Our beloved friend immortalized.

… a neighbor under a pumpkin, at Black Market Bistro, Garrett Pk.

More precision later.

***********************

Oh. Okay.

***********************

He’s with Marcin Brykczynski!

… finds a charming poster while getting out the vote in

York, PA.

Dahm really helps us put this in perspective.

Mississippi’s rate of firearm-related violence (28.5 per 100,000 people) was nearly double that of Haiti (15.1 per 100,000) in 2021, when mercenaries assassinated the country’s president, unleashing a fresh round of gang warfare which pushed the country into a state of civil war… Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama and New Mexico all have higher firearm mortality rates than Mexico, where decades of violence between state forces and rival drug cartels has caused hundreds of thousands of deaths and left more than 115,000 people missing… [F]irearm-related death and injury is not synonymous with an increase in crime [in the US]. Violent crime fell 15% from 2023 to 2024, according to the FBI. More than half of all firearm-related deaths (56.1%) in 2022 were from suicide.

It’s an All-American Halloween, featuring an insane heavily armed Nazi wearing a scary mask and shooting his guns off left and right from the balcony of his well-appointed apartment.

It’s fun to think of this guy going violently mad and accumulating weapons in the privacy of his residence while all around him neighbors are paying one to four million for the privilege of going into lockdown and listening to an hour of crazed screams and booming gunshots from his unit. Talk about amenities! You get a fully loaded schizofascist down the hall – a man with well-known mental issues – who no one – until this rather striking event – considered enough of a threat to evict.

That’s what happens when everyone packs a lot of heat. It doesn’t ever seem a strange or risky sort of thing, even when the heat packer is an obviously dangerous lunatic.

The somewhat circular dirt path begins to take shape.

SING IT!!

That's life (that's life)
That's what all the people say
 I'm ridin' high in April, shoot my brains out in May
But I know I'm gonna change that tune
When I'm up in heaven with the good Lord in June

I said that's life (that's life)
And as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks
Turnin' gray matter into whipped cream
Whipped cream with red chunks floatin' down
What a treat for the wife and kids when found

I've been a dropout, a drunkard, depressive, divorcee, 
A self-hating thing
I've been up and down and over and out
And I know one thing
Next time I find myself
Losing the race
I'll pick up my Glock and 
I'll shoot off my face

Yeah that's life
I can't deny it
I got a brain
And I just wanna fry it
Do you wanna watch me?  Come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up
In a big ball and die

UD‘s trying to figure out precisely how gunny the massacred Humiston family was. Do a lot of Americans bring their guns to work? Washington State employers are allowed to prohibit weapons at the workplace, but maybe Humiston worked at a place where it was okay to carry…?

As for the highly populated death scene that greeted a detective, he describes a “splintered” bathroom doorframe, “as if it had been locked, then forced open,” so we know that the killer’s mother got to hear him kill her husband and children, and then got to hear her son/killer forcing the bathroom door she’d locked in a desperate effort to keep living.

There seems to be a house rather close to the death house. Did no one next door hear her screaming? She must have been screaming.

I’m going to assume the state will try him as an adult. I’m not feeling too confident about his attorneys, whose first public statement shares that he “enjoys mountain biking.”

Multiple news outlets are reporting the impending bankruptcy/abandonment of Portola Valley, California, where housing prices are starting to crash (“In July, the co-founder of Sun Microsystems reportedly sold his Portola Valley mansion for $35 million—which was 65% less than the $100 million it was initially listed for in 2018.”), and where the city council despairs of paying even basic bills. Perhaps they can apply for federal emergency funds. A GoFundMe page?

… authenticate a newly discovered Chopin waltz.

After Erika Fromm interviewed wee UD for a job as her assistant at the University of Chicago, she wrote a brief note to herself about your 20-something blogueuse, at which UD peeked —

V STRONG EGO

— and I’ll admit those three little words have rather followed me around all these years later. (Yes, I got the job and it was very strange – she basically invented hypnoanalysis…) I mean, it’s true that my VSE has blasted me through lots of doors in life (or as sour old Larkin puts it, I’ve repeatedly “burst into fulfillment’s desolate attic”), and that has more or less been a good thing.

Even this very day, when my headstrongism led me astray, my corrective action turned up some interesting stuff.

So for my meditation garden project, I bought a bunch of bulbs, which Xavier the Savior and his guys were going to plant for me. I knew in general that you plant bulbs in the fall, and I was way gung-ho to get them in the ground and start dreaming about the astonishing arrays of reds we’d get; but last-minute checking revealed that these particular bulbs, for my particular planting zone, must wait for early spring planting.

In my merry VSE way, I scoffed at and denied and ignored all of the impeccable sources telling me this, telling me something my freight train of an ego refused to hear, until, as the guys began climbing the hill to the garden, I finally put on the brakes and told them not to bother.

***********************

I could store one set of bulbs for the winter – I put them in a cardboard box and found the closest cool dark place I have to a root cellar – but the other two needed indoor planting. And this meant finding soil and containers to place along some sunny windows. I found four orange plastic containers with the skeletal remains of some plant or other (mums?), and I figured the soil was probably pretty good, so I began digging, and instantly, from all of the containers, multiple large healthy earthworms ooched out. Each of which I lifted and tossed gently onto the lawn so I could bring wormless soil inside.

But those worms – the surprise of them working away all this time, eating, aerating – it got to me somehow. The invisible worm, That flies in the night etc.

Xavier the Savior and his crew are prepping the soil, getting rid of stumps and bricks, finishing the path around the garden, and taking down some dead trees. Tomorrow, lots of red blooming spring bulbs go in, etc.