Stamp-O-Rama

A weird day yesterday, weather-wise. It was rainy, but not rainy enough to make a difference -- just light spatters and droplets here and there. We haven't had much rain at all in the last few weeks, and the ground is hard and cracked. I've been watering in the garden, but we could stand some decent showers.

I mostly stayed inside and worked on sorting and mounting those stamps I bought several weeks ago. Here's what that process looks like:

As I wrote before, there's a lot of duplication, so not all of those stamps will need to be mounted in my albums -- just one of any that I don't already have. I have no idea what I'll do with all the duplicates. This will teach me not to buy an unsorted package sold by weight!

Anyway, I worked on those much of the morning, and then read a while. The New York Times published a massive three-part series of articles about Tucker Carlson -- too massive, in my opinion, but I plowed through. It left me feeling that Carlson's conservatism is a reaction to his own unstable family life as a child, and that he's basically an opportunist milking Trumpist populism for all it's worth. I think he probably feels he's giving a voice to a segment of the population that has historically been denied one -- but to my way of thinking, it's not his job to vocalize and justify the misguided perceptions and paranoias of his viewers. It's to set them straight with the facts.

I've only ever seen short clips of Carlson's show -- I've never watched it in its entirety, and don't plan to. I have enough aggravation in my life. It concerns me, though, that more and more Americans get their "news" from pundits like Carlson who aren't reporting news at all. They're spinning opinion, which is a different thing altogether. This shift isn't new, but the problem is becoming more and more dire, as we saw on January 6th of last year. Oh, for the days of Walter Cronkite, who for all his flaws at least made objectivity the goal.

Olga and I went to the cemetery in the afternoon, and she had a good walk with some squirrel-barking and tennis-ball-chasing. Those flowers are creeping buttercup, the weed that I pulled out of our own garden on Saturday. They're pretty, but man, they do take over.

Finally, last night, we watched the movie "The Duke," starring one of our celebrity neighbors. It was light and entertaining, and I didn't know much about the episode it depicts -- the theft of a painting of the Duke of Wellington from the UK's National Gallery in 1961. (It was soon returned.) I'm curious to see the painting now. I probably have seen it and just didn't know the story at the time.