Dinah; Ants; Birdhouses; My Kidney; Trump and Megan; John Quincy Adams; Abraham Lincoln; Red Kills the Big Bad Wolf

(This is a repeat from Ap;ril 13, 2016.  Check out the President stuff.)

Coolish but warm in the sun.  A nice lady named Dinah came to do some Spring cleaning that we sorely needed.  Now our Feng Shui vibes are roaring because our kitchen area is spotless.  She'll be back in two weeks to help us some more.

Also, early this morning a gentleman carrying deadly poisons rang our bell.  I had asked that our ants be taken care of.  He wanted to spray inside.  I asked him if the spray could kill a cat.  He said "Yes".. so, I asked him to just spray around the outside of the house.  That might do it.  Meanwhile, I'll be putting down some more ant traps where our cat can't get to them.

While Dinah was doing her thing, I was able to work in the garage.  I got lots of boxes together for recycling and rearranged some cabinet contents to hold stuff that I had forgotten I had.  Also, I found our two birdhouses from last year.  The ones that we thought the birds had rejected.  But when I opened them up, there were twigs, grass, cotton, and other nesting material in each of them.  I cleaned them up and put them back up on our porch.

Health Matters

In regards to the mass found on my kidney..  I remembered that when I was driving a cab in New Bedford while I went to Boston University, one of my drunken customers cold-corked me somewhere under my ribs and I had pain for almost two years.  Of course, I felt that I did not have time to go to a doctor about it.  Dumbbell.   Anyway, I wonder if this 4 centimeter mass is a scar from that hit.  Is 4 centimeters the same width as a fist?

Politics

I see where Trump will be meeting with Megan Kelley.  Somewhere, Kelley is saying that Trump is a fascinating person.  So, I guess they have made up.  Fox News probably doesn't want to be in the doghouse with Trump if he gets the Republican nomination.

Presidents

The New York Times Book Review for April 10th talks about three recent books about Presidents and their "partners."  In one of the books:  John Quincy Adams (Militant Spirit) by James Traub, something very interesting to me was pointed out, and I quote:  "...in February 1848, "Old Man Eloquent," as he was called, collapsed at his desk in the House of Representatives and an obscure one-term congressman named Abraham Lincoln was assigned to the committee making the funeral arrangements."

Traub also mentions that Adams liked to  swim at dawn in the Potomac wearing only his birthday suit and a pair of goggles.  He also quotes British historian, George Dangerfield, who described the Adams presidency as "a rather conspicuous example of a great man in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the right motives and a tragic inability to make himself understood."

Traub points to Adams' long service in the House and mentions that "All the irritating Adams characteristics worked to his advantage here, as his arrogance, stubbornness and sheer audacity made him, as one frustrated Virginia slaveholder put it, the 'the acutest, the astutest, the archest enemy of Southern slavery that ever existed.'"

He also mentions that Adams' wife Louisa said that although Adams was an exasperating person, he was however "magnificent."

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In the same 1848 year that Abraham Lincoln helped to bury John Quincy Adams, he wrote the following, which is still true today:

" An honest laborer digs coal at about seventy cents a day while the President of the United States digs abstractions at about seventy dollars a day.  The coal is clearly worth more than the abstractions, and yet what a monstrous inequality in the process."

Fairy Tales Revisited

I mentioned the other day that the NRA has rewritten Grimm's Fairy Tales to show how much better the outcomes would be if the protagonists were armed.  Well, John Schwartz, in the New York Times, writes that the NRA is not original in this regard.  James Thurber rewrote Riding Hood's story to say: "So the little girl took an automatic out of her basket and shot the wolf dead."

John also says that Roald Dahl has Red not only kill the bad wolf with an expert head shot, but is rewarded with a nice wolf-skin coat.   He also quotes Professor Maria Tatar, who said that "the Nazis recast Little Red Riding Hood as the innocent Aryan victim of a Jewish wolf.."   Yes, Herr Goebels had a good imagination.  (I wonder if he read that at night to all of his "beloved" children that he helped to drink cyanide in the final days of Hitler's realm.)

See how happy Red looks, now that she has killed that nasty wolf.

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