Probably not.

Now on to today’s program…….

It’s been raining all day here and, while the normal temperature reaches into the low 70s, I don’t think it hit 60 today. So I pretty much stayed where I am.

I also didn’t really turn the news on, so if anything important happened today, I have yet to hear about it, and I am clearly the better off for that.

And, to tell you the truth, my mind is pretty much a blank.

Now a normal person in my position would simply send a series of parameters to ChatGPT and see what it comes up and print it out as my own. But I am not a normal person. So that is off the table.

So let me tell you about the book I am “reading” (my latest Penguin). Called “Life in Shakespeare’s England”, it is a compilation of 16th and 17th century English writers, covering a number of subjects – Countryside, Superstition, Education, London, Books and Authors, Theatre, the Court, House and Home, Rogues and Vagabonds, and the Sea. The typical entry is about a page and a half. The Compiler was a man named John Dover Wilson, who was a pretty prominent guy, it appears, mid-20th century in Elizabethan studies circles.

I just began the book last night, and I barely opened it today, but I must say it is a real page-turner. Just not in the way that phrase is normally used. It is a page turner not because you can’t wait to see what the next page will bring about, but because you certainly can’t read all of these Elizabethan authors (their language, it does not appear to have been modernized) word for word, so you look at the first paragraph and a line or two after that (unless it really grabs you), and turn the page.

I have read Countryside, Superstition and Education. The English countryside was just as you thought it was, and just beginning to become a bit less so. The problems of education then were not that different from the problems of education today, but not the same either. And superstition in those days seems to have been much more ingrained than today – it wasn’t just knocking on wood, or avoiding black cats. It involved the Devil (who could infest anyone), witches (who feasted on foods made from the blood of children) and ordinary people who seemingly could do miraculous things (and therefore must be possessed of demons and therefore tortured until they confessed). Did they really believe that? We will see what the rest of the book brings.

SPOILER ALERT. Maybe I should also mention “Night Action”, in case I already haven’t, the Netflix series (10 episodes, I think) I am watching while cycling without gaining ground. It’s a show set in Washington DC, but filmed (of course) in Vancouver. Someone blew up a Metro, and then a couple (seemingly ordinary, but really spies) was murdered by a man with a mustache and an accent and his kinky girlfriend. Their attractive, but down on her luck, niece was in the house and escaped, reporting her adventure to a number that she had been told call in an “if something every happens” note her aunt had given her. Little did she know that she was calling a basement phone in the White House and that she was going to meet a guy who (my guess) will wind up to be the love of her life, as they dodge the two murderers, trying to figure out the meaning of a second her aunt had left for her, warning her that something terrible was afoot and it was all occurring at the direction of someone in the White House. Who can you trust? Who is trying to destroy the country, and who will be its savior? (By the way, the U.S. president is an attractive woman – but of a certain age, or getting there – and I surely don’t trust the vice-president. I didn’t trust the assistant director of the FBI, either. But he already dead.)

Do I recommend this show? Not really, but it isn’t so bad that I want to abandon it. Yet.