Tulip and sweet william in These titles mean nothing.

Bird feeder and propane tank in the background.

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Thank you for your kind and helpful comments. To quote the great Dave Ramsey, they were ‘better than I deserve.’ ( He says that to callers when they ask him how he is - it’s irritating as hell.)

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btw- Have you heard Prince of Wales Will’s dad joke? He says Charlotte tells it.

Knock, knock.
Who’s there?
Interrupting cow.
Interrupting cow (moo!) who?

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Let me tell you about a rabbit hole and how I got there.

I am reading Norman Mailer’s last novel - The astle in the Forest. I mentioned it before. It’s an interpretation of Adolph Hitler’s background and it’s very good. Lots of words, but the chapters are short - so you can always read to the end of one and if you want to read a little more you can probably get to the end of that one too.

Thus, and so, I went squirreling away to Wikipedia. I looked up their Hitler article. I didn’t exactly read it but I looked at the pictures. I did notice that Mailer detailed the towns in Austria where the Hitler family lived - including his birthplace Wiki says ‘Adolf Hitler was born on 20 April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary (present-day Austria), close to the border with the German Empire’. So I followed the link to Branunau am Inn and sure enough it had one of Wiki’s great features - a list of famous natives of the town… including HItler of course and a reference to Franz Gruber who wrote Silent Night. Also listed as a notable is Hans Staininger (1508–1567), burgomaster (mayor) of Braunau, (who) had a very long beard, which caused his death. That last phrase caught my flighty attention and I followed a link to the following entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_unusual_deaths#Renaissance

And that for sure was and is a rabbit hole. It is what it says it is = A List of Unusual Deaths.

‘The burgomaster of Braunau (then Bavaria, now Austria), died when he broke his neck by tripping over his own beard.[94] The beard, which was 4.5 feet (1.4 m) long at the time, was usually kept rolled up in a leather pouch.’ That happened in 1567.

It even includes the death of a rabbiter who died after getting his head stuck in a rabbit hole.

And a smallish plane that crashed killing 20 passengers and crew when a crocodile passenger got loose and forced the other passengers to all run away from it, thus destabilizing the plane. The crocodile survived.

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Another Hitler note - it seems there is incest in his family. In one instance his father married either his niece or his daughter who became AH’s mother. Incest and children produced from was thought to be a way of concentrating heredity according to the Mailer book. In other words if you have ‘good genes’ you have a greater chance of passing them on if you have children with a family member who shares the same genes.

Don’t get me wrong. I do not support incest in any way. I’m just reporting what the devil says. He is a main character in Mailer’s book.
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One more thing - I recently saw / not read stories that incest is being discovered from DNA testing at a higher level than previously thought. Did anyone else see that? Or did I make it up? I didn’t make it up. I promise.

Ok, bye for now.

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Oh one more thing - I’m being Columbo-esque today.

The book Mailer wrote before Castle in the Forest was a life of Jesus, concentrating on his early years called The Gospel of the Son. I might need to look for that one - if I ever finish the Hitler opus.

Last updated May 16, 2024