a year in first lines

I haven't previously done the meme of the first sentence of your first post of each month this calendar year, but when I looked this year's up, I saw that they conveyed what a distressful year it's been:

So here we are in a year that's long been a favorite destination of science-fiction writers seeking a near-future setting, probably because its name sounds like the results of an eye test.

Well, good, the other team won.

I'd never even heard of this group, despite its having been around for a dozen years and having as music director Dawn Harms, well-known to me as associate concertmaster of New Century and for various chamber music performances.

I say - even if nobody else does - that it's time for my second monthly list of concerts I'm not going to be able to attend because they're canceled.

Oh, it's about time for another monthly list of concerts I'm not attending because they're canceled.

In the alternative world, the classical concert season is winding down for the summer, but its month of June is still full of things that, in this lower-powered world, I won't be doing.

It's summer festival season in the alternative world, and there were only two big things on my calendar for this month.

In the alternative universe, we'd be in Albuquerque right now, joyfully attending Mythcon, and I'd be just off two weeks of attending concerts and writing reviews at the Menlo Festival, with a little more of it awaiting when we got home.

The alternative universe is beginning to diverge enough from the bleak one we're living in that it's starting to get harder to say what I'd be doing in it.

What I'm watching the Glass Fire in Napa/Sonoma for is whether it's going to overtake the old Kroeber homestead, where Ursula Le Guin grew up in the summers and which forms the center of the setting of Always Coming Home.

Not a very cheerful post, as it turns out.

Sad news, that my friend and the distinguished Tolkien scholar Richard West died on Sunday in Madison, Wisconsin.

loonies of the wazoo

Do you remember Edgar Maddison Welch? He was the guy who was such a devout believer in the Pizzagate conspiracy theory - the one that said that Hillary Clinton was running a child sex-trafficing ring from the basement of a DC pizza parlor - that one day about four years ago he single-handedly invaded the pizza parlor with a semi-automatic rifle and fired off a few shots, only to discover that they didn't even have a basement. He was hauled off by police and apologized for his foolishness at his sentencing.

What gets me is what must have been going through this guy's mind. Not only did he entirely accept the batsht theory that John Podesta's e-mails ordering pizzas were code words for pedophilia, but that the conspiracy was so open and easily findable that one guy with an assault rifle could blow the whole thing wide open. One is stunned at how complicit he must have imagined the DC police, the FBI, and the entire government apparatus supporting them to be in order not to have easily uncovered and exposed this.

So now meet Mark Aguirre, a Houston PI and ex-cop who's been similarly convinced by the equally imaginary stories of mass Democratic ballot stuffing. Hired by a group of similar nuts, he focused on one guy with a small cargo truck whom he was convinced was carrying around 750,000 fraudulent ballots. (And it would have taken nearly that many to turn Texas blue, by the way.) A team of PIs apparently tracked this guy for weeks - how long would it take for him to deliver a load of ballots? - and eventually Aguirre forced his truck off the side of the road and pulled a gun on him.

Only to find that he was an air-conditioner installer and that his truck was full of air-conditioner parts.

Did that abash the conspiracy theorists? No, they figure their harassment stopped the fraud. They remind me of the legendary guy who banged a tablespoon against a frying pan to get the elephant out from under the chair. But, you say, there is no elephant under the chair. "See?" he says. "It's working!"

Oh, and why is Aguirre an ex-cop? Because his way of dealing with reports of street racing in a Kmart parking lot was by leading a police raid there one evening and trying to arrest everybody in the lot, about 300 people, including all those just doing their shopping, and the ones going to the restaurants next door too. That's what turned him from a cop into an ex-cop.

"I just hope you're a patriot," Aguirre said to the cop who arrested him. I hope so too, but that word does not mean what Aguirre thinks it means.