Out of the woodwork

Today’s earworm is from the anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba (RIP). It’s called “The Day the Nazi Died”.

Questions? No? Good.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

They're coming...

Oh, man—I’m so stoked:

The daffodils are poking up and will soon take over the world.

In fact, after seeing the incipient narcissi on my walk, I noticed my neighbor's garden:

We need those daffs. And the crocus. And the mini-iris.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Great wealth

I’ve been thinking recently about a quote from I You We Them, the 1000pp collection of essays by Dan Gretton on desk killers. (It’s not a history, and Fairfax County Public Library designates it Criminology in the Dewey Decimal system.) Gretton attributes it to Honoré de Balzac:

“The secret to great wealth is a forgotten crime.”

That seems pretty legit to me—on both personal and corporate fields. I’m thinking Standard Oil (predatory monopoly), every steel and railroad company of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (campaigns of terror against workers) and Lloyd’s of London (established to insure ships of the Middle Passage carrying slaves to America). And the fortunes of Kennedys (bootlegging during Prohibition) and Trumps (prostitution, violations of fair housing laws) do not stand up to scrutiny of their early days.

But it turns out that Gretton has misquoted Balzac. The original thought, from Père Goriot, is slightly different:

“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.”

Which is to say:

“The secret to great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done.”

This is a little less straightforward, and permissive in a bourgeois kind of way. The “without apparent cause” thing is (to my mind) an unearned free pass: only if the source of the wealth isn’t obvious do we look for the hidden crime? Nah—there are way too many examples of riches coming from the blood, pain and loss of others for me to swallow that.

Now the “crime properly done” thing—that does track. Unexplained wealth coupled with a foundational crime never discovered makes all kinds of sense.

So, if what Balzac is actually saying (and I don’t know the context of Père Goriot) is that huge fortunes are all the result of an original crime, and if you can’t discern the source of some wealth, it’s because the crime was so well executed that people have forgotten it, mais oui.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Horticulture

Okay, my strategy for overwintering my citrus orchard did not exactly work to plan.

How it started:

How it’s going:

I was getting conflicting information on what to do about the dwarf trees—take them inside for the winter; no—trees need a dormant period, leave them out but insulate their roots. And given the winters we’ve had for the previous three years or so, it seemed safe to go the latter route.

However, once we got that extended period of below-freezing temperatures last month, my hopes, well—they basically froze.

So I’ll have to try again this year.

Interestingly, my gardenia bush made it through fine, and I didn’t even bubblewrap it. Perhaps the clue is the larger pot?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: community

Since at least December, I’ve felt a clutching in my gut. Not pain, not obstruction, not bloating; just…awareness of distress that doesn’t seem to go away.

I thought it might be grief for my sister manifesting itself, or perhaps my anxiety that started on Election Day and has ratcheted up every day since. My doctor ran me through some tests, none of which indicates anything (visibly) organic, so I’ve just lived with it.

But last week I saw somewhere (either Reddit or Bluesky) an announcement for a two-hour class on how to “Build a Community”, put on by an organization called The Barnraisers Project. I’m not the community organizer type, but I thought that learning more about community and how to build one would be better than not learning, so I signed up.

Friends—I’ve never felt two hours go by so fast. (This was only beaten by the 90 minutes I spent in a black cab touring Belfast six years ago.) I—like everyone reading this—have been to enough well-intentioned meetings, run by well-intentioned people, which drift all over the place and devolve into individual rants or hand-flapping to have had some trepidations about this. But Garrett Bucks not only knows his community onions, he knows how to run a meeting—make everyone feel welcome and valued, but keeping them on target.

Also—I cannot tell you how heartening it was to be on a Zoom call with 91 other people from all over the country (and beyond), who mourn what this nation has become, and are actively seeking ways to unite and turn it back towards decency. For the first time in months, I am cautiously optimistic. 

And I am grateful.

(Plus—my intestinal tract appears to have relaxed some.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Arise, arise

Today’s earworm is dedicated to the little Muskrat incel dogies. They must really feel like masters of the universe, as they swarm into agency after agency, dicking with code and waving “findings of fraud”. Some of them aren’t even old enough to drink legally, but they’re definitely drunk on power. (Although probably still wondering why the hot chicks won’t look at them.)

Enjoy it while you can, Bund brochachos, because your power will be short-lived, but your disgrace will live forever. There’s precedent for this. Viz:

It's got a great beat; you can dance to it. I give it a 2.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Tolling the times

I received this notification/bill via snailmail on Monday.

My first inclination was to ignore it, because one of the trendier scams these days is a smishing thing: text (often from some foreign country’s area code) announcing that you owe a road toll and you can pay it by clicking here.

Yeah, no.

Look, I haven’t been on a toll road for so many years that VA EZPass deactivated my account (while still holding on to my $25 minimum; I need to get on them about that). So I knew I hadn’t incurred any tolls on 22 January. Besides—this was for a tunnel in…Hampton Roads? That’s 182 miles from me.

Well, I searched for DriveERT on the web, and there is indeed such an entity. So I rang them Tuesday morning. Waited on hold for 30 minutes (God bless speaker phone) and got their front-line help.

Which basically consists of: we photographed the license plate, so how do you want to pay? I kept insisting that my car has not been outside of Fairfax and Loudoun counties for well over a year, she sighed, asked me if I own a GMC truck (no) and transferred me to their second-line support.

It took Dee (or maybe it’s D—I’m okay with public support people using a pseudonym, as long as I have something I can reference when I document the interaction) about 35 seconds to see that somehow in their process they’d transposed two of the characters in the plate they photographed, and she transferred the toll to the owner of that vehicle.

She got a kick out of me saying that if it turns out that my car is travelling more than I am, I’m going to be upset. “It went to Hampton Roads and didn’t even bring me back a tee-shirt?”

Between that and getting all my 2024 tax info to the accountant, Tuesday was a good day.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

QUICC as you can

Since the days back in the last century when my sister drove a Datsun 510 station wagon that was basically held together by political stickers, I've been fascinated with people who use their car’s exterior surface as a thought canvas. So when I saw this new vehicle in the ‘hood, I naturally paused to peruse. I mean:

Taking it by quadrant, we have:

And more granularly:

(This one references Woody Guthrie’s guitar.)

Lest anyone have doubts about the overall theme, there’s the vanity plate:

And from branding on the side panels of the van, I believe that it’s associated with this group, which provides street medics to the queer communities in the East Bay of San Francisco as well as in Brooklyn.

I totally respect their courage in going behind enemy lines into a Confederate state.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

 

Scam alert

Okay, given all the DOGE and general Republican shenanigans currently going on in the Social Security Administration, it occurred to me that this email was a bit rich:

I mean—you gonna include yourselves in this?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

 

Gratitude Monday: naturally

My gratitude today comes from Nature.

The winter aconite was slower than usual to appear—in the past it’s been early to mid-February. But it’s here now, and each year it covers a little more territory.

Also, Saturday marked the return of Scooter, back from hibernation.

I’m grateful for both.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu