Just when you thought it was safe to check your email

Yes, I am back. I have been listening to the Lawfare podcasts that condense each day's marathon Impeachment Hearing in the Senate into approx 1.5 hours. I can manage that (except in the case of gas lighting arguments from The F---ing Moron's F---ing "legal team". (I'm sorry, was that too snarky?)

Here is a summary from a Washington Post opinion piece of the Republican's justification for declining to call additional witnesses:

In short, the Republican argument will be:

• We’ve already heard from enough witnesses, so we don’t need to hear from anyone else — even those with the most direct knowledge of Trump’s thinking as he executed one of the most important and contested acts of conduct in his whole Ukraine scheme; and
• We will now acquit Trump because Democrats couldn’t produce anything from any witnesses who had direct knowledge of his thinking as he executed one of the most important and contested acts of conduct in his whole Ukraine scheme.

Republicans won’t put the argument this way, of course. But this actually is what they’re already arguing.

Actually, I think it can summarized even more briefly:

                    Because CATCH 22 

Read the book: despite it's appearance as a novel it is in fact an air tight legal argument (and much more readable than such things usually are).

Online riches abound

It is either getting funnier/weirder out there, or I am losing it........or, SEE: Venn diagram previously blogged.

I click on this regular Slate column to (usually) mock or (occasionally) find a must-have gem. But I today had such a strong reaction that I went to the comments. (I KNOW, rarely is one's life improved by this diversion).https://slate.com/comments/human-interest/2020/01/kobwa-multifunctional-electric-lunchbox-review-2020.html

My reaction was: cooking FISH at your DESK at WORK?  $#&@! I had to know how others reacted. Not only was I not disappointed, but for approx. 2 pages worth I delighted in exactly how they reacted.


Perhaps you would like to:
a) use some of your daily cat video watching budget or
b) use the time you habitually use to check out something in Wikipedia and link,link, link yourself down the rabbit hole and forget to eat/go to bed or

c) simply spare a few minutes, budgets and habits be damned.

Now I must get back to cat videos that don't watch themselves, you know.

Editorial Correction and Glamping Update

This is my first requested (or discovered by me) needed correction and it reveals quite a bit about the editorial staff here at Blogging for Sanity. After over 3 decades with* Boyfriend I still manage to have the loosest possible grasp on details of his intense relationship with all things boat. After numerous (indeed uncountable) disappointing boat related negotiations between us, he has surrendered any dim hope of me becoming a boating partner. My last post was a bitter reminder of the modicum of attention I pay to specific boats, including his (I no longer wish to know the count of) boats. I am a bad bad boat girlfriend. My hold on him is tenuously dependent upon a butt-load of history, a shared grim sense of humor and reverence for pizza, and some other......stuff. So, after the required sharing of my snarky wittiness, I give you the required correction, with a sweetener.
                                                                                          *living separately but sharing "stuff"

Boyfriend's recreational travel trailer is a My Pod, pictured here behind his Prius. Now this set up is as green as it gets regarding car camping and having a place to comfortably lie around and read while it rains. I did not consider this AT ALL as a solution for me, a glamper. Not only is there no toilet, you have to crawl in and out and get dressed either horizontally, or outside. But it's a really cute and green take on RV'ing (in the most generous meaning). If it has a name, I do not recall it (as is usually the case with me) so I will not hazard a guess and risk a second correction.

EDITORIAL CORRECTION

Wrong boat, wrong name: me bad bad boat girlfriend. Here is the real Salish 100 magic carpet. Behind the guy with the camera is the door to the cabin which has a sleeping berth, and allows stooping! She is LAZY JACK and it may be the only non-sailing boat he owns. But it serves as a way to trailer to an event with a boat AND a berth. It takes only a small truck to haul so this too is quite green.

END OF EDITORIAL CORRECTION

This brings me to a confession of how my trailer camping experiment stands. This is MY blog, so I get to report MY reality (just like all of America these days): I suck at trailer parking. Also, while my RAV 4 Adventure is a comfortable and very safe vehicle, I deplore the mileage (approx 27 mpg unless towing when it is 10 !!!!! mpg). Boyfriend is also stunned at that last number. Also, my desired cover solution for Little Guy did not pan out. That may turn out to be the silver lining in this black cloud of an experiment in trailering. I love LG but backing her up is a nightmare for me. I HATE having this tow vehicle which I have named THE BEAST. Unless needed to tow, I see no need for this gas hog. I am teetering on the brink of offering LG for sale in the early Spring and shopping for a mileage champ replacement vehicle. And it is a very skinny brink.

A hearty chuckle in grim times

But first I have a short report on a recent jaunt with boyfriend to Port Townsend WA for a "boat thang". I curate carefully which of his boat thangs I attend. In this case he was SURE I would enjoy myself - and he was correct! Essentially we made a 700 mile round-trip for a potluck dinner (which was very good), but it's purpose was to bring together small boat nuts who had or were going on a Salish 100 Cruise. Here is a link (blessedly outside Facebook) to last year's event (and maiden event) http://www.ssssclub.com/event/salish-100-small-boat-cruise/.

Magic carpet for multi-day cruises (a bunk!)

There were even folks there who knew they could not attend in 2020, but had hopes or plans of doing so in a future year. Boyfriend did it last year and enjoyed it so much that he may attend as many pre-2020 Cruise events in PT WA as they schedule. I found the crowd to be varied (with many women, a few of whom were the primary sailor in a couple, or solo sailors), gregarious and just wacky enough for my taste. I have been imagining how I might join some of it. However the drawbacks and uncertainties piled up to: "have a good time without me!". Here is a photo of Skip Jack at the time of acquisition. The red strip is now a lovely lesbian purple.

Now the funny. This is an excerpt from a Washington Post article about Lev Parnas, described in the article thusly:

a fast-talking, Ukraine-born businessman sporting an ankle bracelet who — speaking for the first time since his October arrest on campaign finance charges — directly implicated the president in the Ukraine scheme.

And here was the guffaw inducing bit of his "business" history:

Parnas said he sought out the former New York mayor (Giuliani, of course) to be a paid pitchman for a company he co-founded called Fraud Guarantee that claimed to shield investors from financial fraud. He arranged for Giuliani to be paid $500,000 by a Long Island lawyer who was an investor in Fraud Guarantee. He assumed their relationship would be a distant one, Parnas said this past week.

Truth in advertising at last.

Breaking the silence

I have been experiencing my holiday tradition of being put-off by the kerfuffle, and alarmed by the way American's throw concerns about compulsive gift giving ( i.e.environmental and personal financial harms) under the bus of the future. So, my usual amount of merriment.

Folks who know me well are aware that my gift giving is sporadic and (one might reasonably conclude) deliberately untethered from society's proscribed gifting events. As I may have mentioned before, my favorite recognized day of celebration is Arbor Day (the last Friday in April). This event is chock full of no expectations (cards, gifts, festive meals) and replete with meaning for those of us who are moss-loving tree huggers.

But enough of that! There is intriguing financial news to ponder. In today's Register Guard there was this interesting business related item about a lawsuit:

MADISON, WIS.

Delta workers file lawsuit over uniforms

Hundreds of Delta Air Lines employees have filed a pair of class action lawsuits against Wisconsin-based clothing manufacturer Lands’ End, claiming that uniforms they are required to wear are causing serious medical problems.

The lawsuits allege that the uniforms, created by fashion designer Zac Posen and unveiled in May 2018, have caused numerous Delta employees to break out in skin rashes, suffer hair loss, low white blood cell counts, migraines, cause breathing difficulties and other medical problems.

I had to read it twice to ensure that it was the manufacturer and not the fashion designer who was being sued for serious medical problems attributed to the new uniforms. Cuz, I was thinking that was some seriously criminal fashion design to cause so many health problems. As I am sure you are aware (or will very soon will be) fashion has a long history of causing medical mischief. Most obviously (to me) is the crippling of women who wear high heeled pointy toed shoes in order to ?? (I am unclear on the purpose of this fashion choice). And while it is clearly a hazard to oxygenation of the brain, many men continue to wear garrotes (again: Purpose??) as part of the standard business uniform. This choice does however explain the frequency of executive decision-caused calamity in the financial news.

My current screen saver

In the interest of full disclosure: Today I fell victim to an unplanned and hours long cruise through the women's clothing racks at St. V. de P. I had unusually good luck finding good fits, colors, fabrics and "style" in items which dominate my wardrobe. I scored 5 shirts (two for exercise), 1 sweater, 2 casual jackets and 2 vests for the staggering sum of $53.35. At least no additional environmental harm resulted from these purchases (except my gas to there) and negligible financial damage. Also, looking good in some "new" things cheered me up.