17 November—Since “People have to know whether or not their president is a crook,” 52 years ago today, entertaining a group of newspaper editors at Disney World in Florida—without so much as cracking a smile, mind you—Tricky Dick Nixon assured America, “Well, I’m not a crook. I’ve earned everything I’ve got.” There’s no question that he did in fact earn everything he had—by hook or by crook, as it were. And putting aside things like tax fiddles and use of taxpayer money to improve his private property in California, he may not have been a crook in the commonly understood sense of grifter and thief. (As opposed to grifter-in-chief.)

But even though he probably hadn’t known about CREEP’s initial break-in at the Democratic National Committee office in the Watergate Hotel until after the fact, in the aftermath Nixon stayed on top of it and lied to the public (of course) and everybody else and abused his presidential power to obstruct justice. Obstruction of justice was a more serious crime than the break-in, by the way.

Nine months after his assurance, facing impeachment and certain conviction by Congress and courts, Not-a-Crook Nixon announced his resignation in a broadcast from the Oval Office on 8 August 1974, to take effect the next day. A month later, President Jerry Ford sought fit to pardon Nixon (which, like it or not, was the right thing to do in the circumstance) because before the Trumpophilic Supreme Court majority invented total presidential immunity last year, it just didn’t exist—in the Constitution or anywhere else. Those were the days.

A month before Nixon joked that he wasn’t a crook, Spiro Agnew had resigned as Tricky Dick’s veep on 10 October 1973. That was two months after public disclosure of Zorba the Veep’s own criminality. (For those too young—or too old—to remember, that was a Democrat derisive allusion to the 1964 movie “Zorba the Greek” and Agnew’s Greek heritage. But the veep had no problem with it.)

So Spiro Agnew’s crimes included tax fraud, bribery, and extortion. They started when he was Baltimore County Executive and continued when he was Governor of Maryland and Vice President of the United States. To avoid prosecution, he pleaded no contest to a single felony charge of tax evasion and was sentenced to three years of unsupervised probation and fined all of $10,000. God forbid a former American vice president should serve real time. But he surrendered at least a part of his ill-gotten gains (plus interest) and was never pardoned.

The wayward Supremes haven’t invented vice presidential immunity. Yet. Give ’em time.

Apropos nothing, consider the crimes Spiro Agnew committed before and during his tenure as vice president: tax fraud, bribery, and extortion. What unpunishable sitting president does that remind you of?

16 November—The squirrels have been particularly active at Pinchpenny Park these past few weeks, storing black walnuts and other goodies and building nests wherever they feel is safe and comfortable. Wherever they damn well please, in other words. The old hay shed, whose security was breached several years ago by commando squirrels or other rodents who gnawed a ground-level entrance through the plywood siding, is now a popular squirrel condo.

There are several nests in the shed, on shelves, in a milk-bottle crate, in a horse-stall corner feeder from the late barn, and one in a never-used lawnmower grass catcher whose fabric has been recycled—along with other soft stuff rodents are adept at scavenging—to line a few of the nests. Unopened black walnut husks are strewn all over the floor and piled in every receptacle. The current walnut hoard is only from this year and last, though the nests go back to the original breach. The squirrels and I have better things to do than keep house.

Even though squirrels, like most people but unlike most unfairly maligned rats (who are essentially squirrels with bald tails and more community spirit), aren’t known to share resources or living quarters, given the fantastic hay-shed condo—convenient location and great protection from elements and predators—it’s likely that a few families are in fact sharing the premises. It can happen.

The bad news, then, is that the intense squirrel activity this autumn is a traditional portent of a colder and snowier winter than, say, the last one, which was pretty mild and not particularly snowy. Pretty good winter, actually. The Farmers’ Almanac agrees with the squirrels, predicting a “cold and snow-filled” winter. But The Old Farmer’s Almanac predicts another mild and dry winter. Although The Old Farmer’s claims 80 percent prediction accuracy, both almanacs actually have around 50 percent accuracy.

No more accurate than the almanacs in long-range prediction, the National Weather Service, which Donald Trump and Elon Musk knackered along with its parent National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and other federal agencies they didn’t like, tactfully takes a bit from both almanac forecasts to predict “wetter-than-average conditions” with “warmer-than-average” temperatures. More rain than snow, perhaps?

The few woolly bears observed at Pinchpenny Park this season also disagree about the severity of the upcoming winter, two with wider black stripes, two with wider orange (or brown) stripes.

The good news is that although the squirrels appear to be working hard to prepare for a hard winter, they don’t appear to be chubbier than usual. Of course, that could simply be because they’ve been working so hard . . .