Author: photog

Wednesday, Wednesday 02APR2025

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , ,

Ah, the Spring Honey Do List.  The most fiendish accumulation of annoying indoor and outdoor chores imaginable to the fevered brains of wives.  I had just finished what I thought was my chores for the day and had taken a shower when I saw Camera Girl raking the leaves off of the edge of the woods and her flower beds.  Now there is no more useless pursuit than raking leaves out of a forest but what can I say?  Female fastidiousness is as powerful as it is inexplicable to the mind of man.  When I saw the piles of leaves she had raked I foresaw her stooping to pick up all those leaves and painstakingly haul them to the other side of the property to her mulch pile and knew it would take days and break her back.  So, I rushed out and told her to leave the leaves(!) to me and I’d chop them with my push mower.  Hearing that I would be doing this she then proceeded to finish off the other woods for the sake of completeness.  Ah Chihuahua!  Well, no good deed goes unpunished.

But honestly chopping leaves with my trash mower is kind of fun.  After four to eight passes (depending on how wet they are) the leaves just about disappear into thin air.  It’s remarkable what steel and kinetic energy can achieve.  And I did get to see all the plants she uncovered along the woods.  The day lilies are about four inches tall.

The hostas near the woods haven’t appeared at all and some small woodland plants are already out and about.

After she left, I spent another half hour disintegrating the remaining leaves.  When I returned inside Camera Girl came running over and thanked me profusely for sparing her all that stoop labor of moving the leaves to her mulch pile.  And I thought to myself, “I am a good person, amn’t I?  Why else would she be so happy.  So, over the course of the evening several times I reminded her of how nice it was of me to come to her rescue and take care of the leaves.  But what I noticed was that after each iteration of my reminder her gratitude seemed to diminish.  And, in fact the decrease accelerated.  At the end I believe it tailed off sort of like the curve of y=1/Xn where n= the number of reminders and y= her enthusiasm for the reminders.  So, her enthusiasm approached zero as a limit but never quite reached it.

I brought up this observation to her.  She used some Italian hand gestures from her distant past and went back to the cooking tasks that she was busy with.  It’s a shame that her high school back in Sheepshead Bay didn’t do a better job of preparing her mathematically for her life ahead.  Being able to graph and recognize the various curves of common functions is a basic requirement of our technological age.  But we all have to be flexible and adapt ourselves to people as we find them.  And that is a tenet of my relationship with her and I remind her of it from time to time.

April Fool’s Day 2025

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, OCF, photog's Corner , , ,

No thirty inches of snow!  No ice storm!  No baseball sized hail stones!  April Fool’s Day didn’t punish us here in New England.  It’s a bloomin’ miracle.  It’s a pretty nice day so Camera Girl handed me her “Honey Do” list.  The one item I’m stalling on is walking the property with a garbage bag and a stick with a nail on it picking up all the trash that has blown into the wooded areas.  As Sergeant Snorkel told Beetle Bailey, “If it don’t walk, if it don’t talk, police it!”  But it’s annoying.  It makes me feel very uncharitably toward the whole human race when I see what kind of stuff they toss out the windows of their cars.

So, I was driving down the main east-west road in Dunwich in a section that is full of blind curves and rolling hills when up ahead about a quarter of a mile I see something in the road.  I see it’s moving but it’s too short to be an adult human so I slow down.  “Could it be a child or is someone sitting or kneeling on the road?  And then I can see.  It’s a huge tom turkey with his feathers and wings all puffed up.  He’s in the oncoming lane and he’s staring me down!  So, I creep past him looking for his harem.  But I couldn’t see them.  Either they were shielded by the trees or they were gone.  But Tom was sticking to his guns and wasn’t afraid of me.  So, I left him there and in my rearview I could see him still standing there like some blithering idiot trying to act as crossing guard to an invisible flock.

After cutting down the raspberry canes last week I’ve been hoping to see some leaves sprouting up from the dirt.  So far nothing.

But the hellebores are coming up.  More confidently in the sunnier areas and tentatively in the shade.

And likewise for the daffodils.  We have three different stages of development depending where they are on the property.

The hostas near the house have just broken ground.

And this little crocus is bravely showing its colors.

So winter is climatically over.  I will now stow the shoe spikes, snow shovels, ice scrapers, snow blower, snow boots and all the rest of the paraphernalia that litters the mud room and move forward into the growing season.  And now that the ground is completely thawed, I can begin things like fixing fences, gates, damaged wood and all the other weather-beaten components of my poor house and adjacencies.

And I will move the lawn mowers to the front of the shed and contemplate that fateful moment when I drive the mower over the grass for the first time this year.  Right now, it’s unimaginable.  Some of the grass is overly long and soaked with winter water in the soggier areas of the west field.  Some areas are worn away by snow, ice and rain.  Other areas are dead and brown.  Cementing the whole thing over sounds like a better solution.  But in just a very few days the darn thing will revive and life will return.

And in honor of this projected return of life I have put out ten preying mantis egg sacs.  I purchased them from an American company that said they are Chinese mantids.  Well, why not?  Apparently, they’re already outcompeting the Carolina mantis right here in New England.  Who am I to stand in the way of Darwinian selection?

The only thing left to cap off the beginning of spring is the reappearance of the pond turtles.  They have not made their reappearance but Camera Girl will keep me apprised of their status.

“O brave new world that has such people in it!”

Let Me See What’s Going on 31MAR2025

photog Current Events, Trump , , ,

Well, first of all, Europe has gone all in on lawfare to prevent their own people from electing candidates on the Right.  I guess I can paraphrase this as. “If you can’t beat them at the ballot box just round them up and jail them.”

“Monday’s court sentence declares Le Pen ineligible to stand for president in 2027 and gave her a four-year prison sentence – half of it suspended – for embezzlement of European parliament funds.

Italy’s Deputy Prime Minister and leader of the League party Matteo Salvini called the court’s ruling a “declaration of war by Brussels”.

“A bad film that we are also seeing in other countries like Romania,” wrote Salvini on social media.

“We don’t let ourselves be intimidated, we don’t stop: full speed ahead my friend!”

Romania’s electoral bureau in early March rejected the candidacy of far-right politician Calin Georgescu for the re-run of presidential elections in May.

The fierce EU and NATO critic shot to prominence last November, when he unexpectedly topped a first round of presidential voting before the constitutional court annulled the election after claims of Russian interference and a “massive” social media promotion.

Georgescu, who denies any links to Moscow, has slammed the vote annulment as a “formalised coup d’état” and the subsequent banning as “a direct blow to the heart of democracy.”

So that’s interesting.  It’s kind of what they tried against Trump only their people are so cowed that it’s successful.  I guess the question I’ll ask is are their people such slaves that they’ll put up with that forever?  I guess we’ll find out.

The other big “international” development is that the New York Times admitted that the United States military has boots on the ground in Ukraine.  And in fact, the CIA is coordinating missile attacks on the Russian homeland.

Ultimately, the U.S. military and C.I.A. were allowed to help with strikes into Russia.

The hardest red line was the Russian border. But in spring 2024, to protect the northern city of Kharkiv against a Russian assault, the administration authorized the creation of an “ops box” — a zone of Russian territory within which U.S. officers in Wiesbaden could provide the Ukrainians with precise coordinates. The box’s first iteration extended across a wide swath of Ukraine’s northern border. The box was expanded after North Korea sent troops to help fight the Ukrainians’ incursion into Russia’s Kursk region. The U.S. military was later allowed to enable missile strikes in an area of southern Russia where the Russians staged forces and equipment for their offensive in eastern Ukraine.

Longstanding policy barred the C.I.A. from providing intelligence on targets on Russian soil. But the C.I.A. could request “variances,” carve-outs to support strikes for specific objectives. Intelligence had identified a vast munitions depot in Toropets, 290 miles north of the Ukrainian border. On Sept. 18, 2024, a swarm of drones slammed into the munitions depot. The blast, as powerful as a small earthquake, opened a crater the width of a football field. Later, the C.I.A. was allowed to enable Ukrainian drone strikes in southern Russia to try to slow advances in eastern Ukraine.

So, we’ve been playing chicken with the Russians for several years in Ukraine.  Is this still going on?  Why?  Have we officially lost any personnel to the war officially?  Unofficially?  Is there any reason why we should?

From what I can see of Europe’s approach to “democracy” I don’t see any meaningful difference between Russia, Ukraine, France or Romania.  None of them are really democracies in any real sense.  So why are we choosing winners and losers there?  They’re supposed to be grown-ups.  Why can’t they sort out their own messes?  Why should American money and blood be involved in any way?

From what I can see we have no more place telling the Russians or the English how to run their lives than we do the Afghans or the Chinese.  They’re not us.  We’re not them.  If they don’t shoot at us, they can do whatever they damn please.  They can even say mean things about us.  Now as far as buying whatever crap they make in their country, as long as we have the same tariffs on them as they have on us, have at it.  The crap we get from China is no better or worse than the crap we get from Mexico or Canada.  It’s all still crap.  If they want to make their crap here and pay Americans to make it, well, that’s another story.  Now we’ve got something to talk about.  If Toyota builds a plant in Tennessee, then God bless Toyota.  They’re my kind of foreigners.  We can do business and we can even be friends!

I hope Donald Trump understands that blowing people up to “make the world safe for democracy” is just a globalist bumper sticker.  Minding our own business to make America safe for Americans is a policy that can help make America great again.

Just my two cents today.