Georgia in limbo

Not the presidential election, which has been decided. The senatorial. And not just because the runoffs have yet to be held. There's a tiny legal glitch in this election which I haven't seen discussed, and I wonder how it's to be dealt with. I'm a Senate-terms nerd, and this concerns me.

This doesn't apply to Loeffler's seat. She's an interim appointee, and will hold the seat until her elected successor for the two remaining years in the term, whether it be herself or her opponent, is elected.

It's Perdue's. His seat is up in the normal course, and that means his term expires at noon on January 3. But the runoff isn't until January 5. What happens in the interim?

January 3 is a Sunday, so the new Congress will meet presumably on January 4, at which point, as it works normally, the senators sworn in will have their service dates backdated to the 3rd. But they're all uncontested and their elections will be already certified. Perdue will be without a seat until and unless he's re-elected on the 5th, and if the election is close it may take several days to confirm that.

So what happens? Does this count as a vacancy that the governor can fill? That would be subject to Georgia law. If so, he could appoint Perdue and hope he gets re-elected. In which case his service would be continuous.

Or, without the interim appointment, could Perdue's service date - or Ossoff's, should he win - be backdated to the 3rd? I don't think that would fit Senate rules, since backdating traditionally requires uncontested right to the seat.

Or, if Perdue wins, would there be a tiny gap in his service, and would that affect his seniority?

I haven't seen any of this discussed or explained.

post-Thanksgiving dinner

When I bought the three-pound turkey roast, I knew that'd be enough meat for us for at least two dinners. And with three sides, where we normally have one, there were definitely going to be leftovers of everything. So tonight, with the assistance of regular oven and microwave, I heated everything up and we had reruns. That took care of everything but the potato, which I don't eat, and the stuffing, which will still be going on for a while. Plus the brownies, which will also make dessert nibbles for a while.

Today was the annual task of fetching the artificial tree from storage and setting it up for the Christmas season. Also the boxes of ornaments which B will unpack and decorate with. Doing this revealed just what a toll eight months of hiding out at home has taken on my physical stamina.

And there's more to come. Watching the rising tide, and noting also Kevin S's observation that holiday gatherings are only going to increase the number of infected but nonsymptomatic people around, I'm intensifying my isolation. I'm cutting out in-store shopping, including takeout meals, entirely. No commerce or other interaction other than drive-through for at least the next six weeks - basically the rest of DT's term, heh - unless unavoidable.

That meant an extra-large order from grocery pick-up this morning, since I'd been making supplementary runs early in the morning. I did get a due blood test at the clinic this morning, at 6.30 when they open - but not, as it turns out, open the doors to the building, so it was quite a job getting in.

Chilling times. And listening to the Boston Symphony play the Largo of Shostakovich's Sixth as I write this is only underlining it. At least I have my music, and my reading, to occupy me. And come later in the season, we will go out for a drive to look at holiday lights. I'm looking forward to that more than usual.

thanksgiving dinner, steps three-n

First a couple hours' Zoom chat with family, during which both our cats, plus a few other participants', were featured on nationwide tv - from California and Washington to Virginia and North Carolina, plus one screen in London too. B. and I were seated at our dining room table, and the chat was interrupted for me by several visits to the kitchen to start the meal.

After that it became rather busier, especially in the last half hour, the only victim being a few too many seconds distracted from the roasting pine nuts for the vegetable garnish. And my, did a heaping meal of turkey, cornbread stuffing, mashed potato, gravy, and roasted veggies look appetizing on the plate as I served it to B.

The veggie was rather complicated but I'd made it before. The rest of the items were fairly simple except for the turkey roast, which was a new cooking experience for me. Fortunately it worked just as the instructions said it would. My only dilemma was the direction to cook it on a roasting pan. We don't have a roasting pan. What we have is a baking pan with a removable cooling grid. It wouldn't be large enough for a whole turkey, but a 3-pound roast fit fine. So what I did was take out that grid, wrap it in aluminum foil, poke holes in the foil, and presto, a workable roasting pan.

Then this morning what should appear in the Washington Post - the same source where I found the roasted veggie recipe a couple weeks ago, with its recommendation for Thanksgiving - but a recipe for Kamala Harris's personal favorite cornbread dressing and a recommendation to use that for Thanksgiving. Well, it's a little late for that now, isn't it? But if I make the same menu for Christmas, I'll have to try it then.

So we had a very nice meal, with wine, and there's enough leftovers for a rerun tomorrow night. This cozy do-it-yourself job was forced on us by the pandemic, but it turned out quite well. Happy Thanksgiving to all.

thanksgiving dinner, step two

Step 2. Wednesday, make brownies for dessert.

Holiday decorations, step 1: B's home-made seasonal wreath, on our front door:

thanksgiving dinner, step one

Step 1. Tuesday: start to defrost turkey.

thanksgiving menu

I've acquired the last ingredients, so we're all prepared for Thanksgiving dinner. As long as B and I have been together this meal has been with her family; before then it was usually with my grandmother, the only really good cook my family has ever produced. This will be my first attempt at cooking such a meal myself. It'll be just the two of us, though it'll be preceded by a family Zoom phone call. There was a rehearsal for that over the weekend, mostly to ensure that B's non-tech-enabled eldest sister was able to get the connection to work, and she was there, while her husband, like me, was off cooking dinner. (Good on ya, Norm.)

So here's the Thanksgiving menu at our house:

Boneless turkey roast, white and dark meat
with savory herb turkey rub and gravy

Corn bread stuffing (B's request: she likes corn bread)

Roasted zucchini and red onion with tahini and za'atar

Roasted garlic and parmesan red and russet mashed potatoes
(yeah, it's a mix)

Sugar-free chocolate fudge brownies
with mint chip (his) and peanut butter (hers) ice creams, and brandy

Egg nog

Gewürztraminer wine

paperless

Starting this last week, there's been a change in our daily routine. For the first time since ... forever, actually ... nobody's going outside to fetch the morning newspaper. We've canceled our hard-copy subscription. The price kept going up and up, and it was the cost of the physical paper and printing that was doing it. But we're keeping the online subscription, which costs a lot less.

For years now, when we've been on trips it's been B's habit to read the facsimile edition of our local paper from the web on her tablet over breakfast, and now she just does that at home too. My own tablet is too small in size and too slow to make the facsimile edition very useful, but I can always read the articles through the webpage. And I read a lot of news articles while sitting at my desktop. Besides our local paper, the San Jose Mercury News, I keep subscriptions to the Washington Post, which I find continually interesting, and the San Mateo Daily Journal, the paper I write concert reviews for. I also read articles on the Guardian, which is free (and which asks for donations which I might give them if they ever stop being transphobic), and as long as I remember to delete cookies in advance every time, I can read an occasional article from the New York Times. Otherwise I stick mostly to commentary magazines like Slate.

I've had some amazing difficulties with newspaper delivery in the distant past, but our delivery here was pretty good, except for the occasional undelivered Sunday paper and the couple times a month they'd forget and give us the Chinese-language paper instead. But that's gone now.

Meanwhile, my brother and I had a Zoom chat with the latest winner of the copy-editor's award we established in our mother's memory at the paper where she worked as an undergraduate, the University of Michigan Daily. That we like to know where our donation is going is our motive; curiosity on the recipient's part as to where it came from was hers. Among other things we learned that the Daily is almost entirely online these days, there being virtually nobody on campus to pick up a physical copy. So the inexorable trend continues ...

online concert reviews

And here we have it: my return to formal concert reviewing for the first time since March. Kohl Mansion, one of my regular venues, started this month to sponsor online concerts, as so many other chamber music providers have done, and I thought they deserved coverage in the Daily Journal. My editor sounded pleased to have me back (though I'd already done a roundup last month of what local vendors are doing online).

The timing was ideal, with two concerts within two weeks of each other, and the third in the series not for another two months, so I could conclude by promoting it far in advance. I was a little hesitant to approach these for full-length reviews, partly because they're only half-length concerts and partly because I find it more challenging to concentrate on an online concert than an in-person one, but mostly because, with all the recording and computer equipment intervening, I am less sure I'm getting an unmediated listening experience. So I chose to write more briefly on both concerts together, so I could be more succinct.

The result was one of those cases where all my judgment of the works and the performance gets packed into two or three well-chosen (I hope) words for each item, and I spent as much attention on the acoustics as anything else. That I mislaid my notes on the first concert before writing the review two weeks later also contributed; fortunately I remembered the main points. Frankly I was less eager to hear these concerts than the third one, which will be Beethoven's Op. 130 quartet, but the sheer quality of the performances overwhelmed any lesser degree of interest in the music played. I'm content with the result.

Menlo is also doing online concerts, so I'll wait a decent interval and then take up one of theirs.

two nations

To get a crude sense of the geographic spread of the US presidential vote, I look at the results by winners of counties. The close similarity of the counties won by the D and R candidates in the recent election and that of four years ago, and the further similarity with that of other recent elections, prompted a quick update of a database I've kept of the county winners since the election of 2000, which is pretty much when the current dispensation of party affiliation settled into place.

I then counted them up.* And here's the result: 78% of US counties have voted the same way in every presidential election since 2000: 67% Republican, 11% Democratic. (The larger Republican number is due to smaller and more rural counties tending Republican, while more populous urban ones tend Democratic. Biden won Minnesota while carrying only 13 of the state's 87 counties, for instance.) Of the remainder, 16% voted for DT in both the last two elections and 4% voted against him, leaving only 2% of the whole - 76 counties altogether - that switched allegiance one way or the other between 2016 and 2020.

That sounds like a high degree of consistency, but has it changed over time? I made a comparison with the previous 6 elections, 1976-1996. Like the latest 6, it had 3 D and 3 R wins, but the latter were closer to blow-outs, which we've had none of since.** The results in the partial set of states I have calculations for is 54% of counties voted the same way in all 6 elections (48% R, 6% D), and 46% split their vote over the 1976-96 period, as opposed to only 22% in 2000-20.

Yes, it looks like we are settling into two nations.

*49 states. Alaska has no counties, and does not count votes by the boroughs and census divisions which are the (roughly) continuing divisions of the state for most statistical purposes. To calculate by those would require painstakingly adding up individual precincts, and nobody has done that for 2020 yet.
In Louisiana the counties are called parishes, for historical reasons dating back to the early 19th century.
A few other states have occasional large independent cities, but Virginia is unique in considering every incorporated city to be independent of its counties, and most Virginia geographic statistics are kept that way. But I dislike this because it makes Virginia statistics geographically incompatible with other states'. So I combine independent cities with their geographical counties, leaving the Hampton Roads ones that have swallowed the entire county. I figure it this way: in some New England states, counties no longer exist as units of government, but they're still considered useful as geographic aggregates for statistical purposes. I'm just doing the same thing with Virginia.

**I haven't calculated the 1976-96 figures for all the states, just about half which I found more interesting to work with, mostly western, Great Plains, and New England states. But they're roughly representative of the whole, with 80% of their counties voting the same throughout 2000-20, as opposed to 78% in the whole US.

a few more events

The CS Lewis Society offered an online screening of a live performance of a one-man play on CSL's life. The actor, David Payne, has been doing Lewis for a long time and made a pretty fair impersonation. The notion that Lewis would sit there for 90 minutes and tell some strangers all about his life seemed implausible, but many of the specific contents fit the bill, including some light bawdy humor, something the real Lewis enjoyed, and I've no doubt that the one about the pastor who sees a girls' school production of A Midsummer Night's Dream and exclaims that at last he's seen a female Bottom would make the list.

Next morning, or evening Glasgow time, an academic presentation from the university there on the centenary of A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay. Three excellent speakers, one of whom I know. By the time it was over I knew three times as much about Lindsay and the book as I'd ever known before, and that included the dismaying fact that the only copy I've ever read was a corrupted text (it was derived from an earlier edition which had been copy-edited by some busybody who rewrote the text, despite the fact that it was a previously published book). Much discussion of gnosticism, Olaf Stapledon (to whom Lindsay was much compared), even Charles Williams. CSL liked the book for being spiritually-aware fiction, but was appalled by its philosophy, which may be why, unlike for many other contemporary novels he admired, he never wrote the author a fan letter.

New issue of Mythlore arrived, and no sooner do I browse through it than I find an error on Inklings history. Not even an ordinary one. The article author thinks he's found an error in his source material, but he hasn't: the source material is correct. The article author is the one in error. What's more, elsewhere in the same footnote he cites a reference source that, on the same page, could have set him straight. I've written a letter.