Friday, September 6, 2024

Let not your heart be troubled

When the news started dripping in yesterday of the shooting at Apalachee High School I was struck speechless—which you know does not often happen. Rendered without words because of my rage and bitterness that this has once again happened in our country. Someone (in this case, apparently, a 14-year-old boy) has some issues and access to a military-grade weapon, so a local school gets to prove the effectiveness (I’m being ironic here) of all those active-shooter lockdown drills.

Four dead—two students, two teachers—and 30 wounded.

Mike Collins, the Republican who represents the local town in Congress, is unsurprisingly offering up prayers for the victims. He’s taking time out from releasing campaign ads featuring him firing the type of rifle the teenager used and promising to “blow up the Democrats’ cover up”. I think that’s to do with the Big Lie about the 2020 election.

I haven’t heard what the NRA has to say about this one, which is probably a good thing because it would only make me want to projectile vomit.

This is what happens, folks, when you’re more afraid of giving kids books than guns. And when dead children are the price you’re willing to pay for your torturous interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Collins and the rest of the Republicans ought to be the ones who have to go in and wipe the blood off school hallway floors. But they’ll have forgotten Apalachee by the end of next week. Because a child, to them, is only worth protecting before birth.

Well, as you might imagine, I had a bit of trouble picking today’s earworm. I’m going with “His Eye Is on the Sparrow”, the gospel hymn written in 1905. It was inspired by both Old and New Testament texts assuring us that God watches over even the sparrow, so obvs he’s looking out for us as well.

Hmmm.

“His Eye Is on the Sparrow” was a signature piece for Ethel Waters, but I’m giving you Mahalia Jackson singing it.

May the community of Winder, Ga., find some comfort, somewhere.


 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Thursday, September 5, 2024

Auto reflections

My neighbors are in Turkey. They’ve been there since 9 August and have no ETA for returning. In their absence, I’m watering their basil and a couple of other plants, and I’m babysitting their 2019 VW Tiguan.

That car hates me. Since it’s 18 years younger than my Saab, and at least 30% wider, I have about a squillion electronic nannies that scream at me as I try to do things like reverse or change lanes. And I frankly am never quite sure where its wide ass is, so I try to only go places where I can pull through two parking slots. Even so, I often do a completely crap job of parking.

Also, it does that nasty thing at stoplights: when you push the brakes all the way in, the engine cuts off. It restarts when you take your foot off the brake. That thing makes me crazy.

The first week of this stint, the check engine light came on. As you might imagine, that freaked me out. (Although my car sometimes does that and it’s only once been something that really was an emergency. Still, you never know.)

Eventually it went back off again. But last week the battery died. I’ve got jumper cables, but that’s really a two-person job, because the transmitting engine needs to be gunned as you’re starting the receiving engine. A couple of friends came out and did it, and I proceeded to drive around the area for 45 minutes.

I thought all was well. And I’ve driven it around town a few times since.

However.

Yesterday I took Das Auto to Costco to pick up a few pounds of butter and a crate of spinach. Then I hit their gas station to put in some petrol to replace what I’d used up. And it refused to start. Just dead.

The attendant pushed me out to a parking spot and called on the tire people to send someone out to jump the battery. Well, he came, eventually, but didn’t really know how to use the charger. So I called AAA.

That guy came in about 30 minutes, tested the (original) battery and declared it bad and needing to be replaced. I explained about not being the owner, and said I’d notify them, so he jumped the engine and I drove home.

Made it home and put away the comestibles. Sent the owners an email with the options and now I’m awaiting instructions.

Here’s the thing, though: as I was sat in someone else’s car for nearly an hour (for first the Costco guys and then AAA), with nothing to read and only the carts of other shoppers passing by me to analyze, I realized that I was experiencing the proof of the Theory of Relativity. That hour lasted about three weeks for me.

And Costco shoppers buy a crap ton of plastic bags of what appears to be junk food.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 


Wednesday, September 4, 2024

Ooooh-er

I’m looking for a ceiling fan for my living room—this place has fans in all bedrooms plus the “family room” off the kitchen. But not in the living room. Go figure.

Well, I’ve seen about a bazillion fans online, but I need to get out and view them on the hoof to translate to real space. So last week I went out to Lowe’s and was immediately greeted by this:

So I tried out all the animations. All of them.







I’m betting that employees are going to be sick to death of these right about time for them to be swapped out by singing Christmas displays.

I'll tell you what scares me, tho: pumpkin bloody spice. 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

Sunfall

Since I’m once again able to walk, I’m becoming reacquainted with my various morning routes. One of them takes me across a golf course.

On a recent morning, I was treated to this view of the pre-golfer sprinklers at work.




 ©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Monday, September 2, 2024

Gratitude Monday: Laboring class

Today being Labor Day, I’m expressing my gratitude for the benefits that organized labor has brought to the workplace. Yes, I’m talking labor unions. Without them, there’d be a whole lot more miserable employment conditions than exist even now.

Republican candidate for vice president JD Vance sparked rightful guffaws and boos last week when he assured a gathering of firefighter union members in Boston that he and the Kleptocrat “are the most pro-worker Republican ticket in history.” Even if true, that would be a low bar, but it seems appropriate to use this as the starting point for thoughts about workers being worthy of their hire.

There are basically only two reasons why you and I are not working in sweatshops with dangerous electrical wiring, hot and cold running vermin and no toilets—unions and litigation. (I would also have added “80-hour weeks” as one of the not-any-mores, but that’s pretty much so last century.)

Business management in companies both large and small do not provide more or less sanitary and safe conditions, ventilation and some standard of minimum wage out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because over the past 150 years unions have fought with blood and treasure for the concept that labor is part of the value-add of both products and services; and because they’re terrified that if they screw up and get sued, juries will strip their corporate assets in punitive damages like a plague of locusts ranging across Iowa.

I’m not saying that unions haven’t become part of the problem—many of them are every bit as bloated and arrogant and greedy as corporate boards, and in fact you’d have trouble distinguishing one stance from the other across the negotiating table. And I’m also not saying that America’s propensity toward litigiousness doesn’t suck up resources, like some cosmic Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, that couldn’t have been better spent on something like, oh, curing cancer.

But it takes the kind of jackhammer represented by Big Labor and Big Lawsuits to get the attention of the heirs of the Triangle Shirtwaist Company. If you doubt this, I refer you to the history of the textile industry in America: the corporations first moved their factories from states with unions to the South (God bless right-to-work), and then—when even minimum wage became too much for them—to Mexico, India, China and other countries where there’s no concern about pesky things like sweatshop conditions, unsafe factory buildings or child labor.

And it’s not limited to schmattas, either. Thirty years ago during my sojourn in the great, cough, state of North Carolina (which is probably still electing Jesse Helms to the US Senate, corpse though he be), there was a fire in a chicken processing plant that killed 25 workers and injured 54 others. Exit doors from the factory floor had been locked, trapping the men and women in the inferno. Exactly like the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in 1911.

I’m not going to talk about the wages paid or the conditions in the factory, but the plant had never suffered a single safety inspection, so the managers weren’t troubled by having to fork out for any, you know, protections. North Carolina is a right-to-work state, and it don’t hold with no unions.

Let me also bring to your attention the decades of work by César Chávez and the United Farm Workers to bring decent wages, as well as working and living conditions, to the men, women and children who tend and harvest the food we eat. I know that I personally find it easier to swallow fruits and vegetables when I know they aren't the product of slavery-in-all-but-name.

Labor Day was made a national holiday in 1894, in the wake of the Pullman strike, which ended after President Grover Cleveland sent in federal troops to suppress the strikers. As a sop to thousands of workers who’d lost their jobs and their homes, Cleveland created a national holiday to “recognize” labor.

I find that a monumental act of condescension—declaring a holiday "for the workers", kind of like Flag Day, without any meaning behind it. It wasn’t even a paid holiday. And it was set for September to distinguish it from the international socialist/communist labor day of 1 May. But it played well with Cleveland’s corporate constituents.

So it’s incumbent upon us, in times where enormous inroads have been made in the gains unions won for us (I laugh at the notion of a 40-hour week, because no tech employer for the past 15 years has expected anything less than 60 hours per week from its salaried staff), to consider where we’d be if they hadn’t existed.

It’s nowhere I’d care to be, I assure you. So I am grateful today for the battles that labor unions fought. They didn’t always win, but they did move us forward.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu