another task

The first rainstorm of the season was due yesterday afternoon (it's still beating down on us early the next morning: typical California winter storm, no cloudbursts but long steady rain), so I needed to take in some items that had been left on the patio, which in turn meant I needed to do something we don't do often around here: open the garage door.

We don't use the garage door often because we don't keep a car in there: we use it for storage. It's a sectional door which runs on an electric motor, which is loud and grindy, and has been as long as we've lived here, but it never did before what it did this time, which is get stuck.

A hasty phone call later, enter a small truck with two men who specialize in garage doors. The motor is worn out, as are the gears. They have a new mechanism on their truck, so I hire them to replace the whole thing. Busy job that takes over an hour, as the rain begins to drizzle down. Not tremendously expensive considering the amount of work involved and the new equipment. It can be scheduled to open automatically at pre-set times. It can be made to open over wi-fi. I don't want either of those things. I want the open/close button and the button that turns on and off the lights. That's it. And it's astonishingly quiet.

more British detail

I wish to make a subtle correction to the historical comment of a British political think-tank director quoted at the end of this article. He compares what might happen after the current general election with what happened after the last such election held in December, in 1923. “The Conservatives throwing away a majority and the first Labour government ever being ushered in with the support of the Liberals,” he said. “History doesn’t repeat itself but it does rhyme.”

Besides the fact that the Conservatives don't have a majority this time, I wish to quibble with the word support as used of the Liberals in the 1923-24 situation. The Liberals didn't support the Labour government, they consented to it. There's a difference, and since the scenario being mooted in the current election is of a massive anti-Brexit coalition, it's a big difference. There was no anti-tariff coalition in the earlier case, even though that issue separated both Labour and Liberal from the Conservatives. Labour, though a minority, governed entirely on their own. There was no consultation with the Liberals as "support" implies. Labour didn't trust the Liberals and wished to avoid being dragged down by them.

Instead, Labour sailed on and did what they wanted to do, held back by the fact that the Liberals could turn them out at any time, but pushed forward by the fact that the Liberals didn't want another election any more than Labour did. In the event, a controversy caused the government's fall after only eight months, and the Conservatives won the ensuing election. Not an enticing parallel for the anti-Brexit parties, if it is a parallel at all.

(no subject)

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