Where the trash cans stand as lonely sentinels against evil.
Where the streets loom against the sky.
Those last two shots were darker IRL but the camera tech brights then. For the next few, from a night when the power was out, TYG showed me a workaround.
And here’s one from 2020 I think came out very well.
Filed under Miscellanea
J.D. Vance, told the Christian Post that the separation of church and state is Satanic. He’s full of it.
First off, I don’t believe a word Vance says, ever. He’s a soulless ladder-climber who’s made deliberate choices who to sell out to on every rung. To the extent he has sincere beliefs about the United States, they’re repellent. And this is no exception. According to the Christian Post article, “Vance called for ‘a more fully Christian politics,’ one that refuses to treat ‘economic growth’ as an idol, or to dismiss Catholic social teaching as merely ‘spiritual stuff’ with no input on how a nation should be run.”
“Christian politics” is as much gibberish as Mike Johnson declaring all you need to know is that he has a “Biblical worldview.” There is no one Christian politics or worldview. As Mark Noll has written, the Civil War, some Christians believed slavery was a compact with Hell; other Christians believed American chattel slavery was divinely ordained. Many civil rights marchers believed ending Jim Crow was God’s will; many segregationists believed Jim Crow was the will of god. Evangelical Christians in the 1970s were pro-choice; then in the 1980s they swung to “abortion is murder.”
I don’t think there’s any question that slavery and racism are evil; as Huck Finn said, if God wants black America in chains, our duty is to liberate the slaves and go to hell. And I think simple human decency is all that takes to figure that out. As a Christian I don’t dismiss the Bible as a guide; however if Protestants pre-Civil War could not reach a common agreement on what the Bible says about slavery, it’s not a clear, unambiguous guide. We can’t just look up answers like it was a search engine for heaven. And we are, after all, fallible mortals, as are our spiritual leaders. Even if the Bible is inerrant (I do not believe it is), we can’t assume our interpretation of it is.
All that said, I don’t believe for a minute that Vance wants “Christian politics” in the sense that all Christians should have the same right to influence the government. He wants a Christianity that supports his politics, which at the moment are authoritarian, anti-immigrant, and misogynist (I’m quite sure that if it was in his self-interest, he’d switch gears). Lots of Christians, including the Pope, are pro-immigrant; Vance is so anti-immigrant he bore false witness against legal Haitian immigrants, lying they were stealing and eating cats and dogs. There are Christians who are pro-gay and feminist; Vance is neither.
Our religion can support or influence our political positions. If, however, the only argument for our position is “God wants it,” that’s when church-state separation kicks in. Because some other Christian believes God wants the exact opposite, guaranteed.
Filed under Politics
Two trilogies from Ballantine Books, two sets of triple covers. First, The Lord of the Rings by Barbara Remington.
These covers go back to when LOTR was still seen as a one-of-a-kind thing. Epic fantasy didn’t exist as a genre; there was Tolkien and people knocking off Tolkien, that was it. They are very much what I think of as the covers. Remington says she hadn’t had a chance to read the books when she drew the art or she’d have drawn them differently.
Second, the three Gormenghast novels by Mervyn Peake, with covers by Bob Pepper.
Here’s a better look at the image without the titles.
If you think that looks weird, well so are the books: Titus Groan, Gormenghast — apparently I never blogged about V3, Titus Alone Peake’s wife put together a fourth volume from his notes and the novella Boy in Darkness falls between V1 and V2.
Part of the inspiration for this post was someone on FB saying that after reading LOTR they’d picked up the Peake books as another fantasy trilogy — that must mean a lot like LOTR, right? It must have been a jarring transition.
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I predicted last month that the Toddler administration and sociopathic crackpot RFK Jr. would start hacking away at anti-smoking rules if Big Tobacco paid them enough. I hate being right. “The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 14-year ad campaign, called Tips From Former Smokers, was highly memorable and, research shows, highly effective in motivating people to quit. Last year, though, as tobacco companies gave millions to political organizations related to the Trump administration, the campaign went dark.”
“The warning on the government website was stark. Some products and remedies claiming to treat or cure autism are being marketed deceptively and can be harmful. Among them: chelating agents, hyperbaric oxygen therapies, chlorine dioxide and raw camel milk.” That page has gone dark too.
On the other hand, Kennedy has announced he’s willing to devote his department’s resources to investigating Muslim groups for non-existent crimes.
To counter the US withdrawing from the World Health Organization, some states are joining. Right-wingers are unhappy.
“For NIH, it proposes a $5 billion cut to research program funding (~11% cut). It also proposes elimination of 1 institutes and 2 centers: National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health Fogarty International Center. The combined fiscal year 2026 budget for these ICs is approximately $1.2 billion so that leaves a $3.8 billion cut for the rest of NIH.” — Jeremy Berg on the Toddler’s proposed budget for 2027. This was a couple of months back so things may have changed, but as Berg says, the spending priorities show what Republicans think is important. Kennedy, for example, wanted to spend $5 billion of NIH funding, looking for the non-existent vaccine-autism link.
” Federal research funds are not an entitlement, they are not a subsidy: they are subject to exceptionally competitive award processes and intense federal government oversight. Universities do things private companies with research capacities cannot: train research talent, conduct basic research with uncertain payoffs, and distribute knowledge as a public good. And the rewards have been enormous. Everything from the internet to pharmaceutical and health care innovations evolved from such investments. We are richer and healthier for the investment.” — Don Moynihan on why both the Toddler’s war on university research partnerships is bad and people saying colleges should cut themselves free from such deals is also wrong.
Here’s a look at how government dictating scientific truth can go very wrong.
Despite which, the usual The Market Will Save Us suspects insist we should abolish the NIH and rely on the free market. Best quote from the thread, referring to the right wing fondness for herd immunity: “Ah yes, herd immunity, where the non-immune part of the herd just dies.”
Speaking of the free market, an epidemiologist responds to claims that vaccines are a cash cow for clinics and doctors: “Once you factor in staff time, storage and refrigeration, insurance paperwork, and the need to purchase vaccines upfront (often months before reimbursement), most pediatric practices break even. In many practices, low reimbursement for Medicaid and uninsured vaccine administration means the practice loses money on each vaccine administered.”
“Whiskey Pete” Hegseth rescinded the flu vaccine requirement for new recruits. One recruit has died of influenza. Wow, who could have anticipated that … except countless military commanders from the pre-vaccine era.
Despite Kennedy’s lies, studies have consistently found no autism-Tylenol connection. I doubt he knows crap about cellphones’ effect on our brains either. And he can’t do 20 pull-ups.
“I want to say, I’m creeped out by the memo saying that Olmstead “held only that a state cannot institutionalize such patients” — they’re talking about people with disabilities — “without justification,” and then adds, “What counts as adequate justification remains an open question.” Given Kennedy’s war on the disabled and the neurodivergent, I’m creeped out too.
Not a fan of Mehmet Oz serving as the Toddler’s hatchetman on the ACA either.
“An Idaho mother was charged with the murders of her 18-month-old twins more than a year after suggesting their deaths were the result of vaccinations.”
“I don’t think that the Democrats should relax sensible, science-based positions on vaccines and other health care, but I’m unclear on how much more confrontational and assertive Democrats could get on this issue.” — from a post about how to respond to the “woo” faction in our own coalition.
“A big problem for trust in government is that high-quality governance is usually invisible. When the various agencies designed to protect the American people from all manner of threats are working perfectly, most potential disasters are detected and prevented before they happen. A lot of highly trained government workers do diligent and difficult work for little pay and less recognition, heading off crisis after crisis, and the ignorant swing-voting layman assumes that all his tax dollars are being squandered.” — from a Prospect story on the cyclosporiasis AKA explosive diarrhea outbreak. Though in this case it seems the cluelessness was the ignorant Republicans now running things.
Filed under Politics
SPIDER-NOIR (2026) stars Nicholas Cage as Ben Reilly, a 1930s PI who once fought crime and injustice as the Spider, with powers acquired from Great War mad science experiments (he played an animated version of the same character in Into the Spider-Verse). After he failed to save his great love, Ben gave up superheroics for the life of a down-at-heels PI. Now, though things are changing as more superhumans show up.
First we have Flint Marko (Jack Huston) whose body can turn into sand. Then comes Lonnie Lincoln (Abraham Popoola), whose body seems stone hard and incredibly strong. Crimelord Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson) is watching these new players with interest, while also hiring Reilly to find the traitor in his organization. Further complications include shady singer Cat Hardy (Li Jun Li), and that both Ben’s secretary Janet (Karen Rodriguez) and reporter Robbie Robertson (Lamorne Morris) think Ben needs to suit up and take Silvermane down.
This is available in black and white and color both, though I couldn’t figure out the B&W option (I’d have preferred it). It was fun, with a solid cast and an interesting alt.version of the Spider-mythos. I was surprised that it actually shows people smoking as most period pieces these days skip that detail. “You told me yourself, Silvermane — never settle for what someone hands you.”
THE SHEEP DETECTIVES (2026) is a very oddball mystery film in which, as the title suggests, the detectives are sheep. George Hardy (Hugh Jackman) is a sunny, sheep-loving shepherd — he only takes their wool instead of killing them for mutton — in the kind of small, cozy English village where murders happen frequently. Every evening he reads to his sheep from a mystery novel; Lily (Julia Louise-Dreyfuss) is invariably able to figure them out.
Then one evening, George winds up dead outside his small trailer, and wouldn’t you know there’s no shortage of suspects? The local butcher. George’s young heir. Doesn’t his lawyer (Emma Thompson) seem a little suspicious? And there’s a few other people George feuded with … When it appears the nitwit village constable is way out of his depth, Lily and the sheep decide to investigate. After all, how much harder can mysteries be in real life? While I spotted the murderer early on, this mix of cozy-mystery parody and funny-animal story works really well. With Patrick Stewart as an old ram. “Is there anyone in the world who hasn’t seen Return to Oz?”
I watched Alfred Hitchcock’s YOUNG AND INNOCENT (1937) about six years ago as part of my Hitchcock (re)watch. When the Carolina Theatre announced it as part of their own Hitchcock film festival, TYG and caught it on the big screen. She liked it too, though she was thrown by the blackface musical number at the climax.
After weirdly melodramatic marital spat (as Hitchcock Romance says, it’s a surprise it’s not part of a stage show or a film within the film), the wife turns up strangled. When young Tisdale (Derrick de Marnay) finds the body, he realizes his raincoat belt was the murder weapon he panics and runs, get caught and charged. Realizing his bumbling attorney will be no use, Tisdale goes on the run with the help of Erica (Nova Pilbeam), daughter of the local chief constable. Can they find out who stole his raincoat before the law catches up with them?
The plot doesn’t make much sense. Is any belt going to be that identifiable? Did the cops even try to locate the husband? But of course such considerations are secondary in a Hitchcock film. What works is the romance and the troubles the duo get into finding the truth. Unlike many of Hitch’s lovers-on-the-run films, such as The 39 Steps, where the hero has to drag the female lead along until she falls in love, Erica takes Tisdale’s side from the get-go. That makes for a lighter film but it works. “Haven’t you seen anyone with a twitch yet?”
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BORN TO BE POSTHUMOUS: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery reminds me of my friend Ross’s observation that epic biographies should be reserved for people who live epic lives Four hundred pages isn’t epic by 21st century standards but it’s still too big for Gorey’s life.
Gorey was certainly a fascinating person, flamboyant in personal style and grotesquely whimsical in his art. I was surprised to realize he’d died in 2000 — his work seems very much out of another era, which is part of its charm. Despite all of which, his life story isn’t as interesting as the man himself. Dysfunctional family. Flowering in college. Endless details of the plays and the artists he liked, the books he read, the literary friends he made (I’m impressed he had the poet John Ciardi as one of his college teachers). As I often say, it’s not the author’s fault I’m not as interested in the details of the topic as they are; still, the details really don’t seem interesting.
A bigger problem is Dery’s determination to see Gorey as a gay icon. Gorey described himself as uninterested or asexual when the subject came up, though his history shows that may not have been the case. It’s a legit topic for a biographer but Dery really obsesses over it: look at his gay friends, his gay sense of style, his love of Oscar Wilde, his arch, gay sense of humor… by the time we get to any gay subtext in his art I no longer cared. A third, minor problem, is that like many nonfiction writers, Dery tries to make the subject bigger than it is — without Gorey, the graphic-novel industry would never have been open to something as gay as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home! For various reasons, I think that’s nonsense.
G. K. Chesterton’s second Father Brown collection, THE INCREDULITY OF FATHER BROWN has a number of moments I love. There’s Father Brown explaining the difference between a real mystic and a fake (real mystics tell you everything and you’re mystified; fakes hide everything and when you see it you’re bored), his discourse on vigilantes in “The Arrow of God,” on dressing gowns as a perfect disguise in “The Dagger With Wings” and the killer’s motivation in “The Oracle of the Dog” (“If he had really known the money would come to him, I actually believe he wouldn’t have done it.”). Some of the stories, such as “The Doom of the Darnaways” don’t work half as well. Plus we have Chesterton’s religious biases, for example frowning over the 19th century American secularist Robert Ingersoll (more vicious an enemy of religion than Voltaire!). And did you know Jews were subject to fair less persecution in medieval Europe than Christians (for anyone who doesn’t know religious history, this is blatant anti-Semitic bullshit)? Overall I enjoyed it but I can see why some people avoid the series like the plague.
MARVEL MASTERWORKS: Deathlok the Demolisher by Rich Buckler (who did the striking cover here) and a variety of collaborators, including Doug Moench and Bill Mantlo, was one I read for this month’s Genre Book Club; the theme was cyberpunk and this 1974-76 series is very much proto-cyberpunk.
Luther Manning had been a capable military officer. When war hit the United States in the 1990s, he wound up stepping on a mine after which his CO, Major Ryker, rebuilt him as a cyborg (in a moment that’s now hilarious, the cyborg’s computer program runs on punch cards inserted into his prosthetic arm). “Deathlok” did a good job at first eliminating Ryker’s enemies, then Luther’s consciousness reasserted itself. Now he has two missions: take down Ryker and regain his humanity.
This has many cyberpunk elements: powerful computers, advanced tech, a decaying, violent urban setting, omnipresent surveillance. It’s most distinctive high-tech element is that even after Luther regains his mind, the computer is still in his head. The dialogue between Manning and the “‘puter” is the thing many people who glanced at the series on the stands remember.
In the Bronze Age, it was different from anything else out there, much bleaker than, say, the Atomic Knights (who were in reprint in Strange Adventures in the 1970s). There’s a lot I like, some nice touches (Luther’s in an interracial marriage) but the plotting is often wonky. Ryker’s girlfriend discover he’s a cyborg, then spends the rest of the series comatose, hooked up to a computer to enable more intuitive control of the weapons it commands or something like that. And she’s the chief woman character in the series for most of the run. And it’s really disappointing that while Ryker talks about merging with his computer and becoming “the God Machine,” the reveal is anticlimactic — apparently the entire series is about a turf war for control over New York, nothing more imaginative. A mixed bag, but one I’m glad to have read (this also includes Deathlok’s adventures in the present after his series ended, but I won’t get into that here).
Art by Gorey and Buckler, all rights to images remain with current holders.
As I’ve talked about before, one of the military rules of thumb is that no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. I knew this week would demolish any regular plan, so I adjusted accordingly.
(Photos are all from our yard, like this morning’s post. Here we have Mr. Squirrel acrobatically chowing down on the suet we put out for the birds)
This week, we began a renovation project. The master bathroom bathtub has enough problems we decided it was worth fixing them now rather than waiting until they become serious major problems. If you’ve ever heard that major renovations are a massive pain, it’s true. Knowing that I decided to work on Savage Adventures because it’s nonfiction and editing the manuscript doesn’t take creative thought the way resuming work on Let No Man Put Asunder would.
It was as bad as I’d figured and then some. As TYG normally works her IT gig in the master bedroom, she relocated into the spare bedroom and moved her bathroom stuff into mine. I’d almost forgotten how many things she has on her bathroom counter so mine is quite cluttered now.
A much bigger issue is that with people coming in and out, we worried the cats would freak, particularly Snowdrop, and bolt out away from the strangers. If they were spending the day sleeping upstairs we could simply lock them in. The past couple of weeks they’ve been hanging out in the living room so I had to keep constant watch they weren’t sitting too close to the door. Fortunately neither of them tried to get out, though they clearly weren’t happy.
That, coupled with dealing with the contractor if they had questions or requests (TYG did some of that, but with Zoom meetings to attend she can’t do all of it), plus the jarring noises from upstairs left me somewhat frazzled. Because I concentrated on Savage Adventures I was at least somewhat productive. I went through the book and made sure all the Doc Savage novels were attributed correctly; while Lester Dent wrote most of them, Street and Smith assigned other writers to some, and Dent occasionally used ghostwriters. I edited the first three chapters as well. The rest of the time I did some blogging, paid bills, etc. Nothing super-demanding. If not a spectacular workweek, I don’t feel I fell down on the job either.
Over at Atomic Junk Shop I blogged about toxic masculinity, reposted some book reviews from this blog, and posted about Southern Discomfort coming out (same post as I put up here, more or less). And that’s about it.
The contractors will be back Monday-Wednesday next week. I’m slightly more ambitious about what I plan to do. Wish me luck living up to my plans.
Filed under Doc Savage, Nonfiction, Personal, Time management and goals, Writing
Currently we’re doing our best to keep everything alive by steady watering to compensate for the 100 degree-plus heat. In June. And worse in years to come as Republicans have decided they love global warming. However we have these pretty photos from a couple of months back.
First, our lawn with little blossoms.
Next some more flowers
And rain on clover.
Filed under Miscellanea
As I put it back in 2022, “every straight male conservative understands the importance of consent if they walk into a gay bar.” (the thought is not original with me). When it comes to women, however, many of the same men say consent is irrelevant. It’s a ridiculous standard. The important standard is whether they were married.
To believe this is to be pro-rape. It’s saying that whether the woman consented to sex doesn’t matter — the only thing that makes sex moral or immoral is whether they have wedding rings on. And yes, some conservatives say this quite specifically. Matt Walsh, for instance, as discussed at the link above. David French, who argues that if consent is the only standard, why shouldn’t a guy just ask a woman in a business meeting to have sex?
The answer to which is, consent is never the only standard, but it is always a necessary standard. There are power differentials where consent is dubious (“If you want to keep your job, blow me!” may get a yes response but it’s rape as much as if the speaker used force). Or where it’s inappropriate — teacher/underage student, for instance, is wrong even if the student consents. If you’re married and you’ve both agreed monogamy, adultery is wrong even if both lovers are consenting (open marriages and all the other flavors are another question).
Which brings us to Sean Davis, founder of that misogynist website, The Federalist. Responding to the Graham Platner rape scandal, Davis explains it’s all the fault of those sluts who had sex with him: ““I’m going to apologize for coming off as a prude here, but we actually have this amazing institution in America. I call it marriage. Within marriage, sex is normal. That’s what it’s designed for. You can do things, and you don’t have to worry about being accused of rape or non-consent.
“And I think when people go down this path, when they’re being promiscuous, when they’re with a guy like Graham Platner who’s obviously a dirtbag that they’ve had a longtime sexual relationship with, bad things happen there. So, I’m not trying to be judgmental, I’m trying to tell people that when you go down that road you are setting yourself up for bad outcomes … they made terrible decisions. Sleeping with Graham Platner, bad decision. Being promiscuous before marriage or ever, bad decision.”
No, Mr. Davis, you do not come off like a prude, you come off like a shit who doesn’t grasp that consent matters. Non-consent and rape happen in marriage and while they may be “normal” they are still wrong. Whether Platner’s lovers showed good judgment in getting involved with him or not, raping Jenny Racicot is not a natural outgrowth of being sexually active. Nor is raping Racicot justifiable because she wasn’t a virgin.
To be clear, these views are not unique to Davis or to right-wingers. There’s a long history of rape getting hand-waved because the victim was sexually active; marital rape wasn’t illegal in all 50 states until the 1990s (and some state laws still treat it more leniently than stranger rape). That doesn’t excuse him actively encouraging the hand wave, any more than Stephen King’s “there are rapists in Congress who haven’t been charged for it'” excuses voting for Platner.
Filed under Politics, Undead sexist cliches
One by Harry Schaare showing a typical work session at a typical office, as imagined in pop culture decades ago. For secretary stereotypes I recommend Lynn Peril’s Swimming in the Steno Pool.
Here’s a Barye Phillips cover going less for sex, more for thrills.
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