Tuesday, 4.21.26, was a beautiful day but not a happy one. One of those drive-by spray poisonings intended to ruin people's days had been done during the night. I woke up with acute, rather than chronic, Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, taking in about one-third of a breath each time. This is very tiring. I walked to the closet, picked out a dress that had room for my swollen body, and immediately felt as if I needed to sit down and rest for about half an hour in order to have the energy to put on the dress. By the time I reached the road, leaning on a stick to rest about every fifteen paces, it was only about an hour after I should have been in town. I was telling myself that the only errand that really had to be accomplished was voting, so I had till seven o'clock. Fortunately some friends gave me a lift to the polls, and by that time I was actually starting to feel better--slowly. Then I learned that the extended family had almost lost someone who's only about fifty years old. I'd been more or less braced to hear bad news about the older generation, but Generation X, the little kids I used to baby-sit, have NO business having heart attacks. It's too draining for your elders.
He didn't even look fifty, right? Sturdy but healthy-looking shape, black hair, unwrinkled face. He probably didn't want to pass for thirty, as a local politician, but he could've done. He did jobs that kept him on his feet. But he'd been one of those linemen everybody loves, during years when the state road system and private property owners everywhere were being told that new herbicides like glyphosate were safe and effective, so why pay anybody to prune the vegetation along roads when you could just spray it away. That's the only noticeable risk factor for any kind of premature disease condition he and his wife had. They were sober; they were health-conscious; they'd chosen good healthy ancestors. They should have had a health care plan like "I'll start paying doctors when I'm eighty"; it should have worked.
When I came in about half the day was left. I spent it online, but nagging people to vote and admiring the few cute and cheerful individual posts that made it through X's disgusting algorithm, not link hunting.
Then on Wednesday, 4.22.26, an old sick patient who sometimes gets up and drives around drove up to interrupt my day. I let him, because I knew from experience that driving around in less polluted air would improve the way I was feeling, which was still very low. I came in with more than half of normal breathing capacity, about sundown.
"Election" as Referendum, or What We Were Voting About on Tuesday
A state court has already ruled the gerrymandering unconstitutional, without even bothering to scrutinize the mail-in votes that made up that critical 2% of the vote...Wouldn't it be fun to watch state courts overrule everything Governor Ghostface tries, until she goes back to New Jersey, where she came from, in despair?
But then, how would Republicans ever learn to vote against anyone who disrespects bloggers, much less tries to campaign on an accident of physical appearance that just happens to recall She-Devil to mind and solidify feelings that the Worst of Winsome was much nicer than the Best of Abigail...and then proceeds to assert that the candidate not endorsed by our actual police force will sic her crooked-rogue-cop friends on people who don't vote for her. Rs need to know that they cannot just shrug and say "No one could possibly vote for a person who ran a campaign like THAT." Ds already do know that anyone who campaigns that badly has to be planning some kind of election fraud, and they organize and make sure the election's not close enough for the fraud to work.
Having to do it honestly does take longer, no doubt...but, given the looniness of today's Left, it should still be easy.
Medical Care
(Ganked from theviewfromladylake.blogspot.com; Lens traces it to somebody called @daphotosopher on F******k.)
Why shouldn't people who don't need medical care chip in to help pay the bills of people who do? Privately, of course, most of us do, and should. But when helping out turns into a system that collects money from people who may or may not have it to spare, by force, and holds it out to the medical and insurance systems saying "Here it is; see how much of it you can spend," you can be sure the cost of treatment will expand to exceed the funding available. We keep medical care efficient by keeping the insurance industry out of it. It's one thing to pay a surgeon $350 an hour for knowing how to do a coronary bypass operation, and it's another thing to pay for $200 plastic basins and $500 not-exactly-prescription meals. We have to hold things down to the level of "Pay the real cost, and not one penny over..." As long as that's done, then I personally would consent to a special annual tax to help people who had made honest efforts to pay their own medical bills, and still owed more than they could pay, at the end of each year...as long as the hospitals had to wait, and couldn't pay for anything irrelevant or inflated, e.g. insurance gambling schemes that somehow make those who run the schemes rich.
Music
Apache Christian church with songs, prayers, and I think a short sermon. I think the little choir has a delightful amateur down-home sound. Anyway it's interesting to hear "Amazing Grace" and "Glory to His Name" sung in an Apache language. (One of them anyway...the Apache nation was a coalition of several small groups that used different, though "related," languages.)
Parov Stelar. This song was actually composed as a descant to be sung with "Riders in the Sky," by a European whose English wasn't great, so it contains the phrase "Hell a ride." Since that's not a phrase an English-speaking person would say, for years I thought it was "Telluride," as in Colorado, and wondered what story about that town I'd missed.
Greg Kihn.
Tom Petty. Down on the state line I saw a homemade ad, one of those neon signs with boxes of huge plastic letters and numbers people stick on, that claimed that some product "and Tom Petty will never let you down." It has suddenly become heresy to admit that during the man's lifetime I didn't recognize his name, hadn't heard most of his songs, and didn't like the ones I had heard. By "ones" I probably mean one song that one of my sisters found hilariously stupid. In the actual 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s other singers and bands ruled the radios. As a result Tom Petty's digitized music strikes the ears of baby-boomers, I suspect, as new music of our time, a change from the Beatles and Stones and Eagles hits we used to listen to, and it's become boomer bait. But he did write some good songs, I have recently learned, and he was a real virtuoso of the electric guitar..
What fun somebody must have had mowing this into a field. Zen meditation music.
Walter Wanderley, "Brazil's Organist." In Brazil it seems the organ is not confined to churches. This is a toe-tappy samba.
Neil Young plays one of his own more pensive pop songs on the organ. Hey. Clicking on any link in any Link Log here is optional.
"The Spotnicks."
Neil Finn.
Handel's Messiah...no, not immediately after the pop songs above. Back-story is, however, that Handel revised some dance tunes he'd written for the happier choruses in the Messiah. This one sounds positively giddy up to its morning-after ending. For hundreds of years choir directors have been telling choirs, "Yes, you've gone astray--do you have to look so happy about it?"
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