TGIF ~ Hey, it’s almost Christmas!
I missed Friday because for some reason, I was sure it was Thursday. So here we are and it’ i’s Sunday. I must have completely missed Friday and moved directly to Saturday from what I assumed was Thursday.
Does it matter?
I am always uninspired on Sunday. If I had any inspiration — it’s getting harder to find inspiration with each passing day — I probably blew it before I got past Wednesday. I’ve been reading history again. I can read any kind of fiction and it never gets me aggravated.
This it this year’s 2022 Christmas tree. We moved it from the middle of the room to the top of the old gramophone.
History always aggravates me, especially when I realize the here we are in 2022 behaving the same way we did in 1788, although so far we haven’t resorted to beating each other up in Congress. Yes, they really did that. But they all carried walking sticks, so they used them to beat each other up and when the sticks broke, they used fists and eye-gouging.
Back in the late 1700s they were afraid the country was going to have another revolution. No one stormed the Capital because they hadn’t built it yet. I’m pretty sure if it existed, they’d have stormed it. We were lucky back then: Washington D.C. was just an idea. It would be 80 years before it was big enough to be important enough to become a target. We should have just stayed with moving the “capital” from city to city every couple of years. When one city got sick of us, we could move to the next one until they were ready to run us out of town.
Sadly, we built Washington D.C. and nothing has been remotely normal since. Actually, nothing was normal before we built it so why did we think creating it would be better? But at least when John and Abigail Adams first took a look at it, it was merely the potential thought that counted. It could get worse. It did.
Reality is bad but sometimes, history is worse. The painful recognition that not only has nothing improved, but “things” have somehow spiraled backwards and we are pretty much in the same place we were 250 years ago. I find that both comforting and demoralizing. Simultaneously.
And so the holiday season has rolled in. Everyone has their annual cold because what better time to be all sneezy than Christmas?
And the tree is up. Merry merry!!
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Categories: #gallery, #Photography, Anecdote, Christmas, Holidays, Home
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
Do you think having a city specifically created to be the capital is a bad thing? Is it because the people who work there live in a kind of political bubble away from the real world. I’m curious because we have Canberra, created because Sydney and Melbourne could not agree which should be the capital.
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Our capitol cities are strange places, politically and sociologically! They are, by nature, unstable places — there is a stable population of “government workers,” and another full population that changes periodically shortly after elections. The stable portion of the population is continually under pressure to adapt to the incoming climate as it descends!
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It makes those cities “odd birds” compared with cities that grew “naturally.” I’m not sure that DC is an improvement over making New York (which at that time was the biggest city) the capital, like London or Paris, etc. I never gave it a lot of thought until I got into this book and realized all the weird reasons we had to make D.C. our capital.
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I don’t know. I don’t think it’s necessary. It just means that in DC, almost everyone’s work is somehow political. There were other cities. New York would have made a sensible capital since it was then the country’s biggest city. But it is what it is.
I think you only see this “city for politics” in new nations. The old ones didn’t decide. It was obvious.
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I think Canberra is probably a bit odd in comparison to the other capitals. It is a smaller city but wealthier in comparison and more highly educated. I’m sure that a city where the main “industry” is government administration must make for a different feel. The ACT does have its own government but it’s a territory, not a state so doesn’t have the same rights and geographically it is all within NSW. I’m sure they also have homeless people and poor people but not in the way the larger cities do. I do feel that once someone becomes an MP, they are somewhat isolated from the real world anyway. They no longer use public transport to go to work so they don’t get the chance to just chat to people. If they visit a facility, they get the red carpet treatment. They don’t see things as they really are. or have to deal with everyday problems as much. They have staff to do all that.
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They have to make a special effort to be “normal.” I think some do, but most don’t, especially when they have protection details. Hard to be unobtrusive with a security detail following you around.
D.C. is an expensive city. I don’t know how some of the lower level pols manage to find a place to stay. Maintaining two homes — even when one is just a “Pied-a-terre” — is very expensive and D.C., for all it’s high crime and poverty, is $$$$. And has been since I was a child.
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I imagine that it’s difficult for MP’s here too. If you live in a distant state commuting is not an option either.
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The apartment we used to live in on Beacon Hill was one of the early 1800s pied-a-terre’s. It was very small, but it had a back patio and a working fireplace, but it was like a tunnel — very narrow and long. I’m pretty sure the cockroaches in it were original to days BEFORE the founding of the country. They weren’t scared of anyone or anything. We might have stayed longer except for the cockroaches. They were a hardy lot.
Beacon Hill was the original Boston, before they dredged the bay and build up the land. I loved living there — but man, those roaches were something else!
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They say that the cockroaches will outlast all other living creatures.
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I love your beautiful blue tree!
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Last night I went to turn it off and discovered that what I had thought was the on/off switch turned it different colors. I’m going to turn it on. It might NOT be blue this time. Lat night it was red, green, many colors in sequence, flashing, fading. So I have NO idea what it will be when I turn it back on.
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