First Notes

227 lbs

… Christmas eve with M, H and Dogs… we are told about an extremely poisonous toad that inhabits bushes in Florida… now we will keep dogs away from bushes and i will have night and daymares about the dogs getting hold of one until we clear the lands of poisonous toads… dogs behaved pretty well yesterday… M seemed to like them well enough…

… we watched Love Actually together last night… today it is breakfast, presents such as they are… the prep and consumption of Christmas dinner… rack of lamb, roasted root vegetables…

… starting to think about logistics for the return trip… not as well prepared on the food front… not sure how to get prepared… need to get some wine for sure…

… research into Savannah Historic District… looks like a fun day will be had…

… still looks like weather will be good…

… it’s been a little sad being here… i get the feeling M is not sure what to live for… i have my own struggles with that… what do we live for?… especially as we get older and less relevant to the people we live amongst…

Hope everyone has a terrific Christmas day!

Naples, FL, Christmas Eve…

Christmas Journey

… three days of longer, harder driving than expected… we learned that whatever the map app says about travel time, add two hours… we had no time to enjoy any sights along the way… we are in Naples now… will be able to walk around a little…

HCR meter…

… the big news is that January 6 committee may be considering criminal referral of 45 to the DC Federal courts… they are not compelled to take it up, but…

… the 45 admin’s involvement in creating the riot on January 6th is getting clearer… if anything is proven i fervently hope there will be consequences…

First Notes

225.7 lbs

… i knew my weight would be down but almost 3 lbs is amazing!… next two days will add some of that back but nice work me!…

… the drive from Savannah to Naples was, in its own way, easier than either of two days before, but, the rule of add two hours to what the map app says held… i am convinced that this trip should have three overnights, not just 2… we will do that on way back, stopping two nights in Savannah… it won’t make a difference in time spent on the road driving each day, but at least we will see something… will be a busy couple of days and then we will head back… this trip will have to be configured differently if we do it again…

… H and dogs sleeping…

… i was so exhausted last night… couldn’t put two thoughts together towards end of dinner…

Defacing our national parks…

… there is a long list of stupidity in this article about the desecration of our national parks… i concur with the thought that wilderness shouldn’t be easy to get to…

First notes…

… the first two days of travel have been brutally long… yesterday, it wasn’t completely clear why other than some slow spots of traffic… on Tuesday, the trip was 2 hours longer than indicated by google maps when we started out… yesterday it was three hours longer… and this was the indication as we started the trips!… what we had planned to be 7 hr days of travel were, in fact, 9 and 10 hours respectively… we are at 19 hours of a trip that was supposed to take 21-22 hours total… it’s going to be closer to 30 hours… we have been going from point to point with no time to explore along the way… the only thing we have experienced off the beaten track was the result of detours through the countryside… one such detour took us through what looked like poor, sharecropper farmland in South Carolina… … we are told by friends who travel the route frequently that today will not be much better…

… i am going for a 6:30 AM start in hopes that we will miss some of the predicted awful traffic… we have a choice of three routes… two travel highways and are projected to take about 7 hours… one does not use highways and is projected to take closer to 9 hours… we are tempted to do the 9 hour one in the hope that it will be more interesting and with fewer delays…

… one of the thoughts i keep having is how inefficient it all is… when so much of the nation’s goods and workforce flow over the apparently inadequate roads of the nation, so much time is lost…

The Manchin Mess… good article in the Bulwark about the mess…

Omicron, the possible good, bad and ugly… this article in The Bulwark summarizes the possible directions Omicron could go…

Heather Cox Richardson, December 21, 2021…

… the January 6 Select Committee noose tightens around the neck of 45’s administration… violent rhetoric is increasing… the HCR meter pointing down… we are on course for rough times…

First notes…

… we started our journey to Florida yesterday and the first leg of the trip was a bear… we got a late start which put us at DC near rush hour… DC rush Hour traffic is legendary… the traffic was weird too… car with flashing lights moving too slow on I95… in the fast lane!… a brush fire by the side of the road… accidents we never saw because we were rerouted through suburbs and farm land to avoid… the vehicular arteries around DC as metaphor for the arteries of government… what should have been 7 hours of driving turned into 9 with only 2 brief stops!… we will get an earlier start today… hoping the worst is behind us…

… we seem to have landed in the land of national chain retailers… big box stores everywhere…

Ignore Xi Jinping’s Deceptions. China Is Struggling, Therese Shaheen, National Review, December 20, 2021…

… this is a long and interesting article that makes the case that China is not as strong as one might get the impression it is through American news media… it made its case thoroughly and if that case is correct, it makes the China-US tensions seem less worrisome assuming a world where the US and Europe are united in containment efforts…

OMG, this is a must read! Against the Trap of Efficiency: Mortality, Meaning, and the Antidote to the Time-Anxiety that Syphons the Joy of Life, Maria Popova, The Marginalist…

… MP is one of my main spiritual guides and in this post she strikes spiritual gold, so to speak:

The exercise instantly clarifies — and horrifies, with the force of its clarity — the empty atoms of automation and unexamined choice filling modern life with busyness while hollowing it of gladness. What emerges is the sense that making a meaningful life is less like the building of the Pyramids, stacking an endless array of colossal blocks into a superstructure of impressive stature and on the back of slave labor, than like the carving of Rodin’s Thinker, cutting pieces away from the marble block until a shape of substance and beauty is revealed. What emerges, too, is the sense that the modern cult of productivity is the great pyramid scheme of our time.

… and then there is this quote from the book MP is telling us about:

Most other resources on which we rely as individuals — such as food, money, and electricity — are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been.

… this is the foundational idea of what this blog is about!…

Bob Thompson’s Provocative Challenge to Euro-American Art History, Billy Anania, Hyperallergic, December 20, 2021…

Bob Thompson, “Black Monster” (1959), oil on canvas, 56 x 67 inches (© Michael Rosenfeld Gallery LLC, New York)

… if i were anywhere near Maine and the Colby College Museum, i would go see this (assuming adequate safety measures for COVID)…

In 28 years of life, Thompson created more than 1,000 paintings, including hundreds of expressive reinterpretations of Renaissance and Early Modern artworks. These variations, much like those in jazz music, allowed the artist to riff on familiar favorites, and his standards of choice were Poussin, Tintoretto, Manet, and Goya. Approaching renowned white artists from the margins allowed Thompson to tease out Euro-American tensions with Blackness, and the 85 works on display here portray the terror and splendor of public space, the persecution of Black sexuality, and the fine line between assimilation and fugitivity.

… here is a Wikipedia article on him…

… he strikes me as a primitive, almost outsider artist, though he had formal training…

Heather Cox Richardson, December 20, 2021…

… about the betrayal of Joe Manchin… makes a compelling case for an economy centered around ordinary people and how BBB would have helped create that… it notes that Goldman Sachs downgraded economic growth projections by 1% upon news of Manchin’s betrayal… there is more to this than meets the eye though… it sounds like someone in the administration really pissed him off and he is having a temper tantrum… he has also, from what i see, left the door open for a reformulation of the bill into something more to his liking… i suspect we haven’t seen the end of BBB… politics is complicated, there are always steps back and steps forward…

First Notes

228.2 lbs

… departure day… will leave a little later than hoped, but, there is no ferry to catch, so we should be good…

… FB friend of Holly’s told her to beware I95 corridor gas stations… seems to be a spreading vector for COVID… i do an internest search, don’t find any new articles but find one from 2020 citing research of spread along the corridor so it makes sense that it would be a vector for Omicron… i have packed latex gloves and disinfectant wipes which i have not been using lately but will start using on the trip…

… did watch The Ice Harvest last night… slept through most of it… H says it was good… i guess we will add it to the roster…

… did a lot yesterday… not quite enough, but a lot… there is no absolute departure time today, so we should be fine… at least all our Christmas gifts got sent off and delivered…

… check utility bill, had been thinking automatic pay didn’t work… i was right… set up payment… one more thing off my mind…

The New West Side Story Brings the Show’s Father Issues to the Fore, Kyle Turner, Hyperallergic

… compelling review of Spielberg’s take on this classic reimagining of Romeo and Juliet…

Spielberg’s understanding of West Side Story and the role of inheritance in it (the love he’s inherited for the show, the love or hate the characters inherit for one another) is not uncomplicated. He doesn’t find a satisfying, saccharine answer around resilience the way he usually does in his characters, even though that idea easily could have manifested here in the form of María and Tony’s romance. Nor does he lean into the sentimentality of working on such a beloved title. His approach is dynamic, as shown by how he deepens (without “solving”) the story. Though evincing a classical Hollywood sensibility, he makes the personal and political violence more harrowing, their cyclical nature more tragic. The aesthetic in-betweenness — both breathtakingly old-fashioned and sharply modern — feels like his way of situating West Side Story within both his filmography and broader cinematic and political history. “Somewhere” is a utopian song, but finding a “new way of forgiving” doesn’t seem possible without grappling with the past. María and Tony ultimately can’t escape it, but can the show? Can Spielberg himself? Maybe “tonight” …

Keep Christ in Christmas?

… it appears than in the United States, the Puritans were the biggest humbuggers of all…

While today’s hand-wringing about the supposed war on Christmas centers on imagined attacks on American Christianity, there is a rich irony in the fact that the longest and most sustained critique of Christmas—including its banning—came from those who were claiming to be the truest and purest defenders of the reason for the season.¹

… read more here…

Democrats walk on eggshells around Breyer as GOP plans another blockade for any Biden Supreme Court pick, Edward-Isaac Dovere and Manu Raju, CNN, December 19, 2021

… the idea that there might be a supreme court vacancy in 2021 just came on my radar screen through this article on Reason.com about Biden’s potential impact on the federal court system (it’s been relatively substantial so far)… and, of course, its Justice Breyer… according to the article linked above…

Breyer has told several people who’ve made unofficial efforts to push him to retire that he thinks the confirmation process shouldn’t be political, according to people told of those discussions, and Democrats worry he’d remain as an act of resistance to show he’s not bowing to politics.

… and…

Privately, multiple Senate Democrats complain that Breyer seems to have let his ego overtake him and he is not being realistic to how radically Supreme Court confirmation politics has changed in the last five years.

… please let’s not make the same mistake as we did with Ginsberg… ego has got to give way to doing what’s right for future generations… current SCOTUS is awful… it would become more than tragic if conservatives get another seat to fill…

Is Russia Inflicting Brain Damage on CIA Officers and Diplomats?, Nestor T. Carbonell, National Review, December 19, 2021

… there is a lot of ominous news on the world stage regarding Russia… the troop buildup on the border of Ukraine… a foreign affairs analyst commenting on MSNBC that signs are disturbing and this article on Havana Syndrome… it appears the US is getting closer to pinning it on Russia… the tension grows…

The Death of Build Back Better?…

… this article in National Review explains conservative opposition and concerns about the BBB bill as well as a detailed account of Senator Manchin’s concerns about the bill… i have to count myself as among the frustrated with Manchin, probably more over voting rights and the filibuster than this… but i am also one of the more progressive who hopes this will lead to a reformulation of its contents into a narrower selection of priorities with longer term funding which he justifiably claims will be more likely to last into the future…

We must realize we can’t over-consume our planet. This is urgent. We need to listen to all the indigenous people in the world who know how to live in harmony with the planet.¹

First notes…

227.8 lbs

… 24 hrs till departure… things are more or less on track… a few more dangling ends than i would like, but they should be tied up by end of day…

… we watched A Very Murray Christmas last night… it was generally good except for the patriarchal configuration which was generally pretty traditional and maybe more than a little outdated?… it contained the song Baby, It’s Cold Outside, which has come to be known in some quarters as the “date rape song”… as i was listening to it the only thing that stood out to me was the “what’s in this drink” line, which suggests to some in present day audiences that the woman is being drugged… i get that, but, as usual the situation seems more nuanced… it’s worth reading this wikipedia article which outlines the controversy over the song… it is interesting that as contexts change, meanings change too… i generally like the song and the most significant thing to me is that the woman, while resisting, essentially consents… at no time in any performance of the song does she seem out of control… the “what’s in this drink?” line did hang me up a bit… the wikipedia article explains that this line essentially quotes “a common idiom of the period used to sidestep social expectations by blaming one’s actions on the influence of alcohol.”…

… we also watched Chocolat, which was a great movie with a wonderful cast, Jonny Depp, Juliette Binoche, Lena Olin… it was a Babbette’s Feast movie except it’s more direct target was the Catholic Church entrenched Patriarchy of a small town… i look up Babbette’s Feast and just reading the Wikipedia article explaining the plot i am in tears… what a beautiful film and story… i discover it is based on a short story by Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen)… i find a pdf of the story and save it to Evernote… i want to read it…

… i’ve gone down a rabbit hole, one thing leading to the next… what bliss…

… wow! just wow!… the Editors of the very right leaning National Review arguing for electoral count reform based on the fiasco of 45 and making it clear that 45 behaved badly and caused the January 6 riot …

When these efforts failed, the Trump campaign simply had several slates of Trump electors “cast” public votes on the required day, without any sanction from any arm of state government. A lawsuit, objections in Congress, legal memos by Trump adviser John Eastman, and ultimately the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally and subsequent riot at the Capitol were all directed at having either Vice President Mike Pence or Congress certify these fraudulent electors, or at least delay the counting of votes by electors properly certified by state governors.

… i know, i know, we lefties use the term ‘insurrection’ to describe what happened on January 6, but until that is fully established in legal proceedings, as we all believe it will be, i am good with ‘riot’ if it gets us to agreement on electoral count reform… you know, i say potato, you say potato…