Joseph

My severely disabled daughter who has schizophrenia has long believed that she is in business as a movie maker. She now believes the U.S. government and corporations with nefarious motives are interfering with her business and life by stealing creative content and personal information. She wants a dumb phone to replace her iPhone and wants some kind of computer that is immune from AI. First she wanted an older Windows machine to replace her Macbook Air, then she decided she wants a Linux machine, and now she instead wants a Unix machine. I don’t know enough about technology to have an opinion about how to avoid AI and corporates data gathering. But I know my daughter’s remedial movie making and other unemployed affairs are of little interest to the U.S. government and corporate oligarchs. I also know that meeting her demands would make no difference since new paranoias would arise. I told her to consider disconnecting from the internet and that idea did not appeal to her. So here I am.

#Disability #Caregiving #Schizophrenia #MentalIllness #Psychiatry #Paranoia

The Plunger by Stéphane Larue
(Je me pardonne)

#PlumbingBooksOrPlays
#HashtagGames

Sandhill Cranes reportedly fly at altitudes of up to 20,000 feet. I heard some calling in Central Texas today, but low-hanging clouds made it impossible for me to see them. I heard some a year ago in similar weather conditions and also could not see them. I have never seen one. It does not help that they are mostly gray and perhaps miles above me. Shucks.

The Echo Maker is the Cherokee name for Sandhill Crane and the title of a book by Richard Powers that won the National Book Award some years ago. It is about Capgras syndrome, environmentalism, and Sandhill Cranes. The book includes this passage:

“Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.

A neck stretches long; legs drape behind. Wings curl forward, the length of a man. Spread like fingers, primaries tip the bird into the wind’s plane. The blood-red head bows and the wings sweep together, a cloaked priest giving benediction. Tail cups and belly buckles, surprised by the upsurge of ground. Legs kick out, their backward knees flapping like broken landing gear. Another bird plummets and stumbles forward, fighting for a spot in the packed staging ground along those few miles of water still clear and wide enough to pass as safe.

Twilight comes early, as it will for a few more weeks. The sky, ice blue through the encroaching willows and cottonwoods, flares up, a brief rose, before collapsing to indigo. Late February on the Platte, and the night’s chill haze hangs over this river, frosting the stubble from last fall that still fills the bordering fields. The nervous birds, tall as children, crowd together wing by wing on this stretch of river, one that they’ve learned to find by memory.

They converge on the river at winter’s end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter-step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it’s a beginner’s world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.

Half a million birds—four-fifths of all the sandhill cranes on earth—home in on this river. They trace the Central Flyway, an hourglass laid over the continent. They push up from New Mexico, Texas, and Mexico, hundreds of miles each day, with thousands more ahead before they reach their remembered nests. For a few weeks, this stretch of river shelters the miles-long flock. Then, by the start of spring, they’ll rise and head away, feeling their way up to Saskatchewan, Alaska, or beyond.”

#Birds #Birding #SandhillCranes

“Without significant rainfall, Corpus Christi is headed for a ‘water emergency’ within months and total depletion of the system next year, according to the city’s website.” #Climate #Water #Texas #Drought #CorpusChristi

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/03/08/texas-corpus-christi-water-crisis/

Early spring. One of these is unlike the others.
#Flowers #Fungi #Nature #Spring #Photography #Austin #Texas

“THE FIRST ATTEMPT to drill through the Greenland ice sheet was made in the early nineteen-sixties at a U.S. Army outpost called Camp Century. Some fifty years later, the camp remains far and away the biggest thing ever built on—or, really, under the Greenland ice. Camp Century had a bar, a chapel, a barbershop, a movie theater, and a nuclear reactor. All were housed in a network of snow tunnels like those at EGRIP [the East Greenland Ice-Core Project], but extending for miles. The ostensible purpose of the base was to promote Arctic science, but in the nineteen-nineties an investigation by the Danish government revealed this to be a ruse. What the army had really been up to was developing a new system for storing intercontinental ballistic missiles. Its plan was to install a subglacial railway and shuttle ICBMs around in a Cold War shell game. The code name for the scheme was Project Iceworm.” - A passage from the chapter, A Song of Ice Greenland Is Melting from the book, Life On A Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert (2025) which I am reading.

#Greenland #Denmark #Bookstodon #Climate #Science #Nature #Environment

I didn’t feel like going on a hike this morning. But seeing this Rough Green Snake made it worthwhile. #Hiking #Snake #Photography #Nature #Austin #Texas

My MacBook Air crapped out during an iOS upgrade* more than a year ago. I have not replaced it and don’t miss it much. It would not boot after the failed upgrade attempt and an Apple Store worker told me it needed a new motherboard. It was just 3 years old. Now when I need to use a computer, I borrow my wife’s MacBook Air. But I have seldom done that over the past year. When employed, I did need a laptop. But now that I am retired, I find that I really don’t need one. I am enjoying less screen time, more hiking, and more book reading. Hmmm, maybe I don’t need social media either.

*Incidentally, an employee at the Apple Store told me if I had taken my MacBook to them for the software upgrade and it had failed to reboot, they would have repaired it for no charge. So if you need to do a major software upgrade on a MacBook, you might want to let the Apple Store do it.

I once had to replace hardwood flooring in my home due to a water leak. So I bought water sensors with my home security system and placed them under sinks, next to toilets, near the clothes washer, and near the dishwasher. I just got an alarm for a water leak from the dishwasher and was worried about having to dash outside and turn off the water at the meter. But first I investigated. I found that my wife dropped an ice cube on the kitchen floor that just happened to settle right next to the water sensor for the dishwasher. 🤣

Several months ago, a two-thirds or larger majority of us agreed that country music is fundamentally corny. Today I ask you, is folk music (e.g., Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Richard Thompson) the same as country music?
#Music #FolkMusic #CountryMusic

Donald Trump’s State of the Union address this evening is reportedly titled, "America at 250: Strong, Prosperous, and Respected.” Which of those adjectives do you think describes the United States of America today?

#Poll #Trump #USA

U.S. policy is egocentric, and I guess the same is true of policies in many other countries. We need global policies that advance cooperation by serving humankind and society rather than individual needs. So why am I still living here in Texas, which may be more egocentric than any other state? Get me out of here!

#Global #Society #USA #Texas