I usually save these catch-all posts for Sundays, but then I realized I have nothing earthshaking to talk about (not that that’s stopped me from posting in the past).
No, Facebook has not fixed the software fault on my author’s page. The page is fairly worthless if I cannot post links. If they continue to do nothing, I’ll delete the page.
I’ve been updating my website. There’s more I want to do, but for now, I think the books are easier to find now that I’ve moved the books in the folk magic series to a separate page. Now there’s room to display more information about each book.- Our heat wave in north Georgia continues with 100° temps. What’s odd is that the daily weather report keeps forecasting an afternoon thunderstorm that never shows up. Well, nothing is promised for today, but tomorrow there’s supposed to be a cooling shower. Yeah, no, like I believe that. The only consolation here is that we’re not the only ones who can fry eggs on the sidewalks.
We watched “Bull Durham” on TV last night and think it’s held up well during the last three decades. Of course, Susan Sarandon’s character made a big splash in that, though what I liked best was how well the film portrayed baseball in the minor leagues. The team reminded me of the team in the movie “The Natural” that was also inept until somebody came along with the competence and charisma to change everyone’s attitude.- On a personal note, I’m getting fed up with news stories and Facebook posts that say “legacy media” is spreading hate and lies. I think newspapers and local TV outlets have a long way to go to “catch up” with the slanted news on CNN and Fox.
I still haven’t finished Troubled Blood by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling) and, on balance think it includes a lot of digressions about the detective agency’s cases that get left out of most novels. To enjoy the book, you have to be willing to tackle a long haul in the novels (four, at present) in the Cormoran Strike series.- If you ever watched the “Star Trek – Deep Space Nine” series, you may remember that when Dax and Worf had sex, they ended up so badly injured that they needed to check in to the infirmary the following morning. I have a scene like that in my novel in progress and have started wondering how my publisher is going to react when she sees the manuscript.
This peacock is one of our frequent visitors from the farm across the road. He looks for bugs while we’re mowing the yard or soon after. Often has several peahens with him. The focus is a bit off because he was so close I had to take the photo through the dirty windows on the front door.
Our unopened backup jar of Jiff peanut butter is included in the batch being recalled. I’m happy we hadn’t opened it yet. I’m unhappy that the solution is to throw it in the trash.
While waiting for Alice Hoffman’s The Book of Magic to arrive, I pulled my copy of the 1992 Richard Powers’ novel The Goldbug Variations off the shelf thinking I’d re-read some of it. Hmm, perhaps not. I thought it was weird in 1992 and I still do, so I doubt I can stay with it even though I have no trouble staying with Pirsig and Joyce. In its review, the New York Times said, “In his third novel, Richard Powers is up to something very unusual. “The Gold Bug Variations” is a little bit like Robert Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance,” in that it carries us on a cerebral quest for a philosophical heffalump; it’s a little bit Borgesian in its love of the complex and cryptic; it’s a little bit Joycean in its size and difficulty. It’s a “science” novel, but closer to science fiction in its inventiveness, its hardware vocabulary and software characterization, and in the uncritical pleasure it takes in the purely clever, the nifty.” Maybe I’ll just read cereal boxes for a few days.
The grocery store nearest my house has a decent selection of wine in the low-price (swill) category, plus a few other red wines that I actually like. However, the store is discontinuing Yellowtail shiraz. This is almost as bad as Outback Steakhouse taking Black Opal Cabernet off the menu. I contacted customer service to suggest that they keep the wine in stock. Yeah no, like that’s going to happen. The wine goes well with steak and typing blog posts.
We’re having pork barbecue tonight made in the crockpot. What surprises me is the fact that the recipes came in a booklet supplied by Rival when we bought our first crockpot years ago. They took some care putting the recipe book together. That surprised us! Naturally, when we make this barbecue for somebody else, we don’t tell them we got the recipe from a crockpot company handout.
I found the autobiography by Dita Kraus, A Delayed Life to be a nice supplement to the novel version of her story in The Librarian of Auschwitz. She led a very interesting life, though I think this book probably works better for those who’ve read The Librarian of Auschwitz. Interestingly enough, she says very little about the books in her account of concentration camp life.
What doesn’t make my day is the hourly influx of articles (many on Yahoo “news”) about the Kardashians. I don’t think I really know who they are or why they’re anybody. For weeks, I thought they were part of that gang of bad guys from Star Trek’s Alpha Quadrant, the Cardassians. As you can see from this photograph, it’s really hard to tell them apart. I guess some people are famous for being famous while others are more or less fictional.
Yard Mowing: One thing is certain. When we mow the yard on Saturday, we’re going to be stiff and sore on Sunday. Much of what we’re mowing is old fields rather than a yard. That means when we sit on our riding mowers for a couple of hours, we’re subjecting ourselves to a bone-jarring ride. The picture shows the fields on one side of the house, stretching eastward past the original smokehouse.
Call the Midwife: We’ve been watching this 1950s/60s PBS drama since it first aired in 2012. The writing and acting are compelling, and it’s interesting seeing how medicine and midwives existed somewhat differently than they did during the same time period in the States. At the outset, the program was based on former midwife Jennifer Worth’s memoir of working in East London.
Thomas-Jacob Publishing Anthology. I hope those of you who would like to read this free book in a PDF, MOBI, or EPUB file have been able to download it from the publisher’s site 
Cats! Our cats sleep in the bedroom at night. When we turn off the TV late in the evening, they hover around the bedroom door waiting to be let in. Katy sleeps on the bed. Robbie curls up in a box with a towel. They’re kicked out in the morning as soon as one or both of them starts committing infractions. As you can see, I’ve used clip art here rather than any real pictures of the crimes. We’re too sleepy to take pictures at 4:30 a.m.
Where’s the header picture? I removed it because this blog posts to my author’s page on Facebook and the software that made that happen kept selecting the header picture to display with the post rather than the picture I had inserted into the post. That ended up looking like nonsense. Sometimes I could fix it, and sometimes not, but the hassle was getting to be just too much.
Darn it, Husqvarna. Thanks (sarcasm) for mounting the sparkplug in such a way that I have to add a socket to my socket and ratchet set just to change the sparkplug. I have accumulated several of these sets and, while each of them is capable of disarming a submarine’s torpedo (after it’s fired), none of them has a sparkplug socket–which costs about the same as the new sparkplug.
Selling a chapbook for a good cause? If so, why make it hard to buy? First, there’s no apparent website displaying the chapbook. Second, you have to send an e-mail to the professor in charge of the project to find out the cost and how to order it. And then, you have to use a Paypal competitor (that’s owned by PayPal) to make your purchase. Maybe you love Venmo. It seems to be intended for those with mobile devices. Whether or not I can install it on my desktop PC is described in convoluted instructions around the web. The thing is, I don’t need it or want it. So, finally, after a lot of back and forth, I got the chapbook people to accept a check sent via snail mail. Making the chapbook hard to buy won’t help the cause. I hope the publisher didn’t mandate that poems to the chapbook had to be submitted in a WordStar file or rolled up inside a sparkplug socket.
Thanks for the Janis Joplin pix. I don’t know who’s doing it or why, but Facebook has been displaying archival Janis pictures. She was a favorite of mine gone too darned soon. I hope some of the smiles on her face in these photographs came from joy rather than too much Southern Comfort. I still have her vinyl records but due to bad karma, I’m too hard of hearing to listen to them. I liked the way she thought: “Life is too damn short and [screwed] up to go through it silently loving someone and never telling them how you feel. [Screw] the consequences, [screw] the implications of the actions, to hell with it all… whatever happens as a result is better than the nothingness that is inevitable with silence.”
While our drip coffee makers last about 12-18 months, our microwave has lasted at least ten years. Now it’s shutting itself off whenever we cook something on high for 10-15 minutes. So, we ordered a new Hamilton Beach and have it ready to go as soon as our trusty Sharp bites the dust. The appliances my parents bought during, or just after, WWII lasted longer than my parents. I wish today’s products were just as durable.
onight’s dinner is Kraft Mac & Cheese. Any questions?
Dining by Rail. This is my favorite book of railroad dining car recipes and history. The book was written by a chef who compiled these culinary delights for home use. See my review on the 
Finally, Kumquats. Every year during kumquat season, I ask the produce manager at Publix where they’ve hidden in kumquats. The what? So, I’ve gone to the Publix website and asked the same question, and for years I’ve heard stuff like “our grower switched to another product” and “the kumquats got carried off by seagulls and manatees.” This year, for a brief shining moment, the store had kumquats. I think I bought most of them.
Re-reading great books: I re-read books that I like multiple times. This week, it’s Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale. This book is beautifully written even thought the Nazi actions and characters make me angry enough to spit nails–or worse. As an author, I’m impressed with the research Hannah had to do get her facts right while creating an authentic ambiance for the times and people. I feel the same way about The Dove Keepers and a few other books that my reading addicition draws me back to again and again.
Kristin Hannah: While the subject of Wild was compelling for anyone interested in psychology, I was disappointed in this early novel, believing that Hannah hadn’t really come into her own in nailing down her style and voice. The feel-good ending falls into the characters’ laps without insufficient foundation and the author discounted her own childhood disabilties specialist by having her look up autism on the Internet. As I said in my 
711 Ocean Drive: My wife and I watch a lot of noir movies on TV and this one fit the bill last night. I liked the big shoot-out ending at Hoover Dam (still called Boulder Dam in the film) because I visited the dam when I was young and the scenes in the movie matched my memories of the tour. Apparently, when the film came out, Columbia Pictures said that gangsters were so angry about the film giving away their secrets that the production company had to take out special insurance politices on the primary stars (Edmond O’Brien and Joanne Dru) to keep them safe. The Turner Classic Movies (TCM) host said that notion was probably a PR stunt.
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My wife and I are planning a long-awaited trip to Maryland to see the granddaughters. COVID kept us away last year. One year, our rental car was so snowed in, we couldn’t use it. Everyone took turns shoveling away the towering drift. We definitely don’t want to come home with another photograph like this one.
Malcolm's Round Table 