H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

Fuck the Earth

Today is the second of my involuntary holidays this week (business went crazy for two weeks but we're back to a slow crawl again, unfortunately). Yesterday Baby Girl and I went to the dentist and breakfast, wandered the shops along Hawthorne Boulevard (where she fell in love with a 招き猫 (Maneki Neko, the famous Beckoning Cat from Japanese folklore)

...and wanted one so badly I almost relented, but $21.50 for an adorable plastic toy with a waving movable arm? Too spendy! We went to Anzen instead and she fell out of love with Mister Beckoning Cat and into love with a pretty little Chinese temple bell now hanging in her room), played in Laurelhurst Park, read stories, played games and went down, the both of us, for three-hour naps. It was all-day, 24/7 adorable toddler all the time. Fun. And a little tiring.

So today was my day to entertain my self. I've been reading, from both paper and LCD, preparing for some Chicken with Sweet Onion Riata and barbecued asparagus, took a leisurely bike ride down to our little Madrona Hill Cafe and had a breve' and read the paper...lovely, languid day. If I'm going to be poor and unemployed I want to at least enjoy it.

The only task I set myself was mowing the remainder of the lawn. I'd gotten most of the damn grass mowed the previous evening, the only remaining bit was the very back of the back yard. So I stowed the bike downstairs, checked the oil, primed the carburetor, pulled the cord...

...and the fucking thing wouldn't run. Oh, it'd start OK. But after burning through the fuel I'd pumped in through the primer, it'd die. I checked the throttle, checked the fuel, nothing. The likely problem is that the carb is laquered or the jet is clogged, and I don't know enough about little Briggs engines to fix that. So off went the old clapper to the little mower shop on Lombard and went next door to borrow the good neighbors' push mower.Every so often I see them mowing, or hear the "whirr-whirr" of the old-fashioned rotating blades and think how cool it is to have this totally gasless, nonpolluting, human-powered mower. If you have to have grass (and we're too lazy to get about killing all ours and replacing it with some sort of artistic landscaping) what more Portlandy thing to have than a Green Mower, saving the Earth while getting your exercise and keeping the lawn suburban trim?

So, okay, now that I've used the thing to cut, oh, about one-sixth of my yard?

Fuck the Earth. It's gonna have to die beneath the smog-cloud of my power mower exhaust, because I'm not going to spend the remaining few years I have left trimming the grass with a goddam push mower. Leave aside the brutal ramming effort needed to cut down the long grass, the thing had to be re-run over any single patch of grass two to four times to actually cut the stuff. And the tall weeds? They laughed haughtily at it, surviving my most savage attempts to cut them down. I took me a good hour to trim probably less than 500 square feet of a 5,000-square-foot lot.

Sorry, Earth. You're a great planet. But I'm loving my dirty little Sears Lawnmaster. It just wouldn't have worked out between us.

Tsuki to ume

Or, as Basho would have said if he'd grown up in North Portland: Moon and plum.

It seems like such a peaceful thing to have in the yard. A plum tree; white with plum blossoms in spring, heavy with somnolent purple fruit in high summer, drifts of sickle-shaped plum leaves on the ground in fall. Friendly low branches for small people to climb into. Ripe, sweet fruit to eat...

...or to throw...

But then there's the night you go out into the backyard and the swarms of fruit flies rise from the ground like the undead in a vampire movie or like realtors off the cash bar at a Republican congressional fundraiser. You gaze in horror at the ground where smashed plums lie in varying stages of decay like Deadites from Army of Darkness.

You smile a sickly little grin, cry for your wife and helpmeet and your beloved child and begin to load the dead cart with plums. All right, you purple screwheads...this...is...my...wheelbarrow!.

The compost bins, mind you, are already weeping purple juice they contain so many plums. It's getting impossible to keep the flies down round them. The thought of more... So the alternative is...plum burial.

--
Yep. I dug a shallow grave out by the potato bed and dumped them in their own little plum landfill. Now safe in a ditch they bide, food for worms.

Faster, son, faster. More plums are falling even now.