If I only had a field…


From my morning walk. Click here for high-resolution version.

There are many beautiful hayfields in this area. I covet them. I have only woods. I’ve often talked about how much I’d like to have a pasture, or a field. Then again, maybe not. A hayfield is not a hayfield unless there also is a tractor with a mower and a baling machine. I don’t have such things, nor do I have the farmerly skill to use them.

Hay is a major crop in this area. Sadly, though, most of the hay goes to feed beef cattle. This is not horse country, though there are some. Country people love their beef. I can say this for their local beef, though. It’s all grass fed. The beef cattle all live in excellent pastures, and they winter over with local hay.

The political situation

I haven’t posted lately about the political situation. The changes have been dramatic, but everything is going well, and I have little to add. I would like to mention a piece in The New Republic today that detests the political punditry as much as I do. It’s “Beware the Pundit-Brained Version of the Democratic Convention.”

When a political event is on live television — for example, a president’s state of the union speech before a joint session of Congress — the brainlessness of the punditry is on full display. C-SPAN, if you can get it, may televise such events with no pundit “analysis.” But if you watch it anywhere else, you’ll have to listen to the inane and endless yipyap from witless talking heads that passes as analysis. I have not been watching the Democratic convention live. I do watch some of the speeches the day after, and, if there is yipyap, I skip over it.


⬆︎ Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ The road past my house. The house is hidden behind the trees on the lower right. Click here for high-resolution version.


This hayfield plant has remarkably beautiful powers, but I well remember it from my rural Southern childhood and what its briars can do to children’s bare feet. I believe this is Carolina horsenettle, Solanum carolinense. Click here for high-resolution version.

Low tech to the rescue

My heat pump (which also is a cooling system) had been working perfectly for fifteen years. It chose to stop running on a hot Saturday afternoon when the outdoor temperature was 88F. The temperature inside the house slowly rose to a miserable 89F.

When critical systems in a house fail, the perversity principle requires that they fail on a weekend, when the kind of businesses you need are closed (though they might make an emergency call for a hefty additional fee). Lucky for me, my nearest neighbor is retired from the heating and cooling business, and he came to take a look.

His diagnosis, in which he says he is 90 percent confident, is that an electrical relay on the air handler has failed. That’s a relatively minor thing, and if we can acquire a new relay on Monday then the fix won’t take long.

Two rooms in the house have ceiling fans, which help. But my upstairs office does not. I went up into the attic and fetched an oscillating fan that had been used in the downstairs bedroom before I had a ceiling fan installed in that room. I had forgotten how amazing fans can be!

I well remember what it was like growing up in the South in the 1950s, when some businesses had air conditioning but pretty much nobody had it in their homes or cars. It was fans that made life in the South bearable before the age of air conditioning. Architecture and landscaping were important, too. It’s why houses of that era had big front porches and shade trees.

Here in the American South, heat pumps have been common for decades. Almost everyone has a heat pump and has some understanding of how they work. In a climate that doesn’t get too cold, heat pumps are an efficient source of heat. The heat pump’s true magic, though, is that it’s reversible. It can pump heat into the house from outdoors, or it can pump heat out of the house. There is a limit to a heat pump’s efficiency, though. When heating, a heat pump can raise the temperature of the outside air only about 50 degrees F. So, if it’s 20F outdoors, a heat pump will have to rely on assistance from electrical heating coils, which are not efficient.

I have seen a good many stories lately about how efforts to introduce heat pumps in the U.K. aren’t going very well. A friend recently returned from a visit to a Scottish island, where a local had complained about the cost of operating a newly installed heat pump — £2,000 for one winter’s worth of heat. My guess would be that the problem is not so much the heat pump as a drafty and poorly insulated house. Here in American South, people who live in older houses often use heat pumps for cooling but still use gas or oil for heating.

The sound of the fan, and the start of the Democratic National Convention tomorrow, have stirred up clear memories of the summer of 1960, sitting in my grandmother’s living room with the sound of her large floor-model oscillating fan and watching the party conventions on television. In 1960, John F. Kennedy was running against Richard Nixon.

Correction: Upon reflection, I realized that my summer memory had to have been from 1960 rather than 1956, and I have edited the paragraph above accordingly.

I’m also remembering the importance of ice for living in the South before the days of air conditioning. My grandmother was fond of Pepsi. Pepsi over ice was regular thing with my grandmother, especially in summer. At home we drank far less Pepsi and far more iced tea. There was always iced tea in the refrigerator, and there was always ice in the freezer.

Normally, now, I don’t use much ice, even in the summer. But one of the first things I did after the air conditioning stopped yesterday was to turn on the icemaker.

The same way they treat San Francisco


Anne Hidalgo, the socialist mayor of Paris

Apologies… This post contains some coarse language.

The Paris Olympics went just fine. Right-wingers had predicted that it would go very badly. They said that Paris was a cesspool, and that the level of crime would be terrible. According to the Associated Press, 30,000 social media bots in 13 languages were spreading ugly memes about Paris. For example: “Paris, Paris, 1-2-3, go to Seine and make a pee.”

What the mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, said about this won’t be distributed by 30,000 bots on social media. But you can read about it in Le Monde (though the full text of the article is available only to subscribers).

The Times of London (behind a paywall) also wrote about Hidalgo’s interview with Le Monde:

“Fuck reactionaries, fuck the extreme right, fuck all those who want to shut us in a war with everyone against everyone.”

To quote from the Times of London:

Hidalgo told Le Monde that criticism of her was orchestrated by “a reactionary and extreme-right planet” which nourished a “hatred” for Paris because it was the city “of all freedoms, the refuge for LGBTQI+, … a city that has a left-wing woman mayor, and what is more of foreign origin and with dual nationality and an ecologist and feminist to boot.” (Hidalgo was born in Spain.)

This is the same treatment that San Francisco, where I lived for 18 years, has always gotten from right-wingers. Let them say what they want. Let them eat cake, and let them live in Texas.

Berlin Philharmonic 2024-2025 season


Last concert of the 2023-2024 season, outdoors at the Waldbühne in Berlin. Click here for high-resolution version.

I’ve mentioned before how a subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic’s streaming service is such good medicine for the cultural isolation of the woods here in the Blue Ridge foothills. A few days ago I received a brochure for the season that begins on August 23. As usual, it’s brilliant programming. September 24 will be the 200th anniversary of the birth of Anton Bruckner, so the orchestra will be doing six of Bruckner’s symphonies. Other symphonies include Charles Ives’ 4th, Brahms’ 4th, Haydn’s 44th and 54th, Dvořák’s 7th, Mozart’s 20th, Mahler’s 1st and 9th, Beethoven’s 6th, Schubert’s 8th and Tchaikovsky’s 5th. On June 14, Saint-Saëns’ organ symphony is on the program. If you’ve seen the movie Babe, then the organ symphony will be familiar. In the concerto category are piano (Shostakovich, Busoni, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms, Rachmaninov) as well as violin concertos and a cello concerto. Choral music includes a concert performance of Puccini’s Madame Butterfly. John Williams will return to conduct his movie music! The final concert, outdoors at the Waldbühne, will be a Leonard Bernstein concert, including music from West Side Story.

You can download the program here.

A season subscription to the streaming service is not exactly cheap — €169, on sale until August 23 for €152.10. It is, however, some of the best-produced television I’ve ever seen. The video and audio are perfect. Even when recording under a shell at the Waldbühne, the quality of the video and audio are just as good. By the way, those outdoors concerts sell out. The Waldbühne, which can seat 22,000 people, is packed. This year’s end-of-season concert ended with a performance of Berlioz’s “Bolero,” a piece that we’re all familiar with but which I have never heard played quite so brilliantly. The camera zooms in on the faces of the musicians, as always. They kept throwing little smiles at each other, unaware, of course, that the camera caught it. Was it an inside joke of some sort? It’s impossible to know, but I suspect it’s just that they were having such a good time.

All the concerts can be streamed live. They usually start at 7 p.m. Berlin time. You can watch them live, of course. A couple of weeks after each concert, it’s added to the archive. The archive is included with subscriptions. The archive, some of which goes back for 60 years with more than 800 concerts, is an incredible resource.

These concerts are best watched on a big television screen, either with good headphones or a good sound system.

Truth and falsehood in memes


All the memes in this post came from Facebook.

No matter where a propagandist is on the conservative spectrum, from merely conservative to full-on fascist, it is always necessary to lie. One of the wonderful things about being a liberal is that you don’t have to lie about your values and intentions. To argue for fairness, caring, and equality is easy and can be honest. But arguments for dominance, hierarchy, systemic unfairness, exploitation, and, yes, even cruelty, have to be disguised.

Right-wing propagandists also have to lie about the natures and intentions of the people who oppose them. That’s a part of the right-wing need for scapegoats and demonization.

Here is what J.D. Vance said. He was speaking to Tucker Carlson in 2021:

“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too. And it’s just a basic fact. You look at Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, AOC, the entire future of the Democrats is controlled by people without children. And how does it make any sense that we’ve turned our country over to people who don’t really have a direct stake in it?”

Can you count the lies? What is Vance even trying to say, in between the lies? I’d put it like this: To be liberal is to be miserable. Liberals are so perverse and fascist in their misery that they align with corporations (!) to make everyone else miserable. The liberal agenda = misery for all. Liberals are illegitimate as citizens. They don’t have a stake in the country and thus should be marginalized. Only authoritarians can be trusted with power, because in a democracy the inferior people that right-wingers demonize can’t be kept down.

Vance singles out Kamala Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez not because they are miserable (obviously they’re not) but because they are the kind of people who are scapegoated and demonized in right-wing propaganda.

Only someone without the slightest talent for politics would allow himself to be caught on video saying something like “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives.” Half a second’s reflection would see what kind of hilarious and effective blowback it would cause outside the right-wing propaganda network.

I have been greatly entertained by the tsunami of cat memes. Cat memes were already a top genre of memes. Vance provided a way for the cat meme genre to be turned against MAGA Republicans. My guess is that these cat memes will even change more than a few votes. Consider the messages behind the cat memes. None of them lie, because they don’t have to. They don’t have to be mean. Instead they convey a much-deserved ridicule in a funny and even heartwarming way. Such a thing would be impossible in right-wing propaganda.

⬇︎ For comparison, consider this right-wing meme that I found this morning in a Republican Facebook group. It tries to be funny but isn’t. The lie is rather obvious — that real men vote for fascists. It demonizes liberals as infantile and feminized. It tries to stoke and draw power from the gender wars. It unintentionally — and embarrassingly, though it goes over their heads — reveals the insecure masculinity of rural, working-class males and offers no remedy for that insecurity other than meanness and fascism.


⬆︎ A Republican meme from Facebook.

Update:

Grace and good judgment


Source: Wikimedia Commons

Well then, here we are. The politics of the American election changed completely in one afternoon. There are two things on my agenda for the day after Biden’s announcement. The first is to heap scorn on the political media for its savage treatment of Biden while merrily changing Trump’s diapers. And the second is to laugh my ankles off at Republican rage over suddenly finding themselves in a Boeing 737 Max over Новосибирск with both engines on fire.

As usual, a historian, not the media, gives the best account. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote this morning:

“In a time of dictators, Trump tried to overthrow the results of the 2020 presidential election and install himself in power against the wishes of the people. President Joe Biden voluntarily turned away from reelection in order to give the people a better shot at preserving our democracy. He demonstrated what it means to put the country first.”

I did not watch the Biden-Trump debate. Biden had done just fine at the State of the Union address on March 7. The uproar in the next day’s papers took me by surprise. In the coming days, though, it was clear that Biden was in fact fading pretty fast. It was possible that the White House had been covering up for him. It inevitably took some time for Democrats in Washington to work out a plan, but the timing was good, with Biden’s withdrawal coming a few days after Republicans had finished making fools of themselves in Milwaukee and right in the middle of their vulgar con-man-plus-hillbilly triumphalism.

Even with a propaganda network that would have made Goebbels proud, it takes time for Republicans to demonize the opposition. They spent years demonizing the Clintons, so effectively that even some Democrats fell for it. Republicans didn’t have much on Biden other than his age, so they went after his son. Then in one afternoon, Republicans’ entire investment in demonization became worthless. No wonder Stephen Miller had a screaming fit on Fox News and Trump complained that now they have to start over.

All of a sudden, after making Biden’s age (81) their biggest issue, Republicans are left with a 78-year-old who falls asleep in front of cameras.

Heather Cox Richardson again:

“The Republicans’ anger reflects that fact that if Biden is off the ticket, they are in yet another pickle. Just last week, the Republicans nominated Donald Trump, who is 78, for president. Having made age their central complaint about Biden, they are now faced with having nominated the oldest candidate in U.S. history, who repeatedly fell asleep at his own nominating convention as well as his criminal trial, who often fumbles words, and who cannot seem to keep a coherent train of thought. Democrats immediately pounced on Trump with all the comments Republicans had been making about Biden. Republicans have already suggested that Trump will not debate Harris, a former prosecutor. ”

As for the media, they were right about Biden. But that doesn’t get them off the hook if they keep normalizing the fascism of Donald Trump. Is the New York Times capable of a little shame in the form of straightforward truthtelling about Trump? We’ll soon find out.

As for Kamala Harris, I think we should wait and see what happens between now and the Democratic convention, which starts August 19. It’s not over until the convention makes the nomination official. It seems that some of the Democrats whose position matters most want to hold off on endorsing anyone and waiting for the convention — Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffreis, and Barack Obama. That seems wise.

The media, always eager to attack Democrats, will now go on and on about “disarray” and “chaos.” That’s nonsense. The party process is working exactly as it should. In fact it’s working better than it was before, because the Biden campaign and the DNC never really allowed any other options during primary season.

It’s Nancy Pelosi whom I will be watching most closely. She knows every congressional district in the country. She has her own polling information and respects the media about as much as I do. She has no agenda other than winning. If Democrats can win both the House and Senate in November, it’s a sure bet that they’ll win the White House as well.

Update: Jonathan Rauch, in the Atlantic, reminds us that one of the responsibilities of political parties is to select strong, qualified candidates and to stand in the way of weak, corrupt ones. The Democratic Party did this, whereas the Republican Party has been hijacked by Trump. Just think: When Trump is gone, what will the Republican Party have left? Pretty much nothing but shame, irrelevance, and a rage that will accomplish nothing. The Atlantic piece is “The Party Is Not Over: Nominations belong to parties, not to candidates.”

Fiona Hill returns to the U.K.


Source: Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian reports today that Fiona Hill is returning to the U.K. to work for the new Labour government. She will be one of three advisers who will oversee a strategic defense review. In the U.S., Hill first came to our attention when she testified during Trump’s impeachment trial, having worked in the Trump White House, where she was called “the Russia bitch.”

The Guardian writes:

“Notably Hill and the other members of the review team will report not just to John Healey, the defence secretary, but also to the prime minister, Keir Starmer, and the chancellor, Rachel Reeves.”

A few years ago, I reviewed Hill’s book, There Is Nothing for You Here.

Oh, how I envy the U.K. right now. Not only is their election now behind them, they have a Labour government after fourteen years of Tory abuse. And they have Fiona Hill to help figure out how to deal with the Russians.

I have a particular respect for Fiona Hill partly because we have a mutual friend at the Brookings Institution, where Hill worked after the Trump White House. My friend sent her a link to my review of her book, which she read. She sent a reply to my friend: “This is wonderful. Please thank him. I am so glad that the book resonated this way with him. I was unaware of the Paul Krugman quote, but I guess it makes sense. My Dad and his friends would sit around on weekends talking for hours about practical things like this as I listened in as a kid. At the end of every discussion someone would say—well that’s everything settled then, we just need a bit of progress ….”

The Paul Krugman quote that she is referring to is Krugman’s frequent statement that reality has a distinctly liberal bias.

No. 1 pencils, now and always


Click for high-resolution version.

One of the finest writing instruments ever made is the No. 1 pencil. Whenever I have bought No. 2’s, because No. 1’s are often hard to find, I have regretted it. Pencils with harder lead don’t produce good contrast. And one has to bear down harder.

The first twelve or so years of my career were as a newspaper copy editor. (In the mid-1980s, when newspapers started using publishing systems built on computers, I became a systems guy, because I was good with computers, and it paid better.) In those pre-computer days, the type was set in the composing room with hot-lead Linotype machines. The newsroom was full of typewriters, always heavy office machines, usually Royals made between 1945 and 1958. The copy paper actually was cut from the same huge rolls of newsprint that went onto the presses. A big hydraulic knife in the pressroom was used to cut the copy paper 8.5 inches wide by about 20 inches long. When you loaded a typewriter with paper, you always used two sheets of copy paper, with carbon paper in the middle. The top sheet, of course, went into the production process. The carbon copies from the entire newsroom were collected each evening (by a copy boy) and filed away, in case there were ever any questions about whether errors originated with reporters or whether the errors were made during the editing and production process.

Copy editors made their marks with, and only with, No. 1 pencils. This was not so much because the marks ever needed to be erased. It was because No. 1 pencils make clear and readable marks, and the need for less pressure meant much less fatique for the copy editors’ hands. To have edited with hard-lead pencils would have been miserable work.

So, when a copy editor’s evening started (usually around 4 p.m. for morning papers), he or she would sharpen a handful of pencils. During the evening, there would be multiple returns to the pencil trimmer. We wore out a lot of pencils.

In those days, everyone recognized everyone else’s handwriting. By the time a piece of copy was ready to go to the composing room through the pneumatic tube, there would be many pencil marks on it. Every editor would know quite well who had done all the edits, all the way back to the reporter.

Years before I entered the newspaper business, one of the jobs of copy boys would have been to carry copy from the newsroom to the composing room. By the 1930s, pneumatic tubes were the rule, larger versions of the pneumatic systems that large department stores used to use for making change from a single room somewhere where all the cash was kept.

While I’m on the subject, one of the nicest things that ever happened to me was getting a weekend job as a newspaper copy boy when I was in high school. There was no job in the world that I would have been better suited for. One of my favorite parts was looking after a room full of Teletype machines — loading paper, changing their ribbons, tearing off copy, sorting it, and distributing the copy to the right editors in the newsroom. I also typed stories going out to the Associated Press onto a Teletype system that had a keyboard and a tape punch. Punching paper tape before sending the stories allowed typing errors to be corrected, and sending stories out with punched tape meant that the Teletype machine could operate at full speed (about 60 words a minute), reducing the time used on the Teletype’s telephone circuit. Typing directly onto the wire was possible, but it was frowned upon.

Maybe someday I’ll write about the machines that were used to transfer photos over telephone lines, from coast to coast as well as transatlantic. One of those machines (in Nuremberg) actually appears briefly in the Netflix series on the Third Reich (now streaming on Netflix). The machine involved a rotating cylinder to which the photo is attached. Anyone who noticed it in the documentary is unlikely to have figured out what it was. A few of them must still exist in museums.

A few years ago, Ken saw the copy tube (below) in my attic and said, “What is that.” Oh how things have changed, that someone as deeply immersed in writing and publishing as Ken didn’t recognize it.


⬆︎ This copy tube used to belong to the San Francisco Examiner. The typewriter is a Royal HH from around 1952. I have about a dozen typewriters in my collection. Click here for high-resolution version.


⬆︎ This recipe for quiche was typed on a Royal KMM typewriter on newsroom copy paper. You can see some of the pencil marks over pâte brisée and the scratched-out typos. As for pâte brisée, you can be very sure that copy editors were as careful with French punctuation as with English. Whereas the uncaught typo “parpare” embarrasses me now, 45 years later. I have used this recipe for 45 years. Click here for high-resolution version.

(The Royal KMM typewriters were made from the late 1930s into the 1940s. It’s one of the models of typewriter that helped fight World War II. It has been said that World War II could not have been won without typewriters. The logistics of war are formidable. But consider also how the Nazis managed logistics and kept records, and what the evidence at the Nuremberg trial might have looked like had it not been neatly typed.)

Civil War

Need some cinematic therapy? This film should do it for you. A fascist president refuses to leave the White House and claims a third term. You already know the story, but to improve your mental health you need to see the ending. The last fifteen minutes of this film are priceless. The problem is that, as the credits start to roll, you realize that in the real world it’s not over.

This film was released in April and had been streaming for several weeks at a cost of $20 to $30. When the rental price came down to $5.99 from Apple, I finally watched it. There may be other streaming sources as well.

Some reviewers accused this film of holding back on the politics. I don’t think that’s the case at all. It’s clear enough who’s who. The rating on Rotten Tomatoes is 81/70, which no doubt means that right-wingers took offense and voted down the audience rating.