A 2025 Night of the Absurdities

Of course our timeline is cruel and stupid. Of this, there can be no disagreement among reasonable persons. But… it is, very occasionally, if you look closely enough, also absurd in interesting ways. Let’s look at one serious example and a couple silly ones.

The Woefully Misinformed are Now Protesting… Batteries?!

We’re used to a sort of know-nothing NIMBYism now. People oppose vaccines because they’ve been duped, they oppose housing even in places where housing is desperately needed, and so on.

Recently I learned a new sort of know-nothing NIMBYism: opposition to battery storage of electrical power at the grid level, to level out power demand. ^[1]

Without such batteries, we need lots more “peaking” generators, to supply electricity less efficiently but on demand at high usage times. The rest is very efficient baseload generators. But with batteries, the efficient baseload generators can store their excess and release it during peak demand. The round-trip efficiency of baseload generators plus the batteries exceeds that of peakers.

Also, battery storage facilities are very important for large-scale, green solar and wind power generation. They are intermittent, but coupled with batteries they become quite acceptable for baseload purposes.

However… the very wealthy fossil fuel incumbents will do just about anything to encumber green energy, as we’ve previously documented on this Crummy Little Blog That Nobody Reads. ^[2]

And so it is here:

• Even though this will make the grid more reliable, admit more green energy generation, and bring down electricity costs by displacing the expensive peakers, people have been bamboozled into thinking it will raise their electric bills&helllip; because “green” means “bad” to right-wingers.

• Someone has convinced the residents of Oakham, Massachusetts that batteries are always catching fire.

  The distinction between “lithium ion” vs “lithium iron phosphate (LiFePO4)” battery chemistry just doesn’t penetrate their heads. They see “lithium” and think “fire”. (This is why they took the scary word “nuclear” out of “nuclear magnetic resonance imaging” (NMR) and now call them “magnetic resonance imaging” (MRI) scans, to appease the hysterics/testerics (just heard that word!) who get jumpy at the word “nuclear”. There is of course no radiation at all; it’s just the magnetic moment of the nuclei that’s being flipped around and measured.)

  • There was a fire at a facility in Monterey, California. It used batteries with a different chemistry, indoors instead of outdoors, without individual containment housings, without the computer control of thermal characteristics, and before any of this was regulated. In other words, nothing much to do with the present.
    
  • Indeed, according to the EPRI’s BESS (“Electric Power Research Institute” and “Battery Energy Storage System”) database, fire failure mode has gone down 98%, as shown here. ^[3]
  • Somehow nobody ever asks about the fire risks of natural gas pipelines, and even the distribution system into individual houses!
• The plant is proposed on the site of a former auto junkyard, as shown in the aerial photo and rendering shown above. So it’s not like they’re taking over precious green space.
• The signs think that – somehow – the battery storage facility will pollute their drinking water. I have absolutely no idea how that idea came about.
• Even more bizarrely, they think the batteries will somehow be loud, and annoy the people in nearby houses. “Nearby” here is at least 1/4 mile away, so that makes essentially no sense whatsoever.

Quoting Brian Benito, representing the builder Rhynland Energy:

“What I also heard was a lot of misinformation, unfortunately,” he said. “And that information, once it takes hold, is very hard to dislodge.”

As activist Joe Curtatone put it:

“Misinformation about energy storage is spreading faster than facts,” he said. “This isn’t just a debate over technology, it’s a battle over truth.”

Indeed! It’s almost as though there’s organized resistance to green energy, flooding the zone with propaganda in favor of the fossil incumbents, isn’t it?

A New Internationalization/Keyboard Shortcut on Macs

Ok, enough serious stuff!

But on a related note, one of the things right-wingers eye with suspicion is any internationalization whatsoever of the US. Let’s see what’s happening in software that might get their goat, if only they knew about it. (Metaphorical goats. Actual goats, q.v.)

It turns out that in German there’s a funny character: ß, known as the “eszett” or “sharp s”. It means the “s” sound as in the English word “hiss”, completely sibilant and unlike what English writers would render as “sh” or “zh”. It looks like a Greek β, but is quite distinct.

When rendering in character sets that are less than completely accommodating, one writes “ss” as a reminder that it’s an “s” as in “hiss”. For example, the German word for “foot” is “fuß”, which would be written “fuss”.

Now the place where that interacts with computers is on MacOS, which takes seriously the duty to work for almost all languages.

There’s a program called “ssh”, for “secure shell”. It doesn’t matter for our purposes exactly what it does, just take my word for it that it’s a thing some of us use daily. Someone thought, as reported by “benjojo” below, that maybe something interesting would happen if you typed “ßh” at the command line:

The first bit of text shows that, if you type just “ssh”, you get the help text for how to run ssh. The second bit of text shows that, if you type “ßh”, MacOS translates “ß” to “ss” and you get the same thing! (NT folk who are non-members of the neurodivergent computer-oriented tribe of icky nerds will just have to take my word for it that this is amazing and hilarious.)

So I couldn’t just take his word for it, I had to try it. Here is the evidence on my MacOS system (Monterey 26.1, vintage 2025-December). Indeed, the text at the top and bottom are the same: “ßh” gets ‘translated’ into “ssh”.

Someone at Apple had better be giggling right now, and giggling pretty dang hard! Because, intentional or not, this is just brilliant.

It makes me wonder – but not enough to try – what it would do with the ð and þ (eth and thorn) characters? Those used to be in the English alphabet, representing the “th” sound, voiced and unvoiced, respectively. ^[4] Any suggestions for Unixoid commands involving “th”?

Windows 11 Finally Makes Sense!

All the big CEOs are convinced LLM AI is going to make it possible for them to fire there employees and rake in the cash. No less than Microsoft apparently is all-in on that idea, which makes sense given their “investments” in data centers.

From Steve Lieber on Mastodon comes an interesting juxtaposition of 2 facts from TechCrunch and Reddit:

Ok, when you put it that way, Windows 11 makes sense: it didn’t even have a chance of working?! Suddenly, I understand why Windows is so difficult & unreliable that only an MBA could love it.

Really the only surprise is that they admit it?

Yuletide… Celebrations?

We have now entered the season of the year when all sorts of year-end celebrations happen in a variety of traditions. Most of them are beautiful, some are very silly, and a select few are both beautiful and very silly.

Of course you know which of those groups fascinate me most, don’t you?

Gävlebocken: The Gävle Goat

In the Swedish city of Gävle, they have a tradition dating back to about 1966.

For no reason that is particularly obvious to me, they decided to build a giant “yule goat” sculpture out of bales of hay, light it up, and have various parties, festivals, and so on. I don’t get the Gävlebocken (“Gävle goat”) part, but having a reason to celebrate warm feelings with each other at a cold & dark time of year makes perfect sense.

There is another bizarre “tradition”: the young men of the area attempt to set fire to the Gävlebocken. As of this year, 49 out of the 52 goats have been burned down. This is, of course, illegal in highly civilized Sweden. But… things happen.

Here you see a picture of the 2025 iteration of this straw goat tradition. ^[5] And yes, of course there’s a live webcam so you can check in on the state of the goat, to see if it’s on fire.

I don’t actually know which side to root for here. I suspect the local fire department and the elaborate system of goat guardians have a safety system all worked out, since it’s been needed 49/52 times.

I wish the goat good luck. To the extent that “luck” means anything at all, let alone for an inanimate sculpture out of hay. Perhaps the Scarecrow of Oz would like a word? He is, after all, the wisest being in Oz and has previous experience with being made of hay and escaping attack by fire. (Admittedly, a witch instead of pranksters, but still… experience.)

Krampusnacht!

And now, on to serious matters: our second annual ^[6] “Gruß vom Krampus!” post. (Remember that ß character above? “Gruss” means “Greetings”.)

December 05 is Krampusnacht, the night when St Nicolas and his “assistant” Krampus ^[7] come to evaluate children.

As we wrote last year upon this occasion:

One of the nicer folk-myths around European Christianity is a visit from the rather gentle St Nicholas, encouraging goodness in children. Of course this is thoroughly corrupted with greed for presents, but at least the seed was one of kindness.

A rather bizarre turn is that we just can’t seem to leave a good thing alone, but must always go full-on Manichean by introducing a dark counterpart. Like the Babylonian exile exposed Jews to Zoroastrianism which raised the profile of the Satan, we seem fascinated with good/evil counterparts instead of just concerning ourselves with good.

And so it is, even with the gentle St Nicholas and his cartoonish successor Santa Claus. In Alpine folklore, he is accompanied by (not “opposed by”; they always come together) a figure called Krampus. St Nicholas blesses the good children, and Krampus… well, he has business with the bad children:

• He’s always described as dark and hairy, with the horns of a goat and a long pointed tongue. (Sometimes ridiculously long, as in he can pick up children with his tongue.)
• He carries chains and manacles, either to represent the binding of the Devil or with which to bind bad children.
• One foot is a cloven hoof, while the other is mysteriously not.
• He carries birch rods with which to whip moderately bad children.
• He also has a basket or a bag, for children who are more spectacularly talented at being bad. He’s said to stuff them in the basket, kidnapping them either to be drowned, or eaten, or taken to Hell. (Or, in some versions to Spain. No idea why Hell and Spain should be so linked? I also wonder if the American phrase “going to hell in a handbasket” is related to Krampus and his basket?)

Thus the traditions of the more remote Alpine places, where conformity with suspicions by the distant medieval church could be regarded as rather more optional. Today, it’s supposed to be a fun thing to do with kids, complete with parades.

People dress up as Krampus and scare children, in what I’m sure the children think is a totally fun prank. Occasionally after attempting to birch a child, parents feel inspired to punch out a Krampus cosplayer, which I’m sure is also a totally fun trip to a local hospital.

Krampusnacht, or Krampus Night, is December 5th. St Nicholas and Krampus visit houses with children for gentle congratulations & blessings from St Nicholas… or rather more boisterous moral instruction from Krampus.

Once again, here at Château Weekend, we politely wonder if the esteemed Mr. Krampus could come pay a visit to evaluate Mr. Trump for deportation to Spain… or perhaps even warmer climes? I mean, he’s trying so hard to earn that privilege!

The Weekend Conclusion

Ok, the battery thing is just dispiriting; all the disinformation seems to pull to the right-wingers, here toward fossil fuels. But beyond the cruelty and stupidity of right-wing fascism revenant worldwide, our world is also absurd in amusing ways… sometimes. Let’s enjoy the silliness of the rest of the stories.

And enjoy each other, as we are all, in the end, quite silly.

So enjoy the surreal. At least if, like me, you love surrealism.

Which you should!

(Ceterum censeo, Trump incarcerandam esse.)

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Notes & References

1: M Wasser, “As Mass. pushes for big batteries on the grid, some communities push back”, WBUR News, 2025-Nov-10. ↩

2: Weekend Editor, “The Republican War on… Weather?!”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2025-Aug-25. ↩

3: Electric Power research Institute, “BESS Failure Incident Database”, EPRI web site, downloaded 2025-Dec-04. ↩

4: Remember when you were a kid, reading old books, and you kept coming across phrases like “ye olde shoppe”?

It was never meant to be pronounced with a modern “y”. It used to be written “ðe” and when typographers no longer had the “ð” character they temporarily replaced it with a “y”. Later we standardized on replacing both “ð” and “þ” with “th” and inferring the pronunciation from context.

So, yeah, it’s written “ye olde shoppe”, but pronounced “the old shop”. ↩

5: Visit Gävle Staff, “Gävle’s brilliant Christmas symbol”, Visit Gävle web site, downloaded 2025-Dec-04. ↩

6: Weekend Editor, “Gruß vom Krampus!”, Some Weekend Reading blog, 2024-Dec-06. ↩

7: Wikipedia Editors, “Krampus”, Wikipedia, downloaded 2025-Dec-04. ↩