It IS The Heat

It’s a little known fact that Norwegian-Americans (I am one of those) have a motto, which is often displayed on their battle flags and escutcheons. It is Multum de arte nescio, sed quid mihi placet scio. The reason that no one knows about it is simple. When was the last time you paid attention to a Norwegian escutcheon? Or battle flag?

The motto’s translation is: I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.

Since I come from that venerable tradition, I will state without hesitation that I really like the work of Edward Hopper. Everyone is familiar with “Nighthawks,” which might be his most famous painting. But if you google Edward Hopper, you will find a treasure trove of other stuff that echoes that same lonely and alienated feeling that I feel when I look at it. Of course, remember that I freely admit to not knowing much about art at all.

Here’s a small gallery taken from the internet’s large store of his works.

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Here in Paradise we are not suffering from the heat as much as many others in the US. Oh, we hit the 90s occasionally but when the humidity is 10% or less the hurt is lessened.

It also helps that nearly all of our nights are cool, so we can wake up much fresher than I did as a kid in Minnesota. My childhood homes were not air-conditioned and I clearly recall rotating my body during the night trying in vain to find a cool part of the bedsheet. Pillows were too hot to use at all. I tried to learn to hover without much success.

Another burden we have been spared this far is wildfire. Five hundred miles south of us near Ruidoso, New Mexico, the South Fork Fire has burned 20,000 acres and 1500 structures have been destroyed. So while I will often whine* about the local climate on occasion, I truly cannot complain.

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*I claim the fundamental rights of every American:

• Freedom of speech
• Freedom of peaceful assembly
• The right to own as many guns as your typical Colonial regiment might have on hand
• Unlimited kvetching

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Normally the Uncompahgre River is clear water and Class I-II rapids as it passes through the park. This weekend it is higher than at any time since we’ve moved here, with much faster water that is the color of milky coffee. A combination of snowmelt and the solid rain of yesterday have boosted its power.

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From The New Yorker

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I’m thinking this grabs most people’s attention, if only briefly. Certainly got mine.

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Montrose is riddled with roses this time of the year. Before I moved to Paradise, I hadn’t thought of them as plants so well-suited to a dry country. We have an orange bush rose out front that has never been watered by us … ever. In fact, when we moved here it was so scraggly looking that we ignored it assuming that it would perish. Months later when it was still scraggly but showed no signs of going away, I began to trim it and have done so each year since then.

These are not delicate tea roses filling the air with their perfumes, but shrub roses, tree roses, and climbing roses that give up the faintest of scents only if one plunges their nose deep into the blossom.

Risky business … though … that plunge.

Thorns, you know.

Bees, too.

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From The New Yorker

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Governor Landry of Louisiana just signed into law a statute requiring that the Ten Commandments be posted in every public classroom in that state. This is one more example of the perniciousness of “Christian Nationalists.” These are a group of largely white supremacists who hang a gold cross around their neck and try to pass themselves off as Christians. They have little or nothing in common with those who truly practice that faith. Theirs is a political show.

The measure in Louisiana requires that the commandments be displayed in each classroom of every public elementary, middle and high school, as well as public college classrooms. The posters must be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and the commandments must be “the central focus of the poster” and “in a large, easily readable font.”

NYTimes, June 20

“I can’t wait to be sued,” Mr. Landry said on Saturday at a Republican fund-raiser in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. And on Wednesday, as he signed the measure, he argued that the Ten Commandments contained valuable lessons for students.

“If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”

NYTimes, June20

There is more than a little irony in Mr. Landry telling us to respect the law even as he is ignoring the Constitution. The folks who sat down and invented America came from a Europe where religious violence and bigotry had been on prominent display for centuries. They were resolved not to repeat those errors.

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion.”

First Amendment to the United States Constitution

People like Landry who profess to want religion to take a more prominent role in political life always want it to be their particular religion, of course. Throughout human history it has only been a short step from establishing a state religion to the moment when persecution of other belief systems begins.

So I respectfully suggest to Governor Landry that he should make his posters even bigger and then put them where the sun don’t shine, while in the meantime I will make a contribution to the ACLU.

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Memento Mori

Ahhhh, Donald Sutherland. It never occurred to me that you might pass away before I did. I blithely assumed that there would be yet another movie in another season where your particular ability to dominate any scene you were in would be there for me to enjoy.

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