The Minds of People on Social Media

A MAGA classic from somebody called Insurrection Barbie on Twitter/X:

In 2022, NBC was reporting that Joe Biden lost his temper with Zelensky because he wasn’t grateful and he was very demanding.

That’s in 2022.

Wait, the media didn’t tell you about this? I wonder why…

So is NBC not part of "the media"?

First Daffodils, and Others

First daffodils I have seen this year, at the old estate I mentioned last week.

Amazing meadow of snowdrops, like this across half an acre.

One-antlered buck.

Decorative concrete piece, probably a leg from a garden bench.

Listening to "The Autumn of the Patriarch"

The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975) is a famous and famously weird novel by Gabriel García Márquez about the old age of a Latin American Dictator. It is written like a fever dream, an endless series of bizarre anecdotes told in extremely long sentences that randomly shift in tense, person, point of view, and style. The main subjects seem to be the loneliness of power, the absurdity of dictatorship, and the inevitability of decay, but honestly cows, birds, and whores may get as many words as any of the deeper themes.

I tried to read it a long time ago but bogged down and never finished. During my recent fieldwork I decided to listen to it, and this went wonderfully. I liked it much better read aloud that I did when I tried to read it to myself, lettering the mad words just flow over me rather than my trying to disentangle them. I highly recommend this way of appreciating García Márquez, and he now joins my list of authors (Dickens, J.K. Rowling) who are better to listen to than to read.