We drove through several windfarms at night during our drive, and each fan has a blinking red light at the top. The lights are all synchronized to pulse on and off in unison. The "on" part is a little scattered, because the distance is vast and also you're driving through the farm, so the closer fans make the further fans twinkle and flicker as they pass across your line of vision. The "off" beat is decisively uniform.

I assume this is a plane thing, but it would drive me crazy to live near a farm that blinked roughly once per second on and off. I think I could get used to it if it were twinkling and random. But regular blinking seems like it would be harder for me to block out. I imagine that I'd find myself automatically mildly compelled to look towards it and I'd have to keep actively breaking the spell and looking away, whereas if it were random visual static, I could keep it in the background.

This is assuming that I didn't live in the middle of the windfarm, but just on one side of it. Also assuming that I still had high speed internet access in whatever rural tarnation I've been consigned to.

Chase down Alice's Restaurant here.

The last post and all the comments on it really did give me all sorts of warm, loved feelings. I don't know how to say it without sounding cliched, but I think it's amazing that there's a group of wildly intelligent, interesting, politically sound people who are willing to read what I have to say in order to get to the comments. I'm punching above my weight class. From when I was a child, I always wanted to be a writer, and blogging here is actually kind of a childhood dream made real.

What I ought to do is wade through and find fine and wonderful comments made by each of you and link them here in an elaborate display of appreciation. But you don't have that kind of blogger. Sorry!

Thanks, all. I hope you have a fantastic meal with good company in the near future, whether it's part of a Thanksgiving or not.

It's not exactly digging ditches, but there's a constant thrum of attention that has to be paid to the blog when one is the primary poster, and Heebie has been doing it for many years with wit and good humor, and it's a real service. Thank you, Heebie.

My take is yes, the situation linked here would be the same (and would make the letter-writer look like a controlling freak), but I saw some interesting reactions from people on Twitter suggesting that they'd perceive it differently if the genders were flipped.

My wife is an accomplished author who also holds down a fulltime job in an unrelated field, mostly for the benefits. When we had our first child last year, we agreed that she would pause her writing career--something had to go with a new baby at home.

Except, it turns out she didn't pause it. She got a great idea for a new novel, wrote it secretly during her lunch break at work, and sold it for $100,000. I feel so many things right now; it's hard to be mad at someone when they casually tell you your son's college education is now paid for, and her lunch hour is technically hers to do as she wishes. But she went against our deal! She could have been home an hour earlier every night this year if she hadn't done this project, and when I think back on all the times she's been tired or grumpy in the past year, I now blame the book (even though it could have just been caring for a newborn). How do I trust her to keep to her word? How should I feel right now?

Anyone sympathizing with the guy or with his imaginary female equivalent?

Minivet writes: How do we get self-defense to be harder to apply speciously when people of color / women are murdered, and easier when they actually defend themselves?

Compare the Rittenhouse and Arbery cases to Marissa Alexander or, more recently, Maddesyn George.

Are there procedural reforms that would help, short of expecting everyone in the process to recognize implicit racism/misogyny when they see it?

Heebie's take: I am also interested in this question, because I don't know how to think systematically about the factors that need to change. My head keeps going to grandiose solutions about how we need to first ramp up support services for abused women, and pass gun control, and address poverty, and retrain our boys to learn to identify their feelings instead of channeling them into anger, and then, and then, etc. I can't see the trees for the forest.

This is intended to be our system for checking in on imaginary friends, so that we know whether or not to be concerned if you go offline for a while. There is no way it could function as that sentence implies, but it's still nice to have a thread.

Episode Kobe five.

I've read the blog Swistle for probably a decade now, and I adore her and would defend her to the end. She's found herself in a complex situation, and I think she's written about it very well.

Backstory:
- They moved from boring, bland small house to big, old house a few years back. Husband wanted the move. The conditions of the move were that they'd get a housekeeper, so that she didn't have to double her workload of cleaning.
- She has brooded significantly over how best to treat housekeepers - paying them during lockdown, etc - and has an established history of treating them kindly and respectfully.
- She finds herself in the dreadful situation of strongly suspecting that a substitute housekeeper has stolen $300 and some gift cards, and then puts it together that this same substitute housekeeper has stolen money before.
- She is very clear on the dynamics of privilege and accusations of theft, and is clear on the horrible complexity of the situation she's found herself in.
- She's also now very uncomfortable with having housekeepers at all, and ends the service. Updates along the way.

The actual link I want to share is this one, where she drinks some gin, cleans some bathrooms, and tries to process everything that has come to pass.

It's fairly long. She deals with the topic of her college age sons (who'd had the money stolen), the privilege of wealth and whiteness (a little, but she talks more about that in earlier links), the anger at the person who did the stealing, and the sexism and trapped feeling she feels at having to clean this house again. (Also topics she's dealt with at length elsewhere: the ways in which her family acts out the patriarchy and her role in it.)

Here is the concluding bit:

I have been forceably reminded of the bad things human beings are willing to do to each other. I feel nauseatingly privileged, to have this kind of problem: "Oh, our HOUSECLEANERS stole some of our EXTRA MONEY." I feel like I am overreacting: no one died, no one is injured, no one has a new terrible diagnosis, we didn't even have anything sentimental/precious/irreplaceable stolen, all we lost was money. (As far as we know.) I feel like I am in menial service to this house I didn't want. I feel like I am in service to my husband's life and wants, and that his is the Main Life and I am only the Support/Accessory Life. I feel hopeless to fix/change the situation; at this point I don't see any way to solve it, either now or later. I think that if I am the "default" cleaner, so that everyone else gets to essentially choose if they clean or not and everything else ultimately falls to me, year after year, that I will end up leaving my entire family to go live by myself in a 1BR/1BA apartment where I will clean only for myself and not have to hate anyone.