Julia Michaels

The song of the day is 2017's Issues by singer-songwriter Julia Michaels (Julia Carin Cavazos).

Buffy versus Shadowhunters

There is a new series on TV called Shadowhunters: The Mortal Instruments. It debuted in 2015 and is, or will soon be, in it’s third season. IMDB reviewers rate the show 6.3 out of 10, so it must be a good show. IMDB says this about this show:

Clary Fray is a normal teenager living in Brooklyn with her mother. One day, she discovers that she is descended from a line of Shadowhunters; humans born with angelic blood that fight to protect our world from demons. After her mother is kidnapped, Clary must team up with three Shadowhunters: Jace, Alec and Isabelle and her best friend Simon on a quest to find her mother and recover her past.

Why does this storyline sound so very familiar? Let’s compare it to another show that aired from 1997 to 2003 – a show called Buffy the Vampire Slayer. IMDB reviewers rate that show 8.2 out of 10, so it must be a very good show. (The synopsis is mine, but fans of the show can verify its accuracy.)

Buffy Summers is a normal teenager living in Sunnydale with her mother. One day, she discovers that she is the latest in a long line of Slayers: girls born with special powers to protect our world from demons. With the help of her three friends, Willow, Xander, and Cordelia, and her watcher Giles, she pursues her destiny: fighting vampires and demons, all the while struggling to live a normal teenage life of heartbreak and drama.

Wow. Is it me, or do those two plotlines sound almost identical?

I was about 15 years old when I submitted my first short story to a magazine. I received the manuscript back with a note that read, “Get some fresh ideas.”

Fresh ideas might have been important to magazine publishers back in the day, but Hollywood doesn’t run on fresh ideas. Hollywood runs on retreaded plots and rehashed characters. It runs on spinoffs and sequels and prequels. And that’s why I don’t watch a lot of TV. It’s why I “cut the cord” and hooked up an antenna. Almost every show has a whiff of “We’ve been here before.” It’s like the same dead body dressed in a different suit every week. After a while it’s going to smell, no matter how nice the suit.

I suppose being original was easier in the days when there were fewer TV networks. Hollywood writers had only a few hours of airtime to pour their writing talent into. Now there are hundreds of TV channels and thousands of shows, and creative talent is of necessity spread thin. Fewer ideas are original, and more ideas are derivative.

But maybe there’s an upside here. As TV becomes less interesting, books may see a revival. Books are, after all, the last bastion of original thought – something that some people still consider desirable.

Almost an Elvis

I recently saw a Panera bread advertisement on YouTube that showed a peanut butter, bacon, and honey sandwich. The sandwich looked oh-so tasty. (The ad is here.) Throw in some sliced banana and you’ll have yourself an Elvis. Although, technically, I don’t think you need honey to make an Elvis.

When I saw the add I thought to myself, “Ooh, I have to try that.”

Like most people (I assume), I’ve had my share of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I’ve also eaten peanut butter and banana sandwiches, with peanut butter on one slice of bread and mayonnaise on the other. They’re really good. Not Michelin Guide good, of course, but still good. It never crossed my mind to add crisp, fried bacon to the mix.

The closest I came to a peanut butter and bacon sandwich happened when I was in the 8th grade. I had a taste for peanut butter and baloney sandwiches. Every morning I made my school lunch: white bread with peanut butter and a slice of baloney right out of the package. Plus a moon pie. It’s gastronomic heaven – if you’re a 14 year old boy.

Sometimes I prepared fried baloney as a meal for one. And sometimes I would put the fried baloney on a plate and spread peanut butter on it and then roll it up like a fat, meaty joint. Baloney was the Zig-Zag paper and peanut butter was the weed. That PB and baloney combo was good, too. You really can’t mess up peanut butter and baloney. You can’t do much to make it worse, and you can do little to make it better. It is what it is.

But peanut butter, bacon, and honey – that’s another critter, and as it turns out, a popular one. So I had to investigate it.

All I had on hand was whole wheat bread. I like whole wheat bread so that wasn’t an issue. I had real peanut butter in the fridge. The ingredient list for real peanut butter states “Ingredients: peanut butter, salt.” (Look at the ingredients in your favorite brand of peanut butter.) Why keep it in the fridge? Because if you don’t, real peanut butter soon separates into peanuts and oil. And finally, I had low-sodium bacon in the fridge. Unfortunately, I had no honey and didn’t feel like buying a jar of honey for this one taste test.

I toasted the bread and nuked the bacon. I smeared PB on the two slices of toast and added the bacon. I glommed the two slices of bread together, trapping the bacon inside, and I ate the PB and bacon sandwich. The verdict? Good, but not as good as a PB and baloney sandwich. Sorry, Panera. You tried, but when it comes to junk food, it’s difficult for even the best chef to match the gustatory delights dreamed up by a 14 year-old boy.

Post New Year

On this third morning of 2017, I awaken at 2 AM, as usual. Not that I always awaken at that specific time, but I always awaken at some point during the middle of the night – sometimes before midnight, sometimes after. Often, I’ll get up for a few hours then return to bed. But tonight I don’t feel like getting out of bed so early, so I lie in bed and listen to the rain hitting the roof. Occasionally, I glance at the clock beside my bed. When it says 5:00, I get up.

It’s dark and still raining. The forecast calls for rain all day and all night – just like yesterday. A gray day will soon be dawning. But I have a 9 AM appointment with my cardiologist, and I have prepping to do. I don’t want to be late for my appointment, so a four hour head start should insure that I’m not.

I shower. I shave. I even shave my chest and stomach. My torso is just a bit hairy, and when the cardiologist’s nurse yanks those EKG electrodes off me, they take hair with them. There are 12 leads on the EKG machine, so that’s 12 tufts of hair to be yanked out. Shaving my front allows the EKG pads to stick to my skin better, and bonus, also reduces the amount of hair that gets pulled out by the roots.

I dress. I sit in my living room, watching dismal world events unfold on the TV news, until 6:30. Then I get up and fix breakfast. I scramble two eggs and pour them into a hot skillet. I sprinkle the soon-to-be omelet with shredded cheese. I wait a few minutes and then carefully fold the egg mixture into an omelet. This is the point where half the time the omelet tears or breaks in half, but this time the magic works and I end up with an omelet-shaped omelet. I nuke two pre-cooked sausage links in the microwave oven. I go to the living room and sit in front of the TV, where I watch something completely forgettable while eating my breakfast. When I finish, the clock reads 7 AM.

I dress, pulling on freshly washed jeans and a heavy-knit shirt. I put on shoes and socks. The rain has let up and is now just a falling mist, so I take a bag of kitchen garbage out to the wheelie-bin behind my house. I go back into the house and this time I remember to turn off the backyard flood lights. I remember to do that about one in every twenty trips outside at night.

I look at some internet news and then decide to watch a one-hour video that I have on my computer. So I do that, and when I finish, the time is 8:30. It doesn’t take long to drive to the doctor’s office. I decide to leave at 8:45 so I’ll have 15 minutes to get there. Feeling the need to pee, and not knowing how long I’ll wait to see the doc, I go to the bathroom and try to pee. Although I feel like I have to go, not a drop comes out. “Sacrebleu!” I swear in 19th century French. “Is this the beginning of a urinary tract infection or did my prostate explode during the night?! Oy vey.” (I also swear in Yiddish. Yiddish is timeless.)

I pull on my coat, pop a baseball cap onto my head, and grab my umbrella. An umbrella may look dorky, but dressing fashionably cool is the last thing on my mind. I just want to stay dry.

I drive to the doctor’s office, getting there in plenty of time for my 9 AM appointment. I go to the appointment window to check in. The young lady on the other side of the window asks, “Who are you here to see?”

“Dr. Pathak,” I answer.

“He’s not here,” she says.

“Not here? I have a 9 AM appointment today.”

“Dr. Pathak isn’t here,” she repeats, adding, “He’s on vacation this week. Your appointment has been re-scheduled to the tenth. It’s at ten o’clock. Do you want an appointment card.”

“No – ten on the tenth. Got it.”

It would have been nice if someone had called me and told me that the appointment had been rescheduled. But there’s no point in getting upset about it. Shit happens, and always will.

I go to my car. To make the trip not a complete waste of time, I drive to the grocery store in the shopping center next door. I peruse the shelves, looking for something tasty but not overly unhealthy. “Oooh, fried chicken strips!” I pull the package out of the freezer and look at the nutrition label. “If this is three and a half servings, I’m a one-eyed sea monkey.” The label says the chicken strips contain four thousand milligrams of sodium – enough to elevate my blood pressure to what doctors call “the exploding-head threshold.” I put the package back in the freezer.

Next, I put a bag of potato chips into my cart, after first dropping the bag onto the floor, shattering half the chips inside. I could put the bag back on the shelf and get another bag, but I broke ‘em, so I’ll buy ‘em.

Next, I put a wheel of cooked shrimp into my cart. This is one of those round plastic platters: a circular serving of shrimp with a little well of shrimp sauce in the center. I’ve bought them before and they’re good. On the way to my car I, of course, drop the bag with a loud smack into a puddle of rainwater in the parking lot. But no worries. I know those shrimp are sealed up in that little round package tighter than the gold in Fort Knox. It will take twenty minutes with razor-sharp implements to break into that package.

Next, I go to the bread section. The shelf-stocker is there stocking shelves. “Do you have sourdough bread?” I ask.

He points. “Right there. Sourdough. Read it. Are you stupid?”

“Thank you for your help,” I reply and grab a loaf.

“Arrrrgh,” he snarls back. This could be my imagination, but I seem to recall he had an eye patch and a hook for one hand.

Eventually, I wheel my cart to the self-checkout line. My checkout machine turns out to be one of those that, on every third item I scan, tells me to remove the last item from the bag and scan it. Fortunately, at that time of morning the store isn’t busy, and there is a young woman overseeing the self-checkout machines, so every time there is a glitch, I turn around and look at her forlornly. She doesn’t have to ask me what’s wrong. She knows the quirks of every machine, so she can clear up the problem quickly. Or could, were she not distracted by the conversation she’s having with another young woman standing near her.

“Oh la vache!” I mutter in 21st century French. That is a real French curse. It translates as, “Oh the cow!”

Wait – the cow? Yes, the cow. Who can figure out the French?

McCarran-Walter Act

I have received multiple emails from right-wing friends referencing the McCarran-Walter Act, a.k.a. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (8 US Code Law 1182). The point of the email is that all Muslims “should or could be refused immigration to our country”  and asks the reader “what do you say about all of the criticism that Donald Trump received” from ordering a travel ban. What follows is my usual response.

Long before McCarran-Walter, President Hoover and the State Department essentially shut down immigration during the Great Depression as immigration went from 236,000 in 1929 to 23,000 in 1933. This was accompanied by voluntary repatriation to Europe and Mexico, and coerced repatriation and deportation of between 500,000 and 2 million Mexican Americans, mostly citizens, in the Mexican Repatriation.

Briefly, 8 US Code Law 1182 says:

“Inadmissible aliens: defines inadmissible aliens with health-related communicable diseases, conviction of certain crimes, multiple criminal convictions, controlled substance traffickers, prostitution and commercialized vice, certain aliens involved in serious criminal activity who have asserted immunity from prosecution, foreign government officials who have committed particularly severe violations of religious freedom, significant traffickers in persons, and money laundering if the Attorney General has reason to believe that the alien is engaged in terrorist activities, immigrant membership in totalitarian party [at the time, this was listed as Communist], participants in Nazi persecution, genocide, or the commission of any act of torture or extrajudicial killing, association with terrorist organizations, and recruitment or use of child soldiers, to name but a few of the details.”

While it was passed in 1952 and parts of the original Act remain, it has been amended many times and was modified substantially to become the Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965. It was this modified act that President Carter referred to in 1980 when he banned Iranians from entering the United States.

What Carter did was part of a larger program to pressure the Iranian regime in order to secure the release of American hostages without military intervention. In contrast, Trump's proposal comes in response to a mass shooting perpetrated by an American citizen and his immigrant wife. While President Carter targeted individuals by nationality, Trump’s plan targets individuals by ideology. Law experts say that Trump's plan would very likely be ruled unconstitutional.

Furthermore, regarding the Koran forbidding allegiance to the US Constitution, you may recall the kerfuffle when Trump lashed out at the Gold Star Muslim-American parents whose son was killed while serving in the US military in Iraq. There are many Muslims and children of Muslim immigrants who put their lives on the line to defend American values. Beyond dying to protect us from our enemies, I don't know what else Muslims could do to show their allegiance.

By the way, banning any particular religious group from entering the US would violate several parts of the Constitution, specifically the First Amendment's Religion Clauses and the equality dimension of the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment; it would also conflict with the spirit of the No Religious Test Clause of Article VI. 

Cornell Law professor Michael Dorf, an expert in constitutional law, said that while U.S. policy ‘routinely applies different immigration rules for nationals of different countries,’ Trump’s proposal to only exclude ‘foreign nationals who are Muslim’ would likely be ‘unconstitutional.’

Stanford Law professor Jenny Martinez, an expert in international law, said ‘Excluding all people of a particular religion from entering the country on the sole basis of their religion would, in my view, clearly violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection.’

Furthermore, an attempt to ban Muslims from the US would play right into the hands of jihadi propagandists. And how would we know that an immigrant was Muslim? Trump says an immigration office would ask them, "Are you Muslim?" How easy would that be to get around?  If a terrorist was intent on harming us, do you think he would answer truthfully?"

I'm all for banning individuals from our country if their intent is to harm us. But banning individuals according to their religion would be un-American and most likely destined to fail. We have to be smarter about it. There are similar problems with many of Trump's proposals: they are a knee-jerk reaction to a situation and are too simplistic, or too illegal, or too expensive, or too impractical to implement.

Trump on Nukes

President-elect Donald Trump tweeted this statement:

The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 22, 2016

America’s nuclear weapons stockpile is aging, and aging nukes must be refurbished from time to time. It’s called stockpile management. One of the top responsibilities of the Department of Energy is maintaining the nuclear stockpile.

So who did Trump pick to head the Department of Energy? None other than Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas, who has declared that he wants to dismantle the Department of Energy. Okay everybody, all together now: “WTF?”  Does anyone see a problem here?

It’s called having your cake and eating it, too. It’s classic Trump.

Trump wants to increase spending on the military while also cutting taxes and reducing the national debt. That is a formula that has been proven to not work. But it’s an easy sell to Congress. Every House member wants more Federal government money spent in his district; every senator wants more money spent in his state; every taxpayer loves a tax cut. Meanwhile, the ostriches in Congress have their heads planted firmly in the sand and they’re all chanting, “We see nothing.”

Miner

The song of the day is Paper Moon from the album Tuanaki by folk-rock, family band Miner. The album title, Tuanaki, is the name of a vanished group of inhabited islets, once part of the Cook Islands.

 

The Electoral College

Republicans are still gloating over Trump’s election victory. It’s getting tiresome. And they’re forgetting something. Trump won the election but not the vote. Clinton collected 2.5 million more votes than Trump, yet lost the election.The same thing happened in 2000 thanks to the Electoral College.

Conservatives say the Electoral College is a good thing. They say the Founding Fathers did not want a system in which states with big urban populations would dominate mostly-rural states. However, I suspect this explanation was invented ex post facto as a justification for continuing to have an Electoral College. There were no big cities in America in those long-ago days. Ninety-five percent of America’s population lived on farms. In 1790, the population of New York City was 33,131. Why would the Founding Fathers be concerned about something that might happen someday in their future? They would more likely reason that if a situation arose that voters found objectionable, then we would simply amend the Constitution. And we have amended it. In fact, the US constitution has 27 amendments.

But let’s assume my conservative friends are correct and the justification for the Electoral College is to equalize political power between urban and rural populations. The logic that follows is this: dominance of urban populations over rural populations is bad, but dominance of rural populations over larger urban populations is okay. Excuse me, but I really don’t see the logic there. One could argue whether the Electoral College system is better for the country than the doctrine of “one person, one vote.” All I am saying is the Electoral College system is inherently undemocratic. Your vote should count as much as my vote. It’s that simple.

Today, with computers and instantaneous, long-distance communication, the public will know the outcome of an election within hours of the polls closing. Newscasters will provide us with the number of votes cast for each candidate as well as the number of electoral votes each candidate will win. If every elector always votes according to the election results, then the Electoral College accomplishes nothing. It is nothing more than a rubber stamp on an already-known result. In short, there would be no point in having an Electoral College.

But we have one, so there must be a valid reason for it even in today’s computerized, digitized America. And there is – and it’s the same reason the Founding Fathers created an Electoral College system for electing the president. The one and only justification for having an Electoral College is, and always has been, to void an election. The electors can throw out the results of an election and elect someone else. In short, the Electoral College is a circuit-breaker between an ambitious, ego-driven demagogue elected by a duped and manipulated public, and the office of the president. It’s what the framers of the Constitution, who were a little afraid of a direct vote for president, wanted. The difficult questions – to vote the will of the people or to void the election – must be left to the electors and their consciences.

Of course, the “ambitious, ego-driven demagogue” I cite is purely hypothetical. I really can’t think of any presidential aspirant who has immense ambition coupled with a colossal ego. Nope, can’t think of a single one.

A December Day

Today is a Friday. It is late afternoon.  The temperature is 28°F after being 12° last night. A thick overcast obscures the sun, making for a cold, gray day. The weather forecast calls for ice pellets this evening. Ice pellets begin their existence as snowflakes at high altitude. The snowflakes fall into a layer of warm air where they turn into raindrops. The raindrops fall into very cold air near the ground and turn into ice pellets. A tenth of an inch of ice doesn’t sound like much until you try to walk or drive on it. Then, ice is very treacherous.

One winter I was driving to work, and I knew there was “black ice” on my street, so I drove very slowly as I approached an intersection with a stop sign. In fact, my car was going no faster than a person could walk. About 100 feet from the stop sign, I began tapping my brake pedal. Nothing happened, except every time I tapped the brake pedal, my car seemed to go faster. Seemingly in slow motion, my car leisurely slid past the stop sign and stopped in the middle of the intersection.

Another winter, I was driving my Jeep on a four lane divided highway through a rural part of Virginia. The highway was divided by a raised earthen median. There had been an ice storm and bare trees beside the highway glistened with ice, and some trees had branches broken off by the weight of the ice. There were just two vehicles within sight on the highway: my Jeep and a nondescript white sedan ahead of me in my lane. We were driving at the speed limit: 55 mph. The road was covered with snow, but I was pretty sure that under that snow there lurked a coating of ice on the highway. We came upon a tree limb lying beside the road – not unusual, but this limb was lying partly in the right lane.  The driver of the sedan eased his car into the left lane to go past it, as did I. As the sedan driver tried to return to the right lane, his car began to fishtail. The rear of the car went one way, then the other, in increasingly large deviations. Then the car spun around in front of me and veered off the road toward the hilly median. The car hit the median and flipped into the air and came down on its roof on the edge of the road. Though I had been right behind him, I was able to stop my Jeep before it reached the accident, and I pulled off the road and onto the right shoulder. The driver of the sedan crawled out of his car through the side window and walked over to my Jeep. He appeared unhurt.

I put the window down. “Are you okay?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he replied. But then he said, “I think I’ll go into the woods and lie down.” And so he did. I guess he was still some way from “okay.”

Today is also December 16. Is winter here yet? That depends on your definition of winter. For astronomers and scientists, astronomical winter this year begins on December 21. But for weather forecasters, meteorological winter always begins on December 1 – in the northern hemisphere. Down under in the southern hemisphere, the Aussies and Kiwis have their seasons in the wrong months. Their summer is December to February and their winter is June to August. Their autumn is March to May, and their spring is September to November. If you think having all their seasons in the wrong months is weird, know also that they insist on driving on the wrong side of the road. It’s like they live in some bizarre “opposite-world.” Maybe that comes from them being upside down all the time. Anyway, they seem to like it that way.

On Sunday – two days from now – the high temperature is supposed to be 70° with a chance of rain. Sub-freezing one day, balmy two days later: it’s December in Virginia.

Caveman

The song of the day is The State of Mind from the 2016 album Otero War by Brooklyn band Caveman.