Growing Pains

It was Father's Day Eve and everything was wonderful. Tennis in the morning with Ian. A game of Small World in the afternoon. Ping-pong with the kids. Beer from the microbrewery down the road. We were just about to order food from the Malaysian place-- roti and noodles and curry-- and I was absolved from pick-up duty.

I was passing the time before we ordered food by playing low-stakes online Texas Hold'em in my man-cave/music studio. The action was great-- all the Dads were drunk and betting like old-time cowboys. I was raking it in.

Then I heard breaking glass-- car-crash in a movie breaking glass-- and a scream. A slasher-movie scream.

I ran up from my study.

Catherine and Ian were in the kitchen. Ian was screaming, and Catherine had his bloody wrist under the sink.

When Ian came in the house, he pushed the rounded center glass pane of the inner door and his hand went right through. It was humid and the door was swollen and stuck.

Glass was everywhere.




He cut his wrist, but he was extremely lucky. He missed all the tendons and veins. So we didn't have to go to the emergency room.



It was hard to remain calm. Why was he pushing on the glass to open the door? Ian endured the lecture, and perhaps learned a valuable lesson (why do they always have to learn these lessons the hard way?) This is what teenagers do. Ian is about to grow-- his arms are long and his feet are huge but he still weighs 99 pounds. He's weird and gangly and just starting to gain a little bit of strength.

The other day, when he was serving, his new tennis racket flew out of his hand, hit the concrete and cracked. He didn't tell us because he thought we would be angry. I actually stayed calm and we ordered a new racket. We're lucky we can afford it (although we did make him pay for half . . . he needs to replace his grip tape more often, another lesson learned the hard way).

After a major clean-up-- involving a mallet, the vacuum, the dustpan and broom, and lots of wet rags-- we removed the glass from the floor and the door. I threw some duct tape around the frame and maybe we'll fix it (or maybe not . . . it's probably safer this way). We wrapped Ian's arm with gauze and a bandage and ordered the food.

Father's Day itself was less eventful.

I got a Fitbit! This thing is amazing. It has a touchscreen, it tracks steps, has GPS, shows me how far and fast I've run, maps it, and displays my heart rate. Sixty bucks! It's a refurb. I'm living in the future . . . 2012 or so?

I got to drink more local beer, I played more ping-pong with the kids (Ian played left-handed) and we went and saw my parents and wished my Dad Happy Father's Day. Ian's cut stopped bleeding, and we had an epic corn-hole/washer match: my brother and Alex vs. me and Ian. We lost the rubber match but Ian held his own left-handed.

My other Father's Day gift is on the way, a real wooden cornhole set. Ian has promised to paint something excellent on it as soon as his wrist heals.


Hitchhiker's Guide meets Star Trek Meets a Modern Feminist Perspective . . .

If you've ever wondered what Star Trek would be like if it were written by a woman, check out Becky Chambers sci-fi novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

It's a space-opera with a sociological bent-- and while I like it much much more than Star Trek-- there's an archetypal similarity in the mission. The Wayfarer is a tunneling ship that opens up lanes through hyperspace in the Galactic Commons so that there can be communication and commerce between the affiliated species that live throughout the galaxy.

Instead of five years, the diverse crew of The Wayfarer is on a one year trip, but they are definitely going boldly to seek out new life and civilizations and strange new worlds.

The characters are modern and funny and mainly and manifoldly alien . . . humans are on the low end of the totem pole. The new clerk aboard the ship, Rosemarie, is just trying to fit in, knowing full well that the human race-- mainly by pure luck-- has just passed out of this stage:

Perhaps the most crucial stage is that of “intraspecies chaos.” This is the proving ground, the awkward adolescence when a species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided. We have seen this story play out countless times. 

Along the episodically plotted journey, Chambers tackles interspecies coupling, AI rights, gene-tweaking, symbiotic sentient viruses, alien diplomacy, specieism, cloning, and moral relativism. But the book is mainly about a well-developed and fascinating group of sentient beings trying to get along in a small space on an epic journey.

I also learned the word "ansible."

Here's how the reptilian Aandrisk feel about children . . .

The death of a new hatchling was so common as to be expected. The death of a child about to feather, yes, that was sad. But a real tragedy was the loss of an adult with friends and lovers and family. The idea that a loss of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around. 

Chambers works with the conceit that life abounds in the universe, that it will evolve towards intelligence, and that it is carbon-based. With limitations, is it any wonder that sentient creatures have more similarities than differences. Even so, Captain Ashby is mired in this mess . . .

As open and generous as Aeluons generally were to their galactic neighbors, interspecies coupling remained a mainstream taboo.

Every alien race has to come to grip that there are others out there, with goals and dreams and culture that has evolved on a grand scale, in some ways parallel to all life, and in some way completely different and unexpected. 

In the middle of the book, there is a wonderful essay on this. The way it is inserted into the novel reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It is ostensibly written by a sagacious Aandrisk scientist . . . but it's definitely Becky Chambers laying out the reason her story works. I've put it here in its entirety-- thanks to my Kindle-- and because it's so good.

ITEM NAME: Thoughts on the Galaxy—Chapter Three
AUTHOR: oshet-Tekshereket esk-Rahist as- Ehas Kirish isket-Ishkriset
ENCRYPTION: 0
TRANSLATION PATH: [Reskitkish:Klip] 
TRANSCRIPTION: 0 NODE IDENTIFIER: 9874-457-28, Rosemary Harper
When meeting an individual of another species for the first time, there is no sapient in the galaxy who does not immediately take inventory of xyr physiological differences. These are always the first things we see. How does xyr skin differ? Does xe have a tail? How does xe move? How does xe pick things up? What does xe eat? Does xe have abilities that I don’t? Or vice versa? These are all important distinctions, but the more important comparison is the one we make after this point. Once we’ve made our mental checklists of variations, we begin to draw parallels—not between the alien and ourselves, but between the alien and animals. The majority of us have been taught since childhood that voicing these comparisons is derogatory, and indeed, many of the racial slurs in colloquial use are nothing more than common names for nonsapient species (for example, the Human term lizard, to describe Aandrisks; the Quelin term tik, to describe Humans; the Aandrisk term sersh, to describe Quelin).
Though these terms are offensive, examining them objectively reveals a point of major biological interest. All demeaning implications aside, we Aandrisks do look like some of the native reptilian species of Earth. Humans do look like larger, bipedal versions of the hairless primates that plague the sewer systems of Quelin cities. Quelin do bear some resemblance to the snapping crustaceans found all over Hashkath. And yet, we evolved separately, and on different worlds. My people and the lizards of Earth do not share an evolutionary tree, nor do Humans and tiks, nor Quelin and sersh. Our points of origin are spread out across the galaxy. We hail from systems that remained self-contained contained for billions of years, with evolutionary clocks that all began at different times. How is it possible that when meeting our galactic neighbors for the first time, we are all instantly reminded of creatures back home—or in some cases, of ourselves?
The question becomes even more complicated when we start to look beyond our superficial differences to the wealth of similarities. All sapient species have brains. Let us consider that seemingly obvious fact for a moment. Despite our isolated evolutionary paths, we all developed nervous systems with a central hub. We all have internal organs. We all share at least some of the same physical senses: hearing, touch, taste, smell, sight, electroreception. The grand majority of sapients have either four or six limbs. Bipedalism and opposable digits, while not universal, are shockingly common. We are all made from chromosomes and DNA, which themselves are made from a select handful of key elements. We all require a steady intake of water and oxygen to survive (though in varying quantities). We all need food. We all buckle under atmospheres too thick or gravitational fields too strong. We all die in freezing cold or burning heat. We all die, period. How can this be? How is it that life, so diverse on the surface, has followed the same patterns throughout the galaxy—not just in the current era, but over and over again?
We see this pattern in the ruins of the Arkanic civilization at Shessha, or the ancient fossil beds on the now-barren world of Okik. This is a question that scientific communities have wrestled with for centuries, and it seems unlikely that an answer will present itself in the near future. There are many theories—asteroids carrying amino acids, supernovae blowing organic material out into neighboring systems. And yes, there is the fanciful story of a hyperadvanced sapient race “seeding” the galaxy with genetic material. I admit that the “Galactic Gardener” hypothesis has fueled the plots of some of my favorite science fiction sims, but scientifically speaking, it is nothing more than wishful thinking. You cannot have a theory without evidence, and there is absolutely none that supports this idea (no matter what the conspiracy theorists lurking on Linking feeds would have you believe).
For my part, I think that the best explanation is the simplest one. The galaxy is a place of laws. Gravity follows laws. The life cycles of stars and planetary systems follow laws. Subatomic particles follow laws. We know the exact conditions that will cause the formation of a red dwarf, or a comet, or a black hole. Why, then, can we not acknowledge that the universe follows similarly rigid laws of biology? We have only ever discovered life on similarly sized terrestrial moons and planets, orbiting within a narrow margin around hospitable stars. If we all evolved on such kindred worlds, why is it such a surprise that our evolutionary paths have so much in common? Why can we not conclude that the right combination of specific environmental factors will always result in predictable physical adaptations? With so much evidence staring us in the face, why does this debate continue?
The answer, of course, is that the laws of biology are nearly impossible to test, and scientists hate that. We can launch probes to test theories of gravity and space-time. We can put rocks in pressure cookers and split atoms in classrooms. But how does one test a process as lengthy and multifaceted as evolution? There are labs today that struggle to find the funding to keep a project running for three standards—imagine the funding needed to run a project for millennia! As it stands, there is no way for us to efficiently test the conditions that produce specific biological adaptations, beyond the most rudimentary observations (aquatic climates produce fins, cold climates produce fur or blubber, and so on).
There have been bold attempts at creating software that could accurately predict evolutionary paths, such as the Aeluon-funded Tep Preem Project (which, though well-intentioned, has yet to unravel the mysteries of biological law). The problem with such endeavors is that there are too many variables to consider, many of which we remain ignorant of. We simply don’t have enough data, and the data that we do possess is still beyond our understanding. We are experts of the physical galaxy. We live on terraformed worlds and in massive orbital habitats. We tunnel through the sublayer to hop between stellar systems. We escape planetary gravity with the ease of walking out the front door. But when it comes to evolution, we are hatchlings, fumbling with toys. I believe this is why many of my peers still cling to theories of genetic material scattered by asteroids and supernovae. In many ways, the idea of a shared stock of genes drifting through the galaxy is far easier to accept than the daunting notion that none of us may ever have the intellectual capacity to understand how life truly works.

Remote Schooling Has Failed Us

My sixteen-year-old son took a look at a pair of mini-watermelons on the counter and said:

"Can we eat these little watermelons now? Or are we waiting for them to grow?"

When we started lambasting him for his stupidity, he said: "I was kidding! If they were going to grow, they wouldn't have put them in such tight netting."

Numbers and Some Perspective: Is The Coronavirus More Racist Than the Police?

Like most people, I've been mulling over the death of George Floyd and the ensuing protests. As have my friends.

It's really hard to be rational about police violence and brutality, toward black people and people in general. Especially when you are confronted with videos. Videos that elicit emotions. But videos that are also cherry-picked from millions of events. Policing in America is very very difficult. Is the culture of police racist, or is it overly-militarized, or is it simply rational in the face of a violent gun-filled society?

The new episode of The Weeds (Fixing the Police) gets into the nitty-gritty of this. They avoid race. They discuss the pros of a diverse police force, the possibility/impossibility of unbundling the police, the problems with qualified immunity, the simplest way to improve policing (make it easy to get rid of the worst officers) and the difficulty of reform because of police unions. So many of these things apply to teachers as well, so if you are a teacher, this episode is a must-listen. The reforms people want for police unions are often the same reforms people want for teacher unions.

If you want more on how innovative policy could transform policing, Tyler Cowen's new episode with Rachel Harmon covers a lot of stuff:

Rachel Harmon joined Tyler to discuss the best ideas for improving policing, including why good data on policing is so hard to come by, why body cams are not a panacea, the benefits and costs of consolidating police departments, why more female cops won’t necessarily reduce the use of force, how federal programs can sometimes misfire, where changing police selection criteria would and wouldn’t help, whether some policing could be replaced by social workers, the sobering frequency of sexual assaults by police, how a national accreditation system might improve police conduct, what reformers can learn from Camden and elsewhere, and more. 

I obviously think podcasts are a great medium for putting things in perspective. They are unconstrained by time, topical, and often allow smart people who don't come off well on video to express their opinions, with the benefit of audio editing.

Sam Harris puts things in perspective as well as anyone on his Making Sense podcast. He has slow and rational, rather emotionless discussions with smart people. But he does episode "#207: Can We Pull Back From the Brink?" all by his lonesome. He speaks for nearly two hours, in sentences that form logical paragraphs. It's really impressive. Unless you are very focused, it will be hard to listen to in one sitting. I think it's required listening if you want to think about these protests and the death of George Floyd.

Here are some of the questions that the episode (and my resultant reflection) have produced.

First of all, Sam Harris and most everyone has condemned Derek Chauvin's use of force on George Floyd. 

But the question about the scene are myriad: 

Was Chauvin trying to kill George Floyd? Would he have used a different amount of force on a white person? How often do the Minneapolis police (or any police) use this maneuver to restrain people? Why exactly were they restraining Floyd? Is Chauvin a homicidal maniac, a blatant racist, or did he think he was using a standard move to subdue someone resisting arrest?

No matter what the answers, this particular scene was heinous. But are most cops abusing black men like this? Are they doing something different to white people?

Sam Harris points out that there are over 10 million arrests each year in America. About one thousand of these result in lethal force. So one on every ten thousand arrests. Is that too many? It's more than in other developed countries. But we have WAY more guns on the streets than any other developed country.  

Of those that die, most of them are white. About 30 percent of them are black. Black people only make up 13 percent of the population. So there is a disparity. Some claim that this 17 percent disparity is racism. 

Is it?

Perhaps. But black people tend to be more likely to be arrested, and more likely to be involved in criminal activities. If you take this into account, then-- according to Sam Harris and most of what I have read: 

This suggests that officer bias – in terms of officers making different shooting decisions for black and white citizens – is not necessarily the cause of black citizens being shot at higher rates. Even if officers were making the same decisions about whether to use deadly force for black and white citizens, population-level disparities would still emerge given these crime rate differences.
Is some police brutality racist? Perhaps, but that's hard to prove. It's a case by case thing. Is some police violence due to poor training? Absolutely. But there have been police reforms, especially in large cities. FiveThirtyEight has a podcast on police violence that details this. White police are LESS likely to use lethal force on a black person than they are on a white person. Have these reforms in large cities been enough? Do police unions need to be dismantled? Is it possible to dismantle the culture of police in a country as violent and gun-ridden as the United States? The data and numbers are ambiguous . . . although it seems lethal force is going down in major cities, and it is going up in rural areas.

Is some of this police violence because we send a person with a badge and a gun to deal with all sorts of problems that don't necessitate a badge and a gun?

How much of this can be blamed on the war on drugs? Harris talks about "no-knock" drug raids, which are inherently violent for people of any race. Are they necessary?

Harris brings up the largest factor, of course. Median black families have one-tenth of the wealth of median white families. So black families are more likely to live in poverty, in rougher neighborhoods, closer to crime, and closer to hands-on policing. Statistically, much of this inequality is due to slavery, Jim Crow laws, the fables of the Reconstruction, segregation, white supremacy, the KKK, political suppression, lack of civil rights, systemic discrimination, and real estate. Location, location, location. 

This is all well and good to keep in mind until the shit goes down. Then every situation is particular. Radiolab has a fantastic episode that explains the criteria for "reasonable action" by police. It's much more about acting reasonably in the moment, then assessing the totality of the situation. 

Malcolm Gladwell has a great podcast on this archetypal police situation, Descend into the Particular.

He comes to the conclusion that we might police laws far too rigidly, especially in neighborhoods where there is a constant police presence. Howard "Bunny" Colvin from The Wire would agree.

Gladwell breaks down the findings about the shooting of Michael Brown and the Ferguson riots and makes two assertions:

1) the white cop that shot Michael Brown was truly threatened by him

2) the policing system in Ferguson oppressed, terrorized, extorted, and enraged the people of the town, most of whom were black.

The Indicator has a heartbreaking episode on how fees and fines often target people of color and destroy their finances and their relationship with the police. Defunding the police could compound this problem-- if the police have less money, they are going to rely on fees and fines more. The fix for this is something no one wants to hear: higher taxes and a better-funded, more professional, better trained, less militarized, less statistically oriented police department. A department that is incentivized to have good community relations, media presence, and ethical standards, rather than high arrest rates and other conflict-ridden incidents. The Wire covers this.

So in the moment, it's really hard to deescalate a situation when the people you are trying to police despise you. In fact, it's really hard to police any situation that might lead to violence or gunplay.

Now there is Rayshard Brooks. Another video. And with ten million arrests, there will always be another video. Arrests will go awry and people will get shot. Black and white. Videos will surface.

Videos don't indicate the totality of truth. Were the George Floyd protests peaceful or were they riotous? Depends on which videos you watch. This is a major problem. 

For most of the Brooks video, it's a typical DUI stop. Fairly cordial and boring. The Daily podcast "The Killing of Rayshard Brooks" summarizes the incident, if you don't know the details. And then things go wrong. And then there are the questions:

Would the cops have let a white guy walk home? Maybe, maybe not. Once the cops ascertained that brooks was drunk, they couldn't let him go. Brooks also had an outstanding warrant, which was probably weighing on his mind. When they try to cuff Brooks, a scuffle ensues, Brooks punches an officer, grabs a taser, runs, and then turns and shoots the taser at the cop in pursuit, and then he gets shot three times. 

Can a cop let a drunk guy run away with his taser? Does a cop have to arrest a person who has been driving drunk, white or black? Could he have let him move his car out of the drive-thru and then sleep in it? Are the police now liable for this guy? He was drunk. The officer, Garrett Rolfe, was fired for the shooting. If a social worker showed up on the scene, how would it have played out? 

For most of the body-cam video, which is 45 minutes long, Rolfe seemed polite and in control, but once the scuffle ensued and Brooks grabbed his taser, things got ugly quickly. This one seems different than the George Floyd case. The shooting was probably legal, but unnecessary. Brooks was running away. But when he points the taser at the cop, the cop reacts. In that split second, what is running through the cop's mind? If he is shot by the taser, is Brooks going to grab his gun? I would not want to be in that situation.

These are interesting discussions to have. You could discuss this one case for a long long time. But with ten million arrests per year, Harris points out that there WILL be another one. It's the law of averages. And another. 

People are angry. The new episode of This American Life, "Here Again" begins and ends with angry black women. 

The monopoly analogy really gets at just how shafted black people have been in America . . . but so have native Americans, folks in Appalachia, Japanese during WWII, etc. American capitalism shafts a lot of people. 

If you go too far down this road of anger and white guilt and searching for racism, you end up with this . . . a Minneapolis councilwoman saying that calling 911 when you are being burgled comes from a place of privilege. 

This is how Trump gets reelected. As the law and order president. Yikes. So everyone needs to listen to the Beastie Boys and check your head.

Defunding the police is possible, if you can replace them with something. Camden has done this, with some success. But it's a huge job. Police unions hold a lot of power, political and otherwise. And many people genuinely like and respect the police. Starting over is a monumental task, and maybe not the right task during a pandemic. 


Whites comprise 62% of people in the U.S. between ages 45-54.  In that age group, 1,013 white people have died from Covid-19 (22% of the total) compared to 1,448 Black people and 1,698 Hispanic/Latino people.

This is abominable and gets back to how black people have been shafted by the system. And these numbers are something we can improve immediately, with federal leadership, testing, contact tracing, etc. 

If you go by the numbers, black people should probably be a little angrier about police brutality than white people, but not THAT much angrier. We should all be angry that we live in a country that needs militarized police. We should all be angry that we live in a country with such a prevalence of guns and violent crime.

But black people should be very VERY angry about how they have fared during coronavirus.

Who is to blame for that? How could this be remedied? Does our Federal Government even care? It seems Trump and his cronies are only reactionary and won't address this until there are people in the streets chanting about this issue. But of course, going to the streets to protest a virus is the very thing that might increase the virus. It's an ugly dilemma.

Sam Harris thinks the only way forward is to make things LESS about race, with the ultimate goal that the pigmentation in your epidermis is no more important than the color of your hair. I agree with him. Identity politics is the death of us. We should focus on reforms that reduce inequality for our entire society. But that's not how politics and protests work.

I hope things calm down soon and smart people discuss this in a reasonable manner. . . but holding that opinion might put me in the minority. 

Don't Mess With the Locals: Whether You are on the Merrimack or off the Harbor

Townie, a memoir by the best-selling author Andre Dubus III, is the small-town Caucasian version of season four of The Wire. It ends better for him than it does for most of the school kids in Baltimore (perhaps because he is white and his family, though poor, has better connections) but it still explores the same theme: the realm of male violence.


Dubus grows up in a sequence of rough and tumble mill towns in Massachusetts. His home life is anarchy. His dad is mainly absent, teaching college, banging college girls, and becoming a heralded short story writer. His mom is harried and overworked. The kids are left to fend for themselves. He is bullied, beaten, intimidated, and traumatized. The same goes for his artistic younger brother. Then he learns to fight. He also learns to box (there's definitely that vibe from Cutty's gym in The Wire . . . tough street kids learning some discipline and skills that actually translate to their day-to-day existence).

Dubus eventually finds his way, but it's a long and meandering path, fraught with bar-room brawls, vindication, weight-lifting, boxing, stalking people in the streets looking for justice, and the constant looming threat of violence. Once Dubus learns to break that "membrane" and punch someone in the face, over and over, hurt them, it's hard to unlearn that power.

The book might be a bit long, but I blew through it in a few days. I think it's required reading for anyone who has been in a fight, chickened out of a fight, or wonders why some guys end up throwing punches (or worse) for little reason at all. This might help explain those feelings.

Dubus is constantly trying not to portray himself as a hero-- he understands that throwing down isn't the solution if you want to move forward-- but in so many instances, the person willing to use violence is the hero of the moment . . . just perhaps not in retrospect.

The book ends how it must, and those sections when Dubus matures and reconnects with his dad drag a bit, but the first 2/3 of the book is some of the most compelling reading on what it's like to be a young man who needs to establish himself in a fluid and dangerous environment that I have ever read (and again, you should read this in conjunction with Season 4 of The Wire to see both sides of the coin: the white-trash version and the inner city black version).


Cities? Discuss . . .

For some time now, people in America have been moving out of the largest cities to small towns, suburbs, and exurbs. The COVID pandemic has accelerated this trend. The virus puts a serious tax on density.

While this exodus might be good for my property values-- I live in a small town on the train line to NYC-- from a larger perspective, it's kind of scary.

First of all, large cities are some of the greenest places on earth. Especially New York City.

If people move out of our big cities and spread out into the suburbs, traffic and air pollution are going to get worse. More open space will be converted to suburban neighborhoods. Wildlife corridors and wetlands will be disrupted. 

How will this contribute to global warming, air quality, and energy consumption?

If you want to be topical, you've got a better chance of being killed by police in suburbs and country, because cities have more resources and better training programs for their police. And cities tend to be more liberal and accepting of people of color (and diversity in general).

If people move out of cities and spread thinly across our country, what will happen to those urban spaces? We've all learned to shop online (I just bought some athletic shorts from Amazon . . . I know my size and inseam preference and everything) so there's going to be some sort of massive restructuring of retail space. 

We have so many stores in America, especially in our cities. Ten times more retail space per capita than Germany.

What will happen to these stores? And the strip malls? What will happen to the strip malls?

One of my friends used to commute to NYC, but now he's working from home. And he's going to be working from home forever. His company is seriously considering getting rid of all the expensive office space in the city. 

Why keep it?

What if this happens on a massive scale?

Now this migration may allow middle-class people who always wanted to live in major cities but could never afford it the opportunity to do so. People who enjoy diversity and density and city parks and the thrum of creativity and humanity outside their doorstep 24/7.

But with the pandemic looming, will they move? 

I don't have any answers, but I'm sure something is going to happen. Right?


These Regions Go To Eleven

Colin Woodard's 2011 book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America is just as relevant today as it was when it was published. 

Perhaps more so.

Woodard's thesis is pretty simple. He's actually expanding on a book written in 1981 by Joel Garreau called The Nine Nations of North America. Garreau suggests that North America can be divided into nine nations, which have distinctive economic and cultural features. 

Woodard turns up the history and the conflict between these "nations" to eleven. It's a fun read (for a history text). And timely, of course. It will make you think about the various regional responses to the COVID pandemic. 

For example, I've been browsing rental houses on VRBO. Before you can rent a house or travel to Vermont, a number of requirements need to be met. They want tests, quarantining, and they are wary of travelers from New York and New Jersey. They don't have many cases and they want to keep it that. 

On the other hand, this is what North Carolina has on its website:

Here are some important facts about traveling in North Carolina: 

  • All North Carolina borders are open.
  • There is no national quarantine.

We ended up renting a house in North Carolina.

This is how Woodard divides things up:



Woodard gets deep into the history that formed his "nations." He begins with the Founding Fathers and notes:

Our true Founders didn’t have an “original intent” we can refer back to in challenging times; they had original intents.

Here are some other selected passages you might find interesting (probably far too many to read through, but I love the highlighting feature on my Kindle. I can then export the notes to a Google doc and vomit them here on the internet).

First of all . . . the big premise:

The United States is a federation comprised of the whole or part of eleven regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with one another. These nations respect neither state nor international boundaries, bleeding over the U.S. frontiers with Canada and Mexico as readily as they divide California, Texas, Illinois, or Pennsylvania. Six joined together to liberate themselves from British rule. Four were conquered but not vanquished by English- speaking rivals. 

Woodard makes a case against dividing an authentic culture with an artificial barrier.

Mr. Trump, tear down your wall!
 
The borderlands on both sides of the United States–Mexico boundary are really part of a single norteño culture. Split by an increasingly militarized border, El Norte in some ways resembles Germany during the Cold War: two peoples with a common culture separated from one another by a large wall. Despite the wishes of their political masters in Washington, D.C., and Mexico City, many norteños would prefer to federate to form a third national state of their own. 

Sometimes, real history is paradoxical.

English-speaking cowboys would later adopt other Spanish vocabulary, including rodeo, bronco, buckaroo (from vaquero), mustang (from mesteño), bandoleer (bandolera), stampede (from estampida), and ranch (rancho). Oddly enough, it was the Franciscans who introduced this cowboy culture to what is now Texas and California, as tallow and hides were among the only products the missions could profitably ship to the rest of Mexico. Short on labor, the friars trained their neophytes to be their vaqueros, flouting Spanish laws against allowing Indians to ride horses. When the governor of California complained about this practice, a friar responded, “How else can the vaquero’s work of the missions be done?” The first American cowboys were, in fact, Indians.

There were (and are) varying ways that the regions treated the natives. 

Champlain’s vision for New France was more radical and enduring than de Mons’s. While he shared de Mons’s commitment to creating a monarchical, feudal society in North America, he believed it should coexist in a friendly, respectful alliance with the Native American nations in whose territories it would be embedded. Instead of conquering and enslaving the Indians (as the Spanish had), or driving them away (as the English would), the New French would embrace them.

But the Virginia Company’s plan was based on the faulty assumption that the Indians would be intimidated by English technology, believe their employers were gods, and submit, Aztec-like, to their rule. The Indians, in fact, did none of these things. The local chief, Powhatan, saw the English outpost for what it was: weak and vulnerable but a potential source of useful European technology such as metal tools and weapons. 

In one notorious incident, they surrounded a poorly defended Pequot village and butchered virtually every man, woman, and child they found there, mostly by burning them alive. The slaughter was shocking to the Puritans’ temporary Indian allies, the Narragansetts . . .

 When people headed down the coast, to the southern states of Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas . . .

Visitors constantly remarked on their haughty sense of personal honor and their furious reaction to the slightest insult. While the Yankee elite generally settled their disputes through the instrument of written laws, Tidewater gentry were more likely to resort to a duel.

By a twist of history, the dominant colonies of New England were founded by men who stood in total opposition to nearly every value that Tidewater gentry held dear. 

These are the two reasons Americans are insane:

Here were the kernels of the twin political ideologies of America’s imperial age: American Exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny. The first held that Americans were God’s chosen people, the second that He wished Americans to rule the continent from sea to sea.

Woodard is definitely somewhat liberal, and not overly kind to the region he calls the Deep South.

From the outset, Deep Southern culture was based on radical disparities in wealth and power, with a tiny elite commanding total obedience and enforcing it with state-sponsored terror. 

Of course, the Deep South wasn’t the only part of North America practicing full-blown slavery after 1670. Every colony tolerated the practice. But most of the other nations were societies with slaves, not slave societies per se. Only in Tidewater and the Deep South did slavery become the central organizing principle of the economy and culture.

Until the end of the seventeenth century, one’s position in Tidewater was defined largely by class, not race. The Deep South, by contrast, had a black supermajority and an enormous slave mortality rate,
thousands of fresh humans had to be imported every year to replace those who had died. Blacks in the Deep South were far more likely to live in concentrated numbers in relative isolation from whites.
Marriage outside of one’s caste is strictly forbidden. So while the Deep South had rich whites and poor whites and rich and poor blacks, no amount of wealth would allow a black person to join the master caste. 

He admires Greater Appalachia, though I think he's a bit scared of those folk.

The last of the nations to be founded in the colonial period, Greater Appalachia was the most immediately disruptive. A clan-based warrior culture from the borderlands of the British Empire, it arrived on the backcountry frontier of the Midlands, Tidewater, and Deep South and shattered those nations’ monopoly control over colonial governments,

Proud, independent, and disturbingly violent, the Borderlanders of Greater Appalachia have remained a volatile insurgent force within North American society to the present day.

Indian wars and other violence in Appalachia had profound effects on the other nations, particularly the Midlands. 

His take on the Revolutionary War makes sense (but it's not as romantic as what we learned in school).

The military struggle of 1775–1782 wasn’t fought by an “American people” seeking to create a united, continent-spanning republic where all men were created equal and guaranteed freedom of speech, religion, and the press. On the contrary, it was a profoundly conservative action fought by a loose military alliance of nations, each of which was most concerned with preserving or reasserting control of its respective culture, character, and power structure. The rebelling nations certainly didn’t wish to be bonded together into a single republic. 

David Hackett Fischer makes the case for there having been not one American War of Independence but four: a popular insurrection in New England, a professional “gentleman’s war” in the South, a savage civil war in the backcountry, and a “non-violent economic and diplomatic struggle” spearheaded by the elites of what call the Midlands. The four wars, he argues, were fought sequentially and waged in different ways and for different goals. 

The way things finally shook out, The Native Americans were certainly the biggest losers . . .

The American rebellion was precipitated by the Seven Years’ War, a massive global military conflict between Britain and France that lasted from 1756 to 1763. It’s remembered in the United States as the French and Indian War, because here the British fought against New France and its aboriginal allies.

In the end, the French were defeated, and all of New France (save the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon) was handed over to the British Empire. This had two consequences for the people of the continent. First, it removed from the political and military stage the only European society on which Native North Americans could rely.


During the start of the Revolutionary War, New York and New Jersey weren't particularly interested in freedom, liberation and revolt (perhaps because we are so well situated for trade . . . why rock the boat?)

New Netherland’s patriot uprising met with sudden and complete defeat in the summer of 1776 following the arrival of a British armada of 30 warships, 400 transports, and 24,000 soldiers. This invasion force scattered General Washington’s army, retook the city, and by the end of September occupied an area conforming almost exactly to the boundaries of the New Netherland nation. The rebels dispersed and ecstatic townspeople carried British soldiers around on their shoulders. New Netherland had fought a war against liberation and had lost badly. 

New Jersey simply fell into anarchy. “The state is totally deranged [and] without government,” a Continental Army general observed before the British moved in. “Many [officials] have gone to the enemy for protection, others are out of the state, and the few that remain are mostly indecisive in their conduct.” 

Why are we still arguing about the Constitution? 

In the end, the U.S. Constitution was the product of a messy compromise among the rival nations. From the gentry of Tidewater and the Deep South, we received a strong president to be selected by an “electoral college” rather than elected by ordinary people. From New Netherland we received the Bill of Rights, a set of very Dutch guarantees that individuals would have freedom of conscience, speech, religion, and assembly. To the Midlands we owe the fact that we do not have a strong unitary state under a British-style national Parliament; they insisted on state sovereignty as insurance against Southern despots and Yankee meddling. The Yankees ensured that small states would have an equal say in the Senate.

Why does Canada exist? Perhaps to show us the things that we screwed up . . .

If you’re an American, have you ever really asked yourself why Canada exists? When the American Revolution came about, why did only thirteen rather than eighteen North American colonies wind up revolting?

We’ve been taught to think of the ratification of the 1789 Constitution as the crowning achievement of the American Revolution. Most people living in the United States at the time, however, didn’t see it in quite those terms. Outside Tidewater and the Deep South, many were alarmed by a document they regarded as counterrevolutionary, intentionally designed to suppress democracy and to keep power in the hands of regional elites and an emerging class of bankers, financial speculators, and land barons who had little or no allegiance to the continent’s ethnocultural nations. Indeed, the much-celebrated Founding Fathers had made no secret of this having been one of their goals. They praised the unelected Senate because it would “check the impudence of democracy” (Alexander Hamilton), and stop the “turbulence and follies of democracy” (Edmund Randolph), and applauded the enormous federal electoral districts because they would “divide the community,” providing “defense against the inconveniences of democracy” (James Madison). 

 
The competing philosophies of these eleven nations become abundantly clear during the Civil War.

There is no question that the Deep South seceded and fought the Civil War to defend slavery, and its leaders made no secret of this motive. Slavery, they argued ad nauseam, was the foundation for a virtuous, biblically sanctioned social system superior to that of the free states.


Indeed, many of their leaders even argued that all lower-class people should be enslaved, regardless of race, for their own good.

The planters’ loathing of Yankees startled outsiders. “South Carolina, I am told, was founded by gentlemen, [not by] witch-burning Puritans, by cruel persecuting fanatics who implanted in the north.

“There is nothing in all the dark caves of human passion so cruel and deadly as the hatred the South Carolinians profess for the Yankees,” he continued. “New England is to [them] the incarnation of moral and political wickedness and social corruption


From central Pennsylvania to southern Illinois and northern Alabama, Borderlanders were torn between their disgust with Yankees and their hatred of Deep Southern planters. Both regions represented a threat to Borderlander ideals, but in different ways. The Yankees’ emphasis on the need to subsume one’s personal desires and interests to the “greater good” was anathema to the Appalachian quest for individual freedom; their moral crusades

On the other hand, Borderlanders had already suffered generations of oppression at the hands of
aristocratic slave lords and knew that they were the people the planters had in mind when they talked about enslaving inferior whites.


And there are some fables of the Reconstruction:

In all three nations the resistance to Reconstruction was largely successful. There could be no return to formal slavery, but the racial caste system was restored, backed by laws and practices that effectively prevented blacks from voting, running for office, or asserting their common humanity. In the Deep South and Tidewater, single-party rule became the norm and was exercised to resist change, social reform, or wide citizen participation in politics. 

Meanwhile, in Greenwich Village . . .

From that single square mile tucked inside the tolerant cocoon of New Netherland would spring much of what the religious conservatives of the Dixie bloc would later mobilize against: the gay beatniks and their hippie successors, left-wing intellectualism, and the antiwar movement. Like seventeenth-century Amsterdam, New Netherland provided a sanctuary for heretics and freethinkers from more rigid nations.

This conflict finally came to a head during the Civil Rights movement:

In 1955 the three nations of the Dixie bloc were still authoritarian states whose citizens—white and black—were required to uphold a rigid, all-pervasive apartheid system. 

In Mississippi, it was illegal to print, publish, or distribute “suggestions in favor of social equality or of intermarriage between whites and Negroes,” with perpetrators subject to up to six months in prison. Klansmen and other vigilante groups tortured and executed blacks who violated these rules, often with the public approval of elected officials, newspaper editors, preachers, and the region’s leading families.

Across the Dixie bloc white Southerners initially reacted to the movement with disbelief, having been conditioned to think that “our Negroes” were “happy” to be oppressed, patronized, and deprived of basic human and civil rights. 

And the liberal folks from NYC were to blame:

Clearly, their beloved blacks were being manipulated by what Deep Southern politicians called “outside agitators”—Yankees and New Netherlanders—who were often also believed to be communists.

Damn Yankees!

Take the environmental movement, for instance. The entire history of the movement prior to Earth Day took place in the four Public Protestant nations, where the spiritual emphasis was on bettering this world rather than preparing for the next. 

Another New Yorker, President Theodore Roosevelt, pioneered federal government involvement in environmental protection, founding the national forest, park, and wildlife refuge systems. Roosevelt’s Yankee cousin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, created the National Wildlife Federation in 1936.



Not every region is as concerned about the environment (or the people who work in it) as Yankeedom.

To keep wages low, all Dixie-bloc states passed laws making it difficult to organize unions—which their politicians sold as protecting the “right to work."

Taxes are kept too low to adequately support public schools and other services.

From the gas fields of Louisiana to the industrial hog farms of North Carolina, environmental and workplace safety rules are notoriously lax.


The goal of the Deep Southern oligarchy has been consistent for over four centuries: to control and maintain a one-party state with a colonial-style economy based on large-scale agriculture and the extraction of primary resources by a compliant, poorly educated, low-wage workforce with as few labor, workplace safety, health care, and environmental regulations as possible. 

There is some discussion of one of my favorite books on regionality:

This is the strategy Thomas Frank described in What’s the Matter with Kansas? which revealed how the oligarchs of his native state used social and “moral” issues to rally ordinary people to support the architects of their economic destruction.

Vote to stop abortion, receive a rollback in capital gains taxes. Vote to make our country strong again; receive deindustrialization. Vote to screw those politically correct college professors; receive electricity deregulation. Vote to get government off our backs; receive conglomeration and monopoly everywhere from media to meatpacking.

Vote to stand tall against terrorists; receive Social Security privatization. Vote to strike a blow against elitism; receive a social order in which wealth is more concentrated than ever before in our lifetimes, in which workers have been stripped of power and CEOs are rewarded in a manner beyond imagining. 


The important thing to understand is that within our country there are regions that predominantly believe and value completely different things than you. 

Tidewater senator Jesse Helms tried to block the creation of the Martin Luther King holiday on the grounds that the civil rights leader had been a “Marxist-Leninist” who associated with “Communists and sex perverts.”

Tom DeLay proclaimed in the early 2000s, “The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills.” “Nothing,” DeLay told bankers in 2003, “is more important in the face of war than cutting taxes.”

After the 2010 BP oil spill, Representative Joe Barton (from Deep Southern Texas) publicly apologized to the company for having been pressured to create a fund to compensate its victims, calling the initiative—but not the spill—“a tragedy of the first proportion.”


I'm not very keen on George W. Bush and the horse he rode in on. But some people love this stuff:

His domestic policy priorities as president were those of the Deep Southern oligarchy: cut taxes for the wealthy, privatize Social Security, deregulate energy markets (to benefit family allies at Houston-based Enron), stop enforcing environmental and safety regulations for offshore drilling rigs (like BP’s Deepwater Horizon), turn a blind eye to offshore tax havens, block the regulation of carbon emissions or tougher fuel efficiency standards for automobiles, block health care benefits for low-income children, open protected areas to oil exploration, appoint industry executives to run the federal agencies meant to regulate their industries, and inaugurate a massive new foreign guest-worker program to ensure a low-wage labor supply. Meanwhile, Bush garnered support among ordinary Dixie residents by advertising his fundamentalist Christian beliefs, banning stem cell research and late-term abortions, and attempting to transfer government welfare programs to religious institutions.

By the end of his presidency—and the sixteen-year run of Dixie dominance in Washington—income inequality and the concentration of wealth in the federation had reached the highest levels in its history, exceeding even the Gilded Age and Great Depression.


If you're someone from New France, Yankeedom, the Left Coast or the New Netherlands and you want to drive yourself batshit crazy, imagine this . . .

Consider for a moment what U.S. politics and society might be like if the Dixie bloc never existed, or if the Confederacy had peacefully seceded in 1861. You don’t have to stretch your imagination, because this very scenario has been playing out north of the U.S. border.

Comparative early-twenty-first-century sociological surveys have found that New France is the most postmodern nation in North America. It is the region with the lowest proportion of people who believe in the devil (29 percent) and hell (26 percent). Asked if they agreed that the “father of the family must be master in his own house,” only 15 percent of Québécois said yes, compared with 21 percent of Far Western Canadians, 29 percent of New Englanders, and 71 percent of respondents in Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Another academic pollster found them to be more tolerant of homosexuality, extramarital affairs, prostitution, abortion, divorce, and having neighbors with AIDS, large families, drug problems, or emotional instability. Québec, one scholar found, was the region of North America with the highest degree of enlightened individualism and the least respect for traditional forms of authority.

While the Dixie bloc pulls the U.S. federation hard to the right, New France pulls Canada well to the left.

So Woodard sees this scenario playing out over and over, until there's something so cataclysmic that it tears us apart:

One scenario that might preserve the status quo for the United States would be for its nations to follow the Canadian example and compromise on their respective cultural agendas for the sake of unity. Unfortunately, neither the Dixie bloc nor the Northern alliance is likely to agree to major concessions to the other. The majority of Yankees, New Netherlanders, and Left Coasters simply aren’t going to accept living in an evangelical Christian theocracy with weak or nonexistent social, labor, or environmental protections, public school systems, and checks on corporate power in politics. Most Deep Southerners will resist paying higher taxes to underwrite the creation of a public health insurance system; a universal network of well-resourced, unionized, and avowedly secular public schools; tuition-free public universities where science—not the King James Bible—guides inquiry; taxpayer-subsidized public transportation, high-speed railroad networks, and renewable energy projects; or vigorous regulatory bodies to ensure compliance with strict financial, food safety, environmental, and campaign finance laws.

Instead the "red" and "blue" nations will continue to wrestle with one another for control over federal policy, each doing what it can to woo the "purple" ones to their cause, just as they have since they gathered at the first Continental Congress.

We don't have a shared cultural history in this country. Woodard believes our only hope is this:

The United States needs its central government to function cleanly, openly, and efficiently because it’s one of the few things binding us together.

Yeah right.

No Good Dave Goes Unrewarded

It looks like my stint as a community service pandemic shopper is coming to a close. While there were occasional rewarding moments, I'm happy that this chapter of my life where I pretend to be a good person is over. Unlike my wife, I don't think I'm cut out volunteering for things that are not directly tied to my own self-interest (or the self-interest of my kids, wife, friends, students, etc.)

Of course, it also might have been luck of the draw. She's been shopping for a lovely and grateful Trinidadian woman who lives in the senior community building in our town. The woman regales my wife with stories, dirty jokes, and thanks. My wife truly enjoys doing things for this woman.

I've been shopping for a laconic older gentleman who seems to be something of a shut-in. He lives on the second floor of a house divided into three apartments. An old lady with an eye-patch lives on the first floor. I think she's the landlord. She doesn't approve of all the diet soda and iced tea that my guy buys each week.

I think it's time for my guy to get out and about. He lives right around the block from Stop'n Shop and he mainly eats soup, pineapple chunks, crackers, and lunch meat. They've removed the one-way arrows from the aisles in the store, so I think restrictions are loose enough for him to go for it. He needs to see for himself that there is no such thing as "Medium" eggs. These days it's all "Large" and "Extra-Large." 

I don't think he understands that I'm a volunteer and that I don't get paid to buy and deliver his groceries (though I've told him this . . . the graduate student that lives upstairs next to him understands this and has been appreciative of my service and the lady with the eye-patch understands the deal as well). 

So we parted ways today with nary a thank you. And his emails have been getting a little weird. I'll give you a sample, so you know what you're getting into when you volunteer for community service. It's not all medals and parades.

Here's a recent one . . . so he's discussing a receipt from two weeks ago:
 
I went through the register receipt for the groceries you bought on 5/22/20. On the bill from Stop’n Shop on 5/22/20, This item was rung up 3 times—I don’t know what it was. SB is the code for Store Brand: SB.CD.HMST.CHKNN 1.19. Also, on 5/22/20, this item was rung up twice—CMP is the code for Campbells: CMP.GRFORCK.FRN 1.89. I don't know what that item was. The Campbell’s products I bought were rung up elsewhere.

This is what I wrote back:

Not sure what to tell you about this. I don't know the codes for various soups and this was two weeks ago, so I don't think we're going to be able to figure it out. I'll try to make sure that nothing is rung incorrectly-- I'm not sure how this happened or if it was some other kind of soup that got rung up, as they don't always have exactly what you ask for so I try to get something close.

I really love his reply to this. He carefully explains how to go to a grocery store and purchase items, though I've been shopping for him with some measure of success since March!

In the store, I ask that you stay with the cart containing my products. Then watch the cashier's moving belt observing the products on it so that only my products are there. When the cashier is scanning the products, see to it that only my products are scanned. Hopefully, your vigilance will be enough to prevent this problem from happening again.

I'm really proud of my tone in the reply. I tried to channel Saul Goodman, when he was lawyering for all the old folks. He was always patient, good-humored, and empathetic. Never sarcastic.

You got it. I will keep an eye on things and make sure nothing gets rung up twice or mixed together with any other products.

I really wanted to throw around the word "vigilance" in my reply. Especially in regard to Italian Wedding Soup. But I didn't. I rose above it. 

While I'm not going to rush out and volunteer for anything in the near future, I'm happy that I did some service. Before the pandemic, I never went to the grocery store. I was awful at it, so it was easier for my wife to go.

But today, I whizzed through the store, grabbing the stuff on my old man's shopping list like a pro: liverwurst here, bananas there, diet root beer in this spot, reach down for the applesauce, grab a few pears, etc.

Fast and fearless. 

When I look at the guy I was shopping for, I certainly think: there by the grace of God goes I . . . but perhaps learning to navigate the local grocery store is a step in the right direction for me to avoid that fate.

Trump Steals a Move from Shakespeare's Richard III

Today's episode of The Daily (The Showdown at Lafayette Square) details how Donald Trump used the U.S. military to disperse nonviolent protesters with tear gas so that he could creep out of his bunker and pose at St. John's Church with a bible in his hand.


I would applaud our fearful leader for his iniquitous inventiveness, but Shakespeare got there first.

When Shakespeare's Richard III (who is far more charming and eloquent than Trump, but shares his misshapen ego and hunger for loyalty and power) wants to appear above the fray (although he has been wielding his power behind the scenes in maniacal fashion) his slimy advisor, the Duke of Buckingham, gives him a prop. 

A prayer book.

It's ham-handed, but some people love that kind of overt symbolism.



Richard has killed and slandered everyone in his path and galvanized the military. Still, Buckingham counsels Richard to "play the maid's part" when the mayor offers him the crown. He poses him between two churchmen with a prayer-book. The Lord Mayor is properly impressed (or at least pretends to be, to avoid the wrath of Richard).

So Richard plays the part of a pious devotee . . . for a moment. And then he accepts absolute power. 

"I am not made of stone," Richard tells the audience, winking at us, letting us in on the joke. In the same way, Trump tweets, letting his fans in on the fun.

Are we headed down the same plotline? I don't know, but it's worth reading Richard just so you know it.

Here is the scene:

BUCKINGHAM
The mayor is here at hand: intend some fear;
Be not you spoke with, but by mighty suit:
And look you get a prayer-book in your hand,
And stand betwixt two churchmen, good my lord;
For on that ground I'll build a holy descant:
And be not easily won to our request:
Play the maid's part, still answer nay, and take it.

LORD MAYOR
See, where he stands between two clergymen!
BUCKINGHAM
Two props of virtue for a Christian prince,
To stay him from the fall of vanity:
And, see, a book of prayer in his hand,
True ornaments to know a holy man.
Famous Plantagenet, most gracious prince,
Lend favourable ears to our request;
And pardon us the interruption
Of thy devotion and right Christian zeal.

My lord, there needs no such apology:
I rather do beseech you pardon me,
Who, earnest in the service of my God,
Neglect the visitation of my friends.
But, leaving this, what is your grace's pleasure?

You can't make this stuff up.  

Twenty Years!

Today, Catherine and I celebrate twenty years of marriage. Twenty years!

That's ten years times two, man!


 

For a marriage to last twenty years, it has to endure the winds of change. It has to survive and thrive.


Twenty Things That Our Marriage Has Survived



Our marriage survived an extremely long courtship (eight years). Yikes.

Our marriage survived a wild wedding (include a wet and muddy ending . . . I got thrown into the Lawrence Brook and was too filthy to ride home in the vicinity of my lovely wife, instead, I got loaded onto a trash bag in the back of an SUV).

Our marriage survived our first years of teaching.

Twenty years ago, in Milan . . .
Twenty years ago, in Milan . . .

Our marriage survived cross country trips and a monthlong voyage to Ecuador.

Our marriage survived ditching tenure for parts unknown.

Our marriage survived three years living in Damascus and traveling the world.

Our marriage survived intestinal distress and the Second Intifada.

Our marriage survived life before we had money to pay for a cleaning lady (barely).

Our marriage has survived numerous births and deaths.

Our marriage has survived a house purchase and kitchen renovation. Our bank account barely survived.

Our marriage survived a child in a skull shaping helmet.

Our marriage has survived travel soccer.

Our marriage outlasted my 1993 Jeep Cherokee.

Our marriage survived our impetuous son getting hit by a car (he was fine).

Our marriage has survived the acquisition of two dogs.

Our marriage (and out basement) has survived floods and hurricanes (with FEMA assistance!)

Our marriage has survived epic family trips across our vast nation and beyond.

Our marriage has survived raccoons in the attic.

Our marriage has survived my wife teaching fifth-grade math remotely (barely).

And our marriage has survived the Covid-19 quarantine . . . so far.



To celebrate all of this survival, we planted something that could very well survive beyond our marriage . . . a Scarlet Fire dogwood tree.

Apparently, although we stumbled on it serendipitously, it's the perfect tree to commemorate our anniversary. Catherine and I met in New Brunswick, while we were both attending Rutgers, and this tree was bred and developed at Rutgers. Forty-five years of horticulture to produce this tree.

There's a Chinese proverb that says: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” 

I hope twenty years from now, Catherine and I will be able to look at this tree and remember when we planted it.


Internet: Luxury or Utility?

The new Planet Money episode "Small America vs. Big Internet" brings up many of the typical free market vs. government themes that are prevalent in lobbying and politics in our great nation.

But the Covid pandemic really reframes this particular debate.

The City of Wilson was sick of not having fast internet, so they built their own network. They run it like a city utility . . . and it worked (not an easy task). When the big telecom got wind of Wilson's success, they sent a horde of lobbyists to North Carolina to nip this in the bud. The telecom companies have been doing this on a state by state basis, and twenty states now have laws prohibiting cities from creating their own internet infrastructure.

These "level playing field" bills are pushed by telecom lobbyists in the name of free-market competition. But small towns lose out because sometimes it's not financially worth providing fast internet for them.

The question is this: how does the pandemic reframe this dilemma?

Is fast internet a luxury or a utility?

If public schools continue to use the internet for remote learning, then I think there needs to be a shift in the legislation. Fast broadband is vital to kids being educated. If towns want to provide this-- and they can pull it off-- then they should be allowed to do so.

Wilson has been grandfathered, and they are still providing inexpensive fast internet for their residents. But they are not allowed to expand. They should be a model for the nation-- the internet is more like water and electricity and public schools than it is like cable TV.

I'm sure the Trump team is on this.

You Can't Go Wrong with Josephine Tey

Another week of life during COVID, another mystery novel down the hatch . . . 

Josephine Tey's To Love and Be Wise-- the 4th installment featuring the calm, cool, collected, oft-times confused, always curious, and super-classy Inspector Grant-- might be better as a literary novel than as a mystery. The mystery resolves fast and furious in the final pages, but the real fun is touring the weird little English countryside village of Salcott St. Mary with Inspector Grant. The town was once full of farmers and craftsmen but is now regrettably invaded by London artists. They seek the lovely scenery of the town, which sits on the banks of the Rushmere river. 

Reminds me of Wellfleet, a similar town of locals and artists, which sits on the upper arm of Cape Cod.

When you read Josephine Tey, you'll need to look up words like "manqué" and "farouche" but you'll be treated to quick bits of characterization like this:

What made a man a bounder was a quality of mind. A crassness. A lack of sensitivity. It was something that was quite incurable; a spiritual astigmatism.


You also get a detective who is familiar with high art and culture, and thus makes allusions instead of terse, hard-boiled pronouncements . . .

But Walter pinned his worm on to a Shakespearean hook and angled gently with it, so that his listeners saw the seething legions of blind purpose turning the grey rock in the western sea into the green Paradise . . .

Tey herself is something of a social commentator:

And walking has lost face since it became universal in the form of an activity called hiking.

Inspector Grant is no Sherlock Holmes. He thinks hard about the case, runs through the possibilities, and makes his befuddlement apparent to the reader. He struggles for any kind of epiphany and lets you in on that struggle. I really like this about him. I can enjoy the scenery and the people, and then-- once in a while-- he lays out what I've missed.

The possibilities are: one, that he fell into the water accidentally and was drowned; two, that he was murdered and thrown in the river; three, that he walked away for reasons of his own; four, that he wandered away because he forgot who he was and where he was going; five, that he was kidnapped.

Inspector Grant does not completely discount the London artists, just because they aren't gritty and local. Take his friend Marta Hallard, the actress-- who he describes thusly:

He looked across at her, elegant and handsome in the firelight, and thought of all the different parts that he had seen her play: courtesans and frustrated hags, careerists and domestic doormats. It was true that actors had a perception, an understanding of human motive, that normal people lacked. It had nothing to do with intelligence, and very little to do with education. In general knowledge Marta was as deficient as a not very bright child of eleven; her attention automatically slid off anything that was alien to her own immediate interests and the result was an almost infantine ignorance. He had seen the same thing in hospital nurses, and sometimes in overworked G.P.s. But put a script in her hands, and from a secret and native store of knowledge she drew the wherewithal to build her characterization of the author's creation.

She has one of the most telling takes on how to find the murderer. 

Well, I take it you commit murder because you are one-idead. Or have become one-idead. As long as you have a variety of interests you can't care about any one of them to the point of murder. It is when you have all your eggs in the same basket, or only one egg left in the basket, that you lose your sense of proportion.

If you're looking for some sharp and entertaining prose couched within a highly entertaining mystery story, I highly recommend this enigmatic Scottish lady. Her real name is Elizabeth MacKintosh and she wrote plays as Gordon Daviot, but it's when she embodies her Golden Age detective-style as Josephine Tey that something special happens.

Conservatives and Liberals Enjoy the Dog Park (and confusing Dave)

Saturday morning at the dog park, I talked to a professed conservative about the Covid pandemic . . . he was optimistic about the numbers and he seemed like an intelligent, rational business guy (he was willing to admit that he thinks Trump is insane and has handled things poorly . ..  he said he would have voted for Bloomberg for president-- which means he's not voting for Biden, I suppose).

Anyway, he had crunched the data and he was sure the virus was going to subside when the warm weather comes. 

We did not wear masks while we chatted. 

Sunday morning at the dog park, it was the usual group. Liberals. Lawyers, teachers, lesbians, etc. They were all wearing masks, so I put my mask on.

They don't think the warm weather theory holds water. They cited Brazil and Ecuador as counter-examples.

They are also worried about droplets in the air when it's humid. They are worried about crowded beaches, crowded stores, Wal-Mart, the fact that people of color are suffering more from the pandemic. They are worried about wealth inequality being amplified and the fact that the investor class isn't really feeling this because the stock market is propped up by the fed. 


The teacher said she didn't think meat-space school would start until January.

I don't know what to think.

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