Gratitude Monday: Neighbors

In the past three or four weeks, we here in the environs of The District They Call Columbia have been freezing. No, seriously—temperatures have only once or twice risen above the freezing point, and that for only a few hours.

Saturday morning, I checked the weather before going on my walk; Android said 17F, and I thought, "Okay--I've gone out in 12F, this’ll be okay.”

And then I got outside and heard this roaring sound. Which turned out to be the wind. I barely got 20 yards along before I realized I was not going to make my full snow-curtailed circuit, because that wind was absolutely shredding me. I checked Android again: Oh—"Feels like 1". Right. 

As someone posted in the r/nova sub:

So I am filled with greater and abject awe and gratitude for the people in Minneapolis who for months—come day, go day; in fact day and night—continue to fill the sub-zero streets with whistles and jeers to protect and witness for their neighbors, who are being targeted by our own government. They suit up (in many layers), charge up their phones and put themselves in harm’s and cold’s way as testament to decency and humanity.

God bless them all.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Too many of you crying

I believe today’s earworm is appropriate for our times. Our times being two days after Jeff Bezos and his ex-Murdoch stooge publisher Bill Lewis completely eviscerated The Washington Post because reasons, but also because of the ongoing federal police riot in Minneapolis and other US cities. It’s Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”.

Gaye wrote this with Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Al Cleveland in 1969/70, after Benson (a member of the Four Tops) witnessed police brutality at an anti-war protest in Berkeley’s People’s Park. Gaye released it in 1971.

I rather feel like judges all over the country have been asking Gaye’s question for the past 12 months. They’re getting testier and testier about the lack of response from the DOJ and DHS clowns. Viz: this ruling from District Judge Fred Biery, releasing the 5-year-old boy who was abducted by ICE agents, along with his father, in Minneapolis and shipped off to a Texas concentration camp. The whole thing is quite short and well worth a read, but the final page is a WTF broadside:

(The Bible citations are Matthew 19:14: “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” And John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”)

Turn up the volume and listen to Marvin.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

Walking hazard

Okay, now we’re at the tricky stage of snowfall:

When the piled snow melts in the sun (and temps in the mid-30s, yay!) and then freezes. As a pedestrian, you don’t know whether that slick patch is water or ice.

For the record—this one is ice.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Unintended consequences

Since Fairfax County no longer accepts glass for recycling, you have to schlep jars and bottles and whatnots to designated dumpsters. Yesterday I took the accumulation of glass over to one of them and discovered that it’s apparently been a rough couple of weeks or so.

Pretty much filled to the brim.

Gonna be a tough winter.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Getting around

Eight days after the Big Dump o’ Snow and Sleet, our snow removal contractor finally got around to actually clearing the cluster parking lot.

At the South exit, they piled all that snow up at the street corner, so you have to creep out into the middle of the road to see whether anyone’s coming from the right.

Yay.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: warm hands

We here in the environs of the District They Call Columbia have had sub-freezing temperatures for well over a week. We still have mountains of snow from last weekend’s storm, and—while I’m grateful this weekend’s bomb cyclone missed us—this stuff won’t go away for a while.

So on this Groundhog Day I’m grateful for these gloves that a friend knitted for me:

She chose the open-finger pattern so I can take photos with my mobile without having to remove my gloves. The material is wool, so it’s really warm. They are a great blessing on my morning walks, where temperatures have been in the low double digits for weeks.

Being from LA, I’ve never grown used to wearing gloves (or carrying umbrellas), so I have to remember to put them on when I go out. A couple of weeks ago, I stuck my head out the back door to toss seed to the birds and it seemed okay. So when I left through the front door a couple of minutes later I thought, “I probably don’t need the gloves.”

I didn’t get two houses away before I realized I needed the gloves, so I went back and put them on.

So grateful to have them.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

We won't be afraid

A couple of days ago I saw a clip of a Minneapolis community brass band riffing on “Stand by Me” at one of the memorial gatherings for Alex Pretti, the latest victim in that city of our homegrown Gestapo. I was struck by how vibrant the music was—with everyone’s breath coming out in frozen puffs, but no damper on the authenticity or the energy.

And it brought me back to the Playing for Change organization, and their version of the Ben E. King hit, originally released in 1961. Man—different time, and yet so much the same.

I think I saw the Playing for Change video about 10 or 12 years ago; it was such an interesting notion, editing in multiple musicians playing the same piece literally around the world. And that particular song was the perfect one to debut the concept. They’ve since done it with lots of songs, including my last Friday’s earworm.

Both “Stand by Me” and this amalgam of performers perfectly represent what we’ve been seeing for weeks in Minneapolis: people of all backgrounds standing by their neighbors, despite the weather and despite the very real danger of masked thugs intimidating and committing crimes against them.

Minnesota nice will crack the ICE. And we need to stand with them.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Snowed in

To my knowledge, the snow-and-sleet storm that hit the region of The District They Call Columbia on Sunday has not been given a name; no Snowpocalypse or Snowzilla. But—at least in the environs of the People’s Republic, it looks to me like we got right much of it, and—since temperatures are not to rise to even the freezing mark for days—it’s going to be with us a while.

I finally took a walk around the block and took some pix. I think some of these cars are going to be there until at least Groundhog Day. You decide.

These guys got dug out by Wednesday; they’re hopeful about getting their spots back.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Post-storm

As you might be aware, there was a snow storm here. The company contracted to clear snow from our cluster left a 2ft-high margin of 5ft in front of all the parked cars, which means that anyone wanting to move their vehicle out had to shovel about 60cu ft of packed, frozen snow from in front of it. It’s not expected to get above the 20s this week, so that snowpack isn’t going to melt any time soon, either.

I emailed the cluster board, and got back a load of nonsense from one of the members, and put in an urgent property management service request to send the plough out and narrow the margin to about 3ft. The PM for our cluster replied, "I have already reached out to the snow management and am awaiting their anticipated schedule for the next few days." 

What I would have liked would have been, "I've reached out to them and asked them to return and finish the job."

At the cluster board meeting on Monday night I brought it up again, and she gave me some bollocks about it being an unprecedented storm (on account of all of the sleet), and the contractors have to be careful about not wrecking their blade on the blocks of ice that form. Which makes no sense to me: if you can plough to a 5ft margin, why can you not safely go back and carve out 2ft on either side? 

We should "give them the benefit" and let them return for further passes, either Monday night or yesterday.

But as of nightfall yesterday, they hadn't returned.

(Fortunately, I managed to dig out the Saab, and made it out for emergency Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes.)

Walking is also curtailed—despite HOA requirements that residents shovel the walkways in front of their property, not everyone gets with the program. Also, no one is responsible for clearing sidewalks along the city roads here, so pedestrians have to wait for a good melt, or else walk in the street.

So here’s a picture of a candle for you. I was interested by its burning pattern.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

If not now, when?

Eighty-one years ago today, the Red Army—no strangers to nightmares—came upon a hollowed-out shell of a compound that became the one-word representation of the worst that humans could do to one another. And so today, on the anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, we mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was a conglomeration of factories—both for manufacturing and for death, as distinguished from other camps like Majdanek or Sobibor or Treblinka, which were devoted to extermination pure and simple. Great German industrial powerhouses, like the chemical monolith I.G. Farben and arms giant Krupp, consumed hundreds of thousands of prisoners as slave labor in their factories. Those who could no longer work went to the gas chambers, where one of Farben’s most famous products, Zyklon B (developed for pest control), snuffed out their lives.

Oh, well—you know all that, don’t you?

And yet, you don’t, or you forget, or you become impatient with remembering, because it’s uncomfortable and inconvenient and even unpleasant to think about it. And there’s always someone ready to shout about how one atrocity is offset by another because it preceded it, or went on longer, or involved one ethnic or religious group or another.

But the events of recent weeks (and years and decades) have made it all too clear that those who do not learn from history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them. Anti-Semitism, intolerance, racism, fascism and dogmatism are on the rise—and all of them right here in the US. And now that pretty much anyone has access to assault rifles, RPG launchers, bio-weapons and worse, we do well to haul ourselves out of our daily stroll through the trees and take a good, hard look at the bloody forest.

We have been provided with irrefutable proof on an unimaginably massive scale, within living memory, that those who begin by burning books have no qualms whatsoever about burning people. If we can’t learn that lesson, I just despair.

©2026 Bas Bleu