Same old s[tuff]

You know, it’s been another of Those Weeks, primarily thanks to the Kleptocrat and his cabal. They’re all in it, but at the time of writing I’m thinking primarily of the latest revelations about the extent of EPA Slimebeast Pruitt’s venal attempts to get a Chick-fil-A franchise for his wife, sending his staff out to buy a used mattress from the local Hotel Klepto (ewww) and spending nearly $1600 for 2 pens (that's $1600 of our money); and the general mouth-flapping of Rudy Giuliani assuring us that the Kleptocrat is above the law.

(This would be risible if both houses of Congress weren’t under the control of GOPig sycophants, who do not possess a spine between them. But as it is indeed a Repugnant Congress, it’s fucking terrifying.)

And it’s capped off by Li’l Donnie Two-Scoops himself whining about having to go to Canada for the G-7 Summit today; he knows it’s not going to be any fun because—having pissed off every single one of our historic allies—it’s just possible that no one there’s going to give him the adulation he requires. Moreover, he’s got ants in his pants in anticipation of the big meeting with Kim Jong-Un next week, which he’s convinced will earn him the Nobel Prize. (Also, the Québec trip cuts into his golf time.) Although he doesn't think he has to prepare for the Two-Scoops/Rocket Man meet. Because: attitude.

Gawd.

And—as if that’s not whackadoodle enough—at what was meant to be a meeting between Commander Bone Spurs and his Stepford-wife VP Pence and FEMA to discuss planning for hurricane season, he unsurprisingly was unable to stay on topic for longer than 23 seconds, and blathered quasi-incoherently about his favorite-most subject, himself.

That almost wasn’t the weirdest thing about that meeting. And I’m not referring to Melania being there in a kind of proof-of-life presence. No—it’s this water bottle schtick:

By Grabthar’s Hammer, you cannot make this shit up.

(I'm not even going to talk about the buffoon the administration sent as ambassador to Germany. Gawd.)

But, speaking of shit, I have now arrived at the point of today’s post: the mysterious person known as the #poojogger, who has been crapping for more than a year in a Brisbane, Australia, neighborhood has been caught in the act. On camera.

(How long before New Balance distances itself from this customer in the manner of Sanofi decrying Roseanne’s Ambien-blaming?)

Turns out he was a q-qu-quality assurance manager for a company that runs retirement homes. Quality assurance—bwahahahaha! Exec by day, sociopath by night.

Well, actually—sociopath 24x7.

As you might imagine, as with #BBQBecky, the iconic photo of Andrew Macintosh is now featured in all manner of memes, and Twitter is having a laff riot with it. (The one about the second pooper on the grassy knoll is cherce, although the account @poojogger is starting out strong on his own.) He’s been sacked from his job, which is at least somewhat satisfying.

As we wait for the same to happen to the Kleptocrat and his Klan, we’ll have to make do with this story.

Fake friends

As you know, Facebook has been in the spotlight lately for selling influence to whoever’ll pay for it, which—in addition to crappy ads cluttering up your feed—includes allowing bad actors like Cambridge Analytica, the GOP and Vladimir Putin to screw with our political system.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone on a slap-on-the-sincere-face-instead-of-a-smirk-and-suit-instead-of-a-white-tee-shirt apology tour of both the US Congress and the EU’s Parliament. He’s told us he doesn’t understand how this happened, and assured us that it won’t ever happen again.

I’m not entirely reassured, however.

Nonetheless, I thought this was an interesting ad placement in their disinformation campaign.

I mean, I just wonder how many Metro riders are convinced by this sort of thing?

Know what also isn't your friend? Facebook.

Talking business

As with all business, the tech industry basically would wither and die without a steady infusion of trends and their concomitant trendy jargon.

The one I’m thinking about today is “digital”. Everything’s gotta be digital. And everyone’s gotta have a digital strategy, no matter what line of business you’re in. Hospitals, publishers, food trucks…you gotta talk about the digital component of your business model.

What I find interesting is that if you start asking all these people what digital means in context of their business, their eyes slew off to the side, they clear their throats and the conversation kind of drifts into nothingness. Because no one really knows what the hell it means in general, much less how it’s going to affect them. They just know they have to have it.

So when I came across this on the digital Internet, I snagged it for you.

You’re welcome.

Fungus among us

Still in Great Falls park—given the kind of rain we’ve had here, I’m surprised this was the only manifestation of fungi I saw.

Closer views:

No, I did not pick any.

Gratitude Monday: a walk in the park

It’s been a while since I got out in Nature, which is actually kind of odd, when you consider how much Nature there is in Northern Virginia. Mostly of the sort that crawls and bites or sucks blood.

However, on Saturday I went to Great Falls National Park, right on the Potomac River, and spent a couple of hours walking around.

(The last time I was at the park, it was for a photo class. When people had cameras that used film.)

It’s been raining a lot in the area, so the trails were soupy.

(Also—although I sprayed myself liberally with repellant, I still ended up with mosquito bites.)

But this made for some spectacular viewing of the falls. I mean—we’re not talking Multnomah, but still:

Further down the trail, here’s a little feeder fall:

There were quite a lot of people out—dog walkers, runners (a couple of them scared me, going at a good clip even on the slippery trail and even-even on the trails where I had to pick my way through protruding rocks), family groups, even…I guess, rock climbers.

I have to say that signage is kind of sparse and ambiguous in the park. I did wonder what happened here:

Also—not manmade, but I also wondered about the story behind this:

The park also has a few remnants of canal locks, from the pre-railroad days when the Potomac was a highway between Washington and the West, and shippers needed a way to get their goods around the falls. If you didn’t know what to look for, you might not even notice these:

By the time I left, I felt better able to deal with the world, and I’m grateful for the treasure that national parks are, and for having one so close. I’m also grateful that I went on Saturday, because it pretty much rained the whole live-long day Sunday. I’m expecting to see a large boat with a lot of pairs of animals aboard floating up the Dulles Access Road any day now.

Where's the flashy-thingie?

This week scored about a 9.5 on my Weird Shit-o-Meter (to appropriate Men in Black’s Agent Jay). And that was even before the pardon of Dinesh D’Souza.

But here’s another example: the BBC reports on the top ten reasons that (British) corporations toss out for not having women sit on their boards. The pathetic lameness of these things is extraordinary.

(Here’s the list, in case you’re not up to clicking through to the Beeb.)

If I were a stockholder I’d seriously consider selling my shares, because men so stupid as to go on record backing these crack-brained excuses in the 21^st Century could not possibly run a company at a sustainable profit. And that’s before we even get to the fact that businesses with a good mix of women in leadership positions consistently outperform those packed with the XY-chromosome set.

Destination anywhere

You know, it’s been a weird, weird past few days. Li’l Donnie Two-scoops using a tweet to wish us all a “happy” Memorial Day, while assuring us that the generations of dead soldiers would bigly approve of the job he’s doing in the White House; his wife disappearing after a taxpayer-funded “kidney procedure”; Roseanne Barr tweeting something disgusting even by her standards and then blaming it on Ambien; a Kardashian paying a call on the Kleptocrat to discuss prisons and sentencing (the big Kim-Klepto Summit?); the GOPig governor of Missouri is resigning following a sex scandal in a rush to try to avoid investigations that might reveal "dark money"; a GOPig congressmoron from Virginia who used his taxpayer-paid staff as personal servants has decided also to resign suddenly (having only just now discovered that he’s an alcoholic)…

These are some strange times, my friends; strange, strange times.

That being the case, and closing out this bizarre month, I’m thinking that this sign could be pretty much anywhere.

Post-holiday reality

Is there some kind of cosmic Rule that requires we balance a holiday weekend with a shedload of tsuris immediately thereafter? There must be.

Monday afternoon the fan on my HVAC unit stuck in the on position. The AC compressor cycles on and off, as per the setting on my thermostat, but the fan runs ever on.

It could be a lot worse—the AC could have conked, or the fan could have stuck in the off position; in either of those cases, I’d be SOL in DC-area early summer heat/humidity.

But I just have visions of my next Dominion Power bill, and I do not like the number of places to the left of the decimal point that I see.

(And I was just so chuffed at putting out my mosquito zapper on Monday. I hope to God it destroys those things in their thousands—even if it is a bit unsettling to hear that ZZZ ZZZ sound as it does its work.)

Then—work. I’ve got about six spreadsheets going to try to corral various aspects of the business plan. I had a mid-morning meeting where I attempted to tame various human aspects of this project, and then IT needed my laptop because it’s been acting screwy and the Lenovo technician was supposed to do something that would fix it.

I saved to Dropbox everything I had open—just as you’re meant to do—and handed it over. Forty-five minutes later I got it back and started back to work. Only one of the spreadsheets wouldn’t open. Nothing but an error message saying that Excel didn’t recognize it any more, so tough.

Naturally, Sod’s Law being in effect, the bollixed file was the one, mission-critical spreadsheet containing my financial models (such as they are) that I absolutely needed and that would be a gigantic pain in the tuchis to rebuild. So I freaked.

The help desk guy also could not open it, and my anxiety level was rising every second. Eventually, he asked if I could try opening it online at the Dropbox URL. I could, and it did! I downloaded that sucker, changed its name and saved it in two places. Whereupon I slunk home to call the HVAC repair guy and make an appointment for him to come out today.

And then I poured a glass of wine. To propitiate the cosmic Rule.

Veteran driver

Seems appropriate that as I was driving around this weekend—of all weekends—in the Military District of Washington, I found myself behind this car:

Gratitude Monday: paying the bill

We live in parlous times for democracy, with an ignorant, corrupt, venal, narcissistic kleptocrat in the White House, supported by GOPig and Evangelical Taliban sycophants who hand out mulligans for his every violation of the ten commandments and seven sins, as long as he shows signs of implementing their dreams of white supremacy and suppression of women.

It was clear from the 2016 election that Cadet Bone Spurs views the men and women of our armed forces as his own personal collection of toy soldiers to be deployed in whatever way will amuse him most at the moment—whether it’s missile strikes in Syria or a $30M military parade “bigger than Macron’s”, the Bastille Day parade (an annual event that honors France’s independence, not an individual head of state—whether competent or not) he fidgeted through last July.

Thirty million for a parade while 40,000 veterans are homeless.

And whether or not our draft-dodger-in-chief takes time out from golfing, watching TV and tweeting to show up at Arlington National Cemetery today, thousands of people who were not raised by rabid wolves will be there (and at other military cemeteries), communing with friends and comrades, or just honoring the fallen.

You know—those whose sacrifices over the centuries paid the bills for our Constitutional freedoms and our political follies, extremists and moderates, reactionaries and progressives alike. They lie in their tens of thousands around the globe, where they fell, and where they were returned home. I’m grateful for them all, for the graces they bought for us all.

My brothers and sisters—I give you heartfelt thanks, I apologize that we’ve made such a hash of it, and I live in hope that we will find our way back to the democracy you served with such devotion.