The weather outside is (still) frightful
Brrr. Hope you all kept warm during that last thing. And it returned with more frigidity. Colder than a banker’s foreclosure smile. Than a well-digger’s shovel. 20 below wind chill. We kept the inside water running at Wise Acres; better a higher water bill than burst or frozen pipes. Been there.
Warming trend coming…along with the water bill. Not complaining.
Cabinet doors to sinks were open, still are. Frozen pipes avoided so far. The sump pump discharge froze up, so waited until a relatively warm(er) day to free that up so we could do laundry. Power stayed on as the ice storms slid farther south than Kansas, and east. No glaciers melting around here, though.
Just checked the weather and it’s going to be below zero tonight. Then it ramps up from there into daylight 30s and 40s. Dang near tropical. BTW, here’s a link to the best advice I’ve seen and it comes from Louisiana. (Link)
Never open with the weather. Sorry, Elmore.* Sorry faithful readers.
10 Rules of Writing. Elmore Leonard
No blog in January?
But, not to ignore it altogether, here’s a token look back at its first day from Ted Kooser’s The Wheeling Year, A Poet’s Field book (Link)
“It’s New Year’s Day and the future backs up, beeping with cheer, and closes its iron maw on the past. And then, with its massive hydraulics, it crushes the last year, mushing all the days together.Then it lumbers away, groaning and leaking, the scraps of the good times flapping farewell from the edges.”
The epigraph to this book is both biblical and poetic: “One day tells its tale to another.” Psalm 19
The slim book has about 20 short poetic entries for each month and each one is a wonder. I return to it time and again, whatever the month or the season. It gets five round bales from the Wise Acres Reading Forum for its wisdom, beauty and daily breath-take-awayness.
The case for no term limits
For the series West Wing, anyway. It ran from 1999 to 2006, and now Netflix has the whole massively award-winning episodic filibuster. I watch an episode or two a night, and am floored by the acting, the one and two and three-liners, the heart and soul, pathos, outright laughs, life lessons, kindness, cruelty, deep human-ness, on and on.
Donation receipt from the Washington National Monument Society. Tall orders get done when the West Wing is involved…
I’d forgotten how much I liked this series a few years ago, but I recall that I’d wished our then present white house housed people like the series. The thing is, it probably did. The creep level in any given admin is probably high, as is the cool level. It’s a microcosm of our country.
Good minds, not-so-hot minds, mix it up until they figure it all out. The government is run sloppily, or better than that. Surprising presidents like Jimmy Carter, who seem ideal in some ways, will probably pop up, historically, as a lukewarm leader. Same as Obama and Bush. Clinton? Nixon? LBJ? No, Carter had standards.
If anyone had suggested a West Wing Two, say in 2007, somehow hinting at the actual events of the last few Trump-Biden-Trump years, it would be tossed as unbelievable. “Come back with a script that’s not so sci-fi or Kafkaesque and has real people, and we’ll look at it.”
Meanwhile, I’ll watch West Wing nightly and to heck with term limits on that series. I missed a lot of the original episodes. Thanks, Netflix and Aaron Sorkin and Martin Sheen and all the rest of you guys; truly a job well done.
February Blues
And other music. This time of year I find that a helping of Rhapsody In Blue (Link) and some French Market Coffee with chicory does wonders for my outlook on a cold gray morning. Links to R.J.Ronqillo (Link) and Trouble In Mind with some slide/resonator magic; TajMo: Keb Mo and Tajmahal and Room on the Porch, (Link) at the Grand Old Opry, and a short slice of Jesse Davis guitar solo (Link) (he played with Tajmahal a lot during his all too short stay on earth—I include him in case you’ve not heard him, and once you have, you’ll look him up. Indigenous genius, So, links provided above in bold near the artists’ names. Enjoy. I’ll be rhapsodizing right along with you.
$16,764,500 for your thoughts
And you thought we were all done with pennies. So did I. I did wonder if any, maybe 5 or 6, were going to be earmarked as the actual last ones, therefore making them rare coins. But this latest deal from the mint surpasses that.
Art news tells us (Link) that “Stack’s Bowers Galleries, the nation’s premier auction house for rare coins, set a record that is unlikely to ever be broken, selling 696 2025-dated cents or “pennies” for more than $16 million.”
Gallery President Brian Kendrella said, “They captured the public imagination like few rare coins we’ve ever handled.” In fact the numismatists so crowded the website that the servers got fried and the auction was postponed until it was back online. For less than seven bucks’ worth of pennies. 696 of them.
Another car dealer heard from
In days of automobile yore, you bucked the big three at great peril—now, everyone does it. And they all seem to have pretty good reasons and products. If only everything out there could be bought for under 100k, the maker might have a shot at selling them.
Good movie. I think I’ll get the DVD, watch it again…