Out of the woodwork

Today’s earworm is from the anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba (RIP). It’s called “The Day the Nazi Died”.

Questions? No? Good.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

They're coming...

Oh, man—I’m so stoked:

The daffodils are poking up and will soon take over the world.

In fact, after seeing the incipient narcissi on my walk, I noticed my neighbor's garden:

We need those daffs. And the crocus. And the mini-iris.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Great wealth

I’ve been thinking recently about a quote from I You We Them, the 1000pp collection of essays by Dan Gretton on desk killers. (It’s not a history, and Fairfax County Public Library designates it Criminology in the Dewey Decimal system.) Gretton attributes it to Honoré de Balzac:

“The secret to great wealth is a forgotten crime.”

That seems pretty legit to me—on both personal and corporate fields. I’m thinking Standard Oil (predatory monopoly), every steel and railroad company of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (campaigns of terror against workers) and Lloyd’s of London (established to insure ships of the Middle Passage carrying slaves to America). And the fortunes of Kennedys (bootlegging during Prohibition) and Trumps (prostitution, violations of fair housing laws) do not stand up to scrutiny of their early days.

But it turns out that Gretton has misquoted Balzac. The original thought, from Père Goriot, is slightly different:

“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.”

Which is to say:

“The secret to great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done.”

This is a little less straightforward, and permissive in a bourgeois kind of way. The “without apparent cause” thing is (to my mind) an unearned free pass: only if the source of the wealth isn’t obvious do we look for the hidden crime? Nah—there are way too many examples of riches coming from the blood, pain and loss of others for me to swallow that.

Now the “crime properly done” thing—that does track. Unexplained wealth coupled with a foundational crime never discovered makes all kinds of sense.

So, if what Balzac is actually saying (and I don’t know the context of Père Goriot) is that huge fortunes are all the result of an original crime, and if you can’t discern the source of some wealth, it’s because the crime was so well executed that people have forgotten it, mais oui.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Horticulture

Okay, my strategy for overwintering my citrus orchard did not exactly work to plan.

How it started:

How it’s going:

I was getting conflicting information on what to do about the dwarf trees—take them inside for the winter; no—trees need a dormant period, leave them out but insulate their roots. And given the winters we’ve had for the previous three years or so, it seemed safe to go the latter route.

However, once we got that extended period of below-freezing temperatures last month, my hopes, well—they basically froze.

So I’ll have to try again this year.

Interestingly, my gardenia bush made it through fine, and I didn’t even bubblewrap it. Perhaps the clue is the larger pot?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: community

Since at least December, I’ve felt a clutching in my gut. Not pain, not obstruction, not bloating; just…awareness of distress that doesn’t seem to go away.

I thought it might be grief for my sister manifesting itself, or perhaps my anxiety that started on Election Day and has ratcheted up every day since. My doctor ran me through some tests, none of which indicates anything (visibly) organic, so I’ve just lived with it.

But last week I saw somewhere (either Reddit or Bluesky) an announcement for a two-hour class on how to “Build a Community”, put on by an organization called The Barnraisers Project. I’m not the community organizer type, but I thought that learning more about community and how to build one would be better than not learning, so I signed up.

Friends—I’ve never felt two hours go by so fast. (This was only beaten by the 90 minutes I spent in a black cab touring Belfast six years ago.) I—like everyone reading this—have been to enough well-intentioned meetings, run by well-intentioned people, which drift all over the place and devolve into individual rants or hand-flapping to have had some trepidations about this. But Garrett Bucks not only knows his community onions, he knows how to run a meeting—make everyone feel welcome and valued, but keeping them on target.

Also—I cannot tell you how heartening it was to be on a Zoom call with 91 other people from all over the country (and beyond), who mourn what this nation has become, and are actively seeking ways to unite and turn it back towards decency. For the first time in months, I am cautiously optimistic. 

And I am grateful.

(Plus—my intestinal tract appears to have relaxed some.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu