News and Updates

1. We’re coming to the end of the summer and starting tomorrow I’m back on contract down at Home Campus. There are events planned for pretty much every day this week, and we don’t even start classes until September. It was a quick summer.

2. On the plus side, the weather for the last week or so has been nice – not too hot, and no storms that have required warnings (at least not here in Our Little Town). In a world on fire, every day closer to November where it doesn’t hit 90F (33C) is a good day.

3. Why do all the states in the upper midwest have new black and white alternative license plates? Is this supposed to be cool? Hip? Vaguely menacing? If so, do people know that you can put one of those on a Prius, which sort of misses the point? And yes, the sort of Edgelord Dork who owns a Cybertruck is the perfect market for one of these but there is no saving that situation so they can do what they want. There is a certain amount of freedom in owning a Wankpanzer, I suppose – you can’t fall off the floor. But for the rest of us, what is the attraction of these silent-movie plates? I see them all over these days.

4. We’ve been going to Ethnic Festivals of late. Yesterday was the Ukrainian Festival up in Madison. A couple of Fridays ago was the Irish Festival in Milwaukee. They were both fun in different ways, and if you ever get a chance to see SuperCéilí in concert you absolutely should go. I suspect they are a live band rather than one you should listen to on recordings, but they’re quite an experience. The thing that is perhaps most striking about these festivals is how utterly American they are. Americans identify as their heritage in a way that people who actually live in those heritage countries find bizarre and frankly rather irritating, but that’s what you get from a country founded and built by immigrants. Now if we can only get the white supremacists currently running our government to understand this we’d all be a lot better off.

5. The garden keeps producing produce and something, he said, must be done with it. Kim is enjoying her tomatoes and zucchini. I made a batch of raspberry-jalapeño jam today that I’m looking forward to trying. The jalapeño jelly I made last week is finally starting to set – I think I guessed wrong on whether 1.5lb of jalapeños meant before or after stemming/seeding weight, but it looks like it will sort itself out. And yet there are at least 2kg of jalapeños still out there in the garden, waiting to be turned into something. Fortunately our jalapeños will not cause disease or death!

6. It occurred to me on Thursday that I had volunteered to give a couple of presentations for the Mother Ship’s public speaker series in October – a series that I have enjoyed participating in over the years. No problem, thought I, I already have most of the talk prepared and all I need to do is update and edit it. And when exactly did I agree to this? Oh. Oh my. I’ve been pressed into service for a class down at Home Campus at that time, so I’m hoping this can be resolved.

7. Sometimes you get an email from a student or even several emails from multiple different students and – as the late and much lamented Molly Ivins used to say – it’s kind of like finding Fidel Castro in your refrigerator. Hard to know what to think. I suspect, however, that in some ways it is going to be a very long year.

8. The Premier League season is underway, without my Wolves but so be it. Only six more weeks until hockey starts up again. We will hold onto and celebrate these bits of cyclical normalcy for as long as we can.

9. I have been working on a very long and well documented rant for about a month now, and eventually it will come out. The problem is that I find myself very tired of a lot of things right now. It is very tempting to fold in and let the world do its thing without me, but the problem with that is that the things the world chooses to do when you stop paying attention to it are very seldom the things that you or anyone with more than six working brain cells would want it to do. We press on.

10. When it happens, the world will celebrate in ways that will be utterly inappropriate, borderline obscene, and without any shred of remorse or shame whatsoever and I fully intend to take part. And I don’t even have to specify what it is, do I?