Do Adults ever buy hardback fiction to read themselves?

   Is anyone writing decent adult fiction anymore?  I look at the best selling hardback fiction in the Wall St Journal weekend edition.  Most weeks two or three classic Dr. Seuss books and some other children’s books are there.  Seldom are there any books in hardback fiction that I would care to read myself. 

   I’m thinking that the Dr. Seuss and other children’s books are bought by parents and other grownups as gifts for children.  I don’t think grownups read hardback fiction anymore. I know I am reading a fair number of Young Adult books. The YA books have protagonists that actually do something, have a plot that I can follow and have some interesting things happen, and other sequels so that if I liked the first one, I can buy and read some more of the same.

What are the Russians thinking?

    TV coverage of bodies lying in the street, many of them bound, mass graves and blown up buildings are going all over the West, and making us think the Russians are real barbarians.  It is doing them harm, we think that people that uncivilized need some harsh sanctions, like cutting off their oil sales, messing with their credit, seizing $120 million yachts, and other stuff is what they deserve. 

   If the Russians had any sense, they wouldn’t leave dead civilians lying in the streets.  I don’t know where Putin himself is coming from, but the high command of the Russian army ought to have insisted that the troops lay off the civilians.  Somewhere down the chain of command, things were let slip.  Could have been officers at the division level, or at the brigade level, or the company level.  Or it could be that the troops just ignored their officers and started shooting civilians.  How ever it happened it hurt the Russians badly.  They should have known what this sort of behavior would do to them, and they should have prevented it.  They failed, and they are now drawing world wide condemnation. 

More Old Line Science Fiction Authors, L. Sprague de Camp

de Camp was a pretty good writer.  All his stuff is worth reading.  My favorite is Lest Darkness Fall. It's old, copyright 1939. but it still reads well.  Thru methods not well explained, a modern archeologist, Martin Padway gets miraculously transported from our modern time back to Ancient Rome of the 500s.  Despite being written about 70 years ago Padway comes off as a perfectly reasonable modern American in his dealing with the inhabitants of Ancient Rome.   Fortunately Padway knows Latin and Italian well enough to get along in Ancient Rome.  He manages to make a living by borrowing money from a local Rome banker and setting up to distill and sell brandy.  The time is just a few weeks before Justinian, the Eastern Rome Emperor will make his attempt to reconquer Italy for the Empire.  Padway decides to oppose Justinian and Justinian's general Belisaurius.  Thru good luck, and employment of some 20th century military ideas, the Goths in Italy, with Padway leading them, manage to defeat the Imperial invasion.   Padway meets a number of pretty and cool chicks, does not marry any of them.  All in all a good read.  You will enjoy it.   

How long before Biden crashes the US dollar?

Goldman Sachs asks the question.  These are bankers worrying about borrowing too much money.  When bankers express worry about such things, trouble is not far away.

Presby’s sugaring off party

Presby throws this party every year.  Breakfast of pancakes, choice of bacon, pork sausage, or ham, donut holes, coffee.  Kids love it.  Saw new maple sap tanks and the new stainless steel sap boiler, bought some maple stuff, and enjoyed the morning.

 

Biden’s 9000 oil and gas leases.

 Biden has been complaining that the oil companies have 9000 leases to drill and they have not drilled them.  What Biden doesn’t say is that some of these leases were for dry holes, land that just didn’t have any oil in it.  Others are leases on land that has a little oil, but not enough to justify sinking an expensive well which will never produce enough oil or gas to pay for the cost of drilling.  In both of these cases, oil company management is doing the right thing, conserving money by not drilling unless the well will be profitable, i.e. pay off the costs of drilling it. 

   Biden is threatening to cancel all the unused leases and maybe fine the oil companies for not drilling them. 

   This abusive policy is not going to increase domestic oil production and get it back up to where it was when Trump was president.  It will provide welfare for lawyers for years.

   Biden ought to get the leasing situation straightened out so that a lease is issued within a month of the oil company making a request for one.  He ought to sell leases off shore, in Anwar, just about anywhere except in the Grand Canyon.  And come up with a way to disqualify British Petroleum for gross incompetence and endangering everyone near a BP facility.  BP is the company the let the Alaska pipeline rust out and leak, managed to blow up their refinery in Texas, and caused that awful blowout in the Gulf of Mexico back in Obama time. 

Rare Element shortages.

    Lithium is element number 3, above hydrogen and helium.  It is an alkali metal with a single valance electron.  It is found in nature as various compounds.  Elements lighter than iron are quite plentiful in the universe and on earth.  The lighter elements are created in all stars, of which there are many.  The heavier elements, heavier than iron, are only formed in supernova, of which there are many many less than there are stars.  Only one star in 1000 (or more) goes supernova, so the elements formed in supernovae are scarcer, although available.  Copper, silver, gold and platinum are all heavier than iron, scarce enough to be called precious metals, but common enough to be used as money and as jewelry. 

   Anyway, we should be able to find plenty of lithium in North America if we look.  Actually they have found a sizeable lithium deposit out in Oregon.  The company prospecting this deposit was saying on the radio that required greenie paperwork will delay opening a mine in this deposit by five or ten years.  If we really need more lithium for batteries in battery cars, we could get it now be revoking all the greenie paperwork.