calculus
It was a kick to walk into the theater and walk upstairs, downstairs, all the routes and stand in all the familiar places. I'm enthusiastic about having live music again and maybe doing a library summer music series there, but I don't have a lot of time to give it. The library is a full time job. The back stairs still have the signed pics of artists who played there, often with a set list behind the picture. When I walked up to the balcony, a skinny John Sullivan was sitting there.
Along with getting rid of DirecTV, this week I cancelled my eApps virtual machine, and moved just two sites onto directNic hosting, this one and unitymaine.org because it has the web version of the land use ordinance on it and some old theater pages. The painful part of changing hosts is that our old emails don't transfer. I have access to the old server until April; maybe I can figure it out. I've changed the Roku menu so that the few things we use are at the top: WABI app for local news, Paramount Plus for CBS national news, Peacock for NBC, Hulu for ABC, Sling for MSNBC, Netflix and Prime for movies and series. Tourist was the second series we watched set in Austrailia. Feel like we have been living in the outback. Streaming services don't have contracts, so you can switch among them as needed.
Marker: 100Mbps connection and a roku stick are all you need.
At every presidential election, I have a few friends who say they will not vote out of protest. This year it is about the genocide in Gaza and US support of it financially. I totally agree with the protestors: the US is complicit in genocide. In the Michigan primary, some are voting "uncommitted" out of protest, and that makes sense because it sends a message to Biden to change policy toward Israel if he wants support. But when it comes to the November election when our democracy itself is on the line, the calculus changes. A Trump win would be a disaster for Gaza and a vote for the authoritarian criminal Netanyahu, not that any of that would matter since our democracy would be destroyed.
I don't usually join in the monthly book club discussion, but I did for this book. A couple of memorable things: when Moshe wants to move down into the more prosperous part of town, to America, he says, Chona the central character even after her death, says no, this is America, this being the Chicken Hill mix of black, Jewish, eastern Europe immigrants. When one of the two evil characters looks over the town at the mix of immigrants and black people, he says they want to replace him. So there are little touches of our current situation in the book's 1936 setting. I like to think that the loose network of culturally different groups pulling off a daring rescue by each doing their part is a model for a big tent political party. The book referenced the concept of Tikkun Olam, "a concept in Judaism, which refers to action intended to repair and improve the world."
Enough of us at the library have read the book so that we can refer to its characters and events as a common language. I hope the same is true for next month's book, Timothy Snyder's On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, which I want to give a new close reading.
Although not a marijuana user, I am fascinated by the industry that has grown up in Maine around it and I've visited several emporiums of medical and recreational pot with those who are purchasing product. Some like Sweet Dirt in Waterville look like Apple stores with sophisticated displays in fancy glass containers. Others like the one across from the race track in Unity are grubby like old comic book stores. 
The woman-owned Cheese House in Fairfield is fun and fanciful and very yellow inside and out. I can't imagine the thought process that led them to this look, except that it is very visible from the interstate.
