David > Recent Status Updates

The first worldwide radio broadcast was a fight between Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney.

Our age is crowded with celebrities but none can compare in prominence to Charles Lindbergh when he crossed the Atlantic.

Damn! I never knew before how popular, widespread and influential the KKK once was.

A marvelous adventure I would not take for a million dollars.

I cannot imagine why these guys persist. What a perilous ordeal, with seemingly few rewarding moments. The natural threats are bad enough but they're compounded by thieves, corrupt officials, drug gangs....

Kind of ironic, being stuck in Progreso....

He dreamed about the trip for 10 years but is amazingly unprepared and ignorant as he ventures into Mexican waters. Now his and his sons's lives are in danger. Some adventure!

Amazing to think how big an industry based on fashion can be -- the fur trade, for instance -- affecting international relations, development of the U.S., fate of Native Americans -- not to mention the animals. Or bird feathers to adorn women's hats: no utility at all, mere fashion.

Lewis takes a bath with Indians at Lolo Hot Springs. Oh, man, I'll bet he needed it! (He skipped the icy cold plunge the Indians took in the creek.)

L & C are plagued "eye knats" (eye gnats): little flies that are attracted to and feed on lachrymal secretions. Why can't it be creatures like eye gnats that go extinct instead of passenger pigeons and snow leopards?

My wanderlust is at a high pitch of excitement: the Missouri Falls are just ahead.

"each private ate as much as nine or ten pounds of meat per day." They ate 6000 calories/day but still felt hungry because there was so little fat in their diet.

These first meetings with native American tribes and nations are fascinating. If only they hadn't been followed by genocide....

Amazing how Lewis had to prepare for a journey in which he would be practically as remote from civilization and help as an astronaut going to the moon or Mars.

Reagan was not the least qualified president and proved to be far from the worst. Thanks to Morris, I know Reagan about as well as anyone knew him and better than he knew himself. As a biography the book is ground-breaking in form. Its major limitation is its subject, whose shallowness contrasts with the depth of the _fictional_ narrator!

What a simpleton. If only he weren't in a position of power, he would be just any old man.

"an inability to comprehend the reason that challenges faith.... he _believed_ the way a child believes": there you have Reaganomics and the essence of the _non_-"reality-based" politics.

It took me 372 pages but I finally discovered why the persona of the narrator of this biography has seemed from the beginning too remarkable to be true -- and indeed nearly implausible. It's the kind of discovery that makes you all most want to hurl the book out the window (which I did once to a book by Pynchon, I think it was). Well, now bitterly wised up, I'll read on. Why should I be shocked at fabrication?

Morris's son said about Reagan: "he uses humor to express hate." That's an ugly practice but so common among the Becks, Palins, & co.

It's like C. Wright Mills was thinking specifically of Reagan when he wrote, "will not those Americans who are celebrated come to coincide more clearly with those who are the most powerful?" Now we have know-nothing do-nothings like Palin on the verge of actual power.

Extraordinary biography: turns out Morris and Reagan are coevals whose lives intersected in their early days, and especially at Eureka College.

Too bad that this great leader did not, as president, lead the nation in improving civil rights. But thanks to him we didn't use nuclear weapons, as he was pressured to do. He seems to have been a great good man. Ambrose's biography is an enjoyable, engaging one.

If Ike couldn't convince people that _less_ money should be spent on defense what chance would any civilian president ever have?

If Obama thinks being president is a thankless job he's in good company. Imagine the audacity of dismissing Eisenhower's judgment of military matters. I mean, if there was one person in the world who could be deemed an authority, it would be a five-star general. Yet politicians kept insisting that the U.S. needed more nukes. How many? More than the U.S.S.R. That's all that mattered.

"Eisenhower's calm, common-sense, deliberate response to Sputnik may have been his finest gift to the nation...."

It's chilling to think of the repeated pressure on Ike to use nuclear weapons.

Even in Ike's day Republicans wanted tax cuts without bothering to replace revenue. Ike was the radical: he actually believed in arithmetic.

Ike quit a 4 pack a day habit cold turkey. That's willpower!

Eisenhower on Montgomery: "he's just little inside as he is outside."