Patio Boat

May 2025

2025-06-13T08:14:00.000-07:00

May 2025

Mother, may I live?
You may, my son.

Mother, may I crawl?
You may, my son.

Mother, may I walk?
You may, my son.

Mother, may I run?
You may, my son.

Mother, may I go out into the world?
To see and to hear and to smell?

To learn and to teach and to forget?
To have beauty and hate and love?
To have a job and tasks and toil?
To have a love and build a home?
To raise a son with worry and pride?

You may, my son.

Mother, may I live?

Mother?

Mother?

Mother, may I die?
You may, my son.

--John Magee

March 2025

2025-04-16T11:32:00.000-07:00

March.
March. March.

In March we began marching.
Baby steps at first.

Small circles with little signs.

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.

"Are you here, too?"
"Isn't it terrible?"
"I wish there was more we could do."

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.
March. March. March. March.

By the time April arrived
We looked around,
Realized that we were strong,
And began planning to get stronger.

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.
March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March.

But it began with baby steps.

March.
March. March.
March. March. March.
March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March. March.
March. March. March. March. March. March. March....

--John Magee

You Like to Think You Could Do Better

2025-03-20T16:04:00.000-07:00

You Like to Think You Could Do Better

You like to think you would have done as well,
Maybe even better.

You give thanks that you will never find yourself
In such dark times.

Then your times change, despite your efforts.

So you try to do better,
Or at least as well.

And you come to realize
That all you might be accomplishing
Is to make sure the yellow stars
To be pinned to chests
Are at least as pretty as possible.

You like to think you could do better.

--John Magee

January 2025

2025-01-31T11:59:00.000-08:00

January 2025

It is January.

It has always been January.

It will always be January.

Now is the January of our discontent.

Made wintry by soul devoid.

It is January and Los Angeles burns.

It is January and it snows in Pensacola.

It is January and the news is flailing.

It is January and the news is failing.

It is January and the news is ailing.

It is January and the news is news no more.

Once more unto the ice, dear friends.

We close the month with our frozen dead,

Buried in slush beneath a river of lies.

It is January.

It has always been January.

It will always be January.

Even when February comes,

It will always be January.

We will always remember January 2025.

--John A. Magee

What I Plan to Do with My Next Four Years

2025-01-20T10:45:00.002-08:00

I have very few illusions about how the next four years are going to go. As a nation we are recklessly plunging towards disaster. I hope I'm wrong.

I've spent a fair bit of time over the last couple of months thinking about what I intend to do about it all. [Waves arms hopelessly in every direction.]

The first thing is I'm going to start giving myself a bit more credit about how hard I'm trying at my job. I don't write or talk about my job a lot -- yes, this is probably why I'm afraid to watch the show "Severance" -- but I work with a bunch of people to make it easier to find good, truthful, accurate information in online library databases. If I do my job well, it becomes easier for good information to crowd out misinformation, and good information needs all the help it can get these days.

Still, these days in the Age of Misinformation it feels as if I'm one of those Japanese soldiers defending his foxhole on a remote atoll while the war has swept past him. So I'll also spend some time looking for a better opportunity to help good information.

Second, I'm going to keep an eye out for opportunities to help where I can be my most effective. It's easy to despair when it seems all about us is burning. It's impossible to fight everything. So pick one thing that you can do, then do your best at it. Then when you're done, rest up, find another thing then do your best at that. No single one of us got us to this place. No single one of us can get us out of this mess. But if all of us do just one thing to move the ball in the right direction, things will improve.

Along those lines I picked a few groups I like that will be extra busy over the next four years and sent them a little donation today: the ACLU, the Sierra Club, and Amnesty International. It made me feel better about things. I recommend it.

Third, we're headed into four years of meanness for meanness sake and performative cruelty. I'm going to do my best to fight back with beauty and joy and humor. When I say that my plan is to fight fascism with pretty pictures, I mean it. Fascism feeds on hopelessness. Beauty feeds hope. I intend to do my little part to feed hope.

Over on Bluesky the artist Jay Bigam (@jayispainting.earthskyart.ca) -- who created the wonderful #ArtAdventCalendar movement -- recommended that today be a day to post #OnlyBeautifulThings online.

I like that notion. So I leave you with a pretty picture.

Hang in there, everybody. Try not to let hopelessness get the upper hand.

Farewell, 2024

2024-12-20T12:28:00.000-08:00

Normally I put together a little year-end poem for my final out-of-office message at work. This year all I could muster up for 2024 was a haiku:

Twenty Twenty-Four,
A kidneystone of a year.
Farewell. Good riddance.

That seems a bit depressing, so we'll see if I come up with something else before 5 pm. What I'd like to remember of 2024 is that we welcomed Benny Beagle into our home, we saw a cool solar eclipse and several amazing nights of aurora, we built a new porch and deck, and that Monique and I have made it to the wrapup of this year a little the worse for wear, but still here and still in love with each other.

I live a blessed life and I'm keenly aware of it -- even in the midst of a day-by-day disaster like 2024.

I'm also a usually a pretty optimistic fellow, but it seems likely to me that we're all headed into rough waters in 2025. I'm going to give some more thought over the next couple of weeks to just what I want to do in 2025. I haven't felt very effective in recent years. I've mostly felt exhausted. But perhaps I can find a useful place to put my shoulder to the wheel and find an effective way make things a little better at some level in the world.

For now I'm trying to combat it all with pretty pictures. Here, have one of my favorites from 2024!

That might not seem very effective, but in an online world filled with possibly even more horror and anger than we see in the real world, some beauty to balance the scales can't hurt.

I've thought about dipping my toe back into politics. I've been pretty good at fixing things and building things in politics, but it seems to me that the next four years may call for constant full-volume screaming into the void. I could do that, but I'm not sure it would change anything and I'm pretty sure I wouldn't like who I'd become by the end of four years of that.

I might try going back to some writing in 2025. Time flies and it's been quite a while since I've written any fiction. The last sustained push was a couple of decades ago when I wrote a few short stories set in a near-future dystopia. I set it aside for a variety of reasons. One of those reasons was that it was a fairly depressing world to live in. Now that I find myself actually living in a near-future dystopia, maybe it's time to revisit it. (I wasn't entirely prescient. I thought it would take at least fifty more years to get to where we are now.) I'm not sure another run at science-fiction is in my future. But I might like to tackle something. We shall see. I fear it might devolve into what I mentioned above about politics: four years of shouting loudly into the void to no effect.

Hmmn ... time for another pretty picture:

Or I might try something else altogether. Whatever it is, I think my way of dealing with 2025 and beyond is going to be building something for the future, whatever it may be. For a long time now it has felt as if life has me on the run, ground down and trying to hold on to what I've got. That hasn't felt all that good lately. It's time to try something new.

Whatever you might be thinking of doing with your 2025, I wish you all the best with it!

Here, have another pretty picture:

Mood Melancholy - November 2024

2024-11-10T12:52:00.000-08:00

It's been a rough 12 months for me and Monique, full of disease and death and setbacks and sorrow. We are ground down. Tuesday's election results were a perfect capper.

Early on in the Biden Administration -- henceforth known as the Second Weimar Republic -- I remember saying a couple of things. The first was that it drove me crazy that he was having these remarkable policy and legislative achievements, but was utterly unable to communicate those successes to the American people. The second came as they repeatedly failed to deal swiftly and harshly with an armed insurrection and Trump's attempt to overthrow the American government:

"Feckless Democrats and fascist Republicans will be the ruination of us all," I said, donning the mantle of the Cassandra of the early 2020s.

The feckless Democrats have done their part. Now the fascist Republicans have center stage to themselves.

This was the first time I wasn't directly involved in a campaign since the 2000 election shortly after I moved to Michigan. The reasons were mostly entirely unrelated to the election itself, but I hesitate to offer up a post-mortem for Tuesday's Democratic disaster because I hate to be the guy sitting out on the side pointing out what the players did wrong. However, a fair number of people have asked me for my two cents, so here it is:

Several big lies repeated loudly again and again over four years beat out a thousand small truths mumbled incoherently over the same period.

It would be easy to blame Kamala Harris for that, since it was her name on the ballot. But it feels to me as if these results were baked in before she ever took the lead on the ticket. Had she not run a very strong campaign for her hundred days as candidate this could've been an even bigger disaster for the Democrats. Thanks, Kamala. I appreciate the effort.

Joe Biden was a great Senator and a master of the inside game in Washington. But for all that I admire Biden's accomplishments in his first two years, he also failed to communicate those accomplishments effectively. And it constantly felt as if he failed to understand the moment. He kept trying to negotiate with the GOP of forty years ago but never understood that he was getting clobbered in a back alley of the Age of Misinformation.

"We're the American people," he liked to say after some outbreak of general crappiness. "We're better than that."

"No, Joe," I would think wearily. "I've studied a lot of American history and on average we are not better than that. Not unless we are exceptionally well led."

So what next? I don't know. Our best hope for the next few months is the sheer demonstrated incompetence of Trump and his hangers-on and yes-men. But too many of the worst people have been planning the worst things to give me much hope that we'll be as lucky as we were the first time around.

I doubt I'm entirely done with campaigning, but I'm not sure if I'll be ready to come back off the sidelines in 2026 or not. As with 2024, it would mostly be for reasons not related to the election itself.

If I was in charge of Democratic Party messaging for the next four years -- and nobody is knocking down my door asking me to take the gig -- I'd pick two or three brutal truths and shout them again and again and again. And again and again and again. And again and again and again.

Sadly, I belong to a political party that failed to have the stones to deal effectively with the aftermath of an armed insurrection. I doubt genuine messaging discipline will suddenly appear in our bag of skills.

If anybody cares enough to buy me lunch, I'll tell you my nominees for the brutal truths we should be telling again and again and again. But there'll be no lack of terrible things that the Republican Party will do in the next few years. The problem will be picking just two or three. But the real problem is that the Democratic Party never found a truth it couldn't bury under a nuanced 23-point policy statement.

In the meantime there will be plenty of calls to storm the ramparts in protest of whatever's happening. I'll be more inclined to heed them if the elected Democrats still in office look as if they are finally battling on our behalf. For the last four years it has felt as if they were more interested in fundraising off the rising tide of fascism than in actually defeating it. I'm going to need to see something effective out of some of them before they see another dime out of me.

The institutionalists and technocrats have failed us. It's time for a wartime consigliari to take charge.

All in all, not a very cheerful blog post. But it's not a cheerful time. The grey November rains outside my window match my mood melancholy.

Winter is often a time for rest and recovery. Our new year starts around the winter solstice for good reason. I'm planning some rest and recovery for myself this winter. I wish you all the same.

The Revised Patioboater Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

2024-09-23T07:58:00.000-07:00

Up is down! Down is up! Higgledy Piggledy all around!

Like a lot of folks, I'm relieved that Biden decided to step down after all. I suspect his Presidency is going to age well. He accomplished a ton of things in a short period.

Since nobody reads this blog anymore this is mostly for myself, but I'd like to go on this bloggy record as predicting a narrow Harris win in November, followed by two months of dirty tricks and lies. I haven't really looked at the Congressional races, but I'd like to think there might be enough momentum to push both houses back to the Dems. We shall see.

I also predict a very bumpy ride for these final six weeks.

Maybe, just maybe if Harris and the Dems win the GOP will take a look at itself and what is has become and step back from the abyss. I doubt it though. The alternative right-win information environment that a majority of Republicans live in these days is just too toxic. A crushing defeat at the polls might lead the toxicity merchants to step back a bit. But a narrow defeat is likely to just encourage them to double down on toxicity and disinformation. Woe betide us all in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

In any event, good luck Kamala! I'm afraid you're going to need it.

The Patioboater Guide to the 2024 Presidential Election

2024-06-19T10:28:00.000-07:00

Honestly, do any of you need or want any guidance for the 2024 election? Anybody?

These two guys have been around on the public scene for a long time, so I can't imagine there's anybody left undecided, unless they've been in a coma for the last 20 years.

Okay, here's the quick guide: on the one hand, we have a failed president who led the worst Covid response of any industrialized country, then attempted to overthrow the government when people voted overwhelmingly against him. On the other hand we have a decent guy who has led the best economic recovery from the pandemic among industrialized nations, and who passed a series of very effective economic and environmental bills through a narrowly divided Congress.

Choose wisely.

But for those who sat down with a cup of coffee for this read, here's my longer take on the election...

It has probably not gone unnoticed by many of you that my Facebook page has been a quiet place in recent years, mostly filled with photos of sunsets, dogs, and old British cars. This was a conscious decision to focus my space and time back to its original intent, which was to get nice little glimpses into the lives of my family members and friends. I recommend it for peace of mind. I also made myself a rule that I'm not going onto other people's timelines to rebut whatever crapola they post. Again, I recommend it for peace of mind. I have yet to see anybody win a Facebook argument on that basis.

As part of that shift, I've been posting a lot less about politics myself. It isn't that I suddenly don't have opinions, thoughts, or insights. But I also grew tired of the inevitable wave of right-wing misinformation and lies that piled up on those posts, which required me to then spend my time moderating and deleting crapola from the worshipers of the Cheeto God. I could spend a long, long blog post opining about the Age of Misinformation. This isn't that post, but it's important to acknowledge the context for this election.

Since there are very few truly undecided voters to be found, this presidential election is going to end up being a turnout election. The convicted felon is going to spew his Big Lie about the 2020 election to get his base fired up. They will be fired up and they will vote, presumably having also been told that the fix is in so they will have to vote in overwhelming numbers. At the same time, he and his allies and a bunch of Russian 'bots will be spewing a firehose of negative disinformation about Biden, mostly by way of getting people to bring it into the open so that dimwitted pundits will opine about it as if it's not utter made up crapola. ("Meanwhile, is President Biden planning to ___[Crapola]___? Some people say yes. Stay tuned after the break and we'll explain...."

The convicted felon also needs to convince people who would sigh and dutifully vote for Biden that it's not worth it and they should either throw away their vote on a 3rd-party candidate or stay home altogether.

On the flip side, Biden has a different problem that also is based in turnout. He wasn't particularly anybody's #1 choice going into 2020, so there's not really a passionate base supporting him personally. Heck, he wasn't my top choice, either. But he's done a much, much better job with a difficult situation than I expected. Not flawless by any means. But if you sit down and evaluate the job he's done fairly, he's done extremely well.

But the polls sure as heck don't show that. There are some genuine reasons, but a lot of it is also the public reaction to the unrelenting drum of negativity that buzzes of our televisions 24/7 nowadays and seeps into the rest of the news sphere. In any case, he needs to convince people who would be inclined to vote for him to actually show up and vote for him.

He also needs to convince Republicans who won't vote for him but can't stomach another four years of Trump to at least not do the thing that Republicans do in overwhelming numbers: vote for the R on the ballot, regardless of who it is.

So that's what we're going to see in this election: from the GOP and the Russian bots an unrelenting torrent of crapola about how the country is somehow now a hellscape compared to 2020, despite a lot of facts like economic and crime statistics that compare favorably to 2019 before Covid hit, much less 2020. (Does anybody actually remember 2020? Anybody? Because that was *not* a good year!) And from Biden we're going to see some general feel-good marketing reminding people to take a look around because 2024 is mostly pretty good. Plus, there's going to be a lot of targeted campaigning to people who might show up because they support a specific issue or set of issues -- hello, women. And there'll be a fair amount of targeted campaigning to whatever's left of the non-MAGA Republicans asking them to take a very close look at their guy before pulling that lever.

It's going to be a bumpy four-and-a-half months.

If you're looking for something you can do in the midst of all of that to help keep a failed President and convicted felon from somehow getting back into the Oval Office for a revenge tour, here are my suggestions.

Vote for Joe Biden.
I mean it. Vote for Joe Biden. I don't care what your specific beef with him or the two-party system is. If you care about the future of this country, vote for Joe Biden. You can bring your beefs to me on Wednesday, November 6, and I'll hear you out.
Make sure your friends and family members also vote for Joe Biden. No sitting this one out just because we're all tired.
If you're looking for more to do, find a local candidate that you like and help with their campaign. In some elections the top of the ticket has coattails that carry the candidates lower on the ballot. My guess is that in this one the top of the Democratic ticket is most likely to benefit from good campaigning and get-out-the-vote campaigns from the rest of the ticket.
If you have a few extra bucks to put into this, donate to Joe Biden's campaign. You will probably feel that the money gets spent asking you for more money, but that's okay. Marketing campaigns are expensive, especially when they have to counter a firehose of crapola.
If you have a few extra bucks to put into this, donate to other good candidates. They will make a difference in who shows up to vote.

And that's about it. I'd advise steering clear of the 24/7 television news industry for the next few months. It's going to be ugly and uninformative. If you need a peaceful place, stop by the ol' Facebook page. I can't promise I won't ever post on politics between now and Tuesday, November 5. But if I do I can promise I'll be using the ol' delete function energetically in the comments. In truth it'll mostly be sunsets, Benny Beagle, and old British cars.

Here. Have a pretty sunset photo. If you read to the bottom you've earned it.

I watched (almost) 40 Hallmark Holiday Movies in 2022

2022-12-30T14:37:00.007-08:00

Let's get this confession out of the way: I like predictable entertainment.

For one thing, it's comfortable, especially at the end of a long day. I also enjoy watching artists and writers work within constraints: the sonnet, the three-act play, the Perry Mason one-hour telecast. When you know the genre and where you're going, you can relax and enjoy the ride. We all know that Godzilla is going to stomp Tokyo and waddle back into the sea. But how intricate are the buildings he will destroy? And do we make some new friends along the way?

Given that, it should be no surprise that I have a soft spot for Hallmark Holiday Movies, which are among the most predictable of television productions. Billions of bytes have been spilled detailing the dozen or more repeated plot points in these cozy holiday semi-classics, so you don't need me to do that for you. In any case, after a long, long, long year, I decided that I would fire up my trusty DVR and catch as many of the this year's crop as I could and enjoy some nice, comfy Christmas watching.

Along the way I discovered a few problems:

1. I naively assumed there would be maybe 15 or 20 of them to sort through. Between the regular Hallmark Channel and Hallmark Mysteries & Movies, they put out a mind-boggling forty new Hallmark holiday movies this year. That's a lot of Hallmarking, especially since I didn't intend to start watching until after Thanksgiving.

2. It seems that most of North America's hometown Christmas tree lots / Christmas cookie bakeries / holiday hotels / Christmas ornament factories have already been saved by plucky heroines with dull boyfriends in the big city. With 40 holiday movies to crank out this year, Hallmark has been pushing their plots and settings further afield. Sometimes this works well. Sometimes it does not. The ultimate effect is that the general quality feels all over the place, probably more so than in prior years. (Or maybe my memory of the efforts of prior years are covered in a gauzy holiday haze, and they've always been uneven. That seems entirely likely)

3. Hallmark's efforts to bring a lot more diversity to these productions remains a work in progress. For the most part, this is much improved from the first few years of their efforts, which mostly seemed to consist of making a black guy the mayor of every 99%-white small town in America. A few of the better movies this year were set in black or Asian American families. And this year's Hanukkah entry was also one of the strongest entries.

On the other hand, some of the more inclusive entries were among the weaker efforts. There's a certain bit of representation there, too, since several of the other weak movies this year had big-city white girls going home for Christmas. These movies are proving that they succeed or not based on their merits, not based on the ethnicity of the cast. I applaud the fact that Hallmark is trying to make movies that look more like America. They still have a ways to go, but at least they're trying.

However, there was one particularly irritating fail in Hallmark's move towards racial inclusiveness in these films, and it came in one of their biggest, most hyped movies of the year, A Holiday Spectacular, which revolved around the Radio City Music Hall Rockettes in 1958. In that movie one of the main characters is an African American dancer in the Rockettes in 1958 who apparently started with the Rockettes in the late 1940s. In fact, the Rockettes didn't permit their first black dancer until 1987. (No, I didn't know the date that until I looked it up afterwards, but I had a vague memory of it, and this nagged at me as I watched.)

That character and subplot felt like whitewashing genuine history, instead of representation. I like seeing diversity on screen and in surprising places -- Denzel Washington as MacBeth? Yes! -- but with the emphasis of this production on seeming historic authenticity, this felt dishonest about what America was really like in the 1950s -- misrepresentation instead of representation.

So, kudos to Hallmark for continuing to work on inclusiveness. I get what they were trying to do there. But there's more work to be done. There's also a lot more to be said and written on the topic. It's a continuing microcosm of America's "three steps forward, two steps back" progress on racial equality.

As for the movies themselves? My reviews are below in alphabetical order. My favorite by far was Ghosts of Christmas Always, an entirely surprising and fun mash-up of "A Christmas Carol" and a Hallmark Holiday movie plot. Several of the other best movies of the year also involved mash-ups or remakes or winks at the well-worn Hallmark movie trope. My runner up for the best is probably Three Wise Men and a Baby, a Christmas remake of Three Men and a Baby that wrung a lot of laughs out of classic men-and-baby comedy.

The worst by far was We Wish You a Married Christmas, which consisted of two hours spent with an unpleasant squabbling married couple. I only mention it here as extra warning. Spare yourself. It was awful.

Everything else lay somewhere between. Some good. Some very good. Some bad. Some very bad. Some eh. I don't provide any real plot summaries or other information below, so here's a good listing from the TV Guide channel with plot summaries and stars if you want to know more: Hallmark Christmas Movie Calendar 2022: The Full Schedule.

My Rankings

Grinch - Avoid at all costs.

* Ugh. Not good.

** Eh, what did you expect? It's a Hallmark holiday movie

*** Genuinely entertaining

**** Wow! Go out of your way to watch this next year!

#Xmas **

Another classic Hallmark trope: totally botching how social media works in real life. Better than I expected, especially after a weak start and setup. But still dubious.

All Saints Christmas ***

Pop singer and a fake engagement. The plot summary made me think it would be terrible, but the whole movie was fun. Well worth a watch. Special kudos for the ridiculous computer-generated snowflakes falling at the end in Louisiana.

A Big Fat Family Christmas ***

Reluctant daughter and a big family party in San Francisco. Another one that beat my expectations, mostly due to likeable turns by the lead actors, as well as Tia Carrera chewing up scenery as the Mom and a lot of very good location shots of SF.

Christmas at the Golden Dragon ***

Family Chinese restaurant closing. This one grew on me as it went along. The cast was good and the whole thing had a lot of heart, plus yummy Chinese food.

Christmas Bedtime Stories *

Widowed mother. This one probably deserves an "Incomplete" from me because I turned it off after 15 minutes or so. On the other hand, the dismal 5.0/10 IMDB rating and the terrible plot twist at the end mentioned as a spoiler in several user reviews tell me that my instincts were 100% correct here.

Christmas Class Reunion **

Disastrous reunion 15 years after graduation. Pretty likeable. Pretty fun to watch. Pretty predictable. Might've deserved a third star from me, but didn't quite make it.

A Christmas Cookie Catastrophe **

I wanted to like this one more than I did. I like Rachel Boston. I like a good Christmas mystery. And I love rescuing the family Christmas cookie biz. But it just never really developed a spark. Sigh.

A Cozy Christmas Inn ***

Another one right in the old-school Hallmark tradition. Small-town girl goes home for the holidays.

A Fabled Holiday **

Unlikely couple stuck in a possibly mythical village. I expected more out of this one. I like Brooke D'Orsay as a lead actress and I like when they work some genuine mythological angle into these movies. But it never quite flew.

Five More Minutes: Moments Like These **

Five minutes later you're going to have to look it up on IMDB to remember what it was about or who was in it. Totally forgettable.

Ghosts of Christmas Always ****

Amazing. They took the two most overused holiday clichés -- "A Christmas Carol" and the Hallmark Christmas movie -- and made something that felt new and unpredictable. Special kudos for fresh performances from the leads and the supporting cast. Absolutely the best of these that I saw this year and totally rewatchable. Just perfect as it is.

The Gift of Peace ***

There are so many widows and widowers wandering around these movies that a genuine look at mourning and resulting loss of faith felt like a breath of fresh air. I liked this one much more than I expected to.

Hanukkah on Rye ***

"The Shop Around the Corner" aka "You've Got Mail" but with Jewish delis and a Hanukkah theme. We all know where this one is going, but the leads are so likeable in the roles that it's fun to take the ride with them.

Haul Out the Holly ***

Lacey Chabert makes fun of the movie she's in. I liked this one more than it probably deserved, mostly because it was so goofy. It's basically one big wink at the entire format, and manages to have a lot of fun along the way.

Holiday Heritage (Didn't see)

I was pretty burned out on all of these by the time this one came up in my watching. I let the predictable-sounding plot and the weak 5.9/10 IMDB rating make the call. Maybe I'll give it a try if it comes up in the Christmas in July Hallmark marathon. Maybe not.

The Holiday Sitter **

On the one hand, kudos to Hallmark for including a movie with a romance between two gay men. On the other hand, they made them the blandest characters in the blandest movie imaginable, an uninvolving two hours you will entirely forget afterwards.

A Holiday Spectacular **

An unusual history spectacle for Hallmark with a substantial production budget featuring the Rockettes. This one was generally a lot of fun and worth a watch. But to do that you also need to set aside the disappointing whitewashing of Rockette history that I mention up in the introduction.

The Holiday Stocking (Incomplete)

I wasn't feeling the new-angel plot, so I stopped watching after about 10 or 15 minutes. The 6.9/10 IMDB rating says that it deserved better from me. So be it. Watch it yourself and tell me if I was wrong.

In Merry Measure ***

Battling Christmas singing groups in a high-school contest. Another one that was better than I expected from the plot summary, probably because I expected a lot more squabbling but they got past that part of the plot quickly. Bonus points for fun Christmas music performances.

Inventing the Christmas Prince **

Starts terribly, gets watchable for a while in the middle, ends with a dubious deux ex machina. Ultimately the whole thing felt like a two-hour HR training session highlighting what not to do in the workplace. I wanted to like this one more than I did, especially because lead actress Tamera Mowry-Housley was good in her role as a rocket scientist.

Jolly Good Christmas **

Romance finds a personal gift-buyer in London. This would've been just fine if they'd let the lead actor use his own accent. Instead he does a terrible American accent that is awful to the point of distraction. Would've been three stars if they just let the British actor be British.

A Kismet Christmas **

Magic cookies and a nice girl comes home. Good, but forgettable.

Lights, Camera, Christmas! ***

A Hallmark movie about making a Hallmark movie. This one had fun by being a bit meta about the whole Hallmark holiday movie phenomenon.

Long Lost Christmas ***

Looking for long-lost family. Predictable, but everybody in it is so likeable that I gave it a third star, which it probably doesn't deserve.

A Magical Christmas Village **

A pleasant two hours of predictability as every classic plot point plays out in a toy village first.

A Maple Valley Christmas **

Our heroine tries to save the family maple syrup biz. Likeable leads, reliable plot … there might've been a good movie buried in here somewhere, but it all felt a bit tired.

The Most Colorful Time of the Year *

Crazy stalker eye doctor forces experimental cure for color blindness on teacher in denial about his color blindness. Likeable enough on the surface, but there are so many doctor-patient boundaries being crossed here that the whole thing gets a creepy vibe.

My Southern Family Christmas **

Heroine investigates her long lost family in the bayou under false pretenses. Likeable, good performances, classic Hallmark plot. So why didn't I give it a third star? I'm not sure. Maybe it's ultimately the needless deception that fuels the plot. In any case I don't feel compelled to watch it again or recommend that you go out of your way to watch it. So two stars it is.

Noel Next Door ***

Single Mom renews the spirit of Christmas in the neighborhood grouch and finds romance. The first new one of the 2022 season, this was a nice kickoff right in the old Hallmark cliché slot.

Our Italian Christmas Memories **

A commendable effort to bring in a genuine real-world problem, eldercare and dementia. And it had some pretty good performances. But not great, either. A lesser critic would now call the ultimate result as forgettable as grandma's pasta sauce recipe. Fortunately for us all, I'm not that critic.

A Royal Corgi Christmas **

The Corgis are cuter than the rest of the movie, which involves a dog trainer and a dissolute prince. More Corgis would have helped this one. Like, a lot more Corgis. Really, just re-run the Corgi race towards the end for two hours. Alas, that this was the one I saved to watch with my niece Stella, purely based on the Corgi-ness of it all. I should've inflicted a better movie on her.

The Royal Nanny ***

An MI5 agent goes undercover as a nanny. Completely ridiculous, but inexplicably fun. The fun factor makes it an easy watch, probably because nobody involved in this thing takes the mash-up of Hallmark Christmas "royal" movie with an action flick very seriously. Instead they're all just having fun with the tropes.

A Tale of Two Christmases (Didn't See)

I somehow missed this one. The 5.6/10 IMDB ranking says that may have been for the best.

Three Wise Men and a Baby ****

I was pretty skeptical, but this ludicrous remix of "Three Men and a Baby" was so likeable and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny that it was genuinely one of the best ones this year.

Time for Him to Come Home for Christmas **

On the one hand, a pretty entertaining entry. On the other hand, I got "creepy stalker" vibes off the phone message that serves as the McGuffin. Maybe I'm just being too cynical about it, but I guess it's sort of one star if you get creeped out by the message, but three stars if you're fine with the heroine dropping everything to track down the intended recipient. All of that averages out to two stars, so here we are.

'Twas the Night Before Christmas ***

Who really wrote the famous Christmas poem? This one was genuinely good fun and again a place where Hallmark injected a surprising lift into their formula by bringing in another overused Christmas staple.

Undercover Holiday (Didn't see)

Eh, I dunno. The plot looks terrible and the low 5.4/10 rating on IMDB seems to concur. This one is still on my DVR. Will I take the plunge? Seems unlikely.

We Need a Little Christmas **

Widowed single mother finds friendship and romance. Another one I wanted to like more than I ultimately did.

We Wish You a Married Christmas [Grinch]

Just terrible. Two unpleasant hours with a squabbling married couple. This was the 2nd of these I watched this season and it almost put me off the project altogether. People need to be warned. I am warning you.

When I Think of Christmas **

Big city lawyer comes home to sing Christmas carols with her ex-boyfriend. For some reason she's supposed to feel bad about being a successful lawyer. Pleasant, but forgettable. How forgettable? I had to look over the IMDB entry a couple of times to remind myself that I really did watch this one. And now that I'm looking back at this list one more time, I still can't remember what this one was about.

Everything you need to know about what happened in Michigan this week.

2022-11-13T09:30:00.002-08:00

Gallons of (virtual) ink are being spilled by the Michigan political punditry this week to try to explain how the Democratic Party gained control of the governorship, attorney general, secretary of state, and the legislature for the first time in decades, and why they didn't see it coming.

It's not nearly as complicated as they're trying to make it seem.

For the statewide offices, here's what happened:

1.People want to control their own bodies. People like the nice lady who helped them do that over the last six months. They also like her friends who did the same.

2. People like the nice lady who tried to keep them safe from Covid. They also like her friends who did the same.

3. Promise made, promise kept. The damn roads are getting fixed. Michigan was awash in orange barrels and road construction projects this summer. Everybody I talked to about it said essentially the same thing, "It's a pain in the ass, but isn't it great that the roads are getting fixed?"

A ton of work and money went into getting out the message on these points. but a ton of work and money doesn't matter if the message doesn't resonate with people. That message resonated. The only surprise is that political pundits were surprised by that.

As for the legislature, establishing a nonpartisan commission to draw legislative districts worked. After decades of GOP gerrymandering, the partisan results reflected the actual votes that people cast.

Kudos to all my friends in politics who have worked so hard over the years to get us to this point. (A few kudos to me, too, even though I wasn't directly involved in this election that finally put us over the top.)

What do I expect next? More roads getting fixed and more policies that help actual people. If the Democrats now in office deliver on that, they'll have another good year four years from now.

I watched 13 terrible movies in October

2022-11-01T13:44:00.012-07:00

I watched 13 terrible movies in the run up to Halloween. Usually I try to mix in at least a few genuinely good horror classics while they're scattered about the movie channels in October. But I've seen just about all the genuinely good horror and sci-fi classics. And so what's left? The anti-classics.

It was fun. One of the great thing about watching terrible movies is that you go into them with low expectations. If the movie turns out to be terrible, well then, what did you expect?

I guess what you should expect is a little review from me, so here we go.

Here's the list, in the order that I watched them:

It Came From Outer Space (1953)
Slither (1973)
The Beast Must Die (1974)
The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956)
Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967)
The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)
Queen of Blood (1966)
The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964)
Creature with the Atom Brain (1955)
The Thing with Two Heads (1972)
"My Son the Vampire" originally titled "Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire" aka "Vampire over London" (1952)
The Return of the Vampire (1943)
Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

Here are my reviews:

It Came From Outer Space (1953) *** Spaceship crashes in the desert and aliens begin taking over the local townfolk. Pretty entertaining, plus young Russell Johnson (the Professor from "Gilligan's Island") in a small role.

Slither (1973) *** Doesn't at all belong on this list. I assumed it must be some weird thing with snakes, but it turned out to be an oddball 1970s action-comedy movie James Caan, Sally Kellerman, Peter Boyle, and a terrible title. It's good, tho'. Worth a watch.

The Beast Must Die (1974) ** "World's Greatest Hunter" gathers werewolf suspects at his remote English estate for the world's greatest hunt, if only they can figure out which guest is the werewolf. Bonus cheese points for the "Can you guess the werewolf?" break at the end.

The Beast of Hollow Mountain (1956) ** Just the usual Tyranosaurus Rex eating cattle in a Mexican canyon 1950s Western. Kinda fun, especially once T.Rex shows up.

Yongary, Monster from the Deep (1967) ** A Korean ripoff of Godzilla, but without the expensive special effects and production values. Mostly for kaiju completists, but sort of fun if you've seen a lot of Godzilla.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961) ***1/2 Vincent Price at the top of his game as a Spanish Don going mad. Directed by Roger Corman, also at the top of his game here. This is a good one.

Queen of Blood (1966) ** Green vampire woman from Mars set loose on a spaceship. Best for the amazing cast, which includes John Saxon, Basil Rathbone, and young Dennis Hopper, plus a great otherworldly turn by Florence Marly as the Queen of Blood herself. Not great, but more entertaining than it should be.

The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb (1964) *1/2 This was a pretty forgettable mummy movie from Hammer studios. Picks up a bit of momentum in the second half, but not much.

Creature with the Atom Brain (1955) */**1/2 This sci-fi/gangster flick steps into "so bad it's good" territory, which makes it watchable and kind of entertaining. But it's not so bad that it's truly great. It did, however, lead to this great eponymous 1981 song by Roky Erickson and the Aliens:

Creature with the Atom Brain (Roky Erickson and the Aliens)

... which led to this dandy 2018 cover by Quintron & Miss Pussycat that landed on the Dr. Demento Covered in Punk album, which is how both the song and the movie came to my attention.

Creature with the Atom Brain (Quintron & Miss Pussycat)

The Thing with Two Heads (1972) */**** A classic of the genre, that genre being "terrible sci-fi movies in which the head of a racist doctor played by an Academy Award winning actor is transplanted onto Rosie Grier's shoulder." Also features a crazy-ass motocross chase that is firmly rooted in the early 1970s. Monique called it "the strangest movie I've ever watched" and we've watched Jodorowsky's "Holy Mountain" (1973).

"My Son the Vampire" originally titled "Old Mother Riley Meets the Vampire" aka "Vampire over London" (1952) Zero stars - Just terrible. Do not recommend. For masochistic Bela Lugosi completists only. I suspect, however, that a good movie might be made about the making of this unwatchable thing, a statement I feel compelled to explain, since I dug around a bit to see how this awful thing came to be.

This is the final installment of 14 British "Old Mother Riley" comedies. The Old Mother Riley character was played by a guy named Arthur Lucan in drag. He had developed a vaudeville team act around the character with his wife of 30+ years, Kitty McShane, whom he met and married when she was a 15-year-old singer. To make things even a bit weirder, Kitty played Mother Riley's "indiscreet" daughter, an item that undoubtedly demands Freudian analysis. The previous 13 installments of the Mother Riley movies included Kitty, but #13 was a bit of a train wreck because they were in the midst of a bitter divorce and had to film their scenes separately. That left Arthur Lucan without half his act for the next movie in the series.

Meanwhile, aging and alcoholic Bela Lugosi had come to London to star in a theater production of "Dracula" that fell apart when the producers went bankrupt, leaving Lugosi unpaid and without enough money to get back to America. A friend of Lugosi's somehow managed to put him together with Arthur Lucan and the sinking Old Mother Riley franchise so that Lugosi could earn enough money to pay for a ticket back to America. There is also a robot involved in this script for reasons that I don't understand but that probably amount to, "We had an extra robot costume in the studio."

I think the producers were hoping to create something along the lines of the infinitely better "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" (1948) but instead they created this unwatchable mess. This movie is just terrible and unfun, perhaps because somehow through the terribleness on screen you can feel the vibe of various lives falling apart behind the screen. There's a good drama about the making of this mess by B-List entertainers whose best days were behind them -- an elegy to the fading fortunes of the vaudeville and theater performers who had a good run onscreen in the 1930s and 40s. But this movie isn't worth your time.

The kicker: This terrible disaster of a movie would have sunk into total oblivion if singer-comedian Allan Sherman hadn't had a hit record with his 1962 album "My Son the Folksinger." For some reason this inspired an American distributor to rename this mess of a movie "My Son the Vampire" and ask Allan Sherman to create a song called "My Son the Vampire" that they could use for the title track in hopes that it could combine with some marketing as "Bela Lugosi's final movie" to give it enough traction to work the back-end of some double features. And so, nine years after it sank to the bottom of the British movie market this movie sank again to the bottom of the American movie market. From there it oozed onto late-night TV in the 1960s and gained a bit of notoriety for its general terribleness.

Allan Sherman's song is a pretty good Halloween novelty tune. This movie is terrible.

"My Son, the Vampire" (Allan Sherman)

P.S. Does it seem like I used the word "terrible" a lot of times in this review? That's because this movie is terrible, and not in a good way.

Terrible.

The Return of the Vampire (1943) *** This is a surprisingly good effort by Columbia Pictures to grab some of the Universal Pictures horror audience. It was intended to be a direct sequel to the original Dracula (1934) but after a copyright squabble they had to change the name of the vampire and shift the plot around a bit. However, after the clunky introduction with backstory, it turns out to be one of Bela Lugosi's better turns as a vampire and a surprisingly good watch.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957) */**** The King of the All-Time So Bad They're Good Movies. I won't replicate all that has been written about this debacle of a movie. It was famously created by Ed Wood to fit a test clips of Bela Lugosi filmed shortly before Lugosi's death. Its making was immortalized by the infinitely better Academy Award winning movie "Ed Wood" (1994). So here's the thing you need to know: in 2020 Turner Classic Movies gave it a high-end digital transfer in its original 1.85:1 image ratio. This terrible movie has never looked so good. I hadn't seen it in ages, so I was wondering if it would still be fun. It is! Check it out. No, really. Check it out. Everybody should see this terrible movie at least once.

Does it seem like a lot of people you know have caught Covid recently?

2022-07-11T12:11:00.003-07:00

Does it seem like a lot of people you know have caught Covid recently? This seems like a good time for an explanation of why the current Covid situation is probably worse than you think. You should be wearing a good mask whenever you go indoors and probably whenever you're in an outdoors crowd.

The basic problem is that Omicron BA.5 is becoming the dominant variant. It is extremely contagious and also has shifted enough genetically that vaccinations and previous infection provide a good deal less protection that was the case with earlier variants.

Here are three images that show where things stand. Here's a link to the CDC web site:

COVID-19 Integrated County View

The first image is the CDC's "Community Level" map. In many ways it is a measure of how likely you are to get a hospital bed or an ICU unit if you come down with severe Covid. About ten days ago this map was mostly green. It has gotten much worse since then.

The second image is the CDC's "Community Transmission" map. It functions as a measure of how much Covid transmission is in your community. This is a very important measure if you are trying to avoid a breakthrough case for yourself or a family member who is elderly or immunocompromised.

This map has been mostly red since the Omicron BA.2 spike started this spring. The CDC site defaults to the first map, which is generally used for policy decisions. You have to go into the dropdown menu to select "Community Transmission" to see this map.

The final image is a couple of graphs of testing and testing numbers for my home county of Oakland County, Michigan, over the last year.

One of the major changes in testing from this winter's initial Omicron spike is the much greater availability of home testing kits. So actual total-case rates are believed to be significantly higher than the officially reported rate. (I've seen a lot of different estimates as to how much more, so I won't speculate here. Let's just say "much more".) As you can see, the number of reported tests are way down, but the current positivity rate is approaching the levels of this winter's initial Omicron spike. The rate increased 3.23% to 17.55% in just the last week.

So, yeah, Covid is bad out there right now. It's almost certainly going to get worse before it gets better.

Do yourself and your friends and your family a favor. Mask up.

Two Years of Survival, One Week at a Time

2022-03-11T11:48:00.011-08:00

March 15 marks two years since Monique and I entered our own Covid lockdown, a few days after I reckon the wave of the approaching disaster officially arrived in the United States on March 11, the day that Tom Hanks announced he and his wife had contracted Covid, and the NBA shut down their season due to Covid. Before that day most everybody thought of this pandemic as something happening elsewhere that might pass us by. After that day, it was HERE.

Monique and I were in St. Lucia with my folks on a week's vacation, a funny sort of place to watch the world go to Hell. We almost hadn't gone, nervous at the prospect of the approaching pandemic. But there had been few positive tests in the U.S. at that point, so we thought we could zip down to the Caribbean for a week of sun, zip back, and then wait for what might come.

St. Lucia was glorious.

It's fair to say that I had a better sense of what was coming than most. The company I work for sells quite a bit in China, so it certainly caught my eye when we found that China was almost entirely shut down in January. By mid-February I was nervous enough that I amassed our quarantine stockpile, a large stack of rice, beans, pasta, coffee, and a wide variety of canned goods including a case of Spam and at least a half-dozen cans of evaporated milk for the coffee in case we couldn't get fresh milk.

I had no idea that toilet paper would turn out to be the great shortage. It hit the news while we were still in St. Lucia. We tried to paper over that gap by bringing a four-pack back from St. Lucia, which has its own toilet-paper mill. Eventually, the home supply got low enough that we used them.

In late February I told my boss that I thought this was going to be "Spanish Flu bad" and that I was going to go to work-from-home once Covid got to Michigan. Little did I know it was already in Michigan. I have a particularly bad history with respiratory diseases, so I reckoned I had better than average reason to try to avoid this one.

As Monique reminded me today, just two years ago I told her that I thought this pandemic was more likely to last a couple of years than a few months. I am sorry that I was right.

We had our first positive test in Michigan at the start of that week in St. Lucia. I told my boss that I was going to start working from home when I got back. I felt like I might've been alarmist or jumping the gun.

By the end of that week, almost everybody in my entire company had been sent to work from home.

We had flown out of Toronto to save money. Our flight back was getting in late at night and we had originally planned to stay there overnight, brunch in Toronto, then drive back to Wolverine Lake, Michigan, the next afternoon. Instead we grabbed a couple of burgers at a McDonalds and drove through the night.

The U.S./Canada border was closed the next day.

The afternoon we got back Monique headed out into the panic-buying to shore up our quarantine stockpile and to make sure her parents, who live across the street from us, also had a reasonably good supply. And then, like turtles retreating into a den in a mudbank, we hunkered down, pulled our heads into our shells...

... and waited.

All things considered I realize how incredibly fortunate Monique and I are in the way we spent the last two years. Nobody tells you when you get married to make sure you marry somebody that you get along with well enough to enjoy being locked down together for a couple of years. But I'm glad we found each other. And if you're going to be hunkered down for a couple of years, a little house on a nice lake is an excellent place to do that -- even if the "little" in little house makes it a bit claustrophobic in the wintertime.

As it turned out the instead of being reckless, leaving Detroit for a week to frolic in the Caribbean sun was the best thing we could have possibly done. St. Lucia had no Coronavirus. Detroit was already in the midst of one of the worst outbreaks in the world by the time we returned.

I've spent a fair amount of the last two years furious at how Trump and his Administration politicized and mishandled this epidemic. Even after they were justly booted from office they had so poisoned the water that a large number of their supporters continued to refuse a safe, proven vaccine -- making the subsequent waves much worse than they would have been otherwise. This pandemic was always going to be bad. But it took disastrous public health policy at the outset to make it as bad as it was.

I've also spent a fair amount of time furious at people who wouldn't take simple basic steps to make things better, whether it was wearing masks or getting vaccinated. A lot of individuals made a lot of bad, selfish decisions that made this pandemic worse than it would have been otherwise. I have a darker view of many of my fellow humans than I did two years ago. I wish it was otherwise.

Two years later a million or more of my fellow Americans are dead from this disease. Millions upon millions more suffer with symptoms of "Long Covid." Their conditions might improve. Or they might not. Covid was from the start a notoriously fickle and unpredictable disease.

So, other than sit and fume what have I done with my last two years? Mostly just work, watch sunsets and comfort TV, and make fancy-shmancy cocktails on Friday evenings to close out the workweek. Life quickly settled into a pattern of workweeks and weekends. Each week I'd start up on Monday morning, fire up the computer, and start working. Then on Friday evening -- or Thursday quite often, I blew a lot of vacation time on three-day weekends over the last two years -- I'd wrap up at five or six, make myself a nice cocktail or pour a good beer, and congratulate myself and Monique on having survived another week. On Saturdays I'd run an errand or two, mostly as an excuse to get out of the house. I began buying things from local online estate auctions, mostly to have an excuse to go drive somewhere and fetch those things.

This is *not* a good habit for a man who lives in a small house. But here we are.

Surprisingly, the most normal thing about all of this was my job. Most of the people I work with already worked remotely before the pandemic. I was already spending hours a day on Zoom before everybody else joined us. "Zoom fatigue" is real and I had it long before the pandemic. But thanks to the pandemic, at least I now knew what to call it. I missed seeing my colleagues in the same office in person, but other than staying in bed and doomscrolling Twitter for another half-hour instead of getting in the car and driving to the office, my average workday has felt astonishingly normal.

It's all been a grind and an extra grind and an extra-long grind that's been more wearing over time than I would have imagined. But at least it's been a familiar grind.

When I worked in the office, at the end of the work day I would shut down and/or abandon my computer. I used to close down my work day in an orderly fashion, scanning the email pile to make sure it had all been dealt with, then shutting down the computer for its overnight sleep. Now I usually just work until my brain is exhausted and quits, then stagger away from the desk leaving whatever's there for the morning. Neither way is inherently better than the other in terms of getting work done, but the discipline of the daily commute did force me to make a more conscious and complete decision to call it a day.

After work I would head out to watch the sunset, as long as there was any hope at all of a sunset. We can't quite see sunsets from our house, so I do have to head out if I want to watch it. Usually I would head out from our dock in my paddleboat, sometimes in our larger pontoon boat. If the lake was frozen I would walk out on the ice, or to a road ending down the street, or to the boardwalk at the end of the lake. Almost always I'd have my trusty 35mm digital Canon EOS along with me as I'd soak in the sunsets, taking pictures, changing lenses, watching the waterfowl. Sometimes I'd listen to a fantasy sports podcast or a Dr. Demento show. Sometimes I'd just listen to the lake. Mostly I've just been staring at the Sun until it was gone.

If you had asked me a few years ago what I'd do if I had to stay home for a couple of years, I would've thought, "Great. Sounds like I'll finally write a novel." Instead I've become a ludicrously prolific sunset photographer. In the last two years I've probably taken more than 75,000 sunset photos. I haven't written anything longer than a chatty email.

I refer you again to, "work until my brain is exhausted and quits, then stagger away from the desk." Write a novel? I've barely been able to read a novel in the last two years. Stress and exhaustion and isolation. So it goes.

We got brave enough after being vaccinated last Spring to go out and start doing some things last summer and fall. Then the Delta and Omicron waves came and we crawled right back into our hidey hole until they passed. Now that Omicron has passed we're getting optimistic again. Is this really the end of the worst of it? We shall see.

But always there's been the weekly rhythm. Start my workweek on a Monday full of resolve to accomplish all on my to-do list. Stagger away from the desk on a Friday afternoon saying, "Good enough," then pouring a drink to kick off a couple of days of decompression. And on Monday morning, there we go again. Week after week. Month after month. Here we are 104 weeks later. Still surviving.

A lot's happened along the way. We didn't watch Tiger King, but Monique sure has baked a lot of sourdough bread. I've mostly kept in touch with friends and family via Facebook and Twitter. They're helpful platforms if you use them to keep in touch with friends and family instead of using them to wallow in misinformation.

And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Pour yourself a drink on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.

Our beloved Katie the Beagle passed away in May 2020, a blow from which we're still recovering. She was just a little beagle, but she was also a pure, sweet soul and we miss her.

And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Pour yourself a drink on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.

I cleaned the garage and cluttered the garage back up. I did some MG and Jaguar repairs on my own since visits to the mechanic were scarce. Then I fixed them again when my mechanical skills once again proved inadequate. They're mostly still running.

And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Open a tasty beer on Friday evening and head out to the garage again. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.

My father-in-law fell and broke his hip. My sister-in-law came from France and spent last summer with us all tending him and shouldering an awful lot of the load. She returned to France and fell and broke her hip. Like Covid, broken hips are contagious. Who knew?

And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work. Take a picture of your sister-in-law swimming with the ducks. Pour yourself a drink on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.

In late November of 2021 I ruptured the tendons that connect my biceps to my forearm in my left arm. It led to surgery a month later and a couple of months in a splint then a brace and a compression sleeve until I am finally just now three and a half months later starting to type at something approaching my pre-injury pace. So Monique got me to tend for a few months in addition to all else on her plate.

And then on Monday morning, get up, go down to the desk, turn on the work computer and go to work, typing one-fingered with your right hand. Use that same hand to mix yourself a pretty cocktail on Friday evening. Be thankful you survived another week. Not everybody did.

And so on. And so on. And so on.

In about a month or so my company will be opening a new office and we'll be able to go back into the office. Some of my non-work outside activities are picking up the pace. The Covid numbers in Metro Detroit continue to drop. At this point the vast majority of people have either been vaccinated or survived a bout of Covid. Or both. Have we reached herd immunity? Will things start to look more like the Beforetimes soon? Who knows. We shall see.

And now it's 2:48 pm EST on Friday, March 11, almost exactly two years after everything began falling apart in the U.S. In two hours and 12 minutes, I'll call it a work week, shut down the work computer, pour myself a beer on Friday evening and be thankful I survived another week.

To all of you who read to the end, I'm thankful you survived another week, too. Much love. Hang in there.

Photos of Flying Birds

2021-03-07T20:07:00.001-08:00

A friend of mine is looking for photos of birds flying for some paintings she's doing. So I went through some of my best photos of the last year and a half and pulled out the ones with flying birds.

I needed to put them somewhere handy, and I thought some of you might like them, too. Here they are. Enjoy!

Ducks:

Seagull:

Osprey:

Canada goose:

Ducks:

Sandhill cranes:

Ducks:

Geese:

Osprey:

Sandhill cranes:

Frigate bird:

Ducks flocking:

Sandhill cranes:

Great blue heron:

Osprey with fish:

Some pretty bird in Saint Lucia:

A flock of sandhill cranes:

A flock of great blue herons:

Canada geese:

Osprey with fish:

Great blue heron:

Mute swans:

Turkey vulture:

Canada geese:

Great blue herons:

Seagull:

Great blue heron:

Canada geese:

Sandhill cranes:

Seagull:

Sandhill cranes

2021-03-01T07:24:00.005-08:00

Here, have a pretty picture.

This was a flock of sandhill cranes that flew by me back on December 20 when I was down on Wolverine Lake's boardwalk. They've been gone for the last couple of months, finally forced south by the ice and cold.

But last night Monique heard them flying overhead in the dusk. Flocks of Canada geese have also flown by. The calendar turned to March today. Spring is coming. It's not here yet. But it's coming.

Fatigue Fatigue and the State of the ol' Patio Boat Blog in 2021

2021-02-24T09:22:00.003-08:00

As we close in on a full year of pandemic I decided to get off my literary butt to write a wee blog post about how tired I am of everything right now -- just a big pile of pandemic fatigue and zoom fatigue and quarantine fatigue and winter fatigue and February fatigue and meeting fatigue and social media fatigue and email fatigue and leftovers fatigue and meeting fatigue, etc., etc., etc., etc. ETC!!!

If I had to pick one word to describe that essay, it would be "tiresome."

Nobody wants to read that post, including me.

I'll settle for saying this. If you're tired of it all, please know that you're not alone. We're with you.

Instead of the tiresome essay, perhaps instead I'll give you all a quick update on the state of the ol' Patio Boat Blog in 2021. As anybody who stopped by here in the last year has seen, the blog's been pretty much closed for new business. This wasn't by design. It was collateral damage from a bad case of "Sitting at my desk at home all day" fatigue. Once the pandemic hit and I moved to full-time work-from-home status, I began spending *a lot* of my time sitting at this desk with my work computer. I also began taking *a lot* of photos after the work day, mostly of sunsets as I sat out on the lake. Those took a good deal of additional sorting out on my home computer, conveniently located four inches away from my work computer.

There was not a lot of creative spark left after that. And there was ZERO desire to sit at my desk for any additional time. I did try writing a few posts about quarantine life, but they were pretty whiny. I reckoned the world had enough whining without my contribution. I did try writing a few posts about the appalling state of politics in the United States. I reckoned the world had enough political fury without me throwing a few extra blog posts on that pile, too.

So, other than sitting at the desk and working all day I mostly just spent the last year taking pretty pictures, mostly of sunsets out on the lake.

The best of the pretty pictures got uploaded to Facebook or turned into calendars at year's end. I put together 10 different 2021 calendars this year, which was crazy. I guess that made me more of a photographer than a writer for the last year. Ironically, though I've never been a prolific writer, I was an incredibly prolific photographer for the last year or so. I went back and counted in November and in the 12 months between Thanksgiving 2019 and Thanksgiving 2020 I took more than 20,000 photos.

About 1/2 of 1% of all the pretty pictures I took made it into a calendar.

Here, have a pretty picture:

It is just barely possible that I turned to taking pretty pictures as my way of dealing with the whole freaking world falling apart as a reminder that there was true beauty even when all seemed ugly. Gosh, that sounds noble when I type it. But mostly, I was so tired at the end of every workday that I just floated out on the lake, stared at the Sun, and brought my camera along for the ride. Then sorting them out afterwards to pick out the best of the best was a heckuva lot better thing to concentrate on that the horrific state of the world.

A better blogger would've shared many of those pretty pictures here. Alas, gentle reader, you have me. Maybe I'll post some as we go along in 2021.

As I write up this little lunchtime post, it crossed 50 degrees on our porch thermometer for the first time since November. Spring is coming. Vaccinations are coming. The end of the pandemic is coming -- though I reckon Monique and I will need to be hunkered down in place for a few more months before our turn in the vaccine queue comes. Still, just as I now think about everything before the pandemic as The Beforedays, I'm starting to think about what comes afterwards as The Afterdays.

I'd like to put together the occasional blog post in the Afterdays. I may have useful thoughts about things when one day I am not so fatigue fatigued. I'd like to hope the last year has given me some useful perspective on things that I didn't have before. I sure hope so.

Anyway, that's the State of the ol' Patio Boat Blog and your not-so-humble correspondent in 2021: plum tuckered out, but slowly lurching back to life and hoping for better times in the Afterdays. We shall see.

In conclusion, I give you my new life coach and animal spirit: Madeleine Kahn as Lili Von Shtüpp singing "I'm Tired." Hang in there folks. The Afterdays are coming.

Quarantine Diary, Day 28

2020-04-10T07:37:00.002-07:00

Just a placeholder for now. But I've tired of looking at the impeachment post, especially given the disastrous things that have followed. I think I'll start collecting a record of various writings and posts here at the ol' Patio Boat. But for now, have a pretty picture of crocuses:

Impeachment: The Fix Was In All Along

2020-01-31T09:15:00.000-08:00

Breaking the long silence on political blogging to note that I was wrong when I wrote in October that I thought the Senate would ultimately decide to move on from Trump.

Trump is the Republican Party and the Republican Party is Trump. The final Senate vote should come in a day or two, but it's obvious that the Republicans in the Senate have no interest in removing the sheer lawlessness and abuse of power that is the Trump Administration. Up until a week or two ago I still thought the potential electoral suicide of sticking with this disastrous administration would awaken their self-preservation instincts and lead them to dump Trump. But I was wrong.

So what's going on? At some level, I obviously don't understand it, so given my track record in predicting political outcomes in the Trump era, I'd recommend a big grain of salt. But here goes:

1. They're high on their own supply -- Given the extent to which Republican voters and elected officials live within the right-wing information bubble, I've come to believe that it's gone beyond cynically propagating a lot of that stuff to gain and hold power, which was the case for most of the last 30 years. A majority of Republican Congressmen fairly obviously believe the crazy. And by crazy I mean "repeatedly proven to be untrue and counterfactual."

There's a tendency to talk about the modern GOP as if it's a cult. Having spent some time reading about cults last year, it's in many ways a better way to understand their behavior than thinking about them as the usual sort of political party we've had in this country for most of our existence.

We live in an America of two distinct information bubbles. The right-wing bubble dominated by Fox News, Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, and an online ecosphere that gets increasingly toxic and racist and crazy the farther down the rat hole you go. And there's a fact-based bubble in which everybody else finds a niche. The phrase "facts have a well-known liberal bias" shouldn't be true. But it's true in 2020.

I wouldn't have believed that most Republican Congressmen believed this stuff myself until I saw it spewed in the House and Senate for the last three months. I would've thought they were cynically using it to manipulate voters. But they've convinced me. They believe this stuff. And it's industrial-strength poison to democracy.

2. There's something shady going on -- And something shady beyond just the garden-variety system of legalized bribery that has grown like a cancer on our system (direct campaign contributions from lobbyists, nepotism, etc.) for a long time.

The money trail from Russia into the National Rifle Association and from there into Republican campaigns has been pretty well proven at this point, and it has dozens of variants in other GOP SuperPACs and lobbying organizations. And the money trail from American billionaires who only care about keeping and maintaining the GOP's political power to benefit themselves is far more robust than that. The Citizens United v. FEC case in the Supreme Court threw the windows open for untraceable money and the money has been blasting through those windows ever since. All that money is probably playing out in two ways:

2A. For God's sake, don't look at what we've been doing! -- Most Republican members of Congress are desperate to keep from any further scrutiny of their money trail. Desperate. Because most of them have been on that campaign finance gravy train themselves and they don't want anybody to know it. I don't think all of them are in over their heads, but they're all at least hip-deep or ankle-deep in the muck.

2B. Partisan funding means party discipline -- If you've never been involved in campaign finance you may not realize the extent to which internal party goodwill makes an enormous difference in a candidate's ability to finance an election campaign. This problem has grown enormously over the last thirty or forty years. There's a long version of that statement that I might write about one day, but the point is that for most legislators, crossing party lines on an important issue endangers their job. Most legislators have lost their fundraising independence in recent years.When you hear discussion around the point that some of these senators are afraid of a primary challenge, you should realize that this means, "The party mechanisms will find a challenger and shift the money train to the challenger."

I had thought the obvious general election downside of voting against removal (supported by voters by a margin of something like 48%-45% for most of this process) or even voting against a full trial with witnesses and evidence (supported by around 75% of voters) would ultimately move senators, especially those up for election in 2020. Obviously, it didn't.

3. They think they can get away with it, and riding the Trump train is their best chance -- Given the wave of voter suppression, gerrymandering, etc., that followed the 2010 election, the GOP has been riding in power with the support of a minority of voters for quite a while. For most Republicans in Congress, what they've been doing has worked, so why would they change? This isn't about "the will of the people" and hasn't been for some time. It's about keeping power. When Alan Dershowitz stands in the well of the Senate and argues that if the President believes his re-election is good for America then anything he does in pursuit of that is unimpeachable, fascism has officially arrived on our shores.

If you think the Republican electoral abuses of the last ten years were something, just wait until you see what's going to happen this year now that they've collectively decided that any violation of existing law in pursuit of their own hold on political power is legal and good for America.

4. Game theory: There's no upside in voting for removal. There's only downside. -- If you're a Republican Senator and you vote to remove Trump and keep your seat, you will likely become a pariah in your own party. (Hello, U.S. Rep. Justin Amash.) You'll face blame from your political base and a likely loss of fund-raising clout. If you keep your seat you'll be greatly weakened. If you lose your next election or retire you'll be cut off from the lucrative gravy train of lobbying, Fox News contracts, corporate board appointments, etc., that has greeted your fellow former GOP Congressmen.

And what's the upside? Protecting the rule of law and the constitution? We've already seen that Justin Amash was the only Republican Congressman who cared about any of that. And they literally threw him out of the party for it.

If you vote to keep Trump you can hope the voters have a short memory, which has often proven to be the case. And you probably think that nobody will blame you if you all stuck together on it.

-----

Put it all together, and it's probably some combination of those things plus other dynamics I haven't figured out that is responsible for what's been happening, and for what's about to happen in the Senate. Politics is complicated. There's a lot afoot here, and the iceberg principle probably applies: 90% of it is out of sight.

What can we all do about it? Vote in November 2020. Vote in overwhelming numbers. The basic mechanisms of elections are still spread out and diverse enough that it's possible to overcome everything that will happen in the next nine months. But it will take a wave of voters like we haven't seen in ages.

And for me?

In 2016 I discovered with Trump's election that the America I live in is worse than the America I thought I lived in.

In 2020 I've discovered that the basic political calculations that I have relied on to understand how our political systems function no longer work in the year 2020.

I need to improve my understanding of the world that I do live in. I need to better understand how I can make it more like the world I want to live in.

I'm going to spend some time mulling that.

Just cleansing the visual palate for 2020

2020-01-10T10:09:00.001-08:00

I just thought I'd at least post a pretty picture, so as to cleanse the visual palate of the ol' Patio Boat after it's been sleeping the last couple of months. More actual posts coming this year, but for now please enjoy a mid-winter view in black and white.

So, here we are: Watergate Defcon Status 1: The Trumpocalypse in Full

2019-10-07T08:35:00.000-07:00

I've been meaning to post something on recent events for a couple of weeks, now, but a few things have kept me busy and events quickly keep overtaking any coherent thoughts I try to put down in writing.

We are all now in the center of the Trumpocalypse.

The news cycle has spun out of control, with events piling upon events. To sum up for posterity, the White House tried to quash a whistleblower complaint that Trump was holding up military aid for Ukrainse to force them to manufacture political dirt for him to use on Joe Biden. To prove his innocence, a couple of weeks ago Trump had the White House release a transcript proving ... well, proving that he was holding up military aid for Ukrainse to force them to manufacture political dirt for him to use on Joe Biden.

Very shortly thereafter, the US House finally opened an official "impeachment inquiry."

I'm not even going to try to track down the higgledy piggledy that ensued, except to say that the muck gets deeper and deeper as Trump flails about and the GOP tries to duck and cover and avoid the truth.

The elected officials of the Republican Party have been supporting a deeply corrupt, lawless man as their President. Why? In exchange for tax cuts for their billionaire patrons and crazy-ass right wing judges to appease the Evangelical wing of the party. That's what they care about, and that's what they got.

As near as I can tell, elected Republican officials are all okay with that deal. In 2018 billionaires paid less in overall taxes as a percent of their income than all other income groups. Republican appointed judges are overturning decades and centuries of decided law to benefit their party's financial benefactors. And in the face of overwhelming evidence of corruption and abuse of power, the entire Republican controlled US Senate doesn't make a peep beyond Mitt Romney tweeting that the denials "strain credulity." Give Mitt another few months and he may express "concern" about it all.

In the midst of this chaos, I'll commit a bit of prognostication and punditry:

My best guess is still that Mitch McConnell eventually decides his best chance to keep control of the Senate is to give Trump the boot. If so, the final collapse of this rapidly deteriorating house of cards may be fast, in the form of a discussion with Pelosi and a deal to bring one clean, direct charge swiftly through the House and Senate to remove him, and to leave the rest of the disaster that is GOP control in Washington stand in place. They have an easy charge to prove with Ukraine, and the 20 or so GOP Senators that are up for re-election can go home and pontificate about how they hated to do it, but they believe deeply in the rule of law and Donald Trump had -- inadvertently, they're sure -- overstepped his bounds, and how President Pence is healing this glorious nation of ours, God Bless America.

Then they will try like hell to bury every other thing that happened during the Trump administration, while Fox News treats the name Donald Trump like, "New phone. Who 'dis?"

But what do I know? I never thought the Republican Party would ever nominate a sociopath like Trump. Go figure, electing one of the worst human being in America to the Presidency has turned out to be a horrible, corrupt disaster. Who could have possibly see that coming?

If nothing else, we owe Donald Trump thanks for proving that the rot in the Republican Party political structure runs all the way to the core. The GOP is irredeemable. If they were a corporation they would literally change their name and rebrand. Since they all live in the Fox News bubble, I can only assume they'll add another bald eagle to their iconography and ooze on.

At the outset my only hope for the Trump Administration was that we might somehow make it out of this disaster without a nuclear exchange in Korea or the Middle East and without a needless war that would lead to hundreds or thousands of deaths. Despite the deteriorating world condition I thought we might make it. But last night's White House statement that we're abandoning the Kurds has made me lose even that hope.

Not a very cheery blog post. But the world isn't in a very cheery state this morning.

P.S. And then, literally as I was writing it, this gem of a tweet came along from Trump. This is a deeply disturbed mind, cracking under pressure. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

A fun day with the FUN MG in photos, part 2: The British Invasion, plus a lovely dinnertime lineup

2019-07-28T13:59:00.000-07:00

After I got back from my visit with the vintage racers yesterday afternoon, Monique and I took the FUN MG down to the Inn at St. John's in Plymouth. The Concours of America is happening there today, Sunday. As part of Concours weekend they host a variety of automotive events, and last night they had a gathering for all British cars. It was a really fun event with a great variety of cars.

Afterwards, we went out to dinner with some British-car friends and found ourselves in the midst of something truly scenic. Ride along with us...

MGB, Rolls Royce, Mini, Jaguar F-Type, Morgan three-wheeler.

Ken and Melody Klemmer's MG TC. We'll see it again later this evening.

Triumph TR6

Austin-Healey, Triumph TR6, Jaguar XJ6...

... and then an MG TC putts on by.

This Lagonda was lovely.

Lotus, MGB

Monique loved this Invicta.

So this was really cool, a Rolls-Royce Mini. Apparently they built 1,000 of these back in 2018. The interior was every bit as plush as you might expect.

A Reliant Robin three-wheeler drew some of the biggest crowds at the British Invasion. I talked to the guy who owns it and he said it was much steadier around curves than its reputation.

How did it get that reputation?

Top Gear: The Reliant Robin

A nice sample of the variety: a Bug-eye Sprite, a Lotus 3-Eleven, and an old Rolls-Royce.

And that old Rolls was niiiiiiiiice.

Speaking of old Rolls-Royces, this 1909 Rolls-Royce was one of the real stars of the gathering. The details on it were amazing, and the restoration looked immaculate. Let's stop here for a few photos to look closer:

Chauffeur's seating

The second windscreen for the rear passengers

Now *this* is how you accessorize an air hose.

And yes, the rear tail lamps are real lamps.

Speaking of Rolls-Royces, the FUN MG was indeed parked next to one.

At this point I want to point out that the giant puddle of coolant next to the FUN MG did not come from us! It came from a Jaguar E-Type, which is what you should expect when you park a lesser car like that next to an MGB

Another pretty little MGB

Usually I take photos of the exterior of Jaguar E-Types. But this time I was struck by the lovely dash.

Oh, okay, have an exterior photo, too:

Lotus 7

Minis

Morgan

Factory Five AC Cobra replica

Ford Anglia

More Lotuses, these in orange.

Rolls-Royce Corniche. Nice.

Hundreds of *amazing* British luxury and sports cars and what was Monique's favorite? This wee little compact late-1940s Austin.

As the event began to break up, several of us decided to head up to The Garage in Northville, a restaurant in a converted 1930s garage. Much to my surprise, when we got up there with our B, Ken and Melody were waving in the British cars to park in their driveway:

As you might expect, we drew quite a crowd of passers-by. It took quite a bit of patience to catch these pictures of the cars without a crowd around them.

And then after dinner, the British roadsters went on their way....

All in all, an entirely fun automotive day in the Motor City!

A fun day with the FUN MG in photos, part 1: vintage racing

2019-07-28T11:46:00.002-07:00

It's been a while since I've done any automotive photoblogging, and I do have a few good pictures to share from this spring...

... such as this photo of our new MG TD!

But for now you'll all have to settle for a giant two-part photo dump from a fun day I had yesterday with my MGB.

First up was an afternoon stop at the vintage races at the Waterford Hills Racetrack. I got to take the FUN MG on some parade laps on the track itself(!!!), looked at some other lovely British cars, walked around the paddock a bit, and watched some on-track action.

I invite you to enjoy it along with me and the FUN MG:

We're here!

Just a nice little Triumph Spitfire.

And now, some pretty, pretty MGAs...

Parade laps on the track!

We never went all that fast ... maybe 60 or 65 on the backstretch. But it was way fun and a good chance to whip around some corners with a bit of speed.

I'm pretty sure I handled it just like Lewis Hamilton.

Then I walked around the paddock a bit and watched people working on their cars -- getting ready for their sessions or buttoning things up after a session. If you're ever at a race track, it's worth getting access to the paddock. You see a lot more of what goes on than if you just sit on the outside and watch the cars going in circles.

Can I come out and play?

And now, a bit of racing. First some midgets:

Then the bigger cars:

These two Corvettes were very equally matched and swapped places for 2nd and 3rd a few times...

.
... until #90 pushed just a bit too hard towards the end and spun out!

Fortunately, no Corvettes were harmed in the spinning, but the yellow Corvette left was well ahead by the time #90 got back on the track.

Next up, Part 2: The British Invasion, plus a nice dinnertime lineup.

Political punditry: a couple of mid-April updates

2019-04-19T14:05:00.002-07:00

Welcome to the Muellerstrom

Since a redacted version of the Mueller Report finally came out yesterday, I thought I'd check in to see whether my forecast of events to follow that release had any merit:

My half-baked crystal ball on March 25 said...

The Mueller Report will come out, either in pieces or as a wholesale leak or as part of a US House investigation. After it gets out to the public, the same people trying to spin the Barr memo will continue the same spin about what is in the report itself, counting on the repeatedly demonstrated amnesia of the news media to help.

[Prognostication Grade: A. Pressure to release it in its entirety led to a redacted version being released on Thursday, April 18. Barr's efforts to spin and lie about what the report contains continued right into a press conference just before the report was released in which he made several statements directly contradicted by the words in the report. This is modus operandi for the Trump crowd, who follow their boss's lead by uttering any untruth as long as it helps them win even part of a news cycle. Most of news media seems to have forgotten that fact, though they have generally reported that the report itself was a good deal more troubling and damning in its contents than Barr's summary.

Meanwhile, the deplorables continue to be deplorable, the low-information Fox News viewers continue to watch and believe, and everybody else continues to be appalled by it all.]

The facts that do come out will be ghastly. We've all become enured to ghastly facts in the 26 months that Trump has been in office.

[Prognostication Grade: A. The facts in it are ghastly. Many of them were already known, but it's still appalling to see them all in one place.]

My guess that the the Dems in the US House do not open an impeachment hearing, but for the next 22 months we see a half-dozen ongoing hearings into what Mueller found, as well as the rest of the Trump mess of corruption leavened with incompetence. Now that we're more than halfway to the next election, it begins to make more and more sense to let the voters clean this up.

[Prognostication Grade: B. "No impeachment hearings" still seems like the likeliest outcome, but the report makes it extremely clear that Russia engaged in systematic and effective intelligence warfare to interfere with our presidential election, and that the President of the United States then engaged in two years of obstruction of justice in an attempt to cover up the activities of Russian Intelligence Agencies and his own campaign's actions.

Mueller also directly states that the question of whether action should be taken on the massive pile of obstruction-of-justice evidence should be left to Congress.

If committing obstruction of justice to cover up a hostile foreign government's attack on the United States doesn't merit impeachment, what does?]

And oh yes, the voters will need to clean this up in November 2020.

[Prognostication Grade: A. Oh yes, this sure as hell needs voter intervention in November 2020. We also all need to make sure that our election process is a bit better protected from this sort of thing, and we need to do that fast!]

The Presidential Election Horse Race Update

The Presidential election horse-race update that nobody needed. In Kentucky Derby terms, the pack is just now breaking from the gate. Iowa and New Hampshire are the start of the final turn, so there's a lot of shuffling to come.

Top Tier

--Joe Biden (D) (Former VP)
--Bernie Sanders (D) (VT Senator)
--Elizabeth Warren (D) (MA Senator)
--Kamala Harris (D) (CA Senator)
--Pete Buttigieg (D) (South Bend, IN, Mayor)

From unpronounceable longshot to top-tier candidate in just a month, Pete Buttigieg (BOOT-EDGE-EDGE) has pole-vaulted over the crowd. We'll see if Mayor Pete sticks or is just Flavor of the Month, but he's picked up a lot of name recognition that has translated into donations, so it looks as if he'll be a genuine contender.

You've probably heard of…

--Cory Booker (D) (NJ Senator)
--Beto O'Rourke (D) (Former TX US Rep)
--Amy Klobuchar (D) (MN Senator)
--Julian Castro (D) (Former Sec of HUD)
--Kirsten Gillibrand (D) (NY Senator)

To my surprise Kirsten Gillibrand is the member of this tier most likely to fall into the "Also appearing" tier. Her candidacy has thus far gained no traction or enthusiasm that I can see, though she always struck me as a pretty good campaigner in prior campaigns. Despite her weak early fundraising she has $10 million from her Senate campaign to see her through this year and into Iowa and New Hampshire. So we shall see. My guess is that she's going to need a strong showing in the debates if she hopes to re-ignite her campaign. In horse-race terms I guess this would be stumbling out of the gate, but not actually falling down. There's plenty of time to recover, but she's a few lengths back from where I thought she would be.

Also appearing…

I haven't added anybody new to the crowd thus far. In another month or two it'll be time to think about which of these folks might have staying power, but for now, they're all faces in the crowd:

--John Hickenlooper (D) (Former CO Governor)
--Stacey Abrams (D) (Former GA State Rep)
--Tulsi Gabbard (D) (HI US Rep)
--Terry McAuliffe (D) (Former VA Governor)
--John Delaney (D) (Former MD US Rep)
--Steve Bullock (D) (MT Governor)
--Eric Holder (D) (Former Attorney Gen.)
--Jay Inslee (D) (WA Governor)
--Michael Bennet (D) (CO Senator)
--Bill de Blasio (D) (NYC Mayor)
--Seth Moulton (D) (MA US Rep)
--Tim Ryan (D) (OH US Rep)
--Eric Swalwell (D) (CA US Rep)
--Jeff Merkley (D) (OR Senator)
--Andrew Yang (D) (Businessman)
--Richard Ojeda (D) (Former WV State Senator)
--Mike Gravel (D) (Former AK Senator)
--Marianne Williamson (D) (Author)

And on the Republican side, we now have a primary! Bill Weld officially tossed his hat in the ring.

The GOP has grown so rotten and foul in recent years that I doubt there are enough decent Republicans left to make Weld a serious threat for the nomination. But we shall see.

Actual Candidates

--Donald Trump (R) (Cancer on Democracy and Truth ... er, I mean, POTUS, God help us all.)
--Bill Weld (R) (Former MA Governor, Libertarian VP candidate in 2016)

Republicans who like to talk but ultimately won't have the cojones to challenge Trump

--John Kasich (R) (Former OH Governor)
--Larry Hogan (R) (MD Governor)
--Jeff Flake (R) (Former AZ Senator)

Watergate Defcon Status Two in Perpetuity; or, the mandatory speculative Mueller Report post

2019-03-25T16:00:00.002-07:00

And so, no more than ten minutes after I finally publish my first political post on the ol' Patio Boat since Nov. 3, 2017, Bob Mueller hands in his report as Special Counsel and brings his investigation to a close, thus ensuring that nobody will ever read my incredibly long rundown of the 29 or so Democratic Presidential candidates. I reckon that makes this a good time to instead check in on the decline and fall of American democracy with a mind-blowing second blog post in less than a week, this time with a bit of useless speculation about the Mueller Report.

Why the long interregnum since my last political post here? Two reasons really. First, I had a few personal things going on that took my focus away from writing much of anything at all. I may or may not blog about them here some other time, but for a variety of reasons the last year and a half or so left me too tuckered to type.

But the other reason is that we've been through a long, long, long stretch of ... well, much sound and fury, but nothing much that has genuinely advanced the story, such that it is. It isn't that there's been no action at all: there have been plenty of indictments, guilty pleas, convictions, etc. But it's been rather like a long second act in an overstuffed action movie in which you have to wade through an hour of frantic motions and noises on screen before you find out how it's all going to end.

No, I don't yet know how it's all going to end. But we are a good deal closer now than when I last posted about the Trumpocalypse, when Bob Mueller had just delivered his first indictments in the Russian probe. At the time, I thought we were headed inevitably to impeachment. Here's what I thought would happen next:

If I had to bet on the mechanics (that bring us to an impeachment hearing) I'd bet that Sessions gets forced out for repeatedly perjuring himself. That gives Trump an opportunity to appoint a new Attorney General who doesn't have to recuse himself on the Russian issue. The job interview will consist of one question, "Will you fire Bob Mueller?" The first person willing to answer "Yes" to Trump in private and "No" to the Senate confirmation hearing will get the job and pull the trigger. By then the 2018 midterms will be looming and even the shameless Congressional GOP will have to convene impeachment hearings.
--Patio Boat Blog, Nov. 3, 2017, From the Joy of #IndictmentDay to Dr. Hans Zarkov Shouting a Warning over the Rocket Engines

I'd say I was right about some stuff, and wrong about some other stuff.

What I got right: Sessions was forced out and replaced by William Barr, an Attorney General whose job application literally consisted of writing a memo to the Justice Department saying that the President couldn't be investigated for obstruction of justice. Barr's most noteworthy action in his previous stint as Attorney General under George H.W. Bush was to approve the pardon of six individuals under investigation for the Iran-Contra Affair, an investigation that potentially threatened to involve Bush as well.

What I got wrong: even as late as November 2017 it seems terribly naive of me to think that the GOP would ever be shamed into investigating or impeaching Donald J. Trump. The Republican Party has chosen to ride into history as the party of Trumpism. That decision has thus far delivered an election defeat in the 2018 mid-terms that returned the US House to Democratic Party control. We shall see what it brings in 2020.

What did Mueller do? Here's the short version: As @danpfeiffer tweeted Friday: "Trump’s campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, foreign policy advisor, fixer, political strategist and national security advisor have been indicted, convicted, or plead guilty of serious crimes." You can add a dozen or so Russian intelligence agents to that tally, too. On Friday Mueller issued his final report to William Barr, who then issued a letter summarizing the report and saying that the President couldn't be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. That letter also included this quote from the report: "while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it does not exonerate him.”

Trump then tweeted that he'd been completely exonerated.

Where are we now? That's where we stand, in the midst of a vast media frenzy of speculation about what it all means and what's in the Mueller Report with Trump and the GOP claiming victory while the Democrats demand the release of the report itself. Meanwhile, outside the Mueller investigation literally dozens of investigations of Trump and his associates proceed, some of them in state court where Trump's ability to issue pardons doesn't apply.

What next? Here's what my half-baked crystal ball sees.

The Mueller Report will come out, either in pieces or as a wholesale leak or as part of a US House investigation. After it gets out to the public, the same people trying to spin the Barr memo will continue the same spin about what is in the report itself, counting on the repeatedly demonstrated amnesia of the news media to help.
The facts that do come out will be ghastly. We've all become enured to ghastly facts in the 26 months that Trump has been in office.
My guess that the the Dems in the US House do not open an impeachment hearing, but for the next 22 months we see a half-dozen ongoing hearings into what Mueller found, as well as the rest of the Trump mess of corruption leavened with incompetence. Now that we're more than halfway to the next election, it begins to make more and more sense to let the voters clean this up.
And oh yes, the voters will need to clean this up in November 2020.

All of which is to say that we're not quite at the end of the looooooooong second act of this three-act tragedy. So hang in there gang. We're going to be hanging out in Watergate Defcon Status Two for the next 22 months, as near as I can tell.

In the meantime, go find Democratic candidates that you like and support them. Bob Mueller couldn't cure this disaster. It'll be up to all of you reading this to cure it with your votes.