E-mail today from Luis Casillas to me and Luc Baronian (it’s a Stanford connection), with his header:
Apparently English “n’t” is trulyn’t an inflectional affix after all
(intending to convey ‘truly not an inflectional affix after all’) and then the comment:
Seen on Twitter:
(#1) deranged grammar advice on-line
Praise for the singing!
Praise for the morning!
— “Morning Has Broken”
Today, Saturday, awaking officially at 4:52, but lying for maybe 20 minutes in that wonderful half-waking state, with genuinely useful ideas chasing around my head, while an Istomin / Stern / Rose recording of the Brahms trios for piano. violin, and cello (for some reason, in reverse order, ending with No. 1) played on my Apple Music — fabulously passionate, exuberant in bursts, and musically complex. The Brahms is Morning A.
One thing that I worked on in my head was a kvetch from Michael Newman (on Facebook on 6/1, with a response from me) that I didn’t get to post on yesterday, because yesterday was largely a great trial, following on the events reported in my 6/5 posting “An indescribable day”. But now I will introduce Michael and show our exchange; that’s Morning B. Which comes with the promise of a future posting celebrating Michael, singing his praises.
Then, after morning cleanup, I went to my worktable, to turn off the Apple Music, check my vital signs (good), and turn on the tv to MSNBC, which immediately presented me with this panel:
Harvard University Professor Maya Jasanoff and Ankush Khardori join The Weekend to discuss why President Tr**p keeps losing in his war against the nation’s oldest college
In which I was once again impressed with Khardori, who came across as extraordinarily bright, incisive, tough and down-to-earth, and surprisingly charming. Also, to my famously queer eye, definitely sexy; he’s Morning C.
After him, Bob Eckstein’s newsletter The Bob popped up, in a special French edition yesterday, to cap things off with a wonderfully silly cartoon — Morning D.
Morning was then broken, and the day shambled on, with variously astonishing, distressing, and alarming news breaking in one wave after another.
Too much for me to cope with, or even fully describe, and for reasons that will quickly become clear, I have get on with household tasks very soon now, so this has to be abbreviated.
Today is Thursday, the now-standard day for stripping the bed, washing the bedclothes, and putting on fresh sheets. I do the first part of this, slowly but efficiently. My helper J does the new sheets part, because that’s difficult, painful, and tiring for me — tends to take nearly an hour, because I have to stop and pant and rest every so often. It takes J a few minutes, and he then goes on to a big set of household tasks (while I do another load of laundry, for my clothes.)
J did not appear. After he was half an hour late, I mailed my care agency; they eventually said that the agency subcontracting J had moved him to another project, and he wouldn’t ever be back. One of the managers would come to see me at 12:30.
Terrible blow; J did many useful things for me (and we had some future projects I’d bought materials for), not the least of which was being an actual live person, smart and resourceful and good company, someone to talk with when I get a social visit from non-helper friends every two months at best.
I was dithering about how I would even get through the day when I checked the balance in my credit union account and discovered that the Social Security people had deposited a gigantic one-time windfall (it’s complicated, but the money’s entirely genuine; I learned about these payments from Barbara Partee a while back and realized one would come to me eventually, and there it was). So I could order a couple of meals without counting the pennies.
The 12:30 meeting was a push to start getting me ready to sell this house and move to a residential community. Endless complexities, with lots of reassurance that I could just reproduce my workspace in such a community. I had to keep reminding people that I worked full-time on a professional career, and needed the resources to do that, and someone to take over a lot of daily things so that I could do my job. I foresee lots of promises that all of this would be easily taken care of, followed by the refrain “Oh, we couldn’t do that!” and the like.
Meanwhile, I have an enormous amount of stuff to get rid of. Including most of the stuff that makes this little condo an art show and eccentric museum. My caregiving agency is looking for someone new to give me a hand with daily life and to help with the transition to a new place.
But now I have to make up the bed, water the garden, take out the trash, and much much more.
… and the season is Pride Month. Canadian Pride and Canadian pride from Chris Ambidge on Facebook on 6/1:
Oh look — Canada Post is issuing four commemorative stamps in honour of Pride Month. The theme is “Places of Pride / Lieux de la fierté”, and depict four places beloved of LGBTQ2S+ people in Canada, from Hanlan’s Point in Toronto to Club Carousel, Calgary’s first gay bar. I hadn’t seen these last time I was at the post office — I need to go buy me some stamps!
(#1) From the Canada Post website on 5/29:We’re proud to announce our latest stamp series honouring sites across Canada that 2SLGBTQIA+ [2S is two-spirit, a First Nations term for a third gender] people fought to make their own – places of celebration and freedom to be fully oneself, and spaces that nurtured a sense of solidarity that became a catalyst for change. 🏳️🌈
The Places of Pride stamp series honours: Calgary’s first gay bar Club Carousel; Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point Beach; Montreal gay bar Truxx; 3rd North American Native Gay & Lesbian Gathering near Beausejour, Manitoba.
O Canada! … The True North strong and free! — we send Prideful huzzahs to you.
Things are different, stamp-wise, in my troubled country.
Yesterday’s Strange Planet comic strip by Nathan W. Pyle introduces the delightful verb / noun rollsuck ‘to vacuum’ / ‘vacuum cleaner’ (on Pyle’s strange planet, which has our customs but not our vocabulary):
The verb / noun as in: I am rollsucking the foot fabric ‘I am vacuuming the rug’
A midweek quickie. Yesterday on Facebook, a posting from Thorstein Fretheim (Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, specializing in pragmatics and semantics: intonation, discourse markers, prosody, context), as it came to me in English translation:
‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory’ (Address Newspaper) or ‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory?’
(Address is the regional newspaper in Trondheim)
Now this was utterly baffling, so I asked for the Norwegian original:
‘Trondheims egne sjokoladefabrikk’ (Adresseavisa) eller ‘Trondheims egen sjokoladefabrikk’?
Getting prescriptions (re)filled through CVS Caremark turns out to be a constant unpleasant adventure. My password keeps needing to be changed, for no reason I can see, and what happens when I get to the “manage your prescriptions” page is always something different from all previous log-ins. Sometimes I can find no way to get the list of my (alas, very many) prescriptions, or get the list from two years ago, or some list that probably belongs to someone else, so I just abandon the task and try again the next day. Twice I’ve been told that that resource is not available.
Today my problem was a prescription for prednisone 5 mg tablets, which I put in weeks ago, got a message saying it had been processed, and then no news whatsoever. So, after elaborately proving who I was and then changing my password, I found the “track your orders” resource (sometimes it just vanishes and I’m shit out of luck, but it was there today. And told me that instead of being mailed to me (as I had instructed), the rx was sent to my local CVS, held for two weeks without being picked up, and returned to the warehouse. All without any notification to me.
Oh, you say, that should be no problem, just put in a new order. The “submit an order” option was in fact available. Joy.
That’s the land of maze and Shiraz and similar AZ things, those whose names have the letter-sequence AZ in them; Aslan is something entirely different (see below). I was taken to AZ-land yesterday on Facebook by Aric Olnes (who is, among other things, a floral artist), in one of a series of alphabetic flower photos from Casa Thomas / Olnes in Pioneer (Amador County) CA — where Aric and his husband Mike Thomas live these days — which come with lengthy alliterative captions, in this case for the letter A:
(#1) The photo, of a Pioneer Azalea; the caption:Astonishingly attractive Azaleas arrest acrimonious assumptions ascending aloft angelic amiability
(Look, Aric wasn’t aiming for elegance or poetic facility, just alliteration playfully carried to ridiculous lengths; otherwise, all it has to do is make some sense)
And my response, also on Facebook, taking things in a direction Aric probably didn’t anticipate:
— azaleas are from AZ-land, like azure, azimuths, and azithromycin, in a region that embraces Azerbaijan, the Azores, and Azusa [but not Anaheim or Cucamonga] — and is next to the Plaza Hotel, the Amazon River, and Jason Mraz‘s recording studio (among many many other things)
