The Daily Brief

The last third of the year is upon us, that part of the year when we have markets, and prepare for the holiday season. I don’t know how many we will be doing this year. I had to beg off the Folk Festival in New Braunfels as I was still feeling feeble with the Commie Crud. The thought of driving up to the venue with stock and the tables and all, dragging it all from the car, setting up and spending two days outside was just too exhausting to contemplate. A pity for it would have been fun – but I’m only a week out from having to rest for several hours after the exertion of reading the usual news in the morning and walking the dogs for a bare half-mile, and from going to bed at 6 PM, utterly exhausted.

My book didn’t make the Giddings Word Wrangler this year, so that event is also off my calendar. Looking on the bright side, I am spared the cost of two nights in a local hotel and the drive to Giddings – and doing it alone, since the Daughter Unit has Wee Jamie to consider. The Word Wrangler has never been all that profitable for us, but we loved doing it because of the community involvement and the opportunity to hang out with other Texas authors. But we do have Miss Ruby’s Author Corral in Goliad, another Christmas event in New Braunfels and possibly the craft event at the Bulverde senior center. Honestly, this last year really has been one I’d rather forget.

It’s depressing to read the news of a morning – writing about Luna City, the Jim and Toby stories, and the various historicals is an even more urgent refuge than before. Somehow, I have to get myself motivated to finish the Civil War drama, which is nearly half-done. I think what is holding me back is the fact that I will have to write about that war, the ghosts in Union blue and Confederate gray, and the savagery with which they went after each other. I’ll have to write about that in detail, imagine it happening before my eyes. This hits too close to current events, with feelings running high between progressive and conservative factions.

I read the linked story in the Daily Mail, and realized that my daughter and I must have passed within a mile or so of the abandoned water-park many times, during the time that I was stationed at Hill AFB and made the journey up and down I-15 between the home that we had in South Ogden and my parents retirement place in Valley Center. The desert around Yermo, Barstow, Ludlow, Baker and Needles was familiar stomping ground for Dad, who confessed sometimes that in another life, he would have been a desert rat – for he loved the Mojave Desert. Loved the wide blue sky, at home in the dun-colored sweep of desert which actually hid so much life; Dad would have been happy in a small shack somewhere out beyond Needles, with a burro and a dog for company, watching over the desert life that he adored – the kangaroo rats, the little desert kit foxes, the tiny birds which nested in hollows in the cactus, the desert which bloomed into amazing sweeps of color once a year after sudden flurries of rain.

We never would have stopped at the waterpark – deserted now – in it’s prime, as we weren’t really the sort of people who did tourist attractions. Mom and Dad preferred camping trips, day excursions to places that were free or nearly so, long hikes in the wilderness – that kind of thing. But it looks as if it would have been a fantastic place for families, back when it was open, even though a long, long drive out into the desert.

One of Dad’s regular stops in his desert excursions had first been established when his parents, Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie used to drive up to Las Vegas for a spot of gambling. This must have been post-World War II, when gasoline rationing ended. Dad would have been a teenager then; Grandpa Al and Granny Dodie were rather fond of such excursions, which they carried on to a lesser degree when we were kids. Dad fondly remembered stops for a meal at a tiny, two-outlet hamburger chain called “The Bun Boy”, at the approximate halfway point between Los Angeles and Las Vegas, either the outlet on the outskirts of Barstow, or the one in a tiny hiccup in the road called Baker. For a number of years, Baker boasted of the tallest thermometer in the world, constructed by a local entrepreneur. The local radio station, which was all that we could get on the car radio carried commercials for the Bun Boy, or the rival establishment across the road, The Mad Greek, which featured gyros and fries. When my daughter and I drove from Utah for the holidays, or back again after New Years’ we would time the start of our drive to catch a meal – mid-morning breakfast at the Bun Boy, no matter if we had started the drive before dawn at Mom and Dad’s place, or after spending the night at Mesquite on the Utah-Nevada border.

It was a comfortable diner-type restaurant, not terribly distinguished in architecture or décor – but the food was always good, and the burgers were fabulous. Sometimes we ate at the counter, which was always fun, especially if there were truck drivers also getting a quick meal and refills of coffee. We got the low-down from them on where the highway patrols and the local police keep a strict weather-eye on speeders on the highway.

It looks like both locations for the Bun Boy are closed – and Baker itself is a ghost town — all but deserted save for a gas station; the Mad Greek is apparently closed as well. Are the lights still on for the giant thermometer? California used to be such a lively, interesting, fun place, but now I think with sorrow and regret of crumbling ruins and deserted towns, the hot dry wind whipping through places like Baker and the desert water park.

She was born to privilege and a degree of wealth, at the turn of the last century – Muriel Morris, an heiress of the Swift meatpacking fortune, and by most accounts conflicted over that circumstance. Like a scattering of her peers in the debutant world, she had an interest in social justice, as it was generally understood at the time. She is reported to have read Upton Sinclair’s polemic The Jungle as a teenager and been horrified – doubly so as both sides of her family had made their fortunes in the industry which Sinclair portrayed as especially brutal and gruesome. Muriel Morris was also of an unexpectedly intellectual bent and determined enough to pursue her intellectual interests – first with studies at Oxford, England in the 1920s, and then in – of all places, Vienna, Austria, where she hoped to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud. She briefly married a British artist, Julian Gardiner, by whom she had a single child, a daughter, before deciding to pursue a medical degree at the University of Vienna in 1926. She had a trust fund sufficiently generous to support herself and her small daughter.

Twenty years it’s been, as of yesterday. Twenty years and Afghanistan is down the drain, the Taliban back in charge. At least a comprehensive malignant menace like Bin Laden is dead, with his corpse – supposedly – dropped into the deep ocean, although I suppose that his organization staggers on, zombie-like, and possibly subsidized by Pakistan’s secret service. The dust of the fallen towers is settled, and the American troops are home, more or less. Still under a cone of silence as far as the US media is concerned, as are tales of hairbreadth escapes by American citizens, employees, and American-employed Afghan nationals … perhaps they were all made to sign a binding non-disclosure-agreement, as a condition of getting on that big Freedom Bird. Or our national establishment media is doing their bidding, as obedient handmaidens of the Dem party, and doing their best to disappear this latest disaster. Well, good luck with that. There are too many of us out there, and we have a voice, for at least a little bit longer.

It looks as if with the official departure of the US military from Kabul, a media cone of silence perpetuated by the National Establishment Media has descended over the whole ghastly mess, leaving a good many of us who have been following the chaotic and bloody disaster that it was with unanswered questions. Like – exactly how many Americans were left behind in Afghanistan? American citizens and employees of international and US-sponsored NGOs, or dual nationals home visiting relatives in the “Old Country” over the summer vay-cay? A couple of hundred? Or thousands? Independent military reporter Michael Yon and others across the indy blogosphere reported that American citizens – with their passports in hand – were turned away from entering the Kabul Airport by the US Army, and it is those people who are stranded in Afghanistan now. Well, maybe. Between the proverbial fog of war and the cone of silence – a great many questions remain.

They abandoned the dogs. In the hurry to abandon Kabul, the assholes in charge of leaving Afghanistan in an unseemly hurry – abandoned the dogs. Those expensively-trained and pedigreed, loyal, and loving creatures – were abandoned. In their travel crates, no doubt bewildered and confused. Left to die of hunger and dehydration, or to the torture of Muslims who abominate dogs, or a slower death of starvation and neglect, if someone thought to leave the crate doors unsecured, and let them run free about the area.

I don’t care if the carefully-parsed excuse from the DOD claims that they weren’t actually military DOD working dogs, left behind. I don’t care. Those government-grade assholes lie and parse like they breathe, effortlessly and legalistically. The dogs were trained, valuable, loyal and trusting, no matter who held their leashes and held out their reward woobie for them. And they were left behind, in the most disastrous and shameful retreat and withdrawal since – ¦ honestly, I don’t know when. Maybe the sinking of the Titanic.

And don’t even get me started on the American citizens left behind, or the Afghani citizens who had assisted or worked for the NATO establishments in Afghanistan, who are now at peril. Next to which the situation of the poor dogs pales – but humans have abilities, language, and resources. Those dogs have none of that – only bewilderment at being so betrayed.

Seriously, I never expected much from American adventuring in Afghanistan, and that was even well-before 9-11. Everything that I had read about the place – starting with Kipling, and even pop novels like MM Kaye’s The Far Pavilions, and G.M. Fraser’s Flashman series – especially the first Flashman adventure, which covered the First Afghan War in rollicking (and considering current events) depressing detail.  All that I ever read about the place signaled “handle with extreme care, equipped with asbestos gloves and long tongs” to one uninitiated into the mysteries of international relations. Considering how those considered to be credentialed experts in that region have karked up the American withdrawal from Kabul and Afghanistan proper … one might very well conclude that a survey of popular historical novels dealing with the place and people therein might afford a better grasp of realities. Those military in the lower and mid-ranks who had the experience of deployments there had pretty much come to the same conclusion, if my readings of other milblogs, and posts on social media are any indication. Once we settled Bin Laden’s hash, there really appeared no particular reason to linger.

Candidly, the current state of the world and the latest news such a depressing f**king place, that the Daughter Unit and I have taken refuge in renovating the den, which is our TV watching room. A leak in the ceiling from an overflowing drip pan during the week that Wee Jamie was born resulted in part of the ceiling to that room falling in – and it’s taken a bit of time to clear up the mess, although the HVAC company whose’ unit was responsible for the overflow which caused the initial collapse were troopers and cleared away the mess and roughly patched the hole in the ceiling straight away. It turned out, though – that the deductible on my homeowners’ insurance was pretty high – to the point where the insurance adjuster and I pretty much agreed: take that money and just hire the local neighborhood handy guy to fix the damage – patch the ceiling and all – and just forget about filing a claim.

So that is what we have done – painted the walls with the half-bucket of pale gray-blue paint left over from the nursery, repainted the three bookcases with ice-white paint and moved out the armoire which took up altogether too much space in a small room. This very week we began watching TV there of an evening, with a newly-bottle-fed and bathed Wee Jamie in a small rocking cradle between us. Alas, until I have another client, or the sales of books absolutely skyrockets in the next month or two, actual replacement of the lamentably pop-corn textured ceiling with beadboard and the painted concrete floor with vinyl planks will have to wait. In the meantime, we’ve reclaimed the den for TV watching – and what did we find when we checked into BritBox to see what was on offer? Nothing more awesome than Blake’s 7, which was the British equivalent to the first Star Trek series, at a slightly later time period. This series aired on KUED in Salt Lake City, late on Saturday evenings, and which we discovered and watched slavishly – it followed, IIRC, an episode of Red Dwarf weekly. We loved them both, and I taped the whole run of Blake on VHS tapes, which I still have, and will maintain as long as the series remains stubbornly unavailable for a reasonable cost in a format watchable in the US. I even had a Blake’s 7 T-shirt, a gimme from KUED’s annual pledge drive, a shirt which I wish that I had taken better care of, for the nerd-credit that possessing such an item would presently afford me.

“Sets made of cardboard and plastic sheeting. Costumes borrowed from other shows. Shooting on gravel pits and the like. Each episode made for maybe three quid…” So goes one review on the packaged set available on Amazon. Yep, those were the production values all right – I think that my high school drama classes might have made something higher-grade, overall … at least we might have spent twenty or twenty-five bucks. Only the early Doctor Who episodes boasted even lower-rent special effects, as I recall one which supposedly represented some kind of alien entity, consisting of a long sheet of lightweight plastic shower curtain agitated by an off-camera electric fan. Even the original Star Trek boasted more convincing set dressings and costumes, which is saying something indeed.

But against all those production and special effects shortcomings was a bravura cast of actors, plating interesting and flawed human or humanish characters, and some really excellent writing. There were no happy endings, and certainly no redshirts bumped off in each episode while the main characters emerged unscathed at the end of every episode and season. (One character, Ker Avon, in refusing to go planet-side: “I’m not stupid, I’m not expendable, and I’m not going!) In fact, by the end of three seasons, half the starting characters had been redshirted, and their technologically superior spaceship was gone, and the leader, Blake himself, went missing for all of the final season, until the very end. There was really noting quite to equal it on American TV until Babylon 5. Dystopic, dramatic, and engaging … and an improvement on watching the current news.

Indeed, I have seen this movie before. Only it was helicopters lifting off the roof of the American Embassy in Saigon, after a war which didn’t drag on for nearly as long as the hamfisted, ill-advised and ultimately disastrous attempt by an assortment of venial careerists in the DOD and State Department to make a functional country out of an Islamist-ridden tribal hellhole like Afghanistan. Now, it’s grossly overloaded airplanes and mobs in Kabul, Afghanistan. The suspicion now is that those high-ranking idiots, exemplified by General Milley and his boss at the head of the DOD, former General Austin didn’t really believe in that stated mission, they just wanted to ensure that the gravy-train went humming along; pots and pots of boodle for their pet projects, a nice pension, and a profitable post-retirement gig as a member of the board of whatever, or a nice gig as a media commenter. Oh, and instead of dealing realistically and honestly with Afghanistan – a 7^th century quarrel with borders, a fact which has been freely acknowledged for decades, if not centuries – these shoulder-starred geniuses were off on a mad quest to hunt down and eliminate the Great White Supremacist Whale from the military services.

It didn’t get better, seeing it fifty years later.

Well, if there isn’t one element in current events which more clearly shows up the double standard – not to mention the absolute uselessness of masks and so-called social distancing – it would have to be Barak Obama’s lavish party with six hundred of his closest and dearest friends, at his plush estate in that playground of the old-money wealth, Martha’s Vineyard. The Commie Crud virus obviously must know the difference between the enlightened, sensitive members of the elite, and would not dare afflict them, unlike those stupid, unenlightened and no doubt racist proles attending the Sturgis motorcycle rally. So, the Obummer and his guests, solo and chorus gave the middle finger to masks, and social distancing – and by their example, the rest of us ought to be able to do it too, witness the motorcycle rally in Sturgis, which occurred at almost at the same time. The time of the mask is done, although the establish media is still screeching on about it. Is anyone really still listening, out in small towns and rural areas in Flyover country, when some indignant Karen at any level, from the supermarket aisle to the state house, starts wingeing on about the dratted things, and won’t you consider the continued good health of everyone around you, you heartless deplorable, you?

Last Sunday morning, the Daughter Unit, together with the dogs and the Grandson Unit, were doing our customary long walk through the neighborhood when we came upon a rather startling thing – a man’s lost wallet with money, credit cards, and various identification, including a drivers’ license in it, lying close to the sidewalk. It was a slimline leather thing, almost the same dark color as the asphalt paving, and we only spotted it after practically driving the Grandson Unit’s baby stroller over it. It’s not the first time we have found something of the sort while walking. Once it was a woman’s purse, snatched from the front seat of her car not five minutes previously while she went back into the house for something, and once it was a wallet stolen – again from the front seat of the car, the cash taken, and the wallet and ID dumped in the grass at the edge of a vacant lot. In both previous cases, the cash was stolen, but the ID’s had an address on it, and were the owners grateful for getting them back. The owner of the stolen wallet was a resident with a green card, and it would have been a major PITA to get a replacement for it.

But this time, the owner of this lost wallet didn’t live in the neighborhood, but in a gated neighborhood some fifteen minutes distant, a thirtyish guy with a Hispanic name. We were unable to find anything in the wallet with a telephone number on it, and we tried a couple of internet searches. After careful consideration, the Daughter Unit decided that the best thing would be to drive over to the home address listed on the drivers’ license, and return the wallet to the rightful owner, presuming that the address was current. I insisted that she call me before she rang the doorbell of the residence, and again as soon as she returned the wallet to the rightful owner, just on the off-chance that he turn out to be some kind of freak or sex offender. By a stroke of good fortune, the owner of the wallet was driving out of the neighborhood as my daughter was trying to get in, and when she appealed to him for help in getting through the gate, by asking did he know ‘so and so’ – it all ended quite nicely. It turned out that he was a contractor with AT&T doing work in our neighborhood and misplaced the wallet sometime Saturday evening. He was resigned to having to spend all Monday in replacing his ID – he had already cancelled the credit cards, but he was very glad to get the rest of it all returned to him, as it would have been a day off work to get everything else sorted out. Not to put any especial shine on us for being good and honest citizens – but isn’t it a nice thing, living in a high-trust society?
How much longer will that last, I wonder…   This kind of high-trust society can only take so many hits before converting to a low-trust. And that will be a sad thing, I sense.

the descent into senility on the part of the so-called President Joe Biden seems to be accelerating, or so I presume from frequent scans of that news media which has not gone completely bonkers. Honestly, about the only regular mainstream establishment news outlet I check frequently is the British Daily Mail – in spite of all it’s many sins, including apparently allowing semi-literate teenage interns to write the headlines and photo captions, an unseemly devotion to the regular goings on of flashy semi-celebs like the Kardashians and Megan “Royal-Wrecker” Markle, and having the execrable Piers Morgan on staff – they do cover US-based political stories without any particular fear or favor. In other words,

So, it’s silly and stupid, and I really put off this house improvement chore for far too long, mostly because I assumed that I would have to pay a massive ( MOAB-style, as more than $1,000) bomb for it – which I really couldn’t afford, because I am still paying (and will for the next three years or so) the work done on the exterior of the house: the new siding, paint and windows. Which have made the house all ship-shape, water-tight and fit for service for probably at least three decades. At least, that is what the wording on the warranties says, and I won’t argue with that.

But I came out ahead this month, having a nice amount of money left over at the end of my month thanks some nice royalty checks and the work done and paid for with regard to a couple of new clients for the Teeny Publishing Bidness on the “assisting authors to self-publish” track. (I do the agreed-upon editing and formatting prep-work, cover design to their satisfaction, and hand them files they can upload to Ingram Spark, under their own name and ISBN.) I thought that I might as well eliminate another bit of household shortcoming by having some electrical issues remedied. This was caused by two of the male cats; they now live in the Splendid Catio, where they can do no more damage. At least to the inside. They were prone to spray on stuff. I have no notion of why they did this, habitually, but between them, they managed to demolish a number of household electrical outlets and appliances, with the result that some of the outlets and appliances were pretty much frelled and several connections to overhead fixtures were rendered non-functioning, though generous applications of cat pee on the linked electrical line. A good few years past, I paid a licensed electrician at their going rate to replace half a dozen of the outlets … which promptly were ruined when the little (explicative deleted) went through and did it all again within six months. Money wasted, as far as the long-term went. I did have a neighbor who was a licensed electrician and agreed to a couple of hours of work replacing outlets at the neighborhood friends rate, but I talked to him months ago, and he never responded to text messages and phone calls last week, so I went and appealed to Roman The Neighborhood Handy Guy, who is adept with all kinds of maintenance skills and possesses a more-than-full array of appropriate tools  â€¦ as a matter of fact, Roman TNHG is one of Wee Jamie’s Honorary Uncles, the one who will teach him carpentry and tile work, the very moment that Wee Jamie can pick up a power tool. Roman TNHG came on Friday and spent most of a day replacing nine outlets, a light fixture over the kitchen sink that we thought had been totally ruined as it was a cheap thing to start with, and a pair of light switches which had also been generously peed on. (Thanks, kitties – your contribution to the well-running of this household is so noted…)

(Daughter Unit to me, upon regarding the extracted switch elements. “Umm … I suppose we were lucky that the house didn’t burn down…”)

Bonus to that – the garbage disposal, as near-rusted out as it is, does function again. So do the lights and outlets in the kitchen, for which we are so grateful. We can actually use appliances in the kitchen plugged into more than a power strip on a single outlet and a cheap desk lamp on top of the refrigerator. And we can turn on the lights in the kitchen. Another step on recovering a fully-functional, somewhat energy-efficient house and small garden…

That is indeed the question, and against all urging and advice, a fair number of Americans are saying ‘not’; for valid and wholly understandable reasons, after having made a carefully considered decision. Such be the case of the Daughter Unit and I. The Daughter Unit spent most of last year being pregnant and did not want to risk anything that would possibly damage Wee Jamie in utero. Her medical team did not do anything more than make a pro forma suggestion; that they did not mention it after she declined likely hints at their own doubts about the safety. We both had to get yearly flu shots when we were on active military duty, and honestly, I would routinely get sicker from the shot than I usually did from the flu itself. Towards the end of my active-duty time there was a great push to get all active duty to be vaccinated against anthrax, and I was in two minds over having to get that vaccine, before my retirement rendered the point moot. I remembered very well how so many of those deployed for the first Gulf War later developed serious health problems, problems that it was speculated, might have been because of the array of vaccinations they were given, in combination with exposure to various environmental hazards and contaminants. (I’ve always thought that the Gulf War Syndrome was a kind of multiple chemical sensitivity/allergy, caused by exposure to a range of triggering compounds or combinations, to which some people were more vulnerable than others. Not a medical or sciency-person; just my own opinion from what I have read and knowing veterans who were affected by deployment in that war. But that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole.) To get to the point, it was not entirely unknown for reluctant military personnel to be ordered to take vaccines, over their own doubts and objections.

Just this week, the Daughter Unit received a form letter from the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs, addressed to Dear Veteran:

For some curious and mostly unexpected reason, I had quite a lot of money left over, coming down to the end of the month, and the Daughter Unit was feeling a considerable touch of cabin fever. For the last two months, she has been dedicated to tending Wee Jamie, the Grandson Unit, and studying for her Texas real estate agent’s license. This program was interspersed occasionally with trips to the grocery store, or maybe in a moment of daring, to Lowe’s for gardening and household maintenance stuff. On seeing that we could swing a brief road trip, we made a spur of the moment decision to hit Granzin’s in New Braunfels, and then to go eat a meal that we hadn’t prepared ourselves – to Blacks’ BBQ. We have rather missed the Red Hat ladies association that we belonged to for better than a decade; we met once a month for a lunch at a local mid-priced eatery; alas, four long-time members dropped out or moved away, another three died or developed serious health issues, and finally the last and youngest member besides the Daughter Unit moved with her husband to the Caribbean upon his retirement.

So, we fed Wee Jamie in mid-morning, and set out as soon as he was burped, calculating that we could be to New Braunfels and back before he would need his mid-afternoon feeding. I had it mind to check out the JoAnn store there (which is much nicer and more fully stocked than the San Antonio outlet, don’t ask me why) for suitable cotton fabric for another 19^th century costume comfortable for summer wear, but the fabrics that would have worked for the vision that I had in mind were not on sale, and prices for fabrics have sky-rocketed to the point that I just cannot countenance paying them, not when I need them for a costume that requires at least eight yards of 60” fabric, plus all the extra notions like buttons, lining, thread, trim, et cetera. Eh – I found everything I wanted and could afford through an on-line outlet later in the day. Really, I wish now that I had pigged out even more than I did on fabric when Hancock Fabrics was having their closing sales.

On to Granzins’ which was jammed on a Saturday, but fully fitted with employees attentively manning the counter that stretches the whole length of the store. There are a couple of sections – the frozen sausage and Cajun specialities, which are on more of a help-yourself basis, the fresh/smoked sausage and bacon section, the deli and dried jerky and cheese, then the beef, the pork, and the seafood and chicken. On a weekend, or heading into a holiday, Granzin’s is packed with customers buying for a weekend at Canyon Lake or stocking up for a Saturday or Sunday backyard barbeque. The prices are good – almost better than HEB, and the quality is fantastic. Only a few items are pre-packaged. Basically, you can pick out the steak, or the roast, or the whole fryer chicken you prefer. And I don’t know where they get the chicken breasts – they must come off meat chickens almost the size of small turkeys. We’ve made two meals, sometimes, from one of the bigger half-breasts. They also stock a lot of local products – butter, honey, pickled vegetables, nuts, and seasonings. (Granzin’s in New Braunfels is behind Bluebonnet Ford, on a little side street called the Old McQueeney Road, which – if you are not looking sharpish for it along the access road to IH-35 – can easily be missed.)

Loaded up with various protein meats, intended to be parted out, sealed with the vacuum sealer, and stashed away in the freezer for the coming month. It’s been a couple of months since visiting Granzin’s, so we were a little low. The fresh garlic sausage, BTW is awesome, when sprinkled with a little olive oil and some Adams Reserve Texas Steakhouse Rub spice and baked. Our next-door neighbor still raves about the fresh garlic sausage that she brought back and baked for her family.

Black’s BBQ has the advantage of being one of four locations, branching off from the original location in Lockhart. Prior to a book event in Lockhart ages ago, we sampled the Kreuz Market, which was OK, as far as BBQ went, but nothing really special to our mind, in spite of all the hype. All the locals that we mentioned this to afterwards said that we should have gone to Black’s. Well, at last we made it, and the sausage and brisket was pretty darned good, although we still mourn the loss of the Riverside Meat Market in Boerne, which (cunningly disguised as a gas station on the corner of Main Street and River Road) produced the most awesomely good rotisserie chicken and BBQ beef brisket. (That space is an empty and grass-grown lot, now. Guess the Riverside was just too down-market for the upscale yuppie population in Boerne. I’d love to know the inside story, but I’ll bet it’s too depressing for words. The Riverside Market pit and BBQ doesn’t seem to have been replaced locally.) Black’s in New Braunfels has the advantage of a nice location, a roomy building designed in in the architectural style of Texas vernacular, which involves lots of rough stained beams, concrete floors and walls of galvanized tin panels, and a welcoming parking lot, which seemed to be mostly filled on a Saturday at lunchtime. The inside was cavernous and generously fitted out with heavy picnic tables and benches, which allowed diners to socially-distance as they chowed down. Wee Jamie slept happily through all of this, for which we were extremely grateful. He didn’t wake up and demand a bottle until well after we returned home.  

For a number of years, I copied out interesting recipes by hand in a series of small books with lined pages and casebound covers. Many of them came from cooking magazines, such as Gourmet, but many came from the pages of various newspapers, to include the Stars and Stripes – from which I dimly recall reading one for a heavy, dark Caribbean Christmas fruitcake. It is in my mind that the woman who had originated it had a nice local business making and selling these fruitcakes – perhaps she had a cookbook published, and the S&S had merely published an extract from it. Anyway, I copied the recipe from a clipping, into the oldest of my hand-written books, which dates from my first hitch in the Air Force.

Caribbean Dark Fruitcake

Last week, I considered where we are to go, from here – what with an acting president down to his last mental quarter-marble, a VP afflicted with a notable lack of any professional skills save for those employed by ambitious tarts willing to bed their way up the career ladder, a corrupted FBI, and a national press corps remarkable for boot-licking sycophancy. This week, I consider defiance as a reaction; measured defiance, ridicule, strategic protest, declining to do business with companies who have gone offensively ‘woke’, declining to watch television shows or movies which have ostentatiously done the same or even just a sullen reluctance to join the baying throng.

We’re Americans – unruly, disobedient, irreverent – so ridicule ought to be the first resort. “The devil…the prowde spirite…cannot endure to be mocked.” So sayeth the Irish poet and lyricist Thomas Moore; being Irish he likely had a fair turn of phrase when it came to mockery. Mock, parody, ridicule, meme in whatever medium comes to hand, even if it is only leaving notes on gas pumps, or telling jokes ridiculing our inept and hypersensitive ruling class around the water cooler or coffee machine in the break room. The usual social media sites may censor and block as they wish, but that will be an uphill fight when ten or twenty new jokes, memes and materiel take their place. Our current ruling class is vicious, corrupt and power-mad. Take every opportunity that one can take to slide in the shiv of ridicule, especially if you can do so safely.

So I’m more or less resigned to getting spam calls. Because I have a small business, and the cellphone is my contact with potential customers, I have to answer when the phone rings, especially if the number on caller ID is with a south Texas area code. Usually crisply saying the name of the Teeny Publishing Bidness and adding “May I help you?” inspires the usual human caller to break the connection. When the inevitable pre-recorded message regarding my extended auto warranty, I say a couple of cuss words and break the connection. However, the robocalls which mention a legal action against me for a criminal offense, or a threat to suspend my social security number and advise me to dial “1” to speak to an investigating agent, or whatever … those I have had some fun with.

The call always goes to a boiler room – I can tell from the ambient sound, since I used to work at a call center. The person answering always has an accent – Indian, mostly. They announce themselves to be Agent something or other, with Social Security or some law enforcement agency – and I tell them straight out that no they aren’t: they’re scammers trying to scam money from senior citizens, and they are scummy human beings, and I don’t see how they can live with themselves, doing this for a living. I have a very nice, accusatory rant, but mostly I don’t get more than a couple of sentences into it, before they break the connection. Yesterday I did get a woman who at least had the sand to yell back, and insist that she would call again and again, and again … I cussed her out a bit more, threatened to file a complaint with the Texas Attorney General’s office and promised to block the number her scummy, scamming enterprise was spoofing. At least that was a good few minutes that she wasn’t working over someone much more gullible than me.

Frankly, it’s kind of fun making these people’s work lives a bit of a misery. And it certainly relieves my feelings a bit. Honestly, I do wish that law enforcement would work a bit harder on pursuing these cases, although most of it seems to be based overseas. This guy, with his glitter-bomb packages and endless ingenuity – as well as knowledgeable friends in the internet security industry – is doing good work.

This is what a lot of us on the conservative – independent – libertarian-inclined, and otherwise classic old-style liberal have been wondering over the last six months or so. Where do we go from here, seeing that elections largely can’t be trusted, especially in blue-dominated states with a long, long, long history of election corruption and assorted ballot shenanigans?

Where do we go, and what can we do about a national news media which has become so nakedly, proudly partisan, basically the stenographer and mouthpiece for the Biden Administration? Besides patronizing those independent bloggers, reporters and aggregators, foreign newspapers like the UK’s Daily Mail, and that handful of mainstream reporters who actually appear to recall the original mission of ‘afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted’ and report the plain old who-where-what? While it does seem that formerly competent and respected outlets are shedding viewers like the Titanic shed lifeboats after the encounter with the iceberg, at least half the country does believe what they see on CNN and read in the New York Times, and those of similar devotion to perpetuating the Big Lie(s). What to do, especially when loved ones and co-workers swallow the lies whole?

I can’t really speak to the matter of general officers from extensive personal experience with the rank; throughout my military career I was mostly in places removed from direct personal contact. A merciful deity, to quote the rabbi from “Fiddler on the Roof” kept the general ranks – kept them far, far from us, although a SAC one-star did show up one day at EBS-Zaragoza, unannounced and unheralded. It was lunchtime, practically everyone save the radio and TV op on duty had left the building. I was sitting in my office, peacefully adding another layer of much-needed polish to my shoes, when a flight-suited guy appeared in the doorway and cheerily asked, “When you’re done with yours, can you do mine?” He was a youngish-looking, personable guy, and it took me at least five seconds to grok the single star that designated his rank. He introduced himself, Brigadier General Something-or-other. said he was visiting for a readiness inspection of the SAC unit. He just thought he would mosey around and drop in to visit some of the other activities on base which supported his people so well … and could he have a tour of our broadcast facility?

Well, duh – like I could say ‘no, general, sir’. He got the brief informal nickel tour, conducted by yours truly, introduced to the few of our staffers who weren’t at lunch, and the other senior NCO, the maintenance chief, who hissed at me: “Why didn’t you tell us there was a one-star on the ground? We should have been prepared!” and I hissed back that I hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone anything, said one-star just appeared. It was likely, I added, that this general was probably much more knowledgeable about what was really going on in the activities that he visited, because of his practice of just casually dropping by … rather than doing the formal, pre-announced official inspection visit.

But to most junior and med-ranked enlisted, general officers are like saints to Catholics – we know of them, about them, recognize their attributes, and experience the effects of their pronouncements and dictates. One of the things that we know, is that after a certain rank – O-6, or colonel, they become political animals, if they hanker truly after that magical star. The especially eaten-up with ambition are political animals even before that point, but the very best don’t care about much but their people and accomplishing the mission, and yes, it is pretty obvious to any observer with eyes and a modicum of intelligence.

The Curley Effect, so-called after Michael James Curley, four times mayor of Boston and one of the most colorfully corrupt 20^th century politicians in Massachusetts, has been noted as a significant factor in city politics, where a long-time and popular ruling politician deliberately makes the city inhospitable to those who tend to oppose them, essentially shaping the electorate into one which will support the ruling politician forever and ever, amen. This tactic, of rewarding supporters with public largesse, and punishing opponents economically, worked well for the individual politician, as it did for the very Catholic and Irish Mayor Curley – but at the expense of Boston overall, as those individuals, businesses and institutions who opposed him most frequently, departed, taking their money, businesses and civic involvement with them. Mayor Curley and his cronies throve, but Boston was much the worse for it, over the long run. The same pattern wrecked Detroit under Mayor Coleman Young, given an extra push by the collapse of the auto manufacturing industry. It all worked out very well for Mayor Curley and Mayor Young – but not so well for the long-term vigor of the cities they ostensibly managed … right into the ground, they managed them, but didn’t care, as long as they themselves sat on top of the pile of ruin. Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Atlanta and others look to be heading in the same depressing direction – a city leadership determined to secure their own continuance, and not just by driving out those marked as political antagonists.

When I was in college, taking upper division at Cal State University Northridge (a place of no particular fame or note, other than being one of those public unis which used to provide a fair education at relatively low cost) I had a lot of time between some of my classes, and spent many hours in the stacks of the Oviatt Library. On discovering the microfiche newspaper archives, squirreled away in the basement, I undertook a project to read, or at least skim one of them – every daily issue from 1935 to 1945, on reels that covered two weeks at a time. I had already skimmed many of the bound periodicals of the weekly news magazines available – Time, Life, Newsweek and the like – because I had an interest in the period, they were available and what better way to agreeably pass the time between classes? (Both carried the comic strip Terry and the Pirates, which I found fascinating.) I wound up with the Chicago Tribune, after a trial of the Los Angeles Times, because the pages of the Times were scanned from side to side on the reels of microfiche, which made me slightly motion-sick to skim at speed, whereas the Tribune pages were scanned from top to bottom.

The Daughter Unit and I, with Wee Jamie the Grandson Unit, made a road trip last Saturday – a completely enjoyable outing, even with the necessity of stopping several times to change Wee Jamie’s diapers on the hour-and a half drive to Kingsland on the Llano and Colorado Rivers. He slept for the most part, and excited the admiration of many, who noted the Overwhelming Cuteness of Wee Jamie. His eyes actually opened once or twice during these occasions.

We had an appointment for a presentation ceremony at the American Legion post in Kingsland for me to be presented with a quilt; the ladies of this organization have been working for several years on a project to present a patriotic-themed quilt to every military veteran who can be identified and nominated for one. The Daughter Unit was given one, shortly after finding out that she was pregnant, and so it was only fitting that we do another trip to show him off. The Legion post members were cheerfully foregoing up masks nine months ago – and this weekend, the matter was not even raised, nor was there any evidence.