They're here

In honor of the utter clown show that is the Republican majority in the House of Representatives—the ones who are about to shut down the federal government to own the libs—I had to go with “Send in the Clowns” for our earworm today.

There is not one of them who can hawk up an actual reason for careening toward the shutdown at the end of the week, not in all the soundbites they’ve been spewing over the airwaves this week.

Speaker-after-15-votes Kevin McCarthy won’t work with Democrats to come up with a funding bill because if he does, the RWNJs in the inaptly-named “Freedom Caucus” will remove him as Speaker, which is the only thing in life he cares about. Freedom Caukers really seem to have no concern about the hundreds of thousands of federal workers (much less the contractors) who’ll have to down tools and go unpaid until such time as they pull their fingers out and do their damned jobs. (Elected officials do get their paychecks during a shutdown, although I think their staff do not. I’d get my own coffee for a while, if I were one of these buffoons.) They just want to ensure that Dems don’t get any say in the legislation.

Meanwhile, people in banana republics and Eastern European oligarchies are laughing hysterically at this farce, and our allies are whispering among themselves that “that boy ain’t right,” and wondering if maybe a cow sat on the entire US legislative branch.

So, here’s Barbra Streisand singing “Send in the Clowns”, from A Little Night Music.

 

 

Problems of the past

Someone on Twitter posted this image last week:

And for those who do not know what it is, my children, back in the dark days of the last century, before you could stream “content” on any device you owned, people who wanted more to watch than their broadcast and cable TV channels offered had to rent physical video cassette tapes from a place called Blockbuster Video. You went into the shop, picked out what you wanted to see, paid money for it and then went home and put it in what was called a “VCR” (video cassette recorder) machine. Then you returned it to the store.

The catch was—you were supposed to rewind the tape after you watched it. If you didn’t rewind it before returning, you got fined, like when you returned a library book late.

Which brings me to libraries—sometimes local libraries would lend (or rent) video tapes to patrons. And the same rule applied: you had to rewind the tape to start before taking it back or get a fine.

And that brings me to the memory triggered by seeing this image.

The local rag for Williamsburg, Va., was called The Virginia Gazette. And the Gazette maintained an answering machine where anyone could leave a message about, well, anything that came to mind. Kind of like letters to the editor, but without having to write.

Like letters, the paper printed some of the more family-friendly offerings, which could be pretty off-the-wall, as I recall. I thought the worst job at the Gazette had to be whoever had to check the answering machine every morning and listen to the rant-de-la-nuit.

The one that stands out after more than three decades is the library patron who—for reasons unknown—had checked out Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. (First of all, Kubrick; second, Vietnam War; really—do the math.) The patron had been utterly disgusted after powering through maybe five or six minutes of the film. He (pretty sure on the gender, and I’m guessing age was post-retirement) ejected it from the VCR, wrote “FILTH! SMUT!” on the label and returned it, unrewinded, to the library.

What really outraged him—besides the notion that the Williamsburg Library would have such vile materials on its shelves—and drove him to the Gazette’s open line, was that he got fined for defacing the tape (and probably for not rewinding it). That he had to share with the entire readership.

These days, of course, all he’d have to do is raise up on his White hind legs, declare something disgusting and get it banned from the library. And he wouldn’t have to worry about rewinding anything.

 

Let a tail be your umbrella

We’ve had rain for the past few days here in the District They Call Columbia. Started out as the remnants of Ophelia, but I don’t know what it is now. Thankfully, it hasn’t been heavy.

Usually when it rains, squirrels don’t come out. So it’s a good time to toss seed out to the birds and the chipmunk.

However the other day one or two of the little toerags did venture out during precipitation. That’s when I noticed that they were using their tails as umbrellas.

I’ve never seen them do this before, but then I’ve not really ever seen them out in the rain. It’s actually kind of clever.

 

 

Gunfight at the O.K. Patio

In the past week or so a chipmunk has been a regular visitor to my back yard. Whenever I see him, I try to toss out some bird seed; my challenge is to do it without somehow signaling those toerag squirrels.

Last Friday I’d tossed some seed out and Chipper was enjoying it along with a few cardinals, a couple of wrens and a chickadee.

Now, you have to understand that chickadees are teeny-weeny birds. Teeny-weeny. But this chickadee for some reason took exception to the chipmunk and started fussing at him. It fluffed up its feathers and flapped its wings. Chipper took notice and froze. There was a standoff. Then chickadee fussed again. Chipper fled the scene.

After a few minutes of enjoying its victory, the chickadee flew off and the chipmunk returned. None of the other birds seemed to notice.

I seriously laughed the entire afternoon. I don’t know what the chickadee’s objection to the chipmunk was, but, man—it was not having it.

I didn’t get any video of the confrontation, but here’s the chipmunk.

 

 

Gratitude Monday: full circuit

Yesterday morning I walked my first full circuit in…I dunno, probably more than a year. It’s about 3.25 miles and approximately an hour at my current walking pace.

It’s not running, but I’m grateful for being able to do it.

 

 

 

All vows

Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, begins Sunday at sundown. It’s the day when Jews prepare for the New Year by fasting, considering their actions over the past months and making efforts to acknowledge and amend the wrongs they’ve committed. Kind of like steps four through nine of the AA 12-step process.

The deal is that God opens the Book of Life on Rosh Hashanah and inscribes your name in it, but doesn’t close-and-seal it until the end of Yom Kippur. You have those ten Days of Awe to get your ducks in a row.

I really like this concept: devoting serious time to reflect, measure, acknowledge transgressions and resolving to do better. We all need to be reminded of this, to go through the cycle at regular intervals and to take steps to maybe not keep doing the same things over and over again, expecting different results.

In honor of this holiday, today’s earworm is Max Bruch’s “Kol Nidre”, arranged for cello and orchestra. Kol Nidre is from the Ashkenazi tradition of Judaism; it’s sung in the synagogue just before sundown on Yom Kippur. It’s a mixture of Aramaic and Hebrew, declaring null any oaths or commitments made to God from one Yom Kippur to the next, and asking for pardon for shortcomings in fulfilling those vows. The idea, as I understand it, is to mitigate the sin of failing to fulfill a vow that might have been made rashly. (It also annulled any vows associated with forced conversion to Christianity, which was a thing for a long time.)

Cellist Mischa Maisky performs with and conducts the Verbier Festival Chamber Orchestra in this recording.

May your name be sealed in the Book of Life.

 

 

Gripping question

I’ve only bought makeup (aside from mascara) twice in my life (last time being 10 years ago), so I really need to know:

Is foundation being like putty a thing? A good thing?

 

Going nuts

Okay, I was a little nonplussed yesterday when I was buying walnut pieces at Trader Joe’s. Because every bag on the shelf looked like this:

Doesn’t buying a bag of something that’s only half full make you a little…suspicious?

I weighed it when I got home, and it was a skosh over one pound, so okay. (But when I switched to metric, it was 468g, not the 454 stated on the bag; that seems odd.)

But still. Optics.

 

 

Plus ça change…

I interviewed for a position with a cybersec startup last week—the recruiter had reached out to me and it looked like it could be interesting.

However, the VP of Product Management (who, 10 years ago owned and managed a tree removal service and whose LinkedIn profile still enumerates very minor tasks he performed for unrelated work early in his career) was clearly looking for someone more technical than I, so I knew that would be the end of it.

His shop, his call; fair enough.

However, I had found a typo in the data sheet the recruiter had sent me as prep for the VP call (she said it was a white paper, but I do know the difference between the two), so when I sent her my thank-you (since they’d masked the VP’s email address), I said—very nicely—that I’d found a typo and someone in their marketing department would probably want to correct that.

(The company has fewer than 150 employees; I reckoned that the marketing “department” might be the CMO plus one general dogsbody. Interestingly, when I looked up the CMO on LinkedIn, I discovered she has a BA; in “English—Technical Writing”. Well, we all make mistakes.)

I didn’t point out that this particular typo should have been caught by spellcheck in the first draft. I seriously do not know how it made it past what should have been multiple sets of eyeballs on the screen.

Two days later I received the thanks-but-no-thanks email from the recruiter’s email address. It was possibly a systems-generated (or maybe they’re using AI) effort; no mention of my editorial assist and the signature was just the company name.

Bless their hearts.

 

 

 

Gratitude Monday: clouds

I’ll confess that I’m having trouble rounding up gratitude today. Developers are about to get the full go-ahead from the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to slap 82 three- and 4-story townhouses on five acres of the corporate campus behind me. Last week I looked at the Planning Commission staff report and saw the renderings of what they expect these things to look like and the only word that came to mind was “abomination”.

I cannot tell you how sick I feel. This campus is the only green space left along a 12-mile stretch of the People’s Republic, and the county is just going to let these slimeballs pave it over.

I don’t want to live.

So today I’m pulling gratitude for the clouds I saw yesterday morning on my walk, because they were gorgeous. (Also, that first one looks like Jabba the Hutt.)