hudebnik

From the US Department of War (in 1945, before it was renamed the Department of Defense), a pamphlet directed to US military personnel:

https://archive.org/details/ArmyTalkOrientationFactSheet64-Fascism/mode/2up

It's self-congratulatory wartime propaganda, of course, but it makes very clear that we can't assume fascism will never come to our shores, and must learn how to recognize it when we see it, even if it's wrapped in an American rather than a German, Italian, or Japanese flag.

So some time last night President Trump, with no authorization from either Congress (so it violates the US Constitution and the War Powers Act) or the UN (so it violates the UN Charter, to which the US is a signatory), sent air strikes and Special Forces into Venezuela, capturing and abducting President Maduro. There are cheers and dancing in the streets in Venezuela and in Venezuelan ex-pat communities, and defiant speeches from Maduro supporters about President Trump's illegal actions.

Naturally, members of Congress (mostly Democrats) have pointed out that only Congress can declare war, that previous Presidents' abrupt military actions against Iraq, Iran, Syria, Panama, Libya, etc. had at least a "temporary authorization for the use of force", and that any "emergency action" authority he might have with respect to Venezuela expired over a month ago, 90 days after he started the clock ticking by attacking an alleged drug-smuggling boat from Venezuela on Sept. 2.

And naturally, Trump responded by calling them "stupid, weak people" who "should be saying 'good job!' rather than 'gee, it might not be constitutional'." The Constitution and the rule of law are just bureaucratic obstacles in the way of strong men doing what needs to be done.

He might get away with this, politically, on the "ends justify the means" theory: "I got rid of a bad guy, so why are you quibbling about how many laws I broke in order to do it? Likewise, if I deport a gang member who sells illegal drugs, why are you quibbling about things like due process and evidence? As long as my targets are unsympathetic, I don't have to follow any rules. And once people are accustomed to the President not having to follow any rules, I can widen the definition of 'unsympathetic' to include anybody who criticizes or opposes me."

Thing is, Nicolas Maduro really is a bastard, a sadistic dictator, and a criminal who's used the levers of government to enrich himself and his cronies and steal an election he actually lost, his economic policies have been a disaster for his country, and the majority of the Venezuelan people despise him and will be happy to see him go. Is that a legal justification for the United States to unilaterally attack his country, kidnap him, and "run Venezuela" until it can conduct a proper election?

Come to think of it, Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández was also a bastard, a sadistic dictator, and a criminal who used the levers of government to enrich himself and his cronies and steal an election that he probably actually lost, his economic policies were a disaster for his country, and the majority of the Honduran people despised him and celebrated when he was convicted by a U.S. court and sentenced to 45 years in prison for drug-smuggling. And Donald Trump gave him a complete pardon last month, with the justification that "he was treated very unfairly, just like the Biden administration treated a guy named Trump, and that didn't work out very well for them."

Come to think of it, Donald Trump is also a bastard, a sadistic (would-be) dictator, and a criminal who's used the levers of government to enrich himself and his cronies and (try to) steal an election he actually lost, his economic policies have been a disaster for his country, and the majority of the American people despise him and would be happy to see him go. So does that mean other countries have legal justification to attack the United States, kidnap him, and "run the United States" until it can conduct a proper election?

But I guess "legal justification" is a quaint, old-fashioned concept: the only justification you need is power. If you think you can get away with it, do it.

159.8 lbs.
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk, dried cranberries
mid-morning: protein bar
lunch: fish, tapenade, quinoa, dessert bites
mid-afternoon: trail mix
dinner: hamburger, French fries
snacks: cookies
dessert: hot chocolate

In bed 12:30ish, with D. Up 8:45.

shalmestere and I were staying at somebody's house, and took the opportunity to take a hike in the mountains (fairly arid and bare, perhaps southern California) starting just around the corner from the house. I had taken the same hike solo the day before and enjoyed it, but recalled that the maps in the guidebook weren't entirely clear, and there was no signage at all on the trail. Just as

shalmestere started up the first hill, I realized that I hadn't put the shawms in the car, which was a problem as we would need them the next place we were going. I offered to go back to the house and get the shawms, but didn't want

shalmestere to get lost before I could catch up with her, so I told her "if you get to an intersection of trails and it isn't absolutely clear which way to go, stop and wait for me." [Why we didn't just get the instruments after finishing the hike must be attributed to dream logic.]

For the first time this year. (Technically, I saw a dusting of snow on the ground two days ago, on Thursday's bedtime dog-walk, but neither of us had seen it fall, and it was gone by morning.) There appears to be an inch or two on the ground now. Not much more is forecast to fall, so it's just enough to be pretty without posing a major heart-attack or navigation danger.

Yesterday afternoon I retrieved the snow shovel, ice-breaker, ice-melting-salt, and solar-powered Xmas-tree-looking sidewalk-lights from the garage, exchanging them for the leaf-rake, the soil-tilling morningstar, and the spade, none of which I think we'll need for a few months. The sidewalk-lights have been shoved into the ground, and all but one of them lit up successfully last night. Between those, the cone of white lights on the climbing-vine trellis in the front yard, and the fresh coat of snow, it actually looks like a proper Christmastime.

On the schedule for today: wrap Christmas presents, cook, eat, play some music, watch something seasonally appropriate on the tube.

Last night I went to a meeting of the Richmond Hill Historical Society, most of which was given over to a presentation by another organization called Queenslink about their proposed project to revive an abandoned and overgrown train right-of-way (originally built in 1880 as the Rockaway Beach line of the LIRR, which ran until 1962), putting in a subway line (more precisely, extending the existing M subway line) with accompanying foot and bicycle trails. In this satellite map, the right-of-way is the green stripe running from Rego Park to Resorts World. The subway line would be underground in the Rego Park section, and above-ground (and cheaper) the rest of the way.

Sociological aside: the room was full of train geeks, reminiscent of the guy in the Monty Python sketch "It all happened on the 11.20 from Hainault to Redhill via Horsham and Reigate, calling at Carshalton Beeches, Malmesbury, Tooting Bec, and Croydon West". Naturally, most of them already knew in what year the line had been built, when it had been closed down, when the Richmond Hill LIRR station had closed down, when the G train stopped running to Forest Hills, etc. and were not shy about correcting every trivial misstatement anybody made.

This whole plan will of course require a few billion dollars, but oddly enough the biggest obstacle isn't elected officials unwilling to spend money but rather another organization called Queensway, whose proposed project is to revive the same abandoned and overgrown train right-of-way with foot and bicycle trails and recreational facilities ("the High Line of Queens"), but no mass transit. Notably, the Queensway project already has the approval of the current Mayor, Eric Adams, who's leaving office in three weeks. Now, Eric Adams appears to be a crook in bed with Donald Trump, and anything with his name on it is suspect, but that doesn't necessarily mean Queensway is a bad idea. However, the Queenslink people argue that once half a billion dollars has been spent building recreational facilities along the Queensway trails, it will be politically difficult to ever put in mass transit there. And building mass transit anywhere that isn't already a city-owned right of way requires the government taking people's homes and shops, which is also politically difficult.

One player with a vested interest in the project is Resorts World, a developer who's just received final approval to replace the Aqueduct horse-racing track in southern Queens with a casino, hotel, etc. There's still a lot of controversy about that project, but apparently it's going to happen. There's already a subway station at Aqueduct, but only for the A train, which runs through southern Queens and Brooklyn, through lower Manhattan, up the West Side to the northern tip of Manhattan; no straightforward way to get there from northern Queens, which Queenslink would provide. Resorts World has an incentive for as many people as possible to get to its facilities easily, so they may put some money into the project.

The New York City subway system, like most city mass-transit systems, makes it fairly easy to get from outlying areas to the densest business districts in the center of the city, but not at all easy to get from one outlying area to another: you generally have to go into the city center and switch to another line that goes out to where you want to go. One exception is the G train, the only line in the city that doesn't go into or through Manhattan at all: it runs from western Queens straight to southern Brooklyn. It used to run farther out in northern Queens until the early 2000's, and the Queenslink people claim that their project would enable the G train to be restored to where it used to go. After the meeting I asked one of them why this was, and one of the train geeks in the audience jumped in to explain. At present, four subway lines go to Forest Hills, two of them (the R and M) ending there, and the G line used to end there also. But Forest Hills doesn't have a turnaround facility (it takes a lot of space to turn around a 600-foot-long train), so any train that stops there has to go a little beyond the station, cross over two other tracks, and reverse direction before it can pick up passengers and head back towards Manhattan. Every train that does this maneuver takes a long time and blocks traffic on other lines. So the reasoning is that if the M train did that maneuver in Rockaway Beach rather than Forest Hills, there would be room for the G train to do it in Forest Hills again.

The M train is sorta weird in that it starts in Queens, goes through Manhattan and Brooklyn, and ends back in Queens less than three miles from its other end. We've often wondered why they don't just connect the two ends of the M train into a loop, which would provide another way to get from northern Queens to Brooklyn. Naturally, the same train-geek-in-the-audience explained that this is because (a) there's a cemetery in the way, where it's difficult to do underground construction, and (b) the two ends of the M line are basically perpendicular, subway trains can't make sharp turns, and there isn't room to get the two ends of the line lined up with one another.

As it turns out, there's another proposed project to connect Queens and Brooklyn: the Interborough Express, which would run 14 miles from western Brooklyn to north-central Queens along another abandoned and overgrown right-of-way. This project is farther along, with some design work done and environmental impact statements underway. It's farther west, so it wouldn't impact our lives as much as Queensway or Queenslink would.

I haven't heard from the Queensway people directly, and I like the idea of a walking-and-bicycle trail, but multi-mile-long straight-line transit routes already under city ownership are rare commodities, and it seems silly to have one and not use it for mass transit (as well as for pedestrian and bicycle trails).

As far as I can tell, Queensway has two advantages over Queenslink: it costs less money, and it provides a continuous pedestrian-and-bike trail (for about 3/4 mile south of Park Lane South, the right-of-way is too narrow to allow both an above-ground subway and pedestrian-and-bike trails, so the Queenslink people propose a parallel bike route a block away). But it seems to me that continuity is a sine qua non for mass transit, and a "nice-to-have" for trails (since there are plenty of other routes that pedestrians and bicyclists can legally take, just not as pleasant as a park).

Tuesday afternoon, the mail-ordered turkey arrived.

Tuesday night, made cranberry sauce (using the Once And Future Mulled Cranberry Sauce recipe, which we've been using for about 25 years)

Wednesday night, made broccoli slaw (using the new-to-us Mighty Quinn's recipe, slightly modified because neither of us like mayonnaise, and scaled down by a factor of three because it makes over a gallon). Made a cold-water pie crust and filled it with chocolate pecan pie. Made a nut-and-rice-flour pie crust, but too sleepy to fill it with cranberry curd.

Thursday, there's a lot left to do. In no particular order,...

watch parades & dog show on TV

roast turkey (the same recipe we've been using for about 25 years)

sausage stuffing (the recipe shalmestere grew up with fifty-mumble years ago)

sweet potato tian (a new recipe to us this year)

carrot slaw (a recipe we've been using on and off for ten or twenty years)

cranberry curd tart (one of the NY Times's most popular recipes, which we've been doing on and off for maybe ten years)

gravy (the way shalmestere learned to make it fifty-mumble years ago)

We were thinking of a Latin American "corn pie", but I think that may be postponed to next week.

clear the table, lay a festive holiday tablecloth, set the table

wash lots of dishes

call relatives

Well, OK, it's not particularly holiday-themed, but it came up two days before Thanksgiving, so...

Suppose (hypothetically) you were decommissioning a somewhat ragged queen-sized foam mattress topper, and it occurred to you that rather than throwing it all away, you could cut some pads out of it for your circular dog beds. You might spread it out on the kitchen floor (the largest unobstructed area of floor in the house), then put a dog bed on top of it to trace the right size and shape. Unfortunately, it's obvious that you won't get two circles the size of this dog bed from one mattress topper. So how much smaller do they need to be?

( Give it a try yourself before reading my various wrong approaches )

I was just pointed to The World Unpacked, a weekly interview series about "the most pressing global issues". I've only listened to one episode so far, but it's enlightening and entertaining. And the host, Carnegie Endowment analyst Jon Bateman, is my nephew :-)

President Trump has been fighting tooth and nail to prevent the results of the FBI investigation into his buddy Jeffrey Epstein's sex trafficking being released to the public, after promising his supporters for years that they would all be released and the prominent Democrats named therein would finally face their comeuppance. The obvious conclusion is that there's something really bad in there about him personally, and perhaps not much about prominent Democrats.

It's hard to imagine what could be in the Epstein files about Trump that's more scandalous than what we already know about his sex life: posing as his own assistant to "leak" stories about his prodigious sex drive, cheating widely, repeatedly, and publicly on all three of his wives, paying hush money to a hooker he was screwing while his wife was home with the newborn, musing publicly about dating his daughter, routinely dismissing women he dislikes as "fat", "ugly", or "Miss Piggy", walking in on half-dressed underage beauty contestants, raping a journalist, "grabbing them by the pussy", and I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch of things. Even if the investigation turned up something that would cost him a few percentage points of support with his loyal base, he no longer needs his loyal base to win elections: either he won't run again, or he will run again with no doubt about the outcome. And if there are crimes attributable to him, they're almost certainly past the statute of limitations.

But we're unlikely to see the full FBI files on Epstein while Trump is in office. Even with both houses of Congress demanding the full release of the files, by veto-proof majorities, he has a legitimate excuse for keeping them from the public as long as there's a criminal investigation underway in which they could be used as evidence -- and Pam Bondi obediently announced such an investigation a few days ago. That criminal investigation can go on as long as Trump and Bondi want it to.

And if we do see "the full FBI files on Epstein", and they actually are complete, it'll be tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of mostly-boring stuff, which journalists (and self-appointed journalists) will have to comb through to find what's actually important and/or damaging to him (or other prominent people). For the vast majority of people who don't want to spend a good portion of their lives reading through this dreadful stuff, the files will be spun (as the much-shorter Mueller Report was) as "completely exonerating the President", and a good fraction of the American people will believe that. They may even be right: it may actually be a gigantic nothing-burger. And Trump will still be a senile, sadistic, mind-bogglingly corrupt, would-be dictator who's squandered and destroyed a century's worth of national progress in a few years.

In any other time in the past hundred years, perhaps any other time since the founding of the US, this would be considered a scandalous violation of DoJ's neutrality and commitment to the impartial rule of law. But after the past ten months, nobody believes that DoJ has any shred of neutrality or commitment to the impartial rule of law, so it's no big deal, just another "Dog Bites Man, Sky Is Blue, President Weaponizes Law Against His Political Enemies While Immunizing His Supporters" story.

Trump and Epstein were close friends for many years, definitely as late as 2002, but had a public falling-out between 2004-2007 (it's unclear exactly when or why; the later you ask Trump, the earlier he says it was).

But here's the thing: Donald Trump was a registered Democrat from 2001-2009. Just sayin'...

160.3 lbs.
breakfast: grapefruit, yogurt, cereal, soy milk
lunch: chicken bacon avocado sandwich, lemonade
dinner: chicken tortelloni, pesto
dessert: chocolate bon-bons

In bed about midnight; D. followed half an hour later. Up once or twice to cough and pee; up 7:00 to alarm (for an 8:00 doctor's appointment).

Not a lot of coughing overnight, but I have a scratchy throat this morning.

shalmestere and I came home from two weeks in Europe with colds. We didn't pick them up on the plane: we both woke with scratchy throats last Tuesday morning, the day we were supposed to fly home. Anyway, after various misadventures we got on a plane Wednesday morning, we wore masks on the plane to somewhat-reduce the chance of infecting anybody else, and got home Wednesday afternoon, still with scratchy throats but nothing worse. (I had an intermittent, unproductive cough, as I have been since a bout of COVID in July, but that's become "the new normal".)

shalmestere spent most of Wednesday afternoon and much of Thursday and Friday in bed -- partly jet-lag, partly having a familiar, comfortable bed for the first time in two weeks, and partly cold symptoms, which always hit her hard. I still had only a scratchy throat, so I went about the usual post-vacation chores: triaging two weeks of accumulated mail, re-stocking the refrigerator, picking overripe raspberries off the vines in the back yard, paying bills, etc.

Somewhere in the two weeks' worth of work e-mail was an automated complaint from ${EMPLOYER} that I had been physically in the office less than two days a week in Q3, "well below" the three-day-a-week standard they'd issued last year, and they were informing my manager and my grand-manager. Nevertheless, I worked from home Thursday and Friday because I figured I was probably contagious, being only two or three days out from first symptoms.

Saturday I went to a "No Kings" march and rally, on my own because

shalmestere was still too sick. Marching and standing outside in the sun for hours are tiring at the best of times, but I had picked the march/rally two miles away rather than the one in Manhattan, so I got home quickly, drank a lot of water, and collapsed. That evening I noticed that I was getting physically tired more quickly than usual, and coughing and sneezing more often than normal, and having some general all-over body aches. (And

shalmestere was still alternating between the bed and the living room couch, getting tired out by the slightest exertion.)

Sunday it hit. Walking the dogs around the block tired me out. Re-heating lunch or dinner tired me out. General body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, frequent coughing-and-sneezing spasms, all that. Sunday night both of us woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink, usually not at the same time.

I officially called in sick to work Monday, thinking I might get some programming work done in between naps and reheated meals, but not at all confident of that, and not wanting to further exacerbate the hybrid-work-policy issue by working-from-home too much. Again, general body aches, nasal congestion, headaches, getting tired quickly, frequent uncontrollable coughing-and-sneezing. Monday night was the same as Sunday night: we both woke up every few hours to cough, blow our noses, pee, and drink. And I feel about as good this morning as yesterday morning.

To add to the angst, between the 4:30 and 6:30 wake-ups last night, I had a nightmare.

I was walking down the street in a fancy, rich neighborhood and saw a small black boy and a white woman walking together. I asked the boy "And where is your house?", and he proudly stopped in front of one of the grander houses and replied "Right here!" There was a small slab of rock in the front yard, under which were a couple of plants he'd been taking care of, and I helped him plant another one. And I walked on, preparing a standard-issue lecture in my mind about racial prejudice.

But the next block was our own block, and our house wasn't there. I recognized all the houses on the street, but there wasn't even a gap between our neighbor on the left and our neighbor on the right. It seemed that other houses were missing too, although I wasn't sure which ones, because again there was no gap where they should have been. This was now seriously scary.

Conveniently, Pennsic was a short walk away, so I went there, to check on our encampment, and our pavilion wasn't where it should be. I saw Cariadoc in the marketplace and asked him about the phenomenon: he was aware of it, and had identified several people we both knew who seemed to have vanished not only from the site but from the memories of other people we knew. He said he was "going into town" and asked whether there was anything he could pick up for me, and I replied "Well, all our food is in our pavilion, which is missing."

Before I could elaborate on that, I thought I saw (in another market stall in the distance)

shalmestere, in modern clothes, so I ran to catch up with her. But it wasn't her, and I realized there was a substantial chance that she too had vanished completely.

I saw Thor (from the Marvel movies -- I guess we're in the middle of "the snap") standing and talking to his girlfriend on a cellphone. She too was worried about all the missing people and houses, and was calling him "Chris", so I guess this is an out-of-universe girlfriend. But at least they could find one another.

shalmestere and I both have colds, but as usual it's hitting her harder than me, so she opted out of going to yesterday's "No Kings" protest; I had only a scratchy throat, so I decided to go stag. I've done two or three protest marches in Manhattan, and they always involve standing in one place for at least two hours before you can start shuffling slowly along the march route. You can talk to the people near you, but if there are speeches, you won't hear any of them or see the speakers. And by the time it's over, your back is sore, your legs are sore, you're dehydrated, and you're physically a wreck for the rest of the day if not the next day. So with all this in mind, I decided to go to the one two miles away in a small park in Forest Hills rather than the one on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan.

I ran into the first other protesters on the platform of the train station near my house (where I would normally commute to work); we touched antennae briefly, compared signs, all got on the train for one stop, then walked the two blocks to the park where things were scheduled to happen. On the walk, one of the other protesters I was talking to asked whether I had ever worked at Google, and I replied "yes, I still do." He had worked at Google NYC for fifteen years or so, retiring a week before COVID shut everything down, and for some reason recognized me from there. So we chatted a bit about the union, how working at Google has changed, etc.

Got to the park, where there were what looked like about 500 people ranging from age ~5 to 90-something, and somebody leading chants through a bullhorn. After a few minutes of that, there were a couple of brief speeches, including one by the Lieutenant Governor, Antonio Delgado. He's a good speaker; I told him he should consider going into politics. The lady with the bullhorn reminded us that this is a non-violent protest: if we encounter any counter-protesters, we will de-escalate and not take the bait.

And then the rally turned into a march, a bit over a mile from the park to Queens Borough Hall. The police had closed off the local lanes of Queens Boulevard eastbound, and marchers filled that two-lane street for five blocks (which I think means more like 1000-2000 people). As we marched, a number of drivers on the inner lanes honked and waved in support, while other spectators on the sidewalk held up signs of their own and cheered us on.

On the front steps of Queens Borough Hall they had set up microphones and loudspeakers, so I could actually hear what the various speakers and musical groups had to say, of which the consistent call-and-response was "Queens says / No Kings!". Heard from our Congresswoman, our State Assembly member, the State Assembly member from the next district to the west, a retired doctor talking about a friend of hers who used to practice here but moved to Canada because her husband was threatened with deportation, a pastor who pointed out that Donald Trump actually comes from Queens but still doesn't get it, etc. Several speakers quoted the Republican talking-point that this is a "Hate America rally", saying "no we don't, we're here because we love America and don't want to see its experiment with democracy ended." A voice-and-guitar duo took the stage and said "we're gonna take a vote. Would you like a song based on 'We Shall Overcome', or one based on the 'Hunger Games' theme?" Two thirty-somethings standing near me said "What's 'We Shall Overcome'?", and I said "Classic of the civil rights struggle, fifties and sixties." "We Shall Overcome" won the vote, and those of us old enough to know it got to sing along. After another politician or two, a different musical group took the stage: the "Revolution Resistance Choir", which I gather counts about sixty women-and-NB members, but only about eight of them were at the rally. Anyway, they did a couple of protest songs too, some of which I knew ("Woke up this morning with my mind / Set on freedom"), and the rest of which were sufficiently repetitive and formulaic that one could pick up at least the chorus and sing along. The group is quite good.

I chatted with a guy in an inflatable chicken suit, and saw a couple of inflatable frogs and Tyrannosauri. Most people were not costumed, just waving signs and American flags and sporting appropriate T-shirts. There were plenty of police, as well as volunteer marshals, lining the march route and separating the protesters from car traffic and any potential counter-protesters -- of which I didn't see or hear any at all. Things wound down, and I was home in fifteen minutes.

The NYPD, after the fact, reports at least 100,000 protesters in various locations in the five boroughs, and no arrests. Which is obviously evidence that the NYPD is incapable of maintaining peace on the streets, and desperately needs the help of the National Guard if not the regular Army.

Tuesday morning we awoke in our hotel room in Brussels. We took a 10-minute walk to Wittamer's, one of the classic old chocolateries of Belgium, then back to the hotel, packed everything up, checked out, and walked the 15 minutes or so to the main train station. Caught a train to the Amsterdam airport: it was somewhat delayed by a national strike in Belgium, then by a slower train ahead of it on the same tracks, then by an infestation of swans on the tracks. (Would I make that up?) But we still got there at 13:30, in plenty of time for our 17:05 plane to JFK.

As of 16:30, they hadn't started boarding yet, and takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 17:25. Mechanics were looking into "a technical issue" with the plane, with no confident estimate of when they'd be finished. As of 17:45, takeoff was tentatively pushed back to 19:00. As of 18:30, the flight was cancelled altogether, we would be automatically rebooked onto a later flight, we would get an e-mail with details, and if we wanted a hotel voucher to spend the night, we should go to transfer desk T4. We heard about all of this by individual airline employees walking around and telling small groups of people, because the microphone they would have used to announce it more broadly wasn't working. So by the time we got the word about transfer desk T4, there had already been a mass exodus in the direction of transfer desk T4, and we found ourselves at the end of about a hundred-yard-long line inside the terminal.

It occurred to me that the rush for hotel vouchers might well be accompanied by a rush for hotel rooms, so while standing in the line, I pulled out my phone and looked for nearby hotels. Found one, the "Citizen M", a 5-minute walk away from the terminal we were in. This sounded good because we had no idea what time our rebooked flight would be, so I made a reservation there. And since KLM was allegedly paying for it, I requested breakfast with our room (for an extra 19 € each).

I checked my mail a few times for word of a rebooking, then tried text-chatting with customer service to rebook interactively. The bot informed me that my flight had been canceled (news flash!) and pointed me to the exact same web page I had used to chat with it, but also offered the option of talking to a human. So I waited for that.

After an hour and a bit, and before getting a response from the chat, I reached the front of the line for hotel vouchers. There was a ring of about eight self-service kiosks, which the employees recommended you start with, resorting to another line for human customer service only if the self-service kiosk couldn't cope with your request. So I did that: the kiosk recognized that our flight had been cancelled, and offered us food-and-drink vouchers and a hotel voucher. For the hotel voucher, there were two choices: make the reservation for me, or I'll make it myself. Since I had already reserved a room, I picked the latter, and was given two food-and-drink vouchers and a "generic voucher" that isn't actually good for anything itself; you're supposed to show it to the human customer-service agents after standing in another line. But in the process of doing all this, the kiosk also informed us that we had been rebooked for a 7:15 flight to London Heathrow and a connection at an unspecified time from there to JFK. So much for breakfast.

We stood in another line for twenty minutes or so before getting to the human customer-service agents, who took our "generic voucher" in exchange for a voucher at the Park Plaza hotel. I pointed out that I had already made a reservation at Citizen M, which the agent acknowledged was much closer -- "basically the only hotel in walking distance of here". The prepaid vouchers were apparently available only for the Park Plaza, but the agent assured me that we could get reimbursed for the cost of a night's lodging at another hotel, and gave me instead a card with URL's to request such reimbursement in various languages. And she also printed off our boarding passes for the flights to Heathrow and thence to JFK, telling us we should be at the terminal 90 minutes before boarding, i.e. 5:45. We thanked her and walked into the night looking for the hotel.

Which wasn't difficult: Google Maps gave reasonable walking directions, and we weren't far from the front door of the terminal before we could see a big letter-M logo glowing in the distance. Checked in and went to our room.

Which was trippy and ultramodern: the first thing you see when you open the door is a shower stall on the "open plan", followed by a toilet, also on the "open plan", and once you've walked between them, you get to the bed. In fact, both shower stall and toilet have frosted-glass walls that close around them on a circular track, so they're not entirely "open". Next to the bed is an iPad that controls everything in the rooom: the television, the curtains, the blinds, the lights, the soundscape, the night-light (which has separate controls for brightness and color)...

It was now about 9 PM and we hadn't eaten much since noon, so I looked up the menu on the iPad and discovered there was no room service. So

shalmestere and I agreed on some dim sum as a late-night snack, and I went back to the ground floor bar to order it. While waiting, I pulled out my phone and realized that a human had responded to my customer-service chat. I summarized the situation, and the agent said "Good news! You've been rebooked on the 8:00 AM flight from Brussels to Amsterdam, and the 10:00 AM flight from Amsterdam to JFK." This was the exact same pair of flights I'd been rebooked onto twice before, and it was decidedly not appropriate now given that we were in Amsterdam, not Brussels. I pointed this out, and asked whether we could have just the 10:00 flight from Amsterdam to JFK, without the Brussels-AMS leg (which sounded more pleasant than a 7:15 flight changing in London). The agent misunderstood me and said the 10:00 PM flight was cancelled too (I didn't think there even was a 10:00 PM flight!); when I clarified that I meant 10:00 AM the next day, the agent said that flight was also canceled or unavailable or something. So we agreed to stick to the 7:15-to-London plan. And finally the food arrived, I took it up to the room, we ate and fell into bed.

Wednesday morning I woke to my alarm at 4:30 AM. Turned on the night-light in orange-yellow to suggest sunrise, took a shower, and woke

shalmestere to do the same. We got downstairs by 5:30, checked out (accepting the offer of a couple of pains au chocolat to-go, since we had paid for breakfast after all), walked back to the terminal, and went through security and passport-control again. The 7:15 flight to London boarded without mishap, although it didn't actually get off the ground until 8:00. Landed in London only ten minutes late, with about 45 minutes before our connection to New York would start boarding. Unfortunately, the connection to New York was on a different airline and from a different terminal, so we had to stand in line to catch a bus from one terminal to another. Fortunately, the bus stayed on the "inside-security-and-passport-control" side of the border, so we didn't have to do security and passport control again in the new terminal. Unfortunately, the boarding passes we had used for the flight to London were apparently insufficient to get us onto the NYC leg, so we had to stand in another line, with dozens of other people, to talk to one of the two Virgin Atlantic customer-service agents on duty at 9 AM. Eventually the agent issued us two new boarding passes, and we started running to find our gate, hoping it wouldn't be closed by the time we got there. And it wasn't, although the plane was mostly boarded.

Fairly uneventful flight from Heathrow to JFK. Retrieved bags, didn't have to go through customs or even show passports to anyone (just get our digital photos taken), caught a cab home, and collapsed in bed, 32 hours after boarding the train from Brussels to Amsterdam.

Took a train to Ghent, of which we had fond memories from our previous trip to Belgium (15 years ago?). Google Maps showed something called the "Gravenstein Castle", which we didn't remember seeing on the previous trip, and which looked promising from the photos on the Web. So that was our first stop (after lunch at a sandwich shop with awesome frites).

Gravenstein Castle, under various names, was the seat of the Counts of Flanders for almost a thousand years. It started as a 9th-century wooden fort, then became a stone motte-and-bailey castle in the 12th century, was expanded into something more luxurious in the 14th and 15th centuries, was sold and repurposed as a textile factory in the 18th-19th centuries, then was sold to the City of Ghent to be "restored to its medieval glory". Which of course doesn't identify any particular point in time to restore it to, but they aimed for 14th-15th-century. So a lot of the current castle is a c1900 reconstruction, but a decent job for the time.

Anyway, we walked from there towards St. Bavo's Cathedral, the home of the city's top tourist attraction, the Ghent Altarpiece by the van Eycks. We didn't have reserved tickets, but things looked fairly un-crowded, so I went to ask whether we could get in any time soon. And it turned out that the Altarpiece isn't actually there at the moment: it's being restored, and has been temporarily replaced with high-resolution photos of it. So since we saw the real thing on our previous trip, we skipped that. Instead, we went up the nearby Belfort and got the panoramic view of the city.

Back to Brussels, got take-out Thai food to eat in the room, and started packing for our trip home tomorrow.

Sunday, 12 Oct: Mechelen. The train station is on a ring road around the town, mostly following the footprint of the medieval city walls, so we had a bit of a walk to get to the old town.

The first stop on that walk was one of the gate towers remaining from the medieval city walls, now looking rather incongruous in the middle of a traffic circle. Its upper story is now used to store sets and props for some kind of community theatre, but it still commands the main street.

Mechelen, like much of Belgium, is all about the old and the new living side-by-side. Of course, some of the old things are better preserved than others...

Like most medieval European towns, Mechelen was centered on the cathedral, in this case dedicated to St Rumpold (Sint-Romboutskathedraal). This particular cathedral is noted for its enormous bell tower, which visitors can climb up for a small fee. Each of its nine floors serves a different purpose: the entrance,

the crane that raises bells and construction materials to and from the upper stories,

the forge for on-site metalworking,
the bell chamber, the old carillon, the clock,

the new carillon, the place where they mixed mortar for the top story, and the scenic walk at the top.

In the 15th and 16th centuries, Mechelen was home to several of the richest merchants in the Low Countries, one of whom (Hieronymus van Busleyden) built a luxurious palace which is now restored as the Hof van Busleyden, home of a well-respected art museum. We arrived shortly before closing time, so we didn't actually go through the museum, but we visited the bookstore and admired the gardens and facade.

By this time we were pretty tired, so we caught a bus back to the train station and a train back to Brussels.

BTW, I've started uploading pictures and adding them to previous entries, starting October 1. Go back and take a look, if you wish.

Saturday we had reserved tickets to the M museum in Leuven, to make double-sure we didn’t miss the Leuven Chansonnier exhibit. So we took a train to Leuven (a 20-30 minute ride) and walked to the museum.

We needn’t have worried: the museum wasn’t crowded. M Museum is all about juxtaposing old and new: every room seemed to have Renaissance art alongside 20th or 21st century art on the same theme, or commenting on the Renaissance works. The first floor was given over to permanent collections (an impressive collection of Renaissance stuff, and I have no idea how impressive the modern collection was), while part of the second was “The Pursuit of Knowledge”, an exhibition about the 600-year history of KU Leuven that includes the Chansonnier.

I was uncertain how the museum would go about presenting the Leuven Chansonnier, which is after all a single object the size of a large wallet. The installation, entitled "Forty-Nine", set up a darkened room, with speakers on all sides and The Book partly open in a lit display case in the center, and played a recording of piece 49 from the Chansonnier (one of its 12 unica, pieces not known from any other source). On the front wall, five spots of light became the five performers on the recording — two singers, two lutes, and a vielle — with various digital manipulations done on their images. Effective.

Anyway, we saw a bunch of other stuff from the University’s collections -- fossils, 19th-century lab equipment, etc. -- before leaving the museum.

Stopped at the nearby Sintpieterskeerk, which houses Dietrich Bouts's famous and influential Last Supper, as well as a couple of other Bouts pieces.

Obligatory visit to the modern statue of a student having knowledge poured into its head, then walked back to the station for the train to Brussels. Got take-out Thai food and ate it in the room.

As planned, took a morning train from Tournai to Brussels (most of the stops were Not Silly).

As soon as we got out of the station,

shalmestere spotted a poster with medieval drolleries advertising a museum exhibit. She took a photo of it, but we were more immediately concerned with finding our hotel. Which we did without much trouble; it involved walking past some homeless people and the like, but it was a straight shot from the station.

Then looked at the photo again, looked up the museum (KBR -- the Royal Library of Belgium) online, concluded it was an exhibition of medieval manuscripts around the theme of music, and decided this was What We Should Do Today.
Walked back to the station and just a bit past it to the exhibition. Which was indeed awesome.
The KBR's permanent collection includes 279 medieval manuscripts from the Dukes of Burgundy, including most of the famous collection of Queen Marguerite of Austria, and many of them were on display. Some of the musical connections were a stretch — "this is a really cool manuscript, and if you look at the drolleries in the inner margin of the recto page, one of them is an animal playing a harp" — but an excellent collection.

	Here's a page from the famous "Brussels" black-paper basse-danse manuscript, from which much of our knowledge of early basse-danse choreography (and a little knowledge of musical ornamentation) comes. I suspect this is actually a facsimile: the real manuscript is in this library, but I've been told it's extremely fragile (the dyes that turn paper black aren't good for its longevity), and what's in the display case is in excellent condition.
	Neumatic chant notation from the 8th century Antiphonary of Mont Blandin
	Neumatic chant notation from the 12th century Sacramentarium of Stavelot Abbey
	Marginal picture of a transverse-flute player (?)
	Marginal picture of a man pushing another man in a wheelbarrow (from Breviary of Louis de Male, 14c)
	A treatise on music, with drawings of musical instruments (14th century, Park Abbey). Includes a straight trumpet ("tuba" or "basoun"), a horn ("corn&o" or "horn"), a harp ("cithara" or "harp"), something that might be a citole, two recorders ("fistula" or "floyt"), and a snare drum ("tympanum" or [indecipherable]).
	Shepherds playing bagpipe, entertaining the hounds and the sheep
	An opening from (one of) the Chansonnier of Queen Marguerite of Austria
	A young 15th-century nobleman being shown the error of his lascivious ways (including music, hounds, everything that makes life fun)
	A 15th-century representation of the Guidonian hand
	A banquet scene, with alta capella playing from the gallery, from the Histoire de Charles Martel (1465)
	Another banquet scene, with alta capella playing from the gallery, from the Chroniques de Hainaut (1465)
	A tournament with an alta capella playing from the gallery (15c)
	A royal procession, with holy relics and an alta capella at the front, from Fleur des histoires, 15c
	Not a "manuscript", technically, but a four-part piece printed on a tablecloth for Marie of Hungary, 1548.

Back to the room. I took a bag of dirty socks and shirts to a nearby laundromat and, while waiting for the wash cycle, hunted for nearby grocery stores. Didn’t find much, but got some yogurt for breakfast-in-the-room. And we both have enough clean clothes to get through the end of the vacation, even if our flight is delayed.

Packed up and checked out of our postage-stamp studio apartment (the whole place, including bathroom, was about 12 foot-lengths square), hauled our suitcases on the subway to the Gare du Nord, and (after going around in circles for a while trying to find the right hall of tracks) found our TGV train to Lille. The ride went smoothly, but there was a babe-in-arms in the facing seat to mine, and after about the halfway point of the hour-long ride he started getting increasingly fussy and noisy.

Anyway, we got to Lille, got off, and realized that we needed to get from the "Lille Europe" station (for long-distance trains) to the "Lille Flandres" station (for local and regional trains). It's a 10-minute walk, or one stop on the Metro (which we didn't know how to use), or one stop on the Tram (ditto, but I had thought it might be gratis). Found the tram track, which had a ticket machine nearby, so I tried to buy tickets in a hurry before the tram arrived. Bought two tickets, it only printed one, we got on anyway, it went one stop to the other station, and nobody ever checked the tickets. Got off, bought some pre-made, just-microwaved burritos as a quick, portable lunch, found our track, and finished lunch while waiting for the train to arrive.

Got off in Tournai (in a different nation, but they don't make a big fuss about that here), walked 15 minutes to our hotel, checked in and collapsed for a few minutes. But just around the corner from the hotel is the office de tourisme, and across the street from that is the impressive Cathedral de Tournai. So we visited those. The office de tourisme boasts of its "medieval cellar", which does indeed have some medieval pillars and stone walls, and is currently housing an art exhibition called "TournAI", a collection of surrealistic photos and short videos, created by AI, starring implausible, Dr. Seuss-esque architecture.

The Cathedral's nave was built first in Romanesque style, with more and more Gothic features incorporated at the altar-and-choir end. The whole building is roughly the same size as Notre Dame de Paris (slightly larger in some dimensions, slightly smaller in others), and largely covered with scaffolding as various parts of it are repaired and restored.

In fact, if you stand in the center of the nave and look towards the altar, what you see behind the altar are photographs of what was actually there before they started renovating (note the shadow of the cross on the photograph behind it). What's actually behind the altar looks more like...

We paid a few euros to visit the Treasury, which houses a variety of reliquaries made from the 7th-19th centuries, and allegedly the cope of St. Thomas a Becket (there was a lengthy explanation, which I didn't translate successfully, of how it got to Tournai).

Then moved on to the Place Grande, the central square of the town. Looming over one end of the square is the Beffroi, the town bell tower (the town had been specifically granted the right to a secular bell tower, as distinct from a church bell tower, in 1183). We walked almost 360° around the tower, over and around road construction,

to get to the entrance, climbed the tower and got some good views of the city,

then came down with tired legs and sat down with a Belgian waffle (pretty good) and some chocolat chaud (meh).

Visited another church, the Romanesque Sintkventinkerk, which was badly damaged by German bombing in 1940, and largely repaired (and some of the Gothic add-ons reverted to Romanesque) in the 1990's and 2000's.

shalmestere was in a mood for carbonnade flamande, and the first brasserie we stopped at on the central square had it on the menu, so she ordered some, I ordered pâte carbonara, and they were both delicious but so rich we couldn't finish them. Back to the hotel room to decompress.

Tournai has a Musée des Tapisseries, which is "temporarily closed", and a Musée Archéologique, which is "temporarily closed", and a couple of other museums that might be interesting if they were open but they're not. So tomorrow we'll take a morning train to Brussels, check into the hotel there, and probably visit a museum or two in the afternoon.

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Thank you, Heather Cox Richardson

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A long strange trip home

Ghent

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