A return

A while ago RIPTA changed their bus pass system. Instead of getting a new pass made out of thin cardboard every month, you can get a plastic card that you keep permanently, reloading it with money every month.

In practice, the plastic is so cheap that it will eventually break. Once that happens the card can't be read by the sensors, so you have to get a new one. Which happened to me this week.

I found out that the store where I'd gotten these bus cards before didn't have any on-hand. What I was happy to learn is that RIPTA again has a customer service office in their downtown depot, and that the nice lady I used to buy bus passes from is back. So I bought a new card from her and transferred the funds from the old card.

Nice to see her. Also good to know that some more sanity is returning post-COVID.

狐仙

I was talking to a gentleman today―second time I saw him this particular day―about Chinese mythology. He did more of the talking, because while I've read a little about it, I couldn't bring much to mind. So I decided to give myself a little refresher.

The figure of Huxian is quite interesting. A trickster figure who can make you wealthy but will also steer you onto the wrong path. The idea of foxes being untrustworthy apparently crosses over between wildly divergent cultures. There's a practical reason for this among farming communities, of course. But it also feeds a human need for deceit, I think. In this case projected onto other creatures.

Wind you can hear

The Russian artist Marianna Vladimirovna Veryovkina had a fascination with Germany, a country which gave the world German Expressionism during her lifetime. She in fact Germanized her name to Marianne von Werefkin, which is the name she's been known by since then. As a member of the Russian nobility she pretty much had to indulge her curiosity about foreign lands, as the Russian Revolution made her homeland a dangerous prospect.

The title of the above painting has been translated as "Storm Winds." The winds are palpable, causing trees to lay almost on their side. This is nature at its most forbidding. It does exude a kind of fascination, though, in the sliver moon. Still, you can't blame the small human figures for gravitating to the light and warmth of the tavern or cafe.

Primary primer

I got a mailer recently from the Board of Canvassers. A reminder that we in Rhode Island have a Presidential primary on April 2, and where to vote. I appreciate this. Still, what to do?

Obviously Joe Biden is going to win the primary. He'll get the nomination, unless the Democrats convince him to step aside. And in truth, nobody in the party with a snowflake's chance of replacing him is that much better. In the general, Trump may be a better, but there's still going to be a historic lack of good options.

I'll probably vote for a hopeless dark horse candidate. Someone who I can at least support and look at myself in the mirror.

Do I hear another bid?

Am now reading Sotheby's: Bidding for Class, by Robert Lacey. It's about Sotheby's, as you might have guessed. Lacey's first chapter is an extended vignette on the auction of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis's estate soon after she died, and provides some justification for the adage that truth is stranger than fiction.

After that Lacey backtracks to deep background, the auction house's founding in London during the eighteenth century and the history that followed. They've always been in competition with Christies, but both sides have had to remain dignified in public. During the early years Christies specialized in art and Sotheby's in books, but it was inevitable that the two would start to step on each other's toes.

Another interesting detail is that Peter Cecil Wilson, one of their top auctioneers of the twentieth century, served in British Intelligence with none other than Ian Fleming. He often claimed to be the basis for James Bond. Weird if true, but who knows?

Losing face

Of course I still see them, although thankfully not as many as there were before. The masked, that is. But when I see them it's in some bizarre contexts. A guy on bicycle or a woman walking onto the porch of her house, neither of them within six feet of anyone, for whatever that meant in the first place.

The thing is there was never any logic to it in the first place. COVID wasn't sold to people the way you convince grown-ups to do things. It was always just fear and guilt, limbic system abuse. So a few souls are just married to it now. After all, when do you stop? The very question makes you a bad person.

Riches of embarrassment

A giant pumpkinhead monster gazes into a bomb shelter filled with teenagers. It wades in. Seconds late a wave of blood rises. It looks like you didn't secure the lid on the blender while making your cranberry smoothie.

This is Dark Harvest, which I remember being a pretty good book by Norman Partridge. The movie is filled with baffling dialogue, incompetent fights, and yes, moronic CGI gore. Best things to say about it are that it's relatively brief and good for unintentional laughs, except for those unfortunate times when it's trying to be funny.

I only just caught up on the news that the Coen Brothers are not only getting the band back together but working on a horror movie. Good news, because after tonight I'm convinced that the genre could use whatever they have to bring to it.