As you can see, there’s been a
changing of the guard for vacuum cleaning chez moi.
My Kenmore cannister vac,
which I bought about 25 years ago when the previous, 30-year-old Kenmore vac
died, finally gave up the ghost.
I took it to the local vacuum
repair and sales shop, where the proprietor told me that while it was manufactured
in the US, its heirs are made in China, as are all parts. He said that replacing
the motor wouldn’t be a good investment. I went home to do some research.
Turns out a whole lot of
vacuum cleaners are manufactured in China, with somewhat middling reviews. The
best ones come from Germany, but they are also pricey.
Well, after mulling it over, I
bit the bullet and bought the SEBO from the local guy. With an extra box of
bags, it was over $1000.
It’s smaller than the old one,
and lighter. But it better outlast me.
I knew that the environs of
The District They Call Columbia was in the path of the smoke from Canadian
wildfires, but Friday morning, when I stuck my head out of the back door to
toss out birdseed, I’d forgot about that. Because my yard is closed in by trees
and shrubs, I couldn’t see the haze, but I reacted to the smell and taste of
the air.
“Is-is someone barbecuing at
this hour? Burning leaves?”
Then I remembered.
I had to go out a couple of
times, once in the morning and once in mid-afternoon. Both times my eyes burned
and by late afternoon I felt that painful catch in my lungs as they notified me
that they were full of particulates and I should cool it.
Here’s the thing—I grew up in
Los Angeles before anyone gave a damn about air quality. I must have spent half
my childhood and youth never being able to actually fill my lungs with air
because of smog. Only rarely could I see the sky without the pollution blocking
the view (usually after rain), and never in the summer months. It got so that
schools throughout the Basin couldn’t let kids out for recess or physical
education for weeks at a time. It wasn’t until I moved away and then returned after
some years of lung-clearing that I realized what I’d been ingesting all that
time.
LA cleaned up its act—well,
California did. It took decades and caused much squawk from industries—including
auto manufacturers—and consumers. But they cleaned the air, and that’s my
gratitude for today. It’s been decades since I experienced what I did this past
weekend—I’ve taken it so for granted that I forgot all about it. But what a
gift to live in a functioning advanced society with clean air!
I say this recognizing that
even as the words flow from my keyboard this administration is doing everything
it can to send us back to Smog Alertville. That just makes me all the more
grateful that something like this weekend is an anomaly, and it should
be so. We may have to do it all over again when these kleptocrats are driven
from office, but it’s a worthwhile endeavor.
I was in Fairfax Radiology,
which has basically locked up all radiological procedures outside of an actual
hospital in the greater Fairfax County, yesterday. I noticed this sign on both
the entrance door and the check-in counter:
What’s interesting to me is
the last one. Turns out UnionPay is a state-owned Chinese financial services
company, headquartered in Shanghai, that provides cross-border payment
services.
First time I’ve ever seen that
name, but if Fairfax Radiology accepts it, it’s obviously a thing.
I’ve
been thinking about it all week, and I just don’t know what to tell you on
this, the 250th anniversary of our national birthday.
Pretty
sure the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence would side-eye each
other and go down the tavern for a gill of brandy if they caught wind of how
their bold gamble was turning out. They were ready to risk everything—“our
Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor”—to break away from Mother England;
they were overwhelmingly men of property, so they had a lot to lose.
And
the men who carefully put together the Constitution, with its first ten
amendments, would be equally gobsmacked. Like the Declaration, the Constitution
was a response to a failed government (in this case, the confederation) and it
was constructed to “form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure
domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general
Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.
(Liberty figured in both documents, but the concern was lawfulness as a basis
for all government actions.) They crafted a form of government that they
intended to live and grow; one that would be immune to feckless rulers, corrupt
judges or petty legislators because of the built-in checks and balances.
They
just didn’t anticipate a circumstance when we would have all three at the same
time.
This
administration has committed many of the crimes in the Declaration’s indictment
of George III, in addition to many others no English king could have imagined.
The Kleptocrat is manipulating global stock markets with his tariff
declarations; building an armed secret police that can be turned against anyone
in the country, citizen or not; declaring war on states, governors, mayors and
anyone who doesn’t sufficiently bend the knee to him; breaking international
treaties; desecrating national monuments; committing war crimes; violating
constitutional provisions; ignoring actual laws; selling off national lands;
enriching his family and friends; alienating our allies and squandering our
soft power; and generally behaving more despotically than anyone since Ivan the
Terrible.
Beyond
that, he is visibly rotting both physically and mentally. We’ve all seen him
falling asleep at official functions any time he’s not actually speaking. We’ve
clocked him staggering and stumbling (on stairs and ramps particularly). We’ve
noted his bruised and spackled hands, bloated face, swollen ankles. We’ve
listened to him brag about taking repeated cognitive tests as though that’s an
achievement, not a warning sign. And—more than anything else—we’ve watched as
his speech increasingly slurs, animated only when he gets to grievances (of
which he has legion), punctuated by the mangling of multisyllabic words. The
guy is the picture of Dorian Gray.
Congress—more
specifically, Republicans in Congress—have utterly abrogated their
constitutional power because they’re terrified that TACOman will sic his
followers on them either politically or physically. They’re willing to kiss the
ring just to hold the title (and those sweet, sweet lobbying contributions and
insider trading opportunities), as they tug their forelocks and murmur, “Yas,
boss” whenever he makes another demand on them. They’ve taken away healthcare
from millions of Americans, thrown billions of dollars at ICE, gutted
environmental protections and given billionaires and corporations more
billions, hustling to get the job done in time to get home for July 4th
fireworks and barbecues with the constituents they’re fucking over.
And
the courts—God bless them, the frontline judges and even most of the Circuit
judges are doing their damned jobs like Trojans, but the most corrupt SCOTUS in
history is in hog heaven, using their court-of-last-appeal power to cut out the
constitutional support for decades of progress on civil rights. They’re barely
cloaking their intent (or their glee) in their rulings. I’m pretty sure they
write “because we can” in all of them and some clerk removes it before they’re
released.
So—that’s
where we are.
But
let me say a few words about what we could be—still.
Tomorrow
is the 250th anniversary of our founding. Which is to say—we’re
celebrating the birth of our nation, dating from the day we drove a stake in
the ground and said, “We declare ourselves independent,” and setting out the
legal and moral case for the American colonies separating themselves from
Mother England. I’ve written
about this before, and it never grows stale.
The
Founding Fathers weighed all their options and agreed that—much as they were
sons of the Enlightenment hoping for a reasonable solution to all the tsuris
they were getting from His Majesty’s Government—force of arms was going to be
necessary to achieving and protecting those “certain unalienable Rights…Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The price of freedom would include both
blood and treasure, and toward that end, “we mutually pledge to each other our
Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
And
when I think of the Founding Fathers and stunningly beautiful political
documents (which you’d naturally think is an oxymoron of the first order, but
it turns out you’d be wrong), I include the Constitution of the United States.
Even though it came nine years and a war later, the Constitution demonstrates
the mindset of the men who wrote it—devising an entirely new form of government
of checks and balances, not easily susceptible to coups, which gave the
people various guaranteed means of seeking redress.
And
beyond that—it was what software product managers would call “a scalable
platform”: it provided for growth and change as the nation did the same. Stuff
happens; they wanted the government to be able to accommodate it, even though
they understood they had no idea what form it might take.
(Yes,
we are once again in what Abraham Lincoln referred to as a great test of “whether
that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure.” See
the opening paragraphs of this post.)
But
here’s my point (finally) about what just makes me do the happy dance for our
national holiday. Americans—the folks reviled pretty much everywhere at one
time or another in the second half of the last century as being warmongering
minions of the military-industrial complex—celebrate the adoption of
the Declaration of Independence. Not the day shots were first fired; or the day
of the final surrender.
It’s
the day when the representatives of the people (not the generals) resolved that
these colonies should be independent. And by resolving, they made it so.
Yeah—guff
me no guff about them all being wealthy white males, or that they did not
conceive of a time when non-white non-males might be represented in ruling
bodies. (Guff me no guff and see above about the scalable governmental
platform.) And pick me no nits about the actual date-stamp on the actual
signing of the actual document. Sometimes you just have to drive a stake in the
ground and work with it. July 4th was, as they say, close
enough for government work.
And
what we work with is the fundamental idea that the thing to be commemorated—not
with gigantic displays of military might, with tanks, self-propelled guns,
marching divisions and fly-overs, but with homemade floats in community
parades, picnics and barbecues, and children waving sparklers—is not a victory
in battle, but the victory of an ideal.
The
thing about this particular victory is that it’s not one-and-done. It has to be
renewed every day, again and again. Signing the Declaration of Independence,
defeating British armies, writing the Constitution—that was all just the
beginning. The Founding Fathers did their jobs as best they could; we have to
keep doing ours, as best we can. And we can start by celebrating this anniversary like we always do—with barbecues with our neighbors, town parades and local fireworks; not the money-laundering self-referential, tacky displays emanating like a miasma from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
With
all that said, what should be our earworm for today? I’m thinking something
about how immigration not only enriches the American spirit, but makes it. So
Neil Diamond it is.
The extended environs of the
District They Call Columbia are under a heat dome, which is expect to last at
least through Friday. That means that our normal stinkin’ hot and disgustingly
humid days and nights are about to go on steroids. (It was 85°F at 2130
last night; we never get any respite from Summer here.)
God bless the marvel that is
air conditioning in buildings and cars; ditto, ceiling fans. For those who have neither, seek out public
cooling places.
(Ignore the date; some time ago all the electrics were disconnected during some service and I've not bothered to hunt out the owner's manual to reset. Shot yesterday at 1514.)
I’ve discovered a new torment
of summer. Recently (meaning, in the last few months), when a mosquito bites
me, it doesn’t produce just a small red spot of itching. This has happened twice in the last month alone.
No, it welts up and then
spreads to a 2” x 4” patch of inflammation. When you touch the red area, it’s noticeably
hotter than the surrounding skin.
Since my back yard is an
epicenter of Aedes activity during the season, I’m just not looking forward to
the next three months.
I have to say that I don’t normally pay any attention to
the notifications I get from Paris Baguette. I just scan the app to accumulate
points whenever I go in for a latte and then redeem the points when they are
enough to get something free.
But this one kind of surprised me a couple of weeks ago:
Yes, I suppose that some percentage of people might not be
celebrating Father’s Day, for any number of reasons. So, okay.
But I don’t recall a similar notification for Mother’s Day
last month, when I’d imagine there are at least as many people who ditto.
A couple of months ago, I
noted in passing that LIDL had the lowest
price on milk (of three grocery chains), by a dollar. It was
$1.67 per half gallon.
A week or so ago, I noticed
that they’d raised the price to $1.87.
(Yeah—you do have to watch out for cartons damaged in shipping.)
Huh, I thought. But inflation,
fuel cost increases—I guess 11% is…well, it just is.
So I checked out the other
three stores.
Trader Joe’s; actually, no
change from March:
But Wegmans is charging almost
as much for a half gallon as they are for a full gallon:
They’re now up there with Giant:
(Giant was ahead of the game--$3.29 back in March.)
Folks, I do not know what’s going on, but that delta
between LIDL and the other is eye-watering.
Today is the day the suckers and losers—which is to say,
everyone in the lower income brackets, who cannot engage in sheltering income
offshore or writing off everything as a deduction—file and pay federal taxes.
I, personally, do not object to being taxed; I consider it
an entry fee for the life I’ve enjoyed in this country. I’m not wild about some
of the things my government chooses to spend its revenue on, but I figure it
mostly balances in the end. The construction and maintenance of physical and
social infrastructure, providing healthcare and education, a well-trained and
equipped military, foreign aid programs that support our strategic national
security interests, disaster relief here and abroad: if I have to subsidize the
naming of a community center in Alabama for some asshole ex-football coach in
exchange for these things, I’ll suck it up.
But I cannot tell you how much I resent paying taxes to
this administration—I hated doing it the first time around, but now I’m waiting
until the absolute last fucking minute to send my payment. Because not only is
the Kleptocrat finding ways to skim off public funds that even mafiosi haven’t
though of, but he, Musk and the Republicans are destroying enormous parts of
the government, in addition to ensuring that the billionaire boys club
contributes even less than it has in the past (and violating data privacy laws
to enable future lawlessness).
So my entry for National Poetry Month today is from Charles
Bukowski, 20th Century German-American poet, rebel, novelist
and subject of FBI surveillance (on account of his writing in an underground LA
newspaper). The MAGA crowd would despise him.
making it
ignore all possible concepts and possibilities ---
ignore Beethoven, the spider, the damnation of Faust ---
just make it, babe, make it:
a house a car a belly full of beans
pay your taxes
fuck
and if you can't fuck
copulate.
make money but don't work too
hard --- make somebody else pay to
make it --- and
don't smoke too much but drink enough to
relax, and
stay off the streets
wipe your ass real good
use a lot of toilet paper
it's bad manners to let people know you shit or
could smell like it
if you weren't
careful
Back in the Before Times, it didn’t matter where I bought
milk for my lattes; it was $1.99 per half gallon. So I bought it wherever I
happened to be shopping when I ran low—mostly either Trader Joe or Wegmans.
Then, maybe two years ago, I noticed that Wegmans had
raised the price to $2.69—okay, but TJ was $2.49. Why was that, I wondered. I
checked Giant (a regional biggie); they were charging $2.79. What the hell? The milk basically comes from the same cows.
So I limited my milk purchases to TJ. Annoying because it
meant in some weeks going to multiple stores to complete my grocery shopping,
but I found this discrepancy annoying.
Then, in the past couple of months, I went to a Lidl for
the first time. Just for ducks, I checked their milk price: $1.63. This
made me feel like the other concerns—especially Giant—were just taking the
piss. (It may be a loss leader for Lidl, but more than a dollar delta between
them and the next cheapest price seems pretty bold.)
What with tariffs and war in Iran, this past week, they
raised their price to $1.67.
I was in Paris Baguette the other day, waiting for my latte
(I don’t know what it is, but their lattes are infinitely better than the ones
I make; their milk must be from exceptionally happy cows), when I noticed that
I was next to the shop’s thermostat.
Which was encased in a locked plastic box:
I’m thinking that it was an unfortunate and thoughtless
placement of a device that controls the space’s temperature; ergo the
after-market security feature.
I wonder how long it took after opening to encase it?
Long ago, in the Before Times, when the developers of the
corporate campus behind my house were still trying to get planning permission
to turn five acres of parkland into 82 four-story townhouses, I had an email
exchange with a lawyer fronting the project about many of the scores of mature
trees they’d destroy.
He assured me that “the canopy will not be affected,” which
meant that they’d rip out/cut down all the trees they could and eventually
plant an approximately equivalent number of saplings. For dealing with county
agencies, that amounts to “the canopy won’t be affected”.
And as I was making a tour on Sunday morning (the only day
of the week they don’t have crews out violating the start times), I noticed
that three shrubs right next to the model unit do not have long for this
world.
A week ago I was doing my laundry on Saturday when I
realized that the load seemed to be taking…hours. When I looked at the
minutes-remaining readout, I realized it actually was taking hours. Every time
it got down to the point where the final spin should kick it, it looped back to
the beginning of the wash cycle.
Consulting Google, I did what I could—the appliance version
of the three fingered salute (unplugging, waiting five minutes, plugging in,
restarting), but same thing.
Even when I set it to Spin Only, it jumped back to wash and
started adding water.
Disconsolately I wrung out the clothes, hung them on the
drying rack until they were in a state that I could toss them in the dryer. On
Monday I called the appliance repair guy and he came out on Tuesday.
Understand that this machine—bought three years ago when my
old, mechanical-only washer finally expired—is packed with electronics. As it
is, I had to look really hard to find one that isn’t “smart”, but it’s still
computerized and I was envisioning having to replace something expensive.
Well, Alan posited that the machine—like a lot of modern,
agitator-free top-loaders—is very sensitive to load imbalance, and was probably
trying to reset the load. I couldn’t think that what I had in that particular
collection of clothes was markedly different from the hundreds of others I have
run since it arrived. A few times, when I was washing mattress pads, the
machine would go ballistic and I’d have to turn it off, adjust the placement
and then start again. (These modern jobbers don’t have knobs you can pull out
to continue where you left off.) He then had me run through a load on speed
wash, just to see how it went.
Well, we chatted around the machine for about 20 minutes,
and sure enough, it worked just fine. He charged me a call-out fee, and as he
was leaving, he noticed a bird’s nest in my dryer vent, next to the front door.
He checked for eggs—none—and then brought out a kind of mini-chimney sweep
device, with long poles connecting to a drill, and cleaned out what must have
been 20 years of lint from that dryer conduit.
It’s a miracle that I haven’t had a fire in the nine years
I’ve been here.
Well, Saturday, I filled the washer with my colored clothes
and turned the machine on. Let me tell you: then I saw it click over into the
spin cycle I was filled with such gratitude. You cannot believe how wonderful
it is to have a washing machine that works.
And then, when I dumped the clothes in the dryer, it was
wonderful again, knowing I wasn’t risking conflagration.
I believe today’s earworm is appropriate for our times. Our times being two days after Jeff Bezos and his ex-Murdoch stooge publisher Bill
Lewis completely eviscerated The Washington Post because reasons, but
also because of the ongoing federal police riot in Minneapolis and other US
cities. It’s Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On?”.
Gaye wrote this with Renaldo “Obie” Benson and Al Cleveland
in 1969/70, after Benson (a member of the Four Tops) witnessed police brutality
at an anti-war protest in Berkeley’s People’s Park. Gaye released it in 1971.
I rather feel like judges all over the country have been
asking Gaye’s question for the past 12 months. They’re getting testier and
testier about the lack of response from the DOJ and DHS clowns. Viz: this
ruling from District Judge Fred Biery, releasing the 5-year-old boy who was
abducted by ICE agents, along with his father, in Minneapolis and shipped off
to a Texas concentration camp. The whole thing is quite short and well worth
a read, but the final page is a WTF broadside:
(The Bible citations are Matthew 19:14: “Let the little
children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs
to such as these.” And John 11:35: “Jesus wept.”)
Since Fairfax County no
longer accepts glass for recycling, you have to schlep jars and bottles and
whatnots to designated dumpsters. Yesterday I took the accumulation of glass
over to one of them and discovered that it’s apparently been a rough couple of
weeks or so.
Eight days after the Big Dump o’ Snow and Sleet, our snow
removal contractor finally got around to actually clearing the cluster parking
lot.
At the South exit, they piled all that snow up at the street
corner, so you have to creep out into the middle of the road to see whether
anyone’s coming from the right.
A couple of days ago I saw a clip of a Minneapolis community brass band
riffing on “Stand by Me” at one of the memorial gatherings for Alex Pretti, the
latest victim in that city of our homegrown Gestapo. I was struck by how
vibrant the music was—with everyone’s breath coming out in frozen puffs, but no
damper on the authenticity or the energy.
And it brought me back to the Playing for Change
organization, and their version of the Ben E. King hit, originally released in
1961. Man—different time, and yet so much the same.
I think I saw the Playing for Change video about 10 or 12 years ago; it was such an interesting notion, editing in multiple
musicians playing the same piece literally around the world. And that particular
song was the perfect one to debut the concept. They’ve since done it with lots
of songs, including my last
Friday’s earworm.
Both “Stand by Me” and this amalgam of performers perfectly
represent what we’ve been seeing for weeks in Minneapolis: people of all
backgrounds standing by their neighbors, despite the weather and despite the
very real danger of masked thugs intimidating and committing crimes against
them.
Minnesota nice will crack the ICE. And we need to stand
with them.
As you might be aware, there was a snow storm here. The
company contracted to clear snow from our cluster left a 2ft-high margin of 5ft
in front of all the parked cars, which means that anyone wanting to move their
vehicle out had to shovel about 60cu ft of packed, frozen snow from in front of
it. It’s not expected to get above the 20s this week, so that snowpack isn’t
going to melt any time soon, either.
I emailed the cluster board, and got back a load of
nonsense from one of the members, and put in an urgent property management service
request to send the plough out and narrow the margin to about 3ft. The PM for our cluster replied, "I have already reached out to the snow management and am awaiting their anticipated schedule for the next few days."
What I would have liked would have been, "I've reached out to them and asked them to return and finish the job."
At the cluster board meeting on Monday night I brought it up again, and she gave me some bollocks about it being an unprecedented storm (on account of all of the sleet), and the contractors have to be careful about not wrecking their blade on the blocks of ice that form. Which makes no sense to me: if you can plough to a 5ft margin, why can you not safely go back and carve out 2ft on either side?
We should "give them the benefit" and let them return for further passes, either Monday night or yesterday.
But as of nightfall yesterday, they hadn't returned.
(Fortunately, I managed to dig out the Saab, and made it out for emergency Kalamata olives and cherry tomatoes.)
Walking is also curtailed—despite HOA requirements that
residents shovel the walkways in front of their property, not everyone gets
with the program. Also, no one is responsible for clearing sidewalks along the
city roads here, so pedestrians have to wait for a good melt, or else walk in
the street.
So here’s a picture of a candle for you. I was interested by its burning pattern.
