Given the outcome of elections held across the country on Tuesday—all state and local and no federal—it seems to me that the only song possible for today would be “Do You Hear the People Sing?”.
Public Republican rationalizing to the contrary notwithstanding, the flop sweat is palpable. We are not by any means close to the finish line, but it looks to me like we’ve made a good start.
©2025 Bas Bleu
The universe keeps sending me downed road signs. I swear I’m not knocking them over, but here we are.
After I posted about the decapitated
fire hydrant and sheered-off sign last
week, one of my readers advised me where to report the sign. So I did, and the
day after it was back up.
Then, the very next day, and only about 20
meters from the first site, someone ripped out one of those pedestrian crossing
signs.
So I reported that on the same day, 30
October.
It took VDOT a little longer to remediate,
but I am happy to report that, as of this morning, the sign is back up.
Now, if people will just refrain from acts
of road sign vandalism for a while, I’d be much obliged.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Today is Guy Fawkes Day in the UK. It’s not a holiday in the sense that you get out of school or off work; but tonight across the realm there will be fireworks and bonfires lit (along with suitable amounts of drinking) to celebrate the exposure and foiling of the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament and King James I on this date in 1605.
Guy Fawkes wasn’t the leader of the plot, but he was the
one charged with its execution (so to speak). Having been a mercenary fighting
for the Catholic League and the Spaniards against the Protestant
Dutch, he presumably had the experience necessary to handle barrels of
gunpowder and set the charges.
He did, but the plot was revealed via a letter warning a
Catholic Member of Parliament to stay away on the 5th. One thing led to
another, the gunpowder was discovered (“Oi, mate—did you order 30 barrels of
black powder and all this firewood and coal?”), Fawkes was
apprehended and duly tortured to reveal the names of co-conspirators.
(Unsuccessfully—as “interrogators” in our current foreign wars have learned,
torture isn’t a good means of acquiring reliable information.)
Eventually there was a trial, but the verdict was a
foregone conclusion. Fawkes cheated the hangman, though: he jumped from the
gallows and broke his neck.
I’m guessing the executioners went ahead with the
drawing and quartering, however.
Since the 18th Century, effigies of Fawkes, “guys”, have
been burnt in bonfires with much gaiety on this night.
Now, while I think it’s a good thing indeed to foil mass
murder plots (even when the prospective victims are politicians), there’s
something about continuing this tradition of dissing Catholics down into the
21st Century that just creeps me out.
It’s not that I am baptized in the Roman Church, it’s this
holdover from the time when where you worshiped defined your entire existence
for good or ill. I mean—that’s so 19th Century. (Okay, people over here were
certain that JFK would be taking all his marching orders from the Pope; but we
got over that.)
But the Brits are stuck in this time warped mentality in
which Catholics = Satan-worshiping-overthrowers-of-civilization.
This whole aversion to Catholicism is related to the
monarch being the head of the Church of England, which emerged from Henry VIII
having the hots for Anne Boleyn (and the possibility of producing a son
who wouldn't die in infancy) and needing a divorce from Catherine of
Aragon, which Pope Clement VII refused to give him. For centuries after Henry
declared the papacy irrelevant, all non-CoE followers were required to support
the established church with their taxes. So if you were a Methodist, you were
voluntarily giving money to your chapel and involuntarily giving
money to the Anglicans.
That’s one of the reasons why our Founding Fathers slipped
that separation of church and state clause in the First Amendment.
That established church thing just rankled. (A lot of the provisions in the
Constitution were reactions to British governing practices.)
Charles III has signaled a more ecumenical approach for the
new century. He inherited the title of “Defender of the Faith”, which was
accorded to Henry VIII by Pope Leo X for his defense of the Catholic Church
against Martin Luther (and subsequently taken to designate the British monarch as
the head of the Church of England), but has said he prefers to think of himself
as a “defender of faith”. (Some Commonwealth countries also removed the “DoF”
style from references to the king.) Only recently he was seen praying in the
Vatican with Pope Leo XIV; since giant cracks did not appear in the earth’s
surface and the sun, in fact, rose again the next morning, this may be A Sign.
Indeed, in an odd turn of events—even as the Church of
England elects a female Archbishop of Canterbury and the official head of the
denomination reaches out to members of other faiths—evangelicals in the US are
pushing for a White (Protestant) Christian-fascist theocracy in the country
founded on no established religion.
If we had bonfires here, they’d be tossing witches and
irony into the flames.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Today is Election Day for several states, including the Commonwealth of Virginia. All the offices up for grabs are state and local, including governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general. These positions are currently held by Republicans, who’ve done their best to return us to those halcyon days of a century ago, when certain people knew their places and did not dare to question their betters.
Governor Fleecebrains is banned from
re-election due to term limits, but his lieutenant governor is running for his
job and his AG is trying to repeat. I cast
my ballot three weeks ago, and I understand that—at
least in Fairfax County—there’s been a big turnout for early voting.
Still—I was pleased to see this reminder on the info sign on the W&OD Trail yesterday morning.
And this morning—more reminders:
Voting is what makes
it all happen and it’s your ticket to a democratic government.
©2025 Bas Bleu
It’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen Foxy around the ‘hood. So I was very grateful to run into him Saturday morning on the construction site, as I was going over to document crews out working before the contractual start time.
He’s looking fine and fancy, and I’m grateful to see him
again.
©2025 Bas Bleu
For our Halloween earworm, singer-songwriter Elle Cordova has updated Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” for our times.
What’s terrifying is that it’s all true. And the next round of slashing is SNAP benefits, so millions of Americans will start going hungry as of midnight tonight.
Hurrugh.
©2025 Bas Bleu
When my neighbor moved out of his house in June, it was kind of a mad scramble at the end. I’d open my door in the morning and find bags or boxes of things he was jettisoning—foodstuffs, linens, even small appliances.
Yes—one morning there was a box with a toaster and an
electric kettle. Well—I have a toaster oven, but I thought I might quite like
the kettle. Boy, was I right. That sucker was a game changer—heats water for
tea like a champ and then shuts off.
Until a couple of weeks ago when it didn’t any more. Whenever
it was on the plate, it was heating. Once I didn’t hear it when it boiled and
by the time I got to the kitchen, I had to use a hot pad to take it off.
So, I had a decision—do I buy a new kettle or go back to
using the whistling one on the stove? Or continue to use it in its current
condition?
Eventually I opted for replacing it, but with a kettle that
will heat to different temperatures—for green tea, French press coffee and
black tea, amongst other settings. (I make a quart of iced tea about every other day, and starting in October every year I make a pot of hot tea almost daily.) It cost a few bob (although on sale), but
once again, my life is changed.
I do have to remember to poke the setting for green tea instead of just “boil”, which will take some training. (Also—I'm not quite sure of the point of "keep warm".) But it is da bomb.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Here’s a thing I found mildly amusing.
One of my neighbors subscribes to The Washington Post;
I mean, a physical copy of the newspaper is delivered every morning. By which I
mean: it gets flung from the delivery guy’s car, so it generally makes it beyond
the parked cars, but not on her doorstep.
So, as I walk past, I pick it up and place it on a stand
she has next to her front door. All she has to do is open the door and reach
out for the paper. It’s always enclosed in a plastic bag, which is normally
orange.
Well, on Saturday, I noticed that the bag was blue, and
then I saw this:
I actually checked to see that the paper enclosed was
indeed WaPo, and not NYT.
I reckon the delivery guy may also deliver the Times
and either he ran out of Post bags or mixed them up somehow. (Although
he did, in fact, deliver the right paper.)
Sunday we were back to normal orange. Order has been restored in the universe.
©2025 Bas Bleu
I had a little flare of Civic Duty last week. On my
Wednesday morning walk, I noticed that someone had decapitated a fire hydrant.
Actually, the first thing I saw was that someone had
knocked down a street sign in front of the Kinder Care® center:
Then I twigged to the hole where the hydrant used to be,
and the tire mark that seemed to tell a story of a vehicle coming off the
street, shearing off both the hydrant and the sign, then landing back on the
street.
No water gushing, just the hole and one of the little
flange thingies. Also—no hydrant.
Only, about 10 meters on, there it was, tossed in a little
copse of trees. Presumably the miscreant thought their crime would escape
notice if no one found the evidence?
Well, when I got home I called the Fairfax County
non-emergency line to find out what agency handles damaged fire hydrants. Turns
out it’s Fairfax Water, duh. So I called their report-an-emergency line and
connected with a very nice woman named Leah. She took my information (I had to
look up the address, because it didn’t occur to me that it might be useful,
duh) and thanked me.
(I was a little disappointed that I had to do this by phone, because—I had all those photos. But it turned out okay.)
And blow me—Thursday morning there was a new fire hydrant:
Sign is still down—that’s obviously not Fairfax Water’s
problem.
One more bit of info: while you’re on hold with Fairfax
Water, they play Handel’s “Water Music”. Perfect.
©2025 Bas Bleu
We have a central green—a village “common”, as it were—in our cluster. There’s a tot lot, with slides and a jungle gym, swings, a swathe of lawn and, of course poison ivy. (We’re three months out from the first acknowledgment of the pest and still waiting for the cluster board/management company/contracted landscaping company to actually, you know, do something about it.)
There’s also a metal picnic table/benches jobber, where I’ve
seen parents sit while watching their kids play.
Early last week, however, I noticed someone had ornamented
the table with pinecones. They so closely matched the color of the surface that
their protrusion looked almost organic.
When it was still there the next day, I augmented the
arrangement, just because it made me feel happy.
(Took me a while to get the pine sap off my fingers and mobile phone case.)
I don’t know what it was about those slender cones poking
up from the holes in the table, but it evoked something magical, whimsical and
even promising. Considering everything that’s going on in the world, I’m
perhaps overly grateful for things like this. But gratitude is gratitude.
©2025 Bas Bleu
