Midsummer.

Oh, I have been a lazy blogger of late, and for the millionth time, I apologize. Part of it is summer, part of it is that I’ve been reading these excerpts from the new crop of Trump books, and it’s summoning my PTSD. The Michael Wolff book, pfft – it looks like crap. But the one by the two WashPost reporters, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, that one looks pretty amazing, in a wreck-on-the-freeway kind of way. A couple of times this week I had to stop reading and just drink a glass of water. Don’t know if I can take a whole book’s worth.

Today’s excerpt was particularly unnerving. Especially since it’s obvious Ivanka was a source, but fuck her – these people will never wash the blood off their hands. Which they shouldn’t, ever.

It’s upsetting. But I guess it’s something we have to get out of our system.

And current events notwithstanding, it’s been a great summer so far. So much visiting, so much seeing people. I mentioned the Shadow Show return to the stage last weekend, seen here:

And I have some good reading material, thanks to America’s librarian:

I got “Leave the World Behind” out of the library. It’s OK, but the verdict is still out.

So now the weekend has rolled around again. Company’s coming, two kinds. It’s going to rain, but it’ll be a good time. You try to have some, too.

Posted at 9:22 pm in Current events |
 

36 responses to “Midsummer.”

  1. Deborah said on July 15, 2021 at 10:14 pm

    So glad to hear you are having a good summer. This makes me feel better about the state of things. Love the Shadow Show outfits.

    LB is doing well with her shingles, she got a pain med that’s specifically for nerve pain. I can’t remember the name of it but it begins with a P. She was told to start taking one pill a day and after a few days she could increase to 2 a day and then 3 a day if she needed it. So far after 3 or so days she only feels the need to take 1 a day, it seems to be working well for her. Before she finally got a prescription for this she was in very bad shape hurting a lot.

    We are winding down in NM, my husband leaves Saturday and I’m here for a couple more weeks. It hasn’t been the greatest time, because of a number of issues, here’s hoping things improve.

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  2. Ann said on July 15, 2021 at 11:42 pm

    Deborah, I’m glad LB’s meds are working for her and really glad that we just finally got our second Shingrix shots yesterday. They get lots of bad press, but we had zero problems. And way better than getting shingles.

    Someone quoted my father recently as saying the U.P. has two seasons, shoveling and company. I guess I wasn’t as aware of the onslaught of company when I was among them. I think we have a couple of weeks to ourselves between now and the middle of September. But reservations are still coming in.

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  3. ROGirl said on July 16, 2021 at 5:18 am

    A real life example of the wreck on the freeway happened earlier this week. No one was hurt, but that section of road has to be rebuilt, and it was redone over the past few years (massive, ongoing construction to upgrade roadways, rebuild overpasses, improve drainage). The driver apparently tested negative for drugs or alcohol.

    https://cdllife.com/2021/michigan-police-release-dash-cam-from-crash-that-led-to-massive-fuel-tanker-fire/

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  4. alex said on July 16, 2021 at 7:38 am

    I don’t know if we’ll ever get January 6 out of our system. According to Dana Milbank it’s becoming part of our system by the Republicans’ deliberate design:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/07/15/american-democracy-survived-its-reichstag-fire-jan-6-threat-has-not-subsided/

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  5. alex said on July 16, 2021 at 9:49 am

    Strange serendipity but on this date in history in 2009 a tanker exploded on 75 and melted an overpass:

    http://nancynall.com/2009/07/16/fire/

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  6. Peter said on July 16, 2021 at 10:11 am

    The Washington Post had a few articles this morning about the rain storms and flooding in Germany and Belgium, and there was a graph showing the amount of rainfall in the area.

    Maybe they didn’t correctly convert from metric to english units, and maybe I’m reading it wrong, but the heaviest hit areas got 3″ of rain in 24 hours, and I’m thinking we got over 5″ in the recent storm and my basement backed up for only a couple of minutes.

    I’m just saying that if 3″ causes that much damage, they’re going to have some serious problems when climate change really kicks in.

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  7. Peter said on July 16, 2021 at 10:14 am

    Oh and I forgot – Shadow Show should get on a double bill with the Surfragettes. Battle of the cool outfits!

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  8. Dorothy said on July 16, 2021 at 10:36 am

    Peter I’m reading a CNN article about the rainfall and it said Cologne got 6 inches in 24 hours, and Reifferscheid got 8 inches in 9 hours. The swath of rainfall is pretty wide spread (hence – Belgium) so perhaps one area only got 3 inches…?

    On Juneteenth TCM had some cool programming that they don’t usually show, and I recorded the June 1967 Otis Redding appearance at the Monteray Pop Festival. I just watched it yesterday because we got a new DVR from DirecTV and need to send back the old one with anything we recorded on it. Otis only sang, I think, 4 songs but it was fun to watch. During the last song they showed video images of many people, mostly young ladies, in the crowd, and I got a glimpse of one outfit that reminded me of the Shadow Show clothing! The clothing seen in the montage was really great – my eyes were glued to it. I wasn’t quite 10 years old when that occurred.

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  9. Jenine said on July 16, 2021 at 11:37 am

    @Peter – thanks for mentioning the Surfragettes, what a hoot! Here they are doing She Loves You.

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  10. Jeff Borden said on July 16, 2021 at 12:38 pm

    Don’t forget those all-girl teen sensations from L.A. — the Linda Lindas.

    My bullshit detector went off while reading the excerpts from the Washington Post reporters and I reached a similar conclusion: Princess Nepotism had offered testimony so long as she appeared to be one of the sane ones in the White House. How nice. She’s every bit as despicable as her brothers and her father.

    Our country is in a heap of trouble. One major political party has decided it cannot win on its ideas, so it is going to limit who can cast ballots. Fully one-third of Republicans seeking office in 2022 buy into the “election steal” lie while at the state level the dismissal of science, data, evidence, critical thinking and expertise is hitting warp drive. The nutjobs in the Tennessee legislature have so terrified the state health department that now it appears the state is not sending reminders of other vaccinations besides the coronavirus. Welcome back measles, diphtheria, scarlet fever, whooping cough and the gang. C’mon down! It’s a fucking buffet. Just thank Scott Cepicky for the treat!

    I’m dreading our upcoming trip to Florida to see my nephew get married. I’ll be masked up wherever we go and am hoping to practice patience and tolerance if I get called out by the rubes for wearing a diaper on my face.

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  11. LAMary said on July 16, 2021 at 1:04 pm

    The WP reporters definitely got the PTSD going here. What a crazy, dangerous POS trump is, eh? I’ve known he’s an awful person for years but once he got some power he got really horrible. Or as he would say hawrubble. I am trying to decide what percentage of GOP senators, governors and congress members actually believe the election was stolen. I cannot convince myself that it’s not a small number. It really doesn’t make any difference. They all kiss his ass and lie on his behalf.

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  12. Little Bird said on July 16, 2021 at 1:16 pm

    I am indeed doing better! Much better! I’m thinking it also helps that I’m enjoying air conditioning this week while I’ve been staying with a friend (I’m not contagious). The pain med they gave me is Gabapentin. My regular doctors office also sent in a ‘script for oxycodone, which actually wouldn’t really do anything for this type of pain. So now I guess it’ll just sit around until I break an arm or something.

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  13. Mark P said on July 16, 2021 at 2:01 pm

    What’s really scary is that the QAnon maroons are trying to take over the government from the bottom by running for local office, including school boards. Once there they can start spreading the dumb. They are mentally ill, and want to impose their hallucinatory madness on the rest of us. I’m not really sure this country will survive.

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  14. Dave said on July 16, 2021 at 2:28 pm

    I’ve been a big Otis Redding fan for all these years, a bad airplane decision took him away much too soon. I’ve watched his Monterey performance several times on YouTube, as well as other Monterey performances. “Hit me one more time!”

    On his “In Person Live at the Whiskey A-Go-Go”, he does the same thing with his backing band with the same song, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”. Love it.

    I can’t even comment rationally on my discouragement with the political scene so I’ll stop there.

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  15. David C said on July 16, 2021 at 3:06 pm

    I’ve been doing line support at work for the past couple of days. If we’re vaccinated we get a special badge and don’t have to mask. I we aren’t vaccinated we’re supposed to wear masks. From what I see there are a lot of people on the line who aren’t vaccinated and none of them are going to get Covid in their chins.

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  16. dexter said on July 16, 2021 at 4:09 pm

    Nance, the weather report is crazy for southern lower Michigan. I-94 at I-75 has closed lanes as well as other areas under water. Stay safe.

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  17. Deborah said on July 16, 2021 at 4:34 pm

    I think someone who comments here on nn.c lives in Germany? Or did? I wonder if that person can comment about the flooding situation: Is it near where you are? Is there anything happening that we’re not seeing in media photos or descriptions?

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  18. LAMary said on July 16, 2021 at 5:10 pm

    I think Beobachter is in Switzerland. I could be wrong but I think he mentioned that was his location.

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  19. Kristen said on July 16, 2021 at 5:28 pm

    We have a friend who lives in Bonn. I checked in with him today and although he is okay, he said 15 miles south of him there is “lots of death and destruction”. He said the Rhein rose about 10 feet in 36 hours where he lives – “insane”.

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  20. Peter said on July 16, 2021 at 6:50 pm

    I have a couple of relatives who live in Dusseldorf – the north edge of the flooding – and they’re OK, but then again, they live in a mid rise in a heavily built up area. They did tell me that what was strange was that the rain was steady, and the waters were slowly rising, until at one point the water rose rapidly – like someone closed a dam downstream…

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  21. basset said on July 16, 2021 at 7:34 pm

    Similar situation when our house flooded in May 2010. We have a small river at the foot of our yard, gauge is on a highway bridge less than a mile upstream and usually reads 2 feet or so. (1.5 right now, I just checked.)

    We had an enormous amount of rain on the watershed, level rose past the 20-foot flood stage in a day or so then picked up speed and kept rising. Our little river runs into a big one which is dammed into a sizable lake a few miles upstream and the dam had to be opened wide so the water wouldn’t overrun and break it, which meant our river had nowhere to drain to and the whole neighborhood, along with many others, got flooded.

    Water got over the counter tops in our house, and the level topped out at 33 and a quarter. The gauge is under the highway bridge, though, and water was running chest deep over the bridge deck and road so we figure the actual level had to be forty-something.

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  22. Deborah said on July 16, 2021 at 10:48 pm

    The arroyo we have to cross to get up to our land in Abiquiu has blown out the road twice this summer, so far. It usually runs at least once during the monsoon season which goes until September. This doesn’t help the drought one bit unfortunately. The water just roars through, blows out stuff and doesn’t soak in where it could help growing things. It’s exasperating. In Santa Fe we’ve had more gentle soaking rains but it’s a day late and a dollar short, mostly the trees are suffering from a bad monsoon season last summer and a warmer, dry winter. The shrubs and vines are suffering less but the major, needed shade comes from the trees, obviously.

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  23. Joe Kobiela said on July 16, 2021 at 11:37 pm

    Just got home from Shipshewana where we had the pleasure of seeing the Mavericks open their summer tour, if you get the chance see them a blend of country,Latino,Cuban,and Rock,will keep you on your feet for sure.
    Pilot Joe

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  24. Julie Robinson said on July 17, 2021 at 10:10 am

    Okay, I’m late to this party, but did Shadow Show have their outfits custom made? They look very late 60s, early 70s, but I can’t imagine they are vintage.

    We heard last night that the son’s gf doesn’t want kids. Not my business, but I’ll allow myself to be sad.

    Our electrical inspection yesterday was failed and he even received a fine, so the fun continues. Plus the city has rejected our landscape plan, which the architect foisted on us at the last minute. He had lots of boring plants, so we asked to sub out more colorful ones from the APPROVED city list of drought tolerant natives. Now they have disapproved the amount of turfgrass (almost none because of our front yard garden), despite the fact it hadn’t changed from the original plan.

    But at least we don’t have a flood.

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  25. Deborah said on July 17, 2021 at 10:42 am

    Our window replacement vendor selection vote happened yesterday via email. 3 of us chose the same vendor so that’s a majority (out of 5). One guy hasn’t voted yet, but we expect him to today. The AH owner’s vendor choice was only selected to be a bidder because she threw a fit. Their bid was very unprofessional, vague, hand written, didn’t fill out our form, didn’t answer many of questions, they bid 2 products that didn’t meet our specs, and they never mailed a hard copy which they said they did. She’s probably going to throw another fit and we’ll have to take her to court. She’s a mess. And she doesn’t even outright own the unit, it belongs to her late father’s trust, she’s a co-trustee and she’s suing the other trustee because he won’t sign off to give her a clean deed. She’s way behind on her assessments, she’s been getting away with crap for decades because she bullies and intimidates. This is not going to be fun, but she’s dealing with 3 owners now who aren’t going to let her get away with it any more.

    But the good news is that the city guy in charge of fire codes finally responded to a question after a couple of months and many emails I sent him about egress window heights. So our current egress windows are in compliance and we don’t have to have them lowered. I have read the international building codes related to egress windows, forwards and backwards and they are complicated. The city offices were closed through the pandemic until last Monday and everything had to be done through email. Then after opening you had to go through email to make an in-person visit. When I emailed to try to get an appointment they said it would have to be handled via email, so a vicious cycle.

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  26. LAMary said on July 17, 2021 at 10:55 am

    Other than annual brush clearance regulations my neighborhood is pretty laissez faire about landscaping. I know the city will probably bust you if you covert your garage to housing. I used to see a lot of that but gentrification has wiped out that stuff. I have no real lawn. Lots of native plants, wild flowers, pollinator stuff and some tomatoes, herbs, peppers. Younger son has some weed plants. He leaves in a few days to his merch roadie thing with Guns and Roses until November, so the weed plants will either die or his brother will take over.I would be fine with them being composted. He can start his little farm again when he comes back. I’ll stick with flowers and vegetables and anything else as long as it’s low maintenance, drought resistant.

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  27. alex said on July 17, 2021 at 11:23 am

    Julie, there was a post here a few months ago regarding Shadow Show’s costumes. Shadow Show modeled them in a photo shoot for the designer.

    Love the jumpsuit. It looks like one that belonged to my mother and it fit me perfectly when I was maybe 11 or 12. I used to don it whenever I had the house to myself.

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  28. Beobachter said on July 17, 2021 at 11:51 am

    I get phone notifications what seems like hourly re Flood warnings for Zurich (mostly at level 4 of 5), but so far we haven’t seen anything like Germany and other countries are experiencing.

    We’ve been lucky – a wicked storm Tuesday night with 30mm of rain in an hour. Over 24 hours it was only 50mm here, but the western part of Germany had 150mm.

    You see lots of hail damage and downed trees around, but again, nothing in comparison to the pictures from Germany.

    Ticino (the southern/Italian part of Switzerland) had 200mm of rain, not uncommon for them, and the rivers are ‘used to it’.

    I read some good comments on Hacker News yesterday:

    https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27851289

    So we’ve been high+dry, playing a game recommended by some folks here, the New York Times Spelling Bee. We do it Sofa style, w/a Microsoft Surface Pro touch tablet cabled to our dumb (no internet connection) TV. We get 2-letter hints from this site (one of several solution sites around):

    https://www.shunn.net/bee/latest

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  29. Julie Robinson said on July 17, 2021 at 2:10 pm

    No HOA here, which is why we could make our front yard a garden. But the addition has opened us up to all kinds of city regulations, including the landscape plan. There’s no consistency from inspector to inspector. They should be encouraging infill like our project, since it discourages urban sprawl and the need for new roads and utilities.

    Anyway, I took myself out to the pool and like the song in A Chorus Line, everything was beautiful. My mineral sunscreen is working well and I haven’t had any burns or darkening of my brown spot, though it takes some scrubbing to remove.

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  30. basset said on July 17, 2021 at 3:59 pm

    Sent the surfin’ version of “She Loves You” to my main Beatles friends and several others. Here’s another outstanding but unrelated all-female Beatles cover:
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0R-5xkbAAUA

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  31. Deborah said on July 17, 2021 at 6:17 pm

    Good news for us the 4th owner voted with us, so now it’s only the AH who wanted the cheap, crappy window product. So it’s even more of a majority and makes it clear to the AH that she can’t use her intimidating behavior to get her way. It’s still going to be a battle, she’ll say she won’t pay or let the installers in her unit. It’s going to be a legal hassle, but we’re going to prevail. I feel better about making yard improvements around here again now.

    I took my husband to the airport for his return trip to Chicago, on the way down to Albuquerque we stopped for breakfast at the lavender farm. We were there about a month or so ago and I didn’t see any lavender, and I was afraid their lavender had died like I thought ours had. I was wrong on both counts. We have lavender now, some of our plants died from old age but we’re getting one more harvest out of what’s left and the lavender farm looks fine now. It’s really pretty to see a big field of lavender.

    I wish we had a pool, but pools are rare around here, not enough water. People do have hot tubs, I would love to have one of those but even a two person one uses a lot of water, too much for the health of the desert.

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  32. Julie Robinson said on July 17, 2021 at 6:35 pm

    Because of all my joint issues I can’t walk or bike without horrible pain, so swimming and stretching are it for exercise. When we decided to move down here I said I wanted a pool and D said he wanted a lake, and when we found a place three blocks from our daughter’s church we decided it was the one. And I do love the pool. It’s expensive to run and takes a fair amount of maintenance time, but oh it’s wonderful . We have one of those screen enclosures and a lanai and don’t I sound like a fancy lady? The house is modest and every room needs to be fixed up, but we’re going to add a solar pool heater next, I think.

    I hope your awful lady doesn’t decide to stiff the rest of you.

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  33. Beobachter said on July 18, 2021 at 2:07 am

    See if yet another try is the charm for posting this and getting it accepted, this time without multiple links and standing on one foot while tapping ‘Submit comment’..

    I live in Zurich. Media? I very rarely watch live TV (maybe once in the last 2 years). Instead downloading everything, archiving into the vault, and consuming later. (My humble brag schtick does not include “I don’t watch TV”.)

    Because of the crazy time difference and 3+ hours waste of time, even Green Bay Packer games are delayed gratifications. I visit the WTMJ website and use the Windows Total Recorder program to capture the audio feed (fingers crossed no geo-blocking and not having a problem w/o the express written consent of the NFL). The MP3 is transferred to my phone, listened to at triple speed and FFF (Finger Fast Forwarding through the ‘Save big money at Menards’ ads), during an hour walk. Love me some Wayne and Larry on the Uetliberg (“Zurich’s own mountain”)!

    News is via the usual suspects NYT (trending page) and NPR (text only version – loads faster). Recently I added 68k.news (“Google news for vintage computers”), just to see some Fox News and New York Post headlines mixed in with CNBC and CNN. I read Hacker News not for the articles, but the comments from informed (at least I hope so) folks, and probably a bit of confirmation bias..

    Local news is the Tagi (leans left newspaper) and the nightly radio show Echo der Zeit podcast. It’s in a German I ‘understand’, Hochdeutsch (not the local dialect, Züritüütsch). The podcast is part of my doing the dishes routine, zipped thru at double speed on headphones (would drive F nuts if she had to hear it).

    Now to address the flooding situation here..

    We haven’t seen anything like what Germany and other countries are experiencing. We’ve been lucky – wicked storm a few nights ago with 30mm of rain in one hour. Over 24 hours it was only 50mm here, but the western part of Germany had 150mm. Meanwhile, Ticino (other side of the Alps, the southern/Italian part of Switzerland) had 200mm of rain, not uncommon for them, and the rivers are ‘used to it’.

    Echo der Zeit reported big crop losses, and when F was out biking yesterday, she saw lots of downed trees and hail damage. Some sewage treatment plants are letting ‘stuff’ flow untreated into rivers. Again, nothing in comparison to the horrible sh*t in Germany.

    F and I have done some long weekends up in Berlin, learning Berlin is built on marshes. We also did ebikes through the Spreewald (forest along the Spree river) – the Slavic word for it is ‘The Swamps’. It’s beautiful and bog-gy (plus gives you the added exercise of carrying 50+ pounds of ebikes up+down 10+ wooden step bridges).

    When someone on Hacker News commented: “Europe was basically all deforested farmland at one point. As it industrialized the last places farming was economically viable were the most fertile land which is going to be the floodplain and the river’s former oxbow and resulting swamp. Then a developer probably comes along (say 1910 or 1920 or something) and builds on the easiest to build land, which is the already cleared land of the last farm to croak. Then 100yr later we get a record rainfall and the river takes it all back for a couple weeks.”

    It makes a bit more sense to me (have to confess, I had to look up ‘oxbow’ – it’s more than an incident).

    Tagi comments include ‘once a century is now once a decade or more frequently’.

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  34. Deborah said on July 18, 2021 at 2:15 pm

    Photos and videos of the destruction in Germany is shocking. I hope this helps makes people realize how devastating climate change is going to be. It’s only going to get worse and it’s certainly happening more quickly than I thought it would.

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  35. Deborah said on July 18, 2021 at 9:29 pm

    I should have said “photos and videos of the destruction in Germany ARE shocking”.

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  36. Jenine said on July 19, 2021 at 9:25 am

    @Beobachter, thanks for the euro update. Glad you’re on higher ground. Shocking stuff for Germany and Belgium.

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