To Hither and Yon

US Politics

November 6, 2020 1 of 8 (maybe?)

I’m not sure where to start. Well, that’s kind of why I’ve been doing this — to make myself just jump in and start writing.

First of all, while it looks like Biden is going to win the Presidency, it also looks like the Republicans are going to keep control of the Senate (by one vote). This is bad from my perspective because, well, even if Biden gets a chance to rebalance the Supreme Court into a direction that won’t take away gains made in women’s health care (Roe v. Wade), and in marriage equality (Obergefell v. Hodges), it would be difficult because the Senate has to approve the appointment and if he can’t convince at least two Republican senators to approve (that’s assuming all of the Democratic senators would vote for his appointment, which is far from guaranteed, trying to get the Democrats onto the same page is like herding cats, as it were), he might as well not even bother.

One of the observations someone in my social circle, years ago. I thought it might have been at the time of the 2016 elections, but I guess that just shows how long these last four years have been. We’ve been bandying it about for so long that I don’t even know where it started, it’s just one of those things that we now take as true. That is that Tip O’Neill’s assertion that “all politics is local” doesn’t just mean that keeping a national seat requires local pork projects (more on this maybe in another post) and backroom deals, but if people who share your ideas of how the world should be don’t get elected down the ballot, you’ll probably never see the world be how you think it should be.

Like, I want politicians who propose, advance, and pass laws that make our whole nation “sheep” in Jesus’s parable of the Sheep and the Goats. We should all be feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, providing healthcare to the sick (and preventive healthcare to the well, for that matter) and so on.

The way the Republicans claim that this is a “Christian nation” and then fail to achieve the things that Jesus said were the way into Paradise (Matthew 25:34) just boggles my mind.

Crap. New thread. In the same social circle, one of my friends quoted someone who said that the Pledge of Allegiance’s statement of “liberty and justice for all” or the Declaration of Independence’s statement that We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, or the Bill of Rights can be either definitional (we’re the United States so we have these things) or aspirational (we’re the United States so we can achieve these things). I’m in the second group.

Anyway, it seems to me that a lot of the people who believe that these are definitional think that our society cannot be biased against any group. People of Color make less money and have worse outcomes? They must be doing something wrong because we’re the land of the free and the home of the brave. I’ve lived a virtuous live and have these things (actually many don’t — a lot of them are very hard-up for money and have chronic health conditions). So your vices must be keeping you from them.

But so many of our ultra-wealthy are mired in vices. And I’m not just talking about entertainment figures; I mean our captains of industry. They steal. They steal pay from their employees, and I’m not talking about underpaying their employees, though they do that. I’m talking about not giving their employees what little money they’re owed.

It’s called wage theft. Companies underpay their employees, or refuse to let them have meal or rest breaks, refusing overtime pay to people who earn it, or just not making clerical errors right once they’re discovered (something that happened to me in 2015). Corporations make millions of dollars a year from wage theft.

People who run companies that engage in wage theft, whether it’s an honest mistake that can’t be fixed or a standing policy, are by definition not virtuous. They’ve saved themselves money by stealing it from their employees. After all, a penny saves is a penny earned. So by saving themselves money, they’re making a profit illegally. So, if the virtuous are rewarded with financial success and the wicked are punished by financial failure, why are these employers not being punished with financial failure?

Because that’s not how the world works. The world is not automatically fair, we do not automatically have equality, liberty, justice, the pursuit of happiness, or any of the rest of it just because we’re the United States. And we cannot trust the system as it stands now to give people these things. We need to change the system and time has shown us that appealing to the better natures of those who steal, or who cheat, or who lie, doesn’t work. We need laws that force these better behaviors for generations until the way things are now seem barbaric (which they are) to our descendants and they won’t want to go back to how things are now.

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp

November 4, 2020 1 of 8

That “1 of 8” is kind of a joke today. It’s 10:58 pm. If I can write seven more posts today, I’ll be very surprised. Particularly since I’m pretty close to dead tired and I have an early shift tomorrow.

In December, I may go back through and straighten out the numbers, making them “1 of 3” or “1 of 1” or “1 of 20” (as if!).

Anyway, I play three phone games, primarily.* Pokemon Go, Harry Potter Wizards Unite, and Animal Crossing Pocket Camp. I know I’ve written about Pokemon Go, I think I’ve written about Wizards Unite. Have I written about Animal Crossing Pocket Camp? I don’t know. So that’s what I’m going to do now.

As I’m writing this, I realize that gameplay is actually fairly complicated. I may have to write this a just a basic outline and then go into each item in more detail in other posts (but not tonight; It’s 11:27 now and I’m pooped).

Animal Crossing Pocket Camp is, just like it says on the tin, one of the Animal Crossing family of games. In this one, though, the player is managing a campsite for animal villagers to visit. There are four animal villagers at other places in the camp, and you have to bring them items from other (or occasionally their own) part of the camp.

So, the lower right-hand corner is the saltwater beach. You can collect saltwater fish, shells, and coconuts there. Then, progressing counterclockwise, there’s a forest with fruit trees, a freshwater river, with more fruit trees and freshwater fish, and a tropical island with bugs and coconuts.

You trade with the villagers kind of like this. The villager on the bug island wants an apple, and you have one in your bag, so you give them the apple. In exchange they give you things – in-game currency, raw materials for manufacturing things, etc.

Then you take the raw materials to make clothing, furniture, amenities, and so forth.

There are smaller things, like a booth where you can buy fortune cookies that contain more clothing, furniture, and so forth. There’s a boat that you can send to smaller islands to trade for raw materials, clothing, and sometimes the boat will bring back a map that leads you to new villagers. There’s a marketplace where several vendors switch out from time to time. You also have your own campsite and a cabin.

Then, while you’re doing all this, there’s a monthly rotation of events — a gardening event, a fishing event, and a scavenger hunt. Each of these also brings you clothing, furniture, decorations, etc.

Everything cycles around. Every three hours, the villagers leave or arrive at the campground and all have new requests. Alongside this, every three hours the event flowers mature, or the fish come back. The scavenger hunt refreshes more like hourly.

Then, the first week of the month is the gardening event, then there’s a small event for a couple of days, then the fishing event, then another small event, then the scavenger hunt. Then the next month it starts all over again.

Relaxing? Maddening? You decide.

You may be wondering what the point is. I haven’t figured that out myself. You accumulate more furniture, clothing, amenities, and so on. You gradually build more bonds with the villagers. Occasionally they have special events where you can use leaf tickets (the premium in-game currency) to buy limited-time items. They recently had an event where you could buy yukata and interior design items designed by Japanese designer Sou Sou.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time (and then bed!). Today is The Strangers, the first book in the Greystone Secrets books by Margaret Peterson Haddix. Chess, Emma, and Finn, kids of a single mom, are living a happy life until three kids with their first and middle names and birthdates disappear. Then their mom takes off, and leaves them with a woman who protects abused women and children. But the kids don’t take their mom leaving lying down. They’re determined to find out what happened to their mom. The Greystone Secrets series is supposed to be a trilogy. I hope the rest of the books are as good as this one was.

Content Creator: The Try Guys

November 3, 2020 4 of 8

<Keith Habersberger voice>In 2014, in Los Angeles, California, the people at BuzzFeed decided to make a video called “Guys Try on Ladies’ Underwear for the First Time and so was The Try Guys born.</Keith Habersberger voice>

I think I’ve told this story before. In 2019, one of my Facebook friends (I think it was Thomas’s brother) posted an article claiming to have proof that people who see live concerts live nine years longer than those who don’t or something. My guess is that, to the extent this is true, it’s probably more that the people who have that kind of disposable income probably have more food security and better health care. Either way, though it inspired me to look at the list of upcoming concerts and found someone called The Try Guys.

Now, the name sounded familiar. I was pretty sure that some of my Facebook friends had posted links to videos by them. Now memory is malleable, but I think that one of the first videos I thought of was their impaired driving series.

So I went digging and watched every one of their videos over the course of, I don’t know, a week or two? And they were every bit as funny as I recalled.

The Try Guys, as I recall one of the Guys saying, became a sort of thing because they were the four guys at Buzzfeed who were the most comfortable taking their pants off in front of a camera. In fact, one of their running gags is that Ned likes the way his butt looks. That trope goes all the way back to the beginning. It’s there in Guys Try on Ladies’ Underwear for the First Time.

In 2018, they left Buzzfeed and began their own production company, 2nd Try LLC. This is why, if you search YouTube for them, you’ll see that some are published by Buzzfeed and some are published by Try Guys.

The Guys have stuck together through all of the stresses of the creation of their own company. They have group videos and also have their own video series, and in 2019 they began a series of podcasts. The main podcast, called TryPod, is the podcast of the central four Guys. The they started one called You Can Sit With Us, which features Ned’s wife Ariel, Keith’s wife Becky, and Zach’s fiancee, Maggie. I don’t know if Eugene’s partner, Matt, has ever appeared on that podcast. He kind of stays out of the limelight. And recently, Ned and Ariel started a podcast called Baby Steps, which is about their growing family.

The Try Guys has long been sort of my “home” on YouTube. It’s the first channel I check for new videos, it was the first channel I subscribed to, and if I ever have Patreon money, it’ll be the first YouTube channel I donate to the Patreon of.

I can’t subscribe to their Patreon, but I have given the Guys some actual money. I bought their book, The Hidden Power of F*cking Up, and both Keith and Zach have started sideline businesses, Keith sells a hot sauce specifically for chicken, and Zach sells tea. I’ve bought both, but every time I have chicken, I forget to try the sauce. And this reminds me that I haven’t tried Zach’s tea yet, either. It’s 11:30 pm right now, which sounds like a good time for his Mission Chill bedtime tea. The tea smells heavenly. I hope the taste is half as good as the smell.

What Is Olivia Reading Today?

November 3, 2020 3 of 8

I am in the middle of so many books right now that I think I should maybe put some up for later.

The two books I’m spending the most time on right now are El Ladrón del Rayo, the Spanish translation of The Lightning Thief, the first book of Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Woman who Would be King, Kara Cooney’s book on Hatshepsut.

On the back burner at the moment are Harry Potter e la Pietra Filosofale, the Italian translation of Harry Potter and the (Sorceror’s/Philosopher’s) Stone, Children of Virtue and Vengeance, and La Travesía del Viajero del Alba, the Spanish translation of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. I think that’s it.

I also have another Fantastic Strangelings book club book coming in the not-too-distant future (the next week or two), Dark Archives: A Librarian’s Investigation into the Science and History of Books Bound in Human Skin.

I also might have another couple of things I’m working on on my Kindle. Oh! I noticed that my Ms. Marvel and maybe my Unbeatable Squirrel Girl compilations may not have read dates on them, so I’m going to probably be rereading them so they can fit into the Gratuitous Amazon Links. And for this post, you’ll see that our Amazon link is less gratuitous than usual.

And my current National Geographic issue is August 2020. I need to get back to that one.

The Easiest Recipe Ever

November 3, 2020 3 of 8

Well, maybe not the *easiest*, but still pretty damn easy.

Now, as a warning, as far as I’m concerned, a little seasoning goes a long way. So if you’re like my mom, and like things with so many leaves and twigs and things of seasoning that they’re crunchy, move along.

So, this is the seat-of-my pants recipe for my pasta salad.

Ingredients: Rotini, carrots, olives, Newman’s Own Classic Oil & Vinegar dressing (or other salad dressing), other vegetables to taste (I usually put a little broccoli in there, my mom used to like radishes (don’t ask me)).

Boil pasta according to package directions
Drain pasta
Put pasta in fridge
While pasta chills, chop vegetables
Mix pasta and vegetables
Cover with enough salad dressing to . . cover
Serve
Put leftovers in the fridge for later meals/snacks/side dishes

Serves, um, however many people want to eat however much pasta you made.

See? Easy.

I bought the olives and salad dressing months ago, the rotini weeks ago, and the carrots the other day.

So I’m having this for dinner tonight.

Blanket Update

November 2, 2020 6 of 8

I tried, but it looks like eight posts isn’t going to happen today, either. Well, better luck tomorrow. I did leave my word count goal behind me over 300 words ago. So there’s that.

So, I’m still unraveling the blanket and trying to figure out how to make a large knitted blanket out of all of these pieces without losing a lot of yarn to knots when it hit me.

As I said earlier, this blanket is ancient. Some of the threads are snapping as I unravel them because they’re so worn. So I’m going to have to knit it from two strands held together as one.

This is one of my weirder photos. I was unable to get a picture of the Washington Monument that I really liked, partially because of my equipment but mostly because of the fact that they’d drained the reflecting pool when we were there in 2010. When we were walking along the National Mall, though, I noticed that I could see the reflection of the Monument in this puddle. So now, if this blog ever does take off, this pigeon will be famous.

So, rather than pairing up strands, what if I double the strand over and join it to another strand with a square knot*? Then I don’t have to find two strands the same length. I mean, knotting it this way will automatically make two strands the same length kind of by definition.

I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

*That’s the knot where you bend both strands in half and then loop one loop through the other and then pull the non-looped end through the loop. That’s probably not really any clearer, but it’s nearly midnight and I’ve had a busy day, so that’s probably the best I can do right now.

Gratuitous Amazon Link time! This one’s by one of my favorite kidlit authors, so you’ll be seeing her name a lot. This 12-hour period will be brought to you by Winterborne Home for Vengeance and Valor, by Ally Carter. I wasn’t really thrilled by the title, but the story was fantastic. April comes to live at the Winterborne house with a group of orphans. April has a key with the Winterborne family crest on it, and she’s convinced that the key opens a lock somewhere in the house.

I Wonder of Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT) is Still a Thing?

November 2, 2020 5 of 8

Yay! My first medical article, I think.

This post is brought to you by still more blanket unraveling. The blanket is king-sized and while trying to work out the best way to do this, I’ve only unraveled about 0.9% of the blanket. By my estimation, the original blanket (minus the hem, which I just cut off, because life’s too short for trying to unhem a 10-year-old blanket with a seam ripper) is 56 square feet (5.2 square meters) and I still have 50.25 square feet (4.67 square meters) of blanket to unravel.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, since those 5.75 square feet are a fringe, I’ve only unraveled half of that area. So I think I may have only unraveled 0.045% of the blanket.

So I’m thinking “at least I’m getting my NEAT on,” which made me wonder if the science is still good on that.

Looking at the PubMed abstract of an article (Non-exercise activity thermogenesis (NEAT)) from 2002, which may be the original article defining NEAT, I see that this article has been cited in 33 articles total, four articles of them in the last year. Two of the 33 articles were clinical trials.

While I believe that health is more important than waist size and these pages don’t necessarily follow that belief, I also found this page from Harvard Medical School and this page from Vanderbilt University Medical Center. So I guess the NEAT thing isn’t completely out of favor.

Time for another Gratuitous Amazon Link. This is another choice from the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Catherine House, by Elisabeth Thomas. This one was good, but really creepy. Our protagonist, Ines, is invited to Catherine House, a school that doesn’t consider itself to be a college or university, but which takes the place of one. The course of study at Catherine House takes three years, and their students are forbidden to leave the grounds during that time. And, of course, as with all of these kinds of books, there is a secret at Catherine House and Ines cannot leave it alone until she finds out what it is.

Home from My Errands

November 2, 2020 4 of 8

I went to the seamstress’s shop and dropped off my purse. I’m getting a new lining with the internal pocket and everything for a very good price. I hope her work is as good as it looks like because I will promote her services to all and sundry if it is.

Then I went for a walk and played Pokemon Go for a couple of hours. I also started a new (slightly imperfectly implemented) project. As I think I mentioned earlier, when Evelyn and I went walking with the dogs this summer, it was hot. Like hot-hot. Like “surface of the sun” hot. And the dogs weren’t fans.

So we’ve been looking for the most shady paths to take. It’s all pretty subjective, though. I mean, “Hey, that place we went walking last week was pretty shady.” So we go there and it takes X amount of walking in the sunshine to *get* to the shady place.

After I dropped off my purse, I hit the Leon Creek Greenway. While I was walking, I took a picture every 10-ish minutes (I missed one and took it three minutes late, so the picture before that was 13 minutes before and the next one was 6 minutes after). I stopped right after my sixth picture and the next time I have time to walk on the greenway (mid-November, probably), I’ll start from where I took that picture and then take pictures every 10 minutes.

This was the most shade I photographed on this outing. We’ll see what happens in future trips.

Then I’ll do the same thing on the Salado Creek Greenway and make movies of each greenway and see which areas of each seem to have more shade and next summer (if there is a next summer), Evelyn and I will take the dogs here.

Now, as I said, this is imperfectly implemented. Ideally, I’d take these pictures from, like 11 am to 1 pm or something, but I enjoy having a job. I don’t have the time to visit the greenway every day during that two hours in order to get a perfect view.

So, the shadows will be longer in some pictures and shorter in others. Maybe if my dad wins the lottery, I can buy a drone and zip the drone down a greenway at noon on a weekday during the summer when there aren’t many people on it and get one perfect shot of exactly what the shade on the greenways look like at noon.

But for now, as long as I’m doing this with shoe leather and a cell phone camera, we’ll get what we get.

For our Gratuitous Amazon Link this time, we have The Authenticity Project, by Claire Pooley. Julian Jessop, a fairly well-known artist, decides that most of our problems stem from an inability to be honest about our true selves. So he writes his truth in a notebook and leaves it in a coffee shop, inviting the person who finds it to do the same and leave it somewhere else. In the course of the book, six people find the book, and then they find each other and their lives become more intertwined. I really enjoyed this one and hope that by putting this here, someone else will also find it and enjoy it like I did. This is the Kindle edition.

I Need to Get Moving

November 2, 2020 3 of 8

I got up for-me-extra-early today (8:30) and tried to knock out some words, but I’ve found a new YouTuber that I like (and then found a new one, who really is new — she only has two videos so far) and wrote a post, then watched some videos and unraveled, then wrote another post and watched some videos and unraveled.

I mean, these will all be useful later this month, when I write about these YouTube creators and about the blanket-rebirth project (which really needs a name), but it’s not helping me get my daily stuff done.

Along the way, I also took my Symbicort and ate breakfast, so those are useful, obviously. Today I was planning to go to a seamstress that one of my coworkers uses to get a new lining put into my black purse (it’s a black lining and it’s a nightmare to find anything in that purse) and to get started on a project to determine which of the greenways has the most tree cover (almost said “shade,” which sounded wrong).

It’s now noon and I’ve got to get my showering done and try to figure out what’s going on with Pimsleur Czech on my way to running those errands. I’ll post Czech, the errands, etc. later.

This posts’s Gratuitous Amazon Link is for Crossings by Alex Landragin. I enjoyed this one, which is about people who lived in a Polynesian culture hundreds of years ago and where the members of the culture can switch souls with others. Our two protagonists were lovers and they lost each other and now the woman has been hopping from body to body trying to catch up to the man and there’s another order you can read the book in which supposedly also makes sense, but I must have been doing it wrong, because it made less sense to me that way. At any rate, the link is to the hard copy version, because I don’t know how the alternative sequence would work in Kindle. Maybe it’d be easier. I don’t know. I enjoyed the book but not enough to buy the Kindle version, too.

Just a Quick Note About Today

November 3, 2020 1 of 8

It’s now 9:45 am. I’m working from 11 to 7 today and so I have to hustle off to the shower in 15 minutes, so I’m going to have to make this quick.

Today is the Presidential election. I’m terrified that Trump will win again. I mean, we survived the last four years, and Trump is guided by his id more than either of the egos, so I don’t know if the next four would *necessarily* be worse, but I was really hoping they’d, you know, be better.

When I get off work tonight, the polls on the east coast will already be closed and preliminary results will be coming in. So I’m going to close most of my tabs that have anyone talking about current events on them, which leaves me with, um, fiction books, longform articles and old YouTube videos, I think.

I was going to start my content creator topic tonight, but looking at their current videos would be a spoiler, so maybe I’ll do some book blogging. I don’t know yet, but I’ll see what I do once I get there.

Will I make it to 8 posts tonight? Doubtful, but, once again, I’ll try.

A quick Gratuitous Amazon Link. This was the first book in the Fantastic Strangelings Book Club: Follow me to Ground, by Sue Rainsford. This one is also excellent, but creepy. Ada is not human. She and her father are some kind of mystical constructs that use a patch of dirt, called Ground, to heal the local villagers of their illnesses. Everything is going well enough, but then Ada falls in love with a villager named Samson. This link is the hard copy.