Louis Roney: As I was saying...

• Yesterday I was just fixin’ to send an invective to our weatherman when he came to his senses, remembered he was on the Florida payroll, and gave us a beautiful day.

• My b.w. recently read me the book “The Boys in the Boat” by Daniel James Brown, sent to us by former Floridians who now live in the Seattle area. The book brought us much enlightenment and entertainment. Author Brown deals colorfully with how the University of Washington Crew put their shell across the finish line first to win the gold medal in the 1936 Olympics. The scene was of course Berlin, and no less than Adolph Hitler was part of the enormous crowd. Brown tells not only a gripping narrative, but as a biographer delineates the lives of the eight quite different rowers and their coxswain who, through unity of body and mind, won one of the world’s most exciting crew races. Concomitantly, the Olympic rowing story advises us of how a purposeful life should be lived, through the philosophy of George Yeoman Pocock, the maker of the rowing shells. It’s a beautifully written book of courage under pressure.

• Many people’s early lives are spent as half of a partnership looking for the other half. Being alone is often a tolerable solution —for not just any partner can do the trick ideally. Those of us who have been married more than once will, I hope, have met up and bonded with the “just right ” partner the second time around. It seems to me to be a miracle that with all the people walking around out there, that we ever meet the exactly right person with whom we are fated to spend the rest of our days and nights. Men and women are, after all, quite different animals, each with his or her own peculiarities. Trying to match up oneself with someone totally congenial is playing a very chancy game. The law, thank the good Lord, does not insist on perfection, and in the courts one can get disentangled from bad mistakes and drop the hook in for yet another try —if one still has the yen and the courage to do so! I know a guy who seems completely happy in his third time around.

• The little war that is all too often being waged between our ears mercifully comes to a pause at times, in what we welcome as “moments of tranquility.” A great deal of the human race seems from afar to be as busy as a swarm of bees in what is quixotically called longing for escape “far from the madding crowd.” “Tis peace of mind, lad, we must find, and have a witch come nigh. To sit for us and spit for us and bid all ill go by.”—Theocritus (3rd century B.C.) And so it is that mankind, seeking peace, often encounters confusion, and even conflict.

• We should show our president the same degree of respect that he is showing our Constitution. The ultimate law that Congress can use to throttle the president’s lawless moves is to withhold funds. Congress holds the purse strings. What happens when one House is Republican and one Democrat? No funds from the House means no Congressional action.

• Tests on New Zealand youngsters from age 13 to 38 who were found to have smoked marijuana, seem to indicate that the “smoker kids” lost as many as 8 IQ points over time possibly from “pot.”

• We hear much talk of “climate change.” Climate always changes—what else can it do and keep its place as the subject of so much human conversation? Now our “esteemed” Secretary of State is traipsing around the world saying that the weather is the planets “primary problem! ” As Charlie Brown says, “Good grief!”

• “All (people) are subject by nature to equal laws of morality, and in society have a right to equal laws from their government, yet no two men are equal in person, property, understanding, activity and virtue, or ever can be made so by any power less than that which created them.” — John Adams (1776) How come our Constitutional expert lawyer president never seems to have learned this?