Yikes

I miss a lot of things about my life in Daegu, but the summer weather isn't one of them.  Those violent storms early in the week are relatively short, and just make everything even more humid and swamp-like.

Everything In America Is O.K.

Was it only four years ago when right-wing pundits were desperate to remind everybody that Trump's victory was a) due to "economic anxiety," not white supremacy and b) was no big deal?

This is unbelievable.  By that I mean, totally believable:

"The book details a phone call the day after the January 6 insurrection between Milley and Cheney, the Wyoming Republican who has close military ties. Cheney voted to impeach Trump and has been an outspoken critic of his election lies, leading to her ouster from House GOP leadership.

Milley asked Cheney how she was doing.

'That fucking guy Jim Jordan. That son of a b*tch,' Cheney said, according to the book.

Cheney bluntly relayed to Milley what she experienced on the House floor on January 6 while pro-Trump rioters overran police and breached the Capitol building, including a run-in with Jordan, a staunch Trump ally in the House who feverishly tried to overturn the election.

Cheney described to Milley her exchange with Jordan: 'While these maniacs are going through the place, I'm standing in the aisle and he said, "We need to get the ladies away from the aisle. Let me help you." I smacked his hand away and told him, "Get away from me. You f**king did this.""

An attempted coup is still a coup.

Also, fuck Gym Jordan. 

"You can't just make them disappear"

"'It's the anti-Jewish propaganda that is so wicked.'

'I don't give that any attention.'

'You won't forget that your daughter, Helena, is half Jewish, will you, Peter?'

'It's just their strategy.  Pauli knows these people, and he says that it's only for vote-catching.  Everyone knows that the anti-Jewish nonsense will all be dropped if they get any nearer to a majority in the Reichstag.  In the coming year they'll begin to eliminate it from the program.'

'What program?  They haven't got a program, except hating the Jews.'

'Nothing is going to happen to the Jews, Lottie.  Don't get upset on that account.  Look around you: the German economy would collapse without the Jews.'

'But do the Nazis know that?'

Peter looked at his wife with concern.  He hadn't realized how much the Nazi propaganda affected her.  It was, of course, the presence in Berlin of her parents.  Suddenly she was having to explain to them things she'd previously avoided thinking about.  'Well, anyway,' said Peter in an effort to relax her and end these childish fears.  'How can they get rid of the Jews?  They're Germans; they live here, don't they?  You can't just make them disappear.'"

-- Len Deighton, Winter

Through Yonder Window

Bellingham, Washington.

I call this one "Sunrise Over The Septic Tank."

Red Ones Go Faster

I bought a new car, a red Hyundai Kona baby SUV out of loyalty to South Korea I guess.

Haven't done a lot of driving with it yet, but it's very nice

Now it's time to start looking for some part-time work, which I'm actually looking forward to.

If we can make it through the rest of summer without another historic heat wave, I'll be happy.

English Toast

Well, England made it to the Euro final so color me impressed.

I see no way how they can beat Italy though.

Note: I am always wrong when I make sports predictions.

"palm trees standing like dying prisoners"

"I went up to my room, up the dusty stairs of Bunker Hill, past the soot-covered frame buildings along that dark street, sand and oil and grease choking the futile palm trees standing like dying prisoners, chained to a little plot of ground with black pavement hiding their feet.  Dust and old buildings and old people sitting at windows, old people tottering out of doors, old people moving painfully along the dark street.  The old folk from Indiana and Iowa and Illinois, from Boston and Kansas City and Des Moines, they sold their homes and their stores, and they came here by train and by automobile to the land of sunshine, to die in the sun, with just enough money to live until the sun killed them, tore themselves out by the roots in their last days, deserted the smug prosperity of Kansas City and Chicago and Peoria to find a place in the sun.  And when they got here they found that other and greater thieves had already taken possession, that even the sun belonged to the others; Smith and Jones and Parker, druggist, banker, baker, dust of Chicago and Cincinnati and Cleveland on their shoes, doomed to die in the sun, a few dollars in the bank, enough to subscribe to the Lost Angeles Times, enough to keep alive the illusion that this was paradise, that their little papier-mache homes were castles.  The uprooted ones, the empty sad folks, the old and the young folks, the folks from back home.  These were my countrymen, these were the new Californians.  With their bright polo shirts and sunglasses, they were in paradise, they belonged."

-- John Fante, Ask The Dust

"The sun was very pleasant to lie in"

"'You should bring your wife here,' she said.  'There are a lot of guys around.  Somebody would take her away from you and and when you got over it you'd be a lot happier.'

A croquet ball came rolling down the path from Teddy Blue's house.  It explained the sounds we had been hearing.  Sergei, wearing a pair of old shorts, came strolling after the ball carrying a mallet.  Another ball came down the path and a long-haired boy followed it.  Sergei ignored us and studied the position of this ball.  The long-haired boy studied the position of his ball.  Neither of them spoke.  Finally Sergei hit his ball down a little trail that led away from Leslie's house.

'There are ninety-nine wickets you have to got through,' Leslie said.  'They're all over the Lane.  The one thing you have to remember, if you start coming here, is never to move a croquet ball.  There're a couple of balls down the street that have been where they are for two years.  Everybody's afraid to move them.  The guys who started it may come back some time to finish their game.'

Pauline and Cleo came walking down the path, Pauline still in her nightgown.  They sat on the grass, and Cleo played in her mother's lap.  I lay back on the grass and considered taking a nap.  The sun was very pleasant to lie in.

'He has a bad wife,' Leslie said.  'She won't sleep with him.'

'She must be unhappy,' Pauline said."

-- Larry McMurtry, All My Friends Are Going To Be Strangers

"taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,)"

"The People!  Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront to the merely educated classes.  The rare, cosmical, artist-mind, lit with the Infinite, alone confronts his manifold and oceanic qualities -- but taste, intelligence and culture, (so-called,) have been against the masses, and remain so.  There is plenty of glamour about the most damnable crimes and hoggish meannesses, special and general, of the feudal and dynastic world over there, with its personnel of lords and queens and courts, so well-dress'd and so handsome.  But the People are ungrammatical, untidy, and their sins gaunt and ill-bred."

-- Walt Whitman, Democratic Vistas

"to warble spontaneous songs"

"Give me nights perfectly quiet as on high plateaus west of the Mississippi, and I looking up at the stars,

Give me odorous at sunrise a garden of beautiful flowers where I can walk undisturb'd,

Give me for marriage a sweet-breath'd woman of whom I should never tire,

Give me a perfect child, give me away aside from the noise of the world a rural domestic life,

Give me to warble spontaneous songs recluse by myself, for my own ears only,

Give me solitude, give me Nature, give me again O Nature your primal sanities!"

-- Walt Whitman, "Give Me the Splendid Silent Sun"

Life As A List

One way to think about aging is that you've got this list of things you can do, that you're used to doing, and with the passing of every few months you check a few things off of the list -- too dangerous, too overwhelming, simply impossible.

Of course, older folks aren't stupid.  They realize when you've decided there are things they can't do by themselves any longer -- bathing, de-skinning chicken, pulling weeds around the yard, boiling some eggs.  It hurts to have further and more basic things constantly taken away.

My Dad had a really rough time at the grocery store yesterday.  I'm afraid "going shopping" might get crossed off the list soon.