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a St. Patrick's day use for a shillelagh
Tuesday, March 17 2026
On Saturday night after the Pat Ryan event at the Golden Notebook, Jackie's partner Bennett (who, like Ryan, is also a politician, though only at a local scale) had been telling us about how, some days ago, he'd somehow been hacked and an invitation to a competing (and completely nonexistent) political event had been sent out to numerous people. This morning, that hack proved itself to be viral when Gretchen's Gmail proceeded to send out invitations to her contacts. For her, though, the email was inviting people to a birthday celebration. Anyone who knows her very well could immediately see that it wasn't written in her voice:
I'm grateful for another year of life and would
love to celebrate it with amazing people like you.
Please join me for my birthday celebration.
Gretchen would never say she is "grateful" for anything related to being alive. And she would never select a goofy rainbow stamp as the only image on the invitation. Astute followers of Gretchen's life would also remember that she'd already had a birthday back in January.
Clearly this "hack" was related to the one that had sent out emails to Bennett's contacts, but how? As I considering what might have happened, I thought it best for Gretchen to immediately change her Gmail password. Just as she was flagging the eVite email in her inbox as spam, she was horrified to see her entire inbox had cleared. Something bad was going on! Fortunately, unlike me, Gretchen keeps things tidy in her Gmail account and nearly everything is in folders (which were still intact), not in her inbox. But this was definitely spooky. Someone had access to her Gmail account. But how?
Gretchen was touchy about what exactly happened, seeming concerned that I was judging her and concluding that she is at least someone technologically inept. That wasn't my attitude, and I generally consider Gretchen to be unusually savvy with respect to technological risks, especially considering that most of this savvy seems to be unlearned. But it was important to understand how the "hack" had happened. So I asked her to relive how exactly she'd interacted with the eVite she'd received from Bennett. She said she'd opened the email, thought it was suspicious, but nevertheless click on a button in the email to see what exactly the eVite would say. At that point a Gmail screen appeared and asked for her password, and she'd typed it in. "That's it! That's the whole 'hack' right there!" I declared. Later I showed Gretchen how the button in the email I'd received in the eVite sent from her account was not pointed at anything on Google's servers, but instead went to "https://rar.drineadio.business/J4@GvEOWE03hfRzZPXvuSp8/". "That's just some asshole," I said, adding that anyone can make an official-looking Gmail page asking for a password. I then asked if Gretchen uses that password from Gmail anywhere else (a question I already knew the answer to) and she said that she did. "Well, you should change all those passwords right now," I said. She spent the next half hour or so doing so, but took some comfort in the fact that it's pretty impossible to do much with a modern web account before running into two factor authentication. Meanwhile, of course, scads of people were sending Gretchen emails asking if she'd been hacked. And at least one of Gretchen's contacts clicked on the button in Gretchen's eVite and typed in their password, causing the "hack" to spread further. (Interestingly, when I clicked on the button in the eVite, it instead took me to random eCommerce sites, as if the "hack" had been deactivated by whomever contr99ols the server it was hosted on or was only being applied to a subset of the eVites.)
Today was anticipated to be brutally cold, at least for this time of year. But I'd closed the garage door to trap some of yesterday's warmth in there, so I could continue working on the Subaru. I'd been a little confused by the front calipers after finding they were secured by larger (not 14mm) bolts, but today I got in there and figured out the bolts were 17mm (not 19mm, as someone on YouTube had said). The rust on the struts and other steel surfaces near those bolts was next-level, and I didn't have room to work with my big breaker bar, so I was worried I might not be able to loosen those bolts. I was forced to use a spanner on one of the bolts due to the congested space, but then what? Hitting it with a rubber mallet (which had been working pretty well on 14mm bolts) didn't seem to work. Then I remembered my father's old "shillelagh," a club he'd made from some dense native hardwood at our place south of Staunton, Virginia when I was a kid. (I'm not sure how that Irish word found its way into my father's vocabulary, though I know he was, for a time, betrothed to an Irish woman while stationed in England during World War II.) I'd salvaged that club from the ruins of my childhood home and it had been near our front door, perhaps as a defensive weapon, ever since. It only took a few strikes of that shillelagh on the side of the spanner to get that 17mm bolt to begin turning. Soon those big front passenger-side calipers were off.
Unfortunately, that same shillelagh was unable to turn a 14mm bolt securing the right bottom ball joint. I then fired up the air compressor and used an air tool that has worked in similar cases in the past, but all it did was round the points of the bolt. I even tried heating the threads of the stuck bolt with a propane torch, and that did nothing. So I gave up on being able to replace the ball joint myself.
As a relief from the hell of working on the Subaru, I took a little break to go work further building out the west end of the Chamomile Wall. The weather was almost normal at the time, with sunny skies and highs in the low 40s.
Later I experienced considerable frustration trying to fit new brake pads into the front calipers I'd removed this morning. The anti-rattle clips kept getting in the way and at times it seemed like the fit might be impossible. Part of the problem was also the murky light available in the garage, something I was counteracting with a flashlight that then required a hand to hold it. This whole re-braking project has turned into a depressing quagmire, but it could be worse.
My father's old homemade shillelagh. It's likely made of dogwood or perhaps even ironwood. Click to enlarge.
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