Love and tacos

Remember when RWNJs were screeching that if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, we’d end up with taco trucks on every corner? Like that was a bad thing?

I don’t know how she didn’t win on that alone. But tacos are back in the news. Or, more specifically, TACO trades.

The term, coined by Financial Times writer Robert Armstrong is how Wall Street is referring to how the Kleptocrat’s “policy” on tariffs causes extraordinary ups and downs in the market. TACO stands for “T[he Kleptocrat] Always Chickens Out.” So, if you don’t like a tariff, just wait 10 minutes; he’ll back down.

(I don’t know how it took anyone longer than 10 minutes to figure out that he’d behave this way. I mean—it’s exactly his MO for his entire life: he blusters and as soon as there’s pushback, he folds like a cheap lawn chair.)

When a reporter asked him about it earlier this week, he got big mad. Quel surprise.

At any rate, in honor of the culture of tacos, guacamole, tequila and fried ice cream, today’s earworm is “Los Laurales”, from Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de mi Padre album. It’s a love song about how the man to whom it’s addressed doesn’t seem to be committing, but it somehow ends up by saying that women are the downfall of me.

Which seems to cover all perspectives.

Here she is performing it with Mariachi Vargas.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Defensive war

 I have a feeling that this is going to be a bad year for mosquitos in my part of The People’s Republic. Two and a half weeks ago I helped with cluster cleanup and got royally chewed up. Since then it’s like the original bites were the phosphorous flares marking the landing zone for the successive waves of real attacks—and we’re not even at the end of May.

The r/nova sub on Reddit is also indicating that it’s not just here—it’s all over Northern Virginia. So, it’s time for action.

In past years I deployed mosquito zappers, but—satisfying as it was to hear the ZZZZTs—it’s not clear to me how effective they were. Also—although I wasn’t unhappy to see moth corpses in the zapper grille, I don’t know how many good insects met their untimely end as collateral damage.

(If there are good insects.)

I also won't spray indiscriminately for the same reason. Although I have considered it.

But someone on Reddit urged readers to “Google mosquito bucket of doom” as a solution, and that brought me to something I think is worth a try. You partially fill a 5-gal bucket with water, mix in some leaf litter (making an attractive environment for female biters to lay their eggs and for the larvae to develop), but add a Mosquito Dunk, which murders the larvae wholesale. The lady puts all her effort into the bucket, but the babies never leave the maternity ward.

Viz:

I hope this is enough to get me through the summer. Through June, at least.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

New neighbors

So, I ran into this family on my walk yesterday morning.

They seem nice, although the parents aren’t too sure about me.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Vita brevis

The neighborhood sidewalk artists were at work last week—a rather complex narrative.

And then, after a couple of days of rain, this is what remained.

Sometimes not ars longa.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Remembrance

As on all Memorial Days, I’m grateful for the sacrifices of the men and women who have served this country in uniform over the centuries. Who—volunteer or conscript, professional or amateur—fought and died because the nation called upon them to do so.

Unlike grocery shoppers in Buffalo, school children in Uvalde or parade-goers in Highland Park (what a great year 2022 was, eh?), they stepped knowingly into danger, but it doesn’t make their sacrifice any less painful for their loved ones. It also does not lessen our collective loss from the cutting short of their lives. It seems fitting that we spend at least one day a year honoring them.

There will be hundreds of people out at Arlington National Cemetery today, including many visiting Section 60, where the most recent arrivals are laid to rest. Families and friends will set up lawn chairs by graves, share a year’s worth of news and gossip, maybe drink a toast. It’s like El Día de Muertos, only in a lot of languages.

Although I did not know any of them, I join their families in remembering—and thanking—them.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu