A spot of tea?

I do not enjoy shopping. For anything. Thus, Amazon Prime is my friend.

Do you think this is enough tea to get me through the summer? I hope so; I do drink a lot of iced tea.

The flower of our youth

There’s a lot of coverage—rightly so—of the 75^th anniversary of the D-Day landings, that spectacular operation that drove a stake through the wall of Hitler’s Festung Europa and began the 11-month slog to Germany. The ranks of the veterans of Gold, Juno, Sword, Omaha and Utah are thinning and growing frail; they are, after all, in their 90s.

There was a ceremony yesterday at Portsmouth, one of the embarkation points in England, to mark that side of the operation, and there’s another one today at Juno Beach, near Courseulles-sur-Mer, one of the two British landing sites. Most of the heads of state understand the solemnity and importance of remembering these long-ago events; sadly, the one representing the United States does not.

I don’t know what’s on the agenda, but it would be a good thing if the pols visited one of the three military cemeteries within a few kilometers of one another near Omaha Beach: Colleville-sur-mer, American; Bayeux, British; and La Cambe, German. I’ve walked them all, several times.

The American cemetery is situated on the bluff above Omaha Beach. You can stand at the edge and look down on the scene of the slaughter. And wonder how the hell they ever made it up to where you are. The graves are marked with white marble crosses, with the occasional Star of David interspersed. It’s quiet, usually, except for the wind. More than 9300 men lie there—not all fallen at Normandy, but congregated there in the fellowship of death.

The British cemetery, run by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, is in the heart of Bayeux, the town they took on 7 June. The headstones are like those at all CWGC graveyards—identically-sized slabs of white marble engraved with the soldier’s name, regiment and date of death (if known; otherwise a cross and “known but to God” inscribed); a centrally-located Cross of Sacrifice (tall marble cross with a sword inset), and a Stone of Remembrance, inscribed “Their Name Liveth Forevermore”. More than 4000 Brits, Commonwealth, Poles, French and others lie there.

La Cambe is outside Bayeux; you get to it down a quiet road that seems to have no other purpose but to lead you to the dead. The cemetery is maintained by the Volksbund Deutsche Kriegsgräberfürsorge, the German counterpart to the CWGC. It’s not as large space-wise as the two Allied graveyards. That’s because when you look at the inscriptions on the black metal markers set into the earth, you see there are often two to five men buried in a single spot. Plus, there are the nearly 300 known and unknown under the central mound. More than 21,000 men lie there.

The thing that struck me almost from the first in these three cemeteries was the ages on the markers—you almost never see anyone who’d reached 24. Most were in the 19-22-year age range. When you’d expect them to be in college, or working their first jobs.

I’ve often wondered what the world lost through those early deaths. What music never was composed? What scientific breakthroughs never made? What civic gains, feats of sportsmanship, family enrichment just disappeared from the future in June 1944?

That, of course, is in addition to the anguish and sorrow that engulfed their families. Parents, siblings, wives, children—bereft and left alone to sort out a world gone mad. No one to repair the gutter or fix the bike; to guide a grandchild’s hands tying a bow knot; to comfort a friend; to surprise a lover with flowers.

It had to be done—it always seems to need doing. Especially since we see the resurgence of fascism and totalitarianism all around us. But take a few moments this week to think on those 30,000 lives cut short in Normandy 75 years ago. The boys of D-Day who put their lives on the line for their generation and those that followed.

Puttin' on the Ritz

I’ve been knee-deep in spreadsheets for the last while, and yesterday I could only check in a couple of times on the shitshow that is the state visit to the UK. But one of the pieces was this column in The Guardian on the presser (ish) held by Bonespurs and May. And it basically says all I could do, and more.

I’m almost afraid to read—much less listen to—the Piers Morgan interview. But I hope May is removed from the presidential intestine before Morgan starts up. Otherwise, what with the Kleptocrat’s head being permanently installed there, could get a little crowded. And I’m not sure the NHS is equipped to remove blockage of that magnitude.

However, when I saw how Tosser Toddler was tricked out for the state banquet on Monday night, I snorted my coffee through my nose. Apparently no one told him what was expected by way of dress for the occasion and someone had to run out to Moe’s Glam-Spot Prom Rentals™ and mistakenly said, “It’s for a healthy guy weighing 239 lbs with exceptionally long arms. Yeah, that one will do. Doesn’t matter that the waistcoat is cut for an NBA forward, we got a situation here. White tie? No, no—gimme the clip-on. He can’t tie a bow tie and his wife won’t do it for him. And Hope Hicks isn’t available.”

This was the result:

One of the more apt comments on Twitter was, “He looks like he’s trying to smuggle an entire roast pig out of the banquet to snack on back on Air Force One.”

It’s extra delicious that those ridiculously long sleeves really do make his hands look tiny.

At least there’s no room in that getup for him to try to steal any of the silverware.

But I do worry that he’ll return from this junket decreeing that the USMC be kitted out in bearskin hats like the Grenadiers. And he’ll declare a national emergency to get money to buy himself a tiara.

Talking politics

Since the Tosser-in-Chief, accompanied by his adult family of grifters, is strutting around London and enjoying all the attention of the state visit Brexit Babe Theresa May scuttled over here to offer him in January 2017, it seems like an appropriate time to post about the conversations I had with various people while I was in Dublin and Belfast last month.

I’ll preface this by stating that I know for a fact that there are greedy, racist, misogynistic right-wing nut jobs in Ireland, but I did not run into any of them.

Thank God.

Stevie, my sectarian guide in Belfast, was justifiably proud of the progress made in terms of the civic comity and economic growth since the Good Friday Agreement. I told him that I was really heartened to see the changes since my last visit, but I was concerned about the cataclysm that is Brexit. He was, too. It’s not just the danger that a hard border between Ulster and the Republic could reignite the civil war, especially with all the Faragian hate rhetoric. It’s that pulling out of the Euro Zone and deporting all the European workers who fuel the economy could cripple the economy.

From my own observation, most of the people in service jobs—hotel staff, restaurant servers, retail clerks—were, from their accents, Eastern European, both north and south. In addition, a lot of construction, plumbing, electrical and the like is being done by people from Poland, Rumania, Czechia, Serbia, Estonia and the Slovak Republic. Come Brexit, the ones in Eireann will be fine—they’ll still be working and contributing to the nation. The ones in Ulster—not so much. What do you do when your hospitality industry collapses?

I’m not even going to talk about the National Health Service in Ulster, but they’re screwed royally.

Walking down Dublin’s O’Connell Street, I got to chatting with a Nigerian guy named Favour (yes), who asked if I’d sign a petition Oxfam was putting together on the catastrophe in Yemen. After inquiring where I’d been while in Ireland (“You must go to the country, it is beautiful.”) and how long he’s been there (18 months), we got back to the logistics of the petition. It was going to the Tánaiste (the deputy to the Taoiseach, and hearing Favor use the Irish terms was a treat), “Who’s like your Mike Pence.”

“Well, I hope he’s much better than Mike Pence.”

That brought a wry face.

“But he’s also our Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade, so he’s like Rex Tillerson.”

I busted out laughing. “Oh, Tillerson is so last year, hon. At least this week it’s the very robust Mike Pompeo, but who knows for how long?”

Favour was also concerned about the lunacy of Brexit, and the rise of the RWNJs around the world (although he was more tactful in his terminology) who have been emboldened by the slug in the White House.

Then I spent two hours talking with a Twitter acquaintance about the dangers we see ahead. She has two children under the age of 10, whom she’s been able to give a good life partly because of the social support system Ireland has put in place. That would be the kind of social support system that Republicans in the US and Tories in the UK want to dismantle.

As with all my conversations, I prefaced every pronouncement with the disclaimer, “Considering what we in America have let loose on the world, I have no right to claim the moral high ground…” But Theresa May is a self-aggrandizing twit, Nigel Farage is a fascist lunatic and Boris Johnson is the Kleptocrat with a posh accent and apparently undiseased grey matter. Ireland has come so far in the past 30 years, shaking off its religious shackles (the special position of the Catholic Church was written into the Irish constitution in the 1920s; thanks, Dev) and cultivating an educated, innovative, humanistic populace. Reinstituting a hard border with Ulster is part and parcel of the long history of Britain crapping on its neighbors.

And the taxi driver who drove me to Dublin airport flat out said of the stable genius, “If he gets re-elected, I got no sympat’y for yez.” To which I replied, “And you’d be entirely correct.” He wondered how any woman or any person of color could have voted for him. To which I added any serving military or veteran. Or, indeed, any sentient human. He, too, felt that burgeoning racism in Britain is encouraged by the hatemongering emanating from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, and amplified by the likes of Farage.

All of this made me sad. As I told Stevie, I’d actually thought we’d made progress here in the States since the days of Sheriff Clark with his cattle prod, Watergate, the Vietnam War—but here we are, like Groundhog Day, living it all over again. Maybe it’s good that the veneer of advancing has been stripped away and we can look at how little we’ve moved forward in reality. And seeing it, we can change it. I hope so.

But it’s going to take a long time and a whole lot of work.

Gratitude Monday: card on the table

I had a bit of a panic while I was in Dublin a few weeks ago. My route back to my hotel on the Saturday I’d been to Christchurch Cathedral to walk the labyrinth took me past a chocolate shop. I’d walked by a few Butler’s Chocolate Cafés before, but for some reason this one just pulled me in. I’d got whiskey for some friends back in the States, but it occurred to me that a box of chox would be an excellent choice for my Saturday-morning-breakfast friend.

So I went in and spent about 30 minutes wandering around. Hard choices to make, but eventually I found something suitable and went to pay. Butler’s doesn’t accept Amex, so I reached for my Visa card, which wasn’t there. I did that whole shuffling through every affinity card in my wallet thing, fishing in my bag and patting the back pockets of my jeans while the cashier waited patiently. Eventually I hauled out some actual, you know, cash and walked out with the present.

Well, in the mile or so to my hotel, I frantically sorted through how I’d need to report the lost card. Usually I carry a photocopy of my passport, Amex and Visa cards in my luggage, so I have all the digits I need if I have to deal with a loss, but this time I didn’t. Then I mentally walked myself through when I’d last used it; uh, oh…

The day before, on my way back from 14 Henrietta Street, just before I was nearly killed by a LUAS train, I’d stopped at a bookshop and found several books I couldn’t leave Dublin without. As I was paying for them, with my Visa, I was chatting with the owner about how far ahead Europe seems to be with its payment tech than the US. Their credit cards are moving to “contactless” payment, while our banks are still throwing their teddies out of the pram over switching to microchips. At the end of the conversation, there was an exchange about me leaving my card in the POS device. “Oh,” I said, “I’ll probably need this again, won’t I?”

But I didn’t recall putting it back in my wallet. Um.

So back in my hotel room, I desperately dumped my handbag out on the bed. Not there. I went through my coat pockets. Not there. I was considering how to contact CapitalOne to report it gone, when I reflexively patted my jeans—and not just the back pockets, where I usually jam things because manufacturers have taken to giving you useless half pockets in the front. And there it was, along with a fiver.

Epiphany dawned. In the afternoon after 14 Marietta Street and the bookstore, I’d decided to go back to St. Stephen’s Green in the sunshine, as opposed to the downpour of Thursday. And before I went out, in addition to my cameras, I decided to take some money and the Visa card, in case of needing some emergency gelato or anything. Naturally, when I got back to my room that day, I forgot about it and didn’t put them back in my wallet. (Not putting things back in their proper place is the cause of much of the anxiety in my life.)

So I berated myself, and expressed my thanks that all was, in fact, well. And that’s what I’m grateful for today: that buying a gift for a friend prompted the recovery of my credit card. And I hadn’t been as boneheaded as I thought.

End of day

It’s Friday, so here’s a Dublin sunset.

I shot it on my walk back to my hotel from my first “fine dining” experience. That was the day it was chucking it down rain, but the skies started clearing in the early evening, and by 2100, it was looking just beautiful.

That’s the thing: if you want a spectacular sunset, you need clouds to refract the light.

Silver spike

For more than 150 years, a gigantic phallic monument to Lord Nelson was plopped in the middle of one of the main drags in Dublin. It was erected (sorry) by the Dublin Corporation (city government) to pay homage to the victor at Trafalgar, not so different, actually, from the one in Trafalgar Square in London.

Then, in March 1966, the top of the pillar—Nelson’s statue—was blown up, presumably by members of the IRA kitted out with explosives from their pals in ETA. The remainder of the phallus was subsequently removed as a hazard.

For more than 20 years, Dubliners mulled over what to do with the space, and in 1997 The Corpo opened a design competition to replace the Pillar. The winning design was a 120-meter metallic spike, signifying nothing, really, except that you could build it.

Seriously—it has no meaning.

(Okay, the winning architectural firm called it the Spire of Dublin, and described it as an “elegant and dynamic simplicity bridging art and technology.” Whatever. They alternatively called it the Monument of Light, which makes me think of Albert Speer’s Cathedral of Light, so, no.)

Well, at least it's not a British admiral. Or a Starbucks.

But naturally, as I was walking back to my hotel from 14 Henrietta Street, I noticed it, and I had to shoot some photos.

However—and this comes under the category of “don’t try this at home, kids”—I got a little carried away with trying to capture the entire 120 meters in the shot. As I was concentrating on it—and fighting with the bloody LED screen on my digital P&S camera—I became aware of a quiet, repetitive sound somewhere in the area. Eventually I looked up and realized what the repetitive noise was. (When I got back to my hotel I saw that I’d caught it on camera, but because you can’t see anything in the sunlight on an LED screen, I didn’t realize it at the time.)

And I scooted.

Sorry, LUAS driver. I am a total idiot.

Off and on the rails

I do love repeating patterns, and  railings make good subjects. So here's some ironmongery from Dublin:

On Henrietta Street:

  

At the Taoiseach’s palace near Merrion Square:

The Bank of Ireland:

Because it actually wasn’t the way in that day.

At the Guinness Storehouse:

And just somewhere:

But here’s what I also got a kick out of—the way people perched objets trouvés on nearby railings:

Here’s a close-up of the last one:

Transportation modes

I’m always interested in approaches to transportation when I travel. So here are some things that are going on in Dublin.

For one thing, the sharing economy is alive and well.

I saw one in action, too, but didn’t get a pick

But there were a lot of bikeshare installations, although this is the only one I saw that was actually approaching full availability:

In fact, I saw several that were completely empty:

But lest you think no one actually owns a bicycle, here’s a shop:

I’m guessing that you’re not allowed to take your bicycle on LUAS (the light rail system), as here’s one of the stops:

Now, clearly it’s not paradise for cyclists, or for bikes. I was walking along Merrion Street and saw this example:

The tag is a threat:

But since I shot the photo nearly a month after the date on it, I’m thinking they may not be big on enforcement.

Here’s another, which was just sad:

And its tag:

By the time they get round to actually impounding the thing, there’ll be nothing left.

These pedicabs were at the St. Stephen’s Green end of Grafton street (along with horse-drawn carriages, which I did not shoot); only at the weekend, though:

And here’s something I had not come across before this trip.

I would have been clueless had I not seen and heard two of them at a distance in Belfast. (The first time, in the street by my hotel, I was so stupefied that I didn't think to pull out my camera. The second I heard three blocks away while I was at the top of my hotel, and it was too far to shoot.) You get a bunch of people on the bicycle seats (probably pretty well inebriated from what I saw), and they provide the power to move around. They’re also their own cheering section.

I have to say that the notion of doing this as a team-building exercise does not appeal to me in the least. And I think it would only work in a relatively flat city. San Francisco, for example, would not be a good target market. But evidently it’s a Thing in Ireland, north and south.

Gratitude Monday: On duty

Last Thursday afternoon in the District They Call Columbia, we had a tornado warning. Our COO sent round an email telling everyone to get away from outside windows, which is probably good advice, because I’d have been the one glued to a window, shooting photos. As it happens, I was WFH in the People’s Republic, where it got so dark around 1530 that my solar-powered garden butterfly lights came on. Sometime after that, the skies opened up and all the water in the world came right down on us.

(A few weeks ago a tornado actually touched down about a mile from me, although thankfully there was no loss of life.)

Well, during a staged event that afternoon for yet another farm bailout to offset the fallout from his tariff wars, as the Chaos Monkey was peddling porkies about him being calm—the calmest ever, dammit—when throwing a wobbly at Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer the day before, and was calling on his toady aides to—one by one—swear to the assembled media that his account of the encounter was true, and calm…soldiers of The Old Guard were carrying out their duty at the Tomb of the Unknowns across the river at Arlington National Cemetery. Including placing flags at the Tomb in honor of Memorial Day.

And on Friday morning, as Cadet Bonespurs (proud descendant of a long line of military service dodgers) hauled off for a state visit to Japan and golfing with Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, The Old Guard tweeted photos of what real devotion to duty looks like. Viz:

Today I am grateful for the generations of men and women of our armed services who have made great sacrifices for the survival of our nation and our democracy. And I’m grateful for The Old Guard for their dedication to honoring those sacrifices. And I’m grateful for social media, which enabled America’s Regiment to disseminate these photos that silently remind us of what duty looks like.