Republican Senator Joni Ernst of Iowa had a grim message for her constituents furious over proposed cuts to Medicaid that could end health coverage for millions of Americans.

Over a chorus of groans from the crowd at a town hall in Butler County on Friday morning, Ernst said her Republican colleagues were making “corrections” to the federal healthcare program to stop “overpayments” and prevent “illegals” from receiving benefits.

“People are going to die,” one person shouted out.

“Well, we’re all going to die,” Ernst snarkily replied.

When she was greeted with a mixture of stunned groans and shout-backs, the senator exasperatedly added: “For heaven’s sakes, folks.”

Democratic officials and advocacy groups pounced on the moment, accusing Ernst of airing what the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee called a “stunningly callous” remark that points to a wider failure among Republican members of Congress to face criticism over threats to a program that supports millions of lower-income Americans.

“Joni Ernst said the quiet part out loud: Republicans don’t give a shit about whether their own constituents live or die as long as the richest few get richer,” according to Democratic National Committee chair Ken Martin.

Patrick saw Operation Mincemeat–a musical based on the true story of a British deception operation during World War II–when he was in London earlier this year. He recommended we see it during the Mother’s Day Weekend trip. And, we did.

When Diane, Katie, and I saw the musical on Broadway a few weeks ago, it was already a hit after a successful rain in the West End of London. Operation Mincemeat has positive reviews for its humor and compelling story.  The musical is based on the 2011 film of the same name starring Colin Firth and Kelly Macdonald. 

The fun part of Operation Mincemeat for me is the caper aspects of the plot. “Operation Mincemeat was a World War II deception operation where British intelligence planted a corpse, dressed as a British officer, with false intelligence documents in Nazi territory to mislead German forces about the location of the planned Allied invasion of Sicily. The operation was successful in fooling the Germans into believing the Allies would invade Greece, allowing the actual invasion of Sicily to proceed without significant German resistance.”

Operation Mincemeat has been nominated for four Tony Awards:  Best Musical, Best Book of a Musical (David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts), Best Original Score (David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson, and Zoë Roberts), and Best Performance by an Actor in a Featured Role in a Musical (Jak Malone).  We loved it! GRADE: B+

“I think I might burn all these diaries. What if I died and people get hold of them and read them? Their endless self-obsession, anecdotes, self-exiles, rationalizations. Meanness about others.” (p. 412)

I’m usually not that attracted to reading diaries. But Helen Garner’s How to End a Story: Collected Diaries, 1978-1998 (2025) doesn’t sugar-coat Garner’s feelings and thoughts. Helen Garner is a successful Australian writer who has won the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Windham Campbell Literature Prize for nonfiction. In 2019, Garner was honored with the Australia Council Award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature.  She has written an intimate chronicle of life, love, family, and the frustrations of writing and aging.

Helen Garner’s collected diaries span 20 years, with the first volume beginning in the late 1970s just after the publication of her debut novel Monkey Grip. The second volume begins in 1987 as she embarks on an affair that she knows will be all-consuming (and possibly a huge mistake). The final volume begins in 1995, as she fights to hold on to a marriage that is disintegrating around her. Garner’s husband tells her he wants a “girl friend.” As you might suspect, this does not go well.

I found these diaries of the inner life of a woman in love and a great writer at work compelling reading. Helen Garner doesn’t cover up the messy, painful, dark side of love. She doesn’t hide the sheer force of her anger and her judgements of others. Here’s a couple of her judgements:

“Melvyn Bragg interviewed Saul Bellow on TV about The Dean’s December. Bellow grandly puts shit on sociologists, psychologists and criminologists for their failure to cure what’s wrong with society. …I am disappointed and say little. ‘I think,’ says V. ‘you weren’t very interested in what he was talking about.’ …So I say, ‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think he’s a windbag.” (p. 401)

“Read The Aspern Papers [Henry James] with joy. Its beauty, its drive, its seriousness but its lightness of touch.” (p. 452)

“Janet Malcolm has reviewed The First Stone [1995] in the New Yorker. Exhilarating, a critique by someone who wouldn’t know me from a bar of soap. …Then I felt thrilled to bits: she has read me. …(Also, she used the expression, ‘this extraordinary book’.) (p. 672)

Helen Garner is 82 years old now and writes little. But these diaries capture the energy, excitement, disappointments, heartbreak, and thrills of her active Life. It’s quite a roller-coaster ride! GRADE: A

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

Foreword by Leslie Jamison — ix

Yellow Notebook: Diaries Volume 1 1978-1987 — 1

One Day I’ll Remember This: Diaries Volume II 1987-1995 — 257

How to End a Story: Diaries Volume III 1995-1998 — 559

Last week, my selection of AM Gold 1977 (you can read my review here) ignited a “rosy glow of nostalgia” in Deb. I figured I might again light Deb’s fire with this AM Gold 1976 volume.

I’m a big fan of the Bay City Rollers’s “Saturday Night.” “Still the One” by Orleans still gets played at least once a week by Sirius/XM Radio when I’m listening in my car as I’m running errands. “Sara Smile” is one of my favorite Hall & Oates songs.

Here’s a breakdown of the top 10 best-selling singles of 1976, according to the Billboard Year-End Hot 100 singles chart: 

1. Silly Love Songs – Wings
2. Don’t Go Breaking My Heart – Elton John & Kiki Dee
3. Disco Lady – Johnnie Taylor
4. December 1963 (Oh, What a Night) – The Four Seasons
5. Afternoon Delight – Starland Vocal Band
6. Play That Funky Music – Wild Cherry
7. Kiss and Say Goodbye – The Manhattans
8. Love Machine – The Miracles
9. 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover – Paul Simon
10. A Fifth of Beethoven – Walter Murphy & The Big Apple Band

“December 1963 (Oh, What a Night)” by Frankie Valli and The Four Seasons, “Afternoon Delight” by Starling Vocal Band, and “Kiss and Say Goodbye” by The Manhattans made it onto this disc. Do you remember these songs? Any favorites here? GRADE: B

TRACK LIST:

I’m a fan of Garth Nix’s fantasy novels. To Hold the Bridge (2015) collects several of Nix’s short fiction. “To Hold the Bridge: An Old Kingdom Story” isn’t so short. It’s a novella 50 pages long and tells the story of a poor boy who commits a heroic act. I also enjoyed the vampire stories included in this collection: “Vampire Weather” and “Infestation.”

“The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder: As Experienced by Sir Magnus Holmes and Almost-Doctor Susan Shrike ” introduces Magnus Holmes, the second cousin of the famous Sherlock Holmes.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

To Hold the Bridge: An Old Kingdom Story — 1

Creatures of Darkness and Light

Vampire Weather — 53

Strange Fishing in the Western Highlands — 69

Old Friends — 88

Standing Up: Coming-of-Age Stories

The Quiet Knight — 101

The Highest Justice — 113

A Handful of Ashes — 127

The Big Question — 163

Check Your Faint Heart at the Door: Combat and Struggle

Stop! — 172

Infestation — 191

The Heart of the City — 212

Ambrose and the Ancient Spirits of East and West — 235

Holly and Iron — 264

A Wink and a Nod: Lighthearted Tales

The Curious Case of the Moondawn Daffodils Murder: As Experienced by Sir Magnus Holmes and Almost-Doctor Susan Shrike — 307

An Unwelcome Guest — 324

A Sidekick of Mars — 336

Under Other Skies: Science Fiction

You Won’t Feel a Thing — 357

Peace in Our Time — 371

Master Haddad’s Holiday –381

“Previously slated to continue through August 17, the production’s final performance was May 18. At the time of closing, Redwood will have played 17 previews and 127 regular performances. The show was one of 13 productions left empty handed when nominations for this year’s Tony Awards were announced and becomes Broadway’s first casualty of bad luck with the honors.

Redwood explores themes of loss, grief, addiction, and finding strength and resilience. Jesse, a successful businesswoman, leaves her life behind and travels to the redwood forest after her son’s death, seeking solace and a new purpose. The score is by Kate Diaz, with lyrics by Diaz and Tina Landau. The music is a blend of cinematic orchestral scores and pop/rock songs.”

Diane, Katie, and I liked Redwood with Idina Menzel belting out songs while climbing a giant redwood tree while swinging around on ropes wrapped in climbing equipment.  While the special effects are impressive, the mawkish plot gets a little syrupy for my tastes. The performance we saw was a sell-out, but the rumors were already swirling that they were going to pull the plug if they didn’t get any Tony nominations. And…they didn’t.

Despite that decision, Irina Menzel says that Redwood was one of the highlights of her career. “Creating [Redwood] with Tina Landau and Kate Diaz has been my proudest professional accomplishment,” writes Menzel. “It is an all-female-led team, who are fearless risk-takers and gorgeous human beings. I will be eternally grateful to our stunning cast whom I love so friggin’ much. I’ll be singing Kate’s music for years and years to come. You are all my family. Making music and telling this beautiful story with you has been the highlight of my career. In fact, being back in NYC with the entire Broadway community at the Nederlander, of all places, is my ‘little Idina’s’ dream come true over and over again.”

Sometimes risky musicals just don’t succeed. GRADE: C

With Trump’s Tariffs driving up prices, I decided to buy this Panasonic Boombox with Portable Stereo AM/FM Radio, Bluetooth, CD, with USB 110-240 instead of waiting. Flare-shaped bass reflex ports help ensure smoother airflow, reducing air turbulence, to provide full-bodied warm bass tones. It sounds great!

I work in my basement frequently and listen to CDs while I’m sorting books and lugging boxes. But…I have a big basement. Sure, I could move my SONY Boombox (you can read my review here) across the basement. Or, I could have TWO great sounding Boomboxes to listen to on opposite sides of my basement full of books. I opted for TWO! GRADE: A

Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning Part 2 (aka, M:I 8) picks up where Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 left off in 2023 (you can read my review here). An Artificial Intelligence called The Entity is taking over the world and nation-states are powerless to stop it. President of the United States Erika Sloane (Angela Bassett) offers Ethan Hunt (aka, Tom Cruise) an Impossible Mission: Stop the AI from taking over all the nuclear installations in the world and firing those nuclear missiles to wipe out humanity.

Of course, in true Mission Impossible fashion, Hunt builds a team to help him stop the deadly AI. My favorite is Grace (Hayley Atwell, aka “Agent Carter”) whose impressive skills at picking pockets plays a key role in this impossible mission. Simon Pegg is back playing tech-guy Benji Dunn and Ving Rhames returns as Luther Stickell, resident genius. I’m fond of Pom Klementieff as Paris–“I kill people.”

And to spice things up, Hannah Waddingham (aka, Rebecca Welton of Ted Lasso) plays Admiral Neely who commands an air-craft carrier. But with a running time of 2 hours and 50 minutes, be prepared for some scenes to drag.

As usual, Tom Cruise performs some incredible stunts–and takes a lot of punishment. There’s a long underwater sequence. There’s an eye-popping bi-plane gymnastics free-for-all. If you’re in the mood for a long, rambling action movie, Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning Part 2 fits the bill. Just set the bar low. The first Tom Cruise Mission Impossible came out in 1996. Now 29 years later, this franchise just might be over. GRADE: B

J. B. Priestley is best known for his many successful plays. But Priestley also wrote essays, autobiographies, criticism, and novels. Angel Pavement was published in 1930 and presents characters on the cusp of the Great Depression.

Priestley, who displayed his fascination with the world of work in his plays and novels, centers the action of Angel Pavement with the staff of Twigg and Dersingham, a struggling firm located in the lonely, aging, decrepitude of The Roaring Twenties London.

One of most vivid characters in this novel are James Golspie, who arrives in London by ship from Europe, determined to make a fortune.  Golspie is an entrepreneur with business skills, but the time and the economical situation works against him.

“She stood in the entrance a minute or two after he had gone, fumbling for her key, and suddenly from that great ocean of deep depression which she always felt was not far away, rose in the dark a great breaker and swept her away. She could have cried. It was not Norman Bartley–he was feeble fool who was rapidly getting worse–but the endless cheating of life itself that frightened her and stifled her. She was Lilian Matfield, Lilian Matfield, the same that had going playing and laughing and singing and looking forward to everything only a few years ago, no different now except a little older and more sensible, and yet she felt, obscurely, darkly, that somehow she was being conjured into somebody miserably different, somebody stiff and faded and dull.” (p. 252-253)

Lilian Matfield is my favorite character in Angel Pavement. She’s a brilliant secretary at Twigg and Dersingham, superior to all the other staff–mostly men–who shuffle papers day after day. And, given the time, being a woman stifles her advancement and hope in the business world. She lives in an apartment building with other young, single working women .

Here’s Miss Matfield on Christmas: “It was, on the whole, she decided, revolting. You gave people a lot of silly things, diaries and calendars and rot, or useful things that were not right, gloves the wrong size and stockings of the wrong shade…and they in their turn gave you silly things and useful things that were not right. You ate masses of food you didn’t want…then you sat about, pretending to be jolly, but really stodged, sleepy, headachy, and in urgent need of bicarbonate of soda.” (p. 385)

Miss Matfield is drawn to James Golspie simply because he knows his business and stands out among the mediocrity of the Twigg and Dersingham staff. Miss Matfield yearns for excitement to liven up her dull life. Here’s what Miss Matfield reads during her lonely evenings: “There were two travel books and three novels of romance, and all three stories had for their setting such places as Borneo and the South Seas. This was not mere coincidence. Miss Matfield like her fiction to be full of jungles, coral reefs, plantations, lagoons, hibiscus flowers, the scent of vanilla, schooners on the wide Pacific, tropical nights. So long as the young man was first shown to her dressed in white and lounging on a verandah, while a noiseless brown figure brought him something long and cool to drink, she was ready to follow his love story to the end.” (p. 406)

Angel Pavement is almost 100 years old. At 608 pages, it is too long for most contemporary readers. When Miss Matfield and Golspie disappear from a chapter, things get tedious in a hurry. If you’re in the mood for a clever though dated novel about the eve of the Great Depression, Angel Pavement is the perfect novel. GRADE: B