Gathered

-- I'm apparently not all that smart, because not only have I not read any of the books on the longlist for the Man Booker prize, I'd never even heard of any of them.

-- Today is the 35th anniversary of the famed "Pine Tar Game" in which Kansas City Royals third baseman George Brett hit a home run that then wasn't, until it was again. Naturally, since it brought about an intrusion of judges and lawyers into the great game of baseball, it involved the Yankees.

-- A food cart in Portland, Oregon was set up downtown near the offices of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement government agency. ICE office workers, as well as others, bought lunch from the cart, whose owners used the proceeds to help fund a non-profit agency that helped provide food and other supplies for Portland's homeless population. Until folks demonstrating against ICE started cursing and threatening cart workers, including the owners' 21-year-old daughter. So they've shut the cart down, which will mean less money to help Portland's homeless. I always thought the phrase "too stupid to be believed" was hyperbole, but these days I wonder.

-- The Trump administration will spend $12 billion to help out U.S. farmers who are being hurt by retaliation against the tariffs the administration imposed in the president's trade war. A couple of observations, one obvious and one less so. The obvious one is how nonsensical this move is given that the economic woes the farmers are facing are the result of government actions that could be rescinded and allow them to make their own money instead of taking everyone else's. The less obvious one is that the aid will come through a program that dates back to the Great Depression, which ended almost eight decades ago. The government program, of course, didn't.