I actually had a couple of other contenders for my Gratitude Monday post yesterday. One was the African elephant that Texas GOPs trotted out over the weekend for some convention they were holding.
The elephant peed on the venue floor. And—let me say this—evidently
elephants have capacious bladders.
It was magnificent.
©2026 Bas Bleu
My gratitude for today is that the Kleptocrat’s name has been removed from the Kennedy Center—including from the wall of the building itself.
A federal judge, Christopher Cooper, ruled last month, in a
suit brought by ex-officio Kennedy Center board member, Rep. Joyce Beatty
(D-OH), that the center was given its name by Congress and only Congress can
change the name. (It was his handpicked stooge board that renamed the center in
December. A day later, he declared himself surprised, even as workers installed
the clearly planned letters on the wall.) He set 2359 on Friday as the deadline
for the name being off everything—the website, marketing materials, employee email
signature blocks and the building. The Kleptocrat’s KC stooges dithered around
for a couple of weeks, then filed a motion to stay, which the judge denied.
So I joined tens of thousands of online viewers Friday, (as well as scores on site) watching as workers erected scaffolding for the deed.
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| Credit: Rahmat Gul, AP |
There
was a break late afternoon as a storm moved through the city, right around the
time the stooges filed an appeal, claiming for the first time that amended
center bylaws now state that the center only receives funds if the Kleptocrat’s
name remains; if it’s ever removed, the money stops.
Well, that didn’t hold, but they still missed the midnight
deadline. So they filed another motion requesting a 24-hour stay, because the
dog ate their homework. The judge granted them until noon on Saturday to get ‘er
done.
Around 0330, the workers completed the scaffolding, but then spent time pulling up gigantic tarps to completely shield them from view.
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| Credit: Tasos Katopodis, Getty |
Word
on the street is that the delay to the wee small hours, and the tarps, were
solely to spare the Kleptocrat the humiliation of having the world rejoice at
seeing his name come off, letter by letter. But Cliff Owen of AP got this shot
of the P popping out:
And Joyce Beatty stayed throughout the night to witness.
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| Credit: Cliff Owen, AP |
The tarps are still up. It’s more than possible that the
Kleptocrat is hoping for more court filings to overturn the decision—that it’ll
go to SCOTUS, and they may find some way to twist “Congress gave it the name,
only Congress can change the name” into “yeah, it’s okay.” And, of course,
there was the birthday circus yesterday at the Building Formerly Known as The
White House.
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| Credit: Alex Wrobiewski, AFP via Getty |
UPDATE: Per @MusicologyDuck on Bluesky, those door-like indentations have been formalized:
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| Credit: Musicology Duck |
But for now, I’m grateful for Rep. Beatty, for Judge Cooper, for those workers (who I hope got overtime for working through the night), for everyone involved in this exquisite rebuke to the Kleptocrat’s imperial ambitions. And on his birthday weekend.
Many happy returns.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Somewhat hidden in this week’s headlines about the Kleptocrat being roundly booed (and falling asleep) at Game 3 of the NBA finals, him declaring that he “love[s] the inflation” and him getting pissed off that Iran’s not behaving like Republicans in Congress and therefore resuming war crimes was news that America’s farmers are struggling.
He flew to Wisconsin last Friday to rally the racists, where
he had to mock up a “panel” of others so he could sit instead of stand at a
podium. Then he threw a hissy fit when sitting in a mocked-up barn being
interviewed Meet the Press; Kristen Welker kept asking for evidence of his
insane claims about rigged elections past and present, so he ripped off his
mic, stomped on it and then stormed out with a parting, “Thank you, darling.”
During the “panel”, he announced that he’s going to hawk up
another few billions of taxpayer money to help farmers over “the bump” of
tariff-tanked soybean sales to China, climate-change-induced drought and
escalating fuel prices and fertilizer shortages due to the Iran war. He’ll
probably eventually come through with it because the mid-term election is in
five months.
Even so—farm bankruptcies are skyrocketing and so are food
costs for us, the consumers. It’s not a pretty picture.
So my earworm for today is Nanci Griffith’s “Trouble in the Fields”. Sadly, it’s as true today as it was when she wrote it during the farm crisis in 1987.
©2026 Bas Bleu
I was out in the back yard the other day and realized to my horror that I had left a stack of empty planters right side up. That meant that it was full of soupy, fetid water and probably about 12 squillion mosquito larvae.
I upended them & unhoused three slugs and this guy:
I dispatched the slugs and set the amphibian on some
leaves. Much healthier environment for him.
©2026 Bas Bleu
A couple of months ago, I noted in passing that LIDL had the lowest price on milk (of three grocery chains), by a dollar. It was $1.67 per half gallon.
A week or so ago, I noticed
that they’d raised the price to $1.87.
(Yeah—you do have to watch out for cartons damaged in shipping.)
Huh, I thought. But inflation,
fuel cost increases—I guess 11% is…well, it just is.
So I checked out the other
three stores.
Trader Joe’s; actually, no change from March:
But Wegmans is charging almost as much for a half gallon as they are for a full gallon:
They’re now up there with Giant:
(Giant was ahead of the game--$3.29 back in March.)
Folks, I do not know what’s going on, but that delta
between LIDL and the other is eye-watering.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Came across this on my walk the other morning—one of the benches along the W&OD Trail, which overlook the Hidden Creek golf course.
Two different branches of the entitled,
littering asshole species.
There’s actually a trash bin
in the Asplundh parking lot about 20 yards across the trail.
©2026 Bas Bleu
The chalk artists in the ‘hood are out again. Well, really—the chalk philosophers.
I came round the final stretch of my morning walk last week
to find this on the path past the tot lot:
Here’s the expansion:
And, finally, this, echoing Polonius:
I have to say that I don’t believe the artist is some
random 10-year-old. Not quoting a song that’s been covered by Nat King Cole and
Frank Sinatra.
Then, yesterday, there was this on the path by the
neighboring apartment complex’s playground:
With this addition.
Clearly, the Advice from the
Universe is to have integrity, practice love and spread joy. I’m grateful for the reminder.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Around the early part of June, my mind turns to one of the more momentous events of the 20th Century: the invasion of Normandy beaches. D-Day. It was an extraordinary endeavor of infinite complexity, both militarily and logistically. And before the day of computers and networking.
Take that, AI.
In terms of human costs, about 4400 Allied soldiers died on
6 June 1944; German deaths are estimated between 4000 and 9000. You can get a
glimpse of that at the three military cemeteries within a few kilometers of one
another near Omaha Beach: Colleville-sur-mer,
American; Bayeux,
British; and La
Cambe, German. I’ve walked them all, several times.
The American cemetery is situated on the bluff above Omaha
Beach. You can stand at the edge and look down on the scene of the
slaughter. And wonder how the hell they ever made it up to where you are.
The graves are marked with white marble crosses, with the occasional Star of
David interspersed. It’s quiet, usually, except for the wind. More than 9300
men lie there—not all fallen at Normandy, but congregated there in the
fellowship of death.
The British cemetery, run by the Commonwealth War Graves
Commission, is in the heart of Bayeux, the town they took on 7 June. The
headstones are like those at all CWGC graveyards—identically-sized slabs of
white marble engraved with the soldier’s name, regiment and date of
death (if known; otherwise a cross and “known but to God”
inscribed); a centrally-located Cross of Sacrifice (tall marble cross
with a sword inset), and a Stone of Remembrance, inscribed “Their
Name Liveth Forevermore”. More than 4000 Brits, Commonwealth, Poles,
French and others lie there.
La Cambe is outside Bayeux; you get to it down a quiet road
that seems to have no other purpose but to lead you to the dead. The cemetery
is maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the
German counterpart to the CWGC. It’s not as large space-wise as the two Allied
graveyards. That’s because when you look at the inscriptions on the black metal
markers set into the earth, you see there are often two to five men buried in a
single spot. Plus, there are the nearly 300 known and unknown under
the central mound. More than 21,000 men lie there.
(I need to digitize the photos I took of Bayeux and La
Cambe; apologies.)
The thing that struck me almost from the first in these
three cemeteries was the ages on the markers—you almost never see anyone who’d
reached 24. Most were in the 19-22-year age range. When you’d expect them to be
in college, or working their first jobs.
I’ve often wondered what the world lost through those early
deaths. What music never was composed? What scientific breakthroughs never
made? What civic gains, feats of sportsmanship, family enrichment just
disappeared from the future in June 1944?
That, of course, is in addition to the
anguish and sorrow that engulfed their families.
Parents, siblings, wives, children—bereft and left alone to sort
out a world gone mad. No one to repair the gutter or fix the bike; to guide
a grandchild’s hands tying a bow knot; to comfort a friend; to surprise a lover
with flowers.
It had to be done—it always seems to need doing. Especially
since we see the resurgence of fascism and totalitarianism all around us. But
take a few moments this week to think on those lives cut short in Normandy 75
years ago. The boys of D-Day who put their lives on the line for their
generation and those that followed.
And so, for today’s earworm we’re having something that
soldiers on both sides would have been listening to.
The song we know as “Lili Marlene” originated as a poem in
the First World War (the one that was supposed to end all wars), written by a
Hamburg schoolteacher conscripted into the German army, Hans Leip. It was set
to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938 and recorded by a German singer, Lale
Andersen, in 1939.
The gist of the piece is a lonely soldier on watch, missing
his girlfriend. Pretty universal—I expect there was some Greek song around 520
BCE that expresses the same thoughts.
The song pretty much went nowhere until in 1941 German
troops occupied Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, and needed recordings to broadcast
over Radio Belgrade. Andersen’s “Lili Marlene” was one of the few discs the
station had, so it got played a lot. And soldiers loved it.
But Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels loathed it. It
wasn’t sufficiently martial—no proper German soldiers had time to miss their
girlfriends or be anything but aggressively victorious. (He'd get along so well with Kegsbreath.) Besides, Andersen hung
around with Jewish artists, which was not the done thing.
Still—soldiers within range of Radio Belgrade demanded more
“Lili Marlene”. It expanded coverage to North Africa, where the British Eighth
Army took it up. By the time Allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches in
1944, it was on everyone’s playlist, and a standard for Marlene Dietrich’s USO
performances. Vera Lynn also covered it.
(It's kind of interesting that a song with a male soldier's
narrative seems only to have been covered by female singers.)
Here’s Dietrich singing it.
©2026 Bas Bleu
So, there I was, walking down the W&OD Trail, minding my own business, when I saw this coming at me:
©2026 Bas Bleu
Filed under the conundrum that is the healthcare system in America:
A couple of weeks ago, CenterWell, which is the mail order
prescription subsidiary of Humana’s pharmacy benefit management (PBM)
operation, emailed me that they were processing autorefills of three
prescriptions. Fine.
A few days later, I got a message from my PCP indicating
that she’d received the request for refill, but that it’s good practice to
check in periodically with patients on maintenance meds, so would I make an
appointment? Only—she’s not the prescriber for these particular drugs. I
replied asking if she wanted me to transfer the management from my other
provider to her; she declined for [reasons]. Fine.
(Well, actually, not entirely fine. Seems to me that she
could have looked at my history and realized that she is not, in fact, the
prescriber, and maybe reached out to me for clarification. I mean—the meds are
listed in my portal records; you knew there was a portal, right?—but there’s
clearly no record that she or any other provider in the practice prescribed
them. I know things get muddled when Amazon takes over, but still.)
So I called CenterWell to find out why this practice and
not my actual prescriber got the refill request and got through to a
representative who identified herself thus: “This is Betty [I’ll say], your
pharmacy advocate.”
I explained the situation—for some reason CenterWell
contacted my PCP and not the (sole-practitioner) specialist for the refill;
what gives? Well, Betty, my pharmacy advocate, put me on hold for a while and
then came back to say, no, they’d sent the fax request (they only do fax) to
[specialist’s] fax, so everything was as it should be. I asked why, then, did
it show up at PCP and not [specialist]. Well, she couldn’t say, because that’s
the fax number they have, so…
I replied that whatever number they have is clearly not
his, because it ended up at PCP. Betty, my pharmacy advocate, asked if [specialist]
isn’t part of that practice. No—he’s a sole practitioner and in fact operates
in a different state.
To give her credit, Betty, my pharmacy advocate, did try
calling him to find out what gives, but she got no response, as I knew she
would. He’s a sole practitioner and has appointments and no receptionist. She
returned to the line and reported her lack of success, and I explained why that
would be. I said that if she left a voicemail, he’d get back with her, but she’s
not allowed to get callbacks.
Again, she asked if I was sure that [specialist] isn’t
part of the (admittedly huge, found in many states) practice. I said no—the specific
PCP is in Virginia; [specialist] is in DC. Betty, my pharmacy advocate, didn’t
quite get that—what state? The District of Columbia.
“He’s in the state of Columbia?”
“No—he’s in the District of Columbia; our nation’s capital.”
Well—in the end, I could see that I was not going to get
anywhere with Betty, my pharmacy advocate, so I said I’d just contact
[specialist] and have him submit new prescriptions every three months, instead
of one 90-day script with a refill; would that work? Yes, she said (probably
relieved); that will work.
So I thanked Betty, my pharmacy advocate for her time and
emailed [specialist]. He called me back and we had a good laugh about it. I
knew he had, in fact, once worked for the gigantic PCP—like 10-12 years ago;
evidently that fax number (which is in the 617 area code, not 202 for DC or 703
for this part of Virginia) still appears in databases and the effort to correct
it is more than your life is worth. We agreed on the every-three-months plan
and there it is.
The thing about this encounter is that these gigantic
companies give their frontline customer service/pharmacy advocate people a
script and no agency so that they are not really able to provide service or
advocate. Betty, my pharmacy advocate, and her colleagues have no ability to do
anything that can’t be realized in real time—no voice mails, no emails, no call
backs; only what they can do while the customer is actually on the line with them.
She tried, within the strictures Humana/CenterWell placed on her, to help, but she
had no ability to move outside a very small box. It took two individuals—me and
[specialist] to work out a solution, which places the burden on getting the
products/services for which I pay Humana (market cap: $36.7B) delivered. Me, a
retired person, and [specialist], a sole practitioner.
Seems to me that this is kind of backwards, but they make
it so exhausting to even get what you’re paying for that trying to get them to
fix their system is just beyond the beyond.
You know—a conundrum.
©2026 Bas Bleu
