So, I am an aficionado of a certain kind of YouTube series – of ambitious DIYers who most usually have either mad professional building skills, or a generous income (most often both), plus absolutely insane levels of optimism, who take on a decrepit bit of housing, or at least something with all or most of a roof on it. Over a number of years or months, these skilled, and hopeful masochists take on an abandoned or derelict rural property – a tumbledown pig farm in Belgium, a decayed village house or farmstead in Portugal, a ruinous French chateau, a French village hoarder house with half the roof fallen in, or a burned-out country cottage in Sweden. Usually at least half the time-lapsed video is of tearing out the decayed bits, and sometimes the finished result is a painfully ultra-modern interior and looks like one of the display rooms in an Ikea outlet … but if the owners are happy in it, who am I to quibble over their tastes in interior decoration.
Personal Narrative
Mwen Rekòmande Panik Imedyat
Having sensed that my public is calling: “In fair Springfield, where we lay our scene …”
Visible Signs
My daughter and I have done a handful of long road trips over the last few years, especially after Texas sensibly lifted the most onerous COVID restrictions. For many of these trips we preferred to take country roads; various two or four-lane routes which meandered through miles of Texas back country, hopscotching past small ranches and passing through small towns of varying degrees of prosperity. One thing we often noticed in passing was a scattering of Trump banners, many of them weathered and obviously left over from the 2020 campaign. It was a hard-fought campaign; obviously many Trump supporters out here in flyover country remained sore about the steal. Also rather obviously, residents in rural Texas aren’t worried about random retaliatory vandalism to their property or vehicles by displaying such political partisanship.
Interior View
We decided to take a break from watching the interminable (and at this point, rather depressing) Midsomer Murders. From a starkly realistic point of view, the mythical English Midsomer must be about as dangerous as Cabot Cove, with regular citizens regularly dropping off their various perches, to the tune of lashings of blackmail, family grudges, illicit relationships, financial fraud, and outright criminality among the lush gardens and even lusher cozy cottages. It got to the point where we were playing “spot the actor” or “what had we seen this guest star in before?” Anyway, we needed a break, and the choice fell on the latest TV series adaptation of Tony Hillerman’s Leaphorn & Chee mystery novels, Dark Winds … which turns out to be surprisingly good, although some elements from the books have been combined, and the lead characters various backgrounds tweaked a little.
Slow But Exceedingly Fine
I see from various sources that the Israelis have finally done in one of Hezbollah’s senior-ranking terrorists, one Fouad Shakar, who had a multi-million-dollar bounty on his head for involvement in the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. The mills of justice may grind very slowly, but they eventually grind very fine. Well, he got to live more than forty years longer than the 241 Marines blown up in 1983, and I hope without much conviction that he spent every one of those years looking nervously over his shoulder. The Hezbollah organization was also behind the kidnapping, gruesome torture and murder of Americans in Lebanon in the 1980s, and the protracted hijacking of TWA 847 in the summer of 1985.