The Semi-Quint Centennial

OK.

Most of us love the USA enough to want to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence wholeheartedly. 

We would also like to prevent Trump from interfering with the celebration in any way; that's what is needed to encourage any celebrity artists to come celebrate with us.  On the other hand, we don't want to concentrate all the talent in one spot.  That might be too much of a temptation for maniacal MAGA people to come visiting with their fancy firearms. 

One possibility would be to focus on local celebrations only.  This would be depressing, for such an important anniversary, when we would have been expected to have an enormous gathering.  But what are we to do?  If we had all gone to the polls, and prevented Trump from stealing the election, and put our energy behind Kamala Harris, things would be very different today.  But there are a great many "Never Kamala" people among our fellow liberals, and some of them Never.a.woman,.anyway people.  To give them their due, they were probably making a pathetic calculation, thinking: "nobody else will vote for a woman, so let's not waste our votes."

We could actually have a location in which to all gather.  Central Park in New York City; some spacious location in Minneapolis; somewhere in Texas; those sorts of places.  Would be easy to have ICE come in and cause havoc.  I wonder whether armed liberals are itching for an armed confrontation, but that would feed into Trump's desire to mobilize the armed services.  But we have to think of all the angles, and start planning now. 

Archeopterix 

Brucie is getting to be a Curmudgeon

There are dogs in homes surrounding ours on all sides.  Sometimes they start barking; and now Brucie is at a stage of life where puts his head on his paws, and silently endured the racket as long as he can stand it.  Then he snaps, and roars through our house, barking furiously, as if to say, don't make me come out there, and give you a piece of my mind!!!

So obviously curmudgeonly!

Arch 

It's not WHAT You Know ...

The Presidency in the US has never been, in my experience, a one man show.  The knowledge spectrum needed is wide; too wide for a single person.  With the twin problems of wealth concentration and climate change lurking in the background, a not-very-bright real estate agent and TV personality could not hope to be able to run a country like the US all by himself.  But Trump did not have a team for the White House ready.  There were plenty of eggheads in the GOP who would have been willing to help, in the first trump administration, but after how badly Anthony Fauci was treated by the MAGA, and GOP, generally, no capable person was willing to take any responsibility, especially in the area of health.  Let's face it; the people trump knows are quacks, and wall street types—and pretty shady ones, too—and Steve Bannon types (or Elon Musk types) who have more ideas about how to subvert government bureaucracy than about how to repair it.  Public health, especially, requires a certain mindset that the friends of robber barons are unlikely to have.  Your Doctor Oz, and other dispensers of TV medical advice, are probably not sufficiently weird to get Trump's approval. 

Sadly, MAGA could never have been expected to put together an administration that could get anything right; but they did not want to get anything right.  They wanted an agent for their anarchy (and racism, and Xenophobia).  It was a very short-term objective.

In other news today, the courts are getting in the way of allowing the super-grifting that trump wants to do quickly, before he gets too sick for the Oval Office.  (Or too sleepy.)  So any day now he's likely to issue a proclamation that all courts are to be shut down, since they're too hung up on laws and stuff. 

Arch 

America: Two Sides

I have lived in the USA for close to fifty years.  (On August 13, it will be exactly 50.)  You must believe me when I say: in retrospect, they were 50 totally awesome years.

Well, actually, not all of them; some of them were hard, some because of things I did; some nobody's fault.  Lots of things that go wrong are nobody's fault. 

Compared, however, to the horror stories I'm reading in the news and the popular media, I have led a wonderful life.  I have had excellent friends, who have looked out for my family and me for all these 50 years.  I was married twice, and both ladies with whom I was married were (and are) exceptional people.  I have a child (who I obviously think is wonderful) who has a number of friends who think the world of my child; I worked a single job the entire time I was employed full-time, and now I'm retired, with a reasonable retirement plan, perhaps not the sort of retirement most people dream about, but comfortable for myself and my wife, in a small home—or maybe medium-sized home—in a blue-collar neighbor-hood that's staring down the barrel of gentrification. 

But great numbers of US citizens are living with great uncertainty; people of all classes are deeply unhappy with the way things are.  We're all unhappy with the way things are being run by the trigger-happy ex-Fox News types in the White House, and the way they've derailed the technology that previous administrations had aimed against climate change. 

But I'm still convinced that life has been good to us; though I feel guilty that there are so many others who have been—and are—miserable.  Some of whom are better off than we are. 

There are some wonderful people in America.  There are also really terrible people here. 

Arch 

Stairs and Steps

I was brought up to call the cement or concrete front steps (or steps from the ground up to the back door, or the back veranda) were just steps.  Inside the house, steps to the upper floors, if any, were stairs.  If they were enclosed, they would be a staircase.

But I'm hearing people calling the front steps stairs, which is a new one on me.  Stairs are always wooden, and inside.  Outside, they're stone or concrete, and called steps.  In our town, it's possible to buy a complete flight of concrete steps for the front of your house from a garden center; a flight of five step, usually. 

But two things confuse the whole issue: firstly, some people have wooden steps for the front of their house; we do, because our front porch veranda is a little higher than usual, so an extra step is needed, or each step has to be a little taller.  Still, nobody has called our front steps stairs; they wouldn't do that unless we started doing it.

Secondly, fire escapes.   These things have metal steps, and lots of them.  So what to call them: steps or stairs?  Well, neither.  The term stairs is usually not used unless they lead from one level of a house to another, and it's a permanent installation, and it's indoors.  Fire escapes being outdoors, wouldn't be called steps.  The individual steps are certainly still steps.  But the whole flight of steps, indoors, would be stairs. 

Fire escapes can only be called that: fire escapes.  If a house has fixed outside stairs to access an upper level, they'd be called outside stairs sometimes.  You see this in homes where the upstairs part has been rented separately. 

Arch 

More than meets the eye? The Trump - Pope fued?

Well.

Apparently, Trump distrusts both his Vice President and his Secretary of State, according to a Trump Tea-Leaf reader.  This is quite possible, because Trump is facing impeachment; after the Mid-Terms, at the latest, and possibly earlier.  When he is forced out of the presidency, he doesn't want Rubio or Vance salivating after his job.  (Now that they've seen how the grifting is carried out, they're probably certain that they can do it with more class.  Anyone could, honestly, given how stupid Trump is.)  Apparently one of those two must cooperate with the impeachment process. 

Anyhoo, Trump's attack on the Pope is, I hear, in fact an attack on Vance by Trump.  Trump wants to get Vance mired in religious arguments with the Pope, so that he'll be discredited.  Sounds far- fetched, but this is Trump trying to be clever.  (He confuses cleverness with deviousness, which sort of works with finagling crooked financial deals.  Hard to believe Trump screwed up the Federal government to this extent mainly to skim off these enormous chunks of wealth into the vaults of his family.  But it does look that way.)

Kash Patel, meanwhile, has indulged in some baffling excesses: heavy drinking, abuse of the security detail attached to him, profligate spending on his girlfriend, and so on.  This is going on so much that he (Kash) must suspect the end is nigh.

RFK Jr. is merely a distraction.  A bad distraction, because he harms the health of masses of gullible people, but still a distraction. 

Judging from the level of anti-trump posting that's coming into my feed, everybody is getting more angry, but that's not to say that trump- removal is actually imminent.  Interesting: lots of former MAGA voters are coming out as furiously anti-trump.  Probably not going to help us liberals/Democrats very much.

The former trump insider who dropped this insight into the trump/pope wars is Anthony Scaramucci, whom some people will never trust again, but he knows how Trump thinks, I'm willing to bet. 

Arcch

A Quick Word Before I'm Due To Visit The Phlebotmist

I used to think that I knew a huge amount of the music of Bach, because I was familiar with more of his music than my friends were, but the more I study his opus, the smaller the estimate of my familiarity with it shrinks!

I encountered Bach in these ways: 

1. When I was but a child, My dad was in the habit of playing a favorite Bach tune at bedtime: Jesu joy of Man's Desiring (an miserable metrical English replacement for the first line of the German chorale), a number in Cantata 147.  This chorale was wildly popular in Britain, and as a result, also in Sri Lanka.  Our recording was by the legendary Bach Choir of London, led by Sir Reginald Jacques, on an old 78 rpm bakelite disc, played on our (non-electric) phonograph!

The reverse side had two movements from the B minor orchestral suite: the Rondeau, and the Badinerie, which I loved greatly.

2. When I started school at Wesley College, Colombo, I heard the choir sing the selfsame chorale from BWV 147.  I resolved to sing in this fabulous choir as soon as they would let me, and when I was 12, I did. 

3. A couple of years later, I began music lessons, for exams of the Trinity Schools of Music, and my first piece was a Bach minuet.  (This piece was from the Anna Magdalena music collection—curated by Bach's second wife, many of whose entries have been recently suspected of being not by Bach, but by his contemporaries.  The three minuets have been generally considered beyond suspicion for more than a century.  But the needs of musicologists will intermittently drag all of Bach's works back under the microscope.)

4. Once my elder relatives happened to notice my interest in Bach, I was given sundry Bach music and recordings, the latter of which I played incessantly. 

5. A certain teacher at school, who had recently returned from graduate school in England, and was a Bach enthusiast, was temporarily given in charge of our school choir.  He wasted no time in inserting Bach chorales from the Christmas Oratorio into our Christmas carols.  The next term, for Prize Day, the choir prepared and sang another well-known chorale: Wachet auf, or Sleepers wake.  Soon my passion for Bach choral music was kindled!

6. My father was appointed Chaplain to one of the campuses of the University of Ceylon, and we found ourselves surrounded by Bach lovers, who were ever ready to form impromptu choruses to sing at every church celebration.  From there, it was just a short step to having to rein in my Bach mania, because not everyone was happy with a never-ending stream of Bach music all the time. 

7. When I arrived in Pittsburgh for graduate school, I discovered that American libraries had not only books, but collections of recordings, and even phonographs and headsets with which library users could sit and listed to the recordings at all hours of the day and night, until they were expected home for meals.  Furthermore, the university bookstore stocked inexpensive recordings of the Bach orchestral works ($1.98) which I bought, one on each payday!  I played these at as high a volume as I was allowed, and I presently acquired a tape recorder, with which I recoded all the Bach music onto cassettes.  Then I got a little cassette player on which I could play the cassettes, even as I was walking between classes, waiting for classes to begin, or walking home. 

8. Across the plaza from the Pitt Library, was another library: The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, which had sheet music!  I lost no time in acquiring the scores of my favorite movements, and playing them with my friends.  They were impatient with how slow I was with sight-reading; they could play anything at sight. 

Then came the Internet (maybe shouldn't capitalize the word anymore), and now Bach material was everywhere, and I'm not going to itemize from where Bach information was seeping into my brain.  Then I arrived in Williamsport, and it was the home of the John V Brown Library, which had a great collection of recordings, and also sheet music.  At this point, I foolishly assumed that I could consider myself sort of an authority on Bach.  But, in the nature of the subject, different people could consider themselves authorities on different parts of the study.  By playing organ to accompany church services for years, I found myself memorizing the Bach harmony for numerous hymns.  (Bach harmony has long been the preferred harmony, by the Church of England, for hymns not usually associated with Bach, for instance Now thank we all our God, and From all that dwell below the skies.)

Arch, on Bach's Old Style birthday anniversary