I’m leading with the cats, because they’re the big draw, but stick around for the books, which will come along in just a bit.

Phoebe felt like doing a bit of posing this week. Here she is, mid-belly rub.

And just sitting as pretty as you please in the hallway.

Poseidon is also doing well, but he has decided to play it coy. He’s in this photo, somewhere, I assure you. But he knows you can’t see him.

Sometimes being relaxed involves letting gravity take over and just sprawling wherever.

So they are both doing well and enjoying the beginning of their summer. Aren’t we all? I love the mental shift, and now I’m beginning to think that maybe the cats can sense it, too.

This must be the longest daffodil stem I’ve ever seen. It is in an almost perfect spot, removed from the lawn mower blades, reaching out for maximum sun. Just close enough to where we would walk to notice how it is showing off.

I wonder how much it will continue to grow before it gets the attention of a passing critter or bug.

We had a punchy little bike ride this evening. Good legs, good lungs, comfortable in the cockpit, and just a little droopy up one little roller. Everywhere else I could produce good power. Here, The Yankee had finally caught up to me and surged out a little ahead. She was pouring on the coals while I was fiddling with a jersey pocket. She pulled out a small gap, but I was able to shut it down. It was one of those days when most anything seemed possible.

It makes riding fun.

That makes you want to ride all the time. So tomorrow, maybe?

I finished Brilliant Beacons Saturday night. I bought this in April 2021.

I was not aware that our first lighthouses dated to colonial times. But, like many people who have visited any surviving lighthouses, I knew that automation and GPS and other technologies have improved a sailor’s circumstance such that most of the bright old lights are well beyond obsolete. This book covers much that took place between 1716 and the mid 20th century and does so in an easy, approachable manner. Not every lighthouse is dissected, but you’ll gain a terrific appreciation for some of the engineering involved at the most demanding locations. You’ll get a sense of the people that worked in the lighthouses, their steadfastness and their heroism and, sometimes, the crazed things that took place beneath the big, beaming lights. You’ll learn about the brilliant Fresnel lens (most of you have the same technology in your headlights) and you’ll come to know the different parts of the government that made lighthouses a practical fixture, long before they became a photographic fixation. Lighthouses are one of those things that, over the course of time, we got right. And if you’re at all interested in the subject matter, this book gets it right, too.

In addition to a massively overflowing bookshelf, I have too many books in my Kindle app. There were 52 books waiting there last night, all of them, of course, are of an interest to me. I bought them, after all. But which one to read next? I suppose there’s chronology. I’d probably be reading about Jamestown or the Holy See. But what about books that cover broad swaths of time? Or these other books about wood or food? So I could go with purchase date, then. No idea. Alphabetical? Reasonable enough. That’d probably create a little variation, which is desirable. But would that be alphabetical based on titles or the authors’ names?

So I did what anyone would do: I counted all the books and ran a random number generator until one number showed up a third time. And that number leads us to Last of the Doughboys, which I purchased in February last year.

Starting in 2003, reporter Richard Rubin started interviewing surviving members of the U.S. military and auxiliary services that took part in the Great War. Everyone here is more than 100 years old, because time marches on. I’ve read two chapters so far. The first was about his inspiration and the process to finding these centenarians. The second chapter was a summary of an all-but forgotten memoir of WW1, Over the Top, by Arthur Guy Empey. He wrote three other books, none as popular as the wildly successful first. He also penned a handful of popular songs, and a few silent films, acting in some of them, before the talkies drove him out. He had a bunch of magazine, pulp stories under his belt, as well.

In 1935, then in his early 50s, he helped organize a paramilitary organization in Hollywood.

It’s always been a weird place, basically.

None of this last part, the part about the rest of Empey’s life, has figured into Rubin’s Doughboys book. If you read about Empey, it’s clear he made a living on interest in the Great War right up until the public zeitgeist shifted in the mid 1930s. He had a good run of it, though, and himself lived into his 70s, dying in 1963. The rest of Rubin’s book, though, will see his peers having lived decades on.

Time and soldiers, they all know about marching. And in time we lose details. Did the right face happen here or there? Either way, we know we pivoted on this foot, because that’s the concept of the movement. The details might be forgotten, but the fundament is still there, we pivot on the ball of this foot. The non-historian remembers little of the Great War. The thoughtful person might be able to point to some of its many lasting, and continuing legacies. Most of us, at least, recall that it happened. It hardly seems enough to remember, considering the cost. But, then again, this was a century ago. Next month, it’s 105 years, in fact, since Gen. John Pershing arrived in France.

That’s history for you. Vital today, heroic tomorrow, then reunions the next week, and the mists of time after that. Before too long, the original media turns digital or dust.

This footage is the Wikipedia of newsreels, and there’s a heck of a downshift in the final quarter of the footage.

Pershing died in ’48. I bet his name gets mentioned a few times in this book, though. So far, it’s one you want to keep getting back to, eager to see who you’ll meet next.

I wonder how much of it I’ll read tonight.