31 March 2021

Pictures Again

Rather than get all het up about the republican fascist party's definition of "infrastructure" as only being roads and trains (how 19th Century) I am going to post some pictures.

But I will point out that if 20% of our population have no way to be healthy our human infrastructure is non-existent; but then I have no use for the republican fascist  party: Matt Gaetz? pretty typical, I guess?

I hear that the 17 year old's name is Eva Braun, by the way.

And, if our human infrastructure doesn't exist, how can we have an economy or a country?

But Ol' Mitch and the Boys don't want none of that shit going on around here.

And, since America apparently has an undue birth rate among the cretin class, we will continue for another four years just like we have been and currently are are: in the ditch.

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

On Lopez Island we have a lot of these; it's so wonderful to see these beautiful creatures.


In Paris, I go to the Aquarium Tropical when it rains.


I guess they are ready for the return of Napoleon.


Kids in Paris can read. How un American; no wonder we have Freedom Fries.


I never knew what this was about, but it's on the Seine.


This was at the upriver side of Notre Dame before she burned down.


On la Seine somewhere near Pont Neuf


Lakewood Marina in Seattle; there are a lot of turtles there.



25 March 2021

Image Potpourri

 Seine scene



In the little lake at Parc Montsouri


I have heard that it is illegal to take pictures of la Tour when lit up.

Dogs are basic to Paris life.


Boats at the Paris Arsenal

Two different views of a window reflection over a bottle of Aperol



An abandoned rail line


Our plum - or is it prune - tree with Christmas lights


The inevitable bee on lavender


24 March 2021

I Got To Thinking About My Father And The Magic Of Flint

 And that can either be good or it can be bad; I guess it can also be vapid; you judge which it is here.

I have been watching the Ken Burns documentary Jazz.

What a massive addition to American history it is; there should be History of American Thought classes in our better universities using Ken's masterpiece as its spinal chord.

But that probably can't happen; the documentary is too African centric, I would suppose; trump voters can't stand truth and the truth of our culture could never be allowed in a university; Ol' Mitch and the Boys would scorch the fields from which it had attempted to spring.

And that would be that.

But back to Jazz.

In the current episode America has fallen back deeply into Depression: it's 1937 and nobody has a job; except rich people.

The documentary has a brief clip of a musician - Jazz, of course - saying that he asked his band leader how all those people kept coming out, all over America, to see him and the band perform; the band leader said something like "they save their pennies".

That was poignant.

But what it was for me was Proustian.

I suddenly remembered that when I was five, or less, my mother sent me to the corner - it was on a corner, but two blocks away, grocery to buy Kitchen Bouquet; I was doubly honored: I was being sent on a mission by my mother, and one which I had never been sent upon previously (a block and a half alone?) AND I was being told to buy something that I had not only never heard of but which I was unsure that I could even say; but I went. 

And I bought Kitchen Bouquet - even to this minute I can remember the amazed relief with which I received the storekeeper's acknowledgement and understanding of my almost whispered request for what my mother had told me to buy.

And also I bought two pieces of candy.

They cost two for a penny.

Which is why I bought two.

And the penny is the entry point of the whole purpose of this little tale.

But the penny only got me started.

Down the tunnel.

Of what we may or not care about and may or may not remember and may or may not even let into our current little pinched lives.

I have decided to un-pinch.

This once.

By a series of happenstances I was the only person at my father's deathbed.

They said that hearing was the last to go so I said a few inanely and apparently comforting things to him.

I, without thinking, held his hand.

The various machines had green slinky graph lines and beepy burpy audio noises.

It was, once one had become comfortable with the fact that it was an enclosure of imminent death, a rather soothing sort of place.

That all went on for an un-remembered and un-measured period of time.

But it did end: my father flipped his head 180 degrees and the slinky green graph line went flat line.

That was probably the most intimate and meaningful encounter I ever had with my father.

The reason I mention it here is that that experience has turned out to be a gateway.

The intimacy of "I was the only one there when you died" has started and kept alive a low key dialogue with that man, my father, a person who I never really knew.

I said once, on a blog post from Paris on the 70th anniversary of D Day that my father never really returned from WWII.

Since his death I have wished that I had ever been able to, or had been astute enough to have taken advantage of that fact; I should mention that, since his death I have lived in Paris and other parts of France for two or so years out of the last twenty.

I have wished that I could ask him some questions; just a few are enumerated here.

"You spent days in La Louvre; my grandmother, your mother once told me; is that true?".

"Did you ever stand on Pont Neuf and look up river and wonder if the people from up river millennia ago ever came down river?"

"Did you ever walk la Seine on the quai and just feel as if you were in heaven?"

"Was Pont Alexandre III as outrageously beautiful as I have seen it to be?"

"Did la Tour Eiffel make you want to sing - something?"

"Did you ever go to Parc Montsouris, or Parc Monceau, or Parc des Buttes Chaumont, or le Jardin des Plantes - you would have loved the frogs - or Jardin de Luxembourg, or le Bois de Boulogne or le Bois de Vincennes?"

"Or, just where DID you hang out?"

And, most compellingly important: 

"Did you sense that the flint scattered everywhere on Paris' paths was vibrating with stories - maybe even something akin to videos - that those of us now would really like to see and hear?"

"Did you feel the vibrations that I have felt of a curious confluence?"

"Of something; or of anything; or of everything?"

That's what I wish I could ask my father.

20 March 2021

Images: That's All I Have Right Now

 The carousel at the bottom of the steps up to Sacre Coeur is a landmark.


The red one is a male house finch; I think the other one is a female, but her beak is not of finch robustness.


I think this is a golden crowned sparrow.


An all yellow native honey bee


The flowers were the subject; the bee is incidental. 


We Almost Made It

 The human race, I mean.

When a a main stream, rich and multi-accoladed American entertainer abandons the genre of entertainment that has made him rich to make a statement, as Bobby did, you have to feel proud of the country that produced that sort of audacious flexibility; but he died, and the flexibility turned to concrete-hardened MAGA in intervening years.

Apparently between Bobby and donnie something has gotten lost in translation.

Bobby Darin: Simple Song of Freedom


Images That Might Please You


A native honey bee of all one color. 


I think this is a gold crowned sparrow.


The red one is a male house finch; I think the drab one is a female house finch, but I am not sure: her beak looks to be not of finch magnitude.


On the way up to Sacre Coeur it is always nice to see the carousel.


 

19 March 2021

The Bee And Me

 Today was the day to get the lettuce bed ready for a hoard of lettuce starts.

We aren't much in the farm department: we can even fail at zucchini - failure being interspersed with years when we can't harvest them fast enough to avoid zucchini logs in the mix.

The one thing, though, at which we consistently excel is the production of spring and early summer lettuce.

And today was a rain free, windy, occasionally sunny sort of March day that screamed for getting the lettuce bed ready for imminent implants.

In the late summer of last year, after all the other lettuce had gotten long of tooth and had been pulled out, I decided to leave the arugula to go to seed.

That was a good idea: a dense thicket of arugula, it turns out, in the spring when it is getting tall and putting out flower buds has, over the winter kept down to almost nothing all the grass and weeds that, in a clear winter bed appear over the winter and constitute such a pain in the ass in the spring when one wants to get the beds ready for the new season's planting.

Arugula, in the thickness of a dense thicket, it turns out, keeps down to almost nothing the crab grass and other hard to get out stuff that likes to appear in fallow beds over the winter.

I discovered this as I was pulling out all of last year's arugula.

"What a windfall" I said to no one in particular (I almost always wax poetic when my back is killing me and I am thinking of the joy of having a Bloody Mary) as I noticed that all that was left after the easy extraction of arugula was some chickweed, and not much of that, which is pretty easy to get in the tote that goes to the compost heap.

I had to admit that this was a good deal.

I had had, for most of the preceding summer, the peppery leaves of the summer arugula crop in salads and sandwiches and, for most of the winter had had the peppery leaves of summer arugula's children in my winter salads and winter sandwiches, and now at the threshold of spring I had the advantage that summer's children had been so dense that grass and other pains in the ass had not been able to take hold.

"I like that" I heard myself saying to no one in particular.

There was more, though: somewhere early in the arugula extraction I had become aware that I was not alone.

There was a native honey bee nosing around the arugula, hopefully nuzzling the not yet open flowers in search of nectar.

He looked pretty much like this one except that he was wandering around looking for a flower whereas the one in this picture has his nose buried in a summertime thistle.



I felt a kindred spirit: he wanted nectar; I wanted a Bloody Mary; I wondered if his back was hurting.

I went back to gardening and forgot the bee.

But not for long.

I heard a dry wispy voice saying "Noel, leave that one with the almost open flowers".

Taken somewhat aback, I glanced around for the source of the voice and discovered that it was probably the bee who was sitting on the cuff of the right sleeve of the REI jacket that I wear for outdoor chores (it has several holes burned in it from various spring cleanup burn piles).

I had been about to remove the last of the arugula thicket; I scanned the stalks left and saw one quite robust one with one open bloom and a vast array of yet to open buds.

"Bien sur" said I.

"Merci" said the bee.

The Sacklers' Fun Little Defense

The family who own Purdue Pharma have agreed to pay a bunch of money (way less than would be a significant dent in their opioid fortune, but a lot of money) but have found themselves still not off the hook.

Rational people who would like justice done keep coming after them.

It turns out the even Purdue Pharma has been having  them investigated.

I guess Purdue wants to know, like the rest of us, if the Sacklers are the murdering clan of criminals that they appear to be.

So the battle goes on.

To get to the 4.7 billion dollar settlement that the Sacklers have already agreed to - with the condition that they have no guilt - they have spent a lot on lawyers' fees and spent a lot of time in court; it should be pointed out that their lack of guilt really isn't out of step with a payment of 4.7 million dollars, they just think it appropriate to reduce their monumental cash stash in the name of being good citizens.

So it is unsettling, at least for the Sacklers, that everybody keeps coming after them.

So they have had to mount a new and slam dunkedly pervasive defense.

Here it is:

The Sackler Defense



Some Color For The Day

 


18 March 2021

A Fire Worshipper Speaks

From Jason Lemon of Newsweek:

"Evangelical Christian minister Jeff Jansen, a self-proclaimed "prophet," claims that former President Donald Trump is still the legitimate president and that the U.S. military is currently carrying out a coup to remove President Joe Biden from power.

"A number of Christian pastors and so-called "prophets" predicted ahead of the 2020 election that Trump would win reelection, claiming that was God's will. When that prophecy did not come to fruition, some apologized and admitted they were wrong. Others, like Jansen, have found creative ways to justify the current reality in the U.S.

"'You have to realize what's taken place in our nation has been a hostile takeover, and just because there was a fake inauguration [of Biden]…for optics and for posture, let them have their day in the sun,' Jansen, the founder of Global Fire Ministries International based out of Tennessee, said during a Tuesday episode of the Elijah Streams YouTube program. Right Wing Watch first reported Jansen's remarks.

"'It's a tale of two presidents and right now in America—because President Trump has never conceded, he never agreed to anything, never stepped away, never conceded,' Jansen continued. 'He basically stepped aside momentarily, while things are being sorted out.' The evangelical minister said Trump's effort to stay in office by overturning the elections results in the court was stymied by 'corrupt' courts and judges.

"'The last defense is military. So the military, actually the military is in control right now," Jansen said. "They've already made their determination. Now it's about execution. Now it's about returning civil power after the 'we the people' factor, the rightly, duly-elected president from this past election comes forward and exposes the corruption—there will be civil power restored in the United States,' he insisted. 'And that president will be Donald J. Trump.'

"'Later in the interview, Jansen urged viewers to 'watch what the Lord does,' but he predicted that things will move forward and Trump will be reinstated 'by the end of April.'"

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

After reading this I can't help but visualize another and much worst version of January 6.  

Or maybe it will just be a clean little coup like that recently held in Myanmar.

A Few Images

One afternoon in 2012 my wife and I were staying in Paris in the apartment that I usually rent.  We had been to the market earlier and gone long on olives.  It was a nice day so we decided to move out to the terrace. 

Another apartment that I sometimes rent in Paris has a fairly spectacular view of life on the Seine.


The red and blue-green things are the leaves of a succulent that lives on Shark Reef on Lopez Island. the flowers are kind of a surprise.


Oyster catchers need a long bill to delve into the nooks and crannies of the rocks from which they extract their food.  I have never seen it but I imagine that the bill might be good for opening oysters.  I have no idea why it is so bright red-orange.


The Ol' Bad Day Defense

 Back in summertime 2014  - I'm pretty sure it was 2014 - I was listening to All Things Considered Saturday.

Michel Martin was doing a feature on the fairly new Black Lives Matter movement.

She had presented several pieces of the story and had queued up the next which was an interview with a retired detective from the Sacramento police department; I have no memory of what the ostensive subject of the interview was.

Almost immediately the retired detective burst out something about Black Lives Matter being a dangerous Marxist organization.

That got my attention.

After a noticeably subdued gasp and a longer than professional pause Michel forged ahead with the interview.

I have no memory of what was said.

But I have noticed that the dominant attitude of the police toward Black Lives Matter people is that the Black Lives Matter people are terrorists who wantonly indulge in destruction of property and in assaults on the very essence of our sacred American way of life.

I guess that's why, when there were Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer, the cops always showed up in force and in full battle regalia and almost immediately started clubbing and tear gassing everyone in sight; you can't let terrorists have an inch; if you do, they'll take a mile (a stitch in time, etc.)

Early in the white insurrection at the Capitol on 6 January I remember thinking, "it's a good thing they're white; if they were black, they would be dead".

But on the other hand the white teenager who killed two people and wounded a third in Kenosha last summer is out on two million dollars bail that the American Nazis and their ilk raised to let this "poor scared kid who was just exercising his rights" (that's a synthetic quote but pretty close to what has been said about this youthful assassin) have his freedom back.

The court seems not to take his crime very seriously either: the trial keeps getting pushed back so the poor kid can savor his bail granted freedom.

He has been seen drinking and laughing with fascists in bars since his release; I guess being a mass murderer out on bail waives the 21 year old drinking age.

The last straw, though, was last night.

A police captain of the Atlanta Police Department summed up the mass murder of quite a number of Asian Americans by saying that the carnage was not a hate crime, the poor kid had just been "having a bad day".

A Vaccine Passport?

 I have heard a lot of discussion recently about the desirability of some sort of "passport" identifying the bearer of such a document as having been Covid 19 vaccinated.

The travel industry seems to be hugely supportive of the idea.

Restaurants and bars seem to like it also.

Even the governments in charge of doing the vaccinations like the concept - what better way to slap down vaccine resistors than to implement a document that makes the recipients of Covid 19 vaccine able to become fully participating citizens again?

Israel has already come up with some green colored emblem of vaccination.

A couple of questions seem to recur: "how do we control counterfeits"? and "how do we make the carrying of such documentation easy to do and difficult to leave behind on the dresser at home"?

The answer to me is obvious (I am surprised that Bill Gates hasn't already suggested it): put a computer chip in each vaccine dose.


16 March 2021

A Canal In Venice Through A Window Screen, A Flicker And A Burrito

 I have no idea where I was except in Venice when I took this.


This is a female northern flicker.


This was good.







15 March 2021

The Border Again

 I am not going to go into some involved convoluted - deucedly clever - defense of Biden so far about the border or it's larger sibling, immigration.

All I am going to say is that since the fairly human and fairly pragmatic law passed in, think it was 1987, we have been going down hill on how to deal with the fact that a lot of people in the world would like to come and be melted in our pot, along with all of the rest of us.

The horror of that proposition to white supremacists finally boiled the pot over in 2016 and got donnie elected.

And donnie unleashed what I have called - in a previous post - Tolkien's Maelstrom on the land: he did every violent, pornographic, mindless thing he could think of to people whose only fault has been that they aren't white trump voters.

So Biden inherited an immigration situation that had gone from shambles in the years after Reagan signed a pretty decent law through Obama, who didn't seem to want to deal with the mess, to a humanitarian disaster under donnie who gleefully unleashed sadism on the situation.

Biden from day one has said that that level on inhumanity can't persist.

Not surprisingly, a lot of desperate human beings heard that as a sign that the United States was going to again open its arms to people like them.

Like numerous other times in the last 33 years we have a lot of people hoping to escape criminal gangs, organized rape squads, massive extortion of anyone who has been able to achieve even minimal prosperity and just general daily horror, all of which are part of their daily lives in their native lands.

So now we have the worst of all worlds: four years of backlog of demand for being able to move to America crashing headlong into 33 years of deterioration of any system that could cope with any demand, let alone the post donnie bubble.

That isn't to say that Biden should get a political bye on this one.

That is to say he needs to go to the mattresses on this one.

The other night he proved he can give a speech among the best we have heard in a while.

He needs to go to the people again, and soon, with another speech of that caliber.

He needs to tell America why we must have a welcoming immigration system, not a premise for sadists and criminals - ICE - to have some fun.

He needs to remind us all of the words and commit to them, that are on the plaque on the Statue of Liberty; he needs to remind us that those words are not an aspiration, they are an obligation; they are an obligation that all of us who have been so lucky as to have been born here owe the rest of the world.

That obligation is that we must exorcise all the capricious and pornographic sadism from donnie's only real legacy and replace it with a real immigration system.

Of course there need to be rules and there need to be controls and there needs to be organization; but our obligation says that we must also be welcoming; we must also be open minded; we must also be - human.


14 March 2021

Three From Paris

Walking down the right bank heading upriver; that's the American Church's steeple in the distant center; the American Cathedral is more or less at my back on the side of the river that I am walking.


Imagine playing Jesus and walking across the river from where I have put you in the above image, and come back to land where all that greenery is sticking into the river - that's les Berges, an artificial little archipelago, which gets more wildlife friendly by the day - and head down river in the direction of your Church; that's where this sculpture is, in front of Musée d'Orsay. 


This is just inside the portals into the Tuileries at the terminus of Pont du Carousel.  The big thing is le Arch du Carousel; they put it up honoring some one of Napoleon's victories.  That piece of ground plays a significant roll - roll as in, it's a character in the book - in A Curious Confluence. I think that is also more or less where the bomber nearly got Napoleon.


13 March 2021

Pretty Fancy Ducks

 I have a 24/240 mm telephoto lens.

It sends images to a 42mpx full frame, pretty fast sensor.

But even with all that I have had trouble getting any decent pictures of harlequins.

They are really skittish and stay either just at or beyond really good reach of my lens, or, if they are close in on the beach, they fly off the minute they see me.

So this was an unusually lucky shot.




11 March 2021

Ol' Mitch Is Such Slime

 I just saw an interview of Ol' Mitch by Judy Woodruff on the PBS Newshour.

I was really brought up short when I saw what Ol' Mitch is doing under the now famous republican "bipartisan" bullet point.

He says that the Covid Relief Law is a vast waste because "the economy is roaring back".

It clearly isn't - roaring back.

Janet Yellen can't hear the roar.

Jay Powell says he hasn't heard it either.

But Ol' Mitch can hear it.

He apparently can't hear the 14 million Americans who have dropped into jobs la la land, a land from which it is believed, no one ever returns.

But his hearing of it, I realized, as I watched what this most monumental pile of slime in American history was doing, was a stroke of genius.

When, inevitably, the economy takes off under a just signed into law United States Government prod to the economy, and a prod that is predicated on the belief that "the people" will save us, and therefore, that we should put money in the pockets of "the people", Ol' Mitch and the Boys will say that that is proof that "The Biden Law" was a vast waste of America's fragile resources.

Have I ever told you about Ol' Mitch and the Ku Klux Klan?

Liars, charlatans and republicans are all from the same cloth.

Actually they are the cloth. 

God It's Nice To Have A President Again

 After four years of an empty White House - on 20 January 2017 an empty gold plated Cadillac drove up and donnie got out - I had forgotten how it felt to have a President.

I have had inklings of the return of that feeling since Joe won.

Inauguration Day was an uplifting experience.

But it wasn't until a few minutes ago that the full flood of joy at The Return of the President came upon me - just recently, January 20 2021, a 1975 Pontiac station wagon drove up and Joe and Jill got out; and they went into the White House; and they immediately began to retrieve America from the dustbin of history.

Tonight's speech was a good one; I think in time it will be called a great one.

The law that Joe signed into existence only briefly before the speech is going to be marked by future historians as the law that showed America the way out of darkness and put her on the path back to confluence with the paths that Lincoln, Grant, and Franklin Roosevelt had already put us on.

Those paths - one path once again - all are heading in the same direction: to realize and make actual and tangible the soaring words of The Declaration of Independence.

We have, in the dark four years from which we have recently exited, learned that full tilt fascist, racist, mindless hatred can emanate from an empty White House.

Tolkien brilliantly painted verbal images of an internally spinning maelstrom of mindless but purposeful hate, ignorance, malice and just plain raw desire to destroy.

I had fun, just previously, with the old empty car joke; but it lets donnie off way too easily; the car that drove up that fateful day in 2017 to the front of the White House wasn't empty; it didn't have a President, but it did have Tolkien's maelstrom.

Tonight we have seen the maelstrom banished with the Return of the President.

Bipartisan Is A republican Bullet Point ...

 ... not a meaningful component of anything in the real world.

The real world is where fourteen million jobs have disappeared, probably never to be seen again.

The real world is where a half million of our fellows have died from catching what the republicans call a hoax.

The real world is where the recently purged occupant of the White House told us in the days of his tenor in office that we should drink Clorox and not wear face masks.

The real world is where the current President is going to sign the most "help the people rebuild their lives" spending bill of American history into law.

The real world is where the following poll was just promulgated by CNN Polling Director Jennifer Agiesta:

"In the new poll, 61% support the $1.9 trillion economic relief bill proposed by Biden and expected to pass in the House Wednesday, and several key provisions of the bill are even more popular. A broad majority of Americans (85%) say they support policies in the bill that would provide larger tax credits for families and make them easier for low-income households to claim, including majorities across party lines (95% of Democrats and 73% of Republicans support it). Around three-quarters favor provisions to provide funding to facilitate a return to the classroom for K-12 students (77%), and sending stimulus checks worth up to $1,400 per person to most families and individuals (76%). Both of those policies also have majority support across party lines (55% of Republicans support each, among Democrats, support tops 90% for each one)."

In the republican world there is a lot of tooth gnashing about something being cancelled (I have no idea what they are talking about); in the republican world there is a lot of hue and cry that several Dr. Seuss titles that haven't sold a copy in years have been taken out of print because they deal heavily in visual racial stereotypes; in the republican world there are over a hundred voter suppression laws being crafted for speedy adoption across all the states with republican dominated legislatures; in the republican world every republican elected to the House or the Senate is totally interchangeable: each one says the same things, in the same order and at the same high decibel level.

In the republican world those same interchangeable beings all say that there is a fatal flaw in the Covid relief act about to be signed into law; that flaw is that it is not bipartisan.

It is not bipartisan because no republicans voted for it.

The will of the people be damned; republicans are not going to endorse a really good deal for the American people; that's not what republicans do; they appear on Fox News and add their voices to the constant cascade of lies that spews from that cancerous institution.

If the poll noted above is not HEADING TOWARD UNANIMITY I don't know what it is.

If the republicans would abandon their frames and their agendas and their words carefully crafted to elicit hysteria, but which, when examined, mean nothing, and instead try to find out what the people really need and want, they would find the path to their treasured state of bipartisanship.

It's only a vote away.

10 March 2021

A New Concept: The Interchangeable republican

 In the run up to final passage in the House and ultimate signing into law by Joe Biden of the most recent Covid Relief Bill I have heard various republican Congress People interviewed.

I was pretty sure of what I would hear from them: 

  • It's too big
  • It needs to be targeted
  • It pays rapists and criminals
  • There has been and still is copious money from the bill's predecessors
  • It has massive components that have nothing to do with "the virus"
  • The economy is real good already
  • And on and on and blah and blah
I am going to take a parenthetical exit for a moment to give the counter bullets to each of these.

  • We learned in 2009 the cost of going too small; both Jay Powell and Janet Yellen have reminded us incessantly of that lesson learned; so the bill may be big enough.
  • Targeted like donnie's fiasco tax cut for the 1%?  We're dealing with disaster here, and it's a disaster for the mass majority of Americans; the bill is, therefore "targeted" by definition.
  • Under the terms of the bill it is possible for incarcerated people to get a stimulus check; that will, apparently not be easy, but it will be possible; I have no idea why.
  • If all that money is there why are so many micro businesses and minority-owned businesses unable to get any of it?
  • Museums, restaurants, music venues, etc. etc. etc. are all vital parts of our culture and our lives; they are all front line casualties in the face of the covid attack; they also employ massive numbers of people who are no longer employed because of the virus; the republicans are employing a clumsiest-I-have-ever-seen attempt at false causality - or maybe it should be called inverse false causality: "museum" / "virus"; I see no connection between those "words".
  • What happened to the fourteen million employed people who were out there in February 2020?
  • Back atcha: blah, blah, blah.
But the point to this thing I am writing is not that, as usual the republicans have trucked out their bogus frames - known in a lot of circles as lies.

The point is yet to be pointed to.

The point is, every republican Congress Person I have heard interviewed have said all six (some blah blah also) of the above points.

And they recited them in the exact order as the six points above.

That's spooky.

They didn't even stop to breathe until they had dumped their rehearsed, memorized, in that order, recitation.

(In the early days of the computer era when a computer found an inexecutable error it would perform a core dump; a core dump was a printout of the position of every one of the little on/off ferrous doughnuts of which the computer's memory was comprised; the resultant listing was of significant use to minds greater than mine.

Watching these republican Congress People dump their core reminded me of those almost forgotten days.

I have thought for a long time that republicans all come out of some central casting office located in an upscale mall in and upscale city somewhere.

It is unnerving to learn that they are really all rolled off an assembly line in a robot plant in Texas or Arkansas.

09 March 2021

Lunchtime In Paris

 I usually go to Parc Montsouris, and have already made my sandwich poulet before I leave the apartment.  But I like his table quite a bit.  I think this was out front at le Départ St Michel.  That stump was a tree when I first started going there.



08 March 2021

A Few Images En Lieu Of Grand Thoughts

Just as it appears to be, this is at Giverny; I wish I had intended to do that couplet.


A shorebird on Lopez Island; I can't remember what it is.


A sunset on Lopez island


Another Lopez sunset


A cormorant drying its wings in paris


In the mirror of Studio Mazarine


Pont de l'Alma 


On la Promenade Plantée


I only see this type of bird on the quais of the Seine.


I think I remember that this is on la  Esplanade Habib-Bourguiba.  In any event, it was on in Autumn.