This January has been an odd month.
The best thing so far this winter? The new bird feeder, outside my kitchen window. Yes, the birds go through the birdseed at an astonishing rate, but it's worth it. Mostly goldfinches, a few juncos, a few sparrows, and twice a cardinal. It provides them with food, and it helps preserve my sanity in this often cabin-feverish remote rural setting.
The worst thing so far this winter? The accident, totalled my old Jeep, and I'm surprised I walked away from the crash in one piece. On an otherwise clear road, a sudden patch of black ice, or frost coming out of the ground, or whatever... my Jeep ended up smashed to smithereens, lying on its side far out into a field. I crawled out through the front window and walked away unscathed-- quite surprisingly, after going off the road, down a 20 foot embankment, through a barbed wire fence, and rolling more than once as I slid and pitched and careened across the field. Thank God for seatbelts, or I wouldn't be here.
The most unexpected thing so far this winter? The new Jeep. Well, "new" Jeep. 2004 Grand Cherokee, found at a car dealership in town. I was planning on a newer vehicle in the spring anyhow, so I only had to move my plans up by a few months. Though I'm still adjusting to all the technological novelties of a 2004 model. The old Jeep was a '92; yes, that's right, no airbags. Hope I'll never have to test out the airbags on the new Jeep.
Other bits and pieces to January, too. But, you know, this has been an odd month. One thing I discover in this remote rural corner of the country is how readily and quickly friends and neighbors come to your aid when you're in a tough spot. From the friend who spotted the new Jeep for me, to the neighbor who loaned me a car for two weeks, to all the folks who expressed their concern-- and, yes, news does travel. I keep running into people who heard.
Meanwhile, I find quiet satisfaction in watching the birds at the bird feeder outside my kitchen window.
Tuesday, January 31, 2012
Google's New Privacy Whatever
Yeah. Starting March 1. Another month to go. No way to opt out. I haven't quite decided what to do about this. Blogger, you know, is also one of Google's services. I haven't decided yet whether I'll continue this blog, or whether I'll let it go inactive.
On the one hand, I'm sure Google has already gathered quite enough intelligence on me as it is, and this blog is a place where I can vent. On the other hand, no need to feed them with yet another source of intelligence once their privacy policy shifts modes into "one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"...
On the one hand, I'm sure Google has already gathered quite enough intelligence on me as it is, and this blog is a place where I can vent. On the other hand, no need to feed them with yet another source of intelligence once their privacy policy shifts modes into "one ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them"...
Tuesday, January 24, 2012
About That Constitution...
So, you've heard about the TSA detaining Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) at an airport while he was on his way to Washington. Quite predictably, our crotch-groping overlords have little use for the clear and explicit text of the Constitution:
The Senators and Representatives... shall in all Cases, except Treason, Felony and Breach of the Peace, be privileged from Arrest during their Attendance at the Session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same... (United States Constitution, Article 1, Section 6)Like I say, welcome to the police state.
Saturday, January 14, 2012
January Cold
Five below zero this morning. And here I sit, indoors, beneath a warm wool blanket, with a cup of hot coffee at hand. Furnace is running. And I don't believe on this frigid subzero day in the dead of winter that I will have any reason or need to go outside today. Refilled the bird feeder late yesterday afternoon, while the temperature was still in the single digits above zero.
Yesterday a friend who grew up in these parts, and who is only a couple of years older than me, told me that he grew up in a house (same house he still lives in today) where there was no indoor plumbing until he was in third or fourth grade. This was early 1960s. He remembers having to go out and use the outhouse when there was frost on the toilet seat.
Go back a generation earlier than that, and people would've been heating their homes on those subzero days by burning wood in a cast iron stove. Come to think of it, there are still several people around here who burn wood to heat their homes. Me, I'm enough of a city boy that I'd be stuck if I had to do more than just fiddle with the thermostat. But there are a good many folks around here who are not far removed from the roots of their pioneer ancestors.
Yesterday a friend who grew up in these parts, and who is only a couple of years older than me, told me that he grew up in a house (same house he still lives in today) where there was no indoor plumbing until he was in third or fourth grade. This was early 1960s. He remembers having to go out and use the outhouse when there was frost on the toilet seat.
Go back a generation earlier than that, and people would've been heating their homes on those subzero days by burning wood in a cast iron stove. Come to think of it, there are still several people around here who burn wood to heat their homes. Me, I'm enough of a city boy that I'd be stuck if I had to do more than just fiddle with the thermostat. But there are a good many folks around here who are not far removed from the roots of their pioneer ancestors.
Friday, January 6, 2012
Welcome to the Police State
Well, so Congress has passed, and President Obama has signed, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which among other things deals a mortal blow to the right of habeas corpus. Now if a US citizen is suspected of sympathizing with terrorism, the US military can apprehend them, on American soil or anywhere around the world, and hold them indefinitely... without charges, without trial, without legal recourse. As Senator Lindsey Graham infamously put it, "And when they say, 'I want my lawyer,' you tell them, 'Shut up. You don’t get a lawyer.'"
Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
I remember here in my neck of the words, there was a stretch of several years following 9/11 when any time you read the court records in the local paper, it seemed at least half the cases at the county courthouse included a peculiar criminal charge: "making terroristic threats." It didn't matter what the person had initially been arrested for, this additional charge would be tacked on. Resisting an officer and making terroristic threats. Causing a domestic disturbance and making terroristic threats. Disorderly conduct and making terroristic threats.
Obviously a law initially passed for use against terrorism was now being applied to any staggering drunk who bellowed at the police, "You get your hands off me or I'll knock your block off!"
Righto: public intoxication and making terroristic threats.
And once the NDAA starts getting applied with similar elasticity, when the bellicose drunk or the political protester or the person who wrote an angry letter to the editor says "I want my lawyer," you tell them, "Shut up, you don't get a lawyer."
Public intoxication and sympathizing with terrorism. Taking part in a protest march and sympathizing with terrorism. Writing an angry letter to the editor and sympathizing with terrorism. As the quotable Senator Graham put it, "The homeland is part of the battlefield and people can be held without trial whether an American citizen or not."
Gee, what could possibly go wrong?
I remember here in my neck of the words, there was a stretch of several years following 9/11 when any time you read the court records in the local paper, it seemed at least half the cases at the county courthouse included a peculiar criminal charge: "making terroristic threats." It didn't matter what the person had initially been arrested for, this additional charge would be tacked on. Resisting an officer and making terroristic threats. Causing a domestic disturbance and making terroristic threats. Disorderly conduct and making terroristic threats.
Obviously a law initially passed for use against terrorism was now being applied to any staggering drunk who bellowed at the police, "You get your hands off me or I'll knock your block off!"
Righto: public intoxication and making terroristic threats.
And once the NDAA starts getting applied with similar elasticity, when the bellicose drunk or the political protester or the person who wrote an angry letter to the editor says "I want my lawyer," you tell them, "Shut up, you don't get a lawyer."
Public intoxication and sympathizing with terrorism. Taking part in a protest march and sympathizing with terrorism. Writing an angry letter to the editor and sympathizing with terrorism. As the quotable Senator Graham put it, "The homeland is part of the battlefield and people can be held without trial whether an American citizen or not."
Friday, December 30, 2011
Thoughts in the Waning Days of the Old Year
I often think we'd all be better off if the extremists and fanatics and ideologues of whatever stripe could be packed off to some tropical island where they could continue their quarrel-to-the-death with one another, and just leave the rest of us alone. You know, the rest of us? The 80 or 90 percent of us within shouting distance of the broad center?
Because I think many of our social and cultural and political ills stem in large part from the toxic, dysfunctional attitudes of those fanatics and extremists, those engaged activists whether on the Right or on the Left. They're so geared up, so filled with bile and hate, so engorged on the tunnel vision of their uniquely righteous stance on uniquely vital issues, that they can't imagine how most of us really don't give a damn.
Or, even harder for them to imagine, the rest of us do give a damn, but only within limits. We care, but we don't care enough to upend the world in the verbal and emotional and ideological equivalent of World War III. We have our own view of things, but it is a view which is less than totalizing, a view strongly tinged by an informal sense of live and let live. We're not into mudslinging. We're not into scorched earth. This is unsatisfactory to those, on Right or Left, whose rigid bent has ever been let our ideology prevail, though the heavens fall.
How tiresome it must be to be always approving or disapproving of the "correct" things, the "correct" people, the "correct" arguments, the "correct" ideological stances. One cannot be a Conservative in good standing, one cannot be a Progressive in good standing, unless one burns a pinch of incense at the "correct" ideological altar, unless one voices one's approval of all that is "correct," and unless one barks out full-throated disapproval of one's opponents.
Disapproval in particular is essential, disapproval of those on the opposite side, disapproval of the hated, despised, demonized enemy.
Why don't these haters on either side-- good Progressive haters, good Conservative haters-- just go off to a tropical island where they can continue their incessant rigid rage-filled fights, and leave the rest of us alone? Leave the rest of us alone, and stop ripping our society to shreds in the name of an ideological purity, whether Right or Left, which is never pure enough to satisfy the extremists, and only eggs them on to greater and greater displays of utopian purism?
Because the rest of us may care, one way or the other, to some greater or lesser degree; but we don't "care" so intensely that, in order to save the society we live in, we're willing to destroy it.
Come to think of it, it may already be too late. The Center Did Not Hold. The history of the past half century in these United States is largely the history of centrifugal ideologies of Right and Left spinning faster and faster, gaining angular momentum, eroding culture, eroding the economy, eroding the political system, until the entire damn structure is ready to fly apart. Somber thoughts as we come up on 2012.
Because I think many of our social and cultural and political ills stem in large part from the toxic, dysfunctional attitudes of those fanatics and extremists, those engaged activists whether on the Right or on the Left. They're so geared up, so filled with bile and hate, so engorged on the tunnel vision of their uniquely righteous stance on uniquely vital issues, that they can't imagine how most of us really don't give a damn.
Or, even harder for them to imagine, the rest of us do give a damn, but only within limits. We care, but we don't care enough to upend the world in the verbal and emotional and ideological equivalent of World War III. We have our own view of things, but it is a view which is less than totalizing, a view strongly tinged by an informal sense of live and let live. We're not into mudslinging. We're not into scorched earth. This is unsatisfactory to those, on Right or Left, whose rigid bent has ever been let our ideology prevail, though the heavens fall.
How tiresome it must be to be always approving or disapproving of the "correct" things, the "correct" people, the "correct" arguments, the "correct" ideological stances. One cannot be a Conservative in good standing, one cannot be a Progressive in good standing, unless one burns a pinch of incense at the "correct" ideological altar, unless one voices one's approval of all that is "correct," and unless one barks out full-throated disapproval of one's opponents.
Disapproval in particular is essential, disapproval of those on the opposite side, disapproval of the hated, despised, demonized enemy.
Why don't these haters on either side-- good Progressive haters, good Conservative haters-- just go off to a tropical island where they can continue their incessant rigid rage-filled fights, and leave the rest of us alone? Leave the rest of us alone, and stop ripping our society to shreds in the name of an ideological purity, whether Right or Left, which is never pure enough to satisfy the extremists, and only eggs them on to greater and greater displays of utopian purism?
Because the rest of us may care, one way or the other, to some greater or lesser degree; but we don't "care" so intensely that, in order to save the society we live in, we're willing to destroy it.
Come to think of it, it may already be too late. The Center Did Not Hold. The history of the past half century in these United States is largely the history of centrifugal ideologies of Right and Left spinning faster and faster, gaining angular momentum, eroding culture, eroding the economy, eroding the political system, until the entire damn structure is ready to fly apart. Somber thoughts as we come up on 2012.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Christmas Blues
The presents are wrapped at last. I'm getting things pulled together and packed. And then it will be off on the long drive to the city, to visit my mom and my brother for Christmas and several days of vacation.
More than once as I've been getting ready, I find myself pausing and gazing off into the middle distance, and something indefinable descends upon my heart, like the pale grey light of winter. This will be our first Christmas without my father. He passed away this summer. Suddenly, quietly, in his sleep. He was up there in years, but still in good health, and it was completely unexpected.
I find I'm approaching Christmas with decidedly mixed feelings this year.
More than once as I've been getting ready, I find myself pausing and gazing off into the middle distance, and something indefinable descends upon my heart, like the pale grey light of winter. This will be our first Christmas without my father. He passed away this summer. Suddenly, quietly, in his sleep. He was up there in years, but still in good health, and it was completely unexpected.
I find I'm approaching Christmas with decidedly mixed feelings this year.
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