I rushed out the door this morning to my volunteer gig at El Rancho de las Golondrinas and almost missed the scary headlines coming out of Los Angeles: ICE personnel conducting raids around the city to round up "illegal immigrants", ordinary Americans mobilizing on the spot to peacefully push back against ICE, ICE throwing flash-bang grenades at reporters who clearly identified themselves as members of the media, and on and on. My reaction mirrored that of a lot of us, I think:
ibrandify | Deposit Photos
Now Trump has ordered the mobilization of two thousand National Guard troops to "restore order", even though LA Mayor Karen Bass hasn't asked for help, and even though California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked Trump to stand down. As we learned a few summers ago, when Trump ordered peaceful protestors chased out of Lafayette Park in DC so he could walk a block to hold up a Bible for a photo op in front of a church, he's just itching for any excuse to call out the military on US soil.
It's not martial law yet, according to legal experts I follow on social media, but it feels damn close.
The Brennan Center said in 2020 that the president doesn't have the authority to declare martial law, and even if he did, Congress would have to agree. But that's not as encouraging as it might otherwise be, considering Republicans have control of both houses of Congress right now and Trump has proven himself willing to do whatever the hell he wants, legal or not.
This is a developing story, as they say, and to be honest, I don't know what else to say about it right now. My reporter instincts are to just try to keep up with the facts as they unfold and leave any analysis for later.
One thing did occur to me, though: This action in LA is giving Trump and his minions footage of "American carnage" that actually happened here in the US and not in some other country.
Stay tuned, as they say. And as Dan Rather has been known to say: Courage.
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Why the emoji illustration? Because I didn't want give the impression that the reaction was limited to only certain people, whether immigrants or Black people or whatever. I hope we're all shocked, and scared, by what's going on in LA.
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These moments of disquieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Courage.
Here's another post that doesn't have anything to do with writing/publishing -- but it's not exactly political, either. It's based on an email* I got this week about a post Robert Reich published on his Substack that's called "The Tragic History of Neoliberalism". In it, he's refuting comments made by David Brooks, a New York Times columnist who now claims to be a moderate, even though he has, in fact, been a conservative forever.
Reich, whose decades-long career in the federal government includes a stint as Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, starts his rebuttal with this chart, which I have unapologetically lifted from his Substack. (He lifted it from the Economic Policy Institute, so I don't feel bad about stealing it. The chart might be easier to read at the EPI link, plus it's interactive there.)
What it shows is that along about, oh, the late 1970s, the gap between worker productivity and worker compensation began to widen, to the point where, since 1979, worker-bee productivity has increased 86 percent, while worker-bee pay has increased just 27%.
I canceled my NYT subscription quite some time ago, so I haven't actually read the David Brooks column that sparked Reich's post. So I'm going by what Reich has to say about it, which is that what Brooks wrote is an apologetic for neoliberalism. Brooks claims that while wages stagnated in the 1970s and '80s, they began to increase in the early 1990s and, along with productivity, have continued to increase. Brooks says that's the result of neoliberal economic policies, and we should go back to them.
Reich rightfully points out that while wages have trended upward a little bit, the rise in productivity has far outstripped it, and that's due to an imbalance of power caused by those neoliberal economic policies that has basically stolen money from the pockets of the worker bees and put it in the pockets of the fabulously well-to-do.
He doesn't actually use the terms "worker bee" and "fabulously well-to-do", but that's the gist of it.
As I read Reich's post, the refrain of a song kept playing in my head. The song is called "My Back Pages", and I've made that refrain the title of this post. My earworm was the 1967 version by the Byrds:
I never knew the name of the song until I looked it up this week. I also didn't know that it was written by Bob Dylan, although it made perfect sense when I found that out. Dylan was 23 when he wrote "My Back Pages"; it was his declaration that he was stepping away from writing protest songs because he'd begun to realize that right and wrong, good and evil, weren't as clearly defined as he'd thought they were. He was maturing away from his youthful certainty.
I was interested to see Robert Reich out-and-out say he was questioning neoliberalism, because he was part of the administration that instituted it. Bill Clinton was a Democrat elected in 1992 after 12 years of Republican rule -- first Ronald Reagan, then George H.W. Bush. Clinton ran as an antidote to the GOP's pro-business, anti-worker-bee policies. (In 1981, Reagan fired 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers, leading to the near-collapse of the union movement in America and facilitating that widening gap between wages and productivity in the chart up top.)
Clinton ran on bringing the New Deal back, to make life easier for American workers. But then -- ah, then -- he continued and expanded the policies begun under Reagan and Bush the Elder that favored free-market capitalism, deregulation, and a reduction in government spending (as long as military spending wasn't cut), and called it neoliberalism.
I enthusiastically voted for Clinton twice. I thought neoliberalism made sense. I believed in capitalism and thought Clinton's success in balancing the federal budget was terrific. I didn't even mind when he instituted "workfare" to force folks on welfare to get a job, thereby cutting -- all together now -- waste, fraud, and abuse.
What I didn't understand was what those policies were doing to my own earnings. I started out in the working world in 1979 -- right about the time when the wage gap really began to widen.
I was so much older then. I'm younger than that now.
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Reich closes out his post by saying, "Neoliberalism should not and cannot be rehabilitated." Going down that road, he says, will just bring us more of the same: suppressed wages, more profit going to the rich, even less help for those who need it, and more and more Trumps.
He's pushing for a progressive populist movement. I'm leery of labeling anything populism, given that far-right populists, aka MAGA, helped to elect Trump. But I agree that we cannot keep going down the road we're on and hope to continue to call ourselves a first-world nation.
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"Fabulously well-to-do" is from Breakfast of Champions, a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that was published in 1973:
Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn’t get their hands on doodley-squat.
Vonnegut, like George Carlin, saw it all coming. I miss them both.
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*Is it just me, or are we all getting inundated with daily long-form emails we feel obliged to read since social media has been throttling organic reach?
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Ironically, I need to lengthen this already lengthy post by updating you on this: My former employer, WilmerHale, won a court case against Trump this past week. To summarize the backstory, Trump has been mad at WilmerHale ever since Bob Mueller, who was a partner at the firm, was appointed as a special counsel to investigate accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 election. So in March, Trump issued an executive order that was clearly designed to put WilmerHale out of business. It wasn't the only big law firm that Trump targeted in this way, and the management at some firms agreed to settle by providing free legal work to the administration in exchange for having the executive orders against them lifted. But WilmerHale (and two others) chose to fight.
This past week, that strategy paid off. D.C. District Judge Richard Leon blocked Trump's executive order. In a blistering opinion containing 27 exclamation points, Judge Leon agreed with the firm. In part, he said: "I have concluded that this order must be struck down in its entirety as unconstitutional. Indeed, to rule otherwise would be unfaithful to the judgment and vision of the Founding Fathers!"
No word so far on whether Trump will appeal. I suspect he won't; the sturm und drang is what he was after. So this ought to be the end of it.
Kudos to the judge. And congrats to WilmerHale on being on the right side of history once again.
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These moments of bloggy reverse aging have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell.
I'm a day late this week, but today is a holiday here in the US, so it's a Monday that feels like a Sunday. So I'm calling it good.
How many fingers am I holding up? lipsky | Deposit Photos
This past week, the Chicago Sun-Times copped to running a bogus feature article recommending books to read this summer. The article was written by a freelancer for King Features, a company that regularly distributes material like features and comic strips to newspapers. It has been in business since 1915.
The article was included in a supplement called "Heat Index" -- a 50-ish-page filler "magazine" meant to fatten a paper's page count while causing no extra work for the news staff. Wherein lies the problem with this particular article: the freelancer kind of ran out of time to do it properly, so he had A.I. generate it. And then he didn't fact check it. His editor at King Features didn't fact check it, either. Neither did anybody at the Sun-Times (nor presumably did anybody at any other papers that ran it, including the Philadelphia Inquirer, according to The Atlantic, which interviewed the freelancer in question). But while the authors cited in the piece were real, the books that are supposedly coming out this summer by them are not.
The articles I've seen about this mess mostly focus on the fact that staff attrition at newspapers around the country have left the business ripe for this kind of thing. Of course that's true. But there's another danger underlying this obvious conclusion, and it relates to the credibility of the news media as a whole.
Once upon a time, people in the news business prided themselves on being purveyors of Truth, their work consisting of factual reporting, as unbiased as it's possible for a human endeavor to be. It's bad enough that conservative media have made a career out of making stuff up and calling it "news the lamestream media doesn't want you to see!!!1!!1!!!" And it's worse that even liberals are berating papers like the New York Times and The Washington Post for publishing editorials that don't reflect reality as they see it. But now newspapers are letting A.I.-generated dreck past their gatekeepers.
It reminds me of back in the '80s when infotainment became a buzzword in broadcasting. Infotainment programming blurred the line between news and entertainment, to the point where TV news has become more about entertainment than informing its viewers. Owing to the tyranny of the clock, broadcast news has always been less substantive -- by which I mean less detailed -- than a newspaper article. But with papers now beginning to lean on A.I. to generate content, whether because of staff shortages or time crunches or cheapskates in the front office, it's going to be harder to trust what we read in the paper as true.
Journalism already faces a credibility problem. Using A.I.-generated crap without having a human vet it is just going to make it worse.
I hope newspaper owners wake up and realize that relying on chatbot-generated nonsense is not going to improve their bottom lines, and that they're supposed to be providing a service to the community, not just padding the pockets of their owners.
It may be a vain hope. It may be too late to save the news industry. But I hope not.
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These moments of bloggy news criticism have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Fact check everything!
Let's talk about Andor, which wrapped up its two-season arc this week.
Public Domain, according to Wikipedia. Don't @ me.
The series is a prequel to the 2016 movie Rogue One, which itself is a prequel to Star Wars Episodes IV, V, and VI. Anakin has already become Darth Vader, Luke and Leia are teenagers, and the Empire is charge of the galaxy -- for now. But the imperial government is committing atrocities in Emperor Palpatine's name, and people on multiple planets are beginning to rebel. Cassian Andor gets swept up in the nascent Rebel Alliance; his backstory is what the show is all about.
If you're not a Star Wars fan, I've already lost you, so I won't go into many more details. What I want to focus on is the reaction to the show and how it maybe dovetails with what's going on in our world right now.
I've heard several people say that Andor is the best entry in the Star Wars universe, or at least the best since the original film trilogy. I personally think Andor is very good, if not the best; the writing and direction are smart, and the actors all do good work. It's hard for me to call this show the absolute best of them all because I haven't seen all of them and because the shows are all doing different things. I very much liked Obi-Wan Kenobi for sentimental reasons; I loved The Mandalorian, but it feels like a Western with starships instead of horses (and let's be honest, Boba Fett was season 1.5 of Mando).
I think what sets Andor apart is that it's meant to be an adult show from the get-go. The whizbang technology is all stuff we've seen before. There's no Grogu to lighten the mood. There's hardly any mention of the Force until the very end of the second season. It's all just people put in untenable situations and how they react to their lives being torn apart by brutality.
Which leads me to today. It's possible that this is the best possible time for this show to appear. Here in the US, we are in the beginning stages of an authoritarian takeover of our government. We are hearing about more instances of brutality every day. The modern-day resistance is taking its time to gel -- pushing back around the edges and seemingly not making much of a dent. A large-scale uprising like the Rebel Alliance may have to happen before we can beat back our modern-day Palpatine and his minions.
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I had only seen Rogue One once before Andor started airing. Once the show was over, I went back and watched the movie again. And yeah, the show is much better than the movie. Disney was hoping that Rogue One would be the same kind of hit as the original Star Wars movies -- but Jyn's character is lacking both the gravitas to pull off a serious film and the pals that made A New Hope so much fun. This time around, I found myself waiting impatiently for Captain Andor to show up so we could get on with things.
I'm not sure whether I'll ever watch Andor again, but twice is definitely enough Rogue One for me.
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One quick thing related to last week's post about the new pope: I need to say something about this YouTube video that made the rounds right after the announcement. As soon as the first guy said, "ope," I was like, "My dudes, he's not that kind of Midwesterner. You are thinking too far north." Chicagoland is not the land of Fargo, A Prairie Home Companion, hotdish, and yah-you-bet. Not even the accent is the same. If you want to hear the difference, listen first to the folks in the movie Fargo -- here's the trailer -- and then to Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker. If you can't tell the difference, I don't know what to tell you. Except maybe "Aw, jeez."
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These moments of bigger-than-life blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yah, you bet!
Happy Mother's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a mother, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.
I think that covers everybody.
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This past week, Catholics got a new pope. Pope Francis, the first of that name (which I had forgotten 'til just now), died on April 21st, and Pope Leo XIV, formerly known as Robert Francis Prevost, was elected on just the second day of the conclave. I joked on Bluesky that it must have driven TV news outlets wild that the cardinals got the job done so fast. Here they'd barely settled on a name for their live team coverage and whomped up the graphics package, and it was all over.
If my take seems irreverent, remember that I'm Pagan. The head of the Roman Catholic Church doesn't have much of an effect on my life. I once worked with a guy who told a story about a conversation he'd had; the other guy asked him what he thought of the pope (different pope, obviously; this was decades ago) and my co-worker replied: "What's a Presbyterian supposed to think of the pope? He's the bishop of Rome!"
That's pretty much where I am, too.
Anyway, a lot of Catholics have high hopes for this new guy. He's an American, for starters (from Chicago!), although his family background is about as melting-pot as they come. He's also a naturalized Peruvian and has served the church in that country for years. Most recently, he's been holding a top spot at the Vatican. Pope Francis seemed to like him, and it appears likely that he'll be as liberal as Francis was, although church approval for women in the priesthood and LBGTQ+ folks will probably still be a bridge too far.
Another thing that's extremely unlikely to change is the Catholic Church's directive, shared by virtually all other Christian denominations, that its adherents should be fruitful and multiply. It's because the faith wants as many Christians as possible, either by birth or by conversion. Leo hasn't explicitly said how he feels about abortion since his elevation, but in the past he has taken the church's position against it lumping it in with euthanasia for good measure: "God's mercy calls us to protect every life, especially those society overlooks—the child yet to be born and the elderly nearing their journey's end".
That might look good on paper, but of course it sidesteps the question of practicality, especially in this country, where mothers receive so little social and financial support. And the people running our government right now seem hell-bent on making it even harder. So much for protecting every life.
At least he favors gun control.
But as I said above, I'm not Catholic. Catholics and members of other Christian denominations -- of every religion, actually -- have the right to believe whatever they want to believe and practice their religion as they see fit. As long as they don't force me to live by their rules.
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I mentioned above that Pope Leo is from Chicago. This meme is probably my favorite:
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These moments of slightly irreverent blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!
A whole lot of folks will recognize this image. It's the 4-by-4 grid of the daily Connections puzzle published by the New York Times. Today's puzzle wasn't too hard. The yellow and green categories are supposed to be the easiest, but today I got blue first; purple, as usual for me, was whatever was left over once I'd figured out the others.
Anyway, as I said, I got them all right today without making any mistakes -- but that is not always the case. In fact, it is so often not the case that when I consult Mama Google, "connections hint today" kind of pre-populates the query box. I'm beginning to ask myself whether to continue playing.
I'm not at a loss for other games to play. There's Wordle, of course -- I'd keep playing that -- and the NYT has a relatively new game called Strands that's often fun. (Strands, for the uninitiated, is a word search for which you're not given a word list; instead, you get a clue, and the words hidden in the puzzle all relate to the clue, including the Spangram, which is often a phrase instead of a single word.)
The NYT games have a social media element; players are encouraged to share their scores, which I do. One reason I'm hesitating about dropping Connections is that folks may wonder if something's wrong with me if I stop posting my scores. (This actually happened in the early days of Wordle; I played late one day, and a college friend said she was relieved to see my score posted on Facebook. She was worried something had happened to me.)
But these three NYT games do take some time to play, and I was already playing a roster of daily games. There's MobilityWare's Solitaire, FreeCell, and Mahjong; and Big Duck Games's Flow Free, Flow Free Hexes, Flow Free Bridges, and Flow Fit (I tried Flow Free Warps, but it messed with my head).
All this started with either Solitaire or Flow Free, both of which I've been playing for years. Here's my winning screen from Flow Free today:
That's eight years of Flow Free every day -- and counting. I hope to keep the streak going until I'm dead.
On top of all of those, I've started playing three Apple News games, including an intriguing one called Quartiles. You're given 20 word fragments -- sometimes short words or syllables, most often neither one -- and you're supposed to make words out of them. You get one point for a word that uses one tile, two points for two tiles, four points for three tiles, and eight points for four tiles. There are five four-tile words in the puzzle, and if you find all five, you get bonus points. If you earn a total of 100 points, you achieve the rank of Expert. You can keep making words after you reach Expert level, but I tend to bail; after all, I have a whole bunch of other puzzles to do.
So yeah, my life won't be any less rich if I quit one of the NYT games. (The NYT may be less rich, though, if people quit playing; Colin Jost joked at last year's White House Correspondents' Dinner that games subscriptions were the only thing keeping the newspaper afloat.)
What are y'all thinking? Is Connections becoming too annoying?
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Now for something more serious: Today is the 55th anniversary of the shootings at Kent State University. National Guard troops opened fire on a peaceful student protest against the Vietnam War, killing four students, at least one of whom was just walking to class. I remember the shooting, but what I didn't remember -- and what Michael Moore talks about in his Substack today -- is that the National Guard claimed the troops began firing in response to a sniper. The Nixon White House took that version and ran with it. Of course, there was no sniper.
The Kent State shooting made all the papers, but Moore goes on to say that ten days later, there was another National Guard shooting, at Jackson State College in Mississippi, in which a dozen or so protestors were injured and two students were killed. The National Guard again claimed the troops began shooting in response to a nonexistent sniper. But that incident didn't make the papers -- and I bet you can guess why: the victims in Ohio were white; the victims in Mississippi were Black.
Feel free to draw whatever parallels you like to foreign students today being arrested and deported for protesting the Trump administration.
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One more thing, and then I'll let you get on with your Sunday evening. Today is Star Wars Day, aka May the Fourth. In honor of the day, I'm sharing this meme that TrekMovie-dot-com posted on Facebook today.
Live long and prosper, y'all.
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These moments of bloggy miscellany have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!
The turning of the Wheel of the Year has been on my mind for the past week or so, ever since I (foolishly) volunteered to give a presentation on the Wheel to a Pagan group later this month. (Right after I opened my mouth, I thought, "Two hours! How will I ever fill two hours on the Wheel of the Year?" And then after some brief consideration, I thought, "How am I going to cram everything I need to say into two hours?" I'll let you know how I get on.)
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Beltane is coming up this Thursday. It's supposed to be a lighthearted celebration of spring; all around us, at least here in the Northern Hemisphere, things are blooming, creating, procreating. It makes you want to skip and shout.
And then you check the headlines. Every day -- sometimes multiple times a day -- there's another outrage from the Trump administration. It's foreign students, legally in this country, being snatched off the street by masked people in unmarked vans; it's kids who were born in the United States being deported, including a child who was undergoing treatment for cancer; it's federal judges ordering the administration to stop any number of illegal actions and watching the Justice Department lawyers dance around those orders without outright refusing to comply; it's a judge being arrested for showing an undocumented individual another way out of her courtroom than the one where ICE was waiting to arrest him.
To say nothing of what Trump is doing with his on-again, off-again tariffs. No sane business owner can plan anything when they have no idea what the government's economic policies will be tomorrow, let alone five years from now.
Here we are, in the light half of the year now that the spring equinox is past, but it feels like we're still in darkness.
Are we under a dictatorship yet? Are we in a recession yet?
Would knowing the answers make any difference?
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The first three episodes of season two of Andor dropped this past week. At the end of the third episode, with a major Rebel Alliance offensive in shambles and Mon Mothma's financing of the rebels under threat of exposure, the senator deliberately gets drunk at her daughter's wedding reception and dances the night away.
I wouldn't recommend it as a healthy coping mechanism, but it's a way to get through a moment when everything is going to hell around you.
And like Andor, which has nine episodes to go, it's not over for us yet.
A blessed Beltane to you all.
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These moments of bloggy screaming at the darkness have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.
I mentioned at the end of my post last week that it's been more than three years since I published my last novel. The final book in the Atherton Vampire trilogy, The Atherton Vampire: Midnight Creeps, was released in December 2021.
I originally wrote that series for Kindle Vella, a new Amazon platform that was half book sales and half gaming, or so it seemed to me; you had to buy tokens to pay for the books you bought. I thought it would be a place to find new readers on a brand-new platform that wasn't as glutted as the regular Amazon marketplace had become. I figured maybe I could break out there and inspire those new readers to find the rest of my books.
It didn't work out that way. As usual, the writers who did well on Vella already had a name elsewhere. Vella must not have made any money for Amazon, either; the Zon shut it down earlier this year.
Jerry Atherton was my last-ditch effort to goose my book sales. By the fall of 2021, I'd been self-publishing for about ten years. I did pretty well with the first five books of the Pipe Woman Chronicles, but the follow-on series didn't sell all that well. My top sales year was 2013. (I actually moved 15,000 copies of all my books that year. Damn! I wonder if that's enough to get me into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association? SWFA membership was one of my goals, once upon a time.)
By the way, here's a shout-out to the person who bought all five of the Pipe Woman Chronicles books on Amazon this year. How the hell did you find them? They're all ranked at like #2,873,965...
I am off topic, a little, and now I'm going to go a little farther off-topic. Bear with me.
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A few weeks back -- actually, it was the afternoon of the day that the legislative session ended -- I chatted with a Tarot card reader. Now, alert hearth/myth readers know that I know how to read Tarot and I do readings for myself on the regular. But it can be easy to miss things you don't want to think about. So it's not a bad practice to check in with someone else every now and then.
The main message from this reading was that I had an internal conflict. I'd left DC and moved to Santa Fe (in the midst of a pandemic!) for a reason, and since then, I had kind of lost the plot. And I needed to think about how I was going to get back on track and re-focus on my original goal.
That original goal didn't have anything to do with fiction writing, although I did have vague plans to republish all my books with new covers and maybe make audio books for them all. No, the goal was to quit working full time. And here I am, back at work full-time.
I mean, shit happens. I bought a condo in a building that needs a lot of work. To afford that, I had to go back to work. And now, to be completely honest, with Trump back in office and the DOGEbros loose at the Social Security Administration, I'm just as happy to have a paycheck in case our Social Security and Medicare safety nets disappear.
But when I went back full time, my goal was to do it for just five years, until I turned 70. After these idiots in DC started mucking about, I was bracing myself to work 'til I dropped dead.
But I'm tired, y'all. I need to go back to having unstructured days at some point. So I'm returning to the "retire at 70" mindset, and we'll see where we are in three years.
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Circling back to the question that some of you may be asking: Am I going to write any more novels?
Honestly? I don't think so. I do so much reading at work nowadays that I can barely read for pleasure anymore; I tend to nod off after about 20 pages. (To be fair, I also nod off while watching stupid TV every evening. Maybe I just need more sleep...) The idea of sitting in front of a computer for even more hours a day sounds less like fun and more like, I dunno, I should get out and take a walk or something instead.
After I re-retire and get a few months of those sweet, sweet unstructured days under my belt, I may try writing again. Or if I get a kickass idea for a book in the meantime. But otherwise, I plan to stay retired from the writing life.
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These moments of introspective blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell, all of whose 40-ish titles are still available on Amazon.
Earlier today, a friend sent me a screenshot of this headline:
Here's a link to a free version of the story. It doesn't include the second headline, which is too bad, because it gets to the heart of why NaNo is going out of business.
As alert hearth/myth readers know, NaNoWriMo is short for National Novel Writing Month. At first it was a simple challenge: Write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days. Devote all of the month of November to churning out a first draft of the novel you've always dreamed of writing. Get the first draft out of your head and onto the (virtual) page.
I've been a big supporter of NaNoWriMo over the years, both by promoting my own participation in their events and, often, by sliding them some cash. I went back through the blog just now to figure out the last time I participated in a NaNo event. Looks like it might have been November 2020, or maybe summer 2021. I know I did NaNo something like eleven times, and I won every time I participated. But I can't check on the NaNo website anymore because I deleted my account last year, upon hearing about the change in their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their novels.
Apparently there were other problems with the organization: accusations of nefarious people using the forums for grooming and abuse. I never saw any of that because I never frequented the forums. I wasn't interested in wasting time on a message board (if I wanted to do that, I'd go to Kevin's Watch); I was doing NaNo to write my damn novel. I used it as an accountability tool to keep my word count on track. The certificate I got for winning, if I'm being honest, was mostly for bragging rights on social media.
When I started seeing things change at NaNo was about the time the founders sold the place. After that, there were deals for participants at indie-author-adjacent businesses -- stuff like discounts for having your novel printed by some pay-to-publish outfit. I don't think I ever used any of them. But I didn't call them out, either. Maybe I should have.
Probably I should have.
Anyway, last year, NaNo changed their terms of service to allow people to use AI to write their work -- and accused people who complained about the change of ableism, of all things. From the article:
"We believe that to categorically condemn AI would be to ignore classist and ableist issues surrounding the use of the technology," the nonprofit's 2024 statement reads, "and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."
Ooh, privilege and ableism! Insert haughty sniff here!
But the opponents of the change saw that for what it was: bullshit. Published authors believed -- as I do -- that the real aim behind the TOS change was to allow the new owners to scrape content written by participants to train AI so the organization could profit from it. That's just so far from the original purpose of NaNoWriMo as to be sickening.
"So many people worked so hard to make NaNoWriMo what it was," children and YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall posted on Bluesky, "and it was all squandered to prop up a plagiarism machine, truly betraying everything NaNo represented: the limitless creativity of normal people."
It's the same scummy behavior that finally made me quit the dead bird app. It's people who think it's okay to make money off of stuff they stole from content creators. It's not exactly plagiarism, but it's not far off the mark.
About two years ago, I wrote here on this blog, "by and large, creativity should be left to human beings." I still think so. And I still think we ought to be paid, every time, for what we create.
What I told my friend in response to the headline above was: "The founders (of NaNo) had the best of intentions and did a lot of good for writers. As usual, the capitalists fucked it up."
It's a tale as old as greed.
Any ideas on how to change it would be much appreciated.
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In searching the blog to discover the last time I last did NaNo, I realized it's been more than three years since I wrote my last novel. I'm thinking maybe it's time I wrote a retrospective on how my decision is holding up. Maybe next week.
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These moments of human-generated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!
When I was in college, I had a poster that featured artwork kind of like this, except that the bricks were gray:
deberarr | Deposit Photos
The caption read: "For every complex problem, there is a simple solution -- and it's wrong." Apparently nobody knows who originally said it. But it came to mind this weekend when I was perusing stories about the turnout at yesterday's Hands Off protests around the country and around the world.
I didn't go yesterday. I had every intention of going, but it snowed overnight and most of the day, and I was a little worried about driving in it. But we had about 2,000 people turn out at our state capitol building, according to the Santa Fe New Mexican this morning. Our rally was one of several planned across the state, including Albuquerque, our largest city, where the media reported turnout only as "thousands".
Interestingly, that's the same vague number I saw out of most news organizations during the day for the all of the events combined: "thousands". The NBC-owned TV channel in New York City would only say that organizers expected thousands to come -- despite aerial photos showing the crowd stretching 20 city blocks.
Later in the day, some news organizations bumped the crowd-size numbers up to "hundreds of thousands".
But I was following the Alt National Park Service account on Facebook, which said their final attendance figure for all 1,200-plus rallies across the country was five million people.
That's a pretty big discrepancy.
A friend on Facebook blamed it on the corporate takeover of the American media by billionaires who support Trump (or at least want to keep doing business under the Trump regime).
That sounds plausible until you look at foreign coverage of the protests. For example, The Guardian, which is British owned and proclaims proudly that it doesn't bow to Trump, used the same vague wording as every other news organization: "Organizers estimated that more than 500,000 people demonstrated in Washington DC, Florida and elsewhere." The BBC wouldn't commit to a final tally at all, sticking with "thousands".
Here's the thing: It's hard to get an exact number of attendees at big outdoor events. You can get an estimate by counting the number of people in a specific area of known size -- let's call that a "unit" -- and multiplying that times the number of units that the crowd covers. That's the way the National Park Service used to do it in DC -- until the Million Man March in 1995, when the organizers claimed three million people attended and got big mad when the National Park Service said it was more like 400,000. It was far from the first time that event organizers had disputed the NPS's official counts. So Congress inserted language in the next appropriations bill that removed funding for the NPS for crowd size estimating.
Now, 1995 was a while ago, but not so long ago that folks at the NPS have forgotten the methodology, which was never much of secret anyhow. (It's the same way you figure out how many jelly beans are in a jar, right?) The Alt NPS folks said they had a representative at every rally yesterday, and those reps were the ones who came up with the attendance figures for each rally.
But why aren't the media going with the Alt NPS attendance figure? My guess is that they have no way to confirm it, and they figured it was safer to go with something vague like "organizers said thousands had registered to attend" and maybe also say that "organizers later said way more people showed up than they expected" than to go out on a limb with the figure of five million.
Are the media deliberately downplaying yesterday's crowd sizes? Maybe. Is it because of some edict from their owners? I doubt it -- mainly because photos and video of the rallies are readily available. If the oligarchy were indeed trying to promote the undercount, all that photographic evidence would be gone.
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Here's your periodic reminder that media is a plural noun and requires a plural verb.
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Oh hey, I just found out that if you want a copy of the poster I used to have, it's available on eBay. It can be yours for just $40.48 (plus shipping, no doubt). I think I paid a buck and a quarter for mine in 1976, but hey, it's a collectible now, amirite?
The poster attributes the quote to someone named "Bradford", which is clearly wrong. And somehow, that seems appropriate.
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These moments of bloggy plausibility have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!
The legislative session actually ended over a week ago -- on Saturday, March 22nd -- but the condo association immediately had two crises (neither directly involving my unit, but I'm on the board, so...), and dealing with them slopped over into the beginning of the week. So even though I took Monday through Wednesday off to recover from session, I didn't really get a chance to recover recover.
Anyway, that's why I didn't write a post last weekend. And that's enough of my whining for now. Because spring has sprung here in Santa Fe, y'all!
Lynne Cantwell 2025
I actually started seeing signs of green in the flower beds several weeks ago, but we've had a spell of really nice weather, so things have begun springing up in earnest. I'm happy to say that the bulbs I planted last fall are mostly coming up, although some of the tulip bulbs seem to have migrated (bloody squirrels...).
Lynne Cantwell 2025
I also planted white grape hyacinth bulbs last fall. In my experience, grape hyacinths usually spring up before the daffodils, but these seem to be taking their time. Maybe I planted them too deep. Anyway, they appear to be on their way to blooming now.
But the gardening adventure that is making me happiest right now is the planting last weekend of a redbud tree. And it's going to bloom! I took this photo this afternoon!
Lynne Cantwell 2025
Redbuds are my favorite spring blooming tree. I spent decades living in DC, where people come from far and near to ooh and ahh over the cherry trees, and they're beautiful -- don't get me wrong. But there's something about the tiny purple blooms that line the branches of a redbud tree that are just so pleasing to me.
I've wanted my own redbud tree for 40 years or more. We planted one in our front yard in Norfolk, but some asshole cut it down before it could bloom. I mail-ordered and planted a bare-root redbud here last year, but I got overly excited and didn't read all the way through the planting directions, so I didn't realize the roots came coated with wax and were supposed to be soaked in a bucket of water for 24 hours before the tree was planted. I didn't do that, so of course it died.
This year, I bought a tree at a local big-box store in a regular ol' pot. I put it in the bed about a week ago, and it seems to be thriving. Maybe three's the charm. Even if it only survives one year, I'll be happy. But I'll be really happy if it thrives for many, many years, because my porch could use the shade.
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Of course, while I was not-recovering from session, the mess in Washington has continued. So many of the cruel policies put into place by this so-called administration have disgusted me, but nothing has pissed me off so thoroughly as the executive order issued last week against WilmerHale, the law firm I retired from in 2020. The firm represents a whole lot of corporate clients (one of them, in fact, is Tesla), but it also has provided legal advice to the Democratic National Committee and the campaigns of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. And it has a robust pro bono practice, including the representation of several of the inspectors general that Trump has fired. But of course what really got Trump's knickers in a twist was Bob Mueller's work as special counsel investigating Russian interference in the 2016 election. When Mueller left WilmerHale to take the job, he brought along two other attorneys from the firm, Jim Quarles and Aaron Zebley, and all three returned to work at the firm after the investigation was over.
Because of all that, Trump wants to drive WilmerHale out of business. He as much as says so in his executive order.
My old firm isn't the only big law firm Trump has targeted, and at least one of them has basically rolled over and made nice with the administration to keep from being forced out of business. However, I am proud to report that WilmerHale is not rolling over. In fact, the firm has filed suit against the administration, alleging that the executive order violates the First, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments to the Constitution. (You can read the complaint here.)
Standing up to bullies is nothing new for my old firm. During the Army-McCarthy hearings in the 1950s, it was a partner at legacy firm Hale and Dorr, Joseph Welch, who kicked off the downfall of Senator Joe McCarthy. McCarthy headed the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations and was conducting a witch hunt to root out supposed communists in Hollywood and the federal government, among other places. Eventually, McCarthy got mad at Welch, who was arguing with a lawyer for the subcommittee named Roy Cohn, and verbally attacked an associate at Hale and Dorr who had once been a member of a legal association associated with communist activity. Welch mounted a spirited defense of his colleague, saying the the firm knew of the associate's background and wasn't going to fire him over it. When McCarthy refused to drop his attack, Welch finally said, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"
That was the beginning of the end for Joe McCarthy's Communist witch hunts.
When the firm I worked for -- Wilmer Cutler and Pickering -- merged with Hale and Dorr in 2004, I was impressed to learn this history. And I'm proud today to know that WilmerHale is continuing to stand up to bullies with vendettas against the firm and what it stands for: the rule of law.
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On Friday night, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon issued a temporary restraining order against the Trump administration's enforcement of parts of the executive order. In his order, Judge Leon wrote, "There is no doubt this retaliatory action chills speech and legal advocacy, or that it qualifies as a constitutional harm."
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One more thing: Roy Cohn eventually went into private practice and represented, among other clients, Donald Trump.
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These moments of historic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there, guys.
I am not quite to the point of counting the hours until the end of this year's New Mexico legislative session, but it's close. We only have 13 calendar days left -- but really it's 12 days because I work a half day on Sundays and the final day (Saturday, March 22nd -- mark your calendars) has a hard stop at noon. And when I say "hard stop", I mean "hard stop"; New Mexico doesn't do the thing that some legislatures do and extend the session by literally stopping the clock.
Anyway, my point is that it's nearly over, and I'm tired. So here are some photos.
Last week, it was warm enough for Tigs and me to get a little porch time in after work. I thought maybe spring had come early. Oh haha. Yesterday morning, we woke up to several inches of snow. I got this artsy shot of the sconce on my deck through the fabulous wall o' windows -- and I'm glad I took the picture when I did, because it was already melting (hence the tracks of water down the window), and now the snow is nearly gone.
Lynne Cantwell 2025
From the artsy to the ridiculous: I spotted this, um, object mounted to the wall in a legislators' office on our floor. It looks to be made out of actual horseshoes. Is it art? Is it a hat rack? Let me know what you think.
Lynne Cantwell 2025
Finally: I believe I mentioned a while back that one side of my new cube has windows that face a blank wall. I ordered a wall decal from an Etsy shop and affixed it to the window. Now I have a view!
Lynne Cantwell 2025
It came with a bunch of star stickers, which I may put up someday when I'm bored -- after session is over.
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I'm still trying to figure out where I stashed my chile pepper lights. Those would finish off my cube decor nicely, I think. Might have to go spelunking in the closet here in a bit.
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These moments of photographic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Yee ha!
No, it's not Death, as I explained in this post several years back. To recap: the Death card is about change and transformation. Something needs to die before something better can begin. The image on the Death card in the Robin Wood Tarot deck (which is currently my favorite deck) is the Grim Reaper standing in a forest, blocking your path forward, his arm outstretched toward a side path: "The path you were on is closed to you. Now you must go that way." Change, like I said.
I ran across another rendering of the Death card that's a tree stump with a flower sprouting from it. It kind of freaked out my therapist in DC when I showed it to her, but it's the same message of transformation: The tree died, and now something beautiful is coming up in its place.
So, no, Death is not the scariest Tarot card. This is the scariest one: The Tower.
Lynne Cantwell 2025
This is the version in the Robin Wood deck. It's very much like the one in the Waite-Smith deck, which is the one that's most familiar to folks (it used to be known as the Rider-Waite deck). A tower built on a rocky promontory is crumbling in the onslaught of a terrible storm. Lightning has struck the top and lit a fire; massive waves attack from below. The people in the tower are trying to save themselves by jumping from the tower -- to the rocks and the pounding waves.
In short, things ain't looking good for them.
The folks in that tower probably felt they were invincible, but they weren't.
Ten or fifteen years ago, folks in Pagan circles began talking about messages they'd received from their deities that societal collapse was imminent. That upcoming collapse came to be known as Tower Time. The messages were warnings; the idea was to prepare for it. But I don't know that anyone really understood what we were supposed to be preparing for.
Y'all, this is it. Anybody who has been paying attention since Trump's second inauguration knows it. If you were in denial before, his belittling performance against Ukraine's president this week made it blatantly obvious.
This is why I've been thinking of talking to Perun, the Slavic god of lightning and thunder. My Czech ancestors appealed to Him to save their nation from Hitler. Hitler was eventually defeated, but a lot of pain and suffering happened before the world got there.
Anyway, I ordered a statue of Perun from a shop in Prague a couple of weeks ago, and it arrived this week. Yesterday, I welcomed Him formally and asked for his help.
Some of what I heard was relevant only to me. But I think this part is an important message to share: The Tower cannot yet be rebuilt because the foundation is still rotten.
In Tarot, the thing about the Tower is that it was always going to fall. As impressive as it looks, it was built on a bad foundation; the whole thing must fail in order to be cleared away and rebuilt on a firmer, better foundation.
What Perun is saying is that in our world, the destruction phase is not yet complete. Unfortunately, there will be more pain and suffering before we can get to the bottom of the rot and dig it out. Only then do we stand a chance of building a replacement structure that will last.
Perun did say He would try to help, so there's that. But I think how we weather the storm -- and the foundation we build on when the destruction is complete -- will be largely up to us.
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An interesting side note, although maybe only interesting to me: You may recall that this all started a few weeks ago, when I was watching the final video for my class on Cernunnos, the Celtic horned god of the animals. There was a live ritual via Zoom scheduled on the 16th to wrap up the class, and in preparation for it, I ordered a statue of Cernunnos on Etsy from someone in Ukraine. I placed the order on February 2nd, and the statue was shipped on February 4th. It's still not here. The package made it across the ocean and through Customs okay, so that's not it; the last I heard, on February 21st, it was somewhere in Texas.
I ordered the Perun statue on February 11th, and it arrived last week. Now I don't want to get all woo-woo about this. There are many mundane reasons why Cernunnos got lost, or at least delayed, and Perun made it through. I'm just saying.
I'll let you know if Cernunnos ever shows up.
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Back to more mundane topics next week.
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These moments of towering blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there!
Back in my simple living days, one of the practices I adopted, and still do most years, is to observe Buy Nothing Day. It's always the day after Thanksgiving (that's the day after the fourth Thursday in November, if you're not an American), which is also known as Black Friday -- aka the day retailers typically make enough money on Christmas sales to put them in the black for the year. The idea is to consciously refuse to participate in the sort of shopping behavior that used to cause mobs to line up before stores opened at 6:00 a.m. and stampede to buy the low, low priced doorbuster items before they ran out.
I honestly don't know whether Buy Nothing Day ever made a dent in sales at the big-box stores. I do know that shopping habits have changed over the past 20 to 25 years. Now, a lot of folks shop online, and Black Friday has become a multiweek juggernaut. I'm certain you've noticed. We now have "Early Black Friday" sales that start weeks before Thanksgiving; Small Business Saturday; Cyber Monday; and so on. (There's also a Giving Tuesday, when you're supposed to make a donation to your favorite charity.)
The thing is that shoppers -- even the Buy Nothing folks -- still spend as much on holiday gifts as they ever did, or maybe more. They just shop on a different day than the day after Thanksgiving.
Which brings me to this coming Friday... and the weeks ahead.
One of my daughters texted this meme to me. I'm sure you've seen similar ones floating around on social media. For starters, we're all supposed to avoid spending any money at all this Friday, February 28th. There are exceptions for critical things such as medicine. And participants are encouraged to make purchases that day, if they do have to shop, from small, local businesses.
The original aim was to hurt the bottom lines of companies that have rolled back DEI -- diversity, equity, and inclusion -- policies. But it has somehow morphed into a new Buy Nothing Day.
I'm going to participate. But I don't know how much of a dent it will make for us to curtail discretionary spending for a single day. Just like on the traditional Buy Nothing Day, people who keep their debit cards in their wallets this coming Friday will likely just shift their shopping to another day. And just like with Buy Nothing Day, there's no good way to gauge how much of an impact a one-day boycott will make on these giant corporations, because that's not how companies report their earnings. As a financial literacy instructor told Newsweek: "While these blackouts are normally done with the hope of positive implications, the reality is past data indicates they lead to little financial data from most major companies. At the end of the day, even if consumers support the cause, they're going to continue to fulfill their purchasing needs and desires."
As for the follow-up boycotts and economic blackout days: do we really think most Americans have an attention span long enough to remember not to buy General Mills products at the end of April? I'm not even sure the enthusiasm will carry through mid-March.
No, I believe that if we really want to make an impression on corporate America, the answer is to quit our conspicuous consumption habit entirely.
Right after 9/11 happened, President Bush the Younger (satirist Molly Ivins used to call him Shrub to differentiate him from his father) went on TV to address the country, and one thing he said kind of stuck out like a sore thumb for me. He told us that no matter what, we should not stop shopping. I swear I am not making this up. Yes, you're scared; yes, the U.S. is under attack; yes, your government is going to find the perpetrators and make them pay; but don't let it stop you from spending money at the mall.
Why did he say that? Because retail sales are a huge driver of our economy. It depends on regular people regularly buying stuff we only think we need. If people had quit shopping in the wake of 9/11, the economy would have tanked.
You want to cut into the power our corporate overlords have over us? Quit giving them your money. And not just for a day or a week. Permanently. Or as permanently as you can manage it.
That is probably a bridge too far right now, when some folks may be using retail therapy to avoid paying attention to the shitshow in DC. Although the newly unemployed among the federal workforce, and those to lose their jobs shortly when the ripple effects take hold, may be forced to cut back on their spending anyway. But for the rest of us: think about it.
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There are also calls for a national strike on Friday, March 14th. Unfortunately, I can't take that day off; the legislature will still be in session for another week after that. But maybe you can.
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These moments of conspicuously consumptive blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!
First off, I have good news about my post of last week, in which I was dismayed to discover that Czechs in World War II might have equated Perun, the Slavic god of thunder and lightning, with Hitler. I received two translations of the song from friends and family, and Perun is in fact not the bad guy. Here's the verse in question. The song is billed as being "Dedicated to Czech Brothers by American Sokol Members". This first translation is courtesy of one of my cousins.
Let the voice of the Slavs be heard throughout the world!
Our homeland must be free!
Hitler and anyone who stands in our way
Shall be cast into hell by Perun.
Bohemia will live again!
And here's the ChatGPT rendition, courtesy of my author buddy Chris James:
The world can already hear the Slavs' voices, that our homeland must be free again. Hitler and anyone who would stop us, Perun shall strike them into hell, "Bohemia" shall live again!
So! Two translations that make Perun a good guy. I was right! And Google Translate can suck it!
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I may still petition Perun for help with the current craziness in Washington, but it may not do much good.
Lynne Cantwell 2025
As many of you know, I've taken a number of classes from John Beckett, a Druid priest. He posted in his blog at Patheos today that he's had a message from the Morrigan: "Lugh isn't coming to slay Balor."
A bit of Irish mythology is in order. Balor was the chief of the Fomorians in the time of the Tuatha De Danaan. The Tuatha tried to live in peace with them, but eventually things became intolerable, and the Tuatha went to war to overthrow their enemies. The fight slogged on for some time -- until Lugh Lamfhada, the Irish god of light, broke free and cast a spear through Balor's single hideous eye, killing him. The battle was over quickly after that, and the Tuatha then made Lugh their king.
If only our situation were that simple. Our Balor is a many-headed beast; Trump is looking more and more (to me, anyway) like a figurehead, a puppet, with many other people pulling his strings, from Elon Musk to the Project 2025 gang to who-knows-who overseas. The Democrats would need a hero like Lugh to pull off a decisive victory, and let's be honest: we don't have one. Multiple people are attacking them on multiple fronts: they're calling their members of Congress; they're filing lawsuits; and so on. But the knockout blow has been elusive so far.
Really, all we can do is do what we can. For me, that means writing this blog, going to work every day, and trying to keep from reacting to the relentless onslaught of bad news.
I work for the New Mexico state legislature, which is in session right now. Working during session is pretty crazy anyway: the hours of daylight are short, the weather is cold and sometimes snowy, and the workload seems relentless (I could swear we had at least 897 rushes sent to us between noon and 1:30 p.m. today). Much of the legislation we see is well intended. We do see some wackadoodle proposals every year, but usually I can just shake my head and move on. This year, it's hitting differently, knowing there are so many people out there who think this stuff would be a good idea.
Another thing I'm noticing more this year is how much federal law is intertwined with our state laws. It's not just federal funding, although that's important; it's how so many of our state laws dovetail with federal law on the same subject. What happens if the rule of law crumbles in Washington? Will our state laws stand on their own? Will they be allowed to stand?
We are in a good place politically, here in New Mexico -- our executive and legislative branches are both controlled by Democrats, and our congressional delegation is all Democratic, too. But as we learned last fall, that can turn on a dime.
Still, we're doing what we can. Our attorney general and 13 of his counterparts in other states filed suit in Washington on Thursday to have DOGE declared unconstitutional and its actions an abuse of power. There's a hearing set for tomorrow morning.
This isn't the only ongoing court case. But as we've learned to our dismay over the past four years, lawsuits take a long time to resolve. And our view of the future isn't clear.
All we can do is do what we can.
That's my plan. But I think I will approach Perun anyway. He may not be the hero we need, but He does have experience in fighting Nazis. And we need all the help we can get.
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These moments of doggedly determined blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.
I've mentioned that I'm taking a couple of classes during this year's legislative session, just to keep things, y'know, interesting. One of them is on Cernunnos, the Celtic god of the forest, animals and the hunt (among other things); His most famous image is found on the Gundestrup Cauldron, which was unearthed from a peat bog in Denmark in 1891. Despite the cauldron having been found in the Balkans, experts say it's of Celtic origin. Here's Cernunnos on the cauldron:
Stolen from https://balkancelts.wordpress.com/2016/09/06/the-gundestrup-ghosts-hidden-images-in-the-gundestrup-cauldron/
I grew up in the woods, but I have never had a strong affinity with Cernunnos. Still, the class has been worth taking; it's always good to learn new things. And it may have led me to something else.
While watching the final class video, for some reason I began thinking about Perun, the Slavic god of thunder. Perun has some attributes in common with Thor -- they're both red haired and they both wield a hammer and lightning bolts -- but Perun has a bigger role in the Slavic pantheon than Thor does in the Norse, as Perun has been billed as the supreme god of the Slavs. Now, feel free to take that with a grain of salt. As usual, the chroniclers were Christian, and so they were predisposed to view polytheist pantheons through the lens of "there's gotta be One Big God because that's how it works for us". So maybe Perun is the main dude, but maybe he's coequal with Veles, the Slavic god of the underworld and the animals and is sometimes depicted in the guise of a dragon. He and Perun have an epic fight in the skies at the end of winter every year, complete with thunder and lightning, and Veles is always defeated, and then it's spring.
Anyway, Perun played a part in Dragon's Web, the first book in the Pipe Woman's Legacy series, so I included Him in A Billion Gods and Goddesses, the companion book to the Pipe Woman universe's mythology. And in that book, I mentioned that I'd found among my mother's things a little songbook that had been produced, I'm assuming in the 1930s or '40s, by a Czech printer in Cicero, Illinois, and in that songbook was a song that I believed called on Perun to fight against Hitler and free Czechoslovakia. When that memory came up, I was sitting at my desk; I opened my desk drawer, and there it was.
Here's a photo of the song I was thinking of. The verse numbered 2, toward the bottom of the page, is the one that mentions Hitler and Perun:
Lynne Cantwell 2025
My Czech is extremely rusty and was never great to start with. So I figured I'd plug the verse into Google Translate, right? So I did, and...hmm.
Lynne Cantwell 2025
Wait a minute. Perun would be thrown into hell? They're equating the top Slavic god with Hitler? I mean, the Czechs had been Christianized for a long time by then (nowadays the country is largely atheist), but man, I dunno.
I sure hope someone who knows more Czech than me reads this. I was sure that Czech-Americans were asking for Perun's help in defeating Hitler -- and given that success, and what we're up against in Washington right now, I was all set to petition Perun for some help for our side.
I asked Mama Google about any connections between Perun and the Czechs in World War II, and I did find a publication that mentions a branch of the Czech intelligence, "responsible for sabotage and subversive operations", that was codenamed Perun. It's kind of sad that the Czechs made their mightiest god go undercover to beat Hitler. But at least He did fight against Hitler -- or anyway, some Czech operatives fought against the Germans in His name.
And it beats the fate of Lugh, the Irish god of light -- the guy who could do anything -- who in later years was turned into a leprechaun.
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These moments of questionable bloggy translations have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there!
Here we are, the Sunday after Trump's second inauguration, and so of course all the preachers in all the churches in America are talking about it, in one way or another. A lot of them are talking about the homily delivered to Trump and his vice president, J.D. Vance, on Inauguration Day at the National Cathedral by the Right Rev. Marian Budde, the Episcopal bishop of Washington, DC. (For those who aren't clued into ecclesiastical stuff, the National Cathedral is an Episcopal church. That's a Protestant denomination. It's more or less the American version of the Anglican Church, which King Henry VIII created when the pope wouldn't grant him a divorce from his first wife.) The Rev. Budde had the temerity to call on Trump -- to his face, even! -- to "have mercy upon the people in this country who are scared now." How dare she, right? A priest calling on a parishoner to do the right, moral thing! The very idea!
The reactions fell into the usual camps, with Trump and his MAGAts attacking her. One Republican member of the House of Representatives suggested that she be added to the deportation list. Where does he think she should be deported to? She was born in New Jersey!
Pope Francis is siding with the Rev. Budde, at least on the issue of mass deportations. He's calling the plan "a disgrace". So of course the MAGAts are mad at him, too.
None of this stopped ICE from rounding up migrants -- some of them legal -- working at a fish market in Newark, NJ, on Friday. According to Newark Mayor Ras Baraka, one of those rounded up was a veteran who had his military service questioned -- an "indignity", the mayor said. And how.
We knew this was going to happen, and worse. Trump and his minions are not interested in showing anybody mercy, least of all nonwhite, noncisgendered people. But make no mistake: They are all still people, no matter what. As an animist, I think it's a no-brainer: all humans are people (my definition of "people" is a lot broader than just humans, as alert hearth/myth readers know - here's just one of my several posts on the subject), and all people deserve dignity and respect.
Pace yourselves, guys. It's gonna be a long four years.
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Let's talk about something more cheerful. This memory bubbled up in my brain when an author friend made a Facebook post in which he asked people to tell about the first single they ever bought. (In this context, "single" refers to a 45-rpm vinyl record, smaller than an LP, that had just one song on each side.)
I couldn't tell you which single I owned first. I mean, it was probably a Monkees record; I just don't remember which one. But I can tell you that virtually my entire hoard of singles came from one of two stores in my hometown: either Shoppers Fair or 212 Bargain Center.
The name "212 Bargain Center" was not exactly creative: The store was located on Indiana Highway 212, a spur that connects US 12 and US 20. If you've ever read any of Andrew M. Greeley's early novels, you may have run across a mention of the highway; he would sometimes send his priests up to Grand Beach, MI, for a summer outing, and at least once, they stopped at Roxanne's Drive-In on Highway 212 for a bite.
Anyway. When I was a kid, Mom, Dad, and I had a tradition on Saturday nights: after we ate supper at home, we'd get in the car and do some shopping (either at one of those two stores or the mall), then maybe stop for milkshakes at McDonald's (which we consumed in the car -- no indoor seating, folks, this was the '60s), and then head to the South Shore train station on 11th Street downtown so Dad could buy the Sunday editions of the Chicago newspapers as soon as they came off the train Saturday night.
Shoppers Fair often ran a coupon in their weekly advertising circular for singles -- 25 cents each, or four for a dollar. At 212 Bargain Center, you didn't need a coupon; they had a big bin of cut-out singles. Each of these 45s had a hole drilled through the label. They played fine, though, and most importantly, they were cheap. I could usually talk my mother into buying me one or two.
On this particular night, as I browsed the cut-out bin, I ran across a song I liked and asked Mom if we could get it. "Which song is that?" she asked. The house was small and I had my radio on a lot; she'd heard them all. Suddenly, the background music in the store played the record I was asking for. "That one," I said, and she said okay. Then I ran across another song I liked -- and the same thing happened. And then it happened again!
I don't remember how many records I ended up with. I only remember how surprised and delighted I was that the songs I wanted kept playing when Mom wanted to know what they sounded like.
Coincidence? Maybe. Somebody in the office at the store having fun with us? Doubtful. The office was pretty far from the record bin; they would have needed binoculars to see the record labels. A miracle? It's an odd sort of thing to put down as miraculous, don't you think? Serendipity, maybe. Or maybe ... magic.
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These moments of magical blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there, guys.
