The Blivet And The Elf

Big Bird

Bald Eagle Again Today

It landed in front and posed for these pictures.

The Story Of The Eggs

A guy we know here on the island raises chickens.

And the chickens even have a retirement policy: when they get too old to lay eggs they stay on until the die of natural causes; he doesn’t convert his kids’ friends to meat on the table.

Recently he gave us some of the eggs.

Like French eggs, these hadn’t been washed so they didn’t need to be refrigerated.

They were so pretty that we left them on the counter for several days admiring them.

But it seemed that they should be used, and we did – use them – but we memorialized their passing with appropriate images.

The big one became the Huevos in a plate of Rancheros:

The others joined some locally harvested oyster mushrooms in an omelet.

We hope the chickens are pleased when they read this post.

Bullfrog

Over time I have posted several reprises of images gathered from walks while waiting for the ferry.

Here is a single image from a recent one of those walks.

I saw this guy sitting there in the wetland bordered by the boardwalk, thinking deep thoughts – or so he said when I interviewed him.

Or maybe he said he was “deep in it”, which he was – halfway up from the ooze – frog is a very difficult language to catch sometimes. 

The verbs are fairly vague.

Anyway here he is.

My son said it looks like a picture of me sitting on a stool at the end of the bar at The Galley.

Pine Needles In The Rain

A Bald Eagle Today

This one sat on the railing at the edge of a small wetland this morning.

The wetland harbors frogs and an otter family that likes to eat frogs.

The eagle was probably looking for either or both.

Another Picture Of Goldfish In A Pond In Florence

Goldfish In A Pond In Florence

A few years ago.

Macaulay Reaches Across Time

I am about 500 pages into the fourth (of five) volumes of Macaulay’s History of England.

There are numerous places where the author makes observations from his time, based on the events of the history that he is describing, that are so relevant to our time that it is mildly unnerving.

His comments on national debt made me laugh uproariously.

He would have ripped Paul Ryan and his coterie of idiots and sycophants.

But it was his final statement about the battle of Neerwinden from 1693 that straddle the ages.

Neerwinden is not far from Brussels.

Here is the quote.

“The region, renowned as the battlefield, through many ages, of the greatest powers of Europe, has seen only two more terrible days, the day of Malplaquet and the day of Waterloo. During many months the ground was strewn with skulls and bones of men and horses, and with fragments of hats and shoes, saddles and holsters.  The next summer the soil, fertilized by twenty thousand corpses, broke forth into millions of poppies.  The traveller, who, on the road from St. Tron to Tirlemont, saw that vast sheet of rich scarlet spreading from Landen to Neerwinden, could hardly help fancying that the figurative prediction of the Hebrew prophet was literally accomplished, that the earth was disclosing her blood, and refusing to cover the slain”.

He couldn’t have known what was still to come for that ground.

I have stood on Macaulay’s grave in Westminster Abbey and thanked him for this book.

Les Champignons De Parc Montsourris

I was wandering around Parc Montsourris one beautiful sunny morning one November looking for parrots when I saw these wonderful things.

The Bolton Model

Looks like Ghenghis Bolton may not last any longer than "The Mooch" Scarmuchi.
The hubris - or stupidity - required to use the term “Libya Model” to describe his views of prerequisite conditions for the much vaunted (donnie is going to get the Nobel Prize)  - talks with little rocket man to proceed is mind boggling.

One Spring In Bois de Boulogne

Oh, Is That What Really Happened?

I Understand that one of the algorithms that Cambridge Analytica developed with the 87 million American Facebook users’ data was one that could cause targeted individuals not to vote.

I guess the Russians bought that algorithm.

We are learning – substantially beyond conjecture – the Putin wanted Trump to win.

We are beginning to learn what really happened when Little Donnie, Jared and the other usual factotums met with the Russians in June 2016 in Trump Tower to discuss the dirt the Russians had on Hillary.

We are retroactively interested in donnie’s political rally comment the following day that the trump campaign would be imminently releasing damning information about “the Clintons”.

So we have what could be construed to be a curious confluence of algorithm (computer program) and information (computer data – the “dirt” on the Clintons).

If only 70,000 targeted voters spread across Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin – black voters for instance – could have been been convinced not to vote, donnie would have won the 2016 election.

Huh?

As I understand it (but I only get mainstream fake news, so who knows) for the last month or so a bunch of Palestinians who are trapped with no jobs, little food or water and spotty electricity between a big beautiful wall (big fence) and the Mediterranean Sea have been going to their side of the fence and started yelling and burning tires. 

In response the Israeli army shoots a lot of them through the fence. 

Forty some today. 

I assume that they are just filming unruly crowd scenes for some upcoming Israeli cinematic production. 

It’s really nice of all those Palestinians to volunteer as extras. 

Or so I think. 

What Giuliani Is Doing

He’s running the Putin Playbook. Read The Invention of Russia by Arkady Ostrovsky for more on this. 

The Cost Of World Dominance

This has been a thing that has been lurking in the back of my mind for quite a while.

But what it was was never clear; it was merely something unresolved that I knew to be there – in the back of my mind.

Today, this morning, while listening to Public Radio, what it was moved to the front of my mind with frightening clarity: “In the face of the never ending cascade of disastrous – for the world – decisions donnie keeps promulgating, the office of the presidency of the United States of America is too important to the world to confine its franchise to Americans only; at the very least the European Union, Japan, Canada, and non-US/Canadian North America deserve to have an equal popular vote to US citizens, and some sort of accommodation in the Electoral College, for as long as that anachronism persists”.

A follow on thought immediately came to mind: “donnie is fucking everything up to the point that the US is imminently a third world, de-developing country, so our influence on anything is short lived to the point of months”.

How self solvingly efficient.

Just Hypothesizing: Here Comes The Binnie/donnie Nuclear War Show

It could be that donnie really has the delusion of adequacy that he keeps asserting to have.

And having a laughably bogus appointment in Singapore in June does nothing to make me feel that to be other than true.

But I have begun to see a shape to his delusions.

And the shape is ugly, as ugly as its progenitor.

I think donnie and Binnie have cooked up a deal where they are going to force Iran to bomb multiple cities in Israel which would, of course, force an immediate and nuclear Israeli attack on Iran.

Israel has just been itching for this for years.

And donnie wants to be significant: what could be more significant than reducing Iran to ashes – and without any obviously American fingerprints, warplanes, missiles or pilots?

“What a deal!” I think I heard John Bolton shriek.

I guess we don’t need to worry much about trade wars anymore.

The Art Of The Deal?

After consistently denying even being aware of the existence of Stormy Daniels, donnie, today, acknowledged that he reimbursed his (“he’s not really my attorney”) attorney for a $130,000 payment to this person donnie had never heard of.

I get real nervous about sending donnie to negotiate with Kim Jung Un if he – donnie – just forks over money to anybody that shows up and says he – donnie – has indulged in hanky panky.

I can picture Omaha being converted to HQ NKNUKES.