Coffee heat rising

Whither America?

Fighting Uphill through Dystopia

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Wow! This has been One of Those Days. Ever have a day where you felt like every  moment you were fighting uphill…against yourself? 😀

So for the fourth night in a row, I wake up at 2 in the morning and don’t get back to sleep. Along about dawn, I give up and roll out of the sack.

Normally at 5 a.m. I’d take the dogs for a mile-long walk: good for them, good for me. After yet another five-hour night, though, instead I wandered in to the computer to glance at the news. Then drifted over to the chapter I’m writing, which has been going exceptionally well. I’ve been working toward finishing a particularly difficult section of the thing…and when I sat down, got pulled into that.

Come 7:30 a.m., that section was written — we’re now at 62 endnotes, just for that one chapter. (This stuff is astonishing! What has been and still is going on boggles the brain.)

By now it’s getting a bit late for a doggy-walk, but thanks to Hurricane Bud’s outer fringe breezing through a couple days ago, by 7:30 it’s not yet unduly hot. So I decide to shoot out the door, despite the late hour, because the other day we failed to go out and I need not to get back into the no-walk habit.

Foolishly, though, I elect to take the route south from the Funny Farm, which is less shaded than the path through Upper Richistan. This: mistake.

Southward from here is Cassie’s favorite place to take a dump. I do not understand what it is about this particular house, but by damn, Cassie wants more than anything on this earth to dump upon its lawn. Specifically, to take up her position in front of the shack’s huge picture windows so the resident can watch her defiling the yard.

Naturally, I carry blue doggy-bags around with me. But really: every goddam day this dog has to dump on THAT lawn? If I were the homeowner, I’d be irked.

So to minimize the effect, I walk them past the house on the other side of the street and then go south on the sidewalk that passes along the side of the house. That way, when she hunkers down she at least isn’t making a spectacle of herself (and us) through the front-facing windows.

This takes us over a long stretch of fast-heating concrete and asphalt. Meanwhile, Cassie is putting up a fight: she drags  backward while Ruby drags forward. And at this moment, as we’re crossing the street, she decides to sit down in the middle of the goddamn road anbd not budge.

Here we have the flavor of the day: drag me forward, drag me backward.

Finally I cut short the stroll, leave the dogs at the house, and go out to finish the mile-long course.  By the time I get back, it’s starting to get hot.

A-a-a-n-d I haven’t watered the plants in back. In Arizona heat, you either water your potted plants or you watch your plants die. Fly outside to do that job and see the pool walls are draped with moss. Again. Mustard algae: it was cleaned up pretty well yesterday, and now here it is back again.

Feed the dogs. Fly back outside.

Screw on the pressure sprayer, jump in the drink, wash down the steps and seat and walls and walls and walls and walls and walls… Dump in more chlorine.

Notice that I must have slopped olive-oil marinade on the patio while I was entertaining friends Sunday evening. Spray the spots on the concrete and sandstone flags with diluted Dawn, let it sit.

Visit my neighbor, WonderAccountant, to gift her and Mr. WonderAccountant with the remaining half-bottle of wine from the recent shindig. It’s my favorite wine. I, however, am on the wagon and do not want this elixir to be wasted, so figured they might enjoy it. Hang out for awhile, chatting pleasantly.

After the series of sleepless nights, I decide to go back to bed for a short nap. Amazingly, it works: I’m out cold and even enjoying a dream. A fairly involved dream, complete with developed plot and characters…and of course the phone rings:

Hellooo, this is Rachel from Card Services…

Fuck!

Onward to spend the rest of the afternoon cleaning and oiling the kitchen cabinets. Fun job… 😮 But the result is pretty nice.

And speaking of Fuck…

If you are not listening to Rachel Maddow on what that bastard in the White House is doing to the children he has stolen from their parents, you sure as fuck should be. Get it on the Internet: google Rachel Maddow. Or better yet, go straight to the horse’s mouth: Pro Publica: https://www.propublica.org/article/children-separated-from-parents-border-patrol-cbp-trump-immigration-policy

This is simply inexcusable. We put a wannabe Balkan dictator in the White House, funded by multibillionaires who want to change America to fit their perverse tastes, and what we get is a country converted into a wannabe Balkan dictatorship.

If there breathes an American who does not feel shame for this, then that person is not much of an American.

Or maybe we should say this is not America. We have lost our country.

Magazines lost

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Yeah, I know: we still have magazines. Just look at any magazine rack in any supermarket. But they’re not like magazines used to be. Most focus on some narrow topic — quilting or tech or whatever lights your candle. Hardly any are general-interest or news magazines. The few that remain of those are mostly fluff, froth, and advertising — their editorial wells are, shall we say, exceptionally shallow. Magazines went out, along with newspapers, when the Internet came in. They were already struggling with the costs of printing and fulfillment and with the distraction of television. But they drowned in the tsunami that is the Web. And when we lost magazines, we lost a lot more than pictures and light content: we lost an informed public.

What, you ask, brings us this rumination?

Friend of mine, a bright and reasonably educated youngish woman with experience of the world, wondered aloud on Facebook why some people are so vociferously opposed to a national ID card. I remarked that no doubt the idea brings to mind Nazi “papers.” She responded with “I don’t understand.” Two of her followers — moi included — leapt to inform her that the Nazis used a national ID card to track and help trap members of the various groups they wished to extinguish.

I thought how odd that people wouldn’t know that!

But then realized it’s not odd at all. If I learned that in school, I don’t recall learning it there. I learned it from magazines like Life and Saturday Evening Post.

Back in the Dark Ages, magazines published actual content, not just fluff and advertising. Among the things they published were history stories. I remember, for example, learning about the Hindenberg disaster from a terrifying photo spread in the Saturday Evening Post. We learned about Nazi extermination programs from Life, the Post, Time, and even Newsweek, complete with graphic photos of concentration camps. And we learned about how the Nazis operated and what they intended to do once they took over Europe and waypoints. We also learned about Japanese imperialism and what they were up to in their Pacific venues.

Sure, they also published plenty of froth about movie stars and pop singers. But major national and international periodicals did not fail to include solid content presented in an interesting, easy-to-understand, memorable way. Even women’s magazines published real content. Have you picked up a Lady’s Home Journal lately? A given issue contains nothing but advertorial (much of it unmarked) and advertising. It was not always so: Lady’s Home Journal, McCall’s, and their sister publications used to carry real articles about real subject matter.

You didn’t learn the facts behind life in your present society from television. Few documentaries appeared on the boob tube — which was why Newton Minow called it “a vast wasteland.” What we live in now is exactly that — multiplied by some astronomical factor on the Internet, a place where attention span shrinks to secondes. Only in the absence of magazine journalism, we have nothing to take up the slack.

That is why we have voters who do not understand what is wrong with the proclamations of people like Trump and Pence. What we lost was an educated public of adults with common sense and the ability to set current events in their historic context. If things continue as they are going along this shameful trail of ignorance, we soon will lose the Republic itself.

And that is a big loss.

News in the Age of Ad-blocker Blockers

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Have you noticed that more and more news outlets are using software that blocks ad-blockers? I happen to hate pop-ups and babbling panes and things that flicker and flash at me, so as soon as a reliable ad-blocker came available for Firefox, I installed it. Works pretty well: 99.9% of ads are squelched, even on YouTube.

But of course, news media make their money by selling you, so it’s not in their interest to allow any ad-blocking shenanigans. At first just a few news organizations had ad-block killer — notably Forbes. Now at least 30% to 50% of them do — and they’re signing on in increasing numbers. Washington Post, one of my stand-by news sources, now makes itself unreadable to people who don’t care to be subjected to distracting ads.

You can install an anti-adblock killer. But there’s a limit. How many counter-counter-counter nuisances do I have to load into my computer? A lot can go wrong with these things…and when it does, what a time-suck! Consider the degree of farting around required to cope with this mess:

  • Check if you have only one Adblocker enabled. (Adblock, Adblock Plus or uBlock Origin)
  • Check if the script manager is enabled (Greasemonkey, Tampermonkey, NinjaKit, etc…).
  • Check if you have installed the latest version of Anti-Adblock Killer Script (Step 3).
  • Check if you have subscribed to Anti-Adblock Killer List (Step 2).
  • Check if Anti-Adblock Killer Script is enabled.
  • Check if Anti-Adblock Killer List is enabled.
  • Try update or re-install Anti-Adblock Killer Script.
  • Try update or re-subscribe Anti-Adblock Killer List.
  • Check if you have another userscript that might interfere with Anti-Adblock Killer.
  • Check if one of these extensions is problematic (Disable Anti-Adblock, Ghostery, Online Security Avast, Donotrackme, Privacy Badger, Disconnect, Blur, TrackerBlock, Kaspersky Anti-Banner, Freebox (Anti-pub), No Script, YesScript, HTTPS Everywhere).
  • Check if, your JavaScript is enabled Test.
  • Remove duplicates Anti-Adblock Killer (Script/List).
  • Remove or disable personal filters.
  • Enable only the filter lists you need, too many can make your browser unresponsive.
  • Force an update Adblocker lists
  • Force an update Script Manager
  • Check if the site is in “Supported Sites” or in “Changelog”.
    • If the site is not in it, please report it here.
    • If it exists, but the script does not work, it probably means that the antiadblocker has changed, please report it here
  • Try with another Browser.
  • Try with another Script Manager.
  • How to disable the update check Settings
  • How to disable the list check Settings
  • How write Adblock filters here
  • Where can report an advertisement here
  • Consult Discussions or Issues

So…no, guys. I don’t think so.

I’m not turning off the ad-blocker: I refuse to subject myself to advertisers’ garbage or allow it to soak up bandwidth that I have to pay for. There’s an easy alternative: don’t go to sites that block your ad-blocker.

Since more and more sites are doing that, what that means basically is I read less and less news.

And y’know what? That’s a good thing! Cruising news sites is one of my worst habits: I waste hour after hour after uncountable hour reading the news in its many Web-based iterations.

Fewer functional news sites = more time for living

The trick to getting the news, then, is simply to go to PBS, NPR, and BBC. I’m willing to donate to PBS and NPR. But I cannot afford to pay to read every news outlet that is required to get a full, reasonably balanced view of what’s going on in the world, nor am I going to subject myself to endless, intrusive nuisance advertising.

NPR’s national website has a news section that covers the nation, the world, politics, business, technology, science, health, and race & culture. Separately, you can go to your local NPR station’s site, and also to local NPR stations in other parts of the country. These often provide superior news coverage — of course, it’s not hard to get superior to a local news station’s play-nooz, but…just sayin’. Just Google NPR plus the local city of your choice; click on the “news” tab at the station’s website.

The daily update of PBS Newshour comes on at the PBS website late in the day — hereabouts, it appears around 5:00 or 5:30. And it’s a yakathon — I personally don’t have a lot of time to listen to talking heads. I can read a news report two or three times faster than a pretty woman or studly man can yap it at me. PBS publishes some transcripts of the Newshour’s content, which is useful.

BBC News is excellent. Coverage is superb, and you can get US and Canadian news at their website, as well as other international reporting.

Of course, this lets out reportage on the talking cows and the two-headed babies. But, alas, truth to tell, we can do without those lurid time-sucks. If you want lurid and freakish, try your local “news” stations, which are usually full of fluff and time-waste. By and large local news outlets do not report news well, but it’s more or less sort of better than nothing.

Heh. Maybe it is nothing. Maybe “nothing” is better than that stuff.

What you get in a blackout…

What’s the truth?

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Banner image of the day:
A meeting of the four jurists who imposed Nazi ideology on the legal system of Germany.
 Bundesarchiv_Bild_183-J03166,_Berlin,_Amtsübernahme_Dr._Thierack.jpg ‎(800 × 586 pixels, file size: 46 KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

Ya Can’t Shovel Heat!

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Gosh, what a gorgeous morning!

When the hounds rousted me out of the sack around 5:30 this morning, the thermometer in back measured just under 80 degrees. Beautiful morning!

Tidied the pool a bit — an Algae Wars maneuver — and then went swimming. 🙂

The Algae Wars are going well. The human may not be winning, exactly, but a sort of détente has been arrived at. Sweeping the walls or, more fun, getting into the drink and washing them down with the sprayer is beating back the little green critters, even though the water is now about as warm as it’s going to get. Algae love warm water!

So does the human. With a very small amount of daily attention — like, about 10 minutes’ worth — the human has managed to reclaim the pool from the plant life.

It’s 8:30 now and I’m still on the back porch, soaking up the lovely outdoors and swilling an extra cup or two of coffee. Soon, very soon, I must get to work: yesterday had planned to read six pages of the clients’ abstruse magnum opus (having read ahead six pages the day before), but by the time I sat down to work, I was so tired I couldn’t focus on it. So now must get through 12 pages of Chinese-accented academicese so the result can be proofed tomorrow and then sent off to the professors.

The water bill is going to be astronomical this month. During the warmest summer months, I set the watering system to run through its entire cycle every day. This results in water bills that match or exceed the power bills, which as you can imagine are themselves pretty bracing. But as the heat has hovered around 118 to 120, I’ve trotted out around noon or 1 p.m. and pushed the button to run all cycles manually for about 15 or 20 minutes, by way of keeping the greenery alive.

Oh well… It’s only money.

Speaking of astronomical, yesterday a friend and I decided to kill the day exploring Scottsdale Fashion Square, the elegant mall she and I have both drifted away from.

Well…lemme tellya something. Most normal malls indeed are dying, no question of it. But the ones that target the One Percent? Thriving!

You never saw so many rich bitches and overpriced teenagers in your LIFE! The devil may wear Prada, but so does Mrs. Gotrock’s daughter.

And yes, the rich are different from us. (In some cases it’s questionable whether they’re even human: just look at the critters in the White House.)

They eat in food courts, though, so my friend and I grabbed a Pita Jungle lunch and watched the scene go by. We reflected on the latest styles and colors: hevvin help us, what is HOT now is a throwback to 1969: every store is full of hippy-dippy outfits. On steroids.

Some of the stuff is very pretty. And…yes…forgive me, Father, but I have sinned blown away three months’ worth of my budget. 🙂

We went into a hilariously wonderful store called Johnny We. This outfit sells the most gorgeous shirts you can imagine. They’re embroidered, not printed. And elaborately embroidered.

Some of them are a little much, but many rank in the Top This, You Bitches! category. 😀

So there we are with our working-class noses pressed against the window, pining for an embroidered shirt or a purse that costs as much as a Mazerati, when what should we find hidden in the back of the store behind a partition but a couple racks of picked-over merchandise: 30% off!

Hot damn!

This image does not do it justice, thanks to the Mac’s stupid new software. Click for a larger picture…i hope…

We found this filmy cream-colored shirt with café-au-lait and champagne-colored embroidery all over it. With cutwork, if you can imagine! Thirty percent off! Yes yes yes YES!

It’s so, so, so pretty. Even with just a pair of jeans, it’ll be a jaw-dropper.

Not since I was married to the Corporate Lawyer have I spent so much money on a single piece of clothing. Holy mackerel!

Now I’m in the market for a pair of leggings in brown (preferably) or beige. Looks like one can order them from Amazon, but I really don’t like ordering clothes online: too much of a pig in a poke.

So anyway, over lunch we sang the “Where Have All the Shopping Malls Gone” song. And we concluded that the middle class, people who used to support the chain stores that populated the Metrocenters and the Paradise Valley Malls of yore, has essentially gone away. Neither she nor I shop in malls anymore because we can’t afford to shop in malls. And, as the old stand-by stores’ customer base has slipped, so has their customer service. It’s no longer fun to shop in those stores.

She remarked that she used to buy her clothes in Penney’s all the time, and I said I always bought kitchen and household gear at Sears. But now when you go into those stores, the hired help treats you like they wish you would please just go away. Stores like Dillard’s, Nordstrom’s, and Macy’s are affordable only on sale (and Macy’s customer service sucks, too).

Once I would buy cooking and household tchotchkes at Crate & Barrel, Restoration Hardware, Williams-Sonoma, Dillard’s, Macy’s and the like. Now I buy that kind of stuff at Costco or Target — or, more often, order it from Amazon. Used to buy furniture at Crate & Barrel or Macy’s. Now if I can’t find it at an estate sale, I don’t buy it.

Welp, it’s getting warm out here. Damnable “El Capitan” has crashed the MacBook TWICE while I’ve been writing this post, so I guess it’s time to knock off and go to work. On a different computer, thank you very much.

Next computer is gonna be a PC…

The Greatest Country in the World?

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Yesterday, it was 110 degrees in the shade. That’s not an extraordinary figure, though it’s a little early for such a warm day. Rolling off the freeway, I made sure to pull my car into the offramp lane furthest from the curb, something I do by habit to avoid being hassled by panhandlers.

And yea verily, there was a raggedy guy with his worldly possessions tossed on the ground all around him, begging for a handout. A guy in an SUV pulled up beside me, and sure enough, the panhandler barged up to the driver’s-side door and demanded money. SUV dude ignored him.

I was on my way to the PoD vendor, there to pick up some page proofs. It’s a lot cheaper to drive down south of the airport than to have him ship the things to me. Seemed to me I saw an awful lot of derelict-looking folks, and not just in the scruffier part of town. Earlier I’d spotted a guy begging at the corner of Tatum and Shea, smack in the middle of tony Paradise Valley, across the street from a supermarket where one finds BMWs, Mercedes, and even now and again a Bentley in the parking lot.

On an idle impulse, I decided to count the number of transients between the printer’s shop and my place.

So northward and westward bound it was. One . . . two . . .  three, four . . . five . . . six, seven, eight . . .  Some were huddled together in spots of shade, others were standing out in the full sun with their “Disabled Veteran” and “Need Food” signs, trying to cadge a few bucks. And of course, every freeway underpass has at least one and often several panhandlers working the offramps in the shade of the overpass.

On 24th Street at Roosevelt, a freight train was stopped — permanently as far as anyone could tell — right across the road. Becalmed, I settled in for a long, long wait, but then spotted a couple of 18-wheel truckers pushing their way through so right quick shoved my way in behind one of them (yes, I am an aggressive driver), and before long we were eastbound on Roosevelt, following the tracks to God knows where. Nine . . . ten. . . .

It was a long and roundabout trip, and I’ll admit I lost track of my bums because I passed some of the time gathering wool. Eventually we came out on McDowell by way of 36th Street.

This took me way out of my way. But I recalled that I needed something from a Target, and that the Costco shopping center on 44th Street north of McDowell happened to host one of those worthy stores. So bore easterly some more and finally north. Eleven . . . twelve . . .

Parked. Went into the Target. Didn’t find the desired item, but did find Bum #13 loitering in the portico outside the entrance.

By the time I got home, I had counted FIFTEEN derelicts stumbling around the streets, most of them no doubt mentally ill, drug addicts, or both.

Think of that. Fifteen homeless, miserable human beings in one trip. In 110-degree heat.

When I was a little kid in the 1950s, my father used to brag to me that America was “the greatest country in the world,” and one of the manifestations of that greatness was that we didn’t have people sleeping in the streets. In those days, out in Arabia, we would get Life and Saturday Evening Post and Time magazines shipped to us. Those amazing bygone publications would run stories with lots of photos displaying the wide, wide world to the American middle class.

This particular brag of my father’s came, memorably, when one of the magazines ran a big photo spread about India, showing scenes of poverty-stricken, half-starved men, women, and children living permanently on the sidewalks and the roads. See there! said he. America is such a great country, we never have people living on our streets.

Well, of course, he had lived through the Great Depression and passed a time when, for 10 days running, he and my mother had nothing to eat but pancakes and oranges kiped from local orchards, and I’m quite sure he knew about Hoovervilles and Okies. But the Depression was in the past and now we were in the 1950s and we were a Great Country.

He was right, though. When we would go home on long leaves, we would drive all the way across the country, from New York to Ft. Worth to Berkeley and back, and never once encounter anyone begging.

Today you see beggars on every corner.

If we were a Great Country, we could come up with the wherewithal to provide mental health care, drug addiction care, and housing for people who are too sick and too feckless to care for themselves.

When America was a Great Country (so said my father), we and our friends passed through towns and cities in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Lebanon, Bahrein, India, Africa…and everyplace we went we encountered hungry people begging for handouts. That was considered an exotic sight, something you only saw in Third-World countries.

Today we don’t have to travel far to meet a beggar. All we have to do is go down to the corner grocery store.

WTF is wrong with us that we have so many people living and begging in the streets?