494. A Few Brief Notes

Brief Note #1. One of the most relaxing things a person or family could do is spend an afternoon in a riverside park - actually the two-acre front yard of an old riverside mansion - listening to a "pops" orchestra. My friend Preston and I did that Sunday in Madison listening to the Cincinnati Regional Pops Orchestra play selections from Aaron Copeland, Broadway musicals, John Williams' Star Wars, and closing with John Philip Souza's traditional Stars and Stripes Forever, the Official March of the United States of America by an Act of Congress. Regular readers will recall that Souza's grave is in the Congressional Cemetery, one of my favorite places to visit in the capital city of our Republic. The gravesite is shown at right.

Brief Note #2. Tomorrow night Kentucky's Lieutenant Governor, the Honorable Daniel Mongiardo, will be the guest speaker at the regular monthly meeting of the Metro Democratic Club, held at 6:30 pm at the American Legion Hall opposite Saint Raphael Catholic Church on Bardstown Road. Mongiardo, at left from his days as a former Kentucky State Senator from Hazard, is a leading surgeon in eastern Kentucky and in 2007 was elected lieutenant governor on the winning ticket of Beshear-Mongiardo. And like the fictional "real live nephew of my Uncle Sam" Dan is born on the Fourth of July, two months and a few weeks before me in the closing months of the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration. I hope you can come hear Lt. Gov. Mongiardo address the issues of the day, some of which, I am sure, will be related to his campaign to succeed Jim Bunning as the junior United States Senator for the Commonwealth of Kentucky, something he damn near did in 2004 when he achieved the record for the most votes ever received by a Democrat in our state, a record which still stands.

Brief Note #3. The blog will be on break until next week. Happy June!