My love account

In honor of United States’ egg woes—macro and micro—our earworm for today is “I’m Puttin’ All My Eggs in One Basket”, with Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

No eggs for you!

Evidently that part of the kakistocracy that is not subsumed in kowtowing to the Muskrat and his DOGiEs’ campaign to dismantle government or unconstitutionally engaging in rounding up and expatriating people without any due process has been begging European countries for eggs.

No—I am not making this up. As of time of writing, the kleptocrat has asked Denmark, Finland, Germany and Lithuania if they would very kindly give (or possibly sell) us eggs, since they haven’t completely bollocksed up their poultry farming.

And—all have declined to help us out. (As an English friend of mine said: that's them off the Christmas card list, then!)

This guy inherited a strong economy and the greatest power in the world. All through his campaign, he denied both of these facts and promised to “restore” both wealth and power “on day one”. (That was also the day he would be a dictator.)

Now we’re begging Lithuania for any spare cackleberries they might have lying around.

(BTW: this Reddit thread from Tuesday just cracked me up.)

 What are the odds that within two weeks he’ll send in the 82^nd Airborne to some EU country to “liberate” crates of eggs for distribution in Red states?

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Forgettable

Back some 40 years ago, a guy in my American Sign Language class raved about Häagen-Dazs ice cream; I mean he was having a transcendental experience just telling our classmates how wonderful it was.

(Our class was held in a building about a block away from the HD shop that had only recently opened in Pasadena, across from the Bullocks store, RIP.)

Since then, I must have had it, but I don’t recall.

And then last week I bought a pint of what they’re pleased to call coffee ice cream (for which I’m thinking I paid nearly $5):

I have to report that this is the most beige, most tasteless ice cream I have ever had in my life. This includes vanilla ice milk.

I mean—just look at this:

It’s as colorless as it is flavorless.

(And it took me a week to finish off a pint.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

No eggsateration

I guess the good news here is that the local Wegmans has eggs.

The bad news is that customers are limited to 10 cartons per.

Meaning—the total number of eggs you can get on one trip through the check-out line is 120.

(This, of course, doesn’t preclude people doing what my mom used to do when there were limits on how many sale items one customer could by: she’d send all her children through different lanes [this was when supermarkets had more than one staffed lane open at a time] with the max allowed and just the right amount of money to buy them. Until Safeway wised up and put a minimum age requirement on people buying cans of Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom soup for $0.10 each. Probably unconstitutional, but it worked.)

This makes me wonder: who could actually use 120 eggs? Where would they even store 10 cartons of eggs?

(Unless they’re buying for a middle school. Or maybe a neighborhood co-op.)

But the other bad news is that these eggs are $8.59 per dozen. That means (with tax—yes, Virginia taxes groceries), you’d be forking out $94.49 for that max allowed, so your mom better be giving you a Benjamin to hand over to the one staffed cashier at Wegmans.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: the Irish

Hmm? What’s that you say? Oh, right—Saint Patrick’s Day? Why, so it is.

It’s my take that “celebrating” the day is primarily a function of the Irish in America, who had huge chips on their shoulders what with being second-class citizens here. (They were not seen as particularly good for property values, particularly after the mass immigration following the Great Famine of the 1840s.) So they were putting on a swagger to flip the WASPS the bird.

Back in Ireland—eh, not so much. Yes, it was made a public holiday in 1903 as part of the whole idea of public (“bank”) holidays in the UK. But shortly afterward, another law was enacted that closed all drinking establishments for the day. (That stayed in effect until the 1970s.) So—not really so jolly.

(In the 1990s the Irish kind of woke up to the notion that Americans of all backgrounds used 17^th March as a jumping-off point for huge drink fests—including green beer in copious quantities. So in 1996 the government started “Saint Patrick’s Festival” to showcase the country and its industries. The next year it was a three-day event, kind of like your average Polish wedding.)

Okay, now that I’ve got that background out of the way, on to the Gratitude part of this Monday. I’ve always loved those right-brained, sweet-talking, ballad-singing, beauty-loving, cynically-inclined Irish, both here and in the old country. Especially after working in various areas of the tech industry for 30 years, where my right-brained, clear-talking, synapse-skipping cynical inclination stuck out like a lighthouse in a sea of tee-shirted and flip-flopped network engineers and software developers.

The Irish give me comfort and hope, reminding me that being this different is only a problem if you let the surprisingly cookie-cutter narrow-mindedness of the people in the Valley they call Silicon (who consider themselves the very vortex of innovative thinking and yet seem to have been implanted with virtual blinkers the instant they set up their first incubator) impose their values on you.

Yeah—Irish history is not a placid sail through drifts of rose petals. Hard, bloody, vicious even, with a lot of beat downs. And the fat lady has not yet appeared on the stage; so there’s a ways to go. But still they rise. Ya gotta love that.

In the past I’ve given you some music from Ireland, and; of course, Yeats. Feel free to reprise the pleasure; no charge. Even a small treatise on whiskey in Ireland.

So this time around I’ll just share a few photos from my trips there.

Kilmainham Gaol was built in 1796. It was intended to be a model of new prison management philosophies; but two years later there was a rebellion, and the building had to take on a slew of political prisoners, so that whole enlightenment thing pretty much went out the window.

It’s perhaps best known for holding 15 leaders of the Irish Uprising after the British suppressed it in April 1916. They were all executed in the courtyard by firing squad. One, Joseph Connolly, had been so badly wounded in the fighting that the Brits had to sit him in a chair for his execution; he couldn’t stand. It’s an ugly place, that courtyard, and the Irish pretty much keep it that way as a reminder.

I was taken by one of the doors—long since bolted shut—in that courtyard, and this is what I shot.

Up in Ulster, the first colony of Britain, and the last one standing, there’s a three-story high wall between the sectarian neighborhoods of Belfast. The community has used art as a means to mitigate it’s ugliness. There’s one section open to the public for comment, and you’ll notice that in 2019 the Irish had well got the Kleptocrat’s measure. Stevie, my tour guide, gave me a pen, and I added a line from Robert Frost: “Something there is that doesn't love a wall.”

But then, we’ll return to the whole drinking aspect mentioned earlier. Here’s a pub in Dublin, early afternoon. 

This is how you should drink, not crammed up against 1673 people you don’t know, all wearing green and yelling “begorrah” while slurping down green beer.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Out of the woodwork

Today’s earworm is from the anarcho-punk band Chumbawamba (RIP). It’s called “The Day the Nazi Died”.

Questions? No? Good.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

They're coming...

Oh, man—I’m so stoked:

The daffodils are poking up and will soon take over the world.

In fact, after seeing the incipient narcissi on my walk, I noticed my neighbor's garden:

We need those daffs. And the crocus. And the mini-iris.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Great wealth

I’ve been thinking recently about a quote from I You We Them, the 1000pp collection of essays by Dan Gretton on desk killers. (It’s not a history, and Fairfax County Public Library designates it Criminology in the Dewey Decimal system.) Gretton attributes it to Honoré de Balzac:

“The secret to great wealth is a forgotten crime.”

That seems pretty legit to me—on both personal and corporate fields. I’m thinking Standard Oil (predatory monopoly), every steel and railroad company of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (campaigns of terror against workers) and Lloyd’s of London (established to insure ships of the Middle Passage carrying slaves to America). And the fortunes of Kennedys (bootlegging during Prohibition) and Trumps (prostitution, violations of fair housing laws) do not stand up to scrutiny of their early days.

But it turns out that Gretton has misquoted Balzac. The original thought, from Père Goriot, is slightly different:

“Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait.”

Which is to say:

“The secret to great fortunes without apparent cause is a crime forgotten, because it was properly done.”

This is a little less straightforward, and permissive in a bourgeois kind of way. The “without apparent cause” thing is (to my mind) an unearned free pass: only if the source of the wealth isn’t obvious do we look for the hidden crime? Nah—there are way too many examples of riches coming from the blood, pain and loss of others for me to swallow that.

Now the “crime properly done” thing—that does track. Unexplained wealth coupled with a foundational crime never discovered makes all kinds of sense.

So, if what Balzac is actually saying (and I don’t know the context of Père Goriot) is that huge fortunes are all the result of an original crime, and if you can’t discern the source of some wealth, it’s because the crime was so well executed that people have forgotten it, mais oui.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Horticulture

Okay, my strategy for overwintering my citrus orchard did not exactly work to plan.

How it started:

How it’s going:

I was getting conflicting information on what to do about the dwarf trees—take them inside for the winter; no—trees need a dormant period, leave them out but insulate their roots. And given the winters we’ve had for the previous three years or so, it seemed safe to go the latter route.

However, once we got that extended period of below-freezing temperatures last month, my hopes, well—they basically froze.

So I’ll have to try again this year.

Interestingly, my gardenia bush made it through fine, and I didn’t even bubblewrap it. Perhaps the clue is the larger pot?

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: community

Since at least December, I’ve felt a clutching in my gut. Not pain, not obstruction, not bloating; just…awareness of distress that doesn’t seem to go away.

I thought it might be grief for my sister manifesting itself, or perhaps my anxiety that started on Election Day and has ratcheted up every day since. My doctor ran me through some tests, none of which indicates anything (visibly) organic, so I’ve just lived with it.

But last week I saw somewhere (either Reddit or Bluesky) an announcement for a two-hour class on how to “Build a Community”, put on by an organization called The Barnraisers Project. I’m not the community organizer type, but I thought that learning more about community and how to build one would be better than not learning, so I signed up.

Friends—I’ve never felt two hours go by so fast. (This was only beaten by the 90 minutes I spent in a black cab touring Belfast six years ago.) I—like everyone reading this—have been to enough well-intentioned meetings, run by well-intentioned people, which drift all over the place and devolve into individual rants or hand-flapping to have had some trepidations about this. But Garrett Bucks not only knows his community onions, he knows how to run a meeting—make everyone feel welcome and valued, but keeping them on target.

Also—I cannot tell you how heartening it was to be on a Zoom call with 91 other people from all over the country (and beyond), who mourn what this nation has become, and are actively seeking ways to unite and turn it back towards decency. For the first time in months, I am cautiously optimistic. 

And I am grateful.

(Plus—my intestinal tract appears to have relaxed some.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu