Under the seal

I have a Costco membership for several reasons. One is that gas prices are always 20 or 30 cents lower than in the Ville. Also, I buy butter by the four-pound block for my various baking endeavors. I start getting nervous when the supply in my freezer drops below 12 pounds.

But I also get my Greek yoghurt from Costco—Greek yoghurt costs way more than regular and it’s considerably cheaper than the supermarkets or Trader Joe’s. Moreover, it lasts a long time (look—yoghurt is essentially milk that’s already gone bad when you buy it), so buying it in 48-ounce tubs is cost effective for me.

Also—fewer trips out to get it.

But here’s something that’s a little unusual about my most recent purchase:

A little flower from the dairy gods.

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Memorial Day

It seems appropriate that Memorial Day is a Monday gratitude day, because it’s the day we’re meant to reflect upon the sacrifices of the men and women who defend our country.

You know—to express gratitude in some way for their willingness to trade their lives for the security of our society.

I feel better about this than I have in four years, because we now have a president who isn’t hell-bent on screwing the armed services, stealing money meant for their housing and social welfare programs to build a pointless border wall, using them as background props for self-aggrandizing photo ops and dissing them as losers and suckers when required to visit a military cemetery.

As a military historian with a focus on the human element of conflict, it’s always been clear to me that the real cost of war isn’t the treasure, it’s the blood. It’s the sons and daughters who go into harm’s way and never return, or who return so altered as to never really find their way back. As we reflect upon those costs, we really ought to consider the suicide rate of combat veterans; per Department of Veterans Affairs figures, 17.5 veterans killed themselves every day in 2021. That’s 6392 per year. I’m not going to talk about drug and alcohol addiction or homeless rates resulting from PTSD; they’re line items on the butcher’s bill, too.

I wonder what that says about our society that we send these people out to do terrible things on our behalf and then essentially shrug our shoulders and avert our eyes when they come back not in bandbox tiptop condition? Kinda feels like a broken contract to me.

Memorial Day marks the “official” start of summer in the US; rather like acknowledging the dead who made possible the picnics and fireworks of Independence Day. I would like to hope that this year marks the beginning of a national recognition of the real—human—price of wars and a genuine movement to address that price. I have no expectations that Republicans will do this—not even eye-patched combat survivor glory hounds; homeless vets don’t make campaign contributions. (Not like aerospace corporations, anyhow.) But we’re better than Rs, aren’t we? A true expression of heartfelt gratitude ought to include what Abraham Lincoln referred to as work “to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him that shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan”.

At least, that’s what my gratitude means.

©2024 Bas Bleu

And it still is news

I was introduced to Abbey Lincoln a few weeks ago, via an episode of the PBS American Masters series. “How It Feels to Be Free” highlights the work of six iconic Black women entertainers: Lena Horne, Nina Simone, Diahann Carroll, Cicely Tyson, Pam Grier and Lincoln.

Like most of them, Lincoln was a singer, actress and activist. When she let her hair go natural in the 1970s, it was a whole Thing in the jazz world. (I’m reminded that one of Henry II’s justifications for the invasion of Ireland in the Twelfth Century was to bring monastic haircuts into alignment with the greater Church in Europe. Never underestimate the ability of some people to be triggered by how others choose to display their hair.)

Anyway, I really like Lincoln’s voice and the way she takes charge of a song. So here’s her version of a Billie Holliday standard, “God Bless the Child”.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

I say, chaps--Independence Day?

Well, alrighty then—Britain’s prime minister, Rishi Sunak—having at least lasted in office longer than the life span of a head of lettuce left on the kitchen counter—has set a date for the next General Election. Unironically, apparently, it’s going to be on 4 July.

Because nothing disastrous ever happened to the United Kingdom on that date, historically speaking.

In the main, I really admire the British tradition of a very limited campaign period for big elections. (A General Election is national, and it determines which party will control Parliament; thus it also determines, más o menos, who gets to move into No. 10 Downing Street.) By contrast, American presidential elections now seem to be continuous—the day after he was inaugurated in 2017, Cadet Bonespurs filed for candidacy in the 2020 election, using the next nearly four years to violate the Hatch Act in every conceivable way. This time around, Republican candidates came and went before we even got to the election year, and we still have nearly six months to go.

Which doesn’t even count the post-election whining, legal challenges and violent insurrections they have planned.

It's rather odd that Sunak has stuck a pin in this date; the only requirement was that the election be held no later than January 2025, and you'd have thought that (being 21 points behind in the polls) he'd have wanted to wait until the last minute to pull the trigger.

It’s possible, of course, that he just wants to put an end to his misery and turn the detritus of the political operation over to Labour to let them try to clean up the mess left by 14 years of Tory control. Then he can hare off to the Silicon Valley and resume his hedge fund activities. (At least: somewhere as far from Rwanda as he can get.)

Here he is, making the announcement. As a metaphor for Tory rule, it's hard to do better than this.

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Yay, capitalism

A couple of weeks ago, there was a power outage in my part of the People’s Republic. It knocked out electricity through at least my cluster, as well as the empty corporate HQ next door. That was on a Monday.

Evidently the outage triggered the backup generator at the building and no one—security guards, electricians, whoever—could figure out how to turn it off. (One story was the manufacturer was out of business and no technicians knew how to get it to shut down.)

I didn’t hear the generator from my house, but one of my neighbors informed me that they were going day and night. I’d stopped walking through the corporate campus when the developers started doing prep work for building 82 three- and four-story townhouses in about two acres, but on the Saturday (six days after it started) I swung by to see what was going on. Here’s what I found:

You could smell the fumes before you could hear the generator, which was actually pretty loud. This frankly looked like a caricature of a 19^th Century Midlands England industrial site.

I noodled around the internet and found two agencies I thought should be informed of this, Fairfax County’s Division of Environmental Health and the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Former was an email, with one of these videos attached; latter was a website that wouldn’t allow me to upload files.

On the Tuesday, I got a call from Sean at Fairfax County to inform me that they don’t handle pollution; that would be the state. Sean said that the state agency would investigate, but so far (a full week later) I’ve heard exactly bupkis from them, which is pretty much what I expected from this lame-ass Confederate-mentality crowd.

Actually, I checked their portal yesterday and discovered that they've closed the case. Because by the time they apparently showed up, "no pollution observed."

Oh—the developers finally figured out how to turn off the generator. Or maybe it ran out of fuel. But at least it’s stopped spewing carcinogens into my back yard.

For now.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Big day

Oh—my night of opera at the Italian embassy last Wednesday? One other benefit of walking to/from various Metro stations:

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Gratitude Monday: stepping out of an evening

A few weeks ago I received notification from Eventbrite congratulating me on registering for an event at the Embassy of Italy’s cultural center. I was contemplating this wonder when an email from a friend hit my inbox announcing that she’d registered me for an event at the Embassy of Italy’s cultural institute.

Well, why not?

First of all, I have to say that getting me out of the house in the evening practically takes an act of God. This one involved me putting on trousers with a zipper (I’ve worn nothing but sweat pants for almost a year, with the exception of the two weeks I was in Europe six months ago), riding Metro for more than an hour and then walking more than a mile from Woodley Park Metro station to the embassy. I arrived with sweat soaking my face, hair and non-tee-shirt cotton top; amidst the perfectly put-together Italian ladies and the typical embassy event crowd, I looked like trailer trash just back from Walmart.

It turned out to be a promotion of this summer’s Arena di Verona’s 101^st Opera Festival, about which I knew nothing. 

The ambassador introduced the program, which was two sopranos and a tenor, accompanied by the music director on the piano, singing a number of arias. Since they’re celebrating the centenary of the death of Giacomo Puccini, most of the pieces were from him.

Well, I gotta say—it was worth every step and drop of sweat; even the zipper. (If you get the opportunity to hear Yeajin Jeon, go. She’ll be appearing in Turandot in Verona starting next month.) But it was more than the performances. Also more than the quite presentable Italian wines and nibbles served afterward. It was getting out of my comfort zone, doing something different, engaging in acts of civil sociability and stepping away from the screen, for more than six hours all told.

So I’m grateful indeed that my friend thought of me for this particular event.

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Diedi il canto agli astri

I was reminded Wednesday of the stunning glory of Italian opera; in particular, of the genius of Giacomo Puccini.

I’m not going to go so far as to say that his plots really hold a lot of water all the time, but the music—bellissima!

A case in point for both would be Tosca, whose title character is a woman who’s completely undone by jealousy, complicated by the (literally) rapacious lust of the local police chief. Along the way to the end of Act III, there’s more blood than a vampire reunion, or an official portrait of the sitting king of Britain.

Well, but also along the way there’s the aria “Vissi d’arte” (“I lived for arte”). And that’s what I’m giving you today.

Let’s hear Maria Callas singing it.

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

 

Statement

Since this is turning into a week of arts, here’s something I noticed on my Monday walk:

I mean—nice, but I hope they at least also got Mom a supermarket bouquet, or a card or something.

 

©2024 Bas Bleu

Royal blood

Well, alrighty then—King Charles III’s first official monarchical portrait since his coronation (which cost the British public way too much money) has been unveiled and it’s quite the statement.

Although Camilla has told the artist, Jonathan Yeo, “Yes, you’ve got him right,” the folks on the Interwebz beg to differ. I mean—they get the statement part, but it’s unlikely to be one the House of Windsor likes. Mostly around whether the surfeit of red is indicative of Charles being in Hell, or symbolic of the blood of empire.

(¿Por qué no los dos?)

And then there's the butterfly.

Me—I’m thinking that Yeo might just have found a lot of red paint on sale down to the local Michael’s. And climate protestors will have to find something besides tomato soup to throw on it to make their statement.

 

 

 

©2024 Bas Bleu