UofWinds 405, Week 6 2025: The Evil Housekeeper Problem, "Update on my life: Last year, I joined my kids' school's PTA", Monday Night Red Beans & Rice

Good morning. I'm sitting on the sofa trying to type this fortnight's newsletter in spite of an insistent cat who is nudging my hand off the keyboard. It is not the worst intrusion in this moment.

My original intention was going to have this issue of the newsletter be a respite from the wild goings-on of the last couple of weeks. I was going to tell you all that yes, my family did purchase an EV last week and its been a treat to drive. I was going to share the video that helped me understand what the experience of owning an EV is like and gave me the confidence make the jump. There were other plans.

But that's not where my head is at in this moment because that's not where we find ourselves in this moment.

From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem

While it hasn't been enough, there have been some essential journalism and context being made and shared to help make some sense of the catastrophe that has been unravelling within the U.S. capital over the past two weeks. I have found that Jason Kottke's blog and newsletter to be a good source of links to ongoing coverage of the situation.

Last night, the MIT Technology Review published Dan Hon's From COBOL to chaos: Elon Musk, DOGE, and the Evil Housekeeper Problem, which was originally published as a thread a couple days prior on Bluesky and Mastodon. Dan explains why the situation at hand is so dire. He begins,

In trying to make sense of the wrecking ball that is Elon Musk and President Trump’s DOGE, it may be helpful to think about the Evil Housekeeper Problem. It’s a principle of computer security roughly stating that once someone is in your hotel room with your laptop, all bets are off. Because the intruder has physical access, you are in much more trouble. And the person demanding to get into your computer may be standing right beside you.

As Dan states at the end of his essay, this is an emergency.

We need to dust off those “in the event of an emergency” disaster response procedures dealing with the failure of federal government—at individual organizations that may soon hit cash-flow problems and huge budget deficits without federal funding, at statehouses that will need to keep social programs running, and in groups doing the hard work of archiving and preserving data and knowledge.

"Update on my life: Last year, I joined my kids' school's PTA..."

I can't stop thinking about this long thread of Bluesky posts from Jen Wang that was brought to my attention by Erin Kissane. The thread begins benignly enough:

Jen Wang lives in L.A. You might guess what happens next.

In the next set of posts, Jen describes how the school's PTA is transformed into a mutual aid organization.

Jen tells a remarkable story of how the school's PTA ends takes responsibility of coordinating over 100 volunteers and the logistics had to be developed on the fly to handle the immediate and long-term needs of those without homes.

You really do need to read the complete thread to understand how much labour was required and given by volunteers to handle the distribution of donations to those in need and how much technical know-how was needed to set up websites, track needs and volunteers in spreadsheets, set up payment systems, and keep everyone in the loop.

One of the reason why this particular story strikes me, is that during my first sabbatical, I decided to volunteer at my school's Home and School group, and similarly found myself as its president the following year. It was that volunteer work that put me in regular contact with the neighbours who then became my friends. They will be the people that I will turn to if there was a disaster in our neighbourhood for help and to help, for mutual aid.

Monday Night Red Beans & Rice

On January 26th, a small group of people who I follow online began lamenting the passing of a person who I had not heard of before. From writer Helen Rosner:

My dear friend Pableaux died today, a king of a man, a mensch beyond mensches. I met him a decade ago when we were judging a biscuit-baking competition in Knoxville, the most auspicious beginnings you could wish on any friendship, and the love between us was immediate, mutual, and entire. I learned, quickly, that Pableaux shone his light on everyone that way, an infinitude of love. You’d get that text, or that call — “Hey darlin’, I’m coming to your part of the woods.” He’d call from the car just to talk. After Anya was born, and I was really sick, he texted near-daily to check in on me. He caught me once, literally, when I fell off a swing.

Even if you didn’t know Pableaux, you might know him: for his famous red beans and rice suppers, enormous meals-cum-parties that lit up his warm shotgun house in New Orleans, and which he’d gladly take on the road anywhere his car could reach and there was a willing kitchen to host him. (I turned over my apartment to him back in 2016 — David Wondrich on the punch — and god, what a night.) Or for his photography, his sharp, saturated, wildly alive portraits of the community of Mardi Gras Indians in their extraordinary regalia, and (less widely published and praised, but no less loved) of his friends and family. Pableaux shamelessly collected people, scouting any room not for grandness and glamour but for folks with a sort of ineffable prickly goodness, the awkwardness of a soft heart in a hard shell. Those of us lucky enough to be collected — he cared for us with such gentle intensity, true and unwavering... What a joy to get to be one of the many, many people who loved him and was loved by him.

For all of my exhortations of the importance of community bonding that I do in this newsletter, these days most of my extroversion is exhausted during my working hours and I do most of communication to the outside world from a distance, through a screen. I am much more likely than try to gather folks around a dim sum table rather than our kitchen table.

But I want to do better. While I don't think I'll ever feel comfortable putting on a fancy multi-course dinner party for a group of 8, I now have the confidence that I can always make a shared meal of red beans and rice, supplemented with hot sauce and corn bread, because my husband and I made Pableau's recipe last Sunday.

Links from Previous Weeks 5 and 6 Issues

• Thrive/Survive Theory Of The Political Spectrum
• We stayed up all night, my friends and I
• Play about 'corporate mess Target made' set in closed, empty Hamilton Target store
• A Landscape Architect Who Loves Ruins and Hates Ruin Porn
• The Magic of Small Databases: Notes on personal libraries, collections and small indexes on the web

Aeolian Links

• 🇨🇦 How property taxes work — and how they don't
• 🔈 No Time For Fear - The New Deal History Podcast
• 📝 The Coup - Audrey Watters
• 📝 “The Power of the Powerless” by Vaclav Havel
• 🛒 Internet-in-a-Box

Last Week's Question: Grab a book from a shelf and find a random page. Please share a sentence or a short passage that resonates.

• L : "As an example of how impossible it is, even with simple things, to forecast the future, I have often thought of how infinitesimally small would have been the chance of any man or group of men, except the one who actually had the idea, planning to invent the common zipper."
• 😅 : "Biological Lamarckism evolution is hampered by a strict mathematical law: that it is supremely easy to multiply prime factors together, but supremely hard to derive the prime numbers out of the result. The best encryption schemes work on this same asymmetrical difficulty." p, 305. Kevin Kelly's Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, 1994.

This Week's Question

Do you have any recommendations for any books, classes, websites, or any other resources that could support a group of volunteers who want to better prepared to respond in an emergency situation in their neighbourhood?

Answer below or use the UofWinds friction-free survey form.