Day of Kings, 40th of Midsommar, 526 M.E. (Helios): I admit I live by two calendars. While I enjoy my fantasy New Revised Universal Solar Calendar, I recognize that I'm the only person on Earth who follows it so I'm obligate to also recognize the pedestrian old Gregorian calendar. 

Anyway, I was tempted to push Day of Kings from the 40th of Midsommar to the 44th, to coincide with June 14 and the next planned No Kings protests. But what is a calendar but a set of rules?, and rules are rules. I'm stuck in this prison of my own device and am forced to celebrate "No Kings" four days early, but I'll find a march on June 14 to celebrate it with the rest of amerika. 

I slept late today (hey, I'm retired - that's my prerogative!), but I still got my eight-mile walk in today. Of course, my phone only recorded a 7.8-mile Jackson and not a full Van Buren, but I'm used to that by now. The weather was warm and sticky - the cool, dry days of last May are now behind us and summer, although late in getting here, has finally arrived in Atlanta. 

We're only a little over a week into this year's hurricane season, but Tropical Depression Cristina has already formed in the Pacific. Rainfall associated with the storm may produce life-threatening flooding and mudslides in El Salvador, especially in areas of steep terrain. Storm conditions are possible along portions of the coast this afternoon and tonight.

A surface trough across the Yucatan Peninsula is causing scattered moderate and isolated strong convection, and a second trough is over the northeast Gulf of Mexico. A weak low-pressure center may emerge from the Yucatan into the Bay of Campeche tomorrow and then track slowly northwestward through the weekend. 

While I walked today, I listened to Jon Stewart's The Weekly Show podcast interview with Quinn Slobodian, coauthor of the new book Muskism about you-know-who (spoiler alert: the book asserts Musk doesn't have our best interests in mind). I also listened to a Nobody's Ever Asked Me That podcast interview of writer-director-actor Charles Lane, the auteur behind the indie film Sidewalk Stories (1989). I haven't seen the film, but after the podcast I noted that it's now streaming on HBO Max or Max or whatever they're calling it now, and marked it for later viewing, possibly even tonight.  

After the podcasts, I still had enough time/distance left on my walk to stream some recent jazz releases on Spotify, and for some reason suddenly got inspired to stream Captain Beefheart's Mirror Man (1971), which got me home.

According to the New York Times, the combined wealth of the world's nearly 3,000 billionaires is $20.1 trillion, an amount equivalent to nearly a fifth of the total value of all goods and services produced in a year by every country on earth. Fifteen years ago, billionaires collectively had $4.5 trillion. The world could get its first trillionaire this week when Citizen Musk's SpaceX launches its IPO. 

I still bow to no king, though.