News and Updates

1. Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is wasting no time in assembling the Worst Cabinet Ever – a motley collection of suck-ups, Fascists, pedophiles, white supremacists, delusionals, and blistering incompetents chosen solely for their sycophantic loyalty and guaranteed to make any situation worse – and it’s going to be a very, very long four years for anyone with more than six working brain cells. But even in the midst of collapse, life goes on. And sometimes you just have to look away from the horror show and focus on other things.

2. We got to celebrate Lauren’s birthday last week – rather later than her actual birthday, but there is never a bad time for a birthday celebration, really. We had a lovely dinner and lively conversation and then stopped over at Max’s house to say hello to David S. Pumpkin, and there are good things in the world, yes there are.

3. I have spent most of this week grading exams and discussion posts because last week was kind of a lost cause for focusing on anything other than the current crisis and students really don’t need that kind of thing reflected in their exams. I’m almost done now – I just have to get my last batch of exams scanned and sent off to all of the various places that my US1 class beams out to. They did pretty well, and that’s always a nice thing to see.

4. Facebook has decided I’m boring and honestly kudos to them for figuring that out but I have to say that I don’t think I’m boring in precisely the way that Facebook seems to believe. For much of the last month it has been showing me vast amounts of content from a site called “Death Stairs,” which is pretty much exactly what it says on the tin – apparently there are people who go out and photograph unsafe staircases and post them online with descriptions ranging from prosaic (“You could fix this with a couple of two-by-fours and a good set of pliers, you know…”) to purple (“…and then the Angel of Death shown ‘round about me …”) and then other people comment underneath. These posts compete for space with various reels showing people doing household projects in new and presumably innovative ways, which is a genre that might as well be in Sanskrit for all I can make sense of it. I find it kind of compelling that I have so soundly defeated the algorithm’s attempts to understand anything at all about me. Some AI overlords these guys are.

5. Kim and I have been discussing getting a new TV for a while now, or rather Kim has been doing that and I’ve mostly been nodding approvingly since I don’t watch enough television to have it matter one way or the other and she might as well get one she likes. The one we have is getting antiquated – they do that faster than they used to do now that they’re essentially computers – and with the Grand Tariff And Trade War in the offing we figured it was a good time to take care of such a purchase. They’re even on sale at Costco now, right in time for the holidays, so we went down and picked the smallest one they had and it seemed like a good fit until I tried to get it into the van, which should have been my first warning. Fortunately, three-dimensional chess with objects being stuffed into vehicles is one of my hidden talents and we did get it home, where we discovered that we’d been Warehoused. Things don’t seem big in a warehouse. You think the thing you’re buying is a perfectly reasonable size. Then you get it home where the ceilings are a normal height and realize that no, whatever is the proper word for the size of this thing it isn’t “reasonable.” And then you feel really, really grateful that you didn’t succumb to temptation and get any of the larger sizes on offer. We haven’t had time to set it up so it’s just sitting in a box in our living room, slowly deforming the joists underneath and blocking the cat’s path up to the window. Perhaps we’ll get to it this weekend.

6. We’re also trying to get the new showerhead put in. The old one finally died of lime poisoning and old age so Kim found one she liked and put it mostly in before calling me up to finish the tall parts. This didn’t go well and a small plastic gasket – the sort of thing that probably cost them three cents to make – snapped in half. It turns out that this brand of shower heads doesn’t allow replacement parts to be sold by third parties such as your local hardware store. Also, their customer service center is only open during weekdays for forty-five minutes a day, and their website was designed by Neolithic goat herders who had heard of the idea of exchanging money for goods but wanted nothing to do with it. In the end I finally did speak with a customer representative who told me that the gasket was “not a replaceable part” so they were going to send me an entirely new showerhead. “You realize that this is not a sustainable business model,” I told her. “I know,” she said, “but it will be there in a few days.” It’s sitting in the dining room now, not all that far from the television, and someday we’ll get to that as well.

7. We are deep into this year’s rendition of Great British Bake Off and so far so good even if my personal favorite was just voted off. They’ve cut down the nonsense (so far no “tackos”) and focused more on actual baking, which is nice. And the contestants are the usual assortment of decent people who get along and try to help each other. It’s nice to know that such a place exists.

8. It may actually be autumn now, halfway through November. I finally started wearing long sleeve shirts anyway, though the rabbits are still outside since we have not really had any extended freezes that would force us to bring them in. Honestly if we’d covered the garden for those two nights in early October we’d probably still be harvesting tomatoes and peppers.

9. Over the last two weeks of my classes I have gotten to tell three of my all-time favorite history stories – all of which have, at one time or another, been featured here in this space – and they never get old.