In praise of smaller airports.

 

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You get a quick post tonight because I've been out of town at a convention this weekend (Mystic South). Travel is exhausting, as I'm sure you know, and I need to get to bed soon. But traveling into and out of a smaller airport is a lot less exhausting, as I was reminded this weekend.

A couple of weeks ago, the Washington Post ranked the 50 best US airports (it's a gift link), and my current local airport -- the Albuquerque International Sunport -- was ranked seventh. Oh heck, to save time, here's their list of the top ten:

1. Portland International Airport
2. Long Beach Airport
3. National Airport*
4. Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport
5. Seattle Paine Field International Airport
6. Rhode Island T.F. Green International Airport
7. Albuquerque International Sunport
8. Indianapolis International Airport
9. Salt Lake City International Airport
10. Detroit Metro Airport

By and large, you will notice, these are not behemoth facilities. Small airports are just less complicated and easier to get around -- and in some cases, parking is cheaper. For instance, I parked in the garage adjacent to the terminal in Albuquerque this weekend; the maximum charge per day is $14, less than half what you'd pay for the same parking proximity at National.

The convention I went to this weekend was in a suburb of Atlanta, so of course I had to fly into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, the busiest airport in the world. A reported 108 million people traveled through that airport in 2024, and I swear to gods, pretty close to that many were there Friday night. It didn't help that I rode the train out to the rental car area only to find out that I didn't have a reservation, after all (thanks, Travelocity!), and then rode the train back to the main terminal to find the rideshare pickup point, which was an absolute mob scene. Landed in Atlanta at about 10 p.m.; didn't get in the Lyft until 11:40 p.m.; and it was nearly 12:30 a.m. when I got to the convention hotel.  The drive took longer than usual because my Lyft driver went out of her way to avoid traffic downtown due to the Beyonce concert. (Thank the gods that my body was on Mountain Time.) 

Today, we landed in Albuquerque at about 3:45 p.m. I stopped to use the ladies' room (no line!), got to my car, and drove the 45 minutes home. Even with stopping at the grocery store for a couple of things, I was home by about 5:30 p.m. Piece of cake.

Airports are such weird spaces anyway. Smaller ones are just nicer.

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*The official name is Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport. It was plain old National Airport until 1998, when Bob Barr, then a congressman from -- wait for it -- Georgia, went on a campaign to rename a whole bunch of stuff in DC after President Reagan. I believe Reagan has a lot to answer for, so I stick with the airport's old name. 

I liked flying out of National, too. The best part was that when we lived in Potomac Yard, it was only a five-minute drive from our apartment.

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These moments of traveling blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Safe travels, everyone!

Whose flag? Our flag.

As you probably know, Friday was Independence Day here in the US. I haven't been feeling much in the mood to celebrate our country lately, so I wasn't interested in finding a local fireworks display -- and anyway Santa Fe has been in a drought for pretty much forever, it seems like, and so setting off fireworks just seemed like a bad idea. (It didn't stop some of the neighbors, but then some people just want to blow stuff up and damn the consequences.)

But when the Santa Fe Opera sent an email saying they were offering tickets to this weekend's performances at 40 percent off, I snapped up a ticket to The Marriage of Figaro without thinking twice.

I like going to the opera, and we have a terrific -- dare I say world-renowned -- company here in town. World-class performances ten minutes from my house? Yes, please! Plus unlike most other live performance venues, the Santa Fe Opera has built into the auditorium seat backs a screen that shows what amounts to closed captioning. It's for translating the lyrics into English and Spanish, but it's pretty fabulous for hard-of-hearing folks, too.

Anyway, just before the performance started, the orchestra struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner". At the first strains of the song, the audience got to its feet, as did I -- years of public schooling trained me well -- and we began singing along.

Then I heard some guy in the aisle behind me say "something something Republicans". I don't remember his exact words, but what he meant was it was the sort of song you'd expect a bunch of well-to-do Republicans to trot out on the Fourth of July. Maybe he was trying to impress his date with world-weary snark, I dunno. But if I hadn't been concentrating on staying on key, I would have turned around and let him have it.

Our national anthem is for all Americans. I'm not about to cede it to the Republican party -- or our flag, either, which is what the anthem is all about. 

In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think the song is perfect for our times.

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" was written by Francis Scott Key, a lawyer who lived in Georgetown, which at that time was still a sort of suburb of Washington, DC. If you want the whole story, you can read about it on Wikipedia -- but suffice it to say that during the War of 1812, Key and a couple of American companions ended up stuck on a ship in British custody as the Brits were about to bombard Fort McHenry in Baltimore's harbor. The attack began at dawn on September 13, 1814, and continued for 25 hours.

Key and his companions realized they wouldn't know the outcome until dawn on the 14th: if the American flag still flew above the fort, it would be clear that it was still in US hands. And it did, and it was. Key was moved by the British defeat to write a poem that was published as "The Defence of Fort M'Henry".

It wasn't much later that the poem was set to the tune of "The Anacreontic Song", also known as "Anacreon in Heaven", that was written for a gentleman's club in London by John Stafford Smith. It didn't become our national anthem until 1931 (beating out "America the Beautiful", which is a heck of a lot easier to sing).

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" has lately been criticized for racist language in a verse that's hardly ever sung (fun fact: the song has four verses), and there have been calls for a different song to be chosen as our national anthem. Earlier this year, after Trump enacted his on-again, off-again tariffs, Canadians booed the song when it was played at sporting events involving the U.S. and Canada. And of course, there are the everlasting complaints about how hard it is to sing.

But think about its genesis. Key wrote it during wartime, in the thick of battle. He didn't know whether the battle would be won. Moreover, he didn't know whether the country would survive.

It's somewhat analogous to where we are today, except we're not fighting the British -- we're fighting the oligarchy and Project 2025. The ending to the final verse is so hopeful that it could be a rallying cry for today:

And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall wave 

O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

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"The Star-Spangled Banner" isn't perfect by any means -- but neither is the United States. And I'm not interested in relinquishing our anthem and our flag to those who don't believe in America's ideals -- freedom, equality, fairness, and the rest -- to desecrate.

That would be obeying in advance.

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These moments of patriotic blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

All hail the semicolon; and a few words about Mamdami.

I tell you what: Nothing brings out the pedants like a post about punctuation. (And I'm counting on you lot to follow through!)

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Washington Post columnist Mark Lasswell knows this, apparently. His column published in the paper today is titled, "This punctuation mark is semi-dead. People have opinions." (You can read it for free here; you're welcome.)

Lasswell's bio on WaPo's website says only that he has a BA from the University of Missouri. His LinkedIn indicates that he was an op-ed editor for the Wall Street Journal before being forced out in 2017 due to intra-department conflicts during Trump 1.0. That seems like an odd thing to leave out of one's biography on your current employer's website, but maybe he's flying under the radar due to Jeff Bezos's ownership of the Post.

Anyway, back to the poor, benighted semicolon, which Lasswell says was introduced by a Venetian printer in 1494. But according to a study released by Babbel, its usage has dropped by half over the past 50 years in British English books; things are not much better on this side of the pond, according to a Swedish study of semicolon usage in US publications from 1920 through 2019. 

One wonders why it was left to a Swedish academic to study semicolon usage in the United States, but answering that question is beyond the scope of this post (translation: I ain't spending my Sunday afternoon reading a 27-page linguistics paper. If that's your jam, have at it).

Lasswell doesn't proffer any reasons for the declining usage; instead, he wisely (perhaps) leaves it to the peanut gallery to speculate. The usual suspects are suggested, including the dumbing down of edumacation (rest assured that the Oxford comma also gets dragged into the discussion). 

I didn't comment (well, I did, but not about what I'm about to say here), but the discussion did put me in mind of something I learned in a Great Courses course from linguist John McWhorter: As languages become the lingua franca of more people, particularly as people with different native languages come together more often, certain things about them become simplified. For example, irregular verb forms become more regular. And I would suggest that punctuation becomes simpler, too. The semicolon has only a few uses in prose: to connect two closely related independent clauses (i.e., if the text on each side of the semicolon could stand as a sentence on its own); and separating items in a list, if one or more of the items is complex so as to require a comma. (Mama Google's A.I. adds a third usage -- before a conjunctive adverb like "moreover" -- but to my mind, that's the first rule with an extra word thrown in to underscore the relationship between the first and second clauses.) 

So the semicolon is fairly specialized, and people who don't write regularly (I'm not counting social media posts as "writing regularly") probably forget what it's used for. I've seen a whole lot of comma splices that should have been a semicolon. 

I like semicolons; I appreciate their usefulness; and I do get annoyed with comma splices. But at work, we tend toward extreme avoidance. I've seen complex lists in legislation that use nothing but commas. But then we tend to use commas more sparingly than I'd like, too, which is a whole 'nother rant.

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Okay, briefly, Mamdami (since I can't bring myself to comment on Trump's Big Bullshit Bill without swearing): People all over the country are losing their minds over Zohran Mamdami's win in last week's New York Democratic mayoral primary. Mamdami, who says he's a democratic socialist, is predictably making conservatives' heads explode -- but he's also discomfiting Democratic Party stalwarts like Bill Clinton who backed former New York state governor Andrew Cuomo (never mind that Cuomo quit as governor after an investigation found credible evidence that he sexually harassed eleven women). Cuomo outspent Mamdami, $87 per vote to $19 per vote; still, Mamdami won.

There are so many angles to cover with a story like this, Islamophobia (Mamdami is Muslim) being only one. But the thing that most interests me is the Democrats' reactions. They're correct when they say that you can't extrapolate election results in liberal New York City to the rest of the country. But the sotto voce backlash to Zamdami's win is reminding me a whole lot of what the party did to Bernie Sanders in 2016: they decided it was Hillary's turn to be president, and they just were not going to acknowledge Bernie's popularity, period, end of story. Why? Because the Democratic National Committee's business model is to collect as much money as possible to elect as many candidates as possible so they can hold onto as much power as possible. That's their whole reason for being. 

But Bernie proposed helping people, not corporate donors. He talked about income inequality and the oligarchy, and the DNC's big donors are part of the oligarchy. Bernie funded his campaign with small-dollar donations that the DNC couldn't control (and Bernie, bless him, refused to hand over his donor list to the DNC when he dropped out of the race).

Mamdami won by doing the same thing. No wonder the DNC is scared; he's attacking their business model.

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Seven semicolons and the use of "discomfiting" in a single blog post. I ought to get a prize or something.

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But seriously, who thought it was a good idea to back an accused sexual harasser for political office? I mean, Andrew Cuomo is no Trump...

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These moments of bloggy punctuality have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay safe!

War in Iran, and keeping cool in the Southwest.

I was all set to do a 100 percent nonpolitical, totally educational post this week about how I'm not gonna die because of the lack of air conditioning in my condo. And then yesterday, Trump went and dropped a bunch of BOMBS on Iran. (His quirky capitalization, not mine.)

In some respects, we all should have seen this coming. The guy's been itching to play with our arsenal since his first term, when he asked whether nuking a hurricane would work. (Spoiler: No. And also, WTF?)

He also probably thinks he's brilliant for misdirecting his critics with his never-gonna-happen "two weeks" excuse and then striking almost right away. 

Here's what I know: No matter what anybody in the Trump regime claims, it is way too early to know how badly, or even whether, Iran's nuclear capability was damaged. Third-party inspectors would need to be granted access to the bombing sites to evaluate the damage, and good luck getting the Iranians to agree to that now. (I'm feeling echoes of Bush the Younger's bombing runs on Iraqi targets that were supposed to be chemical weapons sites; one may have been a baby-milk factory, but it definitely wasn't a munitions plant.)

Here's what else I know: The Iranians will retaliate. We don't know how yet, but they will. 

As a commenter on some article I read somewhere observed, the United States is now Japan in 1941. And we all know how that turned out for Japan.

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Anyway. I refuse to let Trump derail my original plan. So here's an explainer about my A/C-free condo.

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I have always had a hard time equalizing the indoor temperature in this place. I'm not in an end unit, so I only have windows on the north and south sides. The south side has four ginormous solar windows that don't open - I have often referred to them as the fabulous wall o' windows -- and a door to the deck. There's also a mysterious circular thing that looks like a fan cover in a side wall at the top of the solar windows. On the north side of the house, there are three smaller casement windows, two in the bedroom and one in the office/craft room. This window placement is the classic arrangement for passive solar design. The idea is to capture the heat from the sun in the building's materials (including the brick floor in my living/dining room) on the south side of the house and let it keep the house warm all night long. That works great in the winter. And it did work pretty well in the summer, here at 7,000 feet and almost 40 years ago, until climate change started giving us warmer summers. Today, for me, the living/dining room has been ten degrees warmer than the back of the house in every season.

Of course, you can regulate the sun's intensity by putting a shade on any window. And my solar windows did have shades on them -- dark brown shadecloth-type fabric that you had to pull up from the bottom, even though (as I've explained to several window-shade sellers) the sun, which you're trying to block, comes in at the top. (There's also an exterior roller shade, also in a dark brown shadecloth-type fabric, that I leave down all summer.) The living/dining room temperature can easily exceed 85 degrees on a summer day without any intervention.

Here's my first line of defense: an evaporative cooler, also known as a swamp cooler. 

Lynne Cantwell 2025

The bottom part is a water tank. There's a submersible pump inside that pumps water to the top of the unit and sends it trickling down over a honeycomb-cardboard pad that's maybe two inches thick in the back of the unit. The water saturates the pad; the fan in the front pulls hot air through the wet pad and sends it out into the room, where the water in it evaporates, cooling the room. It's a stupid simple technology that has been around at least since the time of the pharaohs. It's also cheap compared to air conditioning. The tank holds about four gallons of water, which lasts for about four hours. A ten-minute shower uses about 20 gallons of water, or about five refills of this device. As for electrical usage, it's just like running a fan.

Note, though, that a swamp cooler only works in dry climates. If you tried running one of these in the humid mid-Atlantic, it wouldn't work -- the air there is already saturated with moisture. You'd just make yourself more miserable.

Okay, but what about a mini-split? I had a guy come out to the house a couple of months ago to advise me about that, and he suggested that I get the exhaust fan at the top of the solar windows (for so the mysterious circular thing has turned out to be) hooked up again. So I did that, and it's helping a lot. The exhaust fan not only pulls out the hot air that gets trapped at the top of those windows, but it also pulls the cooler air through from the back of the house. For the first time since I moved in, the bedroom temperature is within a degree or two of the living/dining room temperature.

I've made one more adjustment: I got rid of the dark brown interior shades and had fancy light-colored honeycomb shades installed in their place. It turns out that those dark shades were actually soaking up heat and holding it in the room; lighter-colored shades reflect heat. That should have been obvious to me, but it wasn't. It also should have been obvious to whichever previous owner had them installed -- but my money is on it being the same genius who had the exhaust fan unhooked.

Anyhow, as I write this on Sunday at 2:30 pm, it's 82 degrees outside with 15 percent humidity. I've got the shades drawn and the exhaust fan and the swamp cooler running. Just for fun, I put a thermometer in front of the swamp cooler. They're about 30 inches apart.

Lynne Cantwell 2025

TL;DR: I'll be fine.

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The swamp cooler covers about 500 square feet. My condo is about 1,000 square feet, so I have two -- one in the living/dining room and one in the bedroom. You can hook them up to a garden hose, eliminating the need to refill the tank manually, but you're advised to only do that outside -- if you overfill the unit, the water will leak out the back and all over your floor (ask me know I know).

You can get bigger portable swamp coolers, and even whole-house units. The bigger portable units only cover more square footage, though -- they run through the water tank in about the same amount of time. And a whole-house swamp cooler might be harder to manage in a condo building. But if this setup starts to fail, I'll look into alternatives again.

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I splurged on the shades and got the motorized kind. The old shades were a mess -- the original pulley mechanism at the top had broken off and been replaced with an eyebolt drilled through the top edge. To raise and lower the shades, you used a jury-rigged pole with a bolt assembly sticking at a right angle through the end.

As I watched the installation crew testing the motors on the new blinds, I pointed out the pole to them. One asked if I would like for them to throw it away with my old blinds. 

"Yes, please," I said. 

Tigs is somewhat gobsmacked by the new blinds.
Lynne Cantwell 2025

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These moments of comfortable blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Stay cool!