I actually wrote this on US Election Day, so I'm backdating it as the October entry. I missed out in September, and I also missed out on prepping the cinema series. It's the stay-at-home-phase that's slowing my brain down, perhaps.

So this entry will be mostly about small things. Except for the political part (meta as always, sorry).

A time of ap-pre-ci-at-ing simple things

Man, so much is going askew all over in this viral & extremisms phase. Being at home all the time - not my métier! - has done one positive thing for me, made me notice some basics of my life. Partly quite astounding:

1. A hot bath in the morning clears my head, in part truly physically. A thrice-weekly constant.
2. Netflix - the only streaming service I'm trying out, since I'm a cinema & video store fan - put up RAUMPATROUILLE, the cool 60's s.f. mini-series with i.a. beauteous Eva Pflug.
3. I can take out back-in-1-day videos practically every day!
4. Good news - I've learnt I'm not really hermitic after all. I do need to, in the end, see other people every day, preferrably ones I do know already.
5. I prepare food more often; being no real good at cooking, I go for recipes requiring simple actions (cf. picture). I.a. I am beginning to get into pestos - mmm!

Plastics case

I bought a good-looking "for men" shampoo the other day from a major hair products manufacturer (Schwarzkopf) that actually had a little sticker on it saying "no micro-plastics used". I was impressed, and there & then decided to buy no more shampoos that don't have that guarantee. I've felt uncomfortable with the "super trash" aspect of plastics most of my life, and do not think that smoke-filtered burning of plastic trash, like many German cities do, is a long-term solution! It's time to take a far more serious stand against non-degradable industrial products like plastics and C8, and move soon toward no longer having them produced!! The case against plastics, more than that against CO2, is that they're one of the true pollution sins of mankind - that we have the power now to correct.

There are ... strings

The Great Orange Pretender is no Ultron. Recently, mainly through the callous way Republican senators have been behaving in October, I've been wondering whether the people behind the increasingly unpretensive POTUS - the Kochs? the Tea Party? - actually "chose" him to front up a first climax of their deconstruction of things in the system they want gone, or at least stymied to some extent.

So that the strange-skinned puppet has actually been doing his intended job perfectly - to produce dissonance and distraction, year after year, turning the focus away from their actual plans & doings. And now... it feels like they're cutting losses and proceeding to drop him. So, in a way, I am sorry for the flailing "great" fool on the Hill. For a micro-second.