all the news that's not fit to print

The morning might not appeal to many folks, but I love it, 66°F 88% out here on 7H porch, December 6 and reminds me of summer mornings in Newport, Rhode Island, where we lived while at Navy OCS in 1957-58 and at Naval War College in 1968-69. Winters in Newport, you can have and keep but summers were incomparable. 

Wednesday morning breakfast, toast and red salmon salad, hot black coffee. And from the papermill that I can see from here, the seven o’clock whistle that 75 years ago signaled time for breakfast and walk to Cove School. Robert remembers, I remember. And who’s on WDLP, must have been Carl Gray or dishishyosheffDocDaffin. Carl Gray, who was in my father’s class at Bay High, or at least they were there at the same time, was our mayor for a while. A card and character, he used to say on his morning radio show as he was reporting local crime, “if you don’t want to be on my show, don’t do it.” Some will remember both Gray and Daffin. 

News? more catastrophic wildfires in Califivenia, as we watched Victor Borge cast it in a show of memories at bedtime last night. A feisty president word dueling with FatAlbert in DPRK. Same character recognizing Jerusalem for what it was for maybe three thousand years. My sympathy is with both sides. Human history is of land conquest, including Europeans taking over North America and, bleeding hearts, that’s just the way it is, I’m living on or adjacent to an Indian mound. Recent decades or centuries, Palestine was arab, canaanite, palestinian, before that Jewish, before that canaanite. At the moment more eternal warfare over it, the Jewish claim to Jerualem is at least as valid as the Christian and Muslim claim plus Palestine being made Israel a Jewish homeland by international acclaim and decree after WW2 with international shame about the Holocaust, somebody’s got to side with Israel, and with the Jews who are forever under inexplicable persecution. So Jerusalem, Jerusalem, my happy home, and we’ll see what happens with this bold American action. Elsewhere, the people of Alabama will show & tell the world what they are in their upcoming senatorial election. And the US Supreme Court is contemplating whether a culinary artist can just offer a gay couple any item in his bakery showcase or whether he is required to use his artistic talent to create a wedding cake for them. IDK. As a priest I may agree or decline to officiate any wedding, he/she, she/she, he/he or other: will the USSC decision affect my legal options? Regardless of my sympathies, as an American I’m not into being told what to do or what I must do. Don’t push or press me, my temper ignites fast and filthy I'm not proud to confess.

Juan Diego underway for Progreso.

DThos+