27 July—To celebrate Bagpipe Appreciation Day, today’s disquisition goes right to two magnificent performances, the first on the bellows-blown Irish uilleann bagpipe, the second on the mouth-blown Scottish great highland bagpipe. You’ll beat time with your feet just like the virtuoso pipers:
26 July—As the Netanyahu-Trump not unjustified war with Iran continues to deplete American military assets and exacerbate Trump’s disastrous effect on the country’s economy (and the country in general), let’s consider Antonio Vivaldi, who lived from 1678 to 1741. He was a Venetian composer, violinist, and impresario who happened to be a Roman Catholic diocesan priest. He spent most of his career teaching music to the girls at the Ospedale della Pietà, a ritzy convent-music school-orphanage in his native Venice, which is now a ritzy hotel, concert venue, and church popular with tourists.
Father Tony was known as the Red Priest (il Prieto Rosso) not because he was a communist but because he had natural auburn-red hair and Venetian redheads have never been called Zenzero—Ginger. It helps that there were no such people as communists in Vivaldi’s time.
Vivaldi’s best known (as opposed to most well-known) musical work is Le quattro stagioni, The Four Seasons, a set of four violin concertos, each depicting a season. But he wrote over 700 pieces of music, including concertos, sonatas, operas, and choral works. They were catalogued some five decades ago by Peter Ryom and are thus conveniently known by their RV (for Ryom Verzeichnis—catalogue) numbers.
Today you’ll enjoy the first movement—allegro molto—of RV 558, one of Vivaldi’s concertos for diverse instruments, in this case a cello, recorders, mandolins, violins, chalumeaux (clarinet predecessors), theorbos (lutes on steroids), and a violin doctored to sound like a marine trumpet.
So what are you waiting for?
25 July—Judging by the Litchfield Zoning Board of Appeals legal notice in the Hearst RepublicanAmerican pictured below, warning of a public hearing on 4 August, a very small family is or will be living in Litchfield. By a very small family, of course, we mean a family of very small people—in fact, of very very very small people, even smaller than Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians, who were about six inches tall.
To save you the trouble of reading the whole legal ad, this is the relevant text verbatim, with the most relevant part boldly italicized:
Case – 26-08-01 To discuss and possibly act upon – Sink – 47 Byrnes Avenue – from Sec. 1.2. RR Sub. 2. BP FS 50’ for a 31’ front yard variance for construction of a 4” wide covered porch.
While we’re on Litchfield land use, let’s visit the benighted borough of Bantam, which some hoity-toity residents (mostly—but not all—newcomers) prefer to call East Warren, and where the former Bantam School, now the Town Hall Annex, is dying to be demolished. Contrary to earlier wishful life-support estimates that hovered around a piddling $10 million, bringing the 72-year-old Marcel Breuer moribund mutant up to par for any use would cost well over $30 million.
Of course that’s unthinkable and unacceptable to and for Litchfield town taxpayers, who in a November referendum will be asked what they want to do with the decrepit old Bantam Breuer Bauhaus money pit. The close-to-unanimous preferred option is certain to be “Demolish the goddamn thing already!” Even Litchfield taxpayers who live and pay Bantam borough taxes as well as Litchfield town taxes are sure to vote to put the building out of its and the town’s misery.
The problem, however, is a small but stubborn, arrogant, unreasonable cadre of Bantam residents—including the borough’s stubborn, arrogant, unreasonable planning and zoning commission—who will do everything they can and more to keep the embattled building on their terms. Years ago, Bantam P&Z abused its power and put the kibosh on a seven-figure deal, favorable to the town, to repurpose the dilapidated building. And it’s not unlikely the Bantam buggers will do it again.
For any number of reasons, demolition of the former Bantam School at an estimated cost of under a million dollars is the only way to go. And if Bantam P&Z, whose regs don’t specifically address general demolition, doesn’t like it, the town will see the borough in court. But even after the demolition, Bantam P&Z can—and well might—screw the town again . . .
24 July—Simón José Antonio de la Santísima Trinidad Bolívar Palacios Ponte y Blanco, commonly known simply as Simón Bolívar, was born (obviously to an aristocratic family) on this day in 1783 in Caracas, Venezuela, which was back then essentially a colony of Spain (a so-called captaincy general), although it was known as the Kingdom of Venezuela. He led what are currently the countries of Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, Peru, and of course Venezuela to independence from Spain and is therefore popularly known as El Libertador, the Liberator.
Bolívar’s birthday is naturally celebrated in the six countries he liberated from Spain. But it’s a formal public holiday (like Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday in the United States) only in Bolivia, which is named after him, and Venezuela, which, thanks to Amerigo Vespucci, is named after Venice. (America, of course, is named after Vespucci, whom many of us learned about by his Latinized name, Americus Vespuccius. Consider that we could be living in the United States of Vespuccia.)
Since Simón Bolívar’s birthday is an important holiday in Venezuela and is celebrated by Venezuelans in the United States, one wonders whether it’s being celebrated by Nicolás and Cilia Maduro, Venezuela’s corrupt and evil former first couple, who are currently incarcerated in a Brooklyn dungeon awaiting trial on whatever charges, having been illegally kidnapped on corrupt and evil Donald Trump’s say-so.
One also wonders why, having relieved Venezuela of corrupt dictator Maduro, corrupt dictator Trump has allowed Venezuela’s former corrupt vice dictatrix Delcy Rodríguez to take over as interim corrupt dictatrix-in-chief rather than installing presumably uncorrupt opposition leader and 2025 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Maria Machado. Does one really wonder?
One may recall that Sra. Machado gave Trump her Nobel medal ostensibly to recognize his commitment to freeing Venezuela of the Maduro dictatorship. But it was obvious that she was sucking up to him and seeking his active help in overthrowing the Maduro regime. All she did, however, was embarrass herself.
So even though Maduro is out, Sra. Machado is still in exile and things in Venezuela haven’t improved much democratically or economically. But so far this year, since taking over the country’s oil exports the U.S. has collected some $13 billion in sales of Venezuelan oil, some $13 billion more than last year. And that’s what counts to Trump.
The oil profit is supposed to benefit the Venezuelan people, but very, very little has been released from Trump’s executively ordered custodial control. On the other hand, Trump has boasted that the U.S. was “making a lot of money” from Venezuelan oil.
And one wonders who else is making a lot of money from Venezuelan oil . . .
23 July—As Donald Trump intensifies his vexatious crusade to alienate Americans and America’s allies as he antagonizes the free world while enriching himself and his evil spawn and sycophantic klepto-oligarch cronies, back in Connecticut it’s been revealed that an alleged undocumented immigrant was registered to vote back in 2018 but never voted. Oh the horror!
Of course, that’s nothing compared to the 6,600 noncitizens who were registered to vote in New Jersey between 2023 and 2024, with 400 actually having voted. Through no fault of their own, mind you. But when all is said and done, these anomalous voter registrations are all the product of the asinine, ill-conceived National Voter Registration Act of 1993, known by its initialism NVRA.
The NVRA, which took effect in 1995, having been passed by bipartisan majorities in both congressional houses, is more popularly known as the Motor Voter Law because among other titles it requires states to offer people—not just citizens, it turns out—the opportunity to register as voters at state motor vehicle offices when they’re applying for driver’s licenses, for instance.
The Motor Voter Law also requires states to offer people—not just citizens, it turns out—the opportunity to register to vote by mail. It’s not that the Motor Voter Law invites fraud or is more vulnerable to errors than in-person registration with a registrar of voters or municipal clerk (which it does, to be sure), it’s that it makes registering to vote too damn easy.
And that’s just registering. Voting, which according to Article I of the U.S. Constitution is almost totally controlled by individual states rather than the federal government, has been made far too easy in many states, including Connecticut (of course). Take drop boxes. Please. They’re expressly permitted in 29 states, including Connecticut (of course), and the District of Columbia, and are expressly prohibited in only 11 states.
Along with mail-in ballots (as opposed to absentee ballots), drop boxes encourage voting by people who don’t really give a damn and therefore shouldn’t be voting in the first place. And as we’ve seen in Bridgeport, drop boxes and mail-in ballots make election fraud very easy and thus very tempting.
Voting may be a constitutional right, but it’s also a privilege and a responsibility and therefore should be done responsibly. Yeah, right. And states like Connecticut encourage irresponsibility in voting. We know that.
If you think in-person registration and voting are inconvenient, consider that before so-called Permanent Personal Registration was enabled in New York State in 1954 at the discretion of individual municipalities and mandated statewide in 1967, voters had to register every year and in person. And they did it . . .
22 July—In an email commenting on the Monitor’s Monday disquisition, a typically perceptive veteran newsman succinctly characterized Hearst’s dilatory publication of recent events as “yesterday’s news tomorrow.” Yes, we know that’s the title of a book on Jewish journalism in America, but if the shoe fits wear it, and the shoe fits perfectly.
The perfectly fitting shoe, which you don’t have to be Jewish to wear, perfectly segues to Spoonerism Day, celebrating the birth in 1844 of the Reverend Dr. William Archibald Spooner, affectionately known as Spoo. Notoriously absent-minded Anglican cleric, Fellow of New College, Oxford, for six decades and Warden for two, and namesake of spoonerisms, Spoo was immensely popular with both senior and junior members of the college and university. And Mrs. Spoo bore him five children.
Spoo didn’t invent spoonerisms, to be sure. They’re really just examples of metathesis, the transposition of sounds or letters (or anything else). Given the nature of human speech, accidental metathesis must go back to the earliest spoken language, but the earliest recorded examples are found in Ancient Greek texts. And they’re nothing like spoonerisms.
On the other hand, in the 16th century, Rabelais used what the French call contrepèteries, deliberate metatheses, usually in dirty jokes. And these days it’s pretty safe to say that many spoonerisms are indeed deliberate—as well as humorous and intentionally risqué.
Spoo is celebrated for transposing the initial sounds in words, like “bunny phone” for “funny bone” and “belly jeans” for “jelly beans.” But it’s unlikely that he actually uttered all the spoonerisms that have been attributed to him. “The Lord is a shoving leopard” and “It is kisstomary to cuss the bride” were actually invented and circulated by New College undergraduates, for instance.
Spoo died on 29 August 1930 at 86 and the Monitor observed the dad say in 2024 with a few genuine or spurious spoonerisms:
Instead of “Can I show you another seat,” “Can I sew you to another sheet?”
Instead of “You have missed all of my history lectures and were caught lighting a fire in the quad,” “You have hissed all of my mystery lectures and were caught fighting a liar in the quad.”
Instead of “You have wasted two terms,” “You have tasted two worms.”
Instead of “There will be no kissing in the punts, gentlemen,” “There will be no pissing in the cunts, gentlemen.”
And if you’re wondering how “If the shoe fits, wear it” segues to spoonerisms, consider the moral of the sad tale about the explorer who ignored his native guide’s warning to not brush the excreta of the foo bird off his head and died: If the foo shits, wear it.
Not only in Oxford . . .
21 July—The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is commonly known by its acronym OSHA, frequently (usually?) modified in workplaces by both management and workers on the shop floor inconvenienced by it to OSHIT. OSHA was established in 1970 under the Occupational Safety and Health Act—the OSH Act—passed with overwhelming bipartisan support and signed into law by Richard Nixon.
So on 21 July 1984, at a die-casting plant in Jackson, Michigan, OSHA documented the first occupational fatality in the United States caused by a robot when a human die-cast operator was pinned and crushed against an ironically named safety pole by a hydraulic robot. The unfortunate operator actually survived the crushing but died five days later from cardiopulmonary arrest. The homicidal nonhumanoid Unimate robot wasn’t arrested. It was speculated that the worker had ignored OSHA guidelines and crossed a safety rail to pick up some scrap metal.
You’re probably not wondering why OSHA didn’t give the honor of the nation’s first robotic homicide to an incident at a Ford casting plant in Flat Rock, Michigan, on 25 January 1979 wherein a worker who had been asked or told to climb to the third level of a five-story robot-accessed shelving unit to manually retrieve parts because the automated—i.e., robotic—system was malfunctioning was struck in the head by the (malfunctioning?) arm of a (malfunctioning?) robotic parts-retrieval cart and killed instantly. That thoughtless homicidal Litton Industries robot cart left its victim’s body undiscovered for a half hour.
Well, it appears that OSHA didn’t consider the Flat Rock incident to be robot-related for a strictly bureaucratic reason. Of course. OSHA categorizes fatalities by the underlying mechanical or equipment failure, such as being struck by a vehicle or crushed by a machine. But the Flat Rock homicide was recorded by OSHA simply as a generic industrial equipment accident.
Of course, in 1979 there were no specific OSHA workplace safety standards for industrial robots, like lockout rules, presence-sensing devices, and alarms. Boy, have times changed.
The good news is, despite OSHA’s bureaucratic obstinacy, the Flat Rock robotic homicide is recognized by historians, the media the world over, and—most important by far—Guinness World Records as the first documented human fatality caused by an industrial robot. The better news is, the Flat Rock victim’s family won a $10 million lawsuit against Litton Industries. And that was pretty big money back then . . .
20 July—The big news today is about yesterday’s World Cup Final. It’s not that Spain beat Argentina 1-0 at the MetLife Stadium in New Jersey or that Donald Trump was vociferously booed by the crowd when his image was shown on the pre-game video boards and again with even more vigor when he walked onto the soccer pitch for the post-game presentation ceremony. Spain’s victory and Trump’s negative reception were expected.
But the big news about the game is that the real genuine print Hearst RepublicanAmerican and likely all the other Hearst rags that are printed in Albany, which usually publish news a day or two late, if ever, when it’s no longer news, actually ran the World Cup story in this morning’s edition. The very next day. Incredible. Judging by the paucity of non-sports details in the story off the wire, including mere mention of Trump’s presence, either the Washington Post reporter didn’t hang around after the game ended at 6:19 p.m. or the reporter or his editors cut out what they considered extraneous details.
We know that Hearst RepublicanAmerican editors didn’t cut anything out of the World Cup Final story because judging by the Waterbury rag’s shamefully sloppy contents which simply can’t have been edited, there simply can’t be any editors, doubtless a function of the non-journalist group publisher counting beans and not giving a damn about news, features, or readers’ preferences.
The fact that Hearst’s whole Waterbury operation appears to be remote since it was moved out of the Pape building doesn’t help matters. Then there’s artificial intelligence on top of real stupidity. But we won’t go there.
If the Hearst RepublicanAmerican can manage to actually print a story a remote-working lackey or robot couldn’t have pulled off the wire before about 6:30 p.m. and deliver it to a rural front door in a hard-copy newspaper by 2 a.m. the next morning, why can’t it do the same for local news?
Silly question. Because Hearst indulges both paper and digital readers with no more than a token smattering of what it deceptively calls “hyper-local reporting”—even if it’s not—only when it’s convenient for Hearst.
While on print newspapers, a few days ago brilliant editorial cartoonist Rick McKee did a panel that wasn’t in the Hearst RepublicanAmerican. Woman reading newspaper with banner headline: “Mitch McConnell says he’s not dead yet.” Woman says to man reading book: “When print newspapers are gone, what will members of Congress hold up in photos to prove they’re still alive?”
19 July—Why, a Republican reader who claims to be neither MAGA nor “TRUMPublican,” asks, am I obsessed with Trump-Hitler comparisons? Even given all of Trump’s “numerous faults,” as the reader puts it, “there is no comparison because look what Hitler did.”
Fair question and I’m looking at what Hitler did. But am I obsessed or simply aware of the obvious? Anyway, abstractly, anything can be compared with anything else whether or not there are similarities. And, putting aside Hitler’s virulent antisemitism and xenophobia and the Holocaust his megalomaniacal insanity engendered, I regularly, rightly, and unapologetically comment on the similarities of what Hitler did to what Trump has done and is doing because they are so striking. And frightening.
Trump’s self-dealing, using his virtually unlimited power for personal gain, and other financial shenanigans in and out of the presidency are the stuff of legend. Yesterday’s disquisition dealt, however superficially, with Hitler’s self-dealing, using his virtually unlimited power for personal gain, which, given all Hitler’s other faults and the enormity of his crimes, historians and commentators tend to ignore.
And that’s only a small part of the Hitler-Trump similarities. Both autocrats are clearly demented. Both are brilliant demagogues. Hitler rehearsed virtually everything, while Trump usually extemporizes, though he’s known to rehearse; and, as with Thursday’s pathetic performance, he reads from a teleprompter when he feels the need.
Hitler and Trump have cadres of super-loyal flunkies. Hitler and Trump have cultivated cults of personality to portray themselves as infallible people, virtual gods. Trump admires the loyalty Hitler was able to claim from (most of) his generals. Trump also admires dictators.
Hitler and Trump make themselves out to be populists, claiming falsely and opportunistically to represent the interests of ordinary people rather than the corrupt klepto-oligarchs (like themselves) whose interests they really represent. And when you come down to it, their own personal interests supersede all others without question.
Hitler and Trump attack judges who don’t suit them. Hitler was able to fire more judges than Trump, to be sure. Trump has been able to fire only about 100 immigration judges because they work for the Department of Justice, which he has weaponized as his personal shysters.
Donald Trump may not be an antisemite or bigot, and it’s likely he’s espoused xenophobia only for opportunistic political advantage. But, like Hitler, he’s dangerously deranged and has authorized murders and other atrocities. And he’ll go as far as he can to abuse the law and public trust for his own advantage.
That’s only a start. But it’s clear that the Hitler-Trump comparison is valid and necessary . . .
18 July—So Donald Trump won’t be commandeering every fan in the United States to blow the wildfire smoke back to Canada after all. Instead he’ll be inflicting one of his notorious tariffs on the 51st-state-elect to punish it for allowing its alien smoke to drift over the border without documentation.
So one sobriquet we haven’t hitherto pinned on Trump is “moron.” But when is that bloody self-absorbed moronic, mendacious ignoramus going to realize that countries—governments—just do not pay tariffs. Importers pay tariffs, not exporters. And the additional cost of the intentionally punitive taxes (because tariffs are taxes on imported goods) is passed down the chain, ultimately to consumers.
And that contributes in huge part to the very inflation Trump repeatedly in his 2024 campaign promised to end in his second reign of terror. In fact, one of his favorite battle cries was, “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again.”
And too many schmucks evidently believed him. And still do.
Donald Trump is the only American president ever to have used the office to generate personal and business revenue during incumbency. Of course everything he’s done and is doing is unethical as well as unsavory. But we won’t go into the gory details.
Rather, we’ll point out that using a position of national leadership for personal gain isn’t unique to Trump. In fact, it’s not at all uncommon among dictators. Case in point, Adolf Hitler, the first volume of whose monumentally dull, poorly written and edited best seller Mein Kampf was published 101 years ago today. The second execrable volume was published in December 1926.
Mein Kampf initially sold rather poorly, but sales picked up when the Nazi party came to power in 1930, giving Hitler about 400,000 Reichmarks in royalties, equivalent to about $2 million today. And Hitler’s royalties skyrocketed after he became chancellor and his administration made his subliterary travesty mandatory reading in the military, schools, and offices, with additional millions of copies bought by his administration to distribute as wedding gifts. A state subsidy, you might say. By the end of World War II, in fact, some 12 million copies had been sold, earning Hitler about 8 million Reichmarks, the equivalent of over $50 million today.
Believe it or not, Hitler was a tax evader. Before he rose to ultimate power, he went to pains to write off most of his income in traditional ways—understated income, overstated, mischaracterized expenses (cars, chauffeur, secretary, travel), and the like. Didn’t—doesn’t—everybody do it?
When Hitler became chancellor in 1933, he owed the equivalent of some $2 million in back taxes and penalties. But the so-called Enabling Act that gave him dictatorial powers (like SCOTUS gave Trump) allowed him to force his way out of the debt (like Trump). And suffice to say he never again owed a pfennig in taxes (like Trump and his evil spawn will do everything they can to effect).
As if that’s not enough, Hitler established a slush fund to which wealthy Germans in business and industry were pressured to contribute big time to nominally support the Nazi party but which in reality was Hitler’s massive personal expense account.
Sound familiar?
And as if the Hitler Fund’s not enough, federal money was earmarked by his flunkies for his personal disposal, allowing him to do everything he damn well pleased at taxpayers’ expense.
Sound familiar?
17 July—It appears that Donald Trump’s equally demented—make that crazed—warlord Pete Hegseth has been overdosing on testosterone supplements in celebration of his ongoing chaotic deconstruction of the defense department and anticipation of what was supposed to be his master’s game-changing speech. While the Monitor hasn’t made any effort to confirm the details of the alleged OD, we were able to obtain a picture of Hegseth in his current state.
Moving on, it wasn’t easy finding a media outlet that carried Trump’s desperate plea for sympathy last night, but Fox News came through. And, as usual, Trump threatened the networks that didn’t broadcast his latest pathetic one-man show of degenerate self-serving mendacity. And even Fox distanced itself from some of Trump’s bullshit.
Trump looked and sounded so pathetic delivering his rehashed revelations that you almost had to feel sorry for the demented senile scumbag.
As usual, Trump was talking through his rectum and implicitly telegraphing his in no way unexpected intention to do whatever it takes, no holds barred, within or without the law, to get his way—with specific reference last night to elections. He seemed at times to be setting the country up for a combination Kristallnacht and Nacht der langen Messer—Night of Broken Glass and Night of the Long Knives.
Donald Trump’s disapproval rating is about 65 percent. But that means about 35 percent of the alleged electorate actually approve of him. The question, then, is how and why? Do Trump’s supporters know what they’re doing and what he’s doing? Do they care? Are they stupid, blind, ignorant, indifferent, or simply evil like him?
And are Trump’s obsequious flunkies in high places really as committed and subservient to him as they embarrassingly make themselves out to be?