Good morning! Hello. How are you? Feeling okay? Side effects not too bad from your second shot? MAN it is so good to see so many people getting the vaccine. I was laying in bed yesterday thinking about this vaccine and all it meant. Wondering when I could go to New York again. Wondering if I was getting ahead of myself. Wondering where we were with knowing if vaccinated people can pass COVID-19 to, oh, I don’t know, say, a 3 year-old girl when they get home from New York. Wondering what’s up with the variants. Wondering if that woman who runs the CDC meant it when she said on Rachel Maddow “Our data from the CDC today suggests that vaccinated people do not carry the virus, don’t get sick.” Turns out she didn’t mean it! Whoopsie! Wondering why we don’t just use vax passports in this country. Wondering why you don’t hear from our president talking about COVID anymore. Great muddling phrase, “you don’t hear.” It can foster consent when there is none. Is it a turn of phrase critiquing the media? Or the subject of the latter half of the sentence? Who knows! But you can say it, and two people can both go “yeah!” even though one might have just seen Biden talk about COVID yesterday and the other might be a Qspiracy nutbag. Great phrase for politicians and blowhards.
It is thirty degrees outside. Two days ago, the weather said we were going to have one night of 34 degrees — no frost, but close. Instead we got two nights, and the second night was below freezing. There is frost on the yard. Actually lemme go take a picture, it’s kind of pretty.
Every time the weather forecast is wrong I blame Obama. It’s not his fault, of course. But he gave this speech once, and it was a really good speech! Actually, I think it was the answer to a question about whether the government can do any good. It was back when I was working on that Government Good project that was a good idea but I didn’t have enough time to devote to it. Those posts still do really well on Tumblr. Anyway, someone asked him if the government can do any good, why doesn’t it, and he had a great, long thoughtful answer about how the government does lots of things well, but those are the things no one argues about. Like weather forecasting. It was very good. But now whenever the weather forecast is wrong, I think “not so good now, is it, OBAMA.”
In any case, I brought in all the basil and covered all the non-frost-hardy plants for a second day. Hopefully they survived. I mean, I have backups for most of everything – except those strawberries, but they should be fine. But… stressful!
I had a crazy busy day yesterday what with two appointments for mom, but i did manage to buy some more dirt so I will get the potatoes planted this weekend and some random stuff to fill up the rest of my planters. That is exciting. Hopefully this is the end of absurd, late, flash frosts. And, boy. I’m glad I found all that plastic. For a while there, I was worried we didn’t have it anymore. But Emma remembered we moved it down to, logically, the gardening bins.
Before I get into a good, long rant, I would like to pause and wish my friend Christine Navin a happy birthday. I met Christine in 1990, which makes her one of my oldest “new life” friends, after moving out of Alaska and heading to Boston. We met because of Mike Anderson, I believe? She had very red hair. But not in this picture. Happy birthday, Christine. You are a great friend.
Hrm we best use that line tool here. Sorry for the abrupt transition.
Brett Kavanaugh is a monster. Sorry for the abrupt transition there, but he really is the god damned worst. Brett Kavanaugh has decided that children can go to jail for life. Let me repeat that: Brett Kavanaugh, the man very credibly accused of sexually assaulting a woman when he was a teenager, has decided that children can go to jail for life. But you can ignore his own criminal past! Even if he were an angel, he did this in writing an opinion that not only is patently malevolent, it’s also prima facie hypocritical. I am not a man who likes to do long quotes here, but I think this story deserves one or two:
“The Court simply rewrites Miller and Montgomery to say what the Court now wishes they had said, and then denies that it has done any such thing,” Sotomayor declared. “The Court knows what it is doing.” Then she used Kavanaugh’s own words against him, quoting his past statements claiming to support stare decisis, or respect for precedent, to illustrate how he has abandoned his own purported principles. “How low this Court’s respect for stare decisis has sunk,” Sotomayor wrote. “The Court is willing to overrule precedent without even acknowledging it is doing so, much less providing any special justification. It is hard to see how that approach”—and here, she quoted Kavanaugh himself—“is ‘founded in the law rather than in the proclivities of individuals.’ ”
And, lest we forget the actual stakes of this:
In the final portion of her dissent, Sotomayor recounted the story of the defendant in this case, Brett Jones, to show how “many aspects of Jones’ crime seem to epitomize unfortunate yet transient immaturity.” Jones was “the victim of violence and neglect that he was too young to escape.” His biological father was an alcoholic who physically abused his mother, who had severe mental health problems. His stepfather abused him, too, using “belts, switches, and a paddle.” He openly expressed his hatred for Jones. When Jones moved to Mississippi to live with his grandparents, he abruptly lost access to medication he took for mental health issues, including hallucinations and self-harm. Jones’ grandfather beat him, as well. One day in 2004, when Jones’ grandfather tried to hit him, Jones stabbed him repeatedly, killing him. He had turned 15 just 23 days earlier. Jones tried to save his grandfather with CPR but failed. After making minimal efforts to conceal the crime, he confessed to the police.
Jones’ experience is depressingly common among people sentenced to JLWOP. His crime was clearly the consequence of a traumatic childhood. He has been a near-model prisoner, earning his GED, working behind bars, and studying the Bible. His grandmother—the widow of his victim—has urged the courts to release him. Jones’ experience bears out the Supreme Court’s pronouncements in Miller and Montgomery that juvenile crimes often reflect immaturity, the product of underdeveloped brains and severe childhood trauma rather than permanent corruption. As Jones himself put it at his resentencing hearing: “Minors do have the ability to change. … Please give me just one chance to show the world, man, like, I can be somebody. … I can’t change what was already done. I can just try to show … I’ve become a grown man.”
On Thursday, Kavanaugh and the rest of the court’s conservatives denied that opportunity to Jones.
I remind you that this man sits on the bench because of a 50-48 vote, with a single Democract deciding it was okay to put a man credibly accused of rape on the bench, no problem at all with that vote being only 50 votes, and no problem at all that the supposed “investigation” of the accusation was curtailed and farcical. And are we surprised at all who that man is? Joe fucking Manchin, the man who just loooves minority rights. Kids rights? Fuck ‘em.
Bad, bad people.
This man is a cancer upon society, liable to sit on that bench for another fifty years, and people just seem to accept it. He was put there through outright lies and negligent acts. He clearly perjured himself. This is not hyperbole. It was quite obvious. Patrick Leahy was asking him questions about his involvement in the theft of private government information — because hey also let’s not forget that Brett Kavanaugh was involved in a hacking incident against Democratic senators. There was documentation sitting right in front of him proving it. But he kept legalistically non-denying it. But then good ole cornpole Lindsey Graham comes along and says “c’mon ole boy Brett, you weren’t involved in any of that, were you?” And Brett just says “no.” Even though there were documents right in front of him proving he was involved. Also he directly contradicted previous under oath testimony on this topic! And we all just let it go. We put that man on the Supreme Court.
When these things happen, I get so upset. And yet they’re happening constantly. It’s enough to drive you crazy. It’s so hard to return to normal life, and it feels completely evil to do it. I go into, like, a day or two tailspin every time. I have no idea what a proper reaction is to these things. It does not feel particularly healthy, no matter where I end up after it.
Boy, this line tool is really coming in handy.
Last night as I was falling asleep, after the Kavanaugh rage and the long mental journey about COVID and the shiftiness of the phrase “you don’t hear,” I started thinking of the Fairbanks, Alaska Dennys. The northernmost Dennys in the world. How much time we all used to spend there.
The back rooms. How we’d come in as a pack of ten, and they’d give us a table in the back room. How I almost spent the turning of the clock from 1989 to 1990 in that back room before we decided to high-tail it out of there and be somewhere else as the clock rang in. How Chris used to work there. How that one time Frank ordered two Dennyburgers back to back. How we’d just take up adjoining booths and hang out. I hadn’t thought of the place in years, yet it’s always there, in the back of my mind. I could remember exactly the layout of each of the two back rooms, which tables we sat at and when and with whom. It’s barely comprehensible to me that was the same life as mine, yet it’s all still there, filed away, part of the mental oxygen my brain breathes.
If I am not mistaken, this photo shows the two booths at the edge of the smoking section and the non-smoking section. We’d get those two booths a lot, so the smokers could smoke and the non-smokers didn’t have to. Not that Mariah or Tom smoked, though, so I don’t know, maybe I am imagining that.
I don’t know where I’m going with this, but these memories of Dennys, and those old friends, are what got my brain finally torn away from Kavanaugh loathing last night, my thoughts returning to my own life. It worked for me last night, so I guess I figured it would work as a nice transition here, as well, easing you out of my political rage so we can all get on with our lives.
Today’s mix is just a mix. I need a different term for those. Today’s mix is a bokd mix that dares to cross genre boundaries and present to you a more varied picture of our musical landscape, etc. etc. It is a mix from a different time, much like 1993, when you might hear the Orb back-to-back with Nirvana or Blur. I am not sure why Robin Guthrie and not Liz Fraser gets credit with Medicine on Time Baby 3 that seems… odd? And my god I want to go see Genesis this October in England. That’ll be possible right?
Okay well I have gotten myself worked up again about Brett Kavanaugh, and my heart is racing in anger, so I am gonna go take some deep breaths and maybe peek at the chili pepper plants. I hope you have a lovely day. I’m sorry to have upset you. I hope it’s not too bad. It’s Friday! Let’s look forward to our weekend. Ciao.
Thank you, Rick!!! Mike Anderson did introduce us! You guys came to my dorm room at BU and I remember you looking through my cds... I guess you thought I was alright based on my musical taste, which does seem to be the way that we all made friends back then, in the EARLY 90S! Glad we have stayed in touch all of these years... hopefully SOON there will be more drinks at bars and more musique in clubs! I miss that and I miss all of you human people so much! xxoo
It's funny that Denny's is a ubiquitous teenager-in-the-90s experience. Someone burned mine down a few years ago. (It was closed and no longer a Denny's, just an empty Denny's building.)