5/15/2025

Thursday, May 15, 2025

D+169/114

1966 South Vietnamese army battled Buddhists, about 80 died

2018 58 Palestinians were killed by the IDF with 1700  hospitalized on the Gaza border, protesting the opening of the US embassy in Jerusalem and 70 year founding of Israel

2019 Jeff Koons "Rabbit" sculpture sold for $91.1 million, setting a new record for work by a living artist at auction; the buyer was later identified as hedge fund manager and MLB NY Mets owner Steve Cohen

Lights out at 10:30, back on at 545.  53°, fog, 70° high.   

Prednisone, day 365; 1 mg., day 7/21; Kevzara, day 3/14; CGM, day 12/15; Trulicity, day 7/7.  Prednisone at 6 a.m.  Other meds at 10 a.m.(?)   Eye drops at 6 a.m., 11:30 a.m., 4  p.m., and  9 p.m

Only my beautiful daughter, an expert and artistic photographer, knows and truly appreciates the story behind this B&W photo of a crabapple tree that used to be located in Lake Park, on the bluff overlooking Lake Michigan.  I had admired the tree for some time and had tried many times to capture its elegant beauty on film.  I was always unsuccessful because of heavy brush growth all around it, cluttering the background and obscuring its form.  One early morning about 45 years ago, lying in bed, I heard the foghorn blowing at the old lighthouse in the park.  I scrambled into some clothes, grabbed my camera case, rushed to the park, lay down flat on muddy soil on the edge of the downslope off the bluff, and snapped this photo, ever since my favorite, with the fog masking everything but the tree.

Bleak House

“LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes — gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if the day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little ’prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

Gas looming through the fog in divers places in the streets, much as the sun may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time — as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling look.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest near that leaden-headed old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leaden-headed old corporation, Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln’s Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.”

Technology incapacity and cognitive incapacity.  My new $120 external hard drive is not working right.  It refused to complete a backup last night, and this morning, when I tried again, it was exceedingly slow, profoundly so, and so I skipped the backup.  What's the problem?  I don't have a clue.  What's the solution?  I don't have a clue.  If my daughter, the Whiz Kid, were around, I would ask her for help.  Problems with my $1,000 phone?  I would ask her for help.  Problems with my Dick Tracy watch?  I would ask her for help.  Problems with our Samsung smart TV?  Is it the Samsung, or is it the Roku, or is it our YouTubeTV service?  I don't have a clue.  Perhaps the modem or the router in the basement?  The big problem is that I can't figure these things out for myself.  I don't think it's a matter of simply 'not keeping up' on developments in consumer technology, but rather the logic circuits in my brain not being up to snuff.  When I first learned how to use computers for word processing and then for surfing the web and Boolean logic for Lexis and Nexis, I could usually 'play around' with whatever I was working with until I figured it out.  Those days are gone.  Maybe it's my "working memory.  I've really gone downhill this past year, or has it been two years?  I was thinking back to Christmas of 2023 when the first signs of the polymyalgia started, but that forgets the chronic pelvic pain/bladder lesions I was living with before then.  Is there a relationship between the physical challenges I've been dealing with for a couple of years and my mental challenges?  Or is it just the whole shebang crapping out together?  Today my left lower leg and foot are so swollen in coundn't get on first a Haflinger outdoor clog, then my loose slipper, and than my Brooks running (Ha!) shoe,  Finally, I have a sandal on it, but with the back strap unfastened because I can't force my foot far enough into it to fasten the strap.  I had Geri bringing me out footwear from my bedroom like I was in a shoe store.  Does this mean I'll experience another cognitive deficit?  Another physical defect -> another cognitive defect?  Yesterday, the ultrasound ruled out deep vein thrombosis or blood clot, so what is it that has my calf and foot looking like water balloons?  Maybe my brain is flowing downstream.

Murdereers, villains, evildoers, slime, filth, snakes, fiends, birds of a feather, pares cum paribus, thieves.

 A declassified report from the US intelligence community on the 2018 killing and dismemberment of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi says Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman approved the operation to capture or kill him.

. . . . . . .

Trump to Bill O[Reilly: I respect Putin.

O'Reilly: But he's a killer.

Trump:  There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What do you think? Our country’s so innocent?

Anniversary thoughts. (1) Not even a full year into American full-scale engagement in the war, and already the Saigon government was mowing down Buddhists.

(2) Four and 1/2 years before the October 8th pogrom and the restart of the never-ending Israel-Gaza war,  yet another mass killing of Palestinians occurred, triggered in part by Trump's recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel/

(3)  The world we live in.  Hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen (they used to be priests), net worth estimated between $17 and $20 billion, blew $91 million for this ↓

Caela visited this afternoon. 'Twas lovely.  Dinner date Saturday, maybe with Saul.