We Lost L. Neil Smith

      Born 12 May, 1946, SF writer and Libertarian activist L. Neil Smith passed away 27 August 2021.  His entertaining books were not only fun but effective introductions to libertarianism, minarchism and anarcho-capitalism, without pages-long lectures. (Paisley hovercraft, dimensional travel and the occasional exploding planet, on the other hand...!)

      The Probability Broach was perhaps his best-known novel and it's just as much fun to read now as it was when it was first published 41 years ago.  You can find it and plenty more of his books here.

      His family has set up a memorial page.

      In recent years, L. Neil Smith and I had drifted apart politically but I never stopped respecting him as a writer and as an effective publicist of libertarianism.  My condolences to his family and to his many other friends.

Eggs Pomodoro, London Broil Pot Roast: Garden Bounty!

      Sunday morning, I made Eggs Pomodoro.  Our tomato plants have started to ripen, and I had a nice, fresh tomato, a big one, one of the green-topped heirloom types.

      I started by frying a couple strips of bacon (lightly peppered) while I chopped the tomato into small pieces, putting them into a bowl as I went and adding a little seasoning to each layer: freshly-ground pepper and onion powder, basil and Italian seasoning mix.

      Once the bacon was done and draining on a sheet of paper towel, I poured off the bacon fat, being careful to leave all the lovely flavorful bits.  Not all the fat comes off but I got nearly all of it.  Then I added the tomatoes.

      I don't peel them or remove the seeds.  I grew up being told that a lot of the nutrition and flavor was in that;* I don't know if it's true or not, but heirloom tomatoes have thin skins that cook almost to nothing.  The seeds essentially vanish.  (Most of the tomatoes you buy at the supermarket have thicker skins so they will survive being shipped. If you dislike bits of tomato skin in the sauce, you'll want to peel them.)

     The tomatoes started simmering away and I stirred it, then lowered the heat and put a lid on the skillet.  I had a small can of tomato sauce in the cupboard; the can is half the height of a soup can, about 6 ounces.  It's about as thick as spaghetti sauce.  I try to keep a can or two on the shelf, right next to the one or two cans of much thicker tomato paste.  They're both very useful and keep well.

      The tomato cooked down in five minutes or or less; I  added the tomato sauce, gave it a stir, and had a taste.  It was a little thin and wanted salt.  I thought about that, snipped the bacon into it, let it cook open a little and had another taste.  It wanted basil and a little more salt.  Basil was easy.  Instead of more salt, I added six Castlevetrano olives, cut up, and that did it.  I covered the pan, let the sauce get good and simmering, then took the lid off, used the spatula I had been stirring with to make a couple of wells, and cracked eggs into them.

      Cover back in place, the eggs cooked a bit and I broke the yolks with a toothpick and stirred them a little.  I prefer the yolks cooked.  If you don't, just leave them be.  I sprinkled a little parsley over everything and put the lid back on.

      When the eggs were as done as I wanted (pretty firm; this is a matter of personal taste), I dished them out and served it with some grated Parmesan cheese.  About as good a breakfast as anyone could want!  (Tam takes hers without egg; I just can't convince her it's better with, no matter how I make the egg.)
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      Saturday afternoon and evening were hot.  Steaming.  I had a London Broil thawed in the fridge, a great big chunk of beef that really needs to be slow-cooked.  I had it marinating in a mixture consisting of two tablespoons of vinegar brine from"Jeff's Garden" brand hot pepper rings (the flavor of these takes me back to childhood, not very hot but complex) along with a tablespoon or more of the pepper rings themselves, a tablespoon of Worcestershire sauce, a couple tablespoons of soy sauce and a tablespoon of balsamic vinegar, plus ginger and garlic powder, parsley and za'atar (which is sage and some extras).  I wasn't sure what I was going to do; I was just hoping to intimidate what can be a tough cut of meat.

     I had a couple of large tomatoes from our garden, one "Amish Paste" and one of the green-topped heirlooms.  They needed to be used up.

      Running the stove for hours on a hot afternoon wasn't appealing.  I have a nice little roasting pan for the grill and the grill certainly wasn't going to make the outdoors any hotter.  Around four o'clock, I started setting up the grill, building my usual miniature tower of kindling and lump charcoal in the middle.  I stuff the bottom of it with small, crumpled balls of newspaper as I assemble it.  It's usually a one-match start that results in roaring flames up the middle and falls on its own once the charcoal is well-started and the kindling (in a tic-tac-toe grid) has burned away.

      For roasting, the coals get pushed into two rows each side of the center, and the oval pan goes in the middle.  I oiled the bottom of the pan (a quick wipedown with olive oil is all it takes) and put in the London Broil and its marinade.  I gave the meat ten minutes on a side with the lid on while I cut up a collection of vegetables: the big tomatoes diced small, an onion, carrots, three celery stalks and a large potato (with a shake of smoked paprika), loaded into a big bowl in that order.  Gave the meat another five minutes, then added the vegetables and couple of bay leaves.  (I added a small can of mushrooms about midway through the cooking -- wish I'd had fresh, but they were okay.)  There's a trick to picking the order of the vegetables: add them to the bowl in the order of what needs the least cooking to the most, taking into account the relative sizes you have cut them into.  Then when you put them in the roasting pan, you can just pour them in and it will work out.

Tamara Keel photo

      An hour later, they were cooked and the meat was fork-tender.  The addition of tomatoes had made the broth a deep orange hue and it was a tasty a dinner as I have had.  The vegetable take up the broth and end up remarkably well seasoned without being overpowered.

     I should have taken a picture.  Tamara may have and if she did, I'll ask to add it. (She had taken two!)

Tamara Keel photo

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* And Mom and Dad said the same about potatoes; in fact, they told my siblings and I that the skins were the best part.  Unless potatoes have gone green from sunlight, I don't peel 'em.  YMMV, but I even make mashed potatoes with the skins on and they taste great.

Bobbi, Rescuer Of Bats -- Yet Again

      It keeps happening to her even after professional bat abatement: our neighbor, the same woman who is fostering the kittens, texted me about eight this morning:  "There's another bat in my house.  Can you come over?"

      I was sleeping in fairly aggressively this morning, but eight was plenty late enough.  I texted back that I'd be there in a few minutes, threw on clothes, found work gloves and a little cardboard box, and walked over.

      She led me in through her kitchen.  "I think it's still on the pie safe in the dining room.  Yes, see it there?"

      I couldn't find the bat, and said so.

      She pointed. "It's at the screen, see?"

      I finally saw it, a huddled shape no larger than a fat mouse.  She had a window screen leaning against the pie safe.  A careful housekeeper with a half-dozen housecats, she does a lot of window cleaning: noseprints add up.  The bat had apparently made its way up the screen and was clinging onto the front of the pie safe.  A furry, reddish-brown body and black wings helped it blend in with the dark wood.

      It was probably an Indiana Brown Bat.  They're an endangered species and this was an annoyed example.  When I put the open end of the box against the front of the pie safe and slid it up from below it, the bat raised its head and set up a chittering that probably should have made my ears burn.  But it let go and dropped into the box; I folded two of the flaps shut and my neighbor and I headed outdoors.

      She's got an open shed extension on one side of her garage.  The roof is almost flat and fairly low.  I set the box on it, standing one end.  When I opened the flaps, sunlight streamed into the box.  The bat did not like this, not one little bit.  It chewed me out again and showed its fangs.  They have an impressive set of teeth and they can open their mouths wide (handy for scooping up dinner on the wing!).  But they're small; it might've been able to get a fingertip but I didn't care to find out.  I turned the box so the inside was shadowed and left the bat to contemplate.  It was scratching behind an ear with one leg while hanging from the other as I stepped away, a pretty impressive feat.

      The neighbor and I chatted awhile, and then I saw motion on the rooftop.  "Oh, look!"

      She turned and and we both watched the bat crawl to the edge of the roof, hop off and spread its wings like a base-jumper hitting the silk.  Unlike a parachutist, the bat gave a couple of flaps as soon as it caught air, picked up altitude and wheeled away between the neighbor's house and mine.  It circled my house and then hers, then took off toward the nearest row of trees, bobbing and weaving as only bats can.

      My neighbor still doesn't know how the bats get in.  Her house is supposed to be bat-proof!  Perhaps it sneaked down the chimney to her fireplace; I don't think she has an anti-bat screen on the chimney-top.

Internet As Usual

      A quick look around the Internet today finds that all of the politically-fixated regular citizens are every bit as whipped up and frenzied about things as ever, and over the predictable partisan issues in predictably partisan ways.  Tell me how someone voted, and I'll almost certainly be able tell you what bugs 'em the most -- or vice-versa.

      It's good that so many people care so very deeply.  While it is true that there's a pretty good correlation between just how riled up a person is and how far removed from reality their take on things appears to be (and it holds true no matter which of the two big parties they favor), that's a small price to pay the lack of apathy.

      I hope. 

Munchausen's Syndrome By Political Speculation

      People do it all the time.  It's a waste of effort, mental wheel-spinning.  I first noticed it during the Reagan Administration: something awful would happen, or at least something that the person talking or writing about it thought was awful.  They'd describe it and then go on to suppose that in response to the awful thing, or using it as an excuse, the Administration was then going to do something far worse.

      There's never the faintest shred of hard proof for the far-worse-whatever, but it is presented as a virtual certainty.  Oh, yes, there was wickedness in the works...!  But the predictions never happened, or were a nothingburger when they did.

      Nevertheless, the practice persists: "Situation Z is a disaster.  The President is going to declare war/martial law/King's X to take advantage of it/distract people from it...," all very Wag The Dog stuff. 

      Presidents come in for a lot of this kind of talk, and so do Governors and Mayors.  The Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader in the Senate* and the various party leaders are slathered with a bit of it sometimes.  All that is a clue: it is as though they were James Bond villains!

      In real life, a President trying to deal with a situation that has gone off the rails is a lot more likely to hold a press conference (or even a rally).  I'd almost prefer they were capable of Machiavellian maneuvering but the fact is, they're not.  Not a one of them.

      Most Presidents -- and their Administrations -- steer a course between blithe, ill-informed overconfidence and a frantic struggle to keep up with events, with occasional diplomatic set-pieces like G7 conferences serving as breathers.  While we like to think of Presidents we approve of as bold, wise heroes and the ones we disapprove of as wicked evildoers (and in either case, with everything under control), the fact remains that the President of the United States is Just Some Guy.  Oh, he's often (but not always) well-off; he's nearly always well-spoken, or at least very good at speeches to his base.  Some were generals or business leaders -- but there is no career that prepares anyone for the job, the demands and limits of it don't leave much room for major graft or sainthood and in the end, it's Just Some Guy (so far, and I don't think a woman would be any better or worse at it) and whatever kind of staff he could scare up, trying to perform an impossible task.  Events drive Presidencies, not the other way around. Screwups drive Presidencies.  Auric Goldfinger can tunnel into Fort Knox with nerve gas and an atom bomb in the movies, but Presidents have to reply on the unwieldy machinery of government to get anything done, and it's not a precision device.  Most days, they don't even get to decide what to have for lunch.

      Against such a backdrop, borrowing trouble in advance is a futile exercise.  A President may want to get up to awful stuff, but real life keeps 'em hopping.  Speculating about the terrible, terrible things an Administration might do, and bemoaning it as is if it real, is idle nonsense at best.  Every Presidency does bad stuff, some of it quite nasty indeed, and the time to call it out is when it happens.  Haul it out into the light, all the Lewinskys and Nan Brittons, all the Iran-Contras and LBJ shaking his willy at reporters.  It's not pretty, but it's not the stuff of movie-villiany, either.  Watergate is probably as close as we have come, and it was the same kind of tawdry mess, just writ large.  Go back in time and you get things like the sniping and fighting around Thomas Jefferson's Presidency and earlier: just as ugly, but with prettier handwriting, fancier speech and a different wardrobe.

      See them for who they are.  Point with alarm to their bad policies, oppose their politics when your own notions differ, but there's no need for hyperbole or fearful prophecy.  The real world is plenty bad enough and U. S. Presidents are rarely responsible for the worst of it.  They're not saints or heroes, but they're not out to Take Over The World like a Warner Brothers lab rat, either.
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* And usually not President Pro Tem.  That job generally goes to the most senior Senator from the majority party, presumably on the theory that he or she won't brook too much nonsense and can muster the votes to make it stick.  Well, it's a lovely thought; in practice, they take one of the Senators most likely to nod off and put them at the front of the room where everyone can watch.

Back Yard Kittens Come Indoors

     Yesterday morning, about halfway through a series of thunderstorms with heavy rain, Tamara Keel and I rescued four soaking-wet, shivering, crying kittens from a puddle in the back yard. The mother cat was soaking wet, too, but she is a very wary feral that various people in the neighborhood have been trying to catch for years. She may have relocated a fifth kitten before I realized their nest area was flooding and went in after them. She would not have gotten the rest out (and dried off) in time.

      We have been watching these kittens (very carefully, I'd only visited their hiding place three times) for a week and a half. Our neighbor was looking to foster them when they were a month old.

     A huge, old, vine-covered tree across the alley fell in the storm (away from us), crushed a freestanding garage, and pulled the electrical service drop to that neighbor's house almost down.  Our lights blinked.  Tam and I had gone out to the garage to look at the tree from under a roof when I heard really scared-sounding mewing, looked at the gate the kitten nest was on the other side of, and realized there was a big puddle of rainwater under the gate.

      The kitten nest was in a shallow dip and I knew it had to be flooded.  We needed to get the kittens ahead of schedule.  They wouldn't have made it in the heavy rain and standing water.  When I got around to the other side of the gate, a couple of kittens had crawled up into a bush and the other two were in water and weeds, a little higher than the flooded nest.  They were soaked, shivering and crying. I put the kittens in an old sweater in a cat carrier (both from the garage), then carried it to the basement. I put a plastic washtub on top of the dryer, and threw some small old blankets and a couple of T-shirts in the dryer to heat up. With a clean towel in the washtub, I wrapped up the kittens in double-thick paper toweling one at a time and set them together in the washtub. As soon as I had all four done, I started over and by the time that was done they were pretty dry. A dryer-warmed towel and another unwrap and re-wrap with fresh paper toweling stopped them shivering, especially after I put a warmed T-shirt over the top of the tub. Tam was a huge help with logistics for all of that, fetching whatever was needed while I wrangled kittens.

      The dryer top gets fairly warm and I changed out their covers for new ones from the dryer when earlier ones cooled. The kittens huddled up and relaxed. Their eyes are open and their ears are unfolded. They are wobbling around on their feet a little. They may be as much as three weeks old.

      Meanwhile, our neighbor was setting up a largish cage with a heating pad in half of it in her home office and getting KMR (kitten formula) ready. She had some work to finish up, so I kept the kittens warm in their tub on the drier for another 15 - 20 minutes. As soon as she was ready, she called me and I covered the tub of kittens with a newly-warmed cloth and carried them over to her house. They settled in pretty quickly. We draped one of the blankets over the top and two sides of the cage, so they won't be in a draft.

      She texted me a couple of hours later: the kittens had been given formula, been cleaned up and fallen asleep in a pile.

      Here's hoping for the best! One orange and white, one mostly black, one dark tabby and one that might be a dark tortie. I don't know which are boys or girls; at this age, they have only barely discovered that they're cats.

      As of this morning, the kittens are eating well and seem happy in their new home.

Cassandra, 2019

      Imagine you were a Ph.D. head-candler and college professor.  Now imagine you were interested in a particular corner of your discipline, wrote a book about it and it was commerically published, initially to less than stellar sales.

     And then events caught up to your topic....

      Meet Dr. Steven Taylor.*  He's a Psych professor at the University of British Columbia, in Vancouver.  His book, The Psychology Of Pandemics, hit the shelves in October, 2019 and did about as well as you might expect.  (Okay, I might have bought it; but I was fascinated to read an authoritative history of the Bubonic Plague a few years ago.)  Sales have picked up rather a bit since then.

      He's got a blog, too.  From what I have seen of the book and his blog, Dr. Taylor is descriptive rather than prescriptive; he's interested in seeing what real people do in the real world and investigating why they do it.  He's not judging anyone's merit, just looking at their words and actions (and their consequences) as they are.   That's fascinating to me and perhaps useful in making sense of the present mess.

      I'm looking at the Amazon sample of his book now.  It's not inexpensive but it looks like it just might be worth the price.
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* A websearch for "Steven Taylor, Ph.D." turns up quite a few.  Several have psych degrees; several have written books.  They are nevertheless not all the same person.

Picking Sides

      Okay, we have lived with this damn virus for over a year and a half now, from the first whisper to the current surge of the Delta variant.

      Delta is hitting hardest among the unvaccinated, and spreading most rapidly in those parts of the U.S. with the lowest vaccination rates.  You can check it on news sources from CNN to conservative local newspapers and TV stations in the affected area, from NPR to Fox News.  Geography doesn't lie.  If the illness was affecting the vaccinated more than the unvaccinated, most of New England would be on fire; they'd be dying on the sidewalks outside of hospitals in Vermont.

      They're not.  The South is bearing the brunt of this.  Maybe hot weather driving people indoors is to blame?  But no; the entire country has sweltered under a heat wave this summer.

      In the worst-hit places, hospitals are overwhelmed.  Patients are being diverted.  This is one of the subtler ways the virus has killed elsewhere: once the hospitals are full, the rate of increase among the gravely ill can outstrip our ability to get them to a suitable healthcare facility quickly enough to help.  And at that point, a patient suffering heart attack or a severe allergic reaction is in just as much jeopardy as someone with a severe case of coronavirus. The lifesaving care they need is not available in a timely manner. 

      One coronavirus vaccine has received full FDA approval as of yesterday.  You can read about it, including the process they followed, on the FDA website.

      At this point, anyone arguing against the coronavirus vaccines, against measures to limit the rate of spread, or in favor of allowing unchecked spread so "nature will take its course" is arguing on the side of the disease.  On the side of death.  Hey, hold your own opinion, but if you're still on Team Virus after so much has happened, I think you're a fool.

      There's a fight on and it has nothing to do with the usual red-blue political bullshit.  It's the human race against a viral disease; it's people vs. a remorseless, mindless biological robot.

      Pick a side.

Grocery Delivery

     Usually, it works.

      Sometimes it doesn't

      Nice 98-cent refund, at least.

Kittens, Saturday

      I waited almost a week before checking.  As of Saturday afternoon, the kittens were still in the nest.  Their eyes were barely open and they're  huddled in a pile, keeping warm.*  When my shadow fell over them, a couple of the wiggled around and looked up.  Could that big shadow be Mama?  Sorry, babies.  I'm sure she's not far away.

      There are a couple of saplings with branches that must be moved aside to see the nest.  I moved the branches back into place and let the kittens be.  My neighbor wants to foster them (she has bottle-raised kittens before) but they're still too tiny.

      I wish we could catch their mother, Copper, too.  Kittens are best off with their own mother, who will keep them warm, fed and clean with the sureness of instinct.  She is exceedingly wary of people, so wary that I don't know if even the kittens would be enough of a lure.  My neighbor has far more cat-magnetism than do I and she might be able to entice Copper.
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* Kittens can't control their own body temperature until they're a month old.  They need to be kept warm, in a place 85 - 90°F.  Outdoor daytime in an Indiana August is just about perfect, but without Mama in the nest, kittens will huddle for warmth even then.

Lunatic, Interrupted

      Friday night I worked late and drove home as the moon was rising.  It's nearly full and it was beautiful low on the horizon, a small world hanging there in the sky.

      It makes me wistful and angry to look at it these days.  It's 2021 and the last human left the moon just under fifty years ago.  We got there a few times and we never went back.

      Blaming Presidents and Congress and NASA administrators for this is easy but the public had lost interest.  And if an endeavor doesn't engage the public, it's darned difficult to get politicians to spend money on it.

      Someday, we'll go back.  If we're very lucky, we won't have to get our passports stamped by whoever's already there.

      The Moon sure is pretty.  It'd be prettier with some city lights showing.

Blogging

      It is more and more difficult to find anything to write about  that hasn't already been beat to death.  Those dead horses aren't going to rise again.  I, on the other hand, need to go get dug in.

      So I will.