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would have applauded that
Tuesday, October 18 2011
After finishing up the painting work, I took a late morning bath, which is an unusual time for me to bathe. But I had a dental appointment this afternoon and I didn't want to go to it looking and smelling like Ted Kaczynski. The weather has become more cool and seasonal, and a hot bath is a refreshing pick-me-up from the chill of the house. My laboratory is usually fairly warm due to waste heat from computer equipment, but the rest of the house can be rather unpleasant. The dinginess of old cobwebs thickened by dust seems even more dreary and impossible to remedy once temperatures drop below about 62 degrees Fahrenheit. Still, I've yet to come out of summer complacency; burning little more than junk mail and cardboard in the woodstove.
The dental appointment was for a cleaning, my first such appointment in a year and a half. I'd gone over my mouth pretty thoroughly with a professional dental tool in hopes of avoiding a lecture from my hygienist, but she managed to find enough calculus betwixt my lower teeth to keep her happily occupied for a bit longer than expected. She kept going back and forth in the narrow gaps between my lower incisors (which are tiny) and eventually it felt like she was being sadistic. More evidence for this was the fact that I was, to some extent, drowning in my own blood. Once that was over, the actual dentist (as opposed to the hygienist who had done the cleaning), didn't look at my teeth but instead pulled me into a different operating room to give me an update on the cockamamie internet business we've been working on for the past two years. Sometimes he's pushing me to add features and then weeks go by and I don't hear from him, so I think the project finally had a fork stuck in it. Today, though, he seemed a bit more upbeat than usual as he told me of his attempts to raise a half million dollars in venture capital. I'll believe it when I see it. He also said that Boris, whom I imagine to be a big sweaty, hirsute Russian, had done a code review of the website I built and had deemed it "sound." Maybe I'm not just a hack, though it's more likely that Boris is.
On the way home I stopped at the floodplain of the Esopus and gathered nine five gallon buckets of topsoil. I'd only brought eight buckets, but I found a perfectly good one (it was fire engine red) mixed in with the driftwood from recent flooding. It's become easy to gather soil now that the floods have receded. In the place where I like to gather it, fresh new inch-thick layer of flood silt had formed a cap over the existing soil and vegetation. Cutting into it with a shovel, the soil was an layer cake with dense silt at the top, flattened semi-decayed vegetation beneath that, an inch of worm castings, and, at the bottom, more dense silt from floods that happened years ago. I ended up adding some of this soil to the gardens and using the rest to further improve the low ridge in the lawn diverting surface water from the house.
Until today, I hadn't felt compelled to watch any of the Republican presidential debates. It seemed sufficient to get their content in digest form, sparing myself the numbing repetition of talking points designed to confirm and extend voter ignorance on subjects such as the value of regulation vs. that of unwanted zygotes, the usefulness of the free market in fairly distributing medical care, and the vast ocean of oil still left for the tapping beneath American soil. Not that these debates haven't been entertaining, even in digest form. With their rabid bloodthirsty audiences applauding any form of death experienced outside a womb, it would be comedy if there wasn't a real danger that one of these maniacs will one day become president. Tonight, though, I tuned into the debate taking place in Nevada, and it was a doozy. In one part of the debate, things became so heated between Mitt Romney and Rick Perry that my heart rate began to accelerate. When Romney went so far as to put his hand on Perry, I was sure for a half a second there that Perry was going to punch him in the kisser. I'm no Perry fan, but even I would have applauded that.
I also watched a recent Frontline about the FBI's hunt for the perpetrator of the great anthrax letter scare of 2001. It would have been hard to easily follow that story in the news, because it played out over so many years. But the sense one gets from this episode of Frontline is that the FBI's investigative process for this high profile case was done in the shoddy manner of a bayou murder investigation in Louisiana. The investigation leaned heavily on coercive police tactics, shoddy science, and bizarre conjecture, leading in one case to the draining of a large pond in Maryland in hopes of finding a bioweapons lab hidden in a submarine (though all they found was a turtle trap — and why didn't I ever hear about that?). In the end, the FBI ended up paying $5 million to one exonerated suspect and hounding another to suicide without managing to build a solid case against him. Indeed, there's a good chance that the perpetrator is still out there.
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