Saturday night.

I have a confession to make. A dark and awful secret. I am Iron Man a space wizard. Earlier today, I managed to fit a medium-sized bookshelf, a 42″ TV, and a roll-up queen-size mattress into the back seat of my Kia Rio. Verily I say upon thee: my mastery over the fabric of space knows no bounds, eh. Loading up a car during a big move is a lot like playing 3D Tetris. It’s a fun challenge: maybe I could become a car-loading consultant. And yes, I know I could have just rented a Uhaul truck, but where is the fun in that? Also, that would have required a lot more time to pack and unpack (I’ve stretched out the moved across an entire week), and a lot of Toronto’s streets are super-narrow, so a wide truck isn’t the best idea.

Aaaaanyhow, all my stuff is finally moved in. I’ve taken care of all the important things: there’s a towel in the bathroom, books on my bookshelf, some food in the fridge, the laptop and electric tea pot are plugged in, and I’ve hung some of my art hoard on the walls. I’m currently relaxing on my new rental bed with a celebratory cider while enjoying the subtle way the building shakes every few minutes. I’m guessing that’s the subway line that runs a few blocks away. The studio smells faintly of secondhand smoke, but I’ll take that over firsthand covid, eh. It’ll be so very strange to wake up in an unfamiliar place tomorrow. My back will probably be mighty sore… There’s a giant pile of stuff in the middle of the studio that I’ll have to sort and put away. Yay nesting!

There’s more and more fallout over the attempted 1/06 coup. AWS will stop hosting Parler (the far-right social media platform) tomorrow, which means they’ll likely go offline unless they find a new host ASAP. Apple has removed their app from their store. If they want to coordinate future attacks, they’re gonna have to use livejournal or smoke signals. Heh.

House majority whip James Clyburn confirmed that things went very strangely on 1/06. There was far less security than usual. Terrorists somehow got in through the side doors. They knew which specific offices to go to – that sort of information was only known to insiders.

Things we currently know:
1. Attorney general Barr resigned in late December, though he had less than a month to go until the inauguration. The timing was strange.
2. In December, Trump added a lot of his loyalists to the leadership positions to the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.
3. There was abnormally low security on 1/06.
4. Someone in the Department of Defense repeatedly declined the requests to send the National Guard.
5. Although some Capitol police fought the terrorists, some appeared to open doors for them, took selfies with them, and were seen giving them directions to Chuck Schumer’s (top-ranking Senate Democrat) office.
6. The Department of Homeland Security did not do the usual threat assessment on the Trump rally scheduled for 1/06. They feds claim that was the reason there was no extra security.
7. During the attempted coup, Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani tried contacting senator Tuberville but accidentally ended up dialing senator Lee – twice. (These are not very bright people.) They wanted Tuberville to delay the election certification to buy themselves more time. (For what?)
8. Some of the terrorists were identified as high-ranking ex-military.
9. The executive branch helped orchestrate an attempted coup against the legislative branch.
10. If the terrorists stormed the Capitol just a few minutes earlier, or had more guns, they would have succeeded.

Things we don’t know: a whole lot of them.

What I wouldn’t give to get my hands on the inevitable commission report (1,000+ pages, please and thank you) detailing everything that went on. This was unprecedented in American history, and heads must roll.

In covid news, San Antonio is going to stage their mass vaccination at the Alamodome stadium. They’ll be vaccinating at least 1,500 people per day for 12 hours a day, six days a week. I’m not entirely sure why they’re skipping Sunday, but hey, that’s a good start. (Ideally, of course, it’d be a 24/7 operation.) The vaccine will be free (as it should be) but it won’t be a free-for-all first-come-first-serve operation: they’ll start with the highest-risk groups first. It’s downright refreshing to see a major city in the US borrow other countries’ best practices. Here is hoping this will become a new normal everywhere.

Have a safe second half of your weekend, y’all.