The week in weird

We are surrounded by news of the weird, and I’m not exactly sure from which direction the weird winds blow wildest.

First off, on Wednesday, the day the UK’s defence [sic] secretary harrumphed that the Baltic nations should be on the lookout for Russian incursions, given the undeclared war going on in Ukraine, the RAF scrambled Typhoon fighters to warn off two Russian Bear bombers that were skirting the coast of Cornwall.

Cornwall is in the south of England; it’s the little part that juts out to the left on this map:

And you’ll notice that it is a goodly distance from any territory that belongs to Russia. So it’s not like those two Bears took a wrong turn on their way from Smolensk to Nizhny Novgorod and the next thing they know they were skimming past Newquay trying to find the best place for winkles and chips.

There have been other incidents, both in the air and undersea, where Russian units have pushed the envelope in various parts of Western Europe. Testing the boundaries, as it were, kind of like teenagers trying to get their curfew extended. Only with Putin, it’s more like recovering either the old Soviet Union or possibly the pre-1917 Russian Empire. Hard to know with that guy.

But, as Sancho Panza used to say, whether the rock hits the pitcher or the pitcher hits the rock, it’s going to be bad for the pitcher.

However, there’s good weird to balance the bad.

Well, I suppose the modifier “good” all depends on whether you’re one of the protagonists involved in these two stories.

First, from Orlando, a woman believed to be under the influence of some “heavy unknown substance” was arrested last Sunday after peeling off her clothes, walking naked into traffic, grabbing herself in a place where Minnie Mouse doesn’t even have a place and then climbing onto a car and stomping on it.

The report I read makes a point of identifying the car in question as a Lexus, as though that’s somehow more of an affront than a Chevy or a Volvo. And one of the passengers in said Lexus reported that the miscreant (one Amie Carter, 31, if you care) also threw a mobile phone at the car behind the one she was mounting. (Well, that’s the verb the news story uses.)

Sadly (and I do find this difficult to believe) there appears to be no video footage of this incident. Go figure.

Well, naturally I thought this all very interesting, but my big question is this: where did Carter get the mobile phone to throw if she was naked? And my answer to myself is: no place I want to know about.

But from sunny Florida, let’s move up to Michigan where last month Christina Bond fatally shot herself through the eye while adjusting the handgun she was carrying in her bra holster. Bond, an evangelical Christian, biker and Republican, was 55. She was also obviously a gun nut.

Now, as with the case of Carter (and, what the hell, Putin, too), my mind just started filling with pictures. Like—did the folks at the Road to Life church edge away from her when she was taken by the spirit and began speaking in tongues and clutching her chest? What about the Friday night fish fry fundraiser for the Republicans—did they try to keep her away from the deep-fry baskets? Did anyone ask her to dance?

Apparently this bra holster is a whole thing, which I did not know about. I wonder if you have to get a conceal-carry permit for these things, or is the gun not really concealed?

I’m also betting it’s a lot harder to get a guy to look at your face when you’re wearing one of those things. Kind of a double attraction for him. Triple, maybe.

Well, I also wonder what happens when you’re out at the tavern, and you’re three or eight Black Jacks into the evening, and you get a little confused about which cup has your cash and which your carry? Makes me also wonder why we haven't heard of more incidents along these lines. But perhaps we will.

But that’s all the weird I can handle for now. What would be really weird would be if Putin started packing a piece in a bra and then… Oh, never mind.

The minstrel of the dawn

It was quite the blast from the past on Saturday when NPR’s Scott Simon interviewed Gordon Lightfoot. The Canadian singer-songwriter, 76, is embarking on a tour and has embarked on a 26-city tour.

I didn’t recognize Lightfoot’s voice, but then I don’t think I’ve ever heard him speaking much; just the singing. I don’t recall now how I came to love his stuff, but I first went to see him at a tiny club in Huntington Beach, where I probably shouldn’t have been allowed in because I was underage. But I’d persuaded my BFF to go with me, and then somehow had the chutzpah to go backstage—or maybe it was beside-stage; the club really was small—to take his picture:

A lot of years later, I went with another friend to the Universal Amphitheatre to hear him again. This time he was backed up by a band, singers and the whole megillah, and he had a bit of the air of someone who'd already been rode pretty hard and put away wet.

Even if you’ve never heard Lightfoot, you’ve heard his songs. Seriously—if you don’t know “Early Morning Rain”, you haven’t been alive at any time in the past 40 years.

(I know this will sound antediluvian to Millennials, but when I rode my bicycle from Paris to Santiago de Compostela, I had no iPod, no smartphone, not even a Walkman. I sang to myself, and I well recall blaring out “Now the liquor tasted gooood and the women all were faaaast” as I pedaled through a Spanish village, much to the visible surprise of the residents.)

Lightfoot actually wrote a range of songs, including some truly forgettable fluff. “Go-Go Round” comes to mind, with its refrain “Only a go-go girl in love with someone who didn’t care.” Well, yes—haven’t we all been that go-go girl?

But, as Simon brings up in the interview, there are many (including myself) who only know about the Edmund Fitzgerald tragedy of 1975 because of Lightfoot’s “Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”.

My favorite Lightfoot song, however, is the one Simon refers to as the “unofficial Canadian national anthem”, “Canadian Railroad Trilogy”. Actually—I think much of my understanding of Canadian history comes from that one song. Um. But I always loved the three distinct parts, wrapped in the underlying “green dark forest…too silent to be real.”

So I’m glad to hear Lightfoot is still out there playing the halls. And the clubs.

Three Danes

I really don’t know what to say about the vicious attacks last weekend in Copenhagen. I’ve been hearing some talk about the possibility that they weren’t acts of terrorism, but random violence by a young man with gangs in his background.

Well, let me just point out that shooting up a café where Swedish political cartoonist Lars Vilks (who travels with bodyguards because of death threats from Islamists) was participating in a discussion on free speech, followed by firing on a synagogue, does not seem all that random to me. Especially only a month after the Charlie Hebdo/kosher supermarket murders.

So let me just leave you with three names:

Dan Uzan, 37, shot while on security duty outside the Great Synagogue early Sunday morning.

Documentarian Finn Noergaard, 55, murdered at the café on Saturday.

Alleged shooter Omar el-Hussein, 22, only recently released from prison; killed on Sunday by Danish police after he fired on them.

A [Jewish] community volunteer, a film maker and a thug. Make of that what you will.

Not just one of your little toys

What sad news—Lesley Gore has died, aged 68, of cancer. Way, way too young.

Her career in pop started more than 50 years ago, when under that demur little flip ‘do, she showed she had a set of pipes. Well—she was from New Jersey, so…

The reports all describe her as “Lesley Gore, Singer of ‘It’s My Party’”, so maybe that was her biggest hit, although she had more than just a couple.

For me, though, she drew a line in the sand that went way beyond crying at a party. “You Don’t Own Me” should have been the anthem of the women’s movement. If it hasn’t been, there’s still time.

It was used to good effect in The First Wives Club, and I think it’s due for a resurgence.

Whaddaya think?

Gratitude Monday: Health and safety

A couple of years ago I posted about being grateful for the fact that, in the United States, it’s considered a basic duty of the government (usually at the local level, but it goes up the line all the way to the EPA) to provide the citizenry with safe water, and that you mostly get it delivered to your kitchen and bathroom via pipes. You don’t have to go down to the creek with your buckets and schlep it back to your home; you turn the tap and there it is.

Well, yesterday I was talking with a friend of mine who runs an electrical business in England, and was reminded that there’s something else for which I’m grateful: at least in the six states where I’ve lived (even those south of the Mason-Dixon Line), building codes have meant that I’ve had relatively modern plumbing and wiring in my residences.

We were talking about his range of services—new construction as well as repairs and renovations, and I flashed onto my flat in Maidenhead, where there was mildew in the cupboards (closets to Americans), and they ran wires alongside pipes, along the floorboards, outside the walls.

(And, so you know, this was the least appalling place I looked at. Some of them were so stultifyingly awful, I actually gasped. And I've lived in a place where cockroaches were a daily occurrence, although I'm grateful that I only saw rats at a distance in the complex.)

But the worst, for me, was that when an electrician came in to do something about the ridiculous under-counter fridge (it was a plug-in, but stuck into a space with no room for the plug; I’m not making that up, he had to remove the plug and wire it into the wall to make it fit), he showed me the fuse box for the place.

As in—“here are some fuses, and here’s how you take this this wire to replace any fuse here that blows”. Not a circuit breaker, a fuse box. With wires.

Also—when I asked him if running wiring alongside pipes was allowed by building codes, he just laughed. It seems that in the UK, they don’t need no stinkin’ building codes. Or they didn’t up until the 21^st Century.

At which point, my friend tells me, they’re still not huge on enforcing them.

I’ve lived in some dodgy places over the years in the US, but never in a place that I thought might kill me. Or where I was expected to have electrician skills in addition to paying obscene amounts of rent. So I am really grateful that the swell county of Santa Clara has building codes, and enforces them.

And I know where the circuit breaker box is.