I just finished John Le Carre’s latest: “Agent Running in the Field.” It’s a pretty good book for those who like literate spy stories, but to me it’s noteworthy for at least one other reason: It’s the first time I’ve explicitly encountered the dark and dimwitted presence of Donald J. Trump in popular fiction. Probably won’t be the last. Trump is not a character, thank God. But […]
Highway 21 revisited
Last Friday I was driving up I-95 to see my daughter and her girls in Virginia. Somewhere south of Savannah a gleaming red Mercedes coupe with New York plates swept by on my left. It was car to remember, even more so because there was an enormous cream-colored cat lounging the back window, calmly observing all the other northbound motorists. It seemed very relaxed for a cat […]
Fifty-two books
and counting
I participate in the Goodreads reading challenge mostly to keep track of the books I read in a calendar year. Why that’s important, I don’t know. At this point in life, I guess, I like to take note of the few challenges I can actually accomplish. Now that I’ve ruled out paddling around the world in a dugout canoe. My goal this year was 52 books: one […]
Boring is good
OK, the debates were kind of boring. But really, boring is fine, isn’t it? At this point, boring is cool. The only thing not cool is for Democrats to show up with machetes and start carving each other apart on nebulous policy issues. It veered that way for a bit, but cooler heads prevailed. What I want in a president is (a) somebody who is smarter than […]
Black list
What if you discovered that a friend or relative had been donating to Trump’s reelection? Not just shrugging off the malignant stupidity and breathtaking corruption of the last three years, but actually sending money to prop up the world’s largest sack of shit. Would it matter? It would matter to me. A lot. It might even be a deal breaker. In the Washington Post today, there’s a […]
Is that all there is?
I would like to personally thank President Trump for steering Hurricane Dorian well clear of Alabama (and parts of Florida) through the sheer force of his will. That was a close one. If the president had not been closely monitoring the situation between rounds at his golf club in Virginia, this thing could have gotten rough. It’s still pretty bad: We have a couple of small branches […]
Dorian J. Trump
Dorian. Never met anyone named Dorian, unless you count “The Picture of Dorian Gray.” I finally got around to reading that a few years ago. Oscar Wilde. The book was sort of controversial in 1890. It’s about a guy who makes a deal with, if not the devil, then at least a Jeffrey Epstein-like character, if Jeffrey Epstein had been a gifted painter instead of a gifted […]
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