A big day

I got my desk set up today! I’ve been writing at the other end of this rather long, high-ceilinged room that will serve triple duty as my office at the street end, the living room in the middle, and the dining room at the end overlooking the backyard.

My desk is Tracy’s grandmother’s dining room table, thus the double pedestals. One of the pedestals got lost in her family’s move to Bangkok in the 1960’s. Somehow it got separated from the tabletop and other pedestal, so Tracy’s mother and father took the surviving pedestal to a Thai craftsman and had him copy it! All these years later, you can’t tell the difference between the two.

I like writing on a desk that has some history. Like my grandparents’ dining room table, Tracy’s traveled the world before coming to rest here in Milford.

That small Chippendale dresser to my right came with the house, believe it or not, on loan from our landlord, as are several other pieces of antique furniture, including a tall secretary desk with a drop writing surface and glass-fronted display case where we are currently featuring Tracy’s collection of lusterware pitchers and cups. Most of the stuff surrounding me as I sit here was consigned to boxes at our place in Springs. It’s nice to have it out in the open where it belongs.

In the news tonight is a story that hardly needs commenting on. It seems that Governor Ron DeSantis’ campaign to cleanse Florida’s schools of any and all textbooks that might actually contain real information has determined that only a single math textbook was acceptable for K-5 math classes in the state. All others, more than 50 of them, were deemed unacceptable because publishers had sneakily “rebranded Common Core Standards,” or heaven forbid, the math texts contained “prohibited topics” like Critical Race Theory.

The sole math textbook approved was produced by a company called Accelerate Learning, which conveniently enough is owned by the venture capital firm, The Carlyle Group. DeSantis’ fellow CRT-averse governor of Virginia, Glenn Youngkin, was a co-CEO of the Carlyle Group before he decided to rest on his hundreds of millions and run for office. Youngkin reportedly owns some 6.7 million shares of the company. At today’s stock price just north of $40 a share, his holdings are worth about $277 million.

How much the share price of The Carlyle Group changed when the announcement was made that its Accelerate Learning math textbook had been purchased by the State of Florida is not known, but I think it’s a safe bet that it went up.

These guys aren’t satisfied with picking math textbooks for bogus reasons, they’ve got to line their pockets, too. What party do DeSantis and Youngkin belong to?

One guess.