average) rich, and if you've got the bucks, fueling up the Benz is no problem no matter what it burns.  A Third-World farmer might not even be able to find any to buy.  In between, countries are rationing fuel, requesting or requiring people work from home, asking "Is this trip really necessary?" and taking other economizing measures.  And airlines?  If things go on, some of 'em are going to get grounded, or go under altogether.
 
† Still the name of it.  Congress named it and only Congress can rename it, which they have not.

He Said What?

     It would have been inconceivable to my parents: a Republican Vice-President, speaking at a conservative group's event and addressing in passing a war in Europe started by and serving the cause of Russian territorial expansion said, "... a Ukrainian American [...] person got really agitated at me because I was saying we should stop funding the Ukraine war. And I still believe that, obviously, and it’s one of the things I’m proudest that we’ve done as an administration, is we’ve told Europe if you want to buy weapons you can, but the United States is not buying weapons and sending them to Ukraine any more."

     The war in Ukraine slogs on, with Ukrainian innovation and yes, great heaps of weapons made in the West turning the dogged Russian advance into a meatgrinder, holding it and sometimes even turning it back.  It's one of the most impressive defenses ever mounted by a smaller country against a larger one in conventional warfare since the Winter War between Finland and, well, what do you know? -- Russia.  And that one only lasted three months.  Like every war they've been involved in, the Russian strategy consisted of throwing soldiers into the volcano, which is what they're still doing in Ukraine.  I guess it works until you run out of soldiers.

     Whatever one's opinion of the war in Ukraine, stopping Russian aggression seems like it would serve the best interest of the West.  And the war is very much a territorial war, a war of chess or of Go.  We know what both sides want and we know what counts as victory.

     Elsewhere, the VP has signed on, however reluctantly, to a war with much murkier objectives.  The last I knew, the U. S. and Iran were still running different blockades of the Strait of Hormuz and both declaring some form of victory.  Iran wants to keep on being a thorn in the side of the Middle East; the U.S. government wants....  It varies, depending on who you ask, and when.  I don't think anyone outside Iran wants them building nuclear weapons, though there's not broad agreement on the best way to prevent it.  The President might want regime change, but so far all he has managed to do is trade one collection of hardliners at the top for another collection of them, with less experience and more reason to despise us.  All anyone can be sure of is that fossil fuel prices are going up,* the stuff is getting scarce in places that relied on the LNG, crude oil and fuel that was carried through the Strait, and fertilizer and diesel fuel are in short supply and more expensive just as farms in the Northern Hemisphere enter planting season.

     If this is winning, then how much worse is losing?  I don't know; I do know the (small) crowd at the Turning Point, USA gathering the Vice President came to address were booing him over it, which is kind of like going to watch your hometown baseball team and throwing tomatoes at them.  On the domestic front, that's nowhere even close to winning.
________________
* Although there's starting to be some reduction in demand, for reasons that are mostly unsettling.

Deserts Of News

      At one time, it was easy to be awash in news: pretty good newspapers, five-minute radio newscasts -- even the screamin' Top 40 stations on AM and blissed-out album rock on FM had two-minute news capsules once an hour, while their pointy-boots country and suit'n'tie middle of the road peers handed out five whole minutes of network news that covered the world, often alongside another five of state and local material from their own newsroom.  (The "elevator music" stations might or might not have much news -- often very little, since it got in the way of being radio wallpaper.)

     It wasn't in-depth detail and analysis, and you rarely got hard-hitting exposés unless a politician got caught in the wrong bed and/or with a finger in the till, but it was useful, solid stuff, wars and plane crashes, sports scores and election results.  Opinion was clearly labeled and set apart from news coverage -- the editorial page of the paper, or the station owner or general manager gruffly complaining what a terrible idea the new bypass highway was, avoiding car-dealer row.*

     You could glance over the paper as you ate your cornflakes or Cream of Wheat; you could let the radio play while you washed up and got ready for work.

     Our local paper went to the dogs a long while back.  I held on as long as I could -- the catboxes need lining! -- but it kept getting thinner (especially of local news) and subscription rates kept going up, and by the time it was ten times the price of the same amount of blank newsprint, I dropped it.  Radio news -- well, there's NPR.  Their hard-news coverage is a lot more balanced than claimed by their detractors† and you can get 'em via podcast.  That "podcast" part is important, because while over-the-air NPR morning shows have more news content than commercial network TV, there's still a lot of feature fluff and it can get annoying: "The world is at the brink of war and/or recession -- but first, twenty minutes with the woman reintroducing stoats to London." Look, it's lovely but it doesn't affect the price of gas, okay?  I can call up the podcast and let it play actual news while I do dishes.

     On opinion stuff, I balance NPR with The Bulwark, mostly staffed by ex-Republicans repulsed by Mr. Trump's remaking of their party.  The downside -- and why that's not a live link -- is that their content is hosted by Substack, which is still "neutral" on things like Nazis, neo-Nazis and Andrew Tate.  You don't stop evil by closing your eyes and pretending it's just as good as anybody else's honest opinion.

     And that's the other thing about those old newspapers and local radio stations: they stuck to a narrow line, a consensus about decent behavior.  They might lean Right or Left (mostly Right, with those Democrats and hippies at the album rock station and the afternoon paper as exceptions), but they all agreed Nazis were bad, the Soviet Union was bad, abusing women was bad, elections were honest and politicians bore watching.  It wasn't much (and sometimes it was more talk than action), but more and more, it looks like The Good Old Days.
_____________________
*The symbiotic relationship between small-to-medium market radio stations and their local car dealers was deep and profound.  You could tell the #2 or #3 station in town, because the GM drove a Lincoln instead of a Cadillac. None of 'em drove Chryslers except for the sales guy who had that account.
 
† Ad Fontes rates NPR News Now almost dead center, a little to the right of conservative-leaning The Hill, and they provide examples.

Dire Strait?

      Let's see -- we approached the weekend with Iran declaring the Strait of Hormuz was closed -- unless you handed them a million dollars, and weren't on a short list of enemies.  We've exited the weekend with the President of the United States declaring the Strait of Hormuz is closed, but only to vessels headed for or leaving an Iranian port (and presumably any Iranian-flagged ones, though I don't know if they've got any big tankers).  The Strait has been a battleground (battlesea?) for a long time.

     In either case, it's a lot easier to close a narrow waterway than to keep it open.  Commercial ships don't fare well in a battle -- see the North Atlantic in World Wars One and Two for examples -- and will avoid them if given the option.  All it really takes is a motorboat with a crew shooting shoulder-fired missiles while dodging big Naval vessels.  I think very highly of the U.S. Navy, but they're like elephants facing a cloud of gnats, and I'm not sure they brought enough flyswatters.  I'm quite certain Iran has brought enough crazy for the task.

     I don't know how things play out if (when?) a Chinese-flagged tanker decides to play chicken for a load of Iranian oil.  Who wants to gamble with those kind of stakes?

     We might find out.  Meanwhile, the President appears to be picking a fight with the Pope.  Historically, the Holy See is the side to bet on.  As the oldest center of power in the West, Rome has outlasted every government that presented opposition, and looked on while a few of them were stomped flat.  You may well argue the Pope is not his Church -- but the relationship is modeled after that of a Roman paterfamilias to his family, nearly absolute rule.

     Interesting times.  I wish we were not experiencing such interesting times, but so has most of humanity, for most of our existence.  Excitement is a bane, dullness a luxury.

New Phone, Who Me?

     For years, I carried an iPhone, mostly for work and web-browing, and an Android that was on another carrier that had all my family contacts.  Its predecessor was my "Mom phone," with a distinctive ringtone for her calls and mostly used for only that purpose.  I'd bought the replacement online, without having held it.

     That was a mistake: it was too big.  The touchscreen worked differently in small but annoying ways.  I missed text messages often.  Eventually, the screen got cracked, and cracked again, including a really nasty divot.  (I'll say this for screen protectors, though: it took a lot of impacts and even after the screen started breaking, the protector held it together well enough.)  And then it stopped taking a charge.  The frame was bent, too, and when I coaxed it to turn back on, the OS had crashed.  The phone was over six years old.

     There matters sat for over a month.  I kept putting off taking it back to the phone store and then realized I could just move the SIM card.  There's a reputable secondary market in cell phones, and maybe I could find something decent....

     Yesterday, I fired up a refurbed iPhone SE, one of the recent models, and since I had my contacts stored on the card, they popped right up.  It's what I think is the right size for a phone (YMMV) and it mostly does what I expect.  The only touchy thing was moving the card over without touching the contact side -- or sneezing while I did the job.  It's different enough to my work phone that I can tell them apart, and similar enough that I'm not having to code-switch when moving from one to the other.

A Reminder

     I am not obliged to publish every comment I receive, and I don't.  If you have an argument with something I have linked to, go to the source and argue with them -- I am not their proxy.

     Invidiousness will not be rewarded, either.  Snark might be, but my judgement of it is arbitrary.  Yes, I am probably a terrible, terrible person, but I manage to live with it.

Fatal Ignorance

      Perhaps the most infuriating thing for me over the last decade is watching my country turn away from expertise and embrace ignorance as a virtue.  I'm far from the only one who has noticed, and this piece from a highly-qualified science guy and American-by-choice is so worthwhile that I'm making an exception to not using anything from their hosting site.

I'm Sorry, Who?

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

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

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

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

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

Missed One

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

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

It's Spring

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

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

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

No, As In No

     Not just no, but hell no.

     A young man knocked on the front door yesterday.

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

     "Thank you for stopping by.  Goodbye."

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entertainment, We Got

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

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

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

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

Ahistorical, Antifreedom, Agitprop

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

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

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

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

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

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

Naw

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

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

Yuck

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

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

     Not recommended.

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

Pop Goes The Starlink?

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

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

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

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

--

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

Over $5.00 A Gallon

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

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

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

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

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

Fencing the Fences

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hoppin' Turkey?

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

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

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

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

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

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

March

      Oh, frustrating March!  Warm days, some even sunny, and then today was blustery and chilling.  In the afternoon, it was partly sunny and looked great -- until I went out without a coat.

     But the first few flowers are out, the days are longer and Spring is getting all wound up, ready to go off in a flurry of blossoms and leaves.  I'm ready for it.

Agog

     I admit it: I'm watching history reel past, shocked.  I had thought the rule of law and the strength of tradition were stronger in our government; and if anyone was going to break them, I didn't think it was going to be the Republicans.

     Sure, the occasional Republican or Democrat would try to bend the rules, and more often than not get slapped around for it; or sometimes Congress or the Courts would change the rules in a way that bugged me, and not all of that got reversed down.  But the wholesale abrogation of the separation of powers, the meek rollovers from the House and forelock-tugging of the Senate and the absolute partisanship-over-law on the part of some members of the Supreme Court stuns me.

     Historically, representative governments don't last (no form lasts forever).  The first few decades are the most risky.  But if they get past that, they usually last for centuries.  Two hundred and fifty years is pretty weak.

     Maybe we'll pull back.  We've done it before, more than once.  That's what I'm hoping for and voting for.  But it's a long way from being a sure thing. And there sure are a lot of citizens cheering for it to go the other way.

The Churn

     In the novels and TV series The Expanse, spacecraft mechanic Amos Burton makes many references to "the churn," a period of time when everything is in flux before it settles into a new normal.  There's even a novella in the book series and an episode, part of a narrative arc, in the TV series with that title.

     It's an inflection point, a place where the slope of the curve changes.*

     It's where the United States is now.  Up or down?  Authoritarianism or our imperfect-but-striving republic?  War or diplomacy, guns or grain?

     This is not one man's decision, no matter how much the figurehead who's tried so hard to nail himself to the prow of the ship of state may smirk and preen, no matter how much his enablers, handlers and flacks claim otherwise.  We're coming up on critical midterm elections, and it's a time for choosing.

     What do you want?  More imperial presidency, and not just from one man or one party, but a growing trend like the one that twisted ancient Rome?  Or back to the brawling, boisterous and, yes, flawed tripod of American Constitutional government, with a noisy, arguing Congress, an overworked Executive bound by law and a court system that is not open to the highest bidder?

     Our country prospered under the system we put in place 237 years ago.  We'd gotten ourselves well shut of kings, and we needed something that was almost unheard of at the time, a system suited to growing cities, the sparks of industrial production, hard-headed farmers and romantic pioneers.  It was never perfect but the general trend was to make it more accessible, more evenhanded, less corrupt, more free.  It shouldn't be given up without a fight.
___________________
* Strictly speaking, it's where the curve reverses, but the metaphoric use is considerably looser than the mathematical one.

Frustrating

     It's nice to be published.  Another one of my short stories made the grade in an anthology by a new publishing company formed by four writers and academics during the pandemic, and it's a good-looking book, full of fiction, photography, poetry and art with strong links to Indiana.  It pays in street cred and an author's copy, but hey, it's not like anyone else was running after my typewriter, waving cash.  The fictional stereotype aside, writing isn't a job so much as it is something to do while starving (unless you have a day job, in which case you do the day job instead of writing).

     The publishers have a launch party coming up, which promises to be a nice time with a little public (or at least peer) recognition for the contributors.

     It's at very much the wrong time and place for me -- over an hour away, on a day when Tam has a paying work commitment to be elsewhere.  So I'm going to have to miss it.

     The event would have been difficult.  I prefer to be a background lurker, a listener and not a talker.  On most subjects, I couldn't carry my end of an in-person conversation even if I had a spare hat to carry it in.  But it would have been useful, a chance to observe people interacting while claiming to work for the caterer or cleaning crew.*

     Oh, well.

     NOTE: Due to my employer's strict social media policy, I cannot share the title of the book.  This blog only exists because I have been able to maintain reasonable anonymity.
______________________
* True fact: my work ID badge carries the title "Maintenance Technician," and if I forget and wear it outside the building, when people ask about my Exciting Media Job, I explain that I help clean the place up.  It's, er, not untrue.

In A Nutshell

     Here's the problem in all its nuttiness: when you could lose this document among online postings from members of "the Manosphere" and various flavors of "Integralists" and "Christian Nationalists" with no discernable difference, then what you have is just a big stack of things that are all, really, the same thing -- and it ain't the inherent-rights-based representative democracy the Founders and Framers tried to build.

     Yeah, they didn't quite get there in many aspects; but they knew what they were reaching for, and it wasn't jackbooted bullshit marching around, waving a flag and a cross and shouting slogans.

     It's better to fall short reaching up than to succeed punching down.

War! What Is It Bad For?

     You can't see the dead people from here.  But even ignoring that horrible toll, war is bad for a whole lot of things beyond the obvious, from beer cans to electronics to plastic doodads like...uh-oh: your phone.

     Tamara settles in for a look at the facts. Gas prices ain't even half of it.

There Are Still Raccoons In The Chimney

     Thanks to a farrago of crossed signals, the critter removal people were not successfully scheduled until Thursday.  I needed advance notice to get my ham antenna out of the way (and to order a replacement TV antenna, just in case).

     Current plans call for them to show up midday Monday and install a one-way gate on the chimney.  Once the last of the squatters have removed themselves, the chimney will get the same kind of animal-resistant cap all of my neighbors already have.

     Here's hoping for success.

Reading List

     While Donald Trump and Peter Hegseth's supposedly butched-up military machine is stumbling its way through a war of choice in the Middle East, incompetently led and sometimes reluctantly (but competently) served, it might be time for a touch of perspective on current events.  So here are some suggested readings:

     "The Screwfly Solution," by Racoona Sheldon (Alice Sheldon, more famous as "James Tiptree, Jr.")
     The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood
     Practically anything by Ursula K. LeGuin -- I'm presently enjoying The Birthday of the World and Other Stories, a 2002 collection of her short fiction.

     All of them examine power, and how things break, and how helpless so many people are willing to be while it happens, and (in some cases), how it might begin to heal.  We're presently oversupplied with boys who like the sound of smashing altogether too well -- social norms, people's lives, economies, edifices, anything that looks even a little fragile.  But there is a season for all things, and they mustn't be allowed to pursue ruin forever.

Justice?

     This is your regular reminder that nobody "has it coming," unless what's coming is a fair trial and an honest verdict.  Satisfying as tales of vigilante justice or the workings of Fate may be, the real world is rarely that simple.  Sometimes, a bad thing is about to happen and the only way to stop it is immediate, violent action -- but don't mistake that for justice; it's simply a choice aimed at the least-bad solution.

     There are some loathsome people out there, but you can't fix it by becoming loathsome yourself.

Free Cable!

     Okay, not exactly cable, and there may be a little upfront cost; or not, if you or the previous people who lived in your place were lazy enough.

      See, the other thing about over-the-air digital TV is that in addition to providing video good enough to show on a giant screen (seriously, guys, when I was in my teens, we thought a 25" color screen across the living room was huge and now that's the size of my computer monitor), there was bandwidth left over -- as the technology has improved, a lot of it.  So now every over-the-air-channel has multiple extra "dot channels" to fill.*  You can watch them free for nothing -- if you've got an antenna.

     Some of the TV stations put together newswheels or local weather services for their additional channels, but there were already a few companies providing programming to low power TV stations, and a few independent TV channels in the largest cities that weren't quite the size of Chicago's WGN or Atlanta's WTBS but provided a similar mix of old and new.  Those stations and not-quite-networks saw an opportunity and stepped up, making most of their money from commercials and offering their programming to fill the otherwise unused dot channels.

     That was over a decade ago.  In and around a big city, like, oh, Indianapolis, these days you have the usual ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC/PBS, but also MeTV (a kind of homage to a well-run independent local station, complete with Perry Mason and Andy Griffith reruns, Saturday morning cartoons and a Saturday night monster-movie host), a  science fiction channel, two different Western channels, a full-time cartoon channel, a channel of action/adventure programming, one aimed at Black audiences, one for Indian/Southeast Asian viewers, scads of religious channels, a local newswheel and at least two classic-movie channels.  It's better than you used to get from cable TV without the premium channels (and those are all available on streaming).

     Tam mentioned this on her blog recently.  If you live outside the big city and its bedroom communities, you'll probably need something better than old fashioned rabbit ears or a modern flat-panel indoor antenna (bigger is better for those -- you can hide it behind a picture if need be).  You may find a spiky Yagi antenna hiding in your attic or on a pole strapped to your chimney, left over from the days before most people got cable TV.  They work just as well with digital TV signals as they did with analog ones; the only difference is that if you had a lot of "snow" back then, digital TV will either come in great now or not at all; there's not much in-between with a digital signal.  (If you do have to buy an antenna, all I can tell you is the brand I have stashed away in case the well-worn one on our chimney doesn't survive the raccoon removal process: Winegard has been making home TV antennas since way, way back.  I'm sure there are other good brands, and there are still contractors around who install them.)

     Rabbitears lets you look up TV stations serving your location, and lists the channel they transmit on ("Digital Channel") as well as the one your screen displays; it's not always the same.  (This was supposed to be a clever idea to let stations maintain their established identity while everything got shuffled around during the analog-to-digital transition, but I have my doubts.)  There are still a lot of stations on the VHF channels, even low-VHF, so in many locations, you want an antenna that picks them up as well as UHF.  The channel information will help you figure that out.

     Indianapolis has a staggering number of free channels, well over 70 depending on how fancy an antenna you have and if you're willing to point it in other directions than at the main cluster of towers on the northwest side of town.  And that's about average.  It's not "500 channels and nothing on," but these channels have to sing for their supper and there's probably something on one or two of them that'll hold your interest.
____________________
* People call them "subchannels," which is technically inaccurate, or "dot channels," though the main channel is always "[Channel Number].1" and the others are 2, 3, 4, etc., so they're all dot channels.  The channel changer on your remote clicks through them in order, same as always.

On Knowledge And Ignorance

     I frequently encounter -- and loathe -- invincible ignorance, the kind of weaponized not knowing that denies anyone could know anything and therefore, one person's uninformed opinion is exactly as good as another person's deep understanding.

     Well, it ain't, and knowing what you don't know is the beginning of wisdom.

     I am far from the only person who keeps running into self-made fools.  Another of the frustrated has written about it eloquently and in depth.  It's worth a look.

Enough With The Tapdancing

     It's annoying.  It's terrifying, and most people are nowhere near concerned enough: the President of the United States spent a good part of the weekend just past angrily posting on his social media platform, complaining about not being allowed to rule however he sees fit.  I've been looking for neutral coverage about it and of course, it's difficult to find.  You can go straight to the horse's mouth, though.

     Most of the Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court and Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell came in for harsh criticism, as has D.C. Federal Court Judge James Boasberg.  For those of you keeping score at home, that'd be senior members of a co-equal branch of the Federal government and the chair of a Federal agency whose independence most economists say is key to financial stability. The same series of posts claims, falsely, that the 2020 elections were rigged.

     News media also came in for threats; during a 20-minute briefing on Air Force One, the President accused U.S. media of promoting false stories and "not wanting the U.S. to win," cutting off ABC reporters from asking further questions about halfway through.  On Saturday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had threatened broadcast license-holders over their coverage of President Trump's war-in-all-but-name with Iran, posting on X, the former Twitter: "Broadcasters that are running hoaxes and news distortions -- also known as the fake news -- have a chance now to correct course before their license renewals come up. [...] The law is clear. Broadcasters must operate in the public interest, and they will lose their licenses if they do not."   The law might be clear but Chairman Carr is not:  Most national and international coverage is done by networks and the Associated Press,* while FCC licenses are held by individual stations and group owners; ABC/CBS/NBC and Fox own only a few TV stations, while NPR, PBS, CNN and AP own none.  But threats are threats, and the Chairman is hoping station owners will act as his catspaws against the networks and wire service -- and there's a good chance at least some of them will.

     This is all the stuff of dictatorial rule, of "moving towards the Leader" on the part of underlings, and when you throw in the President's announcement that the fight against Iran will end "when I feel it in my bones," and giving his "feeling" that they were planning to attack as one of the Administration's reasons for starting the "excursion" in the first place, it forms a very ugly picture.  President Trump wants to rule like a Roman emperor or a modern autocrat, unfettered by the petty concerns of courts or legislatures, indifferent to public opinion, steered by his own whims.  And much as he rails against the Press, they have continued to sanewash and normalize his dictatorial aspirations, to whitewash his tirades, racism and incoherence, apparently in the vain hope that if they pretend everything is normal, it will all eventually go back to normal.  Just keep throwing raw meat to the beast and pray it will go away?

     Appeasement never works.  Hope is nothing if you won't get out and push towards your goal.  Rust never sleeps -- and neither does the authoritarian impulse and the willingness to be ruled, the will to power and the lazy desire to let somebody else do the heavy lifting.
_______________________
These days, AP is also a software company: as computer-centric "electronic newsrooms" emerged, AP became a leading supplier of newsroom systems.  Think of it as Windows Office scaled so an entire newsroom can share it, with GUI conventions markedly different to those of Windows and Apple, though slowly converging.

Easy Listening

     When I was young and (some) regular household electronic devices still had genuine light-up vacuum tubes inside, I took Radio-TV Production classes for all three years of High School.

     The man who taught that subject was middle-aged and very heavy.  He'd worked his way through college as a jazz and middle-of-the-road music deejay before getting into news (and part-time police work, but that's another story), and told stories of the days when even a medium-sized directional AM station was a Big Deal, with full-time engineers on duty to turn the knobs.*

     One day, a particularly apple-polishing student lamented that there was hardly any jazz at all on the radio any more, and he chuckled.  "You watch TV, don't you?  Listen to the theme music.  Nearly all of it is light jazz of one kind or another."

     He was right.  Most of it still is, with some notable exceptions, and if you want background music and have an Alexa or similar widget that only needs a single song to go searching for more of the same but different, you can spin up a nice fifteen minutes or half an hour of undemanding entertainment by asking it to play the theme from "Mannix," "The Wild, Wild West" (TV show) or something along those lines.

     Semi-relatedly, when I was even younger, I was a fan of both "The Wild, Wild West" and "Love, American Style," and it wasn't until years later that I realized what they had in common was that they were as close as TV ever got to newsstand pulp magazines.  There are other good examples, but those two had taken the essentials and run right from pulp-paper page to the camera lens.
____________________
* That's not all they were doing.  Directional antenna arrays for AM radio are large, from two to as many as nine towers in the 100-foot to 700-foot range and spaced about that far apart, with a large, complex gadget called a "phasor" (no, really) to feed the right amount and phase angle of radio-frequency energy to each one, and a smaller gadget called a "phase monitor" to ensure it was all working as it should.  They were drifty, and regular readings had to be made, along with occasional adjustments.  Over time, the change to transistors and then integrated circuits meant the phase monitors got better and better, and as computers replaced log tables and slide rules, the design of phasors and antenna arrays became less art and more science.  Eventually, it became obvious even to the FCC that most of the drifting was not, in fact, the big hardware, but the little gadgets we used to check it every half hour.  30-minute checks became three-hour checks; engineers on duty 24/7 were replaced by a requirement for one full-timer with the right license and, eventually, "whoever," a part-timer to occasionally look over the automated monitors and make sure the EAS tests ran.  But oh, it used to be a thing, once upon a time.