Maybe A Better Year Ahead?

 

My Favorite Spot For Lunch In Paris

Parc Montsouris:

I like the seat in the foreground.

I make really good sandwiches poulettes.

I can't spell it though.

 

Giverny: Monet's Pond

 I wandered around the site for hours in 2014.

This is one of my favorite images, even more favorite than a couple fairly interesting attempts at The Water Lilies.

Cinq And Me Discussing Cornbread

 One of our cats likes to sit at the counter like Norm in Cheers.

He normally just sits and participates in the conversation.

Sometimes something we are eating is such that he gets more aggressive than normal acceptable human protocols should tolerate; but we just make him back off and, usually, offer whatever it is to him in a cat saucer on the floor at his eating station.

He then eats whatever it was.

Recently some corn bread went through that drill; when it was in his saucer on the floor he just turned up his nose and went back to his stool at the counter.

So we brought the saucer over to the counter and put it in font of him.

He ate the entire saucer.

On his second saucer he and I discussed the nuances of really good corn bread.

A Bird Across From France

 The crow in le Jardin du Luxembourg - from a previous post - went out on the international bird image blog.

I got a lot of comments from birds all over the world saying "good pic", "great catch" and similar accolades.

The one that caught my attention, though, was: "you always favor the 'pretty' birds (jays, house finches, goldfinches etc.) and when you do deign to feature one of us black colored birds, you always either have a Paris crow or a cormorant on the cop dock on quais Bernard. I am a cormorant, and proud of it. But I live in Anacortes on the Salish Sea; so you would never take a picture of  me, let alone feature it in the blog of yours; so go screw yourself".

It was unsigned.

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So I looked back through a lot of Anacortes pictures that I have taken, a lot of them of cormorants and found the best of breed.

Here it is.

I don't know his/her name: if you - the he/she in this image - see this let me know what your name is.

Nice sheen on your breast plate.

A Message I've Always Wondered About ...

 Is this a warning?

My Favorite Image Of The Lady

 Sometimes you just get lucky ...

A Paris Crow Playing The Eagle

 There are lots of crows in le Jardin du Luxembourg.

I like taking pictures of crows.

They are such interesting and involved creatures.

I don't remember taking this image but I must have been expecting some motion, because it's not a bad action shot; I guess I could have gone with a faster shutter, but that would have been trading clarity for the - sometimes it works this way - drama of a little blur.

Anyway, here we have a Paris crow playing eagle in Le Jardin.

Another Session With The President

 Jacques showed up again today.

It was really good to see him.

Inopportune, but nonetheless good. 

Again, so recently having had his company quite recently in the donnie won't leave the white house fiasco.

Jacques was pounding on the front door of our house in Seattle where I have had to repair due to repairs - auto (Mercedes always needs repair) I think repairing for repairs gets some sort of award for punnishness, by the way.

I was surprised that he had found me.

I guess I should not have been.

Surprised.

When I opened the door he was standing there covered with spider webs (I never use that door and the spiders have made it a haven); he said "we need to go see The President again.

And so we did.

And before I could even think of a reply, let alone vocalize one, I was elsewhere.  Jacques stood next to me in a huge room with a table in its center and people seated at the table.

A doorman said to Jacques “Pardon me sir, who is your guest?”

“Noel from the Twenty First Century.”

“Ah, yes – a troubled time.”

“Just so.”

“So take your seats in the chairs set out for the observers.  The meeting is just starting.”

And we seated ourselves and a voice rang out un-assisted by electronic amplification.

“Who called this meeting?”

The speaker was hunched over his writing desk set off to the side, as were our observer chairs – unlike almost all of the other Leaders he eschewed a place at the huge narrow, but, it seemed, infinitely long, rectangular table that filled the meeting room (although there were a few others who chose his type of workspace) – and he had just dipped his quill into his pot of ink when word had arrived that a meeting had been called.

He was fairly short and dumpy, and was bald at the major central part of his head, the baldness being compensated by flowing locks down below the crown of his pate; it was a genuinely eighteenth century look.

Indeed.

“I think it was The President” a short, trim fellow in the uniform of eighteenth century artillery general’s uniform replied.

(Actually, he said something such as “je pense il etait le president”, and that statement was uttered with a heavy Corsican accent.  But this apparently was a post-life group, and language had become subliminally understandable to all of its members.)

As if in support of that assertion, a very tall, very dignified man in a blue revolutionary war American uniform entered the room.

He had apparently heard the question - and the answer - because he said “ It has been coming to us that that which we had expected to happen in only a few years and that which Thomas had always said was necessary for the refreshment of our society - that we tear up the document and start over – has finally after much longer than we had thought has begun to happen”.

“Therefore, as a member of this Council – we being an aggregate of equals – The council of The Leaders, I have asked for a plenary session to summon a representative from the Twenty First Century (a mild rumble of sound accompanied the mention of that century) to explain the problem so that we may rectify it.”

“Here, Here” was the rising cry as the members took their seats, or in a few cases, their writing desks and prepared to discuss what should be done.

“Since you all know my discomfort with extensive public speaking, I ask that you allow me to delegate leadership of the discussion” said The President.

Since the Council of Leaders was, as The President had previously said, a council of equals, anyone could call a session, and the protocol followed that he, or she who called the meeting, chaired the meeting, and led any discussion that the meeting generated. 

But that protocol also allowed for unusual cases to accommodate members’ unique requirements.  It allowed the delegation of a meeting’s leadership in special cases. 

This was one of those cases.  The President was not a speaker; he was a leader.  And he accomplished the things he accomplished through his influence on others, not on his rhetoric.

So the protocol was invoked.

The protocol said that once such a delegation request had been made, it followed that there would be an automatic and proforma unanimous agreement by vocal acclamation.

“Hear, hear” said the chorus of voices that rose from the assembled Council.

“I would like to ask Winston to chair for me, in that case.”

“Hear, hear.”

An older gentleman with something of a stooped posture, wearing what appeared to be a British naval uniform from the Twentieth Century left a writing desk and took has position at the rostrum in the dead middle of the vast meeting room – it was enclosed by that gigantic rectangular table that squared the room.  A small opening in that table at its apparent head was the access point that had allowed Sir Winston to take his place.

“I am honored, Mr. President; let’s be on with it then, shall we?” he said.

“I once had a similar duty assigned to me in The House of Commons and I was confronted then, as I am now, with the need to ask this question: Mr. President, with all due deference to your aversion for public speaking, we nonetheless need to have some indication of the case you perceive to be at hand. Could you, therefore enlighten us?  You, of course, may be succinct.”

“Succinct is good” seemed to be a murmur from the assembly.

The President stood, rising from his place at the huge table.  Then he put his right hand flat on the table; his left hand he put to his chin in what looked – initially - to be that gesture that always seems seems to imply a pondering mood – Rodin used it with The Thinker - on the part of the person employing the gesture.  But the hand didn’t remain at rest in place on The President’s chin.  It moved up briefly covering a major part of his mouth.  And he seemed to push something in backwards into place; then he removed the hand.

Then he spoke.

" Winston, apologies; but as I consider what I know, I am unable to delegate this; donnie has finally gone over the edge; counts, re-counts, court cases, even at the Supreme Court; and it all keeps coming out the same: he lost; and now he is going to veto a financial lifeboat for tens of millions of his fellow citizens; and he has pardoned convicted murderers.

"Noel, you have to take this message to our people in your time.

"It is long past time to invoke the Twenty Fifth Amendment".

I bowed.

"May I use your name, when I tell them, sir?"

"You may; but it will cause riotous laughter.

"So I would suggest that you just get a good lawyer".

As I write this I am back in Seattle.

I guess Jacques has gone back to Paris.

But, as he went out the door and fought off the spiders he said "we are really screwed".

Ice Crystals

 I saw ice crystals on a juniper one morning recently.

They are amazingly beautiful.

I wondered if they would look better as a black and white, or as a color image.

A Lot Of Images This Time!

 

Taken in Bois de Boulogne.  I have never seen a Parrot there; I have seen them on Quai St Bernard, Jardin des Plantes, Bois de Vincenne, rue Henri IV, and just out larking down the river by Le Berges, but never in le Bois de Boulogne.

I think seeds are beautiful.

Part of Pont Alexandre III

I call these wood pigeons; I think they are related to the band tailed pigeons of the American Pacific Northwest.

La Seine a la neige.

I love thistles as photographic subjects; as plants I root them out.

I met this guy under Pont St Michel.

Somewhere in Paris

I felt lucky to get this one.

Napoleon Couldn't Do It

 He wanted to blockade all incoming trade from Britain.

The British navy had other ideas and trade got through.

It looks as if Boris Johnson, by sticking to the position that the EU needs to give Britain the same trade terms and conditions that she had as an EU member - an idiotic proposition on its face - and Covid 19 by mutating in London and south England are going to accomplish the blockade.

The UK is an island with a little chunk of territory on an adjacent, smaller, island.

For centuries that was an advantage.

If you were going to win wars by being the balancer of power, having had a little time, space and distance to study the options was always an advantage.

Recently, however, the insular mindset that that historic fact has carried into current times has proved to be increasingly damaging: 75 million people on a couple of islands are not going to compete very well with 1.2 billion people who have the world's second largest economy and currently own most of Africa, or with 450 million people just across the water from them who have in aggregate the world's second largest economy (China is counted differently; it uses the Big Mac Index) or even with the 320 million people who live in its former colony in North America.

As the boats, trains, planes and lorries stack up off island and quickly turn to other endeavors it is going to be interesting to see how far a stiff upper lip goes these days.

She Described The Problem With Brilliance ...

 I cut the cable years back.

And I got rid of the various hulks of television that had CRTs.

I paid guys to come and heft them out of my house.

And NPR and The Economist were my only sources of information; and that was good.

My daughter in law decided somewhere in that time that an old man without a TV was an endangered species.

What could he yell at?

So, she bought me a television of the new flat screen type.

And I bought an over the air DTV antenna to try to find what it might be that the local TV stations were transmitting, as the law required, over the air,

And I could get a few channels.

Things went forward fairly calmly for awhile.

But then the trump attack beset American Democracy, and, I guess, it won; but there were still some of us with hope.

My hope had been lodged in the brilliance of American comedians attacking donnie. 

Like Colbert, and Meyers and Noah.

So when I recently wandered back to an episode of Roseanne delivered by my DTV  antenna - no fees involved - and saw the brilliance of how she and Dan and her friends and her kids were describing the problem that donnie has exploited and exacerbated - I could not figure out how Roseanne got from a brilliant description of America's problem to an endorsement of a Mussolini  wannabe (how could anyone wannabe like Mussolini?).

How could she describe the problem so brilliantly - that seems to me to involve fairly impressive analytical powers - and come to the conclusion that donnie the dildo was the answer to the problem?

I just don't know. 

I guess mental illness.

Which is which?

And what has happened to America?

A Variety Of Pictures Suitable For Viewing By Children

Iceberg Point on Lopez island

A rainy day in New Zealand

The Paris Aquarium Tropical

Honfleur  waterfront

Under a bridge on the Seine

In a tree on Lopez island

In Bois de Boulogne

The end of the show? Lopez Island fireworks

Most People Don't Think Of Frogs When They Think Of Paris

 But I do.

They are in le Jardin des Plantes.

Wonderful creatures.

Here are a few.

Impasse: How The Republic Crumbles - And is Crumbling ...

 Two of my posts in the last few weeks have been executed with the purest of intentions, including the fact that they were what I was thinking about something - anything - at the moment that I had posted them

But one of my dominant characteristics is that I have some sort of index that I keep about what I think and what I have said over time about what it is that I think.

That can make me pretty redundant over time, which is one of - I assume, many - reasons that I have had no success in literature.

But sometimes the index is useful, and sometimes the things that I have said fit together better that they stand alone.

On November 14 2020, I posted:

"So far all the spaghetti that donnie has been throwing against the wall continues to slide down into a nasty inedible pile on the floor: judges keep saying donnie's legal challenges read like scripts from the theatre of the absurd.

But one high level nasty possibility keeps floating above the fray: the republican legislatures in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan can remove the electors that are directed by the results of the recent election and replace them with electors instructed to vote for donnie.

That's 46 electoral votes.

That's giving the election to donnie.

That is overturning what the VOTERS decided.

The only problem appears to be that for this election cycle, the year 2020, those republicans really can't change the law that says the electors WILL vote for whomever won the election in the states considering this nullification of the people's will; that law was signed into existence prior to 3 November 2020 in the states with republicans considering intervention and it can't be retroactively abrogated in those states; that is the thinking; I guess we will see.

So, in the best of worlds a few states won't be able to say that the PEOPLE have no right to vote for the President of the United States.

It's amazing in donnieWorld how little it takes to make a good day.

But even that paltry good day would be an ephemeral and transient phenomenon: those same legislatures actually can change the law for 2024, saying that the legislature will direct the electors how to vote, non respective to whatever the voters decide; I assume Ohio, just to be safe would pass the same law.

That's 64 electoral votes when Ohio is included.

So I guess I see why donnie thinks he has a chance in 2024.

And I guess I see what Ol' Mitch and the boys will be doing to any attempt by the Biden administration to improve the lot of everyday Americans: "lex nihil".

The only thing I guess I don't see, is why would we even have an election in 2024?

If my logic and facts here are valid, and if the question derivative of them is equally valid, it is obvious that the United States really has become a tin pot dictatorship on a smooth glidepath to 2024. "

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On December 5, 2020 I posted:

"Jacques showed up today.

It was really good to see him.

It has been several years.

We first met in an apartment in Paris where he was eating croissant crumbs and I was lapsing into sleep in a kitchen chair.

On that occasion he was there to tell me that I needed to "find her" or "help her" or something like that.

That had had to do with a relationship spanning 5000 years.

I guess that it turned out well.

And I  have seen him subsequently several times, always in Paris.

This is the first time that he has contacted me on the Salish Sea.

He did that stand there with his hands on his hips thing - being a mouse that has always been an odd pose, but that has always been they way he has acted around me,

Maybe that's the way he acts with everyone.

I have no way to know.

But there he was this time on the island.

He was pounding on the front door - the door on the side of the house that is opposite the water - and I thought that that was pretty ridiculous, but I humored him; he could have just opened the door and come in, since his non opposable thumb wasn't needed for doorknob twisting, but he was being "proper".

What a pain in the ass when your best friends feel that they need to be "proper".

But he did.

Feel that need.

On all previous occasions I have been taken by Jacques to a thing called The Council of Leaders.

It's members are Napoleon, Catherine the great, FDR, Harry and so forth and so on.

Every time I have ever been there it has been chaired by George Washington - they call him The President.

This time the room was empty.

Or so it seemed until the lights came up a bit and sitting alone there was The President.

He looked at me with an expression that was sad, distant and intense.

"Save my country".

"I am just a citizen".

"But you care".

"I do; but we are beyond caring".

"Yes; donnie has nearly destroyed us, but someone needs to act in response; you can try, at least; you can try; you can try".

And then he started to cry; he cried huge lung rending sobs.

"Save my country".

"Somebody, save ..."

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When I wrote these I didn't see the relationship; I was merely documenting how I was feeling.

****************************************************************

If you want to read about my earlier encounter with The President: Noel McKeehan: Adventures and Opinions: Another Day in Paris: I Meet President Washington (noellivefromparis.blogspot.com)

donnie From The Point Of View Of The President

 Jacques showed up today.

It was really good to see him.

It has been several years.

We first met in an apartment in Paris where he was eating croissant crumbs and I was lapsing into sleep in a kitchen chair.

On that occasion he was there to tell me that I needed to "find her" or "help her" or something like that.

That had had to do with a relationship spanning 5000 years.

I guess that it turned out well.

And I  have seen him subsequently several times, always in Paris.

This is the first time that he has contacted me on the Salish Sea.

He did that stand there with his hands on his hips thing - being a mouse that has always been an odd pose, but that has always been they way he has acted around me,

Maybe that's the way he acts with everyone.

I have no way to know.

But there he was this time on the island.

He was pounding on the front door - the door on the side of the house that is opposite the water - and I thought that that was pretty ridiculous, but I humored him; he could have just opened the door and come in, since his non opposable thumb wasn't needed for doorknob twisting, but he was being "proper".

What a pain in the ass when your best friends feel that they need to be "proper".

But he did.

Feel that need.

On all previous occasions I have been taken by Jacques to a thing called The Council of Leaders.

It's members are Napoleon, Catherine the great, FDR, Harry and so forth and so on.

Every time I have ever been there it has been chaired by George Washington - they call him The President.

This time the room was empty.

Or so it seemed until the lights came up a bit and sitting alone there was The President.

He looked at me with an expression that was sad, distant and intense.

"Save my country".

"I am just a citizen".

"But you care".

"I do; but we are beyond caring".

"Yes; donnie has nearly destroyed us, but someone needs to act in response; you can try, at least; you can try; you can try".

And then he started to cry; he cried huge lung rending sobs.

"Save my country".

"Somebody, save ..."

The Beauty Of Our Future

 Black people are going to save America.

I heard that frequently in the days before our recent election.

And I was certainly a believer in that premise.

It looked to me as if James Clyburn had already done it by making it possible for Joe Biden to win the nomination.

And Stacy Abrahms just kept doing it - every day - getting people registered to vote in Georgia.

And they were only two members of a huge population of patriots.

So when so many showed up at the polls, bucked the lines, ignored the threats and pushed aside the attempts at repressing their vote Mr. Biden won.

And America might have been saved; time will tell.

But the components of salvation are present.

Among them being our new Vice President.

But she, like everything we are all hoping for, remains to be seen, and heard, and followed.

Of all the the things that have lifted the pall that descended upon the land on the 8th of November in 2016, the people elected in 2020, and the change that they have promised are the most important.

So we shall see.

*****************************************************************

The cover of the New Yorker, as usual, has summed it all up.

This young woman's eyes are glowing with the hope that she now has for the future.

But, I think, the real message is that she is seeing that future.

And for the first time that future includes her.

In fact that future, really, is her.

A Few Images 120220

I always take a backdoor route to Sacre Coeur. 

I wonder why they are called golden crowned?

Fox Tail grass seed.  Probably a relative of wheat?

There are lots of sweet gums in Paris.

A Northwest tree frog

Horse chestnut leaves look like palm trees when they are little.

I guess somebody forgot to replace the bilge drain plug.

If you go in the front way ...

BIG Bucks From Nothin'

 Remember the great housing bubble of 2009?

That was the phenomenon caused by a decade or more of predatory mortgage loans made by BIG MONEY.

The format was simple: get some poor stupid schmuck with no money to sign for a mortgage that he couldn't afford but make the front end terms and conditions so lenient that the poor schmuck could make a couple of payments; once a mortgage had been closed, quick like a bunny, BIG MONEY loaded it and all the huge pile of recent other schmucks into huge batches of other schmuck mortgages creating gigantic incomprehensible securities and sold them to investors; they were dubbed investment grade securities; they were in fact fictional securities.

When that fiction began to unravel as the schmucks ceased paying, the financial system first, of the United States, and then of the entire world flirted with collapse.

Something had to be done.

So Ol' Mitch and the boys came up with a trillion dollars to bail out the banks; a key use of those funds was to pay all the year end bonuses due to the bankers (the clerical people of BIG MONEY all lost their jobs of course).

Most people's interpretation of the BIG MONEY Schmuck Mortgage story would have seen pretty clear cut massive criminality, but nobody went to jail.

Somewhere in all of that the government ended up owning a huge batch of Securitized Schmuck Mortgages (SSMs).

Everybody was trying to figure out what to do with all that fictional paper.

The solution turned out to be to give it all away.

People like Steve Mnuchin were given paper with a face value of hundreds of billions but a fact value of nothing.

And "Nothin' aint worth nothin' but it's free".

However, there was a way to make fiction have value, since the real estate was real, it was the ability to pay for it that was fictional.

To milk the value out of all of that fictional paper all Ol' Steve had to do was turn all the people who had signed the pretend mortgages into the street.

Once they were on the street the homes that they had been occupying could be fixed up - Steve isn't a poor man, just a well positioned one - and sold.

It turned out there was massive cash available in the world, and that cash loved buying heavily discounted American real estate.

All of a sudden nothin' was worth somethin' and it was far from free.

It turns out that if somebody gives you something that is so dicey that it is going to be hard to sell and if that something, when received free gratis has immense value, there is real money to be made.

All you have to do is flush a bunch of proto serfs onto the street.

So throughout the 2010s the homeless population swelled; and Ol' Steve got to be Secretary of the Treasury.

And, I guess, a lot of his schmuck flushees found low rent habitation.

I don't know that, but that version of the story makes me happy.

However:

Covid came along and millions of people were suddenly unemployed; probably a lot of them were unable to pay their rent.

So I guess they all would have been homeless.

But Ol' Mitch blinked at that moment and allowed a generous financial package to be passed and signed by donnie (he still thought he was going to win the election, so scorched earth had not entered his game plan yet) and a lot of those renters were able keep paying their mortgages.

Ol' Mitch and the boys could be heard muttering "this is not good; this is bad, really bad".

I guess we can surmise something here: when Ol' Mitch says he doesn't want to waste time trying to avoid massive evictions, homelessness, mayhem and misery I guess he's been talking to Ol' Steve.

I can see Ol' Steve licking his lips in anticipation of another great bump in personal net worth.

Because once everybody is evicted, and the impact of nobody having a job and, therefore, no money to spend on anything begins to trickle up, the landlords that have been forced to evict everybody are going to begin to fold (they have mortgages, after all; paying them was what they were using all that rental money for) there are going to be massive tranches of real estate that nobody can sell.

I guess we can solve the problem by giving all that stuff to Ol' Steve.

That will put both the landlords and their tenants out on the street.

I see a pattern developing.

Ol' Steve can probably make some money on all that unoccupied real estate if someone gives it to him free.

**************************************************************

(Richard II said to Wat Tyler just before he had him killed - after Tyler had nearly unhorsed the British monarchy several hundred years before the French Revolution "Villeins thou art and villeins wilt thou be.")

The definition for villein is "a feudal tenant entirely subject to a lord or manor to whom he paid dues and services in return for land".

Sounds like serf to me.

And Ol' Mitch and the Boys are all working on it.

It's gonna be laughable when they get herded into the tent with the rest of us.

It might not be pretty.