Paid Up

My taxes are in, so I’m a fully-paid up American for the next year or so.

I’m not sure that the federal government has earned its keep this year, if I’m being honest here. The main reason why Europeans seem comfortable with taxes while the “taxation is theft” idiocy remains popular here in the US is that Europeans pay taxes and get services while Americans pay taxes and get illegal wars and bloated oligarchs.

I’d like to see Americans get services for our money, though. Such as:

A fully-funded postal system, rather than the systematically and deliberately starved one that we seem to have. Folks, the Post Office doesn’t lose money any more than the military does – it costs money. Not everything is supposed to turn a profit.

A rational healthcare system that doesn’t deliberately exclude the poor and the sick. The American model of private health insurance does not make health care more effective, more efficient, or more affordable, and once you understand that this model is a financial services industry that profits by denying care to those who need it, a lot of things make more sense. Again, not everything needs to make a profit.

An actual public transportation system that would reduce our dependence on automobiles, make our cities more livable, our air and water cleaner, and our foreign policy less dangerous, and also allow more Americans to get more places without having to devote a sizable chunk of their income to purchasing, maintaining, fueling, and storing vehicles.

A justice system that holds insurrectionists, corrupt corporations and the people who run them, wealthy criminals, and child-raping government officials to account would also be nice. I’d actually contribute more for that. How much could a wood-chipper cost?

And so on.

But whatever I may think of the intentionally and historically poor performance of the federal government these days, one does not mess with the IRS. As I tell my students when we cover Prohibition, it was not Eliot Ness who got Al Capone.

So I’m paid up, but not especially happy about it.

We’ve been going to the Tax Preparer People for a couple of years now, ever since my mom died and I had to figure out how my part of the estate would work that way. “Don’t try this yourself,” my brother told me. “Get someone else to do it.” And you know? That was good advice, and we've followed it ever since. So last month I took all of the documents I had in my possession down to the TPP office, sat down with my designated person, answered a few questions, promised I would obtain the last couple of outstanding documents in time for them to file everything by the deadline, and left. It was lovely, and worth every penny of the fee charged.

There were a few changes this year.

For one thing, we forgot that Oliver is no longer a dependent and didn’t adjust any paperwork last year, so we owed the IRS a decent amount of money. Darn kids getting older and turning into responsible adults! This is also the last year we’ll be able to count Lauren, so even further adjustments will have to be made soon.

For another thing, apparently the IRS no longer believes in paper checks (admittedly, who does other than me these days?) and is now giving the Big Frowny Face to anyone who doesn’t use direct deposit or withdrawal for their taxes. The TPP helpfully provided a couple of web pages that would allow me to pay my various debts online, and surprisingly enough this process actually went pretty smoothly. It all went through.

Next year, though, I expect some improvements. If I can’t get the postal system, the healthcare system, or the public transportation system, I’ll settle for the justice system.

Maybe they’ll put a little check-box where you can direct your extra contributions. It will say “Wood-chipper” next to it.

Thoughts on the Current Situation

The President of the United States has lost his goddamned mind.

This week Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump issued a flat declaration that he was ready to have the United States commit crimes against humanity in order to win his illegal, unconstitutional war against Iran. He promised genocide – to wipe out an entire civilization in such a way that it could never rise again.

An entire civilization. The vast majority of whom, by definition, are noncombatant civilians. Think about that.

This threat is, all by itself, more than enough to warrant his immediate removal from office. He should be hauled off in chains, brought up on war crimes charges in international court, convicted, and sentenced to the punishment appropriate for genocidal maniacs. That he ultimately backed down from his threat is irrelevant. He crossed a red line that no head of state should cross and he must face justice.

And yet the Republicans in Congress do nothing. In a just world Congress would have been called into emergency session within hours of that declaration in order to exercise their Constitutionally-mandated oversight on the Executive and remove him from power, and they chose and continue to choose to remain idle and silent. They won’t even allow a vote to make the war legal retroactively, since they know they will lose. They are every bit as guilty of war crimes as he is and should suffer the same fate.

Not everyone is silent. A lot of us are screaming into the void, desperately trying to get some accountability, some way forward out of this that doesn’t involve mass casualties. At least a hundred Democratic Representatives and Senators are openly calling for impeachment. A solid majority of Americans now favors this, in fact. Hundreds of elected officials are openly calling for his removal through the 25th Amendment. The demands of justice are getting louder.

And it has to be said that not even all Republicans are silent. Former MAGA bot Marjorie Taylor Greene tore the guy a new one on social media. “He has gone insane,” she said to everyone in the Trump administration, “and all of you are complicit.” It is truly bizarre to find myself agreeing with Marjorie Taylor Greene, but here we are.

For fuck’s sake, even Alex Jones – a genuine slime mold of a human being – came out swinging against all of this and the fact that he is on my side is just conclusive proof that the whole world has gone mad.

But this is what you get when a child rapist launches an illegal war of aggression against a sovereign nation to try to distract people from his sex crimes. It scrambles things.

Naturally this week is when the story broke that the regime didn’t like what the Pope said about their illegal war and threatened him with a new Avignon. For those of you who didn’t pay attention in history class – which, as a historian currently grading exams, I would estimate is most of you – this is a reference to the 1300s, when the French kings basically kidnapped the papacy, removed it from Rome and installed it in the French city of Avignon, making it a puppet of the French crown. This threat is not the flex that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump or his minions, lackeys, cronies, enablers, and slaves think it is. Declaring war on the spiritual leader of the largest Christian denomination in the United States – a guy who grew up in Chicago, for crying out loud – isn’t going to end well for them.

I suspect that the United States is likely on the brink of serious civil disorder. We have a mad king threatening to destroy the entire world to avoid being held accountable for his crimes, a death cult that worships him and won’t lift a finger to stop him, and an increasingly pissed off majority rapidly approaching torches and pitchforks territory because they want a livable world to pass down to their children and the main threat to that is the guy at the top. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies, enablers, and slaves just keep digging in deeper, unwilling to concede anything to anyone and eager to burn the nation to the ground and piss on the ashes rather than see their agenda hindered in any way. Something has to give.

I don’t condone political violence, but at this point you’d be a fool not to predict it.

And where that goes is anyone’s guess.

A Birthday at the Supper Club

We didn’t celebrate Easter today. We’ll save that for another time, perhaps in a couple of weeks. Holidays happen when you have time for them, and today we had something else to celebrate.

Tomorrow is Grandma’s 80th birthday, after all.

I was not involved in the planning for this, which is for the best since a) planning events is not really my strong suit and if you want an event to go well you should probably consider giving me a meaningless project to distract me and keep me out of your way, such as designing a new ballroom or something like that, and b) there were a lot of moving pieces to keep track of, given the number of family members we wanted to come to this and the even larger number of constraints on their lives that would prevent that. It was a lot of juggling, in other words, but in the end we had a good-sized group, if a smaller one than originally planned, and we made a lovely time of it.

Kim and I set out from Our Little Town, picked up Lauren – only a day removed from 25 hours of travel across eight time zones and fully recovered from whatever jet lag she might have had, which is how you know she is Not Middle Aged – and headed on up to what has become our go-to place for these kinds of celebrations. It’s a Genuine Wisconsin Supper Club – the kind that has prime rib on the menu and artificial bacon bits in a bucket at the salad bar so you know it’s going to be good. We got there a little bit early to set up some decorations and get things ready. I’m not really sure what the inflatable throwing stars were supposed to symbolize but they were festive and set a nice tone.

Eventually the guest of honor appeared and, slightly later due to some confusion about the start time for this event (see above, re: moving pieces) everyone had gathered around the table and we shared a good meal and a lot of conversation and you can’t ask for a better evening than that, I think.

We brought our own cakes, which the Supper Club was happy to let us do – they even provided forks and a cake knife for us, which was nice of them. I ended up giving slices to the waitresses because they were working on Easter and we had, frankly, a terrifying amount of cake, and they seemed happy to be included. It was good cake.

It is a grand thing to celebrate with people you love.

Happy birthday, Grandma!

News and Updates

1. In the past seven days it has been 27F (-3C) and 84F (29C) here. We’ve had sunny days and severe thunderstorms. We had three separate tornado warnings in a two-hour span one night (none of which came close to our house, but the sky was notably yellow). It’s been a time.

2. The rusting silver pickup that has been parked across the street from our driveway for most the past two months (with the brief exception of the blizzard a couple of weeks ago, when everything had to be moved off the street) has finally gone away. On the one hand, it’s a legal parking spot on a public street so there really wasn’t anything we could do about it. On the other hand, it’s nice to be able to back out of the driveway without trying to thread that particular needle anymore.

3. I spent most of today driving, mainly to pick up Lauren at O’Hare from her trip to visit Shai in South Africa and deposit her back in her apartment up by Main Campus University. In this era of uncertainty it was nice that all of her flights went well – the main holdup in Chicago was actually baggage claim rather than security so that was good. She had a lovely time in South Africa and got to see some of the country with Shai while she was visiting. They bopped around Cape Town, where Shai’s family lives. They saw Bafana Bafana in action. They went out to South Africa’s wine country for a few days. They went to one of the townships, which is not something most visitors do – on the plus side Lauren got to help one of the market vendors butcher a chicken, something she has now done on three different continents, but on the down side our bank looked at some of the purchases she made in that market and thought, “that can’t be right” and put a hold on her card until she could explain things, which was complicated by the fact that they don’t use WhatsApp but eventually it got resolved. So it was a good trip and now she is back in Wisconsin to tell us stories.

4. Also, a quick shoutout to the Ethiopian Airlines ground crew in Addis Ababa, who not only got Lauren from her arriving flight from Chicago to her connecting flight to Cape Town in the 15 minutes they had between the first one landing to the second one taking off (a process that involved a bus across the tarmac directly from one plane to the other and a quick climb up the stairs into the back of the plane while they were loading the food) but also managed to get her luggage on board as well.

5. I spent a good chunk of the past week trying to clear my advisees who are graduating this semester, which is a much more complicated process than it used to be because back in the day I would just look at their transcript, compare it with the degree requirements, and write a note on a spreadsheet to say that everything checked out, but these days there is a Computer Program that in theory is supposed to automate much of this task but which in practice required me to spend several days trying to figure out how to explain to the Computer Program that the neat little boxes it divides everything into do not correspond in any meaningful way to the actual lived experiences of flesh-and-blood students. I am not sure this constitutes progress.

6. This is a general problem with This Modern Age, in my experience. We spend so much time, energy, and money trying to automate human judgment which could make those calls quicker, easier, and more cheaply. I do not think This Modern Age was built with me in mind.

7. I visited the Tax Prep Person at the end of last month and let them get on with all of that, a discovery that I made the year after my mom died and let me tell you it was just lovely to have someone else handle that. And they found me a refund I wasn’t expecting so it worked out. This year I’m still waiting for a couple of documents and I’m not likely to get anything back but it should get done. I have to admit, I don’t think the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves has done anything in the last fifteen months to merit me paying them any taxes, but so it goes.

8. I read recently that the reason Americans hate paying taxes while Europeans don’t seem to mind it nearly as much is that Europeans generally get services in return for their taxes while Americans mostly get bombs and oligarchs. I can’t say I disagree.

9. Here we are only seven games from the end of the season and the Philadelphia Flyers are tied for the last playoff spot, which is worlds better than I thought they’d be. They only have about a 25% chance of making it in, according to the sports knobs, but they’re still in the hunt and one takes one’s victories where you find them.

10. Wisconsin has a set of elections this week, and I’ve been working on which candidates I wish to vote for (and, in this day and age, which ones I wish to vote against). Go out and vote, people! If your vote didn’t matter there wouldn’t be so many Republican legislators trying to stop you from casting it.

No Kings

All this past week the same vapid essay has been showing up repeatedly in my social media feeds, put there by an assortment of people most of whom likely had only the best of intentions.

“I’m not going to go to the No Kings protest,” it said. “And neither should you.”

Huh. Didn’t realize I needed permission from some internet stranger to go about my day but there you have it. Consider me notified.

If you haven’t read the piece, I’ll spare you the trouble. The author claims, no doubt sincerely, to have attended several of the No Kings protests only to discover that in the wake of this experience the world had not magically been altered. There were no rainbows and unicorns, the bad guys still existed and held power, and the thought – the very idea – of doing this again without the immediate resolution of those issues seemed dystopian, futile, and just intolerable. They have given up on these protests and would very much like you to do so as well. Instead they have an agenda that they insist you follow that will indeed produce the rainbows and unicorns that the No Kings protest so far have not! So spare yourself the wasted energy, dear reader, and obey your worldly correspondent.

Yeah, no.

Such maunderings are what you get from people who don’t understand the long game and who don’t really understand the point of the protests at all, and the defeatism embodied in that essay is exactly what is necessary for those in power to continue unimpeded.

Tyrants depend on mass submission. There are more of us than there are of them, and the mere fact that this is demonstrated – that masses of people are willing to get out and let people know that they oppose this tyranny – is an important thing in itself. Not everyone is in a position to protest, and the No King rallies serve the useful function of reminding those people that they are not alone. That others agree with them. That this is in fact a popular movement and they should not despair. Even if that is all this accomplishes right now, that in itself is a worthwhile achievement because opposition dies in isolation. We are here. We will not go away. And when the current protest ends and nothing seems to have changed, there will be another one.

Because nothing is going to change overnight. There will be no big reveal after which the rainbows and unicorns will be brought out of the wings to take center stage. This is a war of attrition, of incremental victories and hopeless stands that can only be validated in retrospect. It is worth shouting into the wind just to be heard, because that sets the stage for the next round and the one after that and the one after that and even a brick wall will wear away to nothing in time.

Opposition movements focused on short-term victories tend not to survive.

C.S. Lewis once wrote that in Shakespeare’s King Lear there is a very minor character – unnamed, with less than a dozen lines – who sees the blinding of Gloucester and draws his sword against those who perpetrated this deed because even if he does not understand the larger machinations of the plot he sees what is in front of him and will not stand for it. He does not succeed in stopping it or even punishing the guilty and he is murdered almost immediately, but Lewis said of him that “if it were real life and not a play, that is the part it would be best to have acted.” This is what Ken Taylor describes as defiant resignation – acting despite the understanding that it won’t change anything, simply to demonstrate your unhappiness with the world as it stands and your belief that it should change. That in itself is a worthwhile thing, perhaps not immediately but later.

And sometimes you have to do these things just because they need to be done, whether anything larger comes out of them at all, because it’s what you have to do for yourself.

A.J. Muste protested against the Vietnam War in the 1960s, holding a candle in front of the White House, often alone. Do you think you’re going to change the policies of the US by doing this, he was asked. “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country,” he said. “I do this so the country won’t change me.”

You need to be able to say to yourself and to those who come later that you were not silent in the face of evil. That you spoke up. That you did not let it pass. That you joined with others or stood alone but either way you were not silenced.

Kim and I went to the No Kings protest today here in Our Little Town. I have no idea how many other people where there – I am notoriously terrible at estimating crowd sizes. Several hundred at least. Kim thinks it might have been as many as a thousand. A good-sized crowd on a cold and blustery day, at any rate.

We carried our signs and raised our voices, and there were speakers and singers and most of the cars driving by honked in approval and we went away knowing that we had not been silent and that there were a lot of people here in Our Little Town who agree with us – unlike previous protests, there were no counter-protesters that I saw, which is perhaps a sign that even the hardcore MAGA folks are starting to question things.

As of this writing there are still no rainbows and unicorns, and my country is still ruled by a child rapist desperate to cover up his sex crimes with war crimes, surrounded by a corrupt and spineless mob of cosplaying white supremacist toadies inflicting their shortcomings on an unwilling world.

So we will return for the next protest, and the next, until either they come to an end or we do.

And if that bothers the essayist, well, I can live with that.

A Decade On

Ten years is a long time in the span of a human life.

It isn’t on a historical scale, but then people don’t live on historical scales. They live lives tightly bound by time, three score and ten if they’re lucky, more if they’re even luckier. The great achievement of the twentieth century wasn’t expanding the human lifetime – it was creating a world where more people hit that mark than ever before. This was always a fragile achievement, easily undone by the usual forces that drag our species down into darkness, but it was an achievement nonetheless.

But even so, it always comes to an end.

It’s been a decade now since my dad died. It feels like yesterday. It feels like a hundred years ago.

The world is a different place than it was. His grandchildren are grown now, all but one a college graduate and that last one rapidly approaching that mark. My mom has since passed away. There’s been a pandemic, an insurrection, and enough political stupidity to keep us in conversation for the next decade even if nothing else happened at all.  The Eagles won the Super Bowl twice, something that he’d have enjoyed seeing. I sometimes wonder what he would have made of this world now.

I suspect he would have had some very definite opinions about it.

I do not claim to know what happens to us after we die, but if there is more to this than what we see I hope he is doing well and I hope he knows he is not forgotten.

News and Updates

1. It’s Spring Break Month here in Baja Canada, which is what happens when you have four people in an academic family who have absolutely zero overlap in their Spring Break weeks so there is about that much chance of us doing anything together. I don’t get much of a spring break, to be honest, since the two campuses I work for do that at different times so I get two half-breaks which isn’t all that helpful. Kim’s on her break right now, except that she’s in a far-off city at a conference, from which she will have to do work for Home Campus anyway because that’s just how that goes and that’s not much of a break either. Oliver’s break was a couple of weeks ago but he had so much to do, being a first-year graduate student, that the only thing that was different for him was that he didn’t actually have to go to classes. Lauren is visiting Shai right now and that genuinely is a break so I’m glad that one of us got to have one. There will be stories later, no doubt.

2. Kim and I were hoping to continue our streak of Traveling Abroad this year but we looked at the current state of both international politics and prices (both of which are now … what’s the jargon term that economists use in these situations? … oh, right … “thoroughly fucked”) and decided that perhaps staying closer to home this year would be a good idea. So we’ve got a smaller thing planned and perhaps some others will be added at some point. As problems go this is a fairly high-class one to have, but still. It is one more black mark to be added to the account of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves.

3. Watching the slow-motion suicide of a Great Power from the inside has been a grotesque way to spend time, really. The illegal and blisteringly incompetent war of aggression against Iran, the unfathomably cruel strangulation of Cuba that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is waging that nobody in this country seems to be aware of, the slow-drip of Epstein Files revelations confirming ever more conclusively that the Only President This Country Has is a child rapist surrounded by people who don’t consider that a deal-breaker and are happily willing to violate the law to protect him and cover up his crimes, the open and ongoing financial corruption that makes the Gilded Age look pristine, the continuing rampage of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s unaccountable army of thugs through American streets, the tanking of both the American and the global economies, the destruction of NATO – seriously, it never ends with this crew of cannibals. I very much look forward to clear, unambiguous, and brutally blunt justice being served, and while I have already had to wait far longer than I had hoped for it I will not be deterred from believing that this nation will at some point see that justice served cold and hard. 

4. On Monday we had a blizzard. Today it was 75F (24C). Living in Wisconsin can be strange.

5. One of the ways I have been trying to distract myself from current events has been to get back into genealogy, a deep rabbit hole into which news and events rarely penetrate. After not being able to find my paternal grandmother and her family in the indexed versions of the recently released 1950 Census, I decided to put my research skills to some use and go to the actual documents to see for myself. And it seems that she managed to duck the entire census. I found the sheet where their house should be, and it is not there. On the one hand, this is entirely in character for my grandmother and I have to admire the commitment to the bit. That whole family was like that. I located her parents – my great-grandparents – who were still living at the ancestral family home in West Philly at the time, and both of them reported their ages as being at least a decade younger than they actually were (if the ages they gave were accurate neither one of them would have hit their teens when my grandmother was born and I know for a fact that was not the case). So I’m not surprised that she’s not there. On the other hand, it is disappointing as I had hoped that document could help clear up the ongoing mystery of my grandmother’s marital status in 1950. We press on.

6. I spent a good portion of the last couple of months doing Committee Work down at Home Campus, and on Thursday night this particular committee’s task ended successfully so now I can put down my keyboard and retire from those duties with the sense of a job well done. Three cheers to my fellow committee members and all those who made it happen. One takes one’s victories where they arise.

7. Sometime in November Kim and I got replacement credit cards. I don’t know why this happened, since we’d just gotten replacement cards in June because my previous card was probably sitting in a landfill in Florence somewhere. The first replacement cards were working fine so it was a bit of a mystery, particularly as the relevant numbers remained unchanged. I actually called the credit card company to ask about it and they said, “Yes, those are legit, go ahead and validate them.” And that would have been the end of it except that every time I pull out this latest card I am reminded once again that this card is made of depleted uranium and grief. It is the heaviest card I have ever owned – easily twice the weight of any other card in my wallet – and I have no idea why this is so. Sometimes I just randomly hand it to people to see what their reaction is and it never ceases to amaze them. It is a mystery.

8. It is March Madness season, the only time of the year when basketball of any description makes any noticeable impact on my life, and I have dutifully filled out my bracket. My designated champion lost their first game and pretty much every team I actually thought would be interesting is gone as well, though I did somehow manage to call one entire region correctly in the first round based purely on vibes, so I’ve got that going for me. I am the only person in the family who filled out a bracket and yet I suspect I have still managed to lose this year’s contest anyway.

9. I really hate the fact that the internet killed the phone book and then got so enshittified that you can’t actually find a business anymore. We need a Large Household Project to be done by someone else, and half the results I get by searching online are either a) not in that actual line of business, b) not anywhere in the time zone despite my specifying the actual town I was trying to search, and/or c) so long gone and forgotten that their phone number has been reassigned. This does not strike me as progress.

10. I finally got new headlights on my car. After 20 years the plastic housings had gotten so opaque that they really didn’t illuminate anything anymore, and it is nice to be able to see where I’m going when driving in the dark again. It’s the little things.

Blow Ye Winds, Blow

Apparently our trip up north was very well timed, since we made it home on dry roads with only a minor blip in traffic near Madison. There’s always traffic around Madison. It was an easy drive.

This would not have been the case had we tried it today. Likely would not be the case tomorrow either.

Most of Wisconsin is shut down right now, and when Wisconsin shuts down because of a winter storm you know it’s bad. When they close the bars then shit has definitely gotten real.

The state Department of Transportation has this nice service where if you go to their website you can see a map of travel conditions. The entire northern half of the state is outlined in black and listed as “Stay the hell off the roads you simpletons! Your 4-wheel-drive Compensator will not help you!  We’re not sending people to rescue you! Maybe Tuesday we’ll send out retrieval parties! Morons.” I’m sure if they thought they could get away with it there would be skull-and-crossbones graphics as well, and possibly little hand emojis flipping you off for even thinking about driving, but they’re doing what they can to get the message across.

The interstate highway that we took to drive home on Friday was shut down in both directions at 11am today. The traffic camera images all looked like closeups of sheep.

Down here in Wisconsin’s banana belt it has rained incessantly since about mid-morning and you have to appreciate the fact that you don’t have to shovel rain. The winds are fierce, the ground is saturated, and the main storm has started to sag southward so our potential overnight snowfall has been raised from one to four inches (2.5-10cm) to eight to twelve inches (20-30cm). This will be on top of all the rain, which will have frozen into sheets of ice at some inconvenient point in order to provide just THAT MUCH MORE EXCITEMENT for tomorrow.

Tomorrow is not looking good for leaving the house is what I’m getting at here. All of the local school districts have already announced that they’re closed. As for Home Campus, we usually wait to make that call. Instructors can cancel their own classes without too much bother and staff can make the choice to stay home on their own, but to close the entire campus officially triggers a wave of bureaucracy that the people in charge try to avoid if at all possible. So we’ll see.

I don’t have any classes or student appointments tomorrow, but I do have to be part of two different candidate interviews for positions where we’re hiring and I’m not sure how much of that is actually going to happen. Perhaps there will be Zoom. I’m not the one making the decisions, so I’m sure I will be told at some point.

At the moment I’m just sitting in my little office, surrounded by books, listening to the rain lash against the windows. I got the grocery shopping done yesterday and none of today’s plans involved putting on shoes. There’s corned beef simmering on the stove, since Tuesday is St. Patrick’s Day and nobody has time to simmer corned beef on a workday. It smells good.

So we will hunker down and be glad for our snug oasis in the middle of the storm.

A Wild Trip Up North

I actually like the Minnesota Wild. They’re a good team, they have a snazzy logo, and Minnesota feels like it should have a professional ice hockey team in a way that Florida and Texas really shouldn’t. Plus at this point in American history I confess I have a deep fondness for anything connected to the Minneapolis-St. Paul region, as they have been at the forefront of resistance to the current tyranny and should be supported by all patriotic Americans for this. So I do like the Wild.

Just not as much as the Flyers.

A while ago Kim and I discovered that my hometown Philadelphia Flyers would be traveling to St. Paul for a game in March and we agreed that this would be a fun thing to go see. For me that probably would have been the end of it but Kim is a planner and actually makes things happen, and surprisingly quickly we had tickets and a hotel reservation.

And then we realized that by midwestern standards St. Paul is not all that far from the campus where I teach my remote class, so perhaps we could head there the following morning so I could teach it in person for the first time since I started doing this course in 2012. It would be nice to see the students, for one thing, and it would also be good to see all the people up there who make this class work – any remote class is a group effort, after all. Plus the Campus Director up there is a friend of ours and an old chemistry colleague of Kim’s from a previous institutional structure, so there was a lot to recommend this visit.

We therefore had Plans.

We drove up to St. Paul on Thursday – a relatively uneventful ride for the first part, though once we got past Eau Claire the snow closed in and the High Wind Warning became a genuine thing. It wasn’t much snow, to be honest – just enough that no windshield wiper setting was quite right – but the winds were fierce and remained so through much of the next day.

The Saint Paul Hotel is a much nicer place than I’m used to staying. It’s one of those big old-fashioned places with lobbies that were designed to convey more than simply utilitarian processing, and as someone used to staying in hotels that have numbers in their name it was a bit of a shift, though a pleasant one. They also have valet parking, which meant we just pulled up, handed the keys to a dapper man in black tails and a top hat who did, in fact, work for the hotel (we checked), and then didn’t have to think about it again until the next morning. This worked out very well since the arena where the game would be played was just a three-block walk away.

It was raining when we walked over, which was actually kind of nice. Rain melts ICE, after all, and we were not confronted by any jackbooted government thugs while we were in St. Paul. They haven’t left the city, despite the news reports – they’ve just decided that publicly executing American citizens was bad PR so they’re not as overt as they were a couple of months ago. Still no justice for the dead, of course, but one lives in hope and fury.

We got to the arena fairly early, bought one of the souvenir programs (“Only $5! Benefits youth hockey!” – how could we say no to that?) and found dinner at the first big concession stand that we came to. The arena has a row of Standing Room Only spaces just behind of the last row in the first tier of seats and these come with a little counter that you can lean on and was also absolutely perfect for resting trays of Buffalo Chicken Fries and cups of house cider upon, and we enjoyed a tasty if nutritionally void dinner.

From there we wandered counterclockwise around the concourse until we got to our designated spots on the Standing Room Only section further up the ice. For those who actually watch hockey, we were about level with the face-off dots on the Wild’s end of the ice, across from the team benches. We were a bit worried about the very tall people in front of us who did not sit down during the entire extended warm-up skate, but they did once the game started and we had a great view of the game during regulation time. It turned out that they were most of the neighborhood where Alex Bump grew up and they were here to cheer for him in his first professional trip to St. Paul as a hockey player, even if he was playing for the Flyers. They dutifully wore Flyers gear with his number on it, despite confessing to be Wild fans in general, and you have to appreciate that kind of support. I chatted a bit with the guys standing next to us at our counter, one of whom was also a university instructor so we had that in common.

There were a lot of Flyers fans in attendance, to judge from the jerseys and sweatshirts, and everyone seemed happy to be there. I like going to sporting events where everyone is clued into the fact that it’s a game and you’re there to have a good time. Three cheers to the Wild fans for being good about that.

It turned out to be a very entertaining game, even from a neutral perspective. The Flyers went up 1-0 toward the end of the first period, found themselves down 2-1 after the second period, and then tied it on a short-handed goal in the third.

The game went to overtime, which the NHL now does as a 3-on-3 five-minute sudden death period, and everyone stood up at that point so we couldn’t see anything. Fortunately there were two seats open a couple of rows down by that point, so Kim and I went there and stood by them, so we did get to see the end of the game. When overtime didn’t solve anything they went to a shootout, which the Flyers won 1-0, and it was a good night for the orange and black.

Every single goal of the game was scored on our end of the ice.

We walked back to the hotel, collapsed into heaps on the various chairs, and spent a lovely time not doing much of anything at all before calling it a night.

The next morning we got up way too early, retrieved the minivan from the top-hatted man (who was either still there or had somehow returned before we woke up), and headed off toward Far Away Campus. We made it there with plenty of time to spare despite a) the High Wind Warning still being a thing, which is an experience in a tall vehicle on a high bridge, let me tell you, b) somehow managing to get behind every sightseer in northern Wisconsin, which in mid-March is not that many people so this was something of an achievement, and at least one turkey delivery truck, and c) stopping for breakfast at one of the several million Kwik-Trip gas stations that permeate Wisconsin like pubs in Britain. IYKYK.

Kim found a table just outside the classroom so she could get some work done and I wandered into the room and met Simon, the guy who sets up all the Zoom stuff for the class, and we got things ready. My students filtered in – according to Abbey, the Campus Director, they were happy that I was coming up to see them, and we had a good time together. It was a pretty full house for being the Friday before their spring break, and there was even a former student from last year who sat in for a while. We covered WWII, one of the gateway drugs of history and always a popular subject despite the casualty figures. And then I wandered around the trying to catch up to other folks who I’ve worked with, eventually finding Sue and Angela but missing Sonya and Troy. It was good to see them!

I also bought a campus sweatshirt so I can actually represent when I’m teaching. I have a lot of Home Campus gear, but this is my first for this campus.

After that we went to lunch with Abbey at a very good Mexican restaurant, where we hung out for a pleasingly long while and had good food in the process. One of my students showed up with his parents and it was nice to meet them.

All in all, a good day.

The drive back was uneventful as you always hope they will be, and eventually we came home and were confronted by a deeply annoyed cat who was, nevertheless, not too proud to sit on my lap for a while.

News and Updates

1. There are times when you just have to wonder what sins have been committed to create the timeline we’re in, though it has to be said that many of them are not secret, or at least not anymore. We in the US are governed by a criminal syndicate protecting a ring of child rapists that is actively trying to burn the planet down in order to avoid accountability, loot the place bare, and die with more toys than the rest of us. That much is pretty clear, as is the ceaseless braying of their minions, cronies, lackeys, enablers, and slaves. But the vast majority of people in this world just want to get through their days with as little trouble and as much comfort as they can, preferably with something good to eat and a harmless way to amuse themselves for a while, and sometimes the gap between these two groups of people is just dizzying.

2. I think for today I am just going to focus on my little corner of the world, because you can’t live in the middle of the maelstrom 100% of the time without going mad. I’m sure I’ll get back to it soon. Fuck those bastards and everyone who supports them.

3. It’s the middle of the semester and everything is crashing down. Assignments are due, exams are scheduled, and students are nearly as bewildered and stressed as we are. I have far too many tasks to think about and not nearly enough focus to worry about them. It’s been a time.

4. Last week Kim and I went to the new Indian restaurant in town with our friend George and had an absolutely marvelous dinner. Every kind of restaurant has that one dish that you use to rate it, and for me with Indian restaurants it’s chicken biryani and it was really, really good. They’re a little slammed right now – I don’t think the owners anticipated the demand for Indian food here in Our Little Town, and to be honest neither did I – but definitely worth the wait. Plus we ran into several friends while we were there – Angelica stopped by our table, and we found Camrin and Jacob as well. A good time was definitely had.

5. Lauren came down to visit on Friday, mostly because she wanted to snag a suitcase for her upcoming trip to see Shai, and it was lovely to see her, as you would imagine. She invited Isabella and Lily as well and I made General Tso Chicken and we all sat at the table for a very long time just hanging out together. In a world full of troubles, it is a nice thing to have an evening full of good food and good company. And we had two in a row!

6. Oliver’s professor still hasn’t graded the project he turned in on January 9 and I kind of want to know how it turned out. I don’t know how professors do that. I get mad at myself if it takes me more than a week to grade an assignment.

7. I finally finished my second book of the year, a mark that I used to hit somewhere around January 10 over the past fifteen years or so, but these are not times conducive to doing much reading, at least not for me. It was a very good book, though, and I’ll post my review of it next January assuming we are all still here to post and read blogs. There have been times this week when I was genuinely not sure about that, given Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s illegal war of aggression in Iran – I find that teaching an entire course on the atomic bomb does give you a different perspective on international crises from most people – but who knows. Perhaps I’ll get to write that post after all. We’ll see.

8. Someone stole an hour of my life last night that I won’t get back until November. Daylight Savings Time is a conspiracy against all that is proper and just, and it needs to stop. Try explaining the concept to a cat.

9. I’m trying to find some projects to immerse myself in to keep the rest of the world at bay for a while, and the siren call of genealogy is getting louder. So far I’ve contented myself with trying to organize the stuff I already have in a way that I might actually be able to find specific things when I look for them, but I suspect that at some point I’ll go digging again. It’s an interesting hobby that harms nobody, with the possible exception of myself.

10. It was 70F (21C) today. This weekend it is going to snow. Welcome to March in Wisconsin.

Stories

One of the formative experiences of my life was watching some random news magazine television show back in the late 1980s.

I couldn’t tell you what the show was called, what network aired it, who hosted it, or even if it was actually aired in the 1980s. Maybe it was the early 90s. It was definitely pre-internet. It was a long time ago.

In this particular episode the host had gone out to the rural American west somewhere – one of those vast open landscapes where they don’t bother putting guardrails on the highways because what would you hit if you drove off the road? – to interview a reporter for a local newspaper. This is how long ago that was. There were still local newspapers.

The newspaper office was in a rundown little building on an empty street in town and it was piled with papers, typewriters, and the detritus of journalism before it went digital. There were probably half-empty cups of coffee sitting on desks as well. There would have to have been.

This local reporter had made a name for himself by writing human interest stories. Every week or month or however often the newspaper came out he had a story about somebody telling their tale, often just the most riveting thing you could ever read, and the host wanted to know how he found these people. Was there a trick to it?

The reporter just laughed. Everyone’s got a story, he said. You just have to ask them about it.

When the host seemed skeptical, the reporter walked over to one of the desks and picked up the local phone book. It was a fairly thin volume, as you’d expect from a place that looked like the whole population could fit into a minor league baseball stadium. This is another way you can tell how long ago this was, by the way. There were still paper phone books.

The reporter walked back to the host and told him to rip out a page at random, and when the host did that the reporter stuck it into the wall with a thumbtack and handed the host a dart. Throw it at the page, he said, and when the host did the reporter walked over to see whose name the dart had landed on.

They got into a car and drove out to that person’s home, a sun-bleached trailer on a dusty road under a sky that seemed to go on forever, and they knocked on the door. When someone answered, they introduced themselves as reporters and asked if they could talk for a while, just to see what their story was.

It was fascinating.

I don’t remember who lived in that trailer, or what they looked like, or even the story they told. But I do remember that it was the sort of story that you wouldn’t have imagined coming from someone living a quiet life on a dusty road under a sky that went on forever. Or maybe you would, if you knew someone like that.

And the lesson there, as the reporter had said, was that everyone’s got a story. You just have to ask them about it.

I write down a lot of stories here, because I have my own to tell. I am a historian, telling the stories of others for a living. I enjoy reading memoirs and blogs and the kind of social media posts that go on for multiple screens recounting some story or other – often trivial, sometimes outlandish, but never uninteresting. I love hearing other people tell their stories. I try to be a good listener when they do. Sometimes I succeed.

The world is not made of atoms and forces. It is made of stories, and if you ask people they will often tell you theirs.

On Finding Joy

In this darkening world it is no crime to hold onto what slivers of joy come our way.

It is easy to get lost in the headlines. The US has embarked on a war of aggression in violation of federal law, the US Constitution, the UN Charter, and the Olympic Truce. ICE thugs are still out there brutalizing people in the public streets, kidnapping and trafficking them to random nations. We are still governed by pedophiles, cosplayers, ghouls, and the suck-ups who defend them. AI slop is taking over and people are getting stupider in real time. Everything in the grocery store is smaller and costs more.

There is a very real sense that the people causing all of these headlines want you to get lost in them, though. They want you to despair. They want you to give in to fashionable nihilism and jaded dorm-lobby cynicism. It makes it easier for them when you do.

In such a world the act of finding joy is a subversive one.

There are good books to be read, strong black tea to drink, and conversations to be had with loved ones. The weather is slowly warming and soon we here in Baja Canada will be able to go outside without coats. There are cats. I will hold on to these things in defiance of an era that wants me to think of violence and cruelty and corruption.

It is entirely possible to grieve for the world and still take pleasure in what is in front of us.

There are many kinds of stories to be told, and each does not invalidate the others, no matter how it may seem when we are in the middle of them. I have no illusions about the current state of the world, but I will hold onto what joy comes my way as best I can.

The State of the Union

My fellow Americans, the State of the Union is not good.

Indeed, we are in an extraordinarily perilous time, one that the American republic may not survive. This union has endured through a great many challenges – through wars and pandemics, though economic collapse and through civil disorder – and through it all there has been one constant: the most dangerous enemies of the United States have never been external. They have always been among us.

This was true during the Civil War, this union’s gravest threat, when treasonous southern states nearly destroyed the country to further their empire of human slavery, and it is no less true today.

We today in the United States are ruled by a collection of neo-Nazi ghouls using a senile child rapist as a meat puppet in order to reduce the country to a dictatorship while a corrupt Republican Congress stands idly by and cheers, and the only things that are standing in their way are the fact that they are blisteringly incompetent, the fact that the federal judiciary is still doing the job it gets paid to do, and the fact that the mass of Americans refuse to allow it.

All of those ghouls are home-raised, and whatever the statistical anomalies might say the official record states that the child rapist won the 2024 election with the support of a plurality of those Americans who bothered to vote. The call is coming from inside the house, my fellow Americans.

Let the following be submitted to a candid world:

Under the US Constitution, only Congress has the authority to declare war or commit US military forces into battle, and yet today this rogue administration has launched a war against Iran, one that has already killed more than fifty schoolgirls at an elementary school. This war stands in violation of both the US Constitution and the UN Charter – to which the US and its partner in this travesty Israel are both signatories – and constitutes a war crime. In a just world the people responsible for it would have already been arrested and held without bond for trial. In this world, where those people have access to power and make further claims to unlimited power, this will take some time.

The unprovoked attack on Iran parallels the unprovoked attack on Venezuela of just a few weeks ago. Whether the regimes in those countries are good, evil, or indifferent – and it would be hard to generate much sympathy for either of them on their own terms – the fact remains that it is not the job of the US to use military force against them unless they represent a clear and active threat to the United States, and only after such force has been Constitutionally approved. Further, the long-term consequences of these assaults are not predictable and, historically, these wars have not ended well for anyone involved.

What they are, however, is a desperate attempt to distract the American people and the world from the rapidly expanding horror of the Epstein Files.

Let’s start with the fact that the regime of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump remains in violation of the federal law that requires them to have released all of the files by now. According to estimates from British intelligence the US Department of Justice has released barely 3% of the files and the screeching banshee who runs that department went before Congress, lied under oath about that, and then refused to speak with or even acknowledge the Epstein survivors who were there in the room with her. She carried in an binder detailing everything that members of Congress had accessed while the DOJ had permitted them to look at the files – a grievously illegal but not at all surprising authoritarian move – and her main response to being asked about the pedophiles in power was to shout about the stock market.

Again, they’ve released barely 3% of the files. Files with victims’ names out in the open and pedophiles’ names redacted just in case you can’t figure out who they’re working for and what they’re trying to do. 3%. The fact that the allegations and documentary evidence regarding the rape and murder of children contained in those files is horrifying and deserving of pitchforks and torches should give you pause because that 3% is what they thought they could get away with releasing. Imagine the nightmare fuel that is in the other 97% of these files.

I saw an Instagram reel recently from a guy named Nick J. Freitas who summed up the only possible reaction to that. “You know,” he said, “whenever somebody says that maybe it’s time to move on from the Epstein files I’m always like, ‘Great, I totally agree. I think we should have moved on to the public execution phase of this a long time ago. So what’s the hold up? Do we not have enough woodchippers? I’ll donate.’"

Put me down for a donation as well, and I’ll also happily kick in some time building bleachers for the American public to watch when it happens.

We know from these files that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump is credibly accused of raping girls as young as 13 years old. We know his name appears in these files over 38,000 times – an order of magnitude more than anyone else’s other than Epstein himself. That’s almost 40 more times than Jesus appears in the Bible. It’s more than double the number of times than Harry Potter’s name appears in the entire seven-book series that’s named for him. Representative Jamie Raskin, who was able to view the unredacted files, searched for Trump’s name and got “more than a million” results. They’re Trump’s files more than they are Epstein’s.

You know who’s not in the Epstein files? Drag queens. Transgender people. Immigrants. Brown people. No, this is entirely about wealthy straight white men. Maybe the Republican Party needs to rethink its definition of a threat. Or maybe they already know and are okay with it. One or the other.

“The United States government is engaged in an active cover-up of the largest sex trafficking scandal and influence peddling scandal in the history of the United States, and Donald Trump is right at the center of it,” noted Representative Melanie Stansbury. The UN has noted that the crimes committed by Epstein and his crew are sufficiently vast that they fall under the heading of Crimes Against Humanity.

The cover up being conducted by the DOJ is open, blatant, unrepentant, and doomed to fail. At least nine other countries are investigating these files now, none of which are planning to hide the evidence they have. Britain’s Prince Andrew has already been arrested and will likely face serious legal consequences as a pedophile – the first senior royal to face serious legal charges since 1649, which didn’t end well for Charles I. Norway has arrested a former prime minister. Poland is well into its own investigation. It’s all going to come out, and when it does all hell will break loose. There will be blood.

Not enough popcorn in the world, really.

This is what they’re trying to distract you from with the attacks on Iran.

They’re also trying to distract you from the ongoing thuggery of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s private unaccountable army as ICE continues its reign of terror across the country. They have continued to execute people without consequence, they are stockpiling weapons as if they are preparing for war, and they are trying to build a network of concentration camps across the country to warehouse all of the people that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his neo-Nazi ghouls declare to be undesirable and if you think that’s going to stop with immigrants (documented or otherwise) then you clearly haven’t read a history book in your life.

Folks, immigrating to the US without documentation isn’t a crime. It’s a civil offense. It’s a misdemeanor, roughly on par with a parking ticket. You know what is a felony? Raping children. Consider that.

Every statistic that has come from people other than the thugs currently running amok in this country notes that the overwhelming majority of the people kidnapped by ICE have no criminal record and weren’t even considered threats by the regime that sent ICE after them. In point of fact, given the dregs of society that ICE is reduced to hiring since nobody with any moral fiber will work for them, statistically speaking if you kept all of the immigrants (documented or otherwise) and deported the ICE agents the crime rate in the US would decrease.

Meanwhile Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s tariffs were shot down by his own handpicked radical right Supreme Court, but not before upending world trade, spiking inflation, and alienating most of our trading partners. Now that the highest court in the land has told him to knock it off, his response has been to double down and try to weasel his way to do it again. Because your ability to afford food is not really his concern.

And with all of this – the illegal war, the pedophile protecting, the violent ICE thuggery, the continuing economic collapse of a country that had mostly recovered from the pandemic by the end of 2024 – the neo-Nazi ghouls running this shitshow know very well that they cannot win a free and fair election this coming November. That any such election will likely be such an overwhelming repudiation of their twisted agenda that they could not only be stymied from furthering it but also prosecuted for doing what they’ve already done.

Naturally their solution is to try to prevent any such election from happening.

They’ve introduced the SAVE Act, which would effectively disenfranchise anyone who has ever changed their name for any reason, such as most married women in the US. It would require burdensome and unconstitutional documentation for voters – you’d need a birth certificate and a passport, for example, and unless those are provided free of charge that would constitute a poll tax. And the administration is making those documents harder to get by ordering libraries not to provide pathways for them the way they’ve done in the US. The related MEGA Act – introduced by Wisconsin’s own Bryan Steil – is more or less the same disenfranchisement in a different package because the GOP is many things but imaginative isn’t one of them.

Meanwhile both the Cato Institute and the Heritage Foundation – two of the most right-wing organizations in the US – have publicly stated that voter fraud (and particularly the non-citizen voter fraud that the perpetrators of the SAVE and MEGA Acts are in theory so worried about) simply does not happen on any noticeable scale. The Heritage foundation examined US elections from 2003 to 2023 – over a billion separate votes – and discovered 24 instances of noncitizens voting, most of them by accident, for a fraud rater of 0.0000076%. The Cato Institute notes that Utah has 2.1 million registered voters and an investigation showed exactly one was a noncitizen and that person never cast a ballot. In Georgia there were 15 noncitizens loudly declared by the GOP to be registered in Macomb County, out of 724,000 voters, it turned out that three actually were citizens, four had already been removed from the rolls, and four more were already under investigation. This is a non-issue for anyone who actually has a clue.

It's about voter suppression, not election security. It’s just another form of gerrymandering – if they can choose who gets to vote, then they can determine the outcome of the election. A free and fair election with widespread voting from American citizens will be the death of MAGA and they know it.

The SAVE Act appears dead in the Senate at the time of this writing, and the MEGA Act hasn’t even passed the House. But news broke this week that figures in the administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump are circulating plans for an Executive Order that would allow Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump to seize control of the November elections completely. The odds of that succeeding are low but not zero, and the mere fact that it is even being seriously planned is enough to justify prosecution and punishment.

This would amount to a coup, and since Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump has already gotten away with one coup attempt unpunished it is not farfetched to think he’d try for a second.

Steve Bannon – one of the ghouls leftover from the first administration of Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump – has already floated the idea of using ICE to enforce who can and cannot vote in November. That ICE has no such authority is not apparently an issue for him. That conducting elections is, according to the US Constitution, the sole province of the states, doesn’t seem to be either.

As noted, the State of the Union is perilous and the survival of the American republic is not guaranteed. Nothing is. The Founders understood that republics were short lived, historically, that eventually they succumbed to authoritarianism, anarchy, or vice. They didn’t know how long their republic would last.

We, my fellow Americans, can make it last that much longer if we are vigilant, if we are active, and if we refuse to let this country be taken over by the sorts of people our ancestors shot in World War II.

This is our country.

The ghouls can’t have it.

Thank you, and good night.

An Evening of Music

We were supposed to go to a concert for Kim’s birthday, back in November, but the venue was a good drive away and we ended up with 14 inches (35cm) of snow that day so we hunkered down at home and were glad that they ended up rescheduling the show rather than just canceling it.

And last night was it.

The Movable Feast Tradition says that holidays happen when you have time for them, and if Kim’s birthday is going to be celebrated two months after the actual calendar date, well, that’s just how it works out isn’t it? There’s never a bad time for a celebration.

Although it has to be said that we are getting rather old to be out at concerts on a Wednesday night at venues that require a journey to get back home from, especially since work starts at the normal time no matter what. But sometimes you just have to throw caution to the wind, laugh in the face of danger, and drink caffeinated beverages after 4pm to ensure survival. It’s a dangerous job, and we get to do it.

We went up a bit early and had dinner at one of Kim’s favorite places – a restaurant that she introduced me to before we were even married – and then walked over to the venue. It’s a nice place to see a show if you don’t mind standing – there are a handful of chairs set up way off to house right, all clearly labeled “ADA Seating,” and another handful in a balcony way in the back, but the vast majority of people in attendance stood for the duration of the show.

On the down side, see above re: getting old. It’s hard on the feet after a while. On the plus side, it was pretty easy to get right up to the stage. We were one person back, maybe a yard or so from the stage, and the view was lovely.

Although when I am Grand Vizier of the Universe, one of my many Proclamations will be to impose height restrictions on people standing at the front of audiences. Dude, if you’re two meters tall go stand in the back and let the rest of us see. We did have to do a bit of jockeying to find our spot, but in the end it wasn’t that hard. We just shifted a bit to our left.

DakhaBrakha (the k’s are silent and you hit the h’s hard) consists of four musicians from Ukraine and they play what can perhaps best be described as Ukrainian folk music mixed with free-form jazz, house music, and forest sounds. At one point the singer headed off in a particularly growly direction and all I could think of was, “Hey – it’s Louie Armstrongsko!” It’s an interesting mix of styles, and they put on a really great show – nearly two hours of music without an intermission, and with some really fascinating background visuals as well.

Right before their encore song they auctioned off a piece of original art made by the singer with the proceeds going to benefit the Ukrainian fighters resisting the brutal Russian invasion that started four years ago almost exactly, and they raised a good amount of money. You have to love that. It became part of the show.

It was a long and tired drive home, but it was well worth it.

Happy birthday to Kim!

On the Recent Olympics

Well the Winter Olympics are over for another four years and now I have nothing to do but the work I should have been doing all along, so naturally I’m writing this blog post because surely there is something better I can be doing than my assigned tasks.

You’d think.

I always enjoy the Olympics. Yes, I know that the IOC is a cesspool of corruption that rivals Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s business empire. Yes, I know that these things rarely if ever benefit the places that put them on and in about eight years there will be sad little stories in the news featuring abandoned venues and tales of fiscal crisis. Yes, I know that the world did not stop revolving around its axis and the grotesque horror of modern American politics continued along its lethally immoral way unbothered by anything happening with the Olympics. I know all these things. But still.

You need a break sometimes. You need to focus on good things, and that’s what the athletes are for. These people trained for years to be there. Most of them will never win a medal and most of those people already know that going in but they’re there anyway because it’s enough to say that they were there. Many of them were competing in events that nobody had any idea whether or not they exist outside of an Olympics (skicross?) but which were fun to watch anyway and maybe they should be more well known.

Kim and I watched a fair bit of the Olympics this year, in this darkening world. It was a very nice way to try to stay sane in a climate that wants very much to prevent that.

We watched the figure skaters and marveled at the sheer grace and power of it all. You don’t realize how strong these people are until you see the close-up shots. We mostly saw the Americans because that’s what NBC shows to Americans, but I really loved how supportive most of the skaters were with each other – particularly, it has to be said, the American women. Alyssa Liu set a tone, after ditching the sport four years ago and then returning on her own terms to skate with joy for herself and her art, and watching her, Amber Glenn, and Isabeau Levito be there for each other – and in Glenn’s case, for at least one of the Japanese skaters as well, shooing away the press when that skater needed some time to herself – was a refreshing sight in a world consumed by meaningless rivalry.

The fact that a number of skaters managed to convince other skaters to be part of their their routines during the exhibition gala at the end was a lovely thing.

We watched the US women’s and men’s teams win hockey gold over Canada in overtime, in hard-fought games that could have easily (and in the men’s case probably should have) gone the other way but there is only one statistic that matters in the end and they came out on the plus side of it this time. I remember watching the Miracle on Ice in 1980 live, and while this wasn’t exactly the same it was nice to see. The fact that the women’s team declined Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s grudging invitation to visit was glorious, and I can only wish the men were similarly principled.

We watched a lot of the curling, and it was good to see the most sportsmanlike of games live up to its reputation, mostly, except for the Canadian men’s team, who were caught blatantly cheating, responded with obscenities when questioned, and somehow were not only not immediately disqualified, dunked in maple syrup, and sent home in disgrace but also were permitted to win gold in the end. That travesty did not take away from the larger fun of the sport, though.

We watched the speedskating, which always seems like it’s about three breaths away from catastrophe. We watched a pile of skiing events, including the skicross because it’s good goofy fun. We watched the bobsleds and the luge and the skeleton and wondered precisely how anyone would think that would be a good idea even if they were a lot of fun to watch.

We watched a lot of things.

It has to be said that the primary advantage the US has in these games, aside from enough national wealth to fund training for a lot of athletes and a population large enough to find fifty examples of pretty much anything you care to search for, is the simple fact that immigrants choose to come here. This is a valuable lesson that should be more loudly expressed and more eagerly taken to heart in this country.

But now it’s over, and we return to our regularly scheduled lives already in progress.

C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.

The Road Goes Ever On

I was one of those kids who took a deep dive into Middle Earth at an impressionable age and never quite resurfaced.

My introduction to that world came in early 1980 when some network decided to air the Rankin Bass version of The Lord of the Rings. I remember watching it and thinking that this was a great story but there had to be a better version of it out there than this.

Turns out there was, and I spent a good chunk of the next month reading the book, which the library was happy to lend me, and then much of the summer working as an assistant to my mother in the Montgomery County Courthouse fetching real estate records. She paid me $1/hour out of her own pocket and when I’d amassed enough funds I rode my bike up to the little bookstore in Suburban Square in Ardmore, just outside of Philadelphia, and bought the red-boxed single-volume edition and rode home with it bouncing around in the front basket. I read that annually for more than a decade after that. I can still write your name in Elvish script, which is not the most useful skill in the world but it’s mine and I enjoy it.

From there I read The Hobbit – the prequal to the main story, though Tolkien had to retcon the story to make it fit into the larger universe so there are a lot of differences between the first edition and the one that’s available now. Not all of the gaps got filled by the revisions, though, and one of my favorite facts about that process is that the canonical explanation for this is that Bilbo Baggins was just an unreliable narrator.

I also read The Silmarillion and enjoyed that immensely – it’s much more dense, but if you’re looking for the backstory of it all you will not be disappointed. There’s a reason I became a historian, after all.

I have reached the point in my life now where I am starting to deaccession things. I like stuff as much as the next person – ascetic I am not – but having been part of the process of clearing out my parents’ house I’m seeing the virtue of not leaving that task to my children whenever they need to think about such things.

One of the nicer consequences of this is that more and more of the gifts I receive for birthday or Christmas presents come in the form of experiences, of time spent with family, and that’s a lovely development.

For Christmas last year Lauren said she would get tickets for us to see a play up in Madison, and we went on Friday. I drove up after work and we made a grocery run (because as a parent that is one of the things I enjoy doing for my children) and had a lovely dinner together at a Thai place, and then we headed off to the theater.

The Hobbit: A Musical.

It has to be said that the musical part was pretty limited – most of it was a stage show, though there were some songs interspersed throughout. It was a fairly small but very talented ensemble cast who did a nice job of switching in and out of various roles, highlighted by some really clever costume changes. And they covered pretty much all of the main events of the book in a way that was fun for those of us who know the story and also worked pretty well for people new to it.

Honestly they did a better job with the story than Peter Jackson did.

We didn’t realize until a week or two before the show that it was a production aimed at children – the actors were adults, but a good chunk of the audience was too young to drive. They were captivated. And so were we.

Lauren and I had a lovely evening together.

Merry Christmas to me.

Staring Evil in the Face

We need to talk about the Epstein files.

Because holy fucking shit these things are grotesque.

One of the more interesting articles I read about them was written by a cop, someone who spent a good chunk of his career investigating the sexual abuse of children, and the whole point of this article was that we aren’t ready for these documents. He wasn’t trying to be condescending. His point was that the level of moral depravity and horror that is in these documents is deeply harmful to anyone who isn’t specifically trained to deal with it, and frankly it’s harmful to those people too. He wrote as a man who has stared true evil in the face and survived, barely, haunted and damaged but still mostly whole. For the rest of us, he had only warnings.

And the more that leaks out about the content of these files, the worse it gets.

I’m not going to get into the specifics of what I’ve read – I’ve only seen the public versions of things, and they’re horrifying even in their redacted and censored state. All I will say is that everyone mentioned in these files needs to be put in holding cells and thoroughly investigated and if they have actually committed the crimes against children that they are accused of committing then we as a nation need to think long and hard about whether the Eighth Amendment should be repealed because there needs to be some deeply cruel and unusual punishment inflicted on those fuckers.

All of them. No matter what their current job title may be.

I want every goddamned one of them dangled in a harness from a lamppost and then executed with a cheese grater, starting with their left big toe. I want those fuckers to suffer, immensely and without relief, for what they did to those children. I want a lot of things I won't get, but that doesn't stop me from wanting them.

We are not normalizing this shit. No way in hell. Not on my watch. Not in my country.

And here’s the kicker, folks.

Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump’s administration was required by federal law to release ALL of those files back in December. By most accounts they haven’t released half. I’ve seen some estimates that take into account new analyses indicating that they’ve barely released 4%. If this is the stuff they thought they could get away with releasing, what the actual fuck is in the rest?

I’ve heard defenders of the indefensible claim that if we prosecuted everyone in the Epstein files the whole system would collapse, and you know? If the system depends on protecting child rapists, then the system should burn and take every one of those vermin with it.

It’s going to be a long few months, folks. This isn’t going away, and the reckless actions that Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves are going to take to distract from this will get ever more desperate, ever more violent, ever more authoritarian, and ever more criminal.

Watch your back.

Sportsball

We had a sport-filled weekend, and I have to confess it was good to take a bit of a break from the madness of the world.

The joy of sports is that they are utterly meaningless. It’s a game, and you can get caught up in what’s going on and cheer for one side or another – especially if it’s Your Team, or just a team you happen to like for whatever inscrutable reason one decides to like a team – and the action goes this way and that until the game is over and then you just move on with your life. Nothing of any significance has changed. The sun rises the next morning, the state of the republic remains whatever it was prior to the final score, and all that happened is that you got a couple of hours of entertainment out of it.

More things should be like that.

It’s still early in the semester and this spring I only have one class going (versus the five that I had last semester), so there’s not much grading to do. I got Monday’s class prepped first thing Saturday morning – none of the various Sportsball events I wanted to see had started when I came downstairs, so why not – and the weekend was mine.

First up: Premier League soccer.

I watched the Premier League for over a decade before deciding to settle on a team to cheer for, mostly because I like the logo and their coach at the time reminded me of Ser Davos from Game of Thrones. The Onion Knight is still coaching in the Premier League, though on his third or fourth team since leaving, but I still support Wolves whenever I get a chance to watch.

On the plus side, I have discovered that this gives me a surprising amount of credibility among soccer fans here. The conversation is always the same. We get to talking. We discover that we share a fondness for watching Premier League soccer (while I have no particular issue calling it football, I’m American enough to default to soccer). They ask me what team I support, fully expecting me to say one of the Big Names (Liverpool, Man City, Man United, Chelsea, or Tottenham) and when I come back with Wolves there is a little pause as they decide that maybe I’m not just some bandwagon casual. Not many Wolves fans here in the US, I suppose.

On the down side, Wolves have pretty much already been relegated this year – they have a grand total of one win since the season started in August – and it will be a lot harder to watch them next year. So I try to catch them when I can.

Yeah, they lost. But they played hard and that has to count for something. As a Philadelphia sports fan, that’s all I ask.

Next up: the Olympics.

I generally prefer the Winter Olympics to the Summer version. Yes, I enjoy watching the track and field events and the soccer games and some of the random Weird Sports that they insist on adding every four years, but there’s nothing to compete with a Sportsball Festival that includes hockey, luge, and curling. I’ll watch the figure skating because it’s fun to see what people can do and even the skiing is entertaining for a while, but give me the sliding sports, the hockey games, and the sheer absurdity of curling any day.

C’mon baby, put the rock in the house.

I saw a couple of the women’s hockey games – both Canada and the US beat a determined and hard-working Swiss team that held them pretty close for most of the two games – and I’m looking forward to more of that. The mixed doubles curling event has been fun to watch and since Oliver and Lauren were curlers for several years back in the day and I went to my share of bonspiels, I actually know what’s going on when I watch. And I saw some of the luge runs, because that’s just astonishing that people are allowed to do that unmedicated. Skeleton coming up!

Kim and I did watch large chunks of the figure skating, and it’s really amazing how much better the skaters are than they used to be.

And finally, here in the US it was Super Bowl Sunday, the biggest secular holiday on the American calendar after the Fourth of July and the only day of the year where Americans are legally obligated to have junk food for dinner.

On the one hand, most of the usual parts of this were kind of meh. My team was eliminated early in the playoffs so there wasn’t the Home Town Interest to keep me focused on the game, and to be honest I can’t remember a Super Bowl where the game was so much of an afterthought. There was almost no hype for it leading up to the game that I noticed, and there were times last week when it was actually hard to remember who was going to play. And then they got to the actual game and, yeah, suddenly that made sense. If I had just woken up from a coma and you told me this was a week three preseason game I would have believed you.

Both of those teams played like they knew the winner was going to have to go to the White House afterward.

Even the commercials were uninteresting this year. There was only one that I thought was even remotely funny, in a gross sort of way, and even the good people who make Doritos clearly thought there wasn’t any point in spending their money this year so that was disappointing. From what I could gather from the ads, the American economy is being held together by cryptocurrency, AI, and prescription drugs right now and this does not give me much hope for the future.

Two bubbles and a list of side effects do not a prosperous era make.

I have to admit that I enjoyed the halftime show. I wanted to see an accomplished American with strong artistic skills and a finger on the cultural pulse of the nation, so naturally I watched the Bad Bunny show.

No, I wasn’t going to spend my time watching the Right Wing Safe Space Consolation Halftime Show featuring a has-been lip-synching about having sex with children, which is apparently what conservatives consider a comforting these days. It seemed a bit too much on the nose here in the Age of Epstein if you ask me.

So Bad Bunny it was.

As JJ Watt said later, “Did I understand a word of it? No I did not. Was it a vibe? Yes it was.”

The songs were interesting. The staging was phenomenal. The message was inspirational. The impotent rage it inspired in Convicted Felon Donald J. Trump and his minions, lackeys, cronies and slaves was deeply satisfying. Pedro Pascal was there in the background, which is always a good thing. And apparently Mr. Bunny ran more yards while carrying a football during that halftime show than the New England Patriots did during the actual game. Win all around, I say.

I also loved the fact that the plants were played by actual people in costumes. For everyone who played Tree #3 in their elementary school musical, this one’s for you.

And then we went back to the Olympics. 

A Wedding in February

One of the better things I’ve done in my life was to get ordained online because under the laws of the State of Wisconsin this means I’m legally allowed to officiate weddings.

A proper wedding is a time of joy. Two people declare their love for each other and set off for their future together, and while you don’t necessarily need to be married to do that it is a fact that rituals matter in life and it is a lovely thing to mark the occasion with a ceremony.

I got to officiate a wedding today.

I’ve known Camrin and Jacob since they were in grade school. Camrin, in fact, invited Oliver to her birthday party when they were both in kindergarten. We’re all adults now and I consider both of them to be friends, and when they asked me to be the officiant for their wedding, well, of course I said yes. It would be a pleasure and an honor.

I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.

It was a short, simple ceremony with just family in attendance. They’re planning a larger Celebration of Marriage ceremony for later but this was an important date for them so they wanted to have the actual wedding today.

There is much good in this world, and sometimes we get to be part of it.

Congratulations to Camrin and Jacob! May you know joy and love together all your days.