9/13/23

 Wednesday, September 13, 2023

In bed around 11, unable to sleep, fractured night with several pss and 1 brr, and awakened at 8:09 by a spam call.  55°, high of 63°, partly cloudy, AQi=21😀, wind N at 9, 2-11/13. 0.15" of rain last night.  The sun rose at 6:28 at 84°E and will set at 7:05, 12+36.

Binging Unforgotten.  We binged the last 4 episodes of Season 3 of Unforgotten last night, with me not getting sleepy for some reason and even unable to fall asleep at 11, an unlikely and unwelcome occurrence but, hey, we got to find out whodunit and to watch the great acting of Nicola Walker all night.  We have rewatched seasons 2, 3, and 4 now, leaving season 1 with Nicola Walker and the new season 5 with her replacement.  With each re-viewed episode, my admiration for her acting really challenging roles increases.

LTMW at our lawn guys doing their usual excellent job mowing, trimming, and blowing, and at a lot of action on the short and tall tube feeding stations despite the noisy lawn machines: finches, chickadees, et al.  A couple of English sparrows show up and they look kind of chubby and chunky compared to the sleek chickadees and nuthatches and cardinals.  I'm wondering whether I should start filing the suet cake baskets again or wait till it gets colder, perhaps when the snowbirds show up again.  A huge, extra-long semi just pulled onto Wakefield Court and is backing up into Mequon since there is no exit and no turn-around from our cut-de-sac.  I have such admiration for the drivers of these big rigs negotiating the backups.  It must take a lot of training and skill.  Back in the days when I hauled my 16-foot Lund Mr. Pike fishing boat behind my car, I never became very proficient at backing up, especially when backing up the trailer without the boat on it.  Around 1 p.m., a couple of song sparrows show up, or are they pine siskins, my perrenial uncertainty?

Petty, shameful schadenfreude.  I confess: I felt some pleasure on learning that Aaron Rodgers' Achilles tendon snapped in the Jets' opening game against the Buffalo Bills, ending his season after just 4 snaps, one pass attempted and none completed.  I also felt sympathy for him as a human being when I saw the slo-mo close-up of his calf at the moment the snap occurred, pretty gruesome.  I suppose NFL fans will be seeing him on television as the 'color man' on the Jets' announcing team, and on his favorite Pat McAfee Show where he apparently likes to pontificate, which I've never seen, and elsewhere.  Rodgers' two-year contract with the Jets gives him $75,000,000 fully guaranteed.  His total salaries in the NFL amount to $342,496,898 with the Packers and the Jets.  We can be sure the Jets' owners and managers obtained insurance against a season-ending injury or illness but nonetheless, they are back to the drawing board in terms of filling the QB position.  A big reason for deriving some pleasure over this high-finance boondoggle is that it may have occurred in large measure because of the Jets' ownership choice of artificial turf for their playing field.  Rodgers spent his years in Green Bay playing on grass, the famous 'frozen tundra', which is much easier on the players' bodies than artificial turf if, for no other reason, grass doesn't grow over rockhard concrete, the substrate of artificial turn.  But the artificial turf is cheaper to maintain than a grass field and thus increases the owners' profits from the brutal sport.  "Jets wide receiver and longtime Rodgers teammate Randall Cobb: “We wanted the NFL to protect the players with grass fields, but the NFL is more worried about making money. Profit over people, it’s always been the case. I’ve never been a fan of turf.”  The money-grubbing owners' money-saving, profit-enhancing choice now has cost them money with their superstar QB out for the season and perhaps for good if he chooses to retire rather than return for the next season.  Schadenfreude. The Jets-Bills game drew an average of more than 22.6 million viewers across ESPN, ABC, and other platforms, ESPN said Tuesday. It was the most-watched “Monday Night Football” game since ESPN started carrying the package in 2006.  They can kiss those numbers and those dollars goodbye.  Boo-hoo.

War Is A Racket, is a short book I picked up at the library yesterday written in the middle of the Great Depression by Marine Corps icon, Brig. Gen. Smedley D. Butler (Ret.), after he retired from the Marines.  He was a two-time Medal of Honor awardee who became of foe Big Business, and corporate America, who he accurately believed caused and profited from wars and military adventures in which the little guys fought, were maimed, and died to increase the capitalists' profits.  Butter oversaw American forays into China, Nicaragua, Cuba, and Haiti and this is where he picked up his frequently expressed opinion that he was no more than a bully boy for American corporations, due in part to his Quaker background.  A quote:

    I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914.  I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in.  I helped in the raping of a half dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street.  The record of racketeering is long.  I helped purify Nicaragua for the international house of Brown Brothers 1909-1912.  I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916.  In China, I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Butler was a champion of the Bonus Marchers, World War I veterans who set up camp in Washington, D.C., demanding the bonuses they had been promised by the government.  Their Hooverville camp was attacked and disbanded on July 28, 1932, by future 'heroes' Doughlas "I Shall Return" MacArthur and George "Blood and Guts" Patton on the orders of Republican president Herbert Hoover.  Three cheers for Smedley Butler, shame on MacArthur and Patton.  But one wonders when Butler's eyes were opened to corporate control over the U.S. government including perhaps most significantly governmental decisions to wage war or otherwise use lethal force to advance business interests.  When did he see the light?

Added some color to Camille's collar