Can anybody else smell that?

 Desert Island Discs has been running on the BBC since 1942, asking guests ("castaways," as they cutely call them) to name a book, a luxury item and eight recordings they would want on the proverbial desert island.  Mostly they ask for very long books and wine or a piano.  It's a bit like The Archers -- listeners expect escapist fare.  Rarely does the program make news, even when John Cleese requested "a statue of Margaret Thatcher and a baseball bat."  (The one newly installed in Grantham has already been attacked with eggs, but there is no indication of Cleese's involvement.)

So it was an event when the castaway was Fiona Hill, Russia expert, adviser to George W. Bush and Barack Obama and attempted adviser to Trump.  She described sitting next to Putin at a banquet (apparently because she was considered nondescript and would not distract from the great leader) and how he smelled -- "almost like he had stepped out of some special preparatory bath or something, into the moment."  She was close enough to note his expensive clothes and watch and also his vanity.  ("He really could have done with glasses" but instead had cards with huge words telling him "who was who and what he should say.")  He neither ate nor drank.  Perhaps he fears being poisoned, as Hill was during a visit to Chechnya.  Putin's Russia sounds like the court of the Borgias minus the art.

Hill had nothing to say about Trump's odor, but she was appalled by his ignorance about everything from history to women (he assumed she was a secretary and addressed her as "darlin'").  The day after she testified in the first impeachment Hill got the usual death threats, and a male friend wondered if they should seek extra security.  "No," she said calmly.  "They're cowards."   Trump has taken to saying things like "She'd be nothing without the accent," because although she was born to a working-class Northern family and never tried to acquire a posh accent, to him she sounds like Dame Maggie Smith playing a countess.  So...the coarse kid from Queens is still intimidated by Brits.  I'm glad.

The rest of the news is the usual madness.  

How many plagues can we endure?  Let's see, fire, drought, war, famine...monkeypox.  The WHO thinks it's spread by sexual contact and will spike during this summer's music festivals.  David Heymann says, "There are vaccines available" but many Americans will choose antifungals or exorcism because, well, you know.  

Something about being mayor of New York gives politicians delusions of adequacy.  According to the New York Post, so maybe untrue, Bill DeBlasio wants to run for Congress, after toying briefly with the idea of running for governor.  The current mayor, Eric Adams, reportedly wants to skip all that and run for president.  Dare to dream, guys.  Neither one of you is making people say "Fiorello who?"

The airlift hastily (and badly) named "Operation Fly Formula" will begin delivering infant formula from Europe this weekend.  But what of the dijon mustard disaster?  The mustard seed harvest was halved by extreme heat in Canada and the Burgundy region of France and the shelves are emptying.  It looks like a windfall for the black market.  You can't expect the French to use Gulden's.

Meanwhile British pubs, clubs and bars are having to cut back hours because of a severe bouncer shortage.  Imagine:  the big men (and some women) who size up your clothes and shoes and find you wanting have moved on to jobs with better hours and less projectile vomiting.  Cheer up, covid is back big time.  Maybe lockdown will resume.

A mustard shop in Dijon.  All your mustard needs under one roof.  

"There is more Met than Yankee in every one of us."  Roger Angell, baseball's "reluctant poet laureate," has died at 101.