Put it on my bill

I confess that I was somewhat disappointed that (as of yesterday afternoon) no one thought to post any #showustheduck offerings from PBS. Specifically, I was looking for this:

I like my culture accessible.

What the duck!

We totally need this story, considering the week we’ve been having—and with Friday still to come.

Because last week the Museum of English Rural Life in the UK quacked out a query to its fellow cultural institutions around the, er, web, soliciting, uh, duck pix. Just for ducks, I presume.

The whole thread is here, but I’ll start ruffling feathers by giving you a few of the responses to the call.

There was quite a GIF war between the National Railway Museum and the National Army Museum; you’ll have to go to the thread to see it, all I’ve got are these.

Also, this entry from the Getty sparked a discussion that you really need to follow. (Hint, a turducken made an appearance.)

Someone tried to sneak in a slow lorris being groomed with a toothbrush. Man, there’s always one in every flock.

We’ve got a science duck (remember the study of ocean currents done via a shipload of yellow ducks?):

And a sporting duck from South America:

Musée d’Orsay chimed in:

And so did the Louvre down the street:

I expect other museums will pile on, to defend local honor. And, as far as I’m concerned this thread has got 2019 off to a quacking good start.

Hurting the wrong people

I was on my way home yesterday afternoon, gazing out the Metro window at traffic parked for a couple of miles on the Toll Road (jackknifed truck being hooked up to be hauled away), when I got a text from a friend inviting me out to dinner. Seeing as to how yesterday wasn’t too bad of a day for a Thursday, I jumped at the chance.

Because—aside from dinner with a friend—it kept me well and truly out of danger of stumbling across El Klepto’s primetime televised manufactured hysteria.

I’ve been thinking about his base lately—more than I usually do, on account of the #TrumpShutdown. Someone must have told him that, faced with a choice between building a beautiful wall intended to keep brown people out of a white country and getting tax refunds, his goobers would ditch him like last week’s catfish bait, so furloughed IRS workers are being called back to work to process tax returns, although, of course, they’re still not getting paid.

Last week someone on Twitter posted about one of his MAGAt acquaintances moaning that ordinarily he didn’t give a toss about government shutdowns, but this one is [negatively] affecting him, and he really doesn’t like that. I thought that was the epitome of the red-hatters, but it turned out someone named Crystal Minton, of Marianna, Fla., told him to hold her beer as she jumped right in.

Because lemme just leave this here—the money shot quote from a New York Times story on the double-barreled devastation (hurricane Michael and the #TrumpShutdown) of the economy of the deep-red Florida panhandle. This truly distills the entire I’ve-got-mine/I’m-supposed-to-have-got-mine Republican party down to one simple statement.

If you’d like to read the whole story—there are plenty of others in Minton’s community who are stunned that the Kleptocrat would do this to white people—here it is.

Dinner was great, BTW.

Period of adjustment

At time of writing, we’re closing in on 17 days of partial federal government shutdown, with more than 800,000 workers affected—either furloughed without pay or working without pay. Most of them are likely to be paid eventually, although this is not guaranteed. Additionally, tens of thousands of contract workers—from cleaning staff to software architects—are sidelined with no expectation of recouping their wages. They only get paid for hours worked; lost weeks can’t be made up.

This #TrumpShutdown is all down to the Kleptocrat’s demand for funding his cockamamie wall along the border with Mexico, and down to the Repugnants in the Senate (primarily McConnell, but also Graham and some others) who suddenly are “unable” to vote on a Continuing Resolution they’d previously approved, because they’re afraid of the big baby in the Oval Office. We’re 17 days into it, and we’re told that that baby is willing for it to go on for months until he gets his bloody, useless wall and proves his balls are bigger than Ann Coulter’s.

But here’s the thing—those hundreds of thousands of people who are either working without compensation or involuntarily idled are either dipping into their savings or moving into the red to make the mortgage, buy the groceries or pay the doctor bills that are all due now. The Office of Personnel Management advising furloughed workers to arrange with their landlords to swap repair or maintenance work for rent and Orangina breezily assuring everyone that creditors will “make adjustments—they always do” is just master level fuckwittery, although unsurprising coming from someone who’s spent decades systematically stiffing workers and contractors.

By way of demonstrating, I give two examples from financial institutions with which I have relationships.

My credit union, headquartered in Manhattan Beach, Calif., has a banner across the home page stating that if you’re affected by the shutdown, they’re ready to help. But click through and you’ll see that all the “adjustment” they’re willing to make involves a very limited no-interest 12-month loan ($2000 would not even be a month’s rent in a lot of cities), $5000 credit card limit (with “normal” interest) and two months of deferred existing loan—but interest accrues during that period. (I expect they basically repurposed the accommodation they put up for victims of the California wildfires last autumn.)

They’re still going to make a profit, and this is a credit union.

CapitalOne (where I have a credit card) didn’t have any indicator of “adjustment”, nor did Bank of America. I through no fault of my own have a mortgage with Wells Fargo. If you want to find out what “adjustment” they’re willing to make, you have to call them.

That’ll be deep joy. It’s a wonder to me that WF is even still in business and its entire management structure isn’t in prison after it’s well-documented policy of fraud against its customers that went on for decades.

We the people face another assault this evening: Kleptocrat has announced he’ll “Address the Nation” and expects all the fake media enemies of the people to give him airtime. My fear is that he’ll use the occasion to declare the “state of emergency” he’s threatened as an end run around Congress, and we’ll have something much more serious than a government shutdown.

Can you say Constitutional crisis?

Gratitude Monday: the year in pix

A friend sent me a link to a 52-week photo challenge hosted (on Facebook) by a photography studio in Durham, N.C. The deal is, each week throughout the year participants are given a theme. You consider how you want to interpret the theme, take your photos and submit one to social media (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest).

Not only do you learn from the pix others submit, but you also learn from their constructive criticism.

Week 1’s assignment is “Storytelling: Self-portrait”. Take a picture showing who you are without showing your face.

I thought about taking a pic of my incipient 2019 mindmap—the stickies on my patio door, but I didn’t want anyone enlarging the image and seeing what I need to work on. So I went with a photo of books.

It was actually hard to decide what books to focus on, so I went with a mashup, which pretty much describes me. Voilà:

I like the idea of a weekly assignment; it means that I have to get out and shoot to some kind of spec consistently. Some weeks will be crap; some won’t. But it’s exercising those creative muscles, which I need.

And that’s what I’m grateful for today.