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Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
You may or may not have read the nooz this week about the doings at National Public Radio: how a senior editor was canned for daring to suggest that lockstep leftism has overrun the place (he was shocked, shocked that gambling was taking place in this establishment); and how the new head poohbah is a whackadoodle Maoist who cheerfully, even enthusiastically, endorses censorship of wrong-think. (She thinks the 1st Amendment is problematic.)
Meh, this is hardly a sudden sea-change, but has been coming on for a very long time.
Ol’ Robbo has been listening to NPR-affiliated stations for thirty-five years. Back in the 90’s, the liberal slant was pretty obvious, but I could still listen to, say, Morning Edition and All Things Considered without being outraged. I’d say the first signs of their going more hardline appeared during the Bush/Gore fight, and it gradually ramped up during the eight years of Dubya. But what really started to make Ol’ Robbo’s blood pressure jump was the pandering cover NPR always gave to Obama: The difference between what they told me was going on and what I actually saw with my own two eyes became, well, breathtaking. The more recent slide into full-on insanity over the terms of Trump and the current resident has merely accelerated the pace, not changed the direction. And so, here we are.
Of course, Ol’ Robbo listens to his local station only for the classical musick, to which it devotes almost all of its airtime. When it runs its five-minute top-o-the-hour NPR nooz headlines during the morning and evening commute, I derive great satisfaction from hitting the off button and saying, “Aw, shaddap!!”
To be perfectly honest, however, NPR literally may have saved Ol’ Robbo’s life once. I was driving from school in Virginia to my parents’ place in South Carolina. I’d left in the middle of the night and round about dawn was in the neighborhood of Columbia. At that point, I started getting very sleepy and really should have pulled over but didn’t. Fortunately, I had picked up the local NPR affiliate on my radio, and just before I completely dozed off at the wheel, the Morning Edition theme musick came on. Having been conditioned to wake up to that every morning for several years, I suddenly got a jolt of adrenaline, found my second wind, and carried on down to my folks’ house safely. So there’s that.
I still think the place is evil. They’re just starting to say the quiet part out loud now. What was that joke Peej O’Rourke once wrote? Communists worship Satan. Socialists think perdition is a good system run by bad people. And liberals think we should all go to hell because it’s warm there in the winters.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo is taking the day off from work today just because. For the first time this season, I’m able to lounge comfortably this morning on the Port Swiller Manor back porch with my laptop and my kawfee. (I just wish the pollen wasn’t so awful at the moment.)
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I hope everyone had fun yesterday with the yclipse. (Middle Gel sent me a video from Indiana which I wanted to post here but couldn’t manage the platform translation from her phone to gmail to wordpress. I had thought these things happen more or less automatically now, but no. Technology will let you down every time.) Here, it got quite dark indoors as it does when a thunderstorm is approaching: It was strange to go back out and look up at the blue but dim sky. As I joked with Eldest Gel, it looked as if God was just about to hit the “smite” button (and I wouldn’t blame Him in the least for doing so).
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Ol’ Robbo’s Camillia is in full bloom and even a little past peak, and at the moment is swarming with honeybees. I regularly read articles to the effect that the honeybee population is doomed, and it is all my fault for having the audacity to exist, but, no, it would seem the little critters are doing just fine. Over the years I’ve got used to working around them in the garden, as they are usually pretty non-aggressive. My sister used to keep a couple of hives, but I don’t think I could stick that. At any rate, as Ol’ Robbo understands it, hive-keeping is actually detrimental to the population, as it concentrates the bees unnaturally. As a result, when something goes wrong (and things will always go wrong), it wipes out a much larger batch than it would in the wild.
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Looking in the other direction, Ol’ Robbo notices that the birdhouse I put up by the fence a few years ago is once again occupied by sparrows this year instead of the bluebirds for which I had hoped. Sigh. I don’t understand why said bluebirds seem to shun it. They’re perfectly happy with the one on my neighbor’s fence. The only thing I can think of is that the wisteria on my fence is too close to the box for their liking. (The neighbor’s fence is bare.) I’m very tempted to put up another one a bit farther away just to see if I’m right.
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Another thing which tempts Ol’ Robbo every spring is to put up a bat-house. I am quite fond of bats and love to watch them flittering around in the summah dusk gobbling up skeeters and whatnot on the fly. Alas, Mrs. R is terrified of the things, so it would be very cruel of me to encourage them this way. Anyhow, they seem to do just fine without my assistance.
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Well, as this seems to have turned into something of a gardening post, I will end by saying that I worry this year that the loss of Decanter Dog will mean the deer start coming into the yard again in much the same way as the Saxons started to raid Britannia after the Roman Legions pulled out. Some years ago, I was able to remove the wire cages from around my roses without fear. I’d hate to have to put them back. (All the more reason to get another puppy this summah.) My sister recommends wolf pee to ward them off, while I’m also reminded of a wag who used to comment here years ago who recommended that I, ah, take matters into my own hands, if you know what I mean. Hopefully, no such measures will be necessary. (I just looked up wolf pee online. That stuff’s expensive!)
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo recently tried “Masters of the Air”, Tom Hanks’s latest WWII miniseries, this one featuring American heavy bombers in the European Theatre. I have to say, honestly, that although this ought to be right up Ol’ Robbo’s alley, after a couple episodes it’s leaving me cold. None of the characters so far really means anything to me. Plus, I’m put off by the excessive CGI effects and the rayther overwrought musickal soundtrack. I have not yet decided whether I’m going to try to make it all the way through. (For the record, I really enjoy “Band of Brothers” but did not care for “The Pacific”.) MOTA is based on the book by Donald L. Miller, by the bye, whose study of the Vicksburg Campaign I just finished and really enjoyed. Maybe I’ll look into that.
Also in Tee-Vee Land, Ol’ Robbo waits patiently for news about whether the new “Frasier” reboot will get a second season. I, for one, certainly hope so. The first season felt uneven and the coming to terms between Frasier and his son got pretty tedious, but I also saw some definite signs here and there of the old magic. (We recently rewatched the original “Frasier” for the first time since it aired and Ol’ Robbo was astonished at how good the writing and acting were.) Plus, to be honest, I just really like Kelsey Grammar.
Yes, we likely will watch at least part of the Sooper Bowl on Sunday. Indeed, we’re going to a party for it. Ol’ Robbo has not really paid any attention to pro ball since Dan Marino retired but I definitely will root for San Francisco. For one thing, Ol’ Robbo has a weakness for underdogs. For another, I am getting thoroughly sick of the Chiefs/Taylor Swift biznay: I know when I’m being hyped and hustled and I don’t much care for it.
Speaking of such things, Ol’ Robbo recently went through his Florence King collection for the first time in quite a while. (I believe I have most, if not all of her books.) She had me hooting frequently, but I must say by the end I felt rayther exhausted by her non-stop misanthropy. Lord knows I couldn’t keep that up. Think I’ll stick to being a good-humored curmudgeon myself. (I’m now reading some old Dave Barry to sort of balance things out.)
Finally, whenever I wish to post here I still have to do so via my Edge browser, as whatever glitch developed between WordPress and Chrome never completely resolved itself. To do so, I have to pull up the Microsoft homepage. Good Lord Almighty, if that’s where people get their news these days, no wonder this country is in the state it’s in! The people hosting this Sunday’s party, by the bye, are the sort who…..believe Microsoft homepage headlines. Fortunately, we’ve been able to avoid politicks with them over the years but I’ve an awful feeling that as the insanity deepens, one of these days Ol’ Robbo inadvertently is going to let something slip and get himself cast into the outer darkness for it.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo just finished Stephen W. Sears’s “Gettysburg”.**
For some reason, while I’ve a number of books about that particular battle, most of them focus on specific aspects of it such as Little Round Top or Pickett’s Charge. The only comprehensive volume in my collection heretofore had been Glenn Tucker’s “High Tide at Gettysburg”, which, although informative, is also folksy and anecdotal, and rayther biased. Indeed, I was just a chapter or two into Tucker’s work a couple weeks ago when I said to myself, “Self, we need a fresh perspective. Let’s have a look-see at what’s out there.”
Well. I already have Sears’s masterful accounts of the Peninsular Campaign, Antietam, and Chancellorsville (and therein I’ve long agreed with his criticism of McClellan and his defense of Hooker), so I asked the devil’s website whether he had gone on to Gettysburg. Turns out that he had.
What can Ol’ Robbo say? Once again Sears does a splendid job of parsing the entire campaign, from the high questions of politicks and strategy down to the nitty-gritty of individual unit actions. His reporting of facts appears well documented, and his opinions seem very well-reasoned. In the end, after a cogent explanation of why Lee went into Pennsylvania in the first place, his argument boils down to explaining the ultimate Confederate loss as a combination of hubris and bad command structure on the part of the Rebs with solid organization and management on the part of Meade (and Hooker before him) on the Union side, coupled with the usual fortunes of war. From my own years of study, I see nothing wrong with his criticism of such players as Stewart, Howard, Hill, Ewell, and Sickles, as well as his praise of Meade, Hunt, Reynolds, Hancock, Doubleday, and others. His description of the relationship between Lee and Longstreet, including his explanation of the debate over Longstreet’s argument to swing around to the right of the Union Army and its complications, is especially illuminating. Plus, I believe Sears’s explanation of Meade’s failure to crush Lee’s army before it got back over the Potomac quite creditable.
It is a curious (indeed, almost disgraceful) fact that although Ol’ Robbo lives no more than about an hour and a half away (on a good day) from Gettysburg, and although I’ve passed it a few times on the drive up into Pennsylvania, I’ve never actually been to the battleground. Reading this book gives me much incentive to correct this lapse. (Although, to be honest, we’ve three graduations and a wedding to attend during campaign season next year and I doubt it will happen then. On the other hand, at the rate the Neo-Maoists are erasing history, maybe I’d better get there before the whole site is disappeared.)
** Ol’ Robbo’s apologies, but I’m still experiencing technical difficulties. Edge for me is running an older version of WordPress and I have neither an italics function nor linkage capacity. Chrome still has no editorial tools available. I’ll be damned if I start pawing around for yet another server until I’m completely shut out here.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Uncle Robbo just received in the mail an announcement of my nephew’s wedding next June. Along with a card featuring a pic of the happy couple (in fact, I’ve never actually met the bride-to-be) is a slip of paper reading “Our Wedding Website” and containing one of those iPhone scanning codes which I don’t know how to use. The slip states the link provides “information on hotels, things to do, our registry and more!”
Ol’ Robbo has been out of the picture so long that I must ask: Is this how things are done these days? Mention of the link to the registry simply translates in my mind to “Buy Us Stuff”.
Hmph.
The wedding’s to be held at the Virginia Tech chapel (they’re both alums). Evidently, the Family Robbo is not invited to the rehearsal dinner for some reason so we might find ourselves at loose ends around Blacksburg that evening. Any friends of the decanter having any dining recommendations there?
And no, just in case you’re wondering, nothing so far on the horizon of this sort viz the Gels, although I just learned Youngest is stopping over at her Young Man’s parents’ house for a day or two on her way home from school. (Ol’ Robbo doesn’t mind – we like him.)
And whaddaya know, just as I was typing this I looked out the window to behold Middle Gel pulling in. (Evidently, she left Indiana at 1:30 ack-emma this morning.) She’s brought her cat home, too, which promises to be….interesting.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Well, here we are.
The greens are up at Port Swiller Manor. Mrs. R managed a perfect score yesterday afternoon, nabbing a tree that was just off the truck from the farm (and, I can tell you from personal experience, absolutely running with sap). Apparently, she also got it discounted because she got it mid-week instead of on the weekend. (Who knew?) She further seems to have got the fellah to charge her for only a seven-footer when this one is closer to eight. Mrs. R has always had the touch. Me, I went to this same place a few years back with Youngest Gel and got fleeced to the bone.
As for wreaths, we ordered them from some place in Maine. On the outside of the box, in very prominent lettering, it is stated that said wreaths contain no juniper species. Is juniper a bad thing? Is this a boast? Some sort of FDA thing? We had lots and lots of juniper in the South Texas of my misspent yoot and I don’t recall any issues. I can only suppose that if one is ordering Maine balsam, the sellers just want to assure that they aren’t fobbing one off with weeds.
Regular friends of the decanter may recall Ol’ Robbo mentioning the motion-activated flood lights on the corners of the Port Swiller Manor back porch that look out over the yard? Ever since their installation seven or eight years ago, they’ve had the habit of working only intermittently, going dark for long periods from time to time and then coming back on line. In all this time, I’ve been unable to discern any kind of pattern to this. It just happens. This doesn’t bug Ol’ Robbo so much as the fact that I don’t know WHY it happens. (I’m reminded of an old Steven Wright joke: ”I had this wall switch in my apartment. When I flipped it, it didn’t do anything, but I kept flipping it anyway. The other day I got a call from a guy in Germany. He said cut it out.”)
And speaking of home stuff, the other day Mrs. R suggested that, as a cost-cutting measure in the Great Basement Restoration project, maybe Ol’ Robbo ought to install the insulation himself. Hmmm. I’ve never done that before, but it doesn’t strike me as being terribly difficult. Am I correct about this?
Finally, on a completely different note, why Ol’ Robbo didn’t pick up Stephen W. Sears’s book on Gettysburg years ago, I’ve no earthly idea. But that oversight has now been corrected and I’m enjoying it yugely. More on this later.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Well, well. As regular friends of the decanter will know, Ol’ Robbo is fairly inept when it comes to tech stuff, and when WordPress started playing me false last week, I really didn’t see any options other than repeatedly hitting “refresh” and hoping for the best.
But a little while ago, I suddenly said to myself, “Self, why don’t you try logging on with a different browser and see what happens?” I’ve been using Chrome for a long while, but just now I switched back over to Edge and, well, here I am, with all the bells and whistles back where they ought to be. (I haven’t checked whether the problems have gone away on Chrome, yet.)
I still don’t know what happened. When I first lost access to post editing, a part of me actually thought I was being banned – either by the ChiComs or Bob at the NSA or Nikki Haley or some other gate-keeper. Regular friends of the decanter will know that I hardly post content that can be considered inflammatory these days, but I couldn’t help wondering if my existence itself had now been deemed so. (I get an awful lot of hits on my “About” tab.) On the other hand, the way in which access dwindled seemed haphazard and random, not deliberate, and from what I could gather somebody was actively messing about with the blog’s innards, perhaps trying to do maintenance. Who knows.
In any event, Ol’ Robbo seems to be back in biznay, so help yourselves to a celebratory glass. The walnuts are on the table and the Stilton is over on the sideboard.
Alas, lots of things happened during my lockout that it’s not worth going back to now. However, a special glass of wine with Don for stepping in to post my traditional Thanksgiving Roman Catholic Boys for Art offering and for marking my 20th anniversary as a blogger.
Well, going forward, here we are now, firmly into what they call the “Holiday Season”. As an initial observation, Ol’ Robbo will remind all friends of the decanter of an abuse he’s already observed: “Gift” is a noun, not a verb. This is the law. Learn it. Live it.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
As regular friends of the decanter will know, Ol’ Robbo is deeply suspicious of the modern information age and all the electronic whatzits that go with it. Too much opportunity for spying out personal information by our corporate and gubmint betters. Too much remote control by same. Too much room for fraud and theft. And it’s becoming increasingly apparent that “social media” is a pretty bad idea all around, especially for children.
That said, Ol’ Robbo must give due credit to his iPhone. By keeping a hawk’s eye on the radar on my weather app-thingy, I was able to dash out in the only possible half hour slot between downpours last evening and successfully grill dinner for Mrs. R and the in-laws. (And even then, it was, as Wellington said of Waterloo, a damned near-run thing.)
I’m sure Bob from the NSA chuckled.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Fall is definitely here in the neighborhood of Port Swiller Manor, with highs in the 70’s and lows in the 50’s for the foreseeable future. I will take it gladly.
This morning Ol’ Robbo filled up his hummingbird feeder for what definitely will be the last time this year. As I mentioned somewhere earlier, we’ve had three of the little blighters this year, a male and two females, the latter of which dog-fight non-stop. I suppose they will be lighting out for the territory some time soon. When I stop to think what their metabolism must be and how close to starvation they must come so quickly, their very existence boggles my mind, much less their Herculean migratory practices. Ma Nature truly is a marvel.
(Because the Innerwebz knows all, Ol’ Robbo has been receiving unsolicited ads for hummingbird birdhouses of late. Part of me is intrigued.)
On a different note, today will see the first of three fall limings of the Port Swiller Manor lawn. Ol’ Robbo is still patting himself on the back over, having let it slide for twenty years, taking its maintenance back in hand. Three years into the new regime and it’s looking infinitely better. (Yes, Ol’ Robbo is a thorough suburbanite. I know this violates the canons of the Brave New World Order** but I’m already in so deep for wrong-think on so many other topics that I figure it won’t make any difference at my show trial. (And if you’re paying the slightest attention to the nooz these days you’ll know that Ol’ Robbo is being only slightly hyperbolic is saying this.))
On another completely different note, we are having an industrial-grade dehumidifier installed in the Port Swiller Manor basement today. Regular friends of the decanter will recall the great hoo-hah Ol’ Robbo went through last year having the walls of said basement re-enforced after it flooded out for the umpteenth time. It was proposed at the time that we put in a new dehumidifier but I thought we could get away without it. Well, 48 out of 52 weeks in the year, I am right, but that one month in the summah makes all the difference and the influx of mold has proven unbearable. Perhaps I’m just starting to get old. In any event, in she goes today.
Finally, with the onset of Fall come the inevitable mums. Ol’ Robbo does not like mums. Why, I couldn’t really say. But there it is.
** In the Brave New World Order, of course, you will live in an unlit, unheated, 10×10 stack-a-prole flat, you will be forbidden to travel more than 15 minutes (on foot) in any direction, you will eat zee bugs and like it, and you will report to your Block Captain once a week for Social Credit Score review and adjustment.
UPDATE: Dehumidifier installed. It looks like a small, blocky jet-engine and the drain line feeds directly into the sump pump. The home-owner nerd in me is highly pleased. Meanwhile, I duly tramped around the yard scattering lime broadcast and getting a fair quantity of the dust up my nose. (For that, I prolly oughta mask up.) I’ll do two more treatments this fall, plus overseed after the weed & feed service aerates the place.
Even as I type this I’m receiving word that Mrs. R is buying iris bulbs in quantity. Suddenly Ol’ Robbo sees his next project looming on the horizon.
Greetings, my fellow port swillers!
Ol’ Robbo seems to have mostly kicked whatever it was that has been ailing me – achy muscles, pounding sinuses, and sore throat and lungs, mostly. Whatever it was, I managed to get myself out and do the yard this morning without undue fatigue, so I’ve got that going for me.
On the gardening front, alas, the last of my experimental rhodies has given up the ghost. To hell with it. Maybe the former owner was right about them not growing on this particular plot. I shall replace the corpses with azaleas, which do just fine in the Port Swiller Manor demesne.
Also on the gardening front, Mrs. R is beginning to kick a bit about my scheme to turn the current raspberry bed to roses and peonies, even though I successfully transplanted some of the raspberries to a new bed. I honestly think she just hates the idea of me laying waste to the old bed, sort of the gardening equivalent of shooting Bambi’s mother. Sigh. At the moment, I haven’t decided how much to push back on this but if the project does, indeed, get cancelled or postponed then none of you are allowed to heckle me if I don’t divide out my peonies after all this fall, despite what I said earlier this year.
Speaking of fall, I see college football starts this weekend. Can somebody explain to Ol’ Robbo the brilliant idea of having the Miami (Ohio) Red Hawks play the Miami (Florida) Hurricanes last evening? I mean, I know they’re both technically Division I, but come on. Ol’ Robbo has grown to truly enjoy Mid-American Conference football since Youngest started there. MAC-competition can be pretty tight and I just don’t see the point of a needless, throwaway loss like this. I can only hope that the ‘Canes felt a little bit ashamed of themselves.
On a different note, it seems in my absence from blogging this week that WordPress has added an “AI Assistant” doo-hickey to the menu bar. To hell with that, too. If Ol’ Robbo is going to generate errant nonsense, it’s going to be 100% organic errant nonsense: I’m not going to have a damned machine do it for me.
And speaking of errant nonsense, what news is there these days that isn’t?
Well, enough. Ol’ Robbo braim boggles a bit that it’s Labor Day weekend already. My plan for laboring on the day involves slapping a new coat of Thompson’s Water Seal on the super-woody parts of the back porch. I can’t remember when I did so last, so that means it’s time to do it again.
In the meanwhile, time for me to hit the hammock with a bowl of popcorn and P.C. Wren’s Spanish Maine, the last and (I may say) silliest of his four French Foreign Legion novels. It’s pure melodrama and I’m not especially enjoying it but once I start a book I feel generally honor-bound to finish it.
Later.
Labor Day UPDATE: Mrs. R and I discussed the fate of the raspberry bed again. She ended by saying, “Do what you think is best.”
Right.
To quote the Robot, “Danger, Will Robinson! Danger!”
To quote Admiral Akbar, “It’s a trap!”
We shall see what happens.
As for those of you wondering, no, Ol’ Robbo did not get on with his resealing project today. To quote Cole Porter, “It’s too darn hot.”
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