Friday Morning

Fuck, it did rain. But not much more than a little drizzling by the looks of it. If it doesn’t rain again today, I might still knock out the mowing this afternoon.

1793 George Washington

In the heat of the controversy over the Proclamation of Neutrality and the divided allegiances of his cabinet between the French and the English, President Washington apparently exploded in a purple rage in a cabinet meeting. Jefferson gives an account in his personal journal.

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The President was much inflamed; got into one of those passions when he cannot command himself; ran on much on the personal abuse which has been bestowed upon him; defied any man on earth to produce one single act of his since he had been in the government which was not done on the purest motives; [said] that he had never repented but once the having slipped the moment of resigning his office and that was every moment since; that by God he had rather be in his grave than in his present situation; that he had rather be on his farm than to be made emperor of the world; yet they were charging him with wanting to be a king.

-- Thomas Jefferson

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[Source: Ron Chernow, “Alexander Hamilton”]

Pop

Pop drives his car off to the side of the driveway. I guess Kay will be coming after all. But I may catch a break this time. Pop has his suitcase out, along with a case of beer. I think he may be going to Shiner for a reunion. I would have thought that to be a one-day trip, gone in the morning and back by the evening, but why the suitcase? Maybe they will stay overnight over there, instead of driving back and forth in one day and spending all that time on the tiresome road. It would be nice if Pop could just apprise me of his plans, instead of my having to guess at everything, but he likes to keep me on a ‘need to know’ basis.

Amazon

We have long known that Amazon is a rather evil company. We have some more news of its hardball business tactics. According to Forbes magazine, Jeff Bezos is worth 28 billion dollars. That's the man, not the company. You would think, with all that money, he could play nice with the other children. You would be wrong.

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Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle.

The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling’s new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone’s “The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon” — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as “unavailable.”

[One writer cries out...]

“Your actions to raise the prices of our books, place banners touting books that ‘are similar but lower in price’ and saying that our books will ship in 3-5 weeks when they are in stock is not only a disgusting negotiation practice, but it has made me tell my readers to shop elsewhere — and they are and will,” she wrote.

-- DAVID STREITFELD and MELISSA EDDY, "Amazon Escalates Its Battle Against Publishers" at The New York Times

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I suspect Amazon is helping to kill off serious literature once and for all, but I remain in its thrall - those prices, the wide selection, the Kindle. You can even get x-rated movies at Amazon. Hell, if I lived alone, I could have my groceries shipped to me from Amazon. As I remarked before, Amazon is bad for the world in the long term, but I am not going to live in the long term.

Mowing

After my nap, Pop comes into the big room, asking what I want for dessert this weekend: chocolate cake, plus four apples and milk. He then tells me that he and Kay will be leaving for the weekend. I was too groggy from my nap to nail down the details, but I was so excited that I thought I might have a whack at the lawn this afternoon, while they were out doing their rounds. That way, I could have the weekend with that dread chore behind me.

Nevertheless, just as I am about to crank up the mower, raindrops are falling on my head. It was a very light and unconvincing sprinkling, and I forged ahead. I got most of the back done before the rain started falling harder. This was much more convincing and I quit. However, it only rained for about five minutes, just enough to ruin my plan.

If it doesn’t rain again tonight, I’ll try again tomorrow morning.

Because of my right foot, I may need to go back to making the chore a two-day job anyway, in order to take off some of the pressure from my foot. I was really hurting while I was mowing, but this might have been because I was rushing and running about.

Of John M. Keynes

One of the few mistaken predictions made by John Maynard Keynes is that over the 21st century people would become much more productive thanks to developing technology, and that that would lead to people working much less and enjoying ever greater leisure. Why was he wrong?

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Several contributors to the volume attribute Keynes’s error to a misreading of human nature. Keynes assumed that people work in order to earn enough to buy what they need. And so, he reasoned, as incomes rose, those needs could be fulfilled in ever fewer hours. Workers would knock off earlier and earlier, until eventually they’d be going home by lunchtime. But that isn’t what people are like. Instead of quitting early, they find new things to need.

-- Elizabeth Kolbert at The New Yorker

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