He's smart, very, but is he capable? What was his record as mayor?

I was talking to a book group last week about short stories. Our book for the meeting had been a short story collection, and everybody was saying that, though they enjoyed them, they hardly ever read short stories. I might have thought that short stories would have made a comeback by now, due to shortened attention spans. A hundred years ago, when they were a huge part of reading culture, it was because of the popularity of magazines. There were many outlets at that time for pulp, serious, and middlebrow fiction, and many writers depended more for their income on sales to magazines than on book sales. For them to become popular again, I think there would need to be a move toward distributing them as single stories through subscriptions like Spotify and Audible, rather than in print. (They're available in those formats, but they don't sell a lot and the royalties are abysmal. Few well-known authors write for publication in that format and few people read them.) I don't think I'm wrong about the shortened attention spans changing the market, though, because flash fiction (less than 1000 words) has exploded in popularity during the smartphone era. It's easy to read something that length on a phone. One of the early outlets for flash pieces is called Smokelong Quarterly, because you can smoke a cigarette while you read one...they're one smoke long. Again, the problem is that flash fiction outlets usually don't pay, so they don't attract writers who attract readers. That's a long bit of thread drift, but so it goes...

@Rontuner said: (When every Midwesterner knows that's the time to go out or up on the roof and see how bad it really is outside!!) Glad you guys are all ok!

Out for a walk around a local Wildlife Trust area with ponds and river and there were loads of ox eye daisy, flocks and campion. And lovely water lilies [image: 1781236077354-20260607_120015-resized.jpg] Meanwhile my sisters garden is in full bloom with yellow scabious [image: 1781236426195-20260609_130953.jpg] A pure white peony [image: 1781236447723-20260609_130813-resized.jpg] And rampant fragrant rose with clematis [image: 1781236523498-20260609_130719.jpg]

It’s clearly the work of those same aliens responsible for crop circles.

Well, for automobiles, the emissions are water vapor. There's been hydrogen cars on the road from Honda and I believe others in test programs limited to specific areas in specific states. But however they produce it and whatever the environmental factors involved in its production (and thank you; this is fascinating) is there not a consensus that the oil industry will never really allow it? The worst thing I've heard said about them is that they explode, as if gas and electric vehicles don't?

I just did a Google's AI search about relations between country x and country y. I thought I was reading Cold War propaganda. It was wild.

[image: 1781183934674-img_2824.jpeg]

Oh, it just occurred to me that maximum annual contribution and market volatility are not related to each other. Duh. I had to leave the USAA page alone and do something else. It's almost sunset. It's finally cooled off again. I might return to it tonight. I might wait until tomorrow.

@Mark Place "WOW" emoji here.

My grandfather kept one for upkeep on the farm ditches. He called them by an older name, "motor patrol". He would stand and watch it work. He would stop it and tell the driver what he wanted more frequently than was necessary I am sure. The water drainage district did more of that work in later years. No doubt my grandfather told them how to do it.

@AdagioM said: Ewww. But well played. Exactly that. Thanks

The Oracle founder bought CBS, the largest private donor to the IDF in history. I already knew of him because he bought an entire Hawaiian island. He bought one of the neighbor islands. CBS is not news. And the attack on 60 Minutes was predictable.