Drive Through

 Our internet provider now has a certificate that my computer will accept, and I have been able to get back to the webmail pages. I found several days' worth of email, nearly all from the listserv.

One item in particular caught my eye: the church at the end of the street offered "the drive-thru imposition of ashes for Ash Wednesday". The email explained that this was an innovation from the pandemic, i.e. Lent 2021, which I suppose made sense then. The church is a Mosaic Church, an offshoot of the Southern Baptist Church according to Wikipedia. I had not known that the Baptists had ever gone in for the imposition of ashes.

There are few enough physical needs that can't be served in drive-through fashion in the United State: alcoholic beverages, bank transactions, coffee, groceries, and fast food are among them. This was the first I heard of a religious ministry served that way.

Certificates

Our internet-service provider (ISP) gives us an email account, which we use mostly for the neighborhood listserv. Yesterday, it became inaccessible, for the web server has an invalid certificate. Chrome says

NET::ERR_CERT_AUTHORITY_INVALID

and curl says

curl: (60) schannel: SEC_E_UNTRUSTED_ROOT (0x80090325) - The certificate chain was issued by an authority that is not trusted.

Yesterday I explained this to a support staffer at the ISP. This was not something she could diagnose or fix, and I did not suppose that it would be. Still, I wanted it brought to the attention of those who could correct the certificates. The certificates are not fixed, though I'm sure she did her best to report the error. The last one in the chain expires today, but I have no confidence that the one that replaces it will be better. It could be a week or so before I can log in to the webmail page without telling a browser to ignore errors.

 Bad certificates happen, and I've let one or two linger a day or two past expiration date. Still, it amazes me than an ISP would let this happen.

Roger Schank, RIP

 The New York Times this week carried an obituary of Roger Schank, who taught and wrote on artificial intelligence for many years. I never read his more technical work, unless an excerpt or two, but he wrote books for the general reader also. Of those, I read and enjoyed The Connoisseur's Guide to the Mind and Tell Me a Story. The first, as I recall, got a favorable review from the critic Hugh Kenner.

Crows

 Yesterday I saw a crow perched on the edge of our birdbath. He was facing away from the water, looking southeast, perhaps at one of the neighborhood cats. I was surprised at how big he was.

In the early 1990s, crows were very common in the Washington area. I saw many in Wheaton, where we then lived. A stand of trees near Rockville Pike and Randolph Road, a few miles away, was said to house 500,000 of them. The number looked implausible on paper, but if you happened to be in that area about sunset, and see the dense stream of crows approaching it, you could believe it. Then about 2000 West Nile virus arrived, and devastated the crows. It was at least ten years before I started to see them again.

At some point in the late 1800s, John Hay wrote the poem "Crows at Washington", which includes the lines

 The dim, deep air, the level ray
Of dying sunlight on their plumes,
 Give them a beauty not their own;
Their hoarse notes fail and faint away;
 A rustling murmur floating down
Blends sweetly with the thickening glooms;
They touch with grace the fading day,
 Slow flying over Washington.
 

As far as I know, John Hay and John Quincy Adams were the only men ever to publish their poems and serve as U.S. Secretary of State. Of Adams's verses I have seen little, and that satirical. I was not impressed by what I have seen of Hay's Pike County Ballads, which achieved some fame. Yet the University of Toronto's Representative Poetry Online site quotes a story saying that George Eliot found one of them deeply moving.

The Gates of Europe

If asked to write down what I knew of the history of Ukraine, I would not have needed much paper. I remembered a few facts or situations at long intervals, running from the Scythians to the Maidan, bits of information about events separated by anything from a few decades to several hundred years. I don't think that the scantiness of my knowledge made me unusual among Americans who have not specially studied the history of Eastern Europe.

 Late last year, my wife bought and read a copy of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy, who teaches Ukrainian history at Harvard University. When she had finished with it, I read it. This much improved my understanding of Ukraine, and also of its neighbors. At the moment I can give a more or less cogent account of the Kievan Rus', and of its relation with the Norse along the rivers to and from Novgorod; the origin and fortunes of the Cossacks; the career of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth; and so on.

The book is well organized and quickly read. The chapters run mostly to ten or a dozen pages, of which one can easily read one or two in an evening. At the front there are ten maps showing boundaries and settlements from the early Greek settlements through the post-2014. The back has suggestions for further reading, quite extensive and all in English; a timeline of events; a who's who; a glossary; and an index.