JD Vance probably does love a comfy couch, though

I think it’s important to check the flow of misinformation. According to the Associated Press, JD Vance did not, I repeat, did not fuck a sofa.

This scurrilous accusation does warrant a thorough investigation.

The wild assertions sprang from people on X (formerly Twitter) writing that Vance, now the running mate for Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump, wrote in his memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy,” that he simulated the act with a rubber glove anchored between the cushions as a young man.

“You have only been a Senator for 18 months, you are NOT qualified to be @VP plus you depravely humped a couch and wrote about it in your book!” a Kamala Harris supporter wrote.
Even comedian Kathy Griffin chimed in, declaring the country should not have a “couchf*cker” as vice president.

At one point AP appeared to have another headline, “Posts spread baseless rumors about GOP vice presidential pick JD Vance having sex with a couch,” but the article has seemed to disappear. We’re checking with AP on that.

Why waste all that journalistic effort? According to Mediate, AP did a PDF search of the book that produced 10 references of “couch” or “couches” but in none of them did Vance take liberties. “Sofa” and “glove” did not appear anywhere in the memoir, AP wrote.

I am mostly satisfied at this point, but I wouldn’t rule out the appointment of a Senate committee to investigate further. And I think that Vance needs to make a public disavowal.

The problem with kaiju

I’m sorry, but I’m a cliche. I was lying in bed half asleep last night when my wife came to bed, and I’m fortunate that she didn’t ask what I was thinking.

Because my brain was whirling like a hamster in a cage about…kaiju. This past summer, I have watched Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire (big meh, Hollywood exploding the whole premise) and Godzilla Minus One (really good), and of course I’ve watched the original King Kong, which is the only one to get even close to handling this problem properly.

Here’s the problem: energy defeats flesh. People successfully hunted elephants with sharpened sticks and bows and arrows. They hunted whales with harpoons tipped with flint or copper. Thick skin and scales are hard to penetrate, but apply enough force and you can punch through them. In an animal of vast bulk, it is going to be difficult to get through to a vital organ, but if nothing else, make enough holes and it will eventually bleed out. It’s probably going to be enraged first, and try to kill you, but that’s why you don’t pick on an elephant or a whale — it’s the risk, not the invulnerability.

It bugs me in a kaiju movie that everything just explodes on the surface or bounces off Godzilla. He can’t be denser or tougher than the steel and concrete buildings he smashes with nary a scuff or a scratch — there is no armor thick enough in a mobile animal to resist heavy arms fire. Yet the movies just show modern tanks firing at him, and he isn’t even set back, let alone scored with damage. Good ol’ King Kong gets it right, since [spoiler!] they killed him with repeated machine gun fire that caused enough accumulated damage that he fell down dead.

Don’t get me started on Pacific Rim. Why are they building elaborate, complex, giant robots to grapple with the huge biological horrors rising from the deep? One GBU 12 Paveway launched from an F-15, and it’s splattered. I don’t care what it’s made of, if it can’t survive getting punched in the face by a robot, it’s not going to cope with being torn apart by a 500lb bomb and falling back into the sea as a rain of gibs.

So that took care of my concerns about kaiju, and I could get back to sleep.

But then I thought of other problems. What does Mothra eat? Is she denuding entire forests to grow to tremendous size? And possibly, she doesn’t eat as an imago — all she might have on her mind is sex!

I’ll think about that some other night.

The Magical Misery Tour is over

I’m back home again. It was not a happy trip, but I did learn a few things.

  • Viewings are horrible, but my family insists on having them. Ever since I was a child, I’ve been dragged off to unpleasant funerals where the corpse of a loved one is put on display, and they never look like they did when they were alive, so what’s the point? The mortuary did the best they could, but my mother looked like a melting wax mannequin with a spray tan, heavily made up in a way she would never have done in life.
  • Being executor of the estate is a lot of work, even when my mother had done all the work of creating a legal will. I still have to bring in hired help to sell off the house, and there’s a stack of papers documenting savings and investments I have to shuffle through. I’m going to have to travel to Seattle again a little later this fall, after the lawyer has sorted through his responsibilities, to do things like close out old bank accounts and move money around.
  • At least her heirs seem to be obliging, so far. It helps that it was a small estate, so no one is squabbling over her fortune. There is a little money, though, and I just wish she’d spent it all on herself.
  • The memorial service was nice, at least. We just gathered old friends and family together and told stories. For instance, I learned that she was always quiet and soft-spoken in school, but one time she and a friend decided to go wild and get high…by buying cokes and adding aspirin. It didn’t work. But I think that’s as crazy as Mom got.
  • Anyone want to buy a nice little 4-bedroom, 2-bath house on the road to Lake Tapps in Auburn?

Water, stone, trees

We — myself, Mary, and Alaric — visited Tolmie State Park, just off the Nisqually Reach, with Ji and Knut, and strolled along the rocky beach, relaxing. The water was soothing.

The trees were spectacular.

Knut led the way.

Today it’s back to the grind. My plan is to contact realtors to get an estimate on my mother’s house. I doubt that 50 years of memories will be included in the sale price.

Back to the 1950s

Here’s another blast from the past — my mother was on the junior high “yell squad” when she was 13 or 14 years old (she’s the one on the far left). Once again, as I’m going through these old photos, I am struck by how godawful bad casual photography got to be in the 1970s. Kodak should be ashamed. I have so many photos from my youth that are smeared and grainy, with color blooming over the details, and then I see my mother’s youth, and it’s all these crisp fine black & white images that are fun to look at.

At least I can say that in my home photo collection I switched to taking B&W on my old Pentax in the 1980s, and also to color slide film (that’s a whole ‘nother tangle, converting 35mm color slides to digital images.)

Really, I’m expected to go through all this now?

Yesterday, I spent hours going through massive piles of photo albums, gathering images to put on display at a memorial service. I learned a couple of things. Cheap mass market cameras from anytime in the 20th century were crap and produced smudgy, blurry images. Polaroids in particular were terrible. More professional cameras that typically shot in black & white and used large format produced very nice results, but throwing them in a pile or in sticky photo albums does them no favors.

Also, my mother was quite lovely, but I already knew that.

Mom at 16

It’s also particularly sad to see a long life reduced to this brief shots of happy moments.

Must be about 1940, looks like it was shot on a Minnesota farm, before they moved west.

I know exactly where that picture was taken, in my grandparents’ house. It must be around 1950.

My parents, early 1970s, I think

Mom & Dad at the wedding of one of their kids, I don’t know which one. They were happy at all of them.

Modern cameras are amazingly good, but when you buy a cheap scanner, it’s going to die in the middle of trying to digitize hundreds of old photos.

We read the will yesterday, too. It was written in 1984 and wasn’t changed since, despite the fact that three of the family members have died since it was written. It’s vaguely written, so it’s still applicable, but it basically just says that her executor should divide her estate equally among her 6 kids. Easy, right? I’m meeting with a lawyer this morning to discuss all the details that will bite me in the butt. She wasn’t rich, so that really simplifies everything.

I’m currently dreading the viewing, a barbaric custom. People don’t look as they did in life after they’ve died, so these things are always shocking, distressing events. You definitely come away knowing your loved one is gone forever.

However, I am looking forward to the memorial event on Friday evening. Mom was well-loved, so I expect to see a lot of familiar old faces, and this may be the last grand gathering of the family. This is where Mom’s financial mediocrity is a virtue, because no on will be coming to harangue me for a piece of the pie. There is no pie, there is a small cupcake that is being split 6 ways, and I intend to be meticulous in making sure the crumbs have their proper distribution.

I think I need to lie down

On a personal note, I was on a long drive today, from Morris to Minneapolis, and in particular, from St. Cloud to Minneapolis. Simultaneously, one of those massive monster midwest thunderstorms was following me along I94. I’m talking continuous lightning flashes, rolling thunder, torrential rain, and nasty great lumps of hail falling out of the sky. The roof of my car is heavily dimpled now, and worse, it was slow, white-knuckle driving, and right now my hands are cramped up, and my neck is a rigid stalk of tense muscles, my eyes hurt, and I have a terrible headache. But I’m safe now, at least!

Three hours on the road in the middle of that late at night…not cool. Also not cool was coming up on an overpass and discovering that all the cars in front of me had stopped beneath it for shelter, creating a roadblock of terrible immobile flashing lights…and long lines of cars backed up, unable to fit under the shelter and also unable to pull off the freeway at all.

If you’re wondering where I’m at

This morning, I wrote an obituary and contacted a probate lawyer, so that’s where I’m at. I did post a video that I’d mostly written last week, and this morning I’m going to spend some quiet time feeding the spiders.

I’m also actively avoiding human contact, but that’s mostly normal for me.

My sisters have been gathering photos for a memorial service next week. Here’s Mom in the 1950s with her beau:

And the last photo I have of her, looking dignified and a bit tired:

The light flickers

When I think about my childhood, I founder on the fact that memory is not linear, it’s not complete, and most of what remember is a wash of general feelings and confabulations anchored by brief, vivid flashes of specific moments that are lit up by unforgettable events. I was fortunate that much of that vague blur of background events was made up of kindness and love, of a stable and affectionate home, but that also means that the specific memories are scarce and hard to salvage from the general wave of goodness, and are difficult to place in a clear sequence, unless they’re attached to a recorded historical event.

One such memory is from March of 1964. I was seven, attending Kent Elementary, and I was alone, walking across the playground, which was conveniently across the street from my house. I was alone because I had no friends; we had moved to a new house and a new school, which was a common event, since my parents were struggling economically, and we moved roughly once a year, as they tried to simultaneously move out of the poor places they were trapped in and build a stable home for their family. That’s part of the background noise of my childhood memories, trying to remember which house we were living in when some more interesting thing happened. My memory warehouse is built of one rental after another, creating a ramshackle sequence that stitches events together.

The bright moment that illuminates this one memory is the Great Alaskan Earthquake of 1964. I was walking, alone, when suddenly my legs were swept out from under me, and I was on my knees wondering why I was still wobbling and how the earth beneath me wasn’t stable anymore. I looked up at the school and saw a crack had formed in its south wall. I looked to the right at my house, and saw a few bricks fall from the chimney. That was all — this was near Seattle, far from the epicenter — so damage was light, and maybe the worst of it for me was the abrupt loss of certainty. Not even the Earth could be trusted.

That house, though…
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