Well, fuck. The Brewer’s Art, a mainstay of Mt. Vernon, and host of one of the best basement bars in all of Baltimore (RIP Wroten’s), abruptly announced its closure on Monday, citing over $150K in debt. I don’t know what would have happened there—it was always busy—but this is a loss for Baltimore’s nightlife scene. I spent many an evening tucked away in a corner of the basement nursing an OZZY or four (Fuck you Sharon, it’ll always be OZZY to me), and have a special place in my heart for it.
One thing we didn’t consider when we adopted Hazel was the fact that, as a black dog, her nails are also black. I don’t think I had ever considered a dog’s nails in my life, even after having grown up with three of them, but Hazel, as always, is an outlier in everything she does. Her nails grow at the speed of an F1 car, so she so she sounds like someone typing on a mechanical keyboard when walking on a hardwood floor. Her nails can get so long that when she stands up normally, they twist her toes in weird directions. In normal circumstances, the length of her nails are kept in check by daily walks and her guiding instinct to pull on the leash like a sled dog, but with the frigid snow conditions of the last two weeks, she has only gone outside to do her business and come back inside as quickly as possible, retiring to the couch to wait until warmer weather appears. So they’ve gotten very long.
She’s been to the vet to have them clipped before, and they’ve given us drugs to administer two hours before the appointment. The last time we did this, it didn’t go well, and the vet tech seemed to be pissed at us. We followed your directions, dude. I made an appointment yesterday to bring her in to get them trimmed again, and they upped her dose at our request. She seemed a little spacey on the way there, and was a bit out of sorts in the waiting room. Thankfully, it only took them ten minutes to actually do the work, and she came back out to the waiting room, anxious to leave. When she got home, she was even more gloopy and passed out under Jen’s desk as we worked, her pupils as big as dinnerplates. Overnight, she splayed out in the middle of the bed like a pile of wet towels and lay in the same position all night, forcing me to teeter at the edge of the bed. This morning, she went outside for her customary walk, came back inside and immediately laid on the couch, completely uninterested in driving to school with the girls—an integral part of her normal routine. As a creature of habit, it’s very strange for her not to want to take a ride. But when it came time to meet our neighbor for the first dog walk in two weeks, she was happy to get outside, back to her normal self.
In December, I bought a TIG welder on deep Christmas discount with honorarium money made from a gig at MICA. After a ton of research, I settled on a basic unit from Eastwood, branded Rockwood, which seems to be their entry-level gear. It sat in the garage until this weekend, when I had the jungle site deliver a bottle of 100% argon for about $250 less than if I’d purchased it locally. While freezing my ass off working on the trucks outside, I had the little space heater in the garage warm it up in there. When I couldn’t feel my fingers anymore I retreated back inside, restored the sensation in my hands, and set up the unit.
It’s been four years since my welding class, so my memory of running a TIG unit is very hazy. I’d watched a bunch of setup videos and read the manual, but predictably the printed material was lean on detail. After several minutes with no spark I remembered that I had to ground the workpiece, and after that I was quickly laying beads down. Getting used to the footpedal, which regulates the heat, feeding the welding rod at the right intervals, and keeping the tip of the tungsten out of the pool took some time, but I got into a groove and figured out how to keep the welds from blowing through the metal or just sitting on top of it.
It’s going to take a lot of practice (and a lot of argon) to master, but I’m excited to keep working on it. TIG is really good for doing delicate sheet metal work as well as aluminum, and it’s the latter that I’m really interested in. I’ve got a plan for building a roof rack for the Travelall, and Brian included my metal with an order he put in for the EV project. I’d like to tackle that sometime this summer when I can lay it out in the driveway and assemble the whole thing.
Project Saltbox is a Baltimore-based volunteer group doing work to figure out what ICE is doing behind the scenes in Maryland, through FOIA requests, tracking procurement contracts, and following paper trails. They were the group who broke the news of a warehouse purchase in Hagerstown by ICE, who planned on converting it into a “Processing Center”, better known as an immigration detention center.
I’d like to volunteer some time with this group.
The BBC did an analysis of available video footage of the Alex Pretti shooting in Minneapolis. It looks like he may have had a legally registered gun in his possession, but was never holding it in his hands, and was disarmed after being pepper-sprayed and underneath a handful of agents (one of the agents clearly pulls something from the rear waistband of his pants, but it’s hard to see in the video and I do not believe ICE or DHS’s account of this story for a second) before one of the other agents shot at Pretti 10 times. Kristi Noem immediately held a press conference where she lied blatantly about the shooting, as did other Administration officials.
While I understand and respect the difficult job law enforcement officials do every day, and I see the obvious danger in trying to restrain a suspect who is laying face down, there are five agents surrounding Pretti while he’s on the ground. I don’t understand why these masked cowboys are rolling like they’re assaulting Fallujah instead of starting with nonlethal force, like real police are trained to do. This shit has got to be stopped.
Update: The DHS just testified to Congress that two agents fired their weapons in this incident. Oh, and the cosplay Nazi head of the Border Patrol got shitcanned. I guess that’s a good thing.
Michael Fanone, a DC police officer on duty on January 6, when armed insurrectionists stormed the Capitol building, was sitting in the House Committee hearing with Jack Smith yesterday. One of the Committee members (a Republican from Texas) claimed that the President had nothing to do with the events of that day. Here’s his response.
Fuck Nazis, and fuck the politicians who try to lie to us directly and blatantly about the events we saw with our own eyes.
A week ago, the three of us sat on the couch and watched home movies from when Finn was a toddler. We have fun footage of her bundled up outside after the snowfalls of 2009 when the accumulation was taller than she was, and it was a hoot to watch her waddle down the front walk, faceplant into the side of the snowbank, and lick the snow off her chubby cheeks. We haven’t had a snowfall of that magnitude since.
The current forecast is for a large snowstorm coming our way—the latest projections are for 6-12″ and at least an inch of ice to cap things off. Of course, the weather-guessers are predicting power loss and calamity, so everyone is panicking. My procrastination over buying a snowblower has proven to be wise up until now—and I have a seventeen-year-old with a strong back who can shovel for me while I recover from my snowboarding injuries. I am going to bring about six loads of firewood up to the back porch, warm up the generator, stock up on gasoline, and bring the coolers up to the house just in case, but I do hope we make it through without losing power.
Bungie is releasing a new version of Marathon, the seminal Mac shooter game from the Doom/Quake era of video games, in the next few weeks. This news was exciting; I loved playing Marathon when it was first released. Then I found out this new game is something called a “PvPvE survival extraction shooter,” which I do not like to play. So, that’s a bummer.
I had a great time at Whitetail yesterday with Zachary, Brian and Finnegan; we all took a day off to hit the slopes when nobody else was there. It was cold as hell but sunny, so we were able to keep warm enough to stay alive, and got somewhere between 15-20 runs in on the beginner/intermediate slope to work on our skills before the sun went behind the mountain.
I’m coming up on my eight-year cancer checkup in April, where I’m hoping they’ll tell me I have no new passengers aboard. But the idea that it could return later in some other form has always been in the back of my mind; How would I know it’s back until it’s too late to treat properly?
Researchers are discovering dormant tumour cells, also known as disseminated cancer cells, in association with breast, prostate, lung, colon and other cancers, and these cells are increasingly implicated in some metastatic cancers. An estimated 30% of people who have been successfully treated for cancer might harbour these cells, although unpublished work suggests they could be even more common.
There is a field of cancer research dedicated to finding out why it comes back and how it’s triggered, but it’s still early days and there don’t seem to be any clear answers yet.