5/8/2026

 Friday, May 8, 2026

1945 German General Wilhelm Keitel formally surrendered to the Allies in Berlin

1957 South Vietnamese President, Ngô Đình Diệm, arrived in the U.S. on a state visit

1958 President Eisenhower ordered the National Guard out of Central High School, Little Rock, Arkansas

1967 Muhammad Ali was indicted for refusing induction into the US Army

1970 Thousands of students protested against the Vietnam War following the Kent State University shootings in Ohio

2024 New York has more millionaires than any other city in the world, one in 24, with 744 centi-millionaires worth more than 100 million and 60 billionaires

2025 The father of Natalie Rupnow, the perpetrator of the shooting that killed three people, including herself, and injured six others at the Abundant Life Christian School in Madison, Wisconsin,in December 2024, is charged with felonies in connection with the shooting

2025 Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost of the United States is elected to the papacy on the fourth ballot and takes the name Leo XIV. 

In bed at 9, but received a text message from Caela at 9:15 responding to one I sent at 4:4 about oranges for orioles and couldn't fall asleep.  I got up a little before 1 and moved to the TV room until 3 when I went back to bed and slept until 5:45; 0555 147/87/55 129 203.2; 38/63/34, sunny morning & partly cloudy afternoon

Morning meds at a.m., and half dose of Bisoprolol at 6:40 a.m. Missed my Trulicity injection.

FB posting today:

Unca Donald's folly.  The war against Iran has turned into a fiasco, not just a failure and a loss, but a ludicrous, ridiculous, and humiliating failure and loss.  Our 'excursion', 'blip', ''little skirmish', special military operation', or whatever  word we want to use rather than the accurate one -war, - has been from the beginning B'rer Donald's tar baby.  He can't get rid of it and it is making him and us more vulnerable and less powerful at home and all over the world.  When the Iranians fired missiles at two Navy destroyers in the Strait of Hormuz yesterday, the devastating (and appropriate) American response along Iran's coastal military facilities was almost dismissed by Trump as "a love tap" and not a violation of or end of the 'ceasefire.'  Both Donald Duck and Donald Trump are arrogant, impatient, and immature creatures of sometimes middling but more often, low intelligence who often act impulsively and without much care or pre-analysis.    Both are cartoon characters, but unfortunately, only one is fictional.  One had his Huey, Dewey, and Louie, the other his J.D., Pete, and Kash.  One had his Daisy, the other his Pam and Kristi.  One had his uncle Scrooge McDuck as a role model, the other had his father Fred Trump.  When one was frustrated when he couldn't solve a probelm he had created himself, he would say "This is exasthsperatin'!", the other would say, "There is no problem."  I prefer Disney's Donald to America's/

I'm close to finishing The Correspondent, and I'm enjoying it quite a bit, although 'enjoying' seems an odd word for reading about so manies of the miseries that Life throws at people.  I'm thinking of the bullying that Harry Landy and Felix Stone experienced, Harry's suicide attempt, Rosalie's husband's need to be moved to a nursing home, "DM"s hatred for Sybil and Judge Whatsizname, Sybil's near-estrangement from her dauhter Fiona, etc.  Also, we started out with some letters written in 2012 and now we're into the Spring of 2017 and there has so far been only one glancing reference to Donald Trump!  Sybil was a woman of the world as a lawyer and then chief clerk to her Superior Court judge, a graduate of UVA Law, and highly intelligent.  Trump's campaign in 2015 and 2016, and his election that Fall were cataclysmic events in the U.S. and the world, but only one glancing reference to the man from someone who is so communicative and outgoing?   Perhaps that omission is about to be cured, or perhaps the author didn't want to get into the Trump weeds with her potential readership.  In any event, I think the reason I'm enjoying the book as much as I am is because of how it treats the many hard knocks that her characters, young and old, have to deal with in their lives, especially those experienced by the oldsters, like Sybil's blindness, her struggle with identity and origens, and with the death of her child Gill, her incapability of attending Daan's funeral and her absence's effect on her daughter Fiona, her broken wrist and sprained ankle, her regrets.  I suppose this kind of stuff is grist for the mill of all novels, but in any case, I'm enjoying reading this one.  One of the things about the narrative that I find interesting is the number of "double relationships" (for want of a better term) there are, like the relationship between Sybil and Rosalie and Rosalie and Fiona and Sybil and Finona, and the relationship between Sybil and Harry and Sybil and Harry's dad, and between Harry and his dad.  There's even the relationship between Sybil and his brother Felix, Felix's relationship with his lover/partner Stewart, and Stewart's relationship with Sybil, or at least his attempt to use Sybil to gain contanct with Felix.  Rosalie kept information about Fiona from Sybil, Sybil kept information about Harry from Harry's dad,  and information about Felix from Stewart..  Sybil castigated Rosalie for BETRAYAL of their relationship, but was comfortable to serve as a confidante in other relationships.  I daresay it's true that both Geri and I are great respecters of confidences, even with or from each other and it has on rare occasions led to some peculiar situations which, to respect confidences, I don't get into here.😐

    Perhaps the reason (or one of the reasons) I like this novel as much as I do is reflected in a sentence in a letter Sybil sent to Larry McMurtry: "I am an old woman and my life has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane."  I am an old man and my life, like  all or almost all lives, has been some strange balance of miraculous and mundane.  I find it easy to relate to Sybil, though I'm not sure I like her very much.  I've said it and written it so often as to turn it into a cliché, that we are surrounded by saints, and heroes, and miracles - things marveloous, wondrous to behold, to see and experience.  The world is full of beauty and goodness yet we get so focused on the mundane that we miss the miraculous.  To accompany these thoughts, I looked for but couldn't find my photograph of the exquisite little mushroom I saw by happenstance or serendiptiy 4 or 5 years ago in the lawn near our mailbox.  Exquisite.  Inexpressibly beautiful.  I find such beautiful things all over the place and all the time, unless that is I am beset by the mundane.  Not that what besets me is itself mundane, but my internal mundanity hides its beauty and extraordinaariness from my consciousness.   I'm not expressing my though very well.  I'm like some of my students from my teaching days who would tell me that they understood some legal concept but they just couldn't express it very well.  I would suggest to them that they shouldn't be so sure that they understood the concept until they could express it in words.  I need to do better.