(Via the Florence County Democratic Party on Facebook)
Sue gets up at 6 a.m. and fills her coffeepot with water to prepare her morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards.
With her first swallow of coffee, she takes her daily medication. Her medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to insure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of her medications are paid for by her employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Sue gets it too.
She prepares her morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Sue’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
In the shower, Sue reaches for her shampoo. Her bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for her right to know what she was putting on her body and how much it contained.
Sue dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air she breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
She walks to the subway station for her government-subsidized ride to work. It saves her considerable money in parking and transportation fees because some fancy-pants liberal fought for affordable public transportation, which gives everyone the opportunity to be a contributor.
Sue begins her work day. She has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Sue’s employer pays these standards because Sue’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.
If Sue is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, she’ll get a worker compensation or unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think she should lose her home because of her temporary misfortune.
It’s noon and Sue needs to make a bank deposit so she can pay some bills. Sue’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Sue’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Sue has to pay her Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and her below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Sue and the government would be better off if she was educated and earned more money over her lifetime.
Sue is home from work. She plans to visit her father this evening at his farm home in the country. She gets in her car for the drive. Her car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards.
She arrives at her childhood home. Her generation was the third to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans. The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.
She is happy to see her father, who is now retired. Her father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberal made sure he could take care of himself so Sue wouldn’t have to.
Sue gets back in her car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Sue enjoys throughout her day. Sue agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m self-made and believe everyone should take care of themselves, just like I have.”
I saw this one laughing in my face yet again…this time in my Facebook feed from a relative of a good friend. There are family issues going on below the public surface there that I don’t want to butt into so I didn’t respond. But this is one of those zombie bits of homophobic agitprop that pushes my buttons whenever I see it…
This is one from Rick Warren, a devoted homophobe and pulpit thumper. Near as I can tell it was something he put out there in 2013 around the time of President Obama’s second inauguration. Warren, as you may recall, was invited to give the invocation at Obama’s first inauguration, thereby spitting in the faces of all the gay Americans who worked so hard to get him elected over John McCain and the lunatic Sarah Palin. It’s a clever bit of misdirection, begging the question of what the disagreement is all about. It seems so reasonable on it’s surface, but beneath the surface it’s a sewer of shifty morals intended to make bigoted attacks on our lives appear to be reasoned and compassionate. Warren is giving us the motto of someone who can’t see the people for the homosexuals. It is itself the huge lie it purports to stand against.
There’s nothing complicated here: LGBT people don’t have lifestyles, we have lives. Not all disagreements are equal. If your convictions aren’t grounded by verifiable provable truths they are mere conceits. And where love is ruled by empty convictions, and not by sympathy, kindness, charity, and above all empathy, then it isn’t love at all, it’s sanctimony.
I’ve been watching clips of both Close and Young Hearts on various video social media. It’s given me a disjointed picture of both of them, but the plot summaries I’ve seen have helped me stitch them together. Close is tragic. The homophobia the kids in it experience from their peers drives them apart and the end of it is heartbreaking. Close is basically, near as I can tell, a story about prejudice. Young Hearts is a love story.
I have a fragmented view of this film, from watching the clips of it people have been posting from overseas. So I have almost zero knowledge of the dialog in the clips because the language is Dutch and when there are subtitles those are either in German or French…maybe I’ve seen one or two in English. But I can make out a bit of what’s being said from context, and the fragmentary and miniscule German I know when there are subtitles. And by guessing at the Dutch.
The first part of it is Elias becoming very fond of his new neighbor Alexander, and then falling in love with him. When he’s alone with Alexander he’s happy to acknowledge his love, but when it’s among classmates and family it gets complicated. Especially as he has a girlfriend he gradually becomes more distant to.
There a scene with Elias in the car with mom and his older brother in the front seat, and dad next to him in the back seat, and he comes out to them and it’s a very emotional scene. The kid is crying and telling them he tried to change but he couldn’t, and his mom stopping the car, getting out and coming back to him to tell him he doesn’t have to change, he is loved.
But in the clips I see I don’t get the reactions of dad and the older brother.
I suspect there was some static there because there is another scene that takes place at a costume party, Elias is wearing the costume of a knight and Alexander is dressed as the Joker. Elias tearfully breaks up with Alexander, telling him he isn’t gay like him (Alexander is played as being completely comfortable with his orientation, and not taking any static from his classmates), and that none of this would have happened if he had just stayed in Belgium. They have a fight, and it seems to be over.
But the synopsis I have read say they reconcile as Elias learns to accept himself with the support of his family, and eventually his girlfriend. So I kept looking around for clips of that. There is one where Elias is tossing pebbles at Alexander’s window in the middle of the night and he comes and Elias tries to get back with him but Alexander isn’t having any of it and pushes him away. So that one wasn’t it.
Last night someone posted the reconciliation scene to three Facebook reels. I’m doom scrolling (I guess it’s called now) and I hit this one I hadn’t seen before and it’s the moment the two kids put it behind them and get back together and no kidding it brought me to tears.
Elias is at some big outdoor party with lights and music…his dad is singing on stage…and he’s apparently looking around for Alexander and doesn’t find him and sits down on the grass distraught. Alexander was supposed to be there. Maybe he left because he didn’t want to run into Elias. But then Elias’ older brother comes over and tells him (I think), that Alexander is inside the main tent and he should go find him. Elias gives his older brother a joyful hug…I’m assuming it’s because now he knows his brother is good with it and still loves him. His brother pushes him off with a smile, telling him to go now and find Alexander.
So he goes through this crowd in the main tent looking for Alexander. And here the filmmakers pull out all the stops.
The scene goes into slightly slow motion, a beautiful evocative music soundtrack music comes in (it reminds me very much of passages in the music to In A Heartbeat, but the composers are different), and we see Elias stop suddenly and by the look on his face you know he’s spotted Alexander. I knew Exactly how that felt once upon a time, and that young actor made me relive it all over again. Butterflies like I haven’t had in decades. Then we see from his point of view Alexander, in the crowd, turn slightly, and see Elias. More butterflies.
Where do they get these young actors who are that damn good?? That one scene, just a minute or two maybe, is pure cinematic gold. I hope they and the filmmakers win every award they enter the film in. Not that I would expect the Motion Picture Academy to do anything for this film.
So the two of them reconcile, and then dad stops singing, steps off the stage and comes over to Elias and embraces him. And all the other grown up couples smile, and so does Elias’ girlfriend who accepts him now too. And the two of them, Elias and Alexander stand side by side, happy together again, and Elias puts his head on Alexander’s shoulder…and fade to black.
Supposedly it will be released for US audiences on March 15. Heh…the day after Valentine’s Day. But this is exactly the sort of thing the New American Order doesn’t want anyone to see, so I’m not sure it’ll actually get a USA release.
I bought a copy of Goodnight And Good Luck after seeing many ads in my feed for the play coming to Broadway starring George Clooney as Edward R. Murrow.
Tonight I could only watch maybe the first half of it.
It’s filmed in black and white, and the photography is not only first class, but I think it deliberately harkens back to the film styles of the mid 1950s. Certainly the detail in the clothing, furnishings, technology, and that practically every male in the cast is smoking, or at least holding a cigarette, makes you believe you are looking through a magic screen into the past. The filmmakers recreated that 1950s atmosphere with careful attention to detail.
The movie, and the broadway play, is summarized as the battle between Murrow and Senator Joe McCarthy. But what hits you in the face watching the beginning of it is the environment of the Red Scare. There’s a story at the beginning Murrow reports on, concerning a young airforce man who was convicted of being a subversive on the basis of that being defined as anyone who maintained a close relationship with a communist whether or not they were one themselves. The man was convicted on the basis of sealed documents that neither he, nor his lawyer, nor the presiding judges were allowed to look at. This, in the movie, is Murrow’s first strike at what America was becoming during the Red Scare.
Which was also a Lavender Scare. There’s a scene in the first half of Murrow hosting his Person To Person show. Murrow is interviewing, via television link (that was the show’s hook), to Liberace in his Hollywood home. Murrow’s questions to him are later shown in the cue cards a tech is holding off camera, which tells us they were scripted in advance, and these are not casual conversations between Murrow and his guests they are made to appear. Murrow asks Liberace if he’s planning on getting married soon. Liberace gives him the standard boilerplate about waiting for that perfect mate. Afterward, as the lights in the studio are turned off, Murrow sits alone with a cigarette looking very unhappy at what he had just done.
Before the See It Now broadcast about the young airforce man, two colonels show up in the office of Fred Friendly to basically tell him to scrap the story. We know things you don’t about this, how dare you question our findings. Friendly stands his ground. What findings? Who is making the accusations? How reliable is this source? But the tension in the air is palpable. The military is telling a news broadcaster not to air a story, just on their say-so.
And all for case that turns on a rule that says you are to be considered a subversive if you maintain a close relationship to a communist. It was his father and his sister, and the accusation wasn’t they were communists, but communist sympathisers. The Air Force told him he had to denounce them both. And he wouldn’t. So he was convicted of being a subversive himself.
Later, after some McCarthy hearings CBS was covering, Friendly is given a packet by a creepy man somewhere in the Capitol (who I suspect was supposed to represent Roy Cohn but I didn’t catch the name Friendly says). The packet allegedly contains proof that Murrow is a communist. Friendly walks away in disgust but asks if he can keep the packet. “Sure,” says the creep with a smile, “I’ve made copies.”
Shortly after that scene I had to turn it off. I’ll probably get back to it tomorrow, but I was thinking maybe I should have watched After The Thin Man instead. It was too much like what we are living through now, and that was the early to mid 1950s.
A criticism often leveled at the movie after it came out was that its portrayal of McCarthy was too over the top…not knowing that the clips of McCarthy used in it are actual news footage from those events.
McCarthy’s sidekick during his red baiting capitol hearings was Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn is, so I’m told, the man who taught Donald Trump everything about how to make the legal system turn against itself rather than you, and how to make powerful people afraid of you. It’s not just a likeness between then and now, it’s a bloodline.
It’s been a while since I’ve developed film. I can tell by how I had to wash all my measuring flasks before I began filling them with chemistry. That, and all the times I had to look up some figures in my Kodak dataguides because none of it was fresh in my memory.
I discovered something about how much I’ve aged in only a couple years or so. Thankfully the right hand doesn’t have the tremors my left does, but it’s there. I notice it when I’m trying to do some delicate work, like threading a developer tank spool. And the muscles in them are noticeably weaker. Either that or the crimping on the ends of the film cassettes has got tighter. It was a surprising amount of effort to pop them open with the cassette opener I’ve used since I was a teenager.
But I got four rolls of Tri-X Pan done. I’ll scan them in later and see how long they’ve been sitting there waiting to be developed.
The weakness and loss of fine precision in the hands is ominous. Maybe I can get some of it back by diving back into drawing. I could fill in some blanks in A Coming Out Story maybe…
I’ve been watching clips of this movie on various websites. It’s a stunning exploration of how deep friendship can be between boys, and the ways homophobic social pressure shatters lives. Leo and Remi are in love. It’s never made clear if either of them are actually gay, although I’m told it’s strongly suggested that Remi is and was to a degree self aware. But straight guys fall in love with other guys too in a deeply felt soul brother kind of way, and these two are very young. For a time they grow up in a place where closeness between boys was simply accepted as a part of growing up. That changes when the two move into a new school year.
Their closeness attracts the attention, and static, of classmates, which Leo cannot handle. He withdraws from Remi and it tears them both up with tragic consequences. I’ve seen it said on some forums that Leo capitulated to the homophobia of his classmates, and I think that’s completely unfair. These are kids. If you’ve never felt that pressure…and it comes at you from all directions, that contempt and loathing…consider yourself lucky. It’s too much for a lot of grown adults. It’s way too much for someone that age.
I’m not sure I’m going to watch this when it becomes available because it might be too much for me, even at my ancient age, or especially given what happened to me throughout my own life. I grew up in a period of time and a part of American culture when boys were expected to form close bonds and have a best friend. I had my best friends. We had sleepovers. We were close. What happened in my case was mom had to move several times so she could be close to the bus lines that got her to work. The separations tore me apart. It wasn’t until later in my teenage years that I began to realize it might have been different for me than it was with my friends. Maybe. I’ll never know for sure.
But back then the homophobic static wasn’t there nearly to the degree it is now, because nobody talked about That in front of kids. I didn’t start feeling it until middle school and by then I was keeping an emotional distance from the world around me. I had the additional burden/advantage of growing up around family that absolutely despised my dad and his side of the family, and would take it out on me because I was his son. So I grew up knowing that there would be people in my life who would hate me for something I couldn’t help being. I got use to it, which helped when my sexual orientation became undeniable.
The point is I know how all this feels and how it would have felt to the characters in this movie and I’m not sure I want to relive it again, especially given what happens.
That said, I’m glad that stories like this are finally being told. They need to be told. It’s a crime against humanity to attack closeness between friends, treat it with contempt, gay or straight. This movie is amazing, the young actors in it are pitch perfect in their roles. There is another one along the same themes, but which deals more specifically about gay love and romance, called “Young Hearts” that I’ll probably watch because so I’m told it has a more uplifting ending.
Both of these were made overseas. Close (2022) is a co-production between Belgium, France and the Netherlands. Young Hearts (2024) is a Belgian-Dutch co-production. Of course you knew neither one of these could have been made here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
This is making the rounds online. The story about the man who sold 100k worth of pianos to Trump’s casino was in the news prior to his getting elected the first time, yet people voted for him anyway. This gives us the perspective of the person working the other end of that small business disaster. Check out what Trump did to her son’s class graduation party…
I am so easy to manipulate once you have the key. Oh I can come off as a stubborn single minded I Don’t Care What You Think so and so, yes. Also The Brat can be provoked out of me given certain specific events. Just ask a certain German someone. But once someone has that key I can be talked out of or into practically anything.
Obviously I guard that key carefully. It’s why I will often just walk away from a situation I don’t want to be in, rather than talk it out and get dragged back into somewhere I don’t want to be, especially if it’s someone I like, or did like at some point. It’s very easy for me to brush off angry people. It’s super easy for me to take a walk from someone who questions my intelligence after I’ve already taken the measure of theirs and found it wanting. But if you have that key it’s nearly impossible for me to keep my mind made up about anything you don’t want me to keep it made up about.
So just a few days ago I got a shock at work, and that on top of all the changes to the work environment which had to be made for security reasons (the arms race in cyber space between the good guys and the bad never lets up and we have an active mission going on) made me determined to go back into retirement. I was in tears. A bit of software I’d created that I was intensely proud of got snatched out from me with no notice. I was simply cut out of it. That, and the constant security roadblocks I was colliding with trying to do the work I was tasked with, was too much for me. I’m 71 years old and too old for the stress and heartbreak. I had not come back out of retirement for all of this. I told them I was retiring. Again.
The short version of the story is I got talked out of it.
I’m easy.
I’m hoping we’ve all arrived at an understanding that I’m just keeping an open mind. I have not committed to staying. We will, hopefully, work though things and see if the solutions proposed are agreeable to me after all.
But I have my doubts. There is more to me than the computer nerd/software engineer, but all of it centers on the fact that I am (yes I know it sounds pretentious to say so) an artist. I bring that to everything I do creatively. If the work isn’t worth giving my heart to, then it’s not worth doing. You only get one life and let me reach back into the religion of my childhood and say (I mean this) that it’s a sin to allow yourself to do work without heart. It’s like sex without love. Okay…yes…I realize there are people who are fine with that as long as the money is good. I am not. It’s why for most of my young adult life I bopped from one job to another to another. Once my heart stopped being in it, I was tendering my resignation. Although sometimes I got the boot before that when my sexual orientation became an issue. Which I was fine with because I don’t want to be anywhere people like me are held in contempt either.
There is art I have brought to my work that I must continue to be able to bring to it if I am to stay long term. In the short term, there is a Very Important project I am committed to bringing forth, a proof of concept, and I am going to do that however the f*ck I have to, because I agree it is Very Important and I am Going to get it done.
So at some point today I’ll probably log back onto Facebook. But the week without wasn’t so bad at all, allowing that I felt disconnected from my friends, classmates, and co-workers. They tend not to show up anywhere else like on Blue Sky. So I’ll be back if only to maintain my connection there. But that’s all. I happily found plenty of online entertainment to while away the hours when I should be doing something else, elsewhere.
I am on BlueSky (@brucegarrett.bsky.social). Whiling away the hours scrolling through my BlueSky feed is fun and informative, but getting a constant stream of Oh God What The Fuck Has Trump Done Now can be painful at times. I know we need to stay aware, but you have to be careful not to let it deliver you into despair.
YouTube is easy and fun to just scroll through, even if you haven’t bought the subscription. My brother does this for hours as a way of decompressing after work. This is almost a one on one replacement for Instagram, which is a Meta site, but I remain looking for an alternative source of still photography of cute guys. The video clips of movies and TV shows are nice.
I joined Reddit after reading about the MAGA bellyaching that it was freezing out or limiting the reach of Nazis on the site. I took a look and found a lot of chatter about banning crossposting from Musk’s Twitter, all of which was positive. So I signed in and discovered a rich source of information and entertainment I can scroll through untainted by MAGA/Nazi poison. I was assigned a very weird login name but I can change by visible user name at some point to my own I think.
The only thing I really missed was hearing from friends and classmates. Only one regularly posts on BlueSky and I don’t think any of them are on Reddit, and I get nearly no traffic on this life blog. So the only place I have online to chat with friends and family is Facebook. This is how Meta keeps us hostage to its business model, which Zuckerberg is tilting hard, toxic masculinity right. But we don’t have to capitulate. A former Meta lawyer, fed up with it, posted this and bullet point 2 is especially relevant here:
No more clicking through to buy things. No more checking in. And in the future I’ll be looking for ways to keep Meta cookies off my computers and smartphone because my online activity is also something Meta sells to advertisers. I have location services turned off on the smartphone apps, and I’ll be looking for any chatter about Meta working around that.
When I came back home after getting stuck in California due to the bad weather in Kansas, my first thought was to get my car started. But that had to wait because the temperature here in Charm City was in the single digits and I caught (I think) a flu on the way back. So I was stuck inside until I got over that enough I could go outside and look the car over.
I’ll go into more detail about my adventures coming home eventually, but for now just know that the plan was to visit my brother and family in Oceano for a couple weeks during the holidays by train. I would enjoy a lovely trip out to the west coast in a sleeper car roomette with all my meals provided for and just a carry-on bag with everything I needed for the trip. I’d sent all the clothes and other things I would need while there to him by mail. The plan was to travel light, kick back, and enjoy the ride there and back.
I’ve done that trip by train over the holidays several times with no trouble and it almost worked this time too. Snow and ice getting to Chicago had slowed the trains down but never stopped them. But on the trip back my train was stopped in Albuquerque and had to go back to Los Angeles due to bad weather in Kansas. This eventually turned into an additional two weeks in California, which I didn’t mind very much at all except the weather in Baltimore was getting cold and snowy enough I started worrying about the house and the car. I have an app now that lets me fiddle with the home’s thermostat setting remotely and check the outside temperature. I had the water to the house turned off…SOP whenever I travel…so I was not worried about frozen pipes. But I started obsessing about the roof leaking. That’s happened several times since I’ve owned the house…it’s a flat roof…and I worry about it every time it snows. But the house was fine when I got back. Life was simpler when I was a renter.
My Mercedes-Benz is an ‘E’ class diesel sedan. You don’t want to be leaving a diesel sitting for long times in cold weather. I was pretty sure the local suppliers were pumping diesel with the usual anti-gel additives for cold weather before I left, but now I was also worried about the DEF tank heaters and the batteries. The batteries (a Mercedes ‘E’ class has two) would be running the DEF tank heaters the entire time and I was keeping my fingers crossed that they had enough juice to tide them over until I managed to get back. Since they’d just been replaced last year I should have been more confident than I was but I tend to over think these things. Also, I’d had to replace the DEF tank heaters at 120k (at a cost of nearly two grand!) and the car has almost 210k on it now. I was told then that the famous Daimler incremental improvement regime did not extend to the DEF tank heaters (it did apparently extend to the NOx detectors I’d had to replace at around 50k, but that put them into warranty territory).
When I was finally able to go outside and start the car up I was encouraged by the fact that the key-dongles opened the doors and flashed the lights without hesitation. I still had batteries. I inserted the key…my car was made before keyless go was standard…and clicked it over twice to the full power on position. I let it sit there for a few seconds while the car went through all the sounds of coming awake. My car doesn’t have glow plugs but, so I’m told, pre-heaters in the fuel injectors. I gave them time to come up to temperature. Then I turned the key to start.
I have Never heard my car groan so painfully at cold start, but it was just for an instant and then it turned and caught right away. I felt a wave of relief. The plan was to just let it sit and idle until the engine got up to temperature, then drive it around the neighborhood for a bit and see what the tire pressure monitor says. I sat for a while just listening to the car.
Apart from the factory and distributor I am its first and only owner. I grew up in a period where the rule of thumb was you bought the car new and drove it for about 50k, then traded it in for another car. Wash, rinse, repeat. You did that because as cars got older they were more trouble. But that was Detroit back before Japan started kicking their butts, and it was never what you did with a Mercedes-Benz. Unless you were an empty status symbol seeker you kept your Mercedes for life. Especially if it is a diesel. And besides, the home I grew up in was a do it yourself, waste not want not, replace only if you can’t repair household. I kept my first car, a 1973 Ford Pinto for 136k. What I learned from it was you hold onto a car you come to know its every little quirk and sound, and intuitively how it behaves on this or that road surface. You and the car are one.
So I sat there listening to my car after it had sat for weeks in snow and ice and single digit temperatures and I could tell it was feeling sluggish though it was idling smoothly. That muscular diesel sound has always been reassuring to me in cold weather. I could see it needed road salt cleaned off it even though it hadn’t been driven anywhere. I assumed that was from passing salt trucks on my street, and splashing road slush onto it from passing cars. The windshield had a dusting of road salt and I pressed the wiper stalk to clear it off. Nothing happened.
Oh boy… So I popped the hood and got out to take a look. Ice was bulging out of my washer fluid tank. I was appalled. I use a special Mercedes washer fluid concentrate which I mix to stay liquid at -10 degrees and it never got that cold here while I was away. I popped the trunk and got out the bottle of washer fluid mix I top off the reservoir with. It was fine, no ice, not even a hint of it. But the reservoir under the hood had frozen. Someone during one of my service or car wash visits had topped off the reservoir with their own washer fluid and it wasn’t rated down to the temperatures we’d had. I had to go back inside, mix up some more washer fluid, and get a chisel to clear the ice out of the reservoir while I kept topping the reservoir off with good washer fluid.
Eventually I got it cleared of ice but the washer motor still wouldn’t run. I figured either it was now damaged and had to be replaced, or a fuse had blown when I made the first attempt at running it. So I made an appointment with the mechanics I use to have it looked at. In the meantime the engine was at temperature now, so it was time to take the car for a wee shakedown drive.
I’m here to tell you that there is no rental car I will ever enjoy driving more than my car. It felt like coming home sitting in its driver seat and navigating my way through the neighborhood. The car responded to my touch of the wheel and my foot on the pedals like an old friend. I could feel the road under me like I hadn’t with the rental cars I’d had in California. It was wonderful. I think there and then I promised myself no more train rides this year. I’ll drive it to Walt Disney World later in March. Maybe again in June for Gay Days.
Surprisingly the tire pressure monitor was telling me that I still had the correct air pressure in all four tires, despite the single digit temperatures. I tried the washer squirter one more time. This time, the engine compartment at temperature, it worked perfectly. All it needed was to be warmed up and the last of the ice inside melted. So I cancelled the mechanics appointment. Then I drove up I-83 to the suburbs and filled the tank with fresh diesel.
Apparently it’s the only fish in that tank, which could be, and I sincerely hope is, because that kind of fish doesn’t take well to others. So I’m told by people who keep aquariums, you have to be careful about introducing others into the tank. But it had an audience that it clearly enjoyed as much as the public enjoyed visiting it. And then it lost its audience, and it stopped eating. Tell me that wasn’t depression. Just a fish you say?
In the night I heard him whining and yapping, and when I turned the lights on his feet were making running gestures and his body jerked and his eyes were wide open, but it was only a night bear. I awakened him and gave him some water. This time he went to sleep and didn’t stir all night. In the morning he was still tired. I wonder why we think the thoughts and emotions of animals are simple.
– John Steinbeck, “Travels With Charley”.
Deep within all of us is the beating heart of life on Earth.
[And Also…] This from Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social?) at Blue Sky…
Imagine spending your life being a second-generation NASA employee — she [Janet Petro] was running NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center before this week — and having it come to this.
A lot of people are making a lot of decisions already this week that should stay with them for life.
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