I've been getting email intended for a member of
Congress representing a district in New York state.
A dopey web site lists one of my email
addresses in error as a contact address for him
(and ignores my requests to stop).
I've been getting impassioned pleas asking the Representative to oppose the madness coming out of the White House. The most recent one was from a doctor who wanted funding for the NIH to continue. I write back to everyone, telling them I share their concerns but I'm not the Tom they were trying to contact. One of my climbing buddies works as a ranger for the US Forest Service. He patrols the trail to Mt. Whitney. He likes the work. I write this in present tense because it's hard to accept that he was fired this week as part of the Tr‑‑p administration's willy‑nilly decimation of the federal workforce. In texting me this morning to give me the news, he said, "I'm pretty livid, but in a weird calm angry sort of way."
I broke this blog's comment system when I made some
changes to this blog's behind-the-scenes code.
Sorry about that.
It didn't accept comments earlier today but it's working again now.
These words from
four years ago
There's enough going on to warrant posting about politics every day but for a bunch of reasons I'm largely leaving that to other people. Although I may not comment about every dismal bit of news, we are still well and truly fucked.still apply, although I understated how bad things were. I'd post pics of jackrabbits (not that doing so would change the world) but they haven't been gracing my yard lately.
The one and only cactus I've grown from seed had seven,
eight, and
nine ribs
before settling on ten (which was how many ribs its
parents
had).
It stopped growing a while back and I put it in a larger pot. It's showing new growth now but seems confused about how many ribs it should have. I suspect the cactus has no idea of the sense of suspense it evokes. ![]()
* a small manufacturer of mallets,
not a manufacturer of small mallets
From a 1982 interview with Seymour Cray:
From an interview with Béla Bartók: Speaking roughly, the period from 1910 was not revolutionary at all. In art that is not possible. In art there are only slow or fast progressions. It is essentially evolution, not revolution.
Back in November, the NY Times published an
essay
by a high school student about how her classmates felt the day
after the election. It ran under the title
I'm 16. On Nov. 5 the Girls Cried,
and the Boys Played Minecraft.
An excerpt:
We girls woke up to a country that would rather elect a man found liable for sexual abuse than a woman. Where the kind of man my mother instructs me to cross the street to avoid will be addressed as Mr. President. Where the body I haven't fully grown into may no longer be under my control. The boys, it seemed to me, just woke up on a Wednesday. From a 1994 interview with Frank Zappa:
California is not just earthquake country; it's also fire country.
Knowing that is one thing but seeing the photos from Los Angeles
this month is another.
Around 20 years ago, I was in town running errands and saw a big plume of smoke coming from my neighborhood. I quit what I was doing and went home. The fire was about a mile away from my house. It burned one vacant lot; things could've been much worse if the wind had been a little different. I was reminded a couple months ago how easily the brush in this area burns. The closest fire came to anywhere I've lived was when a bakery across the street from me in San Francisco burned down in 1995. I was riding my bicycle home, saw the fire when I started up the hill to where I lived, and thought this doesn't look good.
From a video Mark Zuckerberg posted this morning:
We're going to simplify our content policies and get rid of a bunch of restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are just out of touch with mainstream discourse.In particular—as of today, Meta's hateful conduct policies page lists this exception to their general prohibition on insults about mental characteristics: We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non‑serious usage of words like “weird.”Gosh, I feel special to be part of a minority singled out as acceptable to insult.
I had an Acura NSX from 2003-2024 (sold as the Honda NSX outside of
North America). The NSX was a significant piece of automobile
history with several features never used in a production car before:
aluminum body/suspension and titanium connecting rods, to name two.
I put 97,000 miles on it and sold it for more than I'd paid in 2003.
In 2005, a guy working at Honda posted to an Internet forum that he had a few prototype NSX connecting rods on hand and would send one to any NSX owner who contacted him. He sent me one and it hung on the wall in my living room for 19 years. Wood paneling fades from daylight coming in through windows. There's a faint shadow of a connecting rod on the wall under the peg it used to hang from. The photo underneath is from Colorado in the 1980s and is a smaller print of the one that I gave to the guy with the spiky hair years later when, by a twist of fate I wrote about a while back, he was working across the street from me in San Francisco. ![]()
I had some urgent paperwork to send to the east coast late last month.
I went to a FedEx office
and asked for their cheapest overnight service; they wanted $68.30.
I felt so old. I remember when FedEx would send an envelope overnight for about $12. I chose the two‑day service this time, which was $9.75. It got there the next day anyway. This is consistent with my experience over the years: you pay for FedEx's two‑day service around Christmas and it goes overnight. I imagine that during periods of high volume, it's to FedEx's advantage to move stuff out of their system as soon as they can. But if they did that all year 'round, people would get wise to it and stop paying for next‑day service. Happy new year, everyone. |