Okay, I had another song lined up for today, but the breaking news yesterday afternoon that a Manhattan jury took less than a full day to convict Cadet Bonespurs on all 34 felony counts of fraud changed my tune.
So today’s earworm has to be The Clash singing “I Fought the Law”.
©2024 Bas Bleu
For a few months there’ve been stories in the news about orcas attacking smallish boats off the coast of the Iberian Peninsula. It wasn’t just a single incident, but multiple events where the killer whales rammed yachts and fishing boats; in some instances, they sank the craft.
Initially there were theories that some yahoos on a yacht had
pointlessly injured an orca, and that word spread among the pods, resulting in
coordinated attacks on anything that vaguely resembled the offending vessel.
I mean—orcas can be assholes, no doubt about it. You don't want to get between a hungry killer whale and a seal. It'll crush you, your boat and all your hopes in a New York instant, and won't ever show a sign of remorse.
But now there’s been A
Study, and it may be that orcas—specifically the teenaged orcas—are merely
playing with Things Hanging Off Boats, like rudders. Playing in the sense that
they ram them until they break off and then they can toss it amongst themselves
like dribbling a basketball. This was exacerbated by the rise in numbers of
their food source, bluefin tuna, so they didn’t have to spend all the hours God
sends finding lunch; they had time on their hands and got bored.
It apparently turns out that, absent organized after-school
activities, gangs of teenagers just do what gangs of teenagers do. Human, orca—whatever.
But wait—there’s more.
It also seems that orca teens—even without TikTok and Instagram—create
and follow fads. Viz: in 1987, juvenile killer whales in the Pacific Northwest
started swimming around with dead salmon on their heads. It was all the rage, like
Swatch watches and mullets on land.
But here’s the thing: the dead salmon hat thing spread to adult
orcas, and then the trend died out.
Teenagers be like: “Well, now the olds are doing it, so it’s all ruined.”
Sounds about right.
©2024 Bas Bleu
I’ve been composting kitchen scraps for about five years now. I use one of the 48-ounce Costco Greek yoghurt tubs to dump scraps, coffee grounds and used tea leaves until there’s enough to take out to the composter. That’s a bifurcated closed bin that you can rotate to keep things stirred up until it’s ready to be emptied out to amend the mostly clay soil in my garden.
I occasionally add leaves in the autumn and shredded paper the
rest of the year for the “brown” component.
I must not have been rotating enough about a month ago, because
when I went out to add some food waste, I found something growing. A lot of
something growing.
I don’t know what it was, but it’s been whirled into the mix now.
©2024 Bas Bleu
I have a Costco membership for several reasons. One is that gas prices are always 20 or 30 cents lower than in the Ville. Also, I buy butter by the four-pound block for my various baking endeavors. I start getting nervous when the supply in my freezer drops below 12 pounds.
But I also get my Greek yoghurt from Costco—Greek yoghurt costs
way more than regular and it’s considerably cheaper than the supermarkets or
Trader Joe’s. Moreover, it lasts a long time (look—yoghurt is essentially milk
that’s already gone bad when you buy it), so buying it in 48-ounce tubs is cost
effective for me.
Also—fewer trips out to get it.
But here’s something that’s a little unusual about my most recent
purchase:
A little flower from the dairy gods.
©2024 Bas Bleu
It seems appropriate that Memorial Day is a Monday gratitude day, because it’s the day we’re meant to reflect upon the sacrifices of the men and women who defend our country.
You know—to express gratitude in some way for their willingness to
trade their lives for the security of our society.
I feel better about this than I have in four years, because we now
have a president who isn’t hell-bent on screwing the armed services, stealing
money meant for their housing and social welfare programs to build a pointless
border wall, using them as background props for self-aggrandizing photo ops and
dissing them as losers and suckers when required to visit a military cemetery.
As a military historian with a focus on the human element of
conflict, it’s always been clear to me that the real cost of war isn’t the
treasure, it’s the blood. It’s the sons and daughters who go into harm’s way
and never return, or who return so altered as to never really find their way
back. As we reflect upon those costs, we really ought to consider the suicide
rate of combat veterans; per Department of Veterans Affairs figures, 17.5
veterans killed themselves every day in 2021. That’s 6392 per year. I’m not
going to talk about drug and alcohol addiction or homeless rates resulting from
PTSD; they’re line items on the butcher’s bill, too.
I wonder what that says about our society that we send these
people out to do terrible things on our behalf and then essentially shrug our
shoulders and avert our eyes when they come back not in bandbox tiptop
condition? Kinda feels like a broken contract to me.
Memorial Day marks the “official” start of summer in the US;
rather like acknowledging the dead who made possible the picnics and fireworks
of Independence Day. I would like to hope that this year marks the beginning of
a national recognition of the real—human—price of wars and a genuine movement
to address that price. I have no expectations that Republicans will do this—not
even eye-patched combat survivor glory hounds; homeless vets don’t make
campaign contributions. (Not like aerospace corporations, anyhow.) But we’re
better than Rs, aren’t we? A true expression of heartfelt gratitude ought to
include what Abraham Lincoln referred to as work “to bind up the nation’s
wounds, to care for him that shall have borne the battle and for his widow and
his orphan”.
At least, that’s what my gratitude means.
©2024 Bas Bleu