Since I don't engage in "social media" anymore, apart from blogging, I'm not terribly up to date on what climate experts are thinking and writing about. I get some email newsletters, and follow the news, but I do feel a little out of touch.

Nevertheless, I'm frustrated by things like this piece in the Miami Herald, that contains utterances like this:

<blockquote>“What we are seeing lately is very consistent with what we would expect to see in a warmer world,” said Jayantha Obeysekera, head of Florida International University’s Sea Level Solutions Center. “This is a sign of things to come.”</blockquote>

And...

<blockquote>“Climate change did not cause this event,” he said. “Let’s be clear, it did not trigger what happened yesterday, however, the severity of the event got enhanced by climate change.”</blockquote>

No, "let's be clear," the climate has changed, is changing and will continue to change until such time as we stop altering the earth's atmospheric composition and the system approaches a new equilibrium state, which may not happen for hundreds or thousands of years.

Climate is:

The meteorological conditions, including temperature, precipitation, and wind, that characteristically prevail in a particular region.

The key words there are "characteristically prevail."

As of some time ago, those words became meaningless because the climate system, which establishes those prevailing characteristics, departed from its own "prevailing characteristics," chiefly the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere.

The climate we are currently experiencing has never existed before in this planet's history.

Yes, there have been periods with similar amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere. But not with the present and recent past polar ice sheets, the locations of the tropical rain forests, the ocean current systems, and certainly not with the human generated land characteristics.

What happened in south Florida last week is not a "sign of things to come," it is a "prevailing characteristic" of the present, which is one of period of transience. We do not currently have the luxury or advantage of a stable climate system. We have destroyed that for ourselves and we're not getting it back in the lifetime of anyone living today.

It is undergoing a transient, driven chiefly by CO2, but also by the heat that has already been absorbed by the oceans, the changing polar ice coverage in the arctic, and other changes that are ongoing, which include the slowing and possible collapse of the AMOC.

It's meaningless to say, "Climate change did not cause this event."

"This event" occurred in a changed climate. There is no other context to consider.

Climate does not "cause" the weather. "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get." But weather is caused by the conditions that establish what the climate is, and those conditions have changed, are changing, and have caused the weather we experience to change.

This is not a "sign of things to come," this is our present reality and it is only going to get worse from now on. It is not going to stop changing, until we stop dumping CO2 into the atmosphere and then we have to wait centuries until it achieves a new equilibrium state.

Maybe less time if we can actively remove CO2 from the atmosphere at a rate that makes a difference.

Yes, as the article mentions, it's possible that Florida may actually become drier in our changing climate, while also still experiencing rainfall events that exceed all of our present stormwater infrastructure capacities.

"Climate change" is what is happening right now. It's a reality. All of our weather is occurring in a climate system that is undergoing a rapid, dynamic and possibly non-linear transition, a dramatic change.

Everything we have built, all of our infrastructure, our economies, our transportation systems, our agriculture was constructed in and for a climate that no longer exists.

It is useless, stupid and futile to think about whether or not a particular extreme weather event was "caused" by climate change. It's a distraction. We no longer have a stable climate, the "prevailing characteristics" no longer prevail, and we are in a world of hurt and the sooner we figure that out, the better.

I'm not optimistic.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:10 Sunday, 16 June 2024

This is a video of the blog post I mentioned last week.

Stick around to about the 12:40 mark for maybe some good news?

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:02 Friday, 14 June 2024

I hope you can read this article in the Miami Herald. Might be behind a paywall. It's a good look at what reality is like today in Florida.

One homeowner who has now been flooded three times said he is selling his home and moving. Another guy who's been flooded twice declared that he wasn't going to "give up paradise for a little bad weather."

It's insanity.

Part of my struggle with the cognitive dissonance that is the normal state of mind in Florida is due to my career in the navy.

When you're out at sea and there's a catastrophic event, there's no place to run. You fight to save the ship. The navy learned a lot from accidental fires and disasters, as well as combat or near-combat actions (STARK) and made sure it trained and equipped sailors to save the ship.

We would hold "mass conflagration" drills. These were all hands efforts. The entire ship would go to general quarters to maximize the watertight integrity of the ship, bring all of its firefighting capabilities to their maximum state of readiness. Fully man all the repair lockers, get people out of their racks and into their spaces where they were alert and informed and ready to take action when directed to.

There is a fire aboard spaceship earth and it has reached the life support system, and the officers on the bridge are debating what the best liberty port will be.

You can't blame Republicans for the catastrophe we're facing. It's been a couple of centuries in the making and we've all played a role in causing it.

But you can blame Republicans for our failure to do ANYTHING about it.

We just passed a law to delete the words "climate change" from the state's statutes.

It's madness. MADNESS!

This wasn't a named storm. This was just weather. Ordinary weather. You can't call it a "1000 year event," when it happens two years in a row! (And please, no lectures about "that's not how statistics work." Go learn physics and meteorology and then come talk to me.)

If we have one major hurricane strike Florida this year, we will have an unprecedented, catastrophic insurance crisis in this state.

The "reforms" the legislature enacted chiefly made it harder to sue insurance companies, and made it easier for them to deny claims. And they will still lose money and leave the state, and their clients and customers will not be made whole and will not be able to sue to be made whole. Blue tarps and property values in the toilet. Tax base collapsing. Let's see DeSantis reject federal money then.

He'll be begging for it.

This issue has been well known and well understood for decades. Florida has been exclusively governed by the Republican party for more than a generation, and they have done nothing to prepare this state for what has been foreseeable, predicted and now experienced.

It's insanity. Stupidity.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:34 Friday, 14 June 2024

This is alarming, but then everything is alarming these days so...

Toward the end, he notes that we may have already passed the tipping point. We won't know until we have a few more decades of observations showing consistent slowing. Here's the PDF.

Florida Republicans don't care. Depending on the speed of the effects, they may not live long enough to regret it. Their grandchildren will, though.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:07 Thursday, 13 June 2024

Sunrise looked promising but I wanted to get my bike ride in before I put the drone up. The best clouds had drifted away by the time I got home and got it launched, but it still wasn't bad.

I took a look down into the swamp and it's pretty dry, maybe drier than I've ever seen it. Net, we're above average in total rainfall in the preceding 12 months, but May was about 30% below average. (We're in St Johns County.)

Meanwhile, south Florida is flooding.

I've been watching Dark Matter on Apple TV+ and I'm ambivalent about it. It's like Quantum Leap in some ways, but the latest episode makes me think it's a remake of The Wizard of Oz, with Amanda as Gwendolyn and the tip that, "There's no place like home." The only thing missing was a pair of ruby slippers (which I saw at the Smithsonian a couple of weeks ago).

I've been playing Quartiles in Apple News+ Puzzles. I guess it's Apple's version of Wordle. I find it pretty entertaining. I seldom get all the words, but I get all the "quartiles" and made "expert" on every game I've played since late last May. I don't understand the "streak" thing on the Scoreboard. My "Current Streak" is 1 day, but my "Expert Rate" is 100% and my "Longest Streak" is 7 days, and I've played every day since I started. Makes no sense to me.

The chainsaw arrived yesterday, and it was really used. They stuck a new chain in the box, but I'm sending it back. I'd rather buy a new one than a scratched=up, oil-soaked used one with a well-thumbed, oily user manual for only a 12% discount. If it'd been discounted 35%, I'd say it was a fair deal. But the previous owner did some serious wood cutting and then returned it. Cheapskate. I didn't even stick a battery in it.

Anyway, the beat goes on...

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:39 Thursday, 13 June 2024

It's a good thing that the generation-long (mis)governing Republican legislature and Ron DeSantis have scrubbed the words "climate change" from the state's statutes! Otherwise, we'd be totally unprepared for stuff like this... (Turn down the volume, don't need the "dramatic" soundtrack.)

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 16:04 Wednesday, 12 June 2024

I've just bought the Kindle version of the book. This is a lengthy conversation, but it's fascinating and you can watch it at 1.25x speed (I did 1.5x, but it's a bit uncomfortable at that speed). This conversation is very much of a piece with "the limits to growth," without ever mentioning "the limits to growth."

Worth a watch.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 13:54 Wednesday, 12 June 2024

Rented this last night and thoroughly enjoyed it. Very funny story layered over tragedy and injustice.

A tonic for what ails ya.

Recommended.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:01 Wednesday, 12 June 2024

I installed the beta yesterday on my 13" M1 MacBook Pro. Rather unremarkable, for the most part. Apparently, all the whizzy stuff isn't ready yet. Frankly, I'm pretty happy with "unremarkable," as long as they're fixing things rather than adding new, broken things and breaking things that used to work in the process.

Maybe it's old age, but a new version of MacOS isn't the exciting thing it once was.

I also installed iOS 18 on my 6" iPad (6th gen). Changes are more evident there, mainly in Photos where the new "organization" mode is present. Meh. I don't perceive any value added. Maybe I'm missing something.

It re-indexed the Photos library. At first I couldn't search for something like "20mm" (as a focal length). This morning I can.

Didn't notice anything different in the editing tools.

The handwriting adjustment feature seems present in Notes, but I haven't tried it yet.

Calculator has the notebook feature in both OSes. I hadn't noticed the RPN feature before, so I don't know how long it's been present. Kinda cool if you like RPN.

I was planning to get a new phone this year, undecided on a 15 or a 16, but I guess it'll be a 16. I think the 14" M3 MBP is relatively safe for the foreseeable future. I'm glad I got the 24GB model if all this AI stuff takes a lot of RAM. Even then, it's probably not enough. I'll have to play with it and see how relevant it is to what I do these days, which isn't much, before I decide if the 27" 2019 iMac is no longer relevant. It'll be five years old next month. I'd gotten 7 years out of my 2012 13" MBP Retina, which was my main machine for all that time. At the time, it was the lack of RAM that made it obsolete. 8GB just wasn't enough anymore. The iMac was an enormous improvement, but two years later they came out with the M1 processor.

World's on fire. People are dying from the heat in India. Windshields and radomes of passenger jets are getting smashed by extreme hail. Steve Bannon is threatening former FBI directors.

And I'm worried about buying a new computer so soon.

The cognitive dissonance! It burns!

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:34 Wednesday, 12 June 2024

One of the things I enjoy about personal blogs are the stories of people wrestling with various aspects of our technologically mediated existence. And one that resonates most frequently of late is Jack Baty's.

I starred this post in NetNewsWire so I could come back to it and blog about it one day. I have the exact same problem when it comes to handwriting. I'm accustomed to "thinking" at the speed that I can type, and when I try to write in longhand, I find myself starting words without finishing the intervening ones. This was brought home to me when I was sending photo cards to my mom every day, and writing little notes in them. I had to force myself to try and slow down. My handwriting improved, but there was still this angst that the whole process was taking too long.

And I make similar mistakes when doing other things. I'll decide I want to ride my bike, but discover I need to put air in the tires. I want to get out on the road now before the sun gets too high, or traffic gets worse, but now I have to put air in the tires! Rather than focusing on the small, simple steps to get the pump out and connected to the valve stem, I'm thinking about why air constantly leaks out of tires, why the valve stem is never at the bottom of the wheel, hurrying, fumbling and tipping the bike over.

And the "still small voice" nags at me to slow down! "Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast."

So I bought a Makita inflator. Why meditate when you can spend money?

I'm a failure.

The notes thing kind of prompted this post. I've pretty much abandoned the idea of "taking notes." I mean, I write stuff down that I don't want to forget, or I write blog posts, but I'm frustrated by the whole concept of PKM now.

I suspect that this AI facility may be somewhat useful, or helpful in surfacing information I've saved. But I'm unpersuaded or uninspired by the concept of "information gardening."

"Garden" gardening makes sense. You're outside, in some vestige of "nature," nurturing something, a living thing that will grow and serve some purpose, be it ornamentation, or providing food for pollinators, or food for people. You're working with the plant.

I used to be enamored with the idea of PKM, or "information gardening." Not so much anymore. Basically, I want to be able to recall how to do something, like call up the maintenance menu on Olympus cameras to check shutter counts or error codes. Stuff that I've saved in hundreds of Apple Notes or downloaded PDFs that I have to fumble around to find.

Yesterday, we noticed that the golf cart charger was still running, hours after Mitzi got back from her stretch class. And the LED was blinking in a way that suggested something was wrong. I wondered if the batteries were low on water. Sure enough, they were! Added water to all of them.

Still the charger blinked. Now I need to find the manual. I know I have a PDF copy, and in a transient frenzy of "organizing," I recalled I placed the PDFs of many of the household appliances in the Home folder (which is literally about our home, not the main folder of some user account). Of course, the first several PDFs all have names like ax17000c2388ssz.pdf. I space-bar down through the list using Quicklook to id them and there it is, the third file in the listing. Remaining in Quicklook, because who has time to actually open the file in Preview? I scroll through the pages and read the LED error codes. Discover I have to reset the thing by unplugging it and waiting 10 seconds.

Suitably equipped with "knowledge," I go back to the garage and unplug the charger and wait the requisite 10 seconds, adding a few for good measure, plug it back in and the LED indicates it's charging.

This morning, the golf cart is charged and the file is still open in Quicklook in Finder. I figure I'll rename the file to Golf Cart Charger, and Finder complains that the name is already taken by another file. I look down the list and sure enough there it is, down the list, which is sorted alphabetically. Delete file ax17000c2388ssz.pdf.

Presumably, I'll soon be able to say, "Show me the golf cart charger manual," and the right pdf will appear. But who knows? Maybe it'll reply "Which one?" or "What's the magic word?"

"Please?"

These things never work the way you expect them to.

Anyway, these days I worry more about "wisdom" than "knowledge." I worry more about "knowing myself," than knowing how to craft the right prompt to get Chat GPT to tell me how to write the regex to do something I don't really need to do at all.

Does any of this matter? Is it all just an effort to flatter ourselves? I mean, the world is on fire. Democracy is on life support and we're seemingly helpless to do anything about it, or a significant proportion of our friends and neighbors think it's just fine with them!

But yeah, check out my cool graph!

This post is from a month ago, but I'm pretty sure I just saw it today. Having just returned from DC where I brought two cameras (plus my phone), I can relate.

In the shower yesterday, I thought about how "lucky" I was. My "quality of life" is better than nearly anyone's. Apart from having a court of bowers and scrapers, it's certainly better than that of medieval kings. It's ridiculous how good it is, and how little I "deserve" it.

And how soon it may all be gone.

Maybe I'll deserve that.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:07 Tuesday, 11 June 2024

Had dinner last night with my daughters, my son-in-law, one of my granddaughters and Mitzi. The restaurant was right next door to a Whit's custard, so dessert was on the menu as well. Enjoyed seeing them all together. We ate at a restaurant in Atlantic Beach in an area of town known as "the corner." It was formerly Ocean 60, but it's an Italian restaurant now. In any event, I dread going down there because parking is nigh-on impossible. They implemented paid parking to try and alleviate the situation by keeping people from going to the beach and taking a parking place all day.

We began our second orbit when we noticed a car backing out on the left side of the street. I turned on my left blinker but there was a pickup truck headed the other way and I thought he would snag the spot first. He slowed, but he didn't pull in.

We were puzzled, but as we approached we saw that it was an "EV Charging Only" space, and guess who drives a plug-in hybrid? Woo-hoo!

Not only was the parking essentially "free." (I got a text from ChargePoint that the city begins charging $2.00/hour for the space after the first three hours.) When we left, the RAV4 was fully charged, and it only cost $1.65!

Normally, that round-trip would have been all electric, but we had to pick up and drop off my youngest daughter, so the extra mileage made it right at the ragged edge of our battery-only range. With the charge, we did the whole thing in EV mode with battery to spare when we got home.

After last night's large dinner and ice cream dessert, I didn't exactly feel like getting up at 0500 and walking. But I did and I'm glad.

While I was sleeping, Amazon delivered my "new to me" Makita DMP181ZX high-pressure inflator. I usually have to pump up the bicycle tires every couple of days and I have a compressor, but it makes an awful racket. The bicycle pumps work fine, and I know I need the exercise. But when we were on the road to New York a few years ago, we had a leaking tire. We'd stop every couple of hours to change drivers and stretch our legs, part of Mitzi's pain management, and have to add some air to the tire. We got it fixed when we got to our destination, but it made me anxious having to always look for a gas station to pull into and hope that they had a working compressor.

I'll be bringing this thing along with us this trip. If we have to top off a tire, we can do it anywhere.

Anyway, got back from the walk, opened the box and stuck in a battery. Pumped up both my bike tires in no time and it's much quieter than the compressor, and much easier than futzing with the bicycle pump. I was playing with the info screen on the RAV4 yesterday, and noticed that it reported one of the tires down about three pounds. So I'll top that off this morning before I head out to my dentist appointment.

If I'm looking at a Makita tool, I'll watch for an Amazon Warehouse sale. It only saves about 10%, which is what I could save at Home Depot, but Home Depot has it listed for $10 more than the Amazon retail price, so I still saved $10. I can't imagine why anyone would have returned it, it looks band new and all the little accessory fittings were present. Maybe they didn't like that you have to screw on the valve connector.

Later this week I should receive a 10" Makita 18v chainsaw. Also a Warehouse buy. It's not something I'm likely to use very often (if ever), but it's the kind of thing that when you need one, you probably really need one. And it's hurricane season. I don't think I'd need anything larger than 10". And if I did, we're probably in more trouble than some downed limbs. I have a bow saw and used it a couple of months ago when Mitzi wanted to remove a couple of cypress trees she'd mistakenly planted too close to the house. Between my little Fiskars hatchet and the bow saw, we got them down, but it was a lot of work.

Anyway, fools and their money and all that.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:18 Monday, 10 June 2024

I've been walking at 0500 every morning for the past week, and biking right after that. I get 5K in on the walk, and 10K on the bike and I'm home by about 0630, and I'm pretty much assured of closing my Move ring without doing another "workout." That's important because we're entering the hot part of the year with the heat index often exceeding 100°F.

Shot the image above with the iPhone this morning. It was 76° and humid this morning, so I'm disinclined to press just for a better time. So pausing for a moment to see if the phone could render a nice image was fine.

Turned out pretty well, I think. This is SOOC, other than being converted to jpeg.

I'm reading Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, by Vulker Ulrich, translated by Jefferson Chase. This is a close look at the days between Hitler's suicide and the final surrender agreement. It moves quickly. If you haven't read anything about Germany in the immediate aftermath of the war, it may be troubling.

One thing I found interesting was the fear the German people had of the millions of "foreign workers" (slave laborers) living in Germany. It was resonant with the fear the Confederate states had of enslaved people, mentioned often in Erik Larson's The Demon of Unrest.

You'd think that fear or anxiety might have been a clue.

Netflix has a new series on Nazi Germany, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial. I've watched the first two episodes. It's pretty well done, with some actual audio from the Nuremberg trials. It's also written pretty on the nose with regard to current events. There's historical footage mixed with reenactments. Six episodes. I'm looking forward to the rest of it.

I'm afraid of what might happen in November. My "best case scenario" is a resounding electoral defeat of Trump, and the repudiation of Trumpism. Ideally, Republicans would then clean house and we'd see the last of the likes of Lindsey Graham and Rick Scott and all the other sycophantic toadies who groveled and licked the boots the failed gameshow host who somehow managed to hoodwink his way into the presidency.

But that's the "best case," and I'm not very optimistic we'll see it. I'm afraid of a low turnout election.

History doesn't repeat, "but it often rhymes."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 06:56 Friday, 7 June 2024

Great interview with Tom Hanks by Christian Amanpour.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 17:38 Thursday, 6 June 2024

Florida is a joke, and it's on Floridians. They keep electing "leaders" who view reality through an ideological lens that focuses exclusively on zero-sum, partisan politics.

Meanwhile, sea level rises, hurricanes get stronger, and Florida passes legislation that removes the words "climate change" from the state's vocabulary.

This report is hysterical. I actually love it. Rich people with private property built too close to the ocean are refusing to sign easements that the Army Corps of Engineers requires in order to shovel taxpayer money into the sea to temporarily protect their expensive homes.

Hey, more power to 'em! I love it. It's a waste of money that creates a moral hazard, forestalling the actual action necessary to deal with the reality that is before us. I'll shed no tears if their houses get washed away.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:08 Thursday, 6 June 2024

Although it can be a bit of a downer, Tom Murphy's Do The Math blog is thoughtful and interesting. I'm going to link to his most recent post as it appears in resilience, because it's easier for old guys like me to read; and I suspect that most of my readers are old guys like me.

Tom has taken a critical look at UN population models and has some thoughts. I find his analysis credible, acknowledging all the caveats he includes.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 10:26 Wednesday, 5 June 2024

I don't know if we're all just boiled frogs or what, but I feel like we all ought to be running around with our hair on fire. But, no. It's just business as usual.

Is anyone paying attention?

Not Florida's Republican government. They'd rather play games about China.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:42 Wednesday, 5 June 2024

Another piece worth reading about the likely future.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 09:47 Monday, 3 June 2024

Heather Cox Richardson seems to have some thoughts for Susan Collins.

I'm sure this made the rounds in "social media," but I'm a blogger, which may be thought of as "slow social media."

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:11 Monday, 3 June 2024

It's in the air. Or at least it's on the web. This morning I read Are We Doomed? in The New Yorker.

It's an interesting read about a college course that examines the question, and the response of the students taking the course.

I'm encouraged by the response of the students. It's not denial, but it's not defeatism either. It's not cynical, but it's not rose-colored glasses either. So you can read it and not want to open a vein.

I know there are pathways where the human species can go extinct, but I think those are less likely than a general collapse of this global, advanced technological civilization, accompanied by the deaths of billions of people. One key will be avoiding a global nuclear exchange. I can't speak to the risk of bio-weapons as an extinction threat. Possibly, I guess.

I think the more likely path is the one we're on now, a "decline and fall" scenario.

But I also think the most responsible, the most meaningful thing to do in the face of this is to try to avoid it. There is always a tension in life, in existence, between attachment and letting go. To act with intention, but without attachment to the results.

The cathedral metaphor at the end of the piece is perhaps helpful.

Do your best. The rest isn't up to you.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:24 Monday, 3 June 2024

And it "ain't what it used to be."

This came up in my feed from Beardy Guy, and it's a good read, albeit a bit long.

Put it this way: If you take a couple of typical undergraduates from the University of Toronto and you drop them in the middle of Beijing with their cell phones, they’re going to be fine. You take them up to Algonquin Park, a few hours’ drive north of Toronto, and you drop them in the park, and they’re dead within 48 hours.

Yes, we live in an advanced technological civilization. All of the eight billion people on this planet depend on it to one degree or another for their survival. That civilization is in overshoot, and it is going to collapse sometime in this century. Indeed, it has already begun.

The linked piece talks about how we might go about preserving some parts of it so that humanity isn't completely reduced to a feudal agrarian existence.

Among the people who see what's coming, there are some who see a "feudal agrarian existence," as the desired end-state, maybe with less emphasis on on the "feudal" and some hope for "communal." I'm pretty sure we won't be that lucky.

But there are some interesting ideas in the linked piece about what people could be doing now. Will they work? Who knows? The more relevant question is "Will people try."

I think they will. I'm somewhat surprised, but even in my brief couple of days up here, there is some acknowledgment, more than I'd expected, from educated people with children that we're in for rough times ahead.

And they're considering plans. Not "prepper" style, AR-15 heavy "survival porn," but relocating to different communities with more advantages and fewer vulnerabilities. Naturally, they are among the privileged class, with the means to contemplate and achieve these things. They may have to pool resources in many cases, but they're beginning to do that work.

The folks who aren't so fortunate are going to have to figure out how to adapt in place. Try to maximize their advantages and reduce their vulnerabilities right where they are. And that work should begin now.

This must be part of that work.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:33 Sunday, 2 June 2024

For Mitzi's grandson's birthday, we went to a local DC event that was taking place at the former RFK stadium, in the parking lot. A "touch trucks" event for kids.

It was pretty cool, if a sonic assault. The city departments, some federal agencies and a few private companies had vehicles of all kinds on display for kids to get close to, climb on, sit in or observe. The garbage truck was very popular.

The Secret Service was there with a couple of the black SUVs and we spoke with one of the uniformed agents. Earlier, I'd seen a helicopter fly over in Marine One livery that wasn't an SH-3. I asked the agent about it and he confirmed it was one of the new ones. They haven't been accepted for service yet thought.

The National Park Service had a helicopter on display, but as we were heading for it, they started moving people away from it as it had to leave. So we retreated back to a point where a motorcycle police officer indicated was far enough.

I wasn't sure, but the decks of ships are much smaller. I told Mitzi's son-in-law to make sure his son had his sunglasses on, since we weren't carrying goggles.

The rotors were spinning and a DC PR guy on a Segway came rolling up pushing everyone farther back. So we backed up another 10 feet or so.

Then the pilots increased the rotor pitch and the fun began. Strollers went flying, all the dust and debris on the asphalt went airborne, the cop's motorcycle tipped over. I was filming, but had to turn away. I saw all the other parents had as well. Mitzi was holding on to two or three strollers. I had to brace my legs against the rotor wash, it was pretty impressive.

The helicopter went airborne and the Segway guy came back to see if everyone was all right. Many of the parents were a little distressed, including Mitzi's daughter and son-in-law.

We collected ourselves, and started out to look at some more trucks. Some yards away I spotted a white ball cap on the ground. I pointed it out and said, "Looks like the helicopter blew somebody's hat off!"

Mitzi said, "That's my hat!" She hadn't even realized it had blown off her head, preoccupied, I imagine, by holding onto flying strollers.

We had a good laugh.

The noise, though, was something else. They let the kids blow the horns, turn on the sirens and the lights. It was getting to be a bit stressful as it happened without warning, often when you were right next to a vehicle.

The music from the dj was loud as well, as it had to be, I'm sure.

The funniest thing though was one of the announcements from the dj. Among the "Your car is about to be towed," and "We have another lost child here," was one that made me laugh.

"The Secret Service has two flashlights missing. If everyone could check and see if one of their little ones picked one up and please return it, they'd appreciate it."

I can't imagine those Secret Service agents got their flashlights back, and a couple of kids got a cool story for school, if one of uncertain ethical virtue.

We headed back to the kids' place to recover with a couple of cold beers. The weather remained outstanding.

And I've finished my 67th circuit around the sun.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 07:59 Sunday, 2 June 2024

Arrived in DC yesterday, very early after a 0300 reveille. The weather here is beautiful! We spent most of the afternoon at the National Portrait Gallery. Fascinating. Unsurprisingly, Trump doesn't have a painting in the gallery, he has a photograph. It's directly across from a portrait of John Lewis in a "justice" gallery, and I have to believe that was intentional (and delightful).

Wanted to get June launched in the marmot and Captain's Log. Mission(s) accomplished.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:14 Saturday, 1 June 2024

I finally finished The Demon of Unrest last night. I loved it, but I do think it lacked a little of the narrative flow of most of Larson's other books. There was probably the usual amount of back-and-forth in time and space, but it felt "bumpier," this time. It probably didn't help that I started out reading it as an ebook, and then shifted to a hardcopy because that was a better experience for me in terms of reading it more quickly.

I fiddled too much with the ebook version, trying to highlight passages, looking things up and dealing with distractions.

The thing I think I found most revelatory was the degree to which the southern planter class was intensely devoted to this exaggerated sense of "honor." And I wonder to what degree this evolved as a kind of psychological defense in terms of a sense of "moral goodness," or righteousness, while enslaving humans and exploiting them economically and sexually.

There is so much to say about the American south and the effects of slavery and planter class culture. Much of it, I think, still exists today. I see it in Florida, where there are essentially two classes, the privileged and the ignored, divided chiefly by wealth and poverty. Race plays significant a role as well, and poor people of color are doubly damned. Florida has never been among the best half of states in infant mortality, and it's not white babies dying that makes it so. And because it's not white babies dying, the state has never made it a priority to do anything about its abysmal performance.

When I hear or read people opposing the removal of Confederate monuments, or opposing removing the names of Confederate figures from public buildings or public spaces, claim that these things represent "heritage, not hate," I wonder exactly what they believe that heritage is, and why it's worth venerating or memorializing?

Because, from my recent reading of the history, that heritage is chiefly one of hate. Hatred of "the North." Hatred of Blacks.

And probably more than a little bit of self-loathing, that this exaggerated sense of "pride" in "heritage" is intended to soothe.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 11:16 Thursday, 30 May 2024

We're headed up to DC on Friday and I've been overthinking what I want to bring, camera-wise. I'm pretty much settled on the OM-5 and a few small primes.

The real question I've been going back and forth on is what to carry in the new sling I bought. I was going to carry the Stylus 1s, because it'll fit with the iPad mini (but it's tight), and the long focal length makes for good out the window shots. But the little Stylus XZ-10 weighs just a little over half of what the 1s weighs (7.7oz) and takes up much less space. It has a 5x zoom 26-130mm efl, f1.8-2.7 and I've had good luck with it out of airplane windows before.

But then there's the XZ-1, which I just adore. It's neither as wide nor as long as the XZ-10 at 28-112mm efl, it's a little bigger and weighs a few ounces more than the XZ-10. But I like playing with art filters, and the XZ-10 has more of them with internal variations you can choose from for most of them.

I think it'll be the XZ-10. The tyranny of choice.

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Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:23 Wednesday, 29 May 2024

Brief moment of panic yesterday when I (re-)learned that you can't charge the Pentax MX-1 in camera. Couldn't find the charger in the drawer full of chargers. Spent an hour or so cleaning up my desk (got about a third of the way through), when it dawned on me that it might be in the box. This camera came with the box and all the docs and I hadn't thrown it away. Quick trip to the closet and there it was!

I'd been wasting some time watching YouTube camera videos and decided I wanted to play with the MX-1.

(The real subject of this post should be the wasteland that YouTube has become with regard to camera videos. But what does one do in a wasteland but waste time?)

Mitzi and I biked over to the garden and I brought the MX-1 along. Tough to compose with just an LCD in that much sunshine, but I got a few shots. More up at Flickr.

Originally posted at Nice Marmot 08:04 Wednesday, 29 May 2024