A Weed-Eater loose

I have a regular topic of conversation with a colleague who lives in Georgia; it’s basically Death To All Squirrels. He insists that they’re not bad with gravy and biscuits, but that’s not really much of a recommendation.

I bring this up because one of those convos brought me to today’s earworm; frankly, my colleague had me at the words, “There’s a Ray Stevens song…”

“The Mississippi Squirrel Revival” seems particularly appropriate for the week in which WaPo has published two stories about White evangelical goobers who would definitely worship at the First Self-Righteous Church. The first one reports on klansters in Appalachian Ohio who cashed their 2021 Stimulus checks but then whine endlessly about how the government support going to other people is screwing with the economy, driving prices up and is Communistic. Several of them are otherwise living on Social Security payments.

The second story is from Appalachian Virginia and reports on critical care nurses who’ve had to endure more than a year of Covid-denying klansters refusing to wear masks, opposing vaccines and deriding everyone in the medical profession as simultaneously lying, greedy and incompetent.

The kill shot for me was Jessica Goff, who said that the virus was a hoax and would go away after the 2020 election. When her own mother came down with it, was hospitalized and intubated, Goff became furious with the doctors for not bringing out sock puppets to convince her of the severity of the case; she told her mother to refuse remdesivir. When—despite her best efforts to the contrary—her mother recovered, Goff declared, “It was definitely a miracle,” but not a medical one. “I had rallied the prayer warriors.”

She still thinks the virus that has killed more than four million people worldwide is exaggerated and that the medical profession is falsifying cases to make money.

So, here’s my wish: may a plague of flea-infested squirrels descend upon every branch of the First Self-Righteous Church and run up the skirts and trousers of every single person there.

That would be a better recommendation than serving with biscuits and gravy.

Oh, here’s the song. 

 

Cycles of life

Here’s a story waiting to be told. A couple of weeks ago, I came across this dead motor scooter on the sidewalk.

How it got there, I have no clue, but it obviously was not going to go anywhere with some of its innards removed.

Then, it got knocked down by person or persons unknown.

And then someone moved it to the street—no telling why.

It’s been there ever since. Clearly Fairfax County PD do not bother with abandoned vehicles, as witnessed by this one, about a quarter-mile up the street. This one's been there for more than a year, with expired tags for ditto.

 

Lake views

Here’s a recent sunrise over one of the People’s Republic’s manmade lakes:

Here are some tourists:

And here are some kayaks and paddleboats ready for the non-webbed set:

Neighborhood buzz

Saturday morning I took a different route on my morning walk and discovered something I must have been passing daily for weeks:

“Those look like beehives,” I thought. So I investigated. And so they were:

America—gonif!

There didn't seem to be any activity, but it was pretty early in the day and I've noticed that I mostly see bees at work later on. I do wonder about how these were set up, and by whom.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Year 245

Yesterday marked the 245^th anniversary of the publication of the Declaration of Independence. In the past I’ve written about the beauty of that document, which I’ve tried to hold on to during the past five years. I knew it was under assault beginning with the 2016 election, and in the first year of Cadet Bonespurs’ reign, the structure of the world he and his ilk wanted to build became clear when his end of the Twitterverse responded with ridiculous outrage to NPR tweeting the Declaration (as it does every year).

It turns out to be not at all surprising that pig-ignorant goobers who’ll have no truck with the notion that all men are created equal would storm the Capitol to overturn an election less than four years later.

The Founding Fathers have taken some hits in recent times—and not just from the would-be dictator and his white supremacist cult. The fact that race-based slavery was embedded in the Constitution because a goodly number of the Founders couldn’t imagine an economy not based on human chattel slavery has made it out of the academic halls and into the mainstream press. That’s proving to be as enraging to both ends of the political spectrum—those who mourn its loss while simultaneously denying it, and those who want white folks to acknowledge that the foundation of this country rests on the blood of their ancestors.

We have still so far to go to achieve the promise of the Declaration.

But on this Gratitude Monday, I’m thankful that we survived the past five years, even as we are still under the assault of both home-grown and foreign anti-democracy elements. After generations of small town parades and community barbecues with fireworks, we've been treated to militaristic willie waving and bloviating at Mount Rushmore. That was hard to take. But there are still more than 81 million of us who want to see this bold experiment succeed. That’s worth a day of gratitude.

 

 

Not without a star

Sunday is Independence Day in the United States. It marks the publication of the Declaration of Independence by our Founding Fathers in 1776. It’s always been a holiday for light and noise in the form of fireworks, of community gatherings, of bands (marching or seated), of maybe some local pols’ pontifications.

And now that Cadet Bonespurs has been resoundingly voted out of office, maybe we can get back to those celebrations.

So for today’s earworm I’m giving you Neil Diamond’s “America”, which is about the diverse strengths brought to this nation by immigrants from all over. It’s something we all need to remember.

 

 

Ding, dong

So Donald Rumsfeld has permanently dodged the International Court of Justice at The Hague. Damn. I hope when he meets Osiris he gets dropkicked to the Devourer because whatever withered husk that passed for a heart (he had no soul) in his privileged white corpse will for sure be found to outweigh a feather.

Well, the ICJ is still cleaning up Serbian war criminals from the 90s, so here’s hoping that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney can yet be brought to book.

 

 

Street art

Chalk artists have been out and about; here are a couple of the latest.

This one is pretty straightforward.

This one was a whole village.

 

All the news

Here’s a prize example of delighting the customer. Not.

I’ve had a Sunday-only home delivery subscription to the Washington Post for more than four years. That subscription comes with full digital access to WaPo (including archives).

I finally decided I don’t want the physical paper because I get all my news online and I see no reason to just send it straight to the shredder and then to the composter. So I called WaPo’s subscription line (you can sign up online, but to unsubscribe, you have to call), which—from the accents—is somewhere in the Philippines. When I explained what I wanted, the guy (I forget his nom-de-contact-center, but the woman I first got was Shirley) told me that my options are: basic digital (“complete” access, except no archives; so, not complete), at $100 per year; premium digital (“complete” access plus archives), at $150 per year.

However, because I’ve been such a great customer, he could give me a promotional rate of premium access for $101.60 per year; that rate stays the same forever. But I have to keep Sunday delivery.

I’m not going to make you go through the entire surreal conversation; I’ll just say that I’m getting the promo rate, and I have to remember to call in once a quarter to put the Sunday delivery on a “temporary” three-month vacation stop.

Gawd.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: respite

As we move into a week of solid 90-degree temps with about 115% humidity here in the District They Call Columbia, I am deeply grateful that I have air conditioning. Just about a year ago to the day, I spent a weekend without it, and it was pretty ghastly.

(Yes, I recognize that in today’s universe, this is not only a First World problem, but it’s a privilege problem, given that Detroit’s freeways are under several feet of water, the West Coast is prepping for another hellscape of fires and the rescue mission at the Champlain in Miami Beach is turning to recovery.)

Because, in my corner of the world, I greatly appreciate air conditioning in the summer. And central heat in the winter. And that’s my gratitude for today.