Happy Ides of March!

Them Romans and their tyrants, huh. 

Huckleberry Sanders

Sarah Huckster Sanders, our current governor, spent yesterday bragging about how she is going to force every public university and public school in Arkansas to install a Turning Point USA club. For the students.

(Student clubs are usually asked for, organized and run by students. This, clearly, will be something else -- enforced, organized, and run by the state. You know. Like Hitler Youth.)

In case you forgot what Turning Point USA is, it's a giant grift formerly run by Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated by a high powered rifle just at the very moment he was claiming gun violence was not a problem, and if it was a problem, it was only because a couple of trans people had shot people.

Turning Point USA exists to make money for those who are running it, to support Trump, and to hurt education. To be clear, they want to turn education into indoctrination for the MAGA point of view, with all its bigotry and hatred. 

They claim to be Christian, but it's a specific kind of Christianity: one that hates the poor, despises the immigrant, and wants to erase from existence anyone who isn't pretty much exactly what Kirk was: a podgy, smug, reactionary white cis guy. (Or "white male man," as Erica Kirk phrased it yesterday.)

Charlie Kirk, the grifter, is now dead. So now his wife, Erica, has abandoned her two children, ages four and two, to continue the grift. Sarah Huckster Sanders, who is grift all the way down herself, has happily joined hands with Erica.

After Trump is gone, all these losers will fall back into oblivion, their natural state.

Bagels in Fayetteville

When I first came to Arkansas, back in the previous century, you could not get bagels here at all, not even the terrible supermarket kind. Later, we could get Lender's at the Walmart. When I returned to Arkansas, in 2002, even Fort Smith had (fairly terrible) packaged bagels. 

When we moved to Fayetteville in 2024, there was an Einstein Bagels. They're acceptable bagels, but still not great.

Last week Benny's Bagels (which is apparently a Dallas chain) opened here. It has been non-stopped packed ever since. These are real bagels, y'all. Dr Skull even approved of them, and he is as judgy as any Jew who grew up running a bakery could be.

So far it's so busy all the time that it's hard to get in there and it sells out regularly, but I'm assuming eventually it will calm down and we will have somewhere to go to get bagels when I don't feel like investing the hours it takes to make them at home.

Photo by Randi Mendolia

Photo source

Higher Prices Brought to You by an Illegal War

Trump ran on no wars, lower prices, and hurting trans people and immigrants.

Since he's delivered on the last two, I suppose conservatives are willing to give him a pass on the first two.

Oh, and he's also destroying the environment. Conservatives love destroying the environment.

What a joke this country has become.

Adventures in Cooking

Dr Skull used to do most of the cooking around here, which was how I liked it. But his spinal issues have left him with less than stellar use of his hands, and also he cannot stand for very long. This means cooking has devolved on me.

I dislike cooking. Well, let me revise that. I like to cook occasionally, but this cooking dinner ever single day is for the fucking birds. Also, sometimes he wants lunch! 

Also, I have discovered that I can only cook about three things that Dr Skull will eat. (My staple, pasta in cream sauce, he will not touch. Or beans and rice, which is the other thing I am truly suited to cooking. He also hates curry.)

Here is what I am cooking these days:

(1) Tuna casserole

(2) Bagels (which we eat with lox and cream cheese and -- Dr Skull -- a slice of red onion)

(3) Roast chicken and asparagus

(4) Something with the leftover chicken. Like chicken pie, or chicken and noodles

(5) Takeout

I am asking you for suggestions for something I could cook which isn't pasta or beans. Help.

Shamus Makes it to One Year Old

The dog is a year old today. 

He still likes nothing better than to sit on my lap.

Sadly, the laptop is usually there

Curse My Life

These days, we only get winter in Arkansas from late November to the first of March. Highs in the high 70s this week, and also rain. So we can't even open the windows, unless we want to live in a swamp of mold. Have to use air conditioning.

Brought to you by Global Warming is just a Leftist scam.

Trump's New War

Apparently claiming to end (fictional) wars wasn't getting him enough attention.

I guess he thinks the American people will support him if he kills enough brown people. That's the plan. That's the only item on his agenda.

What a disgrace.

Here Comes Summer

Highs in the 70s this week. Ugh.

I'm going to miss these frosty mornings. The dog loves them too. He zooms wildly around the dog park, chasing birds and squirrels. Also leaping in the pond, which I do not love as much.

What I'm (NOT) Reading

I've hit a run of mediocre books. Not actively bad -- I kind of like really bad books, because it can be fascinating to watch them trainwreck. 

These are just books that could have worked if the writer had done this or that, but instead they decided to maunder on about some point or plot turn that doesn't matter, or describe something incoherently.

It's kind of depressing. I really need a good book to read. Where is the universe hiding them?

Please Don't

AI is now writing the replies for emails I get on Gmail.

I can write my own fucking emails, guys. C'mon.

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RIP Junti 2013-2026

We had to put my little cat down. The vet told me it was a miracle she had lasted this long, with the kidney numbers they were seeing. I know they said when I took her in the first time that she could have as little as a week, but I don't think I heard that.

She was doing really well for several days -- eating and playing like her old self -- and then yesterday she just crashed. Last night she cried for about an hour, until I finally got her to go to sleep (cuddled in my arms). After that she was lethargic and almost motionless, all bone under her beautiful coat. When we reached the vet, she only weighed 3 and a half pounds.

We got her when she was a fluffball of a kitten, just seven weeks old. She was meant to be a companion to Jasper, our first cat, who hated her on sight. (Jasper was a year old then.) Eventually they got to like each other enough that they would often sleep cuddled together, though for years they had giant hissing fights. When both of them were younger, they would also play together sometimes, chasing each other around the house and leaping up and down on things. 

They loved the bookshelves in our first house, which had a really high place at the top for them to sleep on, like panthers.

Junti on the High Place

Junti was a beautiful Siamese mix, sable brown with black paws and a face, and the clearest, meanest blue eyes imaginable. Dr. Skull was really her favorite, but sometimes she would deign to sleep on my lap, if the days were cold enough.

She was a good cat. I'm glad she didn't suffer long.

Junti on my Lap

Junti Contemplating the Green Space

On Having Enough

I've inherited my father's money about two years ago now. I've been (moderately) wealthy for two years, in other words.

I still think like someone who is lower-middle class, which was how I was raised, and how I lived for most of my life. 

Lower-middle class: there was always enough food, even though it wasn't great food, and we always had clothing, even if it was terrible clothing. Our vacations were spent visiting my parents' relatives in Indiana, or driving to Florida to spend a day at the beach. (This was about what we did for my kid -- our vacations were day-trips to state parks; or an overnight trip to Tulsa, where we would visit the zoo; or a week at my parents' house in New Orleans.)

There was never money for extras like field trips or meals in restaurants or books. I remember a terrible fight my parents had because my mother subscribed to a children's book club which delivered books once a month. Those books were how I read Tom Sawyer and Little Men and Aesop's Fables. 

And when I got out on my own, I almost at once fell into serious debt due to thyroid cancer, so even when both Dr Skull and I were earning pretty good money (from sixty to eighty thousand a year total), we were still living paycheck to paycheck. Money was always a constant worry. When the car broke down, which it frequently did, because it was a crap car, it was always a disaster.

So it's only been in the last two years that I've had enough money. This is such a change, I can't even tell you. We can eat in restaurants. We have a good car. We can afford good health insurance. When I needed another pair of shoes, I just bought them. (I wore a pair of shoes that was cracked across one sole for about a year, because there was never any money for a new pair.) I got new glasses when I needed them, like right then, not waiting and squinting for months. 

I have a wealth manager.

I do still think like someone who doesn't have money. The kid has to keep reminding me, when I hesitate to buy something at the grocery (have you seen the price of chicken lately?), that I can afford to buy food. (When the kid was little, we only bought fresh fruit in the summer, which was when I had extra money from summer teaching.)

It may be true that money doesn't buy happiness, but life without the constant worry and fear about money is certainly making me happier.

What's the End Game?

So MAGA arranged, by voting for an extremely corrupt and dangerous president, to overturn Roe v. Wade. Obviously that was not their end game -- despite what the rubes believe, conservatives aren't at all interested in 'protecting babies.' During the 50s and 60s they used racism to motivate their base; during the 70s and 80s they used the existence of gay people. Starting in the 90s they used abortion, which previous to then not many people had cared about.

Once they overturned Roe v Wade they had to find a new target, something new for their base to get outraged about. They've tried various things -- trans people and immigrants, currently, pedophilia and voter fraud formerly -- but sadly these aren't really getting the base enraged enough to actually, you know, do anything like vote, probably because even MAGAts know most of the claims being made by the Right are silly lies.

Since the attacks on our civil rights and liberties does enrage leftists enough to actually vote, you see the problem, from their point of view.

What to do about this? It's simple, for a simple sort of mind like we see in most conservatives these days. If certain groups of people vote 'wrong,' keep those groups of people from voting.

Not a new tactic, I know. It's the same one that was used in the South from about 1890 to 1965, and in various places and ways since about 2000. Keep the 'wrong' people out of the voting booth, America Becomes Great Again. Or White again, at least.

The latest idea, which I'm seeing bruited about more and more from those on the Right, is to remove the right to vote from women and from anyone who isn't 'head of a household,' which is to say certain married men with children.

For people who scoff at this, the notion that Roe v Wade could be overturned was equally laughable twenty years ago. 

Women have only had the right to vote in America since 1920. Brown and black people didn't really get the right to vote until the Civil Rights act in most places in America. Universal suffrage is a really, really new concept.

If you don't think conservatives can strip away that right, look at all the other rights they've erased over the past year, never mind that last decade.

P.S. They're also coming after contraception, obviously. Keeping people bound down with more children than they can support or educate (this is why conservatives are attacking public schools), especially if several of those children are chronically ill (this is why they're opposed to vaccines), they won't have time or money or energy to kick up a fuss. Plus all those uneducated, malnourished, sickly people will make excellent workers: desperate enough to work for low wages, in such terrible health that they will die in their fifties or sixties, well before society needs to worry about paying retirement.