My dad used to make us milkshakes every once in a while when I was younger.
We had this old blender, the kind that used to be everywhere in the 1960s, with a tall square-cross-sectioned glass chamber that had a little propeller blade at the bottom and a base full of buttons that stood up about half an inch from its surface. There was a semiflexible rubberish sort of lid that kept whatever you were blending more or less inside. The whole thing weighed more than he did and sounded like a pier full of cargo ships unloading bolts in a hurry when in use, but it was more reliable than a geyser and powerful enough to chop concrete.
He also used it to make eggnog around the holidays, sometimes.
My brother and I would always look forward to milkshake nights. My dad would haul out the blender and a jug of milk, find the ice cream in the freezer, and unearth the bottle of Hershey’s syrup from wherever it was hiding. I think there were ice cubes in there too, or – to judge from the noise – possibly rocks. Whatever.
He’d toss it all together and fire up the blender and maybe a minute or two later there it would be – a homemade chocolate milkshake of epic memory, sweet and still frothy from the blender.
Those were always good nights.
He’s been gone three years now, and that simple fact always comes as a bit of a surprise to me. It feels like yesterday. It feels like forever. I suppose that’s how it always is with this sort of thing, but it’s still news to me.
Tonight I had a milkshake in his honor.
It was not homemade, but it was nevertheless tasty and a nice way to remember.
And that’s all it needed to be.
Friday, March 22, 2019
Thursday, March 21, 2019
Not Very Bright Lights, Not Very Big City
“A plague has come to Noah’s Ark.”
Lauren told me that on the way out this morning, as we were headed to the dentist’s office. It certainly feels that way.
On the plus side, the dentist appointment went well.
We’ve been slowly amassing poultry this week. At various times we’ve had as many as twelve (not thirteen – hey, they move around a lot and they’re hard to count) chickens and ten turkeys in assorted large bins in the living room, all chirping madly and, in the case of the turkeys (who really are the dumbest things on the planet, even if you include certain state legislators who shall go unnamed for the moment), learning how to eat. We lost one turkey early on, but that’s to be expected. They’re fragile things, and the attrition rate for them is high even when things go entirely right.
And when they don’t go entirely right, well.
We lost a chicken early this week, which was a bit of a surprise. Chickens are basically indestructible. But it was one of the smallest of the chicks in the bin, and we suspect that it just got trampled. Chickens are smarter than turkeys, but not, after all, by much.
We figured we had been pre-disastered and were good to go.
But when I came home from work yesterday Lauren greeted me with two bits of news.
First, another turkey had died – one of the bigger ones, which was a bit of a surprise. She’d already taken care of burial, so that was that.
And second, one of her rabbits – newly moved outside now that the weather has been consistently above freezing – seemed to have something wrong with an eye.
We are experienced with problems with rabbit eyes. Milkshake did not earn his nickname “the Dread Pirate Milkshake” for nothing, after all. He earned it thanks to a botfly infestation and a surprisingly expensive bit of veterinary surgery that introduced us all to the word “enucleation” which is a word you really do not want to look up. Trust me on this.
He's fine now, if lacking in the depth-perception department.
This particular rabbit – which we have not identified yet in order to reduce its stress levels, since identifying the rabbit involves flipping it over and examining it in rather personal ways – seems to have an abrasion of some sort on its eye as well as some blue sort of something creeping across the surface of the eye. We have been anointing it with unguents and keeping it comfortable, and at some point we will take it to an Expert for evaluation.
By the time we went to bed we figured we had resolved more than our requisite share of animal-related health crises for one week and could therefore sleep without fear.
However.
Turkey poults require rather warm temperatures when they are little. You can’t just put them in a large bin in your living room and forget about them – you have to keep them warm. Normally this entails putting a clip-on lamp with a 75-100 watt incandescent bulb in it on top of the wire mesh covering the bin and just not turning the thing off for a while.
We had this covered, we thought. We’re not noobs. This is not our first turkey poult rodeo. It is our fourth, which is a enough rodeos to figure this sort of thing out, even if it is not a professional quantity of rodeos.
And then sometime last night the bulb burned out.
This morning there were some frosty turkeys. We put them in with the chickens to keep them warm (though you’re not really supposed to put them in with chickens for all sorts of other reasons) and after I dropped Lauren off at the dentist I went out in search of 75-100 watt incandescent bulbs.
Do you know how hard it is to find incandescent bulbs anymore? Everything is LED now. LED bulbs are fantastic, by the way – they give you immense amounts of light for very little energy cost, and they emit almost no heat in the process. As a former firefighter I am very much in favor of light sources that emit no heat. Fewer house fires that way.
But sometimes the heat is the point, and LED lights are not useful for turkeys.
What isn’t LED is now some kind of super-efficient halogen light bulb that says 75 WATTS! on the packaging but really only draws 53 watts, which is not nearly enough to keep a small flock of turkeys warm even if the purchaser thinks it will actually provide 75 watts worth of warmth! Kim discovered this sad fact this afternoon when she went home and surveyed the devastation among the turkeys.
So here we are.
We have already lost one bronze turkey. Several more turkeys are rallying but could still slip away, even with the giant garage bulb that Kim found and installed to warm up the bin. We may yet have to restock our turkeys entirely.
A plague indeed.
Lauren told me that on the way out this morning, as we were headed to the dentist’s office. It certainly feels that way.
On the plus side, the dentist appointment went well.
We’ve been slowly amassing poultry this week. At various times we’ve had as many as twelve (not thirteen – hey, they move around a lot and they’re hard to count) chickens and ten turkeys in assorted large bins in the living room, all chirping madly and, in the case of the turkeys (who really are the dumbest things on the planet, even if you include certain state legislators who shall go unnamed for the moment), learning how to eat. We lost one turkey early on, but that’s to be expected. They’re fragile things, and the attrition rate for them is high even when things go entirely right.
And when they don’t go entirely right, well.
We lost a chicken early this week, which was a bit of a surprise. Chickens are basically indestructible. But it was one of the smallest of the chicks in the bin, and we suspect that it just got trampled. Chickens are smarter than turkeys, but not, after all, by much.
We figured we had been pre-disastered and were good to go.
But when I came home from work yesterday Lauren greeted me with two bits of news.
First, another turkey had died – one of the bigger ones, which was a bit of a surprise. She’d already taken care of burial, so that was that.
And second, one of her rabbits – newly moved outside now that the weather has been consistently above freezing – seemed to have something wrong with an eye.
We are experienced with problems with rabbit eyes. Milkshake did not earn his nickname “the Dread Pirate Milkshake” for nothing, after all. He earned it thanks to a botfly infestation and a surprisingly expensive bit of veterinary surgery that introduced us all to the word “enucleation” which is a word you really do not want to look up. Trust me on this.
He's fine now, if lacking in the depth-perception department.
This particular rabbit – which we have not identified yet in order to reduce its stress levels, since identifying the rabbit involves flipping it over and examining it in rather personal ways – seems to have an abrasion of some sort on its eye as well as some blue sort of something creeping across the surface of the eye. We have been anointing it with unguents and keeping it comfortable, and at some point we will take it to an Expert for evaluation.
By the time we went to bed we figured we had resolved more than our requisite share of animal-related health crises for one week and could therefore sleep without fear.
However.
Turkey poults require rather warm temperatures when they are little. You can’t just put them in a large bin in your living room and forget about them – you have to keep them warm. Normally this entails putting a clip-on lamp with a 75-100 watt incandescent bulb in it on top of the wire mesh covering the bin and just not turning the thing off for a while.
We had this covered, we thought. We’re not noobs. This is not our first turkey poult rodeo. It is our fourth, which is a enough rodeos to figure this sort of thing out, even if it is not a professional quantity of rodeos.
And then sometime last night the bulb burned out.
This morning there were some frosty turkeys. We put them in with the chickens to keep them warm (though you’re not really supposed to put them in with chickens for all sorts of other reasons) and after I dropped Lauren off at the dentist I went out in search of 75-100 watt incandescent bulbs.
Do you know how hard it is to find incandescent bulbs anymore? Everything is LED now. LED bulbs are fantastic, by the way – they give you immense amounts of light for very little energy cost, and they emit almost no heat in the process. As a former firefighter I am very much in favor of light sources that emit no heat. Fewer house fires that way.
But sometimes the heat is the point, and LED lights are not useful for turkeys.
What isn’t LED is now some kind of super-efficient halogen light bulb that says 75 WATTS! on the packaging but really only draws 53 watts, which is not nearly enough to keep a small flock of turkeys warm even if the purchaser thinks it will actually provide 75 watts worth of warmth! Kim discovered this sad fact this afternoon when she went home and surveyed the devastation among the turkeys.
So here we are.
We have already lost one bronze turkey. Several more turkeys are rallying but could still slip away, even with the giant garage bulb that Kim found and installed to warm up the bin. We may yet have to restock our turkeys entirely.
A plague indeed.
Sunday, March 17, 2019
Poultry Redux
Well, after taking a year off to focus on other things, Lauren has decided to go back to the 4H Poultry Project, which means that for the first time since 2017 our living room now echoes with the sound of chirping.
It also has that distinct chickeny tang that follows the introduction of poultry into an enclosed space by about 36 hours, but so it goes. You get used to it. They’re only going to be here until the weather warms up enough to ship them out to our friend’s barn with the rest of our birds, anyway.
I was not part of the Chicken Obtaining Expedition, since that required those involved to be at the fairgrounds a full county over by 6am on Saturday and the only reason I ever want to be up at that hour is to catch a flight to Europe and most airlines don’t let you take poultry on planes so those two things are rarely if ever going to coincide. Plus it is still reasonably chilly out there these days – not really winter anymore, but not quite spring either – and my bed is such a warm and comfortable place.
So Kim and Lauren ventured forth. They came, they saw, they poultried, and now we have nine [CORRECTION: thirteen - they're hard to keep track of] chickens in our living room. After Kim and Lauren got back home they went out again to a different friend’s barn and bought turkeys so we had three of those in there too, in a separate bin.
They’re not even our turkeys. We’re holding them for a different friend who is on vacation and will collect them at some point.
Although we’re down to two now. Turkey poults are very fragile things, and one of them was sufficiently worrisome that our friend with the barn didn’t even charge us for him. This turned out to be a good move.
When I came downstairs this morning I looked at him and figured he had died overnight and the only reason I didn’t bury him in the backyard right then was because I didn’t have my shoes on. By the time I got my shoes, though, it appeared that the little poult was still struggling on [insert Monty Python joke here] so we kept him warm and comfortable and waited for the inevitable to happen.
He’s buried now. He fought bravely, and if there is a next life for turkeys I hope it treats him better than this one did.
We’ll get our own turkeys on Tuesday, apparently. Bronze ones rather than the whites we have now – they don’t show dirt as much, and if you’d like to give a 40lb bird a bath before Fair time go ahead but we’ll stick with the bronzes thanks – and for all I know the process will repeat for at least one of them. For birds that get to be the size of beach balls they’re not sturdy at all.
Meanwhile we have a smorgasbord of chicken breeds randomly chirping in our living room, climbing on top of each other, and keeping the cats entertained.
There are many things that I find myself surprised to be doing at this point in my life. I am always astonished at how many of them involve poultry.
It also has that distinct chickeny tang that follows the introduction of poultry into an enclosed space by about 36 hours, but so it goes. You get used to it. They’re only going to be here until the weather warms up enough to ship them out to our friend’s barn with the rest of our birds, anyway.
I was not part of the Chicken Obtaining Expedition, since that required those involved to be at the fairgrounds a full county over by 6am on Saturday and the only reason I ever want to be up at that hour is to catch a flight to Europe and most airlines don’t let you take poultry on planes so those two things are rarely if ever going to coincide. Plus it is still reasonably chilly out there these days – not really winter anymore, but not quite spring either – and my bed is such a warm and comfortable place.
So Kim and Lauren ventured forth. They came, they saw, they poultried, and now we have nine [CORRECTION: thirteen - they're hard to keep track of] chickens in our living room. After Kim and Lauren got back home they went out again to a different friend’s barn and bought turkeys so we had three of those in there too, in a separate bin.
They’re not even our turkeys. We’re holding them for a different friend who is on vacation and will collect them at some point.
Although we’re down to two now. Turkey poults are very fragile things, and one of them was sufficiently worrisome that our friend with the barn didn’t even charge us for him. This turned out to be a good move.
When I came downstairs this morning I looked at him and figured he had died overnight and the only reason I didn’t bury him in the backyard right then was because I didn’t have my shoes on. By the time I got my shoes, though, it appeared that the little poult was still struggling on [insert Monty Python joke here] so we kept him warm and comfortable and waited for the inevitable to happen.
He’s buried now. He fought bravely, and if there is a next life for turkeys I hope it treats him better than this one did.
We’ll get our own turkeys on Tuesday, apparently. Bronze ones rather than the whites we have now – they don’t show dirt as much, and if you’d like to give a 40lb bird a bath before Fair time go ahead but we’ll stick with the bronzes thanks – and for all I know the process will repeat for at least one of them. For birds that get to be the size of beach balls they’re not sturdy at all.
Meanwhile we have a smorgasbord of chicken breeds randomly chirping in our living room, climbing on top of each other, and keeping the cats entertained.
There are many things that I find myself surprised to be doing at this point in my life. I am always astonished at how many of them involve poultry.
Friday, March 15, 2019
Continued Stray Thoughts on the Current Political Climate
1. Wasn’t Michael Cohen’s testimony all kinds of train-wreck goodness? Here is the lead fixer for one of the biggest crime families in America going on national television under oath to talk about what the higher ups have been doing. With documentary evidence. Truly we live in an age of wonder.
2. Of course the GOP spent most of its time calling him names rather than making any honest effort to examine the crimes he detailed or make any serious run at actually defending der Sturmtrumper. They know der Sturmtrumper’s guilty just like you and I do, but they refuse to admit it. They can’t admit it, one suspects, because they’re caught up in it as well, and will likely go down with their leader when it comes. All they can do is distract.
3.
4.
5. Just about the only person on that committee actually doing their job was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who asked specific, probing questions that set the groundwork for future inquiries the way that it is supposed to be done. This of course caused much paroxysms of horror among Republicans, who just cannot stomach the thought of someone who is female, not white, and smarter than they are, all rolled into one.
6.
7. One of the more fascinating bits of petty chicanery that emerged from that hearing is the fact that der Sturmtrumper has threatened all of the institutions of education which he has attended (confirmed, at least, by Fordham University, which released the threatening letter to the public – it was dated May 5, 2015, during der Sturmtrumper’s presidential campaign) with legal action if they released his grades. Seriously – the people who support him don’t care about his grades (I’ve had a long conversation with one of them recently and it became clear that no amount of booklarnin’ or edumacashin was going to move her off her preconceived notions and ideological fantasies), so I’m not really sure what he gained by doing this – but there it is.
8. On the more serious side, there was Cohen’s warning about 2020. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” he said, “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” The idea that der Sturmtrumper’s growing authoritarianism and hostility to both the Constitution and the republic as constructed by the Founding Fathers might stage an outright coup is, frankly, more credible than not. His supporters –eager to support the new strongman – would probably go along. They’ve gone along this far, after all. Buckle up if that happens, folks.
9. And that’s the thing in general about all of this. Will it actually make a difference? Der Sturmtrumper may well be the most corrupt president this country has ever had, but he does know his supporters well. On the campaign trail he bragged that he could kill someone in cold blood in broad daylight and not lose a single vote, and events have proven him right. In a recent Quinnipiac Poll (March 5), 82% of Republicans approve of his regime even in light of every criminal revelation and every catastrophic policy failure. 82%. It's even more astonishing when you consider that 33% of Republicans believe that he has committed crimes. Do the math. That means 15% of Republicans – roughly 1 in 7 – know very well that he’s a crook and support him anyway. This is your “party of values,” folks.
10. It also tells you that this is der Sturmtrumper’s party now. The moderate Republicans were thrown out in the early 90s when the Culture War was declared. The heretics who questioned the right-wing extremism that became the soul of the party were tossed when the Teabaggers took over in the early 21st century. Now all that’s left are der Sturmtrumper’s minions and those too blind to see that this isn’t Reagan’s GOP anymore.
11. In other news, the Great Voter Suppression Effort continues apace, though there are signs of stiffening resistance among the law abiding and the decent. A federal judge in Texas put a stop to the attempts of the GOP there to get rid of thousands of non-GOP voters – a “ham-handed and threatening” effort, according to the judge. Given that only 80 of the 100,000 voters targeted by the GOP for removal were actually ineligible to vote (and further given that no evidence was ever given that any of them actually attempted to vote), that’s a pretty fair description. But then Voting While Not Republican is a prosecutable offense, according to the GOP.
12. Can we just get over the illusion that the GOP gives a damn about national security? Their president is the greatest security threat this country faces, and yet they continue to give him their slavering support. He sold out Israel in May of 2017, blabbing about a major Israeli espionage operation in front of the Russian foreign minister. He regularly speaks on an insecure iPhone that is, according to American officials, closely monitored by the Chinese. He overrode the opposition of career intelligence officials to give his incompetent son-in-law permanent security clearance. He coddles dictators and angers allies, and if he weren’t the darling of the far right wing in this country we’d have had him jailed by now.
13. Although even his dictator-coddling skills seem to be failing him these days. Did anyone else think that his latest fiasco with North Korea was doomed from the get-go or was that just me? So North Korea is now actively expanding its nuclear program and the US looks like a country stupid enough to give der Sturmtrumper the keys to the government. Color me shocked.
14.
15. So, are we tired of winning yet? It looks like der Sturmtrumper is continuing the recent Republican trend of destroying the economy to wild applause from sycophants. As the latest example, according to the US Commerce Department the trade deficit hit $891,200,000,000 in 2018, the largest such deficit in the 243 years this country has been in existence. This beats the previous record set in 2006. Remind me, which party controlled the White House in 2006? Oh, right. The GOP. Even if you include the services sector – a part of the economy the US remains fairly strong in spite of everything – the deficit last year was $621,000,000,000 which is more than $100,000,000,000 worse than it ever was under Obama (who was, for the record, not a Republican).
16. Some of this is due to the Reverse Robin Hood Tax Giveaway – a $1,500,000,000,000 transfer of wealth away from middle and working class Americans and into the hands of the already obscenely wealthy, something that every competent economist in the United States said would destroy what fiscal responsibility this country had managed to recover under Obama and cause the trade deficit to rise. And lo and behold, the deficit last year skyrocketed to $779,000,000,000 – a 17% increase over 2017 – because of the amount of borrowing that this entails, and that ultimately encourages the trade deficit to rise as well. It’s just math.
17. The budget deficit for this fiscal year is expected to be $985,000,000,000 – roughly 26% higher than last year. Just in case you’re wondering. We’re on a pace to have trillion-dollar deficits without a recession to try to stimulate our way out of, and that has never happened before in all of human history.
18. Part of the problem for this also is that der Sturmtrumper doesn’t actually seem to understand that trade wars and protectionist tariffs aren’t really helpful here. He’s been bragging that his tariffs on Chinese goods have been bringing in money to the US Treasury because the Chinese are paying them, but that’s frankly stupid. They don’t pay those tariffs. Consumers do. As David Weinstein, a professor of economics at Columbia University, said, “When we impose a tariff, it is the domestic consumers and purchasers of imports that bear the full cost of the tariffs.” Really, folks – this isn’t hard. You’re losing. You – yes you, the American consumer – are literally paying for der Sturmtrumper’s ignorance.
19. If you want some numbers, two different papers published by some of the world’s best economists recently declared those tariffs to be the worst economic idea since the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that were prime contributors to the Great Depression. The papers note that the tariffs are costing US companies and consumers some $3,000,000,000 per month in fees plus another $1,400,000,000 per month in deadweight losses, not to mention $165,000,000,000 a year in lost trade and supply chain reorganization costs. So much winning!
20. I suppose it’s just one of those ironies that the US counties that are most hard hit by these tariffs are precisely the ones that supported der Sturmtrumper and continue to support him even now. Someday marketing majors and propaganda specialists will study how the modern GOP convinced 47% of the American public that slitting their own economic throats was their patriotic duty.
21. Meanwhile the February jobs report shows only 20,000 jobs gained in that month – roughly 150,000 fewer than expected. This is a signal of weaker economic news ahead – what little stimulus effect the Reverse Robin Hood Tax Giveaway had has now ended. Trends in the rest of the world point toward softer economic growth in general. American manufacturing is slowing, and the services sector is as well. Watch your back.
22. One of the things that often gets forgotten in the focus on partisan political news is just how much American agree on. 75% favor higher taxes for the wealthy. 80% think corporations aren’t paying their fair share of taxes either. 83% favor strong net neutrality rules. 92% want Medicare to be able to negotiate for lower drug prices. 71% support raising the minimum wage. 62% agree that immigrants strengthen the US and make the country better. 85% want paid leave to deal with health issues. 82% say mothers should have paid leave after childbirth. 69% think fathers should too. 86% think we should spend more on public education. 62% favor marriage equality. 64% want to limit the influence of big money in politics, with 78% specifically wanting the Citizens United decision to be overturned. 66% oppose separating families at the border. 79% want DREAMers to be offered a path to citizenship and 83% want undocumented immigrants to have a path toward legalization rather than be deported. 66% want stricter gun laws, and 97% want background checks on all buyers including at gun shows a figure that clearly includes the majority of gun owners. And yet we have none of these things.
As Tim Wu recently noted in The New York Times, “The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring most of what the country wants – as much as demagogy and political divisiveness – is what is making the public so angry.”
The other thing that feeds into this – something Mr. Wu did not note in his article – is that the policies that the majority wants are generally the ones championed by the Democratic Party. There is not a single major plank in the GOP platform that commands the support of a majority of Americans – not one. And yet we have a minority government determined to shove their policies down the throats of the majority and flatly refusing to accommodate any kind of dissent.
23. Well it looks like the US is finally grounding those Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 planes that have been crashing all over the world, the last major country using them to do so. It’s probably not a coincidence that the FAA has been without an Administrator for the last 18 months because der Sturmtrumper couldn’t be bothered to replace the last guy. After all, what’s a few dead passengers when there are profits to be made?
24. The thing about der Sturmtrumper is that you never have to wait very long for his brutally anti-American character to surface. He’s not even pretending to be anything other than a wannabe petit-Fascist dictator anymore. Please note his recent comments to Breitbart about how his “tough people” supporters are going to rampage through the streets if people keep being mean to him.
As Jim Wright so eloquently responded, “Trump – the guy who sat out his war with fake bone spurs and who can’t figure out how an umbrella works – gonna lead some tough guys in murdering Americans. See in in the street, Motherfucker.”
25.
26. In the wake of Fox News In-House Misogynist Tucker Carlson’s recent comments defending child rape, marriages between adult men and underage girls (hey, he’s on the same side as the Pedophile Roy Moore, after all) and generally being an asshole toward everyone whose penis isn’t white and whose hat isn’t red, the right wingers who support him have pretty much unanimously said, “Okay.” There’s no sense of irritation, let alone outrage, because the modern conservative movement has no moral center whatsoever. As Steve Almond of WBUR notes, “There’s almost nothing a conservative politician or pundit can do or say that the GOP’s base won’t somehow ignore or justify. … [T]here is no guiding morality at the heart of modern conservatism. The party’s only aim is to hold power. It is wholly unmoored from coherent policy aims, aside from the protection of the donor class that underwrites it.” So if you’re waiting for the GOP to feel shame about its vicious sins, you may want to settle in for a while. Pack a lunch.
27. If you doubt that the GOP is the Party of Pedophilia after the sterling examples of Roy Moore and Fox News In-House Misogynist Tucker Carlson, consider the Idaho legislature, which last month voted down a bill that would have blocked marriage for children 15 years old or younger. The bill, proposed by a Democrat, was rejected by the GOP controlled Idaho legislature 39-28. So yeah, no shame.
28. In case you have ever wondered where the real terrorist threat to the United States is, perhaps you should look at a study done by the Daily Caller News Foundation – an institution founded by Fox News In-House Misogynist Tucker Carlson, oddly enough – which looked at an earlier study done by the Anti-Defamation League that looked at extremist murders by the ideology of the murderers between 2008 and 2017. Carlson’s foundation set out to disprove the ADL’s claim that 74% of the ideologically motivated terror attacks in the United States during that decade were committed by right-wing extremists rather than left-wing or Islamic extremists. Instead, they found that the ADL underestimated how much of the violence came from the right. “Our findings support the ADL statistic. Using their definition of right-wing extremists, we found that 92 percent of ideologically motivated homicide incidents were committed with a right-wing extremist or white supremacist motive.” Just pointing out that even the right-wingers are admitting this.
29. If you don’t think this matters, consider the recent massacre in New Zealand, where white supremacist right-wing extremists murdered 49 people praying at a couple of mosques. The halfwits who did this proudly wrote in their penny-ante manifestos about how much they supported der Sturmtrumper as a “symbol of renewed white identity” and how much inspiration they took from the American conservative movement these days. Your party of values exporting its values to peaceful places around the world, folks.
30. Just as a side note, for all the right-wing hysteria about Bad Brown People coming to do you harm, the simple fact is that the majority of mass shootings in this country are committed by white men. 54% of the mass shootings since 1982, in fact, which is not bad for 32% of the population. If we’re going to worry about dangerous people who should be watched carefully and prevented from owning high-powered firearms, statistically that would be a good group to start with.
31.
32. The House of Representatives voted 420-0 – that includes almost every Republican as well as every Democrat, in case you can’t do math – to have the Mueller Report released publicly. On the one hand, this is an encouraging sign that people on both sides of the partisan divide want transparency and accountability. For crying out loud, you can’t get that kind of unanimity on resolutions praising apple pie and baseball these days. On the other hand, the bill immediately died in the Senate when GOP Senator Lindsey Graham – who has gone from a Sturmtrumper skeptic to his most loyal lapdog – immediately blocked the Senate from even considering the House bill. Because covering up crimes seems to be the GOP way these days, and not even the brief ray of disinfecting sunlight offered by the House GOP can overturn that.
33. Der Sturmtrumper, in an obvious attempt to coddle the right-wing snowflakes whose feelings get hurt when their odious views are met with scorn and derision (hello, Milo Yiannopolis! Nice to have you reading along!), has signed an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars,” in his own words. Of course, that cuts both ways. Liberty University and any number of other fundamentalist Christian, right-wing universities receive piles of federal research dollars too. As Jim Wright noted on Facebook the other day, “They will now have to allow free speech on ABORTION, birth control, LGBT issues, atheism, gun control, immigration, Islamic rights, etc. Or lose their research funding. I look forward to the day that a member of the Church of Satan demands to speak at Liberty University.”
34. Earlier this month the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed HR1 – a major political reform bill aimed at returning the United States government to the people it supposedly represents. The bill has a number of fairly common sense proposals in it. It would establish public financing of political campaigns to try to get big money donors out of the process and return elections to voters rather than donors. Similarly, it supports a Constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision legalizing corporate bribery in elections. It would force SuperPACs and other dark money organizations to disclose their donors rather than lurk in the shadows. It would require any candidate for president or vice president to disclose the last ten years of their tax returns, and stop members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment suits against them.
Perhaps most importantly, it would make voting easier and more fair by creating an automatic voter registration process, promoting early voting, making federal election days holidays so citizens wouldn’t have to miss work to vote, prohibiting partisan voter purges, improving election security to avoid foreign tampering, and ending partisan gerrymandering.
I’m not sure how any American patriot can oppose these things, which is why I am utterly unsurprised by the GOP’s frantic opposition to these things. Mitch McConnell – The Most Corrupt Man in Washington – has repeatedly assaulted the bill as “a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party. It should be called the Democrat Politician Protection Act.”
Think about that.
As Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post recently, “I’m not sure if McConnell understands what a startling admission that is on his part. Because what McConnell is saying is that if our voting system were more efficient, more open and more fair, then the inevitable result would be fewer Republicans winning elections. In other words, Republican success depends on the system working in ways that restrict access to the ballot. I happen to think that’s fairly obvious and has been for some time. But it’s remarkable to hear the second most powerful Republican in America admit it.”
2. Of course the GOP spent most of its time calling him names rather than making any honest effort to examine the crimes he detailed or make any serious run at actually defending der Sturmtrumper. They know der Sturmtrumper’s guilty just like you and I do, but they refuse to admit it. They can’t admit it, one suspects, because they’re caught up in it as well, and will likely go down with their leader when it comes. All they can do is distract.
3.
4.
5. Just about the only person on that committee actually doing their job was Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who asked specific, probing questions that set the groundwork for future inquiries the way that it is supposed to be done. This of course caused much paroxysms of horror among Republicans, who just cannot stomach the thought of someone who is female, not white, and smarter than they are, all rolled into one.
6.
7. One of the more fascinating bits of petty chicanery that emerged from that hearing is the fact that der Sturmtrumper has threatened all of the institutions of education which he has attended (confirmed, at least, by Fordham University, which released the threatening letter to the public – it was dated May 5, 2015, during der Sturmtrumper’s presidential campaign) with legal action if they released his grades. Seriously – the people who support him don’t care about his grades (I’ve had a long conversation with one of them recently and it became clear that no amount of booklarnin’ or edumacashin was going to move her off her preconceived notions and ideological fantasies), so I’m not really sure what he gained by doing this – but there it is.
8. On the more serious side, there was Cohen’s warning about 2020. “Given my experience working for Mr. Trump,” he said, “I fear that if he loses the election in 2020 that there will never be a peaceful transition of power.” The idea that der Sturmtrumper’s growing authoritarianism and hostility to both the Constitution and the republic as constructed by the Founding Fathers might stage an outright coup is, frankly, more credible than not. His supporters –eager to support the new strongman – would probably go along. They’ve gone along this far, after all. Buckle up if that happens, folks.
9. And that’s the thing in general about all of this. Will it actually make a difference? Der Sturmtrumper may well be the most corrupt president this country has ever had, but he does know his supporters well. On the campaign trail he bragged that he could kill someone in cold blood in broad daylight and not lose a single vote, and events have proven him right. In a recent Quinnipiac Poll (March 5), 82% of Republicans approve of his regime even in light of every criminal revelation and every catastrophic policy failure. 82%. It's even more astonishing when you consider that 33% of Republicans believe that he has committed crimes. Do the math. That means 15% of Republicans – roughly 1 in 7 – know very well that he’s a crook and support him anyway. This is your “party of values,” folks.
10. It also tells you that this is der Sturmtrumper’s party now. The moderate Republicans were thrown out in the early 90s when the Culture War was declared. The heretics who questioned the right-wing extremism that became the soul of the party were tossed when the Teabaggers took over in the early 21st century. Now all that’s left are der Sturmtrumper’s minions and those too blind to see that this isn’t Reagan’s GOP anymore.
11. In other news, the Great Voter Suppression Effort continues apace, though there are signs of stiffening resistance among the law abiding and the decent. A federal judge in Texas put a stop to the attempts of the GOP there to get rid of thousands of non-GOP voters – a “ham-handed and threatening” effort, according to the judge. Given that only 80 of the 100,000 voters targeted by the GOP for removal were actually ineligible to vote (and further given that no evidence was ever given that any of them actually attempted to vote), that’s a pretty fair description. But then Voting While Not Republican is a prosecutable offense, according to the GOP.
12. Can we just get over the illusion that the GOP gives a damn about national security? Their president is the greatest security threat this country faces, and yet they continue to give him their slavering support. He sold out Israel in May of 2017, blabbing about a major Israeli espionage operation in front of the Russian foreign minister. He regularly speaks on an insecure iPhone that is, according to American officials, closely monitored by the Chinese. He overrode the opposition of career intelligence officials to give his incompetent son-in-law permanent security clearance. He coddles dictators and angers allies, and if he weren’t the darling of the far right wing in this country we’d have had him jailed by now.
13. Although even his dictator-coddling skills seem to be failing him these days. Did anyone else think that his latest fiasco with North Korea was doomed from the get-go or was that just me? So North Korea is now actively expanding its nuclear program and the US looks like a country stupid enough to give der Sturmtrumper the keys to the government. Color me shocked.
14.
15. So, are we tired of winning yet? It looks like der Sturmtrumper is continuing the recent Republican trend of destroying the economy to wild applause from sycophants. As the latest example, according to the US Commerce Department the trade deficit hit $891,200,000,000 in 2018, the largest such deficit in the 243 years this country has been in existence. This beats the previous record set in 2006. Remind me, which party controlled the White House in 2006? Oh, right. The GOP. Even if you include the services sector – a part of the economy the US remains fairly strong in spite of everything – the deficit last year was $621,000,000,000 which is more than $100,000,000,000 worse than it ever was under Obama (who was, for the record, not a Republican).
16. Some of this is due to the Reverse Robin Hood Tax Giveaway – a $1,500,000,000,000 transfer of wealth away from middle and working class Americans and into the hands of the already obscenely wealthy, something that every competent economist in the United States said would destroy what fiscal responsibility this country had managed to recover under Obama and cause the trade deficit to rise. And lo and behold, the deficit last year skyrocketed to $779,000,000,000 – a 17% increase over 2017 – because of the amount of borrowing that this entails, and that ultimately encourages the trade deficit to rise as well. It’s just math.
17. The budget deficit for this fiscal year is expected to be $985,000,000,000 – roughly 26% higher than last year. Just in case you’re wondering. We’re on a pace to have trillion-dollar deficits without a recession to try to stimulate our way out of, and that has never happened before in all of human history.
18. Part of the problem for this also is that der Sturmtrumper doesn’t actually seem to understand that trade wars and protectionist tariffs aren’t really helpful here. He’s been bragging that his tariffs on Chinese goods have been bringing in money to the US Treasury because the Chinese are paying them, but that’s frankly stupid. They don’t pay those tariffs. Consumers do. As David Weinstein, a professor of economics at Columbia University, said, “When we impose a tariff, it is the domestic consumers and purchasers of imports that bear the full cost of the tariffs.” Really, folks – this isn’t hard. You’re losing. You – yes you, the American consumer – are literally paying for der Sturmtrumper’s ignorance.
19. If you want some numbers, two different papers published by some of the world’s best economists recently declared those tariffs to be the worst economic idea since the 1930 Smoot-Hawley tariffs that were prime contributors to the Great Depression. The papers note that the tariffs are costing US companies and consumers some $3,000,000,000 per month in fees plus another $1,400,000,000 per month in deadweight losses, not to mention $165,000,000,000 a year in lost trade and supply chain reorganization costs. So much winning!
20. I suppose it’s just one of those ironies that the US counties that are most hard hit by these tariffs are precisely the ones that supported der Sturmtrumper and continue to support him even now. Someday marketing majors and propaganda specialists will study how the modern GOP convinced 47% of the American public that slitting their own economic throats was their patriotic duty.
21. Meanwhile the February jobs report shows only 20,000 jobs gained in that month – roughly 150,000 fewer than expected. This is a signal of weaker economic news ahead – what little stimulus effect the Reverse Robin Hood Tax Giveaway had has now ended. Trends in the rest of the world point toward softer economic growth in general. American manufacturing is slowing, and the services sector is as well. Watch your back.
22. One of the things that often gets forgotten in the focus on partisan political news is just how much American agree on. 75% favor higher taxes for the wealthy. 80% think corporations aren’t paying their fair share of taxes either. 83% favor strong net neutrality rules. 92% want Medicare to be able to negotiate for lower drug prices. 71% support raising the minimum wage. 62% agree that immigrants strengthen the US and make the country better. 85% want paid leave to deal with health issues. 82% say mothers should have paid leave after childbirth. 69% think fathers should too. 86% think we should spend more on public education. 62% favor marriage equality. 64% want to limit the influence of big money in politics, with 78% specifically wanting the Citizens United decision to be overturned. 66% oppose separating families at the border. 79% want DREAMers to be offered a path to citizenship and 83% want undocumented immigrants to have a path toward legalization rather than be deported. 66% want stricter gun laws, and 97% want background checks on all buyers including at gun shows a figure that clearly includes the majority of gun owners. And yet we have none of these things.
As Tim Wu recently noted in The New York Times, “The defining political fact of our time is not polarization. It’s the inability of even large bipartisan majorities to get what they want on issues like these. Call it the oppression of the supermajority. Ignoring most of what the country wants – as much as demagogy and political divisiveness – is what is making the public so angry.”
The other thing that feeds into this – something Mr. Wu did not note in his article – is that the policies that the majority wants are generally the ones championed by the Democratic Party. There is not a single major plank in the GOP platform that commands the support of a majority of Americans – not one. And yet we have a minority government determined to shove their policies down the throats of the majority and flatly refusing to accommodate any kind of dissent.
23. Well it looks like the US is finally grounding those Boeing 737 Max 8 and 9 planes that have been crashing all over the world, the last major country using them to do so. It’s probably not a coincidence that the FAA has been without an Administrator for the last 18 months because der Sturmtrumper couldn’t be bothered to replace the last guy. After all, what’s a few dead passengers when there are profits to be made?
24. The thing about der Sturmtrumper is that you never have to wait very long for his brutally anti-American character to surface. He’s not even pretending to be anything other than a wannabe petit-Fascist dictator anymore. Please note his recent comments to Breitbart about how his “tough people” supporters are going to rampage through the streets if people keep being mean to him.
As Jim Wright so eloquently responded, “Trump – the guy who sat out his war with fake bone spurs and who can’t figure out how an umbrella works – gonna lead some tough guys in murdering Americans. See in in the street, Motherfucker.”
25.
26. In the wake of Fox News In-House Misogynist Tucker Carlson’s recent comments defending child rape, marriages between adult men and underage girls (hey, he’s on the same side as the Pedophile Roy Moore, after all) and generally being an asshole toward everyone whose penis isn’t white and whose hat isn’t red, the right wingers who support him have pretty much unanimously said, “Okay.” There’s no sense of irritation, let alone outrage, because the modern conservative movement has no moral center whatsoever. As Steve Almond of WBUR notes, “There’s almost nothing a conservative politician or pundit can do or say that the GOP’s base won’t somehow ignore or justify. … [T]here is no guiding morality at the heart of modern conservatism. The party’s only aim is to hold power. It is wholly unmoored from coherent policy aims, aside from the protection of the donor class that underwrites it.” So if you’re waiting for the GOP to feel shame about its vicious sins, you may want to settle in for a while. Pack a lunch.
27. If you doubt that the GOP is the Party of Pedophilia after the sterling examples of Roy Moore and Fox News In-House Misogynist Tucker Carlson, consider the Idaho legislature, which last month voted down a bill that would have blocked marriage for children 15 years old or younger. The bill, proposed by a Democrat, was rejected by the GOP controlled Idaho legislature 39-28. So yeah, no shame.
28. In case you have ever wondered where the real terrorist threat to the United States is, perhaps you should look at a study done by the Daily Caller News Foundation – an institution founded by Fox News In-House Misogynist Tucker Carlson, oddly enough – which looked at an earlier study done by the Anti-Defamation League that looked at extremist murders by the ideology of the murderers between 2008 and 2017. Carlson’s foundation set out to disprove the ADL’s claim that 74% of the ideologically motivated terror attacks in the United States during that decade were committed by right-wing extremists rather than left-wing or Islamic extremists. Instead, they found that the ADL underestimated how much of the violence came from the right. “Our findings support the ADL statistic. Using their definition of right-wing extremists, we found that 92 percent of ideologically motivated homicide incidents were committed with a right-wing extremist or white supremacist motive.” Just pointing out that even the right-wingers are admitting this.
29. If you don’t think this matters, consider the recent massacre in New Zealand, where white supremacist right-wing extremists murdered 49 people praying at a couple of mosques. The halfwits who did this proudly wrote in their penny-ante manifestos about how much they supported der Sturmtrumper as a “symbol of renewed white identity” and how much inspiration they took from the American conservative movement these days. Your party of values exporting its values to peaceful places around the world, folks.
30. Just as a side note, for all the right-wing hysteria about Bad Brown People coming to do you harm, the simple fact is that the majority of mass shootings in this country are committed by white men. 54% of the mass shootings since 1982, in fact, which is not bad for 32% of the population. If we’re going to worry about dangerous people who should be watched carefully and prevented from owning high-powered firearms, statistically that would be a good group to start with.
31.
32. The House of Representatives voted 420-0 – that includes almost every Republican as well as every Democrat, in case you can’t do math – to have the Mueller Report released publicly. On the one hand, this is an encouraging sign that people on both sides of the partisan divide want transparency and accountability. For crying out loud, you can’t get that kind of unanimity on resolutions praising apple pie and baseball these days. On the other hand, the bill immediately died in the Senate when GOP Senator Lindsey Graham – who has gone from a Sturmtrumper skeptic to his most loyal lapdog – immediately blocked the Senate from even considering the House bill. Because covering up crimes seems to be the GOP way these days, and not even the brief ray of disinfecting sunlight offered by the House GOP can overturn that.
33. Der Sturmtrumper, in an obvious attempt to coddle the right-wing snowflakes whose feelings get hurt when their odious views are met with scorn and derision (hello, Milo Yiannopolis! Nice to have you reading along!), has signed an executive order “requiring colleges and universities to support free speech if they want federal research dollars,” in his own words. Of course, that cuts both ways. Liberty University and any number of other fundamentalist Christian, right-wing universities receive piles of federal research dollars too. As Jim Wright noted on Facebook the other day, “They will now have to allow free speech on ABORTION, birth control, LGBT issues, atheism, gun control, immigration, Islamic rights, etc. Or lose their research funding. I look forward to the day that a member of the Church of Satan demands to speak at Liberty University.”
34. Earlier this month the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives passed HR1 – a major political reform bill aimed at returning the United States government to the people it supposedly represents. The bill has a number of fairly common sense proposals in it. It would establish public financing of political campaigns to try to get big money donors out of the process and return elections to voters rather than donors. Similarly, it supports a Constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision legalizing corporate bribery in elections. It would force SuperPACs and other dark money organizations to disclose their donors rather than lurk in the shadows. It would require any candidate for president or vice president to disclose the last ten years of their tax returns, and stop members of Congress from using taxpayer money to settle sexual harassment suits against them.
Perhaps most importantly, it would make voting easier and more fair by creating an automatic voter registration process, promoting early voting, making federal election days holidays so citizens wouldn’t have to miss work to vote, prohibiting partisan voter purges, improving election security to avoid foreign tampering, and ending partisan gerrymandering.
I’m not sure how any American patriot can oppose these things, which is why I am utterly unsurprised by the GOP’s frantic opposition to these things. Mitch McConnell – The Most Corrupt Man in Washington – has repeatedly assaulted the bill as “a naked attempt to change the rules of American politics to benefit one party. It should be called the Democrat Politician Protection Act.”
Think about that.
As Paul Waldman wrote in the Washington Post recently, “I’m not sure if McConnell understands what a startling admission that is on his part. Because what McConnell is saying is that if our voting system were more efficient, more open and more fair, then the inevitable result would be fewer Republicans winning elections. In other words, Republican success depends on the system working in ways that restrict access to the ballot. I happen to think that’s fairly obvious and has been for some time. But it’s remarkable to hear the second most powerful Republican in America admit it.”
Wednesday, March 13, 2019
News and Updates
1. I’ve had the same general winter crud for two weeks now, and it is getting old. It has settled into a persistent cough the way they always do with me – if the next great pandemic is respiratory just say goodbye to me now – and it’s been keeping me up at night, cough meds or no. This is not doing Kim any favors either. Oh well.
2. Down at Home Campus we’re in the middle of switching over from one major academic software package to a different major academic software package that supposedly does more or less the same thing, and my mission this week has been to figure out a) what I need to access from the old package to do my job, b) what I can actually access in the new package, and c) how to square these things. I’ve been going through all of the menus and submenus, systematically, and just clicking on things and so far I have not shorted out the power grid or launched any cruise missiles, so I figure I’m doing well. One fascinating discovery during this process has been that I may have access to something in the new package that don’t think I had in the old one, except that I just know that if I tell them that they will go in with a chainsaw and not only take away that particular access but also everything remotely connected to it, much of which I actually do need to do my job. Maybe if I just promise just to forget I ever noticed this – really, having it provides no benefit to me at all – they’ll leave me alone? We’ll see.
3. Tabitha has been home from Small Liberal Arts College on spring break this week, and she asked if she could bring home a friend who didn’t want to travel all the way to Texas to go back to his home. We figured why not – throw another dinner plate on the table and we’re good, really. We have the space. The other night we got into a conversation and he mentioned that where he’s from they have this thing called Big Tex, which is a 55-foot high animatronic statue by the state fairgrounds. It’s, well, impressive.
But what’s even more impressive, it turns out, is that a while back Big Tex burned down and I know that this is a terrible thing but it just looks like there should be two hobbits throwing a ring at it and I can’t really look away now.
I may have found my new Facebook profile picture.
4. Phooey on Daylight Savings Time. It just means everyone is tired and crabbier than usual, and it doesn’t even save any energy. Seriously – we should just go back to Standard Time and stay there.
5. I have so much grading to do. I really do not like grading. I’ve never met at teacher who enjoys grading, and yet we all give out assignments and grade them because that’s how you get students to learn. Sometimes I wish teaching was as easy and lucrative as right-wing critics always tell me it is.
6. Also, the next time some privileged whinger starts in on “pampered college students” I will go nuclear.
7. I actually managed to watch some television this week, which is kind of a throwback to old times for me. I’m nearly through Season 4 of Game of Thrones now. I saw the first episode of the new season of American Gods, which is quite possibly the most beautifully filmed thing ever put on the air. Kim talked me into the opening episode of The Umbrella Factory, which was pleasantly strange. And last night we watched a bizarre little thing called Disney Couples Therapy, which reminded me a lot of the old cartoon Fractured Fairy Tales in its insistence that “happily ever after” was a myth to be mined for comedy. So yay me.
8. Also, for all my non-Wisconsin readers, I just want to point out that Neil Gaiman made up absolutely nothing about The House on the Rock when he wrote American Gods. It really is like that.
9. It’s looking like this summer will be a “stay at home and let people come to us” sort of time, and I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s nice when people visit.
10. It looks like we will be back in the Poultry Project again this year, with new chickens and turkeys to prep for the Fair. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they’re fun and I enjoy them (especially the turkeys) and the eggs are nice. On the other hand, well, they require time and energy that is in short supply these days. So we’ll see I guess.
2. Down at Home Campus we’re in the middle of switching over from one major academic software package to a different major academic software package that supposedly does more or less the same thing, and my mission this week has been to figure out a) what I need to access from the old package to do my job, b) what I can actually access in the new package, and c) how to square these things. I’ve been going through all of the menus and submenus, systematically, and just clicking on things and so far I have not shorted out the power grid or launched any cruise missiles, so I figure I’m doing well. One fascinating discovery during this process has been that I may have access to something in the new package that don’t think I had in the old one, except that I just know that if I tell them that they will go in with a chainsaw and not only take away that particular access but also everything remotely connected to it, much of which I actually do need to do my job. Maybe if I just promise just to forget I ever noticed this – really, having it provides no benefit to me at all – they’ll leave me alone? We’ll see.
3. Tabitha has been home from Small Liberal Arts College on spring break this week, and she asked if she could bring home a friend who didn’t want to travel all the way to Texas to go back to his home. We figured why not – throw another dinner plate on the table and we’re good, really. We have the space. The other night we got into a conversation and he mentioned that where he’s from they have this thing called Big Tex, which is a 55-foot high animatronic statue by the state fairgrounds. It’s, well, impressive.
But what’s even more impressive, it turns out, is that a while back Big Tex burned down and I know that this is a terrible thing but it just looks like there should be two hobbits throwing a ring at it and I can’t really look away now.
I may have found my new Facebook profile picture.
4. Phooey on Daylight Savings Time. It just means everyone is tired and crabbier than usual, and it doesn’t even save any energy. Seriously – we should just go back to Standard Time and stay there.
5. I have so much grading to do. I really do not like grading. I’ve never met at teacher who enjoys grading, and yet we all give out assignments and grade them because that’s how you get students to learn. Sometimes I wish teaching was as easy and lucrative as right-wing critics always tell me it is.
6. Also, the next time some privileged whinger starts in on “pampered college students” I will go nuclear.
7. I actually managed to watch some television this week, which is kind of a throwback to old times for me. I’m nearly through Season 4 of Game of Thrones now. I saw the first episode of the new season of American Gods, which is quite possibly the most beautifully filmed thing ever put on the air. Kim talked me into the opening episode of The Umbrella Factory, which was pleasantly strange. And last night we watched a bizarre little thing called Disney Couples Therapy, which reminded me a lot of the old cartoon Fractured Fairy Tales in its insistence that “happily ever after” was a myth to be mined for comedy. So yay me.
8. Also, for all my non-Wisconsin readers, I just want to point out that Neil Gaiman made up absolutely nothing about The House on the Rock when he wrote American Gods. It really is like that.
9. It’s looking like this summer will be a “stay at home and let people come to us” sort of time, and I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s nice when people visit.
10. It looks like we will be back in the Poultry Project again this year, with new chickens and turkeys to prep for the Fair. I’m not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, they’re fun and I enjoy them (especially the turkeys) and the eggs are nice. On the other hand, well, they require time and energy that is in short supply these days. So we’ll see I guess.
Tuesday, March 5, 2019
Marching Through Westeros
I’m slowly working my way through The Game of Thrones on television.
Yes, I know. I’m behind the times. Tell me something new.
For a long time I swore I wouldn’t read the books until George RR Martin was either finished with the series or dead, because every novel in the series is a thousand pages long with a multi-year gap between each one, which means that by the time the last one comes out I will have no recollection of the first several and that’s just not a rereading project I want to undertake. Martin is also 70 years old and clearly not a health fanatic, so it was an open question whether I wanted to go down that rabbit hole at all. I was not entirely sure he was ever going to finish this project. I’m still not.
But then a couple of things happened.
First, Kim, who has seen every episode, insisted that I needed to see the television show because it is excellent in every conceivable way – from its cinematography to its writing to its acting and on beyond zebra. Yeah, yeah, I said. “It’s got boobs,” she replied. “Lots of them.” What can I say? She knows me well.
And second, she also insisted – and here I had no quarrel, since I too hold this belief – that I needed to read the books first, before watching any of the show.
So a couple of summers ago I read the books. All of them. Or at least all of them in the main sequence, as well as the giant, lavishly illustrated backstory coffee-table book that is the Westeros version of The Silmarillion in that it covers the extensive history of this world from its earliest moments and drops you off right as the main story opens. There are a couple of prequel books I haven’t gotten to yet that I’m sure I’ll take care of eventually, since we do own them, but I figured I had read enough to watch the show now.
Plus, the books have a curiously fractal quality in that they portray a world of constant shifts and ebbs and flows but if you step back a bit you’ll find that nothing really changes. Kingdoms rise and fall, characters emerge and either survive or are killed – often in stunningly brutal ways – but if you step back a bit the overall picture never changes. So really, once you get a sense of the place, you can just move forward.
They’re remarkably well written books, it has to be said, despite a singular absence of humor throughout. Other than Tyrion and his many dry asides, I can recall only one actual joke in the entire six thousand pages that I’ve read so far. I still have hopes that Martin will finish the series – he’s been promising a new book since at least 2012 – but the wait grows long.
I actually lost a Facebook friend over that fact, to be honest. A mutual friend had posted something about Martin doing something that was Not Writing, and I made a sarcastic comment along the lines of “Why is he doing anything other than Writing? Get back to work!” which was intended as a satire on the sort of moron who actually makes such comments seriously. This particular friend – an author by trade, part of a larger group I belong to and not someone I’d ever met in person – either didn’t catch the sarcasm or didn’t want to be friends with someone who would make that particular sarcastic comment and out the door I went. Oh well. I never bothered to clarify why. People have a right to curate their friends list how they want.
So Kim and I have been chipping away at the television series.
I have a hard time watching scripted anything these days, no matter how good it is. I usually find that I need to get up and walk away fairly early on, and the most I can really do in one sitting is two episodes so binge-watching really hasn’t been much of an option either. The chipping goes slowly, in other words.
But we are making progress. We abandoned all pretense of productivity last night – Kim spent the weekend running labs with her Online students and I spent most of the last several days almost but not quite sick with some kind of winter crud that isn’t bad enough to make me not do things but is bad enough to make doing them more of a chore than they should be, so we were both mentally fried – and we finished Season 4, Episode 4. So only 2.5 seasons to go to be caught up to the present, which might happen in time for the Final Season sometime next month and it might not.
If it doesn’t I will have to abandon social media entirely until I do catch up, which might not be such a bad thing.
You do get to like the characters, some of them, even though none of them are particularly good people. Tyrion, of course, as he is the main humanizing point-of-view character in the series. Ser Davos. A few others. I do like The Hound in a perverse sort of way – he is what he is and makes no pretense otherwise. When Arya yells at him because he’s okay with murdering people but won’t stoop to thievery, for example, he simply shrugs. “Man’s got to have a code,” is all he says.
I still don’t understand why the men of the Night’s Watch, up in the frozen north, refuse to wear hats, though. Seriously, dudes. It’s cold up there. But give Martin and his screenwriters credit – unlike every single movie involving Middle Earth, Westeros apparently does believe in handrails.
So we press on. When I left them, all was its usual bloody chaos. I’m sure the chaos will continue, even as the specifics change ever on.
Yes, I know. I’m behind the times. Tell me something new.
For a long time I swore I wouldn’t read the books until George RR Martin was either finished with the series or dead, because every novel in the series is a thousand pages long with a multi-year gap between each one, which means that by the time the last one comes out I will have no recollection of the first several and that’s just not a rereading project I want to undertake. Martin is also 70 years old and clearly not a health fanatic, so it was an open question whether I wanted to go down that rabbit hole at all. I was not entirely sure he was ever going to finish this project. I’m still not.
But then a couple of things happened.
First, Kim, who has seen every episode, insisted that I needed to see the television show because it is excellent in every conceivable way – from its cinematography to its writing to its acting and on beyond zebra. Yeah, yeah, I said. “It’s got boobs,” she replied. “Lots of them.” What can I say? She knows me well.
And second, she also insisted – and here I had no quarrel, since I too hold this belief – that I needed to read the books first, before watching any of the show.
So a couple of summers ago I read the books. All of them. Or at least all of them in the main sequence, as well as the giant, lavishly illustrated backstory coffee-table book that is the Westeros version of The Silmarillion in that it covers the extensive history of this world from its earliest moments and drops you off right as the main story opens. There are a couple of prequel books I haven’t gotten to yet that I’m sure I’ll take care of eventually, since we do own them, but I figured I had read enough to watch the show now.
Plus, the books have a curiously fractal quality in that they portray a world of constant shifts and ebbs and flows but if you step back a bit you’ll find that nothing really changes. Kingdoms rise and fall, characters emerge and either survive or are killed – often in stunningly brutal ways – but if you step back a bit the overall picture never changes. So really, once you get a sense of the place, you can just move forward.
They’re remarkably well written books, it has to be said, despite a singular absence of humor throughout. Other than Tyrion and his many dry asides, I can recall only one actual joke in the entire six thousand pages that I’ve read so far. I still have hopes that Martin will finish the series – he’s been promising a new book since at least 2012 – but the wait grows long.
I actually lost a Facebook friend over that fact, to be honest. A mutual friend had posted something about Martin doing something that was Not Writing, and I made a sarcastic comment along the lines of “Why is he doing anything other than Writing? Get back to work!” which was intended as a satire on the sort of moron who actually makes such comments seriously. This particular friend – an author by trade, part of a larger group I belong to and not someone I’d ever met in person – either didn’t catch the sarcasm or didn’t want to be friends with someone who would make that particular sarcastic comment and out the door I went. Oh well. I never bothered to clarify why. People have a right to curate their friends list how they want.
So Kim and I have been chipping away at the television series.
I have a hard time watching scripted anything these days, no matter how good it is. I usually find that I need to get up and walk away fairly early on, and the most I can really do in one sitting is two episodes so binge-watching really hasn’t been much of an option either. The chipping goes slowly, in other words.
But we are making progress. We abandoned all pretense of productivity last night – Kim spent the weekend running labs with her Online students and I spent most of the last several days almost but not quite sick with some kind of winter crud that isn’t bad enough to make me not do things but is bad enough to make doing them more of a chore than they should be, so we were both mentally fried – and we finished Season 4, Episode 4. So only 2.5 seasons to go to be caught up to the present, which might happen in time for the Final Season sometime next month and it might not.
If it doesn’t I will have to abandon social media entirely until I do catch up, which might not be such a bad thing.
You do get to like the characters, some of them, even though none of them are particularly good people. Tyrion, of course, as he is the main humanizing point-of-view character in the series. Ser Davos. A few others. I do like The Hound in a perverse sort of way – he is what he is and makes no pretense otherwise. When Arya yells at him because he’s okay with murdering people but won’t stoop to thievery, for example, he simply shrugs. “Man’s got to have a code,” is all he says.
I still don’t understand why the men of the Night’s Watch, up in the frozen north, refuse to wear hats, though. Seriously, dudes. It’s cold up there. But give Martin and his screenwriters credit – unlike every single movie involving Middle Earth, Westeros apparently does believe in handrails.
So we press on. When I left them, all was its usual bloody chaos. I’m sure the chaos will continue, even as the specifics change ever on.
Saturday, March 2, 2019
A Story in a Photograph
We shall not cease from exploration,
and the end of all our exploring will be
to arrive where we started
and know the place for the first time.
-TS Eliot
Every so often I get back to the genealogy project. It sits there in the back of my mind, a diversion from all of the various things that I need to accomplish in the course of a day, a distraction from the ongoing rush of events here in the waning days of the American republic. It’s nice to have a project like that, actually. You need that kind of thing.
It started a few years back when I scanned all of the family photos – several thousand of them, from tintypes through about 1990 – and sent copies of the scans to everyone in the family. I was hoping that this would prompt people to write back with stories and memories, or at least correct the tentative identifications that I had given to people and places, but everyone’s busy and aside from my mom nobody ever did. Oh well. There’s still time.
That’s where things stood for a while, and then a couple of years ago I started looking into the documentary side of things.
The internet exists for maybe half a dozen reasons, one of which turns out to be genealogy. You can find a shocking amount of information online, much of it for free and most of the rest for fairly nominal charges. And if you happen to have been trained as a researcher – one of the skills that historians acquire in grad school, along with the speed reading and how to survive in a major American city on a stipend that your own department considers below the poverty line for one person – you can entertain yourself for a very long time.
Eventually things start to circle back.
This is my great-grandmother.
She’s sitting on what, having just checked Google Earth, are probably her front steps, sometime in the 1920s or 1930s. She’s my maternal grandmother’s mom, and other than those facts and that she died about six months before I was born that was most of what I knew about her when I scanned that photo.
Now I know more.
She was born in a small village in Sicily in the mid-1880s, a few miles west of Messina. She came from a large family, most of whom came to the US at some point or other. What’s funny is that her brothers and sisters appear in three or four different family trees that I’ve found online but she isn’t in any of them. I’m not sure why.
She came to America in 1907, either already married or nearly so. I know the exact day she arrived, as well as the ship she sailed on. She arrived with my great-grandfather, though whether he had been here before and gone back to get her or whether they came together is one of those questions that doesn’t fit any of the stories the family has always told. We thought he met her here. She was also accompanied by her niece. I found a photo of the ship. It was originally built as a cargo ship around the time my great-grandmother was born, retrofitted for passengers not long after, and spent most of the first decade of the 20th century running immigrants between Italy and New York City.
She had a baby the year before my oldest great-aunt was born. It was a stillborn boy. She would go on to have five more children, of whom my grandmother was exactly in the middle. All of them would outlive her.
She received $400 in death benefits from an Italian-American mutual aid society when her husband passed away in the late 1920s. That was a pretty good sum of money then, though not enough to make up for the loss of income. She lived with her children after that – the 1930 census lists her eldest daughter as the head of household, not her. My great aunt would have been 21 at the time, and wasn't married until two years later.
According to my mom, my great-grandmother never did quite wrap her head around the idea of theater and insisted that the soap operas that she watched were real events. She hated one particular character, and when the actress reappeared in a different role after the first character had died, well, comedy ensued.
She died of heart disease at the age of 80, which – coincidentally – is the same age at which my dad’s mother passed away. Demographics wins every time.
She’s also the subject of what is, to my knowledge, the only real ghost story in my family, which I will leave for another time.
It’s interesting how much more that photo says now that it has a few stories to go with it.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)