Per Un Barbiere di Qualità!

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Princess Sack-of-Potatoes’ birthday party was a great success.  My daughter’s in-laws were very congenial and we all good-naturedly performed all the kids’ party rituals.  We dutifully sang off key to ‘Happy Birthday” and applauded the blowing out of the four candles.  We watched as the cake was cut and the opening of the presents and even a spirited game of pin the tail on the donkey.  Only for some unknown reason it was tape the nose on the clown.  This particular clown looked like some kind of nightmarish psychopath which I found quite disturbing but the kids were unperturbed.

When we had all eaten enough burgers and potato salad and cake and ice cream and all the presents were opened the parents gathered up their kids and headed home.  Camera Girl agreed that the event was a great success and we began some of the clean-up.

But I was in the mood for something interesting.  Lately I have been watching YouTube videos of the operatic aria “Largo al factotum” from the Barber of Seville.  It’s the song that everyone remembers from various classic cartoons of the 1940s that has the famous stanza, “Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro, Figaro!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ipb9xbXSAY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJIpVj_YkNo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TKDXr_fimQ8

I watched about a dozen different versions, some going back to the 1920s.  And it occurred to me, “What an interesting character Figaro is!”  Here is the swaggering braggart.  He is a big fish in a little pond.  In his own mind he is a hero, a Hercules of a thousand great labors.  He is always in demand and always acclaimed by the crowd.

And of course, he is merely a legend in his own mind.  His actual trades are barber, dentist, wig maker and a sort of go-between for couples in love.  He passes love notes and such things.  So, he really is a nothing.

But he has a quick wit, the gift of gab, a way with women and enormous self-confidence.  And putting those things together creates a formidable character.  Some people may recognize someone like this.  I knew someone of exactly the type.  They always have a treasure trove of amazing personal stories.  And their personal lives tend to be an awful mess.  They combine recklessness, selfishness and even a bit of cruelty along with their natural abilities as a clown, a skirt chaser and a leader of the riff-raff.  In many ways they are fascinating personalities but they leave a trail of angry women in their wake and never seem to grow up.

And it occurred to me that is why I enjoy the aria.  I recognize the type that Figaro is the symbol of.  And the scene captures that reality splendidly.  And the music is wonderful.

And what a great character he would be to put in a story!  Somehow, I’ve got to have a swaggering braggart in one of my stories.  It would just be too great a thing to ignore.  And in fact, I need him to be a recurring character in a “world” that I make.  It will be a sort of an homage to an old friend that I knew long, long ago in a place far, far away.

Ah, bravo Figaro! Bravo, bravissimo!  Fortunatissimo per verità!

12NOV2022 – OCF Update

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Today is Princess Sack-of-Potatoes’ birthday party here at the Compound and there will be about thirty people and I’ve been elected to grill duty.  After a day of heavy rain and wind we’ve been blessed with sun mild temperatures and a light breeze so everything looks good.

So stay tuned.  I’ll be back with some things to say later on.

Some Observations and Thoughts Working on My First Election

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Now that I’ve almost entirely recovered from the fatigue, fascination and horror of Election Day I’ve had a chance to reflect a little on what I saw and learned.

First off, it really was a fascinating experience.  Coming into direct contact with four or five thousand people, even if only briefly is stimulating and highly interesting.  Even if you’re for the most part only asking and answering questions you get a flavor for each soul you collide with.

And I would say the negative contacts were only in the range of a tenth of a percent.  I could count them all on the fingers of one hand.  And that’s a remarkably low percentage.  Possibly the majority of the participants were enjoying the experience.  Or maybe they picked up on my energy.  Because despite how exhausted I was by the fifteenth hour of my shift I was still energized by the whole thing.  My feet weren’t energized but my mind was.  It was fun.

However, that all ended when the doors were closed and the tabulation began.  Everything about the process of counting the votes is painful, annoying and subject to the vicissitudes of badly designed and easily malfunctioning equipment.  But at least in the case of the election team I worked with everyone went way above and beyond the call of duty to get the numbers accurately and expeditiously relayed to the Secretary of State’s office.  So, kudos to us.

Now I’ll apply what I learned on Tuesday to what is going on across the country now several days after the election in places like Arizona and Nevada.  The delays they are experiencing are on account of the mail in ballots.  Either they are waiting for a certain number of days for ballots mailed in on Tuesday to reach them (which seems idiotic) or they only started processing them after they finished the count of the normal ballots.

In either case this is either rank stupidity or an excuse to fabricate ballots to offset shortfalls by the candidate that’s supposed to win.  If it weren’t then there would be a requirement that all mail in ballots be mailed in a month before the election.  That way all of them would be received and processed before the election.  The fact that these states are allowing their elections to be dragged out for a week or more is malfeasance that necessarily robs the process of legitimacy in the minds of the voters.  By my way of looking at things this is hastening the break down of national cohesion.  This year, more than half of Americans already believed that the 2020 elections were illegally tampered with.  2022 won’t improve on things.

So, I’m struck by the paradox.  Here we have a population of people who expend time and emotional energy to vote in the hope that it influences how their government works.  And yet more than half of those people think that to some extent the selection of federal representatives is rigged.  How can that be reconciled?

Maybe it can’t be reconciled.  And maybe in the not-too-distant future something is going to change.  What’s the old saying?  The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different outcome.  Maybe we’re getting tired of acting crazy.

ZMan Talks About Supporting Your Own Community

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The ZMan walks the talk in that he supports some dissident friendly businesses on his website.  In this week’s podcast he expounds on why this is going to be more important as the gulf between progressive America and non-progressive people becomes insurmountable..

The quote I liked was:

“For dissidents, the only way forward is to develop a counter-culture, which means politicizing our own lives fully. How you spend your money, where you spend your money and on whom you spend your money must be political. How you live, where you live and with whom you live is political. In order to build a counterculture, the dissident must become a fully political animal.”

Let’s Get Small