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!)

3D-Agentur | Deposit Photos

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!

No Kings Day was a success. Now what?

The visuals from yesterday, juxtaposed against one another, were striking: sparse crowds lining Constitution Avenue NW in the muggy heat of Washington, DC, to watch a parade honoring the 250th anniversary of the founding of the US Army and also Trump's 79th birthday; and millions of Americans turning out in thousands of cities around the country to protest the policies of Trump's regime. 

The point could not possibly have been lost on him that way more people wanted to rally against him than to party with him. In nearly all the photos I've seen of him from the event, he looks dour. In one video, it looks like he may have dozed a bit. (I can almost forgive him for nodding off. Not only is he old and possibly not in the best of health, but it was 81 degrees in DC, with 80 percent humidity, when the parade kicked off. The best word to describe that sort of weather is vile. I have lived through those summers; I moved to Santa Fe to avoid experiencing any more of them.) 

I'm waiting to see how his press office spins this morose event tomorrow. Maybe somebody will break out a Sharpie.

In contrast, it was pretty much all sweetness and light around the rest of the country -- even in Minneapolis-St. Paul, where rally organizers canceled their event after a man posing as a police officer shot and killed a state representative and her husband and wounded another state representative and his wife. Despite the cancellation, 80,000 people showed up.

This protest was too big for the traditional media to ignore. Few outlets went with the "tens of thousands" dodge this time; some even admitted to six million people attending. The Alt National Park Service account on Facebook gave the final attendance figure as 12.1 million people -- and as I've said here before, the National Park Service knows how to count a crowd of people because they have been in charge of it for decades, even though they don't do it for public release anymore. At the same time, the media have a habit of lowballing such figures so as not to be accused of lying. 

In 2019, Harvard political science researcher Erica Chenowith published a study she had done that showed nonviolent protest is better than violent protest at effecting change, and that if 3.5 percent of the population actively participates in such protests, change is virtually assured. From the BBC article I linked to a second ago: "'There weren’t any campaigns that had failed after they had achieved 3.5% participation during a peak event,' says Chenoweth – a phenomenon she has called the '3.5% rule'."

Mama Google tells me that the population of the United States (2024 estimate) is 340.1 million. Three-and-a-half percent of that is 11.9 million. If Alt National Park Service is right, and I think they are, then we've hit the tipping point. 

Which brings me to my favorite sign of the day from yesterday's events. 

Stolen from Facebook. If you know the photographer, let me know.

None of this means we can rest on our laurels. Trump and his minions aren't going to give up that easily. So what's next? 

More protests, I would imagine. This cannot be a one-and-done. The more despised this regime appears to be, the more it will encourage folks on the fringes to defect. It may also influence those in office to act more boldly against Trump -- and I'm not just talking about the Democrats. Trump will die at some point (we all will, as Iowa Sen. Joni Ernst has helpfully pointed out), and Republican office holders would be idiots to believe they can ride his coattails forever. No one else in the party even remotely has his star power.

I'm not expecting immediate change -- not from the bunch currently in Washington. But as they say, things happen slowly, and then all at once.

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Happy Father's Day to everybody who is, was, has, or had a father, perfect or im-, and including those with offspring who are or were persons of the nonhuman persuasion.

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

Another day, another scary headline.

I rushed out the door this morning to my volunteer gig at El Rancho de las Golondrinas and almost missed the scary headlines coming out of Los Angeles: ICE personnel conducting raids around the city to round up "illegal immigrants", ordinary Americans mobilizing on the spot to peacefully push back against ICE, ICE throwing flash-bang grenades at reporters who clearly identified themselves as members of the media, and on and on. My reaction mirrored that of a lot of us, I think: 

ibrandify | Deposit Photos

Now Trump has ordered the mobilization of two thousand National Guard troops to "restore order", even though LA Mayor Karen Bass hasn't asked for help, and even though California Governor Gavin Newsom has asked Trump to stand down. As we learned a few summers ago, when Trump ordered peaceful protestors chased out of Lafayette Park in DC so he could walk a block to hold up a Bible for a photo op in front of a church, he's just itching for any excuse to call out the military on US soil.

It's not martial law yet, according to legal experts I follow on social media, but it feels damn close. 

The Brennan Center said in 2020 that the president doesn't have the authority to declare martial law, and even if he did, Congress would have to agree. But that's not as encouraging as it might otherwise be, considering Republicans have control of both houses of Congress right now and Trump has proven himself willing to do whatever the hell he wants, legal or not.

This is a developing story, as they say, and to be honest, I don't know what else to say about it right now. My reporter instincts are to just try to keep up with the facts as they unfold and leave any analysis for later.

One thing did occur to me, though: This action in LA is giving Trump and his minions footage of "American carnage" that actually happened here in the US and not in some other country.

Not to mention that we've all forgotten about the Trump-Musk breakup.

Stay tuned, as they say. And as Dan Rather has been known to say: Courage. 

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Why the emoji illustration? Because I didn't want give the impression that the reaction was limited to only certain people, whether immigrants or Black people or whatever. I hope we're all shocked, and scared, by what's going on in LA.

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These moments of disquieting blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Courage.