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long ago a skilled illustrator named howard pyle made a book entitled The Wonder Clock

and in that book there were 24 stories/each corresponding to a different hour of the day.

the story i vaguely remember from forever ago was “How Boots befooled the King.”

now i must confess that this is not going to be the bunch of words i intended to write. I was going to take my vague memory of that befoolment and compare it to how befooled the american electorate has been based on the headline “Trump Starts Walking Back His Vow to Slash Grocery Prices” and end with an attempt to scare the crap out of my readers by pointing out that Trump’s assertions that under Biden (when Biden was still a candidate) and then under Harris (when Harris became his opponent) there would be World War Three…and here we are with Trump saber-rattling and threatening “hell to pay” in the Mideast, exactly like you’d expect a precursor to World War Three to play out…

except i suspect that my readers are already there, unbefooled all along.

be safe, my friends. survive. let’s make a better world. and let’s hear it for The Who, who correctly prophesied, in their classic joint “Won’t Be Fooled Again,” that we would literally YES LITERALLY AND NOT HYPERBOLIC LITERALLY “Meet the new boss/Same as the old boss.” no fools they!

As a young child I read voraciously from the fairy-tale books on our bookshelves. There were some from Andrew Lang’s series, some Howard Pyle, an Edmund Dulac, and something called something like Seven Stories of Seven Wishes. But the best fairy-story I ever read came later, from J.R.R. Tolkien: “Smith of Wootton Major.” In it Smith, called Starbrow because of a glowing trinket affixed to his forehead, explores the land of Faery and unknowingly meets, and dances with, its Queen. Tolkien’s Queen of Faery reminds me of a friend of mine.