I'm Rubber, You're Glue

Once again, a pretty low-key day around our house yesterday.

I spent the morning reading a long article in The New Yorker about Larry Gagosian. This is a good example of how The New Yorker gets me interested in things that I would otherwise gloss over completely. I always like a good painting but I know nothing about the world of art dealing, which is certainly not my world. I've seen Gagosian's name in magazines and newspapers for years but he isn't someone whose career I have followed. But darned if that article wasn't very interesting!

All it takes is a good writer, really. As we say in the world of journalism, there are no boring stories -- only boring reporters.

I also caught up with my daily dose of right-wing media. You know that crazy woman who was charged with threatening the Trump judge in DC? Well, the right-wing media -- at least the site I read, which shall remain nameless -- have decided that she is a government agent. Or possibly "antifa."

This is how the right-wingers respond when one of their number does something so egregiously embarrassing and wrong that they can't justify it. They disavow that person completely and switch them into the "deep state" column. They've also done this with a white supremacist organization called the Patriot Front, which they insist is actually composed of FBI agents.

And it's what they've done with George W. Bush. The Iraq war was such a shambles that they have decided that Bush, Dick Cheney and their cohort are not true Republicans or conservatives at all. They are actually members of the "uniparty" -- the Democrat and mainstream Republican alliance that allegedly controls the country on behalf of the globalist puppetmasters. In other words, because the right-wingers can't defend Iraq (despite the fact that it was a campaign created by the right), they basically blame it on the DEMOCRATS! And Democrats were voices in opposition to the Iraq war at the time (although admittedly some in Congress ultimately voted for it). Certainly no one I knew in my largely Democratic circles was in favor of it.

This denialism is equal parts fascinating and infuriating. It's like telling your little brother he's wrong only to have him respond, like Pee-Wee Herman, "I know you are but what am I?"

The Trumpian populists are right to be critical of the power structure -- the bankers, the corporations, the CEOs, the "Rich Men North of Richmond" (although many of them are actually south of Richmond -- in Palm Beach, for example). What's frustrating is the populists have equated all those people with Democrats. As has often been pointed out, Donald Trump is a prime example of a wealthy guy whose sympathies hardly lie with the working man -- and yet they've hitched their wagon to him. It's upside-down world.

Anyway, all my friends say to me of my right-wing media indulgence, "How can you stand to read that drivel?" But I think it's valuable to know what the opposition is thinking and how they argue their case. So every day I dip into right-wing news and survey the scene. As long as I read it with a gimlet eye and keep in mind that none of it is actually true, it can be quite illuminating.

Olga didn't even want a walk! I took her up to the high street and back, and that was about it. She was content to lie around the garden while I read. Sometimes we need a day of rest, particularly when we're 80 in dog years.

Can you see how huge the burdock behind her has grown? The leaves are as big as she is!

(Top photo: A fly on verbena in our garden.)

Scaredy Cat

I love the way hydrangeas get splotchy as they age.

I am struggling to come up with anything interesting to tell you about yesterday morning. I can't quite remember what I did, to be honest, aside from walking the dog and doing laundry and vacuuming. And none of that's going to knock anyone's socks off.

In the afternoon I took Olga to the cemetery, where we enjoyed a very slow ramble. Walking her is an exercise in patience these days. She decides where she wants to go and how long it will take to get there. I am merely an anchor for her leash.

Olga can move when she wants to, though. In the evening she was on her bed on the floor when she suddenly leaped up and ran TOP SPEED out the back door. I heard a skirmish and found her standing on her back legs, front paws on the fence, barking upward at this cat sitting atop Mrs. Kravitz's gate next door.

Apparently the cat wandered through our back garden and got the scare of its life when Olga chased it up that fence. I think it's happened before -- we've seen tufts of white hair atop the boards and wondered where they were coming from. I thought they were from squirrels, but this makes a lot more sense.

Anyway, that cat didn't come down for at least an hour. Perhaps it will think twice about entering our yard now.

Re-Start Your Day

I came across this graffiti on a dumpster behind my stepmother's hotel. It's pretty cool -- like Pablo Picasso's version of a bowling pin.

Well, the library is slowly coming together. I still can't re-shelve all the nonfiction books that were displaced by construction over the summer. The workers had to take out a bookshelf to reach the wall behind it -- something about HVAC improvements for downstairs -- and it's still in pieces. Supposedly they're going to put it back together on Monday morning, and then everything can be re-shelved. Students arrive on Wednesday so we've got until then to get things in order.

My day yesterday got off to a dreadful start. For a variety of reasons including blogging and Dave and the dog, I wasn't able to get in the shower until about 7:45 a.m., and no sooner did I get out than Dave reminded me we had an all-school meeting about Artificial Intelligence set to begin at 8:30. Argh! Fortunately I take very fast showers, and we got there in time, but I wasn't able to eat breakfast and I never do well without food. I get hangry. Also, I wasn't really prepared for the meeting, because I hadn't done any of the recommended AI-related readings and activities, and when we broke up into smaller groups a construction guy was in our meeting room running a power saw. He kept saying, "I'm almost done!"

My participation in this meeting wasn't that essential, since I'm not a teacher and particularly since I hadn't done my homework, so my boss -- who knew I'd had a stressful morning -- gave me an out. "Why don't you go re-start your day?" she said. I fled the power saw, walked to Starbucks and bought an almond croissant, ate it on the walk back, and then with blood sugar restored I was able to rejoin the latter half of the meeting.

Afterwards, I was fine.

Part of what elevates my stress levels both at the beginning of the school year and at the end are all the meetings and trainings and, well, disruptions. I am a creature of routine. I just want to do my job and keep my regular schedule. I will be so glad when the year begins and I'm just at my desk, doing my thing.

The other day I was looking something up online when I realized that my alma mater, the University of South Florida in Tampa, has scanned many of the issues of our old college newspaper. Unfortunately it looks like they haven't yet scanned it for the years I worked there (1985-88), but they have issues up to 1980 or so. I found this great old ad in one of the 1980 papers.

Remember roller rinks? I used to love to roller skate, and in fact when in-line skating became popular in the '90s I used to skate every weekend, mostly on sidewalks and streets around Sarasota and Tampa. I used to go for miles. It kept me pretty fit.

When I moved to New York I used to routinely circle Central Park on my skates, at least for the first couple of years I lived there. Then the skates wore out and I was in my mid-30's, and I abandoned skating. And you know, I never wore a helmet. I used to wear knee and wrist pads, but no helmet. Head protection just wasn't emphasized as much then as it is now.

Anyway, I looked to see whether the roller rink mentioned in the ad above still exists, and believe it or not, it does!

A Public Housing Tutorial

Another day of library organization yesterday. As it turned out, there was a huge meeting in the library for the entire morning, so for about half the day I was unable to do much with books. I have to be able to wheel around carts and make noise for that kind of activity. So instead I was sitting in the back office doing more work on the computer, but I did get things done.

After work Dave and I went to meet my stepmother, who's traveling with a friend on a cruise around the British Isles. She's staying in a hotel near Lancaster Gate, so we went to dinner at a nearby pub, The Victoria (above). I hadn't been to this pub in ages and I was amused to see that they've replaced their sign, substituting a fresh, young Victoria for their previous portrait of the dour aged queen. Can you see Dave in the picture, at far left in the plaid shirt?

One of my readers asked about my use of the terms "council" and "estate" in yesterday's post, describing the apartment block being demolished. In England, your "council" is your local government. I live in the London Borough of Camden, which is governed by Camden Council. (There's an additional layer of government for London as a whole, overseen by Mayor Sadiq Khan, which handles issues like transportation that affect the whole city.)

An "estate" is a public housing development. In the states we'd call it a housing project, but that also has a different connotation. Public housing in the USA (where it still exists) tends to be for low-income people. In Britain, where a lot of public housing was built in the '50s and '60s to accommodate people displaced by World War II, "council estates" tend to be more middle-class, although councils also make a special effort to house the poor, elderly or disabled.

Also, to make matters more complicated, many "council estates" now include private apartments. Under Margaret Thatcher, in an effort to privatize public housing, the government began allowing residents to buy their council-owned units. So not every apartment on a council estate is still publicly owned. When Dave and I first moved to London we lived in a privately-owned council flat in Notting Hill, and it was a nice apartment. Several of our neighbors, though, were long-term tenants and still rented from the council. Many of our co-workers have purchased apartments that were previously council flats.

The demolition of the Emminster and Hinstock buildings, which I mentioned yesterday, is part of a redevelopment plan that is explained in more detail here. It will increase the number of apartments in that area, with slightly fewer than a third of them designated "affordable" with controlled rents. The others will be market-rate housing. The council usually does make arrangements to re-house its tenants when schemes like this move forward, but I don't know whether they all necessarily stay nearby.

Back to the United States now, with my latest postcard from the Florida state photo archives, which arrived several days ago. This shows Ponce de Leon Springs, in Volusia County, around 1925. That beautiful old building is gone now, replaced by a rather sterile imitation, but the springs are still open and part of a public park. There are few places in Florida I've never visited, but this is one of them!

News from the 'Hood

Now that I'm walking to and from work, I'm catching up with some familiar sights and seeing how things have changed and/or not changed over the summer.

The Abbey Road street sign around the corner form where I work is even more plastered with stickers now. In fact, it's probably time for Westminster Council to come and relieve it of its burden. (Here's how it looked back in February.)

Remember Monak, the "pan-Asian sushi restaurant" in St. John's Wood that was closed by a firebombing back in April? Well, it's still closed, and not only that, the police and many neighbors want to revoke its license. Apparently there was also an earlier shooting there. No word on what might have motivated the firebombing.

As you can see, for now, the neighborhood is left with a boarded-up shopfront with furniture piled on the roof and enforcement notices plastered to the doors and windows. Yes, that phone box really is crooked.

Meanwhile, nearby Emminster House -- a council apartment block -- is being demolished. Hinstock House, which was next to Emminster, is already gone. The entire estate is under redevelopment, as I previously mentioned.

I did stop in once to ask the workers if I could have the sign for the Lillie Langtry pub, which was located on the downstairs corner of this building -- at the time it was still attached to the exterior wall. But I couldn't get an answer and I never went back, and now the sign is gone, so hopefully it has found a home. (What would I do with it anyway?)

Meanwhile, from nearby Priory Road -- this is what happens when you use plywood to build your garden fence and it becomes un-plied. Just so you know.

Backing-Up Bee

I took these pictures a couple of weeks ago and I've been meaning to post them. The Crocosmia "Lucifer" is done blooming now, but as you can see, when the flowers were out the bees were loving it!

They go head-first into the flowers, which seem like a fairly tight fit...

...and then they have to back out.

It's kind of amusing to watch. But as I said, they've now moved on to other flowers. There's plenty still blooming out there: the lavender, the dahlias, the inulas, the agapanthus, the Japanese anemones.

Apologies for being scarce in the blogosphere over the past couple of days. I am buried at work at the moment, trying to gear up for the new school year. We always have a lot of tasks to complete, like removing graduated seniors and their families from the library computer (which takes hours), organizing all the magazines that have arrived over the summer, figuring out displays and getting the physical space ready (making sure the furniture is in the right place, the shelves are organized, etc.). A surprising amount of stuff gets moved around during routine summer maintenance.

This year, some of the library plants have required extra care. We have a Christmas cactus that seems to have come down with a rip-roaring case of mealybugs over the summer, so I brought my rubbing alcohol and Q-tips to work yesterday to solve that problem. Plus I've been trying to complete paperwork relevant to settling my mom's estate. It's always something!

I normally read blogs during downtime at my desk at work, but I've had no downtime. Hopefully that will change soon. By the time kids arrive next week things should be more normal, and hopefully even before that!

Long-Overdue Random Photo Post

We haven't had a post of miscellaneous photos in a while -- like, more than a month, I think! So here are some random photos I've taken while wandering with my iPhone.

First, I loved this chicken graffiti found on one of my Thames Path walks.

When I wandered through a vintage shop in Greenwich later that same day, I found this pair of "1960s gold crochet pants" (according to the tag). They look like something a bond girl might wear -- or could they be for men, a la "Rocky Horror"? I did not plunk down the £35 it would have taken to find out.

A fun mosaic of shoes on the floor of an underground pedestrian mall in Canary Wharf.

Some graffiti of a friendly bee, seen on another Thames Path walk.

Surely this is a joke, right? Surely?

And speaking of interesting shopfront windows, this is the front of the Islamic Centre in Kilburn. They have a huge buddleia growing up INSIDE the glass, between the window and an interior wall. Did it grow wild there from a seed, watered by a leak in the glass, or is it being cared for? I have no idea.

Some rowdy rats seen on the dashboard of a pest control truck in West Hampstead. This is pretty much what rats do, I suppose.

I found this bag of unopened "Golden Fish" snacks sitting on a wall on Finchley Road. Based on the writing on the package, they look like Arabic knockoffs of Goldfish crackers. I'm not sure why someone was giving away so many of them, unless they were past their sell-by date. I left them there.

Here's more interesting snack food packaging. I found this on my most recent Thames Path walk, while picking up litter along the path to the train station at the end of the route. I've seen these packages before and I'm always amused by the alien theme. I'm doubly intrigued by the fact that they're "beef flavour cosmic corn snacks." I can't quite imagine what that might taste like, and I don't particularly want to find out.

And finally, one more colorful panel of the Mill Lane Bridge, this one painted by 10-year-old Mohamed. I like the bus bearing the TfL symbol, and he's absolutely right about the way the upper level of a double-decker bus passes the upstairs windows of nearby buildings. It's one of the few panels, possibly the only one, that doesn't show any plants at all.