Television Of Interest

     Tamara and I recently watched the entire run of the CBS-carried show Person of Interest, finishing last night.  Despite ending nearly a decade ago, the show is surprisingly current, addressing the rise of "machine intelligence," pervasive surveillance, government (and government contractor) corruption and the morality of power.

     Heavy stuff -- but carried along with no small amount of action and adventure, by a group of competent characters who will beat you at chess or in hand-to-hand combat.  The series begins as one more entry in the "mysterious strangers help good people and stymie evil" genre, along the general lines of, say, The Pretender, Mission: Impossible, Quantum Leap, Have Gun Will Travel, Danger Man, The Avengers and so on: drama in the Gothic mode, with a clear conflict between good and evil, in which good triumphs just in time for the credits to roll, usually by the skin of its teeth.

     That would have been more than enough to carry a TV series, but Person of Interest didn't stop there.  A smart underlying concept and strong characters pushed it more and more along science-fictional lines, in a near-future, near-cyperpunk world of corrupt cops, honest cops, warring criminal gangs, computer geniuses, super-spy/assassins -- and a number of surprisingly human touches, throughlines of love and loss.  From season to season, the story deepens, the bad guys get bigger and badder, and our small band of heroes rise to the occasion or die trying.  There are Classical mappings to most good drama, and if you ever wondered what might happen if clever, lame Hephaestus; bold, handsome Apollo; wise, cryptic Pallas Athena; implacable Nemesis; Artemis the huntress; the Delphic Oracle and a gritty NYC police detective* faced off against Hera, Zeus and Hermes (with a small army of giants and Titans on their side, all answering to Colossus the Forbin Project), this is an answer, with enough side characters and conflicts left over to fill out any collection of ancient gods or a modern rogues' gallery. 

     This is a series well worth watching while it is still fiction.  Don't wait too long.
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* Even I can only strain a metaphor so far, though impulsive Ares is a not-unreasonable analog for Detective Lionel Fusco.  But I will still argue that most ensemble-cast dramas (and not a few comedies) can be mapped onto the various pantheons of the past, for a very simple reason: our stories still deal in archetypes and in human emotion writ large.  Good casting helps; the actors in Person of Interest were as varied as their characters, people of divergent inclinations and career paths who all brought something of themselves to their roles. 

Eggs Pomodoro, Sort Of

     Last night, I made a kind of soup or ragout with ground turkey, mushroom, onion, carrot, celery and mushroom-chicken broth.  It was quick, fresh and easy to make, and there was a little left, which I froze.

     This morning, looking at the choices -- bacon and eggs, oatmeal, Malt-O-Meal,  toast -- I was unimpressed.  All good, but all the same old stuff.

     I had three mushrooms left over, and a little celery and....h'mm, a can of crushed tomatoes.  So I fried up a strip of bacon and drained off most of the fat, diced and cooked the mushrooms in the same pan along with a little celery, and defrosted the leftovers in the microwave.

     The broth had been okay at best.  I poured it off, then added the turkey and vegetables to the skillet with the can of crushed tomatoes and "Italian blend" seasoning, crumbling in the bacon.  Once it was bubbling, I broke a couple of eggs into it and let it simmer, covered.  (I have clear "universal" pan lids in a couple of sizes, very useful for this kind of thing.)

     A dozen minutes later, it was done.  A "fancy" breakfast from this and that.

Omininousity

      Things didn't end well for Cassandra, but they were bad long before they got worse: the thing about prophecies of doom is, even if they're right, they're a downer.

     The downer at present is that we're in a "K-shaped economy," which feels preposterous to most Americans: how can a rising tide not be lifting all boats?

     But that's how it's working: if you were well-off to begin with, came out of the pandemic with money to play the stock market and not worry, a bit in crypto, maybe dabble in prediction markets, you're doing fine.  The trade war (wars?) haven't bothered you; the un-war with Iran hasn't been an issue, and while there's a whole lot of oil and gas (and aluminum and ammonia plus nitrates for fertilizer) bottled up in the Strait of Hormuz, those chickens are still scratching in the yard, and aren't due home to roost for weeks yet.  The top half of the K is going up, up, up!

     But this K is a fancy font: the bottom half is a quarter circle.  If you started out just okay, you're still mostly okay; if you were worse off, you can already feel the pinch of high gas prices and grocery prices that have barely budged down or even gone up, of rising energy costs....  And the people near the bottom, where the curve is getting steep?  They're hosed.  (Welcome to Calculus 001, by the way.  Oh, we've reached my stop already.)

     There are a lot more of us in the bottom of the K than the top, but we don't make colorful news copy; we're not part of the "AI boom" and some of us have lost jobs to it; still, one of the biggest groups is right there where the curve is barely sloping: they're not feeling it much so far.

     But the big dip in the road is coming.  There is no magic restart for the lost months of global trade in oil and all the stuff you can make with it.  Fertilizer is in short supply and expensive, and that's what grows the crops you and your entree eat.  Aluminum -- beer cans, soft drink cans, all manner of consumer and industrial goods -- is getting scarce and costly.  And oil prices -- well, you buy gas; you know how that's trending.  There will be a "capture transient" as it ends, prices ramping up beforehand, undercut by the sudden bump in supply that may result in a nasty fall.  A saving grace as the problem continues is that idled refineries and oil wells (etc.) don't start up quickly; but it's a bitter pill, since it will mean lingering shortages and higher prices until it's all back up to speed.

     Nobody liked Cassandra very much.  They liked her predictions less.  And in a K-shaped economy, you can see the party is roaring!  Look at 'em, in their Rollses and Bentleys, with BMWs and Mercedeses (Mercedii?) for the kids, and all their outrageous costumes -- surely you, too, will soon join them!  It's right there, online and on TV, glittering and shiny, nearly close enough to touch.

     Thing is, you're not gonna get there.  In a K-shaped economy, very few cross over.  The odds it'll be you or me are lousy.   I'm not Cassanda; I'll be happy to have missed my mark.  But that's not how I'm betting. 

Slow-Roasted Skirt Steak

      They've had skirt steaks at the grocer's for some time at a price that is only a little unreasonable and today, I decided to go for it.  It's probably going to cost more later, after all.

     They don't take well to rapid cooking.  You want to go at a skirt stake low and slow, or apply some interesting culinary trickery, or perhaps both.  I picked up some diced red onion, a Poblano pepper and a couple of containers of oyster mushrooms.  (And a box of beef broth, just in case, but I didn't need it.)

     I have just the pan for the job.  As winter ebbed and I started using the grill more, I was thinking about cookware.  I used cheap Teflon pans for years until that started looking like a bad idea, and Revere Ware (copper-bottom stainless steel), which is great to cook in but so very not non-stick. I love my skillet and stewpot from Our Place, but they don't like high temperatures.  My graniteware oval roasting pans are nice, but too thin for direct heat....

     Graniteware is enamelware, and there's a famous, colorful brand of enamel-finished cast-iron pots and pans that has long tempted me.  The Our Place people have a whole line it, too.  Both are first-rate cooking hardware -- and priced to match.  I went looking for something closer to entry-level, to give it a try with a little less commitment.  It turns out that Lodge, a company which makes all kinds of plain cast iron, also does enameled versions.  I've had a round 12" roasting pan with a lid for a while now, and it's working well.  (Bright red with a cream-colored interior!)

     It was just the thing for the skirt steak.  I applied unsalted "steakhouse" rub to it and let it sit while I melted a half-teaspoon of butter and a splash of light olive oil in the pan, just enough to coat the bottom.  I left the fire very low and once the pan was warmed up, I laid the skirt steak in it in a big circle,  covered it and started doing dishes.

     After ten or twelve minutes, it was cooking pretty well and smelled good when I lifted the lid.  I added about half an onion on the meat and put the lid back, and went back to my dishwashing.  When the sink was clear, I washed the Poblano, cleaned out the seeds and white pulp, and diced it finely, then added it, mostly on the steak.  There was now plenty of liquid around the meat; I wasn't going to need the broth.  I puttered around for another fifteen minutes, then washed, cut the stems away and added all the oyster mushrooms (you could use ordinary Porcinis, but we like the fancy ones).

     I let it simmer, covered, for about a half hour while I cleaned up the kitchen and set up for supper.  The total cook time was out an hour and a half start to finish.

     It was good -- the skirt steak is sliced into thin strips crosswise to serve, and with a generous helping of the mushrooms and vegetables and a bit of the liquid, it only needed the least touch of salt.  We had salad on the side, too.

     I am pretty sure hard times are coming.  The effects of the long closure of the Straits of Hormuz haven't hit yet, and when they do, it's not going to be the politicians or the high-rollers playing Wall Street who will feel the pain.  It'll be you and me.  Might as well enjoy a few small luxuries now, while we can.

     (I wrote this on the big iPad last night, and as the post got longer, the keyboard became laggier and laggier.  By the last couple of paragraphs, it was nearly impossible to edit, trying to chase the cursor around.  Better now, but there are probably still a few left.)

Easy-Open Oranges

     They're not cheap, and they have a somewhat limited season, but "Sumo" Mandarin oranges are delightful, for all the name is a cultural mishmash.  The Sumo part appears to be because they're burly, as oranges go, and they have a topknot at the stem end.

     That topknot makes them easy to open: just grab it and twist.  The fruit inside is sweet and juicy, easily separated from the thick rind.  Tamara loves them, and will buy them any time they're available.

     As the season goes on, they get even sweeter and juicier.  I was enjoying one today (kind of, ahem, "borrowed" from Tam's stock) and I was reminded of a gadget from my childhood: An in-orange juicer.

     We called them "squooters," but the "OJ Squeater," world's smallest juice extractor, seems to be what we had, and it's a riff on the Citri Sipper, patented in 1931.  I looked in vain at the big retail sites, but eBay's got plenty of them, and the original Citri Sipper appears to still be a staple of Florida orange stands.  Caveat emptor on those links -- and are you sure you don't have one in the back of the kitchen-gadgets drawer?

     I didn't, and I wish I had.  These late-season Sumo Mandarins are made for 'em.  Nicest Vitamin C I ever had.

Blindly "Edgy?" Disgruntled Employee? What?

      Not to be too vague about it, but the online official swag store of a certain auto-racing sanctioning group briefly offered a T-shirt design so offensive that I won't post it here.

     There's also the fact that they memory-holed it shortly after the image started making the rounds on social media.  Sure, the page got archived; but provenance is a bit tricky when all you've got is a big stack of HTML that anyone with the skills could write, having grabbed the code from a different page of the same site.  I saw it myself, so I think it was indeed real; doubting the initial reports, I had done a search on their site to find it and had the page up for about thirty minutes before hitting "refresh" and pulling a 404. 

     The design in question featured a race-car driver in full kit -- helmet, fireproof union suit, gloves and so on -- seated in a throne-type chair modeled on the one the statue of Lincoln sits in at the Lincoln Memorial, fasces and all.*  Vertical red and white stripes in the proportion of the ones on our flag fill space behind and above the seated figure.  It was apparently in promotion of an automobile race in Washington, D.C. that is part of the celebrations for our country's 250th anniversary.

     The image itself is not the offensive part; it's a little tone-deaf to unseat Lincoln, but decades of zany Presidents' Day-themed ads show that general kind of thing isn't uncommon.  Nope, the problem was the text: Above the driver, "ONE NATION."  Below him, between five-pointed stars, "ONE RACE."

     It's not a cute pun. It's not a dogwhistle.  It's an air-raid siren.  To their credit, the page selling that shirt was taken down shortly after it started getting general attention; to their detriment, somebody made the decision to create and post it in the first place.
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* There's a tendency in various corners of the Internet to point at such representations of rods bundled around an axe in various government buildings, documents, coins, etc. and sagely intone, "That proves it! It's a fascist government!" It proves nothing of the sort; our government was established by men LARPing the Roman Republic (with a touch of Ancient Greek democracy) and for Rome, fasces were a symbol of the power to dispense high and low justice.  Mussolini co-opted it, but he was way late to the table, and was thinking more of Imperial Rome.  And yes, Republic or Empire, the Romans were a bloody-handed bunch, and there are better ways to symbolize government than implied beatings and beheadings.  It's a pretty good reminder of the need for checks and balances, and that justice had better be tempered with wisdom and mercy; but artistic and symbolic use in the U.S. is rarely that nuanced, either.  It's just one more bit of semiotic shorthand to say that government is still in charge of all levels of justice, right up there with the eagle clutching arrows in one claw and olive branches in the other.

Aw, Spare Me

     My family, what's left of it, sometimes shares nostalgic text messages about our happy childhood, and that's fine; we're all pretty old and enjoyable memories are a great comfort.

     Thing is, I disliked childhood.  I never saw anything clearly at farther away than arm's length until I was eight years old -- after being chided for years, "Don't you see it?  Oh, look there!" and not figuring out the reason why.  They tell me what a bright and inquisitive child I was, and darned right: I was trying to figure out the trick to understanding those blurred shapes.

     I spent all of first grade in trouble for not paying attention to what was on the blackboard, and all of second grade being humored as a child who was clearly, mystifyingly, unable to learn much.

     Here's a free tip: if your child is sitting a foot away from the TV or computer (etc.), it might be a good idea to get their vision checked.  Those halcyon years are apparently way better when you can see what's going on.

--

     This post started out to be a rant about news coverage of the current President, which still veers between normalizing stuff with an "Oh, that wacky, limits-testing Republican!" tone and pundits claiming that this time he's gotten himself way too far out on a limb or askew from popular opinion or whatever, and he's about to be brought to heel.  Yeah, well, his will to power is unprecedented for all it borders on incoherent -- and I can write that as someone who was reading newspapers during the Johnson and Nixon Administrations, though I did need some help with the big words in LBJ's early years.  And just who or what. exactly, is going to rein the man in?  His party?  Don't count on it.  Congress?  Nope.  The Courts?  The Supreme Court is brought and paid for, or a large chunk of the Court's conservative majority is. (Look up Leonard Leo, who is to the Right what they say George Soros is for the Left.)

     The misadventure with Iran may yet prove to be an own goal he can't avoid.  Fuel and fertilizer prices are nowhere near done spiking, even if the Strait of Hormuz magically opens up this afternoon.  It will likely be a year or more before the disruption works its way through the system and once it has, prices are unlikely to drop much.  2026 and 2027 will be hungry years.  How hungry remains to be seen, and this is the kind of thing that loses elections -- but it's also the kind of thing that powers major upheavals in systems of government.  So don't tell me "We've got him now!" when that pig isn't even in the poke.

     Chaos is Mr. Trump's very own briar patch. He's not well-spoken; he has never struck me as being particularly bright in a puzzle-solving way.  But give him a clamorous mess, and so far, he has a real skill for coming out on top.  Maybe it's all just bluster and bullshit and associates who have figured out how to profit by upholding and riding his coattails, but it works for him, even as it leaves most of us worse off -- and it leaves his rank and file followers sufficiently less worse off than the people they (and he) most dislike that they have not been minding the downside.  That's a formula for a certain kind of political success, one largely confined to authoritarian, personalist movements.

--

     I believed I was out of childhood when, finally, I got to the point that I was free to starve on my own merits.  I wasn't done growing up until I learned that sometimes, you need a hand when things get bad.

     I won't believe we're done with Trumpism until we are -- and we're putting in the effort to build better checks and balances, to keep Congress, the courts and the Executive Branch more protective of their own powers and less inclined to get in one another's pockets.  If we do not, the system will remain vulnerable to whatever demagogue, from whichever part of the political spectrum, comes along next to work it for their own gain.

And The Winner Is...

      Advertising! That was the biggest winner in Indiana's primary elections yesterday.  There was a big uptick in ad money, largely spurred by supporters of President Trump's efforts to unseat the seven State Senators who thwarted redistricting efforts.

     Turnout was unusually high -- in Marion Country, nearly double that of the previous two primaries.  And that's half of the story.

     The other half is not so great.  All that money pouring in, those TV ads painting that candidate as a closet liberal* and this candidate as a true-hearted America First† stalwart did bring people to the primary polls in record numbers, but that record still amounts to a 14.9% turnout instead of the usual single digits.  Just over eighty-five percent of registered voters are, apparently, okay with whoever the rest of us pick.  I'm honored, I guess -- but should you really trust me when you have a chance to put your own two cents in?

     (And by the way, my thanks to the two parties, especially the GOP, for spending the big dollars buying airtime from my employer, whom you otherwise revile.  You helped keep my paycheck from bouncing, in a market where my industry's share of dwindling advertising dollars continues to shrink.)

     Looking at horserace-level results, of the seven primaried Republicans, five lost to nearly indistinguishable challengers, replacing Tweedle-don't with Tweedle-do.  One held on, and the seventh hung in the balance over a difference of three (3) votes for a long time before being called for the incumbent.  Still okay staying home for the primaries?

     Don't look at me to lay a feather on the scales against either candidate's heart in that close contest.‡ I voted in the Democrat primary.  These are times to pick a side, and downstream of the 2021 insurrection, I'll never vote for a Republican.  They could have cleaned house, tossed out the vandals, religious extremists and authoritarians.  They chose to retcon recorded history and double down instead, so I'll content myself with picking the best Democrats I can find.  (As the late P. J. O'Rourke said of Hillary Clinton in 2016, "...she’s wrong within normal parameters.") 

     The 2026 Indiana primary is done.  The main event is in November -- and the future of the country is on the line.  Nobody's coming to save us, nobody except for us.
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* Despite, in every instance I could check, a voting record somewhat to the right of Genghis Khan and fulsome support of the incumbent President on nearly every issue except redistricting.
 
† Seriously, when did they stop teaching U. S. History in our schools?  That slogan has an ugly history, only barely outside living memory.  Yes, the surface meaning of the words is just fine -- in much the same way as an English word of Scandinavian origin meaning miserly has utterly no relation to a vile racist slur and swastikas have a long and innocent history in Greek, Indian and Native American art.  People of good sense avoid 'em anyway, because the negative associations are far too strong.
 
‡ Indiana Senate District 23 isn't my neighborhood anyway.

Primary Day

     Today's election results should be interesting.  The outcomes for the Indiana Republicans being primaried at the behest of the Republican president may tell us a little -- not a lot, but a little -- about the extent to which Mr. Trump still commands his base.

     Hoosiers remain crossgrained, and tend to prefer the familiar to the new; the latter trait probably finds stronger expression among GOP voters than Democrats.  On the other hand, a lot of the former have hitched their wagons very firmly so Mr. Trump's star.  So we shall see.  A rising star -- or a falling one?

Election Homework Done

     A good start for a Monday: I have located our polling place (a little Lutheran church that has hosted voting several times in recent years) and re-reviewed the (few) primary choices.  Indiana runs closed primaries, but neither party fielded a whole lot of candidates; the Democrats managed a full slate, while the Republicans skipped a few offices, but neither one offered more than one choice for many offices.

     Most of them are unglamorous jobs, like county assessor and clerk of the courts, where there's a lot of actual work and not much shaking hands and making speeches.  Only a few are even useful stepping stones to anything bigger; so what you end up with are people who want the job, either in and of itself or to show they're good members of their party, willing to step up, run, and (usually) do the work if they win.

     Someone's got to do the dull grunt work of government, and I have made my list and checked it more than twice.  I'm going to be interested in turnout numbers; it's not a great predictive metric for the general election this Fall, but it's what we've got.  If turnout for the primary is usually high (or low), that'll be a hint what to expect.

I'm In!

     The new desktop arrived late this afternoon, and after a break for dinner, I'm setting it up.  I've got some applications to download, and I'm hoping to dig out an optical drive and install Word eventually, but the process is underway.

     It's a Windows computer, and this is yet another thing that is pretty comforting with an Apple/Mac product -- and kinda scary in Windows.  I haven't been pulled all the way into the walled garden; work is still very Microsoft-centric, but were it not for a lingering fondness for Paint and the older version of WordArt in MS-Word, I would be very tempted.

Wow

      It's more frustrating than I would have thought.  My replacement desktop computer has been delayed by a day, and I'm not good with it.

     Which is silly.  It will be here when it gets here, and until it does, I have many alternatives.

     I can't say the same about the current Administration: there are no alternatives, and they are taking the kinds of actions that suggest to me they expect a drubbing at mid-terms and want to accomplish as much of their extreme agenda as possible before the axe falls.

     From paying off energy companies to not build new wind and solar plants -- while waging a war that is driving up the price of oil! -- to making abortions ever more difficult to obtain legally, to last minute attempts at redistricting now that the U. S. Supreme Court has finished gutting the Voting Rights Act and frivolous, vengeful prosecutions (most notably over a former FBI director posting a photo of the number "8647" to social media, despite the current President himself having posted a picture that included "8646" and a bound and gagged Joe Biden during the latter's time in office*).  None of it is popular outside of the most dedicated portions of the MAGA base or those to the extreme Right of even it.

     That's both Wow-worthy and frustrating.  This is well past "political hardball," and on its way to a soft coup or autogolpe.  I think a majority of voters won't like it and will register their disapproval at the ballot box this Fall.  But will it matter?  I don't know.  And that worries me most of all.
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* They're both childish things to post.  This is exactly the kind of ultimately petty tit-for-tat that led me to start using only actual names and titles for politicians, no matter what I thought of them.