Well, the pollsters were right – virtually all of the swing states were very tight margins.

And Trump got just about all of them.

Now it gets interesting…

Update 11/7/2024:

Skimming over the election stories, one thing becomes clear: This was a huge, decisive win for Trump and the Republicans. Trump won handily, taking all the swing states. He won the popular vote (!). Republicans will now control a previously tied Senate (with VP Harris as the tie-breaking vote). The House is still up for grabs, but it looks better for Republicans than Democrats.

Harris ran a very good campaign – there will be a lot of finger pointing, but that’s always the case on the losing side. This was not a case of Harris fumbles tossing the election; no, Trump won.

Trump is, for some unfathomable reason, the candidate the American people wanted in this election. A little terrifying (mass deportations, abolishing government bureaus…), but it is what it is.

In this election, Trump chipped away at a vast number of Democrats’ voter blocs – he made gains with young men, with Latino men and Black men.

And here is the stat that I can’t wrap my head around: In the first presidential election since the Dobbs decision (that struck down Roe v Wade – a 50-yeard old precedent that protected abortion), the man who takes credit for this – Trump – received 51% of the white women vote. Wow.

At the end of his brilliant short story A River Runs Through It Norman MacLean muses about various metaphors and realities he had touched on in the story, and ten ends with a simple declarative statement:

I am haunted by waters

.As the two pictures in this entry can attest, I am haunted – and fascinated – by lights and its cousin, shadows.

Both pictures taken this week with a trusty iPhone, capturing those shades and lights many seem to miss.

How the upper photo happened:

• Early morning, sun reflects off some vehicle part in office park parking lot.
• Reflects through an skewed vertical blind in one of our group of offices.
• Composite of negative light (shadows) from outside bush and inside blinds projected high up on kitchenette wall.

It’s not a window – it’s a shadow window.

Crater Lake

After a decade of hiccups – family, pets, the anti-tourism tsunami of COVID – we finally took a vacation this year. (View constantly updated gallery)

It was our usual type of vacation – we usually pick a destination to be the jumping-off point for day trips; only one work week, and after Labor Day (so the kids are back in school and things are less congested).

Our “home base” this trip? Medford, OR, in south central/western Oregon. Known mainly as the headquarters of Harry & David and the eponymous apple, it really is a weird town. One-runway airport (six gates total), a slice of downtown that they are trying to preserve and gussy up, and long stretches of basically abandoned old warehoused, manufacturing plants.and such.

Why Medford? I really can’t recall, but it isnear Crater Lake, and had at least some other locations around it for day trips. We did not select Medford because we wanted to say we’ve been to Medford.

That said, some thoughts on the places we saw. We had six days (Sun-Fri), but first & last days were primarily travel days – long days with connections in Seatac (outgoing) and Salt Lake City (coming home).

Going to take me some time (as always) to process photos and say what I want about everywhere we visited.

Medford

As mentioned above, Medford is a strange little town. They are building up the NW and NE areas around the downtown aren, so why is our hotel – the most eclectic one around – in the dumpy south of downtown area? Land was cheap and they know something we don’t?

It’s a mystery.

Klamath Falls

First of all, no easy way to get there. We took a twisty blue highway north-to-go-south and east one way, and a big dip south-to-go-north on the way back (an Interstate.). Long drive both ways

Nothingburger town. A nice Art Deco church (built 1929) and movie theater, but those were the highlights.

Klamath Falls? No longer any falls. A series of dams built I’d guess in the 1930s erased them. (NOTE: They are removing the dams and the salmon are starting to return up the rivers as in the past. Progress!)

Crater Lake

Again, quite the twisty drive to get there, but the lake is remarkable. And we had a beautiful sunny day (morning) to hit it. The story behind the lake was more complicated than I’d thought, but interesting. Mountain peaks in the distance, varied geological formations around the lake and that blue, blue water.

We did about two-thirds of the rim drive (part was closed for maintenance). After a few stops, it’s just another, slightly different view of the bowl of water and Wizard Island. Glad we went there, however.

Grants Pass

[Editor’s note: It’s “Grants,” not possessive “Grant’s.” Why? I dunno.]

A weird little town with more character than, say, Klamath Falls. Many odd little businesses – lots of vinyl, antiques and such. Like most of the towns we visited, Grants Pass seems to have had a purpose and some point, but now all these tiny towns seem like islands mired in the past.

Many of these towns seemed to pop up after gold was discovered in California (1848), so possibly conduits to California from towns like Portland and Seattle? Grants Pass was making an effort to keep the town updated and all, but it’s still a dot in the midst of a lot of nothing. Yeah, I sound like a Big City bigot, yeah?

Wine Country

This is – south of Medford – wine country. So we kinda just picked a random winery off a guide and headed there to see what we could find. (South of Portland, OR, is also wine country, but we knew a couple of places we wanted to hit on our trip there years ago.)

As seems to be the case in south Oregon, getting there – on old back roads – was a chore and a half.

Nothing spectacular, but did a wine flight and bought a couple of bottles (white).

One ancillary benefit of that winery (Valley View Winery, Jacksonville, OR) was that the host was from Medford. So we asked her about a seafood place in the town. She had a second-hand recommendation and that’s where we later ate. And it was good. And we would never have known of it – it’s almost a neighborhood looking place.

She also told us of a quicker way home (less twisty!) and it took us through the quirky little town of Jacksonville. Wandered around there, had a beer. We would have never ventured there without her recommendation, either.

Ashland

This is a small town south of our hotel that we had gone through on the way to Klamath Falls and our wine adventure. It’s more of an artsy town (there is a university there).

Unfortunately, we got there early (as we are wont to do) and even after a (great) breakfast, nothing was open, We noodled around and looked at the shops and architecture, and then hit a very nice in-town park, Lithia. But nothing really compelling for an out-of-towner. Great for the town, meh for the traveler.

Some random notes

• This was our first trip in some time. Let’s make this yearly again.
• My photog skills have atrophied. For example, there was a nice Art Deco church in Klamath Falls, but I didn’t even try to see if I could get in and see what the interior was like. What is wrong with me?
• Lots of twisty roads through towering forests. Smartphone + Google Maps saved our ass time and time again. Did we get lost? Sure – but were able to quickly discover and fix. Just follow that dot on the map….really.
• would we go back here again? No – but at least I would return to northern Oregon (Portland, Astoria, Columbia River).

We both like movies, and I worked for years at Family Video (RIP – domain doesn’t even go anywhere today) with exposure to movies and such.

So we have a fairly robust movie collection (DVDs).

Yet we have, for the past 25 or so years, always picked up stuff from our local library, the Mount Prospect Public Library (MPPL). They always had a nice selection (somewhat decimated in the summer/holidays when the kids are out of school) and stuff we would not necessarily want to buy. Maybe rent and then decide to buy, but get a free taste first,

I rented a movie recently, Crazy Rich Asians and when I (self) checked out, couldn’t find the slot to unlock the DVD case.

Turns out they’ve gotten rid of that.

That tells me rentals are down and streaming is up. – DVDs (and CDs) no longer worth theft protection.

Interesting.

President Biden will serve the remainder of hsi (first) presidential) term, but will not run for a second term.

Unprecedented.

(NOTE: This was announced yesterday, Sunday July 21, 2024.)

I’m not certain of the context of this Catch-22 (1961) quotation, but I stumbled across this on the internet the other day, and, boy, does it capture the shabbiness of some of our current politics.

Doing a little digging, it appears that 1) The quotation is real, and 2) It’s not a Yossarian (the novel’s protagonist) quotation.- it appears to be an unspoken conclusion reached by an Army chaplain, but I’m not certain.

It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice. Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.

I ran across the book on an Atlantic article about “Summer Reads,” I believe. Subtitled “The Dark Miracle of the American Supermarket,” it sounded like a book I’d enjoy.

Our library had it, so I checked it out and pounded through it pretty quickly – it is a summer book, after all.

Published in 2021 after what I can glean years of investigation, the book is a testament to the American grocery store, from General Stores through the first supermarkets to the brave new world of both big box grocers (think Walmart and Costco) and online grocers (think Amazon and – again – Walmart).

The thread that runs through the entire book is two-fold:

• How margins on groceries are incredibly thin. The figure repeated was ~1.5%.
• How the abundance of product – accompanying lower costs – has been a staple for the arc of American grocery stores.

The book is divided into eight sections: Prologue, six main Parts, and an afterword.

Each of the Parts primarily focus on an individual/store – a humanizing element that helps tell about the bigger picture. For example, the Part on logistics (dry!) is about the author’s month-long ride-along with a long-haul trucker and what her (the driver’s) life was like, and how we depend on truckers for everything, not just groceries.

Chock full of insights and anecdotes, the first tour Parts move along quickly.

The last two Parts, however, are more of a slough, simply because of the subject matter:: sourcing ethics and how human slavery is endemic in a lot of food industries (coffee, coco, shrimp), even if only at the edges. One should not overlook “just a little” slavery.

The Part on ethics – organic food, free-range chickens, ethically sourced [whatever] – was interesting. The author concludes that, at the end of the day, grocery stores try to emphasize these often empty platitudes not to increase sales or – god forbid – do the right thing, but to make us, the consumer, feel a little bit better about ourselves. Cynical, but it feels accurate.

All in all, a fun read with a lot of obtuse (but fun) detail. It’s a relatively short book – approximately 280 pages – and there are some glaring omissions: Delivery and or order online/pickup in store are not mentioned that I recall. No mention of Peapod, which is odd (it does mention online grocers, specifically Amazon).

No mention of the trend toward self-checkout in stores, nothing about loyalty cards/programs or online apps. Not a peep about how liquor has changed grocers (has it? I know my local chain is putting in fancy, dedicated wine rooms. Why?).

But supermarkets have a huge story to tell; one book simply can’t fit everything in. I get that.

I’ll leave the reader with the centerpiece of Part III, about how to get a product into a store (legally, with bribes, pay for display…), cost of shelf space, how a buyer decides what to buy etc.

One word: Slawsa.

Google it. It’s a thing.

This is the title of an Ann Patchett essay published in the March 1, 2021 is of The New Yorker. (article requires subscription – one free article per some period)

The author describes helping a childhood friend, Tavia, clean out the house of her friend’s recently deceased father. The father – divorced for decades and moved to a new city – had pretty much just had his daughter to clean up years of accumulation.

Patchett – herself married with just her husband and one (out-of-town) step daughter left alive – and her childhood friend came to a conclusion:

Holding hands in the parking lot, Tavia and I swore a quiet oath: we would not do this to anyone. We would not leave the contents of our lives for someone else to sort through, because who would that mythical sorter be, anyway?

I saw an ad for this article in March 2023, as I was just finishing up helping move my (still living) father out of his house of 59 years – two floors plus a full basement, two-car garage and yard…into a one bedroom senior assisted living center.

As the closest (distance) relative, I did most of the cleaning, deciding what to give /to whom, so this story/description struck a nerve as they say.

I made a note of it and about a year later went looking for it. The New Yorker search was worthless (even with essay title and author – bad magazine!). Found via Google, of course.

It was well worth the search.

Yes, the author and her friend made a pact to not have others do for them what they had to for her friend’s father.

Where does “How to Practice: come in?

Patchett and her husband were approached by a real estate friend about a house the agent thought they would just love. Patchett and her husband had talked about her labors with Tavia, and agreed that if they moved they would do a purge of belongings before settling into the new house.

Nothing came of the new property, but Patchett floated the idea of “practicing” the purge in their existing house. Her husband – a doctor, and less of a pack-hound than the author – agreed.

What follows is – mostly – Patchett’s purge. How many kitchen whisks are necessary? And so on.

But it’s not just getting rid of stuff – give away, sell, toss in the trash. It’s getting ready for your death. As she and Tavia swore, no one should have to go through their “stuff” after they died; they would try to proactively do the same.

Patchett was essentially performing her own Estate Sale before her own demise. She was “practicing” to be dead. That’s a powerful … rite of passage(?).

What would you give/toss of yours before you’re dead? Patchett found her limit. A friend’s daughter was looking for a manual typewriter, of which she had – even after “practicing” – a couple left.

But she could not part with the typewriter that she essentially had not used for decades because it helped type her grants, first published/rejected pieces etc.

To the friend’s daughter, it had value. What she was looking for to use.

To Patchett, it had immeasurable value because of what it HAD been used for in the past.

A very New Yorker (in a good way) article on several levels.

“Practice” at your own risk, especially as you age.

I can’t remember where or when I ran across this book: It was either an online review or a recommendation from someone I saw on social media.

Whatever. It was the type of books that I don’t normally follow (graphic non-fiction book, about a just barely post-college woman), but it looked fascinating. Stuck it in an Amazon list, and finally got around to buying & reading it recently.

Fascination for many reasons:

• First, it IS like a graphic novel, but its a first-person memoir.
• The book is a door-stopper – 400+ pages, most with a dozen or so panels. And the spreads – chapter leads – are often incredibly detailed. She must buy India ink by the barrel.
• Despite its length, it is a quick read: it is like a comic book, not a lot of descriptive detail – not necessary, as there are drawings!

Basically, the story is: the author, a Nova Scotia resident, graduates from college in the early 2000s with a non-viable degree and lots of student debt.

As Beaton notes, Nova Scotia, and the eastern Canadian maritime provinces in general, were first known for exporting coal. And then the coal ran out.

Then they were known for exporting seafood. And then that industry was depleted.

At the time she graduated (2005-ish), the area was known for a new export: People. Exiles who would help power industries in other provinces, such as the Ontario auto assembly plants.

After reflection, she took a different path: Working at the then fairly new Albertan tar sands, joining a variety of camp jobs in frozen (-50 in the winter) Northern Alberta, helping extract the oil trapped in those sands.

A young woman – in the middle of nowhere – in what was decidedly a man’s club.

I won’t give away her adventures, misadventures or other experiences except to say I wish she included more than the 400+ pages of panels held. It’s a high-level yet tightly detailed account of her roughly 2005-2008 time there that reads almost like a novel.

A highly unusual and very compelling work of graphic non-fiction. Well done!

This is not a happy result – but it’s a vindication of the Rule Of Law.

Some may celebrate, but to me it’s sad that a former President of the USA has been so UNANIMOUSLY convicted of Criminal Charges.