I haven’t actually watched Stranger Things, only clips of it on Facebook or YouTube. So going into this I have a patchy and disjointed understanding of its characters, its plots, and themes. So corrections to anything that follows are welcome. 

That entire genre of horror and monsters is mostly a big turn off for me, having experienced my kidhood watching the old black & white monster and big bug movies of the 1950s on the TV after school. Now it’s all CGI and gore and I’m not into gore. Plus, the thinking seems to be now that scary movies have to make you feel powerless against evil or they’re just not scary enough. I seriously object to that.

So I saw the online talk about Stranger Things ever since the first episodes appeared when I began to see it as less a sort of Twilight Zone or Outer Limits kind of thing and more like an IT thing I just let it slide. But more recently I started seeing online talk about two of the characters, Mike Wheeler and Will Byers, possibly having a gay romance, and it began to get my attention.

The proponents of this theory had clips of the behavior of these two that were very convincing. But I just expect that anything coming out of Hollywood or big bucks entertainment won’t treat us or our relationships seriously, so I figured at some point someone would put the hammer down on any such speculation like they did for Luca. I was pretty sure it would come to nothing. 

I’ve posted this Vito Russo quote so often everyone reading me is probably very tired of it, but here it is again:

“It is an old stereotype, that homosexuality has to do only with sex while heterosexuality is multifaceted and embraces love and romance.”

So when the finale came and went and no same sex romance I wrote it off to the usual entertainment establishment homophobia. Oh sure, progress has been made. We’re not pathetic sissies or psycho murderers anymore. We can exist, just not have love lives like real people do.

We can even have coming out moments now on screen. I began seeing clips of Will’s big speech about how afraid he has always been to be out to anyone, and how after he made that speech everyone in the room said how much they still loved him, and a great big group hug ensued.

I was actually very happy to see that. But because of the nature of that short clip based view of the story, I missed its significance. And that significance was, I believe now, a major milestone in how audiences not only see us as people, but in the context of the overall series plot, it also spoke to the deeper meaning of our civil rights struggle.

This story takes place in the 1980s, which while it was better than previous decades, was still a very hostile time. That’s something younger audiences aren’t quite getting when they watch that scene, and start wondering online about why it was made such a big deal in the story. But that’s only part of it.

Not to go into any great detail about the complex plot of this series, but Will was being mind-manipulated by an evil entity (Vecna) that wanted to eradicate all life on Earth. As I understand it (remember I still haven’t watched the entire thing) at the heart of this story is a wormhole (they call it the Upside Down) linking our Earth with a dark desolate mirror Earth full of monsters, trying to get into our Earth. Vecna wants to use these monsters and the wormhole to eradicate all life on Earth (out of, I assume, just pure hate). It’s been using Will’s fear of how his family and friends will react to him if they find out he’s gay, to alienate Will from his friends, and his friends from each other. And especially from Mike. 

Will has a crush on Mike. Mike sees his relationship with Will as they are best friends. He loves Will, but its Philia, not Eros. Mike’s heart belongs to a girl, El. And seeing it is breaking Will’s heart, and causing stress in their friendship that Mike can’t figure out and Will can’t bring himself to be honest about. There’s a scene where Mike and Will are being driven to Nevada to find El, and Will is telling Mike that if El seemed like she was being mean or pushing him away it’s because she knows she’s different…

This is from a transcript of the scene I found online. Not sure if it’s from the script… [Update… It is from the script]

[Will] (haltingly) …and when you’re different, sometimes you feel like a mistake. 

The pain is real. His own words cut deeply to the core.

I hate who I am.

On the verge of tears, he turns back to Mike:

[Will] But you make her feel like she’s not a mistake at all.  Like she’s better for being different. And that gives her the courage to fight on. If she was mean to you, or she seemed like she was pushing you away, it’s because she’s scared of losing you, like you’re scared of losing her. And if she was going to lose you, I think she’d rather just get it over quick. Like ripping off a Band-Aid 

Now it’s Mike who doesn’t get it.

[Will] (CONT’D) (convincingly) So, yeah, El needs you Mike. And she always will.

Mike’s face brightens.

[Mike] Yeah?

[Will] (breathlessly) Yeah.

Will FORCES out a SMILE and Mike returns with a NOD. Thanks, I needed that.

Will turns to the window full of emptiness that goes on forever. HE STIFLES HIS SOBS, finally resigned to knowing that he just ripped off the Band-Aid.

Vecna has been using kids since the start of the series because, as it admits, kids are easier to manipulate. And it is using Will’s fear of being outed to mind-manipulate him into doing things, to cause strife among the friends, and their friends, and keep them all week and easy to manipulate.

The scene where Will comes out to everyone in the room, terrified, but determined to do it and take whatever comes of it, is pure gold on several levels. So I’m told shooting it took two twelve hour days to get it where it had to be emotionally for the actor playing Will Byers, Noah Schnapp, and also the others. I’m quoting the speech here in it’s entirety because it only works as a whole.  

I haven’t told any of you this because I don’t want you to see me differently. But the truth is… I am. I am different.

I just pretended like I wasn’t because I didn’t want to be. I wanted to be like everyone else. I wanted to be like my friends and, I am like you. I’m like you in, in almost every way. We like playing D&D late into the night and we like that old person smell in Mike’s basement, and we like biking to Melvald’s for malted milkshakes, and we like getting lost in the woods and getting lost in Family Video and arguing about what to rent and settling on ‘Holy Grail’ for the millionth time.

And we like Milk Duds in our popcorn with extra butter, and we like drinking Coke with Pop Rocks, and we like bike races and trading comics and NASA and Steve Martin and Lucky Charms and literally all the same things.

I just— I just— I— I don’t like girls. I mean, I do just— Just not like you guys do. And I had this crush on someone even though I know they’re not like me. But then I realised he’s just my Tammy, and by Tammy, I mean it was never about him. It was about me. And I thought I was finally OK with myself.

But then today Vecna showed me what would happen if I did this, if I told you guys the truth. He showed me a future and in this future, some of you are just worried for me, worried that that things will be harder for me, and it just makes me feel like something’s wrong with me.

So I push you away and for the rest of us, we just drift apart more and more and more and more and more until I’m alone and I know none of that has happened and Vecna can’t see into the future but he can see into our minds and he knows things and it just felt so real. It felt so real.

Vecna showed him what would happen if he came out. But it was a lie. Everything Vecna said would happen if he came out, is actually what would have happened if he’d stayed closeted. Will would always feel like something was wrong with him. He would eventually push all his friends away out of fear and they’d all drift away and he would end up alone. And Vecna creates the mutual distrust it needs, and that’s how it wins.

But Will comes out anyway, despite his fears. And when he does, and he is accepted, and loved, at that moment Vecna loses its control over him, and the power it had over all of them.

Do you see what the filmmakers have done here?

This subplot of Will struggling to deal with his sexual orientation in 1980s America is a metaphor of our civil rights struggle. It was never just about how liberating it is for us to be able to, finally, at long last, live honest decent whole lives, but also about liberating society at large, for all of us to be able to live in a world where the all too human monsters among us no longer have power over us. All of us.

These filmmakers/storytellers get it. That is so deeply gratifying.

Which brings me to the other thing I am very gratified to see in this story: How the filmmakers handled with genuine sympathy Will’s crush on Mike.

El is Mike’s true love. The advocates of a Mike and Will romance weren’t giving us the clips that clearly showed that. I don’t think it was meant to deceive, I think they just had a really bad case of confirmation bias. They were only seeing what they wanted to see in the scenes between Mike and Will and brushing off the scenes between Mike and El. If you didn’t see how Mike felt about El before the finale you had to have during it. Mike is best friends with Will, but El is his true love. A romantic relationship between him and Will would have been contrived and disrespectful of the characters.

Recall that scene where Will comes out took two twelve hour days to film. That was not just about getting Will’s emotional state right, but also the characters watching it. During Will’s coming out speech Mike, and this is something the filmmakers have confirmed, realizes for the first time that Will has a crush on him. The actors are good. During that scene you can see dawning awareness on Mike’s face (Mike is played by Finn Wolfhard).

In the next and final episode, as the team prepares for the final battle with Vecna, Mike has a talk with Will…

[Mike] Hey, um… What you said earlier at the Squawk… I’m sorry. I mean, not sorry about what you said. That came out wrong. Or not came out wrong. Jesus Christ.

[Will] [chuckles] It’s okay.

[Mike] No, it’s… it’s not. I should have been there for you, and I wasn’t. And I guess I was just so self-absorbed that I couldn’t see it. I just… I feel like an idiot, and I… [sighs] I’m sorry.

[Will] You don’t have to be sorry. And you are not an idiot. You’re not. It’s just… I didn’t even understand it myself for the longest time. I just… I think it needed to happen the way it happened. I needed to find my own way. But what matters is that you’re still here, and you still think we can be friends.

[Mike] Friends? No, thanks. Best friends. All right, come on. We’ve got a planet to catch. 

Which brings me to this: After the final battle, Mike is bereft over losing El. Sheriff Hopper has a talk with him. It’s worth embracing.

It’s not your fault. What happened is not your fault. El made her choice. Now it’s time for you to make yours. And the way I see it, you’ve got 2 roads ahead of you. You’ve got one road where you keep blaming yourself for what happened. You keep going over it in your head, what you could’ve done differently. You push people away, and you suffer, because that’s what you think you deserve. And then there’s another road, where you find a way to accept what happened. Find a way to accept her choice. Doesn’t mean you gotta like it, doesn’t mean you gotta understand it and never think about it. You just accept it. And you live the best goddamned life you can. I’ve been down that first road before, and I don’t recommend it.

There’s something there about acceptance for the characters, and also the audience. For Mike, for Will, for the viewers who so deeply wanted that Mike and Will romance to happen. For all the loves that were lost. For all the loves that might have been but weren’t. For everyone of us who were still in deeply love and the other just walked away. And maybe, especially, for all of us gay kids who had crushes that would never be on straight boys who just couldn’t go there: It’s not your fault. You can keep going over it in your head and wonder what you could have done differently. You can suffer alone because it’s all you think you deserve. Or you can find a way to accept what happened and have a life, even if it wasn’t the one you wished for. Doesn’t mean you can never think about it. Denial just makes a fixation worse. You just accept what happened and live the best goddamned life you can. 

It helps when you have billions to spend on fucking up America’s democracy.

Watch this, not just for the whodunnit (it was Musk) but also to see and understand the shifty way he did it. I remember watching a young couple talking about voting for Trump because, as the young woman was saying, he would protect abortion rights. There was a sense even back then that Musk was behind a barrage of disinformation about Trump and abortion rights. Well now we have the receipts.

It takes determined individuals to dig into these sorts of things because our commercial news media won’t. You should watch this entire thing, not just for the whodunnit (it was Elon Musk) but to see and understand the shifty/shitty way it was done. He probably got a good laugh attaching Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s name to it.

Here’s the thing: large majorities in both parties want it to stop. But the only way that’s going to happen is if they, the people who want it to stop, stop voting for the same people that let it keep happening because the money’s good.

I have the book by Peter Wildeblood, who was caught up in this scandal and sent to prison for 18 months hard labor for “conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons”…or in other words, being a homosexual and having an affair with another man. This was Britain in 1954…about a year after I was born here in the United States where things weren’t much better.

This is from the Wikipedia entry on Peter Wildeblood:

In the summer of 1952, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu had offered Wildeblood the use of a beach hut near his country estate. Wildeblood brought with him two young RAF servicemen: his lover Edward McNally, and John Reynolds. The foursome were joined by Montagu’s cousin Michael Pitt-Rivers. At the subsequent trial, the two airmen turned Queen’s Evidence, and claimed there had been dancing and “abandoned behaviour” at the gathering. Wildeblood said it had in fact been “extremely dull”. Montagu claims that it was all remarkably innocent, saying: “We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that’s all.” Letters from Wildeblood and Montagu to McNally, a serviceman and John Reynolds were found by the RAF. They were thus offered immunity as they agreed to turn evidence against Montagu, Pitt-Rivers and Wildeblood.

The atmosphere of the 1950s regarding homosexuality was repressive; some called this period a witch-hunt. The Montagu trial followed a number of other cases in the press, including that of Soviet spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, Labour MP Bill Field, writer Rupert Croft-Cooke and actor John Gielgud. It is in this context that around 1,000 men were imprisoned each year in Britain amid widespread police repression of homosexuals.

But the case against Wildeblood attracted public attention against the law as it stood, and Wildeblood was not shy about speaking out about being homosexual, and what was done to him in the name of the law.

The verdict divided opinion and led to an inquiry resulting in the Wolfenden Report, which in 1957 recommended the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the UK.

Wildeblood’s testimony to the Wolfenden committee was influential on its recommendations. The committee was set up during the prison sentence of Peter Wildeblood in order to investigate the law regarding homosexuality and to give advice and recommendations for reform if need be. Setting up the committee was made possible thanks to increased public attention about homosexuality generated by this and other cases. Peter Wildeblood thus made a great contribution to legal reform, by providing evidence and arguments for the debate in the House of Lords where the law to decriminalise homosexuality was passed in October 1965. Peter Wildeblood was the only openly gay witness to be interviewed and his book Against the Law served as a passionate account of the case and the need for reform.

Which is a perfect example of how gay visibility helps us make progress.

I’m reading Wildeblood’s book Against The Law, but it is slow going because it takes you back to a really bad time, and I have to read it in small doses.

Foghorn Leghorn often said it best…

That girl is about as sharp as a sack of wet mice

That boy is about as sharp as a bowling ball

I say, that boy is playing with a full deck alright, he’s just really slow at shuffling.

Boy, I say, boy, you are as useless as a back pocket on a T-shirt!

But Walter Olson on Facebook posted a few international ones I’m going to add to my collection.

Venezuela: Intelligence is chasing them, but they are faster.

Swedish: The wheel is spinning but the hamster is dead.

Also Swedish: Missing a straw for the broom.

Korian: Is your head a decoration?

And then this from LBJ: He couldn’t pour piss out of a boot with instructions on the heel.

I think I get better now, why Vivian Maier didn’t show her photography to anyone, died alone and unknown, and her work was very nearly lost forever. She probably did show it to a few close people and when they shrugged it off she stopped showing it to anyone, but she couldn’t stop doing it because she was an artist and had that need.

You wonder how much art has been lost to us. Mine will probably vanish after I’m gone. Not that I’ll know it. Every time I have reached out and got the shrug it’s felt like a knife to the gut, but you don’t ever say so because nobody wants to hear that. Eventually you just get beaten down. When it makes you stop creating altogether then you know you’re finished.

Way too cute for my own good college age guy behind the counter at the camera store in San Luis Obispo when I went there looking for red filters for my Canon F1n and Miranda Sensorex. Even worse, he knew everything about my F1s and really liked that I had that Sensorex and we talked film photography all the while he was digging up filters. Or trying to.

Searching for parts for film cameras these days is a lot like browsing flea market tables. You find a camera store that stocks used equipment and asking about things like filters and lens caps quickly turns into a deep search through boxes and trays. But that’s how it is. I feel lucky there’s even a decent camera store nearby.

They didn’t have any to fit the 28mm lenses I had on those cameras, but instead of just throwing up his hands and telling me he couldn’t help me, this kid digs up a 62mm red filter and proposed finding me some step up rings for both lenses for that filter.

I liked the idea because I didn’t want to have to go online for the filters I wanted. You find any camera stores now that have stuff for film cameras and you want to support them so they stay in business. And this kid’s creative solution to the problem was appealing. I could tell he wasn’t just trying to sell me something, he was trying hard to help a fellow photographer. I mean…he just took one look at my cameras and we instantly clicked. So to speak.

Eventually the counter top between us filled up with step up/step down rings and he kept trying this and that combination until he found ones that worked for both cameras. All the while we kept talking photography and film cameras. While checking my F1n to make sure the step up rings weren’t causing any vignetting with the 28mm lens he looked confused momentarily, then we both realized I had installed a diopter on the viewfinder and his eyes, being still 20/20, couldn’t quite focus with that in place. He was super impressed that I’d managed to find a genuine Canon diopter. I told him I’d got that camera body long enough ago that parts for it weren’t so hard to find, but I still had to look hard for diopters.

Then he realized the Canon F1 I had with me was an F1n…the slight improvement over the original F1, which he had one of and loved. I think my heart skipped a beat right just then. I remarked about how one tiny but very nice improvement over the original was the battery check button position was spring loaded so you couldn’t accidentally leave the battery check on and drain the battery. He emphatically agreed and wondered why they’d not done that on the first generation F1s.

I showed him some of my shots of Monument Valley as a way of explaining why I like to work in black and white with a red filter. He loved them, told me what he liked most about them, and about the film he likes to use that gets him similar results. And it really cheered me up to see how another generation of film photographers was coming into their own.

I think a good rule of thumb now for film photographers is if you need supplies go find a college town nearby if possible. The kids there are into it. I often see Hopkins students at the camera store near where I live in Baltimore.

So many times I run into other middle age and older photographers and we start talking and it turns into a subtextual duel to see who the alpha photographer is (that happens with software developers too). This kid (yes I got his name but I won’t repeat it here) and I just started talking like a couple fellow countrymen. We had a perfect affinity, at least regarding our mutual love of photography. Made me feel very good.

And wishing I was 40 years younger so I could ask for his phone number, and could he take me someplace he knows where there are good photos to be had, and I’d bring my camera. And some film. And that red filter he just sold me.

Fifty-Four years ago…

December 15, 1971…sometime around twilight I took a walk from the apartment mom and I shared, up Parklawn Drive to Twinbrook Parkway, then across the railroad tracks and to Rockville Pike. I sat down on a curb near the Radio Shack and watched the twilight deepen over Congressional Plaza. A classmate I was madly crushing on, but could not admit to myself that I was crushing on, had put an arm across my shoulders as we walked together down a school hallway to a side exit where he always parked his little motorcycle, and given me a quick little squeeze, and my head went into the stratosphere and I’d been walking on air ever since. I was watching the colors in the sky deepen, but all I could see was his face, and all I could think about was how it felt to have his arm around me.

Eventually I could think it: I’m in love. And then I could think the rest of it and not be afraid or ashamed, because nothing had ever felt so wonderful. And from that moment on I was never afraid or ashamed. Life was better than I’d ever thought possible.

It didn’t last. He left the country the following summer for parts unknown. A classmate told me he probably went back to Germany which surprised me because he always led me to believe he was a Brazilian. It wasn’t until many years later I found him again and we reconnected briefly. I should tell the rest of this story at some point.

I need to make this point first: I had it good. I had it very good. Compared to other kids I had it golden. Mom loved me, I never doubted that. But there were others on her side of my family tree who would have been happy if I’d never been born. Not all of them…I need to emphasize that too…but enough of them that I felt the static over being my father’s son all the time I was growing up. Here’s the thing: you grow up in these situations others might consider strange and it doesn’t seem strange to you at all. It seems normal. Because for you it is normal. I didn’t get to meet my dad until I was 15 and that had to be on the down low because otherwise mom’s family would go nuclear. Which…they eventually did anyway. But that was normal for me. Your mileage may vary.

Part of the reason I was able to handle my emerging sexual orientation as well as I did was I’d already accepted by then that there would be people in my life who would hate my guts for something I couldn’t help being, and which all by itself wasn’t anything for me to be ashamed of. But it left its mark all the same, and at age 72 I’m still picking out pieces of the scabs.

So if it seems strange for a guy my age to be completely taken by a series of books aimed mostly at teenagers and young adults, it’s because that background premise in those books of “Forbidden Children” and “Children Who Should Not Have Been Born” and its main character telling the gods at the end of the first series to recognize all their children from now on so no one ever feels unwanted again, really hits me in a very deep place where I didn’t expect the books to take me.

I started reading the Percy Jackson books when I saw the cover art pop up in one of my feeds for The Sun And The Star and realized looking at it that it was a story about a young same sex couple in some sort of fantasy/adventure story.

I have been devouring those kinds of stories ever since Mercedes Lackey wrote her Last Herald Mage books, as a way of vicariously having/reliving an adolescence reading boy meets boy, have adventures, win their battles, defeat the bad guys and fall in love stories I never had a chance to have growing up in the late 60s/early 70s. So I bought a copy and started reading, and then fell into Rick Riordan’s universe of forbidden demigod children, unknowingly born into world where they are misunderstood weird kid outcasts at best, targets for monsters at worst, and half their family tree is dysfunctional, and they have to fight for acceptance and find and defend their chosen family.

I was only able to get halfway through the first Harry Potter book before I got bored with it and put it down. It was at the quidditch match part and I put it down to my reliable allergy to watching sports, and bad memories of being forced into it in grade school. This was well before I saw her dark side online. At the time I thought I should at least try to finish it because it seemed like everyone was thoroughly enjoying the books and the story of an outsider kid growing up in a family that raised him in a little closet away from the world of his birthright should have appealed to me. But once I put it down I moved onto other things, and then later I saw her dark side. It was probably less traumatic for me than others since I’d already become bored with her world. In retrospect Rowling had all the tropes and the skill to use them better than most, but not enough to make them rise above themselves. It’s like the difference I found reading Zane Grey versus Louis L’Amour, or Tom Clancy versus Alistair MacLean.

Looking forward to watching the second season of Percy Jackson And The Olympians, and then season three where we finally get to meet a young Nico di Angelo. Alas at the rate they’re going it won’t be for another six years after than before we get to Nico’s fight with Cupid and it comes out he’s gay and he had a crush on Percy. Maybe in seven years Disney Corp will have enough backbone to actually tell its audience that no kid should ever feel unwanted again.

Even if they’re gay and their father is Hades.

[Edited a tad…]

I took a wee trip to Disneyland and now I’m back at my brother’s house. He lives about two miles from the Amtrak station at Grover Beach. There are two trains that run up and down the coast regularly from there. The Very Nice Coast Starlight which runs from Seattle to San Diego, and the Pacific Surfliner which runs from San Luis Obispo to San Diego. Both stop at Los Angeles Union Station and I have traveled on both of them to and from there, but only the Surfliner stops in Anaheim. The biggest problem with the Surfliner is I have to catch it in both directions at an ungodly hour. This time instead of asking my brother to get up at 5:30am to take me to the station I rented a room at a nearby motel I could walk it from. But I still had to be up by 5:30am just to make sure I got dressed and ready to walk to the station before the train got there. In Anaheim I have to cross my fingers that a ride share will pick me up at 5am from a hotel near Disneyland to get me to the station. Which means I need to be up sometime after 4am to dress and make sure I’ve packed everything.

It’s about a six hour ride on the Pacific Surfliner from Anaheim to Grover Beach, and a large segment of that around Vandenberg is kinda boring if you’re not on the ocean side of the train, until you catch sight of the launch facilities there. Otherwise it’s just a bunch of lumpy treeless hills and no cellular data signal for about an hour and a half. I was wishing I’d brought a book along.

A situation at work has been super stressing me out since I got here and I’m going to try one more time to find a resolution to it, otherwise I’m going to need to disappear into my vacation for the rest of the trip and take whatever static I get out of it. I won’t go into details other than remark quietly under my breath that I am ready to retire again. One heart attack and an ablation later I am not up for a lot of stress anymore.

I got not very much relaxation out of my Disney visit, and maybe a big part of that was how crowded the parks were. Also that notification that I had a fifteen hundred dollar hospital bill waiting for me that I wasn’t expecting. But I should consider myself lucky health expenses wise. I asked if it was another out of network doctor trying to gouge me (this has happened before) and the hospital said no it wasn’t a doctor charge but a hospital charge. I’m still going to run it my my health insurer.

My Disney visit was good…I adore California Adventure…but I am still just as stressed as I was before I went. On the other hand…I’m back in California…so there’s that.

Made my usual Back In California visit to an IN-N-OUT burger joint to see if the burgers and fries as still as deathly bland as I remember.

Yeah…same old same old completely tasteless food. Especially the fries. How hard to you have to work to make fries taste like nothing? Why this chain is so popular out here I will never know.

Milkshake was pretty good though. They will need to work on that.

On the left of Nico is (I think) Persephone, and on the right is dad (Hades).

I’m back in California and the ancestral Garrett Family homeland for the month of December. Neighbors, the alarm company, and all the remote gizmos I’ve installed are watching the house for me. During the winter and summer months it’s really nice to be able to remotely monitor the house and control the thermostat. 

I took the train this trip. Probably after I retire for the second time, and have more free time to myself, I might do more road trips out to here, but the other side of that coin is the political situation and my Maryland license tags might make that somewhat dicey if I have to go through places like Texas and Oklahoma. Plus ICE on the roads. I would never have believed when I was younger that someday I might need to have my passport with me when I go on a road trip.

Initially I was going to take the Amtrak Cardinal from Baltimore to Chicago, but I got bumped off it, despite having made my reservations many months ago. I didn’t get any notifications and only found out about it when I was double checking my ticket for departure time, and saw I was on the Acela not the Cardinal. That was confusing (the Acela doesn’t go to Chicago), so I looked closer and saw that the Acela was taking me to DC Union Station so I could connect with the Floridian.

The Cardinal is a small train with only one sleeper car and it only runs three days a week. The thinking among the Amtrak crew I talked to was they’d overbooked it and I, being a solitary traveler, was easy to bump. But Amtrak made it up to me. When they put me on the Floridian they gave me an upgrade to a full bedroom, and refunded me nearly 500 bucks. So…okay…not complaining about having to make an extra connection to DC Union Station. Also, the Floridian is a bigger train that takes a much quicker route to Chicago.

The snow storm in the midwest worried me. Last train ride back home the Southwest Chief had to turn around in Albuquerque due to a big snowstorm in Kansas and instead of getting to Chicago I went back to Los Angeles and back up the coast to my brother’s house. I didn’t want to get turned around back to Chicago because then I might just as well have gone back to Baltimore and cancelled my December visit altogether. But the weather cleared up quickly once out of Chicago and I made it all the way to Oceano with no trouble.

The three day three night train ride is a lot of fun…at least I think so. Provided of course you get at least a roomette. With a sleeper ticket you are a first class passenger and your meals in the dining car are included, and you get to use the first class lounges in the connecting Union Stations. (The one in Chicago is Super Nice!) One other nice thing about going to bed on a rocking moving train is I don’t have to worry about my self winding watch, winding down when I take it off for the night.

It’s nice to be back in the land of my birth, with family that gets me, Old Juan’s Cantina, and that lovely Pismo Beach to walk.

Here’s something a little fun. Going through the “Science” folder I found this BBC Where Do You Fall On The Male-Female Brain Continuum self test I’d taken back in 2006. It used test questions that it purported to relate to sex differences in the brain, but also in our physiology. That ratio between ring and index fingers for example (mine are equal).

So I bit and took the test. Here’s my score.

Unsurprised…

Also…this:

Totally unsurprised.

I’m going through a bunch of old files…newspaper and magazine clippings from a time when paper was the default means of communicating news and information…and running across some oddities and memories of a past life. Let me bore the rest of you with some of it today.

This was in my “Rightwing Mindset” folder. I remember driving past this on my way to Walt Disney World. Basically all you could see from the Interstate was the large faux Roman Colosseum, where I assume they held daily reenactments of Christians being thrown to the lions, or some such. Not sure how they would have enacted the lion’s part of the show.

I never went, not even out of curiosity. Too late now. 2001 – 2020. They couldn’t make it work and the COVID epidemic apparently finished it off. And now it’s gone to its heavenly reward. Here’s the thing…’Christian’ is big word that compasses a Lot of belief, any random quarter of which is probably not completely on board with the other three.

There’s an old Dutch joke about how one Dutchman is a theologian, two Dutchmen are a church, and three Dutchmen are a schism. And of course, the best God joke ever by Emo Phillips. The point being you are not going to bring in the crowds you think you are, just by branding your attraction as a Christian thing.

Especially if it’s Northern Conservative Baptist Great Lakes Region Council of 1912.

This news article came across my feed today…

Top Trump officials Miller, Noem and Rubio adopt bunker mentality with housing reserved for military officers: report

Top members of Donald Trump’s White House are reportedly living in homes typically reserved for top military brass in Washington, D.C. as they pull back from neighborhoods where their presences were often targeted for protests by the many Democrats who make the Capital region their homes.

Stephen Miller and Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently joined a growing list of Trump Cabinet secretaries and advisers who’ve chosen to live in reserved military housing, with Rubio moving onto “Generals Row” in Fort McNair and Miller also living in the area after abandoning his digs in Arlington, The Atlantic reported.

They join Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who moved into military housing earlier this year, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who is alone among his compatriots in finding some precedent for his decision to move onto Generals Row alongside Rubio.

This had me remembering this recent post on BluSky by Mrs. Betty Bowers (The World’s Best Christian):

People claiming that the Epstein Ballroom™ is really just a cover for a bunker has me fondly recalling what Hitler did in his.

Heh.

Listen…I’m not about to downplay the peril my country is facing now, but for all the warnings about how it was in Germany in the 1930s, it is well to remember that this is not Germany, it is not Italy, it is not Spain, it is not Chile. There’s a reason it is a nation of many sovereign states (and a few Commonwealths) plus Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands, gathered under the umbrella of an overall federal union.

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

It was the only way. The diversity of the states and the people within them made no other form of self government possible. The British King tried to impose one and could not. By that time we had become Americans. Diverse, and a bit unruly. Civil War historian Shelby Foote famously said, “Before the war it was always the United States are; after the war it was the United States is… it made us an is.” But either we are or we is, it was the only way to make a thing out of that patchwork quilt.

Listen to an American you MAGA fascists…Fascism demands total control and conformity. You failed to get it from Germany, close as your kind did come, and even then you needed the help of the Treaty of Versailles and the hyperinflation of the great depression. You failed to get it from France…they kept killing your soldiers all the way to the end of the war and maybe you don’t want to recall what they did to the collaborators afterward. And those were small, pretty homogenous nations which America is not. You are not getting servitude out of all 46 states, the 7 commonwealths, Puerto Rico and the Northern Mariana Islands. Maybe you get a significant fraction of those…for a little while…but you are not putting a collar around all of it, yanking its chain and demanding obedience. It’s just not happening in the country a Russian general once spoke of, saying that the reason Americans are so good at war is because war is chaos and Americans live in chaos.

It is the way…

I think the bunkers you want to be in are somewhere in Putin’s Russia…not here…