Yesterday, I was very late posting the Open Thread, and I apologize. I had it ready to go and just forgot to load and post it. I was working on writing and printing letters to my 401(k) custodian and to an urgent care facility which just sent me a bill for services in March of 2023. Had I not received a bill from them in July of 2023 and paid it, I would have just paid this one. But I don’t what to pay for aomething twice. I tried to call, but the menu wanted me to enter my employee ID number, which, since I’m not one, I don’t have. I didn’t even try to call the 401(k) custodian because I’ve tried in the past. Because there’s no such thing as one phone call. No matter how detailed you are, they leave some detail out, and you have to keep corresponding until they get it all. Anyway, with all that, i simply forgot to schedule it. I wish I could promise it won’t happen again, but sadly, I can’t.
In any case, yesterday’s radio opera was “Idomeo, Re di Creta” by Mozart. It’s one of those stories – and every culture seems to have one = there’s even one in the Bible – where someone is in potentially fatal danger, and prays to a god, promising to sacrifice the first living thing he meets when he gets home, and then that turns out to be his child. Oops. Not all of the stories end the same way, though – there are several directions it can go. In this opera, it ends up with the voice of Neptune telling him not to kill his son, but to abdicate n his favor, by which his sacrifice becomes his kingdom instead. Everyone is happy, except the princess the son doesn’t marry. But nothing was ever going to make her happy anyway. And now I’m off to visit Virgil visit Virgil
This, from The 19th, is very much peripheral. But there’s not way i could cover the substantal part of the Convention like the big boys and girls, especially since many readers have likely watched it. And its not an unimportnt side issue in view of Project 2025, for sure.
This is Heather Cox Richardson writing after the third day of the Convention. I saved it for Sunday because – because it’s kind of a sermon. An American, Democratic sermon. Don’t skip it because I said that. It is very encouraging.
Joyce Vance has some suggesions for anyone who is not inspired to do something but doesn’t know what. (Steve SChmidt has the same ones – because he quotes then from her. She’s in Scotland just now, but the animals are being taken care of.)
