Peeking into the rock

 Considering she's coming a bit more than four weeks early, Eloise(the baby) is going through a fairly normal labor. I like all of the doctors and nurses I've met, the hospital has a reasonable cesarean rate, Emma (my daughter) is suffering but normal. In a bit I'm going to go away and get her a pad for the bassinet--lots of things still undone because there was no reason to expect this so early.

 I've had a hard time reading books for a few years, more even than I've admitted to (complained about). I have attributed it to mind scatter from all the various One Damned Thing After Another and also widowhood. Maybe so because suddenly I can read again so long as the thing I'm reading doesn't annoy me too much.

For example, my friend Israel lent me Albion's Seed by David Fischer  (you can read a summary and more positive review of it here) and I can't get into its nine hundred pages of argument that American culture  and politics are almost exclusively descended from four waves of English migration. Despite its length and copious documentation, the actual assertions about culture, psychology, politics, etc. feel unsupported to me. I felt like some asshole had cornered me at a party and was booming along about their nutcase theory. Even though the book has a fat bibliography and a lot of material from primary sources. I don't know why it felt that way to me, but I can't finish it right now. I occasionally browse it for story bits, but it's joyless work.

I picked up The Tree Climber's Guide  by Jack Cooke at the San Francisco Friends of the Public Library's book sale and I can't read it either. Again, it's the theoretics that defeats me.  This book should be right up my alley. It's about the trees of London, as a class and as individuals, meant for people who want to enjoy them to the fullest, including climbing up into them. But it's ruined for me with his uninformed pronouncements on human evolution and nearly spiritualistic approach to everything. I can handle a certain amount of spirituality in a nature book, just not this much. But I still have it in my bathroom waiting for me to give it a fourth chance. After all, it's still a book about urban trees.

Another book I couldn't read was an old Charles deLint, The Little Country. I had the usual deLint trouble where his writing hits an uncanny valley of almost being exactly what I want but somehow tweer than I want even though if I try to catalog the things that make it twee I don't find them--it should be "gritty" almost. Except in this case the things that are supposed to make it gritty include a thing I do not tolerate, which is a fancy, "let's get into the twisted mind of a sociopathic serial killer who likes to torture people" element. I think most people like it better than I do.

So what have I finished? Alif the Unseen by G. Willow WIlson. I went looking to see if there was tumblr discourse about this because there's an aspect of this that I thought the kiddies would go wild for--this book is set inside a not-quite Egyptian world and the author is an American convert to Islam. But she seems to have escaped the discourse treatment. I think the book works. There's a very nice self-insertion element--a character is an American convert living in the nameless City (which seems to be a neighbor of the Emirates). But it's well handled, and she's not the main character or even the main character's girlfriend or his other relationship either. Every character has many layers and you can't waves their short description around and think you've told their story. You need the whole book for that. The story is sort of like North by Northwest in that the protagonist is being pursued by evil forces beyond his ken (that is, the secret police) before he even knows why (he thinks he knows why, but he's wrong). The McGuffin is delicious--it's not a spoiler to say that while at first Alif thinks it's a program he's written, it turns out to be a book. And there's djinns in it and they are not what you think they are. No, not that either. 

I also read The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale. I have mixed feelings about this book. It has some things I hate, which I'll get to, but first let me tell you that Hale can write suspense to the point where you want to claw something to shreds. And it has something I love: worker solidarity, though it's a little shallow in that their solidarity is all about elevating a blond queen over their brown selves. Yep, that's there. You can see why: the story has every goddamned element from a particular version of the fairy tale--no worries, there's lots of suspense for you even if you know the fairy tale and think you know how it's going to work out, so if you care about those things know that you're not going to be ripped-off in the dimension of discovery. But there's problems in the world-building that bug me a lot. One, all the people from the goose girl/princess's country are pale and blond while right next door all the people are dark. Two, these countries are next door to each other and share some history somewhere so that their speech is completely mutually comprehensible--the only difference is an accent so mild that it never interferes with comprehension--and yet they are utterly isolated from each other by geography: it takes months to ride from one country's center of population to the other, over nearly-impassable mountains with only one usable pass, and the royal families have never met each other in generations. The only communication between them in the normal course of things is a small handful of trading caravans that apparently never gossip about one country to the other. Excuse me, but I've met real-world languages that diverged farther than that in a shorter time when they had daily contact. There were details about animal husbandry, clothing production, and cooking that felt not quite fully  researched and developed, but I always feel this way except when reading Heather Rose Jones's books honestly, so I don't hold it against this book. Besides, there's other details that are really really nice.

Right now I'm reading Nova Swing by M.John  Harrison and I can tell you I kind of like the poetic language but not the fact that all the characters speak in the same register and I'm truly creeped out by the way all the female characters seem like simulacrums (some of them are supposed to be such, but not all). I'm glad it's short: I think I will enjoy it by the time it's done, instead of hating it as I might if it was long and kept on doing what it's doing.

So I've spent my time for updating and I'll write about my health (mostly great, with Another Big Honking Deal probably cooking itself up in my lungs) and other stuff at another time.

I think someone else would like this better than me. I skimmed a lot of it because the voice of "Ralph Trilipush" didn't engage me. The core question's pretty easy to the reader, but that's not a problem, because the secondary questions are the point anyway. I think the right person would like it: even though it is not actually a thriller, I think thriller readers would be about right. I looked at his other book, called Prague though it is set in Budapest, and I was not taken with it, but again it looked like someone else might like it better.

 Loughborough is in many ways the Most Typical Village in Little England (that is, England-as-England, as opposed to the whole of the UK). It has 57 thousand people, making it a bit smaller than Santa Cruz, a mixed economy including a University, some manufacturing, some farming, and some commuting, and apparently all the usual institutions. It has the usual history: it went through brickmaking, slate quarrying, textiles, etc., always losing out to some other production center in the course of time, which tragedy hit me pretty hard when I read it over and over again in the historical exhibition at the Charnwood Museum in Queen's Park. And yet...it doesn't look impoverished. Not wealthy, but not impoverished. I believe the University does a lot to make up for the lost industries of yore. It actually looks like a real estate ho/tbed, with signs for student rentals everywhere. That's different from Santa Cruz, where the student rental business is sort of hush-hush.

Another consequence of the University's prominence locally is that you see the word and color "purple" kind of a lot. There's a Purple Pig deli (never open that I see), a Purple Pumpkin...something shop? I thought craft supplies but maybe tschotchkes instead? But the "Purple Bricks" signs are a coincidental national UK real estate thing. Don't ask me to explain UK real estate. It's as byzantine as US real estate, but different.

Hana complains mightily about the sameness of British residential architecture, and at first glance she's right. All the houses are made of brick, usually the exact same red brick with the exceptions being a lighter orange brick, though a few have a veneer of stucco over the second floor, or decorative rustic-sawn planks over the top of the gable, and some of the ones from a hundred years ago are made with decorative bricks inset here and there--that would be during the era when there was a local brick factory, coincidentally or not. Most of the houses have narrowly similar floor plans, with a steep staircase right inside the front door, with a narrow hall and narrow lounge to the side of that, a small dining room and smaller "U-shaped" kitchen (so called because the cabinet fittings line three walls, leaving room for one person to work) behind. Upstairs: two small bedrooms, maybe a third one almost too small for a single bed and definitely not big enough for anything in addition--none with builtin closets--and a bathroom.  Larger houses are often the result of expansion to the side (if not in the middle of a row of terraced houses) or the back. In Frank and Hana's neighborhood the houses have garages but they are proportioned for Reliants or Minis and modern cars can't get into them so they're used for storage and work rooms. In the center of town there are terraces of tinier cottages, and also some larger modern apartment buildings for students. 

In Loughborough there is no road grid. Except for a small number of big roads that connect to highways, all the roads curve, really every which way. It's not radial, like Paris, more contoured, except the roads are not curving round the lay of the land as far as I can see, as the land is mostly flattish. Their street maybe follows Black Brook for a way, but then it veers off in a completely other direction. Also the roads do change names a lot (there are some long streets in Santa Cruz that change names s few times too, but I think they do it more here). And another thing. I've been complaining for years about the occasional misuse of street identifiers--"avenue," "boulevard," "lane," etc., back home--here I see "avenue" used to designate a one-block cul-de-sac. Though most of the cul-de-sacs are helpfully called "close." 

Demographics--I have no numbers, but considering it's a little village in the country, it looks pretty diverse to me. I've heard a number of different languages spoken--Turkish, Polish, Chinese (I don't know which kind) and more than one Indian language (I'm not familiar with any of them enough to identify them). Also, English accents! It seems like there are at least ten different ones in Loughborough. Of course this is reflected in the restaurants-I haven't seen a Polish one, but I've eaten at a Chinese one (it seemed Cantonese but had Szechuan things on the menu) and a Turkish one. It had a guy with a keyboard and recorded riffs, and a dancer whose name was Natasha and she was very English.

Queen's Park maybe deserves its own entry. It has the Charnwood Museum, requisite playgrounds, a little labyrinth mabe od bricks in the ground with a swan statue in the middle, a stream (is it a bit of Black Brook or another one?) with a prominent moorhen nest (Hana calls it the stupid chicken, which describes its looks, but I like it), an aviary full of psittacines, and the Carillon. The Carillon was built after World War One over the objections of the soldiers it memorializes, who wanted a health center instead (and why could they not have had both, I ask!). It is a tower with a patina-copper fancy roof, lens-shaped windows, and a full set of bells which are played from a keyboard. For a pound you can climb the endless steep windy stairs to almost the top, stopping along the way to small rooms that have exhibitions about the soldiers lost in various wars over time. I don't know why, but World War One seems to get much more monumental action in the UK than WOrld War Two.

About those bells--one of the historical industries in Loughborough is the Taylor Bell Foundry which has a museum which is no longer open except by special arrangement so I didn't see that. I'm unclear about whether the bell foundry still operates. I think it does, a little bit.

Loughborough has been a market town since the 13th century. What that means nowadays is that every Thursday and Saturday the town center fills up with stalls selling mostly small goods--fabric,notions, yarn: small tools: housewares:  dishware: clothing and more clothing: toys: accessories; and also food, including meat and fish, baked goods, and produce. Some of these are small operations, but for example, I bought some plaid ribbon (of course!) at a huge stall maintained by a big fabric store from Leicester. I wondered if the butcher shop resents having a big butcher stall set up in front of its doors two days a week, but I don't know, maybe they are related in some way. 

One thing that makes Loughborough very very different from Santa Cruz is that the shopping is mostly all in the town center.  I mean there are no huge outlying malls and little in the way of big box stores (we went to one attempting to get ericaceous fertilizer for Hana's rhododendrons). There is a small indoor-outdoor mall called, of course, "Carillon Mall," but it's right in the middle of everything else, so there's no need to drive ten or fifteen miles to get things. The buses run pretty well, though it's bewildering how many different private bus companies there are running public buses everywhere. And the town is small enough that walking from one end to another is quite conceivable. 

 Most of this is going to be a simple travelogue, with a few trenchant observations, so please skip everything with the tag "UK 2017" if this is boring to you. Sorry, dreamwidth informs me I must delete 846 tags before I can make any new ones, and that is just too damned much work, so the tags for these are going to be vague.

The only things to say about the flight are, one, I was extremely smart when I packed myself piroshkis and carrot sticks. I had made the piroshkis of my own pickled cabbage, leftover bread dough, some ground meat, manymany onions, and dried mushrooms. They were good, they didn't cost me extra, they helped with the goal of leaving my fridge empty of perishables, and frankly the weird little dinners they gave the other passengers did not look filling or tasty. But not terrible. Just not forty-seven dollars worth of comfort.

Two: I had terrible, terrible seatmates. They were not mean to me, or especially rude (with exceptions I'll mention in a bit), but they were terrible, terrible people. I didn't have to interact with them much because I had an aisle seat, but they were about to commence on an affair so they spent all but a couple of the ten hours in breathless conversation in which they revealed their most terrible aspects as if they were precious diamonds: fortunately for them, they each found the other's tedious and horrible personalities enchanting.

Look, you know me. I complain a lot but I rarely say a person is just plain terrible. So it means something, right?

The fellow was one of those English guys who Americans always find attractive at first glance: a bit tweedy, maybe sixty, with a softly rumpled beard&silver hair, impeccable manners but not stuffy. You know what I mean: you expect an archaeologist or a botanist or perhaps a player of an obsolete musical instrument. This fellow was coming back from a conference in San Francisco: was it a Zen one or just a general spiritual one? Anyway, he was there flogging a book called Zig Zag Zen. I don't know which of the editors or authors he was. He asked was it all right if his friend joined us as we had an empty seat between us and of course that was all right. Even if I had known how the night was going to go I would have said yes because if you can't accommodate the worst, being kind to the best is kind of hollow.

She arrived, and she was another English type Americans recognize. Tall, blond, willowy, maybe forty, with an accent I think is a normal middle class one but it sounds a little affected and self-conscious to American ears? You expect an academic, or maybe someone who works in publishing or possibly fashion. But she was at the conference as a delegate from a group of Zen? or maybe something else? practitioners? 

Look, even though I'm uninterested in spirituality, this could have gone another way. They could have spent the time breathlessly exploring the history and practice of Zen, and they did a bit, but only in self-serving and self-aggrandizing ways. He was arrogant, self-regarding, and always sounded like he was lying about his accomplishments (he probably wasn't always). She was gullible, self-regarding, and always putting down some other party to magnify her own wisdom. Plus, she was convinced she had second sight or some damn thing because she predicted trouble with the pound sterling and Donald Trump's election.

They went on and on and on. He slept and she read for maybe two hours out of the ten-hour flight. By the end, they were talking about their respective love lives. Obviously this was their own business, and of course they had to have that conversation because they were going to part at the airport (she lives in London somewhere, he in Ramsgate)  and they had to send the signals that they were mutually up for working something out at a later date--and it was clear neither of them had a monogamous partner to consider, so this was certainly okay and not my business. It's just--they were so loud, and they had been being so awful all night long, and I couldn't escape them even by sleeping--that what could have been nothing at all or even kind of cute was terribly annoying.

I did pass a couple words with them, once when she had gone to the toilet and I was struggling with my chromebook (it likes to hide files sometimes and I was trying to work, silly me) and he asked me what work I was doing and I told him and he said he used to write for Marvel-My Little Pony and Dr. Who-- but "don't tell anybody." Given what I had heard all night I was not inclined to believe him, but then again, maybe he did. (I hadn't said a word about comics, by the way. Just I was working on a fantasy story)

The other time was when we were about to disembark-have you noticed that most stranger-seatmate conversations happen at that time? They asked where I was going and I told them and they drew a blank. They had nothing nice to say about Leicestershire. She said, twice, "It's not a cultured sort of place, is it? I mean, not like Manchester."

(I'm going to be a lot more careful about how I talk about hinterland cities to visitors, from now on)

And to think I sat in the terminal next to a large rowdy family from Modesto who had a great salty sense of humor and a lot to say to each other about everything. I was hoping I'd get to sit by them in the plane, because they would have been fun, but no. (My favorite moment from the terminal was during the long facetime call the younger matriarch was having with a motley group of children, some hers, some nieces and nephews and other assorted kin, when she said, "Now don't fall over, watch it--" she looked up and said, "she just fell right over and dropped the phone." My second favorite is when she said "Tell him put that puppy right back where he found it. It;s not his. We already have five dogs in the house. I'm outnumbered by dogs and children."  You can see why I wanted to sit next to these people and I was so disappointed when I got the terrible people instead).

It's been a while since I wrote about food. It seems a little wrong to natter about my dinner while we have sociopaths and psychopaths taking advantage of the surge in the class war (that is, the ruling class's war against the other clases), but okay, I'm doing it anyway.

From time to time I write a post about "how I'm eating now." Sometimes the motivation is managing my "multiple issue" health, sometimes it's something else. Right now my motivation is largely frugality again. I refuse to be deprived of deliciousness by mere poverty. I live in the middle of such abundance, and I have all the time in the world since I can't work & lack the strength to do anything else in a sustained way, so making food that meets my nutritional needs, is tasty, and is cheap--though it may be time-consuming--is a reasonable path for me.

A few years ago I discovered that it is quite easy to make a kind of soft cheese from whole milk and an acid (that first time it was inadvertent, my coagulant was yogurt because that was what I was trying to make). At the time I didn't pursue it much because I had no idea what to do with the whey that was left over--depending on details it can be three or four times as much whey as cheese.

Last year I experimented with using whey as the liquid when making bread (using the sponge method outlined by Gail Sher in From A Baker's Kitchen). The results were so good that I started making the cheese (and sometimes yogurt) on purpose to get the whey. I've ended up with enough cheese that I've had to experiment with uses of it. Though sometimes I have more whey than I need for bread, too, so I've gotten in the habit of using whey for any baking and much grain cooking. Since my usual coagulant in Meyer lemons (that being what I have in my yard), all of this food has a little of that fragrance in it.

So all last fall and winter my routine has been, about twice a month or once in three weeks, to make about a pound of this cheese and enough dough for three or four loaves of this bread. I started out with half-white & half-whole wheat all purpose flour, but now I use bread flour for the sponge and a variety of other flours in the later stages. The amount of dough I make has increased, since I now make pizza and dumplings loosely based on pirozhki, or fried bread, or whatever. I bake two or three loaves and put one or two lumps of dough in the freezer for later.

Obviously I haven't done it this month since I am trying not to leave a lot of stuff around when I fly out on the 24th, but I still have two lumps of dough in the freezer which I will bake up this weekend: one will be a pirog (like pirozhki, only large), to form my dinner, breakfast, and lunch while I am traveling. I have half a roast chicken in the freezer, some of which I will eat on the weekend and some of which will go into the pirog along with what else I have (a lot of dried store mushrooms because the Grey Bears bag had way too many mushrooms several weeks in a row, many onions,  some carrots, some pickled cabbage and kosher dills, and a yard with a lot of small overwintered greens of various types, some herbs, and green garlic in it. I say pickled cabbage instead of sauerkraut because I only let it try to ferment naturally for a few days and then I packed it with vinegar and stuck it in the fridge. It wasn't very nice at first and I was going to throw it away but after sitting in the fridge for a bit it has developed, not the best sauerkraut flavor, but something nice enough for sandwiches and so on).

Gosh, the parenthetical was longer than the rest of the paragraph.

I can say it's really a relief that some of these greens have naturalized in my yard. Most of the year I can honestly take or leave arugula, but right now I can throw it into any melange of food, cooked or raw, and it lends a nice nutty and pungent note to the whole, not to mention being the greenest thing you ever did see and it also grows in pretty little clumps all over the yard which will become immense patches later. I also have some determined feral kohlrabi and celery root that never made roots but which have really nice leaves and stems. The kohlrabi leaves are mild and tender, rather like kohlrabi the root, while the celery root leaves are strong tasting. Zack never saw much point to celery till I made him taste these leaves. I also have parsley, though not much yet, and this year's turnip greens in baby form, and dill seedlings. Since dill never lasts long for me before going to seed (cilantro neither), I decided this year to plant it densely and eat it young.  There are still a few kale plants I missed when I cleaned up the old (three and four year old) ones, and I just grab them whenever I see a nice leaf. 

I also have the usual perennial herbs for my region: oregano, sage, rosemary, lavender, thyme, spearmint and also persian mint and lovage and horehound (which I mean to make throat drops of but I haven't acted at the right moment yet). Basil doesn't do spectacularly well for me, but I find mint takes its place quite well especially when mixed with parsley. Parsley is the Great Underrated Herb. I think we're accustomed to seeing the tightly curled kind used as a garnish, where it hasn't been treated kindly before serving because nobody's expected to eat it, and occasionally dried flakes. Its flavor does not keep all that well even when you buy it flatleaved and fresh, but when it is new and lush it has a flavor like heaven. I really like it more than most herbs and vegetables. I keep trying to increase my stock of it but some years it all goes to seed in its infancy and I can't figure out why. 

So these 2 or 3 weeks I didn't buy groceries and I didn't go to pick up a Grey Bears bag. This means I'm being inventive with what I have. I ran out of milk, cream, and even cheese, and then discovered how dependent I normally am on dairy products in general. I still had a pound of chicken livers, so that and onions, green garlic, quantities of greens and herbs from the garden, and three asparagus spears (my asparagus is delicious but not prolific), made three meals. Lentils and mostly turnip greens and arugula but also those same herbs made a nice stew. I'm attempting to cook these recalcitrant pinto beans to make an almost vegan tamale pie. I don't know what I'll do if they refuse to soften (I think it's because I put the dried tomatoes in with them when they were still raw). Maybe drain off the delicious juice and toss the beans and start over with-- what do I still have, garbanzos? I made a salad of tuna, potato, carrot, peas, and all the pickled things I had at the time (the last of the artichokes, some beets, some kosher dills, I didn't think of the cabbage though now I can't stop thinking of it)-- sort of like if you started out thinking maybe you'd make a Salat Olivier and couldn't find all the exact things and then couldn't stop putting other things into it. I made a Waldorf salad (which if you make it right-just apples, nuts, raisins, celery and mayonnaise-or-whatever-dressing-you-prefer, is much nicer than most people think). I made apple fritters. I used up the pizza things I had stashed to make pizza. I used the rest of the tomato sauce I made for that to cook carrots in. 

So most of those things came out well and I've had a good time eating them. The pizza was a little eccentric but I get to have eccentric pizza, right? I made a weird coffee tapioca, having sieved the tapioca to try to prevent the frog-eggs texture which I thought would be weird with coffee, and it tastes good enough but it does have a bit of frog egg to it and it kept me up ALL NIGHT LONG so maybe I won't do that again?

The beans I'm cooking are really really yummy and I think they are cooked but they will never be really soft. I wonder if they will cause stomach distress if I use them anyway?

I'm moving over here. I liked having continuity at livejournal, & unlike many I thought they might be able to stay the course. I was rather cheered, not discouraged, by the DOS attacks in the past--figuring that if someone was after the livejournal people, it was probably because they were on the side of democracy in the weird political scene in Russia.

But clearly, this new user agreement shows that, whatever they were doing in the past, they have either knuckled under or allied with the oligarch-run, reactionary Russian government. There's too many pieces of it that imply danger to vulnerable people. Not the least of which is having toi sign that I will obey laws whose text is not available to me to read (I searched on several of the specific laws cited in the new user agreement-- I could find lists that included them, but no text, particularly no translated text--and of course what I would need is a certified translated text, anyway, so I knew what the law was.

My feeling is, if you won't show me the law you want me to follow, it's probably terrible.

Anyway, here I am.

To set the scene, California Street is a quiet suburban-style street with cozy little houses, the oldest about a hundred years old and most of them from the 40's. It's lined with typical mature trees: a handful of redwoods, some palms, some oaks, some eucalyptus, and a fair number of those nameless landscaper's trees that are neither native nor especially useful or beautiful but there they are, they're trees so you have to give them their due. This stretch I'm walking starts after the WPA-era high school and runs to the playground at the entrance to the sewage plant, before it doglegs and runs on to the Circles, where it dead-ends into the church that lives where the cable car barn used to back in the days before the automobile took over everything.

It's about a quarter to nine on a weekday and really very.very quiet on this street. Once in a while someone goes by on a bicycle. Almost no cars. The dog and I are almost the only people here.

Suddenly the air is riven by a shout.

I'M GONNA MURDER ODIN

behind me is a very tall bearded man with amazingly upright posture. Probably under 35 years.

I'M GONNA MURDER FUCKING THOR

He's walking faster than me. Zluta is curious, keeps turning back to look at him. I urge her onwards.

I'M GONNA KILL ALL THE FUCKING GODS, YOU HEAR?

There is nobody else on this street. Nobody.

I'M DOING THIS IN SELF-DEFENSE

I'm starting to plan how to protect myself. What if the guy looks at me, a round lady leading a golden dog, and thinks "Fucking Freya! Thinks she can hide by swapping her cats for a fucking little dog!"

NOBODY KEEPS ME

He's getting much closer. When he yells he stops and turns and faces the sky. Of course. But then he walks fast and in a straight line and he is closing in on me. And nobody to run to.

I AM BY MYSELF


There's a little City Parks truck parked in front of the entrance to the sewage plant. A gardener! The dog and I turn in to the path and stand by the man blowing leaves though we both hate the sound of leaf blowers.

I DENY YOU

The tall straight man does not follow: he keeps walking, down Bay Street.

I DENY ALL THE GODS

WHAT DO YOU SAY TO THAT, FUCKERS?

Just the last couple of days I'm making phone calls and signing feckless petitions in advance of discovering more effective things to do. I'm also being a broken record in the public spaces where I am--twitter and facebook (I hate facebook but it's a public space).

Phone calls I've made: Two to Paul Ryan's office--once to leave a message about the ACA, once to take part in his stupid poll (there's a long recording you have to listen to about how terrible the ACA is and how the brave Congress is determined to gut it, and now what do you think?); one to the House Oversight Committee about the election. Feckless petitions: one to the electors not to confirm Trump, one to UCSC to be a sanctuary for immigrants.

More calls: to Lindsay Graham to investigate Trump: to my reps to be strong (they've all registered some opposition so far & only need to know we support them). And? I forget, I need to make a big list in addition to searching the internet every day.

Personhead Nick Mamatas(nihilistic_kid) suggested getting #Scatocracy to trend. It's silly but it's cool, so I'm taking him up on it, more than he seems to be doing. Also being a broken record about the crimes of Trump and the whole damned GOP. That's what they did about the non-crimes of Democrats for the last generation, and they got it to stick. Of course they had the collusion of the media, which I do not. But there's no noise without noise. Remember how Jonathan Edwards, a progressive Southerner, was ruined over having a friends-with-benefits affair while his wife was in the hospital? Never mind that he kept visiting her and taking care of her, being loyal in the ways that matter. Meanwhile! Trump gets away with serial rape and people just stop talking about it. Also: theft! fraud! Stiffing employees and contractors! Death threats! Treason!

"When they go low, we go high," isn't even wrong, it's irrelevant. Hammering them on real crimes is not going low, it's insisting on truth. It's also a wedge towards talking about the real crimes of capitalism. Trump steals from his employees and it gets glossed over? That's because that's what bosses do. And so on.

I know, everything I'm doing is spontaneous, unfocused, feckless. But it's what I can think of to do at the moment. I remember Nelson Peery saying "If all you can think of to do is to make mistakes, make mistakes," and I don't think these are mistakes.

I have to do other things. But later in the day I'll make a big list of the numbers and share them. Meanwhile, other people are sharing them.