NRA Convention

     The doors open tomorrow on the 2019 NRA convention here in Indianapolis!

     All the big names will be there, as will the protestors across the street.  I was amused when a announcement of and open invitation to the protest gathering on the "Next Door" forum for my neighborhood tuned into virtue-signalling for and against, until a moderator shut it down.  Look, this is the United States of America, where you can peacefully protest any darned thing you want and just as peacefully cheer it on, and when either happens, it's better to look at the issues and the optics than impugn the character and/or the intelligence of the people waving signs.

     Some of the people opposing causes you support are indeed fools or thugs, or worse; others are sincere.  And the same on your side.  This tells us nothing about the legal or moral aspects of the issue at hand.

     But sometimes, people play dirty -- one or more of the anti-gun groups is encouraging businesses to put up "No Guns" signs during the convention that are phrased in such a way as to legally deny entry under Indiana law; this gives them more leverage to have the police come and throw you out, should you happen to mistakenly wander in while visibly armed.  Here's the skinny: in Indiana, you can carry a gun with a carry permit from anywhere, but property-owners (and, IIRC, leaseholders) can ask you to leave -- and if you refuse to leave, that's trespassing and they can call the police.  The wording on the signs amounts to a preemptive request to GTHO.  Don't be a test case; take your money to a business that wants it instead.

     Me, I'll be at the convention Thursday and possibly Saturday and/or Sunday.

Protip

     When a meme supporting or criticizing the President uses the word "insalubrious" when referring to blighted neighborhoods?  That's either Russia's FSB or a plain old nitwit and you'd better fact-check the claims it makes.

     Effective political memes use plain language.  Effective advertising uses plain language.  Who'd perambulate well over a kilometer for an even-toed ungulate with a distinctive fatty hump on its back?

Busy Morning

     Not much time to post this morning.  Last night, I found out my out-of-pocket costs for the cardiac stress test are a couple of orders of magnitude greater than expected.  So that's going to be...interesting. 

It Would Seem

     That I posted nothing today.  Kinda emblematic of the day, though I did reattach vinyl siding to the garage where the wind had peeled it off.

Paged In

     I was thinking about staying home and housecleaning.  Work had other ideas; I had to go in and fix something.  Tried to talk the guys through it over the phone but I didn't explain well enough.

     So I drove to work and fixed it.  Tam hitched a ride and I dropped her off at a camera store a few blocks away.  After I was done and she'd finished shopping, we had lunch on Mass. Ave. (at Bru Burger) and I wrote a little, moving the point of view in a story from first-person to "third person close." We returned home in the chilly drizzle, and have done nothing since.

     And now I'm headed for bed.  Oh, the excitement!

The Mueller Reports

     As near as I can tell from the news coverage, the Mueller Report says whatever you were wanting it to say, managing somehow to find the President (and/or his campaign) both did not collude with the Russians and yet was up to something skullduggerous that Congress must make up their own minds about after a full and complete study of the 400-page report and related evidence followed by thoughtful reflection -- which, of course, various Congressbeings did, fully fifteen minutes after they were given a copy to read.

     Don't you wish you were as clever and as capable of absorbing written information as rapidly as a U. S. Congressthing?

     Yeah, right--  What I'm noticing is that the dance hasn't changed; here we are, a day after the report was released and nobody, nobody has changed their opinion -- not a single member of the House or Senate, not a single TV expert, no pundit, no polemicist, zip, zilch,  none.  And there's all the information I need.

     Politics is what we do instead of sticking one another with swords.  The Mueller Report is an épée with a tip at each end and no grip, which sets off the scoring light and buzzer at the least jostle -- and boy, are the politicians and commentators jostling!

     Same old, same old.  The Russians are still getting what they wanted: chaos.  We're all helping, aren't we?

I Had A Blog Subject All Picked Out

     It would have taken only a little research and been interesting.  I remember that much. 

     Darned if I can remember what the topic was; I was distracted by one of the more dimwitted aspects of the Culture Wars: people making up childish variations on the names of candidates and politicians, complete with semi-obscene speculation on their personal habits.

     Look, I have no doubt this kind of thing goes way back; read the graffiti at Pompeii and Herculaneum to remove any doubt, or look up some of things people from Pharaohs to workaday scribes wrote about enemies from the guy next door to foreign invaders in the various Egyptian kingdoms.  If we could read cave paintings, we'd probably find more of the same.

     Grow up: either politics is serious business, worth the intelligent attention of mature adults, or it's a tribalist exercise in playground-level name-calling.  You can't have it both ways; there's no calling the politician you don't like "Mr./Ms. Poopyhead" and claiming the intellectual high ground.

     I'll give you one or two; even Buckley and Vidal resorted to name-calling and threats of fisticuffs when they first crossed swords.  But for all they disagreed and loathed one another, they managed to figure out that scuffling like schoolkids meant they both lost the debate together.  --All right, Gore and William F. were indeed unusually smart.  But it shouldn't take a self-styled intellectual to figure out (after a mulligan or two) that names like "Drumpf" and "Fauxahontas" don't add anything to our understanding of the issues involved -- or even of the personalities.

Beneficence: That $339 Million?

     One of the more common criticism of libertarianism, minarchism and anarchism is, "Nothing requiring public funding could ever be accomplished."

     As a counter-example, let me point to Notre Dame, where the first day's $339 million has now swelled to a billion dollars.  Even by Washington, D.C. standards, that's serious money.  No government shook them down for it; the Pope isn't handing out extra next-life goodies to the donors.

     If a big project is sufficiently important to enough people, it will be funded.

*  *  *

     An interesting aside to this is, who owns that famous building?  Nope, it's not the Catholic Church -- it's the very secular French government!  But the Church occupies it rent-free and maintains and staffs the place.  This is perhaps another example of "the French do things their own way," and much like French engineering, it works for them even if it's not how you'd expect it to be set up.

     In a larger (and more figurative) sense, Notre Dame belongs to the world, in much the same way as the Taj Mahal or the Empire State Building.  And that's how "the world," everyone from business moguls to academic institutions to schoolkids, responded to the fire damage.   

Notre Dame: What's With That Roof?

     It was the roof "frame" and the structure of the spire that burned.  They were covered in lead, great stuff for the job from the 1100s (when the building was underway) through the 19th century (the last major restoration): it's waterproof, doesn't burn, and sheets of it are easily joined together.  Hundreds of tons of lead -- and the environmental laws and rules in the EU aren't any softer on lead contamination than the ones in, say, California.  Expect to hear more about that in coming weeks.

     The trusses themselves were a "queen-post" design, fairly strong for their weight and with an open space in the center, allowing for access (as seen in this CNN article).  The roof mainly keeps water away from stone arches (six-part rib vaults) below it, arches that carry compressive force from the buttresses on each side.  When news articles talk about the danger of interior collapse, damage to those limestone arches is a big part of the worry; while I snarked on Facebook about the kind of idiocy that manages to set a stone building on fire, the heat of structure fires is a great danger to limestone architecture.

     I'm not finding a lot on the interior structure under the spire in a quick search.  The dramatic interior photograph that has shown up everywhere seems to show a great lump of debris right under the crossing and it could be very bad.

     At the base of the spire was a group of statues: the twelve Apostles, in four groups of three, each group preceded by one the animals symbolizing the four evangelists, and all of them -- all but one -- facing out towards Paris.  The lone exception?  St. Thomas, patron saint of architects. He was looking up at the spire -- with the face of Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, mastermind of the extensive 19th-century restoration.  All of the statues had been removed only days before the fire; no doubt both the saint and whatever records Viollet-le-Duc left are going to be getting a lot of attention in coming months and years.

     This isn't the first time Notre Dame has been badly damaged; the 19th-Century work largely addressed damage caused during and in the aftermath of the French Revolution.  Nor is it the first time the modern world has had to address this kind of disaster: Reims Cathedral was reduced to ruins in a very similar manner during World War One.  Restoration started immediately after the war and the cathedral re-opened twenty years later.

     As of this morning, over $339 million had been pledged by private donors to rebuild the cathedral of Notre Dame.  During the fire, brave firefighters rescued irreplaceable artifacts.  As dreadful as things look, it is not lost.  It will be rebuilt.

Wait A Minute...

     It's a totally unbelievable premise for a science fiction story: it's 2019, and most people buy their books, clothes and household goods from a bald billionaire with an army of robots and his own private space program?  Come on -- no one's going to find that plausible. 

     How about one where the world is polluted, overcrowded and so short on food that they're turning corpses into kibble?  And we'll set it in 2022.

New Eyeglasses, New Battery, Half-Done

     At least I got my glasses!  Nearly a decade ago, when I still wore contacts daily,* I bought a pair of Julbo "Vermont Classic" sunglasses from the discount/overstock section of Campmor.  If you're light-sensitive they're wonderful, big, round lenses with side and center shields so no unfiltered light gets in.  I liked the look of them.  They're solidly-made and priced accordingly. 

     I thought about having prescription sunglasses made from a pair, but I could never find more.  I thought they'd been discontinued.  Then a few months ago, a targeted-marketing discounter  (Massdrop, who specialize in a number of specific geek interests) offered the exact model of sunglasses at well below retail prices.  I bought a pair and set them back, thinking maybe next time I got glasses, I'd find out-- 

     Yes, they can fit my lenses to them, in a fair match to the tint; they're not as dark as the darkest Julbos, but there aren't a lot of glaciers to climb around here, either.  And they're certainly not the usual sort of thing!

*  *  *

     The new battery for my scooter didn't go as well.  There's no sealed battery in the right physical and electrical size (really, really small), so it's got to be conventional lead-acid.  I should have had the parts store fill it.

     The process never works right for me, no matter how slowly I pour: the cells don't fill, don't fill -- then they're suddenly too full.  It's sitting in the garage right now, and as of last night, the two end ones are too full and the middle four have hardly any acid to judge from the front.  Looking in the top, at least two more looked plenty full.  I'm going to have to go buy a hydrometer or something to reduce the level of the over-full ones.

     Had to move the whole set-up so Tam could run to the five and dime, and managed to lose one of the cell caps!  I've borrowed one from the old battery for now.

     The online tutorials always show the cells of these little batteries obviously filling right up, no time lapse tricks, you can see it through the translucent case.  I have never had that happen; there's a huge lag between pouring and seeing results and sometimes it never does show. 

*  *  *

     The probable kidney stone is making me tire easily.  Yesterday, Tam and I went up to "downtown" Broad Ripple about noon, got my glasses and had a little lunch.  Back home, I worked on the battery and then bicycled to the grocer's while she wrote.  I came home, put groceries away, had a very light dinner and watched a little TV, and realized I was exhausted.  Went to bed by nine p.m. and other than feeding the cats at six this morning, I was not out of bed for more than a few minutes until Meet The Press came on at ten a.m.

New Eyeglasses?

      If I can get to the optometrist's in time, I can pick up my new eyeglasses!