When I say "random," I mean it: My thoughts wandered from one thing to another.

I learned from one of the language bloggers who I follow on Instagram that the Chinese people have come up with a nickname for Trump: 川建国 (chuān jiàn guó), which means "Trump builds country." I'm sure if Trump is aware of this he's flattered by it, but only because he's not aware that the "country" being referenced here is China, the idea being that by making America look so bad, he's making China look much better by comparison.

Which got me to thinking that no matter what one thought about Biden, at least when he president, I didn't worry about him stumbling us into a war.

And thinking about the possibility of us ending up in a war made me think about my maternal grandfather. Like most men of his generation, he served in the military during World War II. Unlike most men of his generation, he talked about his experience, specifically to complain about what a miserable experience it was. Out of a strong desire not to get shot at, he joined the Seabees (naval construction battalions) before the army had a chance to draft him. Once he had gone through boot camp, the US Navy, in its infinite wisdom, thought it was a good idea to take a young man who had never been more than 100 miles north of the Gulf of Mexico and send him to Alaska to help build an airfield. And all of this was to be done:

• while wearing boots that hurt his feet (my grandfather had super-narrow feet, and the navy only issued boots in medium),
• without proper medical treatment for his migraines, and
• while being fed food that constantly upset his stomach.

Obviously it was better than getting shot, but the experience was miserable enough that he would still complain about it 40 years later. One day, my grandmother had had enough of his complaining about his military experience, and she asked him "But aren't you proud of getting to do something for your country? Wouldn't you do it again?" He thought about it for a moment, and then, in all seriousness, said "If they were coming from the west, and they made it as far as [a small river about 5 miles west of their house], I might think about it." And thinking about it now, I'm like "Same, Granddad. Same."

I just received the latest update on downloads of my history master's thesis on early 20th century English educational policy. To date it has been downloaded a total of 230 times. Of those, 55 were last month. I suppose it's theoretically possible that there was a major surge of interest in my topic last month, but considering that none of the downloads were from England, I wouldn't bet on it.

The top fans of my work were Brazil (12 downloads), the US (9 downloads), and Vietnam (4 downloads).

Either I don't understand how ebooks work, or else Yale University Press doesn't understand how ebooks work: Today, Yale University Press released Manga: A New History of Japanese Comics by Eike Exner. As you can see in the screenshot below from the Yale University Press website, the ebook version is, and I quote, "Out of Stock" on the day of release.

It seems to me that ebooks should never be out of stock, especially not on the day of release! And I'm sure that by "Out of Stock" they actually mean something like "not ready for sale" or "not available for purchase from this website," but even if that's what they mean, that's not what they said, and saying what they said makes them look stupid.

It makes me proud of high school me, because instead of choosing not to go to Yale because he couldn't afford it, he chose not to go to MIT because he couldn't afford it. 😉

ETA: You can also see in the screenshot I posted that the paper book and the ebook are the same price, which is a whole other thing that I'm not going to bother posting about again, except to say that I hate how the price relationship between paper books and ebooks is completely arbitrary. I'm sure that it's manipulated in whatever way is most profitable for the publisher, and I'm quite confident that it never (intentionally) benefits the author, no matter which way the publisher cooks the books. (pun intended)

I just finished my second book for the reading challenge: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown, which is both "a history of a resistance movement" and "a history that's been sitting on your shelf for too long" (my mother-in-law bought it for me for Christmas about 10 years ago). Having already read Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz's An Indigenous People's History of the United States, a lot of this a lot of this material was already familiar to me, but Brown's choice of events to focus on meant that I still ended up learning new things from this book.

While I admit to not knowing enough about the subject to recognize any faults in Brown's research, I did find one aspect the writing of the book that displeased me: It seemed that as the book progressed, moving closer to the present day, the coverage of material accelerated, as if Brown was starting with a preset limited page count and, having written the first part of the book, was scrambling to include all the material he wanted to before reaching that page limit. The result of this is that the Ghost Dance and Wounded Knee, which I would have expected to be fairly significant parts of the book, are covered in 12 pages immediately before the book ends. 

And when I say the book "ends," I am choosing that word very deliberately. The book just stops at the end of the day of the Wounded Knee Massacre, when the wounded survivors were carried into the church at the Episcopal mission at the Pine Ridge Agency. There is no conclusion, no examination of the reactions to the massacre, nothing. If you removed the table of contents and the back matter, which make it clear that this is the end of the book, and had a group of students read it, they would come back asking you for the rest of the book.