— पांच हजार तीन सौ बासठ —
Not much to report today . . . I didn’t go to a movie last night, and just went home to watch the State of the Union Address with Shobhit. It went on for almost two hours, starting shortly after 6:00 Pacific Time, which would have been shortly after 9:00 Eastern, at the U.S. Capitol.
Here are my brief takes. The news announcers just as President Biden was entering the House chamber made a note to mention that the room was more packed than any address the president has yet given—because, for the first time in his administration, there are no covid restrictions whatsoever. That struck me as batshit. Did no one think to consider the average age of the people in there? The single person shown wearing a mask in there was Bernie Sanders, who is 81. President Biden himself is 80.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is unhinged, but that's not news to anybody. She heckled the president when he said some Republicans are trying to cut Medicare and Medicaid, and she shouted "Liar!" several times. And this, I think, was the best moment in the entire speech, because Biden was like, "Apparently you agree then, let's protect Medicare and Medicade!"
I rather liked
Guy Branum's tweet after Republicans attempted to shout Biden down:
Wait, the State of the Union is the House of Commons now?
Senator Kyrsten Sinema wore a bright yellow dress with huge winged sleeves, making her look like
she thought she was on a red carpet.
Kevin McCarthy, our new Speaker of the House, drew a lot of mockery online, but he really wasn't that bad—honestly not much different from any Speaker from opposition party in most any State of the Union address, historically. He would shake his head at points Biden made that he didn't agree with, but would also clap and even stand up at things he did agree with. He could have gotten away with being far less gracious than he was, and it's sad it has to be contextualized this way, but coming from any Republican that actually counts as a breath of fresh air.
Overall, though, I found it kind of dull, full of platitudes. The best I can hope for is that it can be in any way leveraged to help his chances at re-election next year. As the pundits noted, the stuff he said was less relevant to the people in the room than it was to the American public as an audience. I did find that moment about Medicaid and Medicare pretty delicious though.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बासठ —
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बासठ —
Looking forward, we are now eleven days from our departure for Australia. The other day, I spent a good amount of time taking screenshots of transit and walking maps and itineraries, for all the times we travel between airports and hotels. I added them in attachments in my Google Calendar, but, we will spend a lot of time in Australia with our roaming off and no access to wifi (unless in a store or in our hotel), so last night I also saved all these screenshots as photos to my phone, which I then printed out here at work this morning. They will later be mixed in with printed out flight itineraries, to make a complete packet for all of our Australia travels. I did the same thing when we went in 2020.
We've even already started packing some of our stuff. I never want to start backing so early, but Shobhit gets obsessed about that, so, whatever. We've packed some meal packets and things like sunblock and bug spray. We're well set to be very ready by the time the 19th rolls around.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बासठ —
Oops! I came back to my desk and meant to post this, then got distracted by email—actual work! That's the only reason this isn't getting posted closer to 12:30 as usual today. I guess I'll post this now.
— पांच हजार तीन सौ बासठ —
[posted 12:49 pm]
