Dog-Sitting Instructions (Forgotten)

I'm house & dog sitting this weekend. Before she left, bink reminded me,
"Don't forget to push in the chairs!"
I keep forgetting.

Astro last night, home from a walk:

 This morning. My coffee!

Book Grape, Olive, Pig: Deep Travels through Spain's Food Culture, by Matt Goulding: "An Anthony Bourdain Book"

"There's no wrong note as long as you're singing!"

Good committee meetings are famously hard to pull off.
After all, what in our schooling, family, or work life has prepared us to work together in harmony?

Much as I despise how he responded to me, I don't think Big Boss is a bad person for leading a bad meeting, or even for using God talk to try to pressure me into staying on the committee.

Why should we expect we will able to work together in meetings cold--with no training? 
 
People singing together, however, people with perfectly average voices, prove there IS a way we, together, can be greater than the sum of our parts.
I don't understand the physics of this (do you?), but singing voices blend to be more beautiful than any individual one.

Pete Seeger with his broken old-man voice leads "Amazing Grace" on his ninetieth birthday celebration.



"Let every thing that has breath sing praise." 

I've been thinking about culture changes in the face of climate and political changes (even possible collapse? godforbid).
Of course if we all go up in a puff of nuclear smoke, we won't have to worry about it, but say we survive but have to adapt to massive shocks, or even "just" the gradual slow boil---what helps?

People in the past have gone through culture shocks, disasters, even collapses. 
The forced Jewish, African, and Tibetan diasporas, for instance.
What helps/-ed them?

A shared book, stories, music.

I've been listening to the filmed concert "Pete Seeger in Sweden" (1968) on youtube. 

"See, the slave master brought the Bible to the slave and pointed and said, 'See where it says Obey thy master? Learn that.'
Then he went away and left the Bible.
They turned the page, and it says, 'Moses freed the slaves!'"

I don't know much music history, but if you, a person or a people, have lost everything but breath, you can still sing.

I want to go back to the folk songs of my childhood and sing them till I know them again. Many of them come from the African disapora during the period of slavery, as well as European folk traditions. 
I mostly know them from Pete Seeger records, who says, "The music, like everything else, is all mixed up."

Slime Lab

I've said many times here that I don't like committees. 
(Well, who does?)

I had reservations about accepting Big Boss's request that I be on the new store committee three months ago. Sure enough, the first meeting was bad enough I decided to quit.

I talked myself out of it. Maybe I was being too sensitive? 
Just because Big Boss makes unilateral declarations, with no discussion, doesn't mean it's going to be a pointless committee, right?
And I'm not going to see BB at his worst and start to dislike him, am I?

Wrong. I am––I have.
I won't go into everything wrong in the third meeting, a few days ago, just that fundraising came up (Nooooooo!), and the Invisible Development Director (hardly anyone has even met her), who gets paid more than the executive director, 
. . . and I ended up yelling, What the hell does she DO?

I was told, as if I were a child, that she has raised $50,000 in a year.

Yes, I know that. That's why I was yelling.

I snorted. "Does that even cover her salary?" 

Silence. "We have some concerns about that."
But the board just signed her on for another six months.

Hey! I know that one! It's the Sunk Cost cognitive bias, otherwise known as throwing good money after bad.
There's nothing I can do except note it in the minutes: "The emperor has no clothes."

This is the worst committee I have ever been on.

So yesterday I sent Big Boss a friendly email resigning from the committee, just saying I'd help the store most by playing to my strengths: caring for books and customers.

I figured Big Boss still wanted me on the committee--who'd take the minutes if not me? but I also figured he'd see reason.

But, no.
He emailed back that he disagrees, that he believes my discomfort is from God pushing me out of my comfort zone, and it's God's will I stay on the committee.

My discomfort is from GOD?!?!
I'm like, is it even legal to say this BS to me?

Telling someone you know God's will for them, which just happens to coincide with your will for them, is some nasty, creepy mind game.
The more I think about it, the more I feel slimed. 

Hm. Maybe I could react like wild & wacky scientist Jillian  Holtzmann (Kate McKinnon, below, far right, in Ghostbusters).  After all, going into this workplace, I did say I was going to consider it a spiritual laboratory...

Big Boss is on vacation next week, so I can ponder what I'm going to do. Certainly any tiny, lingering doubt about my decision to quit the committee is gone--I'm just not sure how to best convey that.

No. Actually, I am.
I'm not going to discuss it with him. I'm disappointed in him, and I don't trust him anymore. 
I'm just going to say, I'm sticking with my decision.

My Betty Crocker Breakfast Photo Shoot

I made breakfast for Mz at my place, and she went and got my 1950s' Betty Crocker cookbook, to show how my presentation looks like something out of that (except for that copy of La Peste/The Plague with Camus smoking in the background).

We March, Ann Flies

It's the last week for my Women's History Month books display ^ at work, which you can see part of, front and left. 
(But darn, even when I enlarged the photo, I can't recognize the book this shopper is reading the back of... She's in the fiction section is all I know.)

My displays rely on whatever books are donated,  of course, but I was very pleased that, while our books tend to be a bit dated, I've been able to present a decent spread, including, at the moment:

・Why We March: Signs of Protest and Hope--Voices from the Women's March [worldwide protests after Trump's inauguration, 2017]
・An Unfinished Woman, by Lillian Hellman
・33 Things Every Girl Should Know About Women's History: From Suffragettes to Skirt Lengths to the E.R.A. (2002)

 ・Georgia O'Keeffe: One Hundred Flowers 

・Ann Can Fly (1959), about a girl taking flying lessons

・Radioactive: Marie & Pierre Curie: A Tale of Love and Fallout--visual biography by Laura Redness

・National Museum of Women in the Arts
・All the Women of the Bible
・Galileo's Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love, by Dava Sobel, based on letters of the nun Suor Maria Celeste, daughter of Galileo
・Personal History, by Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham

. . . and more, including books by Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinam, bell hooks, Hillary Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and

・Mighty Be Our Powers: How Sisterhood, Prayer, and Sex Changed a Nation at War - A Memoir by Leymah Gbowee, 2011 Liberia Nobel Peace Laureate

Eventually...

On the city bus to work––the streets are ice-free, but my bike is still in the shop getting a tune-up: the fall knocked its headset out of whack.

Conversation with a bus driver

Bus with sign reading DROP OFF ONLY stops and lets people off, but waits with door open....

Me, from the curb: You're letting me on?

Bus Driver: Come on.

Me: Your sign says DROP OFF ONLY-- are you drop-off only?

Driver: Eventually.

Me: But you're going as far as Lyndale?

Driver: Eventually.

Me, depositing my fare: And we'll get to heaven? . . . Eventually?

Driver: Yes, but right now, we're just going through a little bit of Hell.

Me: [laughs] Right.

Mercy & Justice Kiss

Michael emailed me this 2-minute video, in response to me writing about not assuming bad intent: :
"Be Kind",  from James Martin, S.J, suggesting that instead of giving something up for Lent, one could add something a little positive:

Three Ways to Be Kinder:
1. Don't spread your own misery
2. Don't talk behind other people's back
3. Give others the benefit of the doubt

I especially love the reminder not to spread your misery.
You might think these three ideas would be unobjectionable, but some commenters don't like them.
Sample comment:
"SJ, what can you expect.. so liberal... you better honor Christ and obey the Holy Father."

Ha! (S.J. = Society of Jesus, i.e., the Jesuits, an intellectual order, with a reputation of being liberal Catholics––the Jesuit Pope Francis is such a one.)

This reminds me of another instance of feeling foreign at work:  trying to tell Mr. Linens at work, who had asked if I believe in God, that I believe in God as defined in 1John 4:16:

"God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God..."

He shouted, "BULLSHIT!" and went on to say you have to go to church every week and WORSHIP God.
Big Boss has similarly talked about how important it is not to lose your awe (fear) of how mighty God is.

Some Catholic youtube commenters would agree––as if mercy and kindness were in opposition to judgment and power. 
This is the opposite of the Catholicism I relate to--a Catholicism rooted in the "both/and" of Psalm 85:

"Mercy and truth are met together;
righteousness and peace have kissed each other." 

Don't Assume Bad Intent

[Sorry if this is a bit jumbled: I have to go to work, and I don't have time to edit it.
My leg started to ache after four hours on my feet yesterday, so I left early. I'm thrilled to say it doesn't hurt this morning, so I'm working shorter but more days this week.]

The Hidden Brain podcast "Creative Differences" is about the effect of a person's close contact with people who are different from themselves on that person's creativity.

More contact seems to correlate to more creativity--but the contact has to be intimate--a love relationship with a foreigner, or living in another country, not just visiting.

That feels right to me. I think a key to creativity is knowing that things could be different.
Like Apple ad from the late '90s, "Think different". 

Meeting people whose thinking is aligned with an entirely different set of standards and even facts has been key for me.

In my twenties, I was involved with bink, who came from a poor, working-class family. That's an example of being close to someone different and NOT seeing their difference––not letting it crack my facade––largely, I think, because as an aspiring artist, bink had realigned herself with the creative class. I'm sorry to say, for instance, I couldn't fully understand when she talked about the distress that caused her.

In my mid-thirties, I was involved with an actual foreigner: an upper-middle–class Englishman (my former Classics prof). His thinking was soooo different from mine, sometimes I couldn't make any sense of it. I could not fathom, for instance, how someone with a PhD could support a monarchy and an all-male priesthood. In trying to understand him, I came to see these beliefs of his were often more about social allegiance than intellectual processes––and that the same is true for me.

That was a shock, and it worked to pull the facing off the structure of my thinking to reveal the supports below:
I believe in X,Y, Z because my people do, not because I even truly understand X, Y, Z well enough to know what I think, independently.

Once you see that, you know, a-ha! It could be different.
I could be different. And that opens up possibilities.

I'm in another country, to some extent, at work.

I've been keeping my options open with my coworker Mr. Furniture––a self-taught artist and a Black Panther Party sympathizer. A commenter here had insisted he was hostile, based on things I've reported Mr Furniture has said. The things he says can sound hostile, written out. 

But like a lot of the guys I work with, Mr Furniture came up in generational poverty, then in gangs, has since reformed himself, and practically everything he and these guys say sounds rough and tumble to me.

I know that I'm a foreigner among them and that I just don't get them. So over the past year, I've mostly laid low and tried to observe what they DO, how they ACT, and not judge what they say so much.
Mr. Linens even told me,
"Don't listen to anything I say!"

This is the reverse of how I grew up, in an academic family in a college town where people were judged by what we said, by how we presented ourselves in words.

I took as my guide the saying, Don't assume bad intent.
(Wiser, I think, than the advice to assume good intent. Just don't assume anything!)

It was a shock to me when I first worked among people who weren't primarily word based.  That was when I worked at the Basilica as weekend sacristan. (I was old. Forty!)Many people I came in close contact with at the Basilica were in business of some way––accountants, tax lawyers, small- and even large-business owners––and many came from blue collar backgrounds. 

Plenty of them were wealthy, but not well educated. They would not know what to me were basic facts, like where Yugoslavia was.
In my family, this was practically a sin. 

BUT... they would bring you soup if you were sick, and think nothing of it, even if you weren't a close friend of theirs.
My parents never did good deeds like that. (Or, if they did, they thought something of it––it was a big deal, it signified something.)

I had to reconfigure how I judged people. 

This has been helpful working with Mr Furniture and the other guys. They are friendly to me in the way they treat me, even if not in words.
Yesterday, I was shocked that Mr Furniture complimented me in words--not directly, but in my hearing. He was telling a pal of his that he'd gotten some Black Panther patches from eBay.
"How did you find those?" the pal asked.

"Well," Mr F said, "we have the best book lady, and she found them."

And now, I have to go.

Back to Work, and a Mother's Melancholy Menu

I go back to work this morning, somewhat sadly: I haven't finished reading all my books!

Once it was clear my pulled leg muscle was going to heal fairly fast––it's almost normal now––I had a dreamy week off. 
Forced to stay home, mostly, I did what I like to do. I'd thought that might include sewing (clothes for the Orphan Reds, etc.), but it was all reading and blogging.

I don't know about you, but even a short post can take me a couple hours. Say I mention Arthur Koestler; I've spent some time looking him up. (I've only ever read his Darkness at Noon, and that was twenty years ago.)

And I delete a lot--sometimes a whole lot.
Saturday's short section about my problems with my sister, for instance, had started as a long rant. 
I'm glad I wrote it out for myself, to clear my head, but in the end a simple example caught it best.

How to write about family? 

Amos Oz's memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, is a stellar example. I'd started it back in January, reading carefully, and I finally finished it this week. It's excellent, and I loved it.

Oz lets political history set the stage for his parents, Arieh and Fania Klausner, and other characters of his childhood. Their history is vivid, since they were Jews who emigrated in the 1930s from Eastern Europe to British Mandate Palestine, where Amos was born in Jerusalem in 1939.

Oz uses repetition to highlight certain things.

Several times throughout the book, his mother gets together in Jerusalem with friends she knows from her childhood in Poland. Each time, he mentions that they talk about a handsome high school teacher all the girls had been in love with.

Elsewhere he talks about the fate of people left behind––an uncle, his wife, and their newborn baby murdered by the Germans, for instance. He doesn't say, but you can guess what happened to the handsome teacher...

This is the backdrop for his mother's decline.
His mother killed herself when Oz was twelve. 

I was forty-one when my mother killed herself, which is hugely different (I was her child, but I wasn't a child). Yet when Oz tells how his mother ended her life, in the very last section of the book, pages 531–538, I entirely recognized his grief. 
(The book's copyright is 2003, when Oz was sixty-four.)

Sometimes the repetitions seemingly don't carry much weight. He mentions sugared orange peels two or three times. Embroidered Oriental pillows turn up.
Why did he single those out?
Why do I remember them?

Along with little details, sometimes he backs up and gives a sweeping picture. This description of the difference between his parents reminds me of the differences between my parents––though I've often put them in movie terms:
The Godfather for my father, the child of Sicilian immigrants, and Gone with the Wind for my Southern belle mother.

"Both my parents had come to Jerusalem straight from the nineteenth century.

"My father had grown up on a concentrated diet of operatic, nationalistic, battle-thirsty romanticism... whose marzipan peaks were sprinkled, like a splash of champagne, with the virile frenzy of Nietzsche.

"My mother, on the other hand, lived by the other Romantic canon, the introspective, melancholy menu of loneliness in a minor key, soaked in the suffering of broken-hearted, soulful outcasts, infused with vague autumnal scents of fin de siècle decadence."

––A Tale of Love and Darkness, p. 250

Speaking of movies, Israeli-American Natalie Portman, who looks a lot like the handsome Oz's beautiful mother, made a film of Oz's memoir--the part after 1945. 
It got a decent Guardian review, but I can't bear to watch it. 

And now, to work...

The Future in 1967

bink drove me out to a suburban World Market (like Pier 1 or other import shops) to buy gifts for Auntie Vi, and I asked her to stop when we drove past my favorite modernist office park, so I could take pictures.

Pentagon Park in Edina, MN, was completed 1967, in time to coincide with Daniel Ellsberg leaking the Pentagon Papers––surely not the direction the designers thought the future was going to go.
Now empty, it looks like a movie set for a dys- or a u-topian tale, take your pick. 

Below: one of the park's buildings, its steel peeling, from an era that envisioned we would never want to open windows again.

Family Portraits

I. The Three 

I've come to realize I can't give full attention to eight Orphan Reds after all. I'm going to focus on these three, who I know best: Red Hair Girl, Penny Cooper, and SweePo.
(The others will be happy keeping themselves company, for now.)

 The Original Orphan Reds

RHG (in black) was the first. I found her two summers ago at the Goodwill where I was working. Eventually she wanted a friend like her, and Penny Cooper (in plaid) came. She's the cousin, and both she and RHG are eight. 
Then SweePo (seated) came, who is younger than the others.

RHG and Penny Cooper have always been much the same––confident, and in Penny Cooper's case, even triumphant. (LOL)

SweePo, however, was anxious and shy at first. She'd arrived in a package with religious stickers all over it, and I've wondered if she'd endured some "spare the rod, spoil the child" child-rearing tactics.
Look what a happy girl she is now! Front and center. 

The others look out for her and cheer her on in everything. 
SweePo put her outfit together herself, for instance. Penny Cooper secretly does not think it is a very good outfit, but she is true to her considered philosophy (which she wrote down in her little book) that it's most important to support the people you love in the things they love.

Red Hair Girl is an Aries––is she ever! She considers SweePo's outfit Top #1-A Great!!! . . . and now that we've entered the sign of Aries, she is agitating for her own spring outfit. (Her musketeer outfit is getting tatty too, as you can see.)

II. bink, Selfie with Astro 

Astro is a wire-haired fox terrier––a bit of a ruffian, and the snuggliest lap dog ever. 

He's a rescue. His former owner mostly kept him alone in a room for a year because she didn't know how to handle him.
Luckily, someone eventually told her about the excellent Wire Fox Rescue–Midwest, and she gave him to them.

The WFRM website banner reads,

"Life isn't one straight line. Most of us have to be transplanted, like a tree, before we blossom." 

––Louise Nevelson

bink & Maura had previously given a home to two wire foxes from this group, and when Astro came in, the facilitator didn't even put him on the adoption site––she contacted bink & Maura, asking if they'd take a problem boy who would need some extra work.

Good call.

bink and Maura are celebrating their twentieth anniversary next month, and not to take anything away from that, but I've always suspected that bink's deepest love affairs are with terriers...

III. My Father

I stole this photo off my sister's FB––our eighty-four-year-old father doing the crossword on my sister's back porch a couple springs ago. (He died at eight-six in 2017.) 
This is very much him.

My sister and I are the carriers of our family's culture–
we grew up with the boxed three-volume set of the letters of Vincent van Gogh as a doorstop––
and we're essentially the only ones left. 

(Our brother is alive––
and Matz, who just dropped by as I'm writing this, rolls her eyes and points out he is very much Of the Family Culture: 
he has Latin in his website bio––
but he's been incommunicado for years.) 

When I see my sister (every so often), I get a strong feeling of Home.  
Mostly, despite everything difficult  between us, in the good sense.

Happy Birthday, Bill! Keep it gay!

William Shatner (Captain Kirk) turns eighty-eight today. He was born May 22, 1931--same year as my father (r.i.p.).

A favorite pick-me-upper: 
Shatner singing a snippet of "Keep It Gay" on the Mike Douglas Show in 1969:



The song is from a 1950s Broadway show, Me and Juliet.

I'm inspired by how Shatner's never embarrassed. Whatever terrible acting job he accepts, he gives it his hammy all.

He sure got a lot of practice in Star Trek.
Here, in the episode that gets my vote of Most Excruciatingly Embarrassing, "Plato's Stepchildren" (1968), he maintains his dignity while draped in a tablecloth with a plastic wreath on his head––
or, anyway, he doesn't let looking ridiculous stop him from fully inhabiting the role. 

Screencap from the treasure trove of images TrekCore: http://tos.trekcore.com

Mudlarks

It's finally warming up here--in the 40s. I took Low (one of the returnees, all in red) and SweePo on a short walk in the sunshine yesterday. They love the mud!
My leg ached a lot, but walking helped it, I think. Anyway, it's better this morning. (I'm so relieved!)

SweePo found a flower barrette in the mud outside the nearby grade school. (It was just a flimsy, cheap, plastic one, so I let her keep it.) She is the most into dressing up of all the little reds––she mixes and matches things she finds.

She also found a pink springtime flower (so she thought). She wanted to take it home, but it was stuck––some sort of marker for underground cables?

Well, how bout that? I looked up "EFM Control", the words on the disc on the ground, and read,
"EFM consists of data collection, analysis and reporting."
Surveillance! like in Person of Interest. What have those suspicious grade-schoolers been getting up to?

Happy Spring!

The yet-to-be-named Orphans (Seven and Eight?) are harvesting fabric from the ripped up quilt for new springtime outfits. 
I'd hesitated to do that, you know, but pulling up the polyester fabric, they revealed more of my favorite, worn out cotton fabric underneath:
the bright stuff was a patch!

I'm happy: my leg continues to improve--the pain is more an ache than a stab this morning. Now I can relax and enjoy this forced time off, knowing I am healing. I'm going for a walk later in the day, when the sun will have melted ice off sidewalks.

"That" Commenter

First, let me say that if you leave friendly, interesting information, links, ideas, etc., in the comments here, or if you write long, chatty comments (and of course don't take potshots), THANK YOU!
I love that.
Please don't stop: I am not talking about you here.

I'm talking about me! Sometimes, like, just now, I am horrified to realize I have been That Commenter--the one who fact-checks other people's posts.

Yes. Yes, I did. --Fresca

Ha! Here's a wrong thing I could point out: this meme and most people who quote the original phrase get it wrong.
It's "Someone is wrong on the Internet."

PROOF: "Duty Calls" by xkcd

I don't do this too often on other people's blogs, but I practically have to tie my hands to stop myself fact-checking Facebook, where there are so many half-baked ideas and so much misinformation.
I want so badly to jump in with citations, . . and FOOTNOTES!
(I am loving being off FB.)

What's wrong with jumping in like that?

Sometimes, nothing!
As I said up top, if a friendly commenter shares ideas or information of mutual interest, that's a conversation. That's a good thing.

Or, personally, if I made an error of any importance, I'd probably be happy if someone told me.
It took me a while to realize, for instance, that Les Misérables is about the 1832 Paris Uprising, not the 1848 one of Flaubert's Sentimental Education as I had written in a post here.

If someone had pointed that out to me, I wouldn't mind. (Don't feel you must take it upon yourself--it's a chore.)

But the thing is, I recognize in myself a chiding or competitive impulse when I compose a fact-checky comment. Ick. I don't like that in myself.

I found this key to good comments:
"the intent is to forge a relationship, not to self promote."

I left a questionable comment this morning, then deleted it.
I know bloggers see all comments, even deleted ones, and thankfully, it wasn't awful––in fact, it was kind of interesting (or so I thought).
In context, however, if I were a fellow commenter reading it, I would think, 
"Oh, Here comes that commenter, the Tidy Librarian of the Internet".

You don't have to be a man to be a mansplainer. (I don't think I was ever that bad...)  

Finally, appointing yourself the Janitor or Police or Editor of the Internet is––and I'm talking to myself here––pointless and, quite rightly, thankless.
If other people (especially ones you don't know) don't bother to google stuff, they don't want you to do it for them.

The scroll-over message (what do you call that?) of the xkcd's "Duty Calls" reads, 
"What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!"

Henceforth, I shall consider myself relieved of duty.
Tra la! Tra la!

"Thinking Machines"

Maybe I should read this collection of sci-fi stories, Thinking Machines (1958). I'd saved it for its cover, which has detached, but it looks like some interesting stuff. People have been wondering and worrying about artificial intelligence (AI) for a long time.

Pencil Pots & Another Rescue Quilt

UPDATE: Michael has posted his own pencil pots on his blog too.

Pencil Pots

Orange Crate Art posted a beautiful photo of a realistic pencil pot from a Cuarón movie––the sort of thing a good set designer creates––which inspired me to photograph the two pencil jars on my table. (There are a couple more across the room too.)

The first pot I made about thirty years ago, in my one pottery-making phase. (I was working as a janitor at a place with a pottery studio I could use for free.) I see the jar every day but never notice it... till now, photographing it! It's unlovely, but I love it.

III. Rescue Quilt

While I'm at it--there's a folded quilt in the second photo--it's another Rescue from Recycle at the thrift store.
I don't much like pastels, but the fabric is beautifully worn.

Below is one side of the quilt--I'd washed & dried it in xtra-hot, then aired it in the sunshine.
It's so worn, it's not very usable, and it's an unattractive pattern (I think), but there's a lot of fabric that could be harvested.

I don't know though--there's that push-pull about cutting up cool old things... Books too. It's great to give them new lives in new forms, but if they still hold together, I hesitate to take them apart.

If nothing else, I'll take this quilt back to the store and put it in my Cool Old Things shelf--I bet someone would be thrilled to find it.

Injured

Crumbs.
I have fallen victim to CMII: Classic Minnesota Ice Injury.
Yesterday biking around a curve on a hill, my bike slipped out from under me, and I pulled something in my inner thigh/groin.

It only hurts like a sonofabitch if I move my leg out to the side, even a fraction––like this Manhattan biker is doing:

It doesn't hurt if I don't move (which is nice), so I'm off my feet for a couple days, at least.
Watching Person of Interest last night, I was cringing:
anyone who actually got punched, kicked, and knocked around (and shot!) like the heroes of these stories would not be jumping around the next day.

Of course we know that, but being injured really brought it home.

Sense and the Machine

I've leapfrogged to Season 3, and POI has picked up the pace, but still... the show is just not that sharp. 
Unfair, I know, but compared to The Wire, which deals with similar issues (surveillance & law), it's actually stupid.

The writing is ludicrous, with lines such as,
"You're a good man, you just don't know it yet", 
and, one suffering-in-silence hero to another, 
"Wouldn't it be nice to have a baby?"
Did they use the same screenwriters who wrote the Star Wars prequels? (I'm not even going to google that.)

Still, those set- & props designers keep coming through.
Harold Finch proposed to his girlfriend, Grace, [an unbelievable relationship] with an engagement ring in a hollowed out copy of Sense and Sensibility. 

Finch collects first editions, but notice this is a modern Penguin Classics copy.

Finch only knows Grace because his supercomputer "the Machine" had fingered her as an anomaly, for being (I kid you not) abnormally nice––
so she probably approves.
If it were me, I'd say, I'm not marrying you if you don't care enough to eviscerate Jane Austen for me. 

But here's the thing: 
I don't believe for a second that Harold Finch loves Grace romantically. He never even tells her his real name, or what he does. (It's complicated, but still. She doesn't KNOW him.)

Clearly, Finch's real love is his MIT college friend, Nathan Ingram. Finch keeps his picture in a book I'm sure Finch has much more interest in and affection for:  
The Ghost in the Machine, by Arthur Koestler.

If it were another show, I'd say it had to be intentional that Koestler (below, left) & Ingram (actor Brett Cullen) are mirror images.
A google search turns up nothing.

Why do I keep watching it?
Honestly, I just want to see the story arc of Detective Carter (Taraji Henson) play out. She's the closest thing to a real person in the show, and I like her, and I think she's super cute, and I gather that Mr Reese is going to cotton onto that too, . . . just before she dies.
Probably being hit in the head so often has made him slow witted.

Where We Are

Two magazines come through the mail slot on Saturdays:
Time, for my home-owner neighbors, and the Economist for me.

Their covers this week were quite a doozy. I don't have anything to add, just thought I'd note this historic moment.

1. The Economist, with a frightened Britannia saying, "OH **UK! Whatever next?" about Brexit:

"WHEN HISTORIANS come to write the tale of Britain’s attempts to leave the European Union, this week may be seen as the moment the country finally grasped the mess it was in."

2. Time asks, "Do They Dare?" (referencing T.S. Eliot's "Do I dare to eat a peach?"--is that odd?) about what Time considers the likely impeachment of Donald Trump:

"Top Democrats don't want to say it, but the House will likely move to oust President Trump."

 

I'm looking forward to the forthcoming Raise Hell: The Life & Times of Molly Ivins, a documentary about the Texas reporter.
Regularly I wish I could read her wicked take on politics today.

^ Molly Ivins, known for her rapier wit, poses with a fencing sword in front of the Texas state capitol in Austin.

The Guardian writes, it "sends an urgent message from the Bush years to a nation under Trump with sharp humour.
...After Pat Buchanan delivered an infamous speech at the 1992 Republican convention, couching the struggle with Democrats in terms of a “cultural war”, columnist Molly Ivins wrote that it 'probably sounded better in the original German'.
She did not live to cover a Trump rally."

Vocabulary List

Words jotted in the back cover of Love Lies Bleeding (1948), a paperback copy donated to the thrift store. It's a mystery by Edmund Crispin––I'm not much of a mystery reader and had never heard of him.

mirific     perspicuity

obscurantist    ineluctable

efficacy        approbation

parsimony     syncope

astigmatic   dolorously

voluble        inanition

sybaritic   acerbly

prolegomenon 

Funny how words travel in clumps. Like vacationers abroad, you can recognize them by their clothes & manners. 
(What's the term for that phenomenon? I found culture language; speech communities; and languaculture.)

I don't know half the words on the list well enough to define them cold (out of context). 
In my world, "mirific" looks like Miri-fic, that is, fan fiction about the Star Trek episode, "Miri", in which the young teenager Miri (Kim Darby) develops a crush on Capt Kirk.
(I looked it up, and it's not a popular subject for fic--this makes sense to me since it's kind of creepy--and not in an appealing way, even in the original episode.)

But no, it's mir-ific, as in miracle-making, like terrific--terror-making.
[The Grammarphobia Blog says, The evolution of “terrific” is an example of “amelioration,” a term for when a word’s meaning is changed for the better.]

Anyway, I don't know all the words intimately, but I could place them: Oxbridge English. 
(And what's the proper name of this Latin-heavy English?)

BINGO:
Crispin's amateur detective, Gervase Fen, is an Oxford professor of English Language and Literature, and the novel was donated to the thrift store along with a copy of the 1963 ed. of The Clarendon Guide to Oxford.

Oh, wow! Just for fun, I pasted that entire vocabulary list into Google Search, and first thing up? 
A PDF of Love Lies Bleeding:
http://detective.gumer.info/anto/crispin_2_2.doc

Reading the first page, I found it sickening––not the language, but the culture. 
Here's a screencap from page 1:


Also just for fun, here's the English Reading List from Balliol College––the Oxford college of Dorothy Sayer's detective, Peter Wimsey.
(I just started rereading her Nine Tailors, but I'm not enjoying it.)

Scroll down the page for "things you should read before you come up to Oxford":

www.balliol.ox.ac.uk/admissions/undergraduate-admissions/english-reading-list

Noritake "Spotlight"

Reader, I bought them.

The set of chunky 1970s drinking glasses.
Supervolunteer Michael––the only person at work who knows or cares about vintage––found them online:
they're smoky walnut Noritake "Spotlight" water goblets.

Boom & Orange claimed one for a turret.

Here's an ad for the glasses in an old newspaper online. They cost $3.99 in 1975––doesn't that seem expensive?
I got them for $1.25 each, but they sell online for more like $5.

The Eight

There are eight Orphan Reds.

Here they are, posing for a school portrait.
L to R: SweePo, Red Hair Girl, Penny Cooper, Orange Colored Sky, Boom.
The new ones are seated, front.
We don't really know them yet, and their names are in flux.

The new ones are wearing cast offs, temporarily. Penny Cooper is holding their old plaid dresses. She has entered the dresses in her Book of Things Concerning Dolls as "Property of Me".

The dolls come with these dresses, but Penny Cooper is the only one who likes them.
She loves them!

I'd worried that eight Orphan Reds would be too many, but it's not.

Thrift Store Stuff

I did not buy this, a clock on decoupaged wood showing a bear punching a desktop computer. 
Along the bottom it reads "ENTER YOUR RESPONSE".

I was tempted because this reminds me of learning the computer for the first time in... 1992? I was working in the art-college library.
I remember asking, "How do you turn it on?"
I also remember the little bomb onscreen that meant the computer had crashed, and, if you were like me, you'd lost your work because you hadn't remembered to Save. 

Finally, another ex libris bookplate, in a donated book:

(The store is lit with fluorescents, and my photos always reflect that.)

I located a toaster.

The other day at work, a woman was practically howling in the electronics section––I could hear her from where I was sorting books in the back. 

I don't know if she was high, or what, but she was in high dudgeon that we were out of toasters. (There are often three or four, but they sell fast.)

"You don't have ANY toasters?!?! I have to have toast!
I eat toast EVERY MORNING. I came all this way for a TOASTER!!!"

Mr Furniture pointed out a toaster oven, which makes toast.

"SIX NINETY-NINE??? I don't have $6.99!!! And I have to have TOAST!"

I like toast myself. 
I went to the electronics donations-sorting area, where no one is assigned because the guy who... ––no, never mind––
and I dug up the one toaster there, complete with crumbs.
(People donate electronics in the gunkiest conditions.)

I plugged it in to make sure it worked (it did––toasters usually do), and went and found the woman, who was wandering around, still talking about toast.

"I found you a toaster," I said. "You'll have to wash it up, but..."

She acted like it was a miracle. "YOU FOUND A TOASTER!!!"

"Three ninety-nine," I said, our standard toaster price.

"How bout two ninety-nine?" she said, with a coquettish tilt of the head. "I don't have much money, and I need my toast. If I don't start my day with toast..."

I guess she hadn't started that day with toast.
"Fine," I said. "Two ninety-nine."

That was a good day at work.

Image: The Brave Little Toaster, 1987