5/18/23

 Thursday, May 18, 2023

In bed at 10:20, up at 6:30, beautiful orange-yellow-gold early morning sun in the clear sky.  Let Lilly out (twice), and gave her the Proin pill in liver sausage. 46℉, high of 64℉, wind  S at 8 mph, 3 to 15 mph during the day, with gusts up to 23 mph. The sun rose at 5:25, sunset at 8:11, 14+46.

Lilly is drinking quite a lot of water this morning.  She did yesterday too.  At her advanced age and with her recent incontinence while sleeping, we're keeping a close and anxious watch on her.

LTMW this morning the first thing I see is good neighbor John McGregor out for his early walk up into Mequon, the first of his several daily walks.  He has turned around much sooner than normal, perhaps needing a pit stop.  The sunflower seed tube is 3/4 empty.  I'm busy emptying my Kleenex box and dealing with my daily early morning rhinitis, almost certainly due to some allergic reaction to something in my bed, bedding, or pillows.  I didn't tether myself to the CPAP last night so the runny nose doesn't appear to be linked to that device.  The first squirrel of the morning has appeared on the feeding ground under the tubes, along with a couple of chipmunks and a white-crowned sparrow.  A young oriole landed on one of the oranges at 8:15 and ate his or her fill.  On Wakefield, a neighbor couple with their young golden doodle is walking their baby or toddler in a stroller with their older child keeping pace on his tricycle.  They stop to chat with another neighbor driving by on the way home and then turn around and follow the neighbor in the car, led by the youngster on the tricycle.

Godless.  I finished watching this 7-hour series on Netflix last night.  It was well done and I enjoyed it.  Jeff Daniels played Frank Griffin, an evil preacher leading a gang of 30 desperadoes.  Michelle Dockery, of Downton Abbey, played Alice Fletcher, a tough-as-nails widow who has a 'half-breed' Paiute son.  Thll works; they are all terrific in their roles.  There are many conflicts in the complex plot, the principal one being between Frank Griffin and his 'son,' Roy Goode.  Others include the chase by the sheriff and the marshall looking for Griffin, the relationship betweey live on a ranch outside the silver mining town of LaBelle in the middle of wide-open New Mexico Territory with Alice's Paiute mother-in-law and eventually Roy Goode, played by Jack O'Connell.  The town is populated almost entirely by women after a mining disaster killed almost all of the men.  The dominant leader of the town is Mary Agnes McNue a gun-packing, cross-dressing lesbian or bisexual widow played by Merritt Wever, sister of the half-blind Sheriff Bill McNue and widow of the former mayor.  Sam Waterston plays the federal marshall from Santa Fe, John Cook.  The star casting seems counter-intuitive, especially with Michelle Dockery, but also with Jeff Daniels and Sam Waterston, but it aen the people of LaBelle and Alice Fletcher, between the women of the town and Mary Agnes McNue, between Mary Agnes and her lesbian lover, the whore and school marm Callie Frazer, between the aptly named Whitey Winn, the White deputy sheriff in love with Black Louise Hobbes and the Blacks in Blackdom, a segregated settlement outside of LaBelle, the conflict between the newspaper editor A. T. Grigg and truthful reporting, etc. 

The series is grisly, with a lot of shooting and killing, cold-blooded murders, and Frank Griffin carrying around his amputated left arm until it becomes too "ripe" and is tossed into a campfire.  The series deals forthrightly with lesbianism in a female community, with racism and segregation ("Blackdom"), 'miscegenation' (Alice & Paiute, Whitey and Louise), with corporate greed and opportunism (Quicksilver Mining Company), with the tenuousness of 'law and order' in the face of determined law-breakers, etc.  The series invites comparison with today's America with mass shootings, gang violence, racism, corporate greed and opportunism, 'fake news' and making as opposed to reporting news, feminism, LGBTQ issues, etc.

Police shooting death in Mequon.  Resident in his 80s in a home in the3100 block of Bonniwell was shooting a firearm at another neighbor mowing his lawn.  Good grief.

Gerontocracy.  The NYT reports that 89 year old Diane Weinstein had more than a nasty case of shingles that kept her away from the Capitol for the few months.  The shingles spread to her face and neck, causing vision and balance impairments and facial paralysis known as Ramsay Hunt syndrome. The virus also brought on a previously unreported case of encephalitis, a rare but potentially debilitating complication of shingles.  Characterized by swelling of the brain, post-shingles encephalitis can leave patients with lasting memory or language problems, sleep disorders, bouts of confusion, mood disorders, headaches and difficulties walking. Older patients tend to have the most trouble recovering. And even before this latest illness, Ms. Feinstein had already suffered substantial memory issues that had raised questions about her mental capacity.  The senator still sees the job as her calling and is no more receptive to a conversation about stepping aside than she was in 2018, when she decided to seek another term despite questions about her mental acuity.  She is clearly non compos mentis.  The almost 40,000,000 people of California have one lucid U.S. senator representing them.  The @ 580,000 people of Wyoming and @650,000 people of Vermont have 2 apiece.  It has become increeasingly clear that Republicans rely on older voters to retain power.  If the last midterm  elections had been decided by voters 45 and older, Republicans would have won the House by an even greater margin and likely taken the Senate. But thanks to young voters (especially the 18-to-29 age group, which had the second-highest turnout in midterm elections in almost 30 years, according to early estimates from Tufts University), Democrats retained the Senate, showing that an alliance of Gen Z and millennial voters answered history’s call to defend democracy.  The age/generational differences betwen Democratic voters and Republican voters is exacerbated by the anti-democaratic (small 'd' and large 'D') effects of gerrymandering and by the anti-democratic effects built into our government by the Constituion via the structure of the Senate and the Electoral College and the role of the Supreme Court.  Bottom line: we fool ourselves in thinking that the United States is a democratic, representative democracy.  We are a nation ruled by an entrenhed minority, i.e., older Republicans and increasingly by the MAGA Republican because of their disproportinate power in the House and their power in the fedeeral judiciary gained during the one-term Trump presidency.  Quaere: why should anyone not represented by this minoritarian government pledge allegiance to it?

A drawing I did during the Trump presidency of the flag upside down.  Under the  U.S. Flag Code, the flag should never be displayed with the Union down "except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property."  Are we there?