Moving Day

We have survived, mostly.

More later -- MUCH later. (1) I might have lost my phone and (b) we don't get internet at the house until Saturday.

Read This

...and tell me you think this man is sane:

Another totally Fake story in the Amazon Washington Post (lobbyist) which states that if my Aides broke the law to build the Wall (which is going up rapidly), I would give them a Pardon. This was made up by the Washington Post only in order to demean and disparage - FAKE NEWS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 28, 2019

Moving Advice

Here is a good reason to have all your books on Kindle.

When you move, you don't have to spend six days loading them all into boxes.

And then hauling all those boxes into a truck and out of a truck.

Every bone in my body is one big bruise.

Two Days Until the Big Move

We move on Thursday.

The house is filled with boxes.

We have too many books.

A Young Artist Makes A Comic

We've started packing, and while we were clearing out a closet, we found this comic, drawn when the kid was about seven:

The text:

First panel: Hello, children!

2nd: I'm Mr. Happy Face!

3rd: Do you know what happens when you get old?

4th: You die! (response from children out of panel: WHOAH!)

Baby's first comic!

We Signed The Lease

Oh, my God, you wouldn't believe how great this landlord is, and how wonderful the house is.

Listen to this. He's letting us move in a week early. We don't have to start paying rent until September 1, but we can start moving in right now.

On his part, he's so thrilled to be having academics as his tenants he couldn't stop talking about it. Also! He plans to put in central air!

Also, the house is just beautiful. Built in the late 1940s, on an acre of wooded land, wooden floors, original molding, original kitchen fixtures, original windows... and within walking distance of the university.

There's this little wrought iron, glass-topped table and chairs outside, under the trees. Also original.

And a working fire-place. And built-in bookcases. And so many windows.

Thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone who made this possible. Oh my God.

Links

"Pro-life" crusaders claim to want to stop abortion, yet eliminate access to birth control -- which, as we know, increases the number of abortions

More on this

And more

TYWKIWDBI shares a nice 5-minute informational video on what the USA is doing wrong with the minimum wage

I was posting awhile back about how atrocity stories are used to inflame populations -- buried in this story is such an atrocity story, used to justify stealing infants from the Chinese. I remember many such stories from that era.

What's wrong with sharing these stories?

About those rallies

Long, but worth watching (true of most of Philosophy Guy's work)

Written by my colleagues (in one case, now a former colleague)

Here's a pretty good reading list

Despite the lies Trump keeps screeching at us

The kids are okay; old white Americans? Not so much. (Frankly, this video is just really sad.)

Does everything look alright you dumb fucker? I want that Truck off my lawn. Thor's retirement is not going well. 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/RDBNJ9drs7

— Eugene W (@NOW1SOLAR) August 19, 2019

are you telling me that the guy who ran a scam university and a scam charity and a scam magazine and a scam airline and sold scam mortgages and scam steaks and scam vodka and scam fucking water for fuck's sake, has been running a scam economy? fuck me, I did not see that coming

— Jeff Tiedrich (@itsJeffTiedrich) August 18, 2019

My father is a die hard Fox News watching Trump voter. Let me tell you: it is not a good use of time to try to flip Trump voters. No amount of logic or humanizing or anything else works. Just move on and mobilize and stop voter suppression.

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) August 18, 2019

Heh:

quillette, the other white nationalism

— ᴀsᴄʜ 'demonic ink' ᴄᴏɴꜰᴏʀᴍɪᴛʏ 🍈🍮🥀⚗️🦠 (@AschConformity_) February 27, 2019

Eventually, you know, you gotta ask yourself if we're the baddies:

Update on the Update

The landlord seemed positively cheery about us having so many animals. Also, he says of course he will deal with the fallen trees. He seemed surprised at the question. He says we'll just need to mow and keep the bushes cut back. (Which is what I have always understood "lawn and yard care" to mean.)

We're meeting to sign the lease and walk through the house tomorrow. Thanks to every one of you who donated, we can (just barely) pay the deposit. By the time we have to actually move, I'll have been paid, so we can pay the first month's rent and deal with renting the U-Haul.

I'm hoping, since we've been living in Fort Smith for 16 years and never missed a utility payment once (or a rent check either, I'll just mention -- never even been late with one) that we won't have to pay deposits again. So that should be okay.

Here's the living room of the house:




Here is the kitchen:



It's a little smaller than our current place, but it's also cheaper. Plus it's so close to the university that I can walk to work or ride my bike. Which is excellent.

Again, thank you to everyone who made this possible. I'm sending you love and hugs and every good wish in the world.

Donate to Help Me Move: Update

I've written a letter to the landlord saying we received his (very odd) notice, that his "terms" are not acceptable, and that we will be moving out.

We've begun looking for a place. There are a lot of places available in our price range (I'm hoping for at least a hundred less than we are paying here) though not as many in the location I am hoping for (near the university).

We did look at this one yesterday, which is lovely:



I am waiting to hear if the landlord will accept our tiny zoo of two cats and a dog, and what his philosophy is about who takes care of fallen trees. The rent is perfect -- a hundred and twenty less than we're paying here -- and it has hardwood floors throughout. Though not central air, just window units.

Dr. Skull grumbles when I suggest a duplex or a townhouse, though these seem a practical solution to me. We'll see if I can't twist his arm.

Thanks to everyone who has donated so far! Not only are you making this move possible, you have reinforced my faith in humankind. Go us!

Donate to Help Me Move!

My landlord is having some issues. Originally he was an excellent landlord, if a bit reluctant to fix non-essential items (like our gate, which was broken when we moved in and has never been fixed). But over the past few years he's been growing increasingly strange.

He'll be perfectly pleasant sometimes when we call him for a repair -- when our 15 year old dishwasher finally quit, for instance -- and then lose his rag the next time (a clogged drain).

It's not like we call him often, either. I usually manage most repairs myself.

Anyway, yesterday he sent us this bizarre little letter saying that we were "responsible" for the breakages and damages to the house, and that he wasn't going to "unilaterally" pay for them anymore. Also that he was "revoking" our deposit and applying it to the costs we had already incurred.

If we didn't like this, he said, we could move.

He's well into his 80s, so this could be age-related dementia. But he's also a rich white Republican, so it could be just entitled rich guy hatefulness.

In any case, we really need to move to a less expensive place anyway.

Except, as all y'all know, we're stony broke. (A combination of no work all summer and heaps of medical bills last winter.)

If anyone feels moved to donate to the delagar moving fund, this would be the time.

What we REALLY do in College

The First Week

ONE YEAR LATER

Hey! Who's telling all our deep dark secrets!!

(Original source)

First Day of Fall Semester

First Day of Fall 2019. Things I have Learned so Far:

• Almost all of my students are working full-time
• Almost none of my students are on Twitter
• Almost all of my classes are well under cap (this is very unusual -- up until a few years ago, every class was at or over capacity every semester)
• None of them drink soda anymore -- they drink water, and almost all of them have their own refillable water bottles
• Lots of tattoos
• Not so much dyed hair
• They get very nervous if you ask them to draw pictures*
• They're very, very strict about grammar and spelling
• Their biggest worry is failing
• They've done a lot of cool things**

*I do this thing where I have the students fill out 3X5 index cards with their names, their preferred emails, and their majors, so that I'll have that information. I also have them add other details -- like what their biggest worry is, or something cool they've done. This year I had them draw a little picture in one corner, which was a source of great anxiety. "A picture of what?" "What do you want us to draw?" When I told them to just have fun with it, though, they calmed down.

** One of them swam with sharks. Another works with circuit boards for fun. Another studies cryptids. And one traveled to Germany this summer to work in a winery. 

Hugo Winners

Mike Glyer has posted the Hugo Winners here.

I'm especially pleased about Zen Cho's win, and also Alex Harrow's.

Also The Good Place winning for Best Dramatic Presentation: Short Form, and Spiderman: Into the Spiderverse for Best Dramatic Presentation: Long Form. The Good Place is excellent television, and Spiderman was amazing.

And I was glad to see Gardner Dozois win one last time. He'll be missed.

Wascally Wabbits

So I was having this discussion with a buddy of mine about this commercial which has populated the childhood of American children for the past 60 years:

The catch-line is always "Trix are for kids!"

So my friend and I were talking about the weirdness of this commercial, which relies on children frustrating the desires of another, and mocking and tormenting another, into order to fulfill their own desire -- and their own desires for something both unnecessary and unhealthy, let's not forget. An early commercial makes this even more explicit:

The discussion sparked a memory of how, when I was a young media-saturated toddler delagar, shopping with my parents on Sunday morning at Schwegmann's

I'd always pester my father for Trix, just as the TV had told me I should. "I want Trix!" I would say. "Can we get Trix?"

"Trix are for kids," he would say cheerily, walking on past.

Far from annoying me, this would puzzle me. "But I am a kid," I would say, as if this were some information he was lacking.

"Trix are for kids," he would repeat, continuing on down the aisle.

"But Daddy," I would say, running after him, "But Daddy, I am a kid! So can I have some?"

"Trix are for kids!"

I was just convinced, when I was five years old, he was simply missing the facts. Like if I could get him to understand the data -- that I was a kid -- he would smack himself in the head and say, Oh, right! do a 180 in the aisle and buy me the cereal.

It occurs to me now that this is the fundamental error we are making when we try to hold a reasoned debate with MAGA Americans. We think they are just missing the facts. We think if we just supply them with the data, they will say, oh, right! Now I see, do a 180, and begin acting like decent human beings.

But they aren't missing the data. Like my father, they are perfectly aware of the facts. They know that climate change is real. They know that the USA has kids in cages. They know that Trump is looting the country, and that he changed the tax laws to put more money in the pockets of the 1%. They know that Trump is gutting the EPA to allow corporations to make more money, while destroying our water, air, wetlands, and our national parks. They know socialized medicine is the only system that works. They know antifa is not a terrorist organization, and that Proud Boys is. They know that police violence is a problem.

They know all this. We can repeat this information all we like, we can present all the evidence we want, under the delusion they're just missing the facts, and that if we give it to them, they'll say, oh right, and do a 180.

But that's not going to happen, because they don't care about evidence. They care about power and about wealth. They care about hegemony.  They care about their privilege, and keeping that privilege. If they have to mock and torment people to keep it, well, they'll do that. If they have to exploit people to keep it, they'll do that too. If they have to destroy the planet, well, they're Good Christians, aren't they? They know this is not the only world.

In conclusion: Vote every single member of the GOP out in 2020.

NOW it hits me

Gotdamn it, I have an 8:00 class this semester.