Shana Tova, People! Be Careful!

Here's wishing a happy new year to my Jewish readers. I have always been lucky to have Jewish friends and neighbors, and we would often double up on holidays- we would celebrate Hanukkah with them, they would come over for Christmas Eve. I am still flabbergasted by anti-semitism in the US... this was one country where Jewish people, their religious freedom protected by the Constitution, could thrive, and thrive they have. The arts and sciences would not be what they are without the contributions of Jewish people. Personally, my first pair of glasses was outfitted by a Jewish optometrist, so MY academic potential wouldn't have been the same without this 'Jewish plot'.

I wish I could wish an unqualified happy new year to my Jewish friends, but nothing is straightforward these days. Anti-semitism is on the rise here in the 'States, from attacks on Orthodox Jews in NYC to synagogue shootings country-wide. Conspiracy theories abound, but they all seem to be rehashes of the old 'Protocols' style blood libel. Nothing is untainted by the current awfulness... I can post a picture of birds one day, but bird populations are plummeting. Cool bug pics are nice, but insect populations are declining. Those cute baby turtles I posted about will face the danger of plastic ingestion. Nothing is 100% happy, there's always a downside in this stupid, cruel era. I'd like to think that the bulk of the population is supportive of our Jewish neighbors, but there is a sinister undercurrent which the current administration has emboldened to go public. They aren't the norm, I tell myself, the decent people will defeat them, I hope.

Happy new year... but be careful.

Big Bug Summer Is Over, How About Big Bug Fall?

This summer was a banner summer for big bugs, from beetles to katydids. The big bug trend is continuing into the Fall, to my great delight. A couple of days ago, I saw one of the exemplars of North America's 'charismatic minifauna', a finger long woolybear caterpillar, the larval form of the moth Pyrrharctia isabella:

According to folklore, the wide brown band between the black anterior and posterior bands is supposed to presage a mild winter. Mild or not, these caterpillars are equipped with chemicals which protect them from cell damage so they can freeze solid throughout the winter.

It's been very warm lately, shorts weather is the rule, but this fuzzy caterpillar is a sure reminder that cooler weather is soon to come. What better reminder to get your sweaters out of storage is there than a fuzzy little buddy?

An Uplifting Subject

This week and next week will probably be the busiest ones on the job this year- my department is understaffed and it's the busy season at work. Therefore, I figured I'd break from the political nonsense and post about a subject that is near and dear to my heart... caffeine. My love affair with, by which I mean addiction to, coffee started when I was in high school, when my first job was working in the local delicatessen- stocking the soda and beer coolers, washing pots and pans, sweeping and mopping up at the end of the day, even waiting on customers (though when I started, I was too young to run the slicers). During the lull after the lunch rush and before the end-of-day mop-up, there'd be a time when all of the counters were wiped down, and there would be a slow trickle of customers coming in- some of the local landscaping crews, mainly Mexican guys whose English was largely limited to 'king-sized Budweiser!', would come in for a couple of post-shift tallboys (I loved these guys, and they were instrumental in my maintaining the Spanish I was learning in school, because they encouraged me to practice it by joking around with them). In these quiet hours, the best way to pass the time was to have a cup of coffee- the aroma from the big coffee percolators was enough to tempt even the most bitterness-shy palate. Like most coffee n00bs, I started drinking the stuff with a lot of milk and a fair amount of sugar, until I rather quickly eliminated the sugar (appropriate for iced coffee, but I don't like it in hot coffee) and cut down on the milk. I was hooked.

Now, I drink the stuff religiously, and I love coffee paraphernalia like French presses, Italian Moka pots, and Vietnamese phin filters... all beside the old reliable 8 cup drip coffee maker so beloved of Americans. While I also drink tea and yerba mate, there's no real substitute for a good old 'cuppa Joe'. It's what makes the graveyard shift possible.

So, why am I waxing rhapsodic about coffee? BBC has a nice documentary about the stuff, delving into coffee's origin as a commodity, exploring the growth and harvesting of coffee in Brazil, the roasting of coffee by an Italian coffee maestro, and the growth of coffee culture in China, the largest expanding market for the stuff. It's an informative twenty-two minutes, and I found it particularly beautiful, being a caffiend. Oddly enough, I'm working at a site which is dominated by tea drinkers, so the coffee culture is pretty lackluster. I have a Lipton teabag steeping overlong in my site-mug, destined to be diluted into iced tea, but the night is long, I have to finish the night at another site, and my beloved java will be waiting for me.

Clueless Leader

It's a strange world we live in, a world in which a sports website features better opinion pieces than the 'paper of record', but here we are... David Roth of Deadspin wrote a post which echoes a lot of what I've said about Vulgarmort. This particular paragraph describes the Commander-in-Cheese perfectly:


The more worrying part of all this is that there is fundamentally nothing to know about most of what he talks about. Every rank thought-chunk that clears his blowhole is either some legacy beef or bigotry or something Trump learns from his television shows, which feed him attenuated suspicions, a list of ominous what-abouts that hint at some sort of outcome but stop well short of it, and a bunch of leading questions that, by design, cannot be answered. All of this is supposed to shore up a worldview and generate specific political outcomes, but mostly it aims to create a mood—a coiled and claustrophobic sense of being under siege, by someone—more than it does to answer any of the questions it hints at. It doesn’t really add up to anything, but also it can’t; the game is to accumulate.


This is a guy who can never forget a slight, never let go of a grudge. He is still pursuing a quarter-century feud with Rosie O'Donnell, he still smarts from the now-defunct Spy magazine's 1980's caricature of him as a 'short-fingered vulgarian'. He is the perpetual victim, the spoiler child who believes that every time he doesn't get his way is an attack. He is now, for the first time in his life, facing the prospect of being held accountable for his actions. He isn't up against a small contractor who he stiffed, he can't run out the litigation clock by forcing his opponent to run up legal fees. Trump is pure Id, the living embodiment of all seven deadly sins. Things could take a turn for the (more) dangerous when this cornered beast decides to strike out, or stroke out. Hopefully, he'll be holding a grudge against Nancy Pelosi a quarter-century from now, while rotting in a cell in Leavenworth.

Quick Cute Turtle Post

I have a whole bunch of contractors onsite, preparing for one of our Fall fundraisers, so I'm just going to put up a quick post. Here's a follow-up to the tiny turtle post from this past weekend. First off, here's the Turtle Crossing sign put up by the Manager on Duty and self-appointed Turtle Tiger Mom:

She prepared a makeshift terrarium out of a plastic interoffice mail bin, complete with water and some plants, and collected about another half-dozen baby turtles to be transported away from the footpath. When I arrived, I moved them to locations closer to the pond and the stream.

I also took a picture of the underside of one of the turtles, in order to show how small the plastron of Chelydra serpentina is compared to overall body size:

This lack of armor is offset by the turtle's powerful bite and aggressive approach to defense. It also allows for a lot of maneuverability in forelimbs and neck... these turtles can readily right themselves if turned on their backs, using that long, pythonesque neck. If you look closely, there's a round mark in the center of the plastron where the yolk sac was attached in ovo. In all, I'd say that all of us accounted for about twenty-six baby turtles in all, over the course of two days. They are on their own now, but we got them through that initial, awkward 'please don't tread on me' stage.

Exactly the Wrong Strategy

It's from Politico, so it should be taken with the proverbial grain of salt, but some Democrats seem to want to limit impeachment inquiries to the current scandal involving Trump's interactions with the Ukrainian president. I think that is a huge mistake- any impeachment hearings should involve a broad spectrum investigation of multiple scandals, perhaps with a focus of violations of the emoluments clause and his self-dealing, which is looting the treasury. By playing up these scandals, rather than focusing the Ukraine kerfuffle, the Democrats can point out that Republicans are the party of neither strict Constitutionalism nor fiscally responsibility.

This is a brawl, and the Democrats need to treat it as such- they need to hit Trump again and again, to hit him with everything they've got until he's beaten... irrevocably. If they screw up impeachment efforts, they will enrage their own base while emboldening Trump's base. The Republicans didn't waffle when it came to investigating Hillary Clinton for the Benghazi attacks, they kept dragging her in front of Congress again and again. Decades earlier, they kept investigation Bill Clinton until they found something that would stick, if you'll pardon the expression.

The Democrats need to walk and chew gum at the same time, there are mountains of evidence against Trump, evidence of corruption so rampant that it's ubiquitous... and all of it should be investigated. By limiting their investigation to one aspect of this maladministration, they are only hurting themselves... tragically, this seems to be what the Democrats in Congress seem to do best.

So, It Begins

It looks like the House Democrats have begun an impeachment inquiry. It seems as if the Ukraine scandal was the final straw in a farrago of crimes on the part of the maladministration.

I have vacillated on the impeachment issue- while I have long felt that Trump should be impeached, my feelings about the procedure have been strategic... impeachment should be held off until it can cause maximum damage to Trump in the 2020 presidential election. The Republican Senate will not vote to convict Trump, therefore, any trial should be avoided so he cannot claim to have been exonerated. Time the impeachment so that it throws him off his game- he has a fragile ego and a short temper, so keep him scared and angry. The problem is that every day he is in office, he is doing untold damage to the nation, so delay is dangerous. I don't envy the House Democrats, they are walking on a knife edge politically.

I'm not sure that the timing is optimal for the proceedings to begin, but they are necessary. Annoyingly, I've been dealing with work-related issues all day, so I haven't been able to concentrate on the news, but this process will unfold over the course of months. It has to, having the trial occurring too early might screw the whole thing up.