Strictly for the birds

After this week from wherever is below Hell, here’s something with no human involvement: birds at the feeder.

 

These aren’t actually birds that I want to encourage. Not  sure exactly what they are, species-wise; I only know they’re greedy pigs who can empty a feeder in a New York minute.

What’s fascinating to me is that there appears to be one Momma and several adolescent kids. I mean, they look adult, but they’re clamoring for Momma to feed-us-feed-us-feed-us, like babies.

Since I shot this I’ve been experimenting with adding fishing weights to the spring-loaded feeder. Trying to get a weight that allows the little birdies to eat but clamps shut when any of these bullies lands. So far I’ve got rid of the really big ones, but still getting some of these guys.

Order in the court

I saw the news on the way home yesterday that Justice Anthony Kennedy announced his retirement from SCOTUS. That means the Kleptocrat gets another seat on the court. He already had a free pass with Neil Gorsuch—that was the appointment that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (Reptile – Kentucky) stole from President Obama by refusing to consider his nominee for the last year of his presidency.

McConnell—whose greatest ambition is to return us to those halcyon days of the Nineteenth Century, when women and darkies knew their place—has already announced that the Senate will be voting in the fall (i.e., before the mid-term elections) on whichever crack-brained right-wing nut job Space Cadet Bone Spurs nominates.

The Gorsuch Court has already done serious harm to America—upholding the Muslim travel ban, retaining blatantly gerrymandered districts… Another Nazi on the bench will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Not only are we totally screwed, but our kids and their kids are screwed.

Civil matters

You’ll no doubt have noticed that the party of “Lock her up”, “Rope, Tree, Journalist”, separating toddlers from their parents and tossing them both in separate prisons in their thousands, cutting off healthcare to millions, literally shouting down Democratic colleagues, calling the cops on bar-be-cuers, yelling racial epithets from moving vehicles, and tweeting lies and vile threats to practically anyone from official accounts—they’re suddenly every one of them shocked—utterly shocked and horrified by the incivility they’re encountering from…people who have started pushing back against their affronts to decent society.

Yes, the GOPigs have had their minions pore through the dictionary to find le mot juste, and pulled out their pop-beads to clutch as they use that word. Over and over. With voices shaking in outrage.

The Repugs really understand neither irony nor that whole goose-gander equality thing.

There’ve been numerous instances of this. But the biscuit-taking prince would be David Gergen, who served as a talking head in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton administrations, and who has been one of CNN’s political talking heads for a while. Because on Monday, Gergen’s mouth went on flapping long after his brain stopped sending any intelligent thoughts its way.

Specifically, he pronounced that there has never been a time in American discourse so divisive as our present one. Not even…not even the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements in the 60s and 70s. No, no—a guy who served in Nixon’s White House said:

“I cannot remember a time—the Anti-War movement in Vietnam… The Civil Rights movement in the 60s and early 70s. Both of those were much more civil in tone.”

And then he doubled down: “Even the Anti-War movement was more civil in tone but certainly the Civil Rights movement among the people who were protesting…”

Dave, Dave—put down the Ambien and back away from the microphone.

More civil? More effing civil?

Back in the 60s and 70s, we went on strike. We took to the streets. We shut down universities. We blocked Army convoys. We poured blood on Selective Service records. We burned draft cards, We burned bras. We went to jail. We went to Canada. We marched from Selma to Montgomery. We rode buses. We took over the National Mall. We rioted outside national political conventions. We were escorted by the National Guard into grade schools.

More civil?

We shouted “Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?” We sang “We Shall Overcome”.  When they told us to shut the fuck up, we yelled even louder.

They doused us with firehoses. They fired tear gas grenades at us. They set attack dogs on us. They cracked open our heads with truncheons. They used electric cattle prods on us. They fired rifles at us.

More civil?

Our blood was splattered across college campuses, school yards, national parks, draft boards, city streets, lunch counters.

They burned crosses on our lawns. They bombed our churches. They lynched our sons. They murdered us. Our bodies were scattered from Watts to Kent State to Mississippi.

They shot Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, before our eyes.

There was nothing—not one fucking thing—civil about it.

If you doubt me, there is ample evidence from contemporary news reports, written, photographic and film. It was literally in all the papers, and on all the evening news broadcasts, day after day, year after year. You’d think that a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School and a CNN pundit would be aware of that. But evidently you’d be wrong. 

(Upon reflection, I suppose it's possible that our Dave is engaging in wishful thinking, imagining he lived through the pretty time when gallantry took its last bow, that world of cavaliers and cotton fields, where gentlemen like him, sippin' bourbon in the Big House, heard nary a whisper from the womenfolk or the slaves. A world that was so much better than the one that, in fact, was there.)

And no, we will not shut up; we will not pretend that this cattle car of fascists represents American values; we will not be talked over; we will not be shouted down. In the words of one hero of these days, we are reclaiming our time.

And you can stuff your one-sided application of civility up right beside that poker you’re sitting on. Y'all released the Kraken. Deal.

Baby bumper

I was down to the ABC store a couple of weeks ago. As I was getting out of my car, I noticed this, uh, license plate decoration:

And I wondered about the story behind it.

I mean—it’s not just the little critter. What’s up with the pacifier?

M-maybe it's a...hat?

Gratitude Monday: dining out

As I write this post, I’ve got a fan going at the wind tunnel setting in my living room, with four holes in my walls.

This is because last Thursday I was working from home and realized my bare feet were wet. Water was seeping up through the floor throughout an area about 4’x10’ along the wall I share with my neighbor’s dining room. I called the condo management association and spent the day waiting for their plumber to come out. He cut three of the holes, in an attempt to find the source of the flood, before he went next door and discovered that my neighbor’s ice maker was leaking, and her floor was flooded, too.

Well, he fixed the ice maker, but as it wasn’t clear whether that was the cause of my disaster (it might have been the torrential rains we’ve been having), the condo association sent a contractor out on Friday, who cut a hole in the wall approximately where the refrigerator is on the other side. The short version of this story is that both the plumber and the contractor believe the ice maker is the source of the water, and therefore the water damage. But just to be sure, I have to live with four holes in my living room walls, with buckled floor boards, rugs rolled up in another room and a fan going to try to dry things out. The thinking is, if there are no more leaks, then it was the ice maker, and I’ll have to put in a claim with my neighbor’s insurance to rip up and replace the floor (and remediate any mold underneath it), patch and paint my walls, and whatever.

All this when I don’t even know for sure that I’ll have a job next week.

But even so—I have reason to be thankful. Because Friday night a tiny (26 seats) restaurant in Lexington, Virginia (home to the Virginia Military Institute, but also to Washington and Lee University) asked a party of eight, which included Sarah Huckabee Sanders, to leave. The owner had polled her staff—some of whom are LBGTQ—and when they said they did not want to have to serve that lying, bigoted, arrogant, soulless mouthpiece for the Kleptocrat, the owner asked Sanders to leave.

Which she did, although she used her official press secretary Twitter account to whine about it the next day, lying once again about how she’s always polite and treats people respectfully—as though her pressers aren’t recorded for all to see her at her reprehensible worst come day, go day, week after week.

(It was a bad restaurant week for foot soldiers in Cadet Bone Spurs’ army: chief Nazi Stephen Miller and Aryan DHS Rottenführer Kirstjen Nielsen were both shouted out of DC restaurants by protesters. Mexican restaurants. They were eating in upscale Mexican restaurants after orchestrating the policy of imprisoning asylum seekers at the Mexican border. Talk about yer cojones grandes.)

Leaving aside the protestors yelling “Shame! Shame!” (which is absolutely their right, although pretty painful for other patrons in the cavernous space where Nielsen was videoed), I’m a little uncomfortable that restaurants can start denying service to people based on their lying scumbaggery when they are not otherwise disrupting the place of business. Being a fascist mouthpiece is not a protected class, like race, ethnicity, religion, gender identification or sexual orientation, though. And I admit that it gives me enormous satisfaction to know that these despicable humanoids are tasting some of the rotten fruit they’re so happy to dish out to others.

But the Red Hen restaurant is now facing not unexpected backlash from the MAGAts, including death threats that forced them to close on Saturday. Losing a Saturday night’s revenue is tough for a business that runs on such tight margins. The Deplorables have also invaded the restaurant’s Yelp, Google Reviews and Facebook pages, leaving badly spelled one-star reviews. It’s possible that the restaurant will be closed for a while, which could be disastrous for owners and staff. “For a while” could well become “permanently”.

So here’s what I’m grateful for today: following the example of someone on Twitter, I ordered a Red Hen gift card, and asked that it be sent to Project Horizon, a Lexington-based organization that helps victims of domestic violence. 

Looking at their menu, $40 is not going to go far, but it’s about five days' worth of meals from downtown DC food trucks. (I don’t buy my lunches at work precisely because of the expense, but I reckon that one week’s potential lunches is a fair amount to contribute.) I do not know that I’ll have a job after this week, but I’ve got one now, and I can use some of my income to help the principled folks at the Red Hen and give someone from Project Horizon a treat.

That balances out the holes, the fan and the mold.

Failure to engage

As you know, I’m fascinated by how people behave on social media, especially those who tout themselves as influencers, thought leaders and mavens. Very often they are the ones who follow you and then unfollow as soon as you’ve followed them back. They’re all about self-amplification, and only self-amplification, regardless of what they claim.

Here’s one of my latest subjects. I don’t even know why Larry Kim followed me (or when), and I don’t know why he has a blue checkmark. But the fact that his profile claims he “popularized Unicorns in Marketing” [his capitalization] gave me a clue as to what to expect.

He loves to post Wisdom of various sorts, viz:

Note the highlighted directive WRT engaging. Then know that when I commented on another of his Unicorn Droppings:

…He never responded.

#fail

Monkey business

Let’s have a break from local copperheads and Rams; time for a commercial break. So I’ll give you a couple of bits of business news.

This week, General Electric—that erstwhile powerhouse of American blue-chip manufacturing—was tossed out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Its place on the exchange will be taken by Walgreen’s.

GE was a founding member of the Dow, so this has got to bite. As recently as the 90s, under CEO Jack Welch, the company was held up as an example of how to company. One of their divisions once flew me up to Connecticut for an interview; I wasn’t offered the job but I never held it against them. However, in recent years, they’ve pretty much screwed the pooch and last year it was the worst-performing stock in the Dow.

They put out a “things are going to plan” statement after the banishment was announced, but the plan involves a lot of pulling in of horns and selling off of businesses, from the railroad to the lightbulb divisions. Sad times.

And at the other end of the business weird-shit-o-meter, yesterday the Kleptocrat might have overdosed on Ambien, causing him to accuse those wily Canadians of…well, I’ll let him speak for himself, in his own word salad:

(I'm not even going to comment on #SpaceCadetBoneSpurs' announcement that he's creating another branch of the military—separate but equal—to conquer and occupy space. And he's calling it Space Force. Because of course.)

It took GE 120 years to screw the pooch as badly as the stable genius Chaos Monkey. God help us all.

Drains, snakes & nature

Just as I was getting home yesterday we had one of those gullywashers of a rainstorm. I noticed that the parking lot of my cluster doesn’t seem to have gutters or storm drains, which means that the parking lot could have floated the Forrestal’s battle group.

But it abated after a while and I was able to return to watching the birds at the feeders while my socks dried on my feet.

The rain broke some of the heat, which was nice. (Summer storms don’t always do that around here.) But it also left diamonds on my giant hosta leaves, which I love.

I’m a little leery of those hostas, which are right outside my front door. Last year I found a letter carrier standing on the sidewalk side of the plants; he told me he’d seen a snake slithering under the leaves. And there have been copperhead sightings around the People’s Republic—reptile as well as human—so I’m thinking I might want to trim the big leaves back so the snakes can’t hide.

I’m all for sharing the environment with others of God’s creatures. But really—it’s a big world; they don’t have to be that close to me.

Baaaaaaa

A couple of weeks ago I was parked at a construction road stoppage. I was gazing idly about, as one does, when I noticed the big, tough Ram pickup truck in front of me.

First of all, I can never look at a big, tough Ram pickup truck with a straight face since it was pointed out that their ram is the spitting image of a diagram of the internal female reproductive system.

But then I twigged to Mr. Tough Ram Guy’s stickers:

And I thought, “Yeah—that trade war your Kleptocrat hero’s getting us into is going to take down Harley, along with a good chunk of Flyover Country’s agriculture. How’s that vote of yours workin’ out for you, eh, bud?"

Gratitude Monday: reciprocal thanks

My vast experience with the job search has taught me many strategies for getting through the soul-sucking esteem-smashing slog. Beyond optimizing your LinkedIn profile and spiffing up your résumé—and there are as many definitions of optimal and spiffed as there are subject matter experts (SMEs) ready to sell you their guaranteed Nirvana—and the dreaded networking.

(It’s interesting: networking one’s way into jobs is by far the most successful methodology, as agreed by researchers, hiring managers and SMEs alike. And yet the vast preponderance of job seekers I’ve met would much rather—and do—repeatedly revise their LinkedIn profiles and submit online applications for jobs they find on job boards, and waiting like the refugees in Casablanca to be contacted by recruiters…anything but suit up, get out to Meetups and industry events, ask connections to coffee and rinse and repeat.)

One of the strategies that I personally found helpful was regular sessions with other job seekers—either weekly or bi-weekly—to encourage one another, but also to be accountable. If you don’t have to report on progress against your stated goals and tasks on a regular basis, it’s way too easy to just…not. And I know this because I’m guilty of it.

Under the aegis of one of the Valley They Call Silicon job search support groups, run by a church as one of its ministries, I used to participate in a couple of what were called “success teams”—weekly meetings of about five to eight people looking for work, where we’d go around the table, reporting on what we’d done over the last week, and list what we planned to do in the coming week. People gave encouragement and made suggestions. But importantly, someone took notes and disseminated them, so everyone knew what we would have to report on.

The problem with such groups is that you always have members who are basically phoning it in, for one reason or another. One of them, in Mountain View, was a surgical nurse who’d been fired for some reason and was in the process of a union claim. She had no intention of actually looking for a job; she was merely riding things out until the claim was resolved and she could return to the hospital that had fired her. She’d show up week after week, take up time talking about what she hadn’t done, listen to suggestions the other members would make, write nothing down, parry ideas, and make no contribution to anyone else’s report.

At another group, in Cupertino, the dead weight was a Drama Queen of a self-described entrepreneur-engineer (and expert in everything from baking to economic theory). He’d show up every week with a long list of everything that had prevented him from doing anything, declaimed with full histrionics; his greatest skill, as far as I could see, was his ability to explain (as though to children, with slowed speech, careful enunciation and bugged eyes) why any and all of our suggestions just wouldn’t work in his very special case. He once handed round his résumé; it went back to 1973. And he assured me that he could not possibly cut one single bullet point, because everything on it was incredibly important.

Well—but aside from clangers like those, accountability partners are a good thing. So, back in the day when I was looking fulltime, and a couple of friends were also looking (one in North Carolina and one in England), I’d Skype with each of them every fortnight, just to give support, encouragement and reality checks.

Okay—all this is by way of introduction to my actual Gratitude Monday post. Because one of my colleagues from my stint at Monolithic Networking Corporation seven years ago reached out to me a month or so ago to ask for some advice in his latest job hunt. He was treated shabbily by MNC—a not extraordinary thing for that outfit—but always maintained a positive demeanor, and helped me get a much-needed mouse, which enabled me to do my job. Since then he went to work for Phillips in IoT technology, and when his division was basically shut down, he thought he might like to see if he could marry his experience with IoT to his passion for wineries; we’d once talked about analytics and such, so he thought I might have some suggestions.

Well, I Googled “IoT and wineries”, “AI and wineries”, and “data science and wineries” on my hour-long Metro ride home, and there’s some interesting stuff going on. We had a good long chat, I made some suggestions, I asked if he’d like to go the bi-weekly check-in route, and that’s what we’ve been doing. It’s a bold thing to pivot one’s career in this way, and I really admire him for stepping back to look at the possibilities and work toward them. He’s making great progress with his mother-of-all-spreadsheets to wrangle all his research and his conversations with people on the winery side and on the tech side, and I look forward to our calls.

Well—as you know, last week was a bummer for me, and on Wednesday I was feeling well and truly discouraged over the realization that I just can’t count on my current employment to last. But then an email from my friend appeared in my queue:

“[Bas Bleu],

“I hope that you are having a great day. This morning, after my workout in the gym, I was going through my list of things and people that I am grateful for.

“You were on the top of the list this morning. I really do appreciate your support in getting on solid ground in my career transition. I am very fortunate to have your help in this journey. Thank you.”

Well, that just brought me up short. He’s grateful for me. He’s grateful for me. Huh.

What a wonderful thing to read, on any day, but especially last Wednesday. I am so grateful that he took the time to write it. (And also, kudos for keeping a list of gratitudes!)

But I’m also grateful for our calls, that I can give support and encouragement, and also that my experiences can be turned to something valuable for someone else. It is truly a blessing to be able to help. And I give heartfelt thanks for this reminder.