Arise, arise

Today’s earworm is dedicated to the little Muskrat incel dogies. They must really feel like masters of the universe, as they swarm into agency after agency, dicking with code and waving “findings of fraud”. Some of them aren’t even old enough to drink legally, but they’re definitely drunk on power. (Although probably still wondering why the hot chicks won’t look at them.)

Enjoy it while you can, Bund brochachos, because your power will be short-lived, but your disgrace will live forever. There’s precedent for this. Viz:

It's got a great beat; you can dance to it. I give it a 2.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Tolling the times

I received this notification/bill via snailmail on Monday.

My first inclination was to ignore it, because one of the trendier scams these days is a smishing thing: text (often from some foreign country’s area code) announcing that you owe a road toll and you can pay it by clicking here.

Yeah, no.

Look, I haven’t been on a toll road for so many years that VA EZPass deactivated my account (while still holding on to my $25 minimum; I need to get on them about that). So I knew I hadn’t incurred any tolls on 22 January. Besides—this was for a tunnel in…Hampton Roads? That’s 182 miles from me.

Well, I searched for DriveERT on the web, and there is indeed such an entity. So I rang them Tuesday morning. Waited on hold for 30 minutes (God bless speaker phone) and got their front-line help.

Which basically consists of: we photographed the license plate, so how do you want to pay? I kept insisting that my car has not been outside of Fairfax and Loudoun counties for well over a year, she sighed, asked me if I own a GMC truck (no) and transferred me to their second-line support.

It took Dee (or maybe it’s D—I’m okay with public support people using a pseudonym, as long as I have something I can reference when I document the interaction) about 35 seconds to see that somehow in their process they’d transposed two of the characters in the plate they photographed, and she transferred the toll to the owner of that vehicle.

She got a kick out of me saying that if it turns out that my car is travelling more than I am, I’m going to be upset. “It went to Hampton Roads and didn’t even bring me back a tee-shirt?”

Between that and getting all my 2024 tax info to the accountant, Tuesday was a good day.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

QUICC as you can

Since the days back in the last century when my sister drove a Datsun 510 station wagon that was basically held together by political stickers, I've been fascinated with people who use their car’s exterior surface as a thought canvas. So when I saw this new vehicle in the ‘hood, I naturally paused to peruse. I mean:

Taking it by quadrant, we have:

And more granularly:

(This one references Woody Guthrie’s guitar.)

Lest anyone have doubts about the overall theme, there’s the vanity plate:

And from branding on the side panels of the van, I believe that it’s associated with this group, which provides street medics to the queer communities in the East Bay of San Francisco as well as in Brooklyn.

I totally respect their courage in going behind enemy lines into a Confederate state.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

 

Scam alert

Okay, given all the DOGE and general Republican shenanigans currently going on in the Social Security Administration, it occurred to me that this email was a bit rich:

I mean—you gonna include yourselves in this?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: naturally

My gratitude today comes from Nature.

The winter aconite was slower than usual to appear—in the past it’s been early to mid-February. But it’s here now, and each year it covers a little more territory.

Also, Saturday marked the return of Scooter, back from hibernation.

I’m grateful for both.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu