Monday

Three straight days of drinking. I might need rehab. The good news is, they were enjoyable days with no untoward hangovers. The bad news is, I'm shot, so I'm taking a day off from blogging. I'm just posting two pics from the weekend and two quotes from my weekend reading.

I was at the Frankenmuth Music Festival. It was polka, polka, polka. From what a TDE reader tells me, the Festival on Saturday night was on national television: The Polka Channel, or something like that. You can see the cameras in this pic (it's a random shot; I don't know any of the people):

In this picture, I'm standing with Josh Kowalski, the grandson of Walter Kowalski in Gran Torino. Walter was played by Clint Eastwood; Josh was played by Michael Kurowski, who is dating my niece. He came to the Frankenmuth festivities. Very nice, outgoing kid:

The random quotes from my weekend reading:

First, Alan Jacobs identifies a malady that I think has afflicted me for the past 25 years:

The extreme reader, to coin a phrase, is a rare bird indeed. (“I have done what people do, my life makes a reasonable showing,” Lynne Sharon Schwartz writes. “Can I go back to my books now?”) Such people are born, not made, I think; or mostly born and only a little made. They take care of themselves; they always do go back to their books. They come out of the woodwork when Clay Shirky says that War and Peace isn't interesting to reply that, to the contrary, it's immensely interesting, fascinating, absorbing, and by the way, Mr. Shirky, have you ever tried reading it or are you speaking out of ignorance?–and then back to their books they go.

Second, a disturbing trend:

In 1990, 6.4 million people worked for federal, state, and local governments. By 2010, that number had grown almost 6 times ”“ to 38.3 million ”“ with many of these jobs being white-collar.