Unexpected pleasures

I was recently gifted three cases of Ensure (one vanilla, two chocolate) and discovered it's true the vanilla flavor makes a great coffee creamer. I'm told that's also true of the chocolate. Guess I'll find out when the vanilla runs out. For now, though, the vanilla Ensure turns my coffee into something that bears a strong resemblance to Coffeemate French vanilla. It was a pleasant surprise. And possibly semi-healthy. The bottle claims it's "plus high protein."

I was skeptical of the possibility of Ensure being remotely edible -- back when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I worked as a restorative therapy aid (Edmonds Villa Care paid me to walk old people) Ensure was a disgusting liquid that came in cans and got poured into comatose patients' NG tubes. I had zero desire to ingest it myself, and, to be honest, still don't except as a tablespoon or two at a time in my coffee.

It did occur to me as I remembered my long ago days as a people walker that the ancient crones and dirty old men I cajoled into doing laps* around the nursing home were probably younger than I am now. Lots of stroke victims in their 60s, for example. One of the odd things about any nursing home is there will be a bunch of people in their 60s (strokes, early onset dementia) and a bunch of nonagenarians (90s) and not much in between -- and the really old patients will be still mentally fine but have just gotten too physically fragile to remain independent. So those of us who are "only" in our 70s and 80s can look forward to coasting for another decade or two. Maybe.

*We did do laps. The building was a square -- four long hallways and a courtyard in the middle -- so we'd walk in a big circle.

Why did these go away?

"These" being round cake pans with a nifty feature (a cutter bar) that makes it easy to get a cake out of the pan without cursing a whole lot.  

Okay. I know they haven't actually gone away. When I consulted The Google a few minutes ago I learned Vermont Country Store sells them. But you're not going to find them at Walmart or Target. I know. I had a pair of round cake pans with cutters and somewhere along the way, between multiple moves and general weirdness, they disappeared. I'm not much into baking layer cakes so it took awhile for it to sink in that those pans had vanished. When it did sink in they got replaced (eventually) but wherever I bought the replacement pans did not sell pans with cutters. I wasn't thrilled with the lack of cutters but I accepted reality. On those rare occasions when I did use a round cake pan I would wax nostalgic about the cake pans that existed in the good ol' days. I never got nostalgic to the point of doing a serious search for pans with cutters, but I did miss having a set.

Not anymore. Today I am feeling inordinately happy because the granddaughter-in-law gifted me with several. She works as a home health aide. Clients frequently give her things as part of downsizing (Swedish death cleaning?). Some of it is pretty strange, some is useful, and some ends up at St. Vincent de Paul pretty quickly. She never says no because it's obvious the clients (or their family members) are happy to give the stuff to someone they think will use it even when she never will. 

One client is a dude who loved baking. Unfortunately he's now suffering from Lewy body dementia. He gave the GIL multiple springform pans in several different sizes and four pans with cutter bars. I was ridiculously happy to get the springform pans (they're ideal for cheesecakes) and for sure I did a figurative happy dance over the pans with the cutters. I actually used them yesterday to bake a layer cake, which was the first time in a decade or two. I even did a buttercream frosting from scratch -- powdered sugar is a pain to sweep up with you carpet a kitchen with it -- although the cake was from a mix. 

Given what a totally fucked up timeline we're all stuck in it is nice to have something small and tangible to be happy about. 

Trump curse strikes again

Earlier this week Senator Jon Ossoff made a pretty innocuous comment about Trump's favorite executive assistant Natalie Harp. His comment was meant to be a critique of Cheetolini's lack of interest in doing his actual job: being President. Instead of focusing on important policy issues and maybe finding an off ramp for the clusterfuck he created in the Middle East, Orange Julius would rather talk about drapes for his version of Versailles or the imaginary vandals attacking the reflecting pool on the National Mall. Ossoff correctly noted that Trump preferred to travel with Natalie rather than do any real work.

The MAGAverse flipped out. The response was bizarre. The Reich wing immediately went into overdrive ranting about how Ossoff had trashed the Diaper Nurse by suggesting she and the orange cockwomble were fornicating. It's kind of cute that the MAGAts hold Cheetolini in such high esteem they think that decrepit geezer is capable of fucking anything. Do they see the suggestion of impropriety as proof of Mango Mussolini's manhood? After all, if he and his human security blanket are getting it on it's more proof that he really is the hypermasculine almost a superhero his Truth Social posts keep suggesting he is. 

Let's get real. There isn't enough Viagra on the planet to stiffen the mushroom hiding in Cheetolini's diapers. And if there was it would probably kill him -- Viagra and a bad heart (and Orange Julius is like a textbook illustration for Congestive Heart Failure in an elderly man) do not mix. Granted, it could mean an old dude gets to die happy, but would The Donald risk it? He's definitely sliding into full-blown dementia but he's also got strong survival skills -- and Cheetolini is scared shitless of dying. 

So why do I say "Trump curse strikes again?" Because this is typical inept messaging from Team Trump. If they had all just ignored it anything Ossoff said wouldn't have been news outside Georgia. Instead the rapid response team freaked out and went more than a tad overboard on two things: accusing Ossoff of trashing Natalie and denying vehemently any unseemly genitalia fondling was happening. End result? Instead of a brief mention in the AJC (Atlanta Journal Constitution) a nothing burger turned into a multi-course meal for the national press. And maybe international. I haven't checked Helsingfors Sanomat recently but when a news item is on the front page of every major U.S. paper that news item usally ends up in papers elsewhere. The Trump rapid response team did a great job of promoting a news story no one really knew or cared about before they highlighted it.

So what is the deal with Natalie? It seems likely she's exactly what it looks like: a human security blanket who keeps Orange Julius mellow by indulging his narcissism. She carries a portable printer everywhere so she can produce hard copies of flattering memes, articles, whatever at a moment's notice to placate Cheetolini's ego. She's the one who feeds The Donald's vanity by handing results of bogus polls claiming he's super popular or that the economy is doing great. She guarantees he almost never hears the truth about anything. She's been described by various observers as basically unhinged, so totally obsessed with Trump that she's viewed by security experts as a potential threat (obsessive fans tend to lash out at whoever they've obsessed about when things don't go as expected), but Orange Julius is too dense to realize the woman is a few fries short of a Happy Meal. He loves the flattery so is oblivious to the crazy. Given Natalie's superficial resemblance to Ivanka, it's possible the senile old coot doesn't have a clue who she really is. 

Lessons in mortality

We spent Saturday afternoon at a potluck party at an older friend's house. The fellow enjoys a lakeside cottage and established a tradition years ago of hosting a yard party once every summer. Attendees include fellow lakeside dwellers (i.e, the folks who live on or near the same small lake he does), former neighbors from where they used to live, relatives, and miscellaneous acquaintances. 

I'm not sure what category the S.O. and I fall into. The S.O. has known the host forever, since childhood, and my parents were friends with his parents. I'm not sure just how old the man is, but his younger brother is about to turn 85. So definitely an octogenarian, as is his spouse. Not surprisingly, it was not a particularly young crowd at this soiree. The S.O. and I were incredibly young and spry compared with some of the other folks enjoying the food and music -- the host plays the accordion and usually has a friend accompanying him on keyboards. It's a nice event. It's also one that guarantees that at least once a year we'll get to hear "The Sauna Song." 

The keyboardist, incidentally, looked to be about 200 years old and was toting an oxygen bottle. His grandson served as a roadie: carried in all the equipment, made sure his grandfather was set up correctly, and handled everything that required any physical exertion. His grandfather, despite looking older than the Crypt Keeper, was decent on keyboards. His voice cracked more than a little when he sang, but other than that. . . no issues. I'm not a fan of what I think of as wedding dance music (polkas, schottisches, etc.) with the possible exception of "Kulkurin Valsi" but it was all actually rather nice. 

So what does a summer potluck party have to do with mortality? Well, when the crowd on average is older than the proverbial dirt, one cannot help noticing that the number of attendees has been steadily declining over the past five or six years. More empty seats, more people negotiating with walkers, more folks toting oxygen bottles around. This was not a crowd that was likely to create a nuisance or disturb any uninvited neighbors with noise or rowdiness. The most likely disturbance would be an ambulance siren when one of the attendees dropped from a cardiac event. You know, it's always a nice party with good food and music and people generally enjoying themselves. . . but, fuck, everyone is getting so damn old. 

A very gray day

Houghton July 16

The smoke from the Boundary Waters and the north shore of Lake Superior is still hitting us. Not sure just what the air quality index says but it hit about 1,000 on Wednesday. It's probably lower now, although not by much, because it's raining. Anything above 300 is Bad, as in Really Bad. The local weather guys gave the predicted rain a mixed review. On the one hand, the rain will knock particulates out of the atmosphere. On the other, that might simply cause particulates to be more of an issue at lower altitudes. I don't know and don't especially care. It's going to be gray and smell like smoke outside no matter what our weather is doing here. I'm just going to hope it's raining hard in northern Ontario because a good soaking rain is about the only thing that will stop wild fires in a bone dry boreal forest. 

Our perpetually brain dead idiot of a Congress critter, the Louisiana carpetbagger, was shooting off his mouth yesterday about Canada needing to do something. Right. Like right now the Canadian natural resources people, their equivalent of the Forest Service and similar land management agencies, are just sitting back and saying, yep, let the entire Lake Nipigon/boundary waters region burn. Natural disaster, just let it go, sooner or later the fires will exhaust the current supply of spruce, balsam, and peat bogs. 

Minor digression: peat bogs burn forever, or it can seem that way. It's like when a fire starts in a seam of coal. It'll keep smoldering for months and years. There's a coal seam in Centralia, Pennsylvania, that's been smoldering for over 60 years now. No one knows how that fire started but current estimates are that it'll take another 200+ years for the fire to burn itself out. A bog fire isn't going to last centuries but it's also not going to be easy to extinguish.

Anyway, while Michiganders (and a Louisiana carpetbagger) are busy bitching about bad air, people in northern Ontario are living with apocalyptic scenarios with towns being evacuated and homes being destroyed. I saw a video filmed from a CN freight train that I was hoping was AI but was definitely real and definitely terrifying. Intense fire on both sides of the track and smoke so thick visibility was effectively zero. It's rather petty of Michiganders to complain about smoke when they're not living so close to the fires they can feel the heat. It is also, as my S.O. noted, remarkably chickenshit for people like Jack Bergman (carpetbagger) to complain that Canada is somehow to blame for aggravating asthma in Michigan when Canada has always been really fast in assisting U.S. firefighting efforts. A Canadian pilot died recently in Colorado while assisting with fighting wildfires there. Instead of complaining to Prime Minister Carney about Canada's supposed fuck-ups, Congress critters like Bergman should be asking what the U.S. can do to help. 

Of course, Begman and other Republicans can't go after the real problem that's leading to massive wildfires globally: climate change. Admitting climate change is real would piss off their fossil fuel mega-donors. Besides, Mango Mussolini has declared climate change a hoax which means, of course, that every Republican has to parrot the same line. 

It's also rather stupid for any Congress critter to bitch about Canadian fires when huge chunks of the U.S. are burning right now. If you want to depress yourself, check out the statistics from the National Interagency Fire Center. 

It is for sure an odd feeling to keep smelling smoke when the closest fire is on the other side of Lake Superior anywhere from 50 to 100 miles from here. Going by the maps I've seen on local news, the bulk of the smoke we're getting is coming from the Boundary Waters area so maybe Bergman should be writing nasty letters to Tom Schulz about how the U.S. Forest Service screwed up instead of lobbing insults at Mark Carney. 

Birthright citizenship, voting, and history

I've been reading Eric Foner's The Second Founding. Foner has written extensively on the post-Civil War period and Reconstruction. This particular book looks at the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments to the Constitution. Although in hindsight it seems like Congress clumped the three together rather quickly, it was 15 years from ratification of the 13th to ratification of the 15th.

The 13th amendment was pretty much a no-brainer immediately following the war. The Emancipation Proclamation had freed slaves in the Confederacy; it didn't do a thing for slaves in border states that weren't in active rebellion, like Kentucky and Missouri. Congress recognized slavery everywhere had to be eliminated so they cranked out the 13th Amendment pretty quickly. It's short and simple: "Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States..."

Foner details the debates, which naturally included demands from slave owners for financial compensation for their lost property, but the committees working on the drafts managed to pare it down to a basic statement. In retrospect the exceptional clause has been repeatedly criticized. It's the rationale for prison labor. Need some road work done cheaply? Chain gangs. Or, a more modern example, need furniture for schools and state hospitals? Prison work shops. Or, as I read about not long ago, an airline reservation call center operating out of a prison, which really had me wondering about stuff like how secure is your credit card number when the person asking for it is sitting behind bars. But that's a digression. The exceptionalism clause wasn't seen as much of an issue in 1865; it took decades of Jim Crow and rising awareness of places like Angola (notorious Louisiana prison farm) for people to realize the exceptionalism clause has led to some horrific abuses. In any case, after both houses of Congress passed it, the amendment went to the states for ratification. Twenty-seven were needed for passage; there were 30 ratifications submitted before the end of December 1865. A few states were a little slow -- naturally, Mississippi was last, with the formal paperwork from Mississippi submitted in 2013. (And no doubt there are some Mississippians who think they could have waited a few more years.)

The 14th and 15th amendments did not sail through the process as quickly or as easily as the 13th. The 14th has been in the news a lot lately. It's the birthright citizenship amendment. In reading about the debates a number of oddities struck me. One was that for some Congress critters that big problem with affirming birthright citizenship wasn't that anyone black and born in the United States would automatically be a citizen, it was that birthright citizenship could apply to children born to Chinese laborers in California or Nevada or, possibly even worse, the children born to drunken Irish immigrants. In 1868 there were a lot of Chinese laborers in California. They were, as immigrants so often do, working at jobs sufficiently dangerous or arduous that most white guys wouldn't do them. In retrospect, the paranoia about the Chinese suddenly forming a voting bloc seems rather stupid. There may have been 50,000 adult men laboring on railroads and at other unpleasant tasks, but there weren't very many women immigrating -- and even if there were the amount of time from the amendment's passage to when new natural born citizens would be eligible to vote (age 21) seems like plenty of time for politicians to figure out how to manipulate the masses. 

The nervousness about the drunken Irish was an East Coast issue. Prejudice against the Irish was common in all the major cities. Despite Ireland being part of the United Kingdom at the time, the Irish were never seen as safely English. The Irish did not speak the King's English -- many no doubt were comfortable only in Gaelic -- and, even worse, they were Papists, the dreaded Roman Catholics who answered to the Pope, who was labeled by some American Protestant leaders as a despot. Again, in retrospect it seems rather odd, but while prejudice against the Irish has disappeared over time there is still a lot of fundamentalist Protestant prejudice against Catholics. (A minor digression, but I know people who were raised in a fundamentalist tradition -- not exactly snake-handling Pentecostal Holiness types, but close -- who were/are convinced Catholics worship idols because of the statues of saints in churches.) 

There was also discussion about Native Americans, but Congress concluded that if a Native American belonged to a recognized tribe that tribe was a sovereign nation and that's where a Native American's citizenship lay. Ergo, U.S. citizenship was a nonissue for indigenous persons. 

In any case, the important part of the amendment, Article 1, does three things: it says if you're born in the U.S., you're a citizen. As a citizen you are entitled to equal protection under the law, and, third, states can't take rights away without due process. The other sections of the amendment were basically cleaning up some issues after the war such as Article 3 saying if you'd rebelled (i.e., been in the Confederate army or government) you couldn't run for federal office (no convincing your fellow traitors that you belonged in Congress). Article 3 is often referred to as the insurrection clause; it's the clause some activists tried to use against Donald Trump running for a second term because he'd encouraged the January 6, 2021, rioters at the Capitol. The intent in 1868, of course, was to prevent the asshats who had been stupid enough to drag multiple states into seceding and causing a war from trying to get back into political power and doing something equally stupid again. And it worked, at least briefly, but mainly because Congress also passed the Reconstruction Act for the Confederate states. Reconstruction lasted until the administration of Rutherford B. Hayes. Hayes effectively ended Reconstruction by withdrawing federal troops, which is a subject for a different post.

The 15th amendment provided the right to vote to all citizens regardless of race or ethnicity. The wording is succinct -- "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude." -- and is notable for what it omits (gender). Gender was debated, but apparently giving ladies the right to vote along with former slaves was a bridge too far for male legislators in the late 1860s. Not surprisingly, some of the same objections to the 14th admendment were recycled to argue against the 15th: omigod the Irish might vote! What about the Chinese? It probably helped that states would still control voting (when, where, limiting eligibility through requiring literacy tests or poll taxes, all of which and more states did in attempts to limit who actually got to vote). The amendment passed both houses of Congress in 1869 and was sent to the states for ratification, which took less than a year. 

So what did I learn from this book other than the basic facts? Well, it's pretty clear that there will always be some shit weasels politicians who worry a lot more about hanging on to their Congressional seat than they do about what's good for the country. It's also clear that the current criticisms of birthright citizenship aren't new. They're recycled bigotry from the 1860s. Ditto voting rights. There have always been and probably always will be people who think the ideal voting population consists of one person: one rich guy who's willing to subsidize your preferred lifestyle. Therefore the goal becomes to make voting harder, thus thinning the voting pool. Ecclesiastes 1:9. 

Weather

The U.P. had an actual tornado this past week. It was major news. The Marquette Mining Journal has had it as a headline/front page news on their website for multiple days now. This area rarely experiences tornadoes. Granted, it was probably the lowest setting for a tornado, an EF-0, but the National Weather Service says, yes, actual tornado. Based on what was visible on social media, residents closest to the event reacted as though they've been tornado watching in Alabama or Arkansas for decades: lots of video taken by people who decided the best place to be while observing an approaching twister was on their front porch filming it. 

Voting

Our absentee ballots arrived a couple days ago. Michigan's primary is August 4. I suppose I should get the thing filled out and dropped off at the township clerk's office. There's a drop box to use when the office is closed (which is most of the time; rural township with part-time staffing) so no dealing with the post office and hoping the ballot doesn't end up re-routed through Chicago. Mail vanishes for years if it ends routed through Chicago.

I have not actually looked at what all is on the ballot this time. Michigan does an open primary so I have been toying with voting Republican simply because our current carpetbagging Congress critter actually has some opposition. It's not the usual pattern of the incumbent being guaranteed another shot at doing nothing for two years, which is good. One thing that always depresses me is seeing incumbents running unopposed. 

I have no idea just how deranged the person running against Jack Bergmann is -- for all I know he's even farther out in the right wing weeds than Bergmann -- but I figure just seeing that someone is running against Bergmann is a good sign. Even if Bergmann wins the primary I'm thinking it would be nice to make the carpetbagger nervous when he sees opponents got actual votes. 

Bergmann deserves the label of carpetbagger. As far as anyone can tell, he's never actually lived in Michigan. What he claims as his Michigan residence is a deer hunting camp near Watersmeet. Running (and unfortunately winning) offices in states where Republicans don't actually live seems to be a pattern. Mike Rogers, one of the Republicans running for Senate this year is rumored to be a Florida resident, and of course there's the classic Alabama case. Tommy Tuberville (current U.S. senator and candidate for Governor in Alabama) has been accused multiple times of not living in Alabama anymore. He did live in the state when he coached college football at Auburn, but that was decades ago.  

Mike Rogers, for what it's worth, was recently thoroughly mocked in social media when his campaign photo shopped his picture. They took a routine, totally normal shot of Rogers in an outdoor setting, probably from a public appearance of some sort, and decided it would be a good idea to do a bizarre turning an ordinary, slightly portly and definitely middle-aged dude into Conan the Barbarian or some other muscle-bound he-man. 6-pack abs, muscular biceps, the whole "I'm competing in body building contests in my spare time" look. It was bizarre. It drew laughs. 

On the other hand, Rogers can actually claim to have a connection with Michigan. He was born in the downer peninsula, graduated from Adrian College, and was a Michigan Congressman until he apparently got bored with politicking. He left Congress, picked up some gigs doing commentary on CNN and elsewhere, and got himself a comfortable retirement home in Florida. Starting a few years ago, he's been trying to get back into an elected office. He ran for U.S. Senate when Senator Stabenow retired; he lost to Elissa Slotkin. Now he's trying again to win the seat being vacated by Senator Peters.

There was a time when I would have agreed with the Wall Street Journal that Rogers belonged to the sane branch of the Republican Party. Unfortunately, once he started lusting after a Senate seat he decided to chug the Trump Kool Aid and went all in on election denial and other Mango Mussolini obsessions. At this point in time, I'm hoping that Abdul El-Sayed ends up as the Democratic nominee for Senate and goes on to destroy Rogers in the general election in November. I'm probably dreaming about El-Sayed -- he's been endorsed by Bernie Sanders so you know the Republicans are going to be screaming about godless communism -- but a girl can fantasize.