Don't lose hope.

Sometimes, if you're looking for wisdom, the best thing to do is turn to a children's story.

DVD cover art, used without permission

This year is the 40th anniversary of the release of The NeverEnding Story, a fantasy film based on a children's book. In honor of the anniversary, the movie, with its 1980s vintage special effects intact, is having a limited theatrical release. I went to see it today.

It's not the first time I've seen it -- not by a long shot. The NeverEnding Story was in heavy rotation in our house when my daughters were small. I encouraged them to watch it because I wanted my kids to be readers and in a way, reading is the star of the film.

The main character is Bastian, a boy who has recently lost his mother (the implication is that she's dead). He's being bullied at school, and his father isn't much use. On the run from the bullies, Bastian takes refuge in a bookshop, where the owner is reading an intriguing-looking book. The owner tells him it's not safe for Bastian to read it, then steps away. So of course Bastian pinches the book (he leaves a note saying he'll bring it back, bless his heart) and races off to school. But he doesn't go to class. Instead, he runs up to the attic, which is appropriately dusty and creepy, makes himself comfy on an old gym mat, and begins to read.

(These aren't spoilers. The movie's been out for 40 years, for crying out loud.)

The land in the book, Fantasia, is being devoured by a mysterious menace called the Nothing. The people turn to the Childlike Empress, their ruler, but she is near death. Still, she summons a great warrior named Atreyu and charges him to find a cure for her illness, which will also stop the Nothing.

Atreyu turns out to be very young -- merely a boy -- but brave and stout of heart. He accepts the Empress's charge and goes off adventuring. In his search for the cure, Atreyu loses everything. And at the very last, he must confront a vile, wolflike creature named G'mork.

G'mork explains a lot more to Atreyu than anyone else has so far. The creature says that the Nothing is "like a despair", and it has been growing stronger because "people have begun to lose their hopes and forget their dreams." The wolf goes on to say that "people who have no hopes are easy to control, and whoever has control has the power!"

Atreyu then kills the creature and, with his trusty luck dragon, Falkor, returns to the Empress to tell her that he has failed in his quest. 

But he hasn't, she explains. His real mission was to find a human boy, who is the only one who actually has the power to save Fantasia -- and who has been with Atreyu on his adventures, reading them, all along.

Bastian can't believe that the characters in the book know about him and are expecting him to save them. But finally, he does what the Empress asks and gives her a new name: his mother's -- Moon Child. And then he imagines Fantasia all put back the way it was before the Nothing, and it is.

***

It's been a rough day for those of us who wanted to see President Biden win a second term. He announced today that he's ending his campaign, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris, and giving all his delegates to her.

It was a good afternoon to go to the movies and have a good cry, and I did -- when Atreyu's horse succumbed to the Swamp of Sadness, and when the Empress pleaded with Bastian to save Fantasia.

But it was G'mork's words that really struck me today. So much of political campaigning -- of marketing in general, really -- involves emotional manipulation. One of the most powerful emotions is fear, and so a politician will try to scare people about the world their opponent will create, so that the people will be afraid and lose hope -- making it easier for that politician to control them. 

Both sides do it. The difference for Democrats is that we've seen Trump's craziness with our own eyes. We've experienced his idea of governing. We've at least heard about Project 2025, the playbook his team intends to implement if he's elected again. We watched his supporters storm the Capitol when he lost in 2020. So when Democratic politicians talk about what could happen in a second Trump term, it rings true. We're know we're right to be scared.

I don't know what's going to happen over the next few weeks and months. Presumably Harris will win the Democratic nomination for president. (We now get to endure the breathless speculation about who her vice president will be. Lucky us?) She may debate Donald Trump at some point; Biden and Trump were supposed to debate on September 10th, but who knows whether that date will stand now. Before today, Harris's polling numbers against Trump were about the same as Biden's -- but it's still a little early in the process to put any faith in polling. Trump says he can beat her, but he also said he would beat Biden in 2020 (and of course, he still says he actually won).

In short, things are pretty crazy right now. But we should not lose hope. We, the voters, have all the power. Don't give up and give it away.

***

These moments of moviegoing blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Vote blue this fall!

A little bit about the mass shooting grabbing the headlines.

 

amuzica | Deposit Photos

I owe y'all a blog post tonight, and of course yesterday's shooting in Pennsylvania is at the top of my mind. 

I have a lot of thoughts about it. I'm just not sure how many of them I ought to memorialize in a blog post.

I think we can all agree -- I hope we can, at least -- that violence has no place in political discourse. I also think we can agree that Americans have a history of attempting to settle our differences, real or perceived, with firearms.

The shooter -- whose name I'm not going to mention, in keeping with recent trends -- appears to be a natural suspect in some respects but not in others. He was young -- just a couple of years out of high school -- and worked at an entry-level job in a nursing home. Former classmates said he was quiet and very smart; one said he'd been bullied in school every day. The gunman had donated to ActBlue, the Democratic donation machine, once in the past, but he registered as a Republican for this, his first presidential election. He used an AR-15 that apparently was owned by his father. 

The victims include a volunteer firefighter who was shot while shielding his family from the gunfire. Two more people are in critical condition. All three were in the stands behind Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee for president and the assailant's apparent target. Trump suffered only a damaged earlobe.

There are lots of questions about how the shooter got to his vantage point without running afoul of the Secret Service, which had ten days' notice of the rally -- plenty of time, presumably, to scope out the venue for potential sniper nests.

And really, right now, that's pretty much everything we know. We don't know the shooter's motivation. We've heard from both Republicans and Democrats who want to make this a partisan thing. A Republican member of Congress has publicly blamed President Biden. Other Republicans want to make Democrats responsible because of their dislike of Trump. Democrats have speculated on whether this was a false flag operation to make Trump into a martyr. That spectators were also shot might discount that theory -- except that the pro-gun lobby hasn't shown much empathy for victims in previous mass shootings, preferring to accept them as collateral damage in their crusade to preserve their presumed Second Amendment right to shoot anyone they want to.

(See, that's the sort of opinion I probably shouldn't preserve in a blog post. I guess it's too late now, though.)

Anyway, armchair speculation is a fun parlor game until someone gets hurt -- and someone has. Let's ratchet back the rhetoric, let the professional investigators do their job, and get on with the election without further violence.

***

These moments of targeted blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe out there, everybody.

Whither the CD player?

I'm going to take a break from current events this week and talk about another facet of our late-stage capitalist dystopia: electronics. Specifically CD players.

While I'm a progressive politically, I'm old, so I'm a Luddite when it comes to certain things. I admit freely that I have not yet embraced the digital age 100 percent. Yes, I publish my books as ebooks; yes, I own a Kindle; yes, I have a smartphone and a laptop (and a several-generations-old iPad that has sat unused in a desk drawer since I moved here four years ago). But I have not yet succumbed to digitizing my music collection. Strike that: At one point I spent hours over several days uploading a bunch of my CDs to Apple Music on my laptop. Then I got a new laptop. Everything made the migration to the new machine except my CDs; the album cover images that I'd painstakingly uploaded made it, and I think maybe the playlists, but not the actual songs. Then I learned that Apple uses a proprietary format for music files, and there was probably no way to get those songs to transfer from my old machine to the new one.

What I took away from the experience is that uploading stuff to the cloud gives the cloud owner the rights to your stuff, and they may or may not let you keep it. Which I already knew from a debacle many years ago involving ebook files that disappeared from users' devices because reasons. Hence, I have not given up my actual, tangible CDs.

The challenge these days is to find something to play them on. For maybe a couple of decades, I owned a Bose Wave music system with the add-on CD changer. It looked like this: 

Stolen from the internet

It was hella expensive. I used to get really nice holiday gift cards from my bosses at the law firm, and one year I used my gift card to buy this system. It worked great for many years. But then, as Facebook reminded me earlier today, the changer started giving me error messages on various CDs and finally refused to play any of them. When I got hold of someone at Bose customer service, I was told it was a known issue, and they recommended that I unplug the changer or it might mess up my main unit. Reluctantly, I did. 

That was four years ago. The main CD/radio soldiered on for another couple of years, but then the CD player in it started to die, too. So a few months back, I started looking for a replacement. Of course Bose doesn't make Wave radios anymore; you can get a rebuilt one in random places, but they're super expensive, and I'm not getting those really nice gift cards anymore. So I looked for something less bougie.

My options were pretty limited: either I could go back to the component setup that I'd ditched in favor of the Wave or buy a glorified boom box. I settled on this: an AIWA Exos Home Speaker. (Note that it's marketed as an external speaker that just happens to include a CD player; this is where we are, kids.) I figured that AIWA used to be a decent brand and the unit would probably have acceptable sound quality.

When it arrived, I pulled it out of the box and set it up. I put a CD in the slot and tried to get the drawer to retract. Didn't work. Shoved it shut with my hand. Of course then it wouldn't open again and it wouldn't play.

AIWA customer service was very nice about it. The unit was clearly still under warranty -- I'd just bought it! -- and the rep told me to pack it up and send it to them on their dime, and they'd send me a replacement. He also assured me that I'd get my CD back.

So I sent the broken machine back, and in the fullness of time, the replacement arrived. And it works! But then I tried putting it in the space where the Wave radio used to live. Of course it's about a quarter of an inch too tall. 

The Wave radio fit on the shelf under the TV. The AIWA does not.
Lynne Cantwell 2024

But I can play my CDs again. The sound quality isn't as good as the old Bose, but I didn't expect it to be, and part of the problem might be my hearing issue. 

Did I get my CD back? Of course not. Is it worth calling AIWA again? Not to me!

But now I'm tempted to replace my TV stand so that the CD player will fit. In fact, a full entertainment center would look great on that wall. I could use more bookshelf space, as well as more storage space for my DVDs and Blu-Rays (which I am also hanging onto, thank you very much).

The answer to every problem in our late-stage capitalist dystopia is to spend more money, right?

***

The hearing issue: I can't remember whether I've mentioned this here before, but I have an acoustic neuroma in my left ear that has been affecting my hearing for the past four years. It's to the point now where we need to do something about it, so I'm going in next month for a "gamma knife" radiation treatment. It will be a couple of years before we find out whether the treatment is effective, and I won't get my hearing back regardless. But I'm hoping that it's successful, as the other treatment option is brain surgery. Which I would rather, y'know, avoid.

***

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

Sturm und drang, presidential debate edition.

inueng | Deposit Photos

Let's just start off with the obvious, shall we? The debate Thursday night between President Joe Biden and former president and convicted felon Donald Trump was, for anyone with a grain of sensitivity, painful to watch. Biden was off his game, for whatever reason (I've seen several theories, ranging from "he's 81 and tired" to "he has a cold" to "maybe the Trump team slipped him a mickey" -- yes, I really did see that one, although not in exactly those words). Biden dropped the rhetorical ball a couple of times. His "I can't believe the bullshit coming out of this guy's mouth" expression -- I assume that's what he was going for -- came off as slack-jawed, but not in a good way. 

About an hour after it was over, when I finally shook off my shock and disbelief, all I could say to myself was: "That was bad."

Indeed, the performance handed all the pundits who have never liked Biden the ammunition they've been looking for. He's lost it, they said, some muttering amongst themselves and some aloud; he should step aside and let somebody else run, they said. The New York Times editorial board agreed, and went so far as to publish it.* 

Never mind how something like that would throw the electoral process into chaos. What about all the voters who have already cast their primary ballots for Biden? Wouldn't that disenfranchise us?

And never mind how things turned out when President Lyndon Johnson pulled out of his primary race for a second term in 1968. Chaos ensued. The Democratic Party ended up nominating Johnson's vice president, Hubert Humphrey -- who lost to Richard Nixon.

Historian Allan Lichtman has correctly predicted the winner of nine out of the past ten presidential elections.** He has no time for the pundits who want to kick Biden to the curb right now; debates don't matter, he told CNN. Lichtman has developed 13 keys to determine which candidate will win, and even after Thursday's debate, his system is still leaning toward a Biden win in the fall.

Another historian, Heather Cox Richardson, who blogs at Substack, has pointed out that Trump used a technique called a Gish gallop during the debate: "It's a rhetorical technique in which someone throws out a fast string of lies, non-sequiturs, and specious arguments, so many that it is impossible to fact-check or rebut them in the amount of time it took to say them. Trying to figure out how to respond makes the opponent look confused, because they don't know where to start grappling with the flood that has just hit them. It is a form of gaslighting, and it is especially effective on someone with a stutter, as Biden has."

The editorial board of the Philadelphia Inquirer saw through Trump's bullshit. In an editorial this weekend, the board said it was Trump who should drop out of the race. The editorial recapped Trump's greatest hits, among them his 31 felony convictions and three additional felony trials to come, and his bombastic rhetoric about how awful everything in America is: "Throughout the debate, Trump repeatedly said we are a 'failing' country. He called the United States a 'third world nation.' He said, 'we're living in hell' and 'very close to World War III.'

"'People are dying all over the place,' Trump said, later adding 'we're literally an uncivilized country now.'" Trump, the editorial goes on to note, told 30 lies during the 90-minute debate. There's more -- read it yourself at the link -- but it wraps up with, "There was only one person at the debate who does not deserve to be running for president. The sooner Trump exits the stage, the better off the country will be."

I could not agree more. 

***

*That editorial was the last straw for me. I've finally canceled my NYT subscription.

**The only election out of the past ten that Lichtman's system didn't get right is Bush vs. Gore in 2000. He said Gore would win. Given that the Supreme Court had to decide the winner, I think we can give him a pass on that one.

***

These moments of decisive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Get out and vote!

How to get rid of a boss: a case study.

So let's say that at your latest staff meeting at work, the Big Boss tells everybody on your team that you're getting a new supervisor. Oh, and by the way, your old supervisor was offered a brand-new position in the organization, but instead of taking it, she quit.

Now, you and your colleagues have heard some things about this new supervisor, none of them good. He has some sketchy behavior in his past -- unethical and possibly even illegal. You also know that he's a crony of the Big Boss, and that B.B. has been padding the C-suite with several of his cronies over the past few months -- in an effort, B.B. says, to make the company more profitable. But your company is no stranger to putting principles ahead of money; that's the way it has done business over many decades. And you and your colleagues sure as hell don't want to work for this sketchy new supervisor. So what do you do?

Welp, if you're the Washington Post newsroom, you assign an investigative team to run a bunch of stories about the shenanigans in your new supervisor's past so that he'll quit before he even starts the job. 

And it worked! On Friday, it was announced that Robert Winnett would not be joining the Post as its executive editor, after all. 

As a former journalist, I've been bemused by watching this unfold. Winnett was hired away from the London Daily Telegram by the Post's new chief executive officer and publisher, William Lewis. Both Lewis and Winnett are British. Both are White. They had worked together in the past, at the London Daily Telegraph and the Sunday Times.

But British newspapers have been known to play fast-and-loose with certain practices that are considered highly unethical to American journalists. From the link above, here, in a nutshell, is the dirt on these two guys:

A Post investigation published Sunday revealed Winnett's connections to a confessed con artist turned whistleblower who has admitted to using illegal methods to gain information for stories in Britain's Sunday Times...

The New York Times also reported that Winnett and Lewis had based some stories on stolen records, and raised new questions about a payment made to obtain information that led to a 2009 investigation into government corruption, which shook the British political establishment and led to several officials' resignations.

The Post story goes on to note, "Paying sources for information is considered unethical in most American newsrooms. So is representing oneself as anything other than a journalist to gain confidential information as part of newsgathering..."  

The way Winnett's predecessor was shown the door also rankled among the newsroom staff. Sally Buzbee was the first woman hired as executive editor at the paper, which won three Pulitzer Prizes this year. But Lewis decided she had to go anyway. He offered her a position heading up a brand-new division at the Post covering service news and social media -- which, to be honest, sounds a lot like kicking the little lady out of a man's job and sending her back to editing the women's page. Instead, she quit. 

And now Winnett isn't coming. But it's okay -- Winnett wasn't supposed to transition into the job until after the election this fall, anyway. In the interim, Lewis had hired Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, to run the newsroom, and then helm the new division when Winnett came on board. Now I guess Murray will be the executive editor for the forseeable future. 

But never mind that. Don't you wish you had the power at your job to publicly embarrass your incoming supervisor and his boss by publicizing their sketchy pasts?

***

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

Jimmy Mender: the denouement.

Back in February, I wrote a post about a friend and fellow indie author, Leland Dirks, who had died shortly before. Leland was a special guy. He lived in southeastern Colorado, way out in the sticks, with an assortment of dogs in a house he built himself. He was also gay. And he made no secret of it -- not in his public persona and not in his writings. Everyone who knew him, loved him.

But there's a dark undercurrent running through Leland's work. He talked about growing up in a fundamendalist Christian family where he was not accepted for who he was. During Pride Month 2017, he wrote this on his Facebook page. I'm not going to include a link to his page, for reasons that I'll address below.

What I am proud of first is that I have survived. I did not kill myself, as far too many young people have. Which is not to say that I did not try.... 

I am proud that in the face of hatred and purposeful misunderstanding, even by close family members, I did not deny or lie about a part of who I am.

I am proud that I, like many young boys and girls, survived sexual abuse. I am proud that I sought help in overcoming the damage that left behind. 

Not long after Leland died, I ran across a Facebook post by one of his nephews, announcing his death. On that post, his brother commented with a hateful screed laced with biblical references, condemning Leland's "lifestyle". I don't think he explicitly said that he believed Leland would go to hell, but for sure that was the implication. The nephew claimed the brother's comments were made "out of love." 

I kept my mouth shut. But what I wanted to say was, "If that's what passes for love in your family, no wonder your uncle moved to the back of beyond."

Shortly after that, the brother got into Leland's Kindle Direct Publishing account and rewrote his About section. Here's a link. You can read it yourself, if you have the stomach for it. 

All of Leland's Kindle titles have been unpublished. His paperbacks are still listed, but most are "currently unavailable". His YouTube channel is void of content. His Facebook and Twitter accounts are gone. Someone else is using his Tumblr account. The only place online where I could still find his writing is his author page on Facebook, which I am not going to link to because I don't want his family to be aware of its existence.

I try really, really, really hard to avoid trashing other people's religions. But I cannot understand how followers of a religion that preaches love and forgiveness can sit in righteous judgment of their fellow humans. Isn't that the job of their god? And if Jehovah made everyone in his image, as they claim to believe, then how can they condemn any part of his creation? "Hate the sin but love the sinner" just doesn't cut it for me; it strikes me as mental gymnastics to justify the treatment of other people as less than human.

In that 2017 post, Leland also wrote:

I am proud that I read the book that people used to tell me that I was going to hell and found instead the story of David and Jonathan, the story of the Centurion who asked Jesus to heal the young man he loved, the story of Ruth and Naomi, whose words are often used in many weddings of all sorts.

He got it. I'm sad that his brother hasn't. 

To that man, the brother who is intent on trashing Leland's legacy to "save souls", I say this: I hope that when you get to the afterlife and see Leland again, you will realize the error of your ways. May he be kinder to you than you have been to him. 

Netrun78 | Deposit Photos

***

Several years ago, Leland messaged a few of his indie author friends, including me, and suggested that we promise each other to be the protectors of each other's writings. We all agreed. But as far as I know, when Leland knew he was dying, he never followed up with any of us. 

Creative friends, consider this a cautionary tale. If you have an inkling that your heirs will not respect and protect your work after you're gone, please, please make provisions to hand over the reins to someone who will. Do it today.

***

These moments of sad and angry blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy Pride Month, y'all, and remember: LOVE WINS.

 

All the sides of Trump's felony convictions.

 

Tribaliumivanka | Deposit Photos

In last week's post, I made note of the fact that the 45th president of the United States is now a convicted felon. 

Imagine my consternation on Thursday, when the Washington Post ran an op-ed by Carroll Bogert, president of the Marshall Project, asking the media not to use the term in referring to Donald Trump.

According to Bogert's short bio that accompanied the column, the Marshall Project is a nonprofit online news organization dedicated to covering criminal justice. Bogert believes that "journalism can make our legal system more fair, effective, transparent and humane", and the way to begin to do that is to watch our language. 

"Felon", Bogert says, is pejorative. She writes, "Surely part of the impetus behind the sudden widespread use of the word 'felon' is to take Trump down a peg, to label him as no better than a common criminal. And that is the problem." She notes that people convicted of felonies are often from the margins of society. Calling them "felons" dehumanizes them -- it reduces them to nothing but their crime -- and, among other things, it makes it more difficult for them to pick up the pieces of their lives when they have served their time.

She acknowledges that Trump does not inhabit the margins of society. He is wealthy, privileged, and powerful. And "felon" is a wonderfully clear word -- the kind that journalists usually love to use. Besides, it's the truth: if you're convicted of committing a felony, you're a felon. 

But, she maintains, people convicted of felonies are people first. She compares "felon" to the term "person with a disability", which has been slowly gaining ground on "disabled person"; the idea is that the person needs to be front and center, not the disability. In emphasizing Trump's convictions by calling him a felon, she says, we run the risk of losing the humanity that other people convicted of felonies have begun to regain.

I am of two minds about this.

It should be a no-brainer for me. I'm the person who decreed, as the managing editor at Zapnews thirty-odd years ago, that we would not use the terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" in news copy because they were political positions, not really descriptive of the two sides' stances. (I'm pretty sure I said we should use "anti-abortion" instead of "pro-life". I don't remember what I said to use instead of "pro-choice", and I'm really hoping it wasn't "pro-abortion"; if I did, I hereby apologize.)

Moreover, as alert hearth/myth readers know, I'm an animist. I've explained how I believe it's not just human people who have personhood and deserve respect. Animals and plants have ways of communicating with us and with one another, and even physical features of our world such as mountains, rivers, and rocks may have ways of thinking and feeling that we can't understand. Just because we can't perceive their language, it doesn't mean they don't have one.

I've also talked here about how it's wrong for humans to dehumanize one another; for centuries, that's how we justified slavery and genocide.

And yet. 

And yet, it feels so delicious to dehumanize Trump. I do want to knock him down a peg. I do want to see him treated as any other criminal would be treated.* And "felon" is a clear word. A truthful word.

And given the way his first presidency degraded the nation, and given what he and those close to him intend to do if he's elected again, I could make a strong case for using almost any language to emphasize the clear and present danger he presents to the nation.

And yet.

Is it right to hurt people just to score points against Trump?

I'm feeling a little like Tevye here: "On the other hand...."

I can't promise that I'll never refer to Trump as a convicted felon again. But I promise that I'll pause and think about it. 

Even if only for a nanosecond.

***

*His pre-sentencing conference is tomorrow. But just like the perp walk we never got to see, he's not going to get the full treatment this time, either. He'll be answering the probation officer's questions by video conference from Mar-a-Lago, with his attorney at his side. The official line is that having him report to the probation office, with his usual entourage of Secret Service agents and members of the media in tow, would be disruptive to the whole office and would complicate the lives of other people who are there to meet with their own probation officers.

Sentencing is set for July 11th. The Republican National Convention starts just four days later.

***

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

Rich person, poor person, convicted person.

I have an iPhone (go ahead, say it: "OK, Boomer!"). One nice thing about it is that for ten bucks a month, I get access to stories from a whole lot of publications that I'd otherwise have to pay big money for.

Take, for instance, the Wall Street Journal. I had an introductory subscription for a while, but when that ran its course, the price jumped to the usual $36.99 a month -- which didn't work for me, but totally makes sense for the kinds of readers they're trying to attract (i.e., bankers, stock traders, hedge fund operators, and other finance types).

The WSJ's news coverage reflects who they see as their ideal audience. Take, for example, this story from this week. I've included the link in case you have a WSJ subscription, which I realize is pretty unlikely, so here's the gist of the story: A couple of Nobel laureates decided in 2010 that $75,000 a year ($110,000 a year in 2024 dollars) was the peak salary for happiness; after that, if your salary went up, you'd be no happier. Researchers today are having a hard time replicating their work. From the story: "More recent research suggests that there may be no household income at which happiness peaks, and that our money might influence our emotions well beyond that threshold." As a general rule, though, people who make higher incomes tend to be happier. 

ra2studio | Deposit Photos

To paraphrase something that a fellow I once worked with used to say: Every obvious fact will someday be confirmed by an academic study. 

One obvious fact is mostly left out of the story, although one of the researchers does mention it obliquely: "It isn't what the money buys, but the choices it affords." Or in other words, the less money you make, the fewer options you have. 

And of course poor people have the fewest options of all. Oh, the government has programs to help the poor, but this article in The Atlantic this week paints a less-than-rosy view of that assistance. (You should be able to get to the article from that link -- I got a come-on to subscribe, but I wasn't blocked me outright.) Here's a summary, from the article:

Beginning in the 1980s, the U.S. government aggressively pursued the privatization of many government functions under the theory that businesses would compete to deliver these services more cheaply and effectively than a bunch of lazy bureaucrats. The result is a lucrative and politically powerful set of industries that are fueled by government anti-poverty programs and thus depend on poverty for their business model. These entities often take advantage of the very people they ostensibly serve.

From Medicaid programs to state welfare systems to job-training programs, management of government programs to help the poor climb out of poverty has been turned over to private enterprise -- which of course has a vested interest in perpetuating the cycle, so these private companies can keep as much government money as possible for themselves. 

Note the date in the quote, by the way. Who was president during the 1980s? Why, it was Ronald Reagan, whose "Morning in America" brought us trickle-down economics, weakened labor unions, and more -- ideas that, in the 40 years since, have gutted the American middle class and sent nearly all of the country's economic growth to the top. To the kind of people the Wall Street Journal would love to have as subscribers.

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Speaking of (supposedly) rich people: We've all heard the news by now that as of Thursday, former president Donald Trump is a convicted felon. A grand jury in New York City brought 34 felony counts against him for fraud in furtherance of another crime, and this week, a jury of twelve ordinary New Yorkers convicted him on every count.

Yes, it's likely he will never see the inside of a prison cell -- at least, not for long. And yes, the Republican Party is unlikely to nominate somebody (anybody!) else for president later this summer. But even if all he gets is probation, he'll have to check in with a probation officer on a regular basis. His travel schedule will have to be okayed by his probation officer in advance. And if he violates his probation, he could still be sent to jail. Quite a comedown for the guy with a gilded toilet.

Plus there's a whole list of countries that won't allow in a convicted felon, which could make diplomatic travel dicey for him if he's elected again.

Although it doesn't mean he won't be. The one thing we can all do to prevent that is to make sure we get out and vote in November.

***

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

Kitchen progress.

Last week, I promised y'all a look at the kitchen redo. It's not 100 percent done (more on that below), but I did finish the grout. So here are a few photos.

First, the before and after (in reverse order): 

After! Lynne Cantwell 2024

Before! Lynne Cantwell 2024

I discovered when the installers took the old microwave down that the kitchen originally didn't have a microwave above the stove. Instead, it had one of those old-fashioned range hoods, as evidenced by the backsplash tile pattern -- there are two more rows of those flower tiles, one behind the stove and one behind the microwave. Once they put the old microwave up, you couldn't see the whole backsplash design. After weighing various layouts for my new tile, and realizing that the Day of the Dead tiles were 4.25" by 4.25" instead of the 4"x4" of the solid blue, I decided to just do the whole area behind the stove in the Day of the Dead tiles. I did not, however, try to pull down the microwave by myself. So someday when somebody decides they'd rather not have a microwave over the stove -- surprise!

I decided on the spur of the moment to tile the whole backsplash on the stove side of the kitchen, hence the addition of the white tiles. I also went down an extra row of tile behind the stove, because eventually I want to get an induction stove (mainly because induction is safer for old farts) and most of them are slide-in models without the panel of controls along the back.

I bought the swirly knobs and cup pulls with the antique copper finish on clearance quite some time ago. Then sometime last year, I spotted the swirly switchplate covers, also in antique copper. I was so excited that I ordered them immediately. They have been sitting in a box because the old backsplash came up about a quarter inch too high for the copper covers to fit. When I put up the new tile on the sink side, you bet I made sure the new backsplash was low enough to accommodate those switchplate covers. (Interestingly, or maybe just interesting to me, when I pulled off the plain plastic covers, I realized the bottom edge of one had been trimmed off. Something tells me the tile guy wasn't communicating with the finish guy...)

Lynne Cantwell 2024

There's an additional issue for the plug on the stove side. I need to turn off power to the plug and raise it up to be flush with the tile, using spacers called caterpillars.

All the weeks I've spent watching old episodes of Ask This Old House have paid off. I learned how to: pop old tiles off a wall, patch a wall damaged by the countertop installers when they took down my old tile, install tile, and use a table saw. I sprung for a small wet tile saw after seeing the pros use them on the show (and after the nice lady at Artesano's here in Santa Fe told me that it's about the same price to buy a little one than to rent one), and used it successfully on this project -- which is to say that the tiles that needed to be cut were cut, and I still have all my fingers.

I still have to caulk the edges along the countertop, the tops, and the sides. I also need to seal the grout lines. And at some point, I need to paint (I'm 98 percent sure that I'm going with this color). But it's close enough to done that I unfurled the runner that I got from Ruggable. 

This is the way. 
Lynne Cantwell 2024

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The details -- skip this part if you're already bored: Countertops are solid surface from Lowe's in Terrazzo Sea Glass; 50-50 split undermount sink was free with the countertops; faucet is the Ophelia by Delta; cabinet pulls and knobs were on clearance at Westwoods Cabinet Hardware; switchplate covers came from Switch Hits; Day of the Dead tiles are from La Fuente Imports. The grout is Polyblend Plus in (heh) Bone; the caulk is going to be the same color. This is the wet tile saw I bought; I'll use it again if/when I redo the bathroom. Total cost, not counting the appliances, was less than $6,500, $5,000 of which was for the countertops and plumber.

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Funny story about the grout: The nice lady at Artesano's said not to get a goofy color, but to match it to the countertop. So I dutifully took my countertop sample to the big box hardware store -- and then I had to laugh. The countertop is white with terrazzo-style flecks of light brown and light gray. It goes with everything. I finally just picked a grout color at random. Didn't even occur to me that I'd grabbed "Bone" to go with the Day of the Dead tiles 'til later.

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

Darmok and Jalad on the road.

The problem with memes is that everyone who sees them needs to speak the same language. 

I was reminded of this yesterday, when I shared two memes on Facebook. One hit its mark with almost all of my friends; with the other, I inadvertently started a fight. 

Let me back up and explain why I didn't write a post last weekend: I was visiting friends in California. They live near Temecula, which is inland from the coast. It wasn't my first trip to the state (naturally, as I nailed all 50 states several years ago), but it was my first time in this part of the state. We saw a bunch of stuff and had a fine time. 

Harveston Lake Park, Temecula, CA | Lynne Cantwell 2024

Joshua Tree National Park, CA | Lynne Cantwell 2024

La Jolla Cove, La Jolla, CA | Lynne Cantwell 2024

California is a big, beautiful state. There are big cities and rural areas, mountains and deserts and the Pacific Ocean. But because it is so big, to experience it, you pretty much have to spend a lot of time on the road -- and as in big cities all over the world, if you're driving, you're going to be in heavy traffic. 

I mean, I lived near DC for more than 30 years. One thing I don't miss about it is the traffic. I once met a woman who always brought a knitting project along when she drove herself to work, so she could work on the socks or whatever when she was stuck in traffic.

So anyway, after I got back to Santa Fe, where heavy traffic means waiting through an extra light cycle to make a left, I happened to see this meme. 

Stolen from somebody on Facebook

It made me laugh, so I shared it. 

Then all hell broke loose. The Californians, insulted, were like, "Not all of California!" The Texans were like, "Parts of Texas look like that photo of California!" The New Mexicans didn't say anything (I presume they were chuckling to themselves).

Let's pause here and talk about the other meme I mentioned. It's the one where Pooh and Piglet are having a conversation -- except in this version, Piglet says, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra," and Pooh replies, "Shaka, when the walls fell." The dialogue comes from my very favorite episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which Picard and crew make first contact with a civilization that communicates only in metaphor. The phrases encapsulate the culture's allegorical myths; for example, "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" refers to a story about two enemies who teamed up to fight a mutual enemy and, through that experience, became friends. But you have to know the myth to get the meaning.

Now back to the driving meme. Part of the reason I thought it was funny was that it sums up some New Mexicans' (and some Coloradans') view of both Californians and Texans: that they're carpetbaggers who escape the high cost of living in their home states by moving to other states, thereby driving up prices for housing and everything else. In reality, lots of factors go into rising prices, including corporate greed, but if you're looking for an excuse for why X is suddenly so expensive, people are suddenly so rude, traffic is suddenly so horrible, and so on, new arrivals are an easy target.

Of course, as a (relatively) new arrival to New Mexico myself, I'm aware that I'm part of the "problem". Self-awareness is important, I think. So is agreeing with the locals to blend in, right?

Anyway. To me, the driving meme sums up the stereotypical views of the three states held by New Mexicans: California might be pretty, but the traffic is horrible; Texas is miles and miles of nothing at all; and New Mexico has no traffic and beautiful scenery. Therefore, New Mexico is best.

To get the meme, you have to know the myth.

***

Besides stirring up trouble on social media, I've been putting up new tile in my kitchen this week. It took me longer than I expected (every home improvement project takes longer than you expect...) and still needs to be grouted. So I'll share photos next week.

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These moments of communicative blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Peace to all -- or as a Tamarian would say, "Temba, his arms wide."

"Your data likes this. Here's more!"

I'll get to the cryptic post title in a sec. But first I thought I'd update y'all on my progress on the runner rug. I finished the weaving Friday night, a titch ahead of schedule, and cut it off the loom the same night. Here's how it looked when it was halfway off the loom. I'm stoked that my idea for the center diamond worked as planned. (Yes, the motif is supposed to be off center. I'm okay with that.)

Lynne Cantwell 2024

As you can see, it's Tigs approved -- so far. We'll see how he feels about it when it's stretched out on the bathroom floor.

Right now, the rug has been soaked and is hanging to dry. Then I'll iron it and hem it on the sewing machine. I'm hoping to finish it tonight. 

(Before someone asks: The Ruggable box contains a runner for the kitchen. It's still in the box because the new kitchen counters are going to be installed tomorrow -- at last! -- and then I have to tile the backsplash. I'll put the rug down once all the construction is done. But for those who can't wait to see it: this is the way.)

***

Now about that quote.

Longtime hearth/myth readers will remember when I was all excited about tiny houses. I spent years exploring the idea of downsizing to a tiny house on wheels. I even blogged about it here, here, here, here, here, and probably some other times when I didn't tag it. It wasn't the "wheels" part that excited me, but the tiny-dwelling part. Back then, I was living in an 850-square-foot apartment. It had a generously-sized living/dining room and a great galley kitchen. The bedroom was big enough for a loveseat and occasional table along with the bed and dresser. I thought it had a lot of wasted space. I was sure I could downsize to 500 square feet with no problem. (And I did when I first moved to Santa Fe. But I needed another closet, so I bought the condo, which is about 1,000 square feet.) 

Eventually, though, I dropped the idea of getting a tiny house. It wasn't the size of the living space that put me off; it was the inability to get one close enough to urban, or even suburban, amenities. Cities don't want tiny dwellings unless they're temporary units for unhoused persons. They're just now beginning to approve accessory dwelling units for folks with single-family houses to put in their backyards for Grandma to live in. But a sub-750-square-foot house by itself on a city lot is beyond the pale for a bunch of reasons, including city infrastructure, density, tax base, etc., etc., etc. So by the time I retired in 2020, I had given up on the idea.

Mama Google, though, remembers all. As recently as this week, Google's news page on my phone has suggested an article about tiny houses to me. It's been four freaking years since I moved to Santa Fe, lady -- give it a rest already!

But that speaks to the quote in the title, doesn't it? The search algorithm just keeps serving up links like the links you've already clicked on, whether you're still interested in the thing or not.

The quote is from Jordan Klepper, one of the hosts on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart isn't there. Klepper and his co-host, Ronny Chieng, were interviewing Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for the New Yorker who has a written a book called Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. I haven't read the book, although it sounds interesting. But that quote struck me so forcefully that I wrote it down. 

Here's the thing about algorithms: When they have you pegged, how do you break free? I talked here recently about kitchen renovations. That same Google news page on my phone has been serving up kitchen remodeling articles, even though I've already past the decision phase on the kitchen. I started looking up other home improvement topics to get it to quit showing me kitchen stuff. It hasn't worked very well.

This is a minor topic to be inundated with links about. But what about major topics? What about, say, politics? One of the points Chayka made in the interview, and presumably in the book as well, is that algorithms peg our politics and then keep us pegged. Voters in the US have been funneled into one of two political buckets. How do you climb out of the bucket you're in? It ain't easy. And as many others have observed, the polarization of our electorate is damaging the country as a whole.

I wish I had an answer, but I don't think we're going to get one any time soon. For sure, the solution won't come from an algorithm.

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

Crafty baby (stair) steps.

Tonight's post is gonna be a quickie, because I want to get back to the loom before I lose my mojo again. Here's what I'm currently working on (read: sick of looking at): 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

The pattern is called the Stair Step Rug. I got it from Gist Yarn, but their yarn colors didn't really go with my decor, so I'm using Maurice Brassard yarn instead. The blue, which I'm using for both the warp (the long threads) and some of the weft (the back-and-forth threads), is a cotton/linen blend in the Peacock colorway. The other stuff is a cotton slub yarn, kind of like boucle, in the Turquoise colorway. Here's a photo of some of the photos in the pattern, so you can see what it's supposed to look like when it's done: 

I started it in October or November, I think, and I'd already be done if I hadn't decided to double the length and make it a runner. It's taking forever because this yarn is a whole lot skinnier than the Churro that I've been working with lately. The technique is called crackle weave; I won't bore you with too much technical lingo, but basically I'm alternating the colors -- one row blue, the next turquoise -- with the blue rows all in plain weave and the turquoise rows in a twill pattern. Warping the loom to make all that work was a joy, let me tell you. But it should be very cool looking, with a big Southwesterny diamond in the middle, when it's done. 

The only other project I've finished since my last crafty post is this shawl: 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

The pattern is the Moroccan Lantern Shawl. When I started it last fall, it had been quite a while since I'd knitted anything. I wish I knew what possessed me to pick a pattern with a lacy stitch for my first project after my knitting hiatus. It was kind of a slog. But it's now been done for a while, waiting for me to block it so the points on the bottom edge stand out more clearly. I might get to that here pretty soon. Or maybe not. We'll see.

Speaking of getting to things, I'm going to stop here and get back to weaving. I figured out that if I sit at the loom every night this week, I could have the weaving done by next Sunday. The rug wouldn't be done done, but at least I'll be able to take it off the loom. I'll let you know how it goes.

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

Sad neutrals, begone!

One of the few good things to have come out of Social Security withholding my benefits for way too many months was that it allowed me more time to think about some of the things I want to do with this apartment. 

That's also one of the bad things. Over the past few months, I've spent an inordinate amount of time checking out various blogs and online magazines for redecorating tips. Kitchens are the biggest moneymakers -- HGTV quotes HomeAdvisor as saying a regular kitchen remodel today can cost between $14,611 and $41,432, or about $27,000 as the midpoint -- so of course there are a blue billion articles full of advice on improving your kitchen. Bathrooms are the next biggest gold mine in terms of remodeling, so there are a lot of articles on that, too. 

I say "moneymaker" and "gold mine" with good reason. Virtually all of these articles -- like every article about redecorating in general -- is designed to make you feel inadequate. Because their advertisers, or in the case of influencers, the companies bankrolling them, want to convince you to do something to make your home more comfortable/luxurious/minimalist/maximalist/coastal grandma/spa-like/easy to sell/whatever. For the last few years, as near as I can tell, what you were supposed to be striving for was a farmhouse kitchen with a minimalist aesthetic everywhere else, or something. Anyway, there was a lot of beadboard. And everything from the walls to the sofas to the kitchen cabinets was supposed to be white. A slight deviation from white was allowed, as long as you stuck to neutrals. So beige was okay. Then gray had a moment, and so did greige, an unholy alliance of beige and gray.

It should have been apparent that once designers got on board with greige, neutrals had just about run their course. So now the self-appointed experts are doing a 180. Color, we are now told, is in. No more sad beige! 

Some folks have not quite gotten the hang of this color thing. Here's a screenshot of a Facebook ad I've seen a couple of times. It's from a video posted by an influencer (or maybe the company set up the account themselves -- it's hard to tell these days) who says that with this quilt, her sad beige days are officially over! 

So I'm looking at this and thinking, "If that's your idea of color, honey, we need to talk."

Alert hearth/myth readers who have seen my art quilt headboard and who recall the saga of the stripey chair will understand why I say that. I've never been a fan of neutrals; I lived in apartments for too many years, where all the walls were white unless you painted them yourself and made them white again when you moved out or you didn't get your deposit back. If there's something in my space now that's a neutral color, there needs to be a damn good reason for it -- and resale value is not a good reason when you don't intend to move again for a really long time. And there had better be something fun nearby to balance the bland.

Now I get it. I do. Bright colors take some getting used to. Generation Jonesers may have a leg up on it, given that pop art was, well, popular in the late '60s and early '70s. Some of it is still around; Peter Max, who helped to define the genre, did this poster for Earth Day 2000, 24 years ago tomorrow: 

That's another screenshot, this one from Max's website. You can buy this poster there -- signed and dedicated! -- for $355.

Decorating experts and influencers have a long way to go before we're back to including pop-art colors regularly in interior design. Baby steps for now, I guess.

***

I have to share this with y'all. At the bottom of the article on coastal grandmother style (admit it -- you thought I was kidding about coastal grandmother style) was a link to an offshoot they called coastal cowgirl. I don't think it took.

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Oh hey, there's an update to my kitchen remodeling adventure: The new countertops are finally on their way! I'll share pics when they're here in a couple of weeks. Also, the twelve-year-old fridge started to go bad, so I replaced it this week. I'm hoping the stove will hang on 'til I have the cash to get an induction model (and new cookware that will work on it, which is another story).

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These moments of colorful blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Happy Earth Day!

In which I reconsider the hill I said I would die on.

I may have mentioned that I'm Czech on my mother's side. My maternal grandparents came over from the province of Bohemia in the late 1800s and very early 1900s. My grandfather's family settled in southwestern Wisconsin and then moved to the Chicago area; my grandmother's family migrated to Chicago and stayed there.

Mom's family was closer geographically to us, so we spent a lot of holidays with her side of the family. And of course Mom did all the cooking at home. So I have a fair acquaintance with Czech foods -- particularly baked goods. 

Besides the Chicago area, Czech immigrants to this country settled in several other states, including Iowa, Nebraska, and Texas. (The National Czech and Slovak Museum and Library is in Cedar Rapids. I've never been, but I should probably visit sometime.) The Texas Czechs apparently came from the province of Moravia, arrived in America through the port of Galveston, settled in west Texas, and about 50 years later, started churning out kolaches for sale. Except these Texas kolaches are not the same as the koláčky I remember from my childhood. Ours were cookies. The Texas variety are more like Danish -- some with the fruit and cheese fillings I remember and some filled with stuff like sausage and jalapeños.

To me, this has always been WRONG. I could stretch my personal definition of koláčky to the bigger fruit buns, but savory ones are right out.

Yesterday at the grocery store, I saw some of the savory ones in the freezer section, and it just caught me at the wrong moment. I posted this on Facebook: 

In the ensuing discussion, during which certain of my friends stood up for the Texas kind, I stumbled across a website called Cook Like Czechs. And that's when I figured out where I'd been going wrong. 

It turns out that there are two Czech pastries with similar names:

• the kolache -- the Danish-like yeast bun, which in Czech is spelled koláč in the singular and koláče in the plural; and 
• the koláčky -- the cookies -- of my youth. Here's the thing: koláčky is the plural form; the singular is koláček.

When I read that, a light bulb went off. See, in English, we add "little" before a noun to show that something is a small version of something else. Spanish does the same thing by adding a diminutive suffix: -ito or -ita. With me so far? Okay. Well, in Czech, the diminutive suffix is -ek. So a koláček is a little koláč. 

I'd never heard the singular form -- they were always koláčky in our family. Mom might have used koláč to mean one cookie, which would have added to the confusion.

Anyway, Petra at Cook Like Czechs lists similar traditional fillings for both kolaches and the cookie version: apricot, peach, cherry, prune, poppyseed (my all-time fave), and cream cheese. Petra uses a sweet yeast dough for her kolaches and a cream cheese dough for her koláčky. My mom used yeast dough for her koláčky but made them square and folded the opposite corners in, like in the photo of the recipe at Cook Like Czechs. I make mine with a cream cheese dough but cut them into circles and put a dot of filling in the middle, like thumbprint cookies. 

Lynne Cantwell | 2015 or so

You have perhaps noted that so far, I haven't mentioned any jalapeños. 

So there is a thing called a klobasnek (in Czech, klobásník). It seems to have been invented by those Czech immigrants in Texas. It uses kolache dough as the wrapping; originally the filling was chopped meat, but over the years it has expanded to include all sorts of savory things, including eggs, cheese, sausage, and yes, hot dogs and jalapeños. Of course, because America, klobasneks became conflated with kolaches -- I guess because they use the same dough? 

Anyway, now "kolache" is the generic term for both the sweet buns and the savory things. Let's call them Tex-Czech, okay? Maybe it will keep me from stroking out when I see them in the grocery store.

***

Fun fact: I mentioned above that kolache is the Americanized form of koláče, which is plural. So people who say "kolaches" have pluralized the word twice. Considering there are Americans who routinely call an ATM an "ATM machine", I can't say I'm surprised.

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I learned something else from the Cook Like Czechs website. There's a festive braided bread that's often made at the holidays. We've always called it houska. But this blogger says that's because our family immigrated around the turn of the 20th century. Later on in the Czech lands, the name of this bread changed to vánočka. It's the same thing, just called by a different name. If you go to Czechia now and ask for houska, they'll bring you a braided white roll. Times do change, don't they?

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These moments of Tex-Czech blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Dobrou chut'!

Big Tobacco -- sorry, Big Food -- fights back.

djmilic | Deposit Photos

Toward the end of my time in DC, I was in a bad way. I had been on and off diets for about 50 years, losing hundreds of pounds, only to gain them all back, plus some. I was on two high-priced drugs for type 2 diabetes, one of which was Ozempic. I knew that diets didn't work, and yet every doctor I saw told me I needed to go on another one. When I resisted, I was called noncompliant. The whole dance stressed me out and gave me a binge eating disorder. 

Then a therapist told me about health at every size. The idea is that the scale is not the be-all and end-all -- that your weight doesn't matter as long as your blood pressure, etc., are fine. I glommed onto the idea like a life preserver. The therapist sent me to a dietitian, who recommended a book called The F*ck-It Diet: Eating Should Be Easy. (The publisher put the asterisk in the title, not me.) A lot of what the author wrote made sense to me, so I decided to try eating whatever I wanted, whenever I was hungry.

My fasting blood sugar shot up to about 180. (Note to those who know nothing about blood sugar readings: a fasting reading of between 70 and 100 is normal; 200 is high; at 400, you need to go to the E.R.; and if it's as high as 600, you could go into a coma and die.) I started to maybe think I was being sold a bill of goods -- that as a diabetic, maybe I couldn't eat whatever I wanted. When I broached the subject with the dietitian, I was a titch confrontational -- but the upshot was that she didn't know whether a fasting blood sugar reading of 180 was dangerous for a diabetic or not. We parted ways immediately. Very shortly thereafter, I also parted ways with the therapist who'd sent me to her.

This was not my first run-in with dietitians and nutritionists, although it was the most egregious. So this past week, I wasn't terribly surprised to see this article in the Washington Post: "As obesity rises, Big Food and dietitians push 'anti-diet' advice". It's a gift article, so feel free to click through and read it. The bottom line is that big food manufacturers like General Mills are co-opting the health-at-every-size message and turning it on its head. They claim to be empowering people to reject fat shaming and eat anything they want -- including, of course, Big Food's highly-processed products. To get there, they're enlisting dietitians as social media influencers, even to the extent of paying them to promote the manufacturers' products. (That link is also to a gift article. Both are the result of a new partnership between the Post and The Examination, a nonprofit news organization that specializes in coverage of public health issues around the world.)

The worst part is how these food manufacturers are distorting the health-at-every-size message. Its roots are in the 1960s civil rights movement, according to the article; the original goal was to promote equal access to healthcare. By 1995, the movement had come up with "intuitive eating" as a way for people, including those with eating disorders, to learn to listen for internal hunger cues that diet culture had taught them to ignore. 

As interest in intuitive eating increased, Big Food began to pay attention. Clearly, the industry is scared that the anti-diet movement, along with the success of drugs like Wegovy (aka Ozempic formulated for weight loss) in tamping down desire for junk food, are going to upend their business model. After all, obesity has been deemed a healthcare crisis. So the industry is manipulating the movement's message by "essentially shift[ing] accountability for the health crisis away from the food industry for creating ultra-processed junk foods laden with food additives, sugars and artificial sweeteners," as last week's article says.

This looks suspiciously like the sort of propaganda that Big Tobacco employed for decades to convince its customers that its addictive, cancer-causing products weren't really that bad, and were even healthy.

Last fall, according to the Post/Examination article, the Federal Trade Commission cracked down on a number of influencers and food industry trade groups for not being explicit about who was funding the influencers' posts. But that just means the influencers have to be clear about who's paying for their messaging. They don't have to change their advice.

I'm not trying to discredit all dietitians. I'm sure many of them offer nutritionally sound information and don't take kickbacks for social media posts from anybody. But we've received so much terrible information about nutrition from "experts" over the years -- eggs cause high cholesterol (LOL, nope), margarine is better than butter (actually, the trans fats in margarine make butter the better choice), high fructose corn syrup is fine (not so much), dairy fat is bad (that one's being disproven, too) -- that, well, just be careful about whom you listen to. Especially if it's a paid influencer on social media.

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By the way, I didn't lose any weight on Ozempic. See, Ozempic makes your appetite go away. But a big appetite was never my problem; my problem was binge eating due to stress. I ate whether I was hungry or not. It wasn't until I retired, moved cross-country, and started low-carbing that I've lost weight and kept it off.

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

Comfort TV.

We must be in the waning days of the knock-on effects of last year's SAG-AFTRA and Writers Guild of America strikes. A lot of shows' production schedules were delayed by the strikes, so new episodes are just beginning to filter down to your favorite channels or apps. 

I am not complaining about the strikes. They were good and necessary. People need to be compensated fairly for their work -- and they also deserve protection from greedy producers and studio heads who would rather use performers' past work to generate AI than continue to pay flesh-and-blood performers for new work.

But while good and necessary, the strikes have had an effect on this year's programming, to the point where I'm kind of champing at the bit for new episodes of my favorite shows.

So I've been watching a lot of comfort TV (which I have written about before, here and here). A lot of streaming channels show old episodes of '90s reality TV, which I've never had any interest in watching for a variety of reasons. But I was pretty excited when I discovered that the Roku Channel has all 44 past seasons of  This Old House. 

duh84 | Deposit Photos

You probably wouldn't take me for a person who'd be excited about watching other people renovate a house. But I find it relaxing and kind of soothing. All the guys (and they are virtually all men) are professional contractors. They are capable and confident. They're good at explaining what they're doing and why -- and in some cases, particularly on the spinoff Ask This Old House, they teach homeowners how to tackle certain projects themselves. It's kind of like watching Bob Ross, except with power tools. 

I started watching because as a homeowner myself now, I wanted to learn some of lingo that home repair guys use. I've lived in apartments for a very long time; when something would go wrong, I'd call the leasing office and they'd send over a maintenance guy (who might or might not actually fix the problem, but that's a different rant). Those days are over for me; now I'm at the mercy of contractors. And I'd like to know something about what they're talking about -- and not incidentally, whether it's worth trying to do the thing myself.

Not for nothing, 44 seasons of This Old House plus 22 seasons of Ask This Old House equals a lot of comfort TV.

Roku has a separate channel for the really old episodes, back when Bob Vila was the host. The show was originally broadcast on WGBH, the PBS station in Boston, and focused on houses in the Northeast. It's fun to play "spot the current cast member" when watching the oldest shows -- carpenter Norm Abram and plumber Rich Trethewey were so young in 1979. I recently saw an episode that must have been Tom Silva's tryout -- he was so young that the only thing I recognized about him was his voice.

Vila left the show in 1989 because he didn't want to have to do commercials for the sponsors. Steve Thomas then took over as host. He left in 2003, and that's when the current host, Kevin O'Connor, joined the show. 

TOH has spawned several spinoff series and a magazine. New shows still air on PBS stations, but ownership of the production company has changed a number of times. Roku has owned This Old House Ventures since 2021, the same year the shows went into syndication.

TOH occasionally gets out of New England. I was particularly entertained by the six episodes in season 11 in which Bob and Norm came out to Santa Fe. The local general contractor (whose company is still in business -- I looked him up) had great fun educating Norm on Santa Fe style. (The closed captions mangled the Spanish names of elements of the style. It's spelled latilla, not latia, for cryin' out loud!) 

One somewhat unexpected side effect of watching all this power-tool porn: I'm starting to think that maybe I need to acquire some power tools of my own. Even though I have nowhere to put them. Or room for a workshop.

Luckily for my bank account, the fifth season of Star Trek Discovery starts this Thursday, and I have zero interest in acquiring a starship.

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I heard that: "What's a latilla?" 

Santa Fe style borrows elements from both Pueblo Indian architecture and Territorial style. Buildings are made from adobe (although these days, it's wood frame or concrete with stucco on top) and have flat roofs. Ceiling joists are known as vigas and are often just logs with the bark peeled off. The ends stick out through the side walls of the structure. The latillas are set across the vigas, closely together. The original builders would put sod on top of the latillas, but now they use regular insulation and roofing materials. (A lot of times in new construction, the builder will use modern techniques, coat the building in stucco, and stick fake viga ends on the front.)

Other Spanish terms that are common to the style: a nicho is a niche in a wall, originally for a statue of a saint (aka a bulto) but now for your shampoo in the shower; a banco is a banquette, a bench built into the wall, originally of adobe but nowadays wood-framed and covered in plaster; a portal (pronounced por-TAHL, not POR-tuhl) is a covered porch supported by log pillars with carved corbels; and a canale is a channel for water to drain off a flat roof. You'll also see kiva fireplaces, which are set in a corner and have rounded fronts instead of square. In fact, most edges are rounded in Pueblo Revival style.

You'll see some other architectural styles around here, including Greek Revival and a bit of Spanish Revival, but Pueblo Revival and Territorial style make up the biggest chunk of Santa Fe style. Here's more, if you're interested.

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