Soft Open

Today was the inaugural day of our truncated season. It was an experiment in opening, with limited tickets for two hour blocks for members of the organization. The general consensus is that we have a core group of people who buy annual memberships, and they should be rewarded for their loyalty in a year in which we weren't open at our usual time. As an added bonus, a local storyteller who has worked our events for many, many years was on the premises to entertain our visitors.

Social distancing guidelines were maintained, and masks were required. Visitors were limited to grounds passes, our buildings weren't open to the public. Besides the usual manager on duty, one of our program directors, a vice president, and two members of our development staff were on hand to gauge the number of visitors. By all accounts, things went well... I only came to make sure the place was properly locked up when everybody else left.

The highlight of the day, of course, was seeing everybody. Most of them I hadn't seen since last November, which was about two thousand years ago. Everybody is doing okay... my standard line for the past four months has been 'everything's terrible, I can't complain'. Besides coworkers, my young Chilean friend, who worked as a custodial contractor for us last year, stopped by to meet her sister, who was working as our custodian. She graduated with honors from the local high school, but it was a truncated year, with online classes and no end-of-year New York State Board of Regents examinations. She will be attending the local community college in the fall, other college options just not on the table this year. She's a bright young woman with a strong work ethic, she just happened to arrive in this country at a bad time.

It was a good day, a nice reunion tempered by a slight undercurrent of melancholy. Typically, I'd arrive and there would be a whole contingent of staff, mainly tour guides, hanging around nerding out, and there would invariably be cake and other snacks in the break room, which has now been divested of everything except for a case of bottled water in the fridge. It's a sociable bunch that works here, it's hard getting used to the social distancing.

Nine Nine Nine Tears

One of the more inane political figures of the past decade has been Herman Cain, a 2012 Republican presidential candidate whose platform and campaign slogan, which read like a fast food offer, I lampooned almost a decade ago. Well, Cain the Inane died as he lived, in a stupid and senseless manner, cut down by the 'Rona at the age of 74. Cain's death from COVID-19 was particularly ironic, in light of the lackadaisical manner in which he approached the pandemic:

I don't believe in karma, but I'm not so sure now... In a particularly ghoulish twist, as Cain was dying, his communications team was still making light of the illness which had struck down their boss:

Our government, and our media, have incinerated their credibility. So, is it any wonder that people are skeptical? #Coronavirus https://t.co/2IMVhLGbLn

— Herman Cain (@THEHermanCain) July 29, 2020

He gave his life for Trump, and to 'trigger the libs' by not wearing a mask. This is a case of history repeating as both tragedy AND farce, just the sort of 2-for-1 special old Herman Cain would have pushed as the CEO of a (by all accounts) terrible chain of fast food pizza joints. To mourn the man, I'm gonna cry 9-9-9 tears.

Herman Cain is not the only wingnut who has died of a hoax, Turning Point USA co-founder Bill Montgomery also died of COVID-19. Even as his carcass was stiffening, his organization was tweeting out dank memes to trigger the libs:

Yeah, I feel so owned right about now!

In a trifecta, the Stupidest Man in Congress has tested positive for COVID-19, having been screened just before joining the Dotard on Air Force One. He is claiming to be taking hydroxychloroquine for the 'rona. Among the drug's side effects are 'confusion, mania, hallucinations, paranoia, and psychosis', which are a normal state for Gohmert. I can't say I'd be too sorry to see the awful Gohmert croak... once again, I am tempted to start believing in karma.

On a bizarre side note, today I learned that Gohmert, like Ming the Merciless, has a sexy, rebellious daughter. This year keeps veering from tragedy to farce to cheesy sci-fi flick.

When the Dogwhistle is an Airhorn

My beloved Yonkers was, in a national news story, the subject of a desegregation lawsuit which was resolved in the 1990s. In the interest of full disclosure, I moved to Yonkers right around the time of the desegregation, and lived approximately five blocks north of the recently renovated Arthur J. Doran townhouses, named after a long-serving judge who is a fixture in the neighborhood, the sort of larger-than-life local character that one runs into in the local taverns. For a while, I was carless, so I would take the local bus to work, and I struck up a friendship with a bright, musically talented African-American girl who would take the same bus to the Saunders Trades and Technical High School. This young lady lived in the neighborhood because of the desegregation effort. Despite the fears of a lot of white Yonkers eastsiders, the neighborhood wasn't negatively affected by integration, and the property values most certainly did not plummet. In my estimation, the desegregation (which wasn't necessarily an integration) improved the neighborhood. At the same time, a maturing Irish immigrant community was moving into the area from the Bainbridge Avenue neighborhood in the Bronx and Albanian immigrants were moving up from the Pelham Parkway/Lydig Avenue neighborhood. As things stand, East Yonkers is a vibrant, diverse neighborhood, the sort of neighborhood which is a destination for people from the tristate area and overseas.

Why am I bringing this up? Via Tengrain, we have a racist horror tale told by the Occupant of the White House, the sort of horror tale which is contradicted by my lived experience:

I am happy to inform all of the people living their Suburban Lifestyle Dream that you will no longer be bothered or financially hurt by having low income housing built in your neighborhood...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 29, 2020

There is no non-racist interpretation of this statement. The Suburban Lifestyle Dream the Dotard describes probably only existed in 1950s and 1960s sitcoms, and was notably skewered by Gerry Goffin and Carole King:





Yonkers is that most urban of suburbs, a city of two-hundred thousand residents which is dwarfed by NYC, which abuts Yonkers to the south. My neighborhood is a mix of one family houses, multi-family houses (I live in a three-family house, with an immigrant from Northern Ireland and her children on the floor above me and an African American family, the husband a lawyer and the wife a nurse, on the topmost floor), and largish apartment buildings. Dropped into my neighborhood, you could picture yourself in certain neighborhoods in Queens or Brooklyn. It's the sort of neighborhood where an elderly Irish man goes to the house of the Mexican family next door to watch football, by which I mean fútbol... the sort of neighborhood where the Albanian guy working at the auto repair shop buys his breakfast at a Yemeni delicatessen. It's a Suburban Lifestyle Dream which is diametrically opposed to Trump's racist nightmare... a glorious City of Hills which beats the hell out of a Pleasant Valley.

A Pandemic More Dangerous than COVID-19

A recent video produced by Big Dead Breitbart, disparaging mask-wearing and hyping hydroxychloroquine as a COVID-19 cure, has been taken down by Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube... but not before being shared by the dumbass in the White House.

The video featured members of a group (the Republican Party hastily assembled teams of pro-Trump doctors) naming itself America’s Frontline Doctors (their website is a mere twelve days old). They seem primarily to be anti-vaccine. The group's nominal leader is a Dr Simone Gold, whose career seems pretty damn sketchy, but her mere MAGA misinformation was upstaged by a genuine psycho who believes in disease-causing demon semen and astral sex with witches. Sorry, Simone, you just weren't crazy enough for Trump's 'Murrica. Dr Immanuel was pretty much a QAnoner before QAnon was even a thing:

Dr. Stella Immanuel is a minister. A random sermon: "How long are we going to allow the gay agenda, secular humanism, Illuminati and the demonic New World Order to destroy our homes, families and the social fiber of America." 😬 https://t.co/hHd1Pt20PE https://t.co/fZwd4sChgH

— Brandy Zadrozny (@BrandyZadrozny) July 28, 2020

I'm not the only one who's wondering why this video, accompanied by a broad-spectrum social media campaign also pushing hydroxychloroquine, has been pushed by right-wing media conglomerates Breitbart and OAN. A cynical attempt to boost the drug's price before dumping a ton of it? An attempt to shift the blame for hundreds of thousands of deaths from the Trump Maladministration to a 'corrupt medical cartel' burying a 'miracle cure'? It's a handy-dandy Swiss Army knife, conspiracy-wise, a multipronged assault on Trump's enemies AND a cash grab!

After the purge of the Breitbart video from numerous social media platforms, Dr Immanuel posted an imprecatory prayer exhorting God to bring an end to Facebook:

Hello Facebook put back my profile page and videos up or your computers with start crashing till you do. You are not bigger that God. I promise you. If my page is not back up face book will be down in Jesus name.

— Stella Immanuel MD (@stella_immanuel) July 28, 2020

It's nice to know that she and I agree on one thing!

At any rate, the misinformation, indeed malinformation, pandemic is even more dangerous than the COVID-19 pandemic.

One Hundred and Fifty Thousand

The US death toll from COVID-19 has surpassed 150,000, a number I believed we'd hit by August, but not quite so soon (yeah, I realize that it's the 27th). Back in March, I predicted that a half-million Americans would die before the pandemic ran its course, but I'm now thinking that my prediction was a low-ball. So much for sunny optimism!

The crazy thing is that the initial shutdown was predicated on putting in place a broad testing regimen, which never materialized. The push to reopen things led to a failure to contain the virus, which will inevitably lead to new shutdowns. The current situation with Major League Baseball is a perfect symbol of the failed pandemic response.

At work, we will be reopening one site for limited visitation this coming Friday, admitting small groups of ticket-holding persons, keeping activities limited to outdoors, enforcing social distancing and mask rules. We tend to have responsible visitors, so I think it could work. It'll be nice seeing coworkers outside of the skeleton crew that has been holding down the fort since March, but I can't say that I am one hundred percent confident that it's a good move.

One Hundred Days

There are one hundred days until Election Day. One hundred days until we Americans get an opportunity to vote out the WORST MISTAKE EVER made by an electorate, by which I mean the contra-democratic Electoral College. A lot can happen in one hundred days, especially in this year of out-of-control pandemic and civil unrest which has prompted a federal response which sure looks like a dress rehearsal for putting a dictatorship in place. Current electoral projections show Trump taking a shellacking, but do not take into account voter suppression, a favored tactic of the Republican Party.

It's going to continue to be a long, tragic year, the one hundred days will drag out because of the COVID-19 time dilation effect. I'm resigned to the idea that things are just not going to get any better, not in an existential manner. Of course, there is a feeling of unreality here in my neck of the woods, where the pandemic seems to be under control, for the most part, and civil unrest hasn't really broken out... but there's a feeling that, just out of earshot, the country is a hell-blasted shitscape. It's this shitscape that will determine the outcome of the election, and I sincerely hope that people come to their senses, and that Little Gloves will leave the White House willingly.

One hundred days... I don't even know if suspense is what I feel, and I'm comfortable enough not to feel dread personally (I'm a cishet white guy, even as a Trump-hater, I'll be among the last to feel any oppression). There's an emotion I'm feeling, but it would require a multisyllabic German name to adequately express. I have one hundred days to figure out what that name might be.

Tenacious, Delicious

Life, as they say, will find a way, and no organisms are quite as adept in finding their way as the various plants we call weeds. For instance, here is a lamb's quarters (Chenopodium album) plant growing out of a thin layer of dirt on top of our parking lot at work:

The plant is in the same genus as quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa), and I am always bemused at the idea that suburban yuppies will spray glycosphate weed killer on it while buying quinoa at Whole Foods. For the record, I love quinoa, but hate weedkillers. The green leaves of the plant are comparable to spinach in flavor, and are a big component of my summer foraging regimen. The small seeds are dead ringers for quinoa seeds, though black in color, and, ground into a flour, were a favorite campaign food for Napoleon. I tend to favor the greens, because they are available long term, while the seeds are ephemeral and a pain to harvest.

Looking at that picture of the plant growing in a thin layer of soil, I have to wonder why this particular plant, having been eaten in historical times, never became a part of mainstream agriculture. Did we just happen to pick the wrong vegetables?