Current Events

     The thing about commenting on current events is, right now, we have got a whole bunch of men -- and it's mostly men, you boys gotta own that -- who are busily setting the world on fire, like an entire gang of firebug nitwits creeping around California at the height of dry season with boxes of strike-anywhere matches and aiming to do just that: strike anywhere.

     I can keep on pointin' 'em out, but there are so many and they are so determined in their efforts that there are not enough fire hoses, and none of them fat enough, to prevent some damage.  Sooner or later, one or another is going to get something major going and the winds of history will fan the flames.  The Middle East?  Ukraine?  The Atlantic overturning current?  Most of Canada burning to the waterline (hey, don't we have a state up that way, and a lot of it also covered in woods?)?  Stock market crashing, Africa overrun by infectious disease...?

     Don't know.  Can't say.  The human race perpetually dances on the rim of a volcano, and we have got us a crop of boys who are choosing the more overhanging parts of it for our dance floor and doing a lot of jumping up and down.  Eventually, something's going to give.

     Better be ready to leap for safety -- and to know which direction will do you the most good, 'cos they are just looking for the rush when it crumbles.

Hoppin' John, Skippin' Jenny

     I started with some pretty good Hoppin' John -- ham, mild Italian sausage, green peppers, onion, canned diced mild chilis, a box of crushed tomatoes blackeyed peas and a little this and that.  We had it last week and I froze the leftovers in two batches.

     Then I picked up some pickled mild banana pepper rings, sliced pickled hot cherry pepper, pickled red onions and spicy pickled okra, plus the usual green Castelvetrano olvies and black Kalamata olives.  Handy stuff to have.

     Tonight, Tam brought home bulk sweet Italian sausage (it's not sweet-sweet, just a different herb profile than the mild).  I browned it in olive oil with a little gumbo filé (I should have held that back for later, to help thicken the broth), Cajun seasoning and smoked paprika, added pickled peppers and onions as it was about done and drained it, then added a little more of the onions and pepper, plus five big okra cut into rounds, along with a few of each kind of olives, a small can of tomato sauce, a big can of fire-roasted green chilis and half a can of pinto beans.  Meanwhile, I defrosted the half-batch of Hoppin' John and added it, plus some dried chives, cilantro, a little oregano, some dried garlic and a big bay leaf.  Plus a little more Cajun seasoning after it came up to a boil and I had a taste.  I let it simmer a bit before serving.

     Reheated Hoppin' John is Skippin' Jenny, and this pot skipped as nicely as you please!  This combination is rich in pantothenic acid and other B-complex vitamins, which may be why I have picked up a craving for it: it's one of the building blocks for all the things that help our joints work.  Or, whatever, maybe I just like the flavor.

Sleepy

     I'd post something, but I keep nodding off.  I haven't been sleeping well -- my back wakes me more often than I'm used to.

The Doctor Says

     I'm off for four more weeks.  Well, the doctor actually prescribed light duty, still not lifting any more than fifteen pounds, and that's a downcheck for work, where they require us to be able to lift fifty pounds -- or at least be able to try.

     That's a lot of weight, and far more than I routinely lift.  There are plenty of good workarounds.  The kicker is, there's a possibility of overhead work, and you really don't want to be dropping expensive, heavy equipment, especially when expensive people are working not too far away.  I don't like it but I understand it.  I'll do my exercises and hope for improvement.

One Nothingburger, All The Trimmings

     NPR has cogent analysis of last night's Presidential speech.  Tl;dr? A nothingburger with cheese, pickles, lettuce (oh, lots and lots of fine Taylor Farms lettuce), tomato, mushrooms, Ranch dressing, onion, mustard, ketchup, toothpaste, horseradish, grill-toasted sesame-seed buns and a dead mouse -- but no burger.

     China illicitly stole voter rolls?  Those are a matter of public record.  In many cases, you can make just like a Ministry of State Security spook, and download 'em yourself over the Internet, free for nothing!  No skull or duggery required, Mao jacket optional.

     Foreign countries -- notably China, Russia and Iran -- have tried to interfere in our elections, at least as far back as 2020?  You bet they have; we knew about it then and we know about it now, and they still haven't got into the election machinery to yank levers.  They mostly do indirect things, like fund influencers and leak damaging real information and disinformation, and the state and Federal governments are well aware of it, since they're constantly playing Whack-A-Mole against 'em -- and winning.

     OMG, there are 250,000+ non-citizens registered to vote?  Guess what, there kind of are, and there are two main sources.  The first is paperwork screwups, things like asylum-seeker Hector interacts with state or city governments in some way, getting permission to drive or signing up to pay his sewer bill and so on, and there's one more form to fill out, thanks to voter-registration outreach efforts.  The person behind the counter neither knows or cares if he's a citizen, oops.  Or, and this is a gotcha, Hector follows all the rules, and eventually becomes a shiny new U.S. citizen, Social Security number and all.  Of course he registers to vote -- unlike you, Hector is fresh off Civics classes, and he wants to be a good citizen.  But Homeland Security doesn't have any automatic mechanism to connect new-citizen Hector with asylum-seeker or Temporary Protected Status Hector, and when their SAVE list of non-citizens is compared with lists of registered voters, there he is.  (If he gets snatched by ICE, he will have to prove he's a citizen, and they're very picky about what counts as proof, something that has happened over and over in the past 18 months.)  And there are rather a lot of overlapping names with incomplete data; do they match, or not?  Well, maybe; ICE and CPB appear to be finding out in ways that are often quite rough.  Oops, wrong Hector.

     On and on the claims went, and it was all stuff with a relatively high ooga-booga-scary quotient and little real substance.  None of it was new.  And he capped it off by calling ABC and NBC "complicit" with his enemies in not carrying the speech, and suggesting their licenses to use the high-value public airwaves free for nothing should be taken away.  (TV networks as such don't have licenses, other than for the handful of stations they own directly.  Outside of New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco, odds are the ABC/CBS/Fox/NBC station you watch is owned by a company other than a network.  PBS doesn't own any at all.)

     I watched the speech on CBS, who cut away before the President was done speaking and were surprisingly critical of the content, with extensive on-the-spot debunking from experts.  I don't know if Tony Dokoupil and Margaret Brennan still have jobs as of this morning, but they didn't pull any punches last night.  (I listened to NPR's coverage a little, too, with similar fact-based debunking.  They were both very careful to do their homework, shedding lots of light with little or no heat.)

Alea Iacta Maybe

     There's a Presidential address tonight, which the White House says will be be about "free and fair elections"* and "a couple of other things."

     If the sitting President manages to cover only three topics in the course of a speech, it'll be a first.

     But the stuff about elections puts news media in a quandary: provide a platform for yet more falsehoods about elections (including, according to credible sources, the 2020 Presidential election), or ignore it, and incur the wrath of an Administration with a history of striking back?  Brendan Carr's FCC has been uncommonly pugnacious, so we'll probably see and hear the spectacle all across radio and TV.

     Depending on what he says and takes action on, it could be a crossing of the Rubicon -- if that means anything at all under an Administration that crosses rivers-not-to-be-crossed as if they were taking commuter bridges in and out of Washington DC.  I'll be watching, if only because power-grabbing regimes count on burnout and over-familiarity with awfulness to enable their encroachments.

     Pundit after pundit, editorial after editorial has asked, "When will it get to be too much?"  I think that's the wrong question, one based an overly-simplified version of history.  There is very rarely a moment when everything changes like a flipped light switch, especially for the people in the moment; Ralph Waldo Emerson may have "heard the shot fired 'round the World" at the Old North Bridge, but he was listening in 1837, when the issues of 1775 were long settled.  Conflict had been ongoing; British troops and Colonial militias had been on the move long before.  Conversely, a lot of Americans didn't find out they were in the middle of a shooting war until long afterward.

     One day, everyone will have been against this.  One day, the current mess won't just be something happening on your computer or television screen.

     Tonight?  Who knows.  That's why I'll watch.

     Update: As a commenter pointed out, half of the Big 4 over-the-air networks won't be carrying the speech: ABC and NBC have said "No, thanks" to over-the-air; they'll stream it online, as will PBS.  CBS and Fox are unknown, but likely.  NPR will carry it on radio.  I'm mildly surprised.
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* Which, by the way, they're all been here in the United States, for at least all of your lifetime and probably long before.  Claims to the contrary (especially for 2020) have been unequivocally shown to be lies, distortions and/or bullshit-laden hot air, by everyone from investigating Feds to international observers, as well as journalists who stand to get a lot more attention from bombshells about cheating than a dull report that everything went according to routine.

The Men Who Built The Torment Nexus*

     It's a trope from The Onion and like a lot of satire, it's realer than real.  The essay linked below explains how zillionaire techbros have looted science fiction for settings and widgets while discarding the philosophy and warnings to rot.  Is the future not what you were promised?  Yeah, me, too, and here's one big reason why.
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* Title riffed from Alfred Bester's short story, "The Men Who Murdered Mohammed," which you should read if you haven't.  It's almost reassuring.  Or is it? 

Doctor Today, Dentist Tomorrow

      Saw my regular doctor today for general follow-up on my back and some discussion of long-term prognosis.  It is, as I suspected, partially a dice roll: I should avoid undue stress, but even then, it may flare up from time to time.  I've got a glitchy back now.

     I did very well on blood pressure (see what six weeks off gets you?).

     Tomorrow, the dentist will probably not give me good marks for tooth-grinding.  It's been a problem all my life, and some times more than others.  These are tooth-grinding times, and I bear the marks.

Antenna!

     After checking out the ladders I already own, I realized I had one that was light enough to carry and the right size to reach the roof, so with only one extra trip (had the wrong size of paracord), my ham antenna is back to the usable condition it was in before the raccoons-in-the-chimney excitement.  It was slow going, but I did the job.

     That was Saturday, and it left me pretty worn out.  Still, it's progress.

Looking Back

     The thing about a gerontocracy is that it crumbles away at the upper edge: with age comes power, but nobody lasts forever; the same "bathtub curve" that explains why most of a batch of light bulbs or hard drives fail around the same time shows that the men at the top, once they get there, die off.*

     Lindsey Graham went last night, younger than many but a year older than the age at which his father passed.  His political career followed an interesting path, one that led Anne Applebaum to feature him prominently in a prophetic 2020 article on the compromises some people make and others do not, when power outstrips constitutional limits and trumps political philosophy.  It's worth reading.
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* The horrific second-order effect is that the ruling elite of a gerontocracy has little or no interest in the future: they're not going to be around for it, after all, and so they'll take their pleasures now, and leave dealing with the consequences for those who will come after.

"Alexa, Get Out Of The Uncanny Valley."

     Amazon keeps sticking her in a hang glider and flying her into the Uncanny Valley, and I have to coax her back out again.  Alexa goes from useful and mildly entertaining to unnerving when the online giant turns her A.I. functionality back on.  They do so just about any time the software is upgraded.

     Like all of the big enterprises pushing so-called "Artificial Intelligence," they cannot conceive of anyone not enjoying a predictive text engine biased to suck up to the user.  This failure of imagination comes down from the top: the big-boss-and-owner class loves being catered to, and they don't care if there's any genuine respect or affection behind the tonguebath as long as they get the faithful appearance of deference.  There's nothing at all behind a large language model.  All it does is pick the most likely word or phrase that comes next, based on the prompt and context you and the setup have fed in.  You're talking back to the sounds your garbage disposal makes, not interacting with a creature like yourself -- or even a creature like a hamster, let alone a dog or a cat.

     It takes very little communication for Alexa's A.I. responses to become jarringly off; if you ask her if she and the HAL9000 are friends, instead of the old Easter-egg response, "I know him, but we haven't talked after what happened," the robot muses about HAL's "calm voice and cool demeanor," and wonders if she'd "be a bad influence on him," what with her being so chipper and all.  Never mind, I guess, that if we're treating HAL as an entity she might know, he has committed multiple murders and the bad influence is more likely to go the other way.

     We've got far too many organic sociopaths as it is, and nobody knows how to make 'em feel for others; we don't need to build new ones out of silicon and software.  That stuff is never going to have a theory of mind.

     A.I. is the The Wave Of Thirty Minutes Ago, and after the bubble pops and the economy crashes and recovers, spellcheck-on-steroids will be found to have only a few useful functions, including as a source of lowest-common-denominator entertainment and some non-critical agentic assistance, and it will otherwise be deader than optical disc recordings or analog audio on magnetic tape, as cringe as tailfins.  The unfixable problem is that it is empty at the core; it cannot love, it cannot feel pain or loss, and if a hiccup in the learning process has it considering turpentine a viable cocktail ingredient, it'll pour you a martini that can literally strip paint, without hesitation.  Bottoms up! 

Bear In Mind

      The words "Senator" and "senility" have the same Latin root, senex -- and yes, it means just what you think, only more so: "old, old man."

     U. S. Senators were supposed to be in those years between the attainment of mature wisdom and aimlessly wandering the halls in a bathrobe, and while you can't really mark them off on a calendar (well, kind of: nobody 29 or younger need apply), they're probably supposed to heed the wise council of their peers as they approach the upper limit, and step down gracefully.

     Increasingly, this is seen not to happen.  It's not an especially partisan phenomenon.  Neither are those other chief occupations of a U. S. Senator: lining their own pockets (stock markets and other investments, "campaign contributions" and so on) and getting their state (or pals and benefactors in other states) larded up at the ol' pork barrel.  I guess that's too engrossing to leave time for looking after their colleagues when they start to struggle.  (They cannot even be arsed to revise and pass -- or not pass -- laws, either, which was supposedly the entire point of the job.)

     As ever, the U. S. House runs their own Junior Varsity version of it; I remain convinced that their biggest problem is not too much dissension but a lack of tumult. If House debate were a little more spirited, it'd sort the dispirited right out, but it seems like you can't hardly get a good honest harrumph out of any of 'em on the chamber floor these days.  It's all weirdness and/or weasel-wording any more.

Bicycling

     A couple of cautious trials have shown me that I can ride my bicycle without irritating my back.  Maybe I would irk it if I tackled much of a grade or tried to go really fast, but regular pedaling a modern safety bicycle (as opposed to an Ordinary) is fine.  It's no longer a might-as-well-be-fixed gear, though.  I used to leave it in 21st gear all the time; these days, I'm hunting up and down -- but that's an old lady with a bad back, in 85°F and above heat, so I'll take it.

Warning!

     Tam keeps chuckling when she puts something in the kitchen wastebasket.

     A few days ago, me and my bad back managed to fumble our way to breaking the treadle of the step can in the kitchen, at least a year ahead of the usual lifespan of these.

     So I ordered a new one, and per my usual rule, bought the cheapest of that model; the various colors have different prices, possibly due to popularity, and I am not that particular about kitchen decor.  They're the exact right size for the available space, and in a household with cats, if you can't keep the trash can behind a door with a latch, you want a step-lid can: the cats can't get into them, or anyway, ours haven't figured it out.

     As it happened, "dark gray" is still the lowest price, so the new can was an exact match to the old one, which I had left in place (and we were lifting the lid by hand, like barbarians), so I decided I'd better mark it.  I didn't want to surprise Tam, and if you have hold of the lid when you step on the treadle -- well, guess how I managed to break the previous one.

     I used my largest Post-It note, and stuck it right on the lid at the front:

     You can see why she snickers.  Oh, the shock of the new!

Hooray, Hoo... Oops?

      Got my FMLA paperwork today,* which is good.  It's got me covered through my next ortho doctor's appointment.

     Then I read on down, seeing which boxes are ticked.  Like this one: "Due to the condition, incapacity is permanent or long term and requires the continuing supervision of a health care provider (...)."

     Yeah.  See, per the specialist, my back was never right, and having been riled up once,† from here on it's a matter of managing it.  I'm not a candidate for any kind of hardware (or knifework, and I'm happy about that), but I will never again dance the maskirovka while balancing a 25-pound sack of potatoes on my head.  Or is it dance the mashed potatoes while balancing a 11.34-kilogram matryoshka?  It doesn't matter, they're both out.  Along with some other stuff.  I'm going to have to go a little slower and more carefully now.  If they'll let me.

     Guess I need to save up for a lightweight telescoping ladder.  That ham antenna isn't going to fix itself.
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* Wait, I'm in the Five-Meter Liberation Army now?
 
† Unfortunately for me, they've got X-rays from 2021 to compare the current set to, and things have, in fact, moved a measurable amount, no squinting required.  I'm not gonna be able to BS my way out of this and take more Tylenol to cover, the way I do with most migraines.  It's spondylolisthesis, which until last month, I thought was the name of a general who marched an army out of Greece and fought the Persians to a faretheewell. 

Scenes From An Independence Day Cookout

     Tam, before grilling begins: "Oh, just a small patty for me, please."

     Tam, after I have brought in steaming smashburgers, grilled over hardwood and hardwood charcoal, with rain-damp fresh garlic chive steaming on the coals: "Um, two would be good, with cheese."

     The garlic chives were a freebie -- they grow wild now, and have partially escaped from the raised bed where I first planted them, years ago.  You lay a few stalks on the coals and it adds a nice touch.

     I served up the burgers on spicy hamburger buns with black sesame seeds, a slice of Havarti cheese between the thin burgers.  I had (store-bought) chunky salsa on mine along with ketchup and mustard; Tam eschewed the salsa.  Good either way!

     Tam, this morning:  "Those were the best smashburgers I've had in a long time -- of course, the others weren't grilled over hardwood."

     It does make a difference.  At this point, I'm cooking with my grill-saved stock of charcoal (just close the vents and it goes out) and the remaining hardwood firewood that I bought for kindling last year.  I could not safely lift a bag of lump charcoal at present; I'm going to have to draft Tam to help me buy more of the good stuff.  We're still using the $20.00 covered grill, and it's at least sixteen years old.

Flashback To 2017

     Nine years ago, a series of tweets (and they were still tweets then) that did nothing but quote the Declaration of Independence got angry, defensive responses from supporters of the then (and now) President.

     At the time, it seemed like silly overreaction.  Ah, memories!  Good times.

The Orginal Fireworks

     I haven't felt much like celebrating this Independence Day; it seems to me that our Republic is on the ropes, and the next three or four years will restore it or break it.  I'll be on tenterhooks until the trend is clear.

     But I certainly don't begrudge anyone's celebration of this historic day.  John Adams was right: "It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more."

     Our neighborhood, like many cities and towns in the U.S., sounds like some kind of a battlefield tonight; man-made shooting stars light up the sky, and a series of short, soaking rains in late afternoon should mitigate many of the usual hazards.  I grilled hamburgers for dinner, and cleaning up, I noticed an unusually large number of lightning bugs, fireflies, flashing their own beacons as they hover above the back yard.  It's as if, seeing the lights in the sky, they are determined not to be left out.

     Field Notes, purveyors of fine pocket notebooks and related items, is giving away a pocket edition of the Declaration of Independence and our Constitution all day today, with any purchase; or you can buy one for $4.95.  It's good reading.  It's essential reading, and on this day of all days, they're worth looking over.

Idiotic Posturing

      So, the Mayor of NYC asked New Yorkers to set their thermostats no lower than 78° through these hot days -- and the Federal Department of Energy, which has given the generic version of the same advice on their website for a long time, took those pages down.

     Elsewhere, conservative politicians grumbled about "socialism."

     Of course, the Mayor of New York has no authority over people's thermostats.  Nor does he run that city's electric utility which, like most of 'em, struggles to maintain adequate infrastructure.  Power companies can usually keep up, but extreme weather events -- here's looking at you, Texas -- stress the grid, and it doesn't make any difference what flavor the local politicians are.  You can only draw X much current before it's too much, at which point the system breaks at the weakest points.  Power companies stock parts and size staff for the normal failure rate and a little more when possible, but there's a limit.

     Nature has a way of testing limits.  Nature doesn't take politics into account.

     There's nothing especially political about managing your air conditioning (or heating), either.  People who are careful about money have been doing so for as long as fuel has had a cost, which is forever (the cost of cutting your own firewood is pretty high, just not in dollars).  The poor insulation and undersized cooling here at Roseholme Cottage means we ran for years at 75° in the summer* and 65° in the winter, though I have cheated up to three degrees on the winter setting as I have gotten older.  The main positive effect of air conditioning is to lower the humidity and move the air, and if you get too far off the outside air temperature, you can start to have problems -- the A-coil may freeze up, the motors for the fan and compressor in the outdoor unit could overheat, and so on.  And boy, will your electric bills soar.  (You can also have personal problems -- going from 70° or 68° dry air into a 95° wall of wet air is physically stressful.)

     I keep the fan running in our HVAC system nearly all the time.  In summer, I add a small floor fan in the dining room/library to blow air from the floor register up, because the return intake is in that room, and there's no point to letting it suck low level cold air right back in.  In the office and living room, simple home-made extensions sit on top of the registers, and discharge cold air about four feet above floor level.  A similar trick in my bedroom makes use of existing shelves to channel the air up, and in the very worst weather, a clip-on fan pushes cool (or heated) air towards my bed.

    Some of those tricks are compensating for the 1990s upgrades to the 1920s system design, which left floor registers near room doors instead of at the farthest corner on an outside wall.  In 1920, a big coal furnace with "gravity" thermosiphon air circulation through ducts would have also kept the basement almost too warm for comfort in the winter, with air warmed by radiated heat from the furnace flowing up the outside walls to slit vents under the eaves (and up a few inside walls to the attic as well).  Forced-air climate control doesn't work that way, and the original furnace replacement was done when energy was cheap and labor to relocate registers and run all-new ductwork wasn't.  (In winter, I also run an oil-filled electric heater in the basement whenever I'm home and awake; but plug-in electric heat isn't something to turn on and ignore, and it'll never do the same job as the the smelly, sooty old coal furnace did.)  

     Big-city downtowns are full of this kind of relic infrastructure, electric wiring that was adequate in 1920 or 1930, cooling that relied on open transoms, windows and getting outside -- and people expiring from the heat.  You can stick a modern split-system air conditioner just about anywhere, but running big enough wires from the pole to the outlet to actually power it is another story.  There might not even be enough room in the conduits to do that in an old apartment building, and copper is costly.  And how big is the stepdown transformer on the pole or in a manhole vault?  How fat are the wires that feed it? 

     There are tricks.  The 110-Volt wall-socket juice my then very modern home had in 1924 is now 125 V most places in the U.S., because they have turned up the voltage on the high-voltage distribution side.  You see, the power available through a wire is the voltage multiplied by the current -- the current is limited by the "ampacity" of the wire, which is proportional to how big it is.  Big wires can carry more current.  Voltage limits rely on how good the insulators are -- and they have always been far better than they had to be.  Ceramic and glass are relatively cheap, power-line insulators aren't all that tricky to replace when they fail (if you happen to be a power company lineman -- don't try it on your own!).  So Power & Light turns up the voltage and hey, presto, they can supply 15 or 20 percent more power!

     That's something, but in a bad heat wave, it's not enough.  It helps run your TV and computer and automatic shiatsu massager and super-slice-o-matic self-cleaning air fryer with vacuum cleaner attachment on a system designed to operate a handful of light bulbs and a coffeepot, but when you and everyone else in Manhattan, or Washington D.C., or Pigsley's Corner turns on the air-conditioning and sets it to "Arctic," something will pop.  Maybe your breaker.  Maybe the pole fuse or transformer that feeds your house, and the Smith's, Jones's, Brown's and Doe's apartment house and the bungalow of old Ms X next door.  Maybe it trips a disconnector that keeps cycling, or a transformer's regulating tap-setter at a substation that gets hung up, and a whole neighborhood flickers, goes dark or browns out.  Multiply by a hundred, a thousand--  A power company crew can keep ahead of a few outages, clearing them in mere hours (hours, at 95°), but there is no politics on this planet that will make skilled electrical workers magically appear from the air, along with fuse wire, replacement transformers, and all of the massive, slow-to-replace stuff that fills up a substation.

     There's also no politics that has ever managed to overbuild power grids (etc.) to always hold up to extreme events.  Oh, Ukraine has had a little advantage from hardened Cold War substations, but only if you happened to live in area Soviet planners had deemed critical, and it was never as capacious as its Western counterpart.  Central planning won't save you -- and neither will capitalism.  If you want your power company to turn a profit, you figure out how to price it in such a way that people can afford it;  you build it for the routine loads you have, and you count on having enough staff to keep it going.  For rare localized trouble that gets too much to handle, you hire outside help. But a heat wave isn't like a tornado; it doesn't affect just a few townships at a time.

     The DOE's former advice pages and the lefty-Democrat Mayor of New York City were telling people the same thing because that's how you deal with this intersection of physics, economics and weather, period.  It doesn't matter who you are or, which party or person you voted for or how you think things ought to be done.  We have the power grids we have.  We have the outdoor temperature and humidity we have.  City cliff-dwellers in particular aren't going to be installing rooftop solar, home generators or water wheels, and the choice is to turn up the 'stat a few notches now or sweat like pigs by and by, and shovel out the vulnerable dead afterward.

     Freaking out because your side gave the same advice as the other side for coping with this is simply bullshit, practiced by people who are insanely out of touch with what it's like to live a normal life on an average income. 
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* That's not entirely accurate. I chase 15° to 20° below ambient in summer and will settle for 10° on the worst days, guided by condensation on the older windows, state of the A-coil (once it has iced up, you're done until the ice melts), and experience.

Reality

     I found the article, but I didn't bookmark it: it would appear that the state DSA in New York is somewhat at odds with the wider Democratic Socialists of America. (Found it.)

     The reasons why are a microcosm of how political parties work, especially when they are forced to be "big tents," despite the DSA not being a freestanding party.  The tl;dr is that in New York, and NYC especially, the DSA's got a pretty good chance of influencing the Democratic platform and of affiliated politicians winning office, so they're focused on pragmatic goals with some chance of achievement -- it is a city that had a radio station (WEVD) named after Eugene V. Debs for three-quarters of a century, after all.  The dog occasionally catches the car it chases and New York's DSA has learned what to do about it.

     Elsewhere, DSA-linked candidates stand less of a chance; their local Democrat organization is less likely to listen and as a result, True Believers outnumber pragmatists within most of those DSA groups.  Politics is run by Those Who Show Up; ask me, ask Robert Heinlein, ask any of your local Party organizations and you'll get the same answer.  And True Believers are often very good at showing up.

     So outside of NYC, you're much more likely to find the kind of wild-eyed DSA candidates that rate scare headlines and flaming-letter quotes -- in broad outline, the kind of fringe stuff that all fringe parties and movements generate.  Antisemitism's always popular on the horseshoe ends and in various nooks and crannies of U. S. politics, just as it is in Europe, along with broadsides about bosses and cheaters.  But don't read too much into it; in the wider major-party organization, there are a lot more plain old Democrats showing up in the hinterlands.  I stand by my previous post: the function this sort of outside-insider activism serves is to shake up the big parties when they get too comfortable running things, and I'm never especially sorry to see 'em get a good shaking.

     This is very nearly orthogonal to "leader principle" effects, which can take over a party, at least for a time, and sometimes bend it (see Jackson, Andrew).  I don't like it when any individual politician starts being touted as the Great Hope, especially when they buy into it themselves, and it doesn't matter which party.  The U. S. has a pretty good history of reminding such leaders that they are no more than mortal men, but we've often taken our own sweet time at it and the present run is longer and messier than any.  (FDR got longer at it, but he also got a lot more criticism and outright correction.)  If a sprinkling of DSA-connected Dems will help level the scales, I'm all for 'em -- especially in the U. S. House of Representatives, the (supposedly) fastest-moving and (on paper) highest-turnover collection of elected Federal officeholders we've got.  Reflecting the will of the people, shaking things up, trying even crazy stuff is their job; it's how the Federal government was built from the very start.

About Those Supposed Communists

     The President of the U. S. has been fuming about "communists"* winning primaries in New York City and Colorado.  He appears to be peeved about a subset of Democratic candidates for Congress, who won in very blue districts and who go by "Democratic Socialists of America" and whose politics is, generally, considerably less socialist than Upton Sinclair, Eugene V. Debs or the general trend of the governments of Nordic countries. (All of which just happen to have capitalist economies.)

     We've already got a couple of DSA-affiliated Representatives in the House, Rashida Tlaib and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and here's the thing: voters are entitled to pick their representatives.  Indiana regularly sends an assorted bouquet of conservative Republicans to the House, along with one or two big-city Democrats for contrast.  You might deplore the politics of some or all of that delegation, but the majority of voters in their districts wanted them, and so off they go to Congress, to butt heads or collude with their opposite numbers from the various states.  That's how it works.

     In a country with a strong two-party system, and ours is about as entrenched as they come, you're going to find a diversity of opinion within the parties.  Maybe not as much as there used to be; my parents used to shake their heads over that wild liberal (but nominally Republican) Nelson Rockefeller, and express concern at the most stick-in-the-mud of the conservative Southern Democrats.  It really does take all kinds, and ideally, we're going to get all kinds in Congress, where -- maybe! -- they'll actually address substantive issues and try to find some path to accomplishing the things that really need doing.

     I'm not especially hopeful that the members of the House and Senate are going to do much besides make pretty speeches for their bases and assume various traditionally partisan postures, but if sending in a few younger people, who owe less to lobbyists and big business and aren't in lockstep with their party's orthodoxy, will shake 'em up and at least produce some substantive debate, I'll be happy to see it, no matter what it takes.  I'm not too worried they'll pocket the good silver, not while the Executive Branch is all but looting the Treasury and daring anyone to notice, and with all of their seniors in the Legislature giving them the hairy eyeball.

     It's high time we stopped giving away special tax breaks to the rich, especially on Social Security and Medicare.  Chumps like you and me, the more we earn, the more we pay -- but there's a threshold, low by millionaire standards, where those withholdings plateau, and as fewer and fewer people hold more and more money (and income), the shortfalls in those programs grow in direct proportion.  Removing or at least modifying those limits on Medicare and Social Security pay-in for big incomes isn't making the one or two percent pay extra, it's just asking them to pay the same rate as the rest of us.  If it takes a few firebrands with wacky notions to move the needle in that direction, hooray.  If they get too obstreperous, they can always be voted right back out. Try that with a sticky-fingered gazillionaire, and see how far you get!
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* He used the term "godless communist," which is an oldie from 1950s or earlier, popular during the Red Scare, but the two DSA reps presently in Congress consist of one Muslim and one Catholic, neither of which faith lacks in a Supreme Being.  Atheists are screamingly rare among American office-holders and whoever wins in November, you can all but count on 'em being a member of some theistic religion.  Our Congressthings have many flaws, severally and each, but an insufficiency of God ain't among 'em. 

Pork Chops

     The grocer had nice-looking boneless pork chops and I had most of a bottle of sweet chili sauce.  I took this as a sign, and picked up an apple and a yellow onion, along with fresh mushrooms.  The chops got marinated in cider vinegar, soy sauce and a little Worcestershire sauce, with smoked paprika, coriander,* mustard seed, oregano, cilantro,* ginger, garlic and some mild hot-pepper blend.

     The meat spent several hours with the marinade in a big ziplock bag in the fridge (squeeze as much air out of the bag as you can!) before being lifted out and set in a skillet with a little olive oil over medium heat.  I had peeled and cut up the apple, and put the pieces into the marinade as I got them cut, then added them, and cut up and added the onions, followed by a generous pour of the sweet chili sauce, mostly over the meat.  I put the lid on while I sliced six decent-sized mushrooms, and added them, followed by a half-dozen or more bright red "pepper drop" pickled Peruvian peppers and a few chili-tangerine olives, sliced.  I thought a little more sweet chili sauce was in order, so I added some more.  Yes, this is "cooking by ear."  It's a fairly restrained sweet/hot sauce, and works well with apple and onion.

     I put the lid back on and let it simmer, checking a few times and turning the heat down if it was boiling vigorously.  45 or 50 minutes later, it was looking pretty good, and temperature checks confirmed the meat was done (you want to get it over 170°F).  I microwaved some prepared fresh broccoli, with red bell pepper and spices, and there was dinner.  There was a lot of liquid with the meat, not quite gravy-thick, but very nice spooned over the chops and onion.  The apple was mostly cooked down.

     That's it for much actual cooking until the current heatwave is over -- we're having salad tonight, with peanut better and sweet orange marmalade on whole wheat as a backup if we're still hungry.  Next time, I'll marinate the chops overnight; more time is usually better.
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* Coriander and cilantro are the seeds and leaves, respectively, of the same plant, Coriandrum sativum, and people are either okay with it or they really don't like it.  This appears to be largely genetic (there's a little disagreement), so find out which you are before you cook with the stuff!

New Symptom!

     Or not new so much as one I've had before returning, and way more painful.  Nope, not gonna talk about it, but it's really affecting my mobility.  Fun!

     It's as if I have taken Instant Old pills.

Overdid It

      I did too much yesterday, cooking the steaks.  Woke up achy and went back to sleep -- three times!  Only the first was when the alarm went off (and I did feed the cats then).

     Things I can do without making my back hurt: Sleep, bathe, do small grocery trips (no heavy stuff!), wash dishes if there aren't too many, and cook small meals.  I can read on an e-reader in bed.  I can get on the computer some.  TV, really, more than an hour is too long on the low futon couch.  I can do laundry if I move slow and don't try to pick up too much at a time.  I can pick up the cats (one at a time) if I'm sitting down and it's a straight lift.

     I disconnected some of the support for my ham antenna months ago and I can't get back up on the roof to fix it.  There's no way I can move the ladder.

Steaks

     It was a crazy idea.  But I already had hardwood kindling left over from the last time I used the grill, and the lump charcoal bag was nearly empty and therefore lightweight.

     Tam picked up a couple of New York Strip steaks, I puttered around and got the grill going, and by golly, we had steaks and microwaved new potatoes and a bagged salad for Sunday supper!  It's a rare treat these days, and what with one thing and another, it will be a while before we can do it again.

     Might as well enjoy it.

Yes, Still

     I woke up yesterday with a sharp increase in my back soreness.  It wasn't a surprise.  Thursday night is Trash Night and no matter how careful I am, there's a certain amount of lifting and bending to be done.  I kept the weight down to under my fifteen-pound limit and sat on the floor for low work as much as possible: no bending over!

     Nevertheless, there's a price.  Tam and I took a walk around the block soon after we were both awake, which is something that's been helping, but I was still achy.

     And Friday morning, Holden the tomcat was due for a checkup and rabies shot.  I got ready and loaded him into the carrier, which Tam took to my car.  I carried him into the vet, with great care.  He was brave but scared throughout his exam, hiding under a towel most of the time -- a fourteen-pound tomcat!  They are among Nature's great fighters, but they pick their battles and as far as Holden Wu is concerned, the veterinarian is like Sauron or Attila the Hun, far too terrifying a foe for one creature to handle alone.  The folks at the vet were kind enough to carry him to the car and Tam brought him in when we returned home.

     Afterward, I was still sore -- and hungry!  Addressing those needs might as well be a combined task; Good Morning Mama's diner is several blocks away, so I got my ultra-light purse (I'm down to pocketbook, keys, sunglasses, lipstick, hankie, one [1] pen and a backup phone) and headed out.  An hour later, I was back home, fed, feeling a little better, and tired.  I stayed vertical but I didn't do much.  The paperwork for work is at an impasse and I'm getting a little pressure over it, but I can't make doctors fill out forms or insurers process them any more quickly than they already are; I sent out another round of pleas via phone and e-mail.  Presently I am in limbo, neither on official leave nor allowed to return to work without a 100% all-clear from the doctor.

     "When I get better" is a will-o-wisp, and I'm done chasing it.  There are things I can do, things I need to be doing more of (gentle walks and recommended exercises) and things I need to stop fretting over being unable to do.  I may never carry another boatanchor radio up or down the basement stairs, and that's that; there are plenty of lightweight widgets along those lines and I can fiddle with them, if I am careful about it.

     By bedtime, the pain was much reduced and I slept on a cold pack.  This morning I am, at least, no worse.  

I'm....

     ...Frustrated.  Yes.  I'm frustrated.  The whole mess with my back, medical treatment, dealing with being off work, trying to get cleared to work without making my back worse, it's all frustrating.

Reflecting Fool

     While the rule of law (national and international) and long-established government functions come crashing down, I'm hearing a lot of news about the Reflecting Pool in Washington, DC.

     It's a distraction.  Was the repair work graft-laden?  Probably.  Was the previous condition and repair effort over-hyped?  Almost certainly.  But look -- this is a big, shallow hard-surface pool in warm-climate city.  It's filled from the Tidal Pool and/or city water sources,* and in recent decades, every time it gets drained and refilled for whatever reason, it ends up full of green gunk for a while.  You can't have a shallow, slow-moving pool of water in a Washington, DC summer without stuff growing in it, no matter what you have done to the thing.  They'll solve the current mess, including the self-created elements, by and by, and yeah, probably someone's going to line their pockets over it (again!) to the tune of millions or tens of millions.

     But there are people within the Federal government or closely connected to it, ripping off the public coffers or cheating private-spending suckers and rubes of billions of dollars; the destruction of USAID has resulted in deaths on an enormous scale and helped fuel the present ebola outbreak in Africa, which is on the edge of breaking containment.  The only thing that keeps ebola in check is that it kills infected people pretty quickly, and even those who survive it are usually too sick to travel far until they have recovered.  The present version appears to have a slightly longer period of ambulatory-but-infectious, and that's a problem.

     A little bit (or a lot) of green algae in a (usually) pretty part of DC's memorial landscape is insignificant compared to the infectious dead and burial efforts that are barely keeping up.  Millions of dollars are way smaller than billions.  Yes, it's one more embarrassing farce -- but Europe's melting in the summer heat, disease is way up in Africa, and screwworms are infesting American cattle and pets.  We've got more urgent business than pointing at the green water and snickering.
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* Various infographics show a system of nearly Byzantine complexity.  Make what metaphors of it you will. 

Tuesday

     Yes, well.  Um.  Nothing to report.  I feel like low-grade awful.

Monday

     I went to some effort to return to work, and got chided for it.  Because the doctor put restrictions on my activity, there are more Forms to be Filled Out and approved, via a not very obvious procedure with a third party, and until they are, I cannot go back.

     It's not deliberately Kafkaesque, it's just a ramshackle structure put together to deal with the various contracts, rules and laws that apply, or that might apply, or that some attorney woke up thinking would be a problem unless....  But it falls to me, the person with the back problem, to lift it and carry it, and I'm not as good at it as I probably should be.

     Where does it leave me?  I don't know.

Father's Day

     If you've got one, I hope you made contact.  Yeah, yeah, someone's going to tell me about an awful, awful father, and I'll ask 'em, "Worse than Saturn?" but most fathers do their best, or however close to it they can manage.  One day a year to recognize it isn't too much to ask, and who knows?  You might even end up as friends.

     In the end, my father was my friend, same as in the beginning and a lot of times in between, and I still miss him.

Got Through The Day

     Chaired the online meeting, did a couple loads of laundry and even washed dishes.  That's plenty.  I kind of napped a few times, too.

     Healing takes longer and longer as the years add up.

Conversations With A Doctor

     So I show up at the ortho specialist's this morning, trudge up the stairs to check in just past the dot, and they ask which doctor, then tell me, "He'll see you downstairs."

     The old lady probably needed the exercise anyway, despite what my knees are telling me and my back is hinting at.  Down to the other waiting room, and after a short wait, they take me back, weigh me (under 14 stone, which is awful but improving) and tell me to change to be X-rayed.

     Zap, zap, and I'm sitting in an exam room, glowing slightly and looking over someone else's manuscript when the doctor comes in, introduces himself and asks, "Has anyone ever discussed the defect in your spine with you?"

     The which in my what?  I tell him no and he sits down, calls up the images, and proceeds to show me in today's images and in a set from 2021 when I did something stupid that I have since forgotten, how the important very last bone at the bottom of my spine is, in fact, two bones, a big one carrying the weight and a little one, floating around, not linked up as it should be.  They start out as two bones, but should fuse well before your first breath.  Mine did not.

     It turns out that this biological miracle is so rare, so dire, so weird that, per the doctor, "If I X-rayed the spines of a hundred people at random, around seven of them would have this."  It's not a problem, unless it is, and then...yeah.  Technicolor pain, if you do it wrong.*

     He wrote a couple of new prescriptions, one of which the pharmacist wants to talk to me about (get enough daily prescriptions, the darned things gang up on you), has me in line to schedule physical therapy (oh, joy) and says I can go back to work -- if I refrain from twisting, bending, twerking or trying to pick up anything heavier than a full-grown tomcat.  I didn't ask about parachuting or rock-climbing but they're probably off for awhile, too.
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* The correlation between this and the share of people with glitchy backs isn't perfect, but it's not insignificant.

And Thursday

     Thursday is the same, except Tam and I did the trash-day stuff.  Very slowly, for my part.  But the catboxes have been renewed and fridge has been cleaned, and that's something.  And tomorrow, the city will take the trash away.  Probably.  Wait a minute....

     I just checked.  Tomorrow is Juneteenth.  It's a city holiday.  So that would be a No.  They'll get it Saturday.

New Day, Same Stuff

     Yesterday afternoon, I had an unbreakable obligation that meant driving to the far west side of Indy on 38th Street.  I did it, and was merely exhausted and mildly sore later.  I guess that's a good sign, but it's frustrating -- an hour in the car ought not result in needing to go lie down for a few hours. 

     It should have been less than a hour driving, but the city's patching some ugly potholes on eastbound 38th street at a point where the only way to do the job is by creating rolling, alternating lane closures, and shutting traffic down altogether when they cross over.  This would be easy to become vexed about, but the fact is, the crew was in constant motion, a flurry of a half-dozen men shoveling out steaming hot mix and tamping it down while a big truck crawled along pulling the heated trailer of mix, and one guy managed traffic.  Seeing them, it was obvious that if there was a quicker way to do the job, they'd be doing it.  And this was along just enough of a curve to be a surprise, as traffic came off the short section of 38th that's merged with I-65.*  Drivers were taking it with surprisingly good humor.  Possibly the fact that potholes in that stretch had become nearly cataclysmic, combined with the obvious effort on the part of the road crew, kept people from getting too annoyed.

     I got my errand done (I'd bought a National VHF receiver through a proxy months ago, and while it's not very large, the collection of fragile polystyrene-form coils for the thing made commercial shipping a nightmare, so it was passed from hobbyist to hobbyist to reach me as people traveled for various purposes) but that was it for the day, and today has been mostly horizontal.  If Past Me had bought something like an R-390 instead (a tank of a communications receiver built for the military, designed by Collins), I would have had to pass it along to whoever else wanted it; I could not have lifted it, let alone carried the thing.  Next life, I'm gonna collect stamps.  But when you're doing this kind of hand-to-hand, you've got to show up when the baton comes your way.

     A feature of the my present issues is allergy-like symptoms: sore throat, scratchy eyes, runny nose.  This only makes horse sense with back trouble if those indicators came first and I have vaccines for all the likely causes, but after thinking it over, I ordered a flu and covid test last night and took it this morning, just to be sure.  Nope, nothing but the "control" line that shows the nasal sample and reagent diffused up the indicator okay.  So I guess that's a relief.  The doctor can figure it out; that's his job.
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* I don't know what genius came up with the idea, which seems nuts at first but actually works, getting both traffic arteries through a narrow spot in the landscape -- with a certain amount of lane-swapping.  It's spicy at rush hour but it's akin to a stretched-out traffic circle: there are no sharp intersections, no traffic lights or left turns, and while there's a certain amount of hurt feelings, forced merges and the occasional scraped fender, drivers manage to stay out of each other's way better than on most other busy city streets.

Whoa, Nellie!

     I should've held my horses.  I felt better in the morning, so I went back to work yesterday and by late afternoon, I was in serious amounts of pain.  I wrote an email that seemed all right when I wrote it, and when I looked again, it was half gibberish; stood up to get a cup of water and got a nasty jolt from the small of my back, above and beyond the dull aching radiance.  Things did not improve from there.

     Got home, limped through the corner grocery on the way and managed to pick up a rotisserie chicken and a couple of salads along with a small bag of oranges -- and "managed to pick up" isn't just figurative language, it was almost too much weight.  I unloaded the car by leapfrogging burdens -- dinner, lunchbox, briefcase -- and stayed on my feet long enough to free up a wing and a drumstick for Tam, some chunks of white meat for me, and strip the rest of the bird for soup later.

     Last night was a low-grade nightmare of alternating cold-gel packs and heating pad (and one late-night call) interspersed with dreams about hurting and this morning, I'm better but far behind where I was yesterday morning.  I shouldn't have gone in. Paperwork and a few trips up and down the stairs were all it took to screw up my back again.

     Not a fan of this present state of affairs.

Hoo Boy

     Everyone out there who thought they were ringing in a Caesar and either didn't care or were actively hoping he'd ring down the curtain on the American Republic has now been conclusively shown to have latched onto a dollar-store Nero instead -- and this one can't even play the lyre!

     I don't suppose any of his blood-and-soil fans will mind, and no doubt they loved Sunday's blood and blather.  Say the word "culture" to 'em and they reach for a club (no, I don't mean the 1980s band).

Sunday Night

     I should post something, maybe pithy commentary about whatever in the hell it is that's going on at the White House, but it's past my bedtime and a stripy yellow tomcat keeps walking into the office and rearranging things to suggest I ought to go to bed.  He's right.

Lack Of Adulthood

      Let me weigh in on something I'm not all that qualified to write about: the renaming and denaming of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

     It's been a thing most of my life, and other than scale and influence, it's not any different to whatever artsy Foundation-with-buildings your city has, and they tend to be a thing apart, deeply rooted in the city and regional arts community, especially the performing arts: esthetic pleasures, a bit class-conscious in spots (and a bit overtly not in others), but for most events, a spot check of car radios in the parking lot is going to find more set for the NPR station than country, rock or right-wing talk.  The venue often hosts things of less upscale appeal, touring Broadway shows, popular musical acts, speakers* and so on, too, but it's got its lane.

     They're generally named after a local patron of the arts -- the Honeywell Center in Wabash, Indiana is a good example, a fine venue in a moderate-sized county seat.  The name tends to stick, too.

     So when President Trump decided to add his name to the Kennedy Center, that was a bit incongruous.  Not atypical of him; he loves to put his name on stuff.  But it felt...off.  And then they stuck the letters on the marble wall:
THE DONALD J. TRUMP AND
THE JOHN F. KENNEDY CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
     And that was just messed up.  Not only was the wording flat-out awkward, a low-bidder rush job on a fancy marble-clad building, the fonts didn't match.  Not even close, other than both being serif fonts on roughly Classical models.  It  looked like crap.  It looked, in fact, like something big-city people might expect to see on a building serving a similar purpose in an Indiana County seat, except that I'm here to tell you, nobody in Wabash (etc.) would've stood for such a hack job on their nice performing arts center.  If you're gonna change the name, they'd thunder, do it right!  Match the old lettering or, if you can't, take it all off and start over.  And try to follow the rules of grammar, too.

     That didn't happen at the Kennedy Center.  What did happen was, the new name went up like a bird splat on a wedding cake, a lot of exhibits and displays were put into "storage," present whereabouts unknown to the public.  The membership of the Board that runs it changed, which is a thing that Presidents can do, and a lot of the staff quit, retired or were laid off.  As time went on and acts kept canceling, there were plans to shut the Center down for a couple of years of renovation, and rumors of deep and serious problems with the building itself.  Are they true?  Who can tell.

     Now the courts have pulled the plug on the new name and the closure.  The President has pulled the plug on his involvement, saying he's "returning responsibility to Congress" for running the place, a responsibility Congress has never had.  And there are apparently "poison pills" in the Board's present funding arrangements, clauses that take money away if President Trump's name is removed from the Center.  That'll go back the court system, you can count on it.

     And this entire mess is over...ballet.  Opera.  Orchestral concerts.  Touring shows.  Or, at least, over who gets his name associated with those things, matters that, lovely and fine and uplifting though they are, have nothing to do with the average American sweating the price of gasoline and electricity or jingling coins nervously as the grocery store cash register beeps and the total increases alarmingly.  Real wages are level or declining; real prices are up.  Changing the name on the Kennedy Center -- again -- is only going to affect income for the people doing that particular job, and maybe not even them; they probably already had plenty of other things to do at the same hourly rate.

     It's just childish BS.  In the middle of a not-a-war in the Middle East, a one-side-won't -call-it-a-war in Ukraine and a generous scattering of armed unrest, economic uncertainty and serious disease outbreaks all around the world.  Does the country really have the time, money and energy to spare to keep on diddling with trivial Presidential whims?
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* The county seat where I grew up didn't have much of a venue until the renovation of a semi-decrepit early 20th-Century Colosseum (honest, that's what it was called) in the late 20th and (again!) early 21st Centuries, but we had an arts & culture crowd who did things like make sure the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra gave local concerts and Buckminster Fuller came to give a talk, and rented whatever place they could find for it -- often, the big theater at the local High School.  I was happy to listen; for just a little while, you were dreaming with Prokofiev or thinking Big Thoughts right along Fuller, at least until the final notes rang out or he said goodnight and you were still stuck in the corn-fed tail end of nowhere.  Corn- and soybean-fed, maybe.

Good Fun

     Marvel has spun, well, webs with all the permutations of their "Spider-Man" character.  The core character was popular with my male peers in Junior High and High School: here was this wisecracking kid like them, except he usually knew the right thing to say and he had superpowers!  I thought he was fun, if implausible.  Given similar powers, the zit-faced boys I knew were unlikely to rise to his level of heroism -- or verbal cleverness.

     I admit it: I was never a huge fan of comic books, not even when they started to call themselves graphic novels.  The horror/SF comics were screamingly derivative, often "borrowing" SF plots or entire stories without so much as a nod to the original and I found that offputting.  For pure mindless fun, "Doc Savage" reprints were a better value for my money.

     But Spidey was his own thing, not a sanctimonious stuffed shirt.  Not a millionaire, or invulnerable, or a rebooted Norse god, just Some Guy who stumbled into superpowers, and that was kind of cool.  The thing is, he kind of wasn't entirely original; he had a pulp precursor, much darker: The Spider was the alias of the entirely human (if slightly gadgety) crimefighter Richard Wentworth, maybe the number three hero pulp after The Shadow and Doc Savage.  The Spider ran to greater moral ambiguity (and bloodthirstiness) than the other two and gave rise to a movie-serial version of the protagonist with a much more spidery look, and between the pulp and the films, helped inspire the later comic-book hero.  The teen angst was all from Stan Lee, though, and that's really the emotional driver of the graphic novel character.

     All this is to set up writing about the entirely entertaining Amazon Video streaming series, Spider-Noir.  It's spun from the "Spiderverse" notions Marvel's been shoveling through a kaledeoscope in recent years, but what's come out this time* is a back-crossing between the modern-day four-color hero and his pulp ancestor that's half film noir and half graphic novel (and about ten percent Republic-type serial).  Seedy PI Ben Reilly struggles to make a living, having put away his past as a costumed superhero after personal tragedy, and then....  Then, of course, plot happens.  It's not any more plausible than any other superhero tale, or most film noir for that matter, but it's as engaging as any of them, with a reasonably good take on the 1930s setting and nice acting, cinematography, effects and editing.  It's good fun.  They've managed to explain or at least lampshade most of the incongruities, too.  It's unlikely to alter your worldview, but it's at least as good a value for money as an old pulp magazine or a modern graphic novel.
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* They'd already done a similar thing, "Spider-Man Noir," in print and animation, the latter with the same actor (Nicholas Cage) as the TV series.

Grazin' In The Grass

     There is no reason to threaten any elected or appointed official with any level of violence.  Vote 'em out, impeach 'em, stick them in front of a Congressional committee and (try) to make them answer questions or get 'em hauled into court if they can be (it depends on the office).

     And, sure, criticize 'em.  It's right there in the Constitution that you can do that. This can include very harsh criticism.  "Throw the bum out" isn't especially harsh, as such things go.

     All that said, some critic or group of critics decided the National Mall, that big patch of grass in Washington, DC that stretches from the Washington Monument to the pool in front of the Capitol building could do with some commentary, and they have inscribed -- or tried to -- "86 47" in huge numbers, using something to discolor the grass.  The 8 and 7 are easily visible in photographs; you can trace the 6 but it takes imagination to see a 4. 

     There are about a zillion ways to pull this off, using everything from weedkiller to picnic blankets to fertilizer or even just coordinated dancing.  Make no mistake, it's vandalism however it is accomplished, but it's got more in common with crop circles than, say, the Weather Underground.

     What "86" might mean is presently disputed.  I always thought it was old diner/bar slang that meant "throw out," with a contextual secondary meaning of "not available" and dictionaries generally agree.  DOJ is claiming it means "to murder" in their case against former FBI Director James Comey.

     Defacing grass is hardly likely to amount to a "true threat" in the legal sense, but it's sure to rouse the administration's ire.  There's a big event coming up on the mall, and the setup and crowds will obliterate any marking on the grass: The "86" is going to get 86ed itself.

The More Fool Me

     Maybe I should be less trusting.  I skipped my muscle relaxer yesterday so I could drive to the orthopedic specialists.  My back hurt pretty bad despite OTC pain reliever but I could take it, because I was going to make some progress.  It wasn't easy to find the place, a building ticked behind other buildings, nestled between busy Shadeland Avenue and the freeway.  After a couple of false turns, I was there.

     The office is on the second floor and out of habit, I started up the stairs.   By the landing, I was sure that had been a mistake, but it was too late to turn back and take the elevator.

     Up to the office.  No one in line, a couple of people in the waiting room.  To the receptionist window.
     "Date of birth?"
     I told her.
     "Do you have an appointment?"
     "No, I'm a walk-in.  The online nurse said it was okay?"
     "What are you here for?"
     "My back.  I strained it a week ago Sunday and it still hurts.  Pretty bad."  The small of my back was, in fact, a knot of fire at that point.  Taking the stairs wasn't a wise choice.
     "Oh, we don't do back pain walk-ins."
     "What?"
     She repeated the statement.
     "But the nurse--  Here, I can show you."  Which I did -- called up the conversation on my phone and handed it to her.
     She agreed the nurse had told me to go that office for my back pain.  Unfortunately -- and she wasn't unsympathetic -- the nurse was wrong.  They could maybe see me on the 18th?
     That was a week away.  By that point, as the Stoics put it, either the pain would come to an end or I would figure something out.  I thanked her and left.  Since I had the app open, I texted to the online help system that the ortho clinic didn't accept walk-ins for back problems.  They expressed sympathy.  You will not be surprised how very little pain relief there is in sympathy, no matter how sincerely meant.

     I took the elevator downstairs.

     I've got an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Friday, I'm going to grovel for four more sets of twice-a-day anti-inflammatories and muscle relaxers.  What I have will run out Sunday and I'm not confident my back will be better by then. 

     Update: I do not, in fact, have an appointment with my doctor next Tuesday.  Either I misunderstood the nurse at the clinic last weekend or she misspoke.  It's for July 14, and now I can't see the ortho specialist until June 22.  I went ahead and scheduled it, but I'm going to try for the regular clinic tomorrow.  I'd go today (Friday as I revise this) but the muscle relaxer has me way too out of it to drive.

I'm Off To See The Ortho....

     After three days of the big pills and no better, I got hold of the medical practice that my doctor (and the drive-thru clinic too, these days) is with.  Their online real person (bit of a luxury!) read my tale of woe, opined a week and a half was Too Long to not see significant improvement and directed me to the walk-in ortho clinic tomorrow.

     It's almost an oxymoron, but the notion is that it's for people hale enough to get through the door on their own -- but not so comfy in the doing.  If you can't get in by yourself, the usual path to an ortho specialist is through the door of the ER, and conversely, followups get scheduled in the usual way.  This office deals with issues that are neither this nor that. 

     Back problems, maybe I'm never going to be all that comfortable again, but at least these people will have the gadgets to find out and the experience to know what the pictures mean.

Models Of Leadership

     Vice President James David Vance is a weirdo who believes UFOs are demons.   He's right up there with Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, though he appears to be slightly less bloody-minded than our local talent.

     Look, I get the GOP's hangup with wanting Executive Branch leaders in the general mold of a stern paterfamilias/grouchy grampa, some of whom will even try to run interference for their junior partners.  In a party bending to authoritarianism, "hetman" principle is inevitable.  But where do they get this string of freakish thinkers for the Number Two spot?

     It used to be the great weakness of the GOP was that they stank on ice at mentorship.  Presidents, Governors, even Senators tended to pick "safe" seconds and helpers, Party-line fools or sycophants who could be counted on to be no threat to the guy with the big desk.  But they were rarely way out there -- they left that to the Democrats on one side and the John Birchers on the other (and the Dems tended to marginalize their whackiest, too).

     Anymore, the kids are letting their freak flags fly, and heaven help the Union.  It's for sure they won't.

The Weight Of It

      "I'll just stand this 24-pack of water on end, keep my arm straight and lift with my knees to get it over the threshold and into the house.  How bad can it be?"

     Readers, it was bad.  Back spasm.  I once again saw the logo of the company that owned* whatever is left of RCA's technical IP, rotating and strobing.  I'd as soon see the old 1920s RCA meatball, myself, but what I get is far more colorful and I do not recommend it. 
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* They were Thomson when they ate RCA and that entity is gone now, bankrupt, split up and some of the parts recombined -- including one big chunk, back under the famous technichromatic name. RCA barely kept their patent pool corralled when they existed and it's no surprise the successors never quite managed.  Their pro gear was a wild mix of in-house, contracted out and rebadged products, and you kept it running by keeping track of where the parts had been sourced.

Status Report

     I am in sufficient pain and of such restricted mobility that my temper has no fuse at all.  Every minor annoyance or household mishap triggers anger bordering on rage.  This is nothing I am proud of.  It's annoying.  It's embarrassing.

     One of those remote-grabby things is on its way to me, along with a front-porch delivery of bottled water.  I have a 24-pack, but it's in the back hatch of my car, on the far side of the garage, and I can no more carry it in than I could fly.  Getting those should help with some of the frustration: I'll be able to pick things up from the floor without a heart-pounding series of scary moves to get down to floor level and, far worse, back up.  And Indianapolis city water is nothing to write home about.  It's okay fresh out of the tap but carries the faintest aroma of wet dog after it sits a spell.  (It has been this way for years, no matter how well our reservoirs are doing.  Is it that hint of canal water?  The scattering of city wells?  Some purifying chemical or process?  Our water company draws on a variety of sources and they do honest work, but it's a bulk business, not a boutique bottler.  It's clean water and plenty of it.)

     Just took the second muscle relaxer pill and the first anti-inflammatory.  The latter is some turbocharged prescription-only relative of naproxen, so I had to wait for the previous dose of aspirin to time out; you can't take both at the same time.  Fortunately, acetaminophen is still okay, and I'm watching the clock for my next dose.  Such excitement!

     First commenter to suggest horse-paste, moxibustion or a chiropractor gets punched in the face as soon as I'm feeling better.

Progress?

     Went to the doc, got checked out, got the meds.

     Five hours later, I'm still miserable.  I can't pick stuff up from the floor.  It's a gymnastic exercise to stand up.  But I'm hopeful.  It beats not being hopeful.

Almost

     I rested well overnight, got up and took a walk, napped more, did a little laundry very carefully and almost convinced myself I was getting better.

     Almost.  I relaxed eating dinner and stood up incautiously to clear away my take-out platter.  My lower back went into a spasm that nearly buckled my knees.  Technicolor pain.

     Time to stop pretending.  Tomorrow, I'll get washed up well enough to face the world and go to the doc-in-a-box. 

"Oops?"

     Between work yesterday (trying to rebuild a portable camera tripod that has had a hard life, typical of them; they're extremely difficult to take apart after a few years of heavy use) and my contributions to Trash Night last night (cleaning out the freezer and fridge, a bending-heavy activity, and changing two litter boxes, a task I have long done while sitting on the floor due to bad knees), I am back at square one with my back.  Maybe square -1.  Or -2.

     Hello, Dial-A-Doc?

     Update: The the dickens with them.  They never connected.  Waited an hour, with the little reminder that someone would be along Any Time Now blinking away at the top of the screen.  Oh well.  They don't prescribe muscle relaxers and I won't take them, so what was the point?

Walking

      During the pandemic, Tam and I got into the habit of taking a walk around the block every morning.  Or, by and by, two blocks, or three....  It was decent exercise for a couple of spinsters, and we don't actually spend much time in one another's company otherwise; I work, she's always got writing projects underway, and a lot of our interaction consists of keeping out of the other person's way.  We're usually watching a TV series over supper -- 45 minutes or an hour of staring at the same screen.

     So walking around the block is a good way to find out what's going on with the other person living in Roseholme* Cottage, as well as exercise.  We'd stopped our walks at the worst of winter, and as that damn virus became endemic and the vaccines made it far less a problem, we eventually came to a spring when we didn't start our walks back up.

     That was a mistake.  We're getting old; we need the exercise.  We're getting grouchy, too, and it helps to have a little time to go talk about inconsequentials: Oh, look, a cardinal, a squirrel, the Moon; what lovely flowers! what kind of bush† is that? and so on.

     So we're walking again, this time with our smartphones keeping track.  I need it, especially after the way I strained my back last weekend.  It's getting better, but still a little sore.  And some one of these days, our track will go as far as the place that sells breakfast pastries -- maybe it's not the most healthy goal I could have, but at least it's a goal.
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* This name of my house is not a reference to the similarly-named university but a mocking allusion to the heraldry supposedly associated with my family name, a "naturally-colored" rose on a silver-grey background.  Oh, the arms are real enough, a minor title that faded over three generations, apparently a War of the Roses version of the GI Bill, but my last name is a toponym, and so far there's no evidence I'm related to that long-ago soldier/squire.
 
† I'd sure like to know.  Feathery, reddish-green needles, gnarly branches, dense and no more than three or four feet tall.  Interesting-looking shrubbery. 

That Was...

     Monday wasn't fun.  Tuesday wasn't great, either: my back.  I've been living on aspirin and sleeping on an ice pack, walking as much as I can manage, and I'm getting better, but oh, jeepers.  I did not see this coming.

     I mean, it could be worse.  I could be stuck in a country rapidly sliding down into competitive authoritarianism, in which one party's politicians were uniformly crooks, cranks and grifters, while the other party distinguished itself by fielding many more plain old hacks and allowing the occasional idealist to slip though, counterbalanced by a scattering of outright weirdos; not that their opposite numbers didn't have a few of those, too.

     Oh, wait.

     The United States may be the only two-party democracy (in the broadest sense) that does itself in by the two parties leaping off a precipice, one shouting, "Hey, everybody, lookit me!  I can fly!" while the other party mutters, "Oh dear," and frantically tries to improvise a parachute from a pocket handkerchief all the way down.  They'll both make identical splatters when they hit the ground.

     The next person who gives me a version of "Same old same-old" in response to our present crisis is going to get the unexpurgated version of this diatribe, because no, it's not.  I'm looking back on LBJ and Nixon and both Bushes and Bill Clinton with fond regret: we didn't realize how good we had it at the time.

We Did It!

      Actually, we have almost done it.  For, well, years, Tam and I -- mostly me -- have been accumulating fallen branches and twigs on the front porch, and trimmed saplings in a pile out back.

     Some of it is decent firewood and we do have a fire pit.  I have sorted that out in batches and stacked it in small crates.  The brushpiles remained.  A couple of months ago,* I picked up a canvas mini-dumpster.  They're sold folded up flat, of course, and the package sat in the garage, in mute recrimination.

     Or it did until yesterday.  The weather was nice, the heaps were annoying, and even if we only made a little progress, it would be worth it.

     The work went much better than expected, and after a couple of hours, what do you know?  The porch was clear.

     I felt so good about it that I went out after supper, added a stack of broken-down cardboard boxes, and there was still room for the back yard brushpile.

     Still to come, calling up the provider and paying a little more to have it taken away.

     Maybe we'll even plant some flowers again this year.

     Downside?  My back feels pretty awful.  Too much bending over, not enough proper squatting.  Price of age -- and of getting rid of some of the mess.  And my creaky knees are, at least., not any creakier this morning than they were yesterday morning.
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* Yes, I do have only two speeds, but they're not Dead Slow and Full Stop, only Slow and Slower.

Clever Cicero, Time Traveler?

      The Roman lawyer, writer and orator Marcus Tullius Cicero is greatly admired for his command of language.  Like Shakespeare centuries later, he introduced new words and conventions of form that persisted ever afterward.

     And like the Bard, he was fond of wordplay -- but how could he possibly have invented a riddle that works the same in English as it does in Latin?  Sheer luck, of course, the same chance that preserved his words and Shakespeare's.

     A greeting:
     "Mitto tibi 'navem' prora puppique carentum."*

     In English:
     "I send you a 'ship' lacking stern and bow."

     Something of an "Aenigma a patre," I suppose.
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* I have here taken the cheapest/easiest transcription of written Latin.  For Romans vowel "u" and the consonant "v" were distinguished only by context, as readily as we skip through the myriad inconsistencies of English orthography.  While contemporary fancy inscriptions and (probably) professional scrolls would have written MITTO TIBI NAVEM PROPRA PVPPIQVE CARENTVM at best and probably abbreviated many of the words in standardized ways, Cicero himself probably jotted it down in a chicken-scratch cursive not too unlike a modern doctor's handwriting, with a character like a cross between a "v" and "u" and what looks to our eyes like a ruthless disregard for getting the letters on the same line; Romans didn't see 'em the same way we are taught. 

When An "Idiot Plot" Isn't, Maybe

     Writing -- and chairing the critique group -- has me in the habit of taking a critical look "under the hood" of books and TV/movies/radio shows.  One of the gotchas is what SF writer (and critic) Damon Knight called an "idiot plot," though he gave credit to James Blish for originating the term

     Simplest form, it means a plot that only works if one or more of the characters ignores something that is obvious to the audience.  Now, that's one thing if the plot is just an excuse for razzle-dazzle (the Ginger Rogers - Fred Astaire film Top Hat is often cited, but nobody cares: you're there for the dancing), and something entirely different in a serious work.

     No spoilers, but-- The most recent season of For All Mankind has a crucial plot development that only works if a very smart character misses a point that should be entirely clear to the audience and perhaps the other characters involved, based on past behavior.  They miss it, and keep on missing it, several times.

     Now, the individual involved has been set up as a deeply focused and somewhat neurotic person, probably neuroatypical* and everyone else in a position to work out what happened has a vested interest in staying mum -- so is it really an "idiot plot," or were the writers playing a deeper game?

     Flip a coin.  Much as I love the big, rich story, I've got to admit I'm there for the sets and the characters, for the broad sweep of an alternative history, one in which the Space Race went on and on.

     Moral?  You can get away with it -- if you're as quick on your feet as Fred and Ginger, if you're that gifted at choreography (in the broadest sense), if you're willing to subtly lampshade it, if you've got the sets and costumes and skilled photographers and editors (and/or literary chops) to pull it off.  I think For All Mankind managed the trick, but it's there if you look for it.
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* It's not original with me, but inclinations and skill sets that make for good scientists have a lot of overlap with some autism-spectrum behavior patterns, so much so that it has often been pointed out that while there's zero evidence that vaccines cause autism, there's a pretty good case to be made that autism causes vaccines.

In Other News

     Odds are pretty good that I'm in a recurrence of rheumatic fever.  It's an autoimmune ailment, triggered by strep, and sure enough, I had a sore throat a few weeks back.  The sore throat ran its course and went away, as such things do, and....

     And I've had creeping fatigue, and aching knees, and figured I needed to move more, so I did.  And I kept on being tired and started to have eyelid twitches around my left eye, and sore knuckles, and wow, was I tiring easy, getting other aches and pains here and there, and oh, gosh, did my knees ever hurt, and...

     This morning, I went back to sleep for an hour after I fed that cats.  When I got up again, I was moving slower and slower.  It hurt like the dickens to go down the basement stairs and hurt worse to head back up.  Those darned knees!  Because I can (eventually) take a hint, I loaded up on aspirin* and kept moving, but things did not get better and I ended up back in bed by and by.  I managed to do my part in the Trash Day festivities (cleaning out the refrigerator and changing two catboxes, in that order) but it was slow going and left me worn out.

     Is it or isn't it?  This collection of symptoms lines up pretty well; if I was twitchier or had a bit of a rash, it'd be more likely.  But even physicians differ on diagnosing  mild cases, so darned if I know, but it sure feels like the last couple of bouts I have had with the stuff.

     Tam and I did watch the last episode of this season of For All Mankind tonight, and I would happily watch more if there was any more.  So far, they have done nothing to shake my theory that the series can be taken as a prequel to The Expanse.
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* If the underlying strep infection is gone, aspirin is still the hot ticket for treatment: it's one of the best anti-inflammatories around.  I usually use it as my backup pain relief, since it's a bit harsh on the stomach and acetaminophen in milder, but until this either settles down or drives me to the doctor, I'll do steady aspirin and take the other as-needed.

Gearless Ratchet

     Multitool maker Leatherman sells a gearless ratchet about the size of a fountain pen, and nobody told me.  There was apparently a lot of hype when they first showed up, probably driven by scarcity -- it was a few years back, when supply chains were still shaky, and availability was variable on the manufacturer's website and elsewhere.  Not so much now; you can find 'em anywhere that stocks a good assortment of the maker's tools. 

     What the thing has going for it is that A, it's a ratchet, which makes the slightly awkward Leatherman bit-driver less so; B, it's an extension, which is often less awkward; C, it's also a bit adapter.

     For those who don't know, a very long time back, Leatherman started including a double-ended "precision bit" on most of their multi-tools, a flat, double-ended straight/Phillips gadget that is held in a receptacle by a flat spring.  It's a mixed blessing -- the bits are considerably better than the usual multitool fodder, and you can swap 'em out, but it's one more item to lose and small enough to fumble when you're changing it.  Critically, though the bits are very flat, the shape is a subset of a standard quarter-inch hex drive: the short sides are "pointy" and fit into the widest part of the hexagon recess!  (A downside is that the amount of torque you can apply with the modified drive is lower.  In practice, it has never been a problem for me.) 

     The specialized shape means a plain Leatherman extension -- and this ratchet -- has a flattish end that plugs into the driver receptacle, but the bit end is standard hex.  They'll fit any bit, and it works with any driver.*

     I wanted one of those ratchets on sight, and wouldn't you know it, Tam and I tend to give one another gift certificates on our birthdays.  So that's what she got me for my birthday.  It arrived this morning and I'm very happy with it.
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* Or almost any.  There was an outfit in New England, the Wadsworth Falls Manufacturing Company, who made one of the neatest and most compact sets of bits and drivers imaginable, with a straight-knurl quarter-inch drive that formed part of a 3-degree ratchet.  Their ratchet drive system was deliberately compatible with quarter-inch hex -- but that ratchet won't work with Leatherman's "slice-of-hex" bits.  The company appears to be fading or gone now, and more's the pity.  There are alternatives but nobody makes 'em as small.