We start with a photo of our friends, Yoram and Smadar Levy the night before they returned to their home in Israel. Missing are Josh, who couldn’t make it, and Joan, who was our photographer.

I want to follow up with a few hanging chads from last week.

First, Michelle and Josh came over and jump started Edie’s car and then drove it on an errand. I am going to make sure it holds its charge, so perhaps we don’t need a replacement battery.

Second, I did find out how to get my cursor back on my Asus Vivobook. Turns out it was pretty easy. You just had to know how to do it.

Third, the book I mentioned yesterday, A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Maddox Ford, was the third volume of his World War I tetralogy, written in the 1920s. I went back to look at the Wikipedia articles on the other volumes, and realize that I would have appreciated A Man Could Stand Up much more had I read the first two books earlier. Mainly because I would have understood the characters better had I known something more about their back stories. A Man Could Stand Up is, to a large extent, a book about active warfare – think All Quiet on the Western Front or A Red Badge of Courage. I understood that from my reading. But it is also a story of England before the war, a story of the changes in the life and of the thinking of a young, wealthy Englishman (known as “The Last Tory”) between 1912 and 1918, moving from the certainty of pre-war Britain, through the tragedy and tumult of the war, and then into the absolute uncertainty of what was going to happen next.

I should add that Ford had mentioned that the one minor Jewish character had changed his name to avoid anti-German prejudice during the war. In fact, Ford Maddox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer, and changed his own name as well.

Okay, the regular baseball season is over, with the Nats beating the Mets 6-4, and in the great rivalry between the Nats and the Cardinals, the winner was …….. a tie, each finishing 77-85. For the Nats, this was better than expected at the start of the season. For the Cardinals, this was the first time they finished below .500 for the second year in a row in the last several hundred years. But that does not mean that baseball is over – the playoffs and World Series will run another 5 or 6 weeks into November.

But baseball also made the front page of the New York Times this morning, as there is apparently a proposal by MLB that a game be played in a national park, and our president loves the idea and decided to build a stadium in Grand Tetons National Park. Now, I ask you. What could be dumber? It would be easier to declare Yankee Stadium a national park.

But having major sports teams playing in strange places must be the thing to do. Which means, it must be very lucrative. The NFL game yesterday between the Baltimore Ravens and the Dallas Cowboys was not played in Baltimore or Dallas or even in a national park. It was played in Rio de Janeiro, at the Maracana stadium. It was quite a game, with Baltimore getting a field goal to break a 31-31 tie with (take a deep breath) exactly one second left on the game clock. And next weekend, the Washington Commanders (who upset the Super Bowl champions from Seattle 33-31 yesterday) will play Indianapolis not at Yellowstone or Yosemite, but at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. The game starts at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday in the Eastern Time Zone, so church attendance in DC, which may never be very high (I don’t really know) will face stiff competition.

Meanwhile, the ice hockey Capitals, who have won all three of their pre-season games, open their season Friday night against the Hurricanes in Raleigh. The NBA Washington Wizards do not open their season until October 21.

I was feeling a little under the weather yesterday (I seem to be good today), so we didn’t go to our two scheduled Sukkah parties (both basically moved indoors because of the rain) so that I would not infect anyone. So the day was quiet and after supper and the game in Rio, we decided to watch the MTV Video Award show for 2026. I hadn’t heard any of the music that was played – or maybe I have (you could play it all for me now, and I wouldn’t recognize it) – and it didn’t seem very appealing to me. There was a lot of glitz and fancy staging, all of which left me cold. Snoop Dogg (I really don’t know who he is – I guess he is not the guy that went to jail) was the most boring host imaginable.

Madonna (age 68, mind you) sang the opening number with a younger person named Carpenter which displayed an extraordinary amount of energy (although the song and choreography were pretty dreadful, I thought) for a senior citizen, or for anyone else. She also won many awards, although I left the sound off for most of the non-musical goings on. But she seemed to want to talk and talk and talk. I saw there were several performers who only had one name – Raye, Lila, and I think some others. Bruno Mars was restrained and actually sang what I would call a song. And then was Taylor Swift, who spoke like a very ordinary person, thank you, and premiered her newest video, which left me totally cold.

My ambition was to use that show to catch myself up on popular culture. I did not succeed. Did anyone of my readers watch the MTV award show? I think I know the answer to that question.

Finally, I started to read Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is Our Country, the story of the Jewish Bund in Russia and beyond, and I read the first 30 or so pages, but then I got diverted and turned to an extraordinary monograph called (in full): “The Bund and Social Democracy, 1903-1906, History Honors Thesis, Spring-1964, Arthur R. Hessel”. 88 typewritten pages, plus footnotes and bibliography, only a few typos, and……brilliant.

When I started the thesis, I was assigned a mentor, who was a graduate student in Russian studies, and who was writing his PhD thesis on a history of Russian Orthodox Church bells. As you can imagine, we were not sympatico, and when I handed him my first draft, he said (and this is when I stopped listening) something like “because you have picked such an uninteresting topic, I would suggest you cut it by about a half; no one will want to read something this long”. My mentor (Valentine Boss, where are you now?) never saw my second draft. We never met again. I did it my way.