You are currently browsing the monthly archive for May 2020.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Tuesday, again.
Tuesday has always been Ol’ Robbo’s least favorite day. As in the title, I’ve long thought of it mostly as the hole in the week: No psychological milestone; no character; not even a trash pick-up. It’s simply a 24-hour amorphous lump.
Having said that, a little this n’ that:
Regular friends of the decanter will know that Ol’ Robbo has had almost nothing positive to say about the lockdown now entering its third grim month. But I will say this: I haven’t been in this good shape for quite a while. Without the commute, Ol’ Robbo can roll straight into his workout routine once he closes his laptop for the day and I’ve been diligent about sticking to it. In all modesty, the toning has been quite noticeable, and I’m guessing that the next time I go in for a check-up my doc will have no excuse to squawk at me about my blood-pressure, either. (The real question will be whether I can keep this up once things get back to normal. I hope so. I hope so.)
Speaking of the commute reminds me that starting this weekend Metro will close down its entire subway system in my county, keeping it closed until Labor Day (and most likely beyond). Originally, they had planned a modified, limited shutdown for just my line, which would have been an immense nuisance, but still workable. If the siege is lifted and I need to start putting in regular appearances at the office during the new plan, Heaven alone knows what I’m going to do about it.
Also speaking of the commute, under normal conditions Ol’ Robbo doesn’t get his first cuppa kawfee until he gets in to work. What with the drive, the train, and all, he is at that point at least awake enough to operate his (illicit**) kawfee-maker intelligently. At home seems to be different. I use a single-serving maker here (a gift from Eldest) and more than once in my morning grogginess I have forgot to put a mug under the filter, leaving a thorough mess on my kitchen counter. Heigh ho.
Speaking of grogginess, I had another of my patented weird dreams last night in which I came home to find that Port Swiller Manor had been burglarized. Not only had all of our possessions been taken, the thief had also removed all the fixtures, drywall, and moldings. Even the stairs were gone. If I wanted to reach the second floor, I had to climb up the exposed studs in the wall. Then the thief appeared. It was Michael Keaton as Beatlejuice, except he had no makeup and his hair was blond. He announced that he did it because he was an anarchist and wanted to make a “statement”. I’ve no idea what to make of this.
Oh, one more thing: For those of you keeping score, Mrs. R and I seem to have hit on a happy compromise re Robbo’s Beard. Call it a heavy stubble. On another front, I’m afraid I’m finally going to have to let her have a go at the back of my head with the scissors, as I am starting to look like a hippy (anarchist?) and can no longer stand it.
Well, enough for now.
**We’re not supposed to have them in our offices. I keep mine hidden behind my monitor. Don’t tell anybody.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Friends of the Decanter may recall Ol’ Robbo’s anticipatory excitement last Sunday over the announcement that his diocese would start offering public Mass on a limited basis today? Well, almost immediately after I posted that, Kommissar Northam put the kybosh on it, extending the lockdown in NoVA until the end of this month.
I’ll bet you dollars to donuts he does it again, too. Because It’s For Your Own Good, kulaks.
Meanwhile, Ol’ Robbo is beginning to see articles to the effect that the People shut themselves down and the gub’mint was merely playing catch-up.
The implication is that the People will open things up again despite the gub’mint. I happen to think that’s right but let’s just hold on a minute about that initial premise, Action.
Back in mid-March when things were starting to get hinky, my diocese came out with specific guidelines for the continuance of public worship:
- Dispensation by the Bishop from the requirement to attend Mass for anyone who was sick, thought they might be sick, or otherwise felt at risk.
- No sharing of wine during Communion.
- No “passing the peace” or other touching among the congregation.
There were one or two other items which I don’t recollect, but this was the gist of it.
I thought then that these were perfectly reasonable precautionary measures and I’ve seen absolutely nothing in the two months since then to suggest that we could not have carried on right through operating under them.
Here’s the thing: It wasn’t Bishop Burbridge or “the People” who then within a couple days decided that worship was non-essential and that churches needed to be shut down, it was Kommissar Fargin’ Northam who did so.
Do not, do not, attempt to minimize the gub’mint’s arbitrary overthrow of our Constitutional liberties in this matter. Do not make excuses. Do not let Big Brother off the hook.
Because if you do, it’ll just come for you again.
(Of course, one may criticize the Church for not telling Big Brother to go stick its head in a pig when the diktat came out, but that’s a separate rant.)
UPDATE: First, Ol’ Robbo apologizes for being such a Ranty McRantface about all this. I’m sure it gets tedious for you lot.
Second, I see now that my church actually started Communion services yesterday: Very short, outdoors, no more than eight people at a time. I swear this nooz wasn’t posted when I checked on Saturday. I did see a FB post about another church in teh diocese doing this yesterday, and damme if the first comment wasn’t a Karen ranting about the padre offering Communion on the tongue.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
A lovely, lovely Mid-May-The-Way-It-Ought-To-Be day here at Port Swiller Manor had Ol’ Robbo out doing the Full Monty around the demesne** this morning. This is our expression for a complete top-to-bottom mowing, trimming, and blowering from the ditch by the road all the way to the little glade between my back gate and the tree line. I also threw in cleaning all the leaves and dead camellia flowers off the patio plus a little tree-pruning. It took me about four hours altogether and I’m counting it as my day’s exercise.
In the meantime, as I predicted last week the warmer temperature has started to bring out some more of my flowers in earnest, so I snapped some pics for your consideration:
Say Hello To The Peonies! (These are Japanese-type flowers, I think, but don’t hold me to it)
Another Peony, of the “bomb” flower variety
MOAR ROSES!
Patio Clematis juuuust starting to wake up
Finally, some more azaleas for those who want a reminder of the smell of Holly-Tone
Enjoy! (I should be able to do you some foxgloves and wisteria next week, plus a couple other varieties of peony.)
** A leftover vocabular word from Robbo’s Property Law class back in the day. We had to learn English feudal land rights because our modern legal concepts of land use and land ownership are based on them. Ironically, the course was taught by a professed Communist who didn’t actually believe in any of it.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Since Ol’ Robbo’s COVID-1984 ranting seems to be going over like a lead balloon here, I’ll change the subject and note that yesterday Eldest Gel turned in her final college assignment and is now a graduate-in-all-but-name.
While mentally limning out this post, it occurred to me that she was about six when I first started blogging. Amazing how the time goes by.
Anyhoo, we celebrated by splurging for a family dinner of Hate-Fil-A. Mmmmm….hate sammiches. Mmmmm……fries of intolerance. (We’ll do something a little more formal, of course, once the kerfluffle dies down.)
As to what’s next, well, that sort of comes around to being rant-worthy again, dunnit, because of course instead of stepping out into a booming economy as we once anticipated, she’s caught up in all this lockdown nonsense. She had been accepted into a grad program for this fall but decided it wasn’t a path she wanted to take. Back in early March, she’d started interviewing for a couple local place-holding jobs (tutoring and the like), but that is all suspended now. In the meantime, she’s done a little electronic records archiving for St. Marie of the Blessed Educational Method, and has a summer gig doing research for her college mentor and, hopefully, figuring out where she wants to go. We’ll see.
In the meantime, she still has to go back down to school and clear out her dorm room. She’s got an “appointment” to do so next Monday and I may or may not take the day off and ride down with her. The school is being fussy about the need to wear mask and gloves. What with the Gel’s room having been sealed up for a couple months now, Ol’ Robbo is thinking a full bio-hazard suit might be the better bet.
UPDATE: Whelp, final grades are in and Eldest will graduate Magna Cum Laude. Ol’ Robbo is well pleased.
UPDATE DEUX: Thankee, friends, for the congrats! On a related note, Eldest went to get a smoothie this morning (and one for me, too!) and was accosted at the store by an elderly woman who told her she “really should be wearing a mask.” The Gel just gave her the Death Stare. Heh.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Example No. 437,419 that the Country is loosing its collective mind over COVID-1984:
Ol’ Robbo was out on the sidewalk in front of Port Swiller Manor late yesterday afternoon industriously pruning back the front of his holly hedge. (If I neglect to do so and it grows out too close to the sidewalk, I get nasty little anonymous notes in my mailbox from the local Karens reminding me of the relevant county ordinances governing such things.)
As I have mentioned here before, we live on a fairly busy street and people drive very fast. (Indeed, this is why I planted the hedge in the first place.)
Anyhoo, as I was working, a couple came along on a walk. Before I could move away or even say anything, they cut up my neighbor’s driveway and on to the street. A few seconds later, somebody in a muscle car came roaring up the hill, at which the couple (the car was behind them) broke into a frantic run and got to my driveway just as the car went bombing by.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or weep, but I did think to myself that had they actually been hit by the car, they very likely would have been included among the Corona-related fatality stats for our area.
A good rule of thumb is that if your precaution is more risky than the thing against which you’re taking it, you may need to reevaluate your priorities.
UPDATE: Ace has a post up today about the New Expert Authoritarianism that relates to this and also to a thought I’ve had repeatedly over the past few weeks: The “New Normal”? “We can never go back”? “Reimagining our world”? Who says? Nobody asked me about any of this. Am I just supposed to go along quietly because the new Big Brother wears a lab coat?
I don’t think so.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Happy news in Ol’ Robbo’s corner of the world as late this week Bishop Burbridge announced our Diocese will begin reinstituting public worship on a limited basis next week. No news yet from my own parish about how it will go about implementing this, but I expect Father will let us know soon. Given that there simply aren’t all that many people at the Mass I attend in the first place, there is a very real chance that we could finally get back to something approaching normal relatively quickly. Huzzah! Huzzay!
Speaking of such, Video Meliora has up an excerpt from Flannery O’Connor’s prayer journal which is well worth a read. Ol’ Robbo has long meant to dive deeper into her writings than the quotes, excerpts, and few short stories he has read heretofore. But to be honest, I can’t think of a single other author who actually intimidates me as much as she does. A laser-beam intelligence, profound religious wisdom and insight, and a penchant for not suffering fools gladly, I couldn’t bring myself to read her without anything less than the utmost literary rigor. The idea of reading her casually is, frankly, appalling.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
An odd day here at Port Swiller Manor, in that we have a big, blue, sunny May sky, but also a howling northwest wind and chilly temperatures. (My porch thermometer bottomed out at 35 degrees last night.) Nonetheless, when I went out this morning (my first time in La Wrangler in two weeks), I had the top down.
My jaunt was up to the hardware store to restock my birdseed supply, as my feeder has been empty for about a week and a half. One of Ol’ Robbo’s simple pleasures is to refill his feeder after such a lapse, pour a cup of kawfee, and sit back and watch the birds return. It’s a funny thing, but the chickadees are almost inevitably the first ones in. On the other hand, with any luck the despised cowbirds, impatient of easy loot, will have gone elsewhere by now and won’t come back.
And speaking of birds, the catbird has returned. Another sure sign of the approach of warmer weather. (I’ve seen mockingbirds as well but they don’t tend to come into my yard for some reason.)
In the garden, my roses are opening up. I think as soon as we get a good warm spell, the peonies will follow.
As for the movie flash, I caught “North To Alaska” (1960) on an obscure cable channel last evening. Ol’ Robbo has never seen this film before. It struck him as a pretty decent flick, with John Wayne pretty much being John Wayne. It also confirmed me in my long-standing opinion that Stewart Granger’s appeal was largely a matter of eye-candy and not acting skill. On the other hand, I’d only ever seen Ernie Kovacs’ comedy sketches and was pleasantly surprised at his film presence. Of the leading lady, one Capucine, as John Cleese’s French knight would put it, “Oh, yas, she’s a verrah nice”.
The channel is running a Dook marathon this weekend and one of the films they’re airing is “The Fighting Kentuckian” (1949), another Wayne film I haven’t seen. Ol’ Robbo was gob-smacked, when they ran a plug for it, to learn that Oliver Hardy, of all people, is in it. Who knew? Alas, it comes on at a time not convenient for me and Netflix doesn’t seem to carry it. I see where the devil’s website does, however, and at a reasonable price. Anybody have an opinion about whether it would be worth it?
UPDATE: “Good news, everyone!” as Professor Farnsworth would say. I was checking back on my Netflix queue and discovered that “The Dam Busters” (1955) has suddenly been added to the active list! It’s been sitting in my “availability unknown” column – along with about 40 other films – forever. Apparently, it’ll be reissued at the end of the month. I’ve long suspected that Netflix is perfectly willing to let its DVD library crumble into dust (I recently discovered the swine had been billing me for a streaming service I did not order) but this gives me a wee bit of hope.
UPDATE DEUX: Back to gardening, as you can see I’ve added a couple of rose pics. The upper is one of our double-knockouts. I wish I knew what variety the lower one is: I brought it and a couple others back from my parents’ cottage up to Maine years ago and I’ve long since lost the information.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
One of the casualties of COVID-1984** is Youngest’s “Reveal Day” at school. This was the day on which seniors were supposed to go to school dressed in tees, sweatshirts, and whatnot of the colleges and universities they’ll be attending this fall.
To work around this, the administrators are encouraging teh kidz to put together little five-to-fifteen second videos of themselves announcing their choices. I gather the plan is to fadge them all together in a sort of electronic class collage.
Ol’ Robbo actually thinks it’s kind of a sweet idea. If they can make it work, that is. Our school district has not exactly covered itself with electronic glory since the lockdown began. (Rumor has it the head IT guy was sacked because the transition to Blackboard turned out to be such a pig’s breakfast.)
Anyhoo, I saw Youngest’s entry last evening. It’s pretty representative of the way her mind works.
In the first part, holding up a Hurricanes logo, she says, “Hi! I’m Youngest Port Swiller and this fall I’m going to Miami…..”
Suddenly the shot cuts and she reappears dressed head to toe in Redhawks gear, continuing, “of OHIOOOO!!!!” and laughing like a loon.
She then starts cranking Jason Aldean’s “Big Green Tractor” and the screen is filled with shots of cornfields with Youngest’s head photoshopped into them and the Ohio flag in one corner.
Yes, that’s my gel.
No final word on what the gel’s school is doing about graduation yet, by the bye. Evidently they’re mulling over some kind of virtual ceremony, they may hold it live some time in the summah, or they may just cancel it altogether. Eldest’s college graduation ceremony has been rescheduled to the long weekend in October, but I don’t think that’s a practical option for a high school.
** I saw somebody use this label the other day and immediately decided to steal it. Fits the situation to a tee, I’m thinking.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
What with baseball season put on indefinite hold due to Coronapalooza, Ol’ Robbo has had to lean more heavily on old movies for entertainment these last weeks. A sampling:
“Only The Valiant” (1951) – A new-to-me film I stumbled across on an obscure cable channel. Gregory Peck is a hard-horse Cavalry officer who has to hold a narrow defile against the Apaches with a handful of disgruntled troopers until re-enforcements arrive. It was okay. Ol’ Robbo has never really understood the Peck allure. To me he always seemed simply wooden. If there was some kind of brooding, smoldering, passionate substratum under that tightly-contained facade, damme if I could ever see it. When I put this to the Mothe, who was a yuge Peck fan, she would simply reply, “You haven’t the genes, dear boy. You haven’t the genes.”
“Big Night” (1996) – Tony Shalhoub and Stanley Tucci as two Italian brothers who have one last chance to save their 1950’s Jersey restaurant before the bank takes it. With Minnie Driver when she was sort of a thing and Isabella Rossellini, who at one time Ol’ Robbo thought the Most Beautiful Woman in the World (but not here). It’s actually a very small film but it has its moments. I saw it once years and years ago and my impression was simply, “Eh, fine”. Nothing this time really changed that. I will say this: Ian Holm, who is one of my very favorite actors, could do many, many things. But here he could not pull off a convincing Italian patrono.
“The Lavender Hill Mob” (1951) – Mild-mannered bank nobody Alec Guinness quietly concocts a plan to steal his employer’s gold and get it out of England disguised as Eiffel Tower souvenir paperweights. In Ol’ Robbo’s humble opinion, this is the second best of the classic Guinness/Ealing Studios comedies, the best being – far and away – “The Ladykillers“. Fight me.
Coming Up:
“Adventures of Don Juan” (1948) – I’ve not seen this one before but I’m going to go out on a limb and predict that it’s Errol Flynn doing pretty much what he does in every picture – fling himself about the stage with a sword and a debonair smile. And once again, Alan Hale will be trailing him, no doubt chuckling heartily. (Alas, no Basil Rathbone in this one.)
“Sahara” (1943) – After Tobruk, Humphry Bogart is an American tank commander who has to get back to Allied lines. On the way, he picks up a ragtag of passengers including a Brit medical team, a Frenchie, a Sudanese soldier and his Italian prisoner, and a downed Luftwaffe pilot. I’ve seen this pic a number of times and it is a really good cat-and-mouse tactical thriller involving the search for water and an on-coming German strike force. I’m very much looking forward to seeing it again.
So there you have it.
UPDATE: I received word today that “Joe Kidd” (1972) is on the way. I honestly can’t recall if I’ve seen this before. I’m much less familiar with Clint’s Westerns (apart from the Leone spaghettis) than I am with the Duke’s because by the time Eastwood got into making such movies the genre was dying out. (Happily, his “Unforgiven” (1992), of course, gave it new life. Fun fact: Rob Campbell, who played one of the cowboy bad guys in that film, was a classmate of mine in college.)
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
The other evening, the Star Trek: TOS episode was “The Way to Eden“. Yes, the infamous Space Hippies one.
Although the leader of the band of hippies who take over the Enterprise was insane, his followers were essentially fleeing the technocratic authoritarianism that is the basis of the United Federation of Planets and seeking a simpler, free life.
I’ve seen this episode umpteen times before, of course, but this is the very first time I can remember saying to myself, “Self? They’re dirty hippies and have some serious misconceptions, but on the other hand they do have a point…..”
Yes, the longer Coronapalooza goes on, the deeper Ol’ Robbo’s skepticism and disgust becomes. And no number of teevee ads featuring pictures of little girls chalking “Thank You!” and rainbows on their driveways for delivery guys is going to change that.
**makes pyramid with hands**
***”Coronoapalooza” – Robbo shorthand for my belief that to the extent this may have been a medical crisis – or at least a potential medical crisis – at the beginning, it has long since ceased to be so and is now a purely politickal exercise. The longer the population remains bewildered and frightened, the greater the opportunity to hammer home the foundations of the Brave New World.
And yes, I know I’m perhaps straying into tin-foil hat territory. But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
The Port Stands At Your Elbow 
Recent Comments