"Poppies ... Poppies will put them to sleep!"

            The tap water was back to normal on Sunday morning and so it didn’t taste like iodine, or whatever the chemical actually was, anymore.

            I spent a lot of the day writing about my Saturday trip to the food bank.

            In the late afternoon as I started getting ready for my bike ride, it started raining, but not enough to make puddles and it stopped after a few minutes. There was a 40% chance of showers and the wind was coming from the southwest where I could see the clouds were darker. I prepared to leave anyway, but then I had this thought that it really would rain and so I decided to stay home. It started pouring about half an hour later.

            Since I didn’t ride I did some knee exercises in my living room while listening to an episode of Amos and Andy. In the story, Kingfish’s wife Sapphire was threatening to do something desperate if he didn’t buy her some new clothes. She meant that she would get a job but didn’t say so. Kingfish went out and Sadie came over with $300 that had been collected in a charity drive and gave it to Sapphire to hold on to since she was the treasurer of their women’s group. Sapphire hid the money between some sheets in the linen closet. The next day Kingfish heard from Andy that a local jewellery store had been robbed by a woman who’d gotten away with $300, and then he invited Andy back to his place for a bite. Since there was nothing in the icebox he remembered that Sapphire sometimes hides a dollar or two in the linen closet, so he thought he’d check and if there was some there they could go out for a burger. He found the $300, remembered Sapphire saying she was going to do something desperate and automatically concluded that she had been the jewel thief.

            Kingfish went to Gabby the lawyer for some advice and asked him what he thought of female criminals. He answered that they are very considerate. Kingfish asked how they were considerate and Gabby responded that he’d heard of a woman who stabbed her husband instead of shooting him because she didn’t want to wake up the children.

            Kingfish decided that in order to save his wife from going to jail he needed to find someone that would be willing to take the rap for Sapphire and he’d heard that Shorty the barber was currently homeless. He and Andy went to see Shorty and Kingfish told him that he could get him a place to live with free meals. Shorty declared, “That’s the sweetest thing I heard since Truman’s speech last night!” The show was broadcast on October 15^th, 1946. The headline in the papers that day referred to President Harry Truman announcing in an address to the nation the night before that he would be lifting the controls on meat prices that had been enforced during the war. Andy made the point that the president had just made a million horses very happy.

            That night I watched the first half of the Netflix film, War Machine. It’s a fictionalized satirical account of the story of General Stanley McChrystal’s appointment as the leader of the coalition forces in Afghanistan and his firing a year later. Brad Pitt plays General Glen McMahon and Meg Tilly plays his lonely wife. Ben Kingsley is great as Afghan President Hamid Karzai. The plot covers the general’s attempts to win a war that is impossible to win in a country whose population does not want the occupying armies to be there. It’s well acted and sort of funny but the story unfolds way too slowly.

            The most humorous parts are the ones that are sad but true. In one scene the general, while touring Afghanistan is shown a poppy field the harvest of which would serve the heroin industry. He asks why the farmers can’t grow something else but he is told that although the land would be excellent for growing cotton the United States would not allow them to grow any crops that could compete with U.S.markets.