Sunday Thoughts for June 7, 2020

Hi there, Dear Reader. I hope all’s well with you, wherever you may be on this Sunday in June, 2020. Here in my corner of Florida it’s just past two on a cloudy and rainy afternoon; Tropical Storm Cristobal is churning out in the Gulf of Mexico, and though it is further north from where I live, we are still getting some of the outer band’s wind and rain.

I woke up later than usual this morning, having gone to bed sometime after 1 AM after watching The Longest Day, John Denver: The Wildlife Concert, and Great Voices Sing John Denver. I’m not sure at what time I finally made my way to the bedroom and went to sleep; suffice it to say that it was so late that even though I woke up shortly before 9:30 AM, I still feel sleepy, despite the consumption of a hearty breakfast and two cups of coffee.

I wasn’t going to post here today, but I changed my mind because tomorrow I’ll only have Internet access for about an hour early in the morning, then for about another hour around noon, and then will have to cool my heels – as it were – till around five or so. Other people in the house need to be online during the day, and as I explained in an April post about life with COVID-19 social distancing, bandwith is not exactly in abundance here. I don’t need it as much as others, so I can put my Lenovo all-in-one on airplane mode and work offline.

What that means for this blog is this: I can write my posts at any time during the day, even on airplane mode, but I can’t publish anything until after 5 PM during business hours four days a week. So I have to make good use of my weekends and write/publish posts for A Certain Point of View, Too whilst I can be connected to the Internet.

Anyway, as I write this I’m listening to the digital copy of the remastered version of Star Wars: A New Hope’s soundtrack, which I reviewed here on May 29; this is a cool reconstruction of one of my favorite records of all time, and it is appropriate underscore because I’m looking for photos of some of the Star Wars: The Black Series figures I plan to review over the next few days.

Because we’re in the process of decorating my office/mancave, we finally took the Star Wars The Black Series Darth Vader with 40th Anniversary Legacy Stand out from a storage bin – after almost three years – so we can put it and the other 11 figures that I bought to go with it in late December 2017. We need to put a floating shelf up on the office wall first, but when that’s done, we’ll assemble the stand – which comes with a cool-looking backdrop – and place all 12 figures on it to show ’em off.

I’m not sure when this project will finally be complete, but now that the figures are out of the storage bin and where I can get a hold of them, I can at least review individual figures, such as Luke Skywalker…..

….and Princess Leia Organa…..

In other news, I just received my copy of Library of America’s Barbara Tuchman: The Guns of August & The Proud Tower. I’m still reading my other Library of America hardcover, Cornelius Ryan: The Longest Day, A Bridge Too Far, but if curiosity gets the better of me I might browse through my new hardcover later today. The Guns of August, published in 1962, is about the first month of World War I and is perhaps Tuchman’s most famous work; cited by President John F. Kennedy during that year’s Cuban Missile Crisis as a primer on how a badly-managed crisis led to a catastrophic war that killed millions and destroyed four great empires, The Guns of August earned a Pulitzer Prize in the History category in 1963. I think I might have borrowed an earlier edition of The Guns of August from the Miami-Dade Public Library system back in the day, but I probably did so at an age where Tuchman’s book might have been a challenging read.

I’ve never read The Proud Tower, which is about the period right before the start of World War I and could be seen as a prequel to The Guns of August. So, yeah, I’ll probably give the Library of America volume at least a quick look-see later.