Tragedy, luxuries, statues, parks, galleries

I seem to have acquired a cold since Monday, which feels extremely unfair. I have spent most of the day feeling severely spaced out and trying to convince myself that I will not actually blow my head off if I sneeze one more time. While waiting in line at the post office, dressed normally for early winter (corduroy coat, scarf, flat cap) and not capable of focusing on much of anything other than the necessities of mailing a package internationally, I completely failed to register that the postal worker behind the counter meant me when he said, "Can I help you, sir?" Then he saw the name on the customs form I had filled out and said, "Oh, sorry," and I wish I had had the presence of mind to respond in gender-confusing kind, but instead I believe I said insightfully, "I have to mail this to Canada."

The news is terrible. The news is surreally, fictionally terrible. There is a ceasefire now in Aleppo and I hope it holds; I hope that all the people who called for help are not already dead. The information on the Russian hacking of the U.S. election continues to mount and I can't figure out what politicians are doing with it—shrugging and resigning themselves to a tainted election that looks to produce a uniquely destructive administration? I'm sure there are still people all across this country who are happy for Trump's victory, however much cheating he required to obtain it, but I keep foundering on the idea of the kind of people who cheered a platform of expelling immigrants and rejoiced in a retrograde nationalist ideal being all right with proven foreign interference in the process of American democracy. Perhaps they think it's all lies. The media, you know. You cannot believe the media. You can believe no one but Donald Trump. He has all the answers. He tells you the truth. He'll give you your heart's desire for free. Never mind history, does no one in this country know folktales? I recognize that everyone on my friendlist will have gone through this stage over the weekend and I am just behind the times, but now is when I am reading news and it is bewildering. The continued desire to keep talking about Trump as if he is still (he never was) just an ordinary candidate on track to the White House as usual. This is not usual. This is not normal. What a lousy refrain for the foreseeable future. I like my not normal in other flavors, thank you.

Things that are good—

1. derspatchel made me cheese grits for lunch. They are a comfort food of my childhood, one of my former winter breakfasts that lapsed in recent years. Thank you for the reminder, shewhomust!

2. Erle Stanley Gardner's The Knife Slipped (1939/2016) is even better than its cover and I deeply regret that it was not published at the time of its writing, because if it had set the tone for the rest of the series, Bertha Cool—late-middle-aged, overweight, unsentimental, profane, and majestically undisturbed by other people's reactions to all of the previous—would have been one of the most enjoyably bad-ass female detectives of the twentieth century. As it was, the editor's afterword and my experience of a later book in the series suggest that after the novel was rejected, Gardner redirected the characterizations so that narrator Donald Lam emerged as the brains of the outfit and Bertha as a secondary figure. I like Donald; he is an appropriately odd-couple counterpart to Bertha, being a pint-sized ex-lawyer, not yet thirty, something of a romantic, who's about as much use where fists or guns are involved as a dishrag against a depth charge. He's a smart kid and tougher than he looks, which is why he's working for Bertha's detective agency in the first place. He also makes, in the course of The Knife Slipped, the hilariously genre-savvy mistake of figuring himself as the world-weary private eye being played for a sap by the femme fatale he loves, with the result that he almost wrecks the case trying to cover up guilt that isn't there and really confusing the girl in the meanwhile. Eventually he works his way to the truth of the crime scene, but it takes a boost from his boss who never played the sap for anyone, especially not her cheating late husband; the author of the afterword believes that, too, did not meet with Gardner's editor's approval. I agree that Donald needn't have stayed a screwup in order for the series to progress, but it's a fantastically meta way for him to be fallible and I am sorry that Gardner felt any need to diminish the force of hard-boiled, diamond-wearing DNGAF that is heavy-breasted Bertha Cool, lighting another cigarette and reminding the reader, "I like loose clothes, loose company, and loose talk, and to hell with the people who don't." At the moment I have fancast her with Hope Emerson, but please feel free to suggest anyone I've overlooked.

3. My plush Dunkleosteus terrelli arrived! In May, I backed a Kickstarter by the Paleontological Research Institute to add a plush ammonoid to their line of Paleozoic Pals. My reward level was some fossil wallpapers and a plush placoderm. On the original production schedule it would have been a birthday self-present; as it is, I think it is just generally comforting. I unwrapped it and Rob instantly and correctly exclaimed, "In the Late Devouring Period, fish became obnoxious!" Personally, I think it's got a sweet face.