North Carolina’s trains


Rolling into Greensboro from Charlotte. Click here for high resolution version.

If I had not during the previous two weeks spent quite a lot of time on trains in the United Kingdom, I would not have noticed that American trains are bigger and wider than the U.K.’s trains. Here in the U.S., I rode trains from Greensboro to Raleigh for flights out of the Raleigh-Durham airport.

I had mistakenly assumed that the trains that shuttle back and forth from Raleigh to Charlotte are Amtrak trains. A conductor set me straight, after I’d asked him if he knew when the passenger car that I was riding in had been built. He didn’t know, but he volunteered some interesting information about North Carolina’s trains. They are in fact operated by Amtrak, but they are owned by the state of North Carolina. A good many years ago, North Carolina bought some older locomotives and passenger cars from Amtrak, restored them, and put them back into service for in-state travel.

My excuse for being unaware of that is that I was living in California when North Carolina’s train project started. Plus, we no longer have any state or local news to speak of. But Wikipedia has the complete story, N.C. by Train.

Some Googling confirmed that trains in the U.S. are larger and wider than trains in the U.K. The American tracks are wider, thus the cars and locomotives can be wider.

The passenger car that I rode in from Raleigh to Greensboro was downright elegant, a classic, like riding in a 1956 Buick. Though I was unable to determine when the car was made, my guess is that it was at least 30, if not 40, years old. New York, here I come again, by train, hopefully early next spring.


Classic elegance — a passenger car restored for the North Carolina train system. Click here for high resolution version.

Cats and Sir Walter Scott


Walter Scott in his study, with a cat

Sir Walter Scott’s home, Abbotsford, is an enchanting place. I was not surprised on my visit to Abbotsford to see that he had cats, including a favorite cat, Hinse, whose portrait is among the many portraits in Abbotsford’s armoury room. I said to Ken that any writer who has cats is going to write about cats. I had no particular memory of cats appearing in any of the eleven Waverley novels I’ve read, so I had to do some research.

What I wanted was for Scott to be as much a cat person as Robert A. Heinlein, whose novel The Door Into Summer starts ands ends with a cat. Scott, it seems, was not as much a cat person as was Heinlein. But Scott’s The Antiquary has several mentions of cats.

If there is a character in Scott’s novels who is most like Scott himself, that would be Jonathan Oldbuck in The Antiquary. Oldbuck has a cat. The cat is not given a name and mostly serves as atmosphere, sitting on a table in Oldbuck’s study the same way Hinse sat on Scott’s writing desk at Abbotsford, and sitting in a chair in Oldbuck’s dining room.

Washington Irving visited Scott at Abbotsford and wrote this about Scott:

While Scott was reading, the sage grimalkin, already mentioned, had taken his seat in a chair beside the fire, and remained with fixed eye and grave demeanor, as if listening to the reader. I observed to Scott that his cat seemed to have a black-letter taste in literature.

“Ah,” said he, “these cats are a very mysterious kind of folk. There is always more passing in their minds than we are aware of. It comes no doubt from their being so familiar with witches and warlocks.”

He went on to tell a little story about a gude man who was returning to his cottage one night, when, in a lonely out-of-the-way place, he met with a funeral procession of cats all in mourning, bearing one of their race to the grave in a coffin covered with a black velvet pall. The worthy man, astonished and half-frightened at so strange a pageant, hastened home and told what he had seen to his wife and children. Scarce had he finished, when a great black cat that sat beside the fire raised himself up, exclaimed “Then I am king of the cats!” and vanished up the chimney. The funeral seen by the gude man, was one of the cat dynasty.

“Our grimalkin here,” added Scott, “sometimes reminds me of the story, by the airs of sovereignty which he assumes; and I am apt to treat him with respect from the idea that he may be a great prince incog., and may some time or other come to the throne.”


⬆︎ Hinse


⬆︎ Oldbuck in his study


⬆︎ Oldbuck at breakfast


⬆︎ Abbotsford


⬆︎ And for the record, here’s a photo of Ken and me in a pub in Edinburgh, after we’d been to a lecture at the Edinburgh Sir Walter Scott Club.

Home automation and smart thermostats

Several years ago, when I first set up Apple Home, I saw it as one of those useless things that nerds do only for the entertainment of playing with gadgets. But I’ve changed my mind. It’s convenient, and it greatly adds to one’s security and peace of mind.

A few months ago, I replaced my two 15-year-old thermostats with smart thermostats. I anguished over the cost — about $650 — but I soon realized that I’d made a good decision. The heat pump works much better now. Temperatures in the house stay at the exact level at which the thermostats are set, rather than wavering two or even three degrees higher or lower that the thermostat’s setting. The new thermostats are much better at knowing when to use the heat pump’s electrical coils when it’s so cold outside that the compressor is inefficient.

But, best of all, I can see what’s happening at home when I’m away from home. On my recent trip to Scotland, I was away from home into early December. There were several nights when the temperature was as low as 18F, cold enough to freeze water pipes in an unheated house. Using the Apple Home app on my iPhone, I could see the temperature upstairs and downstairs in the house and confirm that the heating system was keeping temperatures above the 50F setting.

I have several electric heaters, the type that look like small radiators, both upstairs and downstairs. I can turn them on and off from anywhere. If I leave home and forget to turn them off, then Apple Home turns them off for me, with a trigger called “when the last person leaves home.” It’s also nice to have Apple Home turns some lights on when WIFI sees that my iPhone has arrived in the driveway, with the trigger “when anyone arrives home.” Some things are on timers. Apple Home turns on some lights in the morning and makes sure that certain things are turned off at bedtime.

The WIFI light bulbs and WIFI switches that work with Apple Home aren’t all that expensive. And of course the Apple Home system is a built-in part of the Apple ecosystem. To make it work, one needs an Apple device that is always at home and always plugged in — either an Apple TV or an Apple HomePod.

The CEO shooter

While a tsunami of healthy, hilarious, and ever-so-understandable schadenfreude broke out in social media after the shooting of a predatory health care CEO, the punditry scolded us and clutched their pearls, warning us of the dangers of political violence.

But 48.36 percent of the population — those who didn’t vote for Trump — are not as deranged as the 49.97 percent who did. Having lived through years of MAGA political violence, the glorification of MAGA political violence, and the return of a MAGA criminal to the White House with a cast of MAGA goons having a net worth of $340 billion, at least 48.36 percent of the population can distinguish between political violence that serves justice and political violence that serves fascism and oligarchy.

I have argued in the past that, as Putinization comes to America, there is a limit to what Americans will put up with. If the people of South Korea, Belarus, Georgia, Peru, Slovakia, and even Russia will take to the streets in a heartbeat because they hate being kicked around, then Americans, in a country born out of violent revolution, will take to the streets in half a heartbeat. The grassroots political instincts that MAGA tapped and perverted to serve fascism and oligarchy are just as present in those who hate fascism and oligarchy. The CEO shooter reminded us of that, and no doubt terrified those who will do everything possible to retain for themselves a monopoly on violence.

So, mystery shooter, whoever you are and wherever you are, you’re obviously the hero and inspiration that a lot of people need right now. The punditry, clutching their pearls in their corporate gigs, would have us believe that all political violence is equally bad. No it isn’t, because of the difference between justice and injustice. It’s safe to assume that that neutralized CEO, indirectly, out of corporate greed, caused the premature deaths of tens of thousands of people. We can confidently say that he deserves our contempt, even if saying that he, or anyone, deserves to die is farther than we want to go.

They’ll probably catch this guy and make an example of him. But if they take him alive, we’ll get to hear why he did it. America’s CEO’s, and those who are preparing to Putinize America, won’t like that story one bit, because it probably will be a story about predation, exploitation, and the greed of the powerful. And it probably will be a story about one of the many powerless people who died because of it, someone whom the CEO shooter loved.

Scottish pubs


The Royal Pub, Edinburgh

The pubs alone justify a trip to Scotland. The lack of pub culture, as I often have complained, is one of America’s worst flaws. Pubs are a social glue, and America is increasingly an unglued kind of place.

Edinburgh pubs can be very grand. Village pubs are small and cozy, almost always with a fireplace. Pub food will be fairly inexpensive and a touch rustic — soups, roasts, pies, and vegetables such as potatoes and broccoli, treated well.

Ken and I had a long afternoon in Edinburgh, looking at old publications and some first editions in the National Library of Scotland, which is an archive, really, since the items in the collections can be fetched and inspected, but not checked out.

After that it was a lecture at the Sir Walter Scott Club of Edinburgh, with wine and canapes after the lecture. It was a delightful group of people, most of them my age. My questions about cats in Scott’s novels stumped everyone I asked. I’ll have a post on Scott’s cats after I get home.

While waiting to catch a train at Waverley station back to East Linton, we had some ale at the Royal Pub. And I admit that, back in East Linton, we had one more slosh (Scotch, this time) by the fire at the pub in the East Linton Hotel.


The Crown pub, East Linton


French onion soup and a cheese scone, the Crown pub, East Linton

Abbotsford

Abbotsford is Sir Walter Scott’s home, at Melrose in the Scottish Borders. The place is fascinating. Scott’s library is intact, and it is enormous. In fact I suspect that Scott’s books are worth as much as his house.

I learned something new about Scott. He had a favorite cat who often sat on his desk when he was writing. There is a portrait of the cat in the house; her name was Hinse. Any writer who had cats is sure to have at least one cat character in his novels. I need to do some research on that, and I can’t think of a better place to get started that tomorrow’s trip to Edinburgh for a lecture at the Sir Walter Scott Club.

I have many photos, and I’ll have more later. I have only an iPhone to work with while traveling, so I’ll save my photos until I’m back at home with a proper computer and Photoshop.

I plan to visit Berwick Upon Tweed on Friday.

East Linton

East Linton is a village about 20 miles east of Edinburgh, population 2,000. For several decades, trains from Edinburgh headed toward England bypassed East Linton, because the station had been closed. A new train station opened in December 2023, and East Linton is very much on the map again.

East Linton is my home base for this visit to Scotland. I easily got in my 10,000 steps yesterday with a walk out into the rural areas surrounding Linton, even though a storm, Bert, had brought wind and snow. After all, when you visit Scotland, the weather is a part of what you come for.

The old stone construction in the photo is a dovecot (the Scottish call them “doocots”). They were for raising doves. To have a dovecot was a status symbol. The breakfast photo is at the Linton Hotel.

Tomorrow: Edinburgh.

Journalism isn’t enough


Anne Applebaum. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

Journalism — even good journalism, if we could get it — is too narrow a view of events to help intelligent people adapt to the ugly, complicated, and chaotic situation in which we now find ourselves. Now more than ever we need historians and public intellectuals, people like Anne Applebaum.

In today’s New York Times, there is a transcript of an Ezra Klein podcast with Anne Applebaum, Trump Kicks Down the Guardrails. It’s a must-read.

There can be no real discussion of our current situation without an awareness of people who have been in similar situations in the past and the tyrants who put them there. How did it end? What did people do about it? I have journalist friends in high places who are very proud that their work is “descriptive, not prescriptive.” That’s not enough. Without a prescription, a strategy, for coordinated action, what’s to stand in the way of Trump and his regime of grifters, sickos, kleptocrats, and clowns?

As we all hold our breath and wait for Trump 2.0 to get his hands on the levers of power, Applebaum has this advice:

“The worst result or the worst consequence of this kind of government, if that’s what we’re going to have, and of course we still don’t know yet, is that people become apathetic. They say: This is all so overwhelming, it’s so huge. I don’t even know what’s true and what’s not true anymore, and I’m just going to stay home.

“Try to overcome that. And it almost doesn’t matter what it is that you do. Involve yourself in a local group, a discussion group. Join a political party. Run for local office. Try to be present in your community in some way. Do something that makes you active. And that makes you feel that you’re taking part in the governance of your country.”

That’s pretty weak tea, but it’s a necessary start. As for figuring out what’s true and what’s not true, sometimes that’s hard, and we need help from people with a particular kind of knowledge. But often it’s dead easy. If something serves the interests of grifters, sickos, kleptocrats and clowns, then it’s probably a lie, no matter how many people believe it.

Thrifted dress shirts


Bought on eBay for $13. I’m pretty sure this shirt was new old stock, never worn.

I’m retired and live in the sticks, so I haven’t fretted over dress shirts for a long time. But, in Scotland later this month, there will be several occasions for which I need to look like a decent American and even one occasion for which I must meet the dress code for the oldest social club in Edinburgh. Yikes.

Casual shirts in size medium usually fit me pretty well. Dress shirts are a different story. The size with agreeable shoulders and sleeve length are grossly full in the chest and waist. The fabric billows into a bagel above my waist.

I’m an old hand now at understanding how to get tweed jackets to fit. Shirts, not so much. The wonderful Chinese tailor lady in Winston-Salem who worked on my tweed jackets has retired. Shirts, I figured, could be handled by someone here in the country. Some time back I had noticed a sign in a yard on the way to Madison advertising sewing and alterations. I took two Ralph Lauren dress shirts there.

I had no idea what was involved. I had assumed that it meant pinning the shirt to fit, then removing some seams, cutting out some fabric, and making new flat felled seams. When I picked up the shirts, they fit just fine. But she had done the job with what amounted to a single long seam, with appropriate curves, from the cuff through the armpit and down to the shirttail. The original flat felled seams in the sides and down the sleeves were now gone.

OK. Fine. It’s just a shirt and doesn’t have to be perfect, unlike tweed jackets, which last a lifetime. Plus these shirts will be worn under jackets and sweaters.

I realized: Heck fire. I can sew well enough to do that. So I bought a third Ralph Lauren dress shirt in the same size and did the job myself.

What little skill I have at the sewing machine I learned from my mother, when I was probably 11 or 12 years old. That’s a strange thing for a boy to learn from his mother, but partly it was because the machine itself fascinated me, and I love machines. From how-to videos on YouTube, though, I can see that there are many men who alter their own clothing. Two or three times in my life I’ve tried to actually make something, but I’m just not good enough at it. But anybody can sew a simple seam. It was bean bags, as I recall, that my mother started us on, because my younger sister was learning to sew around the same time.

I was amused by the photos on the Ralph Lauren web site. All those shirts have been adjusted to fit the models. The standard sizes just don’t fit lean people. I could have taken in my shirts a little more, but I don’t think that overly tight shirts would be very becoming on someone my age. I’m satisfied just with getting rid of the billows and bagels.

By the way, there is far greater variety of men’s dress shirts on eBay than you’ll find online. Most of the shirts on the Ralph Lauren web site were in cool pastels that I don’t think would look good with winter clothing. I didn’t much like the prices, either.


⬆︎ My rarely used sewing machine was happy to get some daylight and exercise.


⬆︎ This photo is from the Ralph Lauren web site. New shirts similar to my $13 eBay shirt are $148.