A Jewess for Mexico?

Alright, this morning the left toe didn't feel like a vice clamp is around it. 

We did about ten minutes of stretching yesterday and will do the same today. 

We barbequed last night. Damnit, we undercooked the burgers a bit. Still good, though. Yes, yes, we drank a tonne of water. 

We can feel, ever so slightly, the spark of a reading project. Maybe something Medieval. In the 2000s we read a lot of Medieval history and wrote a lot of it too. We wrote about Alfred the Great, the Normans, Hastings, William the Bastard, Robert Guiscard, the 4th Crusade, the 1st Crusade, we published Great Medieval Captains. 

We've even been to Hastings. Below, a picture of the cathedral William the Bastard built to commemorate his victory over England's rightful monarch, Harold Godwinson:

How do you say Mazel toff in Spanish?: '(JTA) — The way things stand now, Mexico is headed to elect its first woman president next year. The two leading candidates in the polls for the 2024 election are Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico City’s former mayor, and Xóchitl Gálvez, a senator representing the center-right opposition bloc. The polls point to another first: Sheinbaum, currently the frontrunner, could become the country’s first Jewish president, too.' 

We're everywhere. There are about a hundred thousand Jews in Mexico. Our first thought was that Sheinbaum has roots in Mexico going back to Spain's expulsion of the Jews in the 16th century. Nope. She's Eastern European and her family came to Mexico before World War Two. Former president Vicente Fox called her a 'Bulgarian Jew'. Um...We guess that's an insult. It seems like Sheinbaum isn't very religious. Which is fine. 

We planned on doing another What Will's Watching this week, but we can't remember what we watched last week. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (4/4) and.... Which doesn't speak well for what we watched. We did watch another episode of Rome last night...which is okay....

A reader notices that in the Red Dawn Thingy universe, MacArthur replaces Ike. More or less. This is an idea we had in The Austrian Painter. We suppose that rather than thinking about presidents, we should be thinking about what happens in the RDT universe. D-Day fails. President Dewey nukes Berlin. Dewey also wins the war with Japan. Europe is a Soviet camp. Dewey would probably be reelected, right? 

We assume the social forces at work in our world would be at work in the RDT world. So civil rights, post war boom, etc. In 1952, after eight years of GOP rule, would the public want, say, President Adlai Stevenson? In our own world Ike would have won in 1952 if he were a Democrat, right? Let's assume MacArthur wins, that probably sets the stage for Kennedy, in 1960. Again, these are the ideas we had in The Austrian Painter. Which is fine. The ideas work. But perhaps we should have some new ideas.  We regret not making Enoch Powell PM in the nuke universe. 

We finished reading the setup chapters in World War 1990: The Final Storm. Nagging us is the thought that we should axe them altogether. The story goes from Soviet machinations, to the setup chapters, to Powell taking a phone call from Admiral Crowe, who's just spoken to Marshall Akhromayev, who told him of those machinations. Going from the machinations to Crowe would make for a much tighter novel. But tightness is not always a virtue. And recall that these scenes exist to remind the reader what's been happening. The last main narrative World War 1990 novel was Battle of the Three Seas and that came out in 2020. Hmmm...what if all the setup scenes became a prologue?