Will's Good Idea for the Week of 12/3/23

We awake this morning to a sore right elbow, probably from the gym, and a sore left big toe, probably from gout. Damn it, we were hoping to do a walk or hit the gym this morning. We've caught the gout in time, took a Colchicine and did a cherry juice shot. So we caught in time. But still, damn it all.

Unironically, or interestingly, we got a uric acid test on Thursday (uric acid buildup causes gout). The target level is 6, says the test. Our test showed our uric acid level was 8.6, which is 'high'. JFC, every time we have to get a test the results are 'high'. Cholesterol, high. Triglycerides, high. Blood pressure, high. Serotonin, high. And some people wonder why we assume we're kicking off in our mid-60s. 

Mrs. Stroock's Eagles play the Forty-Niners today, a peer football team. The Eagles have an impressive string of wins against peers or near peers. In succession these are the Chiefs, the Cowboys and the Bills by less than a touchdown. But these wins were exhausting and exposed the Eagles passing game and passing defense. The Eagles impressive string of victories has to end someday. Unless the Eagles have fixed these problems, Mrs. Stroock will be very disappointed today. 

In his review of Napoleon, Rick McGinnes quotes Andrew Roberts', who asks in his biography of same, '"Who is to say that a Europe dominated in the nineteenth century by an enlightened France would have been worse than the one that eventually transpired, in which Prussia dominate Germany and then forced itself onto the continent in ways far less benign than Napoleon?"' Now that's an interesting question. 

We read an awful lot about Napoleon and his wars some 25 years ago, including David Chandler's 1,200 page magnum opus in 2001. That took a while. Anyway, we came away thinking that Napoleon always needed something to occupy his impressive mind. A new city layout, a new tax system, a new war. And that was his greatest flaw. Napoleon just couldn't stop. So let's say he wins Waterloo, or the retreat from Moscow never happens. A few years later Napoleon would have hatched another military campaign.

No, Will's Good Idea for the Week of 12/3/23 is not an alternate history of a Napoleonic Europe. We don't have the chops for that. [Please, you could spend 2024 reading and researching while wrapping up current projects and be ready to go by 2025-Ed] True. But as the president in Star Trek IV: The Undiscovered Country once said, just because we can do a thing does not mean we must do that thing. [Aren't you always pining for a reading project? -Ed] Yeah but...hmmmm.

Our Good Idea for the Week of 12/3/23 is the title of War Night: War Night and Other Stories of the Great Nuclear War of 1975. War Night will be the main story, the story around which the other stories are built. So the good idea comes with an exit question. What's War Night about? We've no idea. Oh, we have another story idea. An artillery battalion firing nuclear rounds into Fulda Gap.