Will you pardon me?

Well, alrighty then—today’s earworm is in honor of our brave National Guard troops deployed to our nation’s capital to tamp down crime against DOGiE bros. Those champions of freedom, whom our drunken sot of a SECDEF is pleased to term warfighters. Who bravely strap on cammies and Kevlar to…pick up trash and spread mulch, just to keep them away from the Krispy Kreme.

I really like that reflective vest over their tactical kit look. Very “community service in lieu of jail time” vibe.

(Not that picking up trash and tending the plants aren't important work, and it's good that someone is doing it, since the DOGiEs fired most of the National Park Service staff whose job that was. It's just that this doesn't seem to be in line with the administration's testosterone-heavy view of the military's role in the world.)

Anyway—what else could it be today but “Tiptoe through the Tulips”, with that über macho manly man, Tiny Tim. Here he is on the Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In show.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Consumption

If you want to know how long I’ve had this sixer of Gosling ginger beer, it’s since long before the industry ditched the plastic loop packaging three years ago.

I’m thinking from around 2016.

But it still has all its taste, unlike the odd Diet Coke I sometimes find at the back of the fridge.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Persistence and prevailing

Sunday morning I was doing my weekly scout of the construction site. Most of the paw prints from the previous week were gone—stomped over by boots and heavy equipment.

But there was this:

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Foraging

You know, one of the bits of collateral damage from the Covid pandemic is that supermarkets have stopped having bins of mushrooms, so you can pick as few or as many of as many types as you need for a particular recipe.

(I developed one for wild rice that I steam with chicken stock, then sauté a mix of fungi—portobello, oyster, shitake, cremini—with some diced shallots, mix it all together and put it in the oven while I’m roasting chicken breasts marinated in orange juice, soy sauce, Dijon mustard and ginger root. Delish.)

But since the pandemic, you have to buy pre-packaged mushrooms, which starts running into some serious coin if you want a variety, not to mention you get what they pack, not the ones you want. This is the case not only in the big national and regional chains, but also in the Asian and Latino grocery stores I frequent.

(A friend who lives in the Seattle environs swears that they’re all free range there, but I have to wonder.)

So I have to say that when I came across these guys on one of my walks, I was tempted…

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: street-legal

Last Wednesday I took my car in to the garage. The dashboard was telling me it needed service and—this being August—I also needed the annual inspection.

Plus—the Check Engine light had been on for a couple of weeks. (Although this is not always indicative of something major. In fact, almost every time it’s come on it was either a hiccup or something extremely minor. So I didn’t really take it as being something urgent.

However, on Tuesday, the engine took to stalling when I came to a stop light, so I was glad I’d made the appointment for the service.

The Saab guy at the shop had told me that the 120K (the car actually only has 116K miles, but the dashboard won’t shut up about service until the mechanic turns it off) mile service is a full-day affair, so I was prepared for that.

However, late in the day, when I called for a sitrep, the guy said that the check engine fault needed a couple of parts, which “Saab’s not making anymore”, and so he was having to call around to source them.

The good news was the vehicle passed inspection. Bad news was I couldn’t pick it up.

We went through Thursday the same way. At about 1600, when I called, he said he’d found the parts and hoped to have them in the next day.

And this is where I—a fourth-generation native Californian who grew up in LA—began to stress. I can’t be without a car. It’s not just that I live in the suburbs where bus service sucks. (I can, in fact, walk to two grocery stores, but it’s the carrying stuff back that makes it impossible to anything except emergency shops.) It’s not even that I had any appointments that I needed to get to, as in actually driving somewhere.

It's that the very notion of not having a reliable personal vehicle that I can hop into and go somewhere gives me the jim-jams.

The cortisol buildup was considerable.

Friday was also looking bad—another day of looking out my front window and seeing an empty space where a silver Saab should be. I called just after 1300 and he told me the same thing: he’d received one of the parts, but was still waiting for the other.

So, there I was, facing the prospect of having to go through the weekend without wheels. I considered applying for refugee status.

I called a friend and wailed for 40 minutes about the injustice of not having a car. But around 90 minutes later, he rang me to say the second part had come in and the car was ready for me.

Well, I put on my walking shoes, stuffed my driver’s license and Amex card in my pocket and walked the two miles to the garage. In 84-degree weather. (Yes, I could have called Uber, but I know from experience that it’s $15 for that two-mile journey, plus tip, and I needed to work off the cortisol.)

And $1100 later, I turned the key in the ignition, the car started and didn’t cough all the (two-mile) way home. I parked it in its slot and patted it on the hood as I went inside.

(Yes, okay: I'd wash it. Right after I harvest the crop of radishes.)

Order was restored to my world.

That evening, my friend and I had this exchange.

Well, as it happens, my neighbors were moving in on Saturday, and their van blocked my car in until early afternoon, so I couldn’t use it. But it didn’t matter, because it was there.

And all weekend long I’ve been reminded of how grateful I am to have an operational, reliable vehicle. I’m running low on butter, so I need to make a Costco run.

 

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

I got something to say

Okay, here’s where we are:

Having illegally deployed not only National Guardsmen but also active-duty Marines to Los Angeles, to “assist” various DHS thugs in abducting and detaining hundreds of people for the crime of being dark skinned, the Kleptocrat has escalated his militarization of police. As you know, he’s now got 8,000 NG troops in the nation’s capital in response to one of his big, bad DOGiE bros getting mugged by a 15-year-old girl a couple of weeks ago.

Guardsmen, FBI agents and other feds are augmenting Metropolitan PD, rousting homeless folks, bullying residents drinking beer or smoking weed on their front porches (both of which are legal in the District) and generally being assholes. When a White guy yelled at one of the tacticaled up, face-covered up to the eyeballs (and you know this jerk was not covering his nose four years ago) goons, “Why are you doing this—you’re ruining the country!” the hood replied, “The liberals already ruined it,” and went on beating a victim.

At time of writing, the Kleptocrat even announced that he was planning on “patrolling the streets” with his big, manly troops, lowering crime and making DC safe for right-wing White people. (And not those old hippies Stephen Miller claims have been showing up to protest.)

So it seems entirely appropriate for today for us to have N.W.A.’s 1989 “Fuck tha Police”. ‘Nuff said.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Pantry staples

Sometime back in the 90s, I recall reading an article that proclaimed you were a yuppie (roughly defined as a Beamer-driving, condo-residing, dressing-for-success Young Urban Professional) if you had more than three types of vinegar.

I remember getting a kind of sinking feeling in my stomach, because at that time I knew my pantry held apple cider, red wine, white, white wine and sherry vinegars. I also had EVOO, corn oil and peanut oil.

So, after yesterday’s confessional exercise, I thought I’d take inventory. Yeah—so far over the line.

Vinegars:

Oils:

(The peanut oil lives in the refrigerator because it goes rancid at room temperature after being opened. And the Wegman's basting oil is something they gave away for getting their shopping card, back in the 90s, which I've never opened.)

And a bunch of infused olive oils my sister gave me for Christmas possibly 15 years ago, which I should probably start using.

I am somewhat curious about the chocolate one.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Move over, Sally

I just want everyone to know: I do not have a baking problem.

I can give it up whenever I want.

I, uh, also have bread flour (in 10lb sacks), whole wheat flour, rye flour, cake flour and 00 flour (for pizzas). Moreover, I buy granulated sugar 10 pounds at a time, because Big Sugar (and therefore all supermarkets) now sells what used to be five pounds in four-pound bags. That pissed me off. Costco used to have 7lb sacks of icing sugar, but they stopped carrying those. It's 50lbs or nothing, which is really annoying.

(The only reason I don't have 50lb sacks is because I can't lift them off the Costco shelves or into the trunk of my car.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

Personal statements

Time for another installment of vanity plates in NoVa. In no particular order:

 I've pondered this for a long time but I've never decoded it:

I'm assuming this is the Walker family?

To be clear, I wasn't driving when I shot this:

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: They're still here

On Sundays (the only days when construction crews aren’t out on the site from before the legal start time of 0700 until dusk), I walk over to where developers are cramming 82 three- and four-story townhouses on five acres of land. You know—on the former corporate campus with the ponds, water lilies, herons and sacred lotus.

It’s truly depressing to see these structures that are designed to look like every other townhouse development in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, with no attempt to suit the surroundings. (I read through the design documents that Fairfax County Planning Commission staff thumbed up. The cars the artists used to depict parking were BMWs and Porsches. So much for solving the housing shortage.) These—the model units—are presumably the three-story design, because they clearly are not the two-over-two that are meant to comprise the four-story ones. And yet they have a fourth floor taking up half the structure footprint. My guess is the half-the-space part is the “loft opening to a roof terrace” and I wonder if that was what FCPC approved?

Well, but after I threw up a little in my mouth, I wandered towards the ponds and noticed that the site has had other visitors, whose journeys were memorialized in the construction dirt that turned to mud over the past week:

And all those little pawprints made me happy. I’m grateful that they’ve not yet abandoned us, despite the desecration of their habitat.

And I hope they pee on the luxury townhouses.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu