Z for Zelenskyy

Who knows what Putin was thinking when he painted Zs on the sides of his tanks and sent them into Ukraine last week. If his aim was to rattle Ukrainian President Zelenskyy and force him to capitulate, he has instead created an international folk hero.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy's entry into politics is a lesson in the impossibilities of the old saying that truth is stranger than fiction. First, he created a Ukranian television show called Servant of the People, in which he starred as a high school teacher still living with his parents who gets elected President after a student films his profanity-laced tirade against corrupt politics and posts it on YouTube. Then he formed a political party, also called Servant of the People, ran for President in 2019, and won with 73% of the vote.

Donald Trump tried to roll the newly-elected Zelenskyy, and got impeached for his trouble. Now Vladimir Putin wants to take his turn in the barrel, but doesn't appear to understand that he is fighting against magic realism. With the Ghost of Kyiv, "Russian warship, go f yourself", Russian POWs calling their mothers, and videos of everyone from old men to teenage girls making Molotov cocktails, Putin has already lost the public relations war.

The conventional wisdom expressed here in 2014 is that Ukraine will eventually succomb to its much larger and wealthier neighbor, Russia. But that was before Zelenskyy and, to quote its national anthem, Ukraine has not yet perished.

Seven Three-Word Sequences for Solving Wordle

Are you playing Wordle, the daily online game that gives you six chances to guess a five-letter word?

The big question is what word to use for your first guess. I've extended that idea to finding the first three words that provide a very good chance of solving the puzzle by choosimg the words based on the frequency of letters in English words in the table below.

The first three guesses will usually identify enough letters to make a good guess at the answer on the fourth guess, with two guesses still in reserve. Sometimes the first two words will identify enough letters to skip the third word in the sequence and make a good guess at the answer, as was successfully done in the game shown above.

STEIN / HOARD / CLUMP - Pick the low-hanging fruit. This sequence covers 87.51% of the letter frequencies, the highest percentage that can be covered with three guesses.

STONE / CHARD / IMPLY - Reach for the Y. This sequence trades the U for a Y. Stone can be played instead as notes or tones, if you prefer.

ATONE / CRISP / BULGY - Start with three vowels. Atone is often recommended as the first guess, its 40.43% covers the highest percentage of the seven sequences for the first guess, and the next two words in the sequence cover the remaining vowels.

ADIEU / STORY / CLAMP - Buy the vowels. This sequences covers all the vowels in the first two guesses. Adieu is also often recommended as the first guess. The third guess reuses the A that was guessed in the third word, so it can make sense to vary the third word based on what vowells the first two words turn up. For example, clamp, clomp, clump, chink, chunk, flack, fleck, flock.

ENTRY / AUDIO / CLAPS - Buy the vowels, version II. This sequence covers all the vowels in the first two guesses. Audio is often recommended as a first guess, but the frequencies suggest guessing entry before audio. Again, varying the third word based on the vowels already uncovered can make sense.

TREND / CLAMP / WHISK - Buy consonants. This sequence covers only three vowels in order to cover twelve consonants.

FRONT / BUCKS / LYMPH - Pitch a change-up for the most consonants. This covers the three less frequent vowels, and thirteen consonants (counting Y as both). But the low total frequency of 63.69% feels suboptimal when played in comparison to the other sequences above.

How well do these sequences work? I've got a 100% win rate at the offical Wordle site and a 99% win rate at the Wordle knockoff I play for practice. How well will they work for you?

The following table uses letter frequency percentages based on the main entries of the Concise Oxford Dictionary (9th edition, 1995):

	Letter Fre- quency	Stein Hoard Clump	Stone Chard Imply	Atone Crisp Bulgy	Adieu Story Clamp	Entry Audio Claps	Trend Clamp Whisk	Front Bucks Lymph
E	11.16%	Stein	Stone	Atone	Adieu	Entry	Trend
A	8.50%	Hoard	Chard	Atone	Adieu	Audio	Clamp
R	7.58%	Hoard	Chard	Crisp	Story	Entry	Trend	Front
I	7.54%	Stein	Imply	Crisp	Adieu	Audio	Whisk
O	7.16%	Hoard	Stone	Atone	Story	Audio		Front
T	6.95%	Stein	Stone	Atone	Story	Entry	Trend	Front
N	6.65%	Stein	Stone	Atone		Entry	Trend	Front
S	5.74%	Stein	Stone	Crisp	Story	Claps	Whisk	Bucks
L	5.49%	Clump	Imply	Bulgy	Clamp	Claps	Clamp	Lymph
C	4.54%	Clump	Chard	Crisp	Clamp	Claps	Clamp	Bucks
U	3.63%	Clump		Bulgy	Adieu	Audio		Bucks
D	3.38%	Hoard	Chard		Adieu	Audio	Trend
P	3.17%	Clump	Imply	Crisp	Clamp		Clamp	Lymph
M	3.01%	Clump	Imply		Clamp	Claps	Clamp	Lymph
H	3.00%	Hoard	Chard				Whisk	Lymph
G	2.47%			Bulgy
B	2.07%			Bulgy				Bucks
F	1.81%							Front
Y	1.78%		Imply	Bulgy	Story	Entry		Lymph
W	1.29%						Whisk
K	1.10%							Bucks
V	1.01%
X	0.29%
Z	0.27%
J	0.20%
Q	0.20%
1		38.05%	37.66%	40.43%	34.22%	34.12%	35.73%	30.16%
2		29.63%	27.00%	28.57%	29.21%	30.22%	24.70%	17.08%
3		19.84%	20.99%	15.44%	16.21%	18.93%	18.67%	16.45%
T		87.51%	85.66%	84.43%	79.63%	83.28%	79.11%	63.69%

How to Hit a Million Views without Really Trying

I've all but dropped out of the blogger game, with 17 posts in 2017, 7 posts in 2018, and just this 1 in 2019. And yet somehow in that time period Ive gone from 500,000 views to over 1,000,000. That's 690,471* on the blog and 373,476 on the companion YouTube channel. Call it the power of compound interest.

Here are the top 10 posts on the blog:

Views	Post	Date
17,001	John Stamos to Star with Olsen Twins in Two and a Half Women	March 7, 2011
8,319	Picturing Republican Presidents for Next 24 Years	March 1, 2017
7,930	We'll Always Have Paris When It Sizzles	June 1, 2017
7,889	Trump's Great Wall Sinks into the Swamp	April 30, 2017
7,828	Hitting the Half Million View Mark	November 14, 2016
7,796	Boston Skyline	April 1, 2017
7,338	How Michael Moore Dog-Whistled Trump Victory	January 31, 2017
5,954	Stood up on My First Uber Ride	September 15, 2016
5,808	Future Site of Garage B, Former Site of Lanes and Games	September 2, 2017
4,391	Harvard Reenlists in the U.S. Navy ROTC	March 5, 2011

* I should mention that 198,418 views came from a bot farm in Romania, so I'll need to do this post again for real when I hit the 1.2 million mark. Meanwhile, there is another run over on YouTube, with 124,630 views and counting on the video Calling Cows to the Bull Fight.

Starkly Living Free and Dying in New Hampshire

At Stark Park in Manchester, New Hampshire on Saturday, July 7, 2018.


Colonel John Stark's 1st New Hampshire Regiment repulsed three British charges at the Battle of Bunker Hill.


As a Brigadier General of the New Hampshire Militia, he defeated the British at the Battle of Bennington.


At Bennington he issued his second-most-famous quotation. Molly Stark did not sleep a widow that or any other night - she died in 1814 and John lived to 1822.


A gun-toting, baby-carrying Molly Stark has her own statue in Wilmington, Vermont, which I visited last summer.


Stark's most famous quotation, "Live free or die: Death is not the worst of evils" is from a letter written after the Revolutionary War for an 1809 commemoration of the Battle of Bennington. The first part, "Live Free or Die" became the New Hampshire state motto in 1945. In 1977, the U.S. Supreme Court recognized the right of car owners to tape that over on their New Hampshire license plates.


Final resting place of the original Live Free or Die patriot and his wife Molly on a hill above the Merrimack River on what was then their family farm. After the Revolutionary War, unlike many generals, John Stark never sought high public office.

My Garbage Is Eating Better Than I Am

On Sunday, April 1, 2018, the City of Cambridge pulled another one of its April Fools Day pranks.


These bright green curbside compost bins were distributed to residents across the city.


That brings the number of garbage cans at our three-decker to 4 - the new green one for compost, one for regular trash, a blue one for single-stream recycling, and one for yard waste. We loose lids before the cans wear out, so there are several other cans floating around the back side yard and basement. Plus we have several of the old smaller blue recycling bins. There are also separate garbage trucks for each type of garbage, and they all come by on garbage day. It's getting a bit ridiculous.


In addition to the big green bin, the city issued smaller compost buckets - our building got 3, one for each unit - to go inside the residence.


My compost bucket has been getting some interesting meals, such as this one.


And this salad.


Others are less appetizing.

What is Cambridge doing with all this compost? Turning it into methane and fertilizer:

"DPW brings food scraps and other compostables to a facility in Charlestown where it is screened to remove contaminants and blended into a slurry that has a consistency similar to cooked oatmeal. The slurry then goes into an anaerobic digestion tank that uses microbes to eat the organic material, releasing methane. The methane is captured to make clean energy in the form of heat and electricity. Remaining solids are made into a nutrient-rich fertilizer for use on agricultural fields in Massachusetts."

Hillary Clinton Was in Town to Receive a Medal

Orange prison jumpsuit, Hillary mask, "Billy Rapes Them & I Slut-Shame and Victim Blame". That's professional heckling. I had to wait in line to get this picture, while an Asian-American couple took turns getting their picture taken with the Hillary cosplayer.

The Magically Rejuvenated Shower Head

A little CLR in a baggie goes a long way:



I should have taken a before picture to show the low water flow with all but a few of the water jets plugged. Here is the after:

Massachusetts Militia Rallies on Boston Common

Saturday's March for Our Lives should properly be regarded as a militia rally, if you accept U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia's definition of militia as meaning all able-bodied persons (OK, Scalia actually wrote men not persons). So what can possibly be unconstitutional about insisting that our fellow militia be well regulated, like the Second Amendment says?



Something to ponder: Why shouldn't the non-gun-carrying militia such as those gathered on the Boston Common, the National Mall in Washington, DC, and in rallies around the country, have just as much say over regulation of the militia as NRA members?



Something else to ponder: Most of what is being asked for - universal background checks, raising the age for owning rifles to 21, prohibiting assault rifles, and restricting magazine capacity - is already the law in Massachusetts.

Can Trump Top Reagan and Maybe Eisenhower?

Yesterday was Ronald Reagan's birthday, and Donald Trump tweeted out this old picture of the two of them from thirty or so years ago:



That brings up one of my favorite things to say to people who are very down on our current President, "I didn't vote for Donald Trump but he is on track to be the best Republican President in my lifetime." As some of the people I say this too were born in the 1950s during the Eisenhower administration, I sometimes have to add, "But maybe not in your lifetime."

Here's how I rank the Presidents we've had since World War II. I'll rank them by political party, because a merged ranking would just provoke partisan argument (you're welcome to disagree in the comments):

#	Republican President	#	Democratic President
1	Dwight Eisenhower	1	Barack Obama
2	Ronald Reagan	2	Bill Clinton
3	George H.W. Bush	3	Jimmy Carter
4	Gerald Ford	4	Harry Truman
5	George W. Bush	5	John Kennedy
6	Richard Nixon	6	Lyndon Johnson

Where will Donald Trump rank on that list? If he's impeached he'll go straight to the bottom. But let's say that he isn't, that the economy doesn't fall into another Great Recession, and that Trump keeps us out of any major new wars or military escalations. That puts him on track to top Ronald Reagan.

But what would Trump have to do to top the Republican President at the top, Dwight Eisenhower? Let's consider five possibilities:

1. Middle East. Peace between the Israelis and Palestinians would bring to close a mess that got started by the partition in the Truman years.
2. North Korea. Eisenhower campaigned for an end to hostilities, and got an armistice, but the war has never been settled with a peace agreement.
3. Iran. The seeds of our problems with Iran go back to Eisenhower sending Theodore Roosevelt's grandson Kermit to prop up the Shah.
4. MAGA. Economic progress on a par with the 1950s but that brings good jobs to the stagnant U.S. inner cities could also be a huge civil rights advance.
5. Climate change. If only Nixon could go to China ...

If President Trump can do them all, he may even supplant Theodore Roosevelt as the best Republican President since the end of the Civil War. Probably not quite enough for Mount Rushmore. And sorry, Donald, the number #1 slot in the all-time list of Republican Presidents is permanently taken by Abraham Lincoln.

The European Union Cookie Catch-22

For at least two and a half years now, my every visit to the blogger control panel is greeted with this ominous message (bold added):

European Union laws require you to give European Union visitors information about cookies used on your blog. In many cases, these laws also require you to obtain consent.

As a courtesy, we have added a notice on your blog to explain Google's use of certain Blogger and Google cookies, including use of Google Analytics and AdSense cookies.

You are responsible for confirming this notice actually works for your blog, and that it displays. If you employ other cookies, for example by adding third party features, this notice may not work for you. Learn more about this notice and your responsibilities.

If I click the link to learn more, I get an even more stern warning:

If you have edited your blog in a way that hides this notice, it will be your responsibility to notify your visitors about cookies used on your blog and if necessary, obtain consent. Also, if you have added other blog features that set cookies, including third-party analytics or advertising services, you’ll need to provide additional or a different notice.

It is your responsibility to determine, based on your cookie use, what else would be appropriate. If you choose to use a different notice, be sure you still comply with Google’s EU user consent policy. Learn more on generating cookie notices.

Then there is this parting fine print:

To see the notice if you’re outside of the EU, view your blog and change the country code, for example blogspot.fr or blogspot.co.uk. If you use a custom domain, you won't see the notice outside of the EU.

Since leftbankofthecharles.com is a custom domain, that means I would have to travel to the European Union in order to determine if the cookie notice is appearing correctly.

Christmas Day by Kasey Chambers

My favorite new Christmas song:

The 2017 Thanksgiving Week of Food

Here are some of the midwestern culinary treats over the week of Thanksgiving 2017 in Michigan and Iowa.


Cupcake at a cousin's birthday party. Forget dipping your Oreo in a glass of milk.


Breakfast at the Dearborn Inn.


Godfather's Pizza at the Bedford Country Store.


Ham balls!


Grilled tenderloin steak is the poor man's turkey for Thanksgiving dinner.


Thanksgiving dinner.


Cranberry marshmallow salad.


Pumpkin pie with cranberry juice.


Brownie and Diet D. Pepper at the Massena Sale Barn Cafe.


Lunch at the Massena Sale Barn Cafe.


Pizza to go on the ATV at the Bedford Casey's General Store.


Pork dinner.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Norman Rockwell

I came across this roadside pumpkin farmstand in Hadley, Massachusetts. Or maybe it was South Hadley.


The $1.00 pumpkin pile needs some love.


The Great Pumpkin was to be found in Norman Rockwell’s hometown, Stockbridge, Massachusetts.

Smooshin’ It Old School

At Herrell’s Ice Cream in Northampton. I stood in line for 45 minutes at the original in Davis Square some 35 years or so ago. The wait this night was only 30 minutes. The guy behind me insisted on repeatedly singing the Bare Naked Ladies song “If I Had a Million Dollars”. I wanted to put him in a real green dress and send him home with Kraft dinner. Nonetheless, it was worth the wait.

Orange Zamboni Mop & Glow at the MFA

Seen at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Future Site of Garage B, Former Site of Lanes and Games

There is reported to be residential housing development coming too.

Chocolate Moose in Bennington, Vermont

Herding Cattle with My Vespa

I happened on this herd of Hereford cattle in Wellesley while riding my Vespa.

Cambridge's Newest Death Trap for Bicyclists

Is this a new permanent traffic jam on Brattle Street in Harvard Square?



No the city has moved the curbside parking into the middle of the street in order to make room for a new bike lane.



What could go wrong by putting a two-way bike lane on a congested one-way street? Let's count the ways. Pedestrians aren't used to looking both ways to cross the street. Delivery trucks and double parkers are frequently blocking the bike lane. Car drivers are already mistaking the bike lane for a second car lane, and some inevitably will be fooled into turning down the street the wrong way.

But I predict the real killers will be passengers of parking cars dooring oncoming bicyclists as they pop out of the parked car. It's hard enough to teach drivers not to door you, forget about passengers, they aren't going to look.

Cambridge's Postmodern Sidewalk Experiment

I walked by as this section of sidewalk was being poured so I was surmised to find it hardened in this state the next day. What happened? Did a union crew take an ill-timed lunch break?

The city did eventually dig this out and repour, but it was funny while it lasted.