Pikers, One And All

I gotta admit right up front: this impeachment trial is as partisan as they come.

Not because Democrats were gunning for Trump as soon as he took office.  That's just silly. These are Democrats. They've been infighting the whole time. Some of them have been calling for impeachment on grounds of obstruction as outlined in the Mueller report, some have preferred to challenge him with the emoluments clause, some of them have been too busy with the organic kale growers' lobby to pay attention; Nancy Pelosi herself was reluctant as hell to impeach; and it was only late in the game, when someone finally discovered the horse's head from Marie Yovanovitch's bed in a Kyiv dumpster, that the Dems finally said Okay, maybe we've got to go for it now.

Partisan? That would apply more to the obstinacy of the locked-in Republicans, every last craven one of them, who have looked on as Adam Schiff put the color glossies of the concrete shoes on the screen, and said, Okay, but those were illegally fished out of foreign territorial waters in defiance of treaty and none of us, Sir, is above the law. Stand down, Sir.

Some are saying Republicans are afraid to go against their party leaders, but it is unclear what they are afraid of. Is it simply a matter of a working policy of putting party over principle and power over truth? Or is something more sinister at work?

The answer might lie in the Republican reaction to one of Schiff's last statements, in which he quoted a White House source saying any Republican voting against the President would find his or her head on a pike.

Here we've had three solid days in which the House impeachment managers have built a brick shithouse of a case against the President and shattered any conceivable defense, and the whole time Republicans have either listened, fidgeted, or absorbed it all by cutaneous gas exchange through the mucus membranes of their skin; and all of a sudden, right at the end there, they are shocked at the very suggestion that they might feel threatened by the nice man in the Oval Office. Offended! Appalled! How dare you quote that news report, Sir!

And there is your clue. Whenever a Republican goes full Brett Kavanaugh on anything, you can bet that whatever they are accused of is one hundred percent true. The madder they get, the higher are the pikes.

So. They really are afraid. It seems odd to imagine that any grown man or woman would forgo a principled stand just because of a tweet threat from the Alliterator in Chief. Loopy Lamar? Lyin' Lisa? Munchkin Mitt? Sebaceous Susan? Naah. Can't be.

It's got to be serious Kompromat. There must be a dossier on every last one of them. Don't know where someone as upright as the President would find such material, surrounded as he is by only the finest American public servants and not even acquainted with the Russian oligarchy, but it's there. And it's got to be not only stuff that would threaten the Senators' precious power, but stuff they could never recover from. We're talking abortions obtained or paid for; we're talking not merely sexual affairs but affairs in which the good Senators are submissively involved with people who trace their lineage to the shithole countries. We're talking audiotape of them asking for plant-based burgers.

They're terrified.

None Of My Birds Are In The Field Guide

I'm a really shitty birder.

But I am a birder. That's why I trip over sidewalk cracks and drive into the ditch at two miles an hour. Birds are always doing something more interesting than I am. But I can't put two new things in my head at the same time without evicting something else. If I learn one bird, another one is going to fly out. It's a problem. I've only got room in there for about thirty species, and female red-winged blackbirds are four of them.

But hawks. For Pete's sake, I should know my local hawks. Birds of prey have distinct shapes. And it's not like there are a million choices. If I see something hawkish, I should be able to pick it out from the small list I'm likely to see in this area. Shouldn't I? There are all those helpful guide books with the hawk silhouettes all stretched out for you. This should be a snap.

Not, of course, if it is a Cooper's hawk or a Sharp-Shinned hawk, which are functionally the same dang bird, and don't believe anything a real birder tells you otherwise--take it from me, the shitty birder.

Today I saw a bald eagle. Pretty sure about that, since it's common here and looks like an ironing board in the sky. Yup, they're pretty much a big straight plank, and they hardly ever flap. This one was getting closer, close enough to zoom in on the white head and tail. I'd alerted my friend to it and we were eager to see it pass overhead.

But it didn't have a white head or tail. My companion was disappointed. Oh, I said knowledgeably, it must be an immature bald eagle. He bought it, too, but the fact  is until it starts making fart noises and flicking boogers I wouldn't bet the ranch on it.

Phases are little bird jokes. They can't stay basic. They've got to have a juvenile phase and a second-year phase and a Libertarian phase before they're all grown up.

I've got one more large hawk in the brain bank. And that is because it has distinctive white buns and glides a certain way and usually close to the ground. I totally know that bird. It's a harrier. The problem is I can never remember "harrier" and always want to call it a goshawk. This leads real birders to think I don't know what I'm talking about. It would be like if I identified a human as "one of those skinny little blond jobs, you know, a Samoan."

So I was very excited indeed to get a great view of a hawk overhead at Rocky Butte. Rocky Butte is one of our raggedy old municipal bonus volcanoes--we've got lots--and a nice high, windy spot to see hawks. It was an exceptionally windy day. The kind of day when you might spot a hawk and then watch it tip to one side and wheel off ten miles distant in three shakes of a rodent's tail. And there is my hawk, hanging motionless right over my head in a friggin' gale. It was amazing. He just sat there like he was posing for a painting and I was even able to locate him in my little point-and-shoot camera and get several sharp shots even though he was ten miles up. I am telling you people he didn't move at all. And I thought: I don't know who he is, but I have a photo of him now, and he has a fat head and fat short tail and real pointy wings, and that means I can look him the heck up. As soon as I get  home. For once in my life I will be able to look him the heck up.

So I did. Um.

I think the Lesser Antilles is missing a hawk.

Okay, there is no hawk shape in the book for my bird, who otherwise looks as crisp as if he belongs on a coat of arms. I realize now, and very much admire, that he has sculpted himself down to the very last wing finger into the precise scoopy shape that will allow a forty-mph wind to roil around him and hang him up motionless in the sky. He is remarkable, whoever he is. I have decided to call him a red-tailed hawk, aerodynamic-genius phase. A real birder will most assuredly chime in if he's really a Samoan.

Incidentally, the Greater Antilles can be told from the Lesser Antilles by its more annoying voice and slightly longer bill.

If You Can Hear Me, Send Tim Hortons

Meanwhile, in Newfoundland...

The data are in for the great snow emergency of 2020 in Portland, Oregon: it did not get down to the predicted twelve degrees, or within twenty degrees of it; snow accumulation topped out in the neighborhood of zero inches. Most citizens are accounted for and those who are not are assumed to be the kind that never answer a text anyway.

In contrast, our friend Kelly, an authentic Canadian, flew to Newfoundland recently and hasn't been seen since. In fact, Newfoundland in its entirety has disappeared under several meters of indigenous locally-sourced weather, a.k.a. Freedom Flakes. There is enough space between flakes to slide out some internet but otherwise there is no exit hole, and consequently Kelly has yet to surface. She did emit a photograph of snow completely covering her back door (not her personal back door, but the door to her house) and it is assumed and hoped that she and her loved ones are well supplied with cod tongues, scrunchions, and seal flipper pie, which is the ideal comestible for emergency rationing. I have tasted seal before and can vouch for its usefulness in helping you lose interest in food altogether.

Kelly is in there somewhere.

Northern people have the awesomest excuses for not coming to work.

I'll be as sorry as anyone if it is eventually discovered that Newfoundland has sunk below the sea without first disgorging our Kelly, but the thing is, seeing the picture of the door buried in snow immediately brought to mind a favorite fantasy of mine from childhood. I used to imagine that we'd get snow so deep that I'd have to open the door and tunnel to my neighbor Susie's house. She'd be tunneling too. There would be side shoots and mazes. It would be fabulous.

And whereas it might have occurred to me that it would be a logistical crapshoot for Susie's tunnel to meet up with my tunnel, it did not once cross my mind that you can't dig a tunnel if you don't have any place to stash the diggin's. My mother was a tidy woman and would not have approved of storing excavated snow in the living room. No, for some reason I thought I could just punch the tunnel through.

(I also thought, as a child, that ants lived in little sand pyramids, and not that the pyramids were just what they quarried from their underground tunnels. It is a wonder, given my deductive powers, that I ever got a science degree at all.)

What this does show, though, is the consistency of my inner spiritual habitat. Sensible people the world over imagine coming back as something that flies through the air, or frolics in the sea, or thunders across the plain. All my dreams take place in burrows. They might have gingham check cafe curtains and cheery cupboards but they are decidedly underground, and they have nooks and crannies and special rooms for special purposes.

Early Murr and friend

Otters have dens and guest rooms and bonus rooms and rec rooms and pantries and potties but the scary underwater entrance holes are a deal-breaker. A prairie dog arrangement is more to my taste. Prairie dogs live in towns and the towns are subdivided into "wards," although they missed a bet not calling them "boroughs." It is a tunneler's paradise. A prairie dog can pop down an entrance hole and you won't know where it will pop up again, thanks to all the gerrymandering.

Meanwhile, back in Newfoundland, provincial preparedness personnel are proposing an air drop to pepper the population with poutine packets, pointing to their penetrating properties. Hang on, Kelly.

It's How We Roll

If you have to get into a mishap with your automobile on New Year's Eve, I can think of no more adorable way to do it than to get buried in tumbleweeds. It's like facing off against a marshmallow cannon. If you're sitting in your car under thirty feet of tumbleweeds, thoughts and prayers are, for once, an appropriate response. As long as no one chucks out a cigarette butt.

This is what happened to five cars and a semi-truck in Washington. I guess it was something. First you're driving along, then you notice some tumbleweeds rolling across the road, and some more, and at some point you have to slow to a stop, and then there you are under a couple stories of tumbleweeds. You could drive through them but you can't see. You have to call the authorities on your cell phone, and listen to them snorting and hooting at you over at 9-1-1 before they send out the snowplow.

Tumbleweeds have iconic status in the West, and they should, but not necessarily in the way most people think. Here on the range I belong, drifting along with the tumbling tumbleweeds, the man sings; the lonely dead shrubs bouncing along the prairie say Western Expansion as well as anything else. We relate to them. The world is wide, the sky's the limit, we go where the wind takes us, because we are free.

And on our way let's get rid of those pesky buffaloes and Indians because nothing says freedom like a world scraped clean of buffaloes and Indians. Tell you what, let's get rid of the wolves and grizzlies too. Let's stick a billion non-native cattle out there and obliterate the prairie ecosystem while we're at it, and then let's watch our soil blow away with complete shock and a little reproachful glance at God, who was presumed to be on our side.

Ah, the romance of the tumbling tumbleweeds! They are synonymous with the great frontier, an ancient spectacle, a natural wonder, rolling free since time immemorial!

In Russia.

Well, boy howdy, guess whut? We didn't have any tumbleweeds at all until 1870, a mere 150 years ago, when they arrived in South Dakota in a shipment of flax seeds from Asia. About as long as we've had kitty-cats, I reckon. We think they've been here forever because we get our information from 20th-century cowboy westerns. The first tumbleweed landed somewhere and grew, and died, and snapped off, and began tumbling, releasing a quarter million seeds all by itself. It didn't need much water to germinate but managed to suck up an astonishing amount of it later, to the detriment of the native plants. It's one hell of a weed: it easily colonizes disturbed areas, and, shoot, we've been disturbing areas as fast as we can. I mean, Disturbed Areas Are Us.

Here's a cool tidbit: around the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, where the cars were buried on New Year's Eve, the tumbleweeds suck up nuclear waste before tumbling off to new adventures. They try to pulverize them before they tumble, but, hey. Fun!

They're a pest. Someone discovered a fungus from Central Asia that does a number on them, and there's talk of setting that non-native organism loose on the buggers here to see who wins. Can't see any downside to that.

So: there's your icon. Invasive non-native species gains foothold and quickly routs the competition, takes over the landscape, and gobbles up all the resources. It's the Great White Dream. What's not to love?

USA! USA! USA!

Oh, Cold Snap!

Word on the street is we might get some snow this week. Worse, it might get down to twelve degrees. Twelve degrees. Which is probably fine if you live in a place that's supposed to be twelve degrees, because then you would have bear skins in your cave, and wolf and fox carcasses hanging up and extra Sinew and Sinew Skills, plus the secret of fire. We don't have any of those.

Here in our cave we can't get anything to stay lit and there's nothing but damp squirrels to stitch up.

The newspaper helpfully offered advice of what to have on hand for the coming cold snap. It wasn't a big list. I don't think they're even trying anymore. (They did make a joke about the stores running out of kale like last time, but that's not funny--that really happened.) It was pretty much peanut butter, toilet paper, and extra flashlight batteries. They need to add more items because putting the peanut butter right up next to the toilet paper like that is a little too vivid. And really, who needs to run to the store to stock up on toilet paper? If you don't have enough toilet paper on hand, it's its own emergency.

We're not going to the store to stock up on peanut butter because we are old-school and still have survival skills leftover from yesteryear. By that I don't mean anything as fancy as whatever my mom and her family did on the farm, where they had to drill through snowdrifts to get to the outhouse and shovel coal into the stove and whack random edible critters for dinner. North Dakota winters required a level of stamina we don't much see anymore. When my Uncle Cliff finally sold off his cows, I, a city girl, wondered aloud if he didn't kind of miss them. They were cute. He was a mild-mannered and pleasant man and his response was both louder and more vehement than I'd ever expected from him. The upshot was no, he did not kind of miss his cows. Sixty years of walloping their butts into the barn for milking every single, uh, blessed day, twice a day, in all kinds of weather was quite--as it turned out--enough. Thank you.

No, our skills are not of that caliber, and neither are we. However, if we're hungry, we will walk to the grocery store. This is because we are very good at walking and willing to do it, and also we live within three miles of several grocery stores. We live in a walkable place on purpose. We walk to the bigger store with backpacks and if it were not for the occasional kitty litter run or a sale on canned goods, we wouldn't drive at all.

Also, we'll be okay if the store's card readers are on the fritz. We have cash. On hand. Because we're boomers.

If the grocery store runs out of food we could be in a bit of trouble after a while, but it's nothing we anticipate. What we are supposed to do is be prepared with at least three weeks of provisions in case of the massive catastrophic earthquake they've been promising us, and no, we don't seem to have done anything about that. But we do live next to a person who is prepared and we've been very very nice to her over the years.

It's a plan.

I'll Just Do Them By Hand

I'll be the first to admit I don't have much talent for spatial visualization. I park my car using audible data from the curb. I routinely look at something bigger than my head and think "I can eat that." Also? Your dishwasher doesn't make any sense to me. I don't care who you are.

There's a section on the IQ tests where they show you a shape in two dimensions and you have to figure out what it would look like folded up. I can't do that. I can't tell if it will be a box, a swan, or a dreidel. If it weren't for the verbal comprehension part of the test I would've been institutionalized. I used to try to cut out shapes to sew my own stuffed animals and they all came out sad and flat. It was like I had a nice store-bought collection of animals and a separate roadkill set.

But your dishwasher doesn't make sense. There can't be that many dishwashers on the market. No two are alike, except that there's no figuring them out. I know what to do with my own, now. I'm sure it didn't make sense at first either, but after a while, you figure out what goes where from experience. If you load the plates here, there's no place for the bowls. If you stick the big bowl there, the little shallow one won't fit along the side. It's very personal.

Our friends KC and Scott are major food people. When they remodeled their kitchen, they went ahead and put in two dishwashers. That never occurs to most people. They were not about to hand-wash the cooking pots, or stack dirty dishes waiting for the first batch to get clean, and that was that. Regular people design their kitchens so that they're standard and ready to sell to someone else. The four of us are not regular people. (Dave's countertop is six inches higher than standard, and we have two refrigerators. One for the beer. If the next people want something different, they'll have to nuke it and start over.)

They should make dishwashers with cut-outs like those old hand-tool pegboards. I am paralyzed by the sight of foreign dishwasher pegs. They look like a shishkebab assembly line. I see the basket for the utensils, but are my friends handle-up or handle-down people? Do they spear the glasses or slip them between the peg rows? What are the rules? 

Once you decide on, say, where a plate goes, you can keep on stacking them in there in parallel. But they might be on the diagonal and you'll end up with unused corner space. If the proprietor of the kitchen happens to come by while you're puzzling, he'll invariably hover and tsk and twist his hands, and finally say "Usually what I do is..."

That's the key right there. It doesn't matter how you put the dishes in. They're just going to get rearranged after you leave.

Holy Nova!

Either a supernova  or a mammogram.

So the Good Star Betelgeuse might be on the way out. One thing is guaranteed, humans being what they are (gullible, imaginative, and self-centered in the extreme): if Betelgeuse goes ahead and dies on us in a fiery explosion, a lot of people aren't going to be content to admire it for the awesome spectacle it is, but will impute all sorts of significance to it. It will be a sign of something: impending doom, God's Moral Flashlight, anything but the collapse of a massive star that has about run out of fuel and can no longer overcome the force of gravity. Nope: people already believe that their lives are disrupted whenever a planet looks like it's going backwards but isn't. They're not going to let a supernova go by without wringing as much meaning out of it as they can.

For instance, there's quite a lot of speculation that the Star of Bethlehem that led the three wise men to Jesus's bed of straw was actually a supernova. Now, right off the bat you have that problem with witness reliability: Matthew was the only Gospel writer who even mentioned a big star, which you'd think one of the others would have noticed. Especially if it was moving around the sky and pulling up short and parking right over the baby.

But evidently there was a doozy of a nova on February 23, 4BC. And some scholars, based on various things known about King Herod, put Jesus's birth at anywhere between two and six years before his birthdate, which is a good trick all by itself, but maybe not a problem for the divine.

We can't take everything the Gospel writers said to the bank. They don't agree with each other. Everyone has the blessed event taking place in Bethlehem, which concords with an earlier prophesy, but some have Joseph and Mary and the babe hieing off to Egypt and others have them right back in Nazareth, having only popped off to Bethlehem for the census.

(Think about that for a moment. We get all upset when someone bangs on our door for the census, or we have to fill out and mail a form. Imagine how a modern person would feel about making a road trip for the purpose. On a donkey. Pregnant.)

Anyway if it was that particular nova, once again, we're dealing with something that actually took place 21,000 years earlier, so if it really was announcing the birth of the Savior of Mankind, that was some slick planning. The only thing we know of that was happening around then was that people were moving to the vicinity of Canberra, Australia. And generally speaking it isn't mankind that needs to be saved when people start occupying territory, it's the animals that already lived there. Nevertheless, the whole coincidence--star blowing up, baby born 21,000 years later, mankind redeemed--is considered by some to be a mystical slam dunk, because God.

Now if good old Betelgeuse were to collapse this year, it really would've happened in about the time Peter the First of Portugal was born. Peter was in love with his wife's maid and his own father hired men to decapitate her; he had her dug up again, but nobody is reported to have sailed into the sky or anything, and he had to settle for matching tombs so that at least they could be together at the Last Judgment.

To be fair, lots of supernovas haven't panned out, Messiah-wise.

But let's stick to the convention that the significant event is the arrival of the light from the explosion to our planet. In that case, if Betelgeuse goes off now, we should start looking around for a new savior, and it's none too soon. I would've put my money on Greta Thunberg, but I guess it's too late.

Duck! It's Betelgeuse!

The internet is abuzz with rumors of the imminent demise of the star Betelgeuse, but it also claims that illegal immigrants are allowed to vote and Hillary Clinton has people murdered, so I wouldn't get too worked up about the star. The huge bright star has dimmed appreciably in just the last month, however, which could be a precursor to its becoming a supernova, or not.

As awesome as that would be--you'd be able to see it in the daytime--it's probably fruitless to spend the night in a lawn chair waiting for it. You're liable to be chilly, and also disappointed.

Because although Betelgeuse is a big fat red star and is entirely expected to blow up sooner rather than later, "sooner" is a relative term: the human lifetime is not a standard measure for any number of things happening in the universe, no matter how we might feel about it. And besides that, the idea that Betelgeuse is going supernova at all is misleading. As a recent philosopher once put it, it depends on what the meaning of "is" is. If that sucker lights up the sky this month, it really did it in the fourteenth century, and we're only just hearing about it.

Betelgeuse is an Arabic word meaning Orion's Armpit. Orion, the Great Hunter, is the biggest brightest constellation in the sky and viewable from every hemisphere, right where he was installed by Zeus as a favor to a couple of goddesses. In spite of a nice set of nebulas below his belt he is universally assumed to be facing us, which makes Betelgeuse the star at his right shoulder. He is instantly recognizable by his belt and by the line of stars descending from it which we're going to go ahead and call his "sword," and never mind what those goddesses say.

Humans take everything personally. Orion might be a great hunter to some, but in some quarters he's a bison, and elsewhere he's a child's string game, like Cat's Cradle. In any case, even if you see a sword hanging from a belt, how it's hanging is a trick of perspective, because them stars ain't anywhere near each other.

Reminds me of the time we were admiring the view from East Zig Zag Mountain, from which five serviceable volcanoes can be seen, and a young woman asked me what the mountains were. So I told her. Mt. St. Helens on the far left, then Rainier, etc. She thanked me and went back to her picnic rock where I overheard her boyfriend explain that I was full of shit, because Rainier is to the left of Mt. St. Helens.

Which it is, from Portland. But not from East Zig Zag. Mt. St. Helens could have been spewing ash and geologist shrapnel into the air and he still would have called it Rainier, which (he further explained) is much bigger than that little dinky one I pointed out. (It's also fifty miles further away, Idiot Lips.)

So from here we see a nice big great hunter but if you could see the same stars from some other elbow of the galaxy it might totally be Mildred, The Needlepoint Artist. Hope her sore shoulder gets better.

Happy Birthday to my niece Elizabeth!

An Inconvenience Of Frogs

Around the holidays it seems like no one has enough time. There's too much to do. It doesn't feel as good as it should. It's stressful.

For instance, for the volunteers of the Harborton Frog Shuttle, late December is probably a time when there are still more gifts to buy, cookies to bake, family newsletters to mock, and holiday open houses to avoid. It's raining. Nobody is driving fast enough. The Frog Shuttlers are just like everyone else, with maybe better rain gear. But the frogs themselves measure time differently.

The frogs might look at the last Friday night before Christmas and think: Hey. It's raining. We're horny. Let's go downhill to the pond and score. And the Frog Shuttlers think: Hey. It's raining. Everyone's driving too fast. Let's go nab us some frogs.

The frogs we nab won't appreciate it. But they're going to get a lift across a four-lane highway with heedless traffic on it, whereas a lot of the frogs we don't manage to nab are going to turn into road snot. We're as motivated as they are.

The frogs are in a holiday spirit. There is nothing like a steady downpour in the dark to put a frog in a festive frame of mind. They're not stressed; they've got everything all wrapped up already. The dudes come down first, mostly. They're going to stake out their portion of the swamp and practice their moves. I've got your package right here, they say. Come let papa give you a hug and I'll show you how to open it.

If anyone can roll her eyes, it's a frog, but after a while, in the spirit of the season, the big females begin blooping down the hill bloated with eggs and look over the prospects.

And the thing about it is, they will do this without any regard whatsoever for the imaginary needs of Frog Shuttlers. You don't have Christmas wrapped up? Frogs don't care. You have your jammies and bunny slippers on and a Christmas movie cued up and are just starting to think about pouring yourself a nice stiff toddy because it's Me time and God knows you're tired because you've done every damn thing for this family but do they appreciate it? They don't.

Neither do the frogs. It's raining. It's dark. It's Go Time.

And that's the best thing the frogs do for us. They pull us out of our time, our concerns, our petty obligations, our artificial schedules, and put us on Frog Time. Pacific Standard Frog Time. When the air is fresh and the geese and owls and chorus frogs are in charge of music and the night might offer you fifty more plump, rubbery chances to do something for somebody that they won't appreciate.

It's a new year. Instead of marking time, find a new time zone. Mountain Chickadee Time. Daylight Saving Wildlife Time. Eastern Kingbird Time. Pay attention to their needs, and a lot of your own will fade away.

Friday, December 20, 2019. 224 male red-legged frogs assisted, 14 female. Happy New Year y'all!