Friday, January 20, 2017

Fish out of water

You may recall that the building where I live is renovating the corridors, and that someone with a rather delicious sense of whimsy lives on my floor (and at my end of the building).

Well, alas—this week the aquatic primer on the walls was covered up by two coats of “grown-up” paint, and all the fishies disappeared. That’s progress, I know.
  

But a couple of them made a break for it, ending up on the industrial-strength cardboard floor protectors. One in front of my flat:



And one right by the elevators:


(Sadly, it did not take long for Elevator Fish to be squashed pretty miserably.)

But then I noticed that someone had rescued many of the fishies—although I suppose jamming them in the hinge-space of a door is not a pleasant environment for anyone:



Even so, it means that the painters also have a sense of whimsy, and that makes me feel good today, when I very much need it.



Thursday, January 19, 2017

The damned mirror crack'd

Yeah, stuff’s gettin’ real, people.

My place of employment is in the Red Zone; not precisely Ground Zero of the Kakistocalypse, but as close as dammit. Our building garage (and others in the Zone) is closed as of 1000 today, and they may be patting people down as they exit from Metro Center station.

I don’t know, because my manager strongly encouraged me to work from home today, and tomorrow we are thankfully off. But here are a couple of shots from the ‘hood as of yesterday:


Jersey barriers, which I imagine will be moved across the various intersections.


Death to parkers signs.

And, frankly, this is about as close as I want to get to the Kleptocrat and his ilk.

Basically, as close as dammit.


Wednesday, January 18, 2017

Love in the parking lot


Some time ago I was in the parking lot of the Alexandria Wegmans, an East Coast grocery chain, when I noticed this truck all tricked out:


This Wegmans is near Fort Belvoir; I didn’t see a base sticker on it, but it did have an Oklahoma license plate on the rear, and I just kinda thought…

Anyhow, what caught my attention was this declaration plastered to the front bumper:


Look—anyone driving a $32K Silverado pickup with Oklahoma plates and a piece of a Robert Browning sonnet slapped across the bumper deserves a shout-out. I rifled through my car, but didn’t have any decent-sized pads of paper (since rectified). So I scribbled my good wishes on a business card-sized scrap and stuck it under the windscreen wiper.

May you grow old alongside each other, never run out of gas and always be driving under the speed limit as you pass the cop cars.



Tuesday, January 17, 2017

And the landlord's a bastard

On my way back to work from a conference a while ago, I noticed this tagged construction site.


Given the events of this week, I thought it was timely.



Monday, January 16, 2017

Gratitude Monday: Comfort where I find it

On the day we as a nation celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m focusing on some of the remarkable achievements of the United States of America that have occurred in my lifetime. Some of the ones with special meaning for me:

The Space Program. It started out as the Space Race, us against the Soviets, and they won the first few heats. But oh, when we put our minds—our very best minds—to it, we soared. Viz.:

The Mercury Seven—our space pioneers. I’ll give you John Glenn’s first trip, on 20 February 1962, since we so recently lost him:


1969: Apollo II, first landing on the moon. Neil Armstrong took that giant leap on 20 July, followed by Buzz Aldrin. I watched it in Champaign, Ill., with my friend Gretchen Pullen’s family. Look at Armstrong just hopping around like an eight-year-old:


Taking a giant step of a different sort, Richard M. Nixon took a blowtorch to the ice block of our relations with China, and within a few years of entering office, he was entering the People’s Republic. Literally.


But Nixon’s hubris grew as though on steroids, and it was the now-vilified main-stream media, including the New York Times’s disclosure of the Pentagon Papers and the stellar work of the Washington Post, digging into the Watergate scandal. From publisher Katharine Graham down to newbie reporter Bob Woodward, the Post uncovered corruption and crimes on a scale we’d thought could never be replicated. They uncovered it, verified it in accordance with high journalistic standards, and they published it, in the face of intimidation from high-ranking Administration officials. Including Attorney General John Mitchell.

Yes, that’s right: our chief legal officer was not only in on the crimes, he threatened those who brought them to light. Plus ça change


[From left, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee. Photo by Washington Post]

It gave me hope that, no matter how far off track we got, we could right our course and continue to move forward.

We’ve had some amazing song writers during my lifetime. I’ll just sum them up with Bob Dylan and give you something that was true in 1964 when he wrote it and sure as hell is true again now.

Here’s Tracy Chapman singing it at his 30th Anniversary Concert:


In the cinematic arts we’ve had a shedload of brilliant filmmakers. These are among my favorites: Coppola, Coppola, Spielberg, Hill, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Howard, Lee.

And we made—for a while—astonishing progress toward equality for all in this shining city upon a hill: striking down the policies of separate-but-equal; don’t ask, don’t tell; and governmental intrusion into the reproductive rights of women.






All of this may have culminated in the election, in 2008, and reelection, in 2012, of the first African-American man to the Presidency.


It’s Martin Luther King Day, of the week that will see the installation of the antithesis of all these achievements—the Kleptocrat and his appointed administration, abetted by Repugnant majorities in both Houses of Congress. So I’m holding on to these things that I witnessed in my lifetime. We were good, once. I hope we can return to goodness once again.