Friday, February 21, 2025

The MAGA Mindset

Having (wincingly, and so you don't have to) had a glance at several MAGA blogs, sites, and pages, here is what I have learned about MAGA:

(1) If Trump/Elon is hurting them or something they care about, it's a huge offense and horrible and should stop immediately.

(2) If Trump/Elon is hurting other people/things they don't care about, it's wonderful and exactly what should be happening. Hurt those people more! Destroy more of those things!

This is the philosophy of a toddler, and not a very well socialized one. That's our country now.


Thursday, February 20, 2025

Walking in the Snow

It got above 12 degrees, so I went for a walk in the snow.

Despite the socialist snowplow that plowed our streets, there was still a lot of ice on the road. People were driving anyway, and one truck was pulling a guy behind them on a plastic sled, which, wow. I guess that's the sort of thing humans get up to because we have no natural predators.

There were fewer people sledding on the golf course, probably because of the vicious cold. But the sun was out, making everything very pretty.



Here's a pine tree in the snow:



And here is Jasper, very pleased that she is not some idiot who insists on going out for a walk on a snowy, icy, frigid day:



What I'm Reading Now

Audrey Schulman, Theory of Bastards

This is the best book I've read in awhile -- one of those stay-up-until-2:00-in-the-morning books. Told mainly from the point of view of a MacArthur Fellow who studies sexual behavior in primates (mostly human, but in the book it's bonobos), it's the story of a couple months in her life, with frequent flashbacks to her past. She's disabled, which has made her, interestingly, a better scientist; and she's living just before and during climate collapse, which she ignores as assiduously as most people do, right up until she can't.

There are some great characters in this, not all of them human, and the writing is great. Five stars, can't wait to read more by Schulman. (Recommended on Jo Walton's reading list, where I get a lot of my favorite reads; and like her I have some nitpicks about the actual science, but by the time I was thirty pages in I didn't care, I would follow Schulman anywhere.)


Kathleen Flynn, The Jane Austen Project

Time travel and Jane Austen -- obviously a book written exactly for me! And I do like it a lot. A doctor and Jane Austen scholar (that's one character) travels back in time with an actor and a Jane Austen scholar (the other character) to meet and research Jane Austen and to get (if they can) the letters that Austen's sister famously burned upon her death, as well a completed copy of the Watsons.

Things don't go quite as planned, obviously; but what really works in this novel is Flynn's ability to give us the world of 1815, and the Austen family. There's a romance between the two Austen scholars which is pretty well done. I kind of wanted a different ending, but it works for the novel. Recommend for all fans of Austen and time travel.


Gary Groner, The Way

Also a post-collapse/post-apocalyptic novel. Here, a virus has wiped out most of the world's population and remains endemic, killing almost everyone as they age into their forties. Will, one of the few people to survive past fifty, is tasked with taking information about a possible cure from Colorado (where he is the only survivor of a bunch of Buddhist living in a retreat in the mountains) to San Francisco, where a group of scientists still have the technology to do something with the information.

We can gloss over that bit, since the cure is just a McGuffin. What we have here is a travel quest through a world where most of the surviving population are feral children and adolescents, and where any towns or groups of young adults have to try to survive in a lawless landscape. Will struggles to maintain his non-violent worldview, which keeps him from killing or harming anyone or anything, while knowing he benefits from violence done by others. Also, he has two animal companions, a crow and a cat, with whom he can talk. This is either magical realism or some side effect of the virus, I was never sure which.

Anyway, compelling story and great characters. Even an acceptable ending. I liked this one a lot.


Ray Nayler, The Mountain in the Sea

I finally read this one, which everyone was raving about a couple years ago. I love Nayler's short fiction and his novellas, but I could never get past the first ten pages of this one. Finally I just kept reading, forcing myself through the first hundred pages, and it did get better. It's still not my favorite by Nayler. I think he works better with shorter fiction.

Anyway, this is another apres le collapse /apocalyptical novel, and it's about that -- how humans are destroying the ecosystem -- but also about some human fighting to preserve a small bit of that ecosystem, as well as a scientist who is studying octopuses in that preserve. The last half is pretty good, but I don't know if it's worth slogging through the first half to get there.



Weather Report

It's not going to get above freezing here until Saturday.

Good thing I got the bread and milk.


Wednesday, February 19, 2025

Snow in Sunlight

The view out behind my house:




Now that the sun is out it is five degrees outside.





Snow

It's three degrees here, y'all. High of fifteen today.

It looks like we got six or seven inches of snow, from what's on my deck:



These are pictures from the windows, since it's too cold to go outside. Maybe when it gets to be 10 degrees, I'll go outside.


Here's the chicken pie we made yesterday, during the snow day:

It was delicious.




Tuesday, February 18, 2025

SNOW EMERGENCY


We're having a snow event. Ten to thirteen inches expected, says the weather guy. I'm dubious, but it certainly is coming down.

Pix later!

Cats on a snow day




Sunday, February 16, 2025

New Recipe on Cooking with Delagar

 Yes, I have cooking anxiety:

Splendid Pie Crust



Getting a Reply from my Useless Senator

One of my senators finally wrote me a reply, explaining that it was necessary to allow Elon Musk to destroy the country because we needed to cut spending.

He didn't detail which spending cuts were necessary, but from what we're seeing, it's cuts in things like medical research, environmental protection, and OSHA, as well as WIC and Medicare.

What's not being cut, clearly, is the money being poured into Elon Musk's pockets.




Saturday, February 15, 2025

Lies and Nonsense and GOP Rhetoric

...but I repeat myself. In case you were thinking of taking Elon Musk's regime seriously, here's a thread on his very own website: 


And, as he notes a little further down in the thread:

 

Six Ways to Send a Message to Your Reps

 From Nicole & Maggie:

Six Ways to Send a Message to your Reps

Keep messaging, call if you can, write if you can. Let them know we aren't accepting this.

This app, 5Calls, gives you a list of things you can write/call about, and scripts you can use.


Friday, February 14, 2025

American Health Care

So we saw our new pcp, six weeks after calling for the appointment. The visit went well -- he seems like a great guy. And he referred Dr. Skull to a kidney doctor and a pain specialist right away.

The kidney doctor's earliest appointment? Two months from now. The pain clinic's earliest appointment? June 25. Though if we were willing to drive 50 miles, they could get us into their branch clinic in April.

Wow, it's a good thing we don't have socialized medicine, since then we'd have to wait weeks for basic care.

Thursday, February 13, 2025

Gulf of Freedom Fries

Someone on BlueSky said the whole Gulf of America silliness reminded them of the whole Freedom Fries nonsense. To which I say, yes. 

Equally trivial, equally ignorant. Our GOP overlords, y'all.


The Elon Musk Press Conference

I'm not that much disturbed by what Musk's small child said or didn't say to Trump during that weird press conference. What seems really disturbing about the whole thing to me was the way Trump sat there, like a lump of fungus, while Leon Skum did all the talking. Is Trump even really self-aware at this point?


Wednesday, February 12, 2025

Life in Trump's America

What I did today (or I guess it's yesterday now):

4:30 a.m. Wake up and lie fretting in the dark.

5:00 a.m. Get up, make coffee, avoid social media as much as possible.

5:30 a.m. Email at least one (today, four) representatives. Today I expressed concern about the cuts in funding to science research, because what the absolute fuck. Only in more civil language. 

6:00 to 8:00 a.m.: Grade papers. My students have turned in their first paper, which the one where I teach them how to evaluate a source and then they find a source and evaluate it. We're working on sleep this semester, which seemed like a nice topic that could not be politicized. (I want them focusing on the evaluation process -- how we know what good evidence is vs. propaganda -- which if it's a topic like microplastics or climate change, for example, they can't do. They're too caught up in defending their priors to be able to think at all, let alone critically.) 

I have nevertheless a few students who have managed to politicize the process, sending me outraged rants about how I am teaching them to determine what a credible source is -- basically, one written by someone who is qualified and who works in the field; one published in a credible venue; and one which uses credible sources to support its claim.  Demanding that they base their paper on such credible sources is wrong, you see, because science is not always right. So therefore peer-reviewed sources written by experts in the fields are fake news. 

I treat these students as gently as I can, explaining the scientific process and how it works, and requiring them to learn about the peer-review process. This is probably wasted effort, since basing their belief system on propaganda rather than evidence is, in fact, one of their priors. And they will defend it rabidly. 

9:00 a.m. Shower. Try not to fall into despair.

9:20 a.m. Check social media and the three newspapers I read. Wince, close apps, thinking about dying. Start writing the emails I will send tomorrow. 

9:45 a.m. Call the pharmacy's automated phone line to refill my prescriptions. They can't fill one. Talk to the pharmacists, who gives me a list of pharmacies, some as many as 20 miles away, that might have the drug I need. Or, you know, might not. American health care, best in the world.

10:00 a.m. to 12:00 a.m.: Beta reading a MS from one of my favorite authors. This counts as scholarly and creative activity, right?

12:00 noon: Took Dr. Skull to a medical appointment. This is both to establish him with a local physician, and to get referrals to the pain clinic and to the kidney doctor. We had to wait awhile, but otherwise the appointment went well. We both like this new doctor.

2:00 p.m. Stopped by the Harps to pick up prescriptions, some for Dr. Skull, some for son-in-law, some for the cat. Yes, the cat has her own prescriptions. 

"Name?" the pharmacist asked. 

"Jasper," I said.

"Date of birth?"

"....she's a cat. Somewhere around 2010?"

2:30-5:00 p.m. Beta-read MS some more.

5:00 p.m. Gave the kid a ride home from school since it was raining and cold, also so I could pass on the meds for SIL. It is rush hour in Fayetteville, which is nothing compared to rush hours in real cities, but I did have to cuss at some asshats who blocked the intersection where Wedington crosses the interstate. Asshats.

6:00 p.m.  Made dinner. Yes, actually cooked. Cod in butter and lemon sauce, plus grilled green beans.

7:00 p.m. Reading novels. I finished one and started another -- this one a novel by George Stewart which I'd never read before, called Storm. Written and therefore set in 1940. I'm not sure I like it, though Stewart writes wonderfully. Think about checking social media or the newspapers again; successfully manage not to.

9:30 p.m. Bed, after an uneasy check on the weather. We won't get snow tomorrow, probably, but maybe next Tuesday, which is the day I'm supposed to drive down to Fort Smith for my fiction workshop. Ugh.

10:00 p.m. Listen to Tana French The Searcher in the dark, which keeps me from despair at least long enough to fall asleep.

5:00 a.m. Wake up. It's raining. Lie brooding in the dark...