I Don't Enjoy Tenterhooks

     Who does?  --Okay, presumably there's some perv out there who's into the metaphor, and loves being in suspense over serious issues that are likely to effect the rest of their life.  But that person's a statistical blip.  When it comes to our lives (as opposed to a mystery book or a spy movie), everyone wants to know what's around the next turn, or at least that whatever it is, it won't be too awful.

     Of course, we don't all have the same notions of "awful."  We don't even agree on what's going right and wrong at present, so the future and what to do about it is even more contentious.

     As I write, the outcome of the 2024 Presidential election is up in the air, with the two major candidates within a few points of one another and the critical swing states hanging in the balance.  It's a good bet that it's going to stay a mystery down to the morning after Election Day, if not longer.

     I don't like it.  The main thing on offer right now is fear: Mr. Trump wants me to be afraid of "illegals," a category that apparently includes a lot of people who are in this country legally, but don't look like him or speak much English.*  He's also worried about Marxists, "transgenders" and a few other bugbears, all of whom constitute powerless (and often oddball) minorities with scary reputations.  It's a simple formula: wave around a few ooga-booga bogeyman pictures of Leon Trotsky, way-out drag queens, Stalin (not, strictly speaking, a Marxist) or the Assistant Secretary for Health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services -- or, better yet, of some actual criminals whose appearance makes them proxies for ethnic fearmongering.  It appeals strongly to his base, which encourages him to do more of the same, an iterative process that most recently resulted in a "few minutes hate" at rallies out West that would have been cartoonish were it not so unnerving.  I'd say this kind of thing is unAmerican, but our history is not without  low points, from the 1921 Tulsa race riots to 1954's "Operation Wetback" and its Depression-era predecessor that swept up and deported hundreds of thousands of U. S. citizens who happened to have the wrong accent or skin color, along with the undocumented workers and residents the programs were aimed at.

     The Democrats point to the Republicans in justifiable fear of precisely this kind of officially-supported xenophobia, and go on to relatively sober policy offerings: heartfelt, but Vice-President Harris and Tim Walz lack the lurid sideshow appeal of their opposition.

     Mr. Trump keeps finding new kinds of chickens to toss into the pot, promising skyrocketing wages, low prices and a whole slew of things no President or Congress can deliver; Ms. Harris offers a less flashy government of lower deficits, wider attention to human rights and less sloganeering.

     I don't know if that's enough.  I doubt fear is a really great way to get people into voting booths, and I worry that a chance to have some other poor schmuck pushed around is at least as strong a draw.

     So I'm stuck on tenterhooks, at least until the election results are in, and maybe after that, because recent history has shown me that I didn't know my fellow citizens nearly as well as I thought; those gleefully smiling faces in lynching postcards from the first part of the 20th Century were not so long ago as I had let myself be led to believe.  Our worst nature is barely suppressed and, once released, difficult to bottle up again.
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* They'll learn, or if they manage to dodge learning, their kids will pick it up.  For a country without an official language, the U.S. is difficult to navigate without speaking the lingo.

Don't Feed The Reaper

     I want magic.  I want some phrase or string of characters that will choke any Large Language Model that goes to ingest my blog posts and social media content as grist for its mill.  I want helping out AI -- or not -- to be a conscious choice.

     You, I don't so much mind.  Not even the nutjobs; your fantasies, if large enough and askew enough, will crash into reality some day, and either get straightened out or drive you mad.  Problem solved.*  The problem with AI is there's no ghost in the shell.  Nobody's home.  And the other problem is, there are no corrective consequences for an AI coming unmoored, and so we get seven-fingered human images, legal cases that never existed, and complete howling bullshit instead of facts.  The LLMs go drifting off into hallucination and when it happens, the big players laugh like schoolboys pulling the wings off flies and talk about tweaking their models -- I'm not sure if they're talking about adjusting the software that writes the programs that hack the code to run AI, or about their lurid private lives, and I don't much care.

     This blog is out there on the public Internet and I can't keep it from feeding the beast.  I want to feed the beast stuff that will make it choke. 

     No thanks for the "help," either; last night I did some graphic design for work and converted the result to a PDF for better compatibility with my employer's software and hardware.  Of course the default PDF viewer is Edge, and the New! Improved! Vitamin-fortified! Edge comes compete with a pop-up AI assistant, eager to please and completely clueless.  I only wanted to check that the PDF conversion process had gone okay.  Instead, I had a stupid banner filling nearly a third of the screen on top of what I needed to see, making offers that had very little to do with the task at hand.  I had to stop what I was doing and go look up how to turn the thing off and stuff it back into its bottle, where it is unlikely to remain for long.

     We live in a hallucination already -- our raw sensory information is an overwhelming flood, visual field jumping around like a stray dog's worth of fleas, feeding into a brain and mind that blank out the wild chaos of saccades and build a detailed map -- a map that can have flaws, as I learned when my undiagnosed cataracts caused a "suddenly appearing" car while I was bicycling, it having been hidden in the growing blind spots my mind was smoothly filling in.  All of our other senses work the same way, but it all gets reality-tested, over and over, in ways that range from damaging impact to a friend yelling, "Stop!  Stop!  CAR!"  AI doesn't get that correction, nor does it get the adrenaline dump (or worse) that underscores its importance.  Get back to me when your large language model learns how to get bruised -- but I doubt it ever will.

     And that's why I don't want to help the thing.  It's a blind robot.  It will never not be blind, no matter how much it sees.
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* Of course, occasionally enough people go crazy enough that they do enormous harm.  This often requires a war to sort out in tears and blood, and it's terrible.  As a species, we strive to do such damage less and less; as individuals, most of us abhor it.  It's in groups of intermediate size where we get into horrific trouble.

The U. S. Senate, Red In Tooth And Claw?

     It's been all over the news, all over social media -- junior Senator for Oklahoma Markwayne Mullin offering to fight Teamsters President Sean O'Brien in the course of a Senate committee hearing.  He was chided by his Senate colleague Bernie Sanders, a man never overly concerned with decorum, practicality or even reality, which ought to have been humbling but probably wasn't.

     Senator Mullin and Teamsters boss O'Brien have been sniping at one another for months; I don't expect them to be great pals, not the former owner of a big, open-shop plumbing company* and union guy, not a Republican Senator and a labor boss: they're natural antagonists.  However, politics is the tool we invented so we don't have sort matters out by knocking one another over the head, and I do expect a United States Senator and the President of a national union to avoid actual physical conflict, even while being about as lousy to one another as they can manage.

     The Teamsters are proud of their roughneck image -- but even they have had to admit that might doesn't necessarily make right.  I damned well expect a U. S. Senator to understand it.  Tolerating this sort of behavior is a very poor sign for the present course of the GOP.  Senator Mullin citing as precedent pro-slavery Representative Preston Brooks beating anti-slavery Senator Charles Sumner with a cane after Sumner had spoken harshly of slave owners in 1856 does not speak well of him -- the incident is generally understood as the one of the precursors to the Civil War.  The Senator also mentioned President Andrew Jackson's overly-pugnacious behavior, which is shaky ground indeed; Jackson's legacy is at best, mixed, and his temper is more infamous than admired.

     I don't expect Senators -- or even U. S. Representatives -- to engage in hand-to-hand combat or feats of strength.  That's not what I'm paying them to do; it's what I am paying them to avoid, and to manage the conflicts that would otherwise lead to violence.

     This bully-boy nonsense is strictly for the funny papers.  Or the history books, brown/silver/black shirts and all.  (Can you name the countries where each group sullied the public streets?)
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* The plumber's union is a big one, one of the surviving 19th Century American Federation of Labor craft unions,† and historically, they're known to be quite touchy about jurisdiction.
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† In contrast to the younger, scrappier Congress of Industrial Organizations unions.  They're long merged now, but while an AF of L craft union organized workers in skilled trades, the CIO (splintering from AFL in 1935) organized entire establishments, from the sweepers to the top of the hourly pay scale.  There was no love lost between craft unions and industrial unions for twenty years, but by the mid-1950s, they remembered they had a common enemy and got back together.

Still Sick

     Ever the optimist, I keep thinking I'm getting better.  Then the decongestant wears off.

     Making the big effort Saturday cost me dearly: I have been exhausted ever since.  About all I have gotten done around the house is washing the dishes yesterday, in one big effort right after taking all my symptom-suppressing medicine.

     Judging from the pain in my knees, this thing has settled in for the duration.  It's not covid, I've tested negative twice, and the symptoms don't fit RSV or the flu.  It's almost certainly a cold.  The sore throat has mostly faded but the cough and congestion linger.

     One way or another, I'm going to have to try going to work tomorrow, after a "vacation" that has left me more tired and more behind the 8-ball than before it began.

Of Course It Didn't Work

     Yeah, I've got Tamara's cold.  Tried to dodge it, but it was a slim hope at best.  Mild so far, mostly a sore throat and annoyed sinuses, which I am treating aggressively.  I woke up yesterday with a tiny, painful "hot spot" at the back of my throat, so I made a quick sweep through the grocery and the five and dime (okay, Target) to stock up for the duration.  Just in time -- this morning, I have a less intense but full-on sore throat.

     My old sore throat fix-it Chloraseptic was nowhere to be found, so I'm waiting on a delivery.  I tried a similar product, but it has different active ingredients and I'm not happy with the results.  The phenol-based palliative was a staple in the radio business -- back in the old days, you could zap your throat with it and keep on talking.*  You paid for it later: four or five hours of being moderately upbeat no matter how miserable you were feeling left about enough energy to do the rest of your day's work, creep home and drink a bowl of canned soup before crawling into bed, dreading the alarm.

     Of course, the cold has trashed some of my vacation plans.  All that much more time to stay home and write, though.

     I still need to replace the faucet for the kitchen sink; the last one I put in only lasted two years.  It was a no-name generic, and hard water ate a hole in the underside of the spout.  The replacement is a well-known brand, so here's hoping.  Replacement is merely tedious and awkward, like a lot of plumbing.  (Here's a secret: there are two reasons plumbing work is expensive.  A little of it is absolutely rocket-lawyering, where you need deep knowledge, experience, special tools and a good understanding of the building codes. A lot of it is unbelievably dirty, hard to reach and/or fiddly, work that nobody would mess with if it didn't pay well -- but clean running water and sanitary sewers are a basic foundation of civilization, so pay that plumbing bill with a smile or learn to do the simple parts yourself.)
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* I worked in radio long before working from home was a possibility.  Cold and flu season was a particular misery: no matter how careful you were, with everyone using the same few microphones and the same hands-on gadgets, the bug would burn through the staff in a matter of days.  Voice-tracking and digital playback had already helped mitigate that before the pandemic and with the lessons learned during that time, radio talent can now go live from their own living rooms -- or sickbeds.  Hooray, no more shared station cold!

Speculation

     People who have had near-death experiences often report being told, "Go towards the light."

     Okay; this somehow makes intuitive sense to most of us.

     But what if it's a bug-zapper?  There you are, gone from the physical world, and whatever's left is drawn like a moth to the light and -- ZAP! You're no longer a problem for the Universe.

     H. P. Lovecraft and those late-night TV commercials make a weird mix.

Dashboard Icons Explained

      The picture was posted by a friend on Facebook.  The definitions are mine.

1. Motorcycles ran over snake three times, left.
2. Hang onto the dang steering wheel!
3. Motorcycles, snake, 3X, right.
4. Happy fountain ahead!
5. Giant crab has died (get serviced ASAP).
6. Look right here. Speed limit's still 55.
7. Pick a direction, dammit!
8. Built-in adobe bread oven has been left open.
9. Sea fronds!
10. You're all alone now.
11. You're doing too many donuts.
12. Giant crab (see 5) thinks it sees something ahead.
13. Key is lit up.
14. Do you even know what this key is for?
15. Key is hot! (Newer models: key has wi-fi.)
16. Car parked in A-frame garage, you stinkin' hippie.
17. Cowardly feet.
18. Happy feet, go, go, go!
19. Start up the car and drive!
20. Blue light special! Drive to K-mart asap.
21. You are *so* fat-bottomed!
22. Green Lantern summoned.
23. Green Lantern too busy fighting Sinestro.
24. Giant crab reports Green Lantern destroyed by Sinestro.
25. Keyboard-on-a-rope deployed.
26. Warning! Anal probe unlocked!
27. Car-propeller engaged.
28. Tear along dotted line.
29. Hot dog warmer on.
30. Are people on top of car strapped in?
31. Giant crab very wiggly because it has to pee.
32. Tesla sighted.
33. Giant crab has peed on your hippie A-frame garage. Didn't you see the #31 warning light?
34. Wrench left in car.
35. Spacecraft is tumbling.
36. Spacecraft pitch adjustment enabled.
37. Bug deflector adjustment turned on.
38. Convertible top open or closed? Pick one!
39. Warning, driver has large ball on lap. (Portmeirion only: Warning, Rover deployed.)
40. Giant crab is wiggly because it knows something important.
41. It's raining at the gas station! Better wait to refuel.
42. Giant ball on driver's lap is dead. (Portmeirion only: Rover deactivated.)
43. Don't forget about the wrench!
44. Spacecraft is green.
45. Matchbook found.
46. Forget about the burning gasoline and look at our ads: this car is sooo ecological!
47. It's all downhill from here.
48. Thermometer drowning.
49. Giant crab is wiggly because it skipped upper-body workout this morning.
50. Who put mustard in the hot dog warmer?
51. Bail out! Bail out!
52. Flappy hood deployed.
53. Rain stopped at the gas station but the pump is warming up.
54. I'm here to share the good news about our Lord and Savior, James Millen!
55. Look here! The speed limit is still 55 and if you don't slow down, I'm going to turn the car off.
56. MIRROR UNIVERSE WARNING! Check co-workers, friends and family for goatees.
57. Entering Amish zone, oil headlamps on.
58. Ghosts of run-over snakes (see #1 and 3) visible through windshield.
59. Flappy trunk lid deployed.
60. Roller-coaster track!
61. Car is crying.
62. Fat helicopter warning!
63. Ghosts of run-over snakes (see #1 and 3) visible through rear window.
64. Car has wiped away tears and is reasserting its own identity.

The Alien Bee

      Not only is there an Arctic Bee species living North of the Arctic Circle that frantically rebuilds and restocks their hives every short summer, the old queen finishes her year by raising a new princess and matching her with a suitor, sealing up the hive and dying, followed by the entire rest of the hive over the winter as they doze into hibernation and slowly starve in their sleep.

     In the spring, the new queen awakens alone in the hive surrounded by the bodies of the former brood, lays eggs for a new brood of workers, and hies herself off to gather nectar and pollen so she can raise them.  Only when those workers have matured can she put them to work and retire to her chamber to produce drones, a few fertile males and new princesses, of whom only one will inherit the hive.  The lucky excess may start hives of their own.

     Harsh stuff?  It gets worse.  There's a parasitic species of bee up there, too, who bide their time until the new workers are up to speed and then swoop in, kill the queen and enslave her workers -- and when the parasite queen comes out of hibernation in the spring, she lives off stored honey and goes shopping for a new hive to victimize.

     There's a story or two in all of that but it's staggeringly bleak, and we're perhaps fortunate that the Arctic Bee and its parasite appear to prefer mountaintops.

The Big Question

      Sure, they're called "rolled oats," but you've got to wonder just what, exactly, they've been rolling in.  I mean, really...?

Linguistic Patrol: I Don't Know Who Else Needs To See This...

      ...Other than that guy at Atlas Obscura, but tenable and tenuous are not synonyms or even different forms of the same word.  They have, in fact, very nearly opposite meanings.

      I swear, you turn your back on a perfectly good language for five minutes, and the kids are spray-painting stuff all over it; only about ten percent of the additions and modifications come anywhere close to art.

      Look it up -- especially if it feels like a clever turn of phrase.  English steals words from all over, fools around with their meanings without due regard to origins and pays very little attention to fiddlin' details like inadvertent near-twin antonyms. 

And Then I Learned...

      The long-winded labels on prescription medicines are a kind of miracle of the worst of legal and medical prose.  I'm suggestible enough that I rarely read them unless I need clarification on the pharmacy's instructions on taking the medication: why come down with a bad case of imagination?

      So when I was still feeling awful on Sunday, I was starting to wonder if I had some kind of heart trouble.  I hate that feeling, and worse yet, because of the need for quick reaction to a genuine emergency, nobody in the medical business will waste a second figuring out if it's a genuine problem or only looks like one before sending you off to the ER to get it checked out at considerable expense.  The referring parties don't get a commission; they just don't want to have to deal with your rapidly-cooling corpse, spend time and effort giving you CPR, or explain to your grieving survivors that you had not, in fact, looked all that bad before falling over.  Speed affects outcome and minutes count.

      Thing is, I don't have any survivors who will grieve for long, especially not once the insurance and retirement-account checks arrive, and I have had two perfectly terrifying and costly panic attacks in the last fifteen years that felt (almost) like the real thing.  So I faffed around, feeling awful and putting out cautious feelers for advice, thinking, "If it was that bad, I'd be on the floor already," and -- finally -- read the package insert.

      Yeah, about that.  The super-ibuprofen, not so bad.  The muscle relaxer?  "Irregular heartbeat, anxiety, mental confusion, tingling in extremities," and so on and so forth.  It matched up with how I was feeling and none of them were low-probability.  So I was taking those pills, they were letting me me sleep like a log and then I would wake up to an extended bout of side-effects until it was time to take the pills again, sleeping, waking up to feel awful, over and over, with a break on the night when I just took the pain reliever by itself and kept waking up, heart racing, anxious, with pins and needles in my fingers.

      I did it to myself.  I've been off 'em for about thirty hours now and lo, my disturbing symptoms are gone like a campaign promise.  My back still hurts some -- that's what started all this -- but it's much better than it was and will be better still once I take some plain old OTC acetaminophen.

Up A Ladder

      I'm going to go try to replace a vent cover.  The hinged slats have fallen out and we're pretty sure birds are getting in.  This isn't good.

      Update: the replacement is the wrong size.  It's for a larger-diameter duct.  Sticking a new cap on the old duct was going to be an ugly job anyway.  The birds are in a nesting mood and there's rain on the way.  I stacked the new cap over the old one -- with the flaps out of the old one, it fits -- installed four screws and we'll go with that until the weather's more predictable.  It's not pretty but you can't see it from the street.

Not Even A Real Fraud

      Federal investigators have revealed that Congressman George Santos is not even a real grifter.  "George Santos" is actually Lena Jensen, a thirty-year-old graduate student from Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, working on a doctoral thesis about the ease of acquiring dark money in U.S. elections, even for candidates with a questionable background.

      "It was never supposed to go this far," Jensen said, "But now that I'm in office, I feel obligated to serve George's constituents."

      [/SATIRE]

Well, That's Better

      It's -9°F in Indianapolis right now and TV says the wind chill makes it feel like -37°.  -37°???  That's too low.  I asked the robot, and she said, "RIGHT NOW, THE WIND CHILL IS MINUS 28 DEGREES."

      Such an improvement!  Whatever it is, even short exposure gives me blinding sinus headaches and my fingers stop working very well.  This is the kind of weather that destroys garage door springs, so if I need to drive anywhere, I'll have to struggle with the gate or walk around the block to get to my car.  So I'm hoping to avoid it.  Tomorrow will be twenty degrees warmer and 11 above sounds much less offputting.

Weather Alert

      You don't need me to tell you that there's horrible weather coming to most of the contiguous U.S., if it hasn't already arrived where you are.

       I hope the forecasters have erred on the side of caution and it will fizzle out, leaving us feeling a little silly.  But you can't count on that, so stock up, batten down and we'll see how it goes.

Well, This Is Nice

      Day Three of a four-day vacation, and I went home early from a late lunch yesterday and pretty shortly after, fell asleep in a chair while reading online.  So I went to bed and spent at least fourteen hours there, mostly asleep.

      I'm up now, but not a hundred percent.  Made a little breakfast but I'm way out of it.  Took a couple of aspirin a few minutes ago, and we'll see what they do, especially with plenty of coffee.  No serious sinus or throat symptoms, at least.

Walk In At Any Location -- No, Not That One

      A couple of doctors had me down for lab work.  These days, most of that is offloaded to a handful of independent laboratories with multiple locations.  They're all networked and you usually don't even need an appointment; you pick one, give them your name and date of birth, and like magic, the lab order pops up, they do the blood draw (or a few other things) and the results go off to the doctor, neat as can be.

      I went to the (mini) lab next to my GP's office yesterday and gave them my info, remarking there should be two different orders.

      "Oh, the contract changed. At this location, we only do tests for the doctors next door now."

      "But it's still the same company?"

      "Yes.  You could have had all the tests done at any of our full-sized locations, but here we're just doing them for the adjacent office."

      I was there then, and had my sleeve rolled up.  So she did the blood draw for the labs she could handle, and I stopped at another location on my way to work.  This is the opposite of convenient.

      Also, I have bandaids on each elbow.  At least the lab tech found a good vein on my left elbow.  It's usually a challenge.

Literarely

      So, apparently Atlas Twerked isn't a real book.

      I should be relieved.

A Universal Trait

      Scolds of the world -- Left, Right or apolitical, religious, irrreligious, atheistic or agnostic -- have all got one thing in common: The heartfelt conviction that no matter how bad they feel about their own selves, they can always elevate themselves by making someone else feel worse.

      They think it's all relative and if they can make someone else feel small or worth less, why, that's the same as making themselves feel better.

      It's not -- but you'll never convince them otherwise, and it's only too easy a trap to fall into.  In fact, I may have just done so myself.

      As do we all, sometimes.

Sick

      Apparently a visual migraine, with effects I hesitate to describe.  It's difficult to look at things and even harder to see them.  Zero stars.  Do Not Want.