🇺🇸Which🎂America🇺🇸?
Observing a nation's 249th
Greetings for this week’s Independence Day, with a distinctly newShrink holiday menu:
A planned picnic of pictures hand-picked for the occasion…
… plus a side of news as yet too recent for full cooking, too hefty to ignore.
The detonations — as with this holiday time each of the past few years — are compliments of this U.S. Supreme Court. With maximum drama they drop their entire ruling-load on the last days, of the last week, of their year’s term.
Just in time for the day we as a nation are to unite, honor and remember:
All that we know and cherish about the United States of America.
(And all that we don’t.)
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Scenes from Americans getting great again… (and not?)
Regarding the news behind images like these, going forward you’ll likely see something like this, as a single-click link in most, if not every week’s post…
A newShrink 2.0 feature:
News-of-the-Week Notebook (June 23-29, 2025)
Logged mostly daily, like a news-diary entry, the link here has the week’s assorted headlines — plus more links to the full stories and videos, for those interested in more.
As time and priority allows, there’ll be some selected quotes — plus some of my first, often top-of-mind comments and thoughts. Going forward, many of these will likely be still half-baked, with less-varied perspectives… and sometimes less-filtered reaction! More polished pieces of this may show up in later posts. I hope you’ll let me know your take and any thoughts on either or both the Notebook or regular posts.
A caveat for today’s Notebook: Some of my comments/arguments are a bit more… fleshed-out, and from a still-pretty disgusted state of mind. feel free to be the judge!
Meanwhile, each week the main posts’ focus will be on just one or a couple of themes.
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As for the holiday picture-picnic: Here, in no tightly particular order, are a few collections of various newShrink photos from over recent years that are for me profoundly “America-loving “— in ways both direct and ineffable. These are mostly just images, all of which somehow express something of the needed assurance in the song lyric, “… the flag was still there.”
Otherwise, for now I am running short on words.
(Believe it or not. And surely temporary.)
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Writing home…
At top center is a recent favorite find — the framed acrylic piece “Charlotte Starry Night,” by Charlotte artist Chris Hood. It’s an abstract, Van Gogh-styled rendition of the Charlotte skyline — the exact portion of it with “my” former corporate bank-employer’s pink jukebox-shaped building in center view. The piece also happens to capture the same view of the night skyline visible from the entry and a front room of the Charlotte condo. (The piece hangs just inside the front door, naturally.)
Below it here is roughly the same night shot, an attempt to capture New Year’s Eve fireworks that did get a cool neon-like skyline light-show. This week’s 4th-weekend fireworks will be at the lake, where it’s almost not necessary to go anywhere to have some several nights in a row (a big problem for so many dog-households.) Somehow this current pair of Labrador sisters are unfazed by thunder, seem actually to enjoy fireworks. Not sure that will be unanimous for the canines with Grand Miz E coming with her parents and their two dogs. Hope yours, and humans too, have a safe and enjoyable 4th.
At right above, the cartoon and hopeful closing-note are thanks to brilliant, hilarious friend and high school and UNC classmate, David Gephart.
(The 4-leaf clovers are samples from one of my many lifelong, utterly unmarketable skills.)
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And, that is all I have! Talk to you next week.
🦋💙 tish
… it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give — yes or no, or maybe —
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.
— William Stafford, “A Ritual to Read to Each Other”
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