Picadillo

      Picadillo is a south-of-the-border dish with Mexican and Cuban variations and who knows what others (I'd like to find out.)  I made it for dinner last night; my version is very close to this one, adding canned chilis and a couple of chopped-up pickled piparra peppers to the mixture of ground beef, chorizo, onion, bell peppers, tomatoes, sliced green olives and raisins.  (I left out the vinegar and shifted the spices a little; dukkah carries the cumin and cinnamon/clove notes well, with some parsley and basil chiming in.)

      It had been a couple of years since the last batch.  Some versions are made with diced potatoes; mine is served over rice (or, for Tam, not).  It's a very thick stew, as suited to a plate as a bowl, with a complex flavor, salt, sweet, hot and spicy, and you can make it as hot or as mild as you'd like.

      Last night was a good night for chili, with the weather turning from warm to a rainy chill.  This was even better.  It's worth trying!

A Simple Solution

      With the growing popularity of "they" as a singular pronoun, many of us older people have a little trouble getting comfortable with it -- even though it is very useful for those times when you can't tell (too far away, too few clues, wearing an old-fashioned diving suit, whatever) or don't care if someone should get the pink pronoun or the blue one.

      I now assume that everyone I meet either has spiders living in their hair or a mouse in their shirt pocket or both, and, voila, "they" now fits the situation with grace and elan.

      And as a bonus, they're now much more interesting.  What kind of spider suits that individual's personality?  That citizen in the corner, talking to themselves -- are they whispering to their pocket mouse?  What's it saying back to them? The ill-dressed person staring into space while industriously pinky-excavating their ear: have the baby spiders just hatched in there?

      It's really quite fascinating.

      (Several comments lead me to clarify that I am talking about the use of "they" as a singular pronoun in the language.  While this shows up as far back as Shakespeare, until recently, it was uncommon.  As for actual persons using the pronoun to refer to themselves, it's not my job to police the appearance or civil behavior of others and it would be, in my opinion, rude to try.  Language, on the other hand, is the water I swim in. YMMV.)

Weighing In On The Latest Big Issue

      I'm sure you'd all love to know my deep, meaningful insights on the Chris Rock/Will Smith thing.

      Nope.

Surprise!

      Yesterday, I drove over to look after my hospitalized friend's three black cats.  She has more (and more colorful), but the most sociable ones are being looked after in the house of another friend while these have stayed home.

      Her hospital stay was unexpectedly lengthened, so all of this has been very much after-the-fact.

      I fed the cats and checked up on them.  One cat hides from me and I don't know all of her locations; she wasn't in either of the usual spots, but that's not uncommon.  In the basement rec room, there's one who hides behind the washer/dryer and watches me warily, and he did so.  The other cat kind of likes me; he sleeps under an armchair, and if I lift the flap of upholstery at the front, he comes out and wants to play.  That's just what he did.  Eventually, the behind-the-washer cat came out and watched us.  He's done that a few times.  He still doesn't trust me, but he doesn't want to miss out on the fun. 

      After that, it was time to clean the litterboxes, rec room and upstairs.  She uses clumping litter, so it's not too bad; I wear a mask to block the dust.  Noticing the cats had been tracking litter from one of the upstairs boxes, I swept up the excess and then got out the vacuum cleaner to pick the last traces.

      As soon as I turned the vacuum on, two cats -- two! -- practically levitated from behind the furniture, hit the floor running and vanished down the hall.  One was the shy little black cat.  The other one was a big gray cat with white paws that I have not seen in several weeks of feeding and cleaning up after these cats.

      I texted my friend, DO YOU HAVE A GRAY CAT WITH WHITE PAWS?  Sure enough, she texted back that a very timid fellow had eluded the round-up and she had been worried about him.  He's probably the cat who keeps opening cabinet doors, too.

      So I guess I have been looking after four cats.

And Now...

      Progress has been made: I have replaced untidy heaps of papers with a much neater stack of boxes.

      It's something.

Antidisorganization

      I haven't posted anything today because I have been busy,  It's the most wheel-spinning task I know, a problem I make for myself: I have been sorting out the vast mass of stuff, mostly bills and mail, that covers my desk and spills over into untidy stacks.

      It doesn't help that I don't have much of a filing system.  I try to file paid bills in twelve-slot folder, one per year, and usually succeed, but past that--  Things accumulate.  There is a place for most of them, but it's a lot of work to put them there, especially once the stacks get in the way of opening file drawers.

      So I am working it through the hard way, with a series of labeled cardboard boxes -- including one marked "shred."  Anything that doesn't already have a box gets set aside in its own pile, and if more than a few things end up in that pile, I start a new box.

      The next step is to pick a box and sort it, throwing away as much as possible.  And then on to the next.  It's not fun, but it has to be done.

Feeling Ill, Plus A Blast From The Past

      Yesterday, I spent much of the day with a digestive upset.  It was the kind of thing that will take one's attention right off world affairs.  Frantically hoping you'll get down the hall in time to avert personal disaster overrides wondering what kinds of large-scale disasters various world leaders are dreaming up.

      Nevertheless, in all the distraction I chanced on passing mention of something that sounded like an echo of the old Cold War, the kind of pernicious nonsense that teeters on the brink of farce, lacking only a sense of humor to push it over.  Surely it was just an editorialist's effort at historical perspective?

      This morning, I looked it up and no, it isn't.  The bulging brains* at Democratic Socialists of America are blaming the Russian invasion of Ukraine on (wait for it, wait for it...) Western imperialism!  Yes, they're lined up with Mr. Trump in wanting the U.S. out of NATO, and convinced everything will all work out for the best if the West just lies back and lets that nice Mr. Stalin, er, Putin do whatever he wants.

      History teaches lessons, but it doesn't care if we learn.

      As for me, a breakfast of a bagel and rose-flavored yogurt (I joke that it's "soap-flavored" but it's actually delicious, and they still don't list the flavor on their website) may help put things right, if past experience is any guide.

      When it comes to DSA, I don't think yogurt's going to help.  While mainstream politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, ever sensitive to the shifting winds of public opinion, have lined up in support of Ukraine and put the blame squarely on the man who set the invasion in motion and broke the peace, their fringes have only become even fringier.  Some writers have called pointing this out "hippie-punching," but it's hardly so violent.  More like laughing at them.  Hold any opinion you like, it's a free country -- unlike Russia, whose leader seems hell-bent of rebuilding an empire even if all he ends up with is rubble. 
_____________________
* By which I mean "neo-Tankies."  Blaming eeeevil Western imperialists was old stuff by the mid 1970s and age hasn't made it any more plausible.  Most disco songs have held up better.  

Confirming Supremes

      The modern confirmation process for Supreme Court Justices ensures that every successful nominee will have two attributes: phenomenal bladder control and a truly outstanding ability to endure overbearing questioners.  This is probably not what the Framers were after with the "advise and consent" clause, but they're good skills for sitting on the highest court nevertheless.

      In the most recent set of hearings, even some of the Senators who were supporters of the proposed new member of the Court were over-the-top dramatic.  The entire spectacle of Senatorial posturing was embarrassing to witness.*

      It's useful to remember that nobody puts their name up for consideration for the job of Supreme Court Justice unless they're a Constitutional Law geek, and that no matter what you think of any of them or what you believe to be their judicial philosophy, they're just one voice among nine.  Once a Justice has been on the court a while and it fully sinks in that they cannot be fired, they tend to buckle down and do the hard work of figuring cases out rather than following the prevailing winds of partisan ideology.  That's no guarantee you will agree with their decision, but at least they're thinking things through.

      You'd be hard-pressed to find more than a corporal's guard of U. S. Senators of whom the same could be said; possibly not even enough for a round of euchre.
_________________________
* Which is why comments arguing "But the other party was super-mean to the previous Administration's nominees and it's so unfair," will not be published.  Yes.  Yes, they were (and I wrote unfavorably about it); and when the shoe was on the other foot before that, there was unfairness and discourtesy in the other direction.  You don't get to whine about the other side when your side plays the same game, no matter which side you're on.  As you go back in time, the rancor does get less; Supreme Court confirmation hearings used to involve a lot less "gotcha" questioning and playing to the cameras.  We used to wait until Justices were on the Court before loathing them, but that's not how it has worked for well over a decade.

Threats

      In a recent speech, Dmitry Medvedev, one of the Kremlin's high-up muckety-mucks, warned the West that Russia's existence was  an absolute necessity.  If Russia were to collapse, he warned, there would be a half-dozen smaller struggling states in its place, all armed with nuclear weapons.*

      Yeah, let's have a look a that.  It already happened once: the USSR collapsed, and former constituent states of the USSR (and maybe even a few Warsaw Pact countries) were left holding a portion of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.  Most of those small countries dropped the nuclear hot potato just as soon as they could figure out who to hand it to that wasn't going to light the fuse; a few took some convincing, but the problem with a nuclear-armed nation the size of, say, Texas or smaller is that the larger nuclear powers can wipe them out with a couple of hits.  Gone.  Damage a big country can absorb, however painfully, removes the smaller ones from the map.  There's no percentage in it.

      I fret that a desperate Vladimir Putin might do something horrible.  As the war in Ukraine continues to bog down, there's no telling what he might try to seize back the initiative.  But threatening that the world needs Russia in order to keep the peace?  Please.  Russia's already broken the peace.  The only question is how terribly far the Russian government is willing to go to keep it broken.
______________________
* This is part of the ongoing official paranoid line in Russia that "the West" -- NATO, the EU, whatever -- is out to get them. Why?  I don't know, but it's been an easy notion to sell there as far back as Imperial Russia.  It's nonsense.  One more big, screwed-up country with a lousy economy and a dispirited populace is the last thing the West, or any other part of the planet, needs.  A prosperous Russia, fully engaged in world markets, duking it out over petroleum sales and technology, would be a good thing.  If the current war sputters and dies (and it may), The West is going to have to run two Marshall Plans, one for Ukraine and another to rebuild Russia.  Maybe they'll both do as well with it as Germany did with their second chance.

The Hand Guy

      It was the same doctor I'd seen before; he isn't retiring until June.  He has the easy manner of a man who has seen -- and fixed! -- just about everything in his line of work.

      My finger woes are pretty routine, swelling and glitches in the tendons that move fingers and the little sheaths in which the tendons are supposed to glide smoothly.  It's like the cable-operated brakes and shifter on a modern bicycle.  Think how that might run with a handful of coarse sand in the works.  That's what happens to my fingers.

      The appointment was for a follow-up on my right thumb (so far, so good) but the doctor was happy to look at my problematic pinky.  He got X-rays to check for arthritis or other problems, and once that had shown nothing unexpected, the affected finger got washed, numbed and shot up with a corticosteroid.  There's quite a lot of pressure and I was stuck with a "dead" finger for the rest of the day,* but it already feels better this morning, despite lingering soreness at the injection site.  As a late-in-life touch-typist (who still cheats), I miss that finger when it's not working.  Perhaps now I'll have better luck hitting the "' key when I want it, instead of the :; key.
__________________
* This is a little scary with a pinky finger or toe.  It's terribly easy to get into trouble through mild clumsiness.  I found that out more than once when recovering from my broken knee, and it eventually cured me of crutching around the house barefoot or in open-toed sandals.  Yes, the littlest-piggy toe is not supposed to bend in that direction, and about all the doctor (or you, by the third time) can do is bend it back and buddy-tape it to the next toe while it heals.

The Magical Gas-Price Knob

      It doesn't exist.  The President of the United States -- any President -- has no direct control over gasoline and oil prices.  Oh, they can release some from the Strategic Reserve (the oil equivalent of government cheese); they can signal greater or lesser friendliness to the oil industry, and that nearly always divides neatly along party lines.  But prices are driven by global production (OPEC being a huge player, and a friend to no one but itself) and global demand, with Red China being the biggest net importer of oil.  Domestic production and demand affects price, of course; but it's not the only driver and can be swamped by external factors.  And we're driving more these days; with the pandemic in decline, more people are traveling, business has picked up and we're burning more gas and oil.

      Want cheap gas?  Hope that OPEC gets hungrier for dollars and China continues their draconian COVID-19 lockdowns as the more-infectious Omicron variant tears through that country.  Hope the war in Ukraine is brought to a swift end; while boycotts of Russian petroleum have some effect on price, I strongly suspect the tendency of countries to increase military fuel reserves when war is in the air has considerable impact, too.

      But don't look for any magical Presidential gas-price powers.  They don't exist.  Presidents love to take credit when prices are low and evade blame when they are high, but it's like Buster Keaton expertly creating the impression he is starting or stopping a freight train by sheer muscle power: no matter how convincing it looks, that's not how things really work.  Correlation is not causation.

It's Useless Knowledge

      In the heyday of network radio, NBC's Master Control setup was a technical marvel -- but it looked nothing at all like most Master Control systems of its time, and bears only a superficial resemblance to later systems.  And the engineers mainly just set it up for the next event; the NBC booth announcers actually pushed the button to switch from a show in one studio to a remote or a different studio (or even from Chicago or the West Coast).  They tore it all out when they rebuilt network HQ for television.

      Here it is in 1933:

No pressure, but...remember, the whole country's listening.

      After a lot of digging, I finally found a description of the system, starting on page 22 here.  It's interesting indeed, with 48 (!) different studios and patchable off-site sources feeding eight "busses" that can, in turn, be assigned to any of fourteen outgoing lines.  In the 1930s, NBC was feeding up to five different networks (Red and Blue* were the big ones, Orange and Gold were mostly West coast and at least one smaller regional or special-purpose networks), two owned-and-operated AM stations in New York, plus NBC's own shortwave and experimental FM transmitters.

      There was nothing else like it at the time or later.  Other than possibly a panel or two, there's not a bit of it left, either, and most if not all of the people built who built and ran it are gone.  So figuring out how it worked, even in broad outline, is an interesting challenge. 

      I guess it will come in handy if I ever fall into a time machine.
___________________
* NBC Blue eventually was spun off and became ABC.