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Between the Pennsylvania grand jury report on decades of sexual abuse by Catholic priests (covered up by Church hierarchy and thus now mostly beyond the statutes of limitations for prosecution), the death of Aretha Franklin (from that ghastly bastard, pancreatic cancer) and the latest authoritarian antics from the Kleptocrat (abetted by his complicit GOPig enablers), I just haven’t the  heart to write anything today.

It's all I can do to upload this video of a butterfly.

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On my walks, I fill much of the time wondering about the stories behind things I see. Squashed cars are fairly self-explanatory, especially when you can see the presumptive cause of the squashing right there. Yarn bombing is somewhat more nebulous.

But then there’s stuff left out for scavengers. I used to see a lot of that back in the Valley They Call Silicon. The People’s Republic—meh, there are restrictions.

Still, a while ago I was out and saw this waiting by the bus stop:

Seemed perfectly useable to me—I presume all it lacked was a mattress of some kind. There are large apartment complexes on both sides of that street; you’d think someone would snap it up and put it to use.

The next day, someone had righted it (I think it might have been on its side because of torrential rains).

And then, a few days later, it was gone.

I hope: to a good home and not the landfill.

Natural woman

At the time of writing, all we know is that Aretha Franklin is very ill. The nature of the illness is unspecified; she’s 76 years old and had started backing off touring last year.

At any rate, I’ve been thinking of the woman whose music has been somewhere in my life since the 60s. I have nothing profound to say; just for the past couple of days I’ve been poking around my stash of the Queen of Soul, and letting her voice roll around me. From Bacharach to Puccini, she puts her inimitable stamp on everything, and she holds back nothing.  Lordy, what a treasure she is.

Well, as I (and thousands the world around) hold Aretha in our thoughts, I’m just going to share a couple of her standards.

The first is one she wrote, and although it’s from the 60s, this rendition is from The Blues Brothers. It gets me every single time—not only the words, but her. In those slippers. In a greasy spoon.

The second is also from the 60s, written by Carole King, but this performance is from 2015, at the Kennedy Center Honors for King. Watching Aretha’s command of the song, of King and of the audience is absolutely amazing. She is electrifying.

Natural woman. Queen of Soul. National treasure.

Ooooer, scary!

I want this On The Record: I was in Costco last week—single-digit dates in August—and look what I found:

Yes, Halloween costumes for sale.

I just despair.

Gratitude Monday: a bottle of water

I spent much of my birthday weekend fighting with Comcast.

The problem actually started weeks ago, when the error message RDK-03033 appeared on my TV screen. That effectively freezes all functionality, and you have to do the Comcast equivalent of rebooting—unplug your DVR box, wait a while, replug and wait about five-eight minutes for it to cycle back on: powering up, connecting to X1, powering up the “entertainment experience”, connecting to live TV. I’d been doing that on a nightly basis, until last Thursday I finally called what they are pleased to refer to as customer support.

Patricia sent a test signal, then sent a reset signal, and functionality was restored. However, as I pointed out, functionality would be restored every time I went through the home version of reset, but then RDK-03033 would show up again. She arranged for a technician to come out Friday, but then she insisted on passing me on to “Advanced Support”, in Manila from the sound of the woman. She insisted on sending a signal, despite me telling her Patricia had already done so. No, no—this is a different signal.

It was indeed, because after she sent that, my box wouldn’t get past the connecting to X1. That means no TV at all. Imagine my joy.

Okay, Friday afternoon the tech showed up, spent a great deal of time chatting, checked the signal (it was fine), brought in a new box and left. TV working…until…

Two things: RDK-03033 appeared, and I lost most of my recordings.

Now, one of the things Comcast touts about the “X1 entertainment experience” is that your recordings are saved to the cloud. So it’s not supposed to matter what box you have, your recordings are not on a hard drive, they’re in the cloud and accessible on multiple devices.

Right.

I spent 52 minutes on the horn with Rita at their support line. She was well-meaning, but obviously not well trained. Much of the time was spent with her looking through web documents on problems with recordings. Eventually we ascertained that she could see my missing recordings—she read them off, so they were there—but she didn’t know how to get them back in my queue.

She had to consult a “supervisor”, and she called me back on Saturday to instruct me to synch my box—she walked me through it, but the synch process was instantaneous, which told me it wasn’t gathering in 30-40 recordings from the cloud. She read her instructions and said, “it can take an hour.” She called back about 90 minutes later, but the recordings were still missing. Rita said she’d have to consult her supervisor (or maybe it was a different one) and get back with me. On Monday.

About an hour later, RDK-03033 appeared. I rebooted, but then it reappeared a few minutes later. So I called again. New signal sent, functionality restored, but, as I pointed out, that’s no guarantee that the problem is solved. So, new technician out Sunday afternoon.

(Interspersed with this was a series of tweets, which got @ComcastCares—except they don’t—to desperately ask me to please DM them, so they “can help”. One on Friday suggested $18.36 as compensation for all my lost recordings. I told him/her that was completely inadequate. Someone else told me that my cable box is not cloud-enabled. I suggested that it would be extra primo good if all of Comcast could settle on one story to tell me.)

So, yesterday, a new, Comcast-employee technician came out (evidently Yuri, or Mitya, or Pasha on Friday was a contractor), spent nearly two hours checking inside and outside the house (including inside the walls and in the attic)… He swapped out the box (again—this being the fifth box since I opened the account in February of last year), and had a ticket created for the lost recordings. (When I told him one of the score of initials I DM’d with on Twitter told me “your box is not cloud enabled”, he snorted.) I am not holding my breath.

Okay, but this is Gratitude Monday. And in the midst of all this utter crap, here’s what I’m thankful for.

The library here in the People’s Republic is next to a homeless shelter (which new residents would like to drive out, because ew), and you often see people who look like they have no permanent abode, sitting in the courtyard. August in the District They Call Columbia is brutal, with heat and humidity, and that entryway is usually shady, at least.

Friday morning, I walked to the library around 1000 when it opens. It was already nasty hot/humid at that time. Just ahead of me was an older woman, carrying a bottle of water. There was a fellow sitting in the courtyard, clearly not intending to go into the library. She asked him if he’d like her water. He demurred at first, but she said, “I have more in my trunk.” So he accepted.

That small gesture of kindness and decency just made up for everything else.

When I ran into her later in the library, I thanked her; told her that was my grace for the day. And it was, for the whole weekend, even through Comcast.