Not so sweet

For some reason I’ve been singing a lot of early James Taylor around the house. Mostly “Sweet Baby James” and “You Can Close Your Eyes”, but then it seems to me that “Fire and Rain” might be applicable to our times. So here it is, just James and his guitar, from 1970.

Child's play

On my get-the-hell-out-of-the-house walk yesterday, I was suddenly fascinated by the architecture of the play center jobber in the local tot lot. So here are some pix of it.

The overall structure:

Exterior of a little hidey-hole under one of the slides:

Interior of same:

Now, the piled-up cannon balls and barrel-o-gunpowder just made me wonder if parents ever actually looked at it.

Also, I note that the portholes are paned with strong plastic. I guess they didn’t want the local fire department called out every other weekend from kids getting their heads stuck in the holes. I also wonder if that was as-designed originally or if, somewhere in play equipment antiquity, the manufacturer got sued?

But now we get to the slides, which I found fascinating. There wasn’t a one that really looked the slides of my childhood. I mean—here’s this double-wide:

And this curvy one:

This other double one I found…uh, suggestive:

But the absolute take-the-biscuit corker was this one:

Seriously?

Hoods in the 'hood

I’ve noticed that people in the ‘hood have pretty well just parked their cars in the lot and abandoned them. Several have done so in violation of the maximum two cars per house, either with or without a parking permit hanging from the rear-view mirror.

But yesterday it occurred to me that one of the consequences of this (aside from possible battery death) is the undisturbed accumulation of dust. So on one of my excursions yesterday I shot a few examples:

It made me appreciate all the more the color choice of one of my neighbors:

That is basically pine-pollen green, and this stuff just disappears on it.

Forest and trees

It’s been a while since, out and about, I was able to take pix of vanity plates on cars. I have quite the cache of them, never fear—going all the way back to the Valley They Call Silicon—so I’ll never run out.

However, this weekend I walked over to Whole Foods and noticed this one:

As I was trying to work out whether it was something to do with Mobil oil (no “e”), or some kind of “to infinity and beyond” thing about mobility, I glanced at the actual vehicle:

Oh. Nevermind, then.

I do wonder about what mobile orthodontics might be, though. Not enough to inquire, having had braces all through junior and senior high school. I guess things have progressed since then.

Gratitude Monday: Honored dead

It’s Memorial Day, the national day dedicated to the remembrance of those who gave their lives in service to the country. For more than 150 years, the “service” has been specific to the military, but this year it seems much broader than that.

I don’t recall such an extension on Memorial Day of 2002—perhaps because the 3000 or so lost during the 9/11 attacks had been dead for eight months, and we were ramping up another hot war. This time, we’ve recorded 100,000 deaths in the last three months, and the meter’s still running.

(The numbers of both cases and mortalities are almost certainly underreported, for many reasons, both administrative and political.)

For years, the Washington Post printed the names and photos of servicemen and women killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. Whenever they had enough deaths to fill up the double-page center of the front section, they’d publish them. I don’t suppose many in the Shrub administration paid much attention, but it was important for people to see the names and faces of the fallen.

Yesterday the New York Times filled its entire front page with the names of as many covid19 victims as they could; one thousand. Names, ages, location. For some of the dead, they also include brief insights into their lives—sang in her choir, saved Jewish families from the Nazis, liked his bacon and hash browns crispy.

Inside the edition, Dan Barry writes, “Imagine a city of 100,000 residents that was here for New Year’s Day but has now been wiped from the American map.”

That city is going to increase in population before we’re done this year; before we’re even done with the summer. And almost all of the deaths will have been needless, the direct result of our national government abdicating its duty to the citizens who elected them.

So on this Memorial Day, as the toll mounts, I am grateful for the journalists and editors who do their damned job, reminding us that the statistics—whatever kind of “per capita” matters to you—were lives cut short. They were mothers, grandfathers, sisters, sons; gifts to their families, friends and communities. They are lost to us now, and we need to remember that.