Seeking Ferret

The weather hasn't calmed down, but it's cooled down- we've had a series of pretty dramatic summer thunderstorms that have dropped temperatures from the 90s into the 80s and very occasionally into the 70s. I've taken advantage of a few of the lulls in the thunderstorms to get back in the biking thing. Sunday I rode over to the river and then through a riverside park... Google maps says the total trip was about 8 miles, which is a lot for me. I sort of tricked myself into the distance- the trip out to the river is mostly downhill, and the ride along the river was mostly flat, so I kept pushing further out because I wasn't feeling winded, but I struggled on some of the uphill parts heading back. There was one hill in particular that I might've been able to climb at the beginning of the ride, but certainly couldn't at the end, and ended up walking my bike up the hill. But it was a good ride, really pleasant, and my legs were a lot less sore the day than they were after my first bike ride of the summer when I only went half the distance I did yesterday, so maybe my body's adjusting. I always found that to be the case when I was somewhat serious about frisbee in college- I'd come back after winter break of not doing any fitness stuff and the first practice would kill me, and then I'd be fine after that. But my body is not eighteen anymore and it's been a lot longer since I was in shape, so I suspect it'll take longer this time around.

Suburbia makes fitness hard. You basically have to drive everywhere to get to anything useful, so any exercise has to be unpurposeful, done just for its own sake. When I lived in New York City, I didn't need to do exercise because I got several miles of walking done every day, and more on good days. Where I was living for the past ten years, I just didn't have much interest in unpurposeful exercise. I'd get home from work after wrestling with traffic for an hour and be exhausted and grumpy and not want to move. My only exercise of the week came on Shabbos with walking to and from shul. My new town, well, the new township I've technically moved into is even more spaced out than my old one, but I'm two blocks from the border of a town that is much more tightly packed together and has interesting things to walk and bike to. And I have this extra energy that comes of the shorter commute and I'm glad I've been able to burn some of that energy by moving my body.

I also did some stuff in the kitchen Sunday. I baked challah for Vividcon, which is in less than two weeks and I'm very excited about it. I'm hosting a Shabbos dinner at the con, which should be nice. The only problem with VVC is that Saturday night into Sunday is Tisha B'Av, which is a weird semi-holiday that I'm going to have to figure out my comfort level with doing con stuff around. Going straight from Club Vivid to reading Eichah seems weird. On the other hand, I don't want to skip Club Vivid, since I'm premiering a vid there. Eh, I'll figure it out.





Notes on politics I have resisted posting on Facebook:

-My father said when I saw him on Sunday "The liberals keep falling into Trump's traps."

I think in a lot of cases he's right. The baffling case of Donald Trump, Russian agent is a perfect example. The DNC was hacked and their emails released by Wikileaks. It is not clear who the hackers were or what their motivation was. Wikileaks' motivation is general chaos by way of radical information transparency, which is to say, Wikileaks believes that no information should be secret.

The information in the emails included information that was embarrassing to Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. In order to deflect attention, Clinton and her advisors suggested that the Russian government might be behind the hacks. They made this suggestion despite their being no evidence of Russian involvement beyond speculation. The FBI was asked and they said something like "Sure, it could be the Russians, we don't know." On this basis the idea that the Russians, with or without the direct collusion of Donald Trump, had hacked the DNC started to be spread by the media as a rumor.

So Donald Trump, confronted with the ridiculous and unfounded accusation that the Russian government is propping up his campaign, made the sarcastic remark that if he could control who the Russians hacked, he would have instead directed them to recover the missing emails Clinton and her legal team deleted from her private email server- emails that she claims were personal but which a lot of people suspect included sensitive political exchanges, emails which she hid using a private server to step around the Freedom of Information Act's requirements for reasonable transparency, even when it meant mishandling sensitive information.

And the Democrats took this- a clear joke, and a barbed one- and started raving about how Donald Trump had committed the treasonous act of calling for a foreign government to hack an American national's server. When Trump has done nothing wrong except suffer the unverified accusations of liberal hacks.

When conservatives- the kind of conservatives like me who fear Trump- see this kind of nonsense game, it makes it harder and harder to take Hillary Clinton seriously as an alternative to Trump. It makes it easier and easier to say "Okay, Trump is a disaster, but voting for Clinton is courting a different kind of disaster. Hillary Clinton doesn't take democracy seriously, either." Easier and easier to say "If Trump is president, he'll only be able to pass the laws that Paul Ryan sends to him, so Congress will act as all the check on his power we'll need."

And Donald Trump knows this. He knows that if he acts like Donald Trump, outrageous and sloppy and insulting, the Democrats will in their outrage and their distorted worldview fall all over themselves making ludicrous accusations against him. And every time they do, it'll bring the people who know better than to swallow these credulous media narratives more securely into his camp. Every time liberals snicker about how reality has a liberal bias, it helps Trump. Reality doesn't have a liberal bias, the media does. And every time a nonsense story like this is spread by the liberal media- and this one was immediately followed up two days later by the nonsense story of how Donald Trump had leaked information about a secret US base in Saudi Arabia from a classified security briefing he hadn't even received!!!!- every time a story like this is spread, people like me say "Well, Trump is a disaster, but I suppose he'll only be able to pass the laws that Paul Ryan sends to him. Maybe Paul Ryan will be able to act as a brake on his lunacy."


-Except that's the problem. For whatever reason- and I admire Paul Ryan, and to a certain degree I admire the way he's trying to maintain his integrity while struggling to keep the Republican Party he was reluctantly entrusted with in one piece, just as I admired John Boehner's ultimately futile efforts toward the same end, Paul Ryan has not upheld his end of the bargain with his conservative base. Paul Ryan was supposed to have emerged from his meetings with Trump, after Trump had effectively become the presumptive nominee, having extracted meaningful concessions from Trump. Meaningful concessions meaning that Trump would stop acting like a racist authoritarian monster and start presenting himself as a President who could actually lead America, all of America.

Paul Ryan has been struggling hard to maintain his integrity, to draw lines in the sand and to call out Trump when Trump crosses those lines. It's astonishing to imagine that the House Majority Leader has called his own party's presidential candidate a racist, but it's happened! More than once in the past two months! That's actually happened! But it's clear that no meaningful deal was arranged. It's clear that Ryan has nothing Trump wants and no power to control what Trump does, and given that this is the case, it's hard to see the Republican Congress, the clusterfuck that has been this Republican Congress, serving as any kind of break on Trump's megalomania.

And so I'm still voting for Hillary Clinton, because it's possible- actually, the more I think on it, plausible- that the combination of Hillary Clinton, Paul Ryan, and Mitch McConnell will result in the most legislatively productive Congress since the late Clinton/early Bush era. And that productivity could be beautifully tempered by the spirit of compromise.






Emma by Jane Austen

The third Austen novel I've read, and the first which didn't advertise its themes in its title. I enjoyed it greatly, obviously, as it is a great novel. Nobody- nobody!- drops one-liners as brilliantly as Austen. And the whole cast of characters, but particularly Emma Woodhouse herself, are so sharply and complicatedly drawn. There were moments in the later third of the book where I realized that we were still unfolding yet further layers of depth to Emma's personality, new layers that I couldn't have predicted or expected yet which I found completely integrated into my overall sense of who Emma was.

Mr. Knightley is a little hard to like and I think the romantic endgame was a little too neat for me, but I liked basically everything else. I think I particularly like the sense that even when Emma is not behaving well, Austen is rooting for her. There's a really powerful honesty in Austen's writing, and from that honesty emerges love. I am now poking at Northanger Abbey


The Long Lavender Look by John D. MacDonald

Do people know Travis McGee? I think I first learned of McGee from Spider Robinson's Callahan books, as Robinson and Jake are both big fans of MacDonald's work. I've read three or four of them over the years- I haven't particularly been looking for them, but they don't seem to turn up that often. You never see big displays of MacDonald's writing in bookstores or libraries, you rarely turn up the books at used bookstores, but there's about twenty of them and each that I've read so far has been a brilliant mystery novel and also an epitome of that curious genre, the Florida Novel. MacDonald's characters put Hiaasen's to shame. (I also just tried to read a Hiaasen novel, but it didn't take. Sometimes I like Hiaasen, but too often he sounds like reheated Elmore Leonard, like he's trying too hard.) The Long Lavender Look starts off with a pile of cliches- McGeee in jail for a crime he didn't commit, in a secretive rural county with a sheriff who has an unclear backstory- and then MacDonald eases off them one by and the book goes in so many surprising- and moving- directions. The book is funny, but bleak, entertaining but meditative, picaresque but realistic. It's leavened with just the right amount of all the ingredients that flavor life.