Mar 302025
 

Yesterday, The radio opera was Jake Heggie’s “Moby Dick.” I was a little deflated that two of the six main singers has been replaced, but it’s really more of an ensemble piece than a star turn, plus the other four were still there. Heggie and his librettist chose to call the narrator “Greenhorn” until the very end – but uses the same music for when he does sing “Call me Ishmael” at the end to open it. Twelve years ago (Wikipedia gives the date as 2013), I saw this opera on TV performed in San Francisco in, quite possibly, the same production, one which used a vertical cyc which could be climbed to suggest the depths of the sea. That’s probably not a technically correct description. but this photo from the Met’s web page surely looks like what I remember.

It was that production which is on the DVD – I think even the same performance. And very powerful both then and now. Also yesterday, I was finally able to confirm that today is in fact Eid al-fitr, and not tomorrow. It depends on the sighting of the moon which can’t be done in advance. I can’t reference any dates, as the entire Muslim calendar is so dependent on the sightings of the moon that Ramadan and Eid al-fitr can be literally at any time of the year. Also yesterday, Steve Schmidt called the Mango Monster’s administration “the Trump** Regime” and will refer to it by that term from here on out.

https://www.getty.edu/news/medieval-feminist-manuscript-getty-acquisition-christine-de-pizan/
I’d say it’s good news that the Getty Museum is putting this book from the 15th century by Christine de Pizan on display in Women’s History Month, which some of us still celebrate despite the barbarians in the palace. But maybe not so much for the obvious reason. Rather, because it’s good to be reminded of just how deep misogyny has always run, still runs, and will coninue to run unless we take the right steps to oppose it – if it’s even possible to make a dent. Yes, a few people will “just come around.” But the vast majority will never come around, although they may shut up for a while if pushed to the wall. But they will still vote. It’s barely 70 days into the Jsckfruit Jackass’s regime, and already Democrats are talking about nominating a strong woman in 2028. Apparently they still cannot see that this would be the surest way to seal and deliver permanent authoritarianism to the United States. I hate that that is true. But when did good ever come of refusing to see truth?

https://contrarian.substack.com/p/publishers-roundup-11
I’d call this very good news indeed from Norm Eisen, cofounder and publisher of The Contrarian, and a colleague. You might find the information elsewhere, but probably in bits and pieces – and it’s the roundup which makes it so inspiring, at least to me.

Share
Mar 282025
 

Yesterday, Ilhan Omar announced that she is proposing Articles of Impeachment for Hegseth, Waltz, and Ratcliffe over Signal-Gate. That was a scoop from Axios – I went to the site but what more they has was mostly possibiities and speculation. Of course, by today they may have more. Meanwhile (also from Axios), in the Senate, sixteen Dems led by Jacky Rosen have signed a letter proposing a massive investigation of the debacle. And at least one Republican Senator has called for an IG inspection (do we still have any IGs though?). Finally, in an unrelated piece of news, the Sundance Festival will be moving to Boulder, CO, in 2026. Colorado film junkies and residents of Boulder are over the moon.

Something that happened Wednesday and which y’all may have missed is I believe worthy of note. A Turkish PhD candidate on a student visa was essentially kidnapped off the street by DHS agents for an op-ed she published in the college newspaper last year. The F* News (an alum of that college), Wonkette, and Talking Points Memo all have the story, as does the Associated Press (which provided this video) but I haven’t seen it elsewhere yet. It’s hard to say whether we will see it elsewhere. “In [the United States] today, such things happen every minute.” The student’s name is Rumeysa Ozturk.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-159929854
Well, this didn’t take long. I wish the plaintiffs the best of luck – since they are representing the Constitution, and therefore us. I might also recommend a video conversation on Substack between Harry Litman and Malcolm Nance, mostly about the gravity of the situation, but also addressing the merits of potential remedies.

One more article on Signal-Gate, this one from Robert Hubbell. Except it’s not so much about Signal-Gate as it is about messaging, and what we can learn about messaging from Republicans, even though handicapped by our need to stick to the truth. We might at least consider replacing “But her emails” with “But his Signals.”

I don’t suppose Robert Reich says anything in here that we don’t already know. But I like lists. They tend to put raw data into an order, making it easier to digest and easier to discuss as well.

Share
Mar 252025
 

Sunday, I couldn’t find any decks of playing cards in the game locker, and I had managed to time my arrival so that Virgil was already there when I got to the visiting room, so I grabbed the Scrabble board instead. We payed three games which brought us right to the end of the visiting time. We accepted a lot of things I’m pretty sure are not acceptable, but we did have fun. It must be close to a year since we played Scrabble, and I can see some deterioration in Virgil, but as long as he remembers me, and that he loves me and I love him, and is more or less happy most of the time, I don’t worry. He is getting good care, much better than I could possibly care for him; he has many people he considers friends among both other inmates and staff, there is even a resident dog (almost certainly not a purebred black Lab, but he looks and acts like one.) Pretty much the only time he gets upset is if he has a vivid dream that he believes actually happened, and when that happens he calls me and I calm him down. And they are getting noticeably less frequent. (An example of one of those dreams would be that he thought his first wife phoned him demanding back child support. For one thing, no one can phone him – the phones they are allowed to use cannot receive calls. Secondly, I’m pretty confident she has no idea where he is. Thirdly, even if she did, she is not on his visitor list, so would not be allowed to contact him. Fourthly, the child in question is now 56. And he can grasp all of that – but he can also forget it.)

Yesterday, I see there was apparently a huge security breach wherein the top editor at The Atlantic was “accidentally” included in a Signal chat regarding airstrikes in Yemen. I don’t for a moment believe this was an accident. I think we will see more and more  f this type of event until the media stops covering them. Let’s face it – we have no national security.

So far what I’ve had to say for today has been fairly bleak. But if you read this, it should put you in a mood to thank the universe that we still have people like Boasberg. I can’t confirm this, but I think I read somewhere that his ancestry is at least pertly Ukrainian. I remember thinking that would not surprise me. Back when the Russians were telling tha Vikings, “Hay, you guys are pretty good managers, why don’t you stay her and form our government,” the Ukrainians – Cossacks – were mercenary soldiers who never, ever, swore any oath or had personal loyalty to any of the monarchs who paid them. Yes, a deal was a deal, but they remained independent.

I need to explain that this is not a cartoon. It is an actual mail piece I received last week. I did not open it, I just scanned it front and back – I plan to forward it to the Governor unopened. There is, however, enough information on the outside for anyone to know whom to boycott.

Share
Mar 212025
 

Yesterday, I hid a boatload of fonts and downloaded a couple of my favorites. I already discovered on the previous computer that not only are the English fonts that come with Windows 10 all alike and equally boring, but that, with all the non-English fonts displaying, it takes forever to find the right font for the project (if it’s even there.) I had been coping by constructing memes on the 8.1 and either bringing them to the 10 on a flash drive, or just uploading them to PP from the 8.1 and searching for them if they had been pushed down from the top. I don’t have all the fonts I will want yet, but i have a good start, and I need to be choosy, since paint can only show so many before sending me to font jail.

This from Wonkette was posted Wednesday. And there’s a lot in it. Now that the Clementine Caligula figures he’s not accountable to anyone, I don’t know how much it will really do to slow him down. But at least there are people with some authority who are trying.

Harry Litman has more to say about Justice Roberts’s social media post. He makes the implications of it pellucidly clear. I agree that the Roberts who made that post is the Roberts we need. But it’s not enough.

Share
Mar 022025
 

Yesterday, the radio opera was Bizet’s “Carmen.” I doubt I have to say anything about the plot, but this is a recording from 2010 wth Robertu Alagna and Elīna Garanča, which may have been a Live in HD presentation, and if it was, I saw it on television, back in the day when it was easy to get multiple channels without cable. You may laugh at what I remember … but one of the features in the production was that as Don Josê got farther and farther from respectability, they want to show that his hair had grown. (Wigs are nothing new at the Met – many people with perfectly good hair use them, and sometimes a production will require one or more as in this production.) By the time they got to act four it was a wig at or a little below the shoulder. Between the stage business and the lighting, it made Alagna look like Alan Rickman playing Snape. (If you have read the last book and/or seen the last two movies, you know that killing the woman he loved is NOT something Snape would ever have done, no matter how jealous he was.) I know the opera well – have even played second violin in a college orchestra in the seventies (not well I’m afraid, but I worked hard.) If I hadn’t I would have been so distracted I’d have completely lost the plot. I even found an email address for the lighting designer and asked whether that was in tended (it wasn’t. And it’s impossible to predict what people will actually see in a production.) If I’m right, and that’s the same one, it was enough to make me forget Barbara Frittoli and Teddy Tahu Rhodes (there is an actual website called “Barihunks,” and he is one). On another subject, I want to mention “Americans of Conscience.” This is a good site to have in your playbook, especially if you are fit and wanting to do something but don’t know what. Even I, who have issues these days with activity, can find something in their site – in their gratitude section, I can send thank you notes to people who have displayed courage and doing the right thing. I would look at their cookies and opt out of the non-necessary ones, but then I mostly do that anyway. They use WordPress, as do we, so they may already have anything they would collect. In Friday’s email they listed five people to thank and I thanked four of them – I could not bring myself to thank Susan Collins for voting the right way on a Trump** nominee. Had her vote prevailed, I might have, but it didn’t. One other thing – After finding the Ukrainian government’s GoFundMe-like site Friday, I subscribed to it, and yesterday I got the first email from it. They are not letting any grass grow under their feet. They are making 100 Tshirts with this quote from Zelenskyy’s – whatever it’s called when someone is attacked by a mob – Friday: “I’ll wear the costume when this war is over.” And anyone who donates from the email (or possibly just at the website for a limited time) will be entered into a drawing for one.

Wonkette‘s story here is I think mixed rather than totally good. But it does have enough smiles in it that I wanted to share it.

This, also from Wonkette, I consider very good. It’s a little less new, but I hope worth waiting for. I’m not crazy about the point of law on which they based the decision, which is that in order to vacate a conviction the defendant’s constitutional rights must have been violated in some way. And this is almost certainly not the time nor the Congress to ask to pass a law that a conviction may be vacated if there is proof of actual innocence even if there wasa just a good faith mistake. But maybe that’s something to look at.

This is from USA Today, and I would not have seen it had not Faithful America referred me to it. But I’d say it’s good news as far as it goes. It would be better news if there were anyone in this Justice Department who would enforce it (or allow it to be enforced.)

Share
Feb 262025
 

Yesterday – well, let me back up a little. Last week, the guy who had been posting a column of political cartoons daily announced he would not be able to do that any more, for health reasons. He offered, if someone would strp up, to share all his sources, including international sources, and also tips for getting around some issues. I do not get all my cartoons from there – I take them where I find them – but a lot do come through DU. Well, yesterday, his replacement posted (and clearly took all the tips they could get.) So that will make life a bit easier for me. (All the Dr. Seuss cartoons I have used came to me through DU, for one thing.) Also, the backlash against MSNBC was growing, and rightly so.

Talking Points Memo points out a problem which would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. At least it explains in part why some say Elon Musk can’t be fired since no one hired him. Much kudos and many promotions to Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, not only for asking and pressing the right questions, but for not going into a screaming fit while doing so – she certainly must feel like it.

Joyce Vance departs from her usual tone to share a number of things which are being done in response to this administration by people who may have read the CIAs’s “Simple Sabotage” – or maybe are just very creative. Barf bag warning for the AI video.

Share
Feb 192025
 

Yesterday, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) reported that a cybersecurity firm with substantial government contracts has hired a lobbyist (TSF affiliated) for “assistance in navigating DOGE.” So much for “honor among thieves” not that most people ever believed that anyway. And speaking of DOGE, I think I’ve mentioned this before, but it needs a little more history and a little rant. The word “doge,” pronounced “doje” or occasionally “dozhe.” refers to an official of the late Medieval and early Renaissance (Renascence) times. In Italy, at that time, long before it was (finally re-)united in the 19th century, government was by city-states, and most city states had a Doge, or absolute ruler. The name derives from the Latin word “dux,” which means “leader,” and it also means “leader.” As does “Il Duce” (Mussolini) and “Der Führer” (Hitler). In Russia, Stalin held several titles, one of which was “Great Leader.” Are you seeing a pattern here? Dork Vader may be an idiot, but he is an educated idiot and I’m sure he knows every bit of this, and chose it to taunt us – telling us exactly who he is in a way he thinks we won’t understand. People who think that the acronym DOGE has anything to do with canines are simply not taking is seriously enough. Also yesterday I finally finished freezing my credit with all three bureaus. Experian was the hardest for me because, although they claim they will “text or call” for verification, they will not accept a landline number, so I had to phone them. But that’s done now. Finally, I imagine everyone knows the GOP majority in the House is only 3 votes, and that there are 3 special elections coming up to replace three R’s who accepted executive appointments. Dems are working their derrieres off trying to win all three, and what with buyer’s remorse, we might be able to do so. I am always forgetting the districts, which are FL-01, FL-06, and NY-21. The first one happens in April. Funds are being raised for all three of them here.

In this situation we can hope that the Reich on the left is wrong. He hopes so himself. Unfortunately, it is what it is.

This is the kind of civics that, even if you learn it somewhere between K and 12, unless you go to law school, or become a long-term Federal civil servant, you probably forget it. It’s another link in the chain of checks and balances, all of which affect us all in the long run, directly or indirectly, buy for most of us this one is pretty indirect. Even so, it matters. But it’s not sexy, so I doubt you’ll see much, if anything, in the mainstream media. Joyce Vance explains.

Share
Jan 262025
 

Yesterday, the radio opers was Verdi’s Aida, which may be the most performed opera which exists. Certainly it is at the Met, which means it’s had more performances than La Boheme or Carmen. This may be the first time in my life – I don’t remember any other – when I have heard the tenor sang his opening aria the way Verdi wanted it sung – the high note ending on a pianissimo floating away. From the time of Caruso (which is pretty close to the beginning of recorded sound), few tenors have been able to resist the temptation to hit it an hold it forte to show off the high note. The soprano, Angel Blue, reminded me of Leontyne Price in the role. The only other I’ve heard who was as good as those two in the role was Latonia Moore.  I believe there is exactly one race of humans and that is homo sapiens, so I don’t believe in radial memory.  But it is interesting that all three of those divas are African American

I think I have all good news today – Well, Belle’s may not be exactly good, but it is funny.

A few days old, but it is good news. Besides the speed of getting this into court, there’s a short preview of other court action to come. I’m also linking to Joyce Vance, who has some additional details on what actually happened in the courtroom.

This happened on Tuesday, but was published Wednesday. I just received the link yesterday from JL. As y’all know, I got a very late start yesterday – and had email left over from Friday -and had not found any other good news yet, so I’m using this. I do subscribe to Huff Post, but not to everything, just the “Fringe.”

Share