There's a Moon in the Sky, It's Called the Moon, and It Is Part of Mars

The stupid never ceases, with the current cri du cul being Vulgarmort's stupid tweet about the Moon:

For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 7, 2019

Weird, we never learned that in astronomy class! The most charitable interpretation of this tweet would be that a Moon mission would be part of a broader Mars mission, but besides the incoherence of the tweet, such an interpretation would assume that going to the Moon is, in fact, a place where NASA would be going. At any rate, the whole thing is mind-bogglingly stupid.

The post title is taken from a song from the B-52's first album. Poking around the t00bz, I found a great live version of the song from 1985
, and as an added bonus, Tina Weymouth and Chris Frantz of Talking Heads (who are also the Tom Tom Club) are playing bass and drums respectively.

Maybe if someone told Trump he could ride in a gold meteorite, we could get his ass out of the White House.

Complications of Brain Salad Surgery?

It's another bummer in a year of bummers... famed Louisiana musician Dr John, nee Malcolm John Rebennack, has died. The news reports that he died of a heart attack, but I suspect that he succumbed to complications of brain salad surgery.

Dr John was one of the pillars of the New Orleans music scene, working as a session musician with artists across the color-divide since the 1950s (he played with Professor Longhair as a teenager).

I am a fan of the various musical traditions of Louisiana, a point I belabor on Mardi Gras, and I have posted Dr John's version of the standard Iko Iko, a song I posted a 'dissection' of a few years back.

My favorite song by Dr John is the otherworldly, creepy even, I Walk on Guilded Splinters, the tour-de-force of his psychedelic voodoo-inspired album Gris-Gris. Just try to listen to this song without feeling a sligh tingle up your spine.

Malcolm John Rebennack was a one-of-a-kind performer, a flamboyant character from a flamboyant city who took the mélange of cultures from that storied burgh, tripped out, and unleashed the resulting idiosyncratic style on an unsuspecting listening public... maybe he was the one performing brain salad surgery on the rest of us.

Sweetums, 2019 US Tour

My older brother, Sweetums, is coming on a whirlwind US tour because it's a college reunion year. He flies into JFK airport, and we are planning on having dinner with several family members before I drive him down to the Princeton, New Jersey area so he can meet up with some old college buddies and they can road-trip to the reunion. What, you thought he went to Princeton? Hey, now, Sweetums is elite, he's not an elitist. While the prospect of driving on the New Jersey Turnpike isn't exactly a pleasant one, I can't think of anyone I'd rather be stuck in traffic with than il fratello maggiore mio. It'll be nice that he's combining a family reunion with his college reunion.

Floofy, yet Dangerous

I haven't written a Ginger post in a while, so I figured I'd post a comical picture of my divalicious co-worker acting like a floofy, goofy girl. Here's my beloved kitteh exposing her soft white underbelly:

A dog person would interpret this as a desire for a belly rub, but cats are more ambiguous than dogs and that soft, fluffy expanse of fur is surrounded by four sets of switchblades. In this particular case, it's probably a sign of Ginger's trust, but I know her well enough so that I stick to the safe spots when I pet her.

The Ants in France Live Mainly on the Plants

I had a conversation with one of our site visitors yesterday about flowers... I mentioned that she had missed the blooming of the lilacs by a couple of weeks, and she wistfully mused, "I wish the flowers could last all year long." I noted that I loved the sense of succession, the changing of the various botanical sensations. I love the daffodils and crocuses in late March and throughout April, as well as the wild redbud blossoms. They give way to the cherry blossoms, wisteria, and lilac. Now, it's the locust blossoms and the showy peony flowers:

Is that color not outrageous? Of course, with peonies, you get the ants, which are attracted to the nectaries the buds feature much like the trumpet vine does. The vampire hell ants are long extinct, and the current ants tend to prefer heavenly food sources.

The Breakfast Club

I typically work a graveyard shift on Saturday and Sunday, and the last big task of the day is making sure that the place is open for business. I run around unlocking the parking lot gates and await the arrival of the day shift. The cleaning contractors typically arrive around 8AM, and the first of my co-workers arrives around 8:30.

Last week, the Colombia-born cleaning lady brought be a roll from a Colombian bakery, a slightly sweet roll with a slightly coarse crumb... the perfect accompaniment to a cup of the country's famous coffee. She then joked that her male counterpart, who was born and raised in Peru, would bring in some Peruvian bread. I jokingly asked her, "O, quiere decir una papa?", which translates to "Oh, do you mean a potato?" This had her doubled over in laughter, but there's a grain tuber of truth in this, as there is in every successful joke.

This morning, I was the recipient of not one, but two, light and airy rolls from a Peruvian bakery, accompanied by a Peruvian tamal, which differed from Mexican tamales by being wrapped in a banana leaf instead of a leaf from a cornstalk:

This tamal reminded me a lot of the pasteles that my Puerto Rican friends make for Christmas, with maize substituted for the traditional Caribbean blend of yuca and plantain:

It even had the fleeting briny bite of a small green olive placed in the dough to give a hint of seasoning.

The bar has been raised for Sunday breakfast. I figure that, since I have to work overnight, I am at a disadvantage unless I cook something myself. I have an electric burner in the house, purchased when my sister-in-law cooked a nabemono for Christmas dinner one year... now I have to figure out what I can make for what is shaping up to be a Sunday breakfast club.

This Being June 1st

June first is my sister's birthday, and when we were young, it signaled the beginning of that awkward period when my sister and I, Irish twins, were the same age... it was a time when we were impossible to be around, and all of the family pretty much resigned themselves to us being jerks. Once my birthday rolled around, this particular phase would pass, never to be spoken of until the next year.

We've both mellowed considerably since those days of being periodic pains-in-the-ass, and the family doesn't have to deal with this unpleasantness anymore. We both share the family penchant for nerdery, but she's snarkier than I could ever hope to be, so I guess I benefited more from this mellowing. At any rate, I'll be conveying my best wishes to her when things get quiet on the job, and I'll even keep a civil tongue when I'm doing so.

Happy birthday, super-sarcastic sis!