Month: November 2024

Language teaching - Life :) - Other sports - Politics - Romania

Enshittification: it’s pouring out now

November 28, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Yesterday some candles suddenly appeared in the stairwell. When Elena (the lady who owns the flat above me) called me from Canada, I found out what they were for. The woman on the ground floor had just died. She was only 68. Her husband died at the beginning of this year.

It’s been looking pretty grim for a while, but 2024 has taken enshittification (Macquarie Dictionary’s word of the year) to another level. (How did the en- prefix get there?) At every turn we’re sinking deeper into the mire and I don’t see a way out. We’re now systemically prevented from finding an escape. Most of us aren’t even trying anyway. We’re all ordering up pointless crap on Amazon and sharing memes on TikTok that last about five minutes before the next one comes along. At least I think that’s what people do on TikTok; I honestly don’t know.

On Sunday we had the first round of the Romanian presidential elections. Călin Georgescu, pro-Putin, pro-dictatorship, anti-NATO and a conspiracy theorist on every matter imaginable, came from nowhere to top the poll with just under 23% of the vote. He didn’t run a traditional campaign, but he was all over TikTok and Facebook. Since I use neither of them, his popularity passed me by. Also, in Timișoara where I live, Georgescu didn’t do very well. But now I know. He’s 62 so he’s been around the block a bit. He got a PhD in soil science 25 years ago and has since been involved in sustainable development and held positions within the UN where he investigated the adverse effects of dumping toxic waste. So it seems he’s got a brain on him and he did some good stuff before rapidly morphing into, well, toxic waste.

Second place was also a shock. Elena Lasconi, a centrist pro-European, edged out Marcel Ciolacu of the PSD (one of Romania’s big traditional parties) by the tiniest of margins, 19.18% to 19.15%. Ciolacu had a big lead over Lasconi on Sunday evening but his advantage narrowed throughout the night. I watched the results from the last few polling places (out of about 20,000) come through on Monday morning. Lasconi finally poked her nose in front with just 18 of them left to declare. Surprisingly there was no recount. I was glad Lasconi made it to the final two. She’s inexperienced, but the PSD are mired in corruption.

Dominoes are falling all around. Lasconi must beat Georgescu in the run-off on 8th December, or else Romania will be the next to tumble. A lot of Romanians don’t even care. Does anyone care about anything that actually matters anymore? On the radio yesterday there was open discussion of Romania being under attack. Hypothetical, but still.

Today I had four sessions between 3:30 and 9pm. A boy of eight, a girl about to turn 18, then a boy of nine, and finally a woman in her late forties. Last night I had a nightmarish session with a woman of 23. We discussed success and failure. She said that success to her means having a family and a good career. Fine. A shallow definition, but not an unusual one. But then I put it to her that I have neither a family nor a traditional career. Does that mean I’m a failure, then? Yes. I burst out laughing at that point. The rest of the 90-minute session was like talking to an AI bot. Last week I asked her to name one thing she thought could improve Romania. More cars, she said. Hmm, there seem to be enough cars here already. In fact when I’m getting around the city, I’d really like there to be fewer cars. Are you saying that if Romanians became richer then people would have more cars? Or that if Romania’s road infrastructure improved, more cars could be accommodated? Her responses are one word, no words at all, or just utterly bizarre. It’s the same story with almost all women I see that were born between about 1998 and 2008. When I saw the older woman this evening, I told her how great it felt to finally talk to someone like a normal human being.

I recently saw some photos my brother had taken of the little one in the snow, with a mini snowman behind him. They’ve had a real cold snap over there; snow in November is highly unusual. We had a few flurries ourselves last Friday.

When I finished work at 9:30 last night I spoke to Elena and then watched the rest of Birmingham’s match at Exeter. A pretty nice football ground, I thought. It’s called St James Park, and often comes up in British pub quizzes. (Newcastle’s ground is, famously, St James’ Park. Which other team’s stadium is called St James Park?) Exeter sounds like a pretty nice city too; I’ve never done more than pass through it on the train. I’ve sometimes thought that maybe Exeter should vote to leave the UK. What would that be called? Blues were already 1-0 up when I turned on the game. They were dominant but couldn’t put Exeter away until they got (and scored) a penalty ten minutes from the end. Two-nil was how it finished.

Books - Dreams - Family - Language teaching - Maths teaching - Music - New Zealand - Politics - Romania

Pulling teeth

November 22, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A storm ripped through last night at 3am; for an hour and a half I couldn’t sleep. It’s still blowing a gale (or something at around a force 6 or 7 at least) now. And it’s raining hard. Either before or after the storm – I can’t remember – I had my first dream to feature Donald Trump. I was in a small town or village on a sunny day, having been on one of my excursions in the car, when he appeared. There was no rally or anything; he was just there, surrounded by a handful of people. It was all very civilised. He seemed to be at least six foot six. My instinct was to get away from him for fear of being shot. In the same dream, or perhaps the next one, my laptop caught fire.

Here’s a map of the weather warnings that were put out yesterday. The combination of high winds and (in higher terrain) blizzards has made for quite a complex picture. I’m in the orange zone:

Last night I had a chat with Mum. What’s happened to your tooth? A crown had fallen out. She’d already been to the new gleaming-white state-of-the-art dental practice in Geraldine; in ten days she’ll get a replacement crown at a cost of $1800. Dad then came on the line to say he’d just sold a painting for the same amount (I don’t know if that was net or gross). It took me three days to do that! As if three days was a long time. I immediately thought, just imagine being able to make $600 a day doing what I’m doing. I told Mum that if she could hang on for six months (!), she could get it done in Romania for a fraction of the cost. Coincidentally I’d just been reading David Walliams’ Demon Dentist with a very bright girl of almost eleven before this talk of dentistry with my parents. After the dental talk, conversation turned to the various haka and hikoi that have been going on lately in New Zealand.

In a lesson on Tuesday my student went through a long article about career choices. The author of the article likened career decisions to an octopus where each tentacle needs to be fed and accommodated. Tending to your “practical” tentacle too much can mean you neglect your “social” tentacle, and so on. It mentioned that as your salary increases, your expectations increase likewise. You’ll never be properly satisfied. Reading this sort of thing emphasises how atypical my own experiences have been. In January 2008 I went to Melbourne for eight days to attend the Australian Open. And to see Melbourne, which I liked a lot. Then when I got back to work everything got pretty crap pretty quickly. I’d muddled along for a few years as one of the young guys, but all of a sudden a bunch of actual young guys and girls joined the department and I was 28, supposedly a level above. The others at my level were suddenly doing life stuff like buying houses, getting married, having kids, and spending proper money on cars. They were progressing. It became obvious, within the space of a few weeks, that it wasn’t going to work for me. So I actually cut down on my spending, squirrelling away $500 a week for the rest of ’08 and the whole of ’09, until the end finally came in December. When I was in New Zealand last year, I stumbled upon some old payslips from 2007. Oh really, that much? That was the last year, in fact the only year, that I was at least somewhat into my corporate job. I was part of a team of just five. That all felt an awfully long time ago.

Tuesday was when some of the more notable lessons happened. In the morning I asked a 28-year-old what he thought the worst (or most destructive) invention in modern human history was. He quickly shot back: social media. There are several other contenders: leaded petrol, cigarettes, landmines, nuclear weapons (though they may have prevented destruction), and plastic. But all of them were invented even before my parents were born, in some cases centuries before. If you’re talking about the worst invention in the last 75 years, social media must be it. It’s destroying the fabric of our society like nothing else, and it’s horrifying to watch this destruction unfold in real time. That evening I had a 90-minute session with a 23-year-old woman. Teaching women of that age is invariably hard, but this session was excruciating. I got one-word answers from her, if that. Look, this isn’t working. I’m saying five words for every one of yours. (I was being generous.) I was getting a real Demon Dentist feel about the whole thing; it was like pulling teeth.

It’s been a slightly frustrating week, with an above average number of cancellations. I’ve tried to make the most of the annoying downtime by making new games and exercises, for both English and maths. I made a set of cards with the numbers 1 to 100, to help with understanding factors, multiples, primes, and all the rest of it. I’d planned just to go up to 40, but then thought I may as well go the whole hog. I’m happy with the system I came up with. Black for odd, red for even (like the suits of a normal pack of cards), a purple border if the number is prime, squares in the corners to denote a square number, and a small triangle on the right if the number is triangular. It was important not to make it too busy. On the back of each card I wrote the prime factorisation and all the factors of the number.

I’ve been playing my Primitive Man LP by Icehouse (an Aussie band who were big in the early eighties) a lot lately. Icehouse came on Radio Hauraki a lot back in 2007, that one year when my job was meaningful. It was usually Great Southern Land, or sometimes Hey Little Girl. But there are other very good songs on that record too, like Goodnight Mr Matthews. A lot of the tracks remind me of Split Enz who were big at around the same time.

I gave up on Honey & Spice in the middle of the fifth chapter. Whoever the target market is for the novel, I’m as sure as hell not it.

It’s an important time for Romania right now. Citizens (i.e. not me) go to the polls three weekends running. This Sunday is the first round of the presidential election. The parliamentary elections follow on 1st December, which happens to be Romania’s national day, with the second round of the presidential election taking place on the 8th. The far-right anti-everything-except-Trump-and-Putin party will surely increase their vote share. If they gain power, Romania could go the same way as Hungary. Let’s hope not.

I’ve got an important meeting this evening regarding the book(s) I’ve been writing with the help of Dad. More about that next time; it’s been a long post.

Books - Family - Life :) - Politics

And the band played on

November 18, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Scârț, the place that has all the communist memorabilia and also houses the theatre I went to last December, reopened today, so I met Dorothy there for coffee this afternoon. They had records and books for sale, but I didn’t buy anything. Tracy Chapman’s first album would be amazing to have on vinyl, but I wasn’t going to fork out 160 lei for it. We sat inside – the renovation was still under way – and had tea and coffee. We met an Australian guy of sixty or so who had a long white beard and had that general bushman look about him. He also had his cat with him. He talked at length about his cat, including how he nibbled first his fingers this morning, then his dick. He said he lived a two-minute walk from Scârț. He settled in Timișoara ten years ago. In the meantime he tried to return to his native Sydney but couldn’t afford a place to live. Dorothy and I talked about all manner of things including Balinese first names.

Chats with Mum and Dad now revolve around two things. Their house (see later) and how irredeemably screwed we seem to be as a species. Things weren’t looking too rosy even a decade ago, but as I see it we’ve recently entered a new dark age, a cultural desert, devoid of meaning and substance and most of all, hope. Too few of us care because we’ve been conditioned not to care. We’ve all got six-inch rectangular shiny things in our hands that distract us from anything that really matters. And most of us are pretty busy working, in some cases just to make ends meet, but in other cases so we can afford pointless shiny shit that we’ve been conditioned to think we need. The biggest story of the weekend was a geriatric ex-champion boxer (who was massively famous when I was about eight) losing to some YouTuber who is supposedly massively famous now. Both trousered millions just for showing up. There’s also some conference going on in a petro-state where they won’t do anything to solve a climate crisis that many in power deny even exists. Bitcoin has hit US$90,000, a new record high, on the back of Trump’s re-election. How that’s supposed to be a good thing for anybody, apart from the bros who have bitcoin, I have no idea. Elon Musk has even named a new government department after a crypto coin. It feels more and more that as we go about our daily lives we’re like the band that played on as the Titanic sank, though worse, because the band didn’t actually make the ship sink faster.

The House. It feels worthy of a capital H now. On Wednesday I called Mum and Dad. After a few minutes with Mum, she went to an exercise class, so I got to talk to Dad alone, which meant a certain calmness and frankness. Their place is irretrievably bad, he said. “I’m embarrassed to have people round, especially if they ever saw our old place.” Yikes. He’s doing a whole load of DIY now, including doing up a big old shed, a process my brother called “polishing a turd”. Is all this work really worth it? Mum is in denial, he said. The only good news is that the house and renovation have set them back (so far!) around $900k, when I thought the figure was more like $1.1 million. It was confusing – there were so many quotes floating around before (and as) the work got started. Dad wants to be out of there in two years. Sounds like a good plan. They should be challenging their energies into finding a suitable next place, rather than, you know, polishing turds.

I’m reading a book that I picked up at Luton Airport in (I think) June 2023. It’s called Honey & Spice, by Bolu Babalola. I chose it mostly because of the enticing red-and-yellow cover and the author’s name. (The author is a woman.) The modern themes and language (words like mandem which looks kind of Portuguese to me; it’s actually multicultural London English or MLE) make me think I’m too old for this book. It’s like the opposite of a historical novel; I’m reading about a time after my own time. Wikipedia gives the author’s date of birth as 24/2/91, so yes, she’s quite a bit younger than me, but I would have guessed even younger. I’ve so far read just four chapters, and well chapter three was great, so even though the rest of it has left me cold I’ll persevere a little while longer.

Two months, give or take, until I have a niece. Apparently within two hours of my sister-in-law finding out she was having a girl, her mother had bought a whole load of new pink shit. Because that’s what we now do.

Films - Maths teaching - Photos

A big plus

November 13, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

It’s now grey and properly nippy out there. But that’s immeasurably easier to handle than the hellscape that was summer. We had two and a half months of disgustingly hot weather.

Yesterday I hit a brown pigeon on my bike. Ugh. There are so many pigeons here, I suppose I was likely to do that eventually. I didn’t immediately kill it, but I ran over one of its legs and damaged a wing. An old lady picked it up and put it next to a shop wall, where it would surely die.

Maths. Teaching that in addition to English has been a big plus. Pun intended. I don’t get all that enthused by trying to bump a decent student with rich parents up from a B to an A, but when you get beyond that it can actually be pretty fun. Like last night when I taught an 18-year-old guy that a minus times a minus equals a plus. I’m guessing he was taught that at school a few years ago, but maths at school often does just wash over you. Rather than just teach him that fact, I showed him what would happen if a minus times a minus remained a minus. This would be crazy, right? I gave him a “quiz” as I called it, based on we did in the previous session, then spent the remainder of the two hours scribbling on the whiteboard. Every few minutes he took a picture.

Lately I’ve found a Youtube channel called Combo Class in which maths is taught in a pretty unique way – outside mostly, often with things catching fire or falling over each other. The first time I saw it I wondered what the hell I was watching, then persevered and saw that this guy really knew his stuff and could teach it in a very engaging way. He taught me plenty I didn’t know and got me to think about concepts I did know in a totally different way. He’s a big proponent of using bases other than ten (six and twelve, mostly). Base ten, which is ubiquitous to the point that we can hardly think of any alternative, is far from the best base, mathematically speaking. We use it because most of us have ten fingers and ten toes. But it isn’t a fluke that (in the English-speaking world at least) there’s been a lot of twelve around. Time, money, length, cartons of eggs, and so forth. Twelve splits up much more nicely than ten does. And we even have the special word dozen for it. (Here in Romania, everything is so ten-centric – even eggs are sold in tens – that teaching fractions becomes a major challenge; people can’t conceive of dividing something into thirds or eighths or twelfths.)

On Friday I saw a film at Cinema Victoria with Dorothy. We saw Good Bye, Lenin!, a tragicomedy that came out in 2003. It’s about a woman who fell into a coma just before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and her son’s increasingly convoluted efforts to keep the news from her when she woke up eight months later. The film is in German; it was subtitled in Romanian. The soundtrack was composed by Yann Tiersen, who also did Amélie (great film) two years before. Very well done, but I wasn’t in the mood for it. I’d have much preferred some good old simple British comedy. Amazingly, tickets were only 15 lei (£2.50 or NZ$5.50).

Saturday was a full-on work day, mostly in Dumbrăvița. On Sunday I went back to Dumbrăvița to meet Mark for lunch at a burger joint called E10. I wasn’t sure whether to pronounce it in the Romanian way, or if it was an English-language pun (Eaten? Eton?). The burger was fine, if a little pricey. The crappy plastic modern versions of great songs did my head in though, and just being in Dumbrăvița is pretty nasty in itself. A massive, sprawling suburb that just keeps growing, so much of it feels like it was plopped there last Tuesday. There’s the park with the two churches, which is nice, but veer far from that and you’re faced with endless acres of fakeness. And then there are the cars. They keep getting bigger and less Romania-like. The whole place hardly seems to be in Romania. The only positive is a large wooded area near where Mark lives, which is great for walking his two dogs.

Coming back on the bike from Sânmihaiu Român on Friday. You very much feel you’re out of the city.

The Orthodox church in Dumbrăvița. Stop abortion. Don’t kill.
Environment - Politics

Time to wake up

November 11, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Mum shares a birthday with Donald Trump. Dad shares a birthday with Elon Musk. I share a birthday with Adolf Hitler. When it was over without yet being officially over over, we three sharers of villainous birthdays chatted for a good half-hour about what how we got here, how we’ve been asleep at the wheel for so long, and what further horrors are around the corner.

Unlike 2020 when the map of voting shifts was a mishmash of red and blue arrows and was described as a Jackson Pollock painting, this time it was one-way traffic. Only two states out of fifty didn’t move in Trump’s direction. Trump gained among men and women, irrespective of age or race. In other words, Kamala Harris (who ran a good campaign, I thought) faced an impossible task. Biden should have got out much earlier. In fact he should have been a one-term president from the start and the Democrats could have picked Harris or whoever else through a proper primary process. I can’t see the Dems nominating another woman in a hurry. Two of the last three elections they’ve failed to elect one to the White House, and in between they nominated an old white guy. Who won.

I listened to one commentator who complained of a “failure of imagination” as to how bad things could get under Trump and his minions. Best case scenario is their egos and lack of organisation keep the level of damage to a minimum. This is hard to imagine, now that the traditional Republicans have left the scene. It’s full-on MAGA now. Worst case is the US ends up like Hungary, or even Russia. For us in Europe, you can forget about the best case. Ukraine is fucked. There will be some “solution” whereby the Donbas is ceded to Russia, and then what? And forget anything to help the environment. “Drill, baby, drill”, which sounds like something out of Don’t Look Up, will be the mantra for the foreseeable future. They’re likely to drill for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. A third of the area of Romania, this refuge is home to polar bears and other large mammals. It has already seen its ice melt, making sea levels rise, causing more ice to melt due to the albedo effect and so on, so this will be one catastrophe piled on another.

I spoke to my cousin earlier today on Skype. He lives just out of Albany, New York. Good luck for the next four years, I said. Two, he shot back. The midterms. But how can you be so sure the Democrats will gain, even if Trump wrecks everything? Then he talked about good old checks and balances and all the guardrails holding firm. Which they do, until they don’t. I asked him eight years ago if he was going to stay up and watch the election coverage. No, there’s no way that idiot will win. But he did. You wouldn’t think a rapist, a felon and the instigator of a deadly insurrection could run for the presidency a second time, let alone get over 50% of the vote, because that’s obviously fucking ridiculous. But he has. My cousin has a PhD and is very switched on, but I came away from our chat thinking, I dunno man, you might be asleep at the wheel here too. His wife later came on the line. It was great to chat to her. She said she cried when the election results came through.

Yesterday I had maths with Matei. We discussed the election. He talked about all the TikTok memes, making fun of Harris’s laugh and her “working-class family”. And her lies. She’s such a liar, isn’t she? Heaven help us all. Trump lies practically every time he opens his mouth. And are you aware that he tried to violently overturn the 2020 election? He wasn’t. He was twelve at the time, so I suppose I’ll let him off, but it’s interesting that there was no TikTok about that. As I’ve said many times on here, social media is destroying us. Then we moved on to talking about bridges and cathedrals and maths.

Politics

Devastating

November 8, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

Unlike the previous two US elections, I didn’t get up at 2am to watch the results. But I couldn’t sleep. This will probably be seismically bad. Eventually I got up at 6:30, when it might reasonably have still been in electoral limbo. It wasn’t. I saw North Carolina had already been called for Trump, a bad sign, then flicked over to the New York Times needle. It showed Trump with a 90% chance of winning the election, but just by eyeballing the figures from the swing states, I could see this was a conservative (ha!) estimate and his chances were more like 97%.

Not a surprise – I was out by one state in that map I posted last weekend – but utterly devastating. I’ve had eleven lessons since the election was called, and I’m knackered. Tomorrow is a lighter day and I’ll probably post properly then. And get some damn exercise.

Photos - Politics - Travel: Romania

Buziaș again

November 4, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

I visited Buziaș this morning. It was my second time there – I went there with Mark last winter, before I bought the car. It was wonderful with the sun shining through the autumn colours and the leaves continuing to accumulate in a golden blanket. I didn’t do much but wander through the park – extensive for a small town – and the surroundings. Oh, and go inside a large abandoned building. Buziaș might be my favourite town within a half-hour drive of Timișoara.

The presidential race appears to be very close now. I woke up this morning to see a shock poll of Iowa from a highly respected pollster which gave Kamala Harris a three-point lead. Iowa is a state that should be firmly in Trump’s camp. But I’ve been here before with promising polls just before voting day. I remember big leads for Remain just before Leave won. I can’t believe that’s over eight years ago. There were also polls giving Biden huge leads in 2020, and he only just won. (Trump supporters were less likely to answer polls. This could happen again this time.)

Apart from the grave danger a Trump presidency poses to America and the whole world, I still find him utterly repugnant. Îmi repugnă, you can actually say in Romanian. His values are diametrically opposed to mine, those that were instilled into me from my parents, my grandmother, and my teachers at primary school.

I was a bit surprised to hear Dorothy voice support for the US abortion bans. I get it, you’re religious and that’s fine, but even if you’re anti-abortion (which you’re entitled to be), actually banning it is horrifically cruel. Iowa, by the way, has a terrifying six-week abortion ban. Last weekend I watched a documentary on the January 6th insurrection. A scary number of the participants invoked God.

Update: Maia Sandu has been re-elected president of Moldova. She won the second round by a solid margin. That’s a relief. Just a week ago Georgia decided to go pro-Moscow in their election.

This booth was phoneless

This sundial was a bit fast. It was 10:35.

To the toilet. It was brand new and clean, surprisingly.

A squirrel

The abandoned building

I wonder what happened in 1980

This hand-painted sign is very Romanian, particularly those Bs

The Romanian elections aren’t far away either

The Catholic church

There was once a “first class” restaurant at the bottom of this crumbling block

An old Romtelecom phone box near where I live. The phone no longer works.

Environment - Photos - Politics - Writing a book

Book plans and planning for the worst

November 3, 2024 plutomanby 0 Comments

A fairly productive Saturday. An online session (I hesitate to call it a lesson) with the priest, then two maths lessons in Dumbrăvița. After doing quadratic equations with Matei, we discussed the US election for the last 10 or 15 minutes. (It would have been helpful to have devoted the whole two hours to the election. So much maths there. The Electoral College, gerrymandering, and all the rest of it.) Matei brought up the site 270towin.com where you can plug in your own predictions.

After my lessons I met Dorothy to discuss the smaller of the books I (and Dad) have been working on. We wanted to meet at Scârț but it was closed for renovation. What kind of renovation, we wondered. Its messiness is kind of the whole point. I hope it’s for something structural rather than any kind of tarting up. The area surrounding Scârț, which has a park, cobbled streets, and architecture from the last days of the Austro-Hungarian empire, might be my favourite part of the city. We ended up having our tea and coffee a place called Viniloteca (as in vinyl records), which I’d previously misread as Vinoteca (as in wine). It was great, with all its proper music. I felt a certain pang when Tonight by David Bowie and Tina Turner came on. I’ll have to go there with Mark sometime. I didn’t buy any of the records or T-shirts on sale, but that wasn’t my focus. Dorothy and I looked at Dad’s 25 pictures, each one demonstrating a common error that Romanians make when they communicate in English. Seeing a whole body of Dad’s work really shows you what an extraordinary talent he has. (I know I’m biased.) On Monday I’ll try and arrange a meeting with the publishers to see what (if anything) will be the next step in getting the book into print. Will it cost me money? I say “if anything” because this is Romania, where nothing is guaranteed.

Yes, the election. I read an article that described it as bearing down on us all. “Bear down on” – an ominous three-word phrasal verb if ever there was one. Mum, Dad and I doomed for half an hour on Skype last night. What a Trump win would mean for Ukraine and the security of Europe as a whole. What it would mean for democracy. What it would mean for the environment which is deteriorating before our eyes. How the fuck the future of so much of Europe depends on a few thousand ill-informed voters in Cumberland County in Pennsylvania who don’t even care about foreign policy. (I know nothing about Cumberland County. It was a name I picked at random from the list of counties. I’m sure the people who live there are lovely. But that’s kind of the point.) The main thrust of our conversation was: how did we get here? When my parents were my age and I was a teenager, this sort of talk would have been unimaginable.

This was my guess on the 270towin website:

Of the seven swing states, I gave only Michigan to Harris. The most likely map is in fact all seven states falling to Trump. That’s because of how correlated the states are with each other. If there’s a polling error of a few points, it’ll likely be reflected across the board. In the last couple of days, things have looked marginally better for Harris, so I’m still hopeful. It’s certainly not a done deal, as Dad called it last night. But it’s best to mentally prepare for the worst, especially when there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it.

Talking of the environment, more than 200 people have so far died in Biblical-level flooding in Valencia.

Crysanthemums at the market yesterday. It was 1st November, the Day of the Dead.

The two pictures above were taken today.