I must have startled it, because suddenly just overhead the huge dark bird appeared!

Just overhead — a wide, wide wingspan and a starry sky…

Fall.

Picked up this morning, on a glorious Garrett Park walk through sunlight, wind, and whirling leaves. I was on my way to Ruth Roth’s, a neighbor and friend. 93 years old, Ruth is writing a life wisdom book, and I’m helping her. I deliver her mail from the GP post office, and, since she doesn’t use computers, also drop off longhand communications about her text.

Don’t know if this image conveys that this leaf is enormous. Size of a dinner plate.

And – who knew – “eco-car with bamboo” appeared on a number of freight containers as an endless train banged by on my walk. I looked it up: Turns out bamboo flooring is the latest thing, replacing less environmentally friendly tropical hardwood plywood.

Best headline so far in the One Abortion Two Abortions Three Abortions Four / Five Abortions Six Abortions Seven Abortions More scandal.

You learn something new every day. Who knew that serious drug addiction can constipate you to the point where your bowel can explode?

And wow the miracles of modern medicine. You’d think it’d be absolutely impossible to come back from such an event – and most don’t – but the actor Matthew Perry did.

And WOW the power of addiction. Perfectly willing to stand around constipated for ten+ days if the drugs keep flowing.

It’s always been a little dicey, trying to get away with failing to educate your children, and stealing taxpayer money, in America, a country with a meaningful law enforcement establishment. Massive systemic welfare fraud as a way of life occasionally gets you in trouble in this country — just ask Lakewood NJ’s rabbi and his flock.

And now the major ultraorthodox yeshiva in New York City has to pay back eight million of the ten million it stole from the state through truly remarkable, contemptible, long-term, deceit. Which this blog will not detail (it violates our obscenity standards), but by all means read the article yourself.

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Why is UD confident they’ll keep stealing? It’s structural, babe. You educate a community to feel no affiliation with the US beyond lockstep voting as their rabbi instructs them … whaddaya think’s gonna happen? The “US” – that abstraction out there – exists to provide money for one’s life of grand and petty crime, and there’s nothing at all wrong with devoutly pious God-fearers lying and cheating and swindling THAT thing, that vacuous entity out there that can be made to discharge money. It’s just the way they think, and that is that.

That’s the problem with cults; and it’s why self-respecting governments surveil and, when the fraud gets too too too much, pursue them legally.

Well, the Bay. Plenty of Bay … seasoning for UD, a native Marylander whose father loved to take his little motor boat out on it and catch fish for dinner. We had a weekend house here – much further up the western shore than Pier 450 – when I was young.

Yesterday, when we talked to some boat owners who pulled up, elegantly, charismatically, along the Pier 450 pier to join friends for lunch, they happily admitted to regret – often; not always – at having bought their boats. “You know what B O A T stands for, right? Bring Out Another Thousand.” “Every time I take it in for maintenance I regret buying it.”

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The vastly interesting world of this vast estuary … Its spectacular natural world.

Its cultural world, where oysters are planted to bring back the almost-defunct oyster fishing culture. The locals talk distinctly funny, drive vast dusty SUVs and pickups with Jesus Loves You plastered all over them, tatoo themselves. We had a rambling uncomprehending chat with a drunk woman possessed of the local occult accent and also slurring her words. It was important for her to convey to us that at Buzzy’s you can choose your own beer out of special fridges but we didn’t understand why this was noteworthy. She was headed into a store that calls itself MARKET, but when you go in (we were looking for insect repellent) it’s 99.99% alcohol.

Both nights the sky blackly glistened, and we were happy to wake at three and walk along the dead fields and dark pier and drink it in.

Here at the bay, the night sky blasts out at you as soon as you step from your door at three AM.

There’s a meteor shower tonight, but we didn’t see any meteors.

The fisherman at the end of the pier – clearly rather spooked by our apparition – indeed reported having seen shooting stars in the jeweled sky, “but only a few.” In each hand he held a large rockfish. Was he fishing illegally off the hotel’s pier in the wee hours? Is that why we spooked him?

We lay flat on white lounges on the small beach, wrapped in many layers, and looked for Orionids. Just behind us lay enormous flat fallow fields that stretched to the edge of the bay. Absolute silence and stillness, ground and sky, surrounded us. We saw no satellites, and no jets.

… ‘this great abeyance’ — not Plath’s Berck-Plage, but our own Chesapeake Bay, where Les UDs will wander islands and shorelines, scoping out black sky as well as family reunion locations.

At the moment, their best location for next year’s Perseid meteor shower seems to be Assateague Island National Seashore, which allows late night visits. But we’re still looking. A good excuse, in any case, for some adventures.

Blogging continues undaunted.

Sure.

The one thing missing in the latest fifteen year old mass killer’s parents’ statement was the only thing that matters: How many and what type of guns in the house?

Between 12 and 14 ain’t so cool either, and 7, as this writer correctly notes, is absolutely out of the question – parents are in the position of forcing modesty garments on someone too young to choose to wear them.

The parents are doing it because you want to get your daughter used to thinking that covering up is her only option in life. It’s the only thing she’s ever known. She’s always hidden her hair (and probably her body – such girls are often put in body-hiding robes).

The observation in my headline is one of many comments on a NYT article about multiple lawsuits, character-assassination, and life-destruction resulting from a seconds-long incident in which a 7 year old hijabi’s teacher touched her hijab. Was it an innocuous effort to clear the girl’s vision, which seemed to the teacher for a moment to be obscured by the hijab? Was it a vicious humiliating “stripping” of the girl’s clothing, self-respect, and personal integrity?

Another commenter:

[W]hy is a seven-year old girl wearing a hijab? A hijab is a statement of modesty, a way of deflecting unwanted attention from unrelated males. The girl is seven! In what culture are such innocent creatures the objects of unwanted sexual attention?

The answer is clear: You want girls from the moment they enter the public realm to see themselves as destructive temptresses; and you certainly want them to regard all males as people to whose drives and dominance they must in every way from the very beginning of their conscious lives defer.

Another commenter:

I’m sorry, why is a seven-year-old girl covering her hair? What does she have to be modest about at age seven?? I thought girls were only put under hijab when they began menstruating? How early in our lives do girls and women have to have others’ expectations and projections of what it means to be a “good girl” or “ladylike” foisted upon us?

Another:

I am mostly sorry for the child. Having lived in very conservative parts of the Middle East for some time, I know that seven-year-old children typically don’t wear hijabs unless their parents are really extreme religious fundamentalists.

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In Muslim countries where I lived, hijabs are not worn by 7 year olds. Girls starting puberty wear them. Forcing a 7 year old to wear one sounds…

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[T]he early Muslims including Prophet Muhammad PBUH did not preach covering the heads of pre-pubescent girls. This trend simply marks the increase of religious conflict and religious fundamentalism (across many religions).

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More on this controversy.

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Tarek Fatah on Twitter: “Forcing #Hijab on a 7-year-old American girl? Has my Muslim community lost their bearings? Imagine telling a child, her hair triggers sexual desire among men! What has gone wrong with my Muslim community? What next? A hijab for newly-born infant girls?”

Sarah Longwell, The Bulwark.

… For a while, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was supposed to be the Good Republican: a fusion candidate and progenitor of the post-Trump future. Now it turns out that he is a despicable human being, a performative culture warrior who uses the levers of government against companies who engage in speech he doesn’t like and treats refugees as pawns in his political troll game. He keeps a keyboard-warrior press secretary who screams “groomer” at anyone who disagrees with her boss. Oh, and he’s campaigning for Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano, a committed election denier who not only attended January 6th, but bussed others there as well...

[Virtually every once-sane Republican governor] is campaigning either for or with an election-denying lunatic. Ducey, along with the Republican Governors Association, has thrown in with Kari Lake. Sununu has embraced election conspiracist Don Bolduc in New Hampshire. Kemp is campaigning with the pro-coup GOP nominee for lieutenant governor and supporting the supremely unqualified and scandal-ridden Herschel Walker...

 Glenn Youngkin? Holy crap. He’s the term-limited governor of Virginia. There’s zero reason for him to be in Arizona stumping for the BDE candidate who wants to jail her political opponents.

Except that there’s a very good reason: Glenn Youngkin isn’t campaigning to help Kari Lake. It’s the opposite. He’s trying to hug Lake in the hopes that her radioactive Trump energy will contaminate him. Youngkin is trying to make up for having been a Good Republican. Because he realizes that’s a dead end…

Normal GOP politicians who don’t want to swim in the right-wing infotainment cesspool are deemed traitors for throwing in with the “corporate media” and so lose credibility with GOP audiences…

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Strong words, well-deployed.

Color UD mildly shocked but pleased to see this quite explicit article. Reading its concern about how best to have a clitoris, and then enjoying the sometimes hilarious comments on the piece (“Yes, yes. But what about inflation?”), UD kept thinking about the simple solution to the problem offered all over the world to more than two hundred million women.

Haha, I mean not offered; imposed. When they’re children.

IF THEIR CLITS OFFEND THEE, CUT THEM OFF.

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As long as we have people like Alan Dershowitz in the United States (and, on the other side, Ilhan Omar), female genital mutilation will continue to be a popular option among some groups even here. England’s got a rampant case of it.

Entire religious groups, like India’s Dawoodi Bohra, make it the centerpiece of their spiritual practice.

It’s nice that the 164.8 million women in the US get to live in a country whose paper of record cares about their sexual pleasure. It’s disgusting that 200 million (and growing) women – children – outside the US endure the forced amputation of sexual pleasure.

The argument in support of the hijab proceeds on a deeply flawed assumption that girls have an option to wear or not wear it. And since they have exercised their free agency and chosen to wear the hijab, the laws of the land must respect their choice. This argument fails to recognise the fact that the families that prescribe and subscribe to the hijab usually make it mandatory for their female children, when they are as young as four or five years old, to wear the garment whenever they step outside their home or when they are in presence of male family members. The choice of wearing or not wearing the hijab is already made for them by the accident of their birth. The collective pressure exerted by families, especially the male members, a deeply conservative society, and the burden of arcane interpretations of religious dogma make it virtually impossible for any of the hijab-clad girls to exercise free choice.

The head of the ultraorthodox party announces:

‘English, math studies [are] useless for Israel’s economy.’