Wednesday, February 25, 2026

John Sandford - #4

John Sandford is #4 on my list of most read authors currently at 18 novels and counting. I could easily read quite a few more. He's written a lot of books. The police procedure crime mystery novels in the Lucas Davenport series account for 17 of the 18 books I've read. He's been writing one a year in the series since the late 80's.

Before John Sandford became a New York Times Best Selling author he was a journalist who received a Pulitzer Prize for his work.

I started reading his books in 2019 and that year I read 11 books in the series. There are 35 books in that series with another one scheduled for publication this year. The last book of his I read was in May 2021. He has another 15 or so books in a couple of off shoot series.

I've enjoyed all of his books that I've read and they have been page turners that I always finished in less than a week. I should get back into this series.

The John Sandford books I've read and when.
  1. Rules of Prey,1989 - Feb 2019
  2. Shadow Prey, 1990 - Feb 2019
  3. Eyes of Prey, 1991 - Mar 2019
  4. Silent Prey, 1992 - Apr 2019
  5. Winter Prey, 1993 - Apr 2019
  6. Night Prey, 1994 - May 2019
  7. Mind Prey, 1995 - May 2019
  8. Sudden Prey, 1996 - Jun 2019
  9. Secret Prey, 1998 - Aug 2019
  10. Certain Prey, 1999 - Oct 2019
  11. Easy Prey, 2000 - Nov 2019
  12. Chosen Prey, 2001 - Mar 2020
  13. Mortal Prey, 2002 - Jun 2020
  14. Dead Watch, 2006 - Jul 2020
  15. Naked Prey, 2003 - Sep 2020
  16. Hidden Prey, 2004 - Mar 2021
  17. Broken Prey, 2005 - Jun 2022
  18. Invisible Prey, 2007 - May 2023

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

State of the Union - IFLA

I'm glad Becky and I will be at a chamber music concert tonight while demented donny is on the podium spewing out his overflowing his diaper.

From that guy in Australia...  

THE STATE OF THE UNION: A FUCKING EULOGY FOR A DYING EMPIRE

So apparently America is doing a thing tonight. They're going to wheel out a near 80 year old relic from an Adderall fuelled era who looks like he was inflated with a bicycle pump, slapped with a fake tan from a Bunnings discount bin, and ask him to stand at a podium for two hours and tell you everything is fine.

Everything. Is. Fine.

The guy who cannot walk down a ramp without looking like a newborn giraffe on ice. The guy who loses his train of thought mid sentence so often that his speechwriters have started building in random pauses just so it looks intentional. The guy whose mouth is moving but what is coming out has all the coherence of a drunk uncle at Christmas who just discovered Facebook in 2019.

That guy. That guy is about to tell you the State of the Union.
And people are going to watch it. Voluntarily. With their own eyes and ears. Sit down, pour themselves a drink, and go, "Yeah, let's hear what the decaying tangerine has to say tonight."

Here is the State of the Union, mate. I will save you two fucking hours.

It is cooked. Completely, catastrophically, comprehensively cooked.

Your dollar is tanking. Your allies are gone, not drifting away, gone, like they changed their number and blocked you on everything. Canada is looking at you like an ex who finally got therapy. Europe has moved on. They are building their own shit now. They held emergency meetings, not about Russia, not about China, about you. About how to survive you. Let that sink in.

Your bond market is being quietly abandoned by every major economy on earth, because apparently when you spend four years threatening everyone, insulting your creditors, and governing like a mob boss at a casino he is about to burn down for the insurance money, people stop trusting you with their money. Wild concept.

Your healthcare system was already a fucking crime scene and he is turning it into a memorial.

Your social safety net? Being shredded by a man who has never once in his entire pampered, gold toilet, daddy's money life needed a safety net for anything. A man who went bankrupt six times and still landed on his feet because the system was built for people like him. And now he is in charge of that system. For you. For people who actually need it.

And who is he doing it for? Let us be honest. Let us just fucking say it out loud.
His mates. His extraordinarily, obscenely, eye wateringly rich mates. The ones who flew on the same planes as dead pedophiles and somehow, somehow, none of their names ever quite made it to the front page. Funny that. Funny how the files kept getting delayed. Funny how the guy who promised to release everything is also the guy whose name keeps appearing in the same social circles as the guy who did not kill himself.

Funny. Funny funny funny.

And tonight, he is going to stand there, swaying slightly, squinting at the teleprompter like it owes him money, that mouth doing that thing it does, that puckered little arsehole shaped grimace he pulls when he is reading words someone else wrote because his own words come out like a blender full of wet newspaper, and he is going to lie to your face.

He is going to tell you the economy is the greatest in history, while your grocery bill is eating your rent money.

He is going to tell you America is respected again, while NATO is quietly building contingency plans that do not include the United States.

He is going to tell you the border is secure, crime is down, the military is strong, the allies are back, the future is bright, and the crowd behind him, those empty, hollow, sycophantic fucking ghouls who sold every principle they ever pretended to have for a photo op and a mention on Truth Social, they are going to stand up and clap.

They are going to clap, folks. They are going to clap like trained seals at an aquarium that is on fire.

Because that is what enablers do. That is what cowards do. That is what people do when they have already made the deal and the only way to avoid accountability is to keep cheering, keep nodding, keep pretending the emperor's clothes are magnificent while the rest of the world watches a naked old man shuffle toward the podium.

The State of the Union is this:

A great nation, and yes, for all its flaws, it was genuinely great in ways that mattered, is being systematically hollowed out. Not by foreign enemies. Not by immigrants. Not by the people they keep blaming.

By one man. And the spineless, greedy, morally bankrupt parade of arseholes who let him do it. Who helped him do it. Who fundraised for him doing it. Who looked at everything he was and everything he had done and said, "Yeah, that is our guy."
That is the State of the Union.

You can watch him say otherwise for two hours if you want.

Or you can just accept that the building is on fire, the guy holding the hose is selling the water, and the State of the fucking Union is, to use the precise, technical, economic term, absolutely fucked.

And I'm betting not a single word about the doctored Trump Epstein Files
Share this if you think someone needed to say it. They did.

Cara Black - #3

#3 on my list of most read authors at 20 books is Cara Black. This week I started reading novel number 21. Her crime detective novels all take place in Paris and the titles are based on the neighborhood where the crime takes place. The stories all contain fascinating descriptions of these neighborhoods and their history. 

I read my first Cara Black novel in 2018 shortly after returning from our vacation in Paris and I've continued to read them since then. I'm enjoying number 21 and will get back to reading it shortly.

Monday, February 23, 2026

Blizzard in Philly

Overnight a blizzard dumped a lot of snow on Philadelphia and up and down the East Coast. NYC got a lot too. We were talking to Rita last night and she was describing the snow coming down outside her window and happy that she had nowhere to go over the next few days. We had also talked to Katie this week and she was anticipating the heavy snow coming and having the kids home from school again.

So today it looks like the kids are having some fun with the snow in their backyard and the snow in the photos have really piled up around their house.

One of the things about snow storms in Philly is the snow piled up on the narrow streets where there isn't anywhere to put the snow. The narrow streets get clogged with plowed in cars and huge piles of snow. The snow plowing by the city focuses on the main streets and the narrow side streets just don't get plowed very well.
The grandkids did get to play in the snow in their backyard today. It looks like Todd made them a snow fort.






Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child

Douglas Preston and Lincoln Child have been writing together a series of horror crime mystery novels since 1995. Most of them have featured the maverick FBI detective Aloysius Pendergast along with a few other characters that have been part of this ongoing series.

I've enjoyed 26 of their novels. I have been reading them since 2018 so I've read a few a year. A new book was just recently released and yesterday I put an e-book copy on hold with the NY public library. I'm looking forward to reading it. The last book of this series I read in 2024.

I also read of couple of Douglas Preston's earlier historical nonfiction books.

Sunday, February 22, 2026

The Incredible Shrinking Man - Film Favorites

Back to posting my Film Favorites.

The Incredible Shrinking Man was one of my favorite movies from my years as a kid walking around the corner to the Saturday matinee movies. It was released in 1957 but I saw it a little later during those double header movies.

I did see this several times and it always scared me. Especially when he was fighting the family cat or the spider in the basement.






Hockey Gold - USA vs Canada

Becky and I watched the USA vs Canada Olympic hockey game this morning and were very excited to see the USA get the gold medal in a 2-1 overtime game. It was an awesome game and very tough for both teams. I really did think that Canada was going to win because they seemed to dominate throughout most of the game. Then came the 3 on 3 sudden death overtime. Wow, what an ending. And what a way to end the two weeks of the Olympics. The closing ceremony will be on this afternoon.

We were downstairs watching the game by 8:30 this morning which meant we missed a few minutes of the first period. I thought it was starting at 8:30. We didn't much and we certainly saw a lot of the game. And of course the overtime too.

Jack Hughes scored the winning goal in overtime and the goaltender Connor Hellebuyck won the MVP award for the tournament. This was the first time the USA team won Olympic gold in hockey in 46 years... since that Miracle on Ice against the Soviet Union at Lake Placid in 1980.

And the USA women's hockey team beat the Canadian team in overtime a few days ago.

Saturday, February 21, 2026

Open The Bars

I saw some online reporting this evening concerning the US vs Canada hockey game tomorrow for the gold medal. 


Today New York Governor Kathy Hochol made the following statement:

"Tomorrow, it's a gold medal morning. I've directed the State Liquor Authority to suspend enforcement of alcohol service hour from 6-10 AM so bars and restaurants can open early and fans can watch the U.S. go for gold together. Go USA."

We all know that the governor is a Buffalo girl and watching important hockey games in a bar is a tradition. Well, this is for most of New York but some places, like NYC, are under a state of weather emergency because of a coming blizzard so they cannot open. I also saw a list online of Buffalo bars that will be open very early tomorrow morning for the game and be serving drinks... and food.

Lion Hearts: A Novel

Lion Hearts by Dan Jones, 2025. The third novel of the Essex Dogs Trilogy. I read this book in a week and enjoyed it very much as I did the first two novels in this series of Middle Ages history and the Hundred Years War between England and France.

At the end of this book it certainly looked like there will be another one in the series.

The author Dan Jones is a popular historian and journalist who has written at least a dozen books on the history of the Middle Ages throughout his career and only recently began writing these historical novels.

There are a lot of his books I've put on my to-read list including ones about the Crusades, the Templars and many others.

Friday, February 20, 2026

Another Box to Clean Out

I cleaned out another box of "stuff" today that contained lots of paperwork, maps, guide books, tickets, etc from our trip to London and Paris in 2018. Most of the stuff I threw away. I did keep a small amount of our personal guide pamphlets that I think we would enjoy looking through one more time but everything else went into the recycle container unless it had personal info that went into the trash.

There must be another box somewhere with our "stuff" from our 2019 trip to Dublin, London and Edinburgh. It will be fun to go through that one too.