Dots to cuckoos

That clip I gave you yesterday from The Third Man moves on to another choice line from Harry Lime.

Lime actually gets all the best lines; for being a pulp western writer, Holly Martins does not have much of a way with words. Joseph Cotton is exactly the guy to deliver the background noise; he’s always struck me as unprepossessing in the extreme.

Anyway, Lime here encapsulates European history in a couple of sentences:

The way Orson Welles spits out “cuckoo clock” has always cracked me up.

Dots on the ground

A colleague and I were chatting earlier this week, starting out on a documentary on Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, and then on to how the dénouement of the Mueller investigation has emboldened the Chaos Monkey to accelerate the destruction of civilization. From cutting funding for the Special Olympics to out-and-out ending the ACA, the administration doesn’t even bother to dress this shit up any more; they’re on a roll and the whooping and hollering is on maximum volume.

My mate marveled at the callousness of this crowd. How can they live with themselves, he wondered? I immediately thought of Harry Lime, the post-war racketeer who sold fake penicillin in Vienna, in Graham Greene’s novel and Carol Reed’s film The Third Man. In the iconic scene on Vienna’s Prater Ferris wheel, When his old friend Holly Martins, aghast, asks Lime how he can do it, what about his victims, this is his response:

And that’s pretty much how the entire Republican party gets through life; we’re all just dots on the ground to them.

Commerce cubed

Monday afternoon I came across this vehicle in the park-and-ride lot in the People’s Republic:

I was struck by the notion of “used cubicles”, although I don’t know why. Cubes are by definition easily reconfigured and repurposed, so why not?

There was something about the preciousness of their branding that inspired me to visit their website. It was rather sadly borne out when I clicked to see what IT equipment they might be flogging:

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On the other hand, they have 76 Herman Miller Aeron chairs with a price of $400, and I could use a decent computer chair at home…

March madness

It rained here in the District They Call Columbia all day Thursday. I mean, from before dawn until the evening, it never let up. It wasn’t a gullywasher, but it also wasn’t a drizzle. Full-on, steady rain for hours.

Friday, when I went out in the morning, I could have gone swimming in the passenger side footwell, so I took it to the garage right after opening, and spent the day working at home. Just as the Saab guy was calling to tell me that my sunroof had been leaking and they’d have to keep it until Monday, I looked outside, and saw this:

Evidently it was a completely freaky weather system, which brought rain, hail, graupel and possibly frogs and alligators from the skies. (Graupel, if you’re asking, is like hail, only smaller and opaque. You can see that just in the period when I shot the video it tapered off, but left a covering on the ground.

Well, the garage actually had my car ready Saturday morning, so I walked up and got a couple of pix of the daffodils around their parking lot.

Spring, man. Weird.

Gratitude Monday: small comforts

My relationship with money and finances is…fraught. It was one of two major life elements that was weaponized in my family, and I’ve always felt anxiety over it, even when I’m doing well. It’s like the Sword of Damocles is always hanging over me, no matter where I go.

Last week, however, I took two—very small—steps against that anxiety. I came across a follow-up to this story about a local organization that makes life better in small, very personal ways, for kids who need it most. Alice’s Kids answers requests from teachers, counselors and social workers for one-off things that are beyond the means of their families. The daughter of a furloughed federal worker who needs her school cafeteria bill paid or she can’t walk with her classmates at graduation. A classroom birthday party for a child living in a homeless shelter. Clothes for a girl to wear to the funeral of her mother, whose sudden death the child discovered when she came home from school one day. Books for a boy with reading difficulties but who loves Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

Ron Fitzsimmons runs the organization out of his Alexandria home; as a result of the WaPo story, Alice’s Kids is expanding to areas across the country. What touched me was the focus on the seemingly small things (small to those living in comfort) that these children lack. Cupcakes for their classmates. Books of your own. Not being left out of your high school graduation because your tight-arsed school is holding it ransom. Clothes to wear to your mom’s funeral.

So before the oh-man-gotta-watch-your-spending voices started tsking in my head, I went to their site and set up a monthly donation. It’s not a lot per month, but Fitzsimmons clearly targets their gifts where they’ll do the most good, so I know my little will have an impact out of all proportion to what it costs me.

Then, a couple of days later, one of my friends tweeted that his daughter is raising money for her rowing club in Lawrence, Mass. Again, before that Sword could sway over my head and whisper that I shouldn’t be sending money when even at that moment my car was back in the shop, I went to her fundraising site and made a contribution. It’s a welcome diversion from the non-stop news of political, economic, climate and other disasters that swirl around me.

And I was reminded of what tipped me over the edge years ago to become a sustaining supporter of KQED-FM. I was in the Sunnyvale Panera Bread, listening to the station during one of their membership drives. KQED invites contributors to record a message about why they support the station, and they play some of them during every pledge break. I generally tune out to that stuff, but this young fellow’s voice caught my attention.

The high school student said he worked in a fast-food place and earned $15 an hour. He reckoned that $15 per month was one hour’s pay, and supporting public radio was worth an hour’s work.

I picked up my mobile, called the number and set up my sustaining membership, even though my income was…spotty at the time. If the fast-food kid could do it, it would be shameful for me not to as well.

Today I’m grateful for that reminder. I’m grateful that I live in enough comfort that I can share with people for whom comfort is a dream. And I’m grateful that—for a while, at least—I’ve battled that Sword.