A Lonely Cosmos

You probably don't remember this, because I barely do, but way back in May I planted some Cosmos seeds in a tub on our patio. They came from a seed packet I got in one of our magazine subscriptions at work, and they were a spectacular failure. Most of them didn't come up at all. I had just one tiny, struggling plant that managed to sprout and hold on through the summer, but even it didn't prosper.

Imagine my surprise when I went out on the patio the other day and found a lone Cosmos flower, finally blooming! And imagine my equivalent chagrin when I saw that the plant had been broken, probably by squirrels trying to get to the sunflowers in the same pot.

I cut the lonely Cosmos and brought it inside, where I put it in a vase with one of our small sunflowers, also snapped by a marauding squirrel.

I'm just happy I got any flower at all!

I had an interesting experience Friday on my walk to work. I was passing a bus stop when I looked down and saw an important-looking card lying on the ground. I picked it up and it was something called a Freedompass. This is a government-issued transit pass, and it had the owner's picture and name but no contact information on it. I took it to work and, as instructed on the card, e-mailed the Freedompass office to report that I'd found it.

Well, I got an e-mail back telling me how I could replace my own lost Freedompass, which isn't what I needed at all. (Do they have an AI bot responding to e-mails?) So I called their office and a woman there told me to mail it to them. Which I did.

I guess it's not a very interesting story, really, except for that e-mail confusion. It was another "everything has to be done at least twice" moment.

I'm still trying to iron out a notary for that document that Dave has to sign. This is turning into a ridiculous task but I'm going to get it done today, I swear.

I've ordered Walter Isaacson's new biography of Elon Musk for our library. I think Elon Musk is a scary character, a bit like Peter Thiel (whose biography I also purchased and read a few years ago, you may recall). But Isaacson is a good writer -- I loved his Steve Jobs biography -- and I'm intrigued by what I've heard about the book.

Jill Lepore, in The New Yorker, wrote a review that I found quite compelling. It included her spot-on assessment of Twitter, which of course Musk bought and rebranded as X and seems to believe is a valuable vehicle for free speech and the furtherance of Democracy:
 

Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold. Twitter does not operate on the principle of representation, which is the cornerstone of democratic governance. It has no concept of the “civil” in “civil society.”

 Truer words were never spoken! And that, my friends, is why I do not have a Twitter account.