Try, Try Again
Headline from newsmax.com: “CBS Poll: 80% of GOP Back Cheney Removal, Almost 90% Like Trump Policies.” It’s surprising only in the near unanimity.
Another headline from NM: “Over 80% in Japan Oppose 2021 Olympics.” It’s due to Covid, not the fact that The Games are usually a loser financially.
Snippet from an NM article by Jim Thomas: “A U.S. Space Force commander tasked with detecting ballistic missile launches has been fired after saying Marxism is infiltrating the military.” It was during a podcast discussion of his new book:
“If at first you don’t succeed try, try and try again,” said Robert the Bruce, king of Scotland, in 1314. Although he was talking about war with England, the quote applies today to a pro golfer. Richard Bland first earned a spot on the European Tour in 1994. He was forced to return to qualifying school on several occasions but refused to walk away, even as he hit rock bottom when losing his card again three years ago. In 477 starts he had never won — until yesterday at the Betfred British Masters in a play-off vs Guido Migliozzi, 24 (peccato, goombah). Bland is 48, the oldest first-time winner in Euro tour history. He won a tournament on one of the sub-tours in 2001. His mom has promised a lamb dinner to celebrate. Kudos. (From Yahoo Sports, in my own words.)
As far as I know, the only two countries to have ever warned people in a place targeted for bombing are Israel and the USA. Is Hamas issuing warnings before firing its rockets?
The Arizona election audit is underway and Dems are doing everything to throttle it. If there were nothing to hide, wouldn’t they being saying: Go ahead, make fools of yourselves.?
British author Joan Aiken had more than 100 books published, most geared to children. She wrote several novels for adults using characters created by Jane Austen. Recently a posthumous collection of her short stories came my way. The People in the Castle Selected Strange Stories contains 21 pieces, all but one set in the UK. I found them very odd and would have put the book aside if one more appealing had come along. The tale I enjoyed most was Listening, set in Manhattan. It focus is the observations of an educator and contains a bit of one of my favorite themes, existential angst. Here’s an excerpt: “… However inconspicuously we endeavor to conduct our lives, creeping along, keeping our heads well down out of the line of fire, still in the end we fall prey to circumstances, he thought, and I suppose the final knockout is not a single blow, so much as a whole series of minor assaults, to which, in the end, we wearily succumb.” In The Lame King, an elderly female writer suffering memory loss makes this wonderful observation not only about the cover of one of her books: “Nothing to do with what’s inside. But then, whatever is?” Those two highlights made the entire 252 pages worthwhile. I found the writing difficult and there seemed an inordinate number of errors. Almost all 26 users at Amazon who have rated The People… see it differently than I, forging to a consensus of 4.3 on a scale of five. I’ll go with 2.5. The author was the daughter of Conrad Aiken, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1930 for Selected Poems, and received several other literary awards and honors. Joan passed away at 79 in 2004.
My thanks to the kind folks who donated and bought books on this gorgeous day. The session didn’t start well, as I was four-and-a-half car lengths from the corner of East 13th. While I was doing the back and forth with the crates and boxes, someone walked off with two volumes of Gogol in Russian. Perhaps he/she thought they had been abandoned. Six of today’s sales were in that language. Also, a young woman bought The Hours by Michael Cunningham, which was adapted to the screen in 2002 and led to Nicole Kidman’s Best Actress Oscar. Another purchased A Promised Land by Barack Obama, and another took home two kids books. Nadine heeded my suggestion and chose Without a Map: A Memoir by Meredith Hall and a used copy of one of my short story collections, Billionths of a Lifetime. I gave a used copy of Present and Past to the guy who donated the Obama book and a lot of others the past two years. He was most appreciative. I hope he’s not disappointed, ditto Nadine.
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