Lady Bugs

 

A couple of years ago my wife and I stopped at an attraction on the way back to Seattle from a bile trip in the Santa Fe and Taos region. The attraction was called the Pink Dunes National Monument. The place was amazing. Everywhere one looked there were pink dunes. That was probably why they called it the Pink Dunes National Monument. There were some hiking paths indicated and we set out on one of them. Almost immediately the pink dunes were full of interesting and beautiful plants, most of which I had never seen before. In the process of photographing one of the ones that I had seen before – yucca – I noticed that it was alive with lady bugs. Closer examination showed why. The yucca was also alive with aphids. There were a great many more aphids than there were lady bugs and that was good for the lady bugs because aphids are sort of like cattle to lady bugs. I've never been clear about what it is that lady bugs do to or with aphids, but it has something to do with food. The lady bugs either eat or milk, or both, the lady bugs. I could visualize the lady bug eating an aphid, but I had a lot of trouble picturing the lady bug milking an aphid. I didn't even know where the aphids' udder and related equipment might be located. I wasn't even sure whether they had such equipment. And that was, in substantial part, why I had such a problem with visualizing the milking process, if indeed such a process actually existed. In any event I saw neither eating nor milking while I was observing the creatures, but I got some good pictures and when I got back to Seattle and took a look at the pictures I had taken, I discovered that, due to the fairly dense pixel depth of my pictures, I could zoom in on them with Photo Shop and extract fairly intimate pictures of the lady bugs farming their aphids. Here is one of them.

Opportunity Lost

A guy named T.R. Reid has written a really good book on healthcare around the world. Specifically, he has written about how five of our kindred modern industrial democracies provide for health care for their citizens. He discusses the pros and cons and the variances in approach between them. He compares all of that to how we are doing it – or how we think we are doing it. He points out a lot of things that everybody has heard before; he points out much more that most of us haven't heard before. He has also made a really good documentary which has been aired on Public Television about all of this. And he has gone around the country promoting his book. That has often caused him to be interviewed in depth by Public Radio. I have heard him a couple of different times and have been impressed by how much he knows and how useful that which he knows could have been to our elected leaders as they went about trying to implement health care reform; or, in the case of the out of power party, as they went about trying not to implement health care reform. My net net reaction has been that Mr. Reid has learned a great deal of useful information, and that if he could learn it, perhaps all of us Americans could learn it. Perhaps even our elected leaders could have learned it. Perhaps all that learning could have produced a rational national (poetry intended) discussion about what can be done about our health care system. Perhaps we could have learned a great deal from discussing what many other successful and intelligent democracies in the world have been doing. Perhaps we all, citizens and leaders alike could have learned – jointly – a rational and effective way to improve a system which is clearly broken, from a cost viewpoint, from a results viewpoint and from a coverage viewpoint.

But we didn't, or at least we haven't had that discussion. Instead some of us all got together in public meetings and turned red in the face, shouted, followed the redness with purpleness and shouted some more. It strikes me as interesting that the people indulging in this simian sort of behavior are typically the same people who advocate teaching intelligent design. But that aside, we had some loud shouting and some sloganeering and some not so very well veiled racist assaults on our president and little else related to one of the most important issues facing us. And the republicans have just said no. I guess that's the best to be expected from America.

Too bad – it was an opportunity lost.

The RF Trio

The trio plays a prominent part in the tale that unfolds in Screen Saver. Unfortunately, from my viewpoint at least, there is no video of the group and damn little audio. Here is a half baked production which uses the one recorded-in-a-studio song and the few still images that can be found.

La Seine

This is an excerpt from chapter ten of Screen Saver.

"The Seine was a being. It had personality. In the spring it was high and brown; in the summer it was more subdued, still brown. In the winter it was high and brown and intertwined with an occasional maelstrom of seagulls all whirling and chanting their raspy calls to the waves. In the autumn it was a shattered mirror of infinite glinting flashes; it was bounded by the brilliant yellow poplars wandering its banks. It was the home for an endlessly interesting parade of barges and boats. There were the working barges thrusting themselves furiously against the current, laden with gravel for some upstream dumping point. There were the barges that had become homes for river dwelling Parisians. Although those barges floated, they never left their mooring; they clustered instead at points along the river, where the cobblestone riverside quays widened enough to allow pedestrian access and traffic. These tiny water-borne sub-arrondissments were bedecked with tomato and pepper plants in the summer, cascading chrysanthemums in the fall and Christmas trees in December. "

Re-Run

I've seen this movie before. I didn't like it the first time I saw it and I don't like it any better this time. The basic plot of the movie involves the iterative increase of hoards of American military personnel who get sent to some country that nobody in America except those who are in the process of being iteratively sent in ever increasing increments can find on the map; a sub plot is that nobody except those who are being sent have any clear idea about why they are being sent. For example, a while back my brother in law, who spent a year in Iraq, told me over a friendly martini that he had spent that year in Iraq defending the American Constitution. I lacked that sort of clarity about what our purposes had been in Iraq, although I had had some memory of there being vast numbers of nuclear and biological weapons stored there for use against the United States. I suppose if those weapons had been used against us it would have been a bad thing for the American Constitution, so perhaps my brother in law was correct. I can't remember whether we actually got any of those weapons, but since we are still physically intact I guess we did.

The first time I saw the movie I was among the iteratively increasing hoards. We were all being iteratively and increasingly sent to Vietnam. When we got there (we called it "in-country") we all learned where Vietnam was. That was because we all wanted to know how to get back from it, so we needed to know where it actually was on the map. If we had stayed uniteratively increased I suspect we never would have known where it was. And that probably would have been good. Anyway, when we got there some of us got sent "up-country" and some of us stayed in Saigon.

If one was sent "up-country" (some of us were actually sent "down-country"; there were places like the Rung Sat Special Strike Zone – I never knew how to spell it - that were distinctly south of Saigon; I think John Kerry spent a lot of time "down-country") one got to get shot at quite a lot. All that shooting was one of the key contributors to the interatively increasing requirement for hoards of additional military personnel. One of the advantages of all that iteratively increasing need was that it provided employment opportunities for vast numbers of young men who might have been otherwise unemployed, and that was good.

If one stayed in Saigon one spent most of one's time saluting the vast hoards of senior officers who all had flocked to the "war effort" to further their careers. "It may not be much, but it's the only war we've got" was a commonly heard witticism. When not saluting one probably spent most of the rest of one's time dodging large Cadillacs with starred flags affixed to them as they hurtled around the city. Occasionally one had to dodge a large limousine Mercedes that hurtled around with Nguyen Van Tiu in it. Nguyen was the president of Vietnam and he needed to hurtle around the streets a lot. H e couldn't let the American generals out hurtle him.

That movie turned out really well. I just didn't like it. But that's probably because I have always been pretty hard to please. After eight or ten years of thrashing around militarily and diplomatically the United States declared victory and the iterative hoards all went home. Not long after the hoards had left the guys who had been shooting at all of us formed their own government. I had always thought that we could have achieved the same result by just cutting out the iterative increases and the thrashing about and the shooting and just let those guys set up their government. They seemed to be somewhat of an improvement over the government provided by the guy in the Mercedes limo, but I was never sure. Apparently whether it was better or not was moot; we just left after spending a lot of money and sending home a lot of coffins.

But all of this is based on memories, and memories are at best phantoms.

Stasis

I have been beyond the range of the Internet for several days, thus my silence. The nice thing is that, since I know that I am talking to no-one, or to no-one other than to myself, my silence just doesn't matter; although that silence may matter to me, since its presence is yet one more reaffirmation of my gradual slippage into oblivion, in the great scheme of things it matters not. But, now that I have emerged from Lopez to the WiFi zone, here are a few thoughts.

It should be obvious to anyone who pays any attention to anything that the legislature of the United States has evolved since 1994 into a form of government that has no purpose other than a game in which the out-of-power party keeps anything from happening so that they can blame the in-power party at the next election for getting nothing done. Neither party can or will support the best interests of the country because to do so might allow something positive to happen on the watch of the in-power party, thus making them look good and allowing for the possibility of them being re-confirmed in power at the next election. This situation closely resembles the state of affairs that developed in World War I after the initial thrusts and parries had stabilized into an impasse which lasted until the United States added fresh blood on the side of the French and British and tipped the balance in their favor. It would not appear that such a third party exists in United States national politics, so it would appear that the game of keeping the in-powers from accomplishing anything that will help the country is going to continue. Ultimately, it would seem probable that the game will be broken, but it will probably be broken by the breaking of the country.

The only exceptions to the don't-do-anything form of government that have appeared are things that either should not have happened at all, or should have happened differently: under the threat of a McCarthy-like reign of terror from former president Bush and the republicans the democrats all buckled and voted for the Iraq invasion. Driven by a form of mass hysteria caused by the fear of a looming depression Nancy Pelosi was able to force through a trillion dollar list of all the half baked ideas that had been on her spending list for a long time. Rather than trying to act as a productive and protective opposition and forcing deliberation that would create a plan to spend what was probably somewhere near the right amount of money in a manner that made any sense, the republicans just went along.

And the icing on the nightmare cake of misgovernment is the influence of lobbies. What little does happen is the result of that nasty expedient for re-election, the expedient that both the ins and the outs need equally: money from the lobbies.

Les Chastaignes

In Screen Saver the annual cycle of the chestnuts plays a major role. If the book were a novel the chestnuts would be one of the characters, and a complex one at that. But that annual cycle is not a phenomenon confined solely to the United States. That phenomenon also occurs every year in France. It occurs in le Jardin du Luxembourg. And le Jardin also plays a major role in Screen Saver. And like the chestnuts in America, le Jardin would be a character if the book were a novel. But there are significant, and beautiful, differences between French and American chestnuts. And a description of that beauty would have been an important, if tiny, addition to the text of the book. Those words did get written, but they didn't get included. So, blogs being the ultimate menders of all things needing fixing, those words are offered here.

They were horse chestnuts but their flowers were pink. They were not creamy-tan like their American cousins. They had the same dark maroon throats, but the rest of the petals were of an intensely pink brilliance that when seen seemed impossible to describe and equally impossible to ignore. In spring their vertically pruned branches formed huge spatulate palates spattered liberally with foaming globs of their intense dark pink flowers. The spinal paths of the center of le jardin were lined with them. They marched down from just beyond l'orangerie all the way to the formal orchards where in autumn the persimmons shouted out with their joyous deep orange in contrast to their barren, winter-scoured limbs.