hudebnik

gardening

Mon, 06 Apr 2026 01:45:16 GMT

'Tis Spring! 'Tis Spring!

Stopped at Home Depot yesterday and picked up 3 bags of "raised bed soil". Applied one of them, and a bunch of microclover seed, to the little patch of torn-up ground between our new driveway and the next door neighbors' new driveway. Applied some microclover seed, but no commercial soil, to the larger patch of less-torn-up ground between our new driveway and the other next-door neighbors' old driveway. At Home Depot, also picked up two Thai-chili-pepper plants, four potted hyacinths, and three pots of miscellaneous Violaceae. Planted the pepper plants and the hyacinths before it started to rain.

Raining again today. I started three kinds of basil seeds (lemon, lime, Thai) in wet soil in a plastic egg carton, to be transplanted to the front yard once they're big enough. Mail-ordered some holy-basil seeds, which we appear to be out of. Meanwhile, shalmestere started some morning-glory seeds and some cypress-vine seeds in between wet paper towels. Mail-ordered two other kinds of basil seeds and some cilantro seeds.

When it stopped raining, I put some bagged soil into the window-boxes in the back yard, and beat back or trimmed a bunch of raspberry canes, then planted about a dozen sugar-snap-pea seeds in the window-boxes. I want to put in mini-watermelons, interspersed with sugar-snap-peas in the window-boxes, and bush beans in the front yard, but there's a chance of freezing this Wednesday so I want to wait until after that.

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Toughness as a goal

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 14:54:32 GMT

Good discussion by three Times writers makes the point that most of the Trump administration has no strategic goals, whether in the Iran war or in domestic policy. They don't think about what they want to achieve in the long run, but instead concentrate on the tactical question of how they can act right now. Trump's entire career has been based on creating an image of success, strength, and winning, and that's all he can think about, not what he wants to win.

Trump and Hegseth haven't made clear why they're at war in Iran (or anywhere else), much less how to do it. For both of them, killing people and blowing things up in war aren't means to an end, but the end itself; that's how you demonstrate how strong you are.

In immigration policy, they haven't made clear why they need to get rid of millions of immigrants, only that using more force is always better.

"It is core to the ethos and world view of MAGA that, on problem after problem after problem, the underlying mistake of previous administrations is that we were never tough enough.... We haven't been punitive enough, we haven't tried to bully people enough.... We have to pummel people harder. That works with Republican members of Congress, but it doesn't work with other sovereign nations, because they don't like to be pummeled, and they will find a way to stop the pummeling, and it's not always the way you want.... It's not as if nobody thought of 'Well, why don't we use force?' before."

Related, Jamelle Bouie points out that since Trump doesn't entirely believe that other people exist or have their own interests and volition, he's completely taken off-guard whenever one of his opponents fails to follow his script. Who could have predicted that Iran, under attack by the US and Israel, would start attacking ships in the Strait of Hormuz? Who could have predicted that criminal charges against everybody who's ever investigated or disobeyed Donald Trump would be fought, and would fail, in court? Who could have predicted that killing one Supreme Leader would lead to another one, younger, healthier, and more-extreme, taking his place? Who could have predicted that the Democrats in the Senate would make funding for DHS conditional on ICE and CBP acting like professional law-enforcement agencies? Answer: anyone who tries to put himself in his opponent's shoes could have predicted these things.

Every real military leader has heard the lesson "The enemy always gets a vote". It may work for a real estate promoter to paint a glowing picture of how wonderful things are going to be, get the check signed, and hope that people never notice that the glowing picture didn't happen, or that they dismiss it as "well of course the promoter made things sound wonderful; that's what they do." But when you tell people in March that the pandemic will be over by Easter, and it kills a million Americans in the next year, that's harder to hide. And when you're facing an actual sentient opponent who has a strong vested interest in not following your script, it becomes even harder to hide.

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Memory care

Fri, 03 Apr 2026 13:03:49 GMT

As I was walking the dogs Tuesday I encountered a delivery man and a neighbor talking to an elderly woman sitting on her walker (not quite a wheelchair, but it has a seat so you can stop and rest). The guys asked if I knew the woman and where she lived, because she was lost and couldn't remember. I didn't, but came over to help, and the woman happily scritched Bailey while we discussed the problem. She said "they" didn't want to let her leave the building, but this was the third time she had "escaped". The neighbors and I discussed the conflict between safety and autonomy, and how a senior-care institution's top priority is always "don't get sued", with resident quality of life way down the list.

She had a small purse, and went through it looking for ID cards and the like, so we found her full name (Lori <redacted>), but no address. There was a name and phone number of her friend Sarah, so we called that number and got no answer. (At some point in here shalmestere came out of the house and took our dogs home.) There was a prescription for physical therapy, so we called the doctor's office, gave the name, and asked where she lived. The receptionist probably violated HIPAA rules by giving us Lori's address, which was miles away in Flushing, and we were pretty sure Lori hadn't walked all that distance. The receptionist also called Lori's emergency contact, who turned out to be the same Sarah, but this time Sarah's partner answered the phone. Turns out the address the doctor's office had given us was Sarah's address, not Lori's, but Lori lived at such-and-such other address, a senior-care home four blocks away from us, which I had walked past at least a thousand times.

So with that resolved, I accompanied Lori on the four-block walk to the senior-care home; I commented on the beautiful spring weather and suggested she not try to go for a walk in the neighborhood when it's cold or raining. We had a pleasant talk along the way (and met several other people's dogs, which Lori happily scritched), got to the front door, and Lori remarked on how much it looked like the building where she lived. She sat down in the lobby, the receptionist said "Hi, Lori!", and Lori asked "Wait -- how does she know me?" Anyway, once things seemed to be in the receptionist's capable hands, I told Lori how much I had enjoyed talking to her, and walked home.

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The economics of renewable energy

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:18:43 GMT

In case anyone hasn't seen it,

I watched a discussion last week between Paul Krugman and some energy analyst who pointed out that if wind, solar, and battery technology keep improving at the current rate for another twenty years, they'll be so cheap we'll be saying "what do we do with all this electricity?" A world in which usable energy is not scarce -- not only has that never happened in US history, not in human history, but not even in the history of life on Earth. And we could easily live to see it.

And thank you, Donald Trump, for pushing the world in that direction. Prices of gasoline, diesel, fertilizer, etc. will drop slightly when the shooting stops in Iran (whenever that is), but newly-flowing oil through the Strait of Hormuz won't reach its destinations for at least a month after that, and oil wells that were shut down due to the war won't be fully up and running for at least a month, and it'll take at least a year to rebuild the physical damage to wells and refineries done by the war. So those prices won't return to "normal" for at least a year.

This war has made clear to every nation on Earth (except the US) that depending on fossil fuels is a sucker's game, making your economy hostage to random events and unpredictable autocratic states like Russia, Iran, and the United States. The nations that have made the most progress reducing their dependence on fossil fuels (Iceland, Tajikistan, Costa Rica, Norway, Sweden, China, Paraguay, Ethiopia, Denmark, France, Switzerland, New Zealand, UK, Germany, El Salvador, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan...) will thrive in the coming year, and those that haven't will scramble to catch up. If Donald Trump is still President, the US will be one of the last nations to acknowledge this reality; we'll be last in line to buy the technology from the Chinese (since we stopped building it ourselves) while the rest of the world enters a golden age of abundance.

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message to students

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 12:04:55 GMT

At yesterday's No Kings protest rally, I was approached by a reporter who wanted to take photos of my sign, and then wanted to (briefly) interview me. He was from Baruch College -- perhaps from a student newspaper, although he looked a bit old for a college student -- and after I mentioned that I had been a college professor for twenty years myself, he asked "In closing, do you have any message for college students? Or students in general?" I came up with something vaguely coherent on the spur of the moment, but now that I've had more time to refine and structure it, here's approximately what I wanted to say.

We're here protesting to preserve and restore democracy. Democracy is not about agreement -- if everybody agreed on everything, there would be no need for a government -- but rather about how we resolve disagreements. If you cancel people from your life every time they disagree with you on any issue, you won't have many friends or allies. And although President Trump thinks otherwise, you can't get much done without friends and allies. You have to be able to work with people on the areas where you agree, while recognizing that there are other areas where you don't, and that's OK.

I've heard of college students complaining "I'm being forced to listen to things that I don't agree with." To which I would answer "Oh, good! That's why you're here!" If you leave college with exactly the same opinions and beliefs you had when you arrived, you've wasted four years and a lot of money. You are in college to be exposed to ideas you don't already agree with, to understand what they say, to wrestle with those ideas, to understand how somebody could possibly believe them. If after all that you still reject them, fine -- you've rejected them based on actual understanding. But another possibility is that you'll find some value in them, perhaps even change your mind about an idea you thought was wrong. Even if you don't end up changing your own opinion, you'll better understand the people on "the other side". And when you understand the people on the other side, it's harder to see them as sub-humans, as implacable enemies to be destroyed before they destroy you; they're really just human beings who agree with you on some things and not on others.

Anyway, after the reporter walked away, a guy named Tim walked up and introduced himself. He explained that he despised Donald Trump as a human being for his corruption, his toddler temper tantrums, his lies, etc. but he also "detested the Left". I wasn't sure what he meant by "the Left", so I asked.

He answered "All the 'abolish ICE' stuff, the 'open borders'...".

"Well, as long as we have immigration laws, we'll need an agency to enforce them. That agency may or may not be named ICE, which is actually only about twenty years old."

"Oh yeah, it was INS before that."

"Right. A majority of all current ICE officers were hired in the last year, and it's changed from a professional law-enforcement agency to a bunch of hired thugs personally loyal to Trump. They've had a huge hiring push, lowered their hiring standards, and a lot of the older more experienced officers have left because this isn't the agency they signed up for. So there's a reasonable question whether ICE can be reformed, or whether it has to be shut down and rebuilt from scratch.

Of course, we haven't always had immigration laws. The first ones were about 1870, and they were explicitly racist: the 'Chinese Exclusion Act' and things like that. It's only since something like the 1960's that immigration has been based on objective criteria other than race and nationality. And yes, there are people suggesting we should go back to open borders, but they're mostly libertarians rather than liberals. They have some interesting arguments that are worth listening to, but 'open borders' isn't generally a liberal thing."

"Well, during the Biden administration we had this flood of people claiming asylum, and no country can handle that many people coming in all at once."

"Yes, asylum is a problem. The law says you cross the border legally, immediately turn yourself in to an immigration agent, and request asylum. They're supposed to interview you immediately to find out whether you have a plausible claim for asylum, and if so, you can stay in the US temporarily while waiting for your hearing. Which is supposed to be in a few weeks, but currently there's a backlog of years, because there aren't enough immigration judges to hear all the cases. The obvious solution would be to hire more immigration judges, but Republicans don't want to do that: in fact, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last year provided enormous amounts of money for immigration enforcement, but it put a ceiling on how many immigration judges they could hire. It's as though elected Republicans want asylum cases to drag on for years, want millions of people in the US sorta-legally but without permanent status. And they tend to lump asylum seekers in with 'illegal immigrants' even though people awaiting asylum hearings, by definition, are those who followed the law."

"That's what this is really about. I just want people to enter the country legally. Why don't they do that?"

"Great question. Suppose you're a guy in Colombia or Peru or someplace, you've studied the US, you believe in what it stands for, and you want to come here legally, work hard, and make a better life for yourself and your family. How would you do it?"

"That's exactly the kind of person I would want to come here. That guy should go to the US consulate or embassy in his country and ask how to proceed."

"Right, that's how you would ask the question. What do you think the answer would be? Because there really aren't a lot of ways to get into the US legally.

One way is if you've already got a job offer from a US company that's willing to pay for your visa. Joe Schmoe in Colombia probably doesn't have that.

Another way is if you've got close relatives who are already established in the US, they've lived here for a couple of years and they're financially self-sufficient enough to take care of you until you're financially self-sufficient too. Joe Schmoe in Colombia probably doesn't have that either, and Trump is trying very hard to shut that program down.

Another way is refugee status, which takes years of vetting and background checks before the State Department approves you to come to the US, and you have to be documentably a refugee from political persecution or natural disaster or something. And Trump is trying very hard to shut it down. In fact, on his first day in office in 2025, he suspended all refugee admissions: people who had already been approved by the State Department, people who were already at the airport to come to the US, people who were already on airplanes.... There's an annual ceiling on how many people are allowed to claim refugee status: in 2022-2025 it was 125,000, but for 2025-2026 Trump lowered it to 7,500, with most of those slots reserved for white South Africans.

Then there's asylum, which we already talked about. Trump is trying very hard to shut it down.

And there's the diversity lottery, which really is a lottery you have a tiny chance of winning, and Trump is trying very hard to shut it down.

There just isn't a path for 'I want to go to the US legally, work hard, and build a better life for myself and my family.'"

He actually got in more words than that, but I have to admit I did most of the talking. Anyway, we had a fairly pleasant and substantial conversation.

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Another protest march

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 22:13:50 GMT

We were planning to go to the "No Kings" march in midtown Manhattan today, but shalmestere has been dealing with persistent leg pain (behind the left knee) for several days, it was still in evidence this morning, and she decided that standing and walking slowly for several hours on asphalt might not be a good idea. So I went stag to a smaller march in walking distance of home. However, the smaller one started several hours earlier, and the "march" portion of it was over by the time I arrived; it had become a "rally" in front of the county courthouse, with a variety of elected officials, clergy, and musical groups.

There were two "No Kings" specific songs at the rally. One, No Kings in the USA, was new to me; the recording includes a bunch of apparently-famous musicians I've never heard of. The other I had first heard a day or two earlier when one of its writers, John Forster (whom we know through the local chapter of the American Recorder Society), e-mailed us a video. The other co-writer was Tom Chapin, and the video has cameos by a couple of other Chapins, Noel Stookey, Jon McCutcheon, Christine Lavin, Judy Collins, and a bunch of other musicians whose names I didn't recognize. The song is days or weeks old, and in a fitting example of the folk process, people at today's rally were already changing the words: the chorus became "No kings! No kings! in Queens".

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Back from the wars

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 01:39:48 GMT

And I do mean "wars" plural: we spent the weekend at the Military Through the Ages timeline event, which had military units ranging from classical Greek and Roman through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, through recent wars like Desert Storm, and current National Guard. Our group, La Belle Compagnie, presents an English knight's household in the Hundred Years' War.

The show takes place every spring at Jamestowne Settlement, in Williamsburg, VA. Which is some distance from our home in New York City. When we were younger and foolisher, we would drive it straight through (particularly if I had classes to teach on Monday), but this year I took Friday and Monday as vacation days, packed the car on Thursday, hit the road Thursday about 8 PM, and spent Thursday night at a motel in Maryland. (We would have hit the road earlier, but when we closed the garage door we realized that the newly-poured concrete floor was a fraction of an inch higher than the old floor, so the door didn't go quite as far down, so the latch no longer latched. So with the car completely packed and shalmestere sitting in the front seat, I went back into the house, grabbed some tools, and moved the latches up half an inch so I could lock the garage.) Anyway, we got to the site around 3 PM Friday, set up our pavilion and trestle-tables, and drove to the hotel a few miles away where La Belle Compagnie had reserved a couple of adjacent suites.

shalmestere and I portray household servants in the knight's household, hired for (among other things) our musical talent (our boss is rich, but not rich enough to hire servants just to play music), and we normally spend most of a show demonstrating c1400 musical instruments and repertoire for the public.

A month or two ago we were wondering what "new" we could bring to this year's show. We didn't have any new instruments suitable for a 1415 camp. There were a couple of two-part musical pieces we'd been learning recently, but they weren't off-book so we hadn't been performing them at living history shows (modern sheet music and music stands would Not Look Right). So we've been practicing them after dinner to memorize them. We'll look at the last few measures, then close our eyes and play them. Once we've got that pretty solid, we'll add the previous musical phrase, and play from that through the end with our eyes closed until it's pretty solid. And so on until we've reached the beginning of the piece. We got one of them (entitled either "Petrone" or "Retrove", depending on how you read the paleography, from the Robertsbridge keyboard ms) to the point that we played it a couple of times during the weekend. There were a few memory slip-ups, but no crash-and-burn-and-start-over episodes. Another piece from the Robertsbridge codex has no title so we call it "Robertsbridge Thingie", and we haven't quite got it good enough to try to perform off-book.

And we did the usual spiels and demonstrations involving recorder, pipe-and-tabor, shawm, citole, fyddel, and harp. I think two visitors asked me about medieval musical notation, and I restrained myself to about twenty minutes on that topic. And one asked me about the difference between twelve-tone and pentatonic scales, which led into a discussion of tuning and temperaments and difference tones, and then another member of the group who's a voice-technique professor chimed in with some comments about reinforcing overtones, and then we got into solfegge syllables (the visitor had grown up with shape-note music, so he knew some of the syllables, but had no idea that they came from a Latin chant).

Anyway, the whole weekend had pretty good weather, and a decent flow of visitors asking questions. It was warm-ish on Saturday, and warmer on Sunday, but I can put up with that as long as we don't have to pack out wet, and we didn't. The event closed to the public at 5 PM Sunday, our group was off-site by 7:00, and we all went to a Chinese buffet (where we swapped stories of "the weirdest question anybody asked you") before hitting the road to our respective homes. We had the longest drive (the voice professor had driven from Iowa, but I don't think he planned to drive back there immediately), so we got home around 3:30 PM Monday. Unpacked the car, cleaned a few things, put a few things away, went through the mail, etc. I think we'll sleep well tonight.

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spring appears to be happening this year

Mon, 09 Mar 2026 12:55:47 GMT

Temperatures were in the 60's Fahrenheit much of yesterday, and almost all the snow is melted. Had a nice long walk in the park with the dogs, and on the way home we saw the first buds of snowdrops (in somebody else's lawn) and crocuses (in ours).

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spring appears to be happening this year

Mon, 02 Mar 2026 12:55:52 GMT

Snow has been melting rapidly for the past few days, although today's temperature isn't expected to get above freezing. The car is basically free of snow, I think, although I haven't actually tried moving it. The front yard and the sub-lawns are still snow-covered, but only a foot or less deep in most places. A week from now it's supposed to be in the 60's °F. I haven't seen any crocuses or snowdrops yet, but I think it's actually happening.

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War again, war again, jiggity jig

Sun, 01 Mar 2026 01:27:20 GMT

So some time last night the United States started bombing Iran, without (of course) Congressional authorization or UN authorization or any kind of imminent, sudden threat other than "they're not showing us the submissive respect we deserve at the negotiating table". The Supreme Leader, Khamenei, has reportedly been killed (although that's just what the Trump administration says, cum libra salis), and Trump is exhorting the Iranian military to "lay down your weapons" and the Iranian people to "take over your government", assuring them that "the people of America have your backs". If anything would get the people of Iran to support their government, it would be the knowledge that America wanted them to overthrow it.

As the New York Times points out,

there's nobody for the Iranian military to surrender their weapons to,

there are 90 million Iranian people, and no obvious way to decide which of them should "take over the government", since there is no prominent, recognized opposition party, and

the traditional ways that the US government has communicated with the people of oppressive regimes, such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (which includes the Persian-language Radio Farda), were all shut down or de-staffed by DOGE a year ago.

In short, he's apparently decapitated an autocratic regime with no realistic plan for what should come next. Is anyone surprised?

My bet for "what comes next?" is either (a) some prominent assistant to Khamenei quickly steps into his shoes, and nothing changes domestically, as in Venezuela, or (b) Iran has at least a few months of anarchy and feuding among rival warlords before one of them beats the rest and becomes the new autocrat.

And I bet Trump would be fine with either of those outcomes, as long as the eventual ruler of Iran shows proper obeisance to Trump.

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weather

Mon, 23 Feb 2026 05:13:35 GMT

As of Saturday morning, there was a blizzard warning scheduled from Sunday 6 AM to Monday 6 PM, with 12-18" expected.

By Sunday morning, the blizzard warning had been postponed to 1 PM, total accumulation still 12-18".

By 1 PM, there were a few flakes of snow in the air, but nothing "blizzardy".

Around 5 PM, I went out to clear the walk, and I wasn't sure whether to use a shovel or a push-broom. I chose the push-broom, but by the time I was done with the front and back walks, it was becoming clear that I should have used a shovel.

Around 11 PM, I went out to clear the walk. There were about 7" on the ground, but light and fluffy. I cleared the front steps, the walk to the sidewalk, and the sidewalk in front of our property; didn't get to the back sidewalk or the walk between the houses. This was enough to take the dogs out for their bedtime walk. It's still snowing steadily, so by morning it will probably be impossible to tell where I shoveled.

UPDATE, 8:30 AM: Just shoveled another 8-9" from the front steps, walk, and sidewalk. Haven't gotten to the back sidewalk or the walk between the houses. It's still reasonably light and fluffy, but sticking to the shovel; need to apply some baking spray. And it's still coming down steadily.

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weather and cars and stuff

Tue, 17 Feb 2026 12:00:11 GMT

We had a substantial snowfall on Jan. 25. I shoveled the front walk and steps four times, and the back sidewalk twice, in 24 hours.

Around the 28th (or was it the 1st?), I shoveled a path from the back door to the garage, and from the garage to the back sidewalk, in order to take out the trash, recyclables, and compostables and leave them on top of a snowdrift adjacent to the street behind the house. They didn't get picked up that day, but by the next week my next-door neighbor (whose stuff had also not been picked up) had shoveled out a section of said snowdrift so he could put his trash, recycling, and composting bins on pavement adjecent to the street behind the house, and I put mine in the same bare patch.

On various occasions in the first ten days of February, I did some shoveling around the car, hoping to have it freed by the time we needed to use it. So by Saturday the 14th, when we needed the car to drive to a Recorder Society meeting, the car was not embedded in snow, and indeed the pavement around it was dry. We moved the car for the first time in three weeks. Naturally, by the time we got home, my carefully-shoveled parking space had been occupied by another car, but I found an empty space only two or three spaces away, and grabbed it.

On Sunday the 15th, I finally shoveled out the rest of the path between our house and the next-door neighbor's, so we could walk from the back sidewalk to the front steps without climbing over snowdrifts.

On Sunday night into Monday morning, we got another inch or two of snow. By the time I got up, the front and back sidewalks had both been cleared by neighbors with snow-blowers, so I only had to deal with the front walk, steps, and the path between the houses, which didn't take long. And I was able to move the car back to the space in front of our house.

It's supposed to be relatively warm this week, with highs in the 40's Fahrenheit and a rainfall or two to melt the snow. Then more snow next weekend; it remains to be seen how much will fall, how much will stick.

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baking bread

Sat, 14 Feb 2026 21:02:27 GMT

Following up on this post...

Following the directions from KAF, I made a stiff levain (2:1 flour:water, with a little bit of starter) Thursday evening and left it to rise for 12 hours or so, by which time it had roughly doubled in volume and was noticeably softer -- soft enough to stick to the plastic container a bit, but firm enough that I could pull it out in one piece. Made a loaf of dough on Friday, but just when it was ready for a final rise before baking, we had to leave the house for a Gesualdo concert. (Which was very well done musically; the theatrical aspects may have been well done too but we couldn't see much of them.) So I formed a loaf in a loaf pan, stuck it in a 2-gallon ziploc bag, and left that in the fridge overnight.

Around 2 PM Saturday, I put the loaf pan (in which the loaf had risen significantly) in a soaked Romertopf and put that into a cold oven, turning the thermostat to 450°F and setting a timer for 50 minutes. At that point the top of the loaf looked done, but the bottom and sides didn't, so I turned off the oven and gave it another ten minutes without the Romertopf and the loaf pan. Cut two slices for the "hot out of the oven" experience, then put it back in the still-cooling oven for another 20-30 minutes, as it looked fairly moist in the middle of the freshly-cut surface. Tasty, though.

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baking bread

Wed, 11 Feb 2026 13:24:21 GMT

Last week I decided to give up on my current sourdough starter, which was smelling alarmingly vinegary and not rising much, and order a new one from King Arthur. The new starter arrived Sunday, with a "care and feeding" pamphlet that suggested I didn't need to give up on the old one after all, just feed it better. Anyway, I had already thrown out the old starter, so I've been following the feeding instructions meticulously: at every feeding, discard (or use) 2/3 of the starter, leaving 50 g, and add 50 g of flour and 50 g of water. And it does smell nice, and it's been puffing up nicely in the crock.

Last night's batch of bread wasn't exactly light and fluffy, but less dense than the previous two, and not bad considering I'm still trying to make it high-protein and low-carb (using 2 eggs, 1-1/2 cups of water, 1-1/2 cups of white bread flour, a cup of whole-wheat flour, 3/4 cup of wheat gluten, 1/4 cup of flaxseed meal, and 1/8 cup of quinoa). I had the oven at 150°F for a few hours while the bread rose on the stovetop, then put the bread into a soaked Romertopf in the oven, and set the thermostat to 475°F and the timer to 45 minutes. It came out a little dark, so maybe 450°F for 50 minutes next time. And the recipe in the pamphlet for pain au levain, using only sourdough starter and no commercial yeast, has you amplify the 50 g of starter to a levain for 12 hours before adding anything else, which I haven't been doing. The levain is not at a 1:1:1 ratio of starter:water:flour, but a stiffer 1:2.5:5. Try that next time.

Speaking of "stiffer", one of the bread-baking books I've worked with in the past follows a different model of sourdough, allegedly based on the practice of people traveling to California in covered wagons: rather than growing it semi-liquid in a crock, you make it much stiffer into a baseball, wrapped tightly in two layers of handkerchief, and at each feeding, discard the outer crust and use the soft, spongy inner part. Haven't done that in a number of years.

Of course, the Romertopf approach to baking -- starting with a cold oven, as you'll crack the Romertopf by putting it cold-and-wet into a hot oven -- is inconsistent with the way bread ovens have worked for 98% of human bread-baking history: build a fire in the oven, get the floor and walls good and hot, pull out the fire and ash and put the bread in to bake as the oven gradually cools down. I've done the latter too, both in a modern gas oven and in a wood-fired brick oven, and that's another knob to tweak.

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Clothing sweatshop

Mon, 02 Feb 2026 04:24:28 GMT

Some time last summer we were invited to provide music at a Venetian Carnavale, a 16th-century-Italian SCA event in February. Now, we don't do a lot of 16th-century Italian, or 16th-century anything, but there's plenty of good music easily available, by people with names like Bassano, Gabrieli, Dalza, Palestrina, Monteverdi, Vecchi, not to mention all the English, French, and Flemish musicians who were working in Italy at the time. And the dance treatises of Negri and Caroso. So last fall shalmestere picked out a bunch of music and we had an all-day rehearsal to decide which pieces we liked best, which worked best with whom on which instrument on which part, etc. We'll probably add some more pieces with more and fewer parts, so we can have some of us playing while others eat, or have people from other ensembles sit in with us.

But there was the question of clothing. Naturally, we have The Tudor Tailor and Alcega and Patterns of Fashion and class handouts from various 16th-century clothing classes we've attended over the years, but it's all a little foreign to us. We decided that if we're "the hired band of minstrels", we should be dressed somewhat similarly, and since such hired bands in period seem to be all-male, our group are all wearing boy-clothes (despite two of us being genetically, anatomically, and socially female). In November or December we took an expedition to the Manhattan garment district and came home with some luscious shirtweight white linen, some luscious black linen for linings, and some luscious black wool for fashion layers. We've made poufy white shirts with cuffs and collars decorated with blackwork, redwork, and/or linen ruffles. We've (mostly) made Venetian-style poufy knee-britches. And we're in the middle of making cassocks, sorta. In most of the pictures, cassocks are crotch-length outer shirts, but the pictures of hired bands show people wearing short cloaks over cassocks, so we're cheating a little, conflating the cassock and the cloak by making the cassocks loose and thigh-length. And we are not making doublets; that sounded more fiddly than we wanted to deal with. Cutting and sewing all this stuff, from an era that we don't normally do, has been occupying much of our evenings and weekends. The clothes are looking good so far, but we're not sure where else we'll wear them after this event.

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Languages

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 15:01:34 GMT

In second grade I had French classes, so I learned a smattering of French then, but never continued it.

In high school I was asked to choose a language to study (the options being French, German, and Spanish); I decided rationally that Spanish was spoken by the largest number of people in the world, so I went that way, taking two years of Spanish in high school and a third year at the local community college (I really didn't like my second-year Spanish teacher, so when I walked into third-year and saw her there, I dropped the class).

In college I was advised that I should have some reading knowledge of German if I wanted to go to grad school in mathematics, so I took a year's worth of German classes. I forget whether that was before or after I went to Germany, Switzerland, and Austria briefly as a tourist.

In grad school I was (as predicted) required to pass reading-comprehension exams in two of French, German, and Russian, on grounds that mathematics research papers have traditionally been written in those languages. I picked French and German because they use familiar alphabets, have lots of cognates, and I'd already studied both of them a little. The reading-comprehension exams amounted to "here's a chapter of an undergraduate math textbook in Language X; come back with an English translation of it in a few weeks," and I passed both of them.

Later in grad school my advisor got funding for me to attend a month-long workshop with him in Prague. The University didn't offer classes in Czech, but there were self-study materials at the library, so I spent a few months before the Prague trip studying Czech, and impressed my advisor on our first day there by walking into a convenience store and saying "Dvacet listeky, prosim" ["twenty mass-transit tickets, please"]. (One ticket cost 4 kroner, or about fifty cents, and would get you on the street-car; two would get you on the faster subway that only served a few places in the city.)

Around 2020 shalmestere installed DuoLingo on her phone and tried to learn some Irish, in honor of her Irish ancestry, but "it made her brain hurt"; she switched to Welsh (where she also has ancestry) and had a better time.

In summer 2022 we visited Wales, so a few months earlier I installed DuoLingo on my phone and we both tried to learn Welsh (not that one needs to speak Welsh to be a tourist there, but it's always cool to learn another language). I can still say things like "Ydy Bailey eisiau mynd am dro?" ["does Bailey want to go for a walk?"]

In Spring 2024 we visited Spain, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying Spanish in DuoLingo. My high school Spanish came back pretty well, and things mostly made sense to me. There are words that according to all the rules should be masculine but are actually feminine, or vice versa, but those are rare.

In Fall 2025 we visited France and Belgium, so a few months earlier we both switched to studying French in DuoLingo, and are still working on that. My grade-school French did not come back so well, though there are lots of helpful cognates, and I stumble over my tongue whenever there's a pronunciation exercise. And I'm reaching the conclusion that I Do Not Like French; it's almost as irrational and unpredictable as English. I'm still having trouble remembering which nouns are which gender (not an issue in English), and which adjectives go before the noun and which after it (not an issue in English, although we have weird rules about in what order to put multiple adjectives), but the real bugbear is pronunciation.

The words "souvent" and "savent" are spelled similarly, but one is pronounced as two syllables and the other as one. Can you guess which is which? Apparently the "ent" ending is silent in verbs, but not in adverbs, or something like that.

The words "aller", "allez", "allé", "allés", "allée", and "allées" are all forms of the verb "to be", which is somewhat irregular in most languages (including French and English), but irregularity isn't the problem here. All six of these words are spelled differently, any one would be grammatically incorrect if substituted for any of the others, and all six are pronounced identically. The phrases "Il court" and "Ils courent" ["he runs" and "they run"] are pronounced identically, as are the feminine equivalents "Elle court" and "Elles courent" (I got a listening exercise wrong in DuoLingo by guessing the wrong one).

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weather

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 13:53:30 GMT

I spent academic year 1992-1993 at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg. For those who don't know, Winnipeg is pretty much due north of Minneapolis. When you see a weather map of the US with temperature contours, there's always a dip in the upper Midwest, and if you follow that dip across the Canadian border, it's centered on Winnipeg. Winnipeg has four seasons: four months of mild summer, six months of cold winter, and a month each of spring and fall. The year I was there, the temperature dropped below freezing some time in October or November, reached -40° (the point where Fahrenheit and Celsius agree) one night, and didn't get above freezing for an instant until March or April; there was still snow in the shadows of large trees when we danced the sun up on May Day. Which is sorta nice: there isn't the repeated thaw-and-freeze cycle that turns pavement to pot-holes in more-temperate places, and the snow was mostly still white in March. People adapt: the downtown shopping district is connected by underground tunnels so you can shop all day without stepping outdoors, and the University campus is likewise connected by underground tunnels so I could go to my office, the library, the cafeteria, and classes without putting on my coat. Many bus stops are enclosed and heated, and even in 1992 every bus stop had a phone number you could call telling you when the next bus in each direction would be there, so you could plan to get there a minute or two before.

On Jan. 23, the outside temperature in NYC was above freezing, but I don't think that has happened since. It snowed, about a foot, on Jan. 25, and that snow is still white (albeit crusty from a brief period of "wintry mix"). The temperature is forecast to edge up to freezing at mid-day for Candlemas and the next two days, then not again until at least Valentine's Day; we have single-digit-Fahrenheit lows most nights. Last night the bedtime dog-walk was at 5°F, which is -15° in civilized units. Although it wasn't windy, so it felt about the same as the breezier afternoon dog-walk. This sort of cold is not un-heard-of in NYC, but it's rare.

At my mother's home in Greenville, SC, they're getting several inches of snow today.

At my father's home in Louisville, KY, there's no snow falling but it's 10°F.

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Sun, 25 Jan 2026 14:28:22 GMT

Woke this morning to snow on the ground, and still falling. Around 8:45, put my breakfast on to simmer and went out to shovel. There was about 3" of fine, powdery snow on the ground, easy to shovel, so I did the front steps, the walk to the sidewalk, and our sections of front and back sidewalks, then came inside to eat.

Steel-cut oats, with a dribble of maple syrup in the cooking water, "allayed up with yolkes of eyroun", and a nice red grapefruit half. Yum.

Update, 1:00 PM: there was another 6" of fine, powdery snow everywhere I had shoveled before. Shoveled again.

Update, 2:15 PM: it's no longer snowing, but raining and/or sleeting. Yuck.

Update 5 PM: shoveled another 4-5" of heavier, wetter snow.

Update midnight: there's another two inches or so on the ground; haven't shoveled it yet except for a path from the back door to the back sidewalk, which I hadn't shoveled at all yet. This was annoying because I was sleepy, because I was shoveling the full depth all at once, and because of the slight crust on top.

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weather

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 14:34:08 GMT

It's currently 11°F outside, with a "feels like" of -5° and a forecast high of 18°. Should be warmer tomorrow and Monday, although still below freezing, while we get 10-14" of snow and sleet. Then it gets cold again, not venturing above freezing at least until Candlemas. Which I guess is good in that we don't get a melt-and-freeze cycle turning slush to ice, but there may be a layer of freezing-rain ice in the middle of tomorrow's snowfall. We've stocked up on various warm-and-hearty foodstuffs, and are charging battery packs in case there's a power outage.

If there's a power outage, the solar panels will automatically shut off to prevent zapping people working on the lines (we don't have a battery between us and the outside lines). The stove should work as long as we have matches to light it, unless the gas company is forced to turn off the gas. Opinions differ on whether the gas/steam boiler will continue to work: it's gravity-fed, and has a constantly-burning pilot light, so it would be capable of heating the house, but it's also controlled by an electric thermostat. Stuff in the freezer and refrigerator should stay cold as long as we don't open them, especially if the house gets cold. We have blankets and sleeping bags and dog-coats and candles and, if necessary, camping stoves. And no shortage of books :-)

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Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson

Sat, 10 Jan 2026 04:22:35 GMT

From the US Department of War (in 1945, before it was renamed the Department of Defense), a pamphlet directed to US military personnel:

https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

It's self-congratulatory wartime propaganda, of course, but it makes very clear that we can't assume fascism will never come to our shores, and must learn how to recognize it when we see it, even if it's wrapped in an American rather than a German, Italian, or Japanese flag.

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invasions and justifications

Sat, 03 Jan 2026 22:54:21 GMT

So some time last night President Trump, with no authorization from either Congress (so it violates the US Constitution and the War Powers Act) or the UN (so it violates the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory), sent air strikes and Special Forces into Venezuela, capturing and abducting President Maduro. There are cheers and dancing in the streets in Venezuela and in Venezuelan ex-pat communities, and defiant speeches from Maduro supporters about President Trump's illegal actions.

Naturally, members of Congress (mostly Democrats) have pointed out that only Congress can declare war, that previous Presidents' abrupt military actions against Iraq, Iran, Syria, Panama, Libya, etc. had at least a "temporary authorization for the use of force", and that any "emergency action" authority he might have with respect to Venezuela expired over a month ago, 90 days after he started the clock ticking by attacking an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela on Sept. 2.

And naturally, Trump responded by calling them "stupid, weak people" who "should be saying 'good job!' rather than 'gee, it might not be constitutional'." The Constitution and the rule of law are just bureaucratic obstacles in the way of strong men doing what needs to be done.

He might get away with this, politically, on the "ends justify the means" theory: "I got rid of a bad guy, so why are you quibbling about how many laws I broke in order to do it? Likewise, if I deport a gang member who sells illegal drugs, why are you quibbling about things like due process and evidence? As long as my targets are unsympathetic, I don't have to follow any rules. And once people are accustomed to the President not having to follow any rules, I can widen the definition of 'unsympathetic' to include anybody who criticizes or opposes me."

Thing is, Nicolas Maduro really is a bastard, a sadistic dictator, and a criminal who's used the levers of government to enrich himself and his cronies and steal an election he actually lost, his economic policies have been a disaster for his country, and the majority of the Venezuelan people despise him and will be happy to see him go. Is that a legal justification for the United States to unilaterally attack his country, kidnap him, and "run Venezuela" until it can conduct a proper election?

Come to think of it, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was also a bastard, a sadistic dictator, and a criminal who used the levers of government to enrich himself and his cronies and steal an election that he probably actually lost, his economic policies were a disaster for his country, and the majority of the Honduran people despised him and celebrated when he was convicted by a U.S. court and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug-smuggling. And Donald Trump gave him a complete pardon last month, with the justification that "he was treated very unfairly, just like the Biden administration treated a guy named Trump, and that didn't work out very well for them."

Come to think of it, Donald Trump is also a bastard, a sadistic (would-be) dictator, and a criminal who's used the levers of government to enrich himself and his cronies and (try to) steal an election he actually lost, his economic policies have been a disaster for his country, and the majority of the American people despise him and would be happy to see him go. So does that mean other countries have legal justification to attack the United States, kidnap him, and "run the United States" until it can conduct a proper election?

But I guess "legal justification" is a quaint, old-fashioned concept: the only justification you need is power. If you think you can get away with it, do it.

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Dream journal

Tue, 23 Dec 2025 13:24:30 GMT

shalmestere and I were staying at somebody's house, and took the opportunity to take a hike in the mountains (fairly arid and bare, perhaps southern California) starting just around the corner from the house. I had taken the same hike solo the day before and enjoyed it, but recalled that the maps in the guidebook weren't entirely clear, and there was no signage at all on the trail. Just as shalmestere started up the first hill, I realized that I hadn't put the shawms in the car, which was a problem as we would need them the next place we were going. I offered to go back to the house and get the shawms, but didn't want shalmestere to get lost before I could catch up with her, so I told her "if you get to an intersection of trails and it isn't absolutely clear which way to go, stop and wait for me." [Why we didn't just get the instruments after finishing the hike must be attributed to dream logic.]

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Leuven

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:23:28 GMT

Saturday we had reserved tickets to the M museum in Leuven, to make double-sure we didn’t miss the Leuven Chansonnier exhibit. So we took a train to Leuven (a 20-30 minute ride) and walked to the museum.

We needn’t have worried: the museum wasn’t crowded. M Museum is all about juxtaposing old and new: every room seemed to have Renaissance art alongside 20th or 21st century art on the same theme, or commenting on the Renaissance works. The first floor was given over to permanent collections (an impressive collection of Renaissance stuff, and I have no idea how impressive the modern collection was), while part of the second was “The Pursuit of Knowledge”, an exhibition about the 600-year history of KU Leuven that includes the Chansonnier.

I was uncertain how the museum would go about presenting the Leuven Chansonnier, which is after all a single object the size of a large wallet. The installation, entitled "Forty-Nine", set up a darkened room, with speakers on all sides and The Book partly open in a lit display case in the center, and played a recording of piece 49 from the Chansonnier (one of its 12 unica, pieces not known from any other source). On the front wall, five spots of light became the five performers on the recording — two singers, two lutes, and a vielle — with various digital manipulations done on their images. Effective.

Anyway, we saw a bunch of other stuff from the University’s collections -- fossils, 19th-century lab equipment, etc. -- before leaving the museum.

Stopped at the nearby Sintpieterskeerk, which houses Dietrich Bouts's famous and influential Last Supper, as well as a couple of other Bouts pieces.

Obligatory visit to the modern statue of a student having knowledge poured into its head, then walked back to the station for the train to Brussels. Got take-out Thai food and ate it in the room.

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Brussels

Mon, 22 Dec 2025 02:21:05 GMT

As planned, took a morning train from Tournai to Brussels (most of the stops were Not Silly).

As soon as we got out of the station, shalmestere spotted a poster with medieval drolleries advertising a museum exhibit. She took a photo of it, but we were more immediately concerned with finding our hotel. Which we did without much trouble; it involved walking past some homeless people and the like, but it was a straight shot from the station.

Then looked at the photo again, looked up the museum (KBR -- the Royal Library of Belgium) online, concluded it was an exhibition of medieval manuscripts around the theme of music, and decided this was What We Should Do Today.
Walked back to the station and just a bit past it to the exhibition. Which was indeed awesome.
The KBR's permanent collection includes 279 medieval manuscripts from the Dukes of Burgundy, including most of the famous collection of Queen Marguerite of Austria, and many of them were on display. Some of the musical connections were a stretch — "this is a really cool manuscript, and if you look at the drolleries in the inner margin of the recto page, one of them is an animal playing a harp" — but an excellent collection.

	Here's a page from the famous "Brussels" black-paper basse-danse manuscript, from which much of our knowledge of early basse-danse choreography (and a little knowledge of musical ornamentation) comes. I suspect this is actually a facsimile: the real manuscript is in this library, but I've been told it's extremely fragile (the dyes that turn paper black aren't good for its longevity), and what's in the display case is in excellent condition.
	Neumatic chant notation from the 8th century Antiphonary of Mont Blandin
	Neumatic chant notation from the 12th century Sacramentarium of Stavelot Abbey
	Marginal picture of a transverse-flute player (?)
	Marginal picture of a man pushing another man in a wheelbarrow (from Breviary of Louis de Male, 14c)
	A treatise on music, with drawings of musical instruments (14th century, Park Abbey). Includes a straight trumpet ("tuba" or "basoun"), a horn ("corn&o" or "horn"), a harp ("cithara" or "harp"), something that might be a citole, two recorders ("fistula" or "floyt"), and a snare drum ("tympanum" or [indecipherable]).
	Shepherds playing bagpipe, entertaining the hounds and the sheep
	An opening from (one of) the Chansonnier of Queen Marguerite of Austria
	A young 15th-century nobleman being shown the error of his lascivious ways (including music, hounds, everything that makes life fun)
	A 15th-century representation of the Guidonian hand
	A banquet scene, with alta capella playing from the gallery, from the Histoire de Charles Martel (1465)
	Another banquet scene, with alta capella playing from the gallery, from the Chroniques de Hainaut (1465)
	A tournament with an alta capella playing from the gallery (15c)
	A royal procession, with holy relics and an alta capella at the front, from Fleur des histoires, 15c
	Not a "manuscript", technically, but a four-part piece printed on a tablecloth for Marie of Hungary, 1548.

Back to the room. I took a bag of dirty socks and shirts to a nearby laundromat and, while waiting for the wash cycle, hunted for nearby grocery stores. Didn’t find much, but got some yogurt for breakfast-in-the-room. And we both have enough clean clothes to get through the end of the vacation, even if our flight is delayed.

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it's snowing

Sun, 14 Dec 2025 13:05:42 GMT

For the first time this year. (Technically, I saw a dusting of snow on the ground two days ago, on Thursday's bedtime dog-walk, but neither of us had seen it fall, and it was gone by morning.) There appears to be an inch or two on the ground now. Not much more is forecast to fall, so it's just enough to be pretty without posing a major heart-attack or navigation danger.

Yesterday afternoon I retrieved the snow shovel, ice-breaker, ice-melting-salt, and solar-powered Xmas-tree-looking sidewalk-lights from the garage, exchanging them for the leaf-rake, the soil-tilling morningstar, and the spade, none of which I think we'll need for a few months. The sidewalk-lights have been shoved into the ground, and all but one of them lit up successfully last night. Between those, the cone of white lights on the climbing-vine trellis in the front yard, and the fresh coat of snow, it actually looks like a proper Christmastime.

On the schedule for today: wrap Christmas presents, cook, eat, play some music, watch something seasonally appropriate on the tube.

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