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. 

How far do they expect people to commute?

This piece of advertising was in the mailbox the other day. It baffled me at the time because so far as I know the closest Amazon facility of any type is down near Milwaukee, which is a good five or six hour drive from here. Talked with a couple friends, and it appears that every mailbox in the 49946 zip code was graced with this gem. It turns out that Amazon is building a distribution center in Escanaba (or close to it). Escanaba is about 130 miles from where we live. I know desperate workers in various urban areas do some killer commutes but 100+ miles one way in the U.P.? Not going to happen, not unless the paychecks are a heck of a lot better than anything Amazon is willing to disburse. 

So, did Amazon blanket every zip code in the U.P. with this ad or did they think in terms of actual distance? You know, send a card to everyone between Ironwood and Sault Ste. Marie or just the addresses that might be within 150 miles? Then again, 150 miles from Escanaba in any direction could include most of upper Michigan. It seems odd for multiple reasons, the most obvious being that it's kind of weird to start advertising for workers before construction on the building has even begun.

The mind wanders

Insomnia does strange things to a person's thought processes. When you're wide awake at 3 a.m. do you count sheep like a normal, cliched insomniac would or do you go wandering down strange mental alleys?

Tool set for castrating chickens (available from Amazon)

Do you, for instance, ever think about capons? I mean, who was the first person who decided castrating chickens would be a good idea? Large livestock, sure, it makes perfect sense to lop the balls off bull calves or male sheep. It doesn't take much of an agricultural genius to figure out that turning your livestock gender neutral will make the beasts easier to handle and, major bonus for carnivores, fatter. But chickens?

Among other considerations, birds don't have external genitalia. If you want to know if a chick is going to be a rooster or a hen you have to shove a finger into the wee feathered friend's cloaca. Which brings up another question, naturally. Who was the first person to figure out that's what you needed to do if you wanted to determine sex before the birds fledged and  you could tell at a glance which ones were pullets and which were cockerels. One of my friends in grad school was a woman who once worked in commercial poultry production as a sexer. That's what she got to do for her 8-hour shift: shove a finger up a chick's ass and pronounce it male or female. It was not a fun job, albeit one that was apparently not hard to learn. For sure it makes for an interesting line on one's resume. 

In any case, capons are not as common in supermarkets and butcher shops as they once were. Maybe it's because commercial poultry operations have managed to breed broiler-fyers that are a whole lot meatier than chickens used to be -- some breeds now have breasts so large in comparison to the rest of the body that those breeds can no longer reproduce naturally because the rooster can't get close enough to the hens; their chests (the roosters') get in the way (and wouldn't that be a fun job, too, being the person who artificially inseminates chickens). Back in the primitive days of poultry production it would take many months for a castrated cockerel to get to Sunday roasting size; now there are broiler-fryers who go from hatched to marketable in barely 8 weeks. Why think about getting a capon when you can find individual chicken breasts that weigh as much as a whole bird used to? Call me old-fashioned, but it strikes me as profoundly unnatural for one boneless chicken breast to weigh over a pound. Mutants. Birds on steroids. Definitely not the same breed as the yard birds we raised in our back-to-the-land phase in the '70s.

Do camels get a spa day?

I have been doing a fair amount of knitting lately and have begun thinking about non-acrylic yarns. For years I've been too cheap to work with most natural fibers, including even basic wools like the stuff that comes from sheep. Among other things, acrylic yarns are easily cleaned. When I knit stuff like afghans for infants or sweaters and mittens for kids, I want the garment to be machine washable. I might fondle the wool yarns in the store, but I'm usually unlikely to actually buy it. Some of it is basic cheapness -- if a sweater takes five large skeins of yarn to make, and each of those skeins is a natural fiber, a person can easily drop $100 just on yarn. Then when you add in the possibility that the resulting sweater would be one that shrinks to Barbie size and turns into felt if the owner foolishly throws it into a washing machine. . . acrylic seems like the logical choice for most of my projects. 

This winter, though, I've been doing small stuff. Socks. I am actually working with a sock yarn that's got a high wool content. Not a cheap yarn, by my standards, but one pair of socks doesn't actually require much yarn. Then a few weeks ago there was a discussion online among several virtual friends about hemp and hemp fiber. I did some musing about hemp yarn. I've never seen any, but have seen hemp cloth. I have a tee-shirt made from hemp that is lasting forever. The Michigan Tech chapter of NORML sold them back during one of the years I taught at Michigan's Toughest University, which means the shirt is now probably 25 years old. It still looks good. 

Anyway, I figured if a hemp tee-shirt was that durable, hemp yarn would probably stand up to a lot of abuse, too. It would probably make decent socks. So I went looking online for hemp yarn. Turns out there's a lot of it out there. Multiple companies have figured out industrial hemp can yield decent fiber. The hemp plant, the stuff planted in fields that makes it obvious hemp grown for fiber is actually pretty much of shrub, has two layers in the stem.One layer makes good fiber for weaving; the other layer is good for things like paper. Given that hemp is processed in a way similar to flax (source of linen), just on a bigger scale,  one has to assume it didn't take entrepreneurs long to find equipment and start processing hemp again.  So, lots of hemp yarn in a variety of weights/wraps/plies -- there are multiple ways of defining yarn. I'm happily comparing hemp yarns when suddenly a suggestion for something slightly different comes up.

Camel. 

Camel? Somehow I've never thought of camel as a fiber for knitting. Granted, there are things referred to as camel hair coats but it never occurred to me they might be made from actual camel hair.

The push for the camel hair yarn described it as being carefully obtained from Bactrian camels in Mongolia. The hair comes from combing the camels once a year, not shearing them, and is available in two natural colors: a tannish brown and a brownish gray. The price per skein is reasonable. I'm intrigued, but I was having trouble imagining the weight and feel of the yarn. I don't think of camels as having much in the way of hair. When I visualize a camel, it's always a dromedary, the one-humped Arabian camel, the ones zoos have for camel rides for kids. They've never struck me as having much in the way of hair -- they seem to have a fairly short coat. 

So I consulted my sister, the fiber expert. She has llamas, she spins, she weaves, she knows lot of people who mess around with various fibers. And llamas are distant relatives of camels. It turns out she does have experience with camel hair, but has never actually seen commercially produced camel hair yarn. She did a fiber arts project with kids once that involved hair from a camel ride camel. The camel hair was used to demonstrate felting. She said the kids had fun, but the hair was super dirty so things got kind of muddy. 

This raises an interesting question. Do they bathe the camels before they comb them? You know, do the Mongolian camel herders set up a day spa for the Bactrian camels and do the equivalent of a shampoo and blow dry before doing a comb out to get the hair? Or do they wash the mud off afterwards? And how dirty would the camels be when much of Mongolia is desert? Shouldn't the sand just shake out? It would be nice if the camels actually did get a spa day where they got to hang out, gossip over drinks, and get a nice massage and a pedicure in addition to the comb out. Nerf tells me that combing is a plus; it means they'd be getting the soft undercoat and not the much stiffer guard hairs.

Bactrian camels do have a lot of hair. They're much shaggier looking than dromedaries. It might be a really strong yarn. It could also be both fine and soft. According to Google, which as we all know is never wrong, some fibers that get marketed as cashmere are actually camel and not kashmiri goat. That makes the idea of buying camel hair yarn rather tempting.

On the other hand, the incredibly irritating hair shirts medieval monks and other religious ascetics wore as an act of penance were made from camel hair, so who knows? 

You know the price of lumber is high

Just how high does the price of raw wood have to go for it to become more cost effective to make fake stumps than it is to sell real ones? Amazon is offering patio seats and accent tables made from "faux wood." How can it possibly be cheaper to cast a fake stump from resin than to simply cut up a real tree into the appropriately sized pieces?

This little gem is 16 inches tall, comes with adjustable feet, and is ideal for use as either a place to sit or as an accent table. And it could be yours for a mere $67.86 with free shipping if you're a Prime member. 

I have some odd stuff show up in the ads Facebook bombards me with, but faux wood baffles me. Why would the algorithms think I'd want a fake log? 

Really hope this isn't my last post of the year

I recently read that one of the networks, probably ESPN, was going to air a documentary on the competitive world of dog grooming. Competitive dog grooming? Could there actually be such a thing?

So I asked my niece who happens to be a professional dog groomer. She confirmed that there are indeed grooming competitions. She's witnessed them at dog grooming conventions. Another thing I have trouble envisioning, but then again every profession holds conventions. Exterminators, people who make a living offing cockroaches, have conventions so why not dog groomers?

She sent me a few images of work groomers had done as part of these competitions: clipping a dog's coat and then applying color so the beast looked like a camel or a zebra or some other definitely not a dog creature. My immediate reaction was that some people should not be allowed to own dogs.

I can understand, more or less, the standard cuts that get used on dogs. Although, to be honest, how the conventional trim for poodles evolved to what it now is confounds me. I mean, what's the point of the giant fluffy ball of fur around the chest and the naked ass on the other end? But turning a dog into a fake camel? That has to cross some ethical line.

In any case, yesterday she followed up with a link to something even more bizarre. Glitter balls. You got it. Glitter. On the dog's scrotum. A few years ago I thought it was pretty damn weird that there are people who will pay to have fake testicles implanted when they have a male dog neutered. Why it would be important to any dog owner that his or her dog look like it still has functioning testicles once they've been removed is another mystery, one that kind of begs for some Freudian analysis. I mean, just how much of a dog owner's masculinity is wrapped up in whether his dog still looks like it has balls?

Glitter, though, is truly mind boggling. Just what is the point? I did a little Googling, and apparently this first started showing up about a year ago. The testicles are painted with a syrup and edible glitter gets dusted on. Not technically difficult, but definitely weird. The dog will lick it off, of course, making for some colorful poop, but supposedly it doesn't do any actual harm to the beast. What it does to other people's opinion of the owner is different matter.

Who first thought it up? Just how much alcohol had been consumed? And the poor dogs. . .  they already get to suffer the humiliation of being stuffed into strange sweaters and dresses (I see pictures of sad little drop kick dogs all the time being made to wear ruffled outfits that their demented owners believe are "cute") and now their balls are being bedazzled?

I really hope I'm inspired to do at least one more blog post in the next 48 hours. I'd hate to end the year with glitter balls.

Why did we become so boring?

L'Anse High School graduation announcement

I've been puttering away at home scanning and inventorying archival material from the museum because it's too cold to work in the building when the furnace is dead. It must be an effect of aging because I'm noticing the cold more this winter than I did back in 2012-2013 when there was also no gas heat in the building. Back then I managed fine with just an electric space heater in the office.

Closed

Open. There's multiple pages including a class roll under that top sheet. 

In any case, I've been hauling stacks of material home, working through it, and then hauling it back. I'm slowly figuring out what all was in a 40-quart Sterlite bin that ostensibly was packed with miscellaneous school-related ephemera.

Naturally, like everything else I've gotten into in the past six years, ostensible and reality are not synonymous. It is mostly school stuff -- graduation announcements, programs from school plays and concerts, school newspapers -- although there is some odd stuff mixed in, like a yearbook from a local church and a set of aviation navigation tools (e.g., a specialized protractor).

What 1932 looks like when open. And, yes, I cringed when I saw that year written on the front in ink. Made absolutely no sense when the year is clearly shown in that triangle at the top. 

There's also the usual issue of confusing labels, like a gallon ziplock bag labeled "L'Anse" when it's actually full of things from Baraga High School, and vice versa.

Some of the material is interesting, some pretty dull, and the process overall is fairly tedious. It's the type of task I'd hate if it was paid job but when I'm doing it as a volunteer with no set schedule, no deadlines, and the ability to get up and walk away any time it starts to feel too boring, I can't complain. At least my home office is warm.

Another one with multiple pages, hence the leather lace binding. 

One thing does have me wondering, though. When did we as a society decide to become so damn boring? From the earliest graduation announcements I've found up until the late 1930's, there's a lot of variety. The announcements are different shapes, different colors. Some are elaborate with multiple folds, some are simple but not bland. Why did we go from using announcements like the ones shown above to every one being happy with something as bland and lifeless as the example below?

Jostens has been around since 1897 as a supplier of school memorabilia -- rings, pins, announcements, yearbook printing. Their logo is embossed on the back of some the announcements I've been scanning. Did they make the decision to turn boring, or was it a case of their more creative competitors going out of business so they felt free to slack off on design work? It's a mystery.

(Actually, I can see it as being a logical business decision. The niftier announcements with multiple pages and lacing to hold them together were definitely more labor intensive, and even a simple one sheet like the 1922 announcement with its two folds involves a special shape for the paper. The boring ones use a standard size paper so can be run off quickly and are easily machine folded. Still, the older announcements were definitely a lot more interesting than the ones graduating seniors send out these days.)

Spam magnets

What, I wonder, turns a blog post into a spam magnet? About two years ago I wrote a post about one of the National Park sites in Arizona. It got two comments at the time, which is about par for one of my on-the-road posts, time passed, and then spam began appearing. Because I moderate comments a notice would pop up in my Hotmail account. I'd take a look, and the comment would be obvious spam: a very bland, meaningless sentence that could apply to any post with a suggestion that I check out a link.

Sometimes there wasn't even the meaningless sentence, just a link. They all seemed to originate in southeast Asia, e.g., Malaysia or Indonesia. I never clicked on the links, of course. I have days when I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, but even barely awake and non-caffeinated I'm not stupid enough to click on links in spam.

There was another one of those spam comments this morning. Same post. You'd think that after a couple years passed the spammers would latch on to a different URL to target, a more recent post, but apparently not. 

Another museum mystery

A new year, a new mystery at the museum. This time a minor one, but a mystery nonetheless. Why is this little pink box car stuffed full of rocks?

Seriously. It's full of rocks. It's part of a homemade model train set that was in the back of a display cabinet. In the process of shuffling stuff around in the museum we discovered not only could we not move the display cabinet while it was still full of stuff, we actually needed to jettison the cabinet entirely.

We being the S.O. and myself, of course.

The original intent was merely to shove the cabinet back closer to the wall -- there was a gap of almost two feet behind it -- to make it easier to move some other things past it. I cleared away some objects that were sitting on the floor in front and on the sides of it, and told the S.O. it was ready to shove. We were about to when he took a closer look at the beast and discovered it was racked too badly to move safely. The corners were spreading, there was significant crack in the base, and there were other issues.

Okay, if we can't move it safely the obvious thing to do is empty it, get it out the door and to the landfill, figure out a substitution for it short term, and think about investing in a totally new display cabinet for the long term.

Pink box car is hiding behind stuff right in the middle on the bottom shelf.

Minor digression (aka short rant). All the cases in the museum are apparently ones that came from retail businesses. They're all used and in various states of decrepitude. Some are quite decent; a few are pretty damn old with glass tops that are so scratched up you can't see through them. I can understand hanging on to the really old ones, the ones that look like they came out of a 19th century mercantile, but do not get why the museum felt compelled to keep the pretty modern looking but falling apart case the railroad stuff was in. The museum isn't rolling in money, but it could afford to drop a few hundred dollars on a decent display case. I checked the KC Store Fixtures catalog. A comparable case, one with the equivalent amount of shelf space, can be had for under $300.

Then again, the museum was apparently allergic to spending money on things museum professionals would consider essential, like archival storage boxes. As one of the sweet little old ladies told me when I first began volunteering, "Why should we spend money on boxes when we can get them for free from Larry's?" Larry's being a local supermarket. Well, for one thing, if you spend money on actual file boxes they'll all be a uniform size, they'll have lids, and you can stack them in the attic or the storage building without them turning into a leaning tower of weirdness. But back to the box car full of rocks.

Depot model on case. Notice the large gap between the case and the wall. Given that the case was full, that gap made no sense, but then many things at the museum didn't (and still don't).  

I began emptying the display case. I started with the top. There was a model of the Baraga railroad depot sitting on one end. It sat on a substantial piece of wood. I'd never paid much attention to the railroad stuff until this week when I got forced to deal with it -- it's one of those areas that fell into the I'll get to it eventually category -- and had assumed the wood was the base for the model. You know, the model was attached to the large chunk of wood, which measured about 18 " x 18", basically covering the entire end of the case from front to back. When I tried picking it up, it didn't move. That's when I discovered it was screwed down to the end of the case.

Curiosity compelled me to unscrew that chunk of wood. I already knew as soon as I saw those screws that sure as shit there was going to be a significant hole or a crack or some other flaw under it. I was right. That end of the display case had a hole in the top that you could drop a six-pack of cheap beer through and not worry about it hitting the glass anywhere as it fell. So why the heck did the museum keep that display case to begin with? At one point the museum had a surplus of display cases -- I was told the historical society gave a bunch to the Covington Township Museum when they were getting set up. Why give away good cases but keep a crap one?! But I'm veering into a rant again. . .

Whoever made the model put little green Army men into the cab of the engine. There's also one standing in the door at the back of the caboose. 

Back to emptying the case. I got the top shelf emptied. It turned out to be the usual weird mix of stuff where things were stuffed in there that had no relationship to railroading at all but apparently there was an empty spot of the shelf someone felt a need to fill sitting side by side with some really nifty stuff from the Duluth, South Shore & Atlantic. No interpretive labels, of course. I should have gotten into that case years ago.

I am simultaneously impressed by the effort and appalled by the results. 

Then on to the bottom shelf, starting with the homemade model train at the back. It was a little strange (and I don't just mean the upcycled materials it's made from). There were large rocks sitting in the gondola car and the coal tender for the locomotive. Okay. Rock samples. Someone stuck them there to mimic a load, I guess. That sort of makes sense. I take out the locomotive and tank car first. They weigh next to nothing, which is what one would expect when something's made from old plastic bottles and paperclips. Then I grabbed the box car.

It was like trying to pick up a cement block one handed. The thing weighed a figurative ton. I get it out. I open the little sliding door. What do I see? Rocks. The box car is packed full of rocks.

At least I'm assuming it's all rocks. I did not have the energy yesterday to actually empty the box car. I'll do that the next time I'm at the museum, tempted though I am to just inventory the car as is and stick it out in the storage building for some other person to wonder about a few years from now. The one thing I've learned about the museum in my six years of volunteering is to never assume a stash of anything is just junk. Maybe all those rocks are just the equivalent of pit-run gravel, but it's just as likely that hiding in there will be a nice small piece of float copper or some decent Petoskey stones. Maybe there are some gold nuggets a now-deceased member brought back from prospecting in Alaska years ago. When it comes to the museum and it's never-ending odd little mysteries, you just never know. 

Another of life's little mysteries

Why do people buy this stuff? Just what is the attraction of mass-produced weirdness? There was a sales flyer in the mailbox the other day that had multiple blow-in cards all pushing collectibles of various types. There's a godawful, tacky beyond the human capacity to grasp Thomas Kinkade-inspired Christmas tree that comes complete with a glowing star on top and a snow globe in the base. It's one of those things that you look at and the mind boggles. The only places I can think of where people might have taste that weird are also places where one is unlikely to find Christmas tree knickknacks, like cheap bordellos. It is so weird and so ugly. . . I thought Kinkade related items were bad when the man was alive. Apparently his estate has decided they can sink even lower.

The carousel isn't quite as bad. It's got a verse printed on the base about how wonderful granddaughters are so it's easy to picture some sweet little old lady (definitely not me) buying it to give to a little girl as a decoration for her bedroom. That's a pretty obvious market. The kids won't appreciate it much, although you never know. Even if they're not thrilled at getting a knickknack instead of a toy, they're likely to still think it's cute. At least it's not overtly painful to look at and it is a music box, which gives it some entertainment value.

And then there's the dachshund in the sheriff's outfit. Holy wah. The little dude is both cute and appalling. What type of drugs are the people who came up with that design doing? How stoned do you have to be to decide that a dachshund with a badge is a good idea? And just how much persuasion did it take to get the Hamilton Collection t to decide to add it to their product line? Then again, considering just how much crap Hamilton cranks out annually, the dachshund probably wasn't that hard a sell. For all I know, it's just the latest in a long line of canines in improbable costumes and cast in resin to gather dust for all eternity. Dalmations as firemen. Golden retrievers as nurses. Pomeranians as meth heads.

At least they're not trying to convince anyone that the beast is going to increase in value over time, which is actually part of the sales pitches for one of the others where production is going to be limited to a mere 95 days. Ninety-five days! Apparently they're assuming no one is ever going to do the math and think about just how many hundreds of thousands of "collectibles" can be cranked out on an assembly line when the production line is running for over three months. Three months! They could probably saturate their target market with three hours' worth of production, let alone three months. 

OMG. Just realized the little dude has spurs on his boots. I'm suddenly feeling relieved I threw the ads in the burnable trash right after I took the photos. 

Major archeological find

Back in 1992, we decided to build a deck by what is now the entrance to the Woman Cave. At the time, the structure was the back porch we'd added on to the Shoebox, the ratty mobile home we'd lived in off and on since the '70s. The kid did the excavating, the S.O. then built a decent sized deck using rough lumber from a local mill. He treated it with Thompson's Water Seal a few times, but basically the decking was cheap untreated rough lumber, mostly hemlock and spruce, that then sat there exposed to the weather for a couple decades.

Every so often one of those boards would decide it had suffered long enough, it was time to rot. We usually discovered this by stepping through it. Annoying, but not exactly life threatening when the drop was barely 6 inches. We'd slap a patch over the hole and move on. This summer we figured out the patches took up more square footage than the original material. The time for replacement had come. So the S.O. pulled up the boards.

Lo and behold! Major archeological find. I guess it counts as historic archeology because the artifact came complete with a date embossed on the bottom. That date, however, raises an interesting  question: the Big Mac Transformer is copyright 1987. The deck didn't get built until 1992. How did it get under there? Tammi did a really nice job of leveling the space; it was definitely bare dirt when the S.O. framed the deck.

I suspect, of course, that one of the cats carried it under the deck while playing with it. No chew marks on it so it wasn't the dog.

Minor digression: it just struck me that even a plastic Big Mac looks more edible than the real thing.

Cold water Tide, Granny panties, and life in general

I was doing laundry the other day, thinking it was probably the last time I'd be able to do laundry using the line dry option because October's almost here and we've usually started worrying about the hose from the pump freezing by now, and I found myself once again musing on the subject of women's underwear.

A year or two ago I mentioned the mystery of why my Joe Boxer panties have pockets in the crotch. I'm still wondering (to stash mad money? a spare car key? your phone set on vibrate?), but doing laundry got me to thinking about two other mysteries: why are the most commodious, the garments that include the most fabric, called "briefs?" Women's undies come in various forms ranging from butt floss (aka thongs) to hip huggers to briefs. Technically all underpants are briefs, but when you're looking at packaged unmentionables in the store "Briefs" is the label that gets used for the granny panties: undies that go all the way up to your waist and beyond and leave not a bit of ass exposed. They're on the opposite end of the scale from thongs -- thongs leave nothing to the imagination; granny panties leave everything. (They're also the undies one buys when one hits a certain age and decides comfort counts more than it did 20 or 30 years ago.)

But that wasn't the only one of life's great mysteries I was pondering Thursday. The other was what goes through underwear manufacturers' minds when they select fabrics for the aforementioned granny panties, or underwear in general. Being a cheap frugal person, I buy my underwear in packages of a half dozen or more. I tend to be particularly fond of the offers that tell you that two free bonus pairs are included, even though I know that those bonus pairs will be made from fabric that will be painful to the eye. Maybe the reasoning is that in most cases the only person paying much attention to the underwear is the person who puts it on so color and/or print don't really matter? Whatever the rationale, unless you buy a package that contains nothing but white unmentionables, it is guaranteed that in any multi-pack of underwear there will be at least one pair* that hurts your eyes to look at. The last time around I got treated to a pair that is glow in the dark traffic cone orange. I made the mistake of mentioning them to the Kid. She didn't really believe me. I whipped them out of the drawer to show her. She's been begging for brain bleach ever since.

This most recent laundry day was also the day I finally got around to test driving Cold Water Wash Tide. I'm really happy it was on sale and I had a coupon that cut the cost even more. My usual detergent of choice comes from Family Dollar and is not Tide. It works remarkably well, all things considered, but because I'm doing laundry using truly cold water (it's getting sucked out of the ground from an aquifer left by the glaciers and is one step away from forming ice cubes as it leaves the hose) I decided to try a product supposedly designed for cold water. Pshaw. False advertising. Tide apparently defines cold as cooler than what comes out of a hot water heater but not by much. It was a definite disappointment. Live and learn.

I am also rethinking the possibility that last Thursday was the last outdoor laundry day. The temperature here was hovering around 90 yesterday, and is supposed to be almost as warm today. It is supposed to start cooling down, but it's still supposed to be in the low 60s into October. No frost at all shown in the 10-day forecast so if it doesn't rain, I guess a few days from now I'll be line drying again.

*And why are pants, whether it's underwear or jeans, referred to as a pair when there's only one garment?

Shoot me. Just shoot me now.

Speaking of RV park oddities, this is one we'd noticed the first time we campground hosted. Little old ladies and their drop kick dogs. Everyone knows that little old ladies have an irrational fondness for little yippers, the annoying rats on a string or the superficially cute balls of fluff that have the same lovable personalities as gila monsters. Like Pomeranians, a breed that terrorized me back in my newspaper carrier days. (I will go to my grave convinced Pomeranans are the nastist little bastards on the planet.)

With a few rare exceptions, though, when it comes to RV living it is not the little old ladies who get to walk those wee beasties. It's the old dudes, the geezers who spent their entire lives working so they could afford a really nice Leviathan or humongous 5th wheel. The golden years finally arrive, they're able to do some traveling, be snowbirds, enjoy the good years ("this message brought to you by the Ketchup Advisory Board. . ."), and what does The Wife do? She insists first on sharing that motorhome or travel trailer with a dog, sometimes multiple dogs, and the beast is one of those miniature breeds that puppy mills crank out by the gazillions and that are usually psychotic as hell from having spent the first ten weeks or more of its life in a canine concentration camp. Then she decides that walking that beast, that nasty-tempered little yipper, is a good chore for the Old Man. He apparently needs the exercise more than she does. End result? A lot of old dudes shuffling around the RV park or campground walking shih tzus, Pomeranians, Chihuahuas, etc., and all with the same expression on their face: "Shoot me. Please shoot me now." You just know that this is not how they pictured retirement.

One of the neighbors here is an older guy, I'm guessing he's probably somewhere in his 80s, who amuses us because his vehicle has a set of truck nuts dangling from the trailer hitch. You just don't expect to see truck nuts on a vehicle belonging to someone that old. (Actually, you don't expect to see truck nuts anywhere any more -- that fad kind of came and went a few years ago.) It didn't take us long to figure out why he has that set of plastic testicles. They're to compensate for the ones he lost years ago when his wife insisted on getting a couple of perambulating dust mops that he's now stuck walking and cleaning up after. Poor bastard.

Another set of neighbors, some folks who just pulled in a couple days ago with a high dollar Leviathan, actually have four, count 'em, four annoying little furballs traveling with them. The little bastards bark like maniacs every time anyone walks past their site. Now, I know a Class A has a lot more space in it than the Guppy does -- being quite a few feet longer does make a difference -- but even so, why anyone who was even remotely in their right mind would want to travel with four yippers is beyond me.

Speaking of weirdness

I've been indulging in two hobbies -- quilting and pen palling -- for decades now. Pen pals since I was in the 8th grade (long, long ago in a galaxy far away) and quilting. Quilting is slightly more recent. I got into it in the early 1970s. Occasionally the two hobbies overlap.

In a post a number of years ago I mentioned that one of the ways pen pals used to (and still do) find new pals was through the exchange of friendship books, aka fbs. Most people call them eff bees; I tend to refer to them as fibs, possibly because Pen Pal Land has always had its fair share of fantasists. Long before the Internet came along to provide people with a platform for fictionalizing their lives, people did it in Pen Pal Land. But that's normal human behavior and definitely not what I'm thinking about today.

Shady Lady hand applique quilt block

In addition to the fbs, people swap exchange slips, i.e., short form chain letters. Instead of going through the whole rigamarole of "Send $1 to the first name on the list, cross it off, add yours to the bottom, make six copies and pass them on" an exchange slip will just say "2 Viewcards Exchange - 6 copies" (often abbreviated as 2 VC - 6 c) or "Sheet of Seals Exchange - 6 copies." Name an item and somewhere out there exchange slips probably circulate for it, like tea towels or dishcloths.

Tumblers

Or quilt blocks or fabric swatches. I used to do 12-1/2 inch square friendship block exchanges (pieced or applique), tumbler exchanges (a tumbler being a polygon shaped sort of like a drinking glass) done to a standard template, and a few others. At one point I had quite a few blocks other people had sent me. There was no standard pattern for generic friendship blocks, although there were a few exchanges for specific themes (Sunbonnet Sue, pinwheels) or holidays (Christmas). I must have really been into the whole blocks/swatches/whatever exchange thing for awhile. I made two Christmas wall hangings using Christmas blocks people sent me -- my standard Christmas block was one that mimicked a wrapped package -- as well as one full-size quilt top. I do still note in fbs that I'll "swap f/s blocks, 12-1/2 inches sq., pieced or applique" but no one's offered to swap in years. I think all the old ladies I used to get quilt blocks from have died off and no one's replaced them.

Christmas pinwheel, 12-1/2 inch square

Anyway, I'm at that point in the Woman Cave where one quilt just got finished and I have no idea what to do next. I have some vague ideas, but nothing solid. So I've been going through the stash: the multiple Sterlite bins and Rubbermaid totes and the dresser drawers. I'm pulling out odds and ends and kind of inventorying what I have. Do I want to do a quilt that is done from just one or two fabrics or do I want to do another scrap quilt? Maybe I want to take some of the odds and ends of extra blocks and parts of blocks and just sort of start in the middle and work out and see what happens? Not exactly a framed medallion, but the same general idea.

Grandmother's Flower Garden segments

In the process of inventorying, I discovered I still have quite a stash of stuff obtained through exchanges: ordinary blocks, some Christmas-themed blocks, some sets of hexagons for a Grandmother's Flower Garden (I didn't even remember ever getting into swapping those), some humongous butterflies ready to be appliqued on to something. Tumblers, lots of tumblers, enough tumblers sewn together to qualify as an extremely colorful table runner if I felt like putting a backing on it. Most of the finished blocks were quite good; one of the appliqued blocks, a Shady Lady (shown at the top of this post), is so nice that I don't want to put it into a quilt. I want to put it in a frame and hang it on a wall.

Cow pie? Lily pad? Or just plain weird?

And then there's the cow pie. Or perhaps it's supposed to be a lily pad. A kidney bean? Just what was the point? The blob is hand-appliqued so whoever sent it took her time assembling it. But, wow, it's weird.The fabric isn't bad. . . but the execution is definitely strange.

My standard f/s block pattern, for what it's worth, was Rolling Stone. We moved so often that it felt appropriate.

 You know, maybe that's what I should do next -- cut enough pieces to do an entire Rolling Stone quilt. It would be an especially apt project to work on this winter when we're on the road in the Guppy. Definitely something to think about.

Why does the CIA still exist?

I've been reading Ultimate Sacrifice, a book that links the assassination of John F. Kennedy, the Central Intelligence Agency, and organized crime (aka the Mafia). I'm not very far into it so can't comment much on the book itself, although it does seem like the authors spend a lot of time hashing over minutiae and don't seem to have much of a clue in terms of following a coherent narrative line. One thing is super clear, though, and that's how useless the CIA was back then.

It's unreal. The CIA apparently had a gazillion people working for them -- their "station" in Miami apparently employed 3,000 people. You read that right. Three thousand! They're in the heart of the Cuban exile community. And guess what? They can't obtain any reliable intelligence from Cuba. They keep trying to plant spies, deep cover agents, inside Cuba and failing. Their would-be spies end up arrested or dead. But does that deter them from plowing ahead with plans to assassinate Castro? Nope. Apparently the CIA higher-ups had the same attitude as the cockroach general in the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers comics: doesn't matter how many foot soldiers get squashed, there'll always be replacements.

And why is the Castro government so good at catching CIA spies? Because the CIA had already  managed to build a nasty reputation for meddling and murder in Latin America, thanks to activities like engineering the overthrow of the democratically elected Guatemalan government a few years earlier. The CIA trained assassins to target Guatemalan officials and activists. Castro knew what the U.S. government in the form of the CIA was capable of and prepared accordingly.

Guatemala was, of course, a pattern the CIA followed for years, usually with disastrous results for way too many people. Name a decade and you can find a CIA operation that turned out to be a Colossal Blunder. In the 1970s they helped engineer the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile, which led to years of oppression of the Chilean people by a murderous dictatorship. In the 1980s they supported Bin Ladn and helped create the Taliban in Afghanistan.

What's even more bizarre is that a good deal of the time they were actually working at cross-purposes with the rest of the government. The State Department would be pursuing one option through diplomacy while the CIA was busily doing the exact opposite with its covert operations. They would deliberately undermine the diplomats.

And then when you add in the fact that most of the time the "intelligence" they were supposedly gathering turned out to be wrong. . . Why does that agency still exist?  

What is it with Fox News and anger?

As I've mentioned before, one of my long-time hobbies is pen palling. I've got pals I've been corresponding with for over 40 years now. Several of my pals have mentioned that since they slid into the golden years their now-retired spouses have become addicted to cable news programs.

I know the feeling. Back in Atlanta when I was working but the S.O. was a man of leisure, he developed this bizarre addiction to CNN. I don't think he had it on all day, but it did seem like he watched way more Wolf Blitzer than any normal human should. In retrospect, I guess it could have been worse. He could have drifted into watching Fox News. Not likely, because we've been calling it Faux News for years, but you never know. A number of my pals are themselves pretty moderate in their political views, basically right in the middle or even slightly to the left in their leanings, as were their spouses, but somehow the men in their lives got seduced by Fox. Maybe it's the lure of all those young, female, blonde news readers. . .

Anyway, it's become apparent that sooner or later if you're a die hard Fox News viewer you slide into being permanently angry. You're pissed off all the time about everything. In the past few years I've gotten a number of letters in which pals describe just how hard it is to live with someone they thought they knew but who has now become a contender in the World's Angriest Man contest. And, as one pal described her significant other's descent into the abyss, it's like the more they watch, the more they have to watch. Her husband used to have hobbies. He golfed. He fished. He puttered around in a workshop. Now he sits, watches Fox News, and rants.

I can understand the news media lying, either through omission (the stories that never get covered) or on purpose. The news media in this country has been doing both for as long as the United States has existed. The idea that the news media are supposed to objective is a fairly recent fantasy. What I don't understand is slanting the news in a way that seems designed to trigger rage on the scale that Fox News does.

Maybe it's just coincidence. Maybe the angry Fox viewer already leaned towards xenophobia, misogyny, and irrational anger and it just took time for that side of their personality to come out. Maybe the spouses were jerks all along, but my pals never noticed during the decades they were both busy with work. Retirement arrives, they're together 24/7, and suddenly it's holy wah, I'm married to a Bill O'Reilly fan!

I don't know. It's another of life's little mysteries. I do know that every time I read one of those letters from a pal wondering what's wrong with her spouse -- is Fox viewing a warning sign for the onset of senile dementia? Does she need to start looking into nursing homes that specialize in memory care? -- I'm relieved my biggest complaint about the S.O. is he's not a morning person.

I guess there weren't any white actresses available

I've been watching with some bemusement the complaints about Joseph Fiennes being cast as Michael Jackson in an upcoming movie. The truly bizarre part, at least from a disinterested bystander's perspective, is seeing the side-by-side photos of Jackson and Fiennes and realizing that Jackson looks a heck of a lot paler than the white guy picked to play him. I can understand why black actors would be upset -- Jackson was, after all, African American -- but the reality is that between the make-up Jackson wore to cover up the blotchiness caused by vitiligo and the various plastic surgeries he'd had I'm not sure there's a black male actor on the planet who could play him. And I'm not sure any of the female black actors who might have the nose would be too thrilled with having to wear all that whiteface. One of the panelists on The Nightly Show suggested that Jackson's sister LaToya would have been a good choice, but I seem to recall that while LaToya may have paid for the same face as her brother, she's definitely a different body type. LaToya has curves.

Casting actors for roles in bio-pics is inherently tricky, especially if the bio-pic is about someone who's either still around or died so recently we all still have a mental image of what that person should look like. Whoever gets cast as someone famous should bear at least a superficial resemblance to the original person. Fiennes actually comes pretty close to looking like Michael Jackson: thin nose, strong chin, similar ears. He can also act, although his career must have been rather stagnant lately when all the references to him are citing "Shakespeare in Love," a movie that came out so long ago I actually saw it in a theater. In short, looked at from a purely rational perspective, Fiennes playing Jackson makes sense.

On the other hand, given the recent kerfuffle over the Oscar nominations, I find it hard to believe that somewhere in Great Britain (the movie in question is apparently a BBC production) there wasn't a young skinny unknown black actor who could have done a credible job. Who knows -- given the premise of the movie (a road trip that Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor, and Marlon Brando supposedly took) maybe the whole point of the casting is to make things even more bizarre than the reality was. A road trip? Brando, Taylor, and Jackson? Which one of them drove? And why? And just who is the target audience for the proposed film? It actually sounds so weird that maybe black actors everywhere should be feeling grateful they never got a call from their agents about auditioning for this particular role. 

It doesn't take long to take stuff for granted

Today's example: tasers. I'm a fan of John Sandford's books so have been going back and trying to read the books in his "Prey" series that I missed when they were first published. The one I just finished, Silent Prey, came out in 1992. Having the characters depend on land lines and pay phones didn't feel too odd. What stood out was the introduction of a taser into the action -- and it was still so new that no one was calling it a taser. It was a "stun gun." The cops are trying to figure out just how the psychotic serial killer is overcoming his victims, but it's not until about the 6th body that someone notices the burn marks from a "stun gun" on a victim's neck.

After reading about the cops in the book talking about "stun guns" and what a novelty they were, I started trying to remember when I first saw one. I can remember a time when suddenly everyone was talking about how they were the thing to get for self-defense, I just can't remember when that time was. Had to be sometime in the '90s, but I can't recall if it was during my Virginia Tech days or shortly after. I do know that when someone did the heart-to-heart just-between-us-gals talk about the need to carry one for self defense, I declined. I know me. I figured out a long time ago that anything I carry for self-defense is far more likely to be snatched from my fumbling fingers and used against me than it is to deter a mugger or a rapist. If I were dumb enough to spend real money on a taser or a hand gun or even some cheap pepper spray, the low life harassing me would have no difficulty snatching my self-defense weapon up from where I'd managed to drop it in the process of trying to get it out of my pocket or purse. And if by some minor miracle I managed to actually hang on to the device, odds are I'd shoot or shock or gas myself before I did any damage to an assailant. 

Come to think of it, I guess I could wonder about just when pepper spray became common, too, because it does seem to go hand-in-hand with the taser. In my memory, both seem to pop up around the same time, the early to mid-90s. Which, now that I think about, correlates with the racist paranoia that popped up during the first Bush administration about "super predators" and amoral urban youth terrorizing the rest of us. So which came first, I wonder? The market niche (hyper-paranoid white people) or the tasers and pepper sprays? 

I have actually carried something for self-defense, but it didn't fit in my purse or briefcase. I was moderately paranoid when I lived in Washington, D.C., when I first got there so I did what a number of self-defense experts suggested: I carried a large umbrella, something big enough that it was real clear it could function as a club if necessary, and I tried to walk like I knew exactly where I was going. If you don't look like an easy target, you're less likely to be targeted. Of course, whether or not I would have been capable of flailing away at a mugger's head with the umbrella is debatable. More likely I would have done the sensible thing and just handed over my bag. Maybe. If anyone had tried snatching the briefcase with my dissertation research notes in it, serious violence might have ensued.

A small digression: during my time in D.C., two people I knew personally were mugged. One was a friend who was on her way to 7-11 to buy donuts at about 7 in the morning. She said she was really torn by the incident: she was mad as hell that she missed out on the donuts she was looking forward to but at the same time impressed by the mugger's work ethic. After all, no one expects street crime to happen just as the sun's coming up. The other one was a guy, someone I knew through the Smithsonian, who got mugged in the DuPont Circle area when he came up from the Metro. In his case, it was fairly early in the evening but still late enough that the big commuting rush was over and there weren't many people around. He definitely didn't fit the profile for a mugging victim (he was a physically fit young male) but he told us he was distracted, trying to figure out which way to go to get to a party he'd been invited to, and looking lost can cause giant neon signs saying VICTIM in flashing letters to appear over your head. (And it just hit me: all those people wandering around staring down at their smart phones instead of paying attention to their surroundings must be a purse snatcher's idea of heaven. . . which gives me yet another reason to avoid ever owning one myself.) 

"They're coming to convert us"

A friend mentioned the other day that one of the reasons she's nervous about the Islamists in Syria and elsewhere is "they're coming to convert us." I had no good response at the time, and I also have no idea where she got that idea from. As far as I can tell, the fanatics associated with Da'esh (aka ISIS aka ISIL) are focusing their conversion efforts, if you can call them that, on the already converted, i.e., young people who are Muslims already but were raised in more secularized or moderate homes. They do a sales pitch on the Internet trying to persuade young people that Islam needs to be defended against the infidels; they're trying to turn run of the mill believers into fanatics. My friend and I are not the target demographic for Da'esh; they have no interest in converting little old ladies.

As for conversion in general, the S.O. and I have lived all over the country, including multiple major cities (Tucson, Atlanta, Washington, D.C.). We've had a lot of different "missionaries" try to convert us. Mormons, Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, Pentecostals, Baptists, even a few Buddhists. The weirdest one was probably The Process Church of the Final Judgement -- they always reminded me of the Satanist branch of the Salvation Army. Maybe it was the uniforms. Anyway, the one religion that has never in my lifetime tried to persuade me that I should take a look at it is Islam. I've known quite a few Muslims -- co-workers, college friends, students, neighbors, a landlord -- and not once has any of them ever shoved a Koran in my face and told me I need to read the good news about God. Both of my kids had good friends who were Muslim; those girls were the only ones who never tried to persuade my kids to attend religious services with them. We had Baptists, Lutherans, and Pentecostals all trying to lure my kids away from whatever church we might attend to go to their church services instead, but the Muslims apparently figured your religion was your own business.

I know the Nation of Islam, which is a thoroughly American institution, does missionary work in prisons and in the African-American community. We've lived in cities where Nation of Islam members can be seen selling their newspaper on the street. But you don't see Nation of Islam members going door to door ringing doorbells and trying to persuade you to let them into your house to discuss the Koran with you, unlike the Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons who are so aggressive in their marketing missionary work that they've become cultural jokes. 

Yes, it's true that historically Islam did conversion by the sword. But so did Christianity. If you look back a few centuries, both religions did the "convert or die." I have, in fact, heard a few nominal Christians suggest that's what we should do now -- a few years ago, right-wing spokesperson Ann Coulter said basically that: tell Muslims to convert to Christianity and if they don't, kill them -- but that's not exactly mainstream thinking.  

In short, I'm not sure where the conversion fear comes from because it's surely not from being harassed by street corner imams passing out pamphlets and telling us to give up our sinful Western ways. It also can't be from observing Da'esh indulging in LARPing in the Syrian desert because thus far Da'esh seems more interested in terrorizing and chasing out non-Muslims than they do in converting anyone. Several million refugees fleeing the region doesn't exactly suggest that Da'esh is engaging in any meaningful proselyzation efforts. It's a mystery.

Like the swallows returning to Capistrano. . .

There are certain things in life that are predictable. The swallows returning to the mission at San Juan Capistrano, politicians citing the need to spend more time with their family when tanking poll numbers force them to drop out of a campaign, Oprah Winfrey announcing yet another weight loss/get back in shape plan. . . and haters crawling out of the woodwork whenever Jane Fonda is involved with a new movie or television project. Netflix started streaming "Grace and Frankie" and suddenly a couple Hanoi Jane screeds were once again wandering the Internet waiting to gull the gullible.

It's bizarre. First, I've never understood why Fonda wound up as the prime target -- was it simply a matter of her being unlucky enough to have gone from sex symbol to activist? Pete Seeger and Joan Baez both visited North Vietnam and spoke out against the war; I don't recall any garbage wandering the Internet recently about them being traitors. Even when the divisions in society over the war were the most heated, I don't think either Baez or Seeger were actively hated the way Fonda still is. Back at the time she was involved in the anti-war movement, Fonda was hardly alone. Hundreds of Americans visited North Vietnam as part of the effort to protest the war, but to see some of the garbage that floats around the Internet now you'd think she'd chartered a private jet and arrived in Hanoi solo instead of being part of a group tour. She did do some dumb stuff, like allowing herself to be photographed with a group of North Vietnamese soldiers at an anti-aircraft battery, but most of what she's accused of never happened. And some is flat-out stupid.

The prime example: one of the claims made in the emails and web posts denigrating Fonda is that the POWs she met with gave her their Social Security numbers so she could get word to their families that they were alive. The claim is either, depending on which version you read, that she then handed those numbers over to the North Vietnamese or that she personally shredded them. This is nonsense for multiple reasons, but I'll mention just two: First, the most blatantly obvious to someone who actually is a Vietnam era veteran and can put their dislike of Fonda on hold long enough to think the claim through: If you were in the military you never thought about your Social Security number as a form of identification. You thought about your serial number, which was a totally different number at that time. My USWAC serial number bears almost no resemblance to my Social Security number. In addition, those numbers would not have been some deep dark secret from the North Vietnamese: they're on dog tags and they're what military personnel are trained to recite if captured by the enemy (name, rank, serial number). It's been almost 50 years since I enlisted, and there are still days when that serial number comes to mind more naturally than my Social Security number does. Update: The S.O. tells me that the military switched to using Social Security numbers for serial numbers in 1969, after I was discharged, so I never experienced that. The point still holds, though, The North Vietnamese wanted to use the Hanoi POWs for propaganda purposes so never made a secret of who they were holding. They wanted the families to know where their men were so the families would put pressure on the U.S. government to end the war.

Second, in any case, this particular line of saying see how horrible she was really falls apart in view of the fact she hand carried letters home that POWs gave her. She trashed social security numbers but carried real letters? That doesn't make a whole lot of sense -- it says, in fact, that the story about the notes getting shredded is nonsense. And why would the North Vietnamese allow Fonda to carry letters? At the time, there was no mail service between North Vietnam and the U.S. so it was common practice for foreign visitors (journalists, activists, diplomats) to accept letters to put into the mail elsewhere. The anti-Fonda screed says she tore up half a dozen notes; the reality is she carried out over 200 letters. But that's the reality -- and reality is always so boring compared to a melodramatic lie. And, despite whatever mythology some people might like to believe, the North Vietnamese had o problem whatsoever in letting the U.S. military and the U.S. public know who they were holding as POWs and where they were in Hanoi. There were POWs held in isolated areas, especially in Viet Cong controlled areas in South Vietnam, who were listed as Missing In Action for months or years, but the ones who were in or near Hanoi? They were human shields -- or so the North Vietnamese hoped. They wanted the U.S. to know that if they bombed the city they might be bombing U.S. personnel. It was in their interests to advertise how many POWs they held and who they were. Did it work? Good question. . . and one of these days I'll see if I can track down a book or two that takes a good look at the whole conflict from the perspective of what was happening in the North to see if I can find an answer. Most of the books I've read look at the mess happening in the South. (Want to thoroughly depress yourself? Read A Bright Shining Lie.)

I don't know. . . the whole Fonda obsession baffles me. Are people annoyed that despite their dislike she's had an extremely successful career, including winning two Academy Awards for Best Actress in a feature film (Klute and Coming Home)? Or are they annoyed that despite being 78 she still looks drop dead gorgeous? Is it simple misogynism, i.e., she's a woman who had the nerve to express her opinions? Who knows. But then a lot of stuff baffles me. Like why anyone who was a Vietnam vet would be more pissed off at a powerless movie actress than they would be at the politicians who led the U.S. into a war we couldn't win. If I were to waste time hating anyone involved in that war, I'd hate people like General Westmoreland, who kept demanding more cannon fodder even though he knew the war was unwinnable, or Richard Nixon, whose sabotage of the peace talks in 1968 is well-documented. He didn't want to the war to end before the election because he could use it against Hubert Humphrey in the campaign. Then he dragged stuff out for another 4+ years so he could use the war again in 1972. There was a lot of blood on Nixon's hands, but I don't hear many Vietnam vets railing against warmongering politicians. 

Or, if they wanted to aim a little lower in the power hierarchy and they're still pissed about being treated shabbily when they returned from Southeast Asia, how about aiming some scorn at the ancient codgers at the VFW. Today the Vietnam veterans are the backbone of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, they've become the old dudes running the organization, but back in the '60s and '70s the "greatest generation," the World War II vets, didn't want Vietnam vets to join. They didn't think Vietnam was a real war anymore than they thought Korea was a real war. The only war that counted was the big one, WWII, the one they fought in. It wasn't until the VFW as an organization realized it had to recruit new members or die that suddenly they were putting out the welcome mat for guys who had been sent to Vietnam. It's definitely more than a bit odd. Guys in my general age range who bitched back in the 1970s about what a bunch of dicks the old guys at the VFW were are now super happy to be part of that group. When did they get co-opted and become the dicks themselves? It's a mystery.

A slight digression: anyone who allows their dislike of Jane Fonda to cause them to forego watching "Grace and Frankie" is missing a good show. The S.O. and I are almost done watching Season 1 and were quite happy to learn there's going to be a season 2. It's one of those rare shows where I find myself thinking about actually going back and rewatching it from the start to see what I missed the first time through.