Well, here we are at the absolute pinnacle
of Romance—Saint Valentine’s Day. If you’re thinking about dining out tonight
and haven’t booked a table, fuggedaboutit; tomorrow the prices will be lower,
anyhow. To get into Trader Joe’s yesterday, you had to pass through a wall o’
bouquets ready for lotharios low on funds.
Love is, as they say, in the air.
But that’s only part of romantic love. Valentine’s
Day is like a Hallmark movie: it’s all about the appearance of passion. We all
know that the story goes on after Stacy and Todd fade out and the credits roll.
Very often the next chapter is full of screaming fights and slamming doors. And
the one after involves Todd crying into his beer with his bros while Stacy and
her posse slap back cocktails and tick off every single one of Todd’s
transgressions.
That session lasts the whole night.
I was interested to discover that one
organization has recognized and even celebrated this aspect of love. Through
today, Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary in rural Marion County, Ore., will write your ex’s
name (in cat-safe icing) on a heart-shaped mass of meat and feed
it to one of their residents. Your
donation of $50 to $75 also gets you a video of the very satisfying meal.
(The director of Wildcat Ridge Sanctuary
reports that people are also sending in donations with the names of work
colleagues, friends, spouses and other sundry miscreants to become wildcat chow.
This is their fourth year of offering the much-needed service.)
So, in keeping with the full scope of the
day, we’re having Bob Dylan’s “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”, sung by the
Indigo Girls.
I’m getting into the mood for the wintery
mix predicted for the environs of The District They Call Columbia today by reviewing
pix I took of one of the Storms of January.
It’s February, 2025, and I’m grateful my Social
Security payment appeared in my account on Friday afternoon.
It’s quite the statement, actually,
because a year ago it wouldn’t have occurred to me to be concerned. But for the
past 20 days a feral pack of loser incels has been swarming like locusts from federal agency
to federal agency, connecting devices to systems holding the most sensitive
information in the country, downloading and adding data, and generally whizzing
on everything within reach, under the aegis of a ketamine-stoked über willie-waving
incel while the Adderall-addled president jerks around the media between rounds
of golf and plans to use the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for WWF
competitions.
I mean—Pillsbury Spock has tweeted “Death
to USAID”, stopped all payments to the National Institutes for Health (thus
halting critical scientific and medical research), held up the threat of mass firings and promised to move into the
FAA and air traffic control systems (coded in COBOL) to “fix them”.
Like he did to Twitter.
So, yeah—when I didn’t see my monthly
retirement payment (reflecting the money I’ve paid into the system for
decades), I got green around the gills. And when I finally saw it on Friday, I
was relieved. And grateful that—despite their best efforts—some of the
government is still working. So far.
Well, alrighty then—Cadet Bonespurs
proposed Tuesday that the United States take “a long-term ownership position”
of Gaza by sending US troops to clear out all the Palestinian residents of the
region (sending them to as-yet to-be-named countries permanently) and following
them with US companies (mostly ones with his name on them or in which he has a
financial stake) to develop all that beautiful beachfront property.
I have thoughts.
That he did this by way of welcoming
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu is just cherce. I mean—don’t get me
wrong, Bibi would love nothing better than to hand off the ethnic cleansing of
Gaza to someone else; it saves him money and maybe gets about 2.2% of the
world’s opprobrium off his back. But I’m not really sure how happy he’d be to
have an outpost of the United States in his backyard, looking over his shoulder
and making strong suggestions on how he should run his little satrapy.
The notion that Gaza’s neighbors Egypt and
Jordan should take on 2.1 million displaced Palestinians because the Kleptocrat
is waving his willie is also interesting. There are literally generations of
Palestinians who’ve never been allowed out of the Jordanian refugee camps to
which they fled in 1948 because they’re considered alien and troublesome. Both
Jordan and Egypt have been quite clear over the decades that they do not
welcome Palestinians. At all. I do not know how much money we’d have to throw
at them to get them to appear to change their minds about this, but I don’t
think we have enough.
In fact, I’d be interested in Bonespurs’
brain burps on where he expects to find the “good, fresh, beautiful piece of
land” for the displaced millions. Rwanda, perhaps? Madagascar, maybe? Possibly
he’ll annex all of Cuba and move them there. As for finding the “some people to
put up the money to build it and make it nice and make it habitable and
enjoyable”…yeah, okay: I can see Peter Thiel, Eric Prince and some others
sniffing out some very profitable contracts coming down the pike. After they’ve
finished building out and managing the concentration
camp in Guantánamo Bay (you know that’s going
to be a for-profit prison, right?).
Dunno yet how the apocalypse-loving
evangelicals are reacting to this. On the one hand, Bonespurs is talking about
turning the conflict that’s meant to usher in the End Times into luxury resorts
and high-end time shares (neither of which they can afford, unless they're "pastors" of megachurches). That’s not Written in the Book, I don’t think. On the
other, Mini Moses Johnson and his co-religionists have had some kind of chip
implanted in the space where normal people would have a cerebellum, which
prevents them from saying anything critical about their God-sent messiah. So
it’s a paradox.
Evidently all the talk on the campaign trail about keeping US troops out of foreign wars was just so much bullshit. Go figure.
And all you American supporters of
Palestine, who didn’t think Kamala Harris would do enough to help your brothers
and sisters, so you voted R, or third party or not at all: welcome to find out.
I hope you’re happy with your choice.
The rest of you: don't let this shite distract you from the 24x7 fuckery going on in federal agencies by the World's Richest Ketamine Freak and his muskrats. He's playing kid in a ketamine shop with our data from Treasury, and is moving on to "fix" the aviation system. Nothing scary about that, eh?
Well, anyhow—it’s Friday, so in honor of
all that new beachfront development, let’s have something truly classy for the
first president to use the bully pulpit to hawk his cheap-ass schlock merch.
Has to be Frankie and Annette singing “Beach Blanket Bingo”.
During my sortie to IKEA on Tuesday, I
noticed a couple of things.
The breakfast in their cafeteria that used
to be $.99 15 years ago (and may have gone up to $1.99 five years ago, which
was probably the last time I was there) is now $2.49.
But their bacon is really amazing, so it’s
absolutely worth it.
And the 100-pack of tea lights, which used
to be $2.49, is now $4.99. Even so, that's only $.05 per light, so they’re still
the best bargain in candles around.
You may be aware that the environs of the
District They Call Columbia had some Weather last month. Big drop of snow and
then sub-freezing temperatures for more than 10 days. Weather forecast was so
bad that the incoming leader of the free world moved the inauguration ceremony
into the Capitol.
(Haha—no. The Kleptocrat was afraid of
high winds blowing up his hair helmet. And, also, he knew that the attendance
numbers would be even lower than in 2017. He was basically hiding.)
Anyway, the result for me was that, in
addition to my car
being literally frozen so I couldn’t even jump
the battery, my walking was curtailed due to snow and ice on sidewalks and the
W&OD. About Wednesday of last week, I could finally walk about half my
usual distance by sticking to the bike lane in the street, but couldn’t go off-street
safely until Saturday, after it rained all day Friday.
Man—did it ever feel so good to get out
the past two days. Weather’s still bizarre: it was 44F on Saturday when I went
out and 23F yesterday. But clear and windless, so excellent walking weather. Both
days I had more energy throughout the day, and a better mood. Yay, endorphins!
And that’s my gratitude for today: being
able to rack up the steps.
