Kiss goodnight

I’ve been to all three military cemeteries in the vicinity of the D-Day landings (81 years ago today): German, British, American. What struck me about them was the commonality of death—the death of youth.

As I walked among the headstones at Colleville-sur-Mer (American), Bayeux (German) and La Cambe (German), it seemed like the preponderance of the men lying there didn’t make it past age 25, both the attackers and the defenders. The way of the world is that old men start wars and young men fight them.

But here’s something that all these guys, blokes and Jungs might have been listening to, a song that pierced all their hearts wherever they were and whatever uniform they wore: “Lili Marlene”.

The song we know as “Lili Marlene” originated as a poem in the First World War (the one that was supposed to end all wars), written by a Hamburg schoolteacher conscripted into the German army, Hans Leip. It was set to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938 and recorded by a German singer, Lale Andersen, in 1939.

The gist of the piece is a lonely soldier on watch, missing his girlfriend. Pretty universal—I expect there was some Greek song around 520 BCE that expresses the same thoughts.

The song pretty much went nowhere until in 1941 German troops occupied Belgrade, in Yugoslavia, and needed recordings to broadcast over Radio Belgrade. Andersen’s “Lili Marlene” was one of the few discs the station had, so it got played a lot. And soldiers loved it.

But Reich propaganda minister Josef Goebbels loathed it. It wasn’t sufficiently martial—no proper German soldiers had time to miss their girlfriends or be anything but aggressively victorious. Besides, Andersen hung around with Jewish artists, which was not the done thing.

Still—soldiers within range of Radio Belgrade demanded more “Lili Marlene”. It expanded coverage to North Africa, where the British Eighth Army took it up. By the time Allied forces landed on the Normandy beaches in 1944, it was on everyone’s playlist, and a standard for Marlene Dietrich’s USO performances. Vera Lynn also covered it.

(It's kind of interesting that a song with a male soldier's narrative seems only to have been covered by female singers.)

We’ll go today with Lale Andersen’s version, the one that etched itself into the hearts of millions of men in all kinds of uniforms 81 years ago.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Globalism

I confess that I’m posting this just because I found it interesting:

Fairfax County sewer manhole cover…made in India.

I expect the price is going to go up on those puppies, on account of TACO Man’s current tariff on metal from everywhere, including India, being 50%.

(Also—why India? We can’t make them here?)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Art appreciation

More sidewalk art:

(The attention to detail on the Tic-Tac box is really quite good.)

This time, I met the artists, possibly brother and sister; maybe six and eight. (They were climbing on the jungle gym and wearing full-on face-covering mosquito masks.)

I told them I appreciate their work, and they thanked me.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

TACO Tuesday

Here’s an indicator on the effects of the TACO tariffs:

This is the section of The Container Store where they display all the little tchotchkes that are mostly manufactured in China. Look at the empty bins.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: corpse[s]

For my lesson on Friday my yoga instructor scouted some new flows for me to try. I confess that I found them confusing and that the pre-flow poses didn’t adequately prepare my muscles for their demands. (Glutes and quads are still bitching at me about this.)

But I have never been so grateful for savasana in my yoga life.

As a side note—I can no longer get through final relaxation without thinking about the yoga studio in Lincolnshire, England, that got swatted a couple of years ago because “members of the public” reported that a ritual mass murder was in process—based on them seeing seven bodies under blankets lying motionless on the floor in a dark, candlelit room, with one person moving slowly about, tapping a drum.

Not for nothing is that known as “corpse pose”.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Love and tacos

Remember when RWNJs were screeching that if Hillary Clinton won the 2016 election, we’d end up with taco trucks on every corner? Like that was a bad thing?

I don’t know how she didn’t win on that alone. But tacos are back in the news. Or, more specifically, TACO trades.

The term, coined by Financial Times writer Robert Armstrong is how Wall Street is referring to how the Kleptocrat’s “policy” on tariffs causes extraordinary ups and downs in the market. TACO stands for “T[he Kleptocrat] Always Chickens Out.” So, if you don’t like a tariff, just wait 10 minutes; he’ll back down.

(I don’t know how it took anyone longer than 10 minutes to figure out that he’d behave this way. I mean—it’s exactly his MO for his entire life: he blusters and as soon as there’s pushback, he folds like a cheap lawn chair.)

When a reporter asked him about it earlier this week, he got big mad. Quel surprise.

At any rate, in honor of the culture of tacos, guacamole, tequila and fried ice cream, today’s earworm is “Los Laurales”, from Linda Ronstadt’s Canciones de mi Padre album. It’s a love song about how the man to whom it’s addressed doesn’t seem to be committing, but it somehow ends up by saying that women are the downfall of me.

Which seems to cover all perspectives.

Here she is performing it with Mariachi Vargas.

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Defensive war

 I have a feeling that this is going to be a bad year for mosquitos in my part of The People’s Republic. Two and a half weeks ago I helped with cluster cleanup and got royally chewed up. Since then it’s like the original bites were the phosphorous flares marking the landing zone for the successive waves of real attacks—and we’re not even at the end of May.

The r/nova sub on Reddit is also indicating that it’s not just here—it’s all over Northern Virginia. So, it’s time for action.

In past years I deployed mosquito zappers, but—satisfying as it was to hear the ZZZZTs—it’s not clear to me how effective they were. Also—although I wasn’t unhappy to see moth corpses in the zapper grille, I don’t know how many good insects met their untimely end as collateral damage.

(If there are good insects.)

I also won't spray indiscriminately for the same reason. Although I have considered it.

But someone on Reddit urged readers to “Google mosquito bucket of doom” as a solution, and that brought me to something I think is worth a try. You partially fill a 5-gal bucket with water, mix in some leaf litter (making an attractive environment for female biters to lay their eggs and for the larvae to develop), but add a Mosquito Dunk, which murders the larvae wholesale. The lady puts all her effort into the bucket, but the babies never leave the maternity ward.

Viz:

I hope this is enough to get me through the summer. Through June, at least.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

New neighbors

So, I ran into this family on my walk yesterday morning.

They seem nice, although the parents aren’t too sure about me.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Vita brevis

The neighborhood sidewalk artists were at work last week—a rather complex narrative.

And then, after a couple of days of rain, this is what remained.

Sometimes not ars longa.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: Remembrance

As on all Memorial Days, I’m grateful for the sacrifices of the men and women who have served this country in uniform over the centuries. Who—volunteer or conscript, professional or amateur—fought and died because the nation called upon them to do so.

Unlike grocery shoppers in Buffalo, school children in Uvalde or parade-goers in Highland Park (what a great year 2022 was, eh?), they stepped knowingly into danger, but it doesn’t make their sacrifice any less painful for their loved ones. It also does not lessen our collective loss from the cutting short of their lives. It seems fitting that we spend at least one day a year honoring them.

There will be hundreds of people out at Arlington National Cemetery today, including many visiting Section 60, where the most recent arrivals are laid to rest. Families and friends will set up lawn chairs by graves, share a year’s worth of news and gossip, maybe drink a toast. It’s like El Día de Muertos, only in a lot of languages.

Although I did not know any of them, I join their families in remembering—and thanking—them.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu