I identify myself as an ignoramus by admitting that I have no idea who painted this or even what it's about.
I wish, therefore, I had never taken this picture.
But I did.
I know not where.
Maybe Musée d' Orsay?
Or l'Orangerie?
I just don't know, but it kinda looks like Reba McIntire.
I am beginning to hear as the days pass since President Joe made history and the pundits have had time to think about what they saw and heard the other night, and are now saying what they saw and heard, they are saying that they saw and heard what I thought I was hearing and seeing at the time: The President wasn't addressing Congress, nor was he presenting the state of the Union; he was fireside chatting with all of us.
The only difference between the other night and 1932 was that the President this time managed to talk cogently, coherently, occasionally entertainingly, genuinely empathically and massively enthusiastically - all things of which Roosevelt was master - but Joe did it for over an hour, not ten minutes.
If he can do that well for that long, just imagine how effective he is going to be when he starts rolling out the ten minute chats that are going to be required as we get deeper into the republican obstruction and lie season.
Sign me up for the podcast: "Tonight I want To Talk To You About ..."
Last night I saw an American President, for the first time in my adult lifetime, say stuff in simple, clear, easy to understand English declarative sentences.
He wants to do a bunch of stuff to make America a first world country, and make it competitive in the world again, and for the future.
In the time since I have seen endless republican ripostes.
They just hate that we now have a President.
As opposed to the recent alternate fact of having an idiot.
Joe said that we need to spend six trillion dollars to make up for the fact that we have left our highways, byways, water pipes, reservoirs, railroads, electric grids, cities, counties and states, and more - and the American people - to fail and fall fallow in the road race of worldly success.
The republicans say that all we need to do is wait a little longer.
Voodoo economics will ultimately prove to be a winner.
Forty One Years and counting.
Especially from four floors up.
The merle noire in the poem, Solstice Song, that I posted sings in those trees at dawn.
Ol' Mitch and the Boys have been back at the Steak House where they planned out Obama's one term presidency.
This time they've come up with a job creation proposal as an alternative to President Joe's recent "good union family wage jobs" proposals.
Ol' Mitch says "we need to put the minimum wage at $1.00 an hour. That way human labor will be so cheap that there will be no more robots, no more artificial intelligence and no more off-shoring. There will just be millions and millions of jobs. We won't even need automated cotton picking machines anymore".
I am always amused, amazed and befuddled when an African American speaks out loudly against his own best interests as well as the facts of history.
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By Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Mike DeBonis
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — Republicans rallied Thursday behind comments on race made by Sen. Tim Scott as part of his response to President Joe Biden’s address to Congress, embracing what they hoped was an effective message in an ongoing debate over the role of racism in America that has sometimes left them struggling to articulate a clear position.
Scott, delivering the official GOP response Wednesday, suggested that liberals are using race as a political weapon, defining all White people as oppressors and seeking to use the language of civil rights to rig elections.
“Hear me clearly: America is not a racist country,” Scott, the only Black Republican in the Senate, said in the televised GOP rebuttal to Biden’s speech. “It’s backward to fight discrimination with different types of discrimination. And it’s wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.”
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Thank you Uncle Tim.
An amazing sunset seemed even better to me when I saw it through the multiple panes of our front room window.
I didn't know that she was going to burn down.
Over the years I took these images out of abject groveling love.
I was drawn to our lady by her beauty and majesty.
And I had to take her picture.
Again and again.
But I didn't know that she was to burn down.
That would have been an unthinkable thing.
President Joe just gave the best speech that I have ever heard a President give.
I just saw an interview with a marine biologist who is an expert in the area just off the coast of Los Angeles where there are an unknown number - but an easily counted huge number - of barrels of DDT that were dumped back there in the "the ocean is our sewer" era.
That era started when humans first set forth upon the sea and extends to yesterday - plastic is testament to that.
Apparently those unknown but certainly large number of barrels of DDT are rusting into leakage and that might not be good for the lobsters and shrimp and clams and oysters and other marine life that keeps annoyingly clinging to existence in our oceans: they are probably going to die.
How nice.
I just heard on the PBS Newshour that the big spending bill already passed by Congress is going to enable Florida to massively expand broadband to rural parts of the state.
I have been to rural Florida.
I have been to CENTRAL rural Florida.
When we lived in Boca Raton we took our daughter every year to a youth camp somewhere in Central Florida.
The one excruciatingly wonderful part of that was that we always overnighted halfway on our journey at Chalet Suzanne in Lake Wales. There was nothing on offer there that wasn't either the best, or the most interesting thing of its kind that I have ever experienced, lived in or eaten: the tiny potato rolls or the little bity cinnamon rolls; and the best filet mignon I have ever eaten was eaten at Chalet Suzanne; that was in the mid 1980's.
The mid 1980's was when the "others" had begun creeping out of their dens after a long winter sleep, a sleep induced by the success of FDR's policies and programs.
The 1980's were the era of dismantling all that prosperity in favor of trickling prosperity down - the toilet.
So, to make the toilet look good to enough people to keep Reagan in power, the right wing press and The Heritage Foundation began, in tandem, with some help from Hank Williams Jr., promoting a toxic male, gun toting version of America that would, they said, escape the toilet's flush.
That culture found its home in Central Florida.
Which leads me back to the story of our annual migration to our daughter's summer camp.
We always stopped for gas somewhere; I think it was Lakeland.
That was always a scary thing.
It was big fuel stop and the majority of the fuel stoppers were air boat toting, various sorts of seriously lethal looking gun toting bearded male Hank lookalikes.
I will say they never did anything but mutter when they saw us and they never tried to rape our daughter, but there was a chasm of asynchrony there; it reeked with possibilities of violence; culture was not matching culture.
But we always drove on, unviolated, and had a pleasant time at Chalet Suzanne and left our daughter in the moss hanging forests of central Florida.
And she had to eat chicken flatties.
So why am I telling this tale?
I am telling this tale because Florida has just passed a law that has a lot of deleterious functions: it's OK to run down protesters with your car and it's a crime with 15 years in prison to demonstrate, if those demonstrators are demonstrating in favor of police not killing black people.
I see this law as Desantis' endorsement of the Hank Williams Jr. endorsement of guns and mayhem as the new American paradigm.
So, back to the starting point of this post: I would, under no circumstances, endorse expanding broadband - and that is a slippery term - see my post on that subject, in Florida.
I would, however, endorse removing electricity.
The starlings in Paris are a lot prettier than their North American relatives.
Song Sparrow
Trying to stay warm on a frosty morning
Florida's governor has just signed a law that makes it a serious felony to assemble, and to petition the Government, if that assembly has anything to do with Black Lives mattering.
It also makes it OK for vehicle drivers to run down people assembling and petitioning; no criminal charges are to be allowed for running Black Lives petitioners down in Florida. There is an associated rumor that the legislature is working on adding liability for car repairs to the law: Black Lives assemblers and petitioners who are run down by Florida drivers will be held liable for the cost of repairing all damage done to the vehicles involved in the new law's held harmless mayhem.
But on the other hand:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
But Florida will.
And has.
I think Oklahoma has done so also.
The European black bird - the one the Beatles sang about - also called merle noire by the French is mentioned in my post "Solstice Song".
Here are some pictures of them in various Parisian venues.
Once I had the pleasure,
Once I had the privilege,
Of two months on the Seine
Two months of river living.
I was three floors up
Four if one counted American,
And the view from there was crazy,
And I drank it in all hours,
Left the casement open to hear the sounds,
To see the boats, to smell whatever one could smell.
Those two months were May and June
So the solstice came and went
While I was there
In Crazy View.
There was a merle noire - looks like a black robin - living across the river,
In a tree right on the quai,
Sounded just like a robin, too,
Or like it was saying "soon June".
That turned into a poem.
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“The longest day of the year”
I heard myself thinking
“Mid-summer night’s eve”
As I sat in the darkness drinking
The calvados still not gone
Not gone yet from Tuesday
From the bottle at the sink
“Or was it left from Jeudi?”
Whichever - no real difference
Because,
“It won’t last long now”
I heard myself say
“The bottle or the year?”
Seemed to sum the day.
I had a dream.
I was out running on a country road.
A back country highway, it was.
Beautiful day - no clouds, thrushes singing and answering, the smell of cow manure wafting up from the manure streak down the middle of the road, a slight breeze mixing the manure with a flowery scent.
I think I heard John Denver singing.
"West Virginia, mountain mama..."
That lyric wafted across the beautiful green mountains, most of them truncated and surrounded by heaps of slag.
"Welcome to West Virginia" I heard someone say; then the someone cleared his (it was a man, of course) throat.
It wasn't John Denver this time, but this one was also singing; he sounded like Jimmy Buffet.
"Yonder stands Joe Manchin
"With a dram glass in his hand
"He pretends that he's a Democrat
"But that's not what he am".
Then there was another voice; this time it was a woman.
The woman spoke; she had a West Virginia accent, but it was obvious that it was Dame Judy Dench.
"If we had wanted to have another asshole in the Senate, we would have voted for a republican".
I just kept running.
After Grant left the presidency, having chosen not to run for a third term in 1876, he became a civilian for the the first time in a long time.
Somewhere in that time he became aware of the fact that he was dying.
From his viewpoint, as I understand it from Ron Chernow, Grant wasn't particularly worried about dying, but he was worried about the financial health his wife would have after he died: would she have to go to the poorhouse?
So he decided to write his autobiography.
Maybe it would sell.
Two things stand out about that autobiography: It became a runaway best seller, and the reason that it became a runaway best seller was that Grant WAS A REALLY GOOD WRITER.
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I watched a Jimmy Kimmel YouTube tonight.
It was an interview of George W Bush ostensively promoting W's new book Out of Many, One (e pluribus unum I guess).
I had, for me, some unsettling reactions to this interview.
First was that W is a really entertaining person when he sets his mind to it.
Second was that Jimmy Kimmel has a fairly significant level of respect for W, not the President, for W.
And that jangles my memory; but I like the feel of it; so let's accept it.
Third is that, based on the images of W's Paintings - the spinal chord of the book - he has an unexpected talent,
Just like Grant, an unexpected talent has emerged.
I would like him to apply that talent to a portrait of George Floyd.
This morning I was reading an article from The Hill by Jordain Carney:
But I think I heard some of it on KUOW, my local Public Radio station; I have waxed editorial on KUOW's base story.
The base pay rate for Seattle Police is $60 an hour.
That's almost $127,000 a year.
Without overtime.
And Seattle cops are at the head of the line for off duty stuff like traffic control for Seattle City Light street projects - you know, the City goes in and spends weeks removing existing street bed so that the replacement street has a perfect pothole resistant substrate, and then a few weeks later the City goes back in to replace the gas pipes (they didn't know that the pipes needed replacing, weeks before, when they perfected the substrate and laid the new asphalt) - and there are lots of Seattle City Light and whoever-it-is-that's-the-gas-company projects; so there are a lot of traffic control jobs for off duty Seattle cops.
The hourly rate for that is $90.
But that's paid to a middleman so the cops probably don't get $90 an hour for being out there controlling traffic when they are off duty from their prime job which is killing unarmed black men.
They might not get much more than $60 an hour.
Think 60/15 = 4.
That's four times more than Bernie Sanders is trying to get to be the base rate for labor in America.
That's four times the rate that the republican fascist party says will sink America into the vast ocean of historic oblivion - they say it's too much money to pay people.
But I would expect that the middlemen pass on more than $60 an hour to their off duty cop independent contractors.
Because those cops have a lot of skills.
For example, if in a dispute over who has precedence at a four way intersection blocked by construction, one or more of the disputants is black, a cop has the instinct and the training to shoot the black one.
Black Lives Matter.
And nobody knows that fact better than a cop.
After all, their heritage is controlling and killing black people.
Or so one would surmise from history.
But back to the four way intersection where Seattle City Light is doing something vital: if there happened to be more than one black disputant, the cop would have had the skill and training to shoot the other black ones.
That's a valuable skill.
Well worth $127,000 a year base pay with the addition of off duty traffic control uplift.
This was under Pont St Michel if I remember correctly. If I don't, it was somewhere around there.
My first snowman. This was in Portland. The snow was pretty paltry.
At the Paris Zoo. Lots of unhindered migratory and native birds mixed with the flamingos.
There are all the things you could ever want on rue Faubourg St Denis. That's some kind of entendre double.
On rue de Seine.
Life on la Seine where the livin' is easy; I guess; but it, for sure, is beautiful.
Lopez Island cactus flowers
