Actually gone skiing, in the miserable snow of Bear Valley… what’s that you said about global climate change Donald Trump? C’est faux!

And anyway, gone fishing? I’m a vegetarian. So not likely.  But it is just an expression. And I liked the stamp. And I want to try to meet Lougue Kou, the illustrator, if he is still alive, in Burkina Faso.

A couple of end of year book notes.

Yasmina Khadra, Double blanc. Police procedural, hard-boiled, tons of Algerian-French. Interesting but the plot was not very compelling and the super-integrity commissaire not that believable.

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Telling. Truly atrocious, the telling was not worth telling. I have always enjoyed her ethnography-informed science-fiction, but this new-agey claptrap had almost no plot (eventually, wander into the mountains of wisdom) and must have disapprovingly noted that bad people burn books about 100 times on the way.