Help me stand

They’re scheduling back-to-back funerals in Uvalde this week, even as Republicans up and down the food chain deflect from any kind of commonsense gun legislation.

So today’s earworm is Eric Clapton’s “Tears in Heaven”.

 

Trompe l'oeil

Okay, this vanity plate-car combination takes puckishness to a whole new level.

They’ve removed all the Prius branding, swapped in a Lexus logo and topped it off with a Ferrari dealership plate holder.

Well played, people. Well played.

 

Neighbors

Came across this family out for breakfast on my walk yesterday. Thought you might like to say, “hi.”

 

Oh, dear

Saw these on my morning walk Sunday and thought, “Welp, someone’s really, really unhappy.”

Although, tbh, I’m kinda surprised that $50K doesn’t buy more than cheap plastic wheel covers.

Anyway, they were gone by yesterday morning.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: Room for the dead

On this Memorial Day, 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 or school children in Uvalde, they stepped knowingly into danger, but it doesn’t make their sacrifice any less painful for their loved ones. 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.

Some of the graves are so new they have no stone markers yet. But they will.

 

Reaping what we sow

Well, it’s Friday in America, so we’ve got another school shooting. An 18-year-old man bought a couple of AR-15s and 375 rounds, shot his gran in the face, then went to an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, where he fatally gunned down 19 fourth graders and their two teachers before being stopped by the police. Seventeen other children were wounded.

Although born in North Dakota, his name was Salvador Ramos and he apparently wasn’t white enough to be taken alive, like the 18-year-old who murdered 10 Black folks at a suburban Buffalo supermarket a week ago.

This is Texas—where decades of Republican rule have made it easier to buy assault weapons than it is to vote or to seek out reproductive healthcare if you’re a woman (men—just line up here for the meds to treat your ED problems; testicle tanning will be available next quarter; naturally, all insurances will cover)—but it could have been pretty much anywhere. Anywhere someone with an XY chromosome configuration feels aggrieved and wants to vent his anger. Because he’ll have no problem buying firearms.

Every fucking time we have a mass shooting, Republicans at every level of government circle the wagons and propose more ways to twist our society into pretzels to avoid putting even the tiniest controls on the sale of guns. They piously intone “thoughts and prayers” for the victims while pocketing their checks from the NRA (who in turn has inexplicably copious amounts of funding from Russia) and accusing anyone who suggests some gun control laws of “politicizing the tragedy”.

Texas’ governor, Greg Abbott, made an appearance at Uvalde on Wednesday, engaging in faux “leadership” before he buzzed off to a campaign fundraiser. Ted Cruz—the utter emperor of performative piety—was there, too, looking like the bad fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening. Not the season for Cancún, I guess.

(Cruz and Abbott are both speaking at the NRA’s Annual Meeting today in Houston, where they will not mention the true cost of indiscriminate gun ownership.)

Democratic gubernatorial candidate Beto O’Rourke showed up to call them out (interrupting thoughts and prayers with “do your jobs”), which sent the entire stage full of clearly well-fed White mostly male scrotes into a frenzy of outrage. I bet all the sworn personnel were itching to draw their weapons and blow him away; only having cameras there from every news outlet on the planet stopped them. Is this photo from Reuters not outstanding?

I’m going to step away from the current carnage for a moment and bring you reminders of the aftermath of previous school shootings, in Newtown, Conn. and Littleton, Colo. These are tweets, so consider the source (although a reporter from Sandy Hook did reply to the firehouse one to confirm), but they resonate as true:

Why the almighty fuck are we putting more families through this again?

Also, Nicole Hockley, who buried her five-year-old son Dylan after the Sandy Hook slaughter, has described how Dylan’s eyelashes rested on his cheeks in his coffin; a cloth draped across his face below his nose covered the fact that he had no mouth because his jaw had been shot away. Uvalde parents are going to have to identify the mutilated bodies of their children the way she did.

As invariably happens when the mass shooter is white, Repugs are falling back on their sorrowfully intoned, “mental health issues” excuse. I listened to an NPR interview yesterday with a retired deputy sheriff from Uvalde who asserted, “It's about a hurting kid that didn't have the relationships and the connections that he needed. That's what I think the problem is, and that's a tough one to solve. It's easy to pass a law, but it's hard to change a heart.” Asked if he therefore thought that the focus on gun control legislation was misplaced, he pontificated, “I don't know if it's because that's maybe easier to respond to than the moral issues, those deep community fibers that have to be rebuilt somehow. That's hard work. And I think a community like this that's smaller and closer knit together has a chance at doing that work.”

Here's the kicker, for the benefit of Mr. Change a Heart: red states consistently vote against any social programs that could alleviate the causes of “hurting kids”—they won’t even fund physiological healthcare, much less mental health services. Too busy greasing the skids for corporate pollution and tax cuts for millionaires. The hearts that need to change first are yours.

Assuming you have them.

I'm going to point out one more thing: going by the Latino surnames of all the victims, there would be no particular reason for Republicans to rethink their positions. Like the Black victims in Buffalo, they are members of groups Rs are trying to disenfranchise at every opportunity. Replacement, don't you know.

Well, it’s Friday, and I’m supposed to have an earworm for you. Changing it up—I’m giving you a guy named Steve Kerr, who coaches the Golden State Warriors basketball team. Here’s what he told the world just before the Warriors played the Mavs in some tournament. I never heard of Kerr before Wednesday, but he said everything I wanted to, so here he is.

Turn up the volume loud enough so even a Repug can hear.

Canid update

Okay, well—I’m relieved that I’m not dealing with a possibly (fatally) sick fox visiting my back yard. , But the coyote it really is clearly has mange, so I've got to do something about that. My choices are apparently ivermectin, which requires multiple doses, and something called Bravecto, which will take care of the issue (caused by the Sarcoptes sabei mite).

I looked up Bravecto and saw this:

And I’m sorry to say that my first thought was, “Why would I buy 44 lbs of medication when it only takes one dose?” Then I realized that the poundage referred to the size of the animal being treated. Duh.

Yes, the Bravecto is a little pricey, but the chances are better of taking care of the problem with a single administration (probably going to inject it into a hard-cooked egg) rather than repeated doses of ivermectin. Besides—I would not be able to buy ivermectin in a store without overexplaining that I am not using it to treat covid.

I’m a tad concerned that now I have coyote(s) in the wildlife rota. I’d also like to know why they’re eating birdseed and not squirrels.

It’s always something.

 

 

 

 

SOS

People, people—what happened to this fox’s tail?

(This one's a crappy pic of the head, but I wanted you to see that discoloration on her flank.)

Apparently red foxes get mange from a blind microscopic mite, but this one seems to be a grey fox? Looking at these pix, maybe she has lost more than her tail fur, so she does have mange?

What can I do to help her?

Stop press: This is not a fox, it's a coyote! I now have a coyote visiting me.

 

 

Nature's mysteries 8

It’s time for another round of help Bas Bleu identify local plants.

These…things are along a stretch of the W&OD Trail.

What I find interesting is the circular growth pattern. Is it some type of grass? I dunno.

Help a girl out, here. #IDme

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: testing

Gratitude Monday—my, my, my. Here’s what I’m grateful for today:

Got an email Friday announcing that the office in the People’s Republic had been exposed to COVID last Tuesday and Wednesday. Everyone should be aware, etc., etc. etc.

I’m in the office Mondays and Tuesdays, so I was there during the exposure period. I was disinclined to get fussed, because on a typical day I might have a brief convo with someone once, but the truth is that—except for training sessions—I’ve never seen more than 7 people working on my floor, and this past week was no exception.

However, we no longer have to wear masks to move around the office, and I don’t know who was carrying, so to speak, so during a conference call Friday afternoon, I pulled out one of my free US Government rapid tests, read and followed all the instructions, swapped both nostrils (ugh) and waited the 20 minutes.

With this result:

Yay.