notes

1. Despite the date, I hastened to San Jose Tofu to buy a block - first stage in a campaign to have as much as I can stand to eat (perhaps one a week) in the month remaining - and to give the retiring owners best wishes.

2. Changing bandages is difficult when in the company of a curious cat.

3. Wandered by the living room just as B. turned the television on. Heard announcer say, in a shocked voice, "He's marrying a divorced American actress who's three years older than he is." Can't determine which part shocks the announcer most, but realized with a mixture of amazement and regret that I know who's being discussed.

4. Firefox updated itself, again. This time I had trouble figuring out what happened to my bookmarks. I could bookmark a page, I could find (under the icon of a bookshelf) the list of recent bookmarks, but where was my big classified file? And, once I found it, what was an easy way to display it? Turned out they did something very sensible with it: Ctrl-B toggles it on and off as a sidebar, which is much more convenient when I want to consult multiple bookmarks than the old pull-down menu was. I like that; what I didn't like was how difficult it was to figure that out.

5. More big fires, this time in the LA area. Collaterals of friends are being affected by these. Those who say "In December?!" don't know California. I'm afraid this is going to be normal.

6. Al Franken has to go, but Roy Moore is not being prevented from arriving, and Donald Trump is still there. Isn't there something wrong with this disposition? I'd have Franken say, "All right, I'll resign: to take effect the minute that Moore is either defeated or expelled, and Trump is impeached."

6a. I have to agree, though, with regrets, that Franken has passed his sell-by date. It's not so much the incidents themselves, which were routine creepy masher gropings (bad, but deserving a more measured denouncement), but the sanctimoniousness of his response that got him. To the first charge he said it was just one case of bad judgment which he regrets. That might have been forgivable, but no surprise, it turns out he did it all the time. The gap here is what kills it. Kevin Spacey had the same kind of response, and though the charges against Spacey were much worse, it was, again, the divorce of that response from reality which made it game over.