Interesting past few weeks for stateside politics. A very disconcerting poll was dropped recently showing Biden trailing Trump significantly in five of the six biggest battleground states, and yet on Tuesday Dems won pretty resounding electoral victories in purple (Virginia), and even red (Kentucky), states. What to make of it all, I'm not exactly sure, but Occam's Razor suggests that people don't like Joe Biden, and they do like reproductive rights. It also shows the limitations of the Republican cultural-grievances-only strategy. Living in DC, I was inundated with ads for the Virginia candidates, and every Democratic ad was seemingly scripted by Planned Parenthood, and every Republican ad was seemingly scripted by Tucker Carlson. Sanity prevailed this time. So, I'd rather have this result than the opposite (Biden ahead in polls and Republicans winning elections), and it's a fool's errand to read too much into one poll a year away from an election when so much will change -- keep in mind, at this time four years ago, Covid wasn't even a thing yet -- but still, it doesn't make me feel good.
And if you want to feel even worse, consider that this poll was conducted before the October 7 massacre in Israel. This issue is dividing liberals, and it has the potential to further erode support for Biden. It will be very difficult for a Democrat to win a national election without broad support from both American Jews and American Muslims. But is there anything Biden -- or anybody, for that matter -- can do to satisfy both constituencies right now? It doesn't seem like it to me. As I wrote in my last entry, Israel-Palestine is a true moral conundrum, in which there are no good solutions. Perhaps, in a year, with emotions lower than they are today, a common detestation of Trump will carry the day for Dems, as it's did in 2020 and has done in many elections since then, but... I don't know. Nobody does.
Anyway, on to other topics.
S and I have really been racking up the photo-enforced traffic violation fines. We've payed $800 in tickets over the past six months. Those things are such a scheme. They have nothing to do with traffic safety. They're in effect a tax on driving because they are so tacky-tack, and placed in such strategic locations, everybody will get one at some point. I mean, S got two in a row for going 42 in a 30 zone at, like 6:00 am, on her way to work when nobody else is around. Then I got one for failure to stop behind the line when turning right on red. I did stop, mind you, but my front tires were a bit over the line, so they sent me a ticket. I actually tried to fight that one, but it didn't work. It's such bullshit, and I've heard rumors that most people don't pay them and nothing happens, but I'm too scared to test it. So, whenever I pay one, not only am I annoyed because I'm losing money, I'm also annoyed because I feel like a chump.
I should say, to be fair, $500 of that $800 was levied not by DC, but by Montgomery Country, MD. I got two $250 tickets, within a week of one another, for disobeying a school bus' stop sign. That sounds worse than it was. I'm not some maniac driver who endangers children. What happened is, there's an apartment complex along my morning commute on the opposite of the street from the direction I travel. It's a four-lane, double-yellow-line street, and crossing it would be completely illegal (and very unsafe) for anybody, especially children. Occasionally, there will be a school bus at the complex picking up kids. Despite the fact that nobody can cross the street, the driver puts out the stop sign, which stops all lanes of traffic in both directions. Fine, he probably has to do that. But then after all the kids are on the bus, he just sits there for some reason, backing up traffic as far as the eye can see. Every time he does this. Usually, I'm not in the front the of line, so I just have to sit there and wait. But as luck would have it (bad luck, as it turns out), twice within a week I was in the front of line, and so after waiting for, I don't know, two or three minutes I just went. Apparently buses today are equipped with cameras, and ten days later I received a citation in the mail for $250. This was doubly disturbing because I surmised another one was arriving shortly. Indeed it was.
S usually gets the mail, so she saw the first citation, which I didn't mind. But I was a bit embarrassed about immediately getting a second one, and it came while she was out of town, so I didn't tell her about it. Then I paid it with the one credit card I have that's not in a joint account, so she doesn't ever look at the statement. She will notice probably when I use money from our shared checking account to pay off the card balance, but I use that card for subscriptions, and a lot subscriptions automatically renew this time of the year, so she probably won't think much of it. And if she does, and she asks me about it, I'll just fess up. This isn't like a deep dark secret. It's just something, all things equal, I would prefer not to tell her. Such omissions are a key part of a successful marriage, if you ask me.
Final topic: seals. No, not the sea animal, the adhesive material used to preserve foodstuffs. I hate most seals. They are way more trouble than they should be. They are like smoke detectors, in that every time I use one, I'm astounded that we haven't figured them out yet as a society. I don't know if it's companies being cheap or if material science has not advance enough to get seals completely right (probably the former), but so many of them are terrible. The glue on them is very often too strong, which causes one of two problems: The seal won't come off at all; the seal shreds immediately everywhere except along the rim of the container.
An example is the Wegman's snack-size hummus containers. The seal has a little plastic tab sticking out on it, and about a quarter of the time, you cannot grip the tab firmly enough to pull the seal off at all, and another quarter of the time, you tear only the tab off, leaving a perfectly intact seal with nothing to grab.
The Orgrain protein powder container is even worse. If you look at the picture closely below, you will notice paper remnants around the lip. This is because when you tear off the seal, only the top half of it comes off, leaving a thin paper covering totally in place. This happens 100% of the time. I have to get a knife and run it around the lip of the container to cut out the paper.
The absolutely worst seal, however, goes to Costco peanut butter. It's a guaranteed mess trying to get that thing off. You have to pull it off section-by-section and then get a putty knife and scrape off the debris on the rim. This is peanut butter, mind you, the organic kind, so it has massive amounts of oil in it, and as you're spending half your morning trying to jimmy the seal off, that oil is sloshing over the sides and getting all over the jar and the counter and on your fingers -- like I said, guaranteed mess. Well, I guess it forces me to conserve. When the peanut butter gets low, I scrape out every last iota. I'm not trying to be less wasteful; I just don't want to open a new jar.
Until next time...
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