Home for the Holidays

 The kid, his boyfriend, and their cat are all visiting us for Thanksgiving. This is them asleep and the cat staring wide-eyed out the window:

Their apartment has a window, but it looks out onto a kind of passage-way, so Amity (the cat) doesn't get much of view. She is enjoying all our windows.

Our cats hate her, and she herself is deeply confused by the little dog, who she thinks is the strangest cat she has ever seen. She keeps sneaking up on him (not difficult, since he's blind) and bapping him with her paw, trying to see what he's made out of, I think.

We stayed home mostly yesterday, in honor of Black Friday, and today will venture out to buy more food, and maybe have a walk. Tomorrow we drive them home again, and my SIL is going to feed us gumbo.

Avant le Repas

 Avant le repas:

Prepping for TNX

I'm cleaning house and buying supplies for Thanksgiving -- the kid and his boyfriend and their cat are coming for the holiday and staying through the weekend. I'm also writing and grading student work, hoping to get all of the grading done by tonight. Meanwhile I have written and submitted a ghost story.

The thanksgiving menu as it now stands:

• Roast turkey
• cranberry sauce
• mac and cheese
• broccoli casserole
• stuffing
• mashed potatoes
• sweet potatoes
• rolls
• crudités
• deviled eggs
• Superior Pumpkin Pie with whipped cream

I'm making the sweet potatoes and the whipped cream. The kid is making the mashed potatoes. The boyfriend is making deviled eggs. Dr. Skull is making everything else, all of it from scratch, of course. I offered to make a dump cake, but Dr. Skull threatened to divorce me.

Besides the kid and his boyfriend, Uncle Charger will be attending.

After this, and in rapid succession, we will have Uncle Charger's birthday, Dr. Skull's birthday and the boyfriend's birthday (they share the same birthday) and Hanukkah. It's the festive season!

Recipe for a dump cake, in case your spouse is more forbearing:

One can of pie filling

One can of crushed pineapples

One box of white or yellow cake mix

One stick of butter

One half cup of crushed salted nuts.

Get a nine by ten pan. Drain the pineapple and dump it in. Dump in the pie filling. (I like cherry or blueberry). Mix it up a little. Dump the cake mix on top of this, and spread it evenly. Dice and scatter the butter on top of the cake mix. Scatter the nuts over it all.

Cook at 350 degrees for about thirty minutes, or until brown and bubbling. Serve with whipped cream or ice cream. It's delicious! (And yes, I was born in a trailer.)

Plus ça change

I'm working on a short story about a pandemic, so I'm reading a lot of non-fiction books about various pandemics. One of them, written in the 1990s, is about the flu pandemic of 1918, and the author notes in wide-eyed wonder that if such a disease struck today, a million people would die in America, and six million worldwide.

Deaths from COVID-19 worldwide are currently at 6, 626, 455. Deaths in the US are 1,102, 688. (Source is here.)

Apparently people behaved equally badly during the 1918 pandemic, refusing to wear masks, wash their hands, or self-quarantine. There were also conspiracy theories -- for instance, that Bayer aspirin mixed the flu virus in with their aspirin tablets, in order to make more people sicker. Why am I not surprised. 

Billionaire Incompetence

Honestly it's kind of funny watching Elon Musk destroy Twitter.  Also I'm having a lot of fun watching the retrospective tweets people are posting. It's not like Twitter is a net good in the universe, though I have gotten a number of professional gigs out of it -- book review jobs and editing work and so on. I'll miss that part of it. The funniest part is how so many people assumed Musk was competent just because he had a lot of money. As they say on the bird site, lol.

Twitter housecleaning: I put 30-50 feral hogs in the icebox with the plums, the large boulder the size of a small boulder was used to free the Evergiven, Huge truck of misdelivered rice and corn kid and Bean dad started a commune, and All Wives Of Your Youth are loved, forever

— Dr. Sarah Parcak (@indyfromspace) November 18, 2022

This song is about Elon, btw:

 

Oh also, no list of best replies would be complete without this: pic.twitter.com/mBdLOJ4XZW

— paul khruangbin (Dan Lehner) (@danlehnermusic) November 17, 2022

pic.twitter.com/IJs7hplltx

— visceral warning signs (@cleanandgritty) November 17, 2022

What is a Woman

Good thread here, though of course it won't matter for the bigots, since they actually don't care what a woman is; they just want an excuse to be bigots. Still, worth reading for the rest of us:

This might become a thread, but I keep thinking about how off the question of “what is a woman?” really is because you’re asking the definition of a word to precede the reality it describes.

I say this a lot, but words are fake, and definitions are *at best* approximations.

— Magdalene Visaggio 🏳️‍⚧️ (@MagsVisaggs) November 15, 2022

Winter Has Come

It's been in the 40s and 50s here all week, with lows in the twenties and thirties. I like this weather, but as usual our heat didn't work. It took until today for the guy to come fix it -- everyone's heat needs help at this point in the year. 

It's nice to have heat, even if we do have all these windows that just let cold air right back in. I do like winter.

I'm writing my novel and grading the first draft of my students' final papers. Also drinking a lot of coffee. This is my idea of paradise. Well, except for the papers.

Have a cat picture:

I took this one mainly because I love those trees across the street, but Jasper adds a certain touch.

Leftists Talk about the Election

I'm not actually seeing too much of this. Most leftists are relieved by the win, I suspect, and beyond that just really tired of having to fight for things that ought to be our by right -- ownership of our bodies, for instance, and the right to vote, and the right to say what we think is true, even if we are working as teachers in public schools.

Anyway, here's Scalzi's take: 

Likewise “your vote shouldn’t count if we don’t like it,” is also something of a non-starter for a lot of people! Having the GOP become the political face of US authoritarianism in a moment when authoritarianism, including sham elections for political advantage, is being actively (and popularly!) combatted in Europe is not a great look. I also think the political strategy of trying to separate out trans people for persecution, popular as it was and is with the intolerant, was not particularly smart. Trans folks really are a small sliver of the population, but everyone understood the point for the GOP was and is to start with trans folks, and then just keep going to gays and lesbians and then to other groups, including, inevitably, the Jews. 

And here's Pharyngula.

On Twitter, people are furiously pointing out to each other that yes, it still does matter if we take Georgia as well. Couldn't agree more with that one.

Crooked Timber makes a connect to Ukraine.

WOO!

 We won Nevada!

Red Wave my giant ass.

Holding the Senate

Mark Kelly, my favorite astronaut, won in Arizona. Cortez Masto is coming from behind in Nevada. I don't know what's going to happen in Georgia, but it's not impossible that Walker will be defeated. If we win either Nevada or Georgia, we hold the Senate. As Nicole and Maggie say, if you're in any of those states, make sure your vote counted. And if you're in Georgia, vote!

Meanwhile the MAGAs are melting down. Some are bailing from Trump like the sinking ship he is, transferring their (extremely changeable) allegiance to DeSantis, under the belief that he can win the country back for them --- that most of America wants to be led by a fascist who attacks women, minorities, and the LGBTQ community, while licking the boots of the wealthy. 

I know, I know, Trump won. So it's not impossible for 18% of the country to impose their bigoted views on the rest of us. A lot of young voters have grown up in the country Trump destroyed, though -- their schools closed because he was too inept to handle a pandemic; the economy tanking because he gave tax breaks to billionaires; mass shootings increasing because of his followers and their slavering love of guns. Those young voters swing hard for the Left, not being bigots or watchers of Fox News. 

The overturning of Roe v Wade has also brought out voters, and they aren't going Red.

I've also seen reports that COVID-19 is killing more people in Red States than in Blue, and thus more conservatives than liberals. I haven't seen any studies on that, though, so I don't know if it's true.

Others are just continuing to scream about the Democrats "frauding." These people are still repeating the same old lies from 2020. Rod Dreher insists it's because the GOP didn't attack trans people enough. If they had only pushed more hate, he says... And you know, he's not wrong. Today's conservative sure loves to hate.

Anyway, vote, and make sure your vote counts, especially if you live in a swing state.

Winter is Here at Last!

Highs in the 40s and 50s for the next ten days, and lows in the 20s and 30s. I'm so pleased.

We appear to have skipped fall, however. Yesterday had a high of 80, and everyone was in shorts and teeshirts.

Life in Arkansas.

Reactions from the Right

 Rod Dreher is very sad to learn that there was no Red Wave. Surely everyone hates trans people as much as he does? He takes comfort in DeSantis being re-elected, though. At least someone in America hates trans people and is willing to stand up to those militant leftists who think people should be able to control their own bodies!

Sarah Hoyt is sure that the election was frauded. (Yes, she uses fraud in this extremely odd way.) The Left, after all, is a CANCER and since good Right-Thinking (pun intended) Americans did not cut that cancer out (hanging leftists from light posts and throwing them from helicopters is a frequent fantasy among her commenters) well what did we expect?

Red State sounds almost sane in contrast: true, Leftists are eeeevil and corrupt, but the real problem is the terrible candidates put forth by the Right, as well as the fact that although Conservatives have no answers, no solutions, and no ideas. Oh, and the Leftist-controlled Global media (they're too polite to say the Jews openly over there) is lying about our (new) Lord and Savior, DeSantis.

(Almost everyone I'm looking at is waving DeSantis's victory like a bloody flag. Apparently the lesson they are learning from his victory is that because DeSantis attacked LGBTQ people and still won re-election, Americans want the Right to attack LGBTQ people. Correlation ain't causation, but you're not going to get people whose motto is "Scientists are a bunch of lying commies" to understand that point.)

Bradley Devin spouts the usual talking points -- the fact that all the votes aren't counted yet means the Left is FRAUDING; the victory of DeSantis and JD Vance means America is fine with persecuting trans and gay people; the loss of the Senate is a small price to pay for getting rid of Roe v Wade. Also, Conservatives need to swing hard toward Trumpism. A direct quotation: 

But isn’t that always part of the Democrat's electoral strategy? To call Republicans fascists, bigots, misogynists, and all the other dirty words in the liberal mind? 

Clearly, "fascist," "bigot," and "misogynist" are not dirty words to anyone except liberals, so if the Right wants to win over real Americans they need to go hard with their bigotry, fascism, and hatred of women. Because they haven't been going hard so far. I mean the real problem with Republicans is how nice they are.

Anyway, that was all I could take, so if you see some other Rightwing takes that you want to share, feel free in the comments.

Election Results

I woke up at 8:00 to find the news was better than I had been expecting -- we might hold onto the Senate, and though we have surely lost the House, it is by a trickle, rather than a wave.

Given that the party in power almost always loses control of Congress during the midterms, this is sort of good news. And it looks like people under 35 are coming out strongly for the Democratic party, which bodes well for 2024.

On the other hand, here in Arkansas we elected Sarah Huckleberry Sanders. I'm not in the least surprised by this, since (1) all the yards since in the richer parts of town sported her yard signs and (2) Chris Jones is an educated black man, and there is no way Arkansas in general is voting for a black man with an education.

We also voted against legalizing marijuana. By "we" I mean Arkansas, since I voted in favor of the bill. I think what hurt us here was a strong push by the Enemies Of Good. The bill wasn't perfect, so some of the people who do want legal marijuana voted against it. 

We've got a lot of that sort here, the ones who didn't vote for Clinton in 2016 because she wasn't a perfect candidate, the ones that say, "The lesser of two evils is still evil, so I'm going to vote for this candidate who has no chance of winning instead." The ones who put three fanatical conservatives on our Supreme Court. Yeah, them.

I'm still keeping an eye on the results, hoping Georgia goes blue, but all in all "coulda been worse" is my take here.

One thing I know already.

If not for voters under 30 ... tonight WOULD have been a Red Wave.

CNN National House Exit Poll

R+ 13 65+
R+ 11 45-64

D +2 30-44
D +28 18-29#GenZ did their job.

— John Della Volpe (@dellavolpe) November 9, 2022

Voting Accomplished

 I have voted. Jasper bears witness:

There was no one in the polling place but Dr. Skull and me. I voted as you would expected, except for one place where my choice was between a Republican and a Libertarian. I decided not to vote for either of them, since they were both terrible choices.

I also voted for legalizing recreational marijuana, though I don't expect it to pass.

And I voted against the Huckster's kid, and for the physicist, though -- again -- I don't expect it to matter. The citizens of Arkansas would far rather vote for a Mini-Trump than for a black physicist.

Voting

Though I am rapidly losing faith in democracy in America, and though I live in a red state where my vote is essentially meaningless, I am nevertheless going to vote this afternoon.

Join me if you can. 

Pharyngula on the subject.

I especially like his comic: