August interlude

Let me say this about that: when pigs fly.

I was thinking the same thing about seven years ago when Trump descended the escalator and announced that he was running for president.  Fat chance!, I thought but I also felt a chill run down my spine and a toxic worm of a thought that, however unlikely, he just may pull it off.

For all of the craziness of Trump's years in office I think we got through it quite well.  There were no big and drastic changes and it was like a veil was lifted and much of the distasteful, real life, political sausage-making was revealed.  Would we have otherwise  known how full of shit and sleazy many of those in Congress were?  It's a lot easier to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys since Trump came on the scene.  Where it goes from here I can't say; still not watching the news much but the "raid" on Mar-a-Lago was quite entertaining.

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Remember the murder hornet?  Well, it's no longer politically correct to call it that.

Too damn bad, I say.  Names can come and go but it doesn't change the reality of the object named.  I can see changing a name if it's blatantly offensive to certain groups but otherwise I think it's a waste of time.  People are going to call things what they're used to calling them, I think, for instance, Sears Tower.  You south-side guys probably remember that street at 4000W that was later named Pulaski Road.  It took quite a while to stop calling it Crawford.  In a humorous aside, my sister's kids couldn't believe what we used to call Brazil nuts.

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I don't know if I have written about my cataract surgery three years ago.

I recall reading something about it, and a couple of months ago I went to the archive to find it to help me prepare for my own surgery.  Not much help from the archive except that it was comforting to know that it's not a big deal.  And it wasn't a big deal at all; in a couple of weeks I'll be getting the other eye taken care of.

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The kitchen adventures continue.  After a few short weeks my first batch of sauerkraut is ready.  Not bad but it could use more of a punch.  The texture is weird because it is raw and uncooked; heat will kill all of the probiotic goodness but I'm not sure how I can stop the fermenting process.  This was a fun project but now I have more 'kraut than I think I can handle; maybe freezing will work.  I should be planning for next years state fair.

Remember my sourdough adventures?  Unless you're baking a lot bread it's a big pain, you have to keep feeding it and it grows and grows, you end up with too much.  But I read that you can dry it out the starter and it will last indefinitely, and by golly!  It's true.  I had some dried sourdough starter from last winter that I stored in the freezer and it came back to life, big time.  It seemed more robust after its long nap so I dried it out again to see if it would still wake up.  And it did, better than ever.  Just like the guy in Jurassic Park said, "Life finds a way."

 

when pigs fly

 Let me say this about that: when pigs fly.  Oh, there will surely be a woman president not too far down the road, and possibly she will be a republican, but there is no way that it will be Liz Cheney.

She is an extreme right winger, a manic war hawk, and the daughter of one of the main architects of the disastrous war in Iraq, who she has never repudiated.  The right wing is the part of the Republican that fell heaviest in love with Trump, so not much support there.  And while she is a darling to the dems currently because of her campaign against Trump but no dem is going to vote for her when they could vote for an actual dem.

Oh, she may well run in the 2024 rep primary, what else does she have to do, but she has no more chance of doing well there than she did in Wyoming.  She will most likely sign up with one of the cable networks as a commentator, and that's a well-paying gig where you keep a high profile and you don't have to work all that hard.

If we are going to do dueling links, here is one of how the reps turned Ohio from purple to red without changing minds, just changing the map.  

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/08/15/state-legislatures-are-torching-democracy

You Go Girl!

 Wouldn't it be funny if the first female U.S. president was a Republican?  Unlikely, I know, but not impossible.  One thing we can thank Trump for is proving that anybody can become President of the United States.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/liz-cheney-primary-loss-could-be-her-biggest-2024-boost-yet-experts/ar-AA10KfoI?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

Eleven men good and true and one Trumper.

 Oh he is guilty alright.  If you had watched any of the hearings you would know that.  It was all laid out with fine grained evidence.  If you are just reading a short synopsis in the paper or watching a few minutes of it on tv, you are not going to get the details.  If you don't get the details it is like watching two guys arguing from a distance, hard to tell who, if either, of them is telling the truth.  One guy could be telling it straight and the other guy could be lying through his teeth. but you can't tell without the details.

How long did it take to put Al Capone in Alcatraz?  And he didn't have most all of the republican party on his side.

Of course I would love to see him in an orange jumpsuit, but with him getting so much  closer to it, I realized something, he would have to have a trial, he would have to have a jury of twelve people.

One of the jewels of American democracy is the free elections.  Look how Trump has trashed that.  Another jewel is the fair trial, just think of what he would do to that.  Twelve people, and with about a third of the country Trumpers who have no belief in our institutions.  What if one of those twelve jurors is a Trumper?  No amount of evidence would make any difference.  Hell, it wouldn't matter if he was guilty or not.  If he shot that guy on fifth avenue the guy must've had it coming.  What if there is a Trumper on the jury and he gets off?

Grade school was really boring, the smell of the chalk dust, the droning teachers, the clock slowly, slowly, counting down the minutes to 3:15.  And then sometime around fourth grade this new kid took a seat, and he was a troublemaker.  Suddenly school was interesting.  The kid vs the teach was a great show, way more interesting than the multiplication tables.  And aside from his antics, which were really not that clever, he was kind of a liberator, defying the autocratic establishment.

And then he was gone, and school was boring again.  I looked around and none of my fellow classmates was willing to don the jester's hat so I took it up.  Outside of notes from the teacher going to my house and writing pages and pages of "I will be courteous," on lined paper, I had a ball.

It never occurred to me that someday I was going to be on the other side of the desk one day, but sometimes we get our just desserts.  The kids may not have even liked the kid, but they loved the disruption of the grinding of the daily routine.

You know I kind of wondered why Beagles was bringing up the subject of school hijinks after originally writing about Trump, but it hit my quite clearly on reading the last line. 

Either he was really good at not getting caught, or he just exuded some kind of malevolent aura that made other people go nuts.  

Does that sound like anybody we know?

Investigate, Investigate, Investigate

 Mark Twain said, "Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it."  A variation on that theme might be, "Everybody investigates Trump, but nobody does anything about him."  If Trump was guilty of half the things he has been accused of, he should have been locked up a long time ago.  It makes me wonder if there is some truth to his claim that each of these investigations has been nothing but a witch hunt.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not defending Trump. What I mean is, maybe he is a witch and deserves to be hunted.  

When I was driving school buses, we had something we called "the lowest common denominator effect".  I talked to a few teachers who observed it in their classrooms as well.  What it means is, the general deportment of the entire group tends to gravitate towards the worst behaved kid in the group.  There are some kids who seem to have a bad influence on the people around them, and I'm not sure that they all do it on purpose.  Sometimes it's obvious, when a kid does something goofy and immediately looks around to see if anybody's watching him.  Other times it's more subtle.

There was a high school kid who had been in serious trouble with the law, something about drugs.  One of the conditions of his parole was that he attend school regularly.  Funny, I thought that paroled druggies were usually forbidden to come within 500 feet of a school building.  I don't think this kid ever attended school regularly, but they never did come and take him away.  Indeed, he eventually graduated, to the surprise of most of us.  Maybe that was the only feasible way they had of getting rid of him.  The kid moved around a lot, and he rode intermittently on several busses that I was driving over the years.  Every time he rode one of my busses, we had a bad day, with kids acting up and getting all goofy.  I was never able to catch the kid himself doing anything, but the whole ambiance of the bus went down like a submarine as soon as he stepped abord.  Either he was really good at not getting caught, or he just exuded some kind of malevolent aura that made other people go nuts.  

trump. trump, trump

 Well once again it's Trump, Trump. Trump.  Just when you thought, he was beginning to fade to tiny Trump in the rearview mirror he is back again like Godzilla, after they thought they killed him in one of those movies, roaring right back, snorting and tearing up power lines, take that puny humans.

There he was testifying, geez I forget in which investigation, taking the fifth on everything.  Kind of outrageous, inasmuch as he has denigrated others taking the fifth as gangsters, but maybe not so much because his whole operation has been described as like the mafia.  But really, what else did anybody expect of him?  Ho hum.

But then the next thing you know he is stealing nuclear secrets.  The man certainly knows how to top himself.  And like Charlie Brown taking a run at the football, I tuned into Fox thinking surely, hiding our nation's classified records in his basement, likely to peddle to Putin or Kim, would make them, well certainly not condemn him, but maybe wag a little finger of disapproval at him, but no, they were all about the real villains in America like Hunter Biden and the big girl, and oh yes, the FBI, that bad band of brigands.

One never expects a Boebert or MTG to stray from the MAGA line, but, maybe the slightly sensible republican fringe, people like Rubio, might venture a mild tsk tsk, but no they were all into upping the dems Defund the Police with the new rep mantra, Defund the FBI.

Well it's a hard job for Trump to top himself, and I have to admit that this whole thing is getting a little boring already.  Oh I'll follow it because I am a news junky, but I expect the dawgs will roll over with a yawn and mutter, what else is new.

I just wanted to get something out on a Monday.

my pretty good week

 The forest primeval continues to thrive.  The purple morning glories, always late sleepers, are now blossoming beside their pink brethren and all the sunflowers are blooming or beginning to.  The tomatoes that have been stubbornly green for seems like a month are taking on a reddish hue.  

I remember taking the tomatoes home from Gethsemane gardens far out on the north side, watching them protectively on my lap as the Clark Street bus took them on its start stop bumpy ride.  "Be still my darlings," I whispered to them beneath the hub bub of the bus, "I am taking you from your crowded quarters at the store, to a place high in the sky where you will be save from rabbits and squirrels and all manner of critter, and you can gambol with your pals the morning glories and sunflowers all summer long where you can raise your family in their juicy red cribs."  Of course I would be eating their children, but no need to be telling them that.

And what the hell the reason they put their seeds in those cribs is so that some animal will eat them and spread them across the land so that they can find a spot to sprout and grow their own red round cribs for their children and so on and so on.  Best not to think of anything beyond the next generation.  We people do of course and look where it's gotten us, and unfortunately we have taken everybody us.

Well a grim end to a sunny observation, but meanwhile there is still plenty of summer to go.

In other news I can still see for miles.  I find that leaning back from the computer like I am driving some big chrome monster from the late fifties helps me think clearer than when I am all cramped up over the keyboard.  Expect my writing to go up a notch.

The open mic, while not as crowded as I would have liked, still drew a pretty good crowd, and everybody had a pretty good time.  That story that I fretted about, I had practiced it so many times that I could no longer tell if it was funny or not, went over quite well.  Like I said, I could no longer tell if it was funny or not, but when I heard the first laugh from the crowd I knew I was on my way.