The book, which weighs in at more than 950 pages, is sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull -- the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel of history.

In many ways, the book is a mirror of Mr. Clinton's presidency: lack of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations, undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration. --- The NYT Review!!

And this is probably all I'll ever say about the book. I do note that Clinton is back in his element, the headlines, and what he thinks is again front-page news. Fred Barnes, The Shrinking Clinton.

Yesterday we were talking to one of our locals who has put up a new cache out in the Granite Bay area. Since it starts with a Mind's Eye type puzzle to get the coordinates, I was the one who needed to read it. (Rich has a real hard time with these.) As long as we were going to go out there, we went back to Negro Bar where we'd looked for this cache before. Oh. My. Ghod. The first time I'd looked in the pipe that carries the creeklet under the road, but saw nothing. Then I reread the logs and we were sure the cache was in there. However, when we looked, we saw nothing. I kept looking at it, though, and paced off the area where it would be on the top. Rich yelled at me. The coordinates were off about 30 feet! However, he went back to the car for the big flashlight. We kept shining it down the pipe, but nothing could be seen. It kept niggling at us, though. Finally, Rich straddled the creeklet and walked down the pipe, and sure enough, the cache was in a ledge caused by a drop in the pipe. He signed it and left the travel bug in it. He managed to get turned around and walked back.

After that, the new one was easy. We got it after we went round and round trying to locate an approach to one, and after we found another in a pile of granite. Then we went to the Folsom Dam Road parking lot (the road is closed now) and walked a couple-hundred feet to one called Folsom tropics. With the oleander, palms, and eucalyptus, it's well named. I was looking in an oleander, turned around and fell and really scratched my arm up.

When we were at church, Older Son called to wish Rich a happy Father's Day, and all the kids got into the act. I'm not sure why this son always thinks we're out of town... for Mother's Day it was understandable, since we had just gotten home when he called, but he was also sure we were gone today. Vince called while we were in the pipe (!) (I use the editorial "we" there, just like when "we" have all this great garden produce!) Rich called him back on the cellphone, which is beginning to be a little less intimidating. Bernadette called later in the evening. Robert will be in town on Tuesday and we may get to see him.

Let Europe be Europe, Victor Davis Hanson.

I've got your fatwah right here.

Scenes from my driveway. Heh.

Courtesy of Pagan, A Day at the New York Times.

9-11 panel, and from the same paper, this. Snicker.

Mark Steyn:

This [Clinton's book] would be bad news for Kerry, except that he's such a terrible candidate people like him more the less they see of him. He took a week off as a mark of respect for the late President Reagan and his numbers inched up. If he had taken another week off as a mark of respect for the late Ray Charles, he could have opened up a clear lead. If he took the summer off as a mark of respect for the late Sir Peter Ustinov and the late Queen Juliana of the Netherlands, he would be heading for a landslide. So Clinton sucking up Kerry's oxygen is the best news there is for the Senator.

Is that really true? In that summer of 1998, when he was lobbing cruise missiles at abandoned Osama training camps in Afghanistan, the President was doing so on the basis of a couple of hours' tossing on the couch? If you say so. Today, of course, the Clintons are back sleeping together, even if only at the Reagan funeral, where the camera caught them blearily slumped in the pew with eyes closed during the big eulogies.

The Clintons' Democratic Party was great for the Clintons but disastrous for the Democratic Party: during the 1990s, they lost the House and the Senate and a ton of governorships and state legislatures, and eventually, with nothing else left to lose, they lost the presidency. Clinton's heat left the party so parched for talent they had no successful governors to run for president and were forced to turn to a stiff hack weathervane senator in the hope they could so damage Bush they could drag their boy across the finishing line.

Here comes Zimbabwe!

Uhoh. I heard from Ofoto. THAT has only been a week.