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.

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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.

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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!

Slaves in New Spain.

There's a room in the 17th century placita at El Rancho de las Golondrinas called "el cuarto de cautivos" -- the captives' room. It's a small room that contains a fireplace, a couple of wooden bins, and a Navajo loom. It's meant to depict the sort of accommodations that Spanish settlers would have provided for their captives at the ranch in the 1600s.

The room is usually gated -- that is, you can look in, but there's typically no one inside to explain what it's about. Slavery is difficult to discuss. But here's one fact: the captives held by settlers here, in the northernmost outpost of New Spain, were not Black. They were Native American.

How is it that 17th century Spanish settlers held Native Americans in bondage, but in much of the rest of America, slaves were imported from Africa? 

Tinnakom | Deposit Photos

During volunteer training for our upcoming season, we heard a presentation from Jon Ghahate (Laguna Pueblo/Zuni Pueblo), an educator for the Crow Canyon Archaeological Center in Cortez, CO. Ghahate explained that slavery was not unknown in the Americas before the coming of the Europeans; after all, people are people everywhere, with the same urges to be both bad and good to one another. What was different among the Europeans was the Catholic Church. Christianity teaches us to be kind to other people -- with the emphasis on people. If the creature in front of you isn't a person, then no matter how you treat that creature, it won't keep you from getting into heaven. In essence, the church indemnified those who held slaves. And just as the church allowed Christians to see Africans as less than human, it also gave them the same excuse when it came to Native Americans. (Not-so-fun fact: The United States didn't grant citizenship to Native Americans until 1924.)

The year 1492 was a big one in the history of what was to become Spain. Ferdinand and Isabella married and combined their kingdoms into one, Castile and Aragon. Pretty much immediately, they set about kicking the Moors out of Andalucia in southern Spain and taking the land for themselves. And in that same year, they gave their okay to Christopher Columbus to sail west in search of a more direct, and less fraught, trade route to Asia. But Ferdinand and Isabella didn't grant the funds to Columbus outright -- they gave him a loan that he was supposed to pay back with the spoils he gained from his adventuring. (The later conquistadors got the same deal, which explains why they were so hot to find gold here.)

Columbus never made it to continental North America. His ships landed on the island of Hispaniola, which today is split between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. People were living there when Columbus arrived, but very little of their DNA survives today, for a very good reason: Columbus and his men basically slaughtered them. We know this because among the Spaniards who traveled to the New World with Columbus was Bartolomé de las Casas, who chronicled the treatment of the Natives at the hands of the explorers. De las Casas petitioned Charles V of Spain to grant the Natives some rights. 

But all this meant that there weren't enough workers for the plantations that were beginning to be set up in the West Indies. So de las Casas got a bright idea: why not bring in Africans?

Eventually he realized what a bad idea that was, in terms of human rights, but by then the damage had been done. And that's how the idea was planted to bring Africans to the New World ... by any means necessary.

By the time the Spanish made their way north to New Mexico, they had "perfected" their system of dealing with the Natives. In 1510, the church approved a document that was to be read to any Indians the conquistadors met, advising them that they were now subjects of the Spanish crown and of the Pope, and they had better behave as set forth herein or they could be forced to behave. Of course, this document, the Requeremiento, was in Spanish, which the Natives had no way of understanding. (The text at the link is in English.) 

One begins to understand why the Pueblo Indians rose up and drove the Spaniards out of New Mexico in 1680. It didn't last -- the Spanish returned in 1692 -- but the Pueblo Revolt remains, as stated on the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center's website, "the only successful Native uprising against colonizers in North America."

In practice, Ghahate told us, the Spaniards didn't so much take slaves as they impressed Natives to work for them. But they required tribute -- food and supplies, as well as a guide to show them where that gold was -- and forced the Natives to convert to Christianity. In that sense, the system of slavery here in the Southwest was different than that practiced by plantation owners in the Deep South. Also here, some slaves were more like indentured servants and could eventually buy their freedom. They and other outcast people -- Jews and poor Spaniards who came to the New World to find their fortune but never did -- were known as genizaros and lived apart, in their own villages. Intermarriage with Mexican settlers was common, though. Eventually the Mexican government declared all citizens equal, including the genizaros and others of mixed race -- but in society, as you might expect, prejudice lingered. Even today, Hispanic folks here will say they're Spanish, even if their DNA tells a different story. 

DNA is causing a lot of trouble everywhere, am I right?

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On a completely different topic: The Social Security Administration this week that it's making big changes in the way it claws back overpayments from recipients. This comes after news reports indicated that the existing draconian system was impoverishing some people -- even causing them to lose their homes. The two biggest changes: 1) Instead of taking 100% of a recipient's benefit until the overpayment is satisfied, the reduction will now be capped at 10% per month -- and the SSA is instituting a longer time frame for people to pay the overpayment back; and 2) instead of forcing recipients looking for relief to prove why they need it by providing a boatload of financial information, the burden is now going to be on the government to prove why the recipient needs to make reimbursement.

The changes are coming too late to help me -- I finished my penance this month -- but I'm very glad to see that others won't have to go through the same thing I did.

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One more update, and then I swear I'm done: Surprising absolutely no one, Congress took the latest budget brouhaha down to the wire, approving the final six continuing resolutions yesterday. The approval technically came after the Friday night deadline, but the several-hour delay created no damage (other than to Americans' faith in government working for us and our reputation overseas and all the rest). Immediately after the vote, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (GQP-Georgia) moved to remove Speaker Mike Johnson because he, y'know, had to get help from the Democrats to keep the government running through the end of September. It's unclear whether her motion will go anywhere when the House comes back from yet another freaking recess -- but Johnson, apparently having decided that Greene has done her worst, reportedly plans for the House to take up funding for Ukraine when it returns to work after Easter.

That sound you hear is tens of thousands of pairs of eyes owned by rational Americans rolling so far back into their heads that they can see their brains.

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

Janis and Tommy in Truchas.

I may be at risk of turning this into a New Mexico travel blog, but there are so many things I find interesting about this underappreciated state that I've adopted as my home.

Here's one: In the hallway outside our office at the Roundhouse (that's the nickname for the New Mexico state capitol building) hangs a framed print of this photo: 

Stolen from the Santa Fe New Mexican

The caption reads something like, "Janis Joplin and Tommy Masters at Law Ranch, Truchas." (I should have written it down. Silly me!) The photographer is Lisa Law. 

Intriguing, right? I know who Janis Joplin was, but I had never heard of Tommy Masters. Who was he? And what were he and Janis doing in a tiny town in New Mexico?

So I asked Mama Google, and after a few false starts (there's more than one Tom Masters associated with the music industry...), I found an article from six years ago in the Santa Fe New Mexican. It's an obituary for Tommy Masters and his wife, Gloria, who died just a few days apart in October 2017. Here are the opening paragraphs:

Tommy and Gloria Masters were two old hippies who were mainstays in Northern New Mexico's commune scene, friends of counterculture icons, adventurers, and loving parents who built a marriage and raised two children in the midst of the free-love era.

They worked for Bob Dylan; hung out with Janis Joplin, Wavy Gravy, Lenny Bruce and Dennis Hopper. In some ways, the '60s seemed to flow through them.

The article goes on to quote the couple's two sons, who explain that their mom was born in Minnesota and their dad in Delaware. They met in Florida. Tommy Masters started out as a horse trainer, but then he got involved with the "beatnik crowd", according to one of the sons, and that's when the real adventure began. In the late 1960s, they bought property in Truchas, NM, which is on the high road to Taos, about halfway between Taos and Santa Fe. Their land was right near the ranch owned by Tom and Lisa Law. They and some other counterculture folks called themselves the Jook Savages. In 1969, they all traveled together to Woodstock in a white bus driven by Tommy Masters.

But what was Janis doing in Truchas? Lisa Law, who's no longer married to Tom Law, explained it to the paper this way: 

Law said Joplin had come to Taos to film a cigar commercial at the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge. At a bar, the famed singer, who would die in 1970, said she wanted to meet, well, "a mountain man."

Law obliged, introducing her to one at her ranch. Together, Joplin and her new friend went with a group to a bar in Truchas. While there, Law said, the mountain man claimed to have left a potato baking in the oven at his cabin, and Joplin tagged along.

"But I think she checked out a couple of other things because she didn't come back," Law said.

Eventually, Law said, a "very happy" Joplin returned the next day.

"So she sits down on the ground by the adobe wall. And Tommy, who happened to be there, had a hoe in his hand," Law said. "He sits down next to her, so there's a picture of him with the hoe talking to Janis and she's got this big … grin on her face …

"It's the last picture I took of her before she died."

Janis is among the pantheon who went to rock-and-roll heaven at the age of 27. A heroin overdose did her in.

Tommy continued to work as a bus driver when he wasn't farming. He started driving Bob Dylan's tour bus sometime in the '80s. 

The Masterses moved a couple of times as they got older, ending up in Santa Fe. When Gloria got cancer, Tommy nursed her, but apparently it took a toll on his own health. He died the day before Gloria was scheduled to be moved into hospice. Two weeks later, she died. They were both in their 80s -- a tolerable age for a couple of hippies.

But that photo lives on.

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

The Congress that called "Shutdown!"

The thing that's got all the political wags going this weekend is the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address to Congress on Thursday night. While Sen. Katie Britt's little presentation was eminently memeable -- and came SNL-cold-open-ready -- there's another aspect of congressional shenanigans that I want to talk about tonight. It's this business of the once and future government shutdown. 

lightsource | Deposit Photos

On Friday, mere hours before Congress's self-imposed deadline, the Senate approved one of two continuing resolutions to fund the government for the remainder of fiscal year 2024. To be clear, a continuing resolution (let's call it a CR) is not the budget -- it's an agreement to keep the government running under a previously-agreed-to level, often the previous fiscal year's budget, while Congress continues to work on the current-year budget. A CR to fund the government through the end of the fiscal year -- like the one just passed -- functions as a budget, but technically it's not.

We're not out of the woods yet for this fiscal year. The CR passed last week only covers part of the federal government's operational needs. A second CR needs to be approved by March 22nd, just a hair under two weeks from today. And you can rest assured that there will once again be a lot of breathless media coverage about congressional squabbling and who will block what, as well as which federal agencies will have to go dark if it's not approved and how it will all affect you, the American citizen.

I know this because this is the fourth CR this year. And CRs are becoming more commonly used -- there have been 135 since 1998 -- and are lasting longer. In 2007, 2011 and 2013, Congress never passed a budget at all -- it just used a CR for the whole year. Moreover, sometimes Congress and the President can't even agree on a CR; when that happens, as it did in 2014, 2018 and 2019, the government does shut down until an agreement is reached. So even though it seems like the media are crying "wolf" with their scary coverage of the potential damage if a CR doesn't pass, the threat of a shutdown is real -- and factions in Congress use that to their advantage in budget negotiations. 

It wasn't supposed to be this way. A mechanism that was supposed to be a convenience for a Congress that was close to a budget agreement but just needed a little more time has morphed into not just a negotiating tactic, but a cudgel.

The Center for American Progress, a liberal think tank, has provided a listicle of five reasons why careening from near-shutdown to near-shutdown is bad:

• When federal agencies have to prepare for a possible shutdown, it takes time away from their mission of helping Americans.
• If a shutdown actually happens, the affected agencies can't do their jobs -- which, remember, is to provide services to Americans. Also, some federal workers are mandated to keep working, even if they're not getting paid for it -- including the military -- and worrying about how they can pay their bills isn't going to help their performance.
• In a shutdown, it's harder for Americans to access government services. Everything from visa processing times to getting answers to doctors' questions to Medicaid, and a bunch of stuff in between, could take longer. And the people who use the most government services -- the poor -- will be impacted the most.
• It hurts Americans' trust in government.
• It hurts the reputation of the United States among foreign governments by making us look unstable.

But here's the thing: The folks throwing the biggest wrench in the federal budget process right now are MAGA Republicans. For them, these five problems are a feature, not a bug. A lot of them believe the federal government is too big and too bloated. They want it to appear dysfunctional -- it gives them an excuse to either cut funding for these apparently floundering agencies or do away with them altogether. Then taxes will be lower! That's always a good thing, right?

Eh, maybe not. Smaller government and lower taxes sound great -- until you need help.

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Sick of it all? There's a way to fix it.

Shutdowns and threats of shutdowns occur most often when control of the executive and legislative branches of government are divided. The best way to fix it? Give control to a single political party, and give that party big majorities in both the House and Senate. And if you want government to work for you -- if you want services to be there when you need them -- that means funding them at an adequate level, not constantly cutting the budget. And that means voting blue.

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So far, we've been talking about the FY 2024 budget. What's up with FY 2025, which starts October 1? 

President Biden is supposed to deliver his draft to Congress tomorrow. Congress is supposed to have the budget deal ready to go by the time the new fiscal year starts, but the current members will still be in office then. So brace yourself for more budget shenanigans.

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

How old is your city?

So I was chatting with friends on Facebook, as one does, and the definition of "old" came up -- not in terms of people, mind you, although we talk about that a lot, too, but in terms of cities. Specifically, how Europeans marvel at the way Americans marvel at their castles, and how new most of America is in comparison.

I mean, Europe has some really old cities. The oldest city in Europe is generally recognized to be Plovdiv, Bulgaria, founded in 6000 BCE. Athens, founded in 3000 BCE, is a relative newcomer. (The oldest city on that list that I've been to is Seville, Spain, founded in the eighth century BCE.) In short, Europeans think it's normal to share space with really old stuff.

Compare that to the oldest city in America -- St. Augustine, Florida, founded in 1565 CE. Second oldest? Why, that would be Santa Fe, founded in 1610, give or take a year or three. It's also the oldest state capital in the country, and the loftiest, at 7,199 feet above sea level (yes, we're higher than Denver). 

In 1882, Santa Fe had already been a capital city for more than 250 years.
Wikimedia Commons | Public Domain 

And yet those people on the East Coast are so impressed with how historic their cities are. I mean, I used to be impressed, too. I grew up near Chicago, which was incorporated in 1837; cities on the East Coast are venerable by comparison. New York City was founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1624; the English seized it from the Dutch 40 years later*, and it stayed in British hands until we declared our independence from England.

This topic always seems to crop up around Thanksgiving, when the annual bickering starts over the first Thanksgiving. It was the Pilgrims, right? Plymouth Rock and all that? Eh, not so fast. The famous feast in Plymouth happened in 1623, but Berkeley Plantation in Virginia claims their Thanksgiving occurred in 1619.

Note, if you will, that 1619 is nine years later than the founding of Santa Fe.

Last fall, I attempted to point this out on a Facebook post about the Berkeley Plantation event. Other commenters were not amused. "We're talking about colonial America," one fellow said. So if the Spaniards founded it, it doesn't count?

Another person put it more bluntly: "What's your point?" 

To which I replied, "I'm told I don't have one." See, I'd belatedly remembered that famous quote by some Virginian whose identity has been lost to the mists of time: 

To be a Virginian, either by Birth, Marriage, Adoption, or even on one's Mother's side, is an Introduction to any State in the Union, a Passport to any Foreign Country, and a Benediction from Above.

And you thought Texans were impressed with themselves.

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Don't get me wrong - I lived in Virginia for more than 30 years, and both my kids were born there, so I guess I qualify as a Virginian by adoption. And it's a lovely state (sorry, commonwealth). But ... yeah.

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*Among the English sailors who liberated New Amsterdam was Capt. Edmund Cantwell -- the first Cantwell of our line in America. I guess that means I could join the DAR if I wanted to?

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

By Grabthar's hammer: Sci-fi in New Mexico.

 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

The New Mexico state legislature has wrapped up its annual session, so I've finally had a chance to learn the answer to a question that's been bugging me for several weeks: Why does Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham have an R2-D2 in her office?

See, our office is on the same floor in the Roundhouse as the governor's. There's a small gallery behind her reception desk that I pass on my way in to work, and you can see that R2 unit from the hallway.

It turns out that it's part of an exhibit on science fiction and New Mexico's connection to it. Now Albuquerque is the place for Breaking Bad fans (just check out the plethora of merchandise for sale in any tourist trap there), but a whole lot of movies have been filmed all or partly in the Land of Enchantment. Not any of the Star Wars movies, alas, according to this list on Wikipedia, even though there was some talk about Episode VII being shot here while the production crew was scouting locations.

Nor was Galaxy Quest filmed here. Nevertheless, the governor's office has on display a costume worn by Alan Rickman in that movie (and happy belated birthday to Alan). 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

Apparently the only connection between these props and this state is that they're on loan from the New Mexico Museum of Space History in Alamagordo. That's the closest town to White Sands Missile Range, the site of the world's first nuclear explosion, in 1945. (Oppenheimer was actually shot in New Mexico, although not at the Trinity site.) 

The exhibit in the governor's gallery also features info with a much less tenuous connection to the state: sci-fi authors from New Mexico. 

Lynne Cantwell 2024

Some, but not all, of the books in the display case were written by New Mexican authors. And I've gotta say that they missed a whole bunch of folks, including but not limited to George R.R. Martin, Walter Jon Williams, Robert Vardeman, and -- the most glaring omission, to my mind -- Stephen R. Donaldson. (I mean, Stephen McCranie? Who the heck is he? Maybe the exhibit's creators should have asked fans of the genre for input.)

The exhibit is up until April 29th, and admission is free. In fact, the Roundhouse has an extensive collection of work by New Mexican artists, and you can see all that for free, too. I know most tourists don't include state capitals on their itineraries, but ours is worth a stop if you're going to be in Santa Fe anyway.

We missed visiting the space history museum when we were in Alamogordo last fall. Now I'm wondering whether to go back. I have a few other things I want to see in the state first, though.

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

What Jimmy Mender did.

I had a great blog post idea teed up for tonight, but it can wait. I'd rather talk about a good friend who I've never met in person who died this week. 

I've been trying to remember how I met Leland Dirks. I think it must have been at Indies Unlimited. He wasn't on the staff with us, but he was a regular at the site, and he had a story in at least one of our flash fiction anthologies.

The indie author revolution has been both good and bad. The good: Today, anybody can become a published author. When Amazon and other digital publishers opened their doors, traditional gatekeepers, in the form of agents and publishing houses, became irrelevant; good writers could develop a readership by publishing their words themselves. 

The bad: Anybody can become a published author. Even terrible writers. 

And I admit that I have been a snob. Indie authors are encouraged to support each other by talking up one another's books, the theory being that your readers could cross over to the writers you talk about, and vice versa. I've always been a little leery about this blanket promote-everybody approach. What if the other author is a lousy writer? I don't want my readers thinking I recommend crappy books. (Note to my author friends: If I've ever passed along info on one of your books, rest assured that I do not think you write crap.)

Longtime hearth/myth readers may remember that I ran a book review blog called Rursday Reads for several years. In that period of time, I reviewed several of Leland's books -- some "co-authored" by his Border collie, Angelo. So believe me when I say that he did not write crap. Far from it. He wrote with sensitivity and heart. And he almost always included a dog or two.

Not only was Leland a wonderful author, but he was also a gifted photographer. He lived in southeastern Colorado in a house he built himself, and every day he would post photos and videos on social media of his canine companions, the local wildlife (the magpies and coyotes gobbling Maggie's stale kibble were always good for a laugh), and the mountains around his home. I got to know that landscape better than the view around my own home.

But back to the books: My favorite -- the one I thought of immediately upon hearing of his death -- is Jimmy Mender and His Miracle Dog. 

I reviewed it for Rursday Reads, but my review really doesn't do the book justice. The main character is Paul Young, a gay writer who lives in San Francisco. He meets a former cowboy and ex-Marine named Jimmy Mender. Paul is immediately smitten, but Jimmy is not sure whether he swings that way. They have a lovely week together, and then Jimmy just up and leaves town. Paul is devastated. Then by a twist of fate, he's offered a job as the anonymous author of an advice column, which he agrees to take on one condition: the column must be renamed "What Would Jimmy Mender Do?"

Some years later, Paul receives a package from Alaska. It contains several notebooks -- journals that Jimmy kept after he left San Francisco. They're accompanied by a note saying that Jimmy has died, that he wanted Paul to have the journals, and that Jimmy left a couple of other things to Paul if he'd like to come to Alaska and collect them. So Paul journeys north, using Jimmy's notebooks as a guide, and learns not only about Jimmy but about himself, too. And of course, there's a dog.

I'm rereading the book now, and I'd like to share with you the dedication that Leland wrote:

This book is dedicated to all the real life Jimmy Menders out there. Some of them are teachers, some of them are moms or dads or brothers or sisters or uncles or aunts or friends. All of them practice the most powerful yet simplest form of magic: Love.

Leland himself was a real-life Jimmy Mender. Since his passing, many people have come forward on social media to talk about how kind and helpful he was, and how much they're going to miss him. 

I hope he's in a place where he can hear how much he meant to people -- how many lives he touched, all over the world. And I very much hope that wherever he is, he's been reunited with his beloved Angelo and Suki.

Rest in peace, my friend.

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These moments of bloggy remembrance have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe, y'all.

The state of American fiction.

I had a day off from work yesterday (not always a given during session), so I saw a movie, and you get a blog post about it.

By http://www.impawards.com/2023/american_fiction_ver2_xxlg.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=75101757

(Sorry about the gnarly cutline. I don't want anybody coming after me for copyright infringement.)

American Fiction has already won numerous awards, and supposedly there's Oscar talk for Jeffrey Wright, who plays Thelonious "Monk" Ellison. Monk is a literature professor at a West Coast college who is forced to take a leave of absence after a student complains about him writing the N word on the board (it's in the title of a Flannery O'Connor short story). That incident is the tip of the iceberg; Monk is tightly wound due to his agent's inability to sell his latest novel (a retelling of Aeschylus). Despite his literary cred, his novels keep getting categorized as "African-American Studies" because he's Black. And his attendance at a literary festival in his hometown of Boston only makes it worse when he sees that the biggest draw is a novel by a Black woman -- a graduate of Oberlin -- whose novel relies heavily on stereotypical Black narrative elements and street slang.

Monk's visit to his family home is one of the film's revelations. He comes from an upper-middle-class -- maybe even upper-class -- background. His sister is a lawyer; his brother is a plastic surgeon. The family home is a lovely old house in a lovely old-money neighborhood. The family owns a beach house. His mother employs a woman who's clearly been with the family since the kids were small. Everything is so far from the streets that it's no wonder that Monk is frustrated about the state of publishing for Black writers. But then his mother's health begins to degenerate. There's talk of having to sell the beach house to cover her care. And Monk decides to give the White publishing establishment what it wants: a novel full of Black stereotypes that he calls My Pafology. He writes it as a joke, and he insists that his agent send it out.

Of course, it's snapped up immediately for a huge advance. Monk needs the money, but he doesn't want it -- not on those terms. So he tells the publisher that he wants to change the title to Fuck. He figures that will kill the deal. But of course it doesn't. And Monk -- the upper-middle-class college professor -- is forced to do marketing for the book using a persona that his agent came up with on the spur of the moment: a Black criminal who did time for a felony and is now on the lam.

The movie is being marketed as a comedy, and there are definitely funny moments. But there's a lot more to American Fiction than that. There's family drama, and there's Monk's character development. There are sweet moments, too. 

And there's the critique of the publishing industry that drew me to the movie in the first place. The film's thesis is that publishers pigeonhole serious writers of color as "African-American Studies" while glorifying the "raw", "visceral" and "real" street life of poor Black people that Monk has made up. Undoubtedly there are people living that life. But Monk insists that there's more to being Black in America than that, and he maintains it's a failing of White folks that we ignore it in favor of sensational stories about drunks on crack in the 'hood who shoot each other as a way of life.

As an aside, I enjoyed actually seeing Wright, who I knew only from his voice role as The Watcher in Marvel's What If... shorts on Disney+. There's also a very funny appearance by Michael Cyril Creighton, who's also in the cast of Only Murders in the Building. And Leslie Uggams plays Monk's mother.

I wouldn't call American Fiction a perfect film, but it's very good, and it has some important things to say about the state of publishing, not just for Black authors but in general. I hope it's not consigned to the same fate as Monk's serious novels: critically acclaimed but lost in the shuffle. I enjoyed it. Go see it.

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It wasn't lost on me that I'm a White woman who saw the movie as part of an audience of White people. Maybe we'll learn something from it?

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

Election 2024: Sliding into the deep end.

 

S Silver | Deposit Photos

And so it begins. The Iowa caucuses are happening tomorrow night, kicking off the 2024 presidential election (for Republicans, at least; Iowa Democrats will hold a primary in March, and the first primary election for both parties is next week in New Hampshire). 

The outcome of this primary season is likely preordained. Joe Biden is expected to win the Democratic nomination, and Donald Trump is way ahead of all of his challengers for the Republican nomination.

The media are treating it like any other election, talking about winners and losers, poll numbers and prognostications. But we're in a much different situation now than we have been in any past election, because the presumptive GOP nominee is under indictment on 91 criminal charges -- 91! -- not to mention being a defendant in several civil trials. He'll be splitting time between various federal and state courthouses and the campaign trail this year. And yet, somehow, he's still in the lead.

Over at the Washington Post last week, columnist Jennifer Rubin questioned whether the media aren't to blame. (It's a gift article -- feel free to click through and read the column.) She says pundits spent a lot of time after the 2016 election trying to figure out how they could have been so wrong about Trump's popularity. So reporters went to diners across the Rust Belt and talked to Trump's supporters -- and concluded that the problem was too many jobs going overseas.

But later analyses discovered that wasn't it at all. The real reason voters supported Trump had more to do with racism than anything else. The media totally missed the real story, Rubin says: that a minority of culture warriors with authoritarian dreams had taken over the Republican Party.

Rubin is dissembling here. As a former Republican and a Never Trumper, she's not going to admit that the Christofascists have been allied with the Libertarian elements of the GOP for several decades -- since Ronald Reagan, if not before -- and Trump's rise was pretty much the inevitable result.

But she's right about one thing: the media now ought to be covering today's GOP not as a legitimate political party, but like a cult -- the cult of Trump. "More of the media should be covering this phenomenon as it would any right-wing authoritarian movement in a foreign country," she writes. 

I agree with her. But it may be too late. It's going to be impossible to reach most of the devotees of Trump's personality cult. They've been hand-fed lies by Fox News and right-wing social media for far too long. They're not going to quit Trump -- they're in too deep. And like lemmings, they're going to follow him right over the edge into the abyss. Again.

Let's hope enough rational voters turn out in November to keep the cultists from dragging this country into the abyss after them. 

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Speaking of politics: Yesterday marked the first day of my annual marathon, also known as the regular session of the New Mexico legislature. The session doesn't actually start until Tuesday, but there's a lot of prep work to be done on bills and such before the legislators hit the floor (so to speak). So our department started working in shifts yesterday. We'll be working every day, including weekends and holidays, and without breaks, until the final day of the session, which this year is Thursday, February 15th. 

Our state legislature meets for 60 days in odd-numbered years and 30 days in even-numbered years. That it's a 30-day session this year should make it easier, but it doesn't. It just means that everything that usually happens in 60 days has to get done in half the time.

And this year for the first time, I'm doing a session as a full-time employee. There's a bit of a different flavor to that. So I might not be keeping to my usual weekly blogging schedule for the next few weeks. If I've got a good topic, I'll write a post. Otherwise I may sit the week out. We'll see how it goes.

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

Social Security surprises. Not the good kind.

stokkete | Deposit Photos

Consider this a cautionary tale.

As y'all know, I retired in mid 2020, several years before reaching my full retirement age. I crunched the numbers and figured I could make it work with Social Security and various investments, plus a part-time job. And it did work -- until I bought a condo and the condo association slapped the owners with a massive, multi-year special assessment. So I went back to work full-time in May of last year. 

Until you reach the year of your full retirement age, Social Security will let you earn a certain amount each year and still keep getting your benefits -- but if you earn more than their max, they'll dock your benefit by $1 for every $2 over the max you earn. The earnings limit in 2023 was $21,240. I knew I was going to make more than that last year, so in May, I sent Social Security a letter letting them know that I was going to make way more than their earnings limit for the year. 

In early November, I got a letter from Social Security that said -- I'm paraphrasing here -- "Oh hai, you are going to make way more than you should have this year, so we are going to stop paying you benefits for four months, starting now."

The face that guy is making up top is an approximation of my reaction. I mean, I went back to work because I needed the money. I'd made plans several months out based on what I thought would be my monthly income -- which was now being cut by about a third. 

It's not so much that they cut back my benefit. I knew they were going to -- that's why I sent them the letter. But what I want y'all to understand is how they do it: There's no monthly payment plan. They just stop paying you 'til they get back what they "overpaid" you. And they give you very little warning.

So how can you avoid this whack upside the head? You have three options:

1. You can wait 'til you reach your full retirement age before you start taking Social Security.
2. If you retire early, you should keep a close eye on your annual earnings to make sure you don't go over the max earnings for the year (it's $22,320 for 2024).
3. You can tell Social Security to stop sending you money for a while. 

There are a couple of ways to accomplish that third option. If you haven't reached full retirement age yet, you can do what's called a withdrawal of benefits. You can only do it within the first twelve months of retiring, and you can only do it once. And there's another catch: You have to pay them back everything they've already paid you. So let's say you retired for six months, then went back to work. You'd have to give Social Security back every penny they'd paid you -- money you had presumably been living off of, so you wouldn't have it to give back. And if the new job doesn't work out, tough bananas -- Social Security won't pay you anything again until you reach full retirement age.

The other way is called suspension of benefits. Basically, you tell Social Security you'd like to stop getting a check from them until you ask them to start paying you again (or until you turn 70). Under this option, you don't have to pay back anything they've already paid you. But the catch is that you have to have reached full retirement age to exercise this option. 

Both of these options reset the year that you started taking benefits, which will mean a bigger monthly payment for you when they do resume. But lawdy, they don't make it easy for you to change your mind.

Anyway, in my situation, option 3 was not an option; I had yet to reach my full retirement age, and it had been more than a year since I first retired. 

I've been using a term that I haven't explained: full retirement age. What is it? Well, it depends on when you were born. For decades, everybody's full retirement age was 65. Then Congress started dinking around with it, raising it to supposedly stave off a shortfall in the Social Security system (I have Opinions, but that would be another post). For me, full retirement age is 66 and a half. (Here's how to figure out yours. The chart is at the top of page 3.)

As for this withholding-part-of-your-benefits business: The rules change when you get to the year in which you will reach full retirement age. Then the amount you can earn that year raises by a lot -- for 2024, it's $59,520 -- and as long as you don't make that much before the month you reach full retirement age, you're golden. Even if you do make that much money that year, the penalty is less harsh; Social Security retains only $1 for every $3 (instead of every $2) you make over the limit.

Also, Social Security swears that once I hit full retirement age, they'll give me back the money they've withheld from me. It's not like they'll send me a fat check all at once, though; instead, they'll use some arcane formula to bump up my monthly benefit. In other words, they'll give it back in convenient monthly installments -- an option they didn't give me when they began withholding my benefits. Hmph.

The good news for me is that this is the last time I'll have to deal with this. I'll reach full retirement age in 2024, and no way I'll make $59,520 in the months before I get there. So soon all this folderol will be behind me. I just need to make it to March, when my benefit payments will resume.

But the moral of the story for you guys is this: If you're going to start taking Social Security before your full retirement age, pay attention to your earnings if you go back to work. 

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One more thing: If you have your Medicare premium taken out of your Social Security check, but Social Security starts withholding your benefits, Medicare won't drop you or suspend you. Social Security will simply take the missed premiums out of your check once they start paying you again. Isn't that a nice change from the way private insurance companies operate?

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