incidentals

On Tuesday I headed out in search of coolth again. This time I decided to try one of the county's designated cooling centers, mostly in community centers and such, and picked one in a nearby town's library because I knew where it was. Local libraries are still closed to the public except for pickup of books reserved online, but I was kind of hoping that those of us in search of coolth would be allowed free range of the stacks, but no luck: the cooling center was the library's multipurpose room reached from a side entrance. Good thing, then, that I'd brought my own book to read, but I needn't have brought my own water bottle because they had a supply of those.

What I was afraid was that the center would be full, but it wasn't: there were only four other people there when I arrived at 1 pm when it opened; when I left at 3:30 there were about 15 and it still wasn't full. However, I decided to leave at that point, instead of half an hour later, because some of the new entrants decided to sit closer to me than I was comfortable with.

I used my extra half hour (before I needed to get home and start dinner so that it'd be ready when the evening's speechifying began) to shop at a bulk discount market, where I got into a very strange discussion with the checkout clerk. I'd bought a package of Tillamook Country Smoker sausage sticks, which are my favorite brand, and he asked about that, and was surprised when I said it's not the same company as the Tillamook that makes cheese and ice cream. He thought you couldn't have two companies with the same name. I said no; trademarks only apply to the line of business that you're in, and I know they're separate companies because I've visited both in the Oregon town they're named for. Having heard him discussing rock music with the previous customer, I said it was like Apple Records and Apple Computer, which stayed out of each other's way until the latter entered the music business, and then they had to work it out. But he was convinced that Apple Records dissolved when the Beatles did. If only I'd been able to look it up online on the spot, but by this time we'd passed handling the groceries and I ought to let the next person in line in.

On returning to my computer that evening, I found that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival had put online for members only a recording of another of their plays that had had a brief run in March before everything closed: this one was called Peter and the Starcatcher, supposedly the backstory to Peter Pan. I couldn't say, because when I started watching it I only got about halfway through Act 1 before giving up. It was tedious and, like their The Cooper Children, full of spoken expository lumps unfolding great wads of plot and needlessly describing things you could see happening simultaneously on stage. Though supposed to be hilariously funny, it was devoid of anything actually amusing - even though it wasn't written by Terry Pratchett - and, to top it off, it made more mistakes about the nomenclature of British nobility than I had ever previously seen packed into one sentence. Not having any idea how the word "Lord" is used is typical enough, but thinking that lords are created by knighting them is a new one on me.

Democrats, day 3

To an extent this was the day of ordinary people battered by circumstances. There were victims of gun violence, headlined by Gabby Giffords. There were small businesspeople trying to make it through the virus shutdown. Most daringly, there were families being torn apart by deportation of their undocumented immigrant members. Although one article calls this the most gut-wrenching part of the evening, there are those who don't think adult undocumented immigrants deserve any sympathy at all, no matter what their circumstances, so I call this feature daring.

The chair declared Kamala Harris nominated for VP by default, because there were no other nominees. I'd wondered how they were going to handle that. Go through the whole roll call again? Surely Rhode Island wasn't going to cook up another plate of calamari.

After that, the nominee's speech was a well-crafted piece focused on the upbringing she owes to her mother, with a relative minimum of biting DT. More biting had come from Barack Obama earlier - normally ex-presidents aren't that hard on their immediate successors, but as Obama said, these aren't normal times - but he framed his speech largely aspirationally. This, I think, is necessary: if you're going to criticize the US for not meeting ideal standards, it's necessary, if one is to avoid complete cynicism, to observe that the Constitution points to those standards and provides a road for us to get closer there.

Plenty of other good speeches by great women of the likes of Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren ("There's nothing I love better than a good plan. And Joe Biden has lots of good plans"), and, sigh, Hillary Clinton, looking much older than she did four years ago, but not as much older as she'd look if she were President, that's for sure.

The meager applause and cheering after Harris's speech worked a little better than the nomination one last night.

The music was pretty good. I could have lived without Billie Eilish, whom as I wrote once before just makes me want to re-listen to Tori Amos instead, but it wasn't terrible. I liked the guy who sang "Stand by Me" bilingually. The jazz song at the end was quite good: the singer kept the foundations of the song and built ornaments on top instead of tearing the whole thing apart as jazz singers usually do; and I really liked the piano accompaniment. The introduction of Kamala Harris by her sister, niece, and stepdaughter was backed by what sounded incongruously like the love theme from Inception, and if you remember that movie you'll know why it'd be incongruous.