Ashtown Burials fans, I'm holding this microphone because I got three pieces of enormous news.

First piece. If you have a friend who's never read the Ashdown Burials series, they can get book one for free, the Dragon's Tooth ebook at ashtownbarrials.com.

That's the whole book for free. Huge news. Please tell them.

Second piece of giant news, the silent bells is finally available for pre-order. It's coming by this Christmas and you can see the cover news. Please tell them. Second piece of giant news, the silent bells is finally available for pre-order.

It's coming by this Christmas, and you can see the cover now at ashtownbaryles.com.

You get in the hang of it.

Third piece of news, books one through three are also adapted with sweet new covers.

Nate and I show you those in this episode of SAS, and you can check out all the goodies

you get if you pre-order now by going to

ashtownbaryals.com. That's it. That's the big news. It's huge. Please tell everybody. throwing jello for jesus july 4th 2026 a little preliminary horsing around so america happy birthday to you you are now 250 years old which is halfway to 500 we still have plenty of time to fix all this don't let the astonishing fact of commies getting elected interfere with your celebrations that is like coming down with the case of the shingles, but you still get your birthday presents. Whatever you do, don't lose your cheeky ebullience. That is the sort of thing that makes all the difference. That's the secret sauce right there. Be the kind of American that the European World Cup tourists think you are. This evening, be sure to set off the kind of fireworks that the House of Hanover

would have banned as being in poor taste, not to mention uncouth and unsafe. Set your AC settings to a

level that Brussels would not tolerate for a hot minute, and I mean hot minute. Make sure to keep calling

it soccer. I was 23 years old on America's 200th birthday, and am in a position to remember the implications of all that.

What that means is that at that time, I'd been alive for 11.5% of our nation's history.

I'm now 73 on our 250th birthday. That means that I have now been alive for 29.2% of our nation's

timeline, almost a third. Gaining on it, I will get to a third when I'm around 89. Check in with me then, and I will tell you exactly what I think. I will be done holding back by that point. So treat American boomers with the respect that all walking history books deserve. A serious turn. Now, I acknowledged at the outset that I was leading off with some horsing around, but never forget that all such horsing around is nothing more than a decorated deadly seriousness. But then there are other

occasions, such as in the second half of a blog post say, when you dispense with all of that and just say

it straight. Well, as straight as I know how. The central cultural peril we face is the deadly sin

of envy. Envy lies at the root of virtually

every political trouble we have, and we have many. The antidote is therefore gratitude,

and it needs to be 100-proof gratitude. Now, the only place you can get that kind of gratitude

is from the distilleries of heaven, made with peat from the salt marshes of paradise.

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