Joe on the job

Unless you’re Italian or trying to sell a house, you may not be aware that today is Saint Joseph’s Day.

You remember Joseph? Husband of Mary? Taught Jesus everything he knew about carpentry and joinery?

Yeah, that’s the sad tale. Poor guy is always losing out: in the Nativity, it’s all the Madonna and the kid; in cursing it’s always Jesus-Mary-and-Joseph; in March it’s always Saint Patrick.

Joseph is the patron of, among others, the Church Universal, workers, families, engineers, the dying, Canada, confectioners, travelers, those in doubt, cabinetmakers, Korea and Vatican II. Also of house sellers and hunters, which should make him a pretty busy fellow these days.

Today is his official feast day—celebrated widely in Italian communities around the world with altars decorated with flowers, limes, candles, wine, breads, cookies, pastries and other symbols of the good life. This is of particular importance when you consider that Saint Joseph’s Day usually falls in Lent, when consumption is constricted.

(There’s another day, 1 May, dedicated to Saint Joseph the Worker; but that was invented in 1955 by Pope Pius XII to counter the godless communist/union/laborer May Day holiday, so you can fuggedaboutit.)

What I remember about Saint Joseph’s Day is that it’s when the swallows come back to Capistrano—that’s the Mission of San Juan Capistrano, in the eponymous town in Orange County, California. Turns out that the swallows usually show up a couple of days on one side or another of 19 March, but everyone turns a blind eye to those little discrepancies and enjoys the hell out of the miracle of the swallows.

There are decades of stories about how Saint Joe helps the desperate sell their homes: you bury a (plastic/stone/wooden) statue of the saint (head up/head/down/horizontal) in your (front/back/side) yard and Bob’s your uncle—the house is sold.

You can buy purpose-made statues for precisely this use from a variety of sources both on and off line, including from some realtors. Viz:

No clue as to how the saint may help home buyers, unless there’s some karmic connection that his statue in your yard attracts exactly the right buyers for this house.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Marching along

They say March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb. I have to say that this time around I’m looking forward to the lamb. Or at least sticking to something—it’s been quite the yo-yo.

Viz: last week.

Monday and Tuesday was in the 70s; Wednesday we hit above 80°F in The People’s Republic. A couple of my neighbors had their AC on; I opened my patio door and was grateful for ceiling fans in all the rooms I used.

Thursday started out with rain, which then morphed into this:

Fortunately, it did not stick.

Monday of this week we were forecast a squall line that was said to include the prospect of tornadoes. Mercifully, we dodged them, but had a few bouts of exceptionally heavy rain.

Temperature was 63°F when I went on my morning walk, so I was not at all surprised when yesterday it was 30°F. But not without it's charms.

There may be a hurricane today, followed by a blizzard and a downpour of frogs and locusts. I mean—March, man.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Jingle jangle

As you know, I am of the opinion that Saint Patrick’s Day is largely an Irish-American construct—the kind of thing an under-appreciated minority puts on to cock a snook at the majority. After all, you don’t really need to celebrate being Irish in Ireland because you’re in, well, you know, Ireland. (Although about 30 years ago they wised up to the potential tourist bonanza it could be and have been raking in the readies ever since.)

You do need to celebrate it in a culture that looks down on you as a jumped-up ignorant bunch of dirt-encrusted, drink-swilling lowlifes who take orders directly from the Pope and lower property values wherever you go.

So not surprising that someone decided to declare Saint Patrick’s Day an occasion for pretending to be Irish by going pub crawling, drinking green beer and singing rebel songs.

Whatever.

I myself don’t venture into bars or taverns on Saint Patrick’s Day because I don’t like mixing with all those amateur drinkers. But I can still express the sentiment with a song or two. 

Here’s one of my all-time favorites, which goes well with a slurp of Cooper’s Croze—“The Auld Triangle”. Written by Dick Shannon in 1952, it became famous when it was featured in Brendan Behan’s 1956 play, The Quare Fella. The play is set in Dublin’s Montjoy Prison, where he was the guest of the Irish government in his youth and where a triangle signaled shifts in the prison’s daily routine.

I once walked along the Royal Canal, singing it to myself. As one does.

Here are The Dubliners singing it. Lift a glass for all enclosed by walls not of their choosing.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: One side of clouds

I try to be aware of my environment when I walk. I listen to the sounds around me and look side to side. Sometimes I remember to look up, too.

Yesterday morning, that’s when I saw this cloud activity, driven by wind high up that we earthbounders did not experience:

I’m grateful for that ephemeral beauty and that I caught it in transit.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Don't ask me

We lost one of the icons of my youth earlier this week. Country Joe McDonald died from complications of Parkinson’s Disease in his hometown of Berkeley, Calif. He was 84.

McDonald—with and without his band, The Fish—was anti-war all his life. His big Woodstock moment started with him shouting, “Gimme an F,” and exhorting the audience to fill the somewhat weedy air with “FUCK!” Then he segued into the “I’m Fixin’ to Die Rag”.

This song is particularly apt this week, as it turns out. You could substitute “Tehran” for “Vietnam”, while the “be the first one on the block to have your boy come home in a box” line is as true as it was in 1969.

This makes me very tired, that nearly 60 years after Joe asked for that F, we’ve still got leaders who think that a “short, victorious war” is what will settle domestic unrest. Only this time it's so much more unhinged.

Crank up the volume.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Civic duty

Yesterday I cast my early vote in the April special election here in the Old Dominion. The only thing on the ballot is a measure to redraw the state’s congressional districts. The new lines leave Republicans with only one “safe” seat, a strip along the south-western border of the state.

This is largely in response to Texas redrawing its districts last year to dilute Democratic votes to send more RWNJs to the House.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Rs are real het up about this—they went to court to cancel the election but a judge ruled it can go ahead. (They did the same when California redrew its districts so that Republican safe zones lie largely in the eastern desert and east-of-the-Sierras, along with lizards and wood rot.)

Here’s a sample:

Opposing voices:

But I say they can piss up a rope. They fucked around; every time they do that they forget about the second part of that expression. 

Here’s the find out.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Weather whiplash

 March is such a schizophrenic, ADHD month. I mean—the saying is that it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb, and it’s known for its windiness. But this year it just seems unable to make up its mind.

Technically, I suppose we’re in the “lion” phase, and we certainly started out with snow flurries and snowcrete on the ground from February that wouldn’t melt because we were still facing sub-freezing temperatures. But, starting Sunday, we here in the environs of The District They Call Columbia have had daytime temps in the 70s; yesterday Google told me it hit 83F. Aaand…on Tuesday they expect the highs in the 30s.

Meanwhile, I’m reverting to my summertime diet of dinner salads—Greek, Niçoise, primavera, etc.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Seraph

Here’s a motorist who has opinions.

I’m guessing that there have been incidents with other drivers regarding using turn signals and adherence to traffic lights.

I dunno about the horse thing.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: No longer dancing damply with death

A week ago I was doing my laundry on Saturday when I realized that the load seemed to be taking…hours. When I looked at the minutes-remaining readout, I realized it actually was taking hours. Every time it got down to the point where the final spin should kick it, it looped back to the beginning of the wash cycle.

Consulting Google, I did what I could—the appliance version of the three fingered salute (unplugging, waiting five minutes, plugging in, restarting), but same thing.

Even when I set it to Spin Only, it jumped back to wash and started adding water.

Disconsolately I wrung out the clothes, hung them on the drying rack until they were in a state that I could toss them in the dryer. On Monday I called the appliance repair guy and he came out on Tuesday.

Understand that this machine—bought three years ago when my old, mechanical-only washer finally expired—is packed with electronics. As it is, I had to look really hard to find one that isn’t “smart”, but it’s still computerized and I was envisioning having to replace something expensive.

Well, Alan posited that the machine—like a lot of modern, agitator-free top-loaders—is very sensitive to load imbalance, and was probably trying to reset the load. I couldn’t think that what I had in that particular collection of clothes was markedly different from the hundreds of others I have run since it arrived. A few times, when I was washing mattress pads, the machine would go ballistic and I’d have to turn it off, adjust the placement and then start again. (These modern jobbers don’t have knobs you can pull out to continue where you left off.) He then had me run through a load on speed wash, just to see how it went.

Well, we chatted around the machine for about 20 minutes, and sure enough, it worked just fine. He charged me a call-out fee, and as he was leaving, he noticed a bird’s nest in my dryer vent, next to the front door. He checked for eggs—none—and then brought out a kind of mini-chimney sweep device, with long poles connecting to a drill, and cleaned out what must have been 20 years of lint from that dryer conduit.

It’s a miracle that I haven’t had a fire in the nine years I’ve been here.

Well, Saturday, I filled the washer with my colored clothes and turned the machine on. Let me tell you: then I saw it click over into the spin cycle I was filled with such gratitude. You cannot believe how wonderful it is to have a washing machine that works.

And then, when I dumped the clothes in the dryer, it was wonderful again, knowing I wasn’t risking conflagration.

Life is good.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Not a man at all

In the early days of this century, the Brits used to refer to Prime Minister Tony Blair as “Bush’s Poodle”, because he heeled perfectly in step with the American president’s war(s) in the Middle East.

These days, the occupant of the Oval Office can accurately be termed “Bibi’s Bitch”, since the Israeli PM so easily induced him to pour a coat of legitimacy on his attacks on Iran. In fact, one of the many, many “reasons” the White House has given for the war, uh, “special military operation”, is that Israel was going to attack, so we had to get in their with them.

Sigh.

So, I’ve been hearing that old Everly Brothers standard, “Cathy’s Clown” all week. Seems appropriate.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu