7/21/2026

 Tuesday, July 21, 2026

1925 John T. Scopes found guilty of teaching evolution in the “Scopes monkey trial”

1930 US Veterans Administration formed

1940 Soviet Union annexed Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania

1954 Geneva Accords for Indochina divided French colonial territories into the countries of North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos

2024 Joe Biden dropped out of presidential race and endorsed Kamala Harris

2025 The Venezuelan attorney general's office opened a formal investigation into Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele and his government's alleged mistreatment of Venezuelan migrants detained in the United States and sent to the CECOT megaprison, built to hold alleged gang members. 

In bed at 9:30, up at 4:05; 0420 119/67/65 117 203.6;70/80/61, mostly sunny, Beach hazards warnings - waves 4 to 9 feet, dangerous currents  

Morning meds at 9 a.m.

A Confederacy of Dunces (1980) by John Kennedy Toole.  I read this farcical novel many decades ago, shortly after it was published, or perhaps after it won the Pulitzer Prize in 1981.  I enjoyed it very much on that first read, but I'm finding it a bit hard to plow through on this read.  It's a great satire of guys who spend many years in higher education, accumulate more than one degree, and are useless.  The 'hero' is Ignatius J. Reilly, a morbidly obese, flatulent, eructatious, gluttinous slug who, at age 30, lives with his mother in her home in New Orleans.  He spent 8 years at a university earning a bachelor's and a master's degree and has held a paying job for only 2 weeks.  "You could tell by the way he talked, though, that he had gone to school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him.”  He is forced to seek work when his mother damaged a French Quarter balcony, the owner of which threatens to sue her.   Gainful employment, he laments, will interfere with his life's calling, which is writing a magnum opus criticizing all of modern life and culture, indeed criticizing every development in the world since the collapse of the medieval world.  "Employers sense in me a denial of their values...They fear me. I suspect that they can see that I am forced to function in a century which I loathe."  That's where I am so far in the novel.  Alas, I keep falling asleep while reading it..

Watering duties.  I watered the potted plants on the patio (and the hydrangeas) and the impatiens on the front stoop plus the several tufts of new grass where the two spruce trees once were.  

I spent the day feeling like crap again, half dead and approaching full.