Twenty on a Wednesday

Good morning reader(s) of Stroock's Books. The daylight time might be saved, but as we write this it's dark outside. We'll have another warm day today. Yay shorts! After that blizzard and prolonged cold snap, the unseasonably warm weather feels good. 

Bla-bla Israel, bla-bla Iran. The lack of protests in the streets of Iran makes one think that the US state department, or whoever, has gotten word out that people should lay low till an appropriate time. Meanwhile the US and Israel bomb police facilities, IRGC bases, etc etc. Extit question: what is the appropriate time?

Pointless nostalgia. Twenty years on...aye, 2006. We were a more or less permanent sub at Bernards High.  We were in over a hundred days. Most days we brought our computer and wrote during prep time, or even class time. Very often we'd have nothing to do but show a movie, maybe pass out an assignment. Subs don't do much teaching in high school. 

The kids knew us and we knew the kids. Some of them even signed up for classes with us when we were a history adjunct at Raritan Valley Community College. A real treat, actually. Here's the class of 2006. Most of the names ring a bell. Those kids are now older than we were when we knew them - and approaching 40. Amazing. 

Out of curiosity we looked up a kid whom we liked very much. Smart, friendly, respectful. He had military aspirations and had been accepted to a military school and...son of gun. There's a photograph of that young man as a marine lieutenant in Afghanistan.  

Anyhow we were finishing up A Line through the Desert. Also we were working on a series of articles for Strategy & Tactics Magazine about the Roman Empire. An article we wrote about the Roman general Metellus has never seen the light of day. By the spring of 2006 we'd had four articles in print, but nothing out in over a year. The wait was tough. But we'll have the S&T cover twice that autumn.

DOGE Report. 

After further consideration we're keeping the Ardee chapter, for now. Let's fix it. Or not. We've got an Irish army battalion, a British army battalion, the Garda, and the IRA chasing one another around Ardee...kind of like we had the IRA, RUC, UDA, UVF, and UFF chasing one another around Derry in World War 1990: Ireland. We don't like it. We don't like it one bit.