HOT



Tomorrow is the first day of summer but the weather has already heated up here in Arizona.  It's in the mid to upper 90's here but we're in the mountains at over five thousand feet.  Down in the desert (not much of that left) of Phoenix and Tucson, it's approaching 110 daily.  Thank goodness for air conditioning.

Bring on the monsoon.  There already has been one haboob (dust storm) in Phoenix.  That usually means the summer rains are not far behind.

(By the way, I swiped the picture from the National Weather Service.  Thanks, guys and gals.)

TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER . . . .

I've just watched the new video of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy".  I can remember watching the first version years ago as it played on PBS after coming over from the BBC.  In that one, Alec Guinness was remarkable playing the very understated George Smiley.  In the new one, Gary Oldman is equally remarkable playing that part.  The movie is a superb telling of a period during the Cold War when word came that there was a Russian mole high in the British Secret Service and the struggle to locate and identify that mole.  If he really existed.  If you can take the slow pace of a thinking man's spy thriller, this is a great movie which I highly recommend.

This is Alec Guinness as Smiley.



And this is Gary Oldman playing the same role.

P.V. DAYS - PART TWO

In spite of the growth of Prescott Valley, this is still farm and ranch country.  So one of the events at this year's P.V. Days celebration weekend is a tractor pull.  Here are some of the competitors.

John Deere and International Harvester.  Familiar names.  I'm not sure what this one was, other than older.

Of course all of that hard work conjures up an appetite.  And here's what's for sale to satisfy that.

I have had beef jerky but I don't think I ever tried "gourmet" beef jerky.  I wonder what has been added to it.

COMPROMISE

As I said the other day, I've been reading the four volume (so far) biography of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro.  But late today, in Volume Three, I read something that I believe needs repeating here today.  It concerns conversations between Johnson and Hubert Humphrey in 1951 and 1952, both men then United States Senators.  Johnson had taken Humphrey under his wing and these conversations occurred.

"...Johnson would, evening after evening, play variations on the same theme:  "Your speeches are accomplishing nothing," he would say.  Humphrey should learn to compromise.  "Otherwise, you'll suffer the fate of those crazies, those bomb-thrower types like Paul Douglas, Wayne Morse, Herbert Lehman.  You'll be ignored, and get nothing accomplished you want."  Humphrey, the man who had refused to compromise, not only came to believe this -- "Compromise is not a dirty word," he would say.  "The Constitution itself represents the first great national compromise" -- but to believe it with all the fervor of the convert, the convert who is the most enthusiastic of believers.  Not only, he was to say, was compromise not a dirty word; those who refuse to compromise are a threat; "the purveyors of perfection," as he came to call them, "are dangerous when they . . . move self righteously to dominate.  There are those who live by the strict rule that whatever they think right is necessarily right.  They will compromise on nothing. . . . These rigid minds, which arise on both the left and the right, leave no room for other points of view, for differing human needs. . . . Pragmatism is the better method."  The fact that some of his fellow liberal senators were to come to look upon him as, in his own words, one of the "unprincipled compromisers" bothered him for a while, he was to say;  "it doesn't bother me any more at all.  I felt it was important that we inch along even if we couldn't gallop along, at least that we trot a little bit."

Could that not be read on the floor of the House during a joint session of Congress, read at every Tea Party meeting, published on the front page of every newspaper, recited on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News until the message gets through?

No, I doubt it.   But at least I'll do my part.

P.V. DAYS

Prescott Valley is about to have it's annual celebration, known as Prescott Valley Days!  It begins this evening and the carnival is set up and waiting for business.



LBJ

I've been reading Robert Caro's series of books on the life of Lyndon Baines Johnson.  I'm a little less than halfway through the third volume.  SWMBO keeps saying "why would you ever want to know that much about that man?"  I wonder, myself, some times.  There is a ton of minutia about him.  But . . . it's fascinating.  LBJ was an amazing man, a genius politician, a charmer, one of the nastiest politicos I've ever read about, a man who abused men and women who worked for him but engendered their loyalty for decades.  He was a wounded man who needed absolute command of those around him.  Freud would have gone crazy analyzing him.

From his earliest days, he had decided he "would be" President of the United States some day.  He knew that the way to do it was to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, then the Senate, then (perhaps) the Vice-Presidency and finally the ultimate prize.  His attention was focused constantly on his upward journey and he was mightily distressed when the way seemed to be slowing down.

I have spent many days in the fantastic LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas.  It is a wonderment.

One has terrible confusion in reading of his life.  One minute he is a terrific public servant, the next he is a wife-abusing, staff-abusing monster.

I think Shakespeare would have had a great joy trying to define LBJ.



DA BIRDS AGAIN

Big fat robin.

Big dumb dove.

Big dumb birdwatcher.  (You can't see them looking at the ground, goofball.)

Wow!  That light was not nice to my hair color.  Going grayer.