Broad Range of America

This is Noble Rasmussen of Nebraska. He was accepted by all five U.S. military academies. He has chosen the Air Force Academy. He has said: “”I feel like it’s my duty to serve my country.” Best of luck, young man. Photo from Fox News.

Headline from nypost.com: “Heading for an election wipeout, Joe Biden is doubling down on every failed policy.” The strategy is to take the country as far left as possible, knowing that ground will not likely be made up entirely, then begin again once they regain power. It’s been working since at least FDR.

Is this a bad sign? Headline from NYP: “Amazon posts first quarterly loss in 7 years as online shopping slows.”

Earlier in the week I tried to withdraw cash from a Citibank ATM with my HSBC debit cards. Neither pin number was recognized. I was fuming, as I’d been issued them less than two months ago. They’d had to be replaced because the pin of my old card was no longer recognized. Yesterday I wondered if I’d used pin number B for card A and vice versa. Certain I was grasping at straws, certain of the position I had placed them in my wallet, I tried again this morning and voila`! Fortunately no one except those reading this has any inkling of my foolishness. What a relief to get it off my mind, to have access to cash when needed.

Logic in a foxnews.com headline: “‘WHY NOT MORTGAGES?’: Forbes says forgiving student debt mired in compounding problems.”

An FN article by Angelica Stabile profiles eight of the most successful college dropouts: Rush Limbaugh, Tiger Woods, Alicia Keys, Lady Gaga, Bill Gates, Rachael Ray, Ryan Seacrest and John Mayer. I was not familiar with the latter, who grew up in Fairfield, Connecticut and has won seven Grammys. All eight of his studio albums have cracked the top ten, three hitting #1, four #2. His debut climbed to #8. Five of his singles have entered the top 20. He has sold an estimated 16 million records in the USA alone. Kudos, sir. Here he is:

Not much action at the floating book shop on this second straight breezy, beautiful day. My thanks to the woman who donated a handful of Harlequin romances in Russian, and to the gentleman who bought two; and to Ira, who purchased Use This Book!: The Only Book You’ll Ever Need! by Melissa Heckscher and Michael Rogalski, and a Fodor’s Travel Guide for the USA; and to the woman who took home Training Day (2001) on DVD.

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