Chicken Salad Cordon Bleu

     Because why not?  Our corner grocer makes a first-rate chicken salad sandwich, served on a fresh-baked croissant, and despite the -- shudder* -- lettuce leaf they add on the bottom.  The greens make for longer shelf life; they'll make up a batch of sandwiches in little clear plastic boxes, stick them in the self-service deli cooler, and often sell out by the time I stop by after work.

     They were out last night, but had the makings: nice croissants in boxes of four, and plastic containers of their roast chicken salad.  The problem with this is, Tam's not a fan of the stuff.

     Tamara's okay with ham and cheese, though, and I was out of Swiss anyway.  Good Black Forest ham, sliced Swiss cheese, vinegar-dressing coleslaw on the side: a light supper.

     Putting together a sandwich for Tam, I was thinking about how to use up the ham before it expired, and added a slice of ham to my sandwich, cut in two with a little spicy mustard between them, to the bottom of my chicken salad sandwich. (No, I didn't buy lettuce; I'm still a little wary of raw vegetables I didn't grow myself.*)  This turns out to be outstandingly tasty, and I recommend it to my readers.
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* It's annoying.  I like salads, and I like not having to buy all the ingredients and build them myself even more.  Thanks, Trump -- cutting way back on food inspectors, that's some real effective government streaming from you and your party right there.

Leftovers? Luxury!

     Last Wednesday, we had sliced zucchini in puttenesca sauce, with a little ground sirloin and pancetta* in it.  The sauce is absolutely delicious, and carries the squash along nicely.  Then Saturday, I'd made grill-baked meatloaf -- well, not exactly made: the butcher counter at or neighborhood grocery makes "Italian  meatloaf," ready to go in a foil pan, with bell pepper rings and a couple of cherry tomatoes on top.  Cooking it on the grill sounds crazy, but it works; the foil pan goes on mostly-flat perforated grill pan and enough to the hardwood smoke permeates the meatloaf to give it a nice flavor.  My covered grill hits 350°F easily with hardwood lump charcoal. (Fresh green beans, steamed with slivered almonds, on the side -- a four-minute microwave dish.)

     Both meals resulted in leftovers -- more than half a small meatloaf and a fair amount of tasty, meat-laden puttensca sauce.

     Sunday dinner was obvious.  I set the sauce to thawing while I chopped and sauteed a small white onion, followed by mixed exotic mushrooms (King trumpet, maiitake and oyster).  A small can of plain tomato sauce and some sliced olives, a pipparra pepper cut up small and pickled red peppers followed, then the thawed puttensca and, once it was bubbling, the meatloaf, cut into more or less meatball-sized cubes.  With a little grated Parmesan cheese on top, it was a nice ragout.  Leftovers?  Sure.  But what leftovers they were!

     I keep wanting to try baking bread in the covered grill.  It'll be tricky, but it might be very good indeed.
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* The one thing I'd do differently is that I bought a small container of cubed pancetta and some of them were a little tough even after slight browning and long simmering.  A little dab is all it takes, so the slightly more expensive but oh so delicate thin slices would be better, scissored into bits of flavor and added to the ground sirloin very shortly before pouring in the sauce.

About "A.I." And Data Centers

     You want to know what I think about so-called "Artificial Intelligence?" I think it ought to be banned while there's still less there than meets the eye, while it still hasn't got hands.

     I still think there's a very large element of scam to it, and a lump of self-delusion equally as large.  It's the Internet meme, "If friend-shaped, why not friend?" writ large: "A.I." usually simulates an affirming if not outright obsequious collaborator.  There is still nothing inside the box; it can't feel pain, it has no theory of mind, and there is no actual self-awareness at the center of it.  Say it kills us all, or brings about a golden age: either way, there's no part of it that knows what's going on, or that grasps the difference between Utopia and Ragnarok.

     "A.I." is deadly the way a four-year-old with a handgun is deadly, only more so, because the code has no emotional bonds to Mommy or Daddy and it never will.  When research is done on these simulated-intelligence programs, it should be sandboxed and firewalled as if it was refined plutonium, not offered up for any fool to play with.

     And as for the data centers it (and, apparently, everything else) runs on, they're an enormous vulnerability, and one I thought we'd outgrown.  Go back a step or two in technological development, and they're an approximate analog to telephone switching centers ("telephone exchange"); CLifford Exchange was (and is) near my house, just a few blocks over and north on College Avenue.  Typical of post-WW II exchanges, it was a semi-hardened building: very few windows, stout steel doors, thick brick and concrete walls, backup power.  It wouldn't survive an atom bomb, but it has shrugged off storms, floods, being struck by vehicles, tornadoes and civil unrest without a mark.  The only destruction it has suffered was the loss of the larger of the two buildings that once comprised it: telephone switching equipment is minuscule these days, and the real estate was worth more than the empty building.

     Data centers are built using the same methods and materials as your nearest Target, Meijer or Walmart, just like the ones that have the roof peeled off in summer storms or get looted during riots.  Their best physical security consists of chain-link fences and ordinary locks.  If they're so darned important, how come they're built like big-box stores or modern warehouses?

     At one time, the distributed nature of a pretty clever computer (or three) on everyone's desk and, eventually, in everyone's purse or pocket, all interconnected via the Internet, was seen as a great strength, and the fat nodes on the network were understood as weak points that the system was designed to route around in case of individual failure.  Suddenly it's utterly vital to stick one or two or a dozen around every county seat?

     In Frank Herbert's Dune series,* computers are strictly limited in function and computing power; centuries before the setting of his stories, machine intelligence had reached great heights of power and tyrannical authority over humanity, and was only defeated after a long and bitter struggle.  High drama indeed, later novelized as The Butlerian Jihad, named ostensibly after a key character in the battles, though probably a nod to a 19th-Century utopian novelists's cautions about machine intelligence.  Maybe the time to deal with that sort of thing is before it becomes a problem?

     In February 2024, writing about the possible overturning of Chevron, I included "Artificial Intelligence" on a list of things about which I preferred our generally ineffectual Congress get expert advice, but now I'm wondering if the Feds are listening to the right kinds of experts -- better philosophers than tech moguls, better ethicists than software engineers.

     The price of getting this wrong is exorbitant.  
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* The first book is great; I think it kind of tapers off from there, though not for lack of worldbuilding.

CNN Still On The Outs

     Apparently, CNN's out of the video pool for now.  They've got access to the White House, but not Air Force One or special events like the recent state dinner.  The other members of the pool don't agree, but so far, there's no explicit policy, just a series of pointed snubs and counter-boycotts.

     Beside's the Executive Branch doesn't have any pressing problems to deal with -- just a little pocket recissioning, a tactic of highly questionable legality, in which Congress sets up a government program, funds it -- and the administration declines to spend the money.

     Boy, it's sure good there's not a war on, or a price crisis in anything important, like food, housing or fuel.

They're Back In! --Except Where They Aren't

      Around 12:30 yesterday afternoon, the White House started reissuing passes to journalists from CNN, MSNBC and Politico.  They were back!

     Well, sort of.  CNN had long been a member of the cool kid's club video pool, and the administration, having kicked them out of it, is maintaining a sphinxlike silence on whether they're allowed to swim again.  In solidarity, the other members of the pool -- ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox -- are sittin' on their cameras and whatever dignity they can muster.

     The issues here remain that, A) Having opened their doors to the Press, Federal institutions can't kick 'em out without "due process of law," meaning there are charges and a rebuttal and a determination from the git-go, or it ends up in court anyway; and B) Having opened their doors to the Press, Feds cannot give individual reporters or organizations the bum's rush over what or how they write.  Clearly actionable stuff might rate legal cases for libel, slander or over national security issues, but calling the President a big ol' meany or accusing Cabinet members of being stupid or excessively flatulent (or even just saying their approval numbers have reached new lows) are criticisms that Uncle Sam's official and loyal servants must endure -- and have had to from the first days of our Republic.  These are things that stem directly from the Bill of Rights and about which there is no lack of statute and legal-case precedent.  (This doesn't stop the back-and-forth; a local pundit reminds us that it's an ongoing struggle and I think it probably always will be.)

     If the Press, in their various and sundry slants, attitudes, angles, opinions, perceptions and limitations are blind men looking at the elephant (or, occasionally, donkey) of government, then let's have as many of 'em, and as many different kinds, as we can get -- because what no one seems to remember from the children's book is that when you put together all the disparate descriptions of the subject animal, you get a pretty accurate overall picture of the beast itself.

     Guess Who's Not Coming To Dinner:
     For years, the easiest way to get journalists to pay attention has been to feed them. Not feeding them can have the opposite effect.  CNN* and MSNBC showed up to cover the big state dinner for China's President Xi last night, and were sent home without so much as a roll or a stray fork in their pockets, let alone any video or sound bites.  This appears to be more limits-testing, and it's an area that is at least slightly gray; limited-access events (as opposed to press conferences) do have greater leeway for discrimination.  (And there's no word if Politico tried to get in and was sent home without dinner.)  What's next?  I don't know, but it's clear this bit of middle-school jostling is far from over.

     Conflict between the Press and the President is always uneven -- one has a bigger megaphone, but the other has the Secret Service, not to mention the Border Patrol, Space Force, Air Force, Army, Navy, Marines and Coast Guard.  The Bill of Rights offers a little more balance, but when you come right down to it, one side's got locked gates and people to guard 'em, while the other side's got old-fashioned Mark I ears and eyes, a pen, a voice recorder and a camera.  If we want to keep an eye on what our elected officials are up to, we need those ink-stained wretches, even the ones whose fool notions we detest.
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* To be fair, CNN sent a list of who they were sending and the administration returned it with a note: only videographers and sound technicians were invited. CNN replied it was everyone on their list including reporters and producers, or nobody, and the upshot was, nobody, not even if they wore their best outfits and had a guide to which spoon to use for what dish.

Well, What A Surprise

     The news organizations ousted from their spots at the White House went before a judge yesterday -- a Trump-appointed Federal judge, presumably vetted and blessed by the Federalist Society* -- and were granted a temporary order putting them back in the job in the Oval Office, etc. for the next two weeks while the legal process moves forward.

     The judge says the news organizations are likely to prevail when the case goes to trial; there are no do-overs in the news business and government restriction on Constitutionally-protected rights is a serious matter, so CNN, MSNOW and Politico are back in immediately, where no doubt they will be graciously received,  Or not; as I write, there's no evidence that their White House press credentials have been restored.  (Will he or won't he?  The slow accrual of power to whoever holds the Oval Office ought to be chilling to even a superficial student of history, and the Trump administration has done more to further it than any President since Jackson or Wilson.  Enthusiastic partisans should bear in mind that no one man, or even party, can hold the office forever, and that immense power will pass to someone with a very different set of priorities.)

     A couple of things are going on with the case itself.  One is a First Amendment two-step: if you're a responsible party in The Government, once you've let the Press in, you can't shut them out if you don't like what they write, no matter how mean they are.  The other is the right to due process: the government cannot shove people or organizations around arbitrarily, based on whim  They've got to follow due process of law -- pull you over, write a ticket, aim you towards the courts.  A President can't just point and say, "You -- out!" in the manner of a Roman Emperor or a beat cop rousting someone sleeping on a park bench.

     It will be interesting to see what happens next.  Mr. Trump has already said he will appeal if he loses this case.  There's a step or two until the case reaches the U. S. Supreme Court (unless they apply to jump the line, a process governed by arcane rules I would have to go look up), and there's no telling what the slut-gnomes of false Berlin the nine robed eminences will do.  It should be utterly clear, but....

     Presently, none of the affected organizations have White House access yet.  And here's the bitter pill under those sweet, sweet Bill of Rights headlines: it's kicked the disastrous non-war with Iran and six-fifty-a-gallon diesel (chased by gasoline at $4.50 and both rising) plus the President's low and sinking approval ratings right off the front page, or at least below the fold.  Is pushing the Press around a bad look?  Probably not, especially to his base; while the public generally thinks better of news media than they do of Congress or the President, it's not very much better.  And there's nothing like a good fight to gather a crowd.
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* In fact, he's been a member of it since 2009, and they're picky about the conservative creds of anyone they let into the clubhouse.  Sending a boxtop and an SASE isn't sufficient, no matter how much Ovaltine you drink.

Stop Shouting!

     Alternative titles: "Get Off The Bus!" and "Partyline."

     It has nothing to do with politics.  I went to work on a transmitter yesterday; it's been behaving oddly, slow to "wake up" after power hits, and the first, simplest step was to replace the transient suppressors on the incoming power.  They're conveniently socketed, and somewhat inconveniently mounted -- you have to remove the front panel from a module and it exposes the incoming mains voltage, 208 Volt 3-phase.  So I had to shut it all the way off.

     I proceeded to do the task, transmitter off, breaker off, panel off, unplug and replace three little widgets, then put it all back together, look it over, flip the breaker, power up, wait for the hearts and brains of the thing to get happy (okay, the RF modulators and controllers, each nicely redundant) and then the ON switch, a little power-up cycle of yellow and green lights, and--  And--  And--

     And the darn green lights went nuts.  Multiple faults, amber and blinking red in the "Christmas tree" status lights down one side of each amplifier; on the other, where three power supplies should light up green and steady, instead it showed blinks, green and off, chasing one another down the front panel in waltz time, 1,23; 1,2,3; 1,2,3; 1,2,3.  One amplifier showed a few more faults than the other three.

     I started digging through the front-panel menus on the controllers.  They had apparently signed up with the Wobblies: one should be Active while its pal is on Standby.  Instead, they were both on Standby!  Checking the computer-screen GUI confirmed it.  They weren't a-gonna work.

     The manual recommends setting the power output to zero and rebooting.  So I did.  Nope.  The next step is to try shutting things off -- it will run with one controller and one exciter, after all -- and rebooting.  Nope.  At that point, I sat down and put in a request for tech support with the manufacturer,* then went back to trying things like shutting off each amplifier module one at a time, and trying to take off with one prop feathered.  No luck.

     Eventually, a note came back from the factory.  They were reaching out to their subject-matter expert -- who just happened to be the contract engineer who had supervised our installation.  I remembered him as a guy who'd known all the quirks of the transmitter.

     Back to trying things.  My phone lit up with a message: Their guy was deep in another crises, and suggested putting the old transient suppressors back in. That's right, he'd said those things could be flaky, back when we put the transmitter in.  So I did that.  No change.

     I tried a few other things, got a message saying a call to me was next in the queue, and spent some time going back through the manual.  There's no tutorial, but the English translation has all the drawings and implies quite a lot.  I rebooted the internal network switch, even though it mostly communicated with the outside world; internal communications uses a different system.

     Man, still no call.  It had been an hour and a half since the initial contact.  I sent another email to the factory support coordinator, suggesting I'd been waiting long enough to hire a truck and make a good start towards driving the thing back to their parking lot.  That got a reply.  "What?  He hasn't called you?"  By this point, I'd also told my bosses, and they were sending increasingly worried text messages.

     The expert eventually did call.  He was mystified by the symptoms.  We wasted a half-hour trying to connect to the amplifiers directly.  They've got USB jacks, but it takes a stone-simple terminal emulator; it pops up a blinking cursor and we got that far, at least.  From there, a menu should appear in response to a tap on the ENTER key, but none of 'em were answering the phone.

     This made no sense to me, and, at first, not much more to him.  Then he asked if I'd tried shutting things off and restarting.  I had.  "Have you tried shutting off two things?"  That, I had not. So, with the most-complaining amplifier and one of the controllers off, I did yet another reboot.

     It's a slow process, a power-up self-test that steps through each part.  Green lights came up, flickered amber, came back green one at a time.  Green lights that stayed green.  I tried turning up the output power and my analog meters flickered.  (They're external.  It bugged me that the thing didn't have a nice big "I'm happy!" indication I could see across the room, so I added them.)  I told the expert, and kept on turning up the power, a little at a time.  "You're not going to make full power, of course," he told me, "But it'll do at least fifty percent."

     With one of four amplifiers off, you might think 75 percent, but that's not how the math works; the combining uses clever physics tricks that only add up nicely when everything is balanced, and when it isn't, some energy is lost.  Fifty is still greater than zero, and that's where we ended up.

     So what happened?  The internal communications is a kind of "party line," a shared serial data bus.  The expert figures the bad amp has been yelling for help -- but not flagging any alarms -- for a long time.  That's why the transmitter's been so slow to recover from power hits.  When I shut the transmitter down for half an hour, that's longer than it has been off since we put it in, and one of the controllers woke up unhappy.   I'm told that's a known problem.  And the controller was spamming the party line, too.  That's way too much traffic: neither controller could promote itself to active, the good amplifier modules couldn't report themselves ready for duty, and that transmitter wasn't going nowhere nohow until we shut off all the racket on the line.

     If it's not one thing, it's two things.  And it was.  The amplifier modules -- eighty pounds or so! --  are factory repair only, so they're shipping me a box and we'll cycle it through the repair process.    
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* Or as close as I can get.  It's actually imported, then fitted out to U. S. standards by the importer.  But both the overseas manufacturer and the U.S. importer are owned by the same multinational, headquartered in yet another country, so they're actually doing business with themselves.  Happily, all three are mostly geek-driven.  Unhappily, all three got downsized as the last of the U.S. digital cutover process met the COVID-19 pandemic.  There are a handful of engineers and techs left, in three languages.

Strange Bed- Er, Well, This Is Awkward

      Yesterday, CNN had "pool" video duty for White House Coverage; the job rotates between ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC, and with CNN barred, the others refrained from stepping up and say they'll be sitting out pool coverage.  (Not to worry -- the President just launched his very own TV channel, with nonstop, officially vetted and approved coverage of whatever the White House wants covered -- and nothing it does not.  For those keeping track at home, this is the exact opposite of a free press.)

     Radio and online/paper Press have their own pool rotations and a few of them have stepped back, too, which meant yesterday, the Print Media pool covering the President was led by....  Envelope, please!  The Washington Blade, which (per Wikipedia) is the country's oldest LGBT newspaper, backed up by the arch-conservative website, The Daily Caller.  Both of 'em are known to wear their political hearts on their sleeves, and to not avoid sensationalistic stories.  The dynamic out there in the reporter seats must have been interesting; I'm picturing a couple of earnest scriveners desperately trying to read over one another's shoulders while not getting, you know, too close.  What if it's catching?

     There's a certain amount of comfort in knowing that even in these fraught and conflict-filled times, we'll be getting a diversity of perspective on the Executive Branch -- and even more comfort in the thought that they're probably creeping each other out.

It's A Little Thing, But

     It's got me wondering: actors who do one-act plays, or shoot short subjects, do you wish them luck before a performance by saying, "Break a toe?"

It Wasn't A Dare

     Last night, I pointed to, and mocked, the increasing weirdness of the present administration and their Legislative counterparts (and let us not forget the nutjobs and partisan hacks they've ushered into the Federal Judiciary or who were already in place and happy to step up).

     Truth is, I was thinking it was just about Peak Strange.

     Guess again.

     The huge, ugly triumphal arch Mr. Trump would like to put up along the sightline from the Lincoln Monument to Arlington National Cemetery isn't something I've written about much.  While I think every bit of it demonstrates execrable taste, from the design and decoration to the location to the very idea of it,* it was indeed a matter of taste, and paled next to barring press organizations from attending public events of the Chief Executive of the republic, or the markedly violent immigration enforcement dragnets that have wept up legal residents and naturalized citizens, and which have resulted in the deaths of non-citizens and citizens alike.  The arch seemed like a minor detail, more gold-dripping frippery going up while the price of everything skyrockets.

     Turns out I was wrong.  Here's the President of United States of America, on his social media platform last night:

     "At the strong request of the United States Military, and for National Security purposes, I have agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch, [...] at the Receptive Circle adjoining the Arlington Memorial Bridge, into a top grade Military Complex/Triumphal Arch, to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large numbers of drones, plus Snipers, on both the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There will be no facility like this anywhere in the World. [...]."

     Nothing like it anywhere in the world?  Ain't that the truth -- though I have seen similar setups, usually in church belfries, while watching reruns of Combat!  They were occupied by German Army snipers or sometimes machinegunners.  Lest someone accuse me of hostile editing, you can read the original in its entirety at the source.  You can also read news stories about it, but yes, this is just what it appears to be, a sniper tower just off the Mall.  That'll deter the next poor sod who picks up a loose flap of pool coating!  What it reminds me of are the later scenes in the recent film Civil War, when opposition troops are converging on a fortified White House cowering behind high walls -- well, that and the kind of thing military-obsessed boys liked to draw in middle school during class when they should have been taking notes.

     I'm now unwilling to believe the unprecedented actions and events will stop at the present level.  Buckle up, kids, there's no predicting what's around the next corner.
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* Most Roman triumphal arches, and all of the surviving ones, were built by the Roman Empire, not during the Roman Republic.  And the United States federal government has never built any -- certainly not in the national capitol.  There's a message there, for those willing to heed it.

It Just Keeps Getting Weirder

      There's no end to the strange turns.  Let's see -- the President says he's banning some U. S. news organizations from the White House, which is not a specifically enumerated or implied power of the office and which previous Federal court cases have determined is, in fact, not a power Presidents have.  At present, the credentials of journalists employed by MSNOW, CNN and Politico have been revoked.  This is a bad notion and I hope the courts won't let it stand.  I want our elected officials to be scrutinized from every angle, so I can make up my own mind.

     Elsewhere, Congresspeople are getting themselves in trouble of the slept-with-the-wrong-person or took-money-they-shouldn't've type.  You can look up the various scandals, not all of which have been to court, for yourself.  It's too tawdry to list.  This is why you need every shade of reporter looking at them.

     At this point, there are plenty of trailer parks in the U.S. with fewer outrageous and/or or illegal activities going on than there are among the elected officials of the Federal government, and among the wildest offenders you will find many of the same people who have been presuming to lecture us Great Unwashed about our bad behavior.  Y'know, there's no honest path to the moral high ground from waking up in bed with an employee or someone else's spouse (or someone other than your own), dead drunk and violating the U. S. Constitution and I'm sick of the politicians, most of the Press and a whole lot of the rest of us acting as if there were.

     Politicians, appointees?  Fix you own hearts and whatever vestiges of a soul or conscience you've got before you come after the rest of us.

This Is...Unwanted

     I missed a couple of doses of my anti-inflammatory this past week, and maybe I did a little too much awkward lifting on Trash Night last night.  Whatever I did, this morning I woke up with an unhappy back, and gentle exercises and soaking in warm water didn't help.

     So I have taken a muscle relaxer and called in sick.  I'm not going to try to tough it out.  The last time I did that, it ended up costing me most of the summer.

A Staggering Own-Goal

     Through misadventure, misjudgement and incompetence, the United States has led the way to a global shortage of diesel fuel.  Prices have skyrocketed -- and there are service stations in the U. S. where you can't buy it at all: they're out.

     This is bad when you go to top up the VW Golf and approaches catastrophic when the Super Duty pickup has run nearly dry, but you ain't seen nothin' yet.  Every single item on the shelf at the grocery store and the five and dime, every drug in the pharmacy and most children in the schools got there by diesel.  The box and tractor-trailer trucks and farm machinery all run on it.  The trains run on it.  The river barges are moved by tugs burning it.  Most school buses burn it.  The electrical peaking plants that keep the grid up on especially hot or cold days?  Diesel.  And speaking of cold days, fuel oil still runs many furnaces, and it's the next thing to diesel; if refineries adjust to make more truck fuel now, there'll be less heating fuel as winter comes in.  Jet fuel's another cousin (though even closer to kerosene), so close that hospitals and TV stations that fly helicopters sometimes get the emergency generators set up to run on the same fuel, sharing their supply.  And there have already been rolling jet fuel shortages.

     Big ships still run on thick bunker oil, which is pretty much at the bottom of the stuff refineries distill, what's left after they pour the diesel off -- but wait, some of them switch to clean-burning diesel as they approach port.

     Bottom line?  Everything you buy is going to get more expensive, and will stay that way as long as diesel fuel remains scarce and costly (and probably long after, until inventories turn over).

     The problem here is not Orange Man Bad.  Sure, he is, but we've had absolute bastards in the Presidency before (Jackson, Wilson, Nixon...); it's not actually a disqualification.  Nope, the problem is Orange Man Dumb and Orange Man Have Poor Impulse Control. Not to mention Orange Man Not Listen To Qualified Experts, of which his administration has vanishingly few anyway.  We're all going to pay the price for it -- all of us who are not high-and-mighty Federal officials and politicians, anyway.  They're still tucking into nice steaks and rick, thick Senate Bean Soup,* the ingredients for which were carried to the Capitol by train and/or truck, and paid for with your and my tax dollars.

     They've shot themselves in the foot, but we're doing the bleeding for them.
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* Apparently, it's not all that great.  My own 15-bean soup is undoubtedly better, though I rarely have time to make it. It's based on the Hurst packaged beans but uses a different recipe and is served with raw chopped onions and celery for toppings, and generous amounts of fresh cornbread.  And you'd never guess what fuel brought all that wonderful stuff to the grocer's.

Running, Running

     These have been a busy two days. Both cats had early-morning vet appointments, Holden on general principles and to schedule teeth-cleaning, Huck other to check his blood pressure.  Yes, they use a tiny cuff and it's a real struggle to hear the change.  Sometimes they have to shave a spot for the electronic stethoscope microphone, but not this time.  Offer him a Churu treat and he's pretty tolerant of whatever they need to do.

This Timeline Is Deeply Wrong

     "Lay down with dogs, get up with a job at the FBI," shouldn't be a thing, but here we are.  2026 is the gift that keeps on taking.

Getting The Lead Out

     I bought a filtering water pitcher, and the reason is--

     City water tastes pretty lousy if it sits for more than a few minutes.  I drink bottled water and I'd been thinking about a filter carafe for a long time, but, well, what motivated me is that the LSLRP crew has been working two blocks over, and it worried me.  That's the Lead Service Line Replacement Program, our local water (and gas) utility's effort to replace lead pipe from the main to the "meter pit," which around here is more likely to have a shut-off valve in it while the actual meter lives in your basement and is connected to a wireless access port on the outside wall of your house.

     I hadn't been too worried; my house was built in 1924, the water line into the house is galvanized, and I was okay, right?

     Apparently not.  Between ordering the pitcher and receiving it, I got a letter advising me that what I keep thinking of as "L-Slurp" was in the neighborhood, swapping out the old lead pipes and yes, my house was on the list.

     Apparently, I've been running on leaded for twenty years.  Probably not much -- our various water utilities (the thing kept getting bought up and going bankrupt) have known for years and been careful about the chemicals they used, but, still.

     Like smoking, the best time to give up lead is before you start and the second-best time is right now. (And yes, the filtering widget I bought, a well-known name brand, promises it really does remove the lead, honest, cross their heart.)

That Whole Charlie Kirk Anniversary Thing

     Not the terrible thing that was done to him.  I wrote at the time and I'll say it again: nobody has that coming.  Certainly not a guy whose shtick was showing college students that if you go arguing with a man in a venue he controls, where he sets the ground rules and picks the issues, you're going to lose.  It may even be a valuable lesson or two: the grown-up world does not play fair.  You cannot reason someone out of a position he holds on faith.

     I disagreed with most and maybe even all of his positions.  Nevertheless, the violence that was committed against him was absolutely inexcusable and should be condemned by every decent person.

     But I don't quite get why all the media outlets made a point of noting the anniversary of his murder.  What are they after?  They've been covering the trial of the man accused of killing him, and that's appropriate, but this is someone who didn't hold public office, and whose fame was based on employing his rhetorical gifts in remarkably uneven debates.  Big fun if you agreed with him, I suppose, but he wasn't otherwise notable.  The organizations he founded have faltered as cultural forces without him, and many people on the far Right have drifted towards even more extreme figures.  That's not great -- but it's likely those individuals were already headed in that direction.  He wasn't a moderating influence.  I'm sorry for the loss to his family and friends.

     We've got too damn much political violence in this country, and we're too easily chivvied into "Us vs. Them" conflicts that pit working people...against other working people.  Meanwhile, the rich get richer, no matter what their politics happen to be -- and their politics have often been shown to be remarkably flexible, depending on which party is in power and what they they think it can do for them.  Against that, making killers famous, marking the date of their crimes and shedding performative tears over their victims is an utterly cynical sideshow.

Forward-Looking Perspective

     Data centers are the abandoned Kmarts and dead malls of tomorrow -- and tomorrow is right around the corner.

It's 9/11

     Politicians and media will be pulling out out their hair shirts and weeping hankies, and look, it was  a terrible day, an unexpected blow, a mass murder of innocents, a nasty piece of asymmetrical warfare.

     So was Pearl Harbor, and we still mark the day.  But December 7, 1966 was not a day-long commemoration.  My Dad didn't blink when I bought a Toyota in 1977.

     Remember -- by all means, remember.  But don't be consumed by it.  Understand the changes it, and our reaction, wrought in our country. 

He's A Biter

      Holden still can't grasp that his adoptive mommies are relatively fragile.  He sits on the typewriter shelf of my desk, and if he thinks he's not getting enough attention, he'll bite me.

     Flinching doesn't help.  Scolding doesn't register with him.  So I've started crying, as soon as I feel the little cat teeth.  I pull away before he can get a good nip. put my head down and sob, in as heartfelt a way as I can.

     And that works.  He'll either start smoothing on me or go into clown mode, rolling and grabbing at small items on the desk, very much, "I'm playing!  See?  See how amusing I am?  Please stop crying!"

     I just started a few days ago.  We'll see if the lesson sticks.

It's A Kind Of Genius

     Oh, it's crude.  And it's not possible, not to mention illegal.  But it's absolutely an example of how the man works: the President of the United States has promised to pay each and every American* a middling-large sum of money if his party retains control of Congress.  He's made similar payoff promises before, which somehow never materialize.

     It's the same appeal as a one-armed bandit, only with far less chance of a payoff: pull lever, get money.  And there's a group of voters, ranging from low-information to so deep in the fantasy they'll take it on faith, who will be moved by it.  Is the size of that group decisively large?  Is greed a stronger motivation than high prices for everything and stagnant wages?  Stronger than the reaction to an increasingly authoritarian Federal government whose masked secret-police thugs act with impunity?

     I don't know.

     The truth is, the money's not his to spend; it's Congress's.  And Congress doesn't have it; the payout would run to more than 1.3 trillion dollars and they're already deeply in the red funding his don't-call-it-a-war with Iran, the same one that's driving up the price of oil, fuel, and everything that relies on oil-derived stuff to be made or grown and transported.  I suppose they could just have the Mint print it -- that's what the Left calls "Modern Monetary Theory" and the Right mocks (so does the center); it's inherently inflationary, meaning by the time you get your money, it'll buy fast-food dinner for two and a daily newspaper as long as it's not the Sunday edition.  And it's illegal in the U.S. to pay people for votes, not that illegality is much of a deterrent.  (And it's the actual paying for votes part that is illegal -- candidates and everyone else can talk about it all they like.)

     It's money no American will ever receive, no matter who they vote for.

     Politicians have been selling pie in the sky for years; Mencken called elections a kind of advance auction of stolen goods, but the modern, jet-propelled GOP version auctions off the stolen goods -- and then keeps them.

     I beg people to choose a better class of crook.  I have no faith left that they will.

     Update: The "dividend" headlined every TV and radio newscast I saw or heard today.  It'll never be paid -- but using it as a lure is indeed a kind of genius.  Flim-flam genius we should be ashamed of falling for, and yet....
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* Citizens, presumably, given his party's positions, not resident non-citizens.

It's Junk Food

     It's junk science, too: "A.I.," which is certainly artificial but has yet to demonstrate actual intelligence, is going to kill us all, warn the....people working frantically to build ever larger versions of it.

     While it is true that the inhuman, hyperscaled fuzzy-logic might indeed do immense harm, all of it will require human actions -- being fool enough to connect it to critical systems, applying it to cybercrime (it's really, really well suited to that, which reveals quite a lot about the people promoting it) and treating its advice as if it was coming from another soft, vulnerable human being instead of generated by a big, clever next-likely-sequence-of-words machine.  Most of your fellow humans already don't give a flip about you, but a majority would still cringe if you suffered grievous bodily harm in front of them and started to bleed and scream.  A.I. would react to it in the precise same way as lump of mud: not at all.  There is no there there.|

     And of all the junk-food junk science, "Roko's Basilisk" is among the worst.  It's nonsense.  It's brainrot.  It assumes there's a ghost in the machine.  Might some future "A.I." punish anyone* who knew it could be brought into existence and didn't help (or fought against it)?  ...First, it presupposes that there's something to do the knowing; second, it absolves the humans who built and trained the thing, directly or indirectly, of blame.  This is "The lawnmower ran over the rabbit nest" levels of passive voice guilt-dodging: no, stupid, you ran over the baby bunnies with the lawnmower you were wielding, which is why there's blood all over your shoes.

     The basilisk isn't a thought experiment, it's a threat, from the same kind of irresponsible teen-aged thinker that shouldn't be allowed to use dangerous machinery around the powerless and vulnerable.  We've already run that experiment at scale, when DOGE dismantled USAID, and it has resulted in at least hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths so far, with some sources projecting tens of millions dead by 2030.  There's your creature, and it's humans pushing the button, same as always.

     Maybe we should stop them -- or at least stop pretending their imaginary playmate is real.
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* Or, in some versions of the fable, their simulacrum, which is brainrotted brainrot: a copy of you simulated in the machine will not be you, and the illusion of continuity of consciousness does not run in reverse: your copy may "remember" your joys and sorrows, but whatever simulation of suffering it might endure will never affect you.  Fretting this one is like laying awake at night worrying someone will tear up a photograph of you, and I'm sorry to be the one to tell you this, but your ex already did.

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.
________________________
* 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.