July 17 2026: Wildfire smoke obscures the sunrise at Mitchell School in Racine, Wisconsin.
Another Week: Number 186
The dog days historically began with the appearance of the “dog star” Sirius, which happens here on about August 13th.
Wikipedia notes that the period is known as “rot month” in both Swedish and Finnish: “The names stem from the fact that food spoils easily when left out in the heat, and wounds are more likely to get infected and secrete pus during the warm summer months.”
Racine, Wisconsin is more Danish, and our dog days arrived this week. Sitting out in my browning backyard on Monday was gross — too muggy and too many biting flies. Wildfire smoke rolled in on Wednesday evening, so I turned on my air conditioning and my Coway Air Purifier. On Thursday, I watered my plants wearing an N95 mask. On Friday, our air quality reached the “hazardous” purple level. Wildfire smoke is an annual summer thing here now.
On the national level, America woke up Sunday morning to the news that Sen.Lindsey Graham had suddenly died of an aortic dissection. Monday on MSNBC, Eddie Glaude correctly highlighted Graham’s Faustian bargain with Donald Trump as a stain on his memory.
Wednesday saw America’s master of masculinity, Dippity Dude Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, announce via Twitter video that the military will now test service members’ testosterone levels. This is what he obsesses about.
Meanwhile, on Friday, three Army soldiers were killed by an Iranian attack on an air base in Jordan. On Saturday, another soldier was killed in Iraq during a “controlled detonation” of an Iranian drone. To date, Trump’s war on Iran has killed 18 U.S. service members.
On Thursday, Donald J. Trump gave a primetime address to the nation — not to explain his hopeless war, but instead to revive his undying fabrications of election fraud in advance of the November elections.
As a strict rule, I switch away from any channel that allows Trump to speak live on their air. This time, both ABC and NBC refused to platform him.
I walked zero miles this week.
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Jungian podcasts: Orpheus and mandalas
Trying to familiarize myself with the work of Carl Jung, I found a couple of podcasts that made my garden-watering hours more educational.
The C.G. Jung Institute of Chicago produces several podcast series. Because I’m currently reading about Greek mythology, I chose an episode from last year about Orpheus and Euridice.
I also found “This Jungian Life,” a podcast by a trio of Jungian analysts (more recently a duo, due to some unspecified legal dispute). They offer a $592 “Dream School.”
I didn’t enroll, but I did listen to their episode on mandalas, the elaborate, centered designs associated with Eastern religions. I remember Joseph Campbell touching on their ubiquity — for example, in Native American sandpainting.
Apparently, Jung started drawing mandalas in an extremely stressful period of his life, and they helped him find his center. As I listened to the podcast, I noticed that the birdbath in the center of my backyard is circular. Over my 21 years living here, my eyes have constantly looked to it as a reservoir of bliss where birds — messengers of the Greek gods — often frolic like children.
During the current heat wave, I have been refreshing it almost hourly.
The Aviator (1994)
Saturday night at my mom’s, we streamed The Aviator via Paramount+. It’s Martin Scorsese’s biopic from 1994 starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, an aviation pioneer and movie producer who became one of the richest Americans in history.
Hughes also became famous for his eccentric, obsessive–compulsive behavior and the movie begins with a short scene of him as an 8-year-old boy spelling “quarantine” at his mother’s behest following a cholera outbreak. This is the movie’s explanation at the root of it all, its “Rosebud.”
His money came from his father’s shrewd, Bill Gates-like decision to lease, not sell, his patented drill bit invention to the oil industry — so the Hughes Tool Company serves as a bottomless checkbook whenever Howard steamrolls his budget, as he did producing and directing Hell’s Angels.
The scenes in Scorsese’s 2-hour and 50-minute epic are really impressive — especially Hughes’ spectacular 1946 Beverly Hills spy plane crash. DiCaprio is quite good — especially when he rallies for a Senate hearing into his war profiteering.
My mom’s interest, however, was primarily captured by Cate Blanchett’s dazzling performance as Katharine Hepburn. Really the best scene in the movie is when Kate brings Howard home to meet her family. The poor bundle of neuroses finds himself wedged into a table full of effusive socialists.
There was plenty worth watching here, but I was a bit disappointed that the two most interesting topics, — Hughes’ bizarre behavior and his money — were brushed off as vaguely originating with his parents, and that so many other items went unaddressed.
I also couldn’t help but think of our current embodiment of weirdness and wealth, Elon Musk — who also has grandiose media dreams and flying machines, and started with family money.
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