An Irish buddy tagged a bunch of us in a social media post to let us know that our late, great Irish teacher was going to be eulogized on Irish radio! I tuned in this afternoon, and while I didn't catch everything, my Irish must be kind of okay because I understood the guy when he said our teacher liked to play Scrabble in Irish, but she would make these little words worth six points. And then she would take him to a coffee shop and they would talk for hours. He even gave a shout-out to one of the musicians in town. How cool if he had given me a shout-out - it would be like fifteen minutes of fame, but only in Ireland, and only to people who actually speak Irish. I used to think it would be kind of cool to be famous in another country, so that I could walk down the street here, and take the bus, and just live my life, but boy if I were in Montenegro, they'd be all over me! Or I'd think that I'd like to be, not famous, but just renowned in certain circles. I'd go to a Linguistics conference, and people would say, "That's Famous Hat! She wrote the definitive paper on how Etruscan is related to Basque!" But the older I get, the less fame of any sort holds any appeal whatsoever for me.
Today I worked from home, and right at the end of my workday I noticed out the kitchen window (which faces south) that there was a pink glow to the west. Most of our windows face east, so I couldn't see what was going on, but I snuck out of work with ten minutes to go and went down to our dock. There was a woman who isn't in our condo association who was starting to go out onto the dock to see the stunning sunset in progress, but she saw me and stopped. I don't know why I didn't say, "Come with me to get a better view." What would it have hurt? Anyway, I got some photos with increasing zoom.
People are bemoaning the falling birthrate, but to me the issue is obvious: a group of billionaires has set things up so that all the money goes to them. Sixty years ago people could afford to raise families, but not now, and so lots of people are reluctantly choosing not to have children. Suddenly the billionaires realize they will need workers and customers, so they are trying to get people to reproduce, not by making economic conditions more favorable for them, but by trying to make it illegal to not have children. I'm no fan of abortion, but they keep saying they don't want to stop there, soon it will be birth control and sterilization that they outlaw. The odd thing is that there are lots of people trying to come into this country, and they could replenish the stock of workers and customers for the billionaires, but apparently the billionaires are racists too, so they only want white people in this country. They are also trying to convince us (like on the TV station whose name is 666 in numerology) that we would be best off with an autocratic leader. Did you ever hear that Russian asset they used to have whose name meant "tire out"? He was always singing the praises of Putin, and don't we want someone just like Putin? I sure don't, but man, about half the country says they will vote for someone who says straight out that, if elected, he will make himself Dictator for Life. For some reason the billionaires want this, but I wonder if they'll really like it once it happens? It's true that the oligarchs in Russia are doing well under Putin, but I've heard they don't love his war with Ukraine. If you elect a loose cannon, you're going to get cannonballs shot at you. Or, as the famous tweet says: "'I didn't think the leopards would eat MY face!' cried the woman who voted for the Face-Eating Leopards Party." You get what you vote for.
Famous Hat
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