7/5/2025

 Saturday, July 5, 2025

D+239/167/1294

1948 The National Health Service was established in the UK

1950 The Law of Return was passed, guaranteeing all Jews the right to live in Israel

2017 101 people reported shot, 15 killed in Chicago, Illinois over the 4th of July weekend

2024  President Joe Biden gave an interview to quell fears about his stamina and cognitive abilities with ABC's George Stephanopoulos

In bed at 9, up at 5:40, after a night of almost hourly pit stops.  71°, high of 86°, sunny again.

Meds., etc.     

Epitaph on a Tyrant

W. H. Auden

Perfection, of a kind, was what he was after,

And the poetry he invented was easy to understand;

He knew human folly like the back of his hand,

And was greatly interested in armies and fleets;

When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter,

And when he cried the little children died in the streets.

Independence from television day.  I managed to go the entire day yesterday without turning on the television, or the radio for that matter.  I did not want to see or hear the celebration at the White House over the passage of Trump's OBBBill, nor was I interested in celebrations of Independence Day.  I especially did not want to see the flyover of military aircraft in celebration of the passage of the budget bill.  I didn't know what kind of aircraft would be ordered to do the flyover, but I could guess it wouldn't be noisy, utilitarian helicopters or huge C-5 cargo planes.  No, it turned out to be the B-2 Spirit stealth bombers, escorted by F-22 Raptors and F-35 Lightning fighters, the aircraft that participated in the bombing of Iran on June 22.  The B-2s are based at Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri, 900 miles west of the White House.  They cost $130,000 per hour to fly.  The F-35s cost about half that amount, only $67,500 per hour, and the F-22s a bargain at a mere $58,000 per hour.  What was the real cost of that White House flyover yesterday?  We'll probably never know, but we can be sure that it exceeded a million dollars and that it was spent primarily to gratify Donald Trump's ego.  It was his grown-up version of a little boy's playing with model airplanes.  He claimed the flyover was intended to honor the pilots and crews who conducted 'Operation Midnight Hammer,' but we know better.  We know that DJT ultimately honors only himself, the King of the Mountain, the Big Cheese, the Big Kahuna, Mr. "I run the country and the world.'  For on this particular Fourth of July, the Donald was showing that, in very large measure, he does indeed run the country and the world.  He had, in less than two weeks, done what he could to hand Ukraine to his friend Vladimir Putin, gratuitously and unilaterally bombed his foe, the Ayatollah, and bent the Republican Party and the Congress to his will by forcing the passage of perhaps the worst and least humane budget bill in American history.  So yesterday was Donald's day to gloat and my day to wish there was something for America to celebrate instead of so much to regret and fear.

Patio time.  I spent 30 to 40 minutes on the patio this morning, starting around 8 a.m.  It was near 80° and balmy.  Two new flowers had bloomed in the marginal garden, yellow buttercups along the lawn line, and white daisy-like flowers in the rear.  There are still no new flowers on Geri's tomato plant, and only the two green fruits are already growing.  No chipmunks scurried about while I was out there, but I saw a full-grown cottontail rabbit hopping into and then out of the far ferns.  I activated the Merlin app on my phone and it told me that within earshot were cardinals, robins, house sparrows, house finches, goldfinches, morning doves, blue jays, chickadees, a brown-headed cowbird, cedar waxwings, and (could it be?) a rare scarlet tanager!  I saw none of them, but Merlin heard them, and I've come to trust Merlin.  Today, I bite the bullet and load the backyard tray feeder with seeds, establishing a competing food site to draw birds away from my front window feeders.  Will I regret this, or will it cause me to spend more time off my rocker (yuck yuck) and on the patio, in the sun and fresh air?

I spent a little time staring at a single leaf on the pear tree, and wondering how many leaves the tree was supporting, or are the leaves supporting the tree?  It's a silly question, as if we could have the pear tree without leaves or pear tree leaves without the tree. I remember reading Annie Dillard's wonderful book Pilgrim at Tinker Creek many years ago and these lines, which I found online when I came back indoors:

Nature is, above all, profligate.  Don't believe them when they tell you how economical and thrifty Nature is, whose leaves return to the soil.  Wouldn't it be cheaper to leave them on the tree in the first place?  This deciduous business alone is a radical scheme, the brainchild of a deranged manic-depressive with limitless capital.  Extravagnce!

and 

After the one extravagant gesture of creation in the first place, the universe has continued to deal exclusively in extravagances, flinging intricacies and colossi down aeons of emptiness, heaping profusions on profligacies with ever-fresh vigor. The whole show has been on fire from the word go. I come down to the water to cool my eyes. But everywhere I look I see fire; that which isn't flint is tinder, and the whole world sparks and flames.

Neither of these is the exact text I recall, but I can't find it online.  It was sort of a Carl Sagan quote, "billions and billions of" whatevers.  I sent my copy of Pilgrim to Steve some years ago, hoping he might enjoy it.  He didn't, but I wasn't disappointed. Perhaps one day he will pick it up again and find it magical, or not.   I did find related quotes:

I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives.

All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail.

Annie Dillard wrote so much interesting, engaging, pithy stuff and so much of it is available online that I could spend all day looking for the exact lines I have in mind.  In between, I clean my suflower/safflower tube and tray table with very hot water and bleach.  Now I look out the window and see a pair of house finches perched on top of a shepherd's crook looking for their afternoon snack.  I better get back to business, but here are some other unrelated but  thoughts of Ms. Dillard worth thinking about"

Write as if you were dying. At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients. That is, after all, the case. What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon? What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality? 

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.

The surest sign of age is loneliness.

We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet.