Since Dominion Power razed the shrubbery along the W&OD Trail in The People’s Republic, all the critters that used to live there have relocated.
But apparently a cobra chicken family finds the
accommodation suitable. I’ve seen them getting their morning exercise in the
past week.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Between SCOTUS and the Virginia Supreme Court, both the law and enfranchisement had a bad week last week.
I mean—ugh.
So I’m turning to Nature today for my gratitude, and boy,
does she deliver.
Just—have some irises:
©2026 Bas Bleu
Yesterday was one of those overcast days that May has been interspersing with absolutely gorgeous, humidity-free sunshine. Just after noon, I was sitting at my computer, doing some things, when I looked up and the sun was out.
So—here’s Nina Simone singing about it.
You're welcome.
©2026 Bas Bleu
This is a bit of a change from my usual posting on vehicular license plates, because it’s not really about the plate, which is not a vanity offering. This time it’s the plate frame, not the plate itself, that sends the message.
But also, there’s that little pink, plastic thing
hanging from the bumper.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Okay, a while back I found the mother of all tubers at Wegman’s. I mean—it dwarfed all the other potatoes in the bin.
(I have no bananas, so here’s a paring knife for
comparison.)
It made a whole bowl of mashed potatoes, with having to
peel only one.
Win-win.
©2026 Bas Bleu
Today’s Cinco de Mayo, a holiday celebrated more widely in the US than in México. In my native California, the celebrations will have been going on for days, involving fiestas, mariachis and copious amounts of tequila y cerveza.
Also, any number of retail sales.
You may not know that Cinco de Mayo is basically a regional
holiday in México, marking the defeat by forces under Ignacio Zaragoza Seguín
of the invading French army at the Battle of Puebla in 1862. The victory didn’t
stop the French, intent on an imperial adventure come what may. Not until 1867,
when the US woke up from our own civil war and started reminding the French of
the Monroe Doctrine, and adding that, gee, we have this whole army hanging
around, trained, equipped and everything…did the French withdraw.
They left behind their ersatz "emperor of
México", Maximilian, who had the misfortune to be an unemployed Hapsburg
archduke (and possible relative of that popinjay Napoleon III), at a time when
France needed a figurehead to legitimize their invasion of México. He was executed
by firing squad on the orders of Benito Juárez on 19 June 1867.
Sic semper imperis.
Cinco de Mayo isn’t actually México’s independence
day—that’s 16 September, when a criollo priest rallied the
Mexicans to drive the Spaniards out in 1810. It’s kind of like the Fourth of
July in the US—there wasn’t a major military victory, but the very act of
declaring that enough is enough is the point at which a nation grows out of a colony.
Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla inspired his countrymen
with “el grito de Dolores” (“Cry of Dolores). This was something along
the lines of, “Long live Our Lady of Guadalupe, death to bad government and
death to the Spaniards!” The Battle of Guanjuato followed a few days later, the
war was on and the Spanish didn’t actually acknowledge México’s independence
until 1821.
But back to the celebration at hand. It’s really a occasion
to revel in the heritage of the Mexican immigrants to this country. I don’t
remember it as a kid in LA, but by the 80s it was big time. At this particular time, it seems to me more important than ever to consider the multiple cultural threads that are woven into the American tapestry.
For me, I might go for just one shot of reposado, to drink
to the death to bad government. That’s always something worthy of toasting.
¡Viva la Revolución!
©2026 Bas Bleu
Today I am grateful for the poetry of Spring—all the colors that envelop us as Nature throws off Winter’s coat.
I’m grateful for brisk temperatures for my morning walk, as
well as the lack of humidity.
I’m grateful for overnight rain that clears up before I go
out.
I’m grateful for the birds who sing and the foxes running
across the golf course.
Is there any better way to start the day?
©2026 Bas Bleu
I’ve been thinking that we—meaning I—need something to
start the new month off on a different note from most of my posts for National
Poetry Month. May 1st is May Day, which in European tradition
celebrates the full blossoming of Spring. It’s also Beltane, in the Celtic
calendar, marking the halfway point between the Spring Equinox and the Summer
Solstice. It’s also International Workers Day, celebrating the strength and
value of the laboring classes around the world. And it's a day beloved by dictators to show off their military prowess.
For all these reasons, today’s earworm should be exuberant,
lively and danceable. So “The Lusty Month of May” has buzzing around my head
for about a week and a half. It’s from the musical Camelot, with Queen
Guenevere urging the Knights of the Round Table and the courtiers to cast off
the gloom of winter, bust some moves and be fruitful.
Now, I’d been thinking about the song just because it’s such
an animated piece. But this week I started considering the setting—the whole
play; that made me sad. Because Camelot is about a king who wants to
turn the notion of might makes right around and create a court where those with
power don’t use it to oppress those without it, but instead deploy might for
right.
In the end, it collapses not so much because Lancelot and
Guenevere’s love betrays Arthur, but because that evil toad Mordred poisons the
entire court, bringing it all down; all of it. The final scene is Arthur
telling a young Tom of Warwick:
“Don’t let it be forgot
“That once there was a spot
“For one, brief shining moment
“That was known as Camelot.”
And this caused me to wonder if we in the United States are
in that moment where everything is crashing down because an evil toad poisoned
our society and we’re about to be consigned to the mists of history.
Well, anyway—“The Lusty Month of May”, from the original
Broadway cast.
©2026 Bas Bleu
When William Butler Yeats wrote “The Second Coming” in 1919, the world was still picking up the pieces after four years of total war, and was awash in the global influenza pandemic. But here we are, more than a hundred years on, and it feels like it describes the past 15 months entire.
I don’t know what more I can say about it. Except that it
closes out National Poetry Month for 2026, and it’s up to us to deal with that
rough beast.
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
©2026 Bas Bleu
Since he started his pointless war of choice against Iran, the Kleptocrat has apparently discovered that a lot of wars in history have lasted years. This he finds agreeable, because he’s able to compare a war lasting (so far) eight weeks favorably against ones that last four, six or 18 years (World War I, World War II, Vietnam—although the last seems to vary in his mind; that appears as whatever two-digit number that pops into the porridge that occupies his cranium).
He still expects that Nobel Peace Prize, dammit.
The First World War is one of my research concentration
areas as a military historian. It was a cataclysmic convergence of
technological advances, imperial and nationalistic
policies, and just plain unfuckingbelievable stupidity. What a
way to usher in the 20th Century, eh?
Rather oddly, a lot of poetry came out of those four
years—at least amongst the British forces. Robert Graves, Rupert Brooke,
Siegfried Sassoon are a few of the best-known. My favorite, though, is Wilfred
Owen, who was killed in action just seven days before the Armistice of 11
November 1918.
It’s hard to choose which of his poems to share; every one
of them puts you through some horror that the Western Front vomited forth to
everyone in the vicinity of the trenches. “Anthem
for Doomed Youth” could be applied to any soldiers of any war
But the first poem of Owen's I ever read was “Dulce et
Decorum est”, so that’s what I’m giving you.
One of the examples of monumental stupidity during that war
was the use of lethal gas, either delivered via artillery or just released.
It’s like the morons running the show never considered that they were
surrounded by winds, which can shift and send your hot-shot latest
chemical weapon…well, anywhere, including through your own lines.
Chlorine, phosgene, mustard and other types were all deployed by
armies on both sides. They caused serious damage to individual pulmonary
systems without having any serious effect on strategy. The descriptions of
poison gas victims are not for the faint of heart: imagine being
blind and feeling your lungs being on fire even as they fill up
with fluid and drown you.
The green referenced in the poem is chlorine
gas. One of the effects of chlorine gas was to react with fluid in the
lungs to form hydrochloric acid, which caused death, or (at a minimum)
permanent scarring of the lung tissue. In smaller doses, it caused irritation
of the eyes, coughing and vomiting. Chlorine's green clouds made it less
effective over time because it could be seen; chemists quickly iterated to come
up with something invisible.
But, hey, good news: there are still stockpiles of poison
gas on hand in nations around the world, in case someone wants to start a war
of territorial expansion. It's a mark of progress, I guess. (Saddam Hussein
used it in his war against Iran back in the last century.)
BTW—Cadet Bonespurs famously declined to visit an American WWI
cemetery during the Centenary commemoration of the end of that war, because the
weather was inclement and he couldn’t fathom why they would have given the last
full measure of devotion, since there wasn’t really anything in it for them.
In this poem Owen describes the aftermath of such an
attack. It, also, is not for the faint of heart. It would do our white Christian nationalist glory hound SecDef some good to read it; like that'll ever happen.
“Dulce et Decorum est”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.—
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
If you’re unfamiliar with the final line, it’s from an ode
by the Roman poet Horace. It translates roughly to, “It is
sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”
©2026 Bas Bleu
