News and Updates

1. The Summer of Visits has drawn to an end now that our friends Mike and Krista have gone back to Pittsburgh. They dropped off their son at his new graduate program earlier this week and then swung over to see us before they had to go back home, and it was just lovely to have them. There was pizza! There was conversation! There was not nearly enough time, but that’s how it always is when good friends are with you. We shall have to do this again.

2. We also had one of our neighbor’s kids stay with us for a night as well, as they had to be out of town and couldn’t take them along. It went very well! It’s good to have the place full of noise and activity.

3. Lauren seems to be settling into her new apartment. She now has wifi! And through the magic of FaceTime she gave us the nickel tour of the place in its new “actually set up mostly how we like it” manifestation. College student art is a wonderful thing.

4. Speaking of wifi, we may have solved the “one-house outage” problem that has been plaguing us for the last week or so. All of our services would cut out completely at random intervals so we’d call the cable company and they’d say “Huh, there’s no general outage – only at your house,” but they’d also confirm that it was a signal problem rather than a modem problem (i.e. a “them” problem, not an “us” problem). The cable guy came out Friday and determined that the rat’s nest of cables in our basement installed by previous cable guys was not doing us any favors and neither was the band-aid spliced line going out to the street, so he replaced them both. So far all seems well.

5. I’m a bit over halfway through reading The Sandman by Neil Gaiman now, which is something that a) I have wanted to do for a long time because Neil Gaiman, and b) never thought I would actually do because graphic novels are kind of wasted on someone who mostly just reads the words without paying too much attention to the art. Also, it’s 75 issues and both the individual issues and the hardback collections that came out a while ago are far beyond my price range for the set. But it felt like a gaping hole in my reading, and now that Netflix is making the series into a television show I figured they’d have affordable versions printed as a tie-in and it turns out my sense of American commercialism is spot on these days. So now I have the books. They’re deeply weird and a fair amount of fun and I’m enjoying them, though I confess I do much prefer regular novels. Perhaps I’ll get to the Netflix show sometime as well.

6. The horror stories from Forced Birth America just keep mounting up here in the Evangelical States and for once the media is actually reporting them to the general public for wide consumption instead of sweeping them under the rug. This is what you wanted, anti-choicers: deliberate, ostentatious cruelty that makes you feel morally superior to those in need. Please choke on it, with my regards. It is possible that the disgust and outrage of the American majority over this might actually prevent – and will almost certainly lessen – the supposed “red wave” that the GOP was expecting in this year’s midterm election, which might be the only shadow of a positive thing to come out of this moral cesspool. Because while the cruelty is the point with those people and there does seem to be a maddened crowd baying for it, the simple fact is that the audience for cruelty is smaller than they think.

7. Have you noticed that the GOP is no longer bothering to hide the fact that they plan to do away with democracy in the US? They cannot win free and fair elections so they’re just going to make sure we don’t have them anymore. The latest proto-Fascist GOP politician to say the quiet part out loud is Greg Lopez, former mayor of Parkland and a serious Republican candidate for governor in Colorado. Lopez has publicly proposed revising the Colorado voting system along an electoral college model that would explicitly give conservative districts more weight than other districts – one article I read noted that it would give the two thousand rural voters in three sparsely populated counties more than twice the electoral votes of the nearly three-quarter-million voters of Denver and its surrounding counties, and would have turned the 2018 gubernatorial election – which the GOP lost in by double digits – into a right-wing landslide. “It’s not about one-person, one-vote,” said Lopez. “It’s about true representation.” You will notice the assumption here that only conservatives deserve representation and that nobody else counts. David Frum, a former official in the George W. Bush administration, once pointed out that when ideologically committed parties realize they can’t achieve their goals through democratic means they don’t give up on their agenda – they give up on democracy. We’re watching this happen in real time in the US. Watch your back.

8. If the prospect of the GOP seizing power in the US doesn’t terrify you, you’re either complacent or complicit.

9. It’s actually been a nice summer here in the waning days of the American republic, though. Other than a week here or there of hot weather we’ve had highs around 80F/27C and lows around 60F/15C most of the time – especially recently – and while that’s warmer than I would prefer it to be it is still about as nice as you’re going to get in the summertime, particularly as the climate heats up around the globe. I’ll take it.

10. We went to the Arts & Crafts show that my old museum has every year and I got my usual assortment of dip mixes – I’ve reached a point where I generally try to buy consumables rather than things, as I have enough things in my world. Apparently this is the last year they’re going to have that show, which came as a bit of a surprise to me since it was our major fundraiser when I was there. But times change and while the number of vendors and volunteers has declined in our post-pandemic (or, perhaps, still pandemic) world the workload to set one of these things up has remained constant. So I understand why they’re looking for other ways to raise money, but I will still miss the show.