Halfway down the Danube

Random filler while Doug is away

Question 1: Sometimes I lose the urge to communicate with humanity. (Yes/No)

There's a question?

Reading about the artist Foujita. It takes a lot of charisma to pull off a bowl cut, Coke-bottle glasses, a Hitler mustache, and an earring, even in the Paris of the 1920s. The pics from the early 1940s are even better. You really don't think of anyone dressed like Andy Warhol living in wartime Japan. I do wish the book had color reproductions of Last Stand on Attu and Compatriots on Saipan Island Remain Loyal to the End. I am not making this up.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author Wallace Stegner wrote the early corporate history of the Arab-American Oil Company (better known then as ARAMCO). Again, I am not making this up. Better yet, the abridged magazine version is available online. Read about the Italian bombing of Dhahran here. "There it lay, lighted up like a California supermarket opening."

Question 6: Sometimes I suffer from cartoonist envy. (Yes/No)