Rain is never good in a Hemingway novel – it’s invariably portends something somber/sad.

But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-bye to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.

— A Farewell to Arms, last lines

Similarly, pop rock songs about rain are often dark (Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s Going to Fall, for example).

But moving past the dark songs, it’s surprising just how many songs have (at least) “rain” in the title – some sad, some boisterous, some just, well, mention rain. In no particular order:

• A Hard Rain’s Going to Fall – Bob Dylan
• Rainy Day Women #12 and 35 – Bob Dylan (just a silly song)
• Who’ll Stop the Rain? – Creedence Clearwater Revival (CCR)
• Have You Ever Seen the Rain? – CCR, again
• In the Early Morning Rain – Gordon Lightfoot (I heard an early version of this song – not the one on “Gord’s Gold” – and he sounds like he’s trying to do the Dylan nasal sound. Not pretty.)
• Rainy Day People – Gordon Lightfoot
• Let It Rain – Eric Claption (with Derek and the Dominos?)
• Rain – The Beatles (Not on any album; B side of Paperback Writer – not really well known)
• Fool in the Rain – The Beatles
• Like a Rainbow – Rolling Stones (OK – a stretch, but one of my favorite Stones songs. So peppy!)
• Fire and Rain – James Taylor
• Purple Rain – Prince
• It’s Raining Men – The Weather Girls (I had to look that up. Classic camp!)
• Here Comes the Rain Again – Eurythmics
• The Rain Song – Led Zeppelin
• Rainy Days and Mondays – The Carpenters (before I started listening to the radio: released in 1971)
• Rainy Night in Georgia – Written by Tony Joe White in 1967; popularized by Brook Benton in 1970.
• Raindrop Keep Falling on My Head – B.J. Thomas (you think he’d have those initials today? I only like this because it was in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, and used effectively.)
• Red Rain – Peter Gabriel (solo, after Genesis. The “So” album)
• Famous Blue Raincoat – Leonard Cohen (yeah, a stretch, but a great song. Jennifer Warnes does a great cover of this song – and other Cohen favorites – on her “Famous Blue Raincoat” album.)

I deliberately left out Singing in the Rain just because…

Could also pad out the list with “thunder” references (You Love the Thunder, Jackson Browne; Thunder Road, Bruce Springstein), but I didn’t go there.

Also, off the top of my head I can’t think of any other “thunder” songs.

This book, a collection of essays about nature (flora/fauna) was a disappointment – I had read great reviews about her H is for Hawk book, so I thought this book would be a good intro to her writing,

I guess it was, and it was not anywhere as good as expected.

The essays were more – to me – like diary entries than essays. Just didn’t have the gravitas of EB White or James McPhee (who does?).

She writes well, and decidedly knows whats she’s talking about – be it ducks or bugs (a favorite of mine – really) – it’s interesting but not compelling.

Again, less than I expected.

I’m probably not going to read H is for Hawk.

Hmmm…..

Recently watched Ken Burns’ latest documentary, Hemingway.

Like all Burns’ (with Lynn Novick) ) work, this was meticulous, well done and had some incredible (old) photography, both stills and movies..

While Hemingway is one of my favorite authors, and Burns/Novick probably my favorite documentations, this one just didn’t do it for me. Mind you, well done and a deep dive on the controversial author, it seemed, surprisingly, empty. Don’t exactly know why.

It’s a three-part documentary (two hours for each segment:

• A Writer – learning his craft, working as a journalist, and becoming a very successful writer – first short stories, and then the early novels.
• The Avatar – A better name for this section should be “The Myth” – Hemingway was as much a myth as he was a writer: Big game hunter, traveler, consummate alcoholic, rubbing elbows with other famous writers, actors and – especially – other women.
• The Blank Page – The later years, the destructive behavior and the decline of his abilities, with some notable exceptions, the great A Moveable Feast (published posthumously).

The first part was my favorite; this era is when the Hemingway I like was doing his best work, and gathering experiences (ambulance driver in the First World War) that would help fuel future works.

The third part was interesting as it really showed how Hemingway’s later life was – full of booze, erratic behavior, womanizing and so on. A lot of what was presented was new to me, and I’ve read a lot about Hemingway.

Burns/Novick are scheduled to come out with a Frank Lloyd Wright documentary in April 2021; high hopes for this one, as well. Hemingway and Wright are somewhat similar characters: both womanizers, 20th Century giants in their respective fields, and – especially – both held themselves in higher regard than others did.

From CDC.gov

I had my first covid shot Thursday, April 22, had my second and final shot Monday May 10th. (Pfizer)

While the process went quicker this time (my appointment was at 8:30am, just after opening), this shot put me on my ass. I felt fine the day of the shot, but the next day (today) I just slept for a good part of the day: chills, headache etc.

That’s why I took the day after the shot off, just in case there were issues.

Feeling better already (it’s about 3pm), and by tomorrow I expect everything to be back to normal.

Small price to pay.

Update 5/14/2021: Yep, it kicked me in the ass. Got vaccine Monday, all was good. Tuesday I had flu-like symptoms (aches, chills, fatigue), and I tried to sleep it off. Couple of nights of night sweats – nothing worse – and I’m fully healed. And on the road to fully vaccinated (5/24).

Again, no issues – felt crappy for a spell (which means the vaccine is working), but shortly I will be a shield for myself and others against something that has killed 550k+ in the US alone.

Night sweats? Beats dying. Beats passing this on to others….

Be a Man (or woman) – get vaccinated, dammit!

OK, stop me if you know of a real-world implementation of what I’m looking for: Basically, the way paired special characters – such as () {} [] – are handled by keyboards on our smart devices (focus on texting, but writ large).

To the best of my knowledge, they are not handled in any way.

Just keep typing and switch from the alpha keyboard to the special character keyboard and back again.

Here is an example:

I start typing, then add a parenthetical comment. Word guesses appear to help speed the texting.

But what if, after I typed an opening special character – ( { [ – the close character then appeared in the text guesses bar? Like so:

And when I’m ready, I can hit the close parens from the text guesses, it disappears from that bar but is added to the text (without spaces, like word adds supply).

No flipping the special chars keyboard to enter: ). Just hit that character and keep typing.

I think this would be awesome.

Some refinements/issues:

• What if I never hit the close parens character? I guess it stays until the text is sent.
• Should other characters be treated like the parenthesis, curly bracket and square bracket? Perhaps the dash, as sentences like the following are common: “I like Georgia – the country – more than other former Soviet regions.” I would vote no, simply because the dash is often used alone: “Diner at 5 – don’t be late.”
• What happens when we have more than one open special character? First/last one wins? Both are shown? Example: “The First Lady ([Dr.] Jill Biden) spoke at the conference…” Not quite sure on this one. I guess keep the last, and when you use that one, the other reappears? – Because they are matching brackets, supposed to nest. I.e. “(aa {bb} )” not “(aa {bb) }.

Just some thoughts…and if this does become a thing, I can say I called it!

From CDC.gov

I had my first Covid-19 vaccine (PFizer) shot last Thursday, April 22, 2021.

The second and final shot is scheduled for May 10.

No side effects; no issues.

The shot was administered at a mass vaccination location near where I live and work, a shuttered Kmart repurposed for this pandemic issue.

Things went smoothly, about 15 minutes in line (like the lines at the airport when you’re trying to get through TSA screening), 15 minutes to give information and get a shot, and 15 minutes afterwards – they want to make sure you don’t leave before any potential side effects can manifest themselves, such as an allergic reaction.

No biggie: 45 minutes beginning to end, run by the IL National Guard with nurses giving the shots and doing post-shot observation.

But in the US, we are beginning to see a decline in the number of people getting vaccinated – a couple of mass vaccination sites in the Chicago area (where I live) no longer require appointments; you can just walk in.

The decline is not because we have reached out to just about everyone: According to the CDC Covid Tracker has the following data for today:

• 42% of the population have had at least one (of two) shots
• 28.5% of the population fully vaccinated (two Modena/Pfizer shots; one J&J single-shot vaccine)
• The rates are higher for older folks (67.5% of those older than 65 are fully vaccinated), but that still leaves a full third of the most vulnerable (by age) part of the population unprotected.
• And no vaccine is yet available for those younger than 16, so that’s a good chunk of the population, as well. A less at-risk portion of the population, but still…

So leaving out the under 16 population, and understanding that the vaccines have just not reached some areas yet, we are approaching the point where we have vaccinated all those who have access to the vaccine and have been fully vaccinated.

In other words, a lot of people don’t want to get vaccinated.Or are bailing on getting the crucial second shot (which gives you fuller protection, especially against variants)..

Why?

I can get the religious reasons or those whose health could be compromised by the vaccine, but that’s a small bucket, edge cases.

Mostly, it’s political – either covid is a hoax, or “freedom!” (I chose to not have the vaccine because I can).

This is where I lose it: The biggest politically charged complaints about the whole pandemic come down to two things (once you get past “it’s a hoax”):

• I don’t want to be told I should/have to wear a mask.
• We need to get back to “normal,” whatever that is.

You know how we can address both of those concerns?

Get as many people as possible vaccinated.

While daily Covid-19 deaths have plunged since the peak in January 2021, the US is still seeing a consistent rate in April of more than 600 deaths/day – and that translates to 200,000+ a year.

And that’s unacceptable.

I expect this rate to go down as more are vaccinated, but we need more vaccinations.

Why not?

It’ll help others, but what about the individual? The vaccine is safer than the flu vaccine many get, and how many cases of the flu have led to a double-lung transplant? None that I know of, but Covid-19 has seen this event more than once.

Help yourself. Help others. Let’s peel off those masks and get back to normal..

Get vaccinated.

Over at The Atlantic, there’s an article that tries to make the case that All in the Family basically changed television forever.

All in the Family was the first program to genuinely reckon with the cultural upheaval of 1960s America. TV would never be the same.

I’d have to agree.

As the article (by Ronald Browstein) notes, before Norman Lear’s breakthrough sitcom, network TV was safe, down the middle of the road shows that could appeal to almost anyone. Think The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Petticoat Junction – bland, inoffensive time killers.

After All in the Family, the viewing audience was more open to more challenging shows, such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show and M*A*S*H, for example. Without these shows, I don’t know how we would have gotten to much more challenging fare, ushc as The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets..

And today this in-the-cultural-moment shows continue with Fleabag and Breaking Bad, among others.

But those last two shows also exemplify another trend – or connected series of trends – that has, over the past decade or so, has once again “changed television forever.”

When All in the Family first aired in 1971 (wow, that’s 50 years ago!), there were three networks (ABC, CBS and NBC). You watched shows in their time slot; if you missed a show, tough noogies until the summer reruns. Offerings were half-hour sitcoms and hour-long dramas, and most shows had 20-24 episodes per year.

No more:

• No more time slots – Shows drop – usually the whole series – on one day and you can binge watch it all.
• Streaming – Need I elaborate how this has changed everything?
• Networks are now the followers – Streaming services like HBO, Hulu, Amazon Prime have original content that over blows the networks’ offerings out of the water: Fleabag, Game of Thrones and so on. What’s the best network shows out there? Law and Order: SVU season 22? How about sitcoms? They’ve almost disappeared from network TV. But HBO’s brilliant Veep, Amazon Prime’s Fleabag (yes, I’m obsessed), and Catastrophe.
• Shorter seasons – I believe The Sopranos started this.- the first five seasons had only 13 episodes each, vs. networks series’ length of 20-25 episodes. Today, most streamers are just 10-13 episodes, some shorter. The brilliant Fleabag (I told you I was obsessed) has only two seasons of six episodes each. And that’s just right for this show.

And with the exception of big events (breaking news/weather, Oscars), there really isn’t a need to huddle around a TV as a family or whatever – stream it anytime you want on your smartphone, watch it on YouTube and so on.

Brave New World….

Picture part of screengrab from the former nest.com (now part of Google)

I recently added a new wireless network to my house – a Netgear router that spits out wireless at twice the rate of my (admittedly old) Cisco/Linksys router.

I currently have both networks running; the idea is to slowly move all the devices in the house over to the new network one at a time so nothing has down time: Laptops, smartphones, iPad and so on. When everything is safely switched over, pull the plug on the old router.

Yesterday, I switched over my Amazon Fire Stick to the new network; no problemo.

When I went to update my smoke detector – a Nest Protect – it was a little weird. It was easy to navigate to the list of available networks and punch in the password and all, but afterwards there was no indication of just what wireless network it was attached to. The new network was at the top of the list of available networks, but no check mark or what have you to explicitly say what network the smoke detector was talking to (since both the old and new are currently active, hard to say). And when I re-added (?) the new network, I still had to enter a password. Shouldn’t it remember the networks that have been previously added, like smartphones do?

For a device that is otherwise a case study in intelligent – and beautiful – design, this is a weird oversight. End of the world? Decidedly not. But surprisingly odd.

Well, it was a weird year of winter weather – 2020-2021.

We got a surprise dusting of snow on Halloween – much to the chagrin of the kids collecting candy, — but then stayed pretty much snow-free for the next 12 weeks, and the temperatures were wintery, but not Arctic degrees.

Then, sometime in early or middle January, the snow came.

And came and came.

It didn’t really let up until mid-February: We had several big snows – 4, 6, 11 inches, – but the worst of it was that it just kept coming. Like summer rains in Florida – every day at 3pm it rains for 27 minutes and then the sun comes out – we woke up almost every morning with an inch or two of snow.

For the most part it was light snow, and easy to deal with, but combined with some pretty cold temps, the snow never went away – it just kept accumulating.

The picture shows the snow along the front sidewalk (front step to easement sidewalk) and you can see that it is not mounded or drifting. Almost 16 inches, and that includes a month of settling. The mounds at the end for the driveway made it a challenge to back out – you couldn’t see anything potentially coming.

And then – on February 17th, a couple of ducks landed in our backyard, picking at the seed under the birdfeeder. This isn’t unusual, we often get ducks during migrations (some are locals that often come in the summer). But it was still weird to see them inside the almost snow fort that we had carved out at the base of the feeder.

And then their friends came – some 50+ mallards landing in more than a foot of snow in the backyard, completely covering the base of the feeder with others spread all over the back yard. They didn’t stay too long, but it was a strange sight.

As I write this, we are predicted to hit the mid-60s and I plan to barbecue for the first time this year! While I expect a little more snow (it is March in Chicago….) generally cooler weather for the next few weeks, it feels like we’ve turned the corner on winter. Phew!

Click images for larger picture

Oh what to say about, do with this year, this 2020?

Pretend it never existed? Or just bid it a not-so-fond farewell?

It was an exhausting year, politically (can you believe President Trump’s impeachment was earlier this year? Seems like a million years ago), health-wise (coronavirus/COVID-19/vaccines/mask battles), work-wise (in Jan. 2020 did most people know what Zoom was? No – but today it’s a verb) and so on.

Coronavirus alone shifted the landscape of this year, affecting sports, entertainment, dining, retail, employement and just general interactions with others. It also helped make – at least in the US – a toxic political divide even more divisive (see: masks, wearing).

Personally, this was a coronavirus year, so I didn’t much do anything. No vacation, no celebrations.

This was the Year to Do Nothing as much as possible. As I’ve noted many times before, it’s easier for me – a non-social animal – to pull this off; I understand the others champing at the bit to get back out there. But don’t do it!

I read a bit more this year than in years past, a good thing. Two highlights:

• Caste by Isabel Wilkerson. This non-fiction book equates black/white relations not as simple (?) racism, but as a caste institution, as in India or – more recently – the brief but brutal caste system in Nazi Germary in the 1930s and 1940s. Powerful
• The Book of Ruth by Jane Hamilton. A subtle yet disturbing novel about mother/daughter husband/wife relationships. I kept trying to guess where it was going. But didn’t see that happening. Still haunts me. Hamilton, with this book and A Map of the World, is becoming a favorite.

No music, TV show or movie really grabbed me this year. I’m still struggling with how to find music these days. The new (to me) stuff that I find and buy usually comes from music in movies or TV shows.

For me, a forgettable year.

Let’s do better 2021….