Drink now

Here’s something else I saw recently at the grocery store:

Look, I’ve been drinking wine for a long time. And Champagne (and méthode champenoise bubblies) is my substance of choice. But I do not believe I’ve ever seen “user friendly” as a characteristic of, well, any beverage.

But hey, I’m just a bozo on the bus.

RDA

I saw this product line at the grocery store a while ago.

The bars have dates in them so I’d never buy one, but I thought the last ingredient was interesting:

Keep shining

The Mother of Parliaments is shut down while BoJo the Clown tosses his toys out of the pram. And Cadet Bonespurs is omni-raging against investigations into using his office to prop up his failing businesses, against hurricane Dorian not following his instructions to strike Alabama, against the Afghanis and the Taliban not serving up an opportunity for a Nobel Peace Prize, against John Legend a and Chrissy Teigen for no particular reason and against his (now) ex-NSA adviser, John Bolton.

Also, it turns out that the CIA extracted a valuable asset high up in Putin's government in 2017 because it was clear that Blabbermouth 45 was likely to tell the Russians all about him. Meaning the intelligence community decided more than two years ago that the occupant of the White House cannot be trusted with confidential information.

Seventy-five years ago the Anglo-American alliance spearheaded the destruction of on eof the worst dictatorships known to the planet, and here we are in 2019, both of us in crazytown.

I’ll say one thing about this: it’s interesting that the Tories—for all their toffee-nosed elitist classist bullshit—have decided that there is, in fact, a line, and they won’t cross it. BoJo is in the soup as a result of not reading the lapsang souchong leaves in his Wedgewood cup, and discovering that his Conservative brethren are actually chordates. Would that the GOPigs here could find even cartilaginous backbones and give the Kleptocrat even the tiniest kick to the cojones.

Well—I’m not going there. A couple of days ago a friend posted a video on Facebook in which he sang a WWII standard in memory of his recently-deceased brother. I can’t give you that one, but here’s Vera Lynn singing her signature piece.

We can all look forward to—and work toward—some sunny day.

Positivity

A while ago I saw these two cars parked fairly close to one another somewhere around Northern Virginia.

I don’t know whether they share owners, but they’re both Benzes, they have the same Virginia license plate design and their messages are remarkably similar.

Gratitude Monday: fresh colors

Someone on the cluster board must be looking to sell their townhouse, because there’s been a lot of talk about “more updated lighting” and “freshening up cluster colors”. I don’t know what’s going on with the lighting, but they’re apparently serious about the paint. We’ve been bombarded by missives from the management association to go take a look at the samples painted on two units and vote for our preferred colors.

So this weekend I walked over to the two townhouses and here’s their idea of “freshened-up”:

The thing that popped into my mind on seeing them was the faux “seaport” cluster of shoppes that surrounded the Queen Mary in Long Beach. I would prefer they paint my house jungle camouflage than anything calling itself “Boone Nut”, “Weimaraner”, “Chambourd” [sic], “Dinner Party” or “Mysterious”. Pretty sure I’ll lose this, tho.

Nonetheless, I’m not here today to kvetch about the cluster board’s utter lack of taste, but to tell you about what I found on my way across the common property to the Palette of Pretension. Because one or more young person(s) apparently has a palette of chalk, and has used it for the good of humankind. Viz:

(I’m not entirely sure what that long rectangle represents, but it must have had meaning for the artist.)

And today I’m grateful that I happened to cut across the tot lot while these drawings were still intact, because they lightened my spirits and we all need lighter spirits.

I just wish the cluster board had consulted the kids about color schemes. I’ll take “Tree of Life” or “Flying Saucer” over “Boone Nut” or “Mysterious” any day.

Online help

Back in May, when I met up with a Twitter friend in the National Gallery in Dublin, she kept her two kids amused by letting them watch YouTube videos. I commented, “How did we ever live before YouTube.”

Her reply: “We packed bags of coloring books and crayons.”

But we got onto the topic of YouTube as a source of tutorials, and I remarked that one of my colleagues does all kinds of car repairs by looking up symptoms and watching videos on how to fix them. Even I was reassured when I first started making pizza dough when I checked and, yes, dough crawling up the dough hook is totally within normal parameters.

Well, a couple of weeks ago, the arm to the handle of one of my toilets broke, and I finally got round to trawling Google for how to replace it. Sure enough, there were plenty of videos. Looked pretty easy. So, I dropped by the Home Depot and perused the plumbing aisle. One of their staff members asked if I needed help, and I said I needed to replace a toilet handle assembly. He asked where the handle was located; the side. Then, what brand toilet it was.

Well, naturally I had no clue. But he pointed to a Koehler product and said that one works for most. I picked it up and he asked one more question.

“Do you know which way it turns?”

I totally was ready. “It’s reverse-threaded.”

His face lit up and he patted me on the arm. “Very good!”

“YouTube!”

So I went home and followed the video instructions, et voilà:

Turns out it is a Koehler, so totally hardware compatible.

Behind the scenes

The video that should have been all over TV in the Bible Belt during the 2016 elections has been uncovered and is making the rounds on the Interwebs. You know—the 2015 Bloomberg Politics interview in which Cadet Bonespurs is completely stumped when asked what his favorite verses are. He can’t even choose between the Old and New Testaments; apparently he didn’t know there were two of them.

Like the two Corinthians.

Well, that video is hilarious in its own right, and levels yet another charge of hypocrisy against all the evangelicals who believe their god personally sent a lying, greedy, thieving, cruel, blaspheming, gluttonous, fornicating kleptocrat to run the United States. Because your average atheist could have answered more questions about the Bible than the self-proclaimed Chosen One.

Well, but it turns out there’s a guy in the UK named Michael Spicer, who does a kind of Randy Rainbow mashup (without the music and flamingo pink glasses), and now it all becomes clear:

I am never going to be able to listen to this buffoon stumble his way through congratulating Poland on the 80^th anniversary of the Nazi invasion or bragging about our “great relationship” with Colombia and FARC without looking for his earpiece and imagining Spicer somewhere at the other end of the com line.

Say aaah

I’ve never been much of a fan of bossa nova, but back in the sixties it was a whole thing. “The Girl from Ipanema” was probably the best known example; at some point it went from a Sinatra cover to elevator music.

It was in something like the latter capacity—music playing in a store—that I was reminded of it last week, and the opening lyrics stuck with me: “Tall and tan and young and lovely.”

Yeah. Back in 1962 when the song was written, she might have looked something like this:

Every man’s dream, right?

But it occurred to me to wonder, if she carried on walking to the sea every day, under the Brazilian sun, what might she look like today, after all those decades at the beach?

Be careful what you wish for.

Pop quiz

You know those “quizzes” that Facebook serves up? The ones allegedly meant to test your smarts in history or literature or pop culture? (In fact, taking them—or answering any of those “how many of these things have you done?” lists—just feed the platform and its real customers data for marketing to you.)

I don’t take them, but sometimes they’re really funny. Pretty sure whoever put together this one didn’t quite understand the notion of giving too many clues:

Gratitude Monday: workers in progress

I don’t know when, exactly, it became Received Wisdom that anyone whose income is derived from salary or wages instead of from investments is a chump. Possibly that started during the Reagan administration, but it certainly has achieved wide circulation in the past 20 years.

We see it all the time in the commoditization of labor in all forms, from bus boys to software engineers, who across the board put in work weeks that would have sent unions out howling on picket lines just 60 years ago. At the lower end, they work two or three jobs to earn a subsistence living; at the upper they risk being replaced by offshored equivalents if they don’t chalk up 60-hour weeks on a regular basis to meet ludicrous schedules.

And all along the way they are ridiculed and demonized as being, at heart, slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers. (If their skin pigmentation contains higher quantities of melanin, then the opprobrium is proportionately greater.) Because if they had any gumption at all, we’re told, they’d have either inherited some wealth, managed hedge funds for obscene fees, or come up with the Next Great Thing (“the Google/Uber/iPhone of [whatever]”) and sold it just after some overhyped IPO and moved on to something else.

In the Valley They Call Silicon, the big dogs all call themselves Serial Entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists fall all over themselves to throw money at them for their next big cookie-cutter thing. The people who do the actual building may or may not make a couple hundred large if they happen to be there when lightning strikes; but they can equally find themselves looking for another job if the serial entrepreneur in a neighboring building’s cookie-cutter thing goes IPO first.

(As for the people who clean the offices, deliver the snacks in the stocked kitchens and drive the corporate commuter buses—they’re all contractors, working for a series of interchangeable vendors with no concern for health, safety or proper accounting practices. The vendors don’t care who the contractors are; the client companies don’t care who the vendors are. All that matters is who’s going to cost the least.)

Because it’s all about the short-term big payoff, not about long-term growth. Only slackers, moochers and unimaginative losers think about long-term commitments; winners aim to take it all. Now.

This being Labor Day, the serial entrepreneurs, investment bankers and trust fund babies are doing whatever they do in their substantial cushion of comfort. The workers are marking the official end of summer, maybe barbecuing or hitting the retail sales. I’m thinking about the generations of men and women who literally put their lives, their subsistence (no fortunes for these folks) and their sacred honor on the line so that workers could receive fair wages for their labor, so that they could perform that labor under safe working conditions and so that they could build pension plans that meant they wouldn’t have to work literally to death.

These were radical notions 150 years ago—the very idea that sharing out some of the proceeds of productivity with its producers was just cray-cray. But those radical notions—and the radical men and women who fought for them—brought the United States to its zenith of innovation and prosperity. When the labor tide rose, so did everyone’s boat.

Sadly, that tide has receded. We are continually being told that American companies cannot compete in the world economy if they have to think about the welfare of their employees. In their minds (as always), welfare = unearned largesse, AKA the dole. No, every penny that doesn’t go to executive compensation must be pinched to the limit by longer hours, tighter budgets and lower taxes unless we want all those jobs manufacturing goods and providing remote services to go overseas. This current administration, comprising as it does Goldman Sachs execs, CEOs of oil companies and alt-reich racists and misogynists led by the Grifter-in-Chief screaming about turning back the tide of immigration, is only marginally more open about this kind of contempt than Republicans have been since little Newtie’s Contract with America.

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The fact that the Business Roundtable of Fortune 500 CEOs recently announced that it’s possible that corporations might owe the environment, the community and their employees more than a royal rogering is, so far, only talk. And last month at the Royal Dutch Shell plant in Pennsylvania, union workers were forced to choose between "attending" the Kleptocrat's speech or losing a day's work. A plant manager told reporters the company was treating it as a "training" event with the guest speaker being the orange buffoon. We have so much ground to recover.

I think we’ve hit a situation where a small percentage (say, one percent) of the people have been eying that goose that lays such beautiful golden eggs, and they’re convinced that there’s a simple way to release an immediate gush of gold shareholder value by applying this cleaver to its neck…

And I’m probably just being contrary when I say that I perceive something flawed in that strategy. But I do not see how an economy can grow if you strangle the buying power of those who actually build it.  

Thus, I am (as always) grateful to the people who fought for the value of labor in real life-and-death struggles for decades in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries, and for those who continue that fight in these gig economy times. Mother Jones, Wobblies, resisters and all of you—thank you.