Accents

3 min readJul 6, 2022

I don’t know what the answer is to mass shootings, but why does it seem that red flags on the shooters are often ignored?

Demoralizing news from a foxnews.com article by Paul Best: “A Uvalde, Texas, police officer armed with a rifle spotted the gunman outside of Robb Elementary School before he entered the building and asked his supervisor for permission to shoot, but the supervisor either didn’t hear the request or didn’t respond in time…” Why, then, wasn’t the slimeball followed?

Police officers in many states are retiring in droves. Now comes news that all branches of the military are far from reaching recruiting goals. I wonder if it has anything to do with patriotic whites no longer being welcome.

From FN: “Russia confirms 6 Belarusian soldiers fighting for Ukraine captured or killed in Luhansk.” May the rest meet the same fate as many of their allies.

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The cloud cover and the usual breeze blowing along Avenue Z took a little of the bite out of the humidity at today’s session of the floating book shop. My thanks to the young man who bought How to Be a Player (1997) on DVD, Witch & Wizard by James Patterson & Gabrielle Charbonnet, a collection of Garfield cartoons, and Curiosity House: The Screaming Statue by Lauren Oliver & H. C. Chester; and to Wolf, who purchased The World War Two Trivia Book by Bill O’Neill, The Jews in America by Arthur Hertzberg, Four Stars of Hell: With U.S. Paratroopers in Combat from the Night Drop at Normandy to the Battle of the Bulge by Laurence Critchell, The Nearest Exit by Olen Steinhauer, and two Russian DVDs; and to the burly gentleman who took home Once in the Life (2000) on DVD. That looked like it would be it until a young man who spoke with an accent double parked his SUV beside my old Hyundai and asked if I wanted books. I didn’t, but when I noticed the classics up top, I caved despite the inventory being maxed. There were about ten total, all in pristine condition. And minutes later a young man from Macedonia, birthplace of Alexander the Great, as he pointed out, started scooping up many of those titles: Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, The Iliad by Homer, Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell, The Prince by Machiavelli, The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde and The Count of Monte Crisco by Alexandre Dumas, the second copy I sold of it this week. He paid me double, saying he loves America and people who work hard. My humble thanks, sir. I am blessed. Here’s a pic of Macedonia:

I needed a refresher on the area. According to Wiki, it’s “a geographic and historical region that today includes parts of six Balkan countries.” They are: Albania, Kosovo, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and North Macedonia, which until 2019 had been known as the Republic of Macedonia, located in southeastern Europe.