🚨 Paywall Be Damned, There's Problems! 🚨

Good Sunday to the Muleteer herd.

Thank you for paying heed to this emergency broadcast of the Donkey Thoughts as brought to you from my more erudite wife. I think it’s safe to say she’s eruditer than I am, me.

Because of the public service nature of this alert, I’ll leave the paywall out of it for this weekend. Hie ye to the video!

Thanks again to the fantastic National Book Festival put on by the Library of Congress this weekend. It was so gratifying to be back in person with all the readers and writers and knowledge fans. I never dreamed I would get to meet Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, and that we would compare notes of being one-time Champaign, Illinois ne’er-do-wells (maybe she was more just a do-well). We just about wet ourselves listening to the cute AF Megan Mullally put a quarter in Leslie Jordan and just watch him hilariously spin out yarns, sometimes incorporating delightfully inappropriate language, promoting his hilarious, new book How Y’All Doing? Book folks like to laugh too, it turns out.

I also heard gripping presentations from Candice Millard, Andrea Davis Pinkney, Ed Yong, David Maraniss and David M. Rubenstein, and toured the Library itself. Boy howdy, what a gorgeous repository of knowledge. An elfin docent named Mary told us all about the Gutenberg Bible (1 of the 3 they have) on display near the Great Hall. I was not aware, for example, that parchment was originally the word for thin sheep skin, and vellum was calf skin, if memory serves, which was an early, very inconvenient way to source paper.

Anyhow, those are the thoughts for today. Thank you to my bride and to all the scholars, teachers and librarians out there, for curating the wealth of knowledge that resides in books and trickles or streams its way into our everyday lives. They give a stubborn mule like myself hope that I can still evolve and learn and become improved in a palatable way.

Love,

This video fare is usually behind the paywall, but this is a matter of life or death, to a narrow way of thinking, so it’s going out across all the channels. If you care to subscribe monetarily, I thank you, and if you might be recruited only to listen and consider to the free fodder, then I thank you for your attention. If you’re not even reading this, then you can seriously eat shit. xoxo