Another near miss for Trump; and a shower lighting dilemma.

Gods ding it, he's done it again. I had a nice, breezy little post planned for this week, and then Trump sucked all the air out of the room again by showing up at the White House Correspondents' Dinner and maybe attracting a shooter. So I will address that first, and then I'll add a shortish version of my breezy little post at the end. 

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I feel like the best thing I can do right now, when so little is known -- and when, let's be honest, we don't know how much to believe of what either the administration or the pundits are saying -- is to answer some of the conspiratorial questions I've seen online today.

• How did the alleged gunman (hereinafter AGM) get his weapons to DC from California? He took Amtrak. Security is just not as crazy on passenger trains as it is on flights. I don't recall ever having to step through a magnetometer before boarding an Amtrak train. (But you can bet your ass that will change now. Thanks a lot, AGM.)
• Okay, but how did the AGM get his weapons past security at the hotel? He was a hotel guest. Think back to the last time you checked into a hotel. Did you have to pass through a magnetometer at the door? No? Neither did I. If the AGM checked in sufficiently ahead of the event -- say, sometime Friday -- the security checkpoint for the dinner probably wasn't even set up yet. And he wouldn't have had to get past that until Saturday night. Plus which, guys, it's a hotel. They host a lot of big events, not to mention guests who have nothing to do with any of the scheduled events. Setting up a security perimeter at the hotel entrance would be a massive inconvenience to everybody with business there that has nothing to do with the correspondents' dinner. Now, I've seen reports that they have in fact done this in the past. If so, why didn't they do it this year? I have no idea.
• All that said, how did the shooter get so close to Trump? He didn't. The International Ballroom at the Washington Hilton is two floors below the main hotel entrance. The hotel's website has a fun interactive map that allows you to fly around their event space; click the Explore 360 Tour button on this page. It's been a few decades since I attended an event there (the Congressional Correspondents' Dinner used to be held there until it got too big), but I think I recall taking the escalator down to the ballroom. From what I've seen online, the security checkpoint was on the Terrace level, which is between the main floor and the Concourse level. Plus, y'all, the International Ballroom is huge. It seats more than 2,500 people, according to the hotel's website, and the dais is on the opposite side of the room from the doors that attendees come through. So the AGM would have had to get past the magnetometers on the Terrace level, down the escalator, past more agents who were no doubt stationed in the Concourse foyer outside the ballroom, and then past all the journalists at all the guest tables to get to the dais where Trump was seated. He was tackled outside of the magnetometers on the Terrace level. That doesn't seem that close to me.
• Was the whole thing staged? It's possible. It would have required TFGA's handlers to find a willing patsy, suggest he take Amtrak and stay at the Hilton, and do it all without bringing Trump in until the last minute so he didn't give the game away. Reportedly, it wouldn't have been the first time that Trump was kept out of the loop on an important issue.
• If it was staged, why? I doubt it would have been all about Trump's White House ballroom plans; he talks about them at the drop of a hat anyway. As a pivot from the Iran war and the Epstein files, and as an effort to bolster his historically lousy approval ratings, sure. As a commercial for his ballroom? Nah.

That's enough for now. Let's move on to my breezy little post.

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I went ahead this week and bought ceramic tile for the shower walls! I brought it home and loaded it into my storage closet yesterday. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

I've also bought porcelain mosaic tile for the shower floor. I've been wanting to use the star-and-cross pattern on something for ages. Each of these little tile is 2"x2". (Note that this sample came chipped and cracked; I've checked the actual tiles, which were packaged much better, and they seem okay.)

Lynne Cantwell 2026

So anyway, yeah, the wall tile is dark, so the shower is going to be dark -- like a cave, almost, once the shower curtain is closed. Not that I ever want to be on trend, but maybe I am. (Go here and scroll down to number 5.) But it means lighting is a concern. A lot of people have can lights put in so that their shower is daylight bright. (Others do a sun tunnel, but guaranteed that my upstairs neighbor would not be amused.) But I want to preserve the moodiness.

The only light in the shower right now is this battery-operated light, plus whatever filters in above the shower curtain. It would be fun to have a starry sky, and you can get kits that allow you to make one by sticking fiber-optic lines through a suspended ceiling; alas, they require a projector concealed somewhere that's not wet. Another solution I've seen is to have an LED light strip installed at the top of the tile. That looks like my best option, but it would require hiring an electrician. So I may just stick with my battery-powered light.

If y'all have any other suggestions, let me know. I've yet to begin shopping for a contractor, so I have lots of time.

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Heads up that I'll be out of pocket for the next two weeks. See y'all back here on May 17th.

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These moments of bifurcated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

In which Clarence Thomas has it in for progressivism.

"Hmm," I thought a few minutes ago. "It's Sunday. I owe everybody a blog post. What should I write about? I could write about Pagans and Earth Day if I'd gone to the event I was aiming for yesterday, but instead I slept in...

"Maybe I could rant about the annoying trend of long, long Facebook posts that people are resorting to because Facebook will throttle the reach of any post with an off-Facebook link in it. Except I think a lot of folks saw my Facebook post about it yesterday. Why beat a dead horse?

"Wait. When was the last time I did a current events post?" <checks post history> "Holy cats, not since March 1st? And that was only a glancing blow! And there's so much there to talk about -- the Iran war that Trump has declared he won too many times to count, Trump's whining about his ballroom, Trump and Vance picking a fight with the pope over Catholic doctrine, of all things...

"I know! I'll write about Clarence Thomas!"

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Why yes, those scales are tilted to the right.
quarta | Deposit Photos

You may have missed it, what with all the usual noise coming from the general direction of the White House. But this week, Justice Thomas gave an address at the University of Texas at Austin Law School. He started out talking about the Declaration of Independence, this being the 250th anniversary of its signing and all. But then he went off on this weird diatribe about how progressivism is going to doom the United States to failure. No, really. The New Republic quoted him: 

Clarence Thomas alone is devoted to the Declaration's principles in Washington, says Clarence Thomas, and the problem is only getting worse. "As we meet today, it is unclear whether these principles will endure," the justice warned. "At the beginning of the twentieth century, a new set of first principles of government was introduced into the American mainstream. The proponents of this new set of first principles, most prominently among them the twenty-eighth president, Woodrow Wilson, called it progressivism.

"Since Wilson's presidency, progressivism has made many inroads in our system of government and our way of life," Thomas continued. "It has coexisted uneasily with the principles of the Declaration. Because it is opposed to those principles, it is not possible for the two to coexist forever."

Wilson is not the most famous president to be associated with progressivism; that would be Teddy Roosevelt. But Wilson was an academic, which automatically makes him a target of those who love the poorly educated. Wilson oversaw the creation of the Federal Reserve system, the Federal Trade Commission, stronger antitrust laws, and a ban on child labor -- none of which made him popular with the rich. 

Wilson was president during the nation's first Gilded Age, when rich industrialists were remaking the country to suit themselves. (As former Labor Secretary Robert Reich observes, we are in the nation's second Gilded Age today. It wasn't a good thing for the working class then, and it isn't today, either.)

Thomas went on to draw a line from progressive policies in Germany, which Wilson supposedly based American progressivism on, to -- wait for it -- the rise of Hitler. It gets wackier from there; I recommend the New Republic article I linked to above, if you're interested. 

What interested me more than Justice Thomas's rewriting of history was that at the beginning of his speech, he greeted one of the attendees: Harlan Crow. Yup, that Harlan Crow: the GOP megadonor who has showered Thomas and his wife with vacations and gifts, including buying from Thomas in 2014 the house where Thomas's mother lived in Savannah, GA, and spending tens of thousands of dollars to renovate the property -- a transaction that Thomas somehow forgot to list on his mandatory financial disclosure form.

People are prone to telling themselves all sorts of myths to justify their actions and to maintain their lifestyles. In that respect, the rich are no different.

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These moments of self-serving blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Tax the rich, already!

In which I go for Baroque.

Sorry. I had to.

I know some of y'all already thought I was weird because I like opera. It gets worse: I love early music, from the very earliest monophonic stuff like Gregorian chant to the Baroque composers Bach and Handel. And yesterday I got a chance to expand my experience in that playground by attending a concert here in Santa Fe featuring songs from Spanish Baroque composers. 

First, let's set the time frame. If you've ever heard anything by Bach or any part of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, you're already familiar with the biggest musical names of the period. The Baroque period ran from 1600 to 1760, give or take, or about the time when North America was being settled by Europeans. The Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, to give you another benchmark. Here in New Mexico, settlers had begun to come up the Camino Real from Mexico City and make a new life for themselves on the Spanish (later Mexican) frontier; the Pueblo Revolt, when the local Native Americans had enough of Spanish rule and kicked them all the way back to El Paso, happened in 1680, smack dab in the middle of this period.

Back in Spain, Diego Velázquez painted this in Madrid in 1656: 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

The painting is called Las Meninas o La familia de Felipe IV. ("Meninas" are ladies-in-waiting.) It's a little tattered around the edges because it's actually a 3D "postcard" that I picked up when I was at the Prado in Madrid: you flip it over, fold it along the creases, and look through the little portholes to get the 3D effect. The little blond girl at the center is the Infanta Margaret Theresa, who was five years old at the time. The artist depicts himself at his easel on the left; the mirror on the back wall shows the images of the Infanta's parents, King Philip IV and his queen, Mariana of Austria; and in the doorway on the right stands the queen's chamberlain, to whom the artist may have been related. In short, it's a fun painting with a lot going on.

Which is a pretty good description of Baroque music, too. Just listen to one of Bach's fugues. (Start the video at 2:47 if you want to skip the tocatta at the start.)

Anyway, this concert featured songs by a bunch of composers I'd never heard of before. One of them is Sebastian de Murcia. This piece wasn't on yesterday's program, but it gives you a flavor for the sound, anyway. (The instrument being played in the video is a Baroque guitar. It's smaller and fancier than a modern acoustic guitar and has nine strings instead of six. I found a guy on YouTube who gives more information on the Baroque guitar. If you're as nerdy as I am about ancient music, you may find it as fascinating as I did.)

If we were playing the "which historical era would you want to live in" game, the Baroque would be pretty high on my list. Anyone want to join me?

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These moments of ornate blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

Think magic is impossible? Maybe we've just been taught to believe that.

Happy whichever spring holiday you celebrate! The redbud tree is not as showy as I'd hoped it would be -- just a few blossoms are adorning its trunk. But it had a tough maiden year in my garden, and I'm hoping for more blooms next year. At least it's leafing out. 

Lynne Cantwell 2026

Other flowers are doing better, including these volunteer violets (the little johnny-jump-up kind, not the African kind). Volunteers are my favorite flowers.

Lynne Cantwell 2026

My daffodils are done for the year, and so are my grape hyacinths. I'm debating whether to put real money into plants this spring; I still don't know whether my deck will be dismantled this year to fix the bad framing job the roofers did in rebuilding it, and if that happens, I'll basically lose whatever's planted in the beds. Might just stick with volunteers this year.

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Anyway, for most Christians, today is Easter, a sacred day on their liturgical calendar. One of my Christian friends shared a post on Facebook about how Jesus would be treated if he showed up in America today. The original poster basically said that it wouldn't end well, because so many purported Christians would object to the things he actually is said to have believed and done. I think that's true. Regular Americans today who try to embody Jesus's teachings -- healing the sick, ordering the moneychangers out of the temple, exchanging swords for plowshares, and so on -- are often not treated well, to put it mildly. And Christian nationalists have zero use for the idea of welcoming strangers and treating them as actual human beings.

I'm not Christian, as I've said, and while I see where the original poster is coming from -- and even agree with him -- I see an even more basic problem: We, as a society, have lost our belief in magic.

If any holy person or prophet of any religion arrived in today's world, I'd bet you dollars to doughnuts that we wouldn't believe them. Wouldn't believe they were who they said they were. Would call them a crackpot. Would call the cops on them. Would have them committed as mentally ill.

But what if they proved who they said they were by performing miracles? It might get them committed faster. Or we'd dismiss it as a trick, or Photoshop, or A.I. Because by and large, we've had our belief in miracles -- in magic -- beaten out of us. Magic and/or miracles might have happened in olden times, but not any more. Certainly not today.

The Church has only itself to blame. It bought adherents at a cost, and one of the things it did to win believers was to decapitate magic. It did that by declaring anything not officially sanctioned by the Church the work of the devil.

People are moving away from the Church these days, but that doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. Because the Church trained us to mistrust our own senses, and that mistrust has become ingrained in Western culture. Oh, we don't say magic is of the devil anymore, or rather most of us don't, but we still feel uneasy when we see it working. Now we're more likely to say that a thing is impossible. Or it's a trick. Or there has to be an explanation; we just haven't figured it out yet.

Think of all the movies that have turned on this plot point. Here's one: God returns, right? Maybe as George Burns. And nobody believes him except a grocery store manager played by John Denver, and the guy's life gets a whole lot more complicated as a result.

You laugh. I mean, I sure did when I saw the movie. But I laughed partly because God's reception was so plausible. 

I'm not saying we should all give every scammer and con artist we run across the benefit of the doubt. I'm saying maybe materialism doesn't have the answer to everything. 

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To be clear, I do believe in science. But I also think there are some things that are real, but science dismisses them out of hand.

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These moments of bloggy magic have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy spring!