For the weekend…

from Douglas E. Welch

Issue #18: April 8, 2022

Contents:

Essay: “Life” Intrudes This Week
Video: The Origins of the SAS - WW2 Special Episode
Government RSS Feeds
Old Book Illustrations
Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword
Book: Murder on the Rocks: Gray Whale Inn Mysteries, No. 1

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“Life” Intrudes This Week

Life often intrudes and makes a mockery of the “best plans of mice and men.” This week is one of those for me. I have no great, philosophical thoughts to share. Just some very normal scenes of life.

Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem

I ended up knocking loose an old dental filling. Just another small inconvenience in life that I have to take some time and stress to resolve. My dentist was also closed for spring break, so I had to wait a week to get it resolved. Thankfully I wasn’t in any pain, so that made it easy, but going to the dentist is one of the most unpleasant parts of my life.

Due to a dental trauma when I was quite young, I have an intrinsic dislike of all things "dentist". I’ve had some great dentists, but it is the actual procedures and environment that set me off. I often feel like a young child with a deathly fear of dentists when I should be an adult who simply goes in and gets things done. I’m sure many of you have a similar situation that sets you off beyond all reason. We all have traumas that follow us wherever we go. For lack of a better word, Blah!

Time Passes…non-linearly

Now that that is out of the way, of course, it is time to refocus on life. It’s hard to believe that the first quarter of 2022 has already passed. The passage of the years has been mutated by the pandemic and time doesn’t seem to flow like it once did. Some days fly by. Some days drag. Some days you wake up and it’s a month later. Some days it feels like a year later.

Still, we continue. There is no other way, or at least no other way worth considering. We try to establish some sense of a new normal. I’ve taken the recent reduction in Covid infections as a sign to try and get out and live life more.

My son and I spent last Saturday in Little Tokyo enjoying all that it had to offer including unique food stores, cute anime stores, and even a little bit of people watching, something I haven’t done in years. We still kept our distance from people and wore our masks, as COVID is not over yet, but it felt good to be out in the world at least a little bit.

On Sunday, I was able to take a drive around the city, although it was because I needed to charge up my car battery after having it sit for almost a month. Just another small inconvenience but I was able to go to one of my favorite places in the city, Franklin Canyon, in the Santa Monica Mountains between Beverly Hills and the valley.

Smile for the camera

Both of these trips allowed me to engage in one of my favorite activities – photography. Yet another activity I have sorely missed. There are only so many pictures you can take of your garden and neighborhood, although I have made the best of that over the last 2 years.

We visited a small, yet delightful, Japanese garden in Little Tokyo. Although we couldn’t enter the garden itself, the surrounding plaza offers nice views and many photo opportunities

While I am more of a cottage gardener myself, I love the carefully designed nature of Japanese gardens and their peaceful qualities. I make a point of visiting them wherever I may be.

Taxman

Finally this week, taxes were finalized and paid, IRA contributions made, and my civil responsibilities fulfilled. Unlike many, I don’t mind paying taxes. I have a clear understanding of everything that our tax dollars provide as a society. Did I wish taxes were lowered and/or better used? Of course, but this is why I vote for representatives that will, hopefully, support my desires in government.

I think in some cases, we have become divorced from everything that our taxes provide. I have had an idea for a long time that every piece of public infrastructure should contain a tag that explains how much of an individual‘s tax dollars go to support that infrastructure.

Imagine when you looked at a light post it said .00001 of your tax dollars went towards the maintenance and repair of this light post. Or perhaps our roads showed exactly how much of our tax dollars went to pave that block or mile. We need these important reminders to show us how our tax dollars are being spent so that we might better understand why we pay taxes in the first place.

So, this was a week of doing what had to be done. As we head into the weekend, what are you going to do that you want to do? What are you going to do that comes with no obligation and is only for yourself? It is time to slough off your work skin and find a little enjoyment for yourself.

Video

The Origins of the SAS - WW2 Special Episode

"Who dares, wins”. Nowadays the British SAS - Special Air Service is considered one of the best special forces in the world. Yet its wartime origins are shrouded in mysteries and legends. From the first ideas of top-secret “special raiding squadrons”, to the first raids in North Africa accompanying the Long Range Desert Group, the SAS’s beginnings resemble one big experiment. An experiment from which a truly legendary special service would emerge.

Government RSS Feeds

Via GovInfo

A watched government is a good government and these RSS feeds allow you to easily monitor a wide variety of legislative and judicial information. Let the information come to you instead of having to go out and find it each day. – Douglas

RSS feeds are available for many govinfo collections and generally include the 100 most recent documents published. Feeds are also available for bulk data, which can be used with GPO's bulk data repository to download XML data sets in bulk.

RSS feeds are commonly used on blogs (weblogs), news websites, and other places with frequently updated content. RSS is an easy way to keep up with news and information that's important to you. By subscribing to an RSS feed, you can have content delivered directly to you without receiving an email.

Old Book Illustrations

There is a host of amazing, historical, art available on the Internet and Old Book Illustrations is just one of them. All of these items are in the public domain and can be used however you wish in your own projects. – Douglas

Old Book Illustrations was born of the desire to share illustrations from a modest collection of books, which we set out to scan and publish. With the wealth of resources available online, it became increasingly difficult to resist the temptation to explore other collections and include these images along with our own. Although it would have been possible to considerably broaden the time-frame of our pursuit, we chose to keep our focus on the original period in which we started for reasons pertaining to taste, consistency, and practicality: due to obvious legal restrictions, we had to stay within the limits of the public domain. This explains why there won’t be on this site illustrations first published prior to the 18th century or later than the first quarter of the 20th century.

Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword

by Public Domain Review

Who would have thought that the humble crossword puzzle would have been seen as evil and useless as today’s video games back when they were invented. It only goes to show that everything old is new again and one generation complaining about the one following has never gone out of style. – Douglas

The “crossword craze” of the 1920s had hit Britain like a “meteorological depression”, and, as was traditional, Americans were to blame.5 Following the publication of the first crossword in New York World by Arthur Wynne in 1913, the Tamworth Herald lamented the misfortune of a nation where “10,000,000 people have caught the infection of unprofitable trifling”, estimating the loss of productive American labour to crosswords at roughly five million hours per day.6 In the UK, so much damage had been inflicted by ham-thumbed solvers on the dictionaries of Wimbledon that all such reference works were withdrawn from public access.7 Thesaurus sales skyrocketed while library use crashed.8 By the time Vladimir Nabokov published the first Russian krossword in 1924, the Nottingham Evening Post’s “world at large” estimation was quite right: the grid truly had run a girdle around the earth.

Murder on the Rocks: Gray Whale Inn Mysteries, No. 1

by Karen MacInerney

I love mysteries of all types, but especially cozy mystery series like this. They usually revolve around a quaint rural setting, with quirky characters, and special food. What more could you ask for? – Douglas

Innkeeper Natalie Barnes has traded in Texas heat for Maine's tangy salt air and risked her life savings on the Gray Whale Inn, a quaint bed and breakfast on bucolic Cranberry Island. She loves her new life of picking blueberries, watching the lobster boats putter around the island, and whipping up buttery muffins and other rich breakfast treats for her guests... until Bernard Katz checks in.

The overbearing land developer plans to build a resort next door... right on top of a colony of endangered black-chinned terns. Worried about the birds--not to mention the sweet little town and the Gray Whale Inn's survival--Natalie speaks out at the town meeting, letting the whole island know what she thinks of the entitled developer. But the town board sides with Katz, greenlighting the resort... and the possible end to both her Maine island paradise and the inn she's gambled everything to buy. Just when it seems like things can't get any worse, Natalie finds Katz dead on the cliffs next to the inn. Now the police--and much of the island--are convinced the recent Texas transplant is a murderer.

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