Not vanity, but memorable

Okay, this is not a vanity plate. But I swear that when I first glanced at it, I thought it said “THE LASS”, and that became unseeable.

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Sigh

Okay, well—if Costco is going to put up its Halloween décor at the beginning of August, I suppose it makes sense for them to roll out the Christmas stuff before we’ve even hit the Ides of September.

It’s really quite terrifying, because I know there’ll be more every time I make a butter and bread flour run.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: unexpected splendour

Saturday night was one of those not-going-to-get-any-sleep affairs; I eventually nodded off at 0400; woke up at 0500; got back to sleep; eventually just got up at 0845. Naturally, that means that yesterday morning pretty much started out crap.

I got dressed for walking and realized that the windows had fogged over, which portended my walk would be complete soup. (Android said that it was 74F and felt like 74F, but it lied; it felt ghastly. For one thing, my glasses fogged up as I stepped outside.) But I decided I’d at least walk over to the one remaining pie-plate-sized hibiscus shrub to take a picture for a neighbor.

And look what I found on my way:

I saw them because I took a different route than my normal walk, so I don’t know how long they’ve been there. But they were stunning, beautiful and exuberant. And they lifted my day into bearable. For that I am grateful.

 

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Merciful Jesu

Lord, is it 25 years already? A quarter of a century since the world changed utterly with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, ushering in an age of insecurity in the West, multiple wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan and (in hindsight) US policies that made a flurry of performative activities around the top-level symptoms while never actually addressing any root causes.

And it led us to the current administration, the most ignorant, cruel, feckless, incompetent pack of grifters ever assembled in one place and handed the biggest economy, the most powerful military and (apparently) the most spiteful electorate in history.

I’ve been wondering what the Kleptocrat would have done had his arse been spreading in the Oval Office in 2001. I imagine him issuing fatwahs for everyone who ever set foot in a mosque, immediate missile strikes on…well, not Saudi Arabia, the point of origin for the core of the 9/11 perps, because “ally”, but maybe Syria, Iraq and Mozambique, just because he could. He couldn’t have done a better job than Bush 43 at hunkering down on fossil fuels (thus keeping us tied to Middle East supply sources), but he could probably have raked in a lot more bribes from the sheikhs and emirs.

I started down the road of picturing Hegseth as SecDef, but that was too farcically apocalyptic even for me.

Oh—and as for NATO invoking Article V—the only time in its existence—spilling its blood and treasure in defense of the United States…I wonder.

Twenty-five years, and how far have we progressed, really? Thirteen years of Republican presidents; twelve of Democratic ones, with a good chunk of the first years of the latter spent cleaning up the economic mess left by the former. Eighty years of post-World War II international goodwill and soft power gone like our stock of munitions. It’s going to take us longer than Germany to rebuild global trust, if we work diligently and humbly.

Wellbut, today’s a time for commemorating the more than 3000 people—mostly Americans, but (this being America) people from multiple countries—who went about their business on a sunny day in New York City and Washington, D.C., 25 years ago and never came home.

So my earworm is the “Recorare” from Mozart’s Requiem. The prayer begins:

“Remember, merciful Jesu,
“that I am the cause of thy coming,
“and cast me not away on that day.”

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Art appreciation

The neighborhood sidewalk artists have been out again. (The gnats and mosquitos seem to be abating, so that may have something to do with it.)

Not sure whether these are balloons roaming free, or bags of something.

This flower fascinates me. It’s like you could keep adding fill-in petals until you’ve covered the sidewalk.

And this is just...

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

Mobile truth

Another vehicular special edition today—not vanity plates, but the bumper stickers.

All I’ve got to say is: they are correct.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Executive privilege

Special edition of vanity plates today.

Saw this one Saturday, on my way to pick up my CSA in the K-Mart shopping center. (Yes, the K-mart closed decades ago, but that’s what everyone calls it. I don’t even know what its official name is.)

The driver used both a right-turn-only and a left turn only lane to traffic hop on Baron Cameron/Elden Street. I lost sight of the car (naïvely thought that he’d actually turned left when he pulled into the left-turn-only lane), so I was surprised to see the thing parked in the fire lane near the ABC store in the shopping center.

Stayed parked there for at least eight minutes, with flashers on to I suppose indicate he wasn’t going to sit down to a meal somewhere, then hauled out ahead of me.

Didn’t seem to be in such a hurry on his return journey—there was no lane-weaving.

But what a maroon. An executive-level maroon.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Workers

Today being Labor Day, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.

There are basically only two reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services; and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t at times been part of the problem—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions, unsafe factory buildings or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Thirty-six years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno (because NO BREAKS!). Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and it don’t hold with no unions.

Let me also bring to your attention the decades of work by  the United Farm Workers to bring decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of slavery-in-all-but-name. (It would help if there were some sort of—oh, I dunno—independent inspection of food products to detect and cull out things like salmonella, e. coli, cyclospora and screwworm so that we don’t sicken and die from them, but I may just be indulging in a pipe dream.)

Labor Day was made a national holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a national holiday to “recognize” labor.

I find that a monumental act of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist labor day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.

(Someone may tell the Kleptocrat about Cleveland and we’ll see SECDEF assigning the military not only to firing on strikers, but also to taking up jobs in factories and the farms after all the deportations. As it is, he's nixed labor unions for several federal agencies and would happily ensure that working stiffs be reduced to indentured servitude. Or—what’s wrong with slavery?)

So it’s incumbent upon us, in times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15 years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed.

It’s nowhere I’d care to be, I assure you. So I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Caught up in circles

 The music world lost another great this year. Jazz singer-songwriter Cassandra Wilson died at age 70.

I’m not big on jazz—unless you’re talking Miles Davis or John Coltrane. But I am big on amazing female voices, and Wilson certainly had that. She commanded whatever she sang. Actually, she reminds me a bit of Eva Cassidy, Nina Simone and Norah Jones.

Hear for yourself. Here she is covering Cyndi Lauper’s “Time after Time”.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu

 

Bee-ing wonderful

Do you need some clips of bees in late-August action?

Well, I do, so here we go.

 

©2026 Bas Bleu