Golden Day

Last night's sore throat didn't disappear overnight, so I stayed in bed pretty much all day and read. First I polished off the T Boone Pickens auto-bio I had found somewhere in a thrift store or something. Or maybe it had belonged to Mary's dad. Not a great book, but I learned a bit about the oil business and something about the golden days of raiders and how the emergence of junk bonds helped them shake up staid and complacent board rooms. All told some complex stuff -- and Boone is a complex figure, particularly his role in the whole Swift Boat episode a couple of decades later -- but corporate activism of this sort has a role in the investment ecosystem.

Then, chicken tortilla soup from Monterrey Tacos and Burritos -- my sick day staple. Good stuff. After lunch, I lay in bed and looked out at the golden leaves in the backyard, and I actually fell asleep for an hour, something that doesn't always happen on days when I spend a lot of time in bed.

After napping, I got started on VS Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas, which had been in the to be read stack for a long time. So far so good.

Meanwhile, in impeachment land, Mary swore it was a good day, and the liberal chatosphere seems to agree, but the numbers over at 538 seem to be moving towards impeachment fatigue in the genpop. And if the genpop doesn't swing, you damn sure know the Republican Senate ain't goin nowhere.

But it is inspiring in its way to watch the proceedings in snippets, to watch these non-descript, earnest career civil servants come forward and act professionally, as they have their whole careers. "The Swamp." The Trumposphere seems not to grasp that all these educated people could have gone out into the private sector and made a whole lot more money, but they chose to work in government and serve the common good, and now they get reamed for it by a bunch of fuckwits.