A touch of gout this morning. What's up with that?
Tragedy as One Direction's Liam Payne has fell to his death from a 4th floor balcony last night. We're trying to process the news here at the Stroock household. 'There'll never be a One Direction reunion now!' Middle Daughter cried. She suspects foul play.
Well Kamala's interview was a disaster. Just what were her people thinking? We suspect they wanted the interview to go badly so they could run the 'Brett Baier was disrespectful to a woman of color' narrative. Just watch them. [Did you just quote Pierre Elliot Trudeau?-Ed] Actually, we paraphrased him.
The very able Mike Cernovich Tweeted an interesting point, 'Kamala Harris didn’t come out from hiding if Democrats have this super secret double triple stealing machine that so many of you believe they have.' Hmmm...if Kamala can't steal 2024, does that mean Joe didn't steal 2020? We admit, we might see things differently if Trump wins. Exit question. Is that a flip-flop, or just one changing one's mind once the facts change?
On his podcast, the great Stephen L. Miller predicts post election lawfare against Trump. He see's an effort to turn faithless electors, and even a push for congress, led by Kamala who has to sign off on everything as veep, to refuse to certify Trump's win.
Things aren't going well for Kamala, not even the polls, we admit it. But two years ago, polls predicted a red tsunami and how did that work out?
Israel Radar reports that Russia warned Israel not to attack Iran's nuclear sites. We'll reprise something that we've said in earnest as an adult, Wutcha gonna do about it? Seriously, Vlad? Israel Radar also reports on a rumor going around the Twitter right now. We've seen the pics and all we'll say is...maybe.
Don't look like a Jew. The NY Post tells us, 'A dimwitted anti-Israel TikTokker filmed herself tearing down flags outside a New Jersey restaurant — not realizing they were Greek, rather than similarly colored Israeli ones.' The Greek flag has a cross there, DC. Related, our shipment of Israeli T-shirts arrived yesterday. Our policy of wearing Israel gear out continues unabated. Am Israel Chai.
Beat the Mets...Beat the Mets...Dodgers 8, Mets nil. The Mets may finally have run into a better team. There's no shame in that. With the Yankees up 2-0 on the Guardians, we could be looking at a Yankees/Dodgers World Series, the first since 1981. For those who don't know, the Yankees and Dodgers used to be baseball's marquis rivalry. They met a bunch of times in the 1950s and then in 1977, 1978 and the above mentioned 1981. We'll watch that.
Whoa Bibi! JNS reports, 'If a vote were to be called now, Netanyahu’s ruling Likud Party would secure 33 mandates out of the Israeli parliament’s 120...' And interestingly, 54 percent of those polled said they oppose holding an election before the war is over. Nothing succeeds like success, and militarily, Israel is succeeding, so says Israel Radar. Just keep scrolling. No wonder Bibi felt he could leak the Biden's Regime's letter threatening arms sanctions over Gaza.
Related, Breitbart's Joel Pollak has a piece about polls and Jewish support for Harris. About 62 percent of American Jews plan to vote for Harris. This is actually low, as Pollak explains. Pollak also explains traditional American Jewish support for the Dems. We urge reader(s) to click on over and read the whole the thing. Do note that Orthodox Jews overwhelmingly support Trump.
Ah, so Kamala is going on Fox tonight for an interview with Brett Baier. This blog predicts Kamala plans to contradict and argue with Baier to make herself look like a fighter, or some such. We won't opine as to whether that will help her.
The Israelis have finalized their plans for an attack on Iran, they say. We've no idea what the Israelis will do. Given the pressure the Biden Regime has been exerting upon the Israelis, we're of a mind to say, screw it, and hit some nuclear sites. Wanna play hardball, Joe? We'll play hardball. Whatever the Israelis do, we're sure it'll be interesting.
All...Right...Now...we've begun the next story in War Night. This one is about an average Australian family as events unfold. Dad's watching the telly, mom's returned from the market, kids out in the yard. The ABC broadcasts an update on the fighting in Europe. Prime Minister Whitlam comes on screen. What happens when a nuclear war breaks out but you're on the other side of the world? We've also begun research the Soviet space station, comrades....
Good Tuesday, Stroock's Books CoDominium. There's nothing like a Tuesday after a Sunday cardio/strength session and a Monday weightlifting session.
The Mets impressed us last night jumping out to a 6-0 lead against the Dodgers and winning 7-3. The series is tied 1-1 and now heads to Shea, sorry, Citi. The packed-with-national-and-international-stars Dodgers are big bullies, let's see what they can do against a team that's not afraid of them. We think Dodgers in 7. Let's go Mets! F-A-N!
At the Meadowlands we see the Jets are the same old Jets, losing the game via an Aaron Rodgers interception on the final drive.
Reading of events in Israel, our sense is that the Netanyahu government will strike Iran and then perhaps try to wrap up the war via negotiated settlements with Hezbollah and what's left of Hamas. The Biden regime is putting a tonne of pressure on Israel to open up Gaza. Feels like Israel is on the backfoot for the moment.
So it turns out Kamala is a plagiarist. Why are we not surprised? Back in our professorial days we failed students who thought they could cut and paste whole term papers. It was easy to catch. 18-year-olds don't write that good. Neither does Kamala. Note, it is not hard to not plagiarize.*
Someone has, from time to time, run this blog through something called PlagScan. We know this via Blogger's web traffic data. It's possible something here or in one of our books isn't properly attributed. But we've never cut and paste whole blocks of text and passed them off as our own.
We've borrowed and worked with other's ideas. [What's the difference?-Ed] The difference is these are influences. Look at To Defend the Earth. One see's the influence of other alien invasion stories throughout the novel. These include War of the Worlds, Footfall and Independence Day. We even mentioned our influences in the intro, thank you Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The World War 1990 series wouldn't exist without Tom Clancy. The Day After and Nan Randall lay the cornerstone of The Great Nuclear War of 1975. Ideas just don't come from nowhere.
We're not quite ready to get optimistic about the election, but it does seem that the Kamala campaign is repeating the worst mistakes of failed Dem presidential campaigns going back to Dukakis. JFC. What do we make of the polls? If the pollsters are right, then we will have a close race. If the pollsters are wrong, given that they've under polled Trump voters for nearly a decade now, then Trump is going to win comfortably. Kamala's people sure ain't acting like they're winning. Exit question, did the pollsters finally figure out how to poll Trump voters?
Morning Rory is just about done. On to an Australian family?
Good Monday, Stroock's Books Continuum and happy Canadian Thanksgiving to our moose eating cousins up north. We're told by a fellow North American that the Canucks do the whole Thanksgiving dinner as we Americans do. Copying us, we see. Not so British in North America now, are we?!
Also, Happy Columbus Day. This blog endorses and celebrates the European conquest of North America. Yes, we've heard the news that Columbus was really a Jew. So the Native American community is against the Jews now too, we guess.
And don't forget, today is the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings. 1066 was the last time England had a legitimate king. God bless you, Harold Godwinson. We've written rather extensively about the Normans, with articles about Hastings, William the Bastard's conquest of England, the Norman Way of War, and even the First Crusade, which was more or less a Norman expedition. One can find some of those articles in Great Medieval Captains.
And finally, our man on the ground in Ireland wished us a happy Yom Kipper, or Shona Tova as he said. We remarked that is sounds better in the original Klingon. 'What doesn't?' asked. Huh, 'Shona Tova' broke Google's Klingon translator. But when we submitted 'happy Yom Kippur' the translator replied with, 'Hlq Soh!' Can't you hear that? We added the exclamation point. Exit question, is Gagh kosher?
The Eagles won a crappy game against the terrible Browns. Luckily there are no style points in football. This ain't competitive figure skating. The Giants suck, losing to a bad Bengals team on Sunday night to boot. NBC pointedout that the Giants are 1-9 in their last 10 prime time games. And the Mets of New York were overmatched by the Dodgers of Los Angeles. We enjoyed watching the Dallas Cowboys get thrown to the Detroit Lions 47-9. And on Cowboys' owner Jerry Jones' birthday too. Reminder, Danny White, forgotten between Roger Staubach and Troy Aikman, was a better quarterback than Dak Prescott. White got the Cowboys to three straight NFC championship games.
A bit of explanation for our quoting of the Big Lebowski the other day, 3000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax. In 1965 Koufax refused to start a World Series game on Yom Kippur. There's been some controversy as to what Koufax actually did that night. The man himself has never said. The Times of Israel did some digging and turned up several eyewitnesses who say Koufax got himself to shul.
Election update. Polls all show momentum for Trump. Never mind that. For the second weekend in a row now, Saturday Night Live has run skits mocking Harris/Walz. This is a big deal. The skits are a barometer of how the culture views these two putzes, and also helps perpetuate that view. Back in 2000, SNL skits about Al Gore were devastating to his campaign. That's the vibe. Exit question: can Trump Stop the Steal this time?
With the now named Morning Suns turned in, it's time to get back to work on our other projects. As we do so, we note that we churned out and edited 8,000 words in two weeks, which is quick by our standards. Why? because we had deadlines and were focused. So why not focus now? Why not indeed?
Monday Metal. 17 years on, another VH1 promo we saw every hour while home with the baby. We give you, Metal against autism:
Good Sunday morning, Stroock's Books faithful. The autumnal weather has arrived in earnest here in northern New Jersey. Leaves are changing. Some are falling. The weather is just perfect Yankee autumn. We love these cool autumn mornings. We'll hit the gym and then of course, watch some football. As we wrote that we realized that's there's another game on at 9:30 AM this morning, live from London.
We'll be attending a backyard barbeque at across the street this evening.
Mrs. Stroock's Nittany Lions won an overtime squeaker against UCLA 33-30. Actually, at one point Penn State was down 20-6, so this was a nice comeback win. The skipper was pleased, and an extra rum ration issued as a result. However, in casa de Stroock we still don't mention an unnamed baseball team from eastern Pennsylvania.
While the Nittany Lions were coming back, we read through our as yet unnamed 8,000 word short story set on New Years Day in an alternate 1946. The story is as good as we can make it under the circumstances. Recall that two weeks ago we were given two weeks to write 8,000 words. We wrote 8,000 words. Which means we can segue...
...To Will's Good Idea for the Week of 10/13/24. Sometimes we think we should put off writing post World War 1990 novels. Then we think about timelines and a daughter going to college next year. But we do think about it...No decisions have been made on final stories for War Night. We'll be editing Morning Rory all week and probably starting Salyut. War Night will almost certainly not be published this year. Not for nuthin' but we have now written three alternate WWII stories totaling about to 25,000 words. These are the above mentioned, Ambush at Lingayen Gulf, and the Hawaii thnigy in Seven Stories, Kamehameha's Navy, about a Royal Navy Hawaiian PT Boat. That's one story away from the halfway mark. Hmmm....
Good morning, Stroock's Books Kibbutzim, and Shona Tova. To put it another way, Happy Yom Kippur, which one really doesn't say. Of course, one doesn't really have one's morning coffee and work on a blog post on Yom Kippur either, yet here we are.
This is the Jewish day of atonement. As we've written may times before, Yom Kippur is like Catholic confession all packed into one long morning in which one puts it all on the table. Insert bad Will Yom Kippur jokes here.
The Things.
There's really only one thing, upon which we've been busting our butt.
The 8,000 word short story due tomorrow is 8,000 words. We'll give it a read through this afternoon and another tomorrow and that will be that. Then it's back to War Night and Morning Rory. Writing that just now, we realize we don't have a title for this story. Editors don't really like that. We're thinking, 'Two Jews walk onto a Gato class submarine.'
We approach story submission with great fear and trepidation. There's lots of rivet counters out there who will say things like, 'Why everyone knows that ComSubPac's plan for New Years 1946 was...' Or, 'That's a Block III Gato class boat, and those didn't have the Mark II periscope with the sonic proportion gage....' Lol, get fucked. We don't care.
Good Thursday, Stroock's Books reader(s). After the Mets defeated the Phillies on Francisco Lindor's grand slam, Mrs. Stroock isn't pleased. She's not pleased at all. No, Lindor is not the NL MVP. The Dodger's Soheil Ohtani is the NL MVP. It's not even close, guys. Still... Meet the Mets. Meet the Mets...Note, we are not a Mets fan, we are merely noting that they won and happy for them. Recall, a few days ago we were writing beat the Mets, beat the Mets...Here's Mets broadcaster and superfan Howie Rose with another classic call.
Related, it seems Hurricane Milton ripped off the roof of the Tampa Bay Rays' moribund and dank Tropicana Field. If the hurricane leads to the demise of the Trop, it did the Rays and baseball a favor. Both the Rays and Marlins have weird histories and apathetic fanbases. Putting teams in Florida was a huge mistake by MLB.
The leader of this blog's Confederate Contingent asks why every female soldier in Israel looks like a supermodel. Good question. For those who don't know, here's a link to a female IDF soldier tribute page. This link is provided strictly for informational purposes. This link is also provided for informational purposes. As is this one. And of course we should take a moment to recall that Gal Gadot is an IDF veteran. For editorial balance, here's an article about the 'Lionesses of Syria.'
As to why the IDF is renowned for its beautiful female soldiers, recall that Israel is a Mediterranean country. It is also a young country. Which means there's a surplus of dusky hued young women fulfilling their military service. Heck, when we held a pro-Israeli rally at RVCC a decade ago, our flyers featured young Israeli female soldiers. We made our point. Two days before our rally those bastards tried to shut it down. We went right to the dean. The rally proceeded unabated.
Huh, we've posted here and at Substack about To Defend the Earth and sure enough, we've moved a few copies. Look at us. Now we'll post about To Survive the Earth...no reason. Hmmm...sometimes we wonder if it's time to have some new book covers made. TDFT is almost 15 years old. Naaaa. But we do have ideas. We do indeed have ideas.
Meanwhile, our drive to complete an 8,000 word short story by Sunday continues. We're at 6,000 words. You'll never read a more Jewy story about a Gato class submarine rescuing downed flyers in an alternate 1946 in which Japan didn't surrender. Hey, ask us for a story during the High Holy Days, get a Jewy story.
