Allegra – Page 65 – Allegra Sloman's blog

quiet day

2468 words, no kudos.

Yesterday: ran, emptied and reloaded the dishwasher, ran two loads of laundry and put all four loads away. Changed laundry detergents recently and I prefer the scent of the new stuff. I used to believe that my clothes wouldn’t fit in my closet and drawers and it turns out (after I took out the sheets I wasn’t using and put them in the hall closet) that I do. M I R A C O L O. Returned the rolling chair to my room. Cleaned a screen on the volcano. Watered plants. Made coffee and tea as soon as I got up.

Today: I have to go almost all the way downtown for a BP monitor test. Grr. I will be travelling by transit and I’m not looking forward. Need more bird seed. Time to REALLY get up, get going, etc. Happy International Women’s Day.

I keep thinking that Putin will get so mad he’ll set off a tactical nuke and say it’s Ukraine’s fault.

Some greek to go with the site branding

“As a student of philosophy, he was coarse and heedless in appearance, and his clothing was squalid”

-Philostratus, from the @sentantiq twitter account

and here’s something you don’t see every day on menus (found it yesterday while thinking about dinner):

If you don’t know what Cordyceps Militaris is, GOOD. That means you can ignore the next three sentences if you want to. It’s a fungus that grows on living, and then dead, insects. SHUDDER AND HURL. I am a very white person and I think there are a lot of perfectly edible things I can’t eat because I have culturally enabled squeamishness.

I found a new font called Truefesse yesterday (fesse meaning bum in french) and so I made this (Amelia script, also know as the Live, Love, Laugh font, is the handwriting font):

and here’s a list of Russian media outlets that died this past week per Alexey @ Meduza:

Gary Kasparov in 2014:

two medical appointments this week

One for the 24 hr bp monitoring, one for a check in at the doc, who’s FINALLY figured out that I have ADD. I could go on at length, but my own rants irritate me so I won’t.

I was hoping to see Mike this weekend to give him the gifts I got him but I never heard from him. People are just feeling like shit.

Jeff and I got dinner from D Roti Shak yesterday. There’s just something about their food that makes me happy… exactly the right amount of spice.

Kozak, a local Ukrainian restaurant which apparently has killer borscht, has a photo of Putin yelling, in the men’s urinal. It got shared on reddit.

I was supposed to get Alex for an overnight this weekend and it didn’t happen, and I was supposed to get a phone call to go swimming with the folks, and it didn’t happen. I’m assuming something screwed up with custody or someone wasn’t feeling well, but as I say, nobody’s telling me anything and I already call Katie more often than she probably wants to hear from me. Do I sound put out? Maybe a little, but I do remember just how hard it was to do ANYTHING when you have two kids to haul around. And I’m seeing Paul regularly so I hear about the kids and everyone sounds fine.

Started following Paul Blinkhorn from Time Team on Twitter and man I’m enjoying it. He’s a rabid lefty with a mouth on him like a token-sucker.

Very happy to report that Dave D is getting another poetry book published.

2309 words on the story. No kudos this am.

I’m going to make coffee and have leftover Trinidadian food for breakfast.

Tea and toast

Got wordle in three this morning, that was a pleasant surprise.

No writing yesterday but the blog.

I’m genuinely frightened by Putin’s war with Ukraine. The West seems clumsy footed and hesitant now the first sanctions have come through.

Poland and US are talking about warplanes for Ukraine. Once NATO sticks its toe in, an armed conflict across Europe seems more likely. I wake and sleep not knowing what to hope for.

Not too much about Ukraine

It’s terrible. The Russians are being indiscriminate with the bombings, but so are the Saudis and the Americans right now. The hypocrisy is thick as jam, and as sticky.

I think the next stage in my psychosocial development with respect to politics is to really examine how I am untrue both to my grandfather’s approach to other human beings, which should, since he was gentle and helpful, be a guide to me, and to my sparse and weedy ethics, infested as they are with my own version(s) of gender essentialism, ableism and libertarianism, not necessarily in that order on any particular day, and I’m sure in almost 20 years of doing this I’ve revealed enough of my other bigotries to hang myself twice, were such things possible.

I mean if I’m going to bust it back to first principles. Is it a material universe – the commonality of detectible ‘reality’ – or is it an imagined and engineered projection, taking place in real-time, or is it a natural phenomenon which one can interrogate without ever knowing the full truth of, or is it God’s Creation, or (all the Creation gods’ names)’s Creation or something else entirely? I mean, I know which way I play it, every time, but is it a material universe? Should it make a difference? Should I be ashamed that the best argument I’ve seen for it NOT making a difference was from Buddy, in Free Guy? Anyway, can’t have a philosophy without taking that one one.

Sorry about the late post, I had yet another disturbed night of sleep and when I went back to sleep I slept late, it’s now almost 10 am.

2249 words on story thus far. I think I’ll try and go back to finishing the landslide one.

Yesterday was wonderful.

We went to breakfast at IHOP (it was deserted), came back here for some TV. Paul called and we went for a walk in Fraser Foreshore (I masked, he didn’t, I drove) and I took my camera, secure in the knowledge and belief that I WOULD GET PICS for my mOm, and I sat in the appointed place at close to the regular hour, and Paul and I couldn’t even hear the tweety birds, let alone see them.

Much abashed, I trudged back to the car, grousing in a desultory way at Paul, and then I saw one of the other unofficial feeding stations and put down a handful of non salted raw Styrian sunflowers and next thing I know, there’s a chickadee in the bush on the other side of the trail making the excited food song, which is the same as their regular song but buzzier, louder and with an extra DEE in there. I had put away the camera.

So I got my disney princess moment, but didn’t get a picture. BIRDS YOU ARE ANNOYING. But cute.

CW Picture of Tom Lunderville; Paul and I went to Peggy’s after that, to pick up the hat that I gave Tom after wearing it for a while. Now I’m getting it back again. He ruint the crown but I’ll reblock it. We got tea and soup. We chatted for a long time. She’s in relatively good shape all things considered and coping as best she can with how different her life is now. We talked about Ukraine a bit.

We left to go pick up my library book from the main branch of New West Library (‘this is how you lose the time war’) and then came back to Geekhaus to eat – soup Peggy gave us and borscht and lentil soup. I also showed Paul some of the stuff online that I’ve been telling him about Ukraine.

Then I ran a couple of loads of laundry and napped and cleaned out the microwave. It was a lovely sunny day, and I’m glad I wrote about it, because I was happy yesterday and I needed a reminder.

Who am I fooling

Didn’t leave the house yesterday but I ran the dishes and a load of laundry. Jeff and I keystone kops’d the unloading, I wish someone had been taking video. I also mopped all the salt out of the boot tray.

Jeff left the house and returned with Swiss Chalet. Swiss Chalet has had a terrible hold on my palate ever since I visited my first resto on Yonge Street in 1980 or 81. I was working at the Delta Chelsea Inn – I was a baby, and somehow I ended up running the switchboard – an experience which made me believe it would be twenty years before I ever had the strength to be a manager again – and I’d shoot over there on breaks or go after my shift.

A couple of months back I learned to my horror that the only Swiss Chalet IN ALL OF BC was closing – it’s on Lougheed Highway, and since then we’ve made an effort to grab food from there any time we can. Jeff picked up meals for us yesterday and IT WAS SO GOOD. Then he told me that they are probably staying open and that was really good news. I want to live in a Burnaby that has Swiss Chalet. I’m not saying the food is fantastic, I’m just saying it’s a comfort to me.

While Jeff was out had a practice session so long my fingers are quite sore. ah well, if you don’t practice that’s what happens.

Talked to Paul on the phone; I read him a long twitter thread about how the Russian army didn’t rotate the tires on their armored vehicles and that’s why they can’t get through the mud (obvs more complicated than that). The big takeaway is that the Russian army is so corrupt they aren’t paying for spares or basic readiness maintenance and it’s showing in their performance. (Not so much in the south where they were more massed and the weather is better and the ground more solid.) There is also the problem of what the hell is going on with the Russian airforce. The Ukrainians are still just barely holding their own and given that the Russians have overwhelming superiority in numbers and equipment why don’t they have command of the air? Once again I’m thinking they just don’t have enough spares for operational readiness.

Go go dancers from the trendiest gay bar in Ukraine are now volunteering; the waggish comment on twitter was that we now have ‘battle twinks’. OKAY HE WAS CUTE but he’s got nuthin fer me.

A reminder that Ukraine is the second largest country on that landmass. It literally stretches from New York to the Great Lakes if you lay it on top of a map of NA.

Cried, just cried like a fool, when I saw the video of thousands of Berliners greeting Ukrainian refugees off the train so they could have a place to stay.

Too early for the kudos to come in (that’s around 3 am) but the story is at 2200 words. I’m going back to sleep, three and a half hours isn’t enough.

Not posting about Ukraine today

I’m not an expert and I have no special insight. I will say that I’m terrified for Odessa now. It’s not an entertainment, it’s a million refugees and counting and death, death, death and resistance. Please give money to refugee assistance if you can.

I have a library book to pick up today and intend to do some other wandering around New Westminster.

One kudo, word count on new story now stands at 2K.

My sleep is very disturbed, but my BP was 118/84 yesterday…. yay.

all roads lead to the Hague

New signage out of Ukraine

Sleep’s messed up

Off to the library to pick up a book I reserved in July, lol. I was, like, 85th in line.

Galileo drew these after his first glimpse of a moon through a telescope.

The Ukrainian tax office, taking a leaf from its comedian president, has issued a statement about the tax implications of acquiring a Russian tank. Don’t worry, they assure the populace; by the time you get it, it’s not worth much (implication being that it’s been blown to pieces) and it’s not considered a taxable good. Full marks for straight faced ludic nonsense.

More reports of Russians refusing to fight, but the big news is the lengthy file of tanks, half tracks and trucks going into Kyiv, and not moving. Apparently supply is an issue, but what I keep hearing is that Russian boys are holing their gas tanks for the privilege of staying put.

The Russian military is using vacuum bombs (thermobaric bombs) on civilian areas. Mostly people have evacuated but not everyone can. These are bombs that basically turn everything to mush and fix it so even if you’re protected by a wall or building your lungs get mushed.

Reports are overwhelming that Black people who were going to school in Ukraine (a popular destination for med and engineering students from Africa) are being refused entry, food and medical attention at the Polish and Romanian borders. Some of the stories are nauseating and heart-wrenching.

One of the self-funded reporters in Kyiv is a Black man from Chicago, Terrell Jermaine Starr. The amount of racist abuse he’s getting in Kyiv (there are civilians with guns everywhere in town and Ukraine is just as racist as anywhere else) is still less than the fucking bullshit that racist armchair pundit warriors are giving him on twitter. Anyway, we’re into our seventh day of the invasion, and he says he has PTSD already and people MOCKED HIM. Like wtf you got brain maggots er what? If someone shoved a gun in my face I’d be unhappy, and if ten seconds later that gun went off (not pointed at me) because the civilian left the safety off, that would definitely fix me for not sleeping soundly for the next little while.

1594 words so far on the new story, one little kudo last night on the second last story.

Must finish leftovers! No more cooking til leftovers done!!

A link to Zelenskyy dancing with his comedy troupe in black pleather (as a parody, apparently) has caromed around the internet. Here’s the translation, scanged from u/viciuniversum on reddit, unitalicized words in brackets are the translator’s, italicized words in brackets are my explanatory notes:

“Let’s pour a shot of martini
Bud’mo hey! (Cheers!) (Bud’mo, pron bood mor LITERALLY MEANS LET US BE can you imagine being from a country whose nominal drink clinking words are literally ‘let us be’????)
For freedom, for destiny, for truth!
Bud’mo hey!
One shot, two shots, three shots!
Bud’mo hey! You are gay!
For Yura, for Yulya, dulya [hand gesture] for Lyashko! (saints and heros and politicians of yore)

Here’s my bulava (Ukrainian weapon and traditional symbol of power, a short handled round mace) my brothers!
Tomorrow we go dancing against Moskovites (Russians)
We will dance Gopak (Ukrainian national dance, began in 16th century, men returning from battle would re-enact and perform feats like the balletic leaps the dance is known for. Dance is also popular in other slavic countries), we have the strength
Ukraine is not dead yet, as long as we keep drinking well:
Borsht, salo (smoked pig fat), onion, bread, moonshine,
Drink, and eat,
I drink, I drink, I drink!

Lovers,
Those who were sent here (spies),
They are covered in glitter,
We spit on them.
Artists, stylists, move aside [can’t tell]
Lip-stick, gay-parades, and in Rada (Ukrainian parliament) everyone is like that.
I don’t want to, I can’t, but for salo, let’s do it.

Here’s my bulava my brothers!
Tomorrow we go dancing against Moskovites
We will dance Gopak, we have the strength
Ukraine is not dead yet, as long as we have salo!
Borsht, salo, onion, horseradish, moonshine,
Drink, and eat,
I drink, I drink, I drink!

In like a very wet lion

March is coming in with (checks with weathercat Buster) YUP IT’S RAINING. Definitely more like a lion.

I think I owed you a Grecian urn, right mOm?

3300 yo Bronze Age pottery jar with an octopus motif. From Ialysos, Rhodes

I have learned from Tish’s latest letter that Terry will be here in July and he intends to bike back to Cornwall from here. Shoulda heard me squeal, oh how we shall feast him!!! Don’t you love it when guys pushing 70 with a broom just say FUCK TIME! I AM NOT IN YOU! This is a guy whose back was broken in a bike accident …. so he’s, you know, hard fucking core. I learn also that they are grandparents again; Peter and his s/o have had a little boy.

I learn from Leo and Linda that they have REALLY CUTE GRANDCHILDREN. I mean, I already knew, but damn. They are most sincerely cute.

DAY 6 of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine 2022 edition.

Belarusian hackers have messed up troop transports from Belarus. Précis of story:

The ‘Cyber Partisans’ group said that trains had been stopped in Minsk, Orsha, and Osipovichi due to them compromising the routing system and switching devices by encrypting the data on them.

Minsk is the capital and largest city. The Belarusians are going to feel like they’re being whipped at a cart-arse in hell for supporting Putin in this mess. No surprise to me that local hackers are making their sentiments known. Interestingly Anonymous is refusing to do infrastructure hits (such as this) because they figure there’s too much that can go wrong for civilians.

Now, for a little of the old BUT HOW IS THE WAR AFFECTING THE FOLKS AT HOME?

LOLOLOL you will remember the convoy of honkies which so exercised Ottawa and Centretown for three whole weeks until the Emergencies Act was levelled against them? Or perhaps the Ukrainian ‘conflict’ has shoved that recent outbreak of boils upon the body politic from your ever more easily distracted mind?

WELLLLLL, it turns out that when you turn off the rubles AT THE GLOBAL LEVEL, the flow of money AT THE GRANULAR LEVEL which allows the honkies to continue being complete fascist assholes STOPS and they collapse like the water critter in ‘The Abyss’, when the door closes. So the convoy which was supposed to go across the US had 6 trucks and is apparently disbanding. THIS MEANS THAT THE HONKIES IN DOWNTOWN OTTAWA WERE PARTYING ON PUTIN’S DIME.

NEVER

forget this. They weren’t traitors by my standards (even if I said so, at the time, mostly because I’m kinda over the whole nation state thing and how can you be a traitor, etc, if the entity you’re being a ‘traitor’ to shouldn’t exist in the first fucking place….) but they sure’s fuck were dupes and bad neighbours, DUPES I tell ya, and every word of their maskhole, anti disabled, racist misogynist homophobic transphobic ahistorical anti Indigenous horse puckey was supported by Dirty Russian Money. Don’t forget. Never forget.

The punditfaced and wibblebrained Yanks on twitter are encouraging the US to go to war with Russia LIKE SURE BUDDY do you think your Cheetos are going to stay on the supermarket shelves in a post nuclear war world or do you REALLY HAVE PUDDING FOR BRAINS. Bad pudding. Jeff says, “I like pudding.”

TRANSCRIPT OF A CATHERINE BELTON INTERVIEW. She is the person who keeps getting sued by Russian oligarchs because she tells the truth about their relationships with Putin.

There are reports of gang rape (I saw on reddit, it was heartbreaking, a personal account of an 18 year old woman in eastern Ukraine being gang raped ON THE HALFTRACK by five Russian soldiers, who threw money at her and called her hohol (Ukie) whore at the end of it but it was not news and not verified) but less unclear are the multiple reports of Russian tank crews ABANDONING FUELED AND FUNCTIONING TANKS. Just leaving them in the damned road. I don’t know if they’re walking back to the border or handing themselves over to be interned until the end of the war or hiding, or just heading back to Donbas. Who the hell knows. But the untouched tanks are just sitting there. I’ve seen video of one but there are credible reports of more.

_______________

New story is up to 1516 words. I’m going back and forth with first person chapters of about a thousand words apiece.

Two kudos in my inbox this morning; one for the musicians story (in which I promote another musician/filker, go me, AND integrate a song one of the actors is well known for singing … as part of the soppily romantic ending oh come now haven’t you ever wanted to wake up after a night of love with someone singing something beautiful and romantic in the next room … speaking as someone this has happened to, it’s verra noice) and one for the “I’m going to pretend to be your perfect boyfriend” story that starts with a pickup in a bar. One of the things I like doing best in writing fanfic is taking super well known lines from Supernatural (2005) and integrating them in conversations that have nothing to do with the show to give a little frisson to the reader.

1000 words today

It was lovely to get unstoppered. Frame is a witness gets cozy with the person who’s been deputized by the US Marshals service to ‘safely conduct him to the nearest Marshals Office for processing’. The witness is traumatized and paranoid and the deputy is …. having second thoughts about being a bisexual cop in a small town in Colorado. I figure I’ll put them through hell for about 20k words and have a lovely shootout for the finale. (I don’t normally play with guns, but why not, it’s kind of a shooting week in world history.)

little post

Bad sleep, lots of napping yesterday.

Finally working on a story again.

JEEEEEZ

There is so much misinformation, disinformation, cheerful lies, tankie mischief and plum bullshit out there about Ukraine and the Russian invasion that walking away from twitter feels like pulling your lips away from the firehose.

The war is costing Russia something on the order of 8 billion dollars a day, and they just had about half their access to the global banking system cut off. More sanctions are coming. People are protesting daily in every major Russian city (there were at least 5K in St. Pete’s alone !!) and through the entirety of the former Soviet Union, where the resistance of the Ukrainians has put steel in spines. Putin has announced that he wants the territories of the former Soviet Union back and guess what, most of the former slave states are not impressed. And from what I’ve seen there have been protests in every large city in soidisant Canada. If the rest of the sanctions come, Russia has funds for about a month more of this before they have to go to the international equivalent of Vinnie the Fish for the rest of the warchest. Germany spat in Putin’s face and sent anti tank/helicopter weapons to Ukraine. So much for Germany staying neutral! They spat twice hard when they blocked the pipeline from Russia, too, and announced plans as to how they’re going to get along fine without their gas and oil. The German public is not united in this but the poll numbers are high enough that the Ukrainians can continue to lean on them.

And Russian boys are dying in hundreds in Kharkiv right now. They ‘took’ the city and the Ukrainians took it right back.

Putin is now so desperate that he’s calling up the nuclear troops and setting them to do ‘exercises’ which is basically him grabbing his dick and saying LOOKEE HERE. Do I believe that he will use nuclear weapons? Maybe. But he’s already the kind of person who can’t wander out incognito because about a quarter of the population of Russia would be blithe on vodka for a week if they could have a chance to shiv him. To be the aggressor in a nuclear war would not cement his popularity. NATO is on alert which means that US branded troops are now free to move in Europa.

Jeff tells me that the space authority in Russia is threatening to drop shit on people they don’t like from orbit and once again, if it’s the Russians wanting to start a war from space they aren’t going to like the results any more than the poor bastards underneath whatever they drop. Biden’s as much of a Killocrat as the next one, but if ever there was a casus belli that would be it.

Of particular interest to me is the Ukrainians and Americans releasing intel that the Russians are planning an explosion somewhere in Russian controlled territory that they can blame on the Ukrainians so they can send more troops and really crush the resistance. Russians commanded by Putin did the same fucking thing for the Chechen war, blowing up apartment buildings across Russia in the runup to the Chechen War in 1999. The wikipedia article says that nobody really knows who did it but I’ve seen enough evidence to convince me, and if you need convincing please check how the timing of it is what catapulted Putin from the prime ministership into the Presidency just a few months later. NOT AN ACCIDENT.

Apart from Switzerland, which is landlocked, there isn’t a single European country currently allowing Russian flyovers.

On to a more pleasant subject. Jeff is a very good brother and roommate. After I lost my cell phone (coming up on 18 months) he loaned me his spare (non activated) cell phone, so I have an alarm and a clock and gaming platform and something to take into the bath when I want to play solitaire and soak. I dropped it numerous times and it quit. Apologetic and abashed I immediately took it to him and within minutes he had restored it to life. I do not deserve. But I am very happy.

50 cm of rain over the next day. BLOOP

Poem for Russia Today ‘journalists’

As you may or may not be aware Russia Today is a propaganda arm of the Russian state, responsible for (among other things) many of the ‘articles’ which got the honkies in Ottawa and elsewhere so upset. Alexey Kovalyov of Meduza told the workers there to grab everything ‘data’ they can before they quit. (Russia warring on Ukraine caused some of them to rethink their positions, lol.)

The tune is a modification of ‘Take a Nap’

One little thumb drive
Maybe two
Journos, all I ask of you
Before you quit
That den of shit
Load ‘em up
‘Splode ‘em up
Get a grip on it

Because ‘Russia Today’
Is Putin’s propaganda
And it’s no slanda
And it is NOT okay
Screen caps click click click
Before you wander
Over yonder
Download every file that you can grab
And then you blab
To Meduza
And they can tell the world!
(And hopefully keep you out of it.)
PS he’s noodleremover2017 on Telegram

Walked yesterday morning with Jeff to get my prescriptions yesterday and also to pick up Vitamin C and more probiotics (I ran out and I was NOT HAPPY AMIDSHIPS.) All my laundry is put away. I have no idea what I’ll do today but I am not feeling like writing, I can tell you that much. I may make chicken tenders for breakfast, since we have honey mustard sauce.

on feb 16 60 people came to my site

why? What was so different about that day?

Russian government sites are down; twitter has been throttled back in Russia; casualties are mounting and the Russians are having troubles taking Kyiv, since the Ukrainians won’t give a metre without a fight; the Russians are fighting people who didn’t chop down the trees in the public forests in Kyiv while they were dying of exposure during the Great Patriotic War because they knew the war would be over soon enough and their children would want the trees to play under.

The Russians are on the wrong side of a stupid conflict, but the Ukrainians, the good ones and the bad ones, are pretty much united.

The Russians are doing so poorly that they’re threatening nukes. I don’t know how to respond to such atrocities.

Zelenskyy says The Fight is here, I need ammo not a ride. — Russia OUT OF UKRAINE.

As an anarchist I’m not supposed to stand with or under any flag but the red and black, but I’m just going to give you the hairy eyeball if you want to decry the flag that is the blue of the sky and the gold of the grain.

Here’s some real anarchism: they’ve changed the street signs for the oncoming invaders so they all say a variant of GO FUCK YOURSELF\