Photos before the frost


Deciduous magnolia. Click here for high-resolution version.

Deciduous magnolia blooms are very susceptible to frostbite. In many years, frost gets my deciduous magnolia trees before they reach full bloom. There may be frost tonight. But at least the magnolias were able to fully bloom.

As far as I know, even the summer-blooming and evergreen magnolia grandiflora, also called Southern magnolia, grows well farther north, including in the United Kingdom. To my lights, every landscape (or garden, if you’re in the U.K.) needs magnolias. The deciduous magnolias have very little scent. Whereas Southern magnolias can be smelled a mile away (I’m exaggerating) on a hot summer night.

The apple trees are not yet blooming.


⬆︎ Deciduous magnolia. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Plum. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Peach. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ Periwinkle. Earlier I had identified this as bluets, but the PlantNet app seems pretty certain that it’s periwinkle.Click here for high-resolution version.

2017 Fiat 500: A 7-year re-review ★★★★★


Click here for high-resolution version.

I well remember how guilty and splurgy I felt when I bought this car seven years ago. Yet it turned out to be one of the best financial decisions I ever made, because it has kept my cost of transportation very low.

The base price was $14,995. The total sticker price plus a destination charge and $250 extra for the ivory seats came to $16,240. But I didn’t pay that much. The dealer gave me a too-good-to-turn-down discount because Americans won’t buy Fiats, and this one had been on the lot for a while. In fact, Fiat stopped selling the Fiat 500 in North America after the 2019 model year.

Americans prove over and over again that they clueless and foolish in pretty much every way. Most people want enormous SUVs. The average price for vehicles sold at present in the U.S. is just under $50,000. The average amount that Americans spend on gasoline each year is more than $2,700. In some states, such as Wyoming, the average is considerably higher — $3,300 a year. Many households have two cars, and 22 percent of American households have three or more cars. Americans don’t like to ask themselves how much they can afford to pay for transportation. Consequently they don’t have much money left over for buying eggs.

I can’t tell you how many times someone sees the Fiat and says, “Fix it again, Tony.” Probably once upon a time Fiats deserved their reputation for not being reliable. But automobile manufacturing is much, much better these days, largely thanks to robotics and much better machining. Most Americans don’t know that the Italians are superb automotive engineers. The Italians also have a flair for style — and fun — in automobile design that seems to have vanished in many places.

In seven years, my Fiat 500 has had to go in for repairs twice. In year four, a speed sensor failed in the front left wheel. Fiat fixed that under warranty. Last year, the service engine light came on with a complaint about the electronic throttle. That turned out to be a known software issue for which Fiat had issued a service bulletin. The dealership reflashed the PCM, which cost me $100. I don’t mind that, because I assume it means that my Fiat now has the latest version of the Fiat software. Other than that, at 42,000 miles, I’ve never had any trouble.

The engine and transmission are silky smooth. In fact the Fiat 500 handles like a sports car. People ask me if I feel safe in such a small car. I feel as safe in the Fiat as I do in any car. I also believe, because I’m a good and careful driver, and because the Fiat is far more maneuverable that heavy vehicles, that I can evade accidents that heavy vehicles would not be able to evade. I have done many quick stops for squirrels, including a few quick stops in which I had to both brake and swerve. The Fiat goes where I point it, stops quickly, and doesn’t threaten to roll over — though a swerving quick stop is always, in any vehicle, a dangerous maneuver.

My average is about 48 miles per gallon. The photo below shows pretty much the maximum mileage the Fiat can achieve. The 70.5 mpg figure is from a 12-mile trip on a flat highway, mostly in fifth gear, at about 50 mph. The mileage rating on its window sticker was 31 city and 38 highway. One would have to be a terrible, terrible driver to get gas mileage that low.

Before the Fiat, I had Mercedes Smart Cars. Trump types were incredibly rude to such a small car. Once, in rural Tennessee, a pickup truck ran me off the road in the Smart Car. Trump types are not as aggressive toward the Fiat as they were to the Smart Car. But when I have a heavy truck or SUV right on my bumper when I’m driving exactly on the speed limit, I pull over as soon as possible and let the idiots pass.

My car looks like a mouse. That does not embarrass me.

Three generations of white deer?


A neighbor shot this photo of the youngest white deer, now two years old. She is muscular and remarkably healthy.

It was more than ten years ago that I first saw a white deer in the woods here. Sometimes I was able to get a photo, and comparison of the photos from year to year led to a strong suspicion that there were two white deer, almost certainly of two generations. Then, in the spring of 2023, a baby white deer appeared. That would make three, all part of the local deer herd, whose range includes my woods, the opposite ridge to the south, a lot of creek bottom, and a field or two along the ridge north of the creek.

Fortunately their range is not crossed by a paved road, and as far as I know the local herd has not had any car fatalities. The deer are often in my yard. They’re hard on my day lilies, but they’re welcome to the clover. After I stopped keeping chickens, I opened the gates to the orchard. The deer now do a fine job of keeping the undergrowth (mostly honeysuckle) out of the orchard.

My nearest neighbor keeps a close watch on the local deer herd. He puts out corn for them as well as mineral salt. He is a longtime hunter, but as far as I know he has never shot a deer from our local herd. Rather, he sees his job as keeping poachers out and letting it be known that anyone who shoots a white deer — or for that matter any deer from the local herd — just might get shot, if caught. There are plenty of hunters who would like to have a white deer as a trophy.

I asked my neighbor, in a text message, if the youngest white deer has a white mother. He replied:

“Not sure which doe it was. There are genes in this area to produce the white deer. I’ve heard that there are several between here and the river.”

There is a lot of wild bottom land between here and the Dan River, which is less than two miles away. Bears are seen in that area pretty often. There is a pack of coyotes, though I rarely hear them. They must have a pretty large range.

There are places in North Carolina with white squirrels. The commonly heard explanation, probably false, is that they escaped from a P.T. Barnum circus truck after a truck wreck. If Brevard is still having its white squirrel festivals, I wonder if there are any for sale on the black market. Woods with white deer ought to have some white squirrels.

Ken is in the New York Times today


In September 2018, Ken and I hiked across the eight-mile width of the island of Ulva to get to the island of Gometra. This photo of Ken was shot on the Mull side of Ulva. Click here for high-resolution version.

Ken’s article in the New York Times today is “What a Small Island Off the Coast of Scotland Could Teach America.” He writes:

“As an American who lived for years in North Carolina, I saw firsthand the decline of rural communities. The boarded-up shops, political disengagement and ‘No Trespassing’ signs of rural America may be less picturesque, but in important ways they’re not so different from the stone ruins and abandoned fields of Scotland’s Highlands and islands. Could community ownership let people reclaim control over their land and their futures in rural America?

“Some think it might. In the United States, federal and state governments can claim land using eminent domain, but we rarely see communities take control to provide affordable housing, let alone empower local residents to make it happen themselves. ‘It is impressive,’ said John Lovett, a law professor at Louisiana State University, who studies Scotland’s land reform laws. Scotland is ‘trying to achieve something that we just don’t even think about in the U.S. It’s creating a way for the government to enable or facilitate the disassembly or the decentralization of landownership. We’ve never tried that in the U.S.'”


Ken picking blackberries on Ulva, September 2018.

The iPhone’s portrait mode


Shot with iPhone 16 in portrait mode, 2x zoom. Click here for high-resolution version.

I think of the iPhone camera as a snapshot camera. But really it has much more potential than that. I take the phone’s camera for granted because most of the time I can just point and shoot and get a decent photo. But getting the shot of the daffodils that I wanted today actually sent me to Google with some questions.

Shooting in “Photo” mode, the background was entirely in focus, even in the interior light. If I were shooting with my Nikon D2X, I would just set a wide aperture, and that would blur the background. The question I asked Google (silly me!) was, how do I set the iPhone f-stop? Google said: You can’t set the f-stop on the iPhone. Use “Portrait” mode instead, and that will blur the background. So that’s what Portrait mode is for!

This blurring of the background is very important in photography. It’s called “bokeh,” and one of the ways lenses are rated is on the quality of their bokeh. With portraits, of course, though the background may be very important, one wants only the face in focus. And that’s true not just with portraits but with any photo in which the photographer wants only the subject of the photo to be in focus, with everything else blurred just to the right degree.

As an experiment, I tried to shoot the daffodil photo above with my Nikon D2X. I found that it could not be done without a better lens than the light-hungry 28-85mm lens that I normally use, plus some extra lighting, and/or a tripod. The interior light was just too dim for the lens, though the aperture was wide open.

It seems I shoot daffodil portraits pretty much every year. Here are a couple of others.


Shot with an iPhone 12, March 3, 2024. Not in portrait mode, 1x zoom. Click here for high-resolution version.


Shot with Mamyia RB67, 250mm lens, with tripod, Kodak film, March 10, 2018. That clearly was a better daffodil year than this year, after a cold winter.

Jura


Jura Scotch, aged 10 years in American oak barrels that were used for Spanish sherry. More on the little shot glass below.

When I was in Scotland last fall, there was a pub downstairs in the little hotel I stayed in in East Linton. With advice from the bartenders and the people sitting at the bar, I sampled a good many Scotches. By far, my favorite was from the Isle of Jura. It’s impossibly smooth and incredibly complicated, with just the right amount of smoke. At about $50 a bottle in the U.S. for the Scotch in the photo, it’s not even on the high side of what good Scotches cost.

“Single malt” just means that the Scotch comes from one distillery. That’s as opposed to blended Scotches, which buy (I assume) less distinguished Scotches from multiple distilleries and blend them into something as pleasing as possible. But Scotch is to Scotland as wine is to France (or California). It’s all about what part of Scotland the Scotch came from and the choices and skills of the distilleries’ operators. I don’t have enough experience with Scotches to judge how the aging matters. Some Scotches are aged (in barrels) for more than 20 years. I stick with 10- or 12-year old Scotches to avoid bankruptcy.

I hope I remain healthy enough to visit many more islands on future trips to Scotland. I’ll probably make another trip this fall. I have been to Lewis & Harris, Skye, Ulva, Gometra, and Mull. I have not been to Jura, but Jura and Islay probably are next on my list. There’s a woolen mill still in operation on Islay that I’d like to visit. I have a jacket made from Islay tweed.

I bought the little shot glass on eBay. It’s made from uranium glass. It’s not very radioactive. My Geiger counter measures the glass’s radioactivity as around double the background radiation here, a perfectly safe level. Uranium glass is a distinctive green color that glows under ultraviolet light. The glass is tiny. It holds only an ounce if filled to the brim.

Winter vegetables


Rutabaga pie

For some reason — is it because of the political disaster? — the winter of 2024-2025 has felt incredibly long. Where I live, we’ve had two miserable intrusions of the polar vortex. I had planned a February visit to Washington, but I had to cancel it because of ugly weather. Maybe I’m being more liberal with the heating system, but I had the highest electric bill in January that I’ve ever had. In February, the wind blew down a tree, and the tree fell on the power line that feeds the road I’m on. That broke a power pole and left about 400 feet of wire on the ground. It took 24 hours for the power company to put in a new pole and haul the fallen wires back up. Fortunately I have a generator and can keep lights, the computer, and the refrigerator running.

Americans don’t eat a lot of rutabagas, though grocery stores where I am usually have them. I suspect that’s because the rutabagas we get here have a very long shelf life. They’re dipped in paraffin wax and keep forever at the grocery store or in the fridge. They’re as hard a ball of marble. Peeling them is downright dangerous. They’ll want a good 40 minutes in the pot to cook up tender. When the battle between a knife and a ball of marble is over, they’re a comfort food. Mashed, with butter, is the default way of fixing them.

I made a very nice rutabaga pie, though. I wasn’t sure whether to call it a pie or a quiche, because the method of making it is something of a cross between pie-making and quiche-making. Think eggs, cheese, milk, and some browned onions to add umami. Don’t forget to add a little nutmeg.

Wikipedia has a nice article on rutabagas. In some northern countries, they’re probably as important as potatoes. In Scotland, where they are called neeps, I’ve cooked neeps on a camp stove in a yurt. Neeps are so plentiful in some places that they’re used as a food for livestock. It amuses me to think that the sheep that provided the wool for my collection of Harris tweed jackets probably ate neeps. Neeps in the wool!

Winter vegetables are a big help in making winters more bearable. I don’t think there is a single winter vegetable that can’t be made into a comfort food.

First, let’s talk about a sonnet


⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116. I asked Open AI’s 4o engine to modify it for modern spellings. I have typed the text with an IBM Wheelwriter typewriter. Click here for high-resolution version.

The most thrilling news I came across today is that a somewhat different version of Shakepeare’s Sonnet 116 has been discovered in Oxford’s Bodleian Library. The New York Times wrote about it here, and an academic paper about the discovery is here.

This is one of Shakespeare’s best-known sonnets. As the New York Times points out, the new version has an almost scolding tone aimed at those who deceive. The words “heretic” and “mountebank” are used, words that do not appear in the version with which we are familiar.

Sonnets were meant to be read aloud. Note that the word “fixèd” is two syllables.

Contempt for lying mountebanks! Now there’s a thought for the day.


⬆︎ The newly discovered version of Sonnet 116, with the text from the copy in the Bodleian Library.


⬆︎ Sonnet 116 as we have long known it. This page was scanned from the A.L. Rowse edition of the sonnets published in 1964.


⬆︎ I made a trip to Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s this morning. I wasn’t in the market for eggs, because a neighbor has given me some nice big double-yolk eggs. At Whole Foods the egg shelves were pretty much empty.


⬆︎ Even Whole Foods’ most expensive eggs — $13.99 a dozen — were sold out.


⬆︎ I’m guessing that this truck probably cost at least $60,000. It’s also very likely that parts of it were made in Canada and Mexico. When these fools get what they deserve there will be a great feast of gourmet Schadenfreude. But what’s sad is that things will be much worse for people who don’t drive around rolling coal in $60,000 trucks.

The maintenance of the spine


A 6-inch Chirp wheel. Click here for high-resolution version.

If you watch children playing, you’ll see that they flex their bodies, vigorously, in pretty much every way that a body can be flexed, including their spines. We older folks stop doing that, and so we pay for it.

Last year I had a serious round of back trouble. It was so bad that I could barely stand up straight. I literally had to crawl to the bathroom at night. I crouched and waddled down the stairs in the morning to make coffee. The problem was far worse in the morning and got a good bit better during the day. After a few days I swallowed my pride and denial and went to the doctor.

A CT scan showed no obvious problem. (In fact, the doctor said, my hip joints looked very good.) The doctor could not make a clear diagnosis. It was one of two things. It might have been piriformis syndrome. That was the diagnosis I favored, because I believed I had injured the piriformis muscle with some very foolish lifting the day before the pain started. Or the problem could have been an ordinary lower-back problem, which is so familiar to so many people. Either way, the treatment was pretty much the same — physical therapy, exercise, some pain relief, and wait. The pain gradually subsided, and after a month I was 98 percent back to normal.

Little intermittent twinges persisted, though. And I knew that the doctor was right when he said that the problem would come back unless I did something about it. He recommended regularly doing the exercises that the physical therapist showed me, along with yoga. And, he said, keep walking.

I realized that the exercises the physical therapist showed me, as well as the recommended yoga moves, do pretty much the same thing. They flex the spine in every possible direction, and they strengthen and stretch the muscles around the spine. They do the things that come so naturally to children.

A few days ago I came across an article at Wired magazine, “Work Has Given Me Tech Neck. This Device Is Helping Undo the Damage.” The article was selling something (Chirp wheels). But as I watched some videos on how to use it I saw that the wheels can manipulate the spine much more intensely than yoga can do. It’s pretty difficult to flex the spine backwards. The wheel uses body weight to do that, and it can operate on the entire length of the spine including the shoulders and lower neck. So I bought one.

We older folks aren’t eager to get down on the floor. But we ought to, because it’s good for us. That alone is beneficial, I think, because we have to practice getting up. I can still do it just fine — sit cross-legged, shift forward onto the knees, then stand up, preferably without using the hands. But I avoid it.

When you hear your back making little cracking sounds, that’s a good thing! I think it means that the spine is flexing. I spend too much time at the computer. I tend to get cricks in my shoulders. I hope this will help.

Amazon has Chirp wheels as well as similar wheels from competitors.

The political situation

I haven’t posted lately about the political situation because I don’t think I have had much to add. I would emphasize, though, that as the media show their timidity and corruptibility, the intelligentsia are coming to the rescue. I rely on Substack, particularly Heather Cox Richardson, Lillian Rubin’s the Contrarian, and Paul Krugman, who posts pretty much every morning.

The timidity of the media is alarming. This morning, for example, the New York Times said that Trump “contradicted” Emmanuel Macron in a press conference at the White House. But Macron didn’t just contradict Macron. He corrected Trump’s lies (about Ukraine). He even interrupted Trump to do it, in the middle of a lie.

What’s happening is horrifying. Yet history is going to understand perfectly well what is happening, in spite of Republican and MAGA attempts to flood the zone with lies, and even though plenty of chumps still believe them. It’s the smartest and best people in the world up against a ship of fools who want to own the earth and control us all. I hate waiting for justice. But I continue to believe that we will have it.

An exercise in moral reasoning


Luigi Mangione

After a powerful, inhumane, and heartless health care CEO was shot and killed in New York City (presumably by Luigi Mangione), the pundit class flooded the zone with sanctimonious pieces scolding the masses for making a hero out of Mangione. I tried to work up some sympathy for the CEO. I failed, because I think there are millions of people — powerless people — more deserving of our sympathy. Does that make me a bad person?

First I should mention that Mangione’s lawyers have released a statement from Mangione thanking people for their support. Obviously he has become a hero for a great many people. Mangione’s legal team also have started a web site so that people can follow the case.

Until a couple of weeks ago, I thought that Jonathan Haidt, with his “moral foundations” theory, held a monopoly on studying how the moral values of liberals differ from the moral values of conservatives. Now I know that Haidt has a competitor. That’s Kurt Gray, at the University of North Carolina. As Gray writes on his web site, “If you want to understand the morals of the ‘other side,’ ask yourself a simple question — what harms do they see?”

I learned of Gray’s existence after a friend in Washington (who knows that I think Haidt is a schmuck who claims to be objective while implicitly flattering the moral crudeness of conservatives) sent me a link to a YouTube video. In the video, Gray is interviewed by Michael Shermer, who founded Skeptic magazine. I have seen Skeptic magazine from time to time over the years, and I always found it to be smug and snarky. Thus I was not surprised to find, in the video, that Shermer comes across like a used-car salesman. If you watch the video, I’d recommend discounting and skipping over Shermer’s jabbering. Only what Gray says matters.

In the video, Gray mentions the Mangione case. Liberals see a great deal of harm in people dying, or being bankrupted by, the greed of a health-care CEO. But liberals (I can testify to the truth of it) aren’t as alarmed by harm to a CEO who is responsible for those deaths and bankruptcies. What can be said about that kind of ethics?

Most people would agree that, if one of the 40 plots to assassinate Hitler had succeeded, then something like 50 million lives would have been saved, not to mention that Hitler was just plain evil. It is no great leap of moral reasoning to hold that the world would have been much better off if Hitler had died sooner rather than later. I think it reasonably follows that there are plenty of other people whom the world would be better off without.

Whether assassination is justified is a separate, and much more difficult, question. Reasonable people would always hope that there are humane and legal ways of preventing bad people from doing harm. Bad people have lately been very successful in finding new ways of preventing us from using humane and legal ways of stopping them from doing harm. Reasonable people also will disagree on when humane and legal solutions have failed, and when, if ever, the harm someone does in the world is so great that that person should be dispatched. Those who support capital punishment have already taken a stand on this question, which, as I see it, puts them on a slippery slope toward hypocrisy, especially if they demand the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, as many of them will.

It all boils down to what Kurt Gray is arguing: Different people assess harm in very different ways. It’s hard for me, as a liberal, to believe, but many people worry much more about harm to the harmful and powerful than they worry about harm to the harmless and powerless. Luigi Mangione has become a hero because he took the opposite — and, I would argue, the less morally crude — position.

Anyway, my intention here is only to bring up different ways of looking at these things. I am not arguing that Luigi Mangione was right to kill Brian Thompson. Certainly I would not have done that. But I also refuse to be scolded by the morally crude people who today are strutting and gloating over having the upper hand and new power to do harm in the world, with impunity. After all, remember who it was who said this and whom he was talking about: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

The right-wing propaganda campaign against “wokeness” and diversity, equity, and inclusion is all about the glorification of moral crudeness, because everything they want to do is morally crude. It’s no wonder that they had a fit over Luigi Mangione. Someone actually struck back, and a great many people found it inspiring.

Consider skipping to around 39:00 for what Kurt Gray says about Jonathan Haidt.