For our Halloween earworm, singer-songwriter Elle Cordova has updated Bobby “Boris” Pickett’s “Monster Mash” for our times.
What’s terrifying is that it’s all true. And the next round of slashing is SNAP benefits, so millions of Americans will start going hungry as of midnight tonight.
Hurrugh.
©2025 Bas Bleu
When my neighbor moved out of his house in June, it was kind of a mad scramble at the end. I’d open my door in the morning and find bags or boxes of things he was jettisoning—foodstuffs, linens, even small appliances.
Yes—one morning there was a box with a toaster and an
electric kettle. Well—I have a toaster oven, but I thought I might quite like
the kettle. Boy, was I right. That sucker was a game changer—heats water for
tea like a champ and then shuts off.
Until a couple of weeks ago when it didn’t any more. Whenever
it was on the plate, it was heating. Once I didn’t hear it when it boiled and
by the time I got to the kitchen, I had to use a hot pad to take it off.
So, I had a decision—do I buy a new kettle or go back to
using the whistling one on the stove? Or continue to use it in its current
condition?
Eventually I opted for replacing it, but with a kettle that
will heat to different temperatures—for green tea, French press coffee and
black tea, amongst other settings. (I make a quart of iced tea about every other day, and starting in October every year I make a pot of hot tea almost daily.) It cost a few bob (although on sale), but
once again, my life is changed.
I do have to remember to poke the setting for green tea instead of just “boil”, which will take some training. (Also—I'm not quite sure of the point of "keep warm".) But it is da bomb.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Here’s a thing I found mildly amusing.
One of my neighbors subscribes to The Washington Post;
I mean, a physical copy of the newspaper is delivered every morning. By which I
mean: it gets flung from the delivery guy’s car, so it generally makes it beyond
the parked cars, but not on her doorstep.
So, as I walk past, I pick it up and place it on a stand
she has next to her front door. All she has to do is open the door and reach
out for the paper. It’s always enclosed in a plastic bag, which is normally
orange.
Well, on Saturday, I noticed that the bag was blue, and
then I saw this:
I actually checked to see that the paper enclosed was
indeed WaPo, and not NYT.
I reckon the delivery guy may also deliver the Times
and either he ran out of Post bags or mixed them up somehow. (Although
he did, in fact, deliver the right paper.)
Sunday we were back to normal orange. Order has been restored in the universe.
©2025 Bas Bleu
I had a little flare of Civic Duty last week. On my
Wednesday morning walk, I noticed that someone had decapitated a fire hydrant.
Actually, the first thing I saw was that someone had
knocked down a street sign in front of the Kinder Care® center:
Then I twigged to the hole where the hydrant used to be,
and the tire mark that seemed to tell a story of a vehicle coming off the
street, shearing off both the hydrant and the sign, then landing back on the
street.
No water gushing, just the hole and one of the little
flange thingies. Also—no hydrant.
Only, about 10 meters on, there it was, tossed in a little
copse of trees. Presumably the miscreant thought their crime would escape
notice if no one found the evidence?
Well, when I got home I called the Fairfax County
non-emergency line to find out what agency handles damaged fire hydrants. Turns
out it’s Fairfax Water, duh. So I called their report-an-emergency line and
connected with a very nice woman named Leah. She took my information (I had to
look up the address, because it didn’t occur to me that it might be useful,
duh) and thanked me.
(I was a little disappointed that I had to do this by phone, because—I had all those photos. But it turned out okay.)
And blow me—Thursday morning there was a new fire hydrant:
Sign is still down—that’s obviously not Fairfax Water’s
problem.
One more bit of info: while you’re on hold with Fairfax
Water, they play Handel’s “Water Music”. Perfect.
©2025 Bas Bleu
We have a central green—a village “common”, as it were—in our cluster. There’s a tot lot, with slides and a jungle gym, swings, a swathe of lawn and, of course poison ivy. (We’re three months out from the first acknowledgment of the pest and still waiting for the cluster board/management company/contracted landscaping company to actually, you know, do something about it.)
There’s also a metal picnic table/benches jobber, where I’ve
seen parents sit while watching their kids play.
Early last week, however, I noticed someone had ornamented
the table with pinecones. They so closely matched the color of the surface that
their protrusion looked almost organic.
When it was still there the next day, I augmented the
arrangement, just because it made me feel happy.
(Took me a while to get the pine sap off my fingers and mobile phone case.)
I don’t know what it was about those slender cones poking
up from the holes in the table, but it evoked something magical, whimsical and
even promising. Considering everything that’s going on in the world, I’m
perhaps overly grateful for things like this. But gratitude is gratitude.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Man—every time we think the Kleptocrat has reached the absolute pinnacle of lawlessness, corruption and destruction, we discover that he’s only hit the base camp and has another 8500 meters to go. Between enabling Republicans vying for the 21st Century role of Sergeant Schultz; ICE hires being unable to pass either the physical or written exams (with open books) of basic training; US forces using missile strikes to blow fishing boats out of international waters without warning because of “drugs by sea”; the Pentagon replacing actual journalists with RWNJ podcasters; the couch shagger in Israel; and the Kleptocrat responding to the No Kings rallies by releasing an AI-generated video of him wearing a crown, piloting a fighter jet over a US city and dumping clumps of shit on protestors in the streets PLUS literally tearing down the East Wing of the White House to build a ballroom—it’s been quite the week.
(I kind of get why he thinks he should repurpose the East
Wing—that’s where the presidents’ wives have their offices, and obviously the First
Tart isn’t going to be doing jack this term. But still—the photos and videos
are appalling, even as they’re the perfect metaphor for this douchebag.)
So my earworm today is “Welcome to the Jungle”, by Guns N’
Roses. It was the opening track to their 1987 debut album (Appetite for
Destruction, also a good descriptor of this administration). It’s about a
newcomer to the city, overwhelmed by the filth, crime and poverty he
encounters.
If you substitute “White House” for the original Hollywood, it’s spot on for this week. Crank up the volume and scream along with Axl.
©2025 Bas Bleu
Given the ugliness and destruction we’re seeing in places like Ukraine, Gaza and the White House, I thought maybe a couple of pix of trees in their autumn finery might be in order.
I was worried last month, because the trees were mostly
turning brown, not going through the reds and golds. But a few have come
through.
So let us rejoice in their glory.
©2025 Bas Bleu
My morning walk Monday took me past this recycling bin and I was struck by the Folgers container.
I was unaware that it was still in business.
Back in the last century, Folgers had quite the market
share in the States, along with Maxwell House. Since that was also the era of
pre-cable TV (much less internet streaming), their commercials were all over
the airwaves. People made Folgers coffee in percolators, on their stoves. Yuban
was considered upmarket.
(And I only knew this from the TV ads because my parents
drank instant coffee and my mom bought whatever was on sale. Sadly, I can still recall the jingles for them.)
It wasn’t until I worked for the Army and was introduced to
coffee made by grizzled staff sergeants (guys who didn’t judge java as brewed
unless you could stand a spoon straight up in it) in industrial-sized urns that
I came to appreciate the concoction. I started out with Mr. Coffee makers, dabbled
in cone filters for single servings and then moved on to dual pot-plus-espresso
machines.
My current setup is an espresso machine, a burr grinder and
a couple of French presses for when I’m not drinking Italiano. I buy whole
beans from Costco and they last me a good long while, because I’m happy with
one cup per day. (I did stock up early this year in anticipation of the Kleptocrat's whack-job tariffs.)
I haven’t been down a beverages aisle in a supermarket
since 2020 when Wegmans took out their bulk tea option, so I have no idea what’s
on the shelves. But evidently Folgers is still on them.
©2025 Bas Bleu
We’re in an interesting corner of the calendar, where days grow shorter and people of various traditions celebrate the triumph of light over darkness, of good over evil and of life over death.
Last night marked the beginning of the
Hindu festival of Diwali. I
learned about Diwali when I moved to the Valley They Call Silicon. Since I was
struggling with driving back the dark, I glommed onto it like limpets on a
rock. Last night I again massed candles to drive back all manner of dark
things. Not only do I like the soft light that groups of candles give off, the
very act of lighting them one at a time and nursing along some of the ones at
the end of their life slows me down. It calms me down.
Filling a room with candle light takes
time; you can’t flip a switch and move on to the next task on your to-do list.
And if you’re lighting those floating jobbers, you have to be very focused on
not disturbing the water, because then it dowses the flames and you have to
wipe them off and start over again.
It’s like the count-breaths-to-21
methodology of meditation: if you lose count because your monkey mind is
distracted, you have to begin again from one.
There are some days I never make it into
double digits.
But there’s something about knowing how
happy the moving lights will make me that enables me to persevere with candles.
I light them, sit back and watch; and for at least a few minutes the world
around me is peaceful and full of hope. Light prevails over darkness, love
conquers fear, and good triumphs over evil.
It’s something to hold onto in these dark, dark times.
©2025 Bas Bleu
I went to one of the nearly 3000 No Kings protests around the world on Saturday. Over the past few weeks as I’ve watched protesters and people just going about their lives, TBH, being assaulted and arrested by masked and armed federal thugs, the feeling that I can’t let others do this alone has built up inside me.
Also—listening to Republicans of every strip yowling about
the paid America-hating radical left extremists planning insurrection on
Saturday just frankly got up my nose.
I bought posterboard and markers from Dollar Tree, used a
graphic an artist on Bluesky made available as visual interest and cobbled
together a little homemade sign.
The local Indivisible org asked protestors to wear yellow,
and I managed to find a tee-shirt from some tech company that filled the bill.
I removed the biometrics from my mobile phone and put ID
and bail money in my pocket (Governor Fleeceweasel had announced he was calling
up the Virginia National Guard to “keep peace” at the protests) and started
walking to the nearest of four sites in the People’s Republic, about a mile
away.
Along the way, I ran into one of my neighbors, who was
carrying several signs—turns out he’s a cartoonist, and is really good at
expressing ideas visually.
As we approached the site, I was relieved to see that there
were already hundreds of people lining Reston Parkway—on both sides. (I’d been
rather worried it might be five blokes and a dog.) As time passed, protestors
spread out about half a mile. It wasn’t just the blue-haired set (as predicted
by one of the yowling Republicans), although there were plenty of us who had
experience protesting back in the 70s. One woman walked up and down the line
with a bubble generator; there were plenty of cowbells. No inflatable frogs,
but one squirrel, and my neighbor said he saw a rabbit, too.
Cars driving past honked, waved and flashed thumbs up. Some
went back and forth several times. It was a festive atmosphere.
I did not get a lot of pix, because of having to hold up my
sign. Did not get a shot of the beautiful banner proclaiming “We the People
means all of us”, or of the squirrel. But here are a couple.
BTW—the response from the White House was to post an AI-generated video of the Kleptocrat in a fighter jet (wearing a crown and with his breathing apparatus below his nose) releasing clumps of liquid shit on protestors. No, I am not making this up.
My gratitude today is for participating in just one event
of many that were held in Reston, which was one town in hundreds around the
world. More than seven million, we are told. I'm grateful for every one of those seven million, for their determination, their creativity, their joy. And no major incidents (outside of
that one woman in Fairhope, Ala., who was arrested for “lewd conduct” for
wearing an inflatable penis suit and a sign saying “No dick-tator”; it took
three local cops to wrestle her to the ground and someone on Bluesky commented,
“Four dicks.”. And there were a couple of attempts by MAGAts to stir up trouble, because fuckwits gotta fuck), despite all the federal forces standing at the ready with
fingers twitching against their weapons.
I’m grateful for the reminder that—while I am but one, one
plus one plus many more ones is power. And as a sign at one of the protests
proclaims:
Power to the people.
©2025 Bas Bleu
