Author: jono55

I don’t know if you have noticed, but it is quite warm out there in the land beyond the front door. Our ten day forecast here in Paradise goes like this:

Yesterday I had to make some hard choices. You remember my tomato plants? Well, I finally had a lucid moment about the whole thing. I had twenty gigantic plants, with hundreds and hundreds of little green spheres growing all over them. As I saw it I had three choices:

• Throw half the plants over the back fence
• Find new homes for half the plants
• Keep them all and go buy hundreds of dollars worth of canning supplies. Then learn how to can tomatoes according to the manual written by Dr. P. Tomaine
• Run away

There I was, shears in hand and about to commit herbicide as the plants turned their soulful faces up to me and tried to smile even as they grappled with bravely accepting their fate. “The children,” I could hear them whispering, “think of the children.”

I couldn’t do it.

I ran out into the front yard and grabbed the t-shirt of a neighbor sitting on his porch and begged him to take some of the plants. The poor fellow was blind-sided and nodded “yes.” Before he could change his mind I had placed six specimens on his doorstep.

A woman was walking her dog past our house and ended up with four. Another guy took two. And it was done. I could handle the rest.

When you give someone a plant you give them a job to do, and after some reflection these fine folks may decide that they want nothing to do with an instant garden and its responsibility. They may quietly and under cover of night consign them to the trash. That is entirely up to them. I’ve done what I had to do. Just like Pontius Pilate, I have washed my hands of the matter.

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Toady Of The Week Department

Once again, our nominee is Senator Lindsey Graham. He was giving a speech to a MAGA crowd in his hometown in South Carolina, the place where he was born, and he was loudly booed. Do you think he gets it yet? He has made himself into a living, breathing, caricature of a politician that is a completely empty suit. There is no longer anything inside there at all.

One day the clothing will collapse and that will be the end of his story. Can’t wait, actually. It’s painful to watch.

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We drove to Durango today, going the long way because of construction activities on the Million Dollar Highway. There is no plan for any day of the remainder of my life that would include my navigating that road if it were narrowed down to a single lane.

The route we took was beautiful. Not much traffic at all once we got past Telluride. Forests, mountains, creeks and rivers and not a lot of civilization.

On an evening walk, we saw three young deer, all of them bucks. They were striplings, with bodies that had yet to attain that massive muscularity of an older male. When you see one of those guys, you marvel.

Of course those handsome beasts are prime targets for a lesser sort of creature, the hunter. On that same evening’s walk, we passed an open garage door, and there, mounted on the wall amidst a din of clutter was the antlered head of what had once been a magnificent animal. A pathetic display for certain, but only what you should expect when you make a sport of killing.

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To the opera Friday night, in Santa Fe. Overheard this faux conversation, which I took as directed at me:

Doyenne #1: Here, dear, let me open that car door for you.

Doyenne #2: Why, thank you for your kindness

Doyenne #1: Don’t look right this minute, but behind you is a man exiting his car wearing shorts and sandals … and old sandals, at that

Doyenne #2: You met that aged fellow? With the spiderwebby leg veins?

Doyenne #1: That’s the man. No pride or consideration for others, that’s for certain

Doyenne #2: Well, dear, it was inevitable. One of the shortcomings of living in a democracy is everyone thinks they can come to a performance wearing any old thing they choose. Standards are out the window when the hoi polloi are involved .

Doyenne #1: Too true, too true. Let’s do go in though, I’m tired of looking at him. Now where did I put my lorgnette?

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A few pix from the Santa Fe Opera. Photography is not allowed during performances.

WordPress keeps track of such things, and has informed me that today’s post is the 501st since I joined them. Before that I employed another piece of blogging software for several years. You’d think that by now I’d be better at it, wouldn’t you? Oh, well …

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(A note on the header photo. When our fearsome foursome flew into some beautiful Canadian lakes, like Loonhaunt, we didn’t waste a minute. Here an exhausted Sid and Ron have collapsed from having so much fun, but you can see that even though they are comatose their lines are still in the water.)

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Recent conversation with a dermatologist:

Dermatologist: Hi there, how ya doin’?

Patient: Quite well, thank you, doctor.

Dermatologist: What’s your problem?

Patient: My problem is my feet.

Dermatologist: And?

Patient: Well, I used to have remarkable feet. Handsome things, really. In fact, there was a time when I seriously considered becoming a professional foot model.

Dermatologist: I’ll be darned. But now … not so good?

Patient: No, doctor, something is destroying my toenails, as you can see.

Dermatologist: Let’s take a look. Well, they are damned ugly, that’s for sure. What do you think is causing it?

Patient: That was exactly my question for you.

Dermatologist: To be sure, to be sure. And I have answers for you, don’t think for a moment that I don’t.

Patient: Perhaps you could share that information with me.

Dermatologist: It’s a fungus.

Patient: I thought it might be. I’ve been soaking my feet in various concoctions and applying all manner of antifungal creams, to no avail.

Dermatologist: Yah, yah, those never work .

Patient: Your suggestion?

Dermatologist: Well, to begin with, if we were going to treat it the first thing we’d have to do is a culture to find out which fungus it is.

Patient: Okay

Dermatologist: Once we have that data, we can prescribe the correct pills.

Patient: That sounds good.

Dermatologist: Well, yes, but they only work half the time.

Patient: Ohhhh

Dermatologist: And even if they do, there’s a 70% chance it will come right back.

Patient: Ahhhhh

Dermatologist: And there are side effects to the medications … quite a few of them … hair, stomach, testicles …

Patient: Noooooh

Dermatologist: So my suggestion is to fageddaboudit.

Patient: Whuh?

Dermatologist: It’s not painful, it’s not climbing up your leg, it just looks disgusting

Patient: But to keep my feet hidden all the time …

Dermatologist: Your choice

Patient: Thank you, doctor, for your time

Dermatologist: We’re done then, please have the decency to put some socks on immediately, there may be children in the waiting room

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Here’s a tale that reinforces the ancient adage that no good deed goes unpunished.

A couple of years ago sales began to drop steeply and continued to do so until this year the Instant Company entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

The problem? Analysts say that (among other things):

• Everyone had one that wanted one
• They never wear out
• They never break down

There you go. Make something so well that it doesn’t fail and where needing a replacement is a rarity and you may have the dubious distinction of killing off your own business.

We are still using ours 5-6 times or more each week. It is a blessing not to have to heat up the kitchen stove when the weather is as hot as it has been. The device uses much less energy and cooks faster than our range. Converting recipes I already possess for pressure cooking hasn’t been much of a chore at all, and new ones are available by the thousands on the internet.

If mine ever does burn out, by the time the neon light has faded forever from its display I will be at Target buying a replacement.

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I’ve finally been able to put it all together into a framework that makes some sense. What’s that, you say? Well, the Republican right’s war on sex. Or rather, everything other than good old two-gender-wearing-proper-clothing-and-all-that sex. It helps to keep in mind that they have nothing else going for them. They are a party without the foggiest notion about how to govern and all this noise they are making is an attempt to cover up that fact.

But sometimes I feel just a bit sorry for this demented fringe, and would like to offer some tried and true suggestions from Ye Olde Puritan Manual for further forays in the culture wars.

• Bring back the dunking stool, it’s such an excellent crowd pleaser for misogynists
• How’s about an old-fashioned witch hunt? Not the faux, limp variety we read about these days, but a real one, with trials and forced confessions and convulsions and everything?
• How about resurrecting the scarlet letter program? We’d need some new letters for today, but that shouldn’t be an issue.

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We can have democracy in this country, or we can have great wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can’t have both.

Louis Brandeis

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Yesterday Robin and I took a real hike for the first time since her first knee surgery. It was up and up along the Spirit Gulch trail, a few miles only, but strenuous ones. When it is steep going up, it is careful work going back down. The stones roll under your feet when you descend and do their level best to set you down hard.

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As we approached Ouray on our way out, Robin idly mentioned that there was a perfectly good donut shop along its main street, and did I think that there might be any donuts left when we got there? From then on I counted the inches between me and that establishment.

So we stopped, we bought and ate, and we did not stroke out. Not this time, anyway. I don’t want to sound cavalier, but it if is a donut that is destined to carry me off the planet, I can only hope that some kind person will brush the crumbs out of my beard to make my remains look more respectable.

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One of the tasty phrases that Leonard Cohen left us to chew over is this one: “There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.”

Another man named Otto von Bismarck is quoted as saying (although he many not have been the first who did): “Law and sausage are two things you do not want to see being made. To retain respect for sausages and laws, one must not watch them in the making.”

I agree with both of these guys. Sometimes there is just little too much light that gets in for that particular day.

I have friends who just love to watch documentaries that are exposés (and the streaming universe is full of such programming). These friends positively quiver at being able to relate indignantly how this or that politician has been caught out lying to us, for instance.

In my callow youth (which to some degree still persists in hidden niches in my brain, making me a callow senior as well), I was shocked one day to find that President Dwight D. Eisenhower had fibbed. He had told the nation one unhappy morning that a spy plane piloted by a man named Francis Gary Powers, and which had just been shot down over Russian soil, didn’t belong to the U.S. and he knew nothing about it. A couple of days later he admitted, when the attempts at deception were too obvious to be maintained: My bad, America, that was our plane after all.

That was the moment I lost my political maidenhead and became the world-weary and cynical soul that I am today. Since that sad time I have been lied to by every single president of the United States, and I know this because so much of that damned light gets in.

That’s why I am at least partially sympathetic to the followers of Donald Cluck when they give such astoundingly foolish answers to questions involving his probity and honesty.

At some level they know that they would be blinded by the light, so they stick their fingers, chewing gum, and well-chewed tobacco plugs in the cracks to avoid this happening. I get it. I don’t respect it, but I get it.

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We celebrated the Fourth of July this year by not blowing anything up or making any explosive noises at all. Our plan was to to get together with friends and to eat the kind of food that belongs on paper plates and is often found in your lap as a result.

There are no real bargains in paper plates, you learn early in your career as an adult. Trying to save money here is like buying the cheapest parachute you can find. Finding out you’ve made a mistake can be embarrassing at the very least.

We brought pulled pork sandwiches and baked beans as our contribution. I have recipes for both of these that are foolproof, and I am just the fool to prove it. All one needs to do is to measure the ingredients properly, toss them into the Instant Pot, and turn the blessed thing on. Magic happens, and the contents of the cooker are transformed.

It’s hard to remember when sitting on a blanket in a park to watch fireworks began to pall for me, but perhaps it was when (for the numteenth time) some juvenile delinquents ran through the crowd tossing firecrackers to the right and left of themselves and thus burning holes in the hair and clothing of the other attendees.

So on these occasions I now prefer to remain behind and spend my time in the kitchen stirring pots, thus avoiding revealing the grumpy old cynic that I am and spoiling the fun for others.

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The second day of July 1776, will be the most memorable epoch in the history of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forever more.

John Adams

Mr. Adams was only off by two days, but his heart and enthusiasm were in the right place, certainly.

By a remarkable coincidence, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, the only two signatories of the Declaration of Independence later to serve as presidents of the United States, both died on the same day: July 4, 1826, which was the 50th anniversary of the Declaration.

Wikipedia: The Fourth of July

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This morning is another bright and sunny one in a string of bright and sunny mornings that goes back nearly two months. A bit more precipitation would have been appreciated but it has otherwise been a lovely early summer.

Our tomato plants in general resemble nothing so much as smaller versions of Audrey II, the dangerously carnivorous plant in the movie Little Shop of Horrors. This week they are showing tiny fruits.

I tread carefully as I water them and never put one between me and my escape route. I really can’t imagine a more ignominious end than being masticated by a vegetable.

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Here is our local 10 day forecast. Remember, this is Paradise, so heaven knows what the rest of you have to endure.

Every day is to be somewhere in the nineties. Dreadful. And the trend is slowly upward during those ten days. Gruesome. I know that it’s been much worse already in some places, including Texas, but Texas is being punished for being such a backward state, so that doesn’t count.

We do have quite a few visitors from Texas who come to Paradise to get away from living in what is essentially a slow cooker. They are not regarded highly by our local residents. Texans have a reputation for being awful drivers, especially among the people who love to drive Jeeps up along alpine goat trails. Apparently Texans have a habit of putting their vehicles crossways on a single lane jeep trail, blocking traffic in both directions.

There is a genre of “Texan jokes,” which are similar to those targeting ethnicities elsewhere in the country. I will share one of them with you.

An old prospector shuffled into town leading a tired old mule. The old man headed straight for the only saloon in town, to clear his parched throat. He walked up to the saloon and tied his old mule to the hitch rail. As he stood there, brushing some of the dust from his face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other.

The young gunslinger looked at the old man and laughed, saying, “Hey old man, can you dance?”

The old man looked up at the gunslinger and said, “No son, I don’t dance… never really wanted to”

A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said, “Well, you old fool, you’re gonna dance now!” and started shooting at the old man’s feet. The old prospector, not wanting to get a toe blown off, started hopping around like a flea on a hot skillet. 

When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon.

The old man turned to his pack mule, pulled out an aged double-barreled 12 gauge shotgun and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air. The crowd stopped laughing immediately. 

The young gunslinger heard the sounds too, and he turned around very slowly. The silence was deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old timer and the large gaping holes of those 12-gauge barrels. The shotgun never wavered in the old man’s hands, as he quietly said;

“Son, have you ever kissed a mule’s ass?”

The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, “No sir… but…. I’ve always wanted to”

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Buddhism has quite a lot to say about sentient beings and our responsibilities toward them. Which means at the very least, toward each other. Of course, being the argumentative species that we are, we haggle about what “sentient” means, exactly. But whatever species we regard as sentient, we are exhorted to do no harm to them. To not exploit them, to not be cruel to them, to not eat them.

In Buddhist thought there is not nearly so much made of distinctions between man and the “lower” animals. In fact, in some of its traditions, there are no “lower” ones at all. We are equals in our right to be treated with kindness and compassion.

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When one’s belly is full, the evening is soft and warm, and the after-dinner chairs are comfortable, there is a tendency for the conversation to wander a bit more freely. That is what happened on the evening of the Fourth of July just past when four sentient friends were gathered together and began to discuss the world around them, especially from a political standpoint.

It turns out that it’s not all about us. For instance, we in the West have a very long and strong habit of using up earth’s resources at an exorbitant rate. Often we take those materials from countries where the local inhabitants have had little say in our appropriating their stuff. That era is coming to an end, and a newer era of sharing those resources more equitably is being worked out. This will not happen without dislocation and pain, certainly, and perhaps not without bloodshed. Our species reaches for our guns entirely too quickly.

Eventually we may be better off as we learn to live within our planet’s means, but the choice is being forced upon us, and when that happens our tendency is to behave at first like the two-year old who climbs onto the table and declares “Don’t tell me what to do!”

That approach won’t work this time, I think. We are bumping up hard against realities that we have ignored or pretended did not exist. The bill is coming due.

(Bob Dylan was twenty-one years old when he wrote A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. How prescient was that?)

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From The New Yorker

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I was a deprived child in so many ways. Deprived of things that I would definitely have benefited from but never received, For one thing, no one ever read Goodnight Moon to me. Of course it hadn’t been written yet, but still … .

Not everybody has liked Goodnight Moon, as evidenced by the following quotation from a Wikipedia entry.

From the time of its publication in 1947 and until 1972, the book was “banned” by the New York Public Library due to the then head children’s librarian  Anne Carroll Moore’s hatred of the book. Moore was considered a top taste-maker and arbiter of children’s books not only in the New York Public Library, but for libraries nationwide in the United States, even well past her official retirement.

Wikipedia: Goodnight Moon

My own read on Anne Carroll Moore is that she must have been a colossal sourpuss.

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From The New Yorker

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Friday Robin and I took our bikes to the Grand Mesa. Since these are not mountain bikes, we limited ourselves to traveling on the roadways.

Our first choice had been to take the 24 mile ride round trip to the Lands End Observatory, but gave up on that after less than a mile. The road was washboarded gravel that was so unpleasant to ride on that we weren’t having any fun at all. With such a violent jarring there was a fear that the fillings of our teeth would loosen and fall out as well as all the screws on our bicycles, so we returned to good old asphalt and did a dozen or so miles up there at 10,280 feet altitude.

I had packed a picnic lunch which we carried in panniers, and when the time came to eat we pulled off into the Spruce Grove Campground, looking for a table.

Which we did find.

But.

In less time than it took to type this sentence we were surrounded by thousands of mosquitoes all humming in anticipation of a sumptuous blood meal at our expense. We paused not for a moment, but mounted up and rode further on until we found a place in the sunshine where the breeze could get at us and blow the insects away. It’s a blessing that these pests are such weak fliers that almost any wind can provide some protection.

(Really, it was thousands of them. They formed a cloud around us.)

Our lunch was a simple one. An apple, an orange bell pepper, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Neither of us had eaten a PB and J in many years, but that particular day it was was the perfect thing.

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Doonesbury is pretty good this week. If you’re woke, that is.

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We watched the opera Tosca last night, on Prime. Robin had been curious about it, we had a couple of hours to burn, and so it went. It wasn’t free, but for five bucks is was certainly something different from the run of the mill streamers.

The production was from 2022, done in modern dress, and was easy to follow once we found the key to the subtitles. I will here insert that my Italian is very week, basically consisting of the names of three sausages. The story line … well … it has everything. Lust, murder, torture, suicide – they are all there. And gore, did I mention gore?

The lady is desired by yet another man who wields quite a bit of power, and who wants to spend some serious canoodling time with her. He cares not a whit how that happens, or whether she is interested.

Before you know it there is blood flowing, amputated fingers on the floor, knives flashing, and a firing squad that forgot to use the blanks they were issued. By the end of the story the three leads are all dead, which pretty much wraps things up.

I enjoyed it even though I try to avoid becoming becoming cultured whenever possible. I’ve heard there are other operas, maybe we’ll do this again.

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