Every year around this time I find myself asking myself two questions:

1. When is Turkey going to grow up?
2. When is the foreign policy establishment of the mighty United States of America going to stop letting itself get pushed around the schoolyard by some punks in Ankara?

They’re unlikely to be answered satisfactorily any time soon, but I’m not going to let that spoil the mood. And I’m not ready to consider them rhetorical questions.

In the meantime, here’s something nice Congress can do: it can reduce its annual aid to Turkey by exactly the amount Turkey spends on public relations in the United States. The American taxpayer is, in effect, paying for Ankara’s attempts to quash legislation and influence our own foreign policy.

Then the “blizzard conditions” arrived, on top of the snow that had fallen so recently, on top of what we’d already shoveled into rather large piles, and things threatened to become interesting again.

Drifts. Now that’s something I miss here in DC. It’s happened a couple of times since I’ve been here, and it’s happening now. The snow is still arriving pretty much horizontally, although the end of the precipitation is supposedly in sight. The winds, however, will continue, if we are to believe the weather mavens (and they’ve been pretty accurate this year).

I know, it’s trite to talk about the weather so much. So here’s a picture of a bird hiding under our back deck during the onslaught today:

For all I know, the sparrows are still hunkering down in the bush by the front porch (two of them flew out Monday while I was talking across it with a neighbor, me down on the ground, he on his porch—he didn’t even notice).

Almost time to start shoveling again …
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*I refuse to call it Snowmageddon, or Snowpocalypse, or Blizzacane, or whatever everybody’s calling it. Good grief, as if.

(Note the three o’clock shadows—already a month from the solstice, but the sun is still lying low.)

Two weeks ago today, the Potomac was frozen over, and I saw this scene from Key Bridge as I biked to work:

A diver had knocked a hole in the ice with an ax and had lowered himself into the water. On the dock of the nearby boathouse, a bunch of guys prepared to join him, one of them maneuvering a strange contraption:

I thought maybe they were fishing for a dead body,* or looking for explosives, or something else appropriately dramatic.

But eventually their casual, almost lackadaisical behavior convinced me it was a training exercise, so I repacked the camera, put my gloves back on, and continued on my merry way to an absolutely thrilling Monday at work.
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*One summer day several years ago, again on my way to work, I had indeed seen a dead man splayed out on the boathouse dock, surrounded by police and rescue personnel. It was the morning after a nighttime cloudburst, and it’s my guess he was a homeless guy who had been washed out of a culvert about a half-mile upriver. If you rent a canoe and paddle up that way, you’ll see the warning sign where the stormwater periodically rushes out into the Potomac.

Five male robins were rummaging around in the dead leaves under the front porch and shrub this morning. It looked like they were looking for food. The leaves were flying left and right, and one of them made an angry open-mouthed gesture when another got too close. One guy made a brief dash toward the window where I was sitting and thought better of it. This does not look good, folks. It’s winter. What the hell are the robins doing?

My alma mater got a little cute the other day, sending out a sample admissions essay that they thought would help calm applicants down a bit as the January 2 deadline approached. While most people seemed to think it was just fine, others thought it went over the line. You decide. I think it was classic U of C.

When a big corporation does something right, we should acknowledge it, right? Way back at the beginning of 2009 my trusty Canon A95 started acting funny. Eventually the funniness turned into a permanent inability to take a picture—the image had a magenta cast and bunch of horizontal lines all over it. I kept fiddling with it, hoping it would “fix itself” (yes, I do believe in magic), but also decided to buy a newer model. I ended up with the SX10 IS, which I really like. In late summer I decided to sell the A95’s wide angle lens on eBay, but while I was researching what such things might go for and the A95 in general, I learned about a problem some A95s had with their CCD (the imager): some units supplied by Sony had an issue with the connector, which Canon eventually concluded was not caused by user mishandling, and the company was replacing them for free whether or not the camera was still covered by the warranty (I bought the thing back in 2005). Long story short: talked to a Canon rep, got a free FedEx label, sent the little guy to Illinois, and got a working A95 back two days later. So now I have a nice second camera I can carry around and not worry about anything. (My recent wandering-around-town pics were taken with the A95.) Kudos to Canon. Customer for life here.

Oh, heck: one more testimonial. The Roland Micro Cube is really nifty. I use it with a Yamaha electric violin. You can plug in your guitar if you want. Either way, you can mess around with straight amplification or an array of classic amp decks (JC Clean, Black Panel, Brit Combo, etc.). It’s a gas. Not a lot of power, but enough—it’s really a practice amp. But get this: it runs on batteries, and for a long time (I bought it over a year ago and still haven’t swapped out the rechargeables I put in it). If you need more power, get the bigger model. But this little thing is great just as is.

Okay, that’s enough. Goodbye, 2009.

Addendum 2010.01.20: Turns out the feisty robins are from up north; “our” robins have headed south.

I’m a Clevelander, so snow always makes me happy. I wasn’t at all bothered that the Volvo was buried …

… but, damn, look at this!

Luckily that’s my backup bike (my Trek is warm and dry inside—and gloating, no doubt). But the point is this: I had to take the Metro all week! Okay, okay, it was a short week, with Christmas and all. But still—no biking makes me ornery.

Usually. But snow always pleases me somehow. And the walk to and from the Metro gave me a chance to see the snowy sights I might miss on the bike. For instance, this—the fattest snowman I’d ever seen, digesting happily near the festooned deck of the Dancing Crab:

As for this, I have no idea what it was meant to be—a decorated pile of snow, I suppose:

In taking this shot, however, I learned something about those signs made of dots that run from right to left (there’s probably a fancy name for them—the devoted reader will clue me in, I’m sure). The dots must get filled in from top to bottom as well, because the word “cigar” (or the phone number, whatever) was clearly visible when I snapped the picture, but not all the dots are lit up in the photo. Even such minuscule enlightment is enlightenment, right? My spouse (who is truly enlightened) would not agree, of course, but that’s okay. Many paths etc.

And I saw this, which has nothing to do with the snowstorm:

“Captain Arturo, fighting for nonviolence.” I’m a sucker for heavy irony, especially when it comes to aggressive or antisocial behavior.

Speaking of which, let’s commemorate the can’t-do attitude of the new upper-northwest branch office of TD Bank (“America’s Most Inconsiderate Neighbor™”). Unlike most if not all of the businesses around them, they declined to shovel the public sidewalks along the two streets abutting their marble-and-glass palace, never mind that it is a requirement imposed by force of local law, if not also and equally by the natural and healthy urge of a properly developed social consciousness.

As of Monday evening (thirty or forty hours after the snow had stopped falling, but who’s counting?), they had not cleared the sidewalks, and by Tuesday the local Yahoo listserv was buzzing with complaints—tales of women slipping and falling, bank personnel saying they have no intention of shoveling the sidewalks, etc.). Also by Tuesday, the bank had shoveled the sidewalks, but it was too late—the bile was out of the bladder.

The chronology is funny, if you find really stupid, inconsiderate things funny: at 5:45 am on Sunday, heavy equipment arrived to clear TD Bank’s parking lot and drive-through lanes—the kind of heavy equipment that beeps whenever it backs up. The nearest residence is right across the alley from the bank, and it’s residences all the way up the street. But apparently the job wasn’t really done, because at around 11:00 pm on Monday, the heavy equipment shows up again, this time with a big dump truck. They’re going to haul away all that snow, you see. For whatever reason. And this is when the guy shows up with a shovel to do the sidewalks. Funny, eh?

In response to a query about how long they intended to work, the man in charge said, “As long as it takes.” Did that mean “through the night”? Yes, it did mean that. Who told them to start work at 11:00 pm? We were hoping for a name, but the answer was: “The property owner.” The property owner—isn’t that the bank? No, it’s not the bank. And indeed, the property owner is not TD Bank. We forgot. They’re leasing the site from … from some … well, rumor has it, a couple of greedy sisters up in Rockville sequestered behind some LLC. Well, sisters anyway—the greedy part is obviously editorializing, based on how they ran off a popular movie theater (The Outer Circle) and a restaurant (Round Table, which had cleaned up its act and had turned into a very neighborly establishment indeed) because they weren’t bringing in enough dough, and who, because they wanted to lease the land rather than sell it, constricted the pool of tenants to the likes of a 24-hour CVS (which was already situated a few blocks south on Wisconsin Ave.) or a bank (of which there were already five in a four-block stretch, from Fessenden to Jenifer). According to this nocturnal snow-removing demon, it was the old ladies in Rockville (or their rep) who arranged for the work that disturbed the sleep of the bank’s neighbors for a second night straight—not the bank. (He, of course, didn’t say “the old ladies in Rockville.” We’re putting two and two together, that’s all.)

Oh, well. That’s all blood under the bridge by now. The rains came, the snow melted, the squirrels are frolicking, and the sidewalks along TD Bank are incredibly clear. Let’s not even think about the nine months of construction hell in 2009, and the years of hassles and ANC meetings because of the bank’s original plan to use the nearby alley as a driveway for its two drive-through windows, and so on, and on and on. The new year is almost here. Perhaps the bank learned that customer convenience doesn’t trump common decency toward its neighbors. And no doubt the plans for the big new super-Safeway down the block will be just fine and the project will be a monument to enlightened urban life.

During the 2008 campaign Obama trashed the Bush administration for not boldly sending in the forces necessary to get bin Laden when he was holed up at Tora Bora, excoriating Bush for making the wrong bold move two years later—invading Iraq. Good so far. But Obama would go on to prate about how Afghanistan was/is the focal point of the revenge campaign against bin Laden and al-Qaeda. “Was” is correct. “Is” is not. By all accounts, bin Laden is now in an ungovernable region along the Afghan–Pakistani border. One cannot undo the mistake Bush and his crew made in 2001. I had hoped Obama was just trying to outhawk the already sufficiently hawkish Hillary Clinton, protect his flank from the war machine, and so on. You know, campaign sparring. Hope against hope, I knew, but I thought the smart law professor would figure out a way to do the right thing and explain away his change of mind.

And yet, in perhaps the boldest move of his not very bold presidency (as we knew it would be), Obama has decided to send an additional 30,000 troops into the geopolitical shithole that is Afghanistan. One wonders why we even give it a name with “stan” at the end, as if it were a country. Too much of it is just a collection of valleys filled with families/tribes that speak different dialects and hate each other almost as much as they hate foreigners. And they just happen to be the best, most tenacious, stubborn, punishment-absorbing fighters in the world. I think maybe the Russians learned that, after an unhappy vacation there, as did the Brits before them.

In other words, Barack Obama has shown that he believes in “magic history.” He seems to think genies can be put back in bottles, and that if you click your ruby slippers three times, bin Laden will be found and killed and that will be that. (How many times during his campaign did he repeat that odious incantation about finding and killing bin Laden, placing special, almost loving, emphasis on the word “killing,” as if he thought his predecessor or his opponent was incapable of murderous thoughts, as if he really thought killing bin Laden would solve the problem of bin Ladenism and militant Islam and the subhuman conditions in Gaza and everything worth addressing in an adult way.) What on earth does Obama hope to accomplish in Afghanistan? Why is this the one campaign promise he will actually keep—not just keep, but expand, elaborate on, aggrandize, inflate? He used to talk about sending “at least” two brigades (six or seven thousand soldiers). How very clever of him. He will indeed be sending at least that many soldiers. Michael Moore is right to be outraged, but he has no basis for feeling betrayed.

Back in the sixties, what Obama is doing was known as an “escalation” (the Orwellian term “surge” had not been invented). LBJ made a few escalations of his own, even after he eventually came to see that Vietnam was a lost cause. But Johnson couldn’t withdraw from his inherited war because he felt his manhood was at stake. Or “too much blood and money had been spent.” Or “America does not walk away from unfinished jobs.” Etc. Plus ça change … (And, indeed, the French will politely decline to send more troops to Afghanistan. Don’t you just hate it when the French are right?)

Addendum 2009.12.01: Obama gave his speech tonight and says he will start pulling forces out in July 2011, after adding his 30,000 by June 2010. So it starts to quack like a “surge,” not an open-ended escalation. Does that make it right? Does this approach make sense with people who measure time in hundreds (or thousands) of years, not hundreds of days? It’s like the kid who wants to stop the fight, but doesn’t want to look chicken, so he throws one last punch before he says, “Let’s quit!” That’s the positive spin. The scary alternative is: he really does think we can fix Afghanistan with nineteen more months of heightened US military intervention—and will probably keep lots of US troops there well beyond that point to keep it from backsliding. Ah, the follies of Empire … if only they were the Ziegfeld and not the body bag variety.

What’s that? Yes, they’re Catholic. But we like to think there’s more to their marital longevity than the fear of eternal damnation. “1 4 3 — 7” they would write on their teenage correspondence. I guess they really meant the seven. Good for them, through thick and thin. And good for us.

And though they don’t read these Basement notes, they believe in the magical transfer of thoughts and feelings through space and time, so I’m sure they hear me say “Bravo!” (There’s always the telephone as a backup.)

Armenia

Back in August we heard about the incipient rapprochement between Armenia and Turkey that was to culminate in an imminent restoration of diplomatic relations. On October 10, after a last-minute dispute over wording was resolved with input (shall we say) from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the two countries signed a historic agreement to do just that, reopening borders that Turkey sealed in 1993 in solidarity with Azerbaijan in its conflict with Armenia over the territory of Nagorno-Karabagh. Although some elements in the Armenian diaspora expressed displeasure at the terms of the agreement, other major players fell in line behind it, as the New York Times reports:

Despite noisy street protests, some influential expatriate groups in the United States—including the Western and Eastern Dioceses of the Armenian Church, the Armenian General Benevolent Union, the Knights of Vartan and the Armenian Assembly of America—announced they would back the agreement, in a joint statement that was released Oct. 1.

While I’m sympathetic to those who are unhappy, I think the opinions of Armenians in Armenia trump the feelings of those abroad, and I doubt the pressure Armenia was subjected to caused it to perform a suicidal, or even self-destructive, act. But time, as it always does, will tell.

Bees

The mysterious and devastating decline in honeybee populations in this country (and abroad) was noted here back in May 2007. The evidence is mounting that pesticides are the primary culprit. Now there’s a shocker.

Bikes

Bad news from Paris: their bike-sharing system has run into a nasty patch of human nature in the form of stolen and vandalized equipment.

With 80 percent of the initial 20,600 bicycles stolen or damaged, the program’s organizers have had to hire several hundred people just to fix them. And along with the dent in the city-subsidized budget has been a blow to the Parisian psyche.

“The symbol of a fixed-up, eco-friendly city has become a new source for criminality,” Le Monde mourned in an editorial over the summer. “The Vélib’ was aimed at civilizing city travel. It has increased incivilities.”

The heavy, sandy-bronze Vélib’ bicycles are seen as an accoutrement of the “bobos,” or “bourgeois-bohèmes,” the trendy urban middle class, and they stir resentment and covetousness. They are often being vandalized in a socially divided Paris by resentful, angry or anarchic youth, the police and sociologists say.

I was downtown last night and saw a half-empty SmartBike rack—the bikes that were there seemed fine, and the fact that many were missing I took as a good sign. Whether DC will eventually share the French experience remains to be seen.

Facebook

Still tired of it.

Google

I revisited my street via Google Street View and, lo and behold, I am no longer there. The building under construction on the corner is much further along in the new views—in fact, I can pretty accurately date the shots from the state of the site. So it looks like the Googlemonster is a restless beast, continually revisiting everything it encounters in addition to going new places all the time. Just like the way it crawls the web, come to think of it.

Kindle

Too many people keep borrowing it. That’s not unexpected, since it belongs to my employer, and the borrowing has to do with the stated reason for buying it: to see if we should start publishing on that platform. The upshot (for me) is that it’s a great way to read stuff that flows, where you just flow along with it. It’s not so hot for text that is technical, encyclopedic, laden with graphics or tables, or choppy—i.e., built for browsing (like a newspaper or website), not for reading straight through (like a novel). Also not great for marking up and making notes, in my opinion. It’s still pleasant to read with it, but I suspect Kindle will be seeing serious competition in the years ahead, if it isn’t already, especially from devices with touchscreens and color.

Obama

A year ago at this time we were wondering who the next president of the United States would be. Although he’s only been president since January 20, this is as good a time as any to take stock of Barack Obama. On the plus side, he made a pretty decent Supreme Court nomination and got her confirmed; he initiated bilateral talks with Iran and has ratcheted down the rhetoric; he has scrapped the antiballistic system in Eastern Europe, leading to improved relations with Russia (and maybe leverage in our dealings with Iran); and he has done some heavy lifting in pursuit of true healthcare reform, which will likely pass in some form during this current session of Congress. On the negative side, he has done little to extract the US from Iraq, and even less to shut down Guantánamo; he has continued some of the previous administration’s abuse of executive privilege and government secrecy; and he has made only a half-hearted show of exposing and dealing with White House and Justice Department culpability in justifying and providing cover for torture by the CIA and the military. Still to be scored is his approach to Afghanistan—he is currently deliberating, and the hope arises he will ditch the simpleminded bellicosity displayed in his campaign and find a saner solution to that mess.

Addendum 2009.11.02: I knew I would forget something: a small additional plus for Obama, who “took advantage of a rare political moment to break through one of Washington’s most powerful lobbies and trim more weapons systems than any president had in decades.” What makes it small is this: “Now the question is whether Mr. Obama can sustain that push next year, when the midterm elections are likely to make Congress more resistant to further cuts and job losses.” And this: “Mr. Obama has said that he does not intend to reduce military spending while the nation is engaged in two wars.” We are no closer to discarding the notion that the US must be capable of fighting multiple strategic (i.e., nondefensive) wars simultaneously.

Addendum 2009.11.03: A significantly bigger, unvarnished plus: “Without fanfare, President Barack Obama has okayed a large cash infusion to help clean up the Great Lakes, quietly signing a bill that was years in the making and marks a rare bipartisan milestone.”

"American Alphabet" by Heidi Cody

I don’t think I’ll get them all, thank God. But a few of them will continue to bother me.

Don’t “Read More” until you’ve given yourself a chance to guess at them.

Here a few that I know: Bubblicious (or is it Bubble Yum?), Campbell’s soup, Dawn dish soap (not sure), Eggo frozen waffles, Klondike ice cream bar (maybe—from the middle of the word?), Lysol disinfectant products, M&M’s, Orios (?), Pez, Q-tips (?), Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, V-8 cocktail juice, Twix (?—from the middle of the word again?), York peppermint patties.

The A and S are driving me crazy. (Alpha-Bits? and that fruit toffee stuff that comes in little squares? what the hell’s the name …) The K looks awful familiar as well.

Okay, lemme outta here!