Stuck in the Middle...

Seldom do I "copy and paste" anything, thinking that if it is worth posting it should come from my own finding or thinking. However, this picture struck me as being very funny and I just had to "copy and paste" it.

Visiting in a Civil Manner

I love this picture showing five Presidents visiting in a civil manner.

How the Time Flies

June 3 - Protest in Tiananmen Square crushed by Chinese military

On this day in 1989, the Chinese government called in the military to put down a pro-democracy demonstration staged by more than 100,000 people in Tiananmen Square in Beijing resulting in hundreds of deaths.

A Review of Stegner's Big Rock Candy Mountain

One of the great writers of the West wrote the novel THE BIG ROCK CANDY MOUNTAIN which I read many years ago. He was Wallace Stegner and the book is said to be semi-autobiographical. The "Bo" mentioned below was patterned after his father. A long article by A. O. Scott in today's New York Times (6-02-2020) named "Wallace Stegner and the Conflicted Soul of the West" bears some similarities to the virus we're experiencing. Here is a portion of that long article -

"One of the stories is that whiskey is an effective medicine, but the town is dry, so Bo, heedless of expert advice and by nature resistant to any attempt to tell him what to do, hatches a plan to cross the border into Montana and bring back a few cases. He undertakes a thrilling, harrowing journey, driving in a blizzard on dubious roads through locked-down villages and desolate farmsteads. It’s an exciting ride — a tour de force of precise, suspenseful prose — and also an appalling study in selfishness and irresponsibility. Chasing after a big score, Bo spreads the virus across a wide swath of territory before coming home and falling sick, along with Elsa and Bruce. Bo, a rambunctious avatar of the unconfined, can-do spirit of the West, is a mortal danger to everyone around him.

The picture of empty streets and stricken households — of neighbors reluctant to open their doors, of public buildings hastily converted into morgues and wards — makes for eerie reading now. So does the portrait of Bo Mason, a man who thinks he can outwit biology and who places money over family safety or civic obligation. “That quarantine’s nothing but a word,” he says, and he goes about his business with blustery confidence in his own immunity — to bad weather and financial miscalculation as well as infection. "