We Drive a lot, and other Notes

We wake up groggy and cranky after having driven to New York to take our dad to the doctor. We drove back right into the rain, and heavy traffic.  

We have a minor high ankle sprain, we think. 

We'll put on an 80's training montage and power on through at the gym.

Baaaaaa! [swipes at the air and drinks his grog, or coffee, anyway].

The news makes us angry and sick. We're consuming less of it. Or trying to.

We're sick of the Israeli political rigamarole. Go away. We think we'd vote against Bibi just for dragging out the judicial overhaul bill for so long. 

We'll tell you one thing that gets us all riled up. Every day we see videos of police badly mishandling an encounter. These usually begin with an officer needing some information, demanding ID, etc etc, and an honest citizen saying something like, 'Last time I checked, you didn't need ID to walk down the street.'* Quite right. From there the police escalate, because... why? Here's one horrifying incident. Here's the Bobbies dragging an autistic girl off to jail. Imagine Joe Friday doing that. Exit question, Officer: was whatever you needed worth tackling that man holding a baby and handcuffing him kicking and screaming?*

[You gonna comment on that guy in Utah that died in a hail of federal bullets? -Ed] Not till we know all the facts, no. But we will say this: don't threaten to assassinate the president on FB, or anyplace else. In fact, don't threaten to assassinate the president at all. There is a not zero chance the previous sentences get this post or even this blog banned, because the world is run by subliterate morons. We can be found at Substack, where everything here is cross posted. 

Barry Soetoro, a final thought. David Samuels long interview is probably the best article on Barry O ever written. Something we've noted before, Obama is a deeply weird man. Supposedly a man of the world but surprisingly hollow, the word Samuels and Garrow uses. George W. Bush spoke another language. His father played guitar, Nixon the piano. Obama does neither. President Carter had an incredibly interesting and accomplished life before politics, a nuclear submariner and farmer. What did Obama ever do? Again, a weird and hollow man. 

We watched a bit of Shark Tank last night, which always makes us think about how to expand our audience. Mark Cuban said digital advertising is less and less effective. Print advertising? Sure, if you want to burn money. Book shows? Book tours? A good way to sit at a table and watch people try to avoid making eye contact. No, no and no. There must be some way out of this conundrum. We've no idea what that is. Sales are up this week, for some reason. 

2003 and Me. At night we lifted weights in our basement. One of those August nights in 2003, we were lifting and listening to Led Zeppelin, absentmindedly playing air guitar between sets. It occurred to us, you know, we could probably learn guitar. And so we did...and so we did. 

We'll write more about this tomorrow, but today we'll read the final of five aerial attack scenes in World War 1990: The Final Storm.

We are writing the Tromso counterattack scene in World War 1990: Norway. On our long drive yesterday, it occurred to us that this is the climax of the book. We'll write accordingly. What's this chapter entail? Norwegian armored counterattacks around Bardufus and the Froy Defence line, while NATO air pounds Soviet naval forces at Tromso. 

*In fairness there's plenty of videos of people baiting cops too.