Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Peter Sage’s blog post today was titled, “Three Corners of An Intersection”. It’s a tale of political signs.
Peter installed his sign first, Kamala Harris – 2024.
The next day, a neighbor responded with a Trump in 2024 sign across the street.
The day after that, a third neighbor put up a handmade sign against Trump.
There’s no sign on the fourth house at the intersection. They must be the undecided.
IMO, this pretty well paints the political scene of the United States in 2024.
My wife and I have noticed a striking trend: shelves in various kinds of stores are emptier and emptier.
We were talking about this earlier in the week when at a Rite Aid. Many shelves were empty, but it also seemed like the store had rearranged the shelves, providing much wider aisle space but reducing their shelf space. She and I discussed whether it was an extension of unresolved supply chain issues encountered during the pandemic, Rite Aid was in trouble, or if it was just this store.
But yesterday, we headed to a larger town, Medford, and visiting the mall and several other locations. The wider aisles and paucity of goods were encountered in Kohl’s, Macy’s, Target, Ulta, and several other stores.
It used to be that when we were in these places, so many goods were being provided that moving between racks and shelves was a distinct challenge. Now the script seems flipped.
I did some research. Empty shelves in Rite Aid stores in Bakersfield, CA, was attributed to Rite Aid’s bankruptcy.
The others? I couldn’t find reasoning provided but it wasn’t a deep dive. Perhaps it’s just my perception, or a local phenomenon, or the stores have simply changed policies.
I don’t know. Like many things in life, I’m just left wondering.
We’re spending hours over the last few days trying to find who lost homes and what businesses are gone in southern Oregon, where Ashland, Talent, Phoenix, and south Medford were fire struck a week ago. This is circulating Facebook and speaks volumes.
The consequences of the Almeda Fire (yeah, not ‘Alameda’), as it’s been declared, are rippling out. It’s named after the little street where the grass fire was first reported. The air is surprisingly clear, declared green by AQI, with a rating of 46, but a smoky odor teases you like a strong memory.
My little town, Ashland, Oregon, was where it started. We suffered some losses of homes. The area to the northwest suffered much more.
A trailer park is gone. Fast food restaurants and homes are gone. A winery.
Continuing into Talent…much of the northern side burned. The Camelot Theater is gone.
On into Phoenix…
Most news services are declaring that the small town of Phoenix, population of forty-five hundred, is gone. The primary road into town is blocked off, so confirmation is yet to come, but Youtube videos taken during the night attest that Phoenix suffered. Information is spotty, as the news services cope with elections, COVID-19, wildfires across the western US, and the snow in Colorado. We’re hampered locally as reporters had to evacuate their homes and the fire burned through a cable affecting at least one service provider. Some early reports said it was a local ISP called jeffnet, but others say it was Spectrum. Maybe it was both.
Those who bundle everything — television, phone, Internet — to one provider suddenly found they weren’t receiving the local emergency alerts, a new consideration offered for you the next time that you’re debating you options.
The fire continued into south Medford, about fifteen miles up the Interstate. That section of city was evacuated, along with the
Damage reports continue seeping in. So many fires are burning that the area lacks the resources to combat them. While towns and cities this part of Jackson County are fighting this fire, a larger fire is consuming another part of the county to our northeast. The county to the west is battling its own blazes, as are towns further north in Oregon. Little help is available.
The wind has abated. This is good news. Cooler temperatures are prevailing, the low nineties, but it’s going to increase again tomorrow and continue to get hotter the rest of the week.
I was at the March for Our Lives event in Medford, Oregon, with about a thousand others yesterday, when I spied a Pittsburgh Steelers hat on a tall individual. It was a crowded space, but eventually, finding him beside me, I said, “Hey, a Steelers fan,” because so am I. Laughing, he pointed at my USAF Retired hat. “And you’re retired from the Air Force,” he said. “Like my Dad.”
His father had retired from the Air Force and moved back to Pittsburgh, PA. We chatted and uncovered that we’d lived in the same Pittsburgh neighborhoods decades ago. He was fifteen years younger than me, but we’d attended the same schools, including Turner Elementary School on Laketon Road in Wilkinsburg. Like me, he’d followed a convoluted path to reach Oregon. My last stop before Oregon was Half Moon Bay, California, and his last stop was Madison, Wisconsin. He’d only been in Oregon three years. As a military brat, he was familiar with the places where I’d been assigned, and I knew his locations.
Besides politics, we talked about the changes back in the Pittsburgh area, and the Google location there, which we’d both visited. Six degrees of separation, small world, et cetera. He was like a familiar face in the crowd, to finish the cliche trifecta.
Michael Seidel, writer 