The dog’s got some canine habits, for sure. Such as chewing things. Pictured below is a stuffed figure I don’t ever remember getting, and which no one in the house has paid much attention to for years. The hound found it recently and did some damage. Was Mr. Sluggo to its Mr. Bill. Reminds me of the young days of Katie, my mother’s dog, who destroyed (among other things) most of the pine-cone elves acquired in Germany in the ’50s that we used to hang as Christmas decorations.

A few months ago I picked up a hardback book at Big Lots. That retailer isn’t generally known for its books, but it had a bin of landfill-destined titles that I had to rummage through. I found A Fiery Peace in a Cold War (2009) by Neil Sheehan, whom I know as the author of A Bright Shining Lie, which I read some years ago, and remembered liking.

The progression of pricing was from $32 on the dust jacket to $7 at Bargain Books, which I could tell from a partially obscured price tag, to $4 at Big Lots. For that price, I would take a long look at Mr. Sheehan’s latest.

The book promised a biography of the man more responsible for the creation of the U.S. ICBM arsenal than anyone else: Air Force Gen. Bennie Schriever (1910-2005). I’d never heard of him. I started reading it the other day, and it’s good so far. I was interested to learn that Schriever mostly grew up in San Antonio. The early chapters contain a number of references to places that I would know 50 years later.