Hey, it’s my last update of 2024. Happy New Year’s Eve!
What are your plans for tonight? Ours are to stay the hell home, have a nice dinner, and stream something on TV. I’ll be up with the dogs when the fireworks and gunfire kick off, offering hugs and a safe lap when needed. On New Year’s Day I’m making a sausage, shrimp, and crawdad boil … a good way to kick off 2025!
The solar-powered bird feeder camera we gave ourselves for Christmas has been difficult to figure out. First, pairing it with iPhones and iPads; second, figuring out how to download the 10-second videos it records in order to share them. But I’m getting there!
The feeder’s been up since Christmas day, six days now, and so far only two hummingbirds have discovered it: a drab grey female who comes by several times a day, and then yesterday this handsome purple-throated male, who so far has visited only once. Luckily for these two, the feeder has an attachment just for them, which you can see in the video. The hopper, which surrounds the camera, is filled with Michelin five-star seed, according to the nice man at Wild Birds Unlimited, where we go for supplies when we’re feeling posh (Ace Hardware when we’re not). Regular birds, even though plenty of them live in the trees behind our wall, have yet to approach. We’ll know when they do, because the camera’s sensitive and records any motion, day or night, including dogs shitting and me cleaning up after them. Actually I’m looking forward to nighttime bat captures, once spring arrives and they migrate back from Mexico.
My Chinese watch collection is up to six now, all homages to Swiss luxury watches I’d love to own but cannot afford.
In the first row, two near copies of the Rolex Submariner (the ones with Mercedes Benz hour hands) and one of the Tudor Black Bay (the watch with the red bezel). In the back, the red, white, and blue number borrows heavily from the Omega Seamaster America’s Cup edition, and the all-black chronograph with the silver metal bracelet is modeled after another Omega, the Speedmaster worn to the Moon by Buzz Aldrin. The last watch, with the Panda eye subdials, is a homage to the Breitling Top Time chronograph, and the thing I love most about it is its old-school mechanical movement … no wagging your wrist to keep it wound, you have to go at it the old-fashioned way.
In my book, all wristwatches made after the original, created by Abraham-Louis Breguet for Caroline Murat, Queen of Naples, in 1810 (per Wikipedia), are to some degree homages to watches that came before. Homages like the ones I own, which are more blatant about it, are controversial with watch collectors: some regard them as fakes; some love them. Me? I’m Team Love.
I don’t own any fakes and don’t ever plan to. Fakes range from the obvious ones guys in trench coats sell on the street to almost exact replicas that can pass for the real thing. What they all have in common is that they aren’t what the name and logo on the dial say they are. Homages may look, from a distance, like Rolexes or whatever, but they’re branded with their own names and logos, and there are always other small differences. A friend recently sent me an article about “parody” watches, which are another thing entirely … picture a Rolex lookalike with “Relax” on the dial … and I have no desire to own one of those. For what it’s worth, the Chinese watches I’ve collected are good watches, equal to (and in some cases better than) Japanese Seikos, five of them in fact powered by Seiko movements. And they’re affordable, which carries a lot of weight with me.
We have good memories of President Jimmy Carter, conveniently forgetting how most of us turned against him during his time in office. Some of that was driven by his decision to boycott the Olympics after the USSR invaded Afghanistan; some by increased gasoline prices, inflation, and unemployment; some by the humiliating hostage crisis in Iran and the failed rescue attempt. Even though Republicans were behind most of these crises (with one in particular working behind the scenes to ensure the Ayatollah held onto our hostages until after the election), we were ready for Reagan. But Jimmy never let us down, committing the remainder of his long life to good works and humanitarian action, and that’s the Carter we fondly remember. You know what else? He was the first president to ride a motorcycle, and he loved dogs.
When I was a joint staff officer at U.S. Special Operations Command, I worked with an Army colonel who’d been one of the undercover operatives sent into Tehran early in the hostage crisis. His mission, along with a few other Farsi-speaking agents inserted with him, was to gather the sort of practical intelligence the eventual rescue team would need: the location of buildings where the hostages were being held and the best approaches to them; how many Revolutionary Guards were posted at doors, gates, and windows; which way those doors, gates, and windows opened; maps of the best escape routes out of the city and to the desert pickup point; etc. These men were in-country for more than a year. The man I worked with had to maintain his cover in Tehran for a month or more following the failed rescue, finally exfiltrating himself, on foot, to Turkey. Tell you what, if that rescue had been a success, Jimmy Carter would have been a two-term president with his face on Mount Rushmore; Reagan a footnote.
I don’t think Trump is going to be a footnote, for better or worse, and everyone knows it’ll be the latter. So there’s that to look forward to.
Stay fresh, cheesebags, resist, and Happy New Year!