Mass- produced books are a rather new phenomenon. I don’t have an exact date, The Gutenberg Bible is not quite six hundred years old. And that wasn’t about mass distribution.

Mass- produced books require a broadly literate market of readers who will buy them. The genre’s suitable for mass production are romance novels, science fiction, pornography,. Those are the first that come to mind. Include mysteries, and Westerns,

Bloggers have mastered the jejeune political rant. It doesn’t take a lot of skill. Somewhere between swatting flies or shooting down a hydrogen filled balloon.

This brings us to our old reliable nemesis: Donald Trump. He’s picked a timeles target, the Persians, now called Iranians, to quibble with. Grudge matches on a grand scale involve billions of dollars. There are probably Iranian farmers who can’t get crops planted. That means Iranian theocrats will have to use oil money to buy grain from Canada, Russia, Argentina, and maybe Ukraine . They will probably farm out their nuclear weapons research to the North Koreans. They have The Bomb and need oil.

It’s been 46 years since the Iranian Hostage Crisis, when the Shah of Iran was ousted by the Shi’a mullahs and Ayatollah in power now. Remember that the Shah was a CIA client stooge. (I can’t think of a better word).

The takeaway from this muddle is that the Iranians are no more closer to getting rid of the current theocracy than they were under Reagan, George H W Bush, Clinton, George W Bush, Obama, Trump 45, or Biden.

We will have to spend money replacing the ordnance we’ve expended

The merry go round will make several more turns.

Maybe peace would be cheaper for all concerned.

I started cleaning. I had porn on, but soon tired. Then I started Ken Burns’ The Civil War. I’ve seen the series many times before, but I never tire of it. Like Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation , there is much to learn for he and Clark are both master teachers.

That’s enough for now.

Criterion Collection has a marvelous collection of the films of Jacques Tati.

He was (is) a genius. Watch these instead of the drivel you have to pay to watch in the prisons they call movie theaters today.

Trust me on this.

It cost me 43 cents. 43.cents, I remember when a packet cost a nickel and was devoid of stigma. The Jonestown mass suicide was facilitated by grape Kool Aid mixed with cyanide. We call that a Public Relations catastrophe.

I bought cherry, not grape, added my cup of sugar, poured in 2 quarts of water and stirred thoroughly.

And….,,

I tasted it. Not Bad at all,

Adults have to swill alcohol at cocktail parties, pig roasts, wedding receptions, They pretend they like it and some do.

But that taste of Kool Aid brought forth innocent memories. Before I knew about the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Water Gate break in, marriages and divorces. Joint custody. The long list of nightmares that is adulthood.

Next on my list Cotton Candy,

To my left , as I sit in my “comfy chair” is a box, filled with books that I ordered from Amazon and I’ve been intending to read, but have yet to read.

Well, doggone it. I am going to read them.

Expect book reports.

Having just completed Stay Alive, Ian Buruma’s history of Berlin during the war years, 1939-45, a memoir of a gay man hiding in Berlin An Underground Life. (Gad Beck) seems like a logical segue.

So here goes.

thiugh

I can’t find a better word for how I feel

One adjective says it all.

This is the toughest question I’ve ever asked myself. Does it mean giving your body to someone else,of putting up with their alcoholism or showing them the path to recovery? Does it mean losing the person, you thought you loved forever?

More will follow.

O

Paul Cooper is a podcaster who uses that term as the basic premise of his stories. He describes the fall of cultures throughout the world.

A lot of cultures accumulated very little garbage. They constantly found uses for things before those things became effluvia.

Today, we can watch freight trains hauling containers of trash to giant trash pits on their way to becoming giant trash mountains. We can decry this need to manage our waste, or we can see it as a giant jobs program for future archaeologists. ( The children of the rich who aren’t managing the inheritance will need something to do.)

I can see this phenomenon take place in my own personal living space (lebensraum). “What do I do with my trash?” has become an existential question. Not that Sartre or Camus fretted over their egg shells and old newspapers, but you get the idea.

Happy Canada Day to any Canadian readers I might have.

I‘m plowing through Antony Beevor‘s The Fall of Berlin 1945. Can one suffer from shell shock, simply by reading about The War (The Great Patriotic War) ?

Sleep? Maybe later.

I’m reading Antony Beevor’s The Fall Of Berlin 1945. The full horror of the war on the Eastern Front is brought to light. 27 million Russians died in World War Two. I just noticed that 85 years ago today 22 June, 1941, Nazi Germany invaded The Soviet Union.

This book is a small glimpse into the unspeakable horror that was W W Two. If your father or grandfather never talked much about The War, this book will give you an idea why.