Disco Doesn't Suck

My neighbor down the hill has the most beautiful cosmos plant in her front garden. Unfortunately, my phone couldn't figure out that it was the flowers I wanted to photograph; it focused instead on the Bathing Beauty, the mannequin in the bathtub in the background. You can pretty clearly see her legs sticking out of the end of the tub. Her head is at the other end, mostly concealed behind that lavender.

I went to the dentist yesterday for a check-up. Yes, this was my second dental appointment in a couple of weeks, but as I think I mentioned before, my dentist and my hygienist work on different days, so I can never do both a cleaning and a check-up at the same time! It's the craziest system.

Anyway, happily, my teeth are all in good shape. We're watching a few areas where I have aged fillings, but nothing needs any special attention now. They did a thing where the dental assistant ran a wand around the inside of my mouth, over the front, back and chewing surfaces of my teeth, and produced a 3-D image of them. She could then rotate my demonic, lipless grin on a computer screen and show me my teeth in great detail. It was pretty cool. I took a picture of the 3-D image but it's a little creepy -- disembodied teeth look very skull-like -- so I won't inflict it on you. TMI, I'm thinking.

When I sat down in the chair I was carrying a magazine and the dentist asked what I was reading. It happened to be an article in The Atlantic about trigger warnings, in which a feminist writer questioned whether such content warnings are actually harming girls and women by making them less able to confront disturbing information. I gave the dentist a brief summary but as I did so I wondered, what if she's been assaulted in some way that requires a trigger warning? Am I triggering her by merely describing this article?

What a tangled web.



When Jimmy Buffett died several days ago, I thought about the one Buffett album I ever owned -- "Volcano," which as I recall I got for my birthday or for Christmas one year when I was a kid. In my memory, I got it and John Lennon and Yoko Ono's "Double Fantasy" album at the same time. I decided to look in my old journals and see if I'd mentioned them, and if my memory was accurate.

Well, surprisingly, although I wrote about getting the "Moonraker" sountrack in 1979, I did not mention records by Jimmy Buffett or John Lennon. At least not that I can find. I definitely owned them both, though, and I'm pretty sure they came together.

What I did find in my journals were chips of an old record, which I glued to the page on Aug. 1, 1981. We were about to leave on vacation and I wrote about buying four rolls of film and two packages of flashcubes (remember those?) at the astonishing price of almost $17, which must have been a fortune to me at age 14. And then I'd have needed to get it all processed! What a nightmare film photography was.

Anyway, I then wrote, "(My brother) and I destroyed his disco records today. We both hate disco, see. Here's an example of what happened to Gloria Gaynor and Amy (sic) Stewart...that's what they get for recording disco. It's their own fault."

Several things are odd about this. I don't hate disco. I love disco. I've always loved disco. In fact, I bought that Gloria Gaynor record. But this was 1981, not too long after an event called "Disco Demolition Night" in which mostly young white men publicly destroyed records made predominantly by black artists, many of them women, and loved by gay listeners. It was the "Disco Sucks" era. People used to walk around with that phrase on t-shirts, and I remember my stepbrother being especially anti-disco. So apparently, I got swept up in the fervor, even though deep down I liked disco myself.

I suspect my brother and I were both just sick of those records, as anybody gets sick of a song they've heard a million times. My participation in "Disco Sucks" was purely opportunistic and prompted by peer pressure. Besides, how was it OK to hate on Gloria Gaynor while listening to Shirley Bassey singing "Moonraker"?!

Hasbulla and Tilapia

That's me in real time, pretty much, writing this post. I'm sitting out in the garden, having already washed dishes and folded laundry. And it's not even 7 a.m.!

One of my happiest discoveries was learning that our WiFi signal stretches out to the garden bench. So I can sit out here in nice weather and read blogs and (obviously) write my blog, which is pretty great. It's about 60º F (15.6º C) at the moment according to my phone, though it doesn't seem that cool to me. Olga is sniffing around the garden and under all the plants, no doubt searching out the scents of any foxes that wandered through overnight.

That photo on my desktop is one that I took way back in December 2013 when Olga, Dave and I went up to Norfolk to stay at a bed & breakfast run by some acquaintances from work. I blogged it here. God, that seems like a long time ago. We hadn't even had her a year yet.

The 10th graders didn't protest the changes in the library yesterday. They seemed to accept that their large group was a little too unmanageable for the fiction section. Or maybe they're plotting some kind of retaliation. Ha!

This cardboard cutout was standing beneath the school stairs, in an area where the seniors often gather. Do you recognize him? I didn't, but someone filled me in -- he's a Russian MMA and TikTok star named Hasbulla. Why he's standing beneath our staircase I have no idea.

That sign in the background is even more of a mystery.

The Wrestling Team

I saw this tiny shirt lying outside a charity shop on my way to work yesterday morning. Such an optimistic message! I'm not sure I know any toddlers who are capable of positive vibes every day, though.

A fairly routine day at work. The 10th Grade boys, my nemeses, once again colonized the fiction section on their break times, sprawling all over the floor and sneaking in food. My boss was surprised to count 32 people packed into the shelves at one point during lunch -- entirely blocking access to the books for a middle school class that happened to be visiting at the same time. Some of the high-schoolers were horsing around. (My boss's word was "wrestling.") I said, "Listen, I dealt with this all last year, so you don't need to tell me."

She decided to rearrange some furniture to make that corner less hospitable and hopefully move the crowd into more open areas where there are actual tables and chairs. I'm sure the kids will complain today.

She's also talking about getting mirrors so we can see into various nooks and crannies from the circulation desk. Probably a good idea. An inevitable consequence of having shelves and bookcases is that you can't see into every corner. I am always up and walking around but I can't be everywhere all at once.

Here's my "Florida Memory" postcard for September -- a scene at Paradise Park near Ocala in 1950 or so, shot by Bruce Mozert. Paradise Park was the black counterpart to Silver Springs. I posted another image from Paradise Park back in April.

Under the Burdock

We had a truly sunny day yesterday, our first in a while -- but not the last. Apparently we're in for a warm, dry spell. It's too early to call it an Indian summer, because it's still actual summer, but it feels that way.

Olga and I spent yesterday in the garden. I repotted several plants, using the same pots (because we don't have any vacant ones) but replacing and augmenting the soil so the roots can continue to grow. Olga, meanwhile, shifted between basking in the sun and retreating to the shade in the flower beds. That's her above, beneath the parasol-like leaves of the burdock, though you can barely see her.

Here's a clearer view.

I also sat out and read "Demon Copperhead," which finally, finally got returned to the library. I'm about 100 pages in and enjoying it a lot. It taught me a new word, Melungeon, which I don't believe I've ever heard before.

Meanwhile, Mr. Russia spent all day doing some kind of work on his balcony, scraping or refinishing or something else that wasn't painting our dining room ceiling. I think I'm coming to believe that it's better to just leave that ceiling alone anyway.

I had lunch in the garden, and the meat wasp returned, once again carving off a chunk of my leftover burger and flying away with it.



I couldn't interest Olga in much of a walk. She has been especially lazy this weekend. (Dave thinks the visitors on Saturday took a lot out of her.) We did walk around the nearby housing estate where we found these chairs being discarded. They're all pretty beat so I didn't take any of them, but we do have one identical to the one on the far right that I found on the street years ago. I wonder if it came from the same set? Ours is in much better condition and it's very solid -- we keep it in a closet because it's butt-ugly but we use it when we need to climb up on something, to change a light bulb, for example.

Last night we watched "Red, White and Royal Blue" on Amazon, a silly film about the son of the American president falling in love with a British prince. I read the book several years ago and liked it. The movie was less satisfying -- many reviews have likened it to a Hallmark movie, which is pretty apt. "A royal disappointment," said the BBC, while The Guardian noted Uma Thurman's "deranged" southern accent. (I actually think she's one of the better elements of the movie.) Reviewer Ron Hilliard's take on it sums everything up well. Writer/director Matthew Lopez made a valiant effort to stay faithful to the book and preserve its fun, soapy tone, and it's not terrible -- if you've got nothing better to do it will kill two hours of your life. But the gay romance has been done better. "Call Me By Your Name" and even "Maurice," from as far back as the 1980s, are much more effective.

A Wasp Stole My Hamburger

Despite the slowly shortening days and cooler temperatures, some of our late-summer flowers are still cranking along, like our purple loosestrife and lavender (above). Our peruvian lilies are still blooming, as are our Japanese anemones (below)...

...and our dahlias (below)...

...although the dahlias are diminishing in number and seem a little more lopsided as the sunlight wanes.

Things are looking good enough that we had a little gathering in our garden yesterday -- a "band director barbecue," as Dave called it, though there was no barbecuing. His two co-teachers came over, one with her daughter in tow and one with his golden retriever, Luna. We thought Olga and Luna would be able to play together while we ate, but they pretty much disregarded each other and in fact Olga was mostly interested in barking at us. "PLAY WITH ME!" she demanded.

We made hamburgers in the kitchen and brought them out to the garden to eat. We were surprised when a couple of wasps started hovering around the meat and flying away with chunks of it! I've NEVER seen this before, but apparently wasps are omnivorous and they do eat insects and carrion, so I suppose seizing a bit of hamburger is completely within their wheelhouse.

I even made a video, we were so mesmerized by the wasp meat thieves.

After we'd eaten and were sitting talking, Dylan (one of Dave's co-teachers) casually mentioned that he's allergic to bees and could go into anaphylactic shock if he's stung. We were all like, "Hmmmm...maybe we should go inside." So we did.

Fortunately there were no bee stings. Or wasp stings, for that matter.

Hosting is tiring, even for a simple backyard lunch! Of course I had to clean the house before anyone even showed up, and Dave cooked, and then I cleaned up, and this pretty much killed the day.

Last night we rented a movie on Apple TV+ called "I am Michael," about a writer named Michael Glatze, a prominent young, gay magazine journalist who famously renounced homosexuality to become an evangelical pastor. A couple of well-known gay Hollywood personalities were involved in this film, including Gus Van Sant and Zachary Quinto, so I knew it wouldn't be anti-gay in tone. It was pretty good, though the transitions between scenes seemed jumpy. I remember reading the original article (linked above), but somehow I missed the movie until now. Anyway, we enjoyed it and it provoked a lot of discussion!

Here's another cultural morsel I enjoyed -- this article in The Atlantic by David Brooks about why Americans are so sad, angry and terrible to each other. (He says Americans, but I think the same forces apply in many Western countries.) Brooks thinks we have slowly eroded the moral underpinnings of our society by becoming ever-more focused on self. Younger people don't get the same messages about caring for others and sacrificing for others that earlier generations did, and because they live ever-more isolated existences they don't absorb cultural norms through participation in civic organizations and churches, or become skilled at living alongside and tolerating people who believe differently.

Brooks notes that nowadays, people identify more tribally and often through politics. "If you are asking politics to be the reigning source of meaning in your life, you are asking more of politics than it can bear," he writes. "Seeking to escape sadness, loneliness and anomie through politics serves only to drop you into a world marked by fear and rage, by a sadistic striving for domination. Sure, you've left the moral vacuum -- but you've landed in the pulverizing destructiveness of moral war."

It's a pretty interesting article, and quite compelling!

Lassie and Beautiful Thing

Here's a very popular book series in our library -- the Alex Rider books by Anthony Horowitz. They're about a teenage spy and we seldom have so many of them in, so when that happened recently I had to take a photo to get the cool effect of the spine designs. (The picture is still missing volumes 11 and 12, so who knows what they might have added!) I've never read any of them but as I said, they're popular with the kids.

Here's another book that caught my eye the other day:
 

Yes, we keep "Lassie Come-Home" on the shelf, even though it is a rather petrified copy. The copyright page is missing so I can't even tell when it was printed, but the catalog gives the publication date as 1971. (The original copyright is 1940.)

It was definitely printed before "decimalisation," the streamlining of British currency that occurred in the early '70s. The price on the spine is given as 12 shillings and sixpence. I was prepared to see that "Lassie Come-Home" had fallen out of favor but in fact it has been checked out several times in recent years, most recently in 2020. I guess good old Lassie still has some appeal. I'm tempted to read it!

As I've written before, I used to watch the "Lassie" TV show when I was little, but I never read a real "Lassie" novel -- just children's adaptations and comic books. In middle school I did read my grandfather's old copy of "Lad, a Dog," by Albert Payson Terhune, a 1919 book -- also about a heroic collie -- that was a precursor to the whole Lassie phenomenon. I haven't seen a copy of that book in years. It's probably full of culturally problematic language.

You'll notice that "Lassie Come-Home" contains a hyphen, while the famous movie version didn't. Apparently Lassie is referred to in the book as "Lassie Come-Home," once she does, in fact, come home. I can see some cigar-chomping producer in Hollywood barking, "GET RID OF THAT HYPHEN!"

Not much of note happened yesterday. We had an all-school assembly in the morning to kick off the school year -- even though we're already more than a week into it -- and the library was once again very busy. Which I like! It makes the time fly.

In the evening Dave and I watched "Beautiful Thing," a 1996 movie about two teenage boys who fall in love on a London housing estate. It's one of my favorite films, set in Thamesmead, where I recently walked on the Thames Path. I hadn't seen it in years, and Dave insists he'd never seen it, though I can't believe I didn't show it to him before now. He probably fell asleep. He managed to stay awake last night, but we both had trouble hearing many of the lines -- the sound on our rented version from BFI wasn't great, and there were no subtitles that I could find. The East London accents can be quite impenetrable, at least to our American ears, especially when the lines are spoken quickly. But we got the gist!

Sidney Boyd Court

I walked to work on a slightly different route a couple of days ago, down West End Lane, which is a bit curvy and thus probably a slightly longer walk but I had time and was in the mood for something new. I passed this large crescent-shaped apartment building called Sidney Boyd Court, which is architecturally a bit unusual.

It's council housing, built in 1953. Apparently it was built on a World War II bomb site, where seven large houses were destroyed by a Doodlebug on June 20, 1944. Eighteen people died in that bombing. Can you imagine living in a time and place where an enemy rocket could demolish your house and take your life at any moment? Of course plenty of people live with that reality now, but it is blessedly far from my own experience.

Anyway, after the war, what was then known as Hampstead Council (before he borough of Hampstead was consolidated into Camden) erected this building and named it after Sidney Boyd, a local councillor and mayor.

The six-story block has 50 apartments, according to this page, and one Flickr user said that as a child they always thought the balconies looked like bathtubs. Which they do!

Anyway, that's probably more than you wanted to know about Sidney Boyd Court, but I was curious. The only other information I could readily find online were individual apartment valuations, which led me down a real-estate rabbit hole looking at properties all over the area. Which convinced me even more that we would never be able to buy anything in this part of town, should the impulse ever strike us.

Here's the valuation for the flat we rent. If that's accurate, well, let's just say it won't be ours anytime soon. (Also, what's with all that ugly furniture? And look how empty the garden used to be!)

I am just not very motivated this morning. In fact, I'm still in bed, and I have to go to work in less than an hour. I guess I should get up and get moving. Fortunately I don't think Olga will want a walk because it's damp and rainy out there. Yesterday morning it was 52º F as I walked to work. I despair for my sunflowers!