Doom Report (Week 20: Why, Yes: More Snippets)

Well, the news has all been about President Musk stepping down.  He “left” the government, accepting a golden key (which his sidekick Trumpy, hilariously, made sure to point out has been given out to a lot of people), and headed back to spend more time tanking his stock prices.  And, even up through the middle of the week, I didn’t buy it for a second.  I was completely in accord with Jon Stewart, who said on the Weekly Show this week:

I think everybody thinks it’s—I think people are talking about it like, it’s over.  It’s not over.  That was the first—that was an official, explicit confluence of the richest man in the world and the most powerful man in the world, sitting next to each other, seeing how they’re going to divvy up the spoils and how it’s going to go down.  But it is still unofficially, implicitly—they are still together, collaborating on despoiling whatever it is, and he will still use his media might and influence to shape things, and Trump will still shower him with the spoils that go to those that are in favor of the king ...

But then shit started to get ... messy.  And I was suddenly reminded of something I said way back in Week -4:

I mean, they are two malignant narcissists: they were never going to be able to work together for long.

Remember right at the end of last year? when Musk was having twitterbattles with Bannon and Loomer over immigration?  I was surprised that the Trump-Musk alliance was breaking down so quickly.  But then it all blew over, and I was surprised that the alliance seemed to be holding.  Quite frankly, this has taken way longer than I at first anticipated, and I think I almost forgot that I was expecting it—maybe even forgot to expect it at all.  But, also I don’t want you think I’m breaking my arm patting myself on the back; after all, as Brian Tyler Cohen said this week:

... but sometimes it’s just entertaining to watch the most predictable outcome on Earth take place between the most thin skinned narcissists ever born.  No one didn’t see this coming.

So, the thing that everyone with half a brain said was going to happen happened ... not like I needed to be an oracle to make that prediction.  Seth Meyers had a pretty good Closer Look summarizing the feud (although it missed some of the juicier bits that came later), and The Daily Show also did a good summary, including the delusional belief coming from Newsmax that Trump and Musk staged all this in what they call a “4D chess move.”  This is exactly as hilarious as it sounds, not only because Trump is so dumb he can’t even read his daily intelligence briefings, but also because, despite the legions of fanboys who assume that mega-rich must equal mega-smart, Musk is also a dumbass, as Adam Conover pointed out over 2 years ago.  (Fun fact: while I’ve never met Musk personally, I actually work closely with someone who has met him, and, based on the stories of that meeting, Conover ain’t wrong.)  Basically, these idiots probably couldn’t finish a game of 2D chess, much less “4D chess,” which isn’t even a thing.

Good things to watch this week:

• In this week’s Strict Scrutiny, one of Leah’s favorite things is a New York Times article about how many children President Musk has murdered.  Now, the “favorite things” section is supposed to be where the ladies of Strict Scrutiny end the show on a more upbeat note: here are some things we enjoyed this week.  It might be a new novel they read, a new song—usually by either Beyoncé or Taylor Swift—that they like, etc.  I’m not sure this article, which references mathematician and professor of infectious diseases Brooke Nichols’ model showing that DOGE cuts are responsible for the deaths of over 300,000 people, over two-thirds of them children, counts as “positive.”  But it certainly is interesting.  (Note that Christopher Titus picked up on this story as well: his latest Armageddon Update provides an articulate take on it.)

• Speaking of Leah Litman from Strict Scrutiny, the fact that she’s got a new book out means she’s showing up everywhere these days.  Last week, I mentioned seeing her on Even More News; this week, she was interviewed by Michael Kosta on The Daily Show, and by Mehdi Hasan on Zeteo.  Both are great.

• In case current events aren’t depressing enough for you, you may want to check out More Perfect Union’s video on PFAS (a.k.a. forever chemicals).  As dispiriting as it is to know that our bodies are full of chemicals that never break down and that chemical companies have known about this for decades and done nothing, I actually find it heartening that MPU isn’t letting the avalance of current events stop them from bringing long-term things like this to our attention.

• More Perfect Union also gives us an excellent study of why young men are turning to the Right (or maybe just away from the Left?).  Basically, every news story you’ve heard about this since the election is reductive and silly; not exactly wrong, but the truth is way more nuanced, and this video does an amazing job of clarifying the situation.

Finally, our hopeful news for the week is that Kilmar Abrego-Garcia has finally been returned to the U.S., although we must temper that with the knowledge that the Trump regime immediately arrested him on ridiculous charges.  Still, if he manages to get the due process he was denied for all this time, he’ll likely end up going free at the end of the day ... and then maybe ICE will deport him somewhere else, but at least he won’t be locked up in a megaprison that many have called a concentration camp.  We have to be very liberal in what we describe as “hopeful” in these times.

Robert Reich closed this week’s Coffee Klatch with these words, and I think they’re worth closing my post with as well.

People come up to me in the street and say “How are you?”  And my first impulse is to say, “Okay.”  And then my second impulse is to tell the truth, and to say “I’m not okay.  You know, I feel like shit.”  And a lot of you feel that way too.  But know that you’re not alone.  Know that we will get through this, and know that we all, together, in solidarity, have a much greater chance of getting through this if we’re together.

Stick together, people.

Doom Report (Week 18: What? More Snippets???)

This week marked yet another insane Oval Office meeting with a foreign head of state.  This time the strategy seemed to be to overwhelm the President of South Africa with conspiracy theories of “white genocide.”  Of course, all these theories have been thoroughly (thoroughly) debunked, but reality has never stopped President Musk’s sidekick Trumpy from telling a good story.  And no doubt President Musk himself is the driving force here.  This motherfucker: nearly 50 years of apartheid, and he’s decided white people are the ones getting oppressed.  As for Trump, I think Ronny Chieng summed it up best on The Daily Show this week: “It’s like someone told him, hey, it’s not just a genocide, it’s a white genocide.  You know: the bad kind.”  But the person who really had Trump’s number this week was Heather Lofthouse; on this week’s Coffee Klatch, she says:

I mean, watching Trump bring these foreign dignitaries in to be so horrific to them—I mean more to some than others, right?  We had Zelenskyy; we had the president of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa.  It’s not lost on me that one is Jewish and one is black.  And Donald Trump goes after them.

Let’s see ... who hates Jews and black people?  Nope; can’t think of anyone like that.

Top things to watch this week:

• On The Daily Show this week, Charlamagne tha God deconstructs the whole “Daddy’s home” bullshit that Repulicans were doing for a while there.  Charlamagne is always incisive, and this take does not disappoint.

• Brian Tyler Cohen discusses the brain drain to Europe that Trump and flunky Kristi Noem have kicked off by attacking international students.

• I’m really starting to love Ezra Klein.  Too often progressives decide he’s a “closet Republican” when he points out that we’ve overregulated ourselves.  But I’m convinced those people aren’t actually listening to what he’s saying.  This week Hasan Minhaj interviews Klein and, as usual, it’s a banger.

• Medhi Hasan interviews Molly Jong-Fast (daughter of seminal author and feminist icon Erica Jong) where they discuss just how stupid Trump is (it’s entitled “Thank God Trump is a MORON,” if that gives you a clue just how entertaining it gets).

And the continuing proof that Trump—and most of the people around him—are utterly incompetent is about all the hope I can offer this week.  Maybe it would make you feel better to know just how bad Trump’s lawyers are; my father might say they couldn’t find their asses with both hands, a map, and an ass-finding machine.  Well, Liz Dye from Legal Eagle has got you covered.  Enjoy.

Doom Report (Week 17: Even More Snippets)

Of course, the major news this week was Trump saying he would accept a $400 million plane from Qatar.  The commentary community can’t decide whether this is a dumb idea because it’s such an obvious bribe (especially given that the “palace in the sky” doesn’t remain government property after Trump leaves office), or because the plane could contain surveillance equipment to funnel national secrets directly from Air Force One to a Middle Eastern monarchy.  But I say: ¿por que no los dos?  Trump says he would be a “stupid person” to say no to a free plane, but then again he also said “I don’t know” when asked if he was responsible for upholding the Constitution.  One might note that he specifically swore to do that during his Oath of Office, but I’m sure that Trump would point out that he never actually touched the Bible during his swearing-in ceremony, which is the Presidential equivalent of crossing your fingers behind your back.  So I think we’re all good here.

There’s also been talk of President Musk stepping away from his important job of single-handedly tanking the unemployment figures by personally putting over a quarter of a million federal employees out of a job, presumably to spend more time with his plummeting stock prices.  If it’s true, then it would certainly wound my dogged meme of President Musk and his sidekick Trumpy.  But I would note two things.  First, much like the “ceasefire” in Gaza, it was announced, but it never actually happened.  And, second, even if it does happen, does it really mean anything?  Some might take it as a sign that Trump is retaking control.  But I would look at it like this: being the billionaire President because you bought the election is kinda like being a grandparent.  You get the joy of playing with the little ones, and whenever they get to be too much to handle, you just call your children and make them take the little brats back.  Doesn’t mean you’re not still sneaking them twenties whenever no one’s looking.  So I’ll take this news of Presiden Musk stepping down with several wheelbarrows of salt, thank you.

Things to check out this week:  Don’t miss Zeteo’s interview with Ras Baraka, the Newark mayor arrested by the regime this week.  Baraka is backed by the Working Families Party and other progressive orgs in a bid for governor; I wonder if Trump’s targeting of him will help him win, as it did for the Liberals in Canada and the Labor Party in Australia.  For the legal perspective on the Mayor’s arrest, Liz Dye over at Legal Eagle has got you covered.

Other good shows this week include Stephen Colbert’s examination of the Qatari plane scandal: both the initial report, where he pointed out that Trump’s claim that being up-front about taking the bribe made it okay was like saying that stabbing someone is okay as long as you do it “in broad daylight while saying the words stabbity stab stab stab,” and the follow up where he responds to Trump’s whine that all the other planes were bigger than his by noting that “Trump definitely does not have a little plane: it’s definitely at least an average American male plane.”  Also don’t miss SNL’s final Trump impression before they take off for the summer; as James Austin Johnson (speaking as Trump) says, “see you in the fall, if we still have a country.”  Fingers crossed.

Good news being few and far between these days, I’ll give you a bit that’s only slightly outdated.  Remember when I talked about Allison Riggs, way back in Week -1?  She’s the North Carolina supreme court justice who won a narrow victory over her Republican opponent and maintained the exact same narrow margin in not one but two recounts, only to have her opponent, one Jefferson Griffin, demand that the board of elections throw out 60 thousand votes—but only in Democratic-leaning counties!—due to supposed irregularities.  Well, 13 days ago a Trump-appointed federal judge threw out Griffin’s case on the grounds that he could not “change the rules of the game after it had been played” (which, duh).  Two days later, Griffin finally conceded.  As I noted, Brian Tyler Cohen was always leading the charge on this reporting, and he covered the news by interviewing both Riggs herself after the victory and legal expert Mark Elias after the cocession.  The fellows over at Election Profit Makers, being NC residents, also weighed in on the victory (jump to about 5:00 in), where they point out exactly what BTC has been warning about lo these many months: “obviously, if it worked, then we would see it all the time, everywhere.”  Mildly chilling thought, but the crisis has been averted.  After Griffin’s concession, the EPM fellows noted (following week, about 12:15 in) that Griffin’s “name is mud, and he should just be ostracized from society.”  I certainly hope that ends up being the case: it would be sad if there were no consequences for dragging out an election for six months and trying to disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters, many of them serving in the military.  But for now I’ll just be happy that Riggs won, and she was finally sworn back in to her seat.

Sometimes the small victories are all the sweeter.

Doom Report (Week 15: Snippets the Fourth)

This week marks the end of Trump’s first 100 days, which of course is a completely arbitrary landmark, but one that we’ve started making a big deal out of ever since FDR.  If you want a good summary of how Trump’s done during this period, I highly recommend Robert Reich’s video on the topic.  Reich is at his best when doing simple explainer videos such as this one.  His style is clear, his rhetoric is down-to-earth, and his facts are presented simply and without spin.  There’s bias, of course, but (in my opinion) no spin.

For a more amusing take on our current situation, I’ll refer you to Seth Meyer’s “A Closer Look” from Monday.  He’s coming off a two-week break, so he has to cover a lot of ground, and he does it with his usual panache.  When pointing out that Democrats need to do a better job of grabbing attention, he notes:

And, unlike Trump, Democrats have the benefit of not having to make shit up to get attention.  You can just shock people by reading actual headlines.  Like: “Two-Year-Old U.S. Citizen Appears to have been Deported with no Meaningful Process.”  Or: “Trump Cuts Threaten Agency Running Meals on Wheels.”  Or: “FDA Making Plans to End its Routine Food Safety Inspections.”

And that’s sort of a perfect summary within the summary.

One of the biggest new stories this week was that the US economy shrank this past quarter for the first time in 3 years.  If it does so again this current quarter, we’ll be in a recession.  And, in response to the looming consequences of his trade war with China (i.e. potentially bare shelves around Christmastime), Trump actually said “well, maybe the children will have 2 dolls instead of 30 dolls.”  And, while I watched many people this week make fun of that quote, not one of them responded as I immediately did: what about the families that can’t afford even one doll?  This was so utterly tone-deaf that it forcibly reminded me of Lucille Bluth talking about bananas.  So, if it bothers you that President Musk and his sidekick Trumpy have fired over a quarter of a million governement workers—so far—and you wish you could do something about it, there’s a charity that offers legal defense to illegally fired government workers.  Worth checking out.

Good shows this week:

• The second episode of Bowman and Bush, the showcase of Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, two former Representatives who were defeated for re-election last year by critics of their stance on the Palestinian genocide.  I’m sure it’s just coincidence that the two primaries in which they were defeated just happened to be the two most expensive primary races in US history.  They provide, as always, an excellent breakdown of what’s gone wrong with the Democratic party.

• On The Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Andy Bashear, the Democratic governor of very red Kentucky.  Top quote: “Well, I think what the people of Kentucky want is what the people of America want.  They want a better life. And if you can convince them that you are working your hardest to create that better life, then they’ll give you that opportunity.”  Hopefully more Democrats learn this soon.

• Don’t miss Desi Lydic’s interview with Jon Meacham on The Daily Show.  You may recall that I talked about Jon Stewart’s interview with this historian back in Week -1, and he continues to not disappoint.  With brilliant and inspiriing quotes like “to cut mindlessly is just mindless”, it’s a great watch.  His best quote, though, was this one:

But to fight fear, you need courage.  And courage is one of the most contagious things you can imagine.

And, just in case that wasn’t quite uplifting enough—or perhaps not quite enough of the uplifting—I’ll leave you with the words of J.B. Pritzker, as highlighted on the final episode of America Unhinged, as he inspires his constituents to make their voices heard:

These Republicans cannot know a moment of peace.  They have to understand that we will fight their cruelty with every megaphone and microphone that we have.  We must castigate them on the soap box, and then punish them at the ballot box.

Let us hope so.

Doom Report (Week 14: Snippets the Third)

The best video this week, once again, comes from The Weekly Show, where Jon Stewart is this time interviewing Brit Rory Stewart.  Rory is a former member of the Conservative Party, which he left in 2019—apparently Brexit and Boris Johnson were a bridge too far for him.  He has an American wife and has taught at both Harvard and Yale, so he’s not unfamiliar with American politics; in response to the same comment from J.D. Vance that drew an incisive reply from the Pope before his untimely death, Rory called it a “bizarre take” on the Bible, to which Vance tweeted back that “Rory Stewart thinks he has an IQ of 130 when it’s really 110.”  Damning with faint praise indeed.

Anyway, Rory said 3 things during the interview which I found trenchant.  The first was about the perceptions of our economy:

... I think one of the things that’s difficult to understand in the US debate is, you are all thinking, well, the reason ... Trump came to power is that the American economy is relatively weak ...  Of course, the rest of us have spent the last five years looking at you, thinking you’re an economic miracle, right?  I mean, Europe’s economy was the same size as the American economy 10 years ago.  You’re now 50% bigger than us, right?  So we look at you and we’re like, wow.  ...  Then the question is, how do you reconcile that with how somebody feels in Dayton, Ohio who’s voting for Trump?  How does this make sense?  On the one hand, the American economy is going gangbusters.  You’ve got the seven largest companies in the world.  You’ve got 70% of all global equities are in the United States, et cetera.  And yet, a lot of people feel their lives are very underwhelming, very disappointing.  They’re struggling with cost of living.

Once again, as I mentioned two weeks ago, the thing that both I and Some More News independently concluded is here reinforced by a Brit: the typical economic indicators are failing us because they’re only indicating how rich all the rich people are while the rest of us are getting screwed.

Rory’s second quote is regarding the tariff debacle, and it’s an exchange between the two Stewarts:

Rory: I mean, your listeners will understand that Trump is saying four completely contradictory things, right?  He’s saying these tariffs are going to generate a huge amount of money for the US government, right?
Jon: No more taxes.  All the money from tariffs.
Rory: Exactly.  We’re going to import all this stuff from China.
Jon: The most beautiful word in the English language.
Rory: Right.  Second thing is, it’s going to create lots of jobs, right?  That’s the opposite.  That’s, we’re not importing things from China.  We’re going to make them here.  In which case you don’t get the tax revenue.
Jon: Right.
Rory: Third thing he’s saying is, no, no, no, these are temporary things which are being used to achieve something else.  They’re being used to get a concession on fentanyl from Canada or Mexico.
Jon: Sure.  Canada’s been flooding us with over $40 worth of fentanyl over the last year.
Rory: So that’s a completely different theory.  That’s like, I’m not actually going to keep tariffs.  I’m not going to get the revenue from it.  I’m not to get the jobs from it.  I’m just using it to stop the fentanyl coming in.  And then the fourth theory, which seems to be going with China, is I’m using it to damage somebody else’s economy.  It’s like sanctions: I’m just punching them.  And I’m going to take some damage in my own economy, but they’re going to feel it more.  You know, Walmart will feel the pressure, but China macroeconomics will feel it more.

I appreciate his ability to lay it out succinctly like that, because it makes it really obvious how utterly batshit crazy it all is.

Finally, he noted this:

Rory: These are people who think, like many people did in the 1920s and ‘30s, that liberal democracy was kind of weak and indecisive and incompetent, and it failed people.
Jon: I think Musk said that empathy is the world’s biggest problem.
Rory: Yeah.  ... like you, I was talking to Ezra Klein recently, and ... one of his points is he thinks that Musk was motivated by the fact that he felt that his employees were rude to him, and that they kept asking for empathy, and that a lot of this rage with DEI and wokeism is just Musk and other tech bros, feeling that the people who work for their companies were not obedient enough to the great leader.

Compare this with my discussion of “swim teams” and what my CEO said.  Spot on, I say.

Please also note that Rory Stewart is the former president of GiveDirectly, which is an amazing charity that you should go give some money to right now.  Especially if you’re worried that the disappearance of things like USAID is causing real harm to people in other countries—which it is—this is a good way to help combat that.

If you need a shorter video to watch, let me recommend Hank Green’s video this week on the closing of the Loan Programs Office.  While Hank is primarily known as a science communicator, sometimes science and politics intersect—particularly when there’s an anti-science regime in control of the government.  Well, anyway, the LPO is the government program that gave Tesla the loan to build its first electric car factory, and DOGE just shut it down.  I would once again point out that the far right has lost its sense of irony, but I think Hank is probabaly more correct when he says “it’s textbook ‘I got in and I’m going to close the door behind me’.”

Finally, let us all heed the wise words of Kat Abughazaleh in her video this week about the regime’s disturbing tendency to disappear people (including small children).  Kat is a researcher on the far right, a contributer to Zeteo, and, more recently, a candidate for Congress in Illinois.  In this great breakdown of the dangers posed by ICE, she notes:

This is scary, it is not normal, and anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.  The road to atrocities is paved by people telling you you are overreacting.

You’re not overreacting.  People told us we were, before the election.  Now, I hope—I pray—they’re seeing that we weren’t, in real time.

Doom Report (Week 13: Snippets the Second)

This week, the major story (at least in my view) has been that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the Trump regime disappeared to El Salvador in direct defiance of a court order.  The court order, by the way, only prevented him from being deported to El Salvador: if the regime weren’t utterly incompetent, and they really wanted to deport him, they could have deported him to literally any other country in the world.  But they are utterly incompetent, and they actually didn’t mean to deport him: they picked him up completely by accident, thinking he was Venezuelan.  And of course if they had just deported the 200 Venezuelans to Venezuela, poor Abrego Garcia would be stuck in a country where he had never been and had no knowledge of, but the regime wouldn’t have run afoul of the law.  But the regime, in its brilliance, decided to send the Venezuelans to El Salvador, where our taxes are paying the “world’s coolest dictator” to put them all in prison, despite none of them being convicted of a crime ... or even spending a day in court.  Thus, Abrego Garcia ended up in the one country in the world where he wasn’t allowed to be deported.

So the issue went to court, where the regime admitted that Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake.  And then it went all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled 9-0 (an amazing thing in and of itself) that the regime had to bring him back—or, as Trump put it, “it’s interesting because we won that decision nine to nothing in the Supreme Court, and, uh, if you listen to the news, you wouldn’t know that.”  Nope, you sure wouldn’t know that thing you just said that totally isn’t true.  So then the regime immediately changed their story and started claiming that they had done it on purpose because he was a dangerous gang memeber.  Don’t miss Stephen Miller’s self-righteous, condescending press conference: when he asks “what do you think would happen to him if he came back to this country?” and a reporter responds “he could be with his family.”  Rolling Stone also has a great article covering all the regime’s lies.  Meanwhile, the courts are now contemplating holding the government in criminal contempt, and a court of appeals has denied the Trump regime’s request to allow them to interpret the word “facilitate” to mean “sit around and do nothing despite the court order.”

Again: we are paying the dictator of El Salvador to keep all these possibly innocent people incarcerated.  Which is a sweet scam for him, because, as Mother Jones reported, Bukele actually cut a deal with MS-13 to stem the flood of violence and let him credit for it, which is how he was able to come to power.  Then he in turn gives incarcerated MS-13 members special privileges, including just letting a bunch of them go.  Some of them end up in Mexico, where they get picked up and deported to the US for outstanding crimes here, and could possibly end up in court testifying to the whole devious scheme.  Trump is doing a Bukele a favor (though) by sending those guys back to El Salvador so that Bukele can let them go again and start the whole cycle over.  And then Bukele makes us, the American taxpayers, pay for the whole scam to boot.  Slick motherfucker.

Good videos this week:

• Legal Eagle has the absolute best summary of the Abrego Garcia case, including a later update.

• On this week’s Weekly Show, Jon Stewart interviews Heather McGhee.  She tells some fascinating stories of institutionalized racism, including a few I didn’t know about.  Do you know what two major groups of workers were initially excluded from receiving Social Security?  It was agricultural workers and domestic labor.  Probably just coincidence that those were the two sectors with the highest percentage of black workers.

• If you’re still buying the bullshit that Trump is “just joking” when he talks about running for a third term, you should watch BTC’s analysis of Steve Bannon’s comments on Politically Incorrect. (To his credit, Bill Maher calls him out on this stance pretty hard.  While Maher is, in general, a terrible human being with terrible views, he’s still on the right side of history every now and again.)

• America Unhinged had a pretty good show this week, where they cover RFK Jr saying just the most disgusting (and abjectly false) things about people with autism—which my autistic child watched and just laughed at the ignorance of—and also Republican Lisa Murkowski admitting that she’s afraid of speaking out against the current regime.

On this week’s Pod Save the UK, Nish Kumar once again put something into perspective for me.  He pointed out that he had learned in school that the Great Depression led inevitably to the rise of the Nazi party.

... I spent so much time at school, studying the Wall Street crash and the depression in the 1930s, and how that had huge implications and led directly to the rise of the Nazi party.  It was such an important event for me, like the ways that that happened, and the lack of regulation around financial markets.  Then, in 2008, to see that happen again, and to see, over the next sort of 15 years, that not lead to the kind of sweeping changes that brought in the postwar consensus and led to the establishment of the NHS and the welfare state in the United Kingdom; to sort of instead see that all we’ve seemed to have learned from that is, that inevitably leads to a rise in far right politics, is really a great source of despair for me.

Again, the British perspective (and their no doubt superior educational system) helps a lot.  As a stupid American, I had never actually thought of the Great Depression as a worldwide event before, but now that I have, it all makes perfect sense: a severe economic downturn makes people desperate, and distrustful of their leaders, and ready to listen to anyone who tells them that the immigrants and the brown people and the Jews (or the Muslims) are the problem, and promises them a better life if they’ll just hand over all the political power.  And they do.  And apparently the only difference between 1929 and 2008 is that, in the latter case, it took twice as long before the people elected a right wing lunatic.  And also that Hitler seems to have been a lot smarter than Trump.  But it’s the fact that we as a people seemed to have learned nothing in the intervening 80 years that really depresses me.

In the end, I’m trying to take comfort in the wise words of Heather McGhee this week, who reminds us to stay ready so we don’t have to get ready, and always know what time it is.

Doom Report (Week 12: Snippets the First)

I’m starting the process of moving the Doom Report to a less weekly format.  So this week I’ll give you a few nuggets, but save the rest up until there’s sufficient momentum for a more nuanced report.

This week, the great sage Benny Johnson gave us these indelible words of wisdom: “Losing money costs you nothing.”  I mean ... except for all that money you lost.

Hunh.

Maybe Benny’s not so bright after all.  Happily, there’s a solve for your financial woes: just follow Trump’s social media and he’ll tell you when to buy and sell.

Good videos this week:

• Legal Eagle has an in-depth look at the tariffs, from how stupid they are, to where the numbers come from, to why they’re most likely illegal.  Probably the best video of the week.

• Some More News has a great explainer on the economy.  Great mostly because they echo what I said over a year ago: the numbers the Democrats are using to demonstrate how “good” the economy is are not working any more.  Refreshing to know there’s a school of thought where people actually understand that.  But the video is also good because they quote Robert Reich—I love it when my sources of information overlap.

• Speaking of Reich, he had a good (and very quick) video on how President Musk is reducing his tax burden.  Not yours, of course: just his.

• More Perfect Union had a great video on the Bernie/AOC rallies.  Also featuring John Russell, who is my favorite MPU contributor.

• Another MPU video, only slightly less entertaining, but probably more informative: why we have a major shortage of fire trucks.  An excellent couterexample next time someone is trying to convince you of the benefits of privatization.

We’ll talk more next week, I’m sure.

Doom Report (Week -3)

Well, it’s a New Year, finally.  I was supposed to celebrate the new year on Tuesday night, along with everyone else, but that didn’t really happen.  Having had the flu (or perhaps a bad cold) for several days just before Christmas (along with the rest of the family), I had stopped doing my daily fiber.  And, since I have diverticulosis, not doing fiber for an extended period has a tendency to result in a diverticulitis flare-up.  So that’s what I was doing on New Year’s Eve.

Happily, I soon recovered, and we celebrated New Year’s on Friday night.  It’s actually quite nicer when you can pause the ball drop at any time.  So a bottle of champagne for the older two, a bottle of sparkling strawberry lemonade for the younger two, and we “cheers"ed at whatever time the littlest one said she was getting too tired to stay up any longer.  So, 2025, ye have been rung in.  For all that’s worth.

In the ongoing political drama, the only interesting development, to my way of thinking, is the memo put out by Susie Wiles.  Wiles, you may recall, is slated to be Trump’s chief-of-staff.  She’ll be the first female chief-of-staff, which is nice and historical and all, but, as we might expect from anyone associated with Maga World, she’s not exactly a model human being.  Still, she seems to have a few redeeming qualities.

The first time I ever heard of Wiles was when it was reported that Trump had to pick Gaetz while Wiles was out of the room.  The implication was clear: if Wiles had been around, she never would have approved.  Even more intriguing, there was just a hint, just a whisper that Trump wouldn’t have dared do it if she’d been there.  Now, that is an impressive woman—actually, fuck that: that, friends and neighbors, is an impressive person utterly regardless of gender.  If there’s one thing that we can say about Trump somewhat consistently, it’s that he does whatever the fuck he wants.  The mere idea that anyone could control him—even a little!—is a bit amazing.  So that’s when I started to wonder who this pit bull of a person was.

And now, apparently, she’s put out a memo “reminding” everyone that people up for government positions do not speak for the incoming administration.  Now, she apparently stressed that this doesn’t apply to Musk, as he’s not actually up for a government job, because the “department” of government “efficiency” is a thing that doesn’t exist, and Trump can’t make it exist, because that’s not a power that presidents have.  So, supposedly, this memo has nothing to do with Musk, and nothing to do with Musk’s little kerfuffle with Bannon and Loomer (which I mentioned last week).  To which I, much like the author of the article at the other end of that link I pointed you towards, say: bullshit.  And, the best part is, it seems to have worked.  No more episodes of Vicious Tweets, at any rate.  Which means that the world’s richest man—a.k.a. the world’s biggest brat—just got put in his place by a little old white-haired lady who Trump, apparently, calls the “Ice Maiden.” Quite impressive indeed.

We shall see what the future holds, I suppose ...

Thankful for Heroscape (among other things)

This week was Thanksgiving, and I took an extra two days off, so I had sort of a 6-day weekend.  One of those days we ate a lot of food (but not so much turkey this year) and came up with some ideas of what we were thankful for.  (One of the things I was thankful for was that we didn’t have to have any of those uncomfortable conversations so many “news” stories lately have been telling us how to navigate—or trying to tell us, anyway.  With brilliant advice such as “avoid politics”—gee, ya think?—none of the ones I saw were actually particularly useful.  Thankfully, we didn’t have to worry about that because our Thanksgiving dinner comprised 4 people who all happen to have compatible political views.  But I digress.)

One of the days was spent having an all day (about 6 hours all told, I’d say) Heroscape battle: 3-way, 2v1, with me holding the heights against two swarm armies (Marro drones and vipers) run by the Smaller Animal (who, again, is way taller than me by this point) and one of his best friends who hasn’t played in a while.  And another day was another 3-way Heroscape battle (1v1v1 this time) with me, the Smaller Animal, and my youngest, who thus far had resisted playing (though they’re fully into the crafting aspects of making custom elements for the game).  But suddenly they found an army that interested them, and demanded we play for a second day in a row.  For the record, I won the 2v1 (primarily because I drafted a long-range army who was able to tear up the mostly-melee attacking armies before they could get close enough to engage), and the Smaller Animal won the 1v1v1 (because they chose a regenerating army that was devilishly difficult to exterminate permanently).

So it’s a been a family-focussed few days, and then it’s back to work tomorrow.  I think the break did me some good, and it should be fun to get back to work again.  Let’s find out.

Doom Report (Week -10)

This week, I’m watching the news and wondering where all those people my friend was talking about last week are ... you know, the ones that are supposed to stop the idiot we just elected from doing bad things if he goes too far.  And yet, our future president has suggested we put a climate denier in charge of the EPA, a Russian asset as head of national intelligence, a pedophile as the Attorney General, a person who believes in neither vaccination nor pasteurization to run the CDC and the FDA, and a Fox “News” host who thinks that women shouldn’t serve in combat to head up the Department of Defense.  Theoretically, all those people have to be approved by the Senate, but he’s already asked the new Senate majority leader to keep the Senate in “recess” until he appoints whoever he wants to wherever he wants, and it’s not clear whether that request will be rejected or not.  And, even if it is, it’s not clear whether the new Republican-led Senate will just do whatever he wants anyway.  And that’s not even considering that he wants to put a guy with billions in government contracts in charge of the budget by inventing a new government department (which, technically, the president can’t do, but, again: if Congress is just going to give him whatever he wants, that’s not much of an obstacle).

I continue to hope I’m wrong.  I mean, the guy’s not even president yet, so all of this dreck may not come to pass.  And, as I mentioned last week, I’m far more interested in you being able to tell me “I told you so” than the other way around.  But, the fact that the guy’s not even president yet and is still able to cause this much chaos does not bode well for our chances, I fear.

Wake up and smell the catfood in your bank account

Hey, look: two microposts for the price of one!

What Kamala Should Have Said

I’m sure by now everyone’s seen at least clips of Kamala’s Fox “News” interview with Bret Baier.  Several excerpts have been replayed ad nauseum, but the one that interested me was this one:

Bret: If that’s the case, why is half the country supporting him?  Why is he beating you in a lot of swing states?  Why—if he’s as bad as you say—that half of this country is now supporting this person who could be the 47th president of the United States?  Why is that happening?
Kamala: This is an election for President of the United States.  It’s not supposed to be easy.
Bret: I know, but ...
Kamala: It’s not supposed to be ... it is not supposed to be a cakewalk for anyone.
Bret: So, are they misguided, the 50%? Are they stupid?  What is it?
Kamala: Oh, God, I would never say that about the American people.  And, in fact, if you listen to Donald Trump, if you watch any of his rallies, he’s the one who tends to demean, and belittle, and diminish the American people.  He is the one who talks about an enemy within: an enemy within—talking about the American people, suggesting he would turn the American military on the American people.

Now, Kamala is currently getting credit for not “falling for” that “trap” (although it was so clumsy and obvious that I can’t really believe that anyone would have fallen for it), and I understand that she had her talking points that she needed to get out, and this was a score for her in that department.  But here’s what I wish she would have said instead:

Imagine there’s a user car salesman.  And he sells a lot of cars.  But the reason he keeps selling those cars is because he keeps telling lies: he makes claims about the cars that just plain aren’t true.  And people keep believing him, because they assume that he wouldn’t be allowed to outright lie like that.  Surely, they think, surely if he were completely making shit up, someone would come along and stop him, because that would be bad.  Probabaly illegal, even.  So he keeps conning people into buying the cars.  Now, in this situation, we wouldn’t blame the victims of this con job ... we wouldn’t say that the people buying these cars are stupid.  We have to blame the conman, right?  He’s the one doing the lying and cheating.

(And we could also blame the TV station who keeps showing ads saying how great this criminal is even though they know he’s lying.  But that might be too subtle for a Fox audience.)

So that’s what I wish she’d said.  And, I know, she needed to get her point in about the Nazi quotes Trump keeps spewing (quick, who said this, Hitler or Trump? “Those nations who are still opposed to us will some day recognize the greater enemy within. Then they will join us in a combined front.”^*), and also there’s no way she could have gotten through an answer that long without Baier interrupting her.  Multiple times, even.  But, still ... that was the right answer, I think.

Beetlejuice Redux

This weekend we rewatched Beetlejuice, in preparation for watching Beetlejuice Beetlejuice next week.  Here are the the things I had to explain to my children:

• This movie is so old that the “little girl” in this movie is the mom in Stranger Things.  (And you should have heard the gasps of disbelief.)

• Who Ozzie and Harriet were.  And, looking back on it, that was an outdated reference at the time: the only reason I know anything about The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet is because of second-hand stories from my parents.  Not sure what Burton was thinking on that one.

• The sandworms look like they escaped from The Nightmare Before Christmas because of Tim Burton’s involvement in both.

• Why the concept of a “talking Marcel Marceau statue” is dumb (and therefore funny).

• That’s a Johnny Carson impression, which is totally wasted on the youth.

Despite all that, they really enjoyed it (again/still), and are now sufficiently refreshed on the story to watch the sequel.  Just in time for spooky season.

__________

* And are you willing to admit that you only knew it was Hitler because Trump isn’t that articulate?

Technicolor pachyderms is really too much for me

This week, our new Heroscape has finally arrived!  We got the prepainted versions of the new master set as well as what they’re calling a “battle box” (which is basically just a mini-master set).  So we slapped all the terrain together into a basic map and my middle child and I have played two games so far with the new figures, trying different configurations and combining with some of the classic figures to fill in gaps.  So far, I haven’t managed to win a game, though it’s been pretty close both times.  They seem to be having a good time kicking my butt, so I’m happy enough to provide the experience.

Our smallest child isn’t interested too much in playing, though she likes to watch and provide a running commentary.  And a fairly snarky one at that.  She also likes the mapbuilding aspect, and the map has been getting slowly larger and more elaborate as the week goes on.

She also displayed some interest in taking a non-Heroscape figure we found while gathering supplies in my office and working up a custom card for it.  In just a couple of hours, she managed to work this up on her art tablet:

I should be clear that, while I did help with the wording a bit, all the graphics and layout is completely her work.

Anyways, that’s how we’ve been spending our week.  Maybe I’ll have a more formal review of the new set next time.

Feeling so good-natured I could drool

This month, we’re getting new Heroscape for the first time in 14 years, and a new edition of D&D (despite the fact that they refuse to admit it’s a new edition) for the first time in 10.  Exciting times for my two primary gaming passions.  So far all we’ve seen are previews, but I’m cautiously optimistic.  Probably more so for the Heroscape “Renegade wave 1” (really wave 14) than the D&D “Fifth Edition 2024 rules” (really 5.5e, or, as the great Dael Kingsmill has dubbed it: “5e2e”).  But still looking forward to both.  Good times for fantasy gaming fans.

How I loved your diamond eyes

When a show I thought was okay premieres its second season (or third, or fourth, or ...), I just watch the new season.  The recap is good enough.  When a show I thought was pretty good premieres a new season, I often back up two or three episodes to help refresh my memory and put me back in the vibe of the show.

But when a show that I really love puts out a new season, I go back to the beginning and watch it all again.  For instance, season 5 of Stranger Things (its final season) will come out next year, and I’ll go back to season 1, episode 1 and start watching, just as I did when season 4 came out, when season 3 came out, and when season 2 came out.  With the end result that, by the end of next year, I’ll have seen season 1 of Stranger Things five times, season 2 four times, season 3 three times, and season 4 twice.  Of course, I’ll only have seen season 5 once, but maybe I’ll rewatch it all from beginning to end a few more years hence.

I bring this up because season 4 of The Umbrella Academy (also the final season) is coming out next month, so I’ve started back around with episode 1 of season 1, and let me tell you: it’s just as amazing as it was the other 3 times I’ve watched it.  It’s about as close to a perfect episode of television as I can possibly imagine.  It sets up some extremely complicated family dynamics in an engaging way that epitomizes the maxim of “show, don’t tell”; it introduces a whopping 10 main characters in a way that cements them all firmly in our minds; it includes some amazing acting, some amazing music (including a gorgeous violin piece performed by Lindsey Stirling), and what may be the most perfect single cinematic shot that I’ve ever seen, set to (of all things) “I Think We’re Alone Now” by 80s pop star Tiffany.  I was really surprised how great it was all over again, the fourth time I’ve seen it.

Anyways, that’s my recommendation to you: go rewatch The Umbrella Academy.  Unless you haven’t seen it at all yet, in which case ... what are you waiting for?

Full Plates

Well, we’re back from our week-long trip to Las Vegas, which was a lot of fun, but also somewhat exhausting.  It’s nice to be sitting in my own chair, watching my own television again.  And, later, I’ll be sleeping in my own bed, which will be best of all.  Hopefully I’ll have a more complete report on the trip next week.

Today I’ll just give you a short note on the results of our license plate game.  My two younger children suddenly realized, right in the middle of the week, that the parking lot was slowly filling up with license plates from pretty far away, and started trying to “collect ’em all.” We continued all the way through to the drive back home, whereon I thoughtfully slowed down every time we passed a semi, an RV, or a trailer (those being the vehicles which had the best chance of being from far off).  At the end of the day, we collected 34 states: 31 from the US, 2 from Canada, and 1 from Mexico, which I thought was pretty damned impressive.  Having lived on the East Coast, and having spent a bit of time traveling through New England in particular, I’ve seen a few Canadian plates in my time, but I’ve never seen a Mexican license plate in my life.  So that was exciting.  Anyway, here’s a list of what we managed to geolocate:

• Alberta
• Arizona
• Arkansas
• California
• Colorado
• Floria
• Georgia
• Idaho
• Illinois
• Indiana
• Iowa
• Maine
• Michigan
• Minnesota
• Missouri
• Montana
• Nebraska
• Nevada
• New Jersey
• New Mexico
• New York
• North Carolina
• Ohio
• Oklahoma
• Oregon
• Quebec
• Sonora
• Tennessee
• Texas
• Utah
• Virginia
• Washington
• Wisconsin
• Wyoming

Not a lot from the Eastern half of the country, but a moderately respectable showing, I’d say.  My youngest had a map which she downloaded to mark off the states as we saw them.  Perhaps I’ll post that at some point.

Primm's Cup

No long blog post this week: I’m in sunny (way too sunny, actually) Las Vegas for another Perl conference—my first since the pandemic.  I brought two of my children for moral support.  And I guess I’ll take them to do a few things around town, but mainly the moral support.  From where I live, Las Vegas is a bit over a 4 hour drive, which isn’t terrible.  Of course, it ain’t that fun, either, particularly when your little Prius is desperately trying to get the inside temp down to the 68° you requested while whinging that the outside temp is anywhere from 101° to 106°.  And the drive is mostly a whole lot of nothing: flat land, scrub brush, and stunted Joshua trees.^*  I think I even saw an actual tumbleweed or two.  And the roads are very, very straight—I swear, at one point I glanced up at Waze and the map was entirely blank, with a single, perfectly straight line bisecting it, upon which our little arrow floated, seeming to make no progress.  My children will verify this, as it was so surreal I had to point it out to them.  Anyway, a drive like that can put you right to sleep, regardless of whether you’re actually sleepy or not.  I thought the kids would have to pee more often and that would help break up the drive, but not so much, it turns out.  We stopped once in Palmdale and then not again until Primm, which is nearly 200 of the 284 miles.  If you’re not familiar with Primm, just imagine the sort of “town” that might spring up if you slapped the cheesiest casino possible directly on the Nevada state line and you’ve pretty much nailed it.  And, if you’re not familiar with Palmdale ... well, don’t worry: you ain’t missing much.

Anyway, that’s been my day, so there was no chance to write a proper blog post.  And, next Sunday, I’ll be traveling back along the same route, so don’t expect too much then either.  Maybe in two weeks there’ll be something more exciting.

__________

* That’s not my picture, but it’s pretty much exactly what the whole trip looks like.

To those who cannot remember the past ...

This week, I had the good fortune to attend an anniversary dinner for my work, where I enjoyed some lovely cuisine with 10 of the 11 other people who have also worked for our company for 10 years or more.  We ate, and drank, and talked, for several hours.

At some point the topic of the recent college student protests against their institutions’ ongoing financial support for the killing of innocent people in Palestine came up.  Now, I think there’s a very interesting discussion to be had about how it really shouldn’t be a controversial opinion to be anti-genocide, and it really shouldn’t be controversial to say that they have the right to protest—it’s literally one of their First Amendment rights, along with freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion.  But that wasn’t the discussion we had.  The discussion we had was how much of an idiot you have to be to think it’s a good idea to call the police to “break up” a protest on a college campus.  Even a completely clueless administrator (or rich donor, or Speaker of the House) with only a cursory understanding of history should understand that attempts to stop a protest via violence only makes it worse.  (Special dispensation for the Speaker, who doesn’t seem to know any history that isn’t found in the Bible.)  I would more likely believe that the suggestion to call the police on a campus protest came from an undercover instigator who was trying to make damn sure that the protests succeeded than credit the notion that some college president said, with complete lack of irony, “I know: we’ll call in the cops and the National Guard and that will definitely put this silly protest thing behind us.” I am not old enough to remember the violence at Kent State—I was in fact four years old at the time—but I know about it, and even I understand what a moronic idea that is.

The thing that I thought of after that discussion, too late to contribute it there, so that now I must share it here with you, is that it might also behoove people in positions of collegial power to try to think of a time when there were widespread college protests that we currently look back on and think, man, those college kids were totally wrong.  Would it be the Free Speech Movement in 1964? the civil rights protests against racial inequality in 1968? the antiwar protests of 1970? the anti-apartheid protests of 1985? the protests against school shootings in 2018? the Black Lives Matter protests of 2014 and again in 2020?  Which of these are people looking back on and saying “well, here’s an example of where the college kids really blew it, and I bet they’re embarrassed about it now!” Is there a single counterexample that I’ve missed? a single case where the protests were misguided? a single case where these people—and to call them “young people” is just pointlessly reductive—really should have been told to “stop the nonsense; stop wasting your parents’ money”?  I haven’t thought of one yet.  But perhaps I lack the imagination of those wiser than I.  (Although, I gotta tell you: at this point, I’ve managed to live long enough that most of the idiots spewing this sort of garbage are no longer older than I, so maybe I should start referring to them as the “young people.”)

Anyway, that’s just what I’ve been thinking about recently.  Thinking about, as Elizabeth Shackleford put it in the Chicago Tribune, college protests and the right side of history; thinking about the ACLU’s advice to college presidents.  Thinking about how stupid you have to be to want to escalate college protests, and how morally bankrupt you have to be to think you’re going to come out looking good trying to quash them.  Just little stuff like that; nothing too heavy.

First of the season

Today I finally got the pool warm enough to swim in.  It was not warm, mind you: just warm enough.  So my youngest and I spent nearly an hour in the pool, shivering and playing ball.  (Well, okay, the last bit was spent in the jacuzzi, warming up and playing 20 Questions.  But you know what I mean.)  This is perhaps the latest in the year we’ve waited since we moved in here, but the weather this year has been pretty abysmal.  I’ve complained a bit about the rain, which has been pretty miserable, but of course the rain has affected the temperature as well.  Normally I can’t get through March without being tempted to crank up the pool heater.  But this year it’s been getting cold at night pretty much every night until just this week.  So there wasn’t much point till now.

So, climate change is screwing us, but we’re gonna go down fighting.  We’re paying for a pool, and, dammit, we’re going to swim in it.  Weather be damned.

I'm drownin' ovah hyeah ...

Today I’ve spent all day recovering from my water pillow springing what might be generously described as “a leak.” So I’ve had to disassemble the whole bed, wash everything that’s washable, bin everything that’s hopeless, and drag the mattress out to sit in the sun.  After dealing with that all day, I’ve got nothing left in me to devote to a blog post.  Hopefully next week.

R.I.P. Jim Ward

As one gets older, more and more of one’s heroes tend to die.  And even hero-adjacent figures.  And, sometimes, people that you can’t exactly explain why they were important to you, and often you didn’t even realize they were that important to you until after they were gone.  I distinctly remember my father being very upset when Del Shannon died.  Now, you who are reading this very likely have no clue who that is.  I knew who it was, of course: he was the guy that sang that one song.  Not sure if he was a proper one-hit wonder by the strictest definition, but certainly I had never heard but one.  I was a bit taken aback that his death was that impactful to my father: this was not a Beatle, not Elvis, nor even Carl Perkins.  Any of those and I would (and did) understand that my dad probably saw it as a moment that represented the passing of part of his life, part of his culture.  But ... Del Shannon? the “Runaway” guy? really?

But by this point in my life I’ve felt this way many times myself.  I felt this way (and wrote about it) when John Perry Barlow died.  Before he passed away, I’m not sure I could have come up with his name if you’d asked me about him; after he was gone, I understood what an impact he’d had on my life.  And again when Neil Innes died; I remember it felt a bit unreal to think that the guy who wrote (and sang) about brave, brave, brave Sir Robin, who bravely ran away and hid, was just ... done.  It shouldn’t have felt that way, I thought—after all, he was just a guy, a year older than my father, whose songs were already a decade old by the time I heard them ... why should it be surprising that time had moved on and he was now no more? shuffled off his mortal coil? an ex-Python?  And, anyway, he was just the guy who wrote the music for them, and, once again, I probably couldn’t have come up with his name if you’d pressed me ... but it was still significant once he wasn’t around any more.

And now Jim Ward has died.  Who the heck is Jim Ward, you ask?  Another barely noticed influence on me, this time in the D&D world.  Not one of the co-creators of the game: that would be Gary Gygax, who we lost in 2008, and Dave Arneson, who we lost the following year.  But he was one of the first people to meet Gygax and play this new-fangled game that Arneson had conceived of and Gygax had put down (very complicated) rules for.  He played (sometimes) a wizard named Drawmij (read that backwards if you don’t immediately get it), who became a big deal in the D&D world of Greyhawk: he was a member of the Circle of Eight (which included such other luminaries as Bigby, Rary, and Leomund) and bequeathed us enduring legacies, such as the spell Drawmij’s Instant Summons and the magic item Drawmij’s undersea apparatus.  Meanwhile, in the real world, Ward himself became a very early employee of TSR, the company Gygax founded to produce D&D, and co-authored seminal D&D book Deities & Demigods, as well as designing Metamorphosis Alpha, commonly considered to be the first sci-fi TTRPG, and Gamma World, commonly considered to be the first post-apocalyptic TTRPG.  In his later years, he wrote a series of columns for D&D site EN World called “Drawmij’s TSR”; for the most comprehensive view on him, his “who is Jim Ward” post is a great read, though I favor his very amusing takes on corporate mismanagement, such as the story of why I got cardboard chits instead of dice in my first D&D box set.

It’s a weird feeling when someone you didn’t really realize was important dies.  You’re not quite sure how to feel.  It’s mostly sadness, of course, and maybe a little bit of guilt that you didn’t appreciate them more when they were still around. and a little bit of nostalgia over what has been lost, and a little bit of dawning realization of your own mortality.  It’s complicated, although that’s certainly part of what makes us human.  The ability to feel conflicting emotions.  The ability to think to yourself, it’s really a bummer that this person is gone, and at the same time I’m so joyful that they contributed so much.  And, even though it didn’t seem like a lot at the time, and even if it may not seem like that much now, in the grand scheme of all the myriad experiences that make up my life, it was something impactful, something meaningful.  So perhaps mostly gratitude.  That you were touched, in however small a way, by someone who probably felt like they were just doing their job, but really they were making lives better.  And that’s pretty awesome, and worth celebrating.