Diary

My new telescope mount has arrived, and I will be assembling it shortly. It is of much higher quality than my previous mount and should last for the rest of my life. I am only going to be using it casually, as I have already spent several years stargazing.

Of course, I am still reluctantly following the political news. I think that, in less than five months, the momentum against Trump has already shifted significantly. In his second term, with all of the guardrails removed, he has been free to show just how incompetent he is. I think that all he's managed to do so far is slow global economic growth and damage the federal government. He seems to want to tear up the U.S. constitution, but I don't think he's succeeding at all. As the French would say, he is a "dwarf on stilts." At the moment, I don't think he's far from alienating just the American public, but the billionaires and the Republican Party. He is proving to be a stupid fat guy on weight-loss medication. I think that he is on a trajectory in which he could eventually be impeached again and removed from office.

Some readers may have been surprised to see that my last post was a quotation from the Bible. This is not to say that I've suddenly had an improbable religious conversion, but that the Bible is a text like any other and can be read for a variety of reasons. If Jesus Christ was an actual historical figure, you don't have to look at him ideologically. I see him as a person of his time who had strong opinions and voiced them publicly at his own peril. In modern terms, the Parable of the Blind can be seen as a critique of Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin or Benjamin Netanyahu. They are not unlike modern-day Pharisees. Unfortunately, Christ's prophecy in his case didn't exactly pan out, because he was executed, and they weren't, but, in principle, he was probably right.

The readership of this blog has been expanding over the last few years. From 2014 to 2020 I was getting only about 100-200 pageviews per month. Starting with the pandemic, pageviews have continuously increased. I think that some of my most popular posts must have attracted web crawlers that have gradually indexed the entire blog. Now people are reading very old posts that were hardly ever read. The upshot is that the number of pageviews per month is currently approaching 12,000, and I'm getting more comments. But I don't think that anything on the blog is about to "go viral," so I'm not very concerned. Since I have no ads and don't charge any fees, I'm not about to become wealthy.

I did end up spending a couple of hours cleaning up the pollen on the back porch. The previous owner kept the screens covered with thick plastic year-round, and she didn't use the porch much. I think that earlier, when her mother lived in the house, they had parties and played cards there. There was a refrigerator. When I moved in, it looked a bit like a museum. When her daughter moved in in about the year 2000, she was divorced, and her children had already grown up. I think that she had a boyfriend for a few years, but he never lived in this house and died long ago. She and her mother were Italians who used to live on Long Island.

Because the back porch wasn't used much, the eastern phoebes got into the habit of building their nests above it. When I moved in in 2023, they were there. In 2024 they built a nest there and laid eggs in it but abandoned the nest before they hatched. Since I was going in and out of the back door frequently, because the tomatoes were planted nearby, the phoebes must have become scared. This year, they attempted for several days to build a nest above the front porch, but they couldn't attach it to the wall properly, and their building materials kept falling off. I helped them out by installing a small wooden ledge where they had been trying to build the nest, and they immediately built a nest on it. There is currently a female phoebe in the nest incubating her eggs. The same birds usually return to the same location each year. Eastern phoebes are a good species to have here, since there are lots of insects, and they are voracious insect-eaters.

The spring turned out to be colder and rainier than usual, but there haven't been any freezes, and my tomatoes have been planted and are doing well. The weather has just changed to warm and sunny. I think that living in the woods has been good for my health. I haven't been sick at all, and my previous allergies have disappeared.

I've been reading a new book on the history of Indo-European languages, which I am finding quite interesting, and will be commenting on it soon.