This post is a day late. Not my fault. WordPress.com was having a bad day.
I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan’s. To me he was an affable guy propped up by the powers-that-be in his party. A likable frontman for a group of largely unlikable people.
In his second term it was obvious to me (and I thought must be to everyone else) that his mentation was slipping, and yet nobody was willing to bring that into the discussion. The whole thing smelled awfully like a cover-up.
So when he left office I did not miss him. When he was officially diagnosed with dementia a few years later the news came as no surprise. But this week I became aware of a public letter that he had written in 1994, when his condition was first made public. I thought it was particularly graceful, and link to it here.
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One place where I wasn’t surprised was this week’s park bench talk from a princess. I thought that she carried it off extremely well. Dignified, straightforward, without maudlin appeals. The lady has class. (Even though class is something of which I have never been accused, I know it when I see it.)
Times like this I am glad to be a nobody and thus no one cares what I choose to make public or not. Kate’s widely broadcasted message will probably not stop the attacks from the weak-minded and the cynical, who will continue their carping no matter what. But it may be enough for the rest of us, and hopefully this family can get the room and time they need and deserve.
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This morning I ran across one of those science pieces in the Times that just make my day. Where I learn something completely new and unexpected about the biology of our planet. Today I learned that there was such a thing as an olm.
An olm, you say, this is the first time you’ve heard about them? Why should anyone bother talking to you, you ignorant savage.
I admit it. I was ignorant of the fact that there are blind cave salamanders the size of bananas who meander up and down those springs that bubble to the surface.
Creatures that had eyes when they were first hatched, but then skin grew over them rendering the animals incapable of sight.
They are so careful about not wasting energy that one member of the species was observed to not move for seven years. Okay, that last bit about not moving for many years … that’s not news. There are members of congress who do that, and fail to make any contribution to the public welfare for decades. Take former Senator Strom Thurmond, for example:
Retrospectively, a Senate aide stated that “for his last ten years, Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback”, while a 2020 New Yorker article stated that he was “widely known” by the end of his career to be non compos mentis.
I guess that somehow I had expected more of salamanders.
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I’m getting better at avoiding clickbait. Early on in my internet life I really thought that I would eventually see the image that had attracted me. I know now that it never happens.
Clickbait consists of a never ending loop of advertisements with a handful of images sandwiched in there which bear only the slimmest relationship to what you were looking for. Let me give an example. Here is the headline:
Here is the image that accompanied the headline. Impressive, but being a Subaru owner for a long time now, I suspected that something might be amiss.
Here is what the Subaru Forester really looks like. Boxy, utilitarian, not at all like the Blade Runner sort of vehicle in the picture above.
My experience is that the image you wanted is never reached. Eventually you slump in your chair contemplating throwing that paperweight at the cat but catch yourself before you do something you’ll regret. The cat then relaxes and goes on with her self-assigned task of pulling your perfectly good wool carpeting to shreds.
However. Every once in a great while what looks like clickbait turns out to be a chest filled with treasure. Such was the case of a notice of a restaurant in Austin TX called El Arroyo. It is locally famous for having a clever sign out front, and a host of pictorial examples were provided.
I’ve captured some of them, and will post them here in the days to come.
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From The New Yorker
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Spitting rain/snow intermittently now for several days. It’s the sort of stuff that takes away just slightly from the glory of going out the front door. Yesterday we went for lunch with a friend who was leaving for a month’s trip and which involved getting into a warm and dry automobile, a short travel, then a quick dash into a warm and dry restaurant. Instead of charging up and down the hill down along the Uncompahgre River, we walked on the indoor track at the recreation center.
I can actually stand quite a bit of meteorologic hardship when it serves a purpose or there is nothing to do but bite the bullet. For instance, on our trips into the Boundary Waters, friend Rich and I had made a pact that if it was pouring rain on the day we were to enter the wilderness, we would rent a cabin instead and do day trips in between rain showers. But if we were already out there when the rain started, we would change nothing and proceed in the soggy state which was by now a fait accompli.
How to put it another way? I do not deliberately seek to be miserable, but can accept it with something approaching good grace when it is unavoidable. If I have to, I can come up with as stiff an upper lip as anybody. The operative words are “have to.”
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Little Home In The Valley 
I never liked Reagan – because of his politics, I hasten to say, since I obviously did not know the fellow – but the current GOP choice does have the knack of making him and others like him appear saint-like.
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