Spring Is Here And So Are We

We're back from seven weeks, mostly in the desert, but eating instead of fasting. And what insights did I gain? Hardly any: we were gone seven weeks, and if time is really money, why don't we represent it as $7 weeks? Time wasn't just money, of course, it was also sitting and eating. So now, I'm in the largest pants I've worn in ten years, and blogging instead of going to Planet Fitness.

Still, the days are getting longer, the snow here is virtually all gone (having never arrived in the first place) and it's hard not to believe in the promise of spring. Be not deceived, though, this is just when most blizzards arrive.

Americans With Disabilities Act. But Sometimes They're Sad On The Inside.

We're waiting for our flight home. The flight's not until tomorrow, so we're staying in a motel. Microtel, actually. Which, inexplicably, I construed as sort of a resort suite experience, but it's not.  I asked for a handicapped room when I made the reservation on Expedia, and it is. The bathroom light doesn't work nor does the AC/Heat. What I should have said was handicapped accessible. 

WWJDD?

It's probably a coincidence that Vladimir Putin hasn't been seen for days, and then just as he reappears, I start blogging again. 
In my last post, we were in Tucson. The day before we were scheduled to leave, Karen's brother called to offer her a chance to talk to her mother. A few minutes later he called to say that she had died. It's comforting that practically the last thing she heard was Karen telling her she loved her. We changed our plans and our flights; instead of going home we came to Iowa for the funeral. At the visitation, Geraldine looked beautiful and at peace. Seeing her so, along with the dignified funeral provided some comfort.
Now we are in Northeast Iowa getting ready to go back to Anchorage at the end of the week. A few years ago, agronomists, maybe, or lunatics, introduced Asian beetles to America as a way to control aphids. They have been very successful at surviving (with a lifespan of two to three years) reproducing and colonizing new areas, planting their little flags in bathrooms and living rooms throughout the Midwest. Rash ecologists, using the there-was-an-old-lady-who-swallowed-a-fly pest management philosophy have suggested importing Asian predators to control the beetles, but we all know how these things end; with schoolchildren fleeing Bengal tigers to get to T-ball practice.
Other things I've learned here in Iowa: one benefit of drinking coffee late at night is that when you have to get up to go to the bathroom, you'll already be awake and St Patrick's Day Parades are truly John Deere's hour come at last.

Now We're in Tucson

I bet you're just like me, you vaguely remember reading about Francis Fukuyama's essay The End of History, but you never  actually read it. I know, right? You could casually mention, as Wikipedia puts it, "the idea of an 'end of history' does not imply that nothing more will ever happen. Rather, what the postmodern sense of an end of history tends to signify is, in the words of contemporary historian, Keith Jenkins, the idea that 'the peculiar ways in which the past was historicized (was conceptualized in modernist, linear and essentially metanarrative forms) has now come to an end of its productive life; the all-encompassing “experiment of modernity” . . . is passing away into our postmodern condition'," to attract the ladies. I never did that, because I was already well into the bonds of matrimonial bliss when it came out, but you know, could have.
Anyway, it seems that despite the optimism engendered by the fall of the Berlin Wall, history didn't even slow down, better yet end. Some people just don't want to be Western Liberal Democrats 
The above is the intro to a crazed rant I was going to post, but for a clear and rational explanation of why Bibi Netanyahu can't really be taken seriously, click here, and for the real Israel/Iran/Saudi/US situation, you really, really should read this. 
And finally, if Netanyahu really doesn't want a "messianic, apocalyptic regime" to have nuclear weapons, shouldn't he be trying to get Republicans out of government?