Today's Water Cooler 2026-05-19

Birdsong of the Day

Moar mimidae:

Neighborhood woodland, St. Louis, Missouri, United States. Complete with various engine noises, which the bird does not imitate.

In Case You Might Miss…

(1) Collins bets on clout as Platner attacks the system.”

(2) After Musk v. Altman: “Wall Street expects smooth sailing from here.”

(3) “Several countries have incorporated cash into their constitutions.”

Politics

Trump Administration

“Trump Is Pressuring John Thune to Fire the Parliamentarian Over Ballroom Funding” [NOTUS]. “President Donald Trump pressed Senate Majority Leader John Thune to fire the Senate parliamentarian after she ruled Republicans could not include funding for the president’s ballroom in a budget bill, two sources familiar with the request told NOTUS…. While Trump has promised to build the ballroom with private donations, Republicans are looking to get $1 billion in Secret Service funding into their filibuster-proof legislation. About $220 million is aimed specifically at the East Wing project. Elizabeth MacDonough, the nonpartisan parliamentarian who gives determinations on the rules of the Senate, determined Saturday that the provision, as written, did not pass the so-called Byrd Rule, which prevents non-budget items from passing with a simple majority.” • In the past, Democrats have meekly bowed to the parliamentarian; Republicans fire them. We’ll see if history repeats itself. If it does not, that’s an indicator of Trump’s waning clout.

“I Am The Lord Thy God And Donald Trump’s Ballroom Is Very Low On My Priorities List” [Wonkette]. “Dude is sitting in a room decorated like King Midas threw up all over it and has the gall to read a Bible verse where I told people to be humble.” • Ouch!

Election 2026

“Battleground state with few combatants – why Pennsylvania’s primaries lack competition” [The Conversation]. “Pennsylvania remains one of only 13 American states that holds closed primary elections. That means voters must already be registered as party members to vote in that party’s primary. In an open, or even semi-open, primary state like Michigan and Iowa, potential challengers can try to win a primary election by relying on new voters choosing to align with the party only for that election day, or even for that specific election. A closed party system gives party regulars, and the party organization itself, enormous sway over who gets nominated. Potential candidates in closed-party states are much better off working within the party organization and waiting for an incumbent to step down before throwing their hats in the ring. Pennsylvania is a closed-party state and a swing state. In an election cycle in which political parties from West Virginia’s Republicans to California’s Democrats seem to be turning on their own members, Democrats and Republicans in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania have managed to keep their parties more unified. The desire for party fealty is strong, but not as strong as the need to win in the general election. Pennsylvania parties are powerful, and they are staying cautious until November. An uncontested primary, in other words, isn’t a sign of apathy. In Pennsylvania, it’s strategy.” • Hmm.

* * *

“Collins bets on clout as Platner attacks the system” [Punchbowl News]. “Collins is unapologetically leaning into her seniority and institutional know-how, which have enabled her to use that very system to benefit Maine. It’s a formula that’s been successful for the battle-tested Collins in her previous races, to the endless dread of Democratic leaders…. Platner acknowledged the importance of Senate seniority. But he said Collins’ earmarking success is a distraction from decades-long problems such as stagnant wages and high costs. ‘Talking about it and being like, ‘No, you are right. [Seniority] is important. The power does matter. Structurally, you have to know what’s going on,’ Platner said in an interview. ‘But also, since things didn’t get better, she clearly isn’t very good at this. Because if she was, we wouldn’t have this problem.’ Platner added, ‘She’s had 30 years. If the money you’re bringing into Maine is making it better, then why did it get worse?’” • That’s not a bad argument.

“Unearthed posts show Dem Senate hopeful praising vulgar graffiti, making crude porta-potty admission” [FOX]. • That fainting couch is getting pretty crowded. Seriously, this didn’t work in the primary. I don’t see why it would work now (although it is amusing to watch Republican operatives exhuming and reanimating zombie Democrat talking point).

“Oysterman, Veteran, Prep-School Alum: A Senate Candidate’s Complex Class Story” [New York Times]. “The bulk of his income appears to come from the nearly $60,000 in tax-free disability benefits he qualifies for each year after serving four combat tours, according to people familiar with his finances, his financial disclosure form and Mr. Platner himself.” Oh. “Mr. Platner has described his mother, who owns an upscale restaurant, as his oyster farm’s biggest customer.” Oh! More: “Already, Republicans have signaled that his economic background will be a line of attack, casting him as a ‘prep-school kid’ still financially dependent on his parents at the age of 41. They’re picking up on questions that were previously raised by some Democratic supporters of his former primary opponent, Gov. Janet Mills.” Thanks for putting those talking points in play, Democrats! More: “ ‘This is not a salt-of-the-earth guy coming up from a hardscrabble existence,’ Tony Buxton, a former chairman of the Maine Democratic Party who had supported Ms. Mills, said in an interview late last month. ‘If he’s an oysterman, I’m a florist, OK? Because I raise roses and give them to my wife.’” In an interview with The New York Times, Mr. Platner scoffed at such attacks. ‘I work with my hands on the ocean and I don’t make much money,’ he said. ‘I’m not really sure what else the definition is than working, making money from working, not being rich.’ His campaign also noted that Ms. Collins has a lucrative stock portfolio, describing the senator as ‘ultra wealthy.’” • I think many, many people in Maine have “complex class stories.” That said, it’s only May. We’ll have to see if Platner can take a punch. My guess is that he can (as Fetterman could; deadweight though he turned out to be, he ran a great campaign).

Democrats en Déshabillé

“Rejecting the Health Care Trap of the Democrats’ Donor Class” [David Sirota, Jacobin]. Sirota in fine form: “Last week, the oligarch-funded Searchlight Institute, led by Sen. John Fetterman’s former top aide, got itself a headline proposing that Democrats coalesce around free primary care and around creating the public health insurance option that the party promised to create eighteen years ago and then dropped.” Ah, happy days. More: “[New York Times opinion writer Rachael Bedard] is invoking a now-familiar argument among American liberals — namely that their party should always be pitching compromises rather than making maximalist demands. And perhaps at the end of drawn-out legislative fights, that logic occasionally might make a bit of sense. But what’s new here is that this argument — which had resulted in so many surrenders, including Barack Obama’s surrender of his single payer promise and then his public option promise — is now being made by liberals even before Democrats are in any kind of policy fight at all. That, of course, is the intended effect of the Searchlight Institute’s proposals — to get liberals to help stop a Medicare for All fight before one even unfolds.” • That’s our Democrats: Preemptive surrender.

* * *

“6 to 1: Democratic speakers dominate 2026 commencement stages at Top 100 universities” [The College Fix]. “The Fix looked at the keynote commencement speakers at undergraduate ceremonies at U.S. News & World Report‘s Top 100 schools. The analysis found only six Republican or Republican-leaning speakers compared to 38 Democrat or Democrat-leaning speakers. Put another way, Democrats account for 86 percent of partisan keynote speakers. The Fix reviewed public statements and donation records to determine the political leanings of speakers. The numbers only include the speakers at either the main commencement ceremony, or if there are multiple events, the undergraduate ceremonies. Other speakers did not publicly indicate a political leaning and were counted as not applicable in the analysis. Some universities have not announced their keynote speakers as of mid-May. This year’s results are more skewed than the 5-to-1 Democrat-to-Republican ratio that The Fix found in 2025.” • And therefore…

“The Commencement Address I Would Give If Asked” [Confined Space]:

I want to talk about work. Not résumés. Not LinkedIn profiles. Not “finding your passion.”

But about the work and the people that make our lives possible. The work of people who:

Build and maintain our roads.

Stock our grocery shelves.

Staff our hospitals.

Deliver our mail and packages.

Harvest our food.

Repair our power lines in the middle of storms.

Care for our sick children and aging parents.

Keep buses, trains, and airplanes operating, schools open, water clean, and cities moving.

Work and workers that are often invisible—right up until their work stops.

And I want to talk about something even more important: Whether those workers come home safely at the end of their day. Because behind every hard hat, every hospital badge, every steel-toed boot, every safety vest, every uniform—there is a human being: Someone’s son or daughter, someone’s brother or sister, someone’s parent.

Someone who kissed a loved one goodbye that morning with every expectation of coming home for dinner.

You probably already realize that for many, work is more than a paycheck. It is a calling. It is a source of pride, accomplishment, inspiration, and a service to others. It is also a critical factor in people’s health and well-being.

For others, work may be a necessity – to provide shelter, food, and a brighter future for their children.

But whether a calling or a necessity, workers deserve basic protections. Many of the workplace protections we now take for granted were not gifts bestowed by employers who took pity on their employees’ sorry working conditions.

• I keep hearing how Democrats really, really wish they could find a way to appeal to the working class. Do you think any of ‘em will give a working class-centered commencement speech like this one? Not a chance.

Realignment and Legitimacy

“A majority of Americans say the country’s best years are behind us” [Pew Research]. “Ahead of the United States’ 250th anniversary, 59% of Americans say the country’s best years are behind us, while 40% say its best years are ahead. Americans are also much more pessimistic (44%) than optimistic (28%) when asked to think about what things will be like in the U.S. 50 years from now. Another 27% are neither optimistic nor pessimistic, according to a December 2025 Pew Research Center survey.” Handy chart:

• Of course, Trump’s no dummy, and “Make America Great Again” is designed to appeal to this sentiment. All too evidently, it’s not working (unless you equoate “owning the Libs” with making America Great). Two more stupid, endess wars haven’t done our favorite peace candidate any favors, either. And what do the Democrats have as a counter-offer? Two different versions of the Abundance Agenda, one thin gruel, the other positively runny. This, when (say) single payer health care and removing the imperial face hugger from the body politic are somewhat (somewhat) more commensurate with the country’s problems.

“NextEra-Dominion Merger Would Create a Mega Utility Monopoly That Makes Families Pay for the AI Boom” [(press release) American Economic Liberties Project]. • I love AELP, I truly do, but the “meretricious” shibboleth “families” is always a substitute for working class, so why not just say the words? (And if it’s not such a substitute, what is it?)

Geopolitics

“Sidelined from legacy institutions, a movement centering Judaism outside Israel rises” [Religion News]. “A group of synagogues, nonprofits and small lay-led prayer communities previously on the margins of the Jewish establishment have formed a new association as an effort to better advocate for their emerging vision of Judaism in the 21st century. The association, the Jewish Diaspora Movement, launched Monday (May 18), consists of 40 groups, mostly in North America, that are united in their rejection of Israel’s ethno-nationalist Judaism. Though not explicitly anti-Zionist, the association is committed to centering the diaspora, rather than Israel, and working toward the liberation of all people, it said in announcing the association. ‘We joyfully view wherever we are in the entire world as our home and reject the vision of Judaism that is state-centric, militarist, ethno-nationalist,’ said a news release announcing the new association. The ‘founding minyan,’ or quorum of groups, under the new umbrella includes Jewish Voice for Peace, the largest organization of anti-Zionists in the country, and Rabbis for Ceasefire, a coalition of rabbis that emerged in the wake of Israel’s war on Gaza. It also includes a constellation of synagogues and prayer groups, or chavurot, that have emerged in cities such as Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. The Jewish Diaspora Movement has been in the works for several years and is yet another signal that the consensus that made Zionism a centerpiece of Jewish identity has broken down.”• Hmm.

Pandemics

Stay safe out there!

Long Covid

“One of the World’s Most Decorated Directors Nearly Died From Long Covid. Now He’s Got a New Film at Cannes: ‘A Complete and Utter Miracle’ ” [Hollywood Reporter]. Andrey Zvyagintsev: “It was a horrific illness, which took 18 months of my life. For 12 months, I could not get up, and it was all to do with Covid. So the pandemic really hit me hard. I was bedridden. I couldn’t move my hands. I couldn’t move my legs. I couldn’t use them at all. With what actually happened, you can consider this to be a complete and utter miracle. It took a lot out of me. As I refer to it, I was dead. Forty days of induced coma is almost the same as being dead. And after that, I resurrected. It was absolutely incredible. I can tell you honestly that 40 days of coma is not the best pleasure one can have and enjoy. You don’t exist. But gradually, very gradually, I started to adapt. I underwent a course of rehabilitation. In August 2022, I came from Germany to Paris in a wheelchair. I started moving, I started walking, and I started being myself again.” • I wonder how many other stories like

Business

AI: “Federal court rejects Elon Musk’s claims against OpenAI, saying he filed his lawsuit too late” [Associated Press]. “The nine-person jury found Musk waited too long to file his lawsuit and missed a statutory deadline. After a three-week trial, the jury deliberated less than two hours.” • Missing a statutory deadline is even dumber than butchering standing. Musk can hire whatever quality of advice he wants. How could they not have warned him? Or was Musk his own client, and on the day he filed the ketamine was unusually strong?

AI: “Elon Musk Rages Against ‘Terrible Activist Oakland Judge’ & Jury After Losing $150 Billion OpenAI Trial; Accuses Sam Altman Again Of ‘Stealing A Charity’ ” [Deadline]. Viewing the statue of limitations as somehow unfair and staying on brand that the rules shouldn’t apply to him, Musk followed that up with: “Regarding the OpenAI case, the judge & jury never actually ruled on the merits of the case, just on a calendar technicality.’”• This guy built the team that tried to rewrite HUD’s rules and regulations, automagically, using AI. “Technicality,” my Sweet Aunt Fanny!

AI: “Can They Both Lose” [Atrios]. • Exactly. As with any squillionaire vs. squillionaire celebrity cage death match.

AI: “Musk v. Altman proved that AI is led by the wrong people” [The Verge]. “Almost nobody in this saga seems worth trusting. Some of the most powerful people in tech seem temperamentally incapable of dealing with each other honestly. And if that’s true, it raises a bigger question: Why are they in control of a trillion-dollar industry that’s set to upend people’s lives?” • Generalizing: “Why isn’t capital under democratic control?”

AI: “After Elon Musk’s Court Loss Comes the Long Hot A.I. Summer” [New York Times]. “As for Mr. Altman, he has repeatedly maintained he has no direct stake in OpenAI. ‘I’m doing this because I love it,; he told a Senate subcommittee in 2023. It emerged during the trial, however, that he has stakes worth $2 billion in companies that directly do business with OpenAI. He said he had been recused from negotiating the deals.” BWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA!!! Just like the other Sam, Sam Bankman-Fried. Meanwhile: “A.I. has pretty much a green light from Congress, the Trump administration, the courts[,] and Wall Street. There is a scattering of opposition among state regulators and isolated lawmakers, but so far it hasn’t amounted to much. All of which leaves the increasing anger felt by those clerks, administrators, writers and other citizens with pretty much nowhere to go. Wall Street expects smooth sailing from here.” • No doubt.

AI: “AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology” [Futurism]. “There’s a serious mismatch between public sentiment and corporate excitement over AI. Companies continue to AI-wash layoffs and jam the tech into every corner of their products, yet research keeps finding that Americans are opposed to rampant AI expansion: according to one recent Economist/YouGov poll, a staggering 70 percent of Americans think that AI is ‘moving too fast,’ and about 64 percent believe it’s unlikely that the general population will ever reap future economic benefits of the tech. Yet no one seems to be more confused than the makers of the tech themselves. Back in January, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang lamented on a podcast that the AI backlash has been ‘extremely hurtful,’ blaming pushback on ‘doomers’ pushing a negative ‘narrative’ of AI. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman observed in an X post last fall that there are ‘so many cynics,’ and that it ‘cracks me up when I hear people call AI underwhelming.’ And in February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared that ‘looking at what’s possible,’ in his view, public embrace ‘does feel sort of surprisingly slow.’ According to Axios’ Madison Mills, tech CEOs have also privately conveyed their bafflement. ‘In previous conversations with Axios, AI executives at multiple frontier AI labs were surprised by the negative opinions,’ Mills writes. ‘They see AI as just as inevitable as the rise of the internet.’” • Somebody call a wh-a-a-a-m-bulance! These are the effing weasels guys who enshittified Google. And we trust them with AI?

AI: “The hidden underwriting exposure of AI data centers” [CFO Dive]. “The next era of artificial intelligence rests on a physical backbone: a vast, capital-intensive build-out of data centers and power infrastructure requiring trillions of dollars in investments over the next five years. Debt markets are mobilizing to meet the insatiable demand, from investment-grade private placements to complex project finance structures. When it comes to financing digital infrastructure, there is a growing underwriting gap. Data centers are still widely financed as though they are traditional real estate assets; buildings with secured long-term leases, strong counterparties and predictable rental streams. Lenders take comfort in creditworthy tenants, secured contracts and tangible collateral. That framework is dangerously outdated. In the AI era, lenders are not just financing buildings, but they are financing high-performance compute factories. The value of these assets and the serviceability of the loans depend not only on tenant credit quality, but on uninterrupted operational performance. The stability of the capital stack is now impacted by power certainty, cooling resilience and the ability to maintain strict uptime thresholds and other performance criteria as defined in service-level agreements between tenants and asset owners.

This shift has introduced operational volatility into an asset class previously prized for its predictability. Its operations will determine credit performance.” • Hmm.

Tech: “Software Costs Nothing to Ship but a Fortune to Abandon” [Silicon Opera]. “The zero marginal cost idea has genuine explanatory power. It explains why software companies can scale so fast, why SaaS multiples looked reasonable during the growth years, why VC money chased software over hardware. Chris Anderson’s The Long Tail and later thinking around digital economics made this a mainstream framework. Shipping software is cheap. Hosting it keeps getting cheaper. The economics are genuinely different from manufacturing. But this framing got applied too broadly. It described distribution costs and then quietly implied that all costs trend toward zero. The idea migrated from ‘cheap to ship’ to ‘cheap to adopt, operate, and exit.’ That last part was never true, and the industry largely pretended it was.” And: “Even in companies with sophisticated finance teams, exit costs almost never appear in the original software procurement analysis. There are structural reasons for this. First, exit costs are contingent…. Second, exit costs are diffuse…. Third, the people who feel the cost are rarely the people who made the original decision. The VP who signed the contract for a platform tool is usually not the one who leads the eventual migration. The organizational memory of why the tool was chosen often outlasts the memory of what alternatives were evaluated. As measuring software cost accurately is already hard, adding the dimension of contingent future exit costs makes it nearly impossible. The result is systematic underpricing of vendor risk at procurement time, and systematic overpaying at exit time.” • IBGYBG.

Finance: “Singleness of Money and the Role of Central Banks” [Bank of Japan (PDF)]. “Recently, several countries have incorporated cash into their constitutions. Slovakia, Hungary, and Slovenia enshrined the right to pay with cash in their constitutions. In March, Switzerland incorporated the central bank’s provision of cash into its constitution.” Handy chart:

• Interesting. Why can’t we do that?

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 62 Greed (previous close: 62 Greed) [CNN]. One week ago: 65 (Greed). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). • Drifting lower….

Rapture Index: Closes down one on Oil Supply/Price. “Despite all the fighting in the Middle East, oil prices have declined” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 182. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • I’d never checked the FAQ for this site. It’s everything I expected, and more.

Climate

"Insane Stratos Data Center Approval Threatens Great Salt Lake Basin" [Clean Technica]. "Box Elder County Commissioners voted on Monday to approve the Stratos Data Center, a massive project set to become one of the largest in the country. The facility will be built in the Great Salt Lake basin, threatening a critical migratory bird habitat and an ecosystem that is already under significant strain. The facility is projected to increase Utah's carbon emissions by 50%. The project is expected to reach 9 gigawatts of power, consuming more than twice the electricity of the entire state of Utah, and requiring a significant amount of already limited water resources.... Despite unanswered questions about its projected water use, the facility filed a water rights change application to re-direct an existing agricultural water right for industrial use, and in response, 3,700 community members filed protests asking the Utah Division of Water Rights to reject the project's application." • Ah, water rights in the West. I doubt this fight is over.

"Geopolitical posturing and resource-grabbing: Trump's distraction from the real Greenland problem" [The Ice Blog]. "[Y]ou might have missed the announcement about the temperature record smashed in Greenland during the first month of 2026. The Arctic island this year experienced its warmest January on record.... 'Climate change is already clearly visible on Greenland,' said Jacob Hoyer, head of the National Centre for Climate Research at the Danish Meteorological Institute. 'From the records we can see that it is warming four times faster than the mean temperature hike in the world.'... The island is losing ice mass at an average rate of 25 million tonnes per hour, or 6,900 tonnes per second, Harris writes. It is discharging 52 million tonnes of ice per hour or 14,500 tonnes per second. That means all this freshwater is flowing into the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans.... Global sea level is rising ever faster, primarily through increased melting of glaciers and ice sheets, as well as warming ocean temperatures, which cause sea water to expand in volume. The Greenland ice sheet is responsible for around 20 percent of current sea level rise.... While it would take centuries for the ice cap to melt completely, some recent work indicates that sea level could increase by 1 metre within 75 years." • Yes, but easier to get at the mineral wealth?

"New Orleans must immediately plan evacuation after terrifying finding: experts" [Raw Story]. "'While climate mitigation should remain the first step to prevent the worst outcomes, coastal Louisiana has evidently already crossed the point of no return,' the [Nature] paper adds. That's because rising waters are slowly eroding Louisiana's coast, including New Orleans, which 'may well be surrounded by the Gulf of Mexico before the end of this century,' according to the study's authors." And: "'What kind of retreat do you want?' asked [study co-author Brianna Castro]. 'Do you want to incentivize it and then people go naturally for jobs, housing, and lifestyle amenities—or do you want people to wait and then have to leave abruptly in crisis?'"• What a silly question. The latter, of course.

The Gallery

"The Fascination of Flaming June" [The Met]. "When the British artist Frederic Leighton exhibited his iconic painting Flaming June in 1895 at the Royal Academy of Arts in London, critics assessed it as one of his finest submissions, and it quickly became a popular hit.... Leighton was one of the most celebrated British painters of his generation. A proud traditionalist but also spirited and independent-minded, he championed time-honored ideals of beauty and refinement with dramatic flair. The artist's style was well suited to the tastes of the British cultural elite... By the 1890s, Leighton had a considerable reputation to uphold and a proven strategy for creating acclaimed works. He specialized in depictions of women in allegorical or mythological guises, their erotic appeal disciplined by elegant grandeur. These subjects provided a point of departure for the display of Leighton's talent for gorgeous color, complex poses, and swirling drapery. In Flaming June, he executed the components of his strategy to perfection." • It's not that I prefer the undraped to the draped, but when the drapery becomes the theme, that's a little too much of the imperial temperament for me. (Although Leighton's premature call on global warming is interesting. All our Junes are flaming now.)

"Why Do Museums Make You So Tired?" [Mental Floss]. ". If you've ever wondered why looking at beautiful things is often more exhausting than a session at the gym, there is a century's worth of research to explain why.... ["Museum fatigue"] was first coined by Benjamin Ives Gilman in a 1916 edition of The Scientific Monthly, after Gilman realized that the physical toll on visitors wasn't a lack of interest, but a design flaw. Using fatigue-detecting photographs, Gilman observed visitors and realized that the height of display cases and the way information was presented were literally giving people neck cramps and mental exhaustion." And: "Beyond the display cases, your brain is paying a steep metabolic price for all that culture. As a calorie-hungry organ consuming 20 percent of your total energy, the brain enters a mental marathon when faced with a museum's high-density environment. This triggers decision fatigue, where you're constantly making rapid-fire micro-choices about which plaque to read or how long to linger before moving on. By the time you've processed dozens of novel objects, your prefrontal cortex—the seat of executive function—is effectively fried. This cognitive drain is exacerbated by a perfect storm of sensory factors. To protect artifacts from UV damage, galleries are often windowless and dimly lit, which can inadvertently trigger the body's sleep signals. Without a visual horizon to look at, your gaze remains locked in a near-focus state, leading to tired eyes and disorientation....And then there's the learning piece: the brain uses significantly more energy to process novelty, meaning your mind is working much harder to decode the symbolism in an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus than it would to look at a familiar object in your own home." • I'm good for an absolute maximum of 90 minutes, but I thought it was just me.

News of the Wired

I am not feeling wired today.

Plant of the Day

Via IM:

IM writes: "I'm so happy to have WC back! I'm not sure if this is a proper Plantidote, but the abundance of fallen cherry blossoms on a transport truck on a beautiful May morning must be something close."

Patient readers, please dig deep for more Plantidotes. Thank you! (It's helpful to have one Plantidote for each email. I track the Plantidotes I have run by whether I have opened the mail or not, and when there are several Plantidotes in one mail and I use one, I have to remember to mark the mail unread so that I remember to return to the mail for the rest. And if I'm in a rush, that's a source of error. Thank you! If that's a hassle, by all means combine them; I send and receive so much mail it doesn't seem to me like it would be.)

Send your plantidotes as attachments to lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [AT] protonmail [DOT] com. And if you put "Plant" or "Plantidote" in the subject line, I'll be less likely to lose it. Gardening season approaches, at least in the Northeast. Prep work is fine!