Fish out of water

You may recall that the building where I live is renovating the corridors, and that someone with a rather delicious sense of whimsy lives on my floor (and at my end of the building).

Well, alas—this week the aquatic primer on the walls was covered up by two coats of “grown-up” paint, and all the fishies disappeared. That’s progress, I know.

  

But a couple of them made a break for it, ending up on the industrial-strength cardboard floor protectors. One in front of my flat:

And one right by the elevators:

(Sadly, it did not take long for Elevator Fish to be squashed pretty miserably.)

But then I noticed that someone had rescued many of the fishies—although I suppose jamming them in the hinge-space of a door is not a pleasant environment for anyone:

Even so, it means that the painters also have a sense of whimsy, and that makes me feel good today, when I very much need it.

The damned mirror crack'd

Yeah, stuff’s gettin’ real, people.

My place of employment is in the Red Zone; not precisely Ground Zero of the Kakistocalypse, but as close as dammit. Our building garage (and others in the Zone) is closed as of 1000 today, and they may be patting people down as they exit from Metro Center station.

I don’t know, because my manager strongly encouraged me to work from home today, and tomorrow we are thankfully off. But here are a couple of shots from the ‘hood as of yesterday:

Jersey barriers, which I imagine will be moved across the various intersections.

Death to parkers signs.

And, frankly, this is about as close as I want to get to the Kleptocrat and his ilk.

Basically, as close as dammit.

Love in the parking lot

Some time ago I was in the parking lot of the Alexandria Wegmans, an East Coast grocery chain, when I noticed this truck all tricked out:

This Wegmans is near Fort Belvoir; I didn’t see a base sticker on it, but it did have an Oklahoma license plate on the rear, and I just kinda thought…

Anyhow, what caught my attention was this declaration plastered to the front bumper:

Look—anyone driving a $32K Silverado pickup with Oklahoma plates and a piece of a Robert Browning sonnet slapped across the bumper deserves a shout-out. I rifled through my car, but didn’t have any decent-sized pads of paper (since rectified). So I scribbled my good wishes on a business card-sized scrap and stuck it under the windscreen wiper.

May you grow old alongside each other, never run out of gas and always be driving under the speed limit as you pass the cop cars.

And the landlord's a bastard

On my way back to work from a conference a while ago, I noticed this tagged construction site.

Given the events of this week, I thought it was timely.

Gratitude Monday: Comfort where I find it

On the day we as a nation celebrate the life and work of Martin Luther King, Jr., I’m focusing on some of the remarkable achievements of the United States of America that have occurred in my lifetime. Some of the ones with special meaning for me:

The Space Program. It started out as the Space Race, us against the Soviets, and they won the first few heats. But oh, when we put our minds—our very best minds—to it, we soared. Viz.:

The Mercury Seven—our space pioneers. I’ll give you John Glenn’s first trip, on 20 February 1962, since we so recently lost him:

1969: Apollo II, first landing on the moon. Neil Armstrong took that giant leap on 20 July, followed by Buzz Aldrin. I watched it in Champaign, Ill., with my friend Gretchen Pullen’s family. Look at Armstrong just hopping around like an eight-year-old:

Taking a giant step of a different sort, Richard M. Nixon took a blowtorch to the ice block of our relations with China, and within a few years of entering office, he was entering the People’s Republic. Literally.

But Nixon’s hubris grew as though on steroids, and it was the now-vilified main-stream media, including the New York Times’s disclosure of the Pentagon Papers and the stellar work of the Washington Post, digging into the Watergate scandal. From publisher Katharine Graham down to newbie reporter Bob Woodward, the Post uncovered corruption and crimes on a scale we’d thought could never be replicated. They uncovered it, verified it in accordance with high journalistic standards, and they published it, in the face of intimidation from high-ranking Administration officials. Including Attorney General John Mitchell.

Yes, that’s right: our chief legal officer was not only in on the crimes, he threatened those who brought them to light. Plus ça change…

[From left, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, Carl Bernstein, Bob Woodward, managing editor Howard Simons and executive editor Ben Bradlee. Photo by Washington Post]

It gave me hope that, no matter how far off track we got, we could right our course and continue to move forward.

We’ve had some amazing song writers during my lifetime. I’ll just sum them up with Bob Dylan and give you something that was true in 1964 when he wrote it and sure as hell is true again now.

Here’s Tracy Chapman singing it at his 30^th Anniversary Concert:

In the cinematic arts we’ve had a shedload of brilliant filmmakers. These are among my favorites: Coppola, Coppola, Spielberg, Hill, Lucas, Scorsese, De Palma, Howard, Lee.

And we made—for a while—astonishing progress toward equality for all in this shining city upon a hill: striking down the policies of separate-but-equal; don’t ask, don’t tell; and governmental intrusion into the reproductive rights of women.

All of this may have culminated in the election, in 2008, and reelection, in 2012, of the first African-American man to the Presidency.

It’s Martin Luther King Day, of the week that will see the installation of the antithesis of all these achievements—the Kleptocrat and his appointed administration, abetted by Repugnant majorities in both Houses of Congress. So I’m holding on to these things that I witnessed in my lifetime. We were good, once. I hope we can return to goodness once again.

Another country

A week hence, the United States of America will see the inauguration of the Kleptocrat (no, I don’t believe you’re going to see his name on my site; I’m doing my part to not contribute to his web analytics) as President. So I think this story from yesterday’s New York Times is timely. The headline is certainly instructive: “In Iowa, Trump Voters Are Unfazed by Controversies.”

Because remember what I said about magical thinking? When you’ve made up your mind as to the preferred outcome, the facts—not even blizzards of them—do indeed not faze you. This is crystalized in a quote from one of the people the Times reporter interviewed to ask if he had any second thoughts, given the disclosures of questionable dealings with Russia [and a shedload of other high crimes and misdemeanors I’m just too discouraged to enumerate, but which include refusal to divest his business holdings, nominating an entire skulk of corporate foxes to guard the working guy’s henhouse and allegedly engaging Russian prostitutes to pee on a hotel bed once occupied by Michelle and Barack Obama, because he’s that kind of vindictive frat boy].

No, Al Ameling does not. “The way it is nowadays, unless I see positive proof, it’s all a lie.”

(He didn’t specify what constitutes positive proof, but I’m guessing that he would have to see and hear the Kleptocrat in flagrante delicto, in person—because those libtards could fake all kinds of photographs and videos you know—shooting heroin with 12-year-old naked Russian hookers covered in canola oil and glitter in order to even ask himself the question if there might be something—just the very faintest whiff of something—that might be in any way unsavory associated with this guy. But he’d accept any explanation up to and including flat out denial of the whole thing that he was seeing and hearing in person.)

But I didn’t need to read the entire article (although I did) to know what was going on. The photo directly under the headline basically told the story:

And it depresses me no end. I wonder how many of these men are going to like having their Medicare replaced with vouchers? And how they’re going to like the new co-pays on their cholesterol and erectile dysfunction meds?

To counter this oppressively ghastly reality (because—while I do clap for Tinkerbell—I’m not delusional, and this is the world today), I’ll leave you with another photo. It was shot within spitting distance of where the inauguration ceremony will take place (any bets on whether the Kleptocrat whips out a crown—for which he will bill the US taxpayers—and place it on his own head?), but a long, long time ago.

I gotta hold on to something.

Everybody to get from street...

Here’s a thing new to me:

A couple of days ago my manager sent round an email asking for his staff members’ cell phone numbers. “I would like to be sure I have everyone’s proper numbers.”

Now, this isn’t the tech/business world where your employer demands that you be contactable all the hours God sends, and my work isn’t exactly mission-critical, so there’s no need to call me at 0330 demanding [some arcane datapoint over which I have no control anyway]. This is by way of me saying that so far I haven’t given out my mobile number to anyone at work.

A few members of the greater team immediately hit reply-all and handed over their digits, but I’ve so far abstained.

Then yesterday the CFO/CLO sent an all-staff email announcing that the company’s going to conduct a test of their “emergency contact process”. We’re supposed to reply to a group text so they can collect response-time data for…data collection purposes.

In theory this seems an okay thing. After all, our place of business is in downtown Washington, D.C., which could have emergency-bad things happen to it. And we are in the scientific arena, which makes us a potential target for Repugnant-Kleptocrat emergency-bad things, so I can see that they might want to be able to reach everyone in a timely manner to communicate emergency-bad things to us all.

(As an aside—why are there never emergency-good things? Wouldn’t it be nice if there were?)

But here’s the deal: yes, I have a mobile phone. But I do not live in it. It is literally on for less than one hour out of 24, while I’m on Metro. I occasionally turn it on if I need to check something on the Web, or I want to notify someone that I’m running late. I do not call people on it just to chat, and I only text as a last-measure form of communication.

And yet, despite me telling people I need to speak with about important matters that mobile is the worst possible way to reach me, I still turn on the thing to discover three-day-old voicemails or texts from yesterday morning.

Folks—the shelf-life of voicemails and texts is pretty short, so if I tell you that I don’t ever have the phone on, please use my preferred methods of communication: email or landline. Or else somehow just beam your important thoughts directly into my brain.

So, the upshot is: yeah, I’ll give my digits to my manager (although I suppose I could debate how “proper” they are), and yeah, I’ll try to remember to have the sodding thing on at the day and time of the planned emergency drill. But I’ll just point out that were this drill to be a real emergency-emergency, I’d still be in the street.

It's not paranoia if it's happening

For some reason Google signed me out of one of my accounts yesterday. When I logged back in, it tried to get me to “verify” a phone number where they can call me for whatever purpose they take it into their heads to execute.

At no time have I ever tried to associate a phone number of any stripe with a Google account. However, I do have an entirely fictitious set of digits that I use for the times when you absolutely have to give some online entity a number if you want their “free” thing.

So here’s the creepy thing: I’ve never “given” that number to Google, so they obviously scraped it from times when I was using Chrome as the vehicle for “signing up” for something online.

I tried, but they don’t give you an option for “Hell no, I won’t verify anything.” So I just deleted it and clicked continue.

They tried again to get me to bite, but I just clicked Done, and I appear to be okay.

For now.

Dressed for success, unpresidented

I was going to write about something else today, but then this story flashed across my social media feed…

(And before I get to it, let me just say that I have no intention at all of spending the next four years writing about all the crap that’s about to flood from the White House, joining the sewage already flowing from the Capitol cloaca. Because that would be more than a full-time job, and I do not have the blood pressure to deal with that shit.)

But I just had to pass on the Washington Post’s Reliable Source gossip column report on an interview that the Kleptocrat-elect gave to the New York Times in which—after he once again bashed Meryl Streep—he proclaimed that for his upcoming inauguration (oh, Lord—I’m not sure my fingers can type this without my entire body wanting to howl with laughter), “There will be plenty of movie and entertainment stars. All the dress shops are sold out in Washington. It’s hard to find a great dress for this inauguration.”

Now, let’s consider the degree of pathetic wish fulfillment these two statements require. Because we already know that his inauguration team is having a very hard time finding even D-list celebs who are willing to perform for this Klown Kar of Kakistocracy. And I really hope that those who are signing on are getting payment in advance, because this jerk and his toadies are consistent in only one thing, and that’s stiffing the hired help.

But that whole bit about the state of party frock availability for this event utterly surpasses just about everything the Klown-in-chief has ever tried to palm off on the public to hype himself. Is he imagining that this vast wasteland of formalwear will mean that women will show up at the various events wearing yoga pants and I’m With Her tee shirts? Or that they’re flocking to Philly in search of frocks?

Or perhaps he’s laying the groundwork for a later claim that the tens of thousands of gorgeous women who really, really wanted to show their support for him had to stay home because of a dearth of finery suitable for the occasion?

Well, whatever.

But the whole reason I’m posting this is actually this comment posted to the story.

Whoever toleranceisbest is, s/he won teh Interwebz yesterday.

Gratitude Monday: Living in a fishbowl

The building where I’m living has been in the process of renovation for the past ten months. Something to do with asbestos abatement, which of course is a good thing. (There’s apparently been some discussion back and forth amongst residents about just how extensive the asbestos danger is; legal representation may have been consulted.)

The process involves stripping away the wallpaper on the corridors of each floor (approximately a quarter of a mile from one end of the building to the other), replacing the popcorn-sprayed ceilings, and then repainting. They started with the top floor and have been slowly working their way down to where I am. 

When I saw the wall underpinning I confess that it seemed something hovering between urban decay and an underwater world. Don't know if it's just what the walls look like after the wallpaper's been steamed off, or some kind of primer for the next stage.

Here are some pictures of the walls in the transitional stage, to give you an idea:

And here’s what the penthouse floor (yes, that’s what they call it) looks like post-renovation:

But when my floor got stripped down, I discovered that someone has both an artistic and a whimsical bent, because I got off the elevator one day and found these fishies floating in the rather aquatic environment:

That was great, but a few weeks later, I went down to the storage level using a staircase in the opposite direction from the way I go to work, and I discovered that the fish fantasist must live at my end of the building, because starting just outside my door, there was a whole series of aquatic life presenting itself at various points along the walls.

So today I’m grateful for the pleasure that this unexpected discovery, quite literally at my doorstep, has given me.