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For twenty-mumble years, we've been going to the Amherst Early Music Festival, a week-long summer workshop with classes taught for (largely) amateurs like us by some of the best early-musicians in the world. (It's actually two weeks long, with different faculty and different sets of classes each week; we usually come for only the second week, which usually has more of a Medieval/Renaissance and less of a Baroque leaning.)

This year they had to cancel or re-staff a lot of their classes because every single European faculty member was denied a short-term work visa. I talked to a Long-Island-born teacher who lives in the Netherlands with her Dutch husband (from whom I've taken classes in previous years): she was able to attend the workshop because she has dual US/Dutch citizenship, but he wasn't.

I guess I should be relieved that it's not only "brown" people being denied entry to the US: these are British, Dutch, French, Swiss, German, all highly educated professionals and all looking extremely Caucasian. But it's pretty silly. These folks have homes and families and full-time jobs and established careers in Europe; they're not at high risk for overstaying their visas and becoming "illegal aliens", who we've been assured want only a life of raping, looting, pillaging, having anchor babies, living fat off the generosity of the US taxpayer, and eating our house pets.

I don't know what rationale was given for any of these denials. It's possible that several of them (being, in my experience, decent human beings who care about other human beings) had made one or more social-media posts criticizing the Trump administration, and that was enough to make them threats to US national security. Or perhaps it was that they were to be paid by a US-based organization funded by mostly-American students, adding a few thousand dollars to the US's trade deficit.

I took an hour out of my work day to go to the swimming pool. Left the house a bit before 4:00 (wanted to leave earlier, but it took me a while to find my gym-bag). Got there around 4:15, stood in a line it turned out I didn't need to stand in, then went upstairs and checked in with my membership card and combination lock, no line. There were lots of lap-swim lanes, but more than half of them were closed for no obvious reason. Anyway, I swam nine laps before the lifeguards ordered everybody out of the pool at 5:00. They would reopen at 5:30, but only the "open swim" area, not the lap-swim lanes. Drove home in bad rush-hour traffic and did some more $EMPLOYER work. I think I hadn't swum laps in a regulation-sized pool since 2019.

One of the other guys in my lane commented "You swim really well for your age." I didn't ask him what he thought "my age" was -- I assume he based his estimate on the white hair in my eyebrows and five-o-clock shadow -- but I guess I can check off that Bingo square now.