His Honor Rests in Peace

Duke, the Great Pyrenees who was write-in elected four times as the mayor of Cormorant Village, Minnesota, has passed away at 13.

Duke was elected mayor four times, first in 2014, and served as an unofficial ambassador for the village at festivals and events. He retired last year, when it became clear he could no longer perform his duties.

Now that's a good example for modern politicians to follow, except it would probably leave us with a lot of empty chairs at local, state and federal level. On the other hand, how that's a bad thing I'm not sure I could say.

Karma Not Real

It couldn't be, or else when Michael Cohen swore that unlike everything he said with complete conviction when he worked for Donald Trump, this time he was telling the truth, the lightning strike would have leveled not only the Capitol but most of Washington and parts of neighboring states.

Perception

Over at Live Science, writer Emma Bryce unpacks some of the possible reasons people hate the venerable font Comic Sans.

One of the most likely reasons seems to be overuse -- it started showing up where it didn't have any real place and so it became annoying.

The font creator, though, seems to have the right idea about the whole matter. He lives in France, grows olive trees and practices calligraphy. The fact that there is actual organized antagonism towards a font does not appear to have made much difference in his life at all.

Extended Friday

By the time the early 1980s rolled around, Robert Heinlein had amassed a curious dual reputation. He was the Science Fiction Writers of America's first Grand Master. He was one of the genre's "Big Three" along with Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke. With Stranger in a Strange Land, he had written one of the first sci-fi novels that grappled with questions about the human condition at levels approaching those usually reserved for sniff-down-your-nose literature.

And for most of the previous 15 years, almost everything he had published was uninspired, unintelligible or both. While Glory Road and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress both had their moments, Farnham's Freehold zigged and zagged in unexpected places and sank whatever interest it might have developed by relying on a thoroughly unlikable lead character. The lumbering Time Enough for Love cried out for even a little of the authorial discipline that had made Heinlein a top short-story writer. And I Will Fear No Evil was published while Heinlein was struggling with potentially lethal peritonitis, meaning his ability to give it anything like the attention it needed was just not there. Fear is the kind of novel that a sprawling hot mess looks at and says, "Bless your heart."

After Time Enough was published in 1973, Heinlein continued to struggle with his health. Finally fit enough again to create a novel, he greeted the 80s with The Number of the Beast. It did little or nothing to correct the idea that the great author's muse had packed up and moved on, mixing satire, parody and homage in confusing dead ends and whatnot.

Then came 1983 and Friday. The story of an advanced "artificial person," it tells about a series of incidents in the life of Friday Jones sometime in the 21st century as she searches for something -- mostly herself. Friday is a courier for a military and espionage private contractor in the Balkanized remains of the United States and Canada. Her work takes her around the world and sometimes off of it to space stations and other places near Earth. We meet her when an operation goes bad and she is captured and tortured for information from her employer. After some recovery time, she takes vacation with her family, a group marriage in New Zealand. But when they learn her heritage they divorce her, and she finds solace with some new friends, the wealthy Tormeys. It's while visiting the Tormeys that Friday is cut off from her employer and headquarters by a worldwide series of terrorist strikes called Red Thursday. The middle third of the novel is a travelogue across the different countries that used to be the United States as she attempts to get back to HQ. Once the reunion finally happens -- in a totally different context than she expected -- Friday takes on some new assignments before her boss's death dissolves the company. Her first private assignment heads her out of the Solar System to one of the distant colony worlds, but also puts her in danger of losing her life even if she succeeds.

The narrative takes awhile to describe because it's less of a single plot and more of a string of events through which Friday moves. The novel might have been better split into three or maybe even four connected shorter stories so that a reader would realize upfront he or she is not dealing with a strictly one-piece arc on Friday's journey to find a real place for herself. It could also benefit from a trim -- a sequence where Friday enlists with a private military contractor in order to try to get back into her home Chicago Imperium is really just padding and definitely takes longer than it needs to for even its small benefits.

Nevertheless, Heinlein's decision to exchange his thinly-clad philosophical musings for something like an actual series of events and happenings was warmly greeted by sci-fi readers. Friday was nominated for both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, something no one had even bothered trying to do for Number. It has Heinlein's trademark immersive world-building, offering a picture of where and how our characters live with just one or two well-chosen details. It features some of his pretty on-target forecasting, showing a society in which cash is all but absent and governments and others keep track of people by the use of credit or electronic money. Heinlein also suggests that some future conflicts will be fueled not by nation states but by corporations, through hired mercenaries offering fighting, courier or espionage services.

Friday's aforementioned "strung-together" characteristic weakens it, no matter how much it improves on its predecessors of the previous 15 or so years. It also suffers from Heinlein's career-long difficulty in writing women characters. Friday herself, though female, has a pretty masculine personality. She seems a lot more like a "tough broad" character from 1940s movies with an amped-up sex drive than a real woman, which only highlights for readers the reality that we're listening to what a man thinks a woman's voice is like. Heinlein starts out by showing how much of Friday's life is driven by her awareness of her lab-grown heritage and search for a place to belong, but he tends to wander away from that drive too often to let it be the peg on which a complete narrative could hang.

Like a lot of Heinlein fans, the return of actual events to a Heinlein novel put me over the moon when I first picked up Friday. Reread many years later, its flaws are pretty clear and it doesn't match up as well to his better work. But when considered with his other "late period" output, spanning from 1980 until Heinlein's death in 1988, Friday takes the prize. Its linear structure, likable central character and refusal to dally with mysticism and multi-dimensional frippery all offer something none of the others can match.

Omission

Someone told me the Oscars were tonight. Turns out I saw as much of the Oscars broadcast as I saw of the Oscar-nominated movies and performances -- no more than I wanted to.

Like, Black Panther. Into the Spider-Verse. Incredibles 2.

You could say I've gotta get out more. Or you could say the entertainment industry needs to give me a reason to want to get out more. To-may-to, to-mah-to, I suppose.

What Is Your Emergency?

Our Congress is preparing to vote on a resolution blocking President Trump's state of emergency declaration with regards to our nation's southern border. Several representatives and senators don't believe illegal immigration is a problem at all, several more do believe it's a problem but don't believe that the president's demand for a wall is the way to solve it. Still more accept those two ideas but don't believe the president needs a national declaration of emergency to get funding for his wall, or they may believe that this issue is important but doesn't get to the "emergency" level.

And of course there are people who would slap the cookie out of a child's hand if they learned the president once smiled at a person who built the plant where it was produced.

Amongst the rhetoric from those supporting this resolution are a good many statements citing the proper separation of powers as outlined in the Constitution. It's Congress' job, we're told, to pass legislation that pretends to funds what the government does. If the president objects, he may veto the legislation. But he's not entitled to just sign the pretend funding legislation and then declare an emergency to shift the money around the way he wants. That power's not in the Constitution, so unless some body of boneheads somewhere changed things around to give him that authority, well, he can't just seize it for himself.

Appearing as the "body of boneheads" in this episode will be the 94th Congress, who in 1976 passed HR 3884 (introduced by New Jersey Democrat Peter Rodino) on a 388-5 vote. HR 3884 became the "National Emergencies Act" when it passed the Senate without a roll call vote and was signed by President Gerald Ford. The act delegates 136 distinct statutory authorities to the president; 123 of them can simply be invoked by the president without Congressional input and they can only try to stop them afterwards.

As this column at The Week points out, 31 of the 59 national emergencies declared since the act's passage are still in effect. The other 28 were declared taken care of by the president himself -- not one was revoked by an act of Congress. It's entirely possible that this particular emergency should be revoked, based on any number of reasons that sound good to me. But the idea that the current congressional leadership has suddenly developed an appetite for its congressional duty of crafting, debating and passing legislation for which senators and representatives may be held accountable by their constituents is, as the column notes, ridiculous.

This isn't a new problem, as James Q. Wilson's 1987 article from The Public Interest describes. Even without a Lexis-Nexis search, I can bet I'd find exactly zero complaints from these new stalwart defenders of congressional prerogatives about the 13 emergency declarations during then-President Obama's two terms. There are days when I wonder which is worse -- that these twerps expect people to believe what they say or that they don't.

2-22-80; 4-3

Why yes, Al. Yes I do.