10 December: Hit The Holiday Wall

     That's enough Christmas cheer for one year already, thank you very much.  Yes, wassail you right back, now just go, please?  Go.  And take 2016 with you.

Thought For The Day

     "Be pleasant and kind to everyone you meet, and always remember they may be a dangerous nutjob."

     It's "The most won-der-ful time/Of the year,"  Except for some people it's a huge ball of stress.  Let's not help push them over the edge.

History, What Is It?

     I failed to mark the 75th anniversary of Pearl Harbor yesterday, an error made worse by the rapidly diminishing numbers of people who were there and remember the attack first-hand.  In 2016, the attack that precipitated U. S. involvement in the (already two years on) Second World War is almost as remote in time as Spanish-American War when I was in High School, and exactly as long ago as the Philippine-American War, which I never even knew of up until this morning.

     While there's small danger of WW II being lost in a footnote, recent history rests on the shifting sands of fools and hasty thinkers; one TV network promoted their coverage in ads with a script that featured the line, "Seventy-five years ago, Pearl Harbor was under siege," which completely misstates the event with a single word: Japan was in no shape to stage a siege and never planned on one.  Pearl Harbor was a hit-and-run effort.  They'd hoped to cripple the U. S. Pacific fleet with a single stoke, leaving that ocean open to their advance.  They nearly succeeded; British and U.S. possessions fell to Japan throughout the first half of 1942. It wasn't until the battle of Midway in June of that year that the odds began to turn.

     There should be no need to point out the remarkable confluence of changing technology and pure luck that led to victory in the Pacific: all of the Navy's aircraft carriers were at sea on maneuvers on 7 December 1941.  The submarine fleet was undamaged.  Repair facilities and oil supplies were left largely intact.  With those tools, and an angered nation (not to mention Congress!) behind the effort, Japan was beaten back.  While submarine warfare was well-established in WW I, the airplane and aircraft carrier combination were still relatively new, a huge change for naval thinkers.  They were able to adjust, with remarkable results. 

     Nevertheless, the attack was a major blow to the U.S. Navy.  Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."

     There are many lessons to be learned from Pearl Harbor; that may be the most important one.

Books -- Also, If You're Reading This

     ...Then my plan to save time has worked.  I need to make an early start of it today, so I'm posting tonight.  Wait, that doesn't make sense -- you're reading this about nine hours after I wrote it.

     Posting about what?  How about Lionel Shriver?  I finished her novel The Mandibles: A Family, 2029-2047 several weeks ago and found it rewarding reading, a close-up look into the abyss of economic collapse through the lens of several generations of an extended family.  Generally well-written and ultimately humane; Shriver has one visible seam typical of mainstream writers doing speculative fiction -- but it's a forgivable one, no worse than anything you might find in Vonnegut.  She is a storyteller, her prose usually effortless, her plotting not quite invisible but deft enough. 

     Having read one Shriver novel, when The New Republic showed up at the used-book store, I didn't hesitate.  This one, too, is a kind of spec-fic, seeing as how it's set in a part of Portugal that does not, in fact, exist.  It's a story about journalism, terrorism, and just how far bored or desperate men might go.  By turns funny and profound, with an interesting ending.  I liked it.

     Shriver is an outsider's outsider and her perspective is rarely predictable.  If you read Rand and Vonnegut, R. A. Lafferty and Avram Davidson, you might enjoy her work.

An (almost) English Breakfast

     No photos -- this is the time of year when it cools down quickly and between cats and my own clumsiness, I used up my picture-taking time.

     Oh my, it's good: a "banger" sausage, fresh mushrooms, a fried egg and (rye) toast, the last being where the "almost" comes in.  I lightly browned the sausages and then left them to cook in a quarter-inch or so of boiling water under a lid, which essentially steams them; you do have to top up the water from time to time.  Then I sauteed the mushrooms in a non-stick skillet with a very little butter and once they were almost done, pushed them to one side and cooked the egg in the mushroomy flavor.  The flavors all kind of dance together, with the strong, umami-rich sausage setting the tone.

     I've been reading Terry Pratchett the last couple of days, A Slip Of The Keyboard,* which collects his shorter non-fiction.  It's amusing and poignant -- and saddening, since many of them were written after Sir Terry was diagnosed with an insidious variety of Alzheimer's disease.  He wrote in the growing awareness that there were only so many more years or months or days left in which to write, and one reads knowing time already ran out.  A good English-style breakfast helps soften that, somehow.
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* You could visit Tam's and use her handy link to Amazon to get your own copy.  And maybe add A Blink Of The Screen, which collects some of his short fiction.

From A Cancelled Christmas Special

     Apparently, this song was the breaking point, and National Geographic and The Hallmark Channel have dropped their plans for the "Olduvai Gorge Christmas Special."

     Still, I thought it was cute:

I want an australopithecus for Christmas
No other fossil hominid will do
No ancient frog
No thunder lizard toy
I want a australopithecus to play with and enjoy

I want an australopithecus for Christmas
I don't think Santa Claus will mind, do you?
He won't have to use
A dirty chimney flue
Dig him up under the floor
That's the easy thing to do
I can see me now on Christmas morning
Creeping down the stairs
Oh what joy and what surprise
When I open up my eyes
A fossil homind is standing there
I want an australopithecus for Christmas
No other kind of hominid will do
No Neandertals
No Homo Habilisuses
I only like australopithecuses
And australopithecuses like me too.

Cat Social Dynamics

     The subtitle should probably be "Food First!"

     The Huck and Rannie dynamic is uncomplicated -- he's a great big, bouncy, rambunctious tomcat in his middle years, while she is small, slender, elderly, and rarely interested in roughhousing.  She usually says terrible things to him in Cat if he gets too near; he sometimes tries to get her in a half-Nelson when he's in a playful mood and when he does, she complains in language that nearly turns the air blue.  She rarely raises a paw to him, though, perhaps because she knows he'd only take it as play.  Meanwhile, he ignores her growls and yowls with what looks like a shrug. 

     Both cats are now eating prescription diets.  Rannie Wu is on food to help her liver (and which she seems to have a lot more luck keeping down than regular cat food), while Mr. Huck gets something to help prevent the formation of crystals in his bladder.

     Neither cat minds the special food; in fact, they appear to prefer it. Rannie started on her diet a week or two before Huck, and when we went to pick up his food, all the veterinarian had was the canned version.  We put the dry version on order and bought several cans to tide him over.

     The cats are fed separately because Huck's appetites are truly immense and unless prevented, he will gobble down his meal, shoulder Rannie to one side and eat her food.  We've fed them apart for years.  With plain (though high-quality) kibble, Huck always finishes first.  He's slower with the canned food, taking time to polish every last bit from his bowl

     Rannie figured out something was going on when we began opening the can of Huck's food in the kitchen, but aside from looking up and sniffing, she didn't seem very interested.

     A couple of days into the canned food, Tam had fed them and on noticing Rannie was done, opened the door into the back of the house and followed Rannie to the office/cat room.  Huck still had a little food left and was working on it.  Rannie Wu walked over, looked at it, turned and shot Tam a "How could you?" look -- and then turned back, reached out and popped Huck good and hard on the back of his head!

     I'd like to tell you he took it to heart or was at least startled, but Tam says he didn't appear to even notice.  I stopped by the vet the next morning and got a half-dozen cans of Rannie's special food the next morning and I think she's forgiven us.

A Quick Keyboard Note

     Today, I unearthed the little Bluetooth dongle for my PC and connected the Quirkywriter keyboard to it.  This is one part of a multipart attempt to "civilize" my desk, with a lower typing surface and -- I hope! -- the monitor on a repositionable arm.  That's yet to come.  For now, keyboard.

     This may speed the next steps:
     1. Finish clearing off the actual desk surface.
     2. Install the aformentioned monitor arm.

Why Is A Mouse When It Spins?

     Surprisingly few people know the answer these days.

Omelette

     If you're keeping track, deli roast beef, black olives, Havarti cheese and some freeze-dried chives makes a fine omelette filling.  Especially if you add some Italian seasoning to the eggs.

"Unseemly"

     I participate in a little neighborhood online bulletin board, mostly by reading. My neighborhood, like many these days, is home to a few chicken-owners. Perhaps more than average, since SoBro is home to Agrarian, an upscale version of the good old feed & seed co-op and an excellent source of small domestic fowl* and everything you need to raise them.

     This is supposed to be a "new trend" but in fact, it's a very old one.  My Mom, who grew up in the 1930s and 40s, was a city girl and her family kept chickens everywhere they lived -- and milk-goats, too, if they had a big enough lot.  This was not unusual at the time, at least in the Midwest.  Mother never tasted cow's milk until she attended public school.†  (She and her siblings tended to make pets of the surplus goats despite being warned not to, which caused an occasional very awkward dinner.)

     A recent posting to the neighborhood thing complained of a rooster crowing at 5:30 a.m. (which is, by the way, a very fine time for a rooster to crow -- that whole 5:30 to 8:00 a.m. block, is exactly when they're supposed to be rousting folks out of bed) and wondering if the owners can't silence it? 

     There is only one way to effectively silence a rooster; the owner responded, saying the rooster was already overdue to go to the Great Beyond or possibly a crockpot, and screen after screen of horrified comments ensued: "Don't kill it, rehome it!" "Send the rooster off to a farm to live out its natural life!"  --The "natural life" of excess roosters on a farm is to get fed to the hogs, if they're lucky; but don't try to tell moderns that.

     But the capper was the commenter who mused, "...I don't think many of us realized that people who own chickens in the city were using them for anything other than eggs. There's something about butchering an animal in an urban residential area that just seems generally unseemly."

     Lady, it's a chicken. If you're not the kind of "wit" who cuts off their heads and lets them run all over the backyard while they're expiring, it's no more "unseemly" than what the local high-end butcher does with a side of beef and a collection of cutting instruments that may include a stainless-steel bandsaw, in a tiny shopping district in the middle of an urban residential area. It's a good deal less unseemly than what any of your neighbors who hunt will be up to in their garage if they're lucky enough to bag a deer.

     I don't dislike chickens, though I think they're dumber than a bag of rocks and considerably more smelly.  I'd need to be a lot hungrier before I'd kill and dress one, though I do love fresh eggs, especially when laid by a critter that lives outdoors and gets to eat bugs.  But calling out the normal process of slaughtering and eating non-productive hens (and perhaps even roosters, though IIRC, they're a bit tough and gamy) as "unseemly" when you only know it happens because your neighbors said so, is just about the silliest thought I have seen expressed today. Possibly this week.
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* They also sell ducks.  This is a great temptation to me: as a child, I had a duck and so did my baby brother.  They are pleasant, garrulous creatures if you have enough yard to ensure the duck splat doesn't get too concentrated, who wander around all day "talking" to one another and eating whatever they find that looks edible.  Ours each laid an egg a day, rich and strong-flavored, excellent for baking and just fine fried.  Alas, Roseholme Cottage doesn't have enough yard for two ducks and a solo duck would be too lonely: they're not very bright but they're quite social.

† For reasons I have never fully understood, she managed to avoid public school until third grade. Both of her parents were fully-qualified schoolteachers and the family was moving around a lot at the time, so perhaps it was just easier.  On the other hand, she was the youngest child in a very large family and though Mother's mother was an unsentimental person, I do wonder if my grandmother succumbed to the temptation to keep her youngest at home for just a couple more years.

I Seem To Have Been Raffled A Rifle

     The call came in last night and, eating dinner in the far corner of the house, I missed it.  The message was from a club in the northern part of the state and when I called back, they confirmed I'd won a Ruger 10/22 in a charity raffle!  A friend had entered Tam and me in it some weeks back and there were some nice guns to be won.  This one is third prize, a 10/22 Breakdown, easy to carry to and from the range.

     Still working out delivery details, but it's interesting.  I have my Dad's old Remington 941 and a much newer Savage, both .22s.* Adding a Ruger will be nice.
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* While it's not true that I don't have much use for any caliber other than .22, I am very fond of it.  Light enough to shoot several hundred rounds in a single practice session, it's what I originally learned to shoot with and face it, if you can't hit the target with a .22, you don't have much hope of doing so with anything bigger.  Would you rather be missing at fifty cents a round or ten cents?  Or just over nickel per, if the last sales flyer the Data Viking shared wasn't a typo.