Some Weekend

     Once again, I chaired the monthly writer's "critique group," where we analyze one another's work, everything from grammar and word use to plot development and character behavior: "Your protagonist is an underweight ten-year-old -- do you really think she could fight off a tiger bare-handed?"

     It's fun but exhausting; I'm markedly not an extrovert, and I find a pleasant morning talking shop with a half-dozen friends exhausting.  I napped in the afternoon (instead of doing laundry) and grilled moderately-priced steaks for dinner as a treat, with baked potatoes and salad.  That left Sunday for laundry and housework; blogging had to wait.

     On politics, the merchants of balloon-filling (get it while it's hot!) were busy all weekend, especially on the Sunday politics shows.  These days, it's like going to a silent movie, and if you cared to watch, you booed at the villains and cheered for the heroes, and Little Nell got tied to the train tracks same as always.  The locomotive is just out of sight around the bend, smoke trailing upward from the stack, bell ringing, whistle hooting, and yet everyone is acting like it will never arrive.  Going to be an interesting day when it does.

     On the topic of imminent doom, I've been reading John Kenneth Galbraith's The Great Crash, 1929, an analysis of the factors that led up to the event that marks the start of the Great Depression.  There's plenty to debate in Galbraith's politics -- though he did correctly identify the Vietnam War as a quagmire best avoided, well before U. S. involvement -- but his lively, snarky approach to a subject that could be a dull slog (and has often been, in other hands) is well worth reading.  The book, written in 1955, accurately identifies one of the clever tricks that led to 2007's sub-prime mortgage crisis and remains a red flag to look out for; the dismal science is much better at looking backward than warning of danger ahead, so props to him for that.