Ted and I have been working on updating our house and yard for two years, and we’re almost finished. In late July, we finished the outdoor updates with some tree trimming and thinning.

Tulip tree

This tulip tree is special. When our children were in elementary school, every fourth-grader was given a tree sapling on Arbor Day. At the time, the saying was that the best survival rate for these saplings was at the homes of the kids’ grandparents. Our kids’ grandparents did not live nearby, so we planted them in our yard.

Jeff and Kathy each received an evergreen. Both of those died within a few months. Thom was given an oak tree. He named it Fred, and it lived for a few years until bunnies chewed off all the bark at the bottom of the trunk. Kari’s sapling was a tulip tree. She named it Paul, in honor of her Grandpa Paul. Roughly 40 years later, that tree still lives. Unfortunately, a disease struck it a year ago and our arborist has been working with us to save it. It looks much better now than it did before the treatments.

Now that the tulip tree is healthier, we decided that it’s time to prune the formerly-diseased, now-dead branches. The workers needed a cherry-picker to reach the high branches.

Here are the before and after pruning pictures. The “after” tree doesn’t look as full in this photo as it does in the above “healthier” photo because I took this picture earlier in the year, before it was fully leafed out. The tree looks better without the deadwood.

Magnolia trees

Long ago, in 2010, Ted and I hired a landscape designer to beautify our yard. He must have been amused at our naiveté. We don’t have strong gardening skills, so we took his word for everything and paid him a small fortune (in our terms) to install what he’d planned. Some of the things his team planted were very nice; most of them were overdone and/or overplanted; and about one-half of them died within 2-4 years (after the one-year survival warranty, of course).

The designer placed three trees in stupid (my opinion) places: two beneath the pergola and one beside the pool deck. After (I think) 9 years, one of the trees beneath the pergola died. For the 15 years since they were planted, we have tried to keep the other two trees trimmed to fit under the pergola and beside the pool. Although we enjoy the magnolia blooms every spring, we decided that those plants just want to be trees, not shrubs. They’re growing almost faster than we can keep them trimmed back. We were starting to feel a little claustrophobic with a tree closing off half of our view on one side of the pergola and of skimming leaves from the other one out of the pool. It was time for them to become “giving trees” and to give mulch to gardeners, so we had them removed.

Here goes magnolia tree #1. Surprisingly (to us), it took less than 30 minutes to make these trees disappear. That’s a tiny fraction of the time we’ve been spending to keep them pruned away from the pergola and the pool!

Because of the (idiotic) places these trees were planted, the tree company could not get a stump grinder in place, so we have low-cut stumps now. We’ll have to think of a way to enhance them. Any ideas?

And here goes magnolia tree #2.

Our patio view no longer feels claustrophobic. Here’s the before picture, followed by the after picture.

As you can see, we still have plenty of trees without those two magnolias.

Burning bush hedge

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that, when fall arrives and the burning bushes turn bright red, it looks like nearly everyone in the area has at least two burning bushes in their yard. We have six–four in a privacy hedge, one beside the storage shed, and one at one end of our house. The burning bush hedge reached a point where Ted and I could not trim it without a tall stepladder, so we decided to take it down and keep it shorter. Here’s one of the tree guys beginning to do that for us.

The worker has part of the hedge trimmed, but hasn’t yet done some of the back side. You can see how much he’s taking off.

Here’s the hedge at a manageable height. With air and light, the bushes will fill out by next spring. A four-man professional team with professional knowledge and tools, completed all this tree/bush work in under 3 hours. I’m looking forward to the time we’ll save next spring when we’ll only have the now height-accessible burning bush hedge to trim.

Japanese maple

The landscape designer put a Japanese maple in a dumb place too. It’s one of his plantings that has survived and we’ve continued to trim it in the shape it had when it was planted. Over time, however, it’s getting to be a challenge to keep it trimmed away from the sidewalk so that we can walk past it without ducking. It’s also reached a point at which we can’t reach any higher with our electric trimmer to keep it trimmed back. Like the magnolias, we decided this little tree also wants to be a real tree, so we trimmed it from the bottom up. The carpet roses along the front porch (again, planted by the landscaper) have also survived, but they never look very good and can barely be seen from the road. In addition, Ted is tired of deadheading them all the time. We took them out this year.

Now the Japanese maple can grow to be a tree and the annuals we planted along the porch have brought us numerous compliments from neighbors and passing pedestrians.

That completes our outdoor updates–at least for a few years. We still have a little bit to do inside our house. Watch for the coming changes. They’re in progress as I write this post.

Theo, Ted, and I saw Superman yesterday. In my opinion, it was a combination of any current adventure movies (lots of noise and action, and the hero won), Jurassic Park (dinosaur-like super-creatures), Star Wars (weird, robotic super-creatures), the original Superman, and updated Superman. (Lois Lane is no longer pining for Superman. The two now obviously have a G-rated relationship and she knows Superman and Clark Kent are the same person.)

Yes, Kelly Anne Conway, the word “immigrant” is mentioned, but the three of us agreed there was nothing preach-y about it, nor did we think the movie was woke–no matter how you define that word. It was just fictional fun. The surprise of the movie was the number of laugh lines.

It’s still hot outside, so the three of us headed to DQ for treats afterwards. It was an afternoon well spent with our grandson.

Faster than a speeding bullet. More powerful than a locomotive. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. Look up in the sky! It’s bird! It’s a plane! It’s. . .Superman!

Eighty-seven years ago (1938), a baby arrived in America from a home in turmoil.  A family in Kansas raised him, and he struggled to balance two identities.  This was the beginning of Superman comics and has been the backstory ever since.  The first Superman story stated he was sent to Earth from Krypton, a fictional doomed planet.  His origin provided a convenient plot device:  it explained his superpowers.

The comic book Action Comics No. 1, published in June 1938. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Superman’s motto was to fight for “truth, justice, and the American way.” James Gunn, the director of Superman, told the Times of London, “For me, it (Superman) is mostly a story that says basic human kindness is a value and is something we have lost.”  The first page of the Superman story describes Superman as a “champion of the oppressed.” 

The image above was originally produced in 1949 and distributed to schools by the Institute for American Democracy, an offshoot of the Anti-Defamation League.  The art team at DC digitally restored the poster in 2017.

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, wrote Superman’s story as World War II loomed.  While fascism rolled through Europe and echoed in the United States, Superman’s early adventures show him fighting “for the little guys, for abused women, for exploited mine workers, and against corrupt politicians,” said Danny Fingeroth, author of Superman on the Couch:  What Comic Book Heroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society.  Throughout his adventures, Fingeroth tells us “Superman is the immigrant embodying the best of American qualities, even though he’s from somewhere else.”

Like Superman, the large majority of superheroes are outsiders.  That’s the common thread that gives them staying power for people from many walks of life.  Other immigrant superheroes include Green Lantern (beings from various planets), Wonder Woman (from a fictional island), Star Wars characters (from a galaxy far, far away), and even Deadpool (Canada).  Check Google for more.

Unfortunately, in these divisive times, everything seems to be political and, with immigration crackdowns ramping up, right-wing media is referring to the new Superman movie as “Superwoke.”  My CNN newsfeed today reported that Kelly Ann Conway, a former Trump adviser, said, “We don’t go to the movie theater to be lectured and to have somebody throw their ideology on to us.”  In contrast, Define American founder Jose Antonio Vargas and narrative strategist Andrew Slack wrote in The Hollywood Reporter, “You can’t politicize the truth.  Superman has been an ‘illegal alien’ for 87 years.” 

It’s not surprising that, last week, the White House’s social media accounts shared an AI-generated image of the movie poster depicting President Trump in the title role.  Sadly, however, that post was soon followed by one from the Department of Homeland Security, which shared the iconic image of ET’s bicycling silhouette with text superimposed over the moon saying, “GO HOME.”

Superman is a fictional and thus, an imaginary, character.  Does everything have to be political?  Still, Kelly Ann is partially right:  We don’t select movies based on our political ideologies and we don’t go to the movies to be lectured or to politically analyze them.  We go to the movies to have fun, to find adventure, to feel thrills, and to laugh—and maybe during this heat wave, to stay cool.

Dean Cain, now a conservative commentator, said the Superman director’s decision to invoke immigration while promoting the film could be a costly mistake.  So far, he’s wrong.  The movie finished in the Number One position on its opening weekend and continues to draw large audiences.  It topped the box office again in its second week.  It has now grossed $235 million in the United States and $406.8 million worldwide.  It looks like a lot of people just want to have fun.

The Superman comic books were my favorites when I was a child.  I remember buying them for 10 cents each and re-reading them over and over because I enjoyed them so much.  Ted and I are going to see Superman, and we’re going to have fun watching it for 2 hours and 9 minutes with no political commentary. 😊

Author’s note: To provide full disclosure, I based this post on an article in CNN. It incensed me to read that people are slamming an imaginary character, with a reputation as a champion of the underdog, as being woke (according to their definition of the word). Even worse, in my opinion, they are trying to take the fun out of a fictional movie by describing it as pro-immigration propaganda. Someone had to speak up for Superman, and because I’ve always liked him–fictional or not–I decided it should be me.

I recently had lunch with my friend, Cindy, whose sister was on the last plane that took off from the St. Louis airport just before the May 16 tornado struck. Cindy’s sister said the pilot used the gate microphone to say, “They’re closing the airport for storms. Get on the plane, stow your luggage, sit down, and buckle up. We’re taking off!” The photo below was taken by a reporter from Fox 2 TV, a local station. Cindy’s sister had a safe flight.

There’s a house near ours that Ted and I refer to as the “party house” of the neighborhood. Those folks have a swimming pool and a lot of friends and relatives. It’s not unusual to see a dozen or more cars parked on the street in that area on weekends. It’s never a problem–no vandalism, no kids running in the street interfering with traffic, no loud music, no late hours–just a lot of people having fun.

In the last few years, our neighbors across the street from our house have yielded their position of “Best Neighborhood Fireworks” to the folks in the party house. The party house fireworks show typically lasts about 30-40 minutes, and the fireworks are non-stop. Frankly, it’s as good a show (and longer) than any public displays (usually about 20 minutes) in the area, and we have no traffic or parking problems to watch it.

This year, several families gathered in one neighbor’s driveway to watch the fireworks, and one member of the group counted 60 cars parked on the street and more that she couldn’t see around the curve. When I say “party house,” I mean it! We non-party house folks assumed that all guests contributed to the cost of the fireworks, but that’s really not our problem–we just enjoy the show.

I took some videos of the fireworks this year, starting when the first one of a group was launched. The long series lasted a full two minutes, and there were at least 6-8 long series. Just like at the public displays, there’s a brief pause between series, while the group lines up the next display and sets it off. To stay within the space limitations of this blog, I took some 30-second videos. Here’s one–and remember, this is only one-fourth of how many fireworks went off in a two-minute display. There’s sound of you want to hear the bangs.

Here’s a shot in which my camera must have auto-corrected for the darkness, but I think it’s an interesting picture. The time stamp of the photo is 9:42 p.m., and it was dark at the time.

Several political scientists have outlined the process of democratic institutions declining, as witnessed by norms that can lead to autocracy. The following is a generalized outline of the ten potential steps that could contribute to a country becoming autocratic.

  • Exploiting crises and polarizing rhetoric. Leaders exploit economic or social insecurities to gain power, often using populist and nationalist appeals and blaming external forces or minority groups for societal problems.
  • Weakening of government institutions. This includes measures like extending executive power, abolishing term limits, or enacting regressive constitutional reforms to grant greater authority to the executive branch at the expense of legislative or judicial checks and balances.
  • Repressing dissent and controlling information. Restrictions are placed on civil society organizations, protests, and independent media. Surveillance and censorship technologies may be used to control the flow of information and to stifle criticism
  • Crippling the opposition. Opposition parties are weakened through infiltration, co-optation, and scare tactics to diminish their ability to challenge the ruling power.
  • Capturing elite support. Leaders secure the allegiance of influential figures in the military, business, or other sectors through patronage networks, financial incentives, or intimidation.
  • Manipulating elections and undermining the electoral process. While retaining the façade of democratic elections, leaders may engage in gerrymandering, change voter eligibility rules, or place allies on electoral commissions to ensure favorable results.
  • Undermining the rule of law and judicial independence. Courts are reshaped through ideological appointments or other means to ensure they align with the ruling party’s agenda and do not independently challenge executive actions.
  • Concentrating power in the hands of an individual or a small group. Authority becomes increasingly centralized, often bypassing constitutional constraints and reducing the accountability of the ruling power to the people.
  • Cultivating a cult of personality around the leader. Leaders promote an image of indispensability and charisma, often through propaganda and control over state media, reinforcing public allegiance to the ruling power.
  • Maintaining power through a combination of co-optation and repression. The regime balances distributing state resources and benefits to loyalists with the suppression of dissenting voices and opposition.