No retreat

Apparently the job of being the leader of the free world leaves the incumbent a whole lotta time to devote to slagging off entertainers. In the past week, the Kleptocrat has tweeted negatively about Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Bruce Springsteen.

The latter got far enough under the dictator’s skin that he followed up his initial verbal tirade with a spliced video of him hitting a golf ball that knocks The Boss over.

You know—the kind of thing a petulant acne-riddled 13-year-old with Windows Vista on his Dell Inspiron would put together to show his mates.

If he had any.

Anyway, today’s earworm Is one of my favorite Springsteen songs, which seems appropriate in these times more than ever. Crank up the volume for “No Surrender”.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Fine wine

Yes, I bought it because of the bottle.

How does it taste?

I bought it for the bottle.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Good deed

I met this guy on the W&OD Trail last week.

He seemed pretty well plopped in the center of the path, and I was concerned because cyclists these days don’t care what they mow down. So I moved him to the side. He snapped at me, but at least he didn’t pee on me.

(When I was known as “[Bas Bleu], Redeemer of Reptiles” at William & Mary because I used to pull to the side of the Colonial Parkway to shuttle tortoises across the road before they became road kill, they used to express their appreciation to me in urine.)

Continuing on my walk, it occurred to me that I’d actually moved him to the side opposite to where he was heading, so on my return, I picked him up and set him down on the other side.

Snap, but no pee.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Give me the rep who's seen some things

My prescription insurer is Humana, the fourth largest healthcare insurer in the country. (Considering the business model of healthcare insurance companies, that means it’s a fucking big outfit.) The division that handles Humana’s mail order pharmacy is called CenterWell. Not an everyday brand, but as part of Humana, you’d kind of think it’s got some legitimacy in the field.

My primary care practice is OneMedical—as in Amazon OneMedical. (Don’t @ me; the preponderance of providers I’ve had there have been excellent, and you can always get an appointment when you need one. They also spend 20 minutes with you, instead of the industry-standard 15, or the 10 minutes I get at my orthopedic practice. And I’ve been with them since before the Amazon takeover.) Again—not hard to find or contact.

So it has been an absolute clusterfuck of an experience to get two medications my doctor prescribed for me into the CenterWell system…for more than two weeks.

I got the prescriptions filled for two one-month runs at CVS; after lab work confirmed that they were working, I used the CenterWell website to request a transfer. (During the second month, I received both emails and snailmail urging me to make the shift to save money.) I did everything as instructed and got online confirmation.

So when a week went by and I hadn’t received anything, I went back to the website. Seeing so signs of an order in process, I used their chat, where I allegedly got a human identifying itself as Sally. She informed me that “the fax we sent to your doctor was not a correct number.” She kept repeating, “The number we had was incorrect.” With some probing, I discovered that it took them six days to follow up the failure to connect, “[b]ut now we have the correct number and the new request was sent and we are waiting for your doctor to respond.”

Well, I terminated the chat and called their “customer care” line, where I spoke with Terri. She gave me the same improbable story: they only do this stuff by fax, and (implication) waiting six days to follow up is SOP. I still couldn’t get any sense out of my query as to why they didn’t have OneMedical contact details.

But, since I’m a girl who believes in redundant systems, I went to the OneMed portal and requested that they send the 90-day Rx to CenterWell. A little non-plussed to have one of the OneMedical staff ask for CenterWell’s name/address, as it wasn’t in their system, but I tracked it down and gave it to her. She said she’d sent them the prescriptions.

That was Friday.

Over the weekend I got two of these emails:

Which did not fill me with warm and fuzzy confidence. So I went online yesterday to find that CenterWell had no sign of having anything they were processing. (There was also no information relative to the email—I clicked on the link and got nothing that would tell me what provider or medication their email referred to.)

In chat, “Julia” kept repeating such vapid, banal phrases—wrapped around the reality that she’s “mute” and therefore cannot do anything that would help break the logjam—that I asked her if she’s a bot. She says no, but…

Anyway—a call to customer care, where I get Belinda. Belinda has clearly seen some things. Belinda listens, checks up my history (seeing that I’ve been getting the meds filled at CVS) and says, “I’m going to call your doctor while you stay on the line. We’ll get 30 days at CVS, and when 15 days have passed, it will automatically trigger the 90-day request for mail order.” And she did it. While I was waiting, a notification came in from OneMed that they were reviewing the prescription request, and 15 minutes later, I had the confirmation.

But here’s the thing: two bloody multi-billion dollar companies with systems out the wazoo couldn’t get shit done for two fucking weeks until one woman called another. It shouldn’t have required that.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Avian amusements

There’s no getting around the fact that I am easily amused. And there’s no greater example of this than my joy in watching the birds in my backyard. Two recent incidents:

Baby finches—standing on birdseed—harassing dad to feed them:

Cardinal really getting into a bath:

That’s my gratitude for today.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

I'll go there proud

For a guy who spent most of his life in Pennsylvania, Jim Croce is embedded in our memory as representing Chicago. That’s because of his 1973 hit “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown”, who—as we all know, came from the Southside, “the baddest part of town”. (1973, the year he turned 30, was also when he died, in a small aircraft crash. What an appalling loss to the American music scene that was.)

As far as I know, “Leroy” is the only song Croce wrote set in Chicago, but it certainly made an impression. I thought about it when the College of Cardinals elected a Chicagoan named Robert Prevost to the papacy last week.

There’s something about people from the Second City—you know, that little bit of chip on their shoulder that makes them just a squidge bolshie. Croce captured that to the nth in “Leroy” (although, it didn’t play out according to plan, as Leroy Brown learned a lesson ‘bout messin’…), and I wondered about Father Bob. Haven’t seen any of that so far, but it’s only been a week, so early innings yet.

Prevost took the nom de Pontiff Leo XIV, which is also very interesting. The last Leo—in the Nineteenth Century, issued a notable encyclical, Rerum Novarum, in which he set forth the rights of workers to fair wages, safe working conditions and the formation of labor unions. (It also upheld property rights and free enterprise.) Leo XIII also spoke out for social justice and the rights of migrants as a subset of the innate dignity of humans.

I suspect that picking his professional name from the ranks of Leos is indicative of XIV’s intention, and I look forward to watching him take up where XIII left off. There may be some flavor of Chicago in how he manages the Byzantine operations of the Church at large and the Vatican in particular.

(It’s also notable that even the MAGA yahoos who are rendered apoplectic at the notion of referring to another human by the name that person prefers do not dead-name the Pope; they’re all able to manage “Leo” when they tweet about him being a “WOKE MARXIST POPE”.)

So the Jim Croce song I’m giving you today is “I’ve Got a Name”. It’s a simple concept that everyone can get behind. Here he is on Midnight Special singing it, not long before his death.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Armageddon delayed

Sorry, dear reader(s); I spent much of yesterday trying all the ways the internet tells me to get my Samsung mobile to charge, because it stopped.

One after another, I tried: different charging cables, connected to different outlets; using a wireless charger; cleaning the charging port with a pin and a clean toothbrush; forced restart; OS update. Nothing worked, and I was down to 27% battery.

Frantically I went to Samsung and looked up their “authorized” service, something called (I’m not making this up) ubreakitifixit (by Asurion). Then I spent about 15 minutes walking around the Clocktower shopping center in Herndon, because there are about 50 different business in the big building and all I had was a street address.

Fortunately, the very nice young geek used something more effective than a pin or a toothbrush to get out a crap ton of pocket lint, and restored my ability to recharge.

I spent the remainder of the day retiring to my fainting couch to recover.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Over my shoulder

Microsoft Word, and its step-sibling Outlook, has got a lot more irritating in the past couple of years. I don’t know whether it’s AI, or just someone deciding that what people really need is not just spellcheck, but grammar and punctuation suggestions. And there doesn’t seem to be a way to turn those “features off.

Believe me, if I could find it, I would. Since the seventh grade, when Miss Bauer rammed the tools of English into us, I have not needed any jumped-up bog standard “help” with language, thank you very much.

But, back to spellcheck: a couple of weeks ago, Outlook signaled that it didn’t like “gormless” as my choice of descriptor for someone who absolutely personifies the quality. So when I clicked on the word, these are the substitutes it suggested:

Now—why would you object to “gormless” the adjective, but be perfectly happy with “gormlessly”, the adverb? See why I want to turn the dag-blamed thing off?

(As I write this, it’s still giving me the wavy red line under the offending word.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

History rhyming

I got a little backed up on topicality last month, what with posting poems every day. But when the Kleptocrat initiated his hostile takeover of the Kennedy Center, it had a strong whiff of seen-this-before.

Cadet Bonespurs doesn’t give a flying fuck for the arts; if it ain’t about him, or he can’t profit from it, just move along. However, during his first time in office, he was snubbed by KC honorees, so he never went to a performance and he’s been nursing that grievance ever since. So he replaced board members with toadies, who accordingly named him the chairman, then appointed a master groveler, Ric Grennell, as president. Since then, staff and managers have been fired (or quit), ticket sales have plummeted and performers have cancelled appearances. (Grennell has also nixed any events that don’t meet his high standards of non-woke.)

But that’s not my dèjá vu point. This is it:

Photo of frustrated artist Adolf Hitler, flanked by pet architect Albert Speer and officially approved sculptor Arno Brecker, admiring the Eiffel Tower on 23 June 1940.

I was struck by how this photo of the Kleptocrat surveying the Kennedy Center with some minions (photo by Jim Watson, AFP/Getty) has the same vibe. The smug, triumphant "take that, you mean people who didn't appreciate me!" vibe.

Personally, I do not rule out the possibility that, after he tanks the center as a viable arts venue, he’ll buy it (using goober donations) for development. It is, after all, a waterfront property. He likes those.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Habemus papam

Well, Catholics had a turnup for the books last week when the conclave of cardinals elected a man from Chicago as Pope. Robert Prevost (who’d only been a cardinal for 19 months) succeeded Argentine Francis I, taking the nom de pontiff Leo XIV.

This is so interesting—and heartening—for a number of reasons.

Francis was generally seen as on the radical side, because he fostered outreach to the poor and marginalized. In reality, he was pretty centrist, but in an organization as hide-bound, hierarchical and committed to maintaining status quo as the Roman Catholic Church, this can be taken for radicalism.

He was also a Jesuit. Jesuits are the wildcards of the Church; it was interesting that Francis was elected in 2013.

Leo is an Augustinian, which is also interesting. Founded in 1244 in Tuscany by followers of the Rule of Augustine, 4^th and 5^th Century Bishop of Hippo, Augustinians focus on education, evangelism and community. They are bridge builders and upholders of justice. The cardinals clearly know this, and they know how closely Francis drew the American to him in recent years. It took them barely 24 hours to elect him as Francis’s successor. They clearly expect him to carry forward Francis’s work.

In his first address as Pope on Thursday, Leo used the words “peace” and “justice” multiple times, and he talked repeatedly about welcoming all, with a special shoutout (in Spanish) for his former parishioners in Peru. I also think it's not for nothing that he picked "Leo" as his moniker: the last one, Leo XIII, was huge in the social justice fight. XIV's history would indicate that he's of the same persuasion.

It remains to be seen how much success Leo will have. The Vatican is a huge ship, and it takes a long time to change course. But the fact that MAGAts have gone ballistic in their criticism of him (“WOKE MARXIST POPE” tweet-shrieked that noted theologian Laura Loomer) is a definite plus. (As "Robert Prevost", Leo's only tweets this year opposed Kleptocrat administration policies and one even flat out called JD Vance's notion that Christians need to rank their love of humanity wrong.

Also—the memes about a Chicagoan being Pope are absolutely cherce, and we can expect them to continue throughout his papacy.

And I am grateful that all those old men in medieval robes creaked their way to what may be one of the boldest choices possible for the future of a vast number of Christians. I am heartened.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu