December 6
I'm so tired and depressed and it's my blog so I'll do what I want with it, lol
2024 was a bad year for all of us. I know that. You know that. For me, it included my dad spending over a month in the hospital after randomly tripping while at a routine doctor's appointment and then passing away in May.
As I entered the holiday season for the first time without my dad both of my cars died. A shit condiment to go with an otherwise challenging year. I am grateful fo ra lot this year, as I posted last week, but it's been tough.
So, yesterday I took the loaner car from the place where car number 2 is being repaired (alas, car number 1 didn't make it) to my happy place here in South Florida. You got it, the Everglades.
I met some new friends, mostly tourists and anhingas, aka, snake birds.
The first picture is of, what I think is an adolescent anhinga I found on the side of the road, literally, in Everglades about 45 minutes from my door. The other three are of a different anhinga who was hunting in the Royal Palm area of the Everglades, exactly 45 miles from my front door. Anhingas and cormorants are related birds that are common in the Everglades, hunt in the water and, interestingly, do not have water proof wings, the way most birds do. That's why dude looks like a drowned rat. All images copyright Philip Cardella 2024
The Jewel of the Everglades, purple gallinules, were also busy yesterday.
I think these are three images of the same purple gallinule hunting in the Royal Palm area off Anhinga Trail in Everglades National Park. All images copyright Philip Cardella 2024.
Interestingly, aside from a number of tourists I talked to, including students on field trips, I also made friends with another mammal yesterday. The thing about mammals is that ever since anaconda snakes took off in the late 1990s in the park, the mammal population has been all but eradicated, some species sightings are down 90% or more. So seeing any mammal in the park is lucky.
I'm not gonna lie, I took the image where the coyote's whole body isn't visible from the car. I was stopped but it was a one handed snap off a very big camera and lens. I then pulled over, got out of the car and took the other image.
So that's my happy place for the week, I guess. We also went to the Art Miami Festival for an event at a Maker Space in Miami Beach called Moonlighter FabLab and saw the work of and met a fantastic artist who works in aluminum and titanium named Christopher Bathgate.
I'm not sure how to describe this art. The guy makes it all himself, even the process of changing the color of the metal, the machines and tools for machining it. Everything. For those needing a description, a lot of futuristic sci-fi looking metal objects that are quite colorful and take weeks, if not months to make. All photos copyright Philip Cardella 2024
The last few weeks have been weird here
Fireworks boomed by our house at 2 AM, November 6th, when 45 was declared 47. It was surreal. 45/47 even carried our county, something I think only Reagan has done as a Republican. I mean, like, ever. The days leading up to the election were full of pagentry; I'm thinking most Americans never see, unless you are at an actual rally. Flags and banners from at least one house on every other street, trucks blasting past at 80 miles per hour with huge flags flapping in the wind and their horns blasting.
That's on a normal day.
For the entire three and half years we've lived here.
After the election there were even more flags and banners. The people who for two years have gathered at the county's busiest park every Saturday were back at it. Houses on almost every street around us had 45/47 flags or banners. Houses that previously had nothing had signs that declared victory. I meant to take a lot of pictures of it. But it was, frankly, depressing. So I waited.
These three pictures were taken during a 10 minute break from writing this piece on 12/6/2024. They were all within five minutes walk from my house. Copyright Philip Cardella 2024. Three different houses with various Christmas displays and large Trump flags and banners.
And then something weird happened. A lot of the flags and banners came down. Not all of them, by any means, but many.
A return to normal? I'm not sure. Maybe, as the nominees came in and the policies were officially announced, some had buyer's remorse. Maybe some even put out flags so their houses wouldn't be targeted.
Find the light of truth in an age of darkness
A guy named Robert Reich recently posted a list of news sources he relies on and I thought it was a good one so I thought I'd share it.
Here are the sources I currently rely on for the truth: The Guardian, Democracy Now, Business Insider, The New Yorker, The American Prospect, Americans for Tax Fairness, The Economic Policy Institute, The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, ProPublica, Labor Notes, The Lever, Popular Information, Heather Cox Richardson, and, of course, this Substack.
Notes about what I'm up to with this
I'm trying to bring back This Week in Florida History and with the anniversary of Castor's journey over the shitbow bridge last week I started working on a piece on that. But that means talking about Cuba and America and Cuba and Florida and Cuba and Miami and that is going to take a minute. LOL.
I'm also working on some stuff on the impacts of climate change. Nowhere is as vulnerable in the mainland United States as South Florida, so I got to thinking about that after seeing the devastation in Asheville, North Carolina, firsthand last week—exactly two months after Hurricane Helene.
Images from Asheville, North Carolina, November 2024. Copyright Philip Cardella 2024. An 81 West sign blown over by water and covered in river gunk. A "Asaka Japanese Cuisine" sign with a reader board that says "Hope birthed from chaos" and a pile of garbage from the river next to it and in the background the devastated restaurant. A white van face down in the river up against trees that were displaced and lodged in the river bed.
Follow Me to the Fediverse (encore post, now with more links!)
Think social media like X, Xitter, BlueSky, Threads, only not owned by CryptoBros, Would-be dictators, TechBois, or anyone else! The fediverse comprises thousands of little Twitter-like things (called instances) that are privately controlled, and users can come and go as they please. X or Xitter, is owned by the Saudis and their little democracy-murdering apartheid lover Elon Musk; Threads is owned by democracy-hating Meta (Facebook) and Mark Zuckerberg; BlueSky was started inside of Twitter, broke off when Musk bought it and is funded by shady investment groups, the known ones being mostly cryptocurrency ponzi+ schemes. It is run by a CEO whose primary experience is technical work for...cryptocurrencies. BlueSky says it won't be a crypto-centric thing. Also, cable TV said it wouldn't have commercials until it did.
The fediverse: all the assholes, none of the fascist rule.
