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A bright red radio with 90.7 visible on the digital screen in front of a night scene, trees silhouetted in front of a dark sky with a few stars.

I am sitting in a campground under the stars listening to the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra‘s performance of Berlioz’ “The Damnation of Faust” on STLPR. I complain about a lot, but right now I got none.

The St. Louis Book Fair provides its wondrous bounty again this year:

  • “Arcadia” and “The Real Thing” by Tom Stoppard
  • “Collected Poems, 1953-1993” by John Updike
  • “The Wild Party” by Joseph Moncure March and illustrated by Art Spiegelman
  • Best American Poetry; ’89, ’92, ’97, ’15, ’16 and ’18
  • Best American Short Stories; ’86, ’87, 09, ’14, ’16, ’18 and ’20
  • And like 25 “Magic Tree House” books for my kids

Since I’m slowly amassing most of the Best American Short Stories collection (between 1986 and 2020 I’m missing four volumes), I saw several Best American Poetry books and thought I’d start a new quest.

Today I had a lunch at a diner and witnessed a man order his meal, and while waiting, open a single-serving plastic tub of jelly and eat it with a butterknife. Later, a woman who’d ordered coffee (small diner-sized mug) put in four (4) cups of creamer. People are fascinating.

I don’t know if it had this much grain in the print paper, or whether it’s just digital artifacting, but I love the look of this photo by David Carson on today’s front page.

As a one-time newspaper designer, I’m very curious about how this not only appeared twice in the obits today, but has different tracking between the two.

If you never hear from me again it’s because I massively overestimated my abilities. Which I guess applies to a lot of situations. But in this case specifically it’s because I’m going to attempt to run some ethernet.

Five years ago today, I got to visit the Apollo 11 Command Module when it was displayed at the St. Louis Science Center. A surprisingly moving experience.