Covid booster day by Hal Brown

 The Easter edition of my blog is chock-a-block with multifarious mishegas and much more (click here).

I will be getting my second Covid booster this morning. I don't know what, if anything, I will post here later. If you missed the Easter edition and want to see it click here. I was first on line to get my Covid booster since I arrived 40 minutes early. Fortunately the senior facility where I hang my hats had arranged to have a vaccination clinic here.

It was arranged for the Safeway pharmacy to give the boosters onsite. 350 residents signed up. All I had to do was walk through several buildings to get to the injectadtorium where I snagged the number one seat. Below are the photos of my walk. I hadn't been on the building for months.

A rainy day

Last minute preparation

Ten minutes to go and the pharmacy staff is getting ready to start at 10:00 AM sharp.

I had a chance to chat with friends some of whom I hadn't seen in nearly two years.

Then I got my shot which I barely felt. One the way back I admired the offerings in our marketplace but resisted buying any of the goodies baked in our kitchen. No wonder lots of new residents gain 20 pounds of more when they move here.

Then I went home....

Hal Brown's Easter blog

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These greeting are from me and my Westies and a friendly snail. Easter Sunday was a perfect time for a picnic at Willamette Park in West Linn. The prime table from the last picnic on March 25th was available...

Unfortunately some vandals had defaced it by spray painting profane graffiti.

Then a ride into the hills of West Linn not only provided beautiful vistas but showed why the city can afford a park with three baseball fields with artificial turf diamonds.

Mt. Hood

If you have a spare $40 million or so you might be interested in a house like this:

See more about this mega-mansion here.

If you can't swing $40 million or just don't "need" 50,000 square feet, for a mere $15 million you can get a home like this:

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Here's a greeting from an unhinged certifiable maniac engaging in projection by calling sane people he considers his enemies maniacs:

My reply to Lacky Liz Harrington's tweet of Trump's Easter statement.

Yet another example of Trrump's psychological projection. He's the certifiable maniac, revenge obsessed malignant narcissist becoming ever more delusional. He's unhinged and has the judgement of a cliff leaping lemming.

Click to enlarge

Here's some trivia for TV viewers who, like me, are fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I am binge-watching it now.

Who is the character whose personalty (not powers) most resembles Donald Trump?

The answer diehard fans know is Glory, the near invulnerable god from Hell, who is trying to locate the mysterious powerful "key" which if she has her will enable her to destroy mankind. To protect it an order of ancient Byzantine monks transformed into human form as Buffy's sister Dawn who didn't even exist prior to Season Five. When she came on the scene she had memories of being there for as long as she could remember as did all the other characters.

This is Glory who has a cadre of troll-like sycophants to do her evil bidding who incessantly praise her. She is known as "Glorificus" or sometimes "Glorifius." She was also known as "the Glorious One" (among many other amusing, groveling titles such as "Her Splendiferousness," "Her Sparkling Luminescence" and "Oh Sweaty-Naughty-Feelings-Causing One").

Here are more from a fan website:

JINX I am in thunderous agreement, oh glittering, glistening Glorificus. 

MURK: Uh, begging your pardon, and begging in general, but ... were you talking to me? 
GLORY: Eww. Yeah, right. Like any of you have ever bathed, anyway. 
MURK: Oh, but we do, Your Scrumptiousness. We bathe in Your Splendiforous Radiance, Your Aromatic-

GLORY: (annoyed) He's getting stronger. I'm losing him, I'm losing control of him. 
JINX: You're speaking of Ben, Most Glamorous yet Tasteful One? 

MURK: We can do that, O ... thou. 

DREG:Forgive me, Shiny Special One. I beg of you to rip out my inadequate tongue.


DREG: No! No, no, Your Terrifically Smooth One, it is the epitome of ankles. 
To touch such an ankle would be - but I'm not touching. I'm backing away.

DREG: Yes. Dreg. Your Creamy Coolness has honored me by speaking my name. Your voice is like a thousand sweet songbirds that-
and I could go on and on but I will stop there..

I find the ways the minions bend over backwards to find new and more outlandishly over-the-top ways to praise her amusing and am reminded about reading reports like this of how people seeking Trump's endorsement and approval are told to make sure they go out of their way to stroke his massive ego.

Okay, enough politics...

At 6:15 AM I went outside and walked down the path across from my house and took these photos of the full Pink Moon.

"April's full moon will illuminate the sky this entire weekend, and while it's called the pink moon, it's not actually that color. The pink moon will appear full from early Friday to Monday morning, according to NASA. It will be at its peak fullness on Saturday, April 16, at 2:55 p.m. ET."  Read about it here.

On the bottom of this photo you can see the freight train which has stopped.

 On Language: Something to think about 

Whether to put the f-word spelled out in a headline is an editorial decision. After all, everyone will know what the word is no matter how many asterisks are between the first and the last letter. There's more how editors and writers deal with obscene and profane words as well as insults in articles.  Here's an article from Agente Presse France about how profanities and insults are translated so people who speak other languages can fully grasp the intended meaning.

Introduction: 

 

“Son of a bitch”, “emmerder”, “grab 'em by the pussy”...  How exactly do you translate a swear word uttered by the French president or any other political figure, so that an American, Spanish or Argentinian reader really gets the gist? Similarly, how to translate a profanity said by an American president for the benefit of francophone readers? Every time a head of state uses an expletive, the result is instant head-scratching and intense debate in the newsroom, explains Sebastien Blanc, head of AFP's French editing desk in Washington, with the input from his English-, Spanish-, and Arabic-speaking colleagues.

The article concluded:

Has anyone forgotten the infamous video unearthed in 2016 where Donald Trump boasted he could grope women with impunity, including “grab 'em by the pussy”?

So misogynistic and crude was the sentence that AFP in French initially decided not to use it and merely described Trump as uttering “un mot très cru pour le sexe féminin” (a very crude word used to describe female genitalia).

But in an update on the story, the expression was translated literally into French. And it didn't end there, far from it. “Crooked Hillary”, “Crazy Bernie”, “Sleazebag”, “Slimeball”, “Horseface”... There was much head-scratching over the years.

Website recommendations for news and information

I rely on several websites to stay informed about news, information and opinion. I subscribe to The New York Times and The Washington Post. I also check out RawStory several times a day because they are the best website to follow breaking news reported elsewhere including on subscription websites, with summaries and links.

(RawStory is an American progressive news website and online tabloid. It was founded in 2004 by John K. Byrne and is owned by Byrne and Michael Rogers. Wikipedia)

They also have some excellent original articles, particularly by Tom Boggoini, Travis Getty, and David Caye Johnson.

Another website which I've been aware of since RawStory often republishes their articles in Agence France-Presse. For example the story

Endangered North Atlantic right whales make a stand in Cape Cod piqued my interest because I used to live near The Cape and spent a lot of time there and am concerned about the plight of whales.

Wikipedia tells us: Agence France-Presse (AFP) is a French private international news agency headquartered in Paris, France. Founded in 1835 as Havas, it is the world's oldest news agency.

AFP has regional headquarters in Nicosia, Montevideo, Hong Kong and Washington, D.C., and news bureaus in 151 countries in 201 locations. AFP transmits stories, videos, photos and graphics in French, English, Arabic, Portuguese, Spanish, and German.

You can read stories from the website here:

The best part of this Saturday Night Live open is the end with the actor playing Trump.

Elon "Modest Me" Musk wants to buy Twitter. What could go wrong? By Hal Brown

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Yesterday's blog

 File this under I really don't give a damn about this story. Well, I gave enough of a damn to see if I can get a tweet of mine to trend. That's why I posted this on Twitter (click to enlarge):

I superimposed the DonkeyHotey caricature of Musk over a depiction of the Telsa he fired into space Wirth his Space-X rocket.

You can follow replies or retweets, if there are any, here.

The color wheel is a metaphor for U.S. becoming all white in near future, by Hal Brown

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"The color wheel is a metaphor for U.S. becoming all white, as with sunlight, in near future" by Hal Brown

This story is dedicated to the memory Jackie Robinson. Today we celebrate the date in 1947 he played his first Major League baseball game. See article about he originally was a Republican and became a dedicated Democrat.

Just for the hell of it I decided to add red, blue, and green lights for my bathroom to add a little festiveness. I thought replacing three white lights with them might make the room darker but they didn't.

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With the white lights unscrewed the room still looks white albeit a little darker..

Observing this led me to do some research about the colors that constitute visible white light. Here is what I found on this website:

What are the 3 primary colors that make up white light?

Light is perceived as white by humans when all three cone cell types are simultaneously stimulated by equal amounts of red, green, and blue light. Because the addition of these three colors yields white light, the colors red, green, and blue are termed the primary additive colors.

How many colors make a white light?

The spectrum of white light consists of six basic colours arranged in a specific order: red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet. Although Newton understood that a beam of light of a particular colour is always deviated by the same amount, he did not appear to understand why this is so.

How many different colours make up white light?

White light is made up of the following colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet.

It occurred to me that this is a metaphor for what the United States will be when the group commonly referred to among the MAGA bigots “us white people”, and with liberals “angry white people” are no longer  in the majority.

One could just say that if the primary colors of red, green, and blue represent people with black, brown, and white skin, add them all together you get white. I don’t mean white in the sense of the color of white skin which is even in an albino is never really white, or a sheet of white parer, but white like the sunlight streaming through my skylight:

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Here’s another metaphor: sunlight is known to be a disinfectant. There’s nothing this diseased country needs more than a good disinfecting and I don’t mean the swallowing of bleach as a cure for Covid.

Expanding the color metaphor to all the colors of the spectrum, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet made me think of both the original Pride flag with its six colors...

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... to the new version:

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Photo by HalBrown

 
Whether it is gender identity or ethnic background the United States in moving inextricably towards being a country where people who place a great deal of stock in having white skin and being heterosexual, and you might as well add in being Evangelical Christians and believing in conspiracy theories (see previous blog entry), no longer can swing elections their way.

In their death throes they are more likely to express their rage in antisocial ways in order to shape our society and culture to their liking. This could see the end of Roe vs. Wade protections of a woman's right to choose and in Republican  controlled states the end of fair elections.

But time is still on the side of shifting demography, and time will usher in true white sunlight. Anything that was changed for the worse can be changed back for the better.

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