Looking for a great film.  Try The Reader. A brilliant performance by Kate Winslet and her teenage lover David Kross.  It leads to her trial of Nazi war crimes. We saw it on HBO Max but it’s available elsewhere.

Climate change is real and vicious. We can look forward to more frequent Ida-type hurricanes. As a meteorologist, I know that warm water fuels hurricanes. In the past, Caribbean hurricanes were mitigated by churning up the water so that cold water came to the top, reducing intensity. Now, because of warming, the warm water goes down many meters so that the churning doesn’t bring cold water up. The result is intensification of hurricanes before they make land fall. We are getting much better at predicting their movement but so what. This is a disaster and if we don’t take global warming seriously and do something, it won’t be long before there is no Gulf Coast.

President Biden should play hardball. He should close down the Johnson Space Center and Kelly AFB. Also, he could have military hospitals giving abortions.  We can’t let this asshole Abbott do what he is doing.

Since my legs and knees have been bothering me, I have taken to swimming laps in a 25 meter pool daily. My friend Carl Trop touted me onto underwater headphones with 8GB memory. FINIS DUO is the product. I load it up with MP3 files, charge it, attach the phones to my goggles and the phones rest on my cheekbones. The sound is conveyed through the cheeks and is amazing underwater. Today I swam 20 laps, (a kilometer) listening to Horowitz playing Scarlatti and Pollini playing Shubert.  The laps flew by. Frankly, I still can’t believe I can even swim that far.

The years I lived in Italy were probably the happiest of my life.  Even though I worked my ass off, I always felt I was on vacation. Writing my book MOFFETT’S WIFE which takes place in the Italy of my mind was not only fun, it made me recall memories which are as vivid now as they were many years ago. It was easy to create the environment in the book because the memories flowed, each one created another. The book is about a woman whose son is wrongly charged and convicted of the murder of his business partner.  She is frantic and takes matters into own hands with an unusual plot to find the real criminal.

Since my legs have begun to fail me, I have been swimming laps every morning.  My friend Carl Trop suggested I get a FINIS DUO, underwater head set.  He let me try one of his.  It was life changing.  I bought one and now every morning, I have these speakers sitting on my cheekbones attached to my swim goggles. I have been listening to Neil deGrasse Tyson’s book “Astrophysics for People in a Hurry” while swimming which eases the boredom of the line at the bottom of the pool I follow. Anyone who swims for exercise should try one.

I drew from my experience as a meteorologist back in my Air Force days to give some spice to my novel “A LONG DRUNK AND A BREAKFAST” I did that for six months flying into one hurricane 12 times for a temporary hazard pay of $150 a month.  Sounds puny, right?  But my monthly salary as a First Lieutenant was $335.  The extra cash was significant.  It wasn’t as scary as you might imagine.  Get a copy of my book with the link button on the FICTION page of this website.

Ii have been a Met fan since their beginning, fed up that the Dodgers left. But now, I have become a reluctant Met fan. I was very optimistic about their chances but as most fans know, injuries took their toll this year. But for the life of me, I cannot figure any of the moves made by the manager, the general manager and the owner. I cannot watch a game any more. There is absolutely no instinct for the game on the part of any of them. The players have problems but good coaches, which they have NOT, could improve things tremendously. As an old Brooklyn Dodger fan since childhood, I never questioned Leo Durocher’s moves, even when he went to the Giants. I never second guessed Gil Hodges. He knew the game and could sense things. But this group stinks. Lindor is an overpaid joke.. Rosario was getting better every day. Baez is a hacker that will swing at anything that moves and statistically, he hits it occasionally. Talk that he would go to 2B when Lindor returns is a disaster. MacNeil is a natural 300 hitter and great fielder. I could go on but it’s useless. None of them have any feel for the game, the players and the situations. I know management will blame their failure on injuries and the players and probably  trade the good ones. But nothing will change.  Any knowledgable teenager could do better than these guys.

Our original purpose 20 years ago was to stop al qaeda from further intrusions into our country to do damage.  We found and killed Osama bin Laden.  We stopped al quaeda.  A small force on the Afghan-Pakistan border would have done the job.  We didn’t need to spend billions building an army for the Afghanis.  They wouldh’t use it properly anyway.  We knew that.  It was a bonanza for the arms merchants and money in the bank for the rulers.  Getting out was the right thing.  Afghanistan is not our responsibility.  And certainly not if they themselves don’t care.  It’s a travesty that after billions of dollars spent on them, the Afghan army couldn’t even hold on for enough time for us to get out reasonably.