Month: January 2022

I know I procrastinate but I made myself a New Year’s resolution that I would write something really special– Which means I have ’til December, right?
–Catherine O’Hara

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The Meta Verse

This coming June will mark 100 years since Robert Frost wrote “Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening.” Frost had been up all night working on a different poem and stepped outside at dawn. He claimed later that what is one of his most celebrated works came to him then as if he were hallucinating and took him very little time to complete.

So, a couple of things. Frost wrote a poem about looking at snow in June when there was no snow to be seen and although his inspiration happened when he went outside at daybreak, “Stopping by the Woods…” takes place in the evening.

So what? My point is simple. Frost, of course, used his memory and imagination to create the poem and we use ours to enjoy and admire what he composed. When it comes to the four seasons– although in Maine one of them is barely discernible –and a daily morning and evening, we’ve all experienced them so we’re on the same page, at least I still hope so. But what about things you are told exist and find you have trouble trying to imagine and have no frame of reference to help you to do that?

That’s how I’m feeling about what’s called the “metaverse.” I know we’re now living today in an America divided into two different realities that we can easily distinguish. One is where I reside and I’m assuming all of you who get my posts also do. The other, which is often called an “alternate reality” but really should be called out continually from the top of our lungs a poisoned one, scares the hell out of me and makes me feel paralyzed to contemplate its ascendancy.
Can you reason with people living in a different reality than you with “alternate facts” peddled by fear and hate mongers? If you think you know how, please tell me and tell the world!

And now, to my dismay, I’m feeling more and more that a third reality is on the rise and it’s one I increasingly can’t even comprehend. Every definition for the evolving so-called metaverse that I’ve searched for differs from the other– a digital reality, an augmented reality, a virtual reality –so take your pick.

The metaverse claims to be both real and unreal at the same time and I have a lot of trouble trying to understand if you’re supposed to want to invest in or spend money there, how that’s sensible. Can things exist that don’t exist? Oh sure, you can buy a Tesla and other real things with Bitcoin but what about things that may only exist in the metaverse?

What is hot at the moment are places in the metaverse like “Decentraland” where you can buy real estate– or would it be unreal estate? You’ll need a “digital wallet” to make the transaction and I’m not sure you can build on the property you purchase yet. However, “Metaverse Motors” is about to open shop. You’ll need a “metamask” to check out what’s available on the lot. Want to take a virtual Ferrari for a test drive? I’m not sure if there are any roads for that yet either. People are spending money for this. I’m not making any of this up.

I bet if Albert Einstein were alive he might have been able to explain all this to me but there’s no Einstein around and I’m certainly no Einstein, although I once met one of his great grandsons. He was in my kid’s high school class and yes, he was good at math.

My confusion may have started with my awareness of “Bitcoin” as an alternative currency. I’ve seen physical images of Bitcoins and they look like the chocolate coins or what’s called “gelt” that Jewish kids play a game called “dreidel” with at Hanukkah. Playing dreidel on a heated surface is ill advised though– the gelt melts. It appears that getting in on the gold rush for Bitcoin and “mining” for it with your computer uses up so much electricity that we all could be heading for a meltdown.

I’ve learned that Bitcoin is created, distributed, traded and stored– it doesn’t appear to be edible –in a system known as blockchain. I gather that it’s some kind of all purpose mint, bank, trading post and vault but not one with machinery, tellers, branch stores or security guards. Apparently, it does have a virtual safe where all your Bitcoin accumulates and the combination you are given to get into it for a withdrawal is so complex and long that if you lose it, you lose everything you’ve stashed away in there. Hey, I can’t even remember the combination for my locker at the Y.

Then there are “NFT”s which stands for non-fungible tokens and can’t be inserted in a turnstile at a New York City subway station but are being used to buy and sell art– digital art that I’m not clear goes on a wall or an iPhone. Some of these pieces have sold for the equivalent of many millions of real dollars or Bitcoins but I’m not certain which and maybe it’s neither. That’s because most NFTs also rely on blockchain but a different cryptocurrency called “Ethereum.”

Here’s how Ethereum works according to one of its proponents:

“Ethereum is different from Bitcoin in that the network can perform computations as part of the mining process. This basic computational capability turns a store of value and medium of exchange into a decentralized global computing engine and openly verifiable data store.”

Yeah, that’s truly helpful for my understanding. But getting back to Robert Frost, if his time were this time, maybe he would have been among the poets using blockchain and NFTs as the way to publish. There’s now a way in the metaverse for doing just that with your meta verse– what else? –formerly known as poetry. You can have your meta verse purchased as an “original” metaverse manuscript and the buyer will allegedly have the only one in the universe.

NFTS, Ethereum, blockchain… Yes, I guess I’m bewildered as well as skeptical. I find the world is real enough as it is. Two realities are already one too many. I’m going to sit the metaverse out. Why do I need to become a Bitcoin miner? I’m content to occasionally be a devourer of my own supply of chocolate coins. I can always purchase more of them for me and more for Hanukkah gelt for our grandsons with dollar bills or a plastic card in my pocket. As far as I know neither of them are into Bitcoin. The nine year old just opened a bank account– a real one.

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I took this picture on March 18, 2015 which makes it pre-Trump, pre-COVID and an eternity ago. In March of 2015 I never imagined we’d be burdened with the enormity of the challenges our country and the world face in 2022. On the first anniversary of an assault on our nation’s Capitol this day should be one of the most solemn and shared in our country’s history. I doubt it will be.

A professional football coach named John Madden died last week and a moment of silence was observed at all of last weekend’s NFL games. There won’t be a national moment of silence today that I’ve heard about.

A television personality named Betty White died last week and her fans placed flowers on her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Security concerns will likely preclude that there will be flowers placed on the steps of the Capitol today by the public.

President Biden will speak today and I doubt his broadcast will garner an audience even remotely close to the one that annually watches the Super Bowl. And I’ll be shocked if he will be praised or even awarded respect by his political opposition– a group that was equally endangered when the rioters stormed their chambers.

One of Betty White’s celebrity friends paid tribute to her by saying, “The world is different now.” A year ago a mob was stirred up and emboldened by the President of the United States. Although it failed to stop the democratic election of his successor, it delivered a blow to an already wounded nation that has not begun to recover or even been able to address it.

The so-called “insurrection” is still a raging infection that has afflicted our politics, our electoral process, our physical well being and our concern for one another. Our world is different now.

If our history turns further in the dark direction we have been heading, perhaps the photograph I took in 2015 that seemed at the time to be ironic and innocent can be considered prescient.

Today, as I look at the photograph I see it differently. In it the person dressed as the Statue of Liberty is at the ferry terminal where you board to visit the real deal. People’s backs are turned away from her. There’s a guy whose back isn’t but his head is down and he’s looking at his phone.

Nobody in the picture notices the Statue of Liberty and the person in the costume looks weary to me, looks lost behind its mask’s frozen gaze. I know I’m attaching meaning to my photograph that I wouldn’t have seven years ago but I stare at it now and ask myself what future that Statue of Liberty could possibly have been imagining for us?

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus wrote the words inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1883. Once they were considered our national credo. How many of us, if asked, would agree with that today?We have taken our democracy for granted and now there’s a great risk it may be taken from us. In March of 2015 I would never have imagined this was possible.

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Well, week one of 2022 is done and I’ve finished my annual sort out– learned the term from watching the great British sitcom As Time Goes By –of the room I spend the most time in my house other than the bedroom.

Do you know what the two most important things are in my house? For me it’s a no brainer– one is the mattress I sleep on and the other the chair I sit in in front of my desktop computer.

My office is back together but all my sorting only produced two waste baskets full of stuff to throw out and a five pound pile of papers to be shredded. I have to face it; I don’t really sort. I shift. I move stuff around and as time goes by I won’t know where most of it is anyway and just repeat the process again next year and reacquaint myself with all the things I couldn’t find or didn’t need.
And right now life in general looks a lot like last year and most of the year before. COVID is still hovering in place and many of us are doing the same.

What did Yogi Berra say? “It’s Déjà vu all over again!” 

And what did Neil Young say? “Don’t let it bring you down. It’s only castles burning.”

And what do I say? Well, let me steal a little from Irving Berlin…

There may be trouble ahead

But while there’s caffeine and vaccine

And Biden’s agenda may yet advance

Let’s give the country a chance

Before we boomers are dead

Before our kids ask us to pay the bill

And while we still have our manse

Let’s give the country a chance

Soon, we may be eating prunes

Asking someone to lift our spoons and then…

There may be hard knocks ahead

So grab your flashlight and hang tight

Let’s make the best of the circumstance

We’ll give the country a chance

And if you really want to see  someone– John Cameron Swayze –turn lemons into lemonade click on the link…

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As I look out my window, the temperature is zero degrees Fahrenheit which is -18 celsius if one prefers to feel colder. This morning I’m about as far away from playing golf here in Maine as I can be. Hey, but in three months and more appropriately dressed for ice fishing, I’ll be golfing again. I know there are only a few of you who share my addiction, but today’s cartoon is as much about the late John Updike and the day I spent on the golf course with him nearly 30 years ago as it is about golf.

A while back a high school classmate asked me to write about my day with Updike at his home course, the Myopia Hunt Club in South Hamilton MA, for a journal he edits devoted to the history of the county in Pennsylvania where I grew up. Updike was born and raised in Shillington and was perhaps the most famous person from Berks County until Taylor Swift started singing songs about how miserable a time she had at her high school in Wyomissing.

I’ve pasted my article below and if you’re interested to learn that John Updike and O.J. Simpson nearly had a head on collision of sorts and how I resorted to playing what I call the “Imber card”, please read on. 

A Good Walk Remembered

 Golf has spawned as many books on how to play it as any sport I can think of and among the writers who have attempted to explain why so many of us love such a difficult game is John Updike. Updike once described the ups and downs of a round of golf as being like islands of ecstasy in a sea of misery and I won’t disagree. In my opinion he wrote as well as anyone ever has about the mysterious allure of golf and in my office at home here in Maine there’s a frame on the wall with three postcards Updike wrote to me in 1994 that chronicle my getting him to play golf for television.

The initial correspondence represents a courtship on my part and a dance on his. I was a producer for ABC News and wanted to convince Nightline to let me do an entire program about golf. Nightline’s anchor Ted Koppel was not much of a sports fan but ABC broadcast the U.S. Open golf tournament back then in 1994 and at night, after the first two rounds of the event, a highlights package the network aired delayed the time Nightlineregularly began.

Koppel was not pleased about having his show forced to defer to golf for even fifteen minutes and my pitch was, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” I reasoned that since golfers would already be watching the Open highlights, a Nightlinedevoted to their sport might keep them tuned in. Koppel’s staff bought the idea, although I don’t think he was at all enthused. I knew I had better come up with something special. This was Nightlineafter all and it was the class act at ABC News.

So I found three amateur golfers to profile who had unique stories to tell about their passion for the game and had lined up quick commitments to participate from two of them. One was Eli Callaway who had revolutionized the marketing of golf equipment with his best selling Big Bertha driver. The other was a bank president from New Orleans named Pat Browne who was the best totally blind golfer who ever lived.   

John Updike was to be my third act. I greatly admired his occasional essays about the game in golf magazines and knew he was a golf fanatic like me. I contacted his publisher and shortly afterward the first of his typed postcards arrived.

“Dear Mr. Imber:” it began, “Your thoughts and mine on golf agree in every regard… If you could come to this area, I’d be happy to talk with a camera.” 

That was great news of course but then a couple sentences further on Updike demurred.

“Or we could skip it – there are so many mightier presences in golf than my own.”

Updike and I did share some common opinions on how the game should be best enjoyed. He was a walker like I am, riding in a cart was out of the question for him and so were caddies. Updike carried his own bag, having written once that  a caddy handing him a club for every shot would be like someone over his shoulder handing him a different pencil for every sentence he wrote. Certainly, he sounded interested in doing my Nightline project and I was confident I’d get him to sign on. I hadn’t even used the “Imber card.”

I grew up outside of Reading, PA as did Updike. My grandfather and his brother had a store downtown that bore the family name. That John Updike might know who I was if I reminded him wasn’t because of the store, however. It was a bit more intimate than that. My father’s brother Irving was a physician in Reading and just happened to have been Updike’s father’s doctor. My uncle was known to be an outstanding internist but in Updike’s first novel, The Poorhouse Fair, there is a less than flattering description of the fictional interior of a doctor’s office that was detailed enough that it upset its real life decorator who also happened to be my aunt.

At this point communicating with John Updike progressed to using the telephone and it was time to pull out the “Imber card.” As soon as I mentioned my uncle, the doctor, Updike agreed to do an interview. There was just one last obstacle to negotiate. He’d do it but didn’t want to be shown actually playing golf. For me and for television that was a major problem since I needed to enhance at least some of what he had to say with video of him in action. In the end he relented… “How can I turn down Dr. Imber’s nephew.”

As someone once said, “It’s never over until it’s over,” and on the day my crew and I arrived at his golf club north of Boston John Updike announced that he only had an hour to spend on the shoot, admonishing us that…“I’m still a working writer after all.”

Fortunately, once we got started out on the golf course his reserve vanished. Updike turned out to be a total ham and gave us more great material than I could have dreamed of. After lofting a shot into a pond he turned to the camera and asked, “I hope you got all of that.”

Later when looking for a ball in the woods he found instead a piece of broken glass and shuddered theatrically as he examined it before tossing it away. And when at last he hit his best shot of the day he proclaimed with as much irony as exhilaration, “By jingo, there is life after death!”

When I reminded him that we had used up our one hour of his time, he merely asked me if we should continue so I would have what I needed. Any earlier hesitation had turned into total and exuberant cooperation.

I had at first considered doing a straight interview with him but instead asked Updike to read my favorite short essay of his titled The Bliss of Golf.I feel it’s the equivalent of a hymn to the sport and its splendor as well as a lament on the anguish its mere mortal acolytes more often endure. While he was seated comfortably on the lawn in front of the clubhouse and about to begin reading, a gust of wind blew over one of the metal stands and heavy lights we were using, almost striking him in the head. That explained why a few days later Postcard #2 arrived and began…

“Dear Peter Imber: That was fun, especially catching the light pole in an instant of Harry-Angstrom-like reflex.”

Updike’s mention of his most recurring character “Rabbit” Angstrom brought back a memory of my own. I had been an extra in the movie of Rabbit Run that was shot on location in Reading years before. At the time my father and I had played golf with the movie Rabbit, the actor James Caan.

Like any golfer you’ll meet, Updike also filled me in on the state of his game.

“I finally broke 90 yesterday on the Myopia Links and have high hopes for the rest of the season. If I am ever in Berks County with my golf clubs, I will give your father a call.” 

That was an offer I’m sure my dad, who played golf well into his 80s, would never have refused.

I traveled to the ABC News offices in Washington to put my golf show together. I would have four days to work there and edit my three golfers’ stories to be ready for broadcast on the Friday night of the U.S. Open. In the television news business that was just enough time to complete a polished version of a half hour show like mine. But there had been an horrific double murder in Los Angeles the previous week and on Wednesday my golf program was moved up a night so that Nightline could use Friday to air its first reporting on what was quickly becoming the most sensational news event in years.

The rescheduling tightened my deadline but would prove to be an exceptionally lucky break. My show aired Thursday night and was well received by my peers. It was to be among my favorite pieces of work I did at ABC News.

Postcard #3 was dated the day after the broadcast and read…

Dear Peter:

I underestimated how late the show runs and my taping ended when I plunked the ball in the water. So could I accept your offer and you send me a tape? My wife and stepson loved it, and the interweave of images and words was very artful. But I did look my age, and moved as if underwater. Good thing it wasn’t on Friday night; Juice’s Last Ride would have ousted it from the airwaves.

Best,

John

I had already returned to my base in Los Angeles on that Friday. The helicopter shots of O.J. Simpson’s white Bronco making its surreal freeway journey filled nearly every television screen in the country that evening. Updike was right, the golf program would have never made it.

For me the O.J. Simpson story was what I would be assigned to work on exclusively for the next year. It was a grueling challenge and as I would think back on what a pleasure it had been to spend a day with John Updike on the links, I’d remember that just like golf the news business had its islands of ecstasy in a sea of misery.

Updike published a collection of his golf stories and essays titled Golf Dreams two years laterin 1996. I don’t know if that was his plan before making his television golfing debut. If I helped prompt him to do it, that afternoon with him on the golf course ranks easily as my greatest contribution to the game.

Here’s a link to the Nightline segment…

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I’ve had this cartoon in the queue for a while and what I thought I should write to accompany it has taken me a while to figure out. Above are two famous quotes that in my view sum up how I see the dividing line between America’s two political parties today.

For a long time I’ve felt that the fight over which side gets to make the rules for America hasn’t been a fair one. Let’s put it this way. As I see it, the Republicans are attacking with flamethrowers while the Democrats are defending themselves with water pistols.

That was the original idea to go with the cartoon but it’s sure led me down a different path from where I thought I’d be going. Perhaps my concept was overly simplistic and historically inaccurate to begin with– both sides try to bend things to their advantage when it’s their opportunity to do so. And anyway, if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’ve had more than enough commentary about overheated partisanship and the resulting dysfunction we’re living with to leave you either bored, frustrated, angry, depressed or numb– pick any combination of the above and your order also includes egg roll and fried rice.

So, the more I looked at the cartoon, the more I became unable to commit myself to writing anything to go with it until yesterday when I decided to research the origin of the quotes in my cartoon themselves and was surprised at what I discovered.

I had always assumed that Grantland Rice’s words were referring to playing by the rules in sports. Rice was of course a sports writer and the most noted and prolific one of the early 20th century. He’s estimated to have written over 20,000 columns which when one does the math, add up to nearly 70,000,000 words.

Rice also published three books of poetry and this most referenced sentence of his– “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” –is contained within his poem Alumnus Football. When I read it I realized it wasn’t really about football or sports at all. It’s about displaying tenacity on the field of life. See what you think?

http://runalot.blogspot.com/2007/12/alumnus-football-by-grantland-rice.html

And how about famed football coach Vince Lombardi’s mantra “Winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” Well, right off the bat I learned that Lombardi wasn’t the original author of what’s regarded as his motivational modus operandi. Another football coach named Red Sanders used the phrase first and it appeared in a Los Angeles newspaper article in 1949 after Sanders’ UCLA team lost to arch rival USC.

Lombardi actually claimed to James Michener in a book Michener authored entitled Sports in America that he’d been misquoted and that what he said or meant to say was “Winning isn’t everything. The will to win is the only thing.” 

He’s not the only sports figure who has had a quote become forever inseparable from him that is apparently not totally accurate. Baseball manager Leo Durocher acquired his nickname “Leo the lip” for his run ins with umpires and he’s light years behind Yogi Berra in any ranking of the most quoted figures in the history of the sport or any sport.

“Nice guys finish Last” is Durocher’s contribution to the quote Hall of Fame but there’s a bit of a twist. The story goes that his New York Giants were mired in next to last place in the National League in 1946. In conversation with Brooklyn Dodgers announcer Red Barber, Durocher was ridiculing his team’s performance when Barber jokingly teased, “Leo, come on be a nice guy.” To which Durocher replied, “Nice guy? The nice guys over there (pointing at his club) are in seventh place.”

Ok, the National League back then consisted of eight teams so that’s awfully close to “Nice guys finish last.” Durocher’s autobiography uses that as its title and in it he misquotes himself, which may be a swing and a miss but not a called strike three in my book.

Quotes or misquotes and even when there’s mistaken lineage seem to have a tendency to take on a life of their own. Oh sure, they can be taken out of context and sometimes that’s of little importance or consequence but sometimes there are lasting reverberations.

Yeah, I thought I was going to stay clear of politics but when I write it’s like building a road in unsurveyed wilderness sometimes and I guess I just came upon a rock ledge that needs to be dynamited.

At the top of my list of the most damaging quotes by an American about America in American history has for a long time been this one…

“Government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.”

— President Ronald Reagan (January 20, 1981)

Yes, that’s right out of Reagan’s first inaugural address– a man assuming the presidency apparently making it clear that he’s disdainful of the government he’s just sworn to administer. At least that’s what I thought until I did a little research about Reagan’s declaration which has become one of his most cited pronouncements.

The quote is arguably taken out of context. Reagan was referring to shrinking government spending and regulations– the cornerstones of what became known as Reaganomics and what I believe were the bedrock of Republican policy until Donald Trump became president and poisoned and disgraced whatever remained of Republican policy. Reagan’s remark in 1960 wasn’t calling for dismantling the entire government but what it came to mean for many Americans over time has been something different and destructive and so, it might as well have.

Ronald Reagan’s “Government is the problem” could be claimed then to have meant something more innocuous but through the years the kindling he lit with it is now a firestorm. And as we now know too well, rhetoric can fan flames that become next to impossible to put out. Trust and respect for Congress, the Presidency and government agencies are at or near all time lows and in a 1986 press conference Reagan threw what, looking back now, was another log on the fire…

“The nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

According to the quote “experts”– The Yale Book of Quotations and quoteinvestigator.com/ –Reagan was by no means the first person to mock government with this description. Its first use most likely appeared in Reader’s Digest a decade earlier.

Gee, I really have strayed away from my starting line. But let me circle back with one more quote.

Whenever I’m in New York, I try to walk by the Seagram Building on Park Avenue. It was designed by the architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and constructed in the 1950s. It’s set back from the street which allows you to take it in more fully. It’s simple, it’s elegant and it speaks to me like a favorite symphony or painting. It also embodies an aphorism that Van der Rohe liked to use– “Less is more.”

Mies Van der Rohe is also connected to an expression that is well known and frequently uttered– “The devil is in the details.” And yes, as you may have guessed by now that’s not what he said if he ever said it at all. I have to wonder how van der Rohe would react if he found out how this most lasting association with him beyond his architecture was, shall we say, remodeled?

What was actually said by whoever said it wasn’t invoking Satan in the basement. No, the original quote got turned upside down. It was “God is in the detail” and thus specified a different stickler for meticulousness– The one who resides in the penthouse.

Ok, that’s enough and I’ll let someone else have the last quote…

“Leave God alone. He has enough problems.”

— Elie Wiesel

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Down under the Novak Djokovic saga appears to be over. The winner of nine Australian Open tennis titles won’t have the opportunity to win this year’s championship. Three quarters of Australians polled believe Djokovic, who refuses to get a COVID vaccination, should have been banned from playing and agree with their Federal Court’s decision that canceled his visa to enter the country for a second time in 11 days.

As of two weeks ago a little less than half of the people in Serbia have been fully vaccinated so in his own home country, although he may be in the majority, it’s still a close call. Serbia is on the list of places our own CDC recommends Americans avoid. 

Sports has a way of stoking national passions and Serbia’s president, Aleksandar Vucic spurred his country’s outrage by decrying Australia’s decision disqualifying its premier athlete as harassment and his treatment while in limbo there “Orwellian.” 

After my last post I probably shouldn’t be attributing quotes to anybody but the Serbian president set himself up for this one.

“Serious sport has nothing to do with fair play. It is bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence: in other words it is war minus the shooting.”
–George Orwell in The Sporting Spirit (1945)

Those are strong words indeed, but I don’t think war is imminent. Serbia and Australia are 8,500 miles apart and Serbia is landlocked while Australia’s aircraft carrier is only big enough to land a helicopter. However, El Salvador and Honduras, which you can drive between in a little over three hours, did go to war for four days in 1969 after playing a disputed soccer match….

But back to Novak. Djokovic is not your ordinary anti-vaxxer if there is such a category. According to multiple sources, he has held unconventional if not wildly strange views for years when it comes to science, medicine and healing.
For instance he claims he discovered he was gluten intolerant 12 years ago after he held a slice of white bread on his stomach and noticed a weakness in one of his arms. Two years ago he claimed that molecules in water react to human emotions and polluted water can be cleansed by talking to it. Will power is one thing, nonsensical beliefs in mind over matter are another.

That’s not to say many outstanding athletes haven’t been superstitious– Serena Williams would wear the same socks during every match she won in a tennis tournament, Arguably the best basketball player of all time, Michael Jordan had his University of North Carolina college shorts under his team’s in every game he played as a professional. But my own favorite is baseball’s Wade Boggs. Boggs recorded 3,010 hits in his big league career and ate chicken before each and every one of them. He appeared in 2,432 games. I’ll take a wild guess that in the 18 seasons he played he racked up more battered fowl than batted foul balls.

But back to Novak Djokovic and the difference between superstitions and beliefs. I’m neither a theologian nor a philosopher but it seems to me that Wade Boggs’ chicken habit was harmless. He wasn’t pushing his chicken dinner ritual on anyone else, although he did author a cookbook titled Fowl Tips. 

Djokovic’s beliefs about detoxifying water, the healing powers of magnetic fields generated by Bosnian pyramids and his well documented mistrust of conventional science and medicine, capped by his refusal to be vaccinated against COVID-19 can be judged– at least by me –as a misguided parallel universe of his own creation. The danger in this is apparent when others who look up to him make his mindset their own.

There are four so-called Grand Slam tournaments in tennis. The Australian Open is the first of the season and is followed by the French Open, then Wimbledon in England and lastly, the United States Open. If COVID is still a clear and present danger to public health at the time they are scheduled, I wonder how each country will deal with Djokovic if he remains unvaccinated?

A few days ago the French parliament voted overwhelmingly to require all who attend sports events to be vaccinated against COVID-19, including the participants. That tournament will be held in May. The U.S. Open is played in New York in early September. If COVID is still rampant and Novak Djokovic still unvaccinated, he could be spending more time in court again than on one.

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“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal.”–Emma Goldman

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“Who hears music feels his solitude peopled at once.” — Robert Browning

“Music was invented to confirm human loneliness.”— Lawrence Durrell

“I don’t know anything about music. In my lineyou don’t have to.”— Elvis Presley

I’ve put together a short playlist of music that I hope you’ll find pleasing. Just click on the link below…

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLxoRxwG_idkWhWIb4jZ-6b3On_dUZKyue

The pieces in order…

Le Roi s’amuse, Scene du bal: I. Gaillarde. Moderato ben Marcato (2:57)

Composer: Léo Delibes

Sarabande pour Dulcinée — from Don Quichotte (3:38)
Composer: Jacques Ibert

Piano Concerto No. 1 in A Minor: II. Intermezzo – Andante espressivo (4:30) Composer: Dora Bright

Clarity (3:19)Composer: Oliver Davis

Below is a reprise of something I wrote last year about my enthusiasm for classical music and subsequent comeuppance in the 8th grade when I should have been “allegro non troppo” about showing it.

Music Schooled

I can’t carry a tune or even make one out and I have a story to prove it which shouldn’t surprise anyone who has been receiving my cartoons and commentary at this point.

As I write right I’m listening to WQXR– a classical music radio station in New York City. I have listened to it a lot and a lot more since last March. It’s an aural security blanket, a reminder that the world hasn’t yet descended into total darkness.

I love classical music and the credit for that goes to my father and the Food Fair supermarket. In the late 1950s somebody had the idea that the greatest classical music could be widely marketed and I mean marketed literally. A collection called “The Basic Library of the World’s Greatest Music” totaling 24 records was sold at supermarket chains nationwide. The cost was originally less than a dollar an album.

My father purchased the set of all 24 incrementally, which I guess means he made at least two dozen shopping trips to the Food Fair that my mother didn’t. I don’t remember ever being encouraged to listen to the records but when I began to I was hooked, especially by the romantic selections like Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Dvorak’s New World Symphony.

Each album came with a booklet that included information about the music and a short biography of the composer. This well of information would eventually provide me with a well deserved lesson in humility.

In my 8th grade music class, part of the state mandated curriculum was an introduction to classical music and our teacher played some of the same pieces that I had already heard at home– remember when phonograph/radio consoles were a piece of furniture?

Anyway, I couldn’t help myself and when the teacher would tell us about a work and its composer that I had already listened to and read about, I chimed in with something I knew that she hadn’t mentioned. I even compounded my smart aleckey-ness by volunteering to do reports on a few composers I particularly liked.

At the end of the school year we took the state mandated final exam. It counted for half our grade and, I believe to this day, was a weird way to evaluate what we had learned. The teacher sat down at the piano and our task was to determine if the scales she played were ascending or descending. I couldn’t hear any difference. I really couldn’t.

At our last class she was about to read out each of our final grades, but there was a pause before she began and I knew what was coming after she said this…“Not everyone this year who did the most work, did well on the listening test which as you know makes up half your final grade.”

She started announcing them. There were a lot of A’s– we were the so-called accelerated group –but then she got to me…“Peter, D on the final, B- for the year.”

I was sitting in the back of the room and at that moment a lot of heads turned toward me with big grins on their faces. I had earned them and I still see them.

Later in life I came to realize what was a huge embarrassment at the time had a silver lining. I figure it this way. Why did I love classical music perhaps more than the other kids? Easy– I hear it differently!

A final note…At college I discovered I had an unusual musical ability that might be my ears compensating for their inability to distinguish when a pianist’s hands are moving to the left or to the right. 

The college radio station held a contest and its premise was simple; a popular song was played backwards and the first person who was able to identify it won.

In quick succession I was the prize winner three straight times before I was banned from further participation. My rewards, by the way, were record albums. All three were soundtracks from Elvis Presely movies.

And for those of you who have listened and read this far, here’s a favorite short work from Bruno Bozzetto. It’s a piece of animation set to music from a film titled Allegro non troppo which he created in the 1970s.

I think it sums up the naked cynicism and hypocrisy of those today who have encouraged so many not to get vaccinated against COVID-19 while they themselves are… Bozzetto’s cartoon may have been prescient except for its ending. He was an optimist…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MXm9SyD1Oos

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“No matter how cynical you become, it’s never enough to keep up.”— Lily Tomlin

I was going to leave it at that with Lily having the last word but then I read a column by Linda Greenhouse in the New York Times that described Stephen Breyer this way…

“Although the labels often affixed to Justice Breyer are “pragmatist” and “seeker of compromise,” it has always seemed to me that these, while not inaccurate, miss the mark. They discount the passion beneath the man’s cool and urbane persona, passion that I think stems from his early encounter with a court that understood the Constitution as an engine of progress.”

Those last seven words speak volumes to me and made me rethink my cartoon might be something more than just an attempt to be witty by playing on Breyer’s name and Joel Chandler Harris’sfabled briar patch.
The Disney movie Song of the South, based on Harris’s Uncle Remus stories was withdrawn from release two decades ago and the film had even created controversy when it premiered in 1946. The mainstream press reviews were mostly effusive…

“Topnotch Disney—and delightful” — Time Magazine

But the black press was divided…

“Song of the South will prove of inestimable goodwill in the furthering of interracial relations.” — The Pittsburgh Courier

“As vicious a piece of propaganda for white supremacy as Hollywood ever produced.” — The Afro American

I saw Song of the South as a kid and had no idea that it might have been viewed as defamatory. In the 1950s I watched the TV sitcom Amos ‘n Andy and was oblivious to any denigration of black Americans and the offense they might have taken at being portrayed as negative stereotypes on television.

My awareness and sensitivity evolved and so did most of the country’s and we have the Supreme Court to thank for that. Brown v. Board of Education Topeka in 1954reversed the legality of “separate but equal” that had been established by Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896. Later, other decisions by the Court made racial discrimination in commerce and marriage unconstitional as well. The Court and the country evolved.

Stephen Breyer’s retirement in my estimation is worthy of an unqualified “job well done.” I share the belief that the Constitution has been and needs to be an engine of progress. I also share the fear that the Court that Justice Breyer is leaving won’t be seen as abiding by that conviction in the years ahead by a majority of Americans.

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“You know those little snow globes that you shake up? I always thought my brain was sort of like that. You know, where you just give it a shake and watch what comes out and shake it again. It’s like that.”
— Gary Larson

I agree, Gary. And right now here in Maine there’s a whole lot of shakin’ goin’ on!

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“How long do you Americans want to fight? One year? Two years? Three years? Five years? Ten years? Twenty years? We shall be glad to accommodate you?”

— North Vietnamese Premier Pham Van Dong in 1966 during an interview with an American journalist

What a sad time for the world and for all of us. As our country has now engaged in three failed wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan I have found myself less aware of the costs of each of them. I knew guys who died in Vietnam, I know journalists who almost died in Iraq. I don’t know anyone, not a soldier nor a reporter who went to Afghanistan.

But I do believe that my feeling progressively more distanced from each of these wars wasn’t so much my getting older and not needed to fight them. No, in each case the sacrifices by those who did go were increasingly easier for me to pay less attention to and avoid thinking about. The draft existed for the Vietnam War but like millions of others coming of age in the ’60s I was able to skirt it with a doctor’s letter or a deferment or a lucky lottery number. The unpopularity of that war led to our present day “all volunteer” armed forces and further insulated me and you from having to be concerned with America’s involvement on distant battlefields.

When wars are out of sight they also may become out of mind. The transformation of news coverage which I witnessed during my own career further made our wars less visible and conscience raising. Media, and especially television news, changed from seeing its responsibility to bring you the news you needed to know, to pandering to present you the news it thought you wanted to know. Soldiers dying overseas became almost less important than the latest diet that might make you thin. And besides stories about eating to combat COVID are a hell of a lot cheaper than having a news bureau in Kabul.

Sometimes when I found a story for an ABC News broadcast and if a correspondent didn’t participate in its production, I’d write and edit a version of it and voice it myself. In 2004 during the United States’ military involvement in Iraq I went to a beach in Santa Barbara, California and was moved and saddened by what I saw. It was a Sunday and a local carpenter was laying out crosses in the sand– one for each American soldier who had been killed in the war.

He had been doing this for months and each week he had to make and then plant more crosses. I interviewed a man there whose nephew had died in Iraq just months before and what he said then has haunted me ever since… “If we don’t finish what we do now, this is all in vain. And we don’t want any of these boys’ lives to be lost in vain.” Today, thousands upon thousands of parents, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters and children of the dead we lost in Afghanistan are asking themselves if their loved ones’ sacrifice was indeed for naught.

Here’s a link to that 2004 story…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZLBDAuWAJc

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Rosh HaShanah can be translated literally from Hebrew as head (rosh) of the year (shanah) on the Hebrew calendar. When I was growing up my family belonged to a Reform Jewish congregation. We went to services on erev (the evening of or beginning of) Rosh Hashanah and in the morning the following day. After that my father and I headed for the golf course. But we didn’t play at our country club. Our exclusively Jewish club was closed in observance of the Jewish holiday so on Rosh Hashanah my father and I would usher in the new year by playing at a public course.

Ten days later was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Catholics have Confession which, it’s my understanding they may do every month, or even every week. We Jews do our only official ask for forgiveness once a year. Yes, the joke is we go for wholesale versus retail when it’s available. But Yom Kippur is a solemn day that even those of us who do not go to synagogue like me take seriously. I fast. Very observant Jews fast on six different occasions in the course of a year. Many others, however, fast only one day a year on Yom Kippur.
Our country club, which no longer exists, was closed on that day as well so many years ago. After services my father and I never played golf.
May the New Year be a happy, healthy and prosperous one. May your family bring you joy and may we all help to make the world better by our presence.

Peter

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Having a last name that begins with the letter ‘I’ often had me being the only person in a classroom with that distinction or one of just a few ‘I’s on any other subsequent roster in which I was listed. The name that immediately preceded me in the Disney Company directory was that of Bob Iger, the CEO. I thought that at some point I’d get a call intended for him but it never happened and if he ever got one intended for me I never learned about it.

But it’s not like there are none of us with ‘I’s as the first letter of our last names. There are dozens of ‘I’s who have notably dotted the world from playwright Henrik Ibsen to singer Burl Ives with Sports illustrated swimsuit model Kathy Ireland and Hall of Fame baseball player Monte Irvin alphabetically in between, plus there have been 14 Popes Innocent which ranks second behind the most popular Papal appellation which is John with 21.

Imber isn’t a common surname but not the most uncommon one by a longshot. A website– namecensus.com –estimates there are over 500 Imbers in the United States which seems awfully high to me. Apparently, I only know a tiny number of them.

Years ago before it cost money to search people’s names on the internet I discovered there were three Peter Imbers in America plus a number of others overseas from Australia to Germany. That prompted further research and I found there were 14 Abraham Lincolns alive in the United States at the time. In fact there was someone with the same name as every president in America’s history, including multiple Millard Fillmores and even several James– including the middle initial K –Polks. I thought visiting with a few of them and getting their take on being a modern day Ulysses Grant or Harry Truman– there were eight of each of them –would have been a fun Nightline show but my idea was vetoed. Ted Koppel and I weren’t on the same wavelength when it came to story ideas which in retrospect probably served him well.

As for those two other Peter Imbers, I contacted both of them. One even had the same middle initial as I do– K. Almost the first words out of his mouth when I reached him were, “So you’re the one who has been getting the United Mileage Plus miles I’m missing.” Needless to say we haven’t communicated since. I’m not sure what he does but his father– Gerald Imber –is a notable American Imber.

Dr. Imber is a plastic surgeon in New York City who has been called an artist of a surgeon for his skills at keeping his patients looking younger than their age and not turning out like some less fortunate celebrities– Meg Ryan and Sylvester Stallone come immediately to mind –whose face lifts have left them looking like Cabbage Patch Kids. 

Another Imber who actually was an artist was Jonathan Imber who lived here in Maine. My brother’s name is Jonathan and I have been asked a number of times if I was related to the painter. “No,” I say, “I’m related to the scholar who is a chaired professor at Wellesley and my brother.”

Ultimately, it’s a small world for Imbers. In fact it’s so small that once upon boarding an airplane I found a woman in my seat and we both had been given the same seat assignment. I guess Southwest didn’t believe that two Imbers could be traveling to the same place at the same time.

Ah, but I haven’t mentioned that third Peter Imber. I discovered he was a Catholic and thus he became the only non Jewish Imber I’ve ever personally known about. And there’s another distinction here as well. That Peter C. Imber, who has since died, didn’t claim to be related to me which was also a first since every Jewish Imber will swear that he or she is a relative of the same Imber who I have been assured I am a descendent of and who died over a century ago.

Naftali Herz Imber was born in 1856 in the Ukraine and after wandering about Europe moved east to Ottoman Palestine in 1882. When most others were headed west and often to America, Naftali’s sense of direction was unconventional and so was to be his life and his destiny. He had begun writing poetry as a boy and in 1886 published his first book of poems in Hebrew. One entitled Tikvahtaynu– Hebrew for Our Hope —quickly became the lyrics for the Zionist anthem in the late 19th century and later the Israeli national anthem after the establishment of the modern state.

Imber’s poem was retitled Hatikvah– Hebrew for The Hope —and is sung at events in Israel just like our Star Spangled Banner. He’s the country’s Francis Scott Key as well as considered its first beatnik. That is sort of revisionist history since our own beatniks didn’t make the scene until the late 1950s but Naftali was a special case…

“a relic of the extinct species of wandering minstrels who used to pay their way in song and story, wit and wisdom…always broke but never without something to give to the needy, his pockets always bulging but only with scraps of paper scribbled full of Hebrew verses.”–Gerard Wilk in a 1951 article in Commentary.
Today, a couple dozen streets are named for Naftali Herz Imber in Israel, while one of America’s original beatniks, the author Jack Kerouac, only rates an alley in San Francisco and as far as I know there’s not anything anywhere named for the poet Allen Ginsberg.
Naftali Herz Imber returned to Europe from Palestine and eventually came to the United States where his life took a dark turn.

In 1909 he died at age 54 in New York’s Bowery, a penniless alcoholic.  His remains were reinterred in Jerusalem in 1953. My father told me my grandfather sent Naftali money in the final sad years of his life.

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At dinner the other night my friend David asked me how I thought the Salk vaccine would have been accepted by Americans if the polio epidemic were to be happening today. We looked at each other and shrugged. We both knew the answer. Polio shots wouldn’t have been nearly as well received and instead of respirators we’d have needed a lot more iron lungs.

Blame today’s resistance by those who refuse to get the COVID vaccine on whatever you like. There’s politics, misinformation spread by social media, a loss of respect for science, fear, a belief that an individual’s freedom trumps the common good of all… In the past couple weeks I’ve seen up close that those hesitant to get the jab can be anyone from a dental hygienist to a yoga instructor.

I am by no means a student of U.S. Supreme court decisions but recently, I learned of one I’d never heard of and my apologies to professor Vincent Starzinger if he mentioned it and it sailed by me. His course on constitutional law was one of the best times spent in the classroom during my undergraduate years at Dartmouth.

Jacobson v Massachusetts was a U.S. Supreme Court case decided in 1905 that affirmed the authority of the states to enforce compulsory vaccination laws. The vaccination in question was for smallpox and in a 7-2 decision the court held that “in every well ordered society charged with the duty of conserving the safety of its members the rights of the individual in respect of his liberty may at times, under the pressure of great dangers, be subjected to such restraint, to be enforced by reasonable regulations, as the safety of the general public may demand.”

For a more complete explanation of the case here’s an article written on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Jacobson v Massachusetts:https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2004.055152

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What’s the most amazing thing that hasn’t happened in my lifetime? Easy! The world hasn’t had a nuclear weapon used in anger since the United States leveled Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945. What’s arguably had an impact on the world comparable to an atom bomb since then? Easy! the internet.

With the world so far avoiding nuclear annihilation being the exception it seems that throughout history whatever humans have created and developed through research and technology has invariably been put to use. For nearly every discovery and invention that we’ve embraced and believed beneficial we have also often belatedly realized that there have been unexpected consequences. What has an upside rarely hasn’t also come with a downside.

Sure, at the moment I’m thinking about social media and the continuing string of accusations about Facebook’s bosses being more concerned about its profits than its impacts on society. But I’m not sure at this point that, even if they wanted to, social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, et al. could fumigate their sites and eliminate the toxic fumes that all too frequently spew so noxiously from them. They and the totality of the internet have become as uncontrollable as Frankenstein’s creature.

Mass media and the internet used to be called the information highway but regretfully they have also become a misinformation morass. It’s not something new. Since the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press in the 15th century to the yellow journalism of Hearst and Pulitzer in the 20th, truth and facts have always been up for grabs but today it’s easier than ever before to dispute, distort and damage them while stoking anger, hate and fear.

For me a key experience in my understanding of the internet’s potential for good and for bad goes back decades to a used bookstore in California. I wanted to find a book to read to my young son. In fact it was a whole series of them I had read as a kid about an athlete named Chip Hilton. Hilton starred in three sports and the books followed him through high school and college where his exploits on the football and baseball playing fields and the basketball court were matched by his qualities as a person and a leader.

It was a time before the internet and when I finally found a copy of A Pass and a Prayer on a shelf in Santa Barbara, I also discovered the author’s writing was so dated that my son showed no interest in my hero. But I was undeterred and soon there was eBay and instead of hunting for Chip Hilton randomly in stores and flea markets I could easily find and collect all 23 of the books that my mother had given away to the public school library. The internet had quickly become the world’s largest and most well stocked bookstore.

What I realized also after restoring my Chip Hilton trove was that people no matter where they were located physically who had common interests no matter how arcane, could now discover one another more readily and more quickly than ever before in human history. All the Chip Hilton book possessors and hunters could now communicate with one another if they so desired to. All the racists, homo and islamophobes, anti-semites, white supremisists and anti vaxxers could too.

From A to Z– Amazon to Zoom –we have seen so much change in so short a time. Doubtless we will see much more and be challenged to constantly adapt and be vigilant. I’m not sure we’re doing a good job of that at present and what Mark Zuckerberg created in his college dorm room may be just a precursor of how difficult it will be to control what’s coming.

“Nothing is so painful to the human mind as a great and sudden change.”
–Victor Frankenstein in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

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In the past surnames were often tip offs to one’s occupation– Baker, Fisher, Mason, Taylor, Weaver…Willie Shoemaker was a famous jockey but it’s a good bet somewhere along the way a Shoemaker ancestor shoed people and not horses.

As far as I can determine, the name Imber is derived from a Yiddish form of the German word ingwer, which means ginger. My family name originally may have indicated that one was a grower or seller of spices as far back as the late Middle Ages. Ancestry.com claims to have over 10 billion records but my specific family tree’s roots stumped their database. The Jewish villages of Eastern Europe called shtetls weren’t noted for their record keeping. 

I did meet and knew of other Imbers in Israel when I lived there in the 1970s. One was an officer in my artillery unit during my time in the army and another was a disc jockey on Israel radio. Both of course claimed to be related to Naftali Herz Imber, the poet who wrote the words of Hatikvah in the 19th century which became modern Israel’s national anthem.

Shamira Imber was at one point suspended from broadcasting because she played a protest song about the Israeli Army’s treatment of Palestinans in Gaza and the West Bank on the eve of the day that Israel commerates the Holocaust. I guess some Imbers have rocked the boat. Others just got on one. 

My grandfather, Jonas Imber, fled Europe along with his brother Joseph to avoid conscription and came through Ellis Island in the early years of the 20th century. One of my most prized possessions is the English dictionary he was given by an American Jewish newspaper shortly after his arrival. Its pages have exceeded their lifespan and I dare not open it.

Jonas and Joseph settled in Reading, Pennsylvania after being advised that opportunities awaited them there and within a decade they went from peddlars with a horse and wagon to businessmen with a store and employees.

My grandfather Jonas met my grandmother Anna in America and while he learned and spoke the language of his adopted country, Anna, although she comprehended English, hardly ever brought herself to speak it. Like many Jewish immigrants my grandparents spoke Yiddish when they didn’t want their three children to understand what they were talking about, but sometimes the kids could anyway.

Anna was not a great cook. Her chicken soup might have had curative powers, but it could have used a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. My father told me that on occasion Jonas, a kind and patient man, became exasperated by what was offered at the dinner table and would blurt, “Ikh kum heym far dem?” I don’t think I need to translate.

The two Imber brothers built houses side by side on a steep street above the city of Reading. The houses were identical. Up the hill from them was the mansion of William H. Luden, the inventor of the menthol cough drop. The smell from the Luden’s factory downtown is deep in my olfactory memory alongside that of grandmother’s Anna’s chicken soup.

I had never considered why Jonas and Joseph had identical houses until I took Jo to see them and she asked me. My mother had the answer.

“The two women didn’t like each other and didn’t trust one another. They insisted on the same house for each of them because they wanted to make sure neither got a square foot more.”

It was the spring of 1929 when both families moved into their new homes and simultaneously, construction was completed on a luxurious three story department store on Reading’s main street to house the Imber Brothers’ burgeoning business. Six months later in October they lost it and literally everything else except for the two identical houses when they were wiped out financially by the stock market crash.

My father was 12 at the time. He and his older brother and younger sister all managed to go to college and my father went on to get an MBA after paying his first year’s tuition with winnings from a fraternity poker game at Penn State.

When he returned to Reading after landing in Normandy on D-Day plus 1 he went to work for his father and his uncle at the smaller store they had reopened, but soon realized that Jonas and Joseph weren’t about to let him implement any of what he had learned at Harvard Business School. As I’ve seen in my own life– my mother told me to sit up at the table on the occasion of my 50th birthday –you often remain a child in the eyes of your parents.

My father bought in and then bought out the owner of a women’s ready-to-wear store down the street. I liked visiting him there because in the basement was a bowling alley and I’d be given a couple dollars so I could bowl and entertain myself while waiting for him to finish work. The noise from the rolling balls and flying pins was certainly strange accompaniment for the women upstairs trying on dresses and millenary but apparently, not an obstacle to sales.

At one point the business had expanded to three other retail stores plus two outlets in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. My father’s wish was for one of his sons to work with him. I wasn’t interested and neither was my brother. We both moved away and pursued our chosen careers. All the stores have been shuttered since the early 1990s.

There is only one Imber left in Reading. My grandfather’s brother Joseph’s son Harold is still alive. The two identical houses also remain side by side on Eckert Avenue and I assume their current inhabitants have no idea of how that symmetry came to be. Families take their memories with them and leave behind mysteries in their place.

Last night I searched for pictures of the Imber Brothers store on the internet and found something else instead. For sale on eBay was a wood handle for a shopping bag. Imber Bros. was printed on it. The seller believes it’s from the late 1800s. Close, but it isn’t. I remember those handles and believe they were still in use when I was a kid. For $19.99 I bought it.

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Stuff(ing) You Might Not Know About Thanksgiving

The debasement of the human mind caused by a constant flow of advertising is no trivial thing. There is more than one way to conquer a country.

–Raymond Chandler

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Send in the Clowns
Sung by Bernadette PetersAccompanied by Stephen Sondheim
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOZhmsp6iBQ

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The latest COVID variant– Omicron –is the 15th letter in the Greek alphabet. WHO gives COVID variants their names. That’s not a question, it’s the answer! The World Health Organization decides which variants are ones we need to be concerned about. The first one designated Alpha was formally identified in the United Kingdom almost exactly a year ago.
 

To get to Omicron WHO skipped two letters– Nu since it was believed it would have been confused with the word “new” and Xi, as some have speculated,not to offend China and its president Xi Jinping.

COVID now has the Greek alphabet naming rights all to itself. This past spring the WMO– World Meteorological Organization –decided to stop using Greek letters to identify tropical storms and hurricanes which it fell back on in years when its list of 21 selected proper names was exhausted.

In 2020 nine Greek letters had to be utilized in addition to the regular 21 from WMO’s prepared list that started with Arthur and ended with Wilfred. From September 18 to November 18 last year the Greek names began with Alpha and ended with Iota.

At one point Hurricane Zeta named on October 25thwas followed in rapid succession by Hurricane Eta on October 31st and Tropical Storm Theta on November 10th. Little wonder the Greek names were shelved. Zeta Eta Theta sounded like a fraternity.

So, will COVID with its variants become akin to an annual hurricane season? Here are a couple thoughts…

“We need to get used to the fact that there will be large numbers of variants appearing globally over the coming months and years. Stay calm, we will need to do this again and again in the future.”
–John Bell, professor of medicine at the University of Oxford

“There’s a joke among epidemiologists. If you’ve seen one pandemic, you’ve seen you’ve seen one pandemic one pandemic.”
–Brandon Dean, Los Angeles County Public Health Department

Who’s laughing? The WHO’s not.
Hang in there!

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Without cream cheese what’s a bagel to do?

Under the heading “This is just too rich” was something I stumbled across yesterday. Would you believe that Kraft Heinz, the company that makes Philadelphia Cream Cheese will pay you $20 NOT to make a cheesecake this holiday season?

You may be aware by now that among the multitude of things that have been impacted by supply chain shortages is cream cheese. I first noticed this a couple months ago when there was no Philadelphia Cream Cheese on the shelf at my local supermarket. I was a bit surprised but then again during the pandemic a lot of grocery items have been unavailable at times.

However, when shortly afterward I couldn’t find the whipped variety– my favorite cream cheese –anywhere, I realized that bagels and lox would at least temporarily lack the very mortar that has made the three of them bind together so immortally.

So, what happened? Well, according to an article a couple days ago in The Forward the problem is in the water– specifically, the water in a small town in New York State near the Canadian border. Lowville, NY is apparently low on water because of all the cream cheese making that takes place there. It’s the site of one of the largest cream cheese production facilities in the country and of late 80% of the town’s water has been used to meet an increased demand for cream cheese for use in comfort food at home in the time of COVID-19. In order to have enough water for its residents, Lowville officials recently reduced the amount of water available to the cream cheese factory.

According to the Washington Post spokespersons for both the town and Kraft Heinz have denied that the water reduction explanation is the reason for less cream cheese on the shelves or as neither of them would say but I will, the withholding of the water excuse just doesn’t hold water.

As with everything else that has inconvenienced, outraged or frightened us these days, much blame is now being spread around to explain the present paucity of cream cheese. There have been claims of worker shortages, unvaccinated truck drivers, cyberattacks and one I have to attribute to the author of The Forward article and wish I could take credit for that pointedly accuses New Yorkers of “laying it on too thick.”

New Yorkers do buy a lot of cream cheese but it’s not just for their lox and bagels. Junior’s in New York uses about 140,000 pounds of Philadelphia cream cheese every week for its classic New York cheesecakes and besides providing them to its four restaurants it also supplies 8,000 supermarkets nationwide. Since Junior’s cheesecakes are 85% cream cheese that’s four million pounds of the product required annually. I think for Junior’s output alone there may never be a glut in the demand for cream cheese as long as there are guts in need of cheesecakes.

So, what about the $20 being offered by Kraft Heinz for you not to make one for the holidays yourself? Well, of course there are hoops to jump through but not ones as daunting nor risky as trying to slice a bagel when you’re barely awake on a Sunday morning. First, the $20 is only for the initial 18,000 people who sign up in advance to be eligible. Second, you will have to send in a store or restaurant receipt for a dessert purchased in a market or eatery between December 17 and December 24. And third, you’ll need to reserve your opportunity to get the $20 starting TODAY at noon. Go to SpreadThe Feeling.com to sign up.

I still have a small container of cream cheese in our refrigerator. I’m using it sparingly but my problem isn’t whether it will last into the new year. My lox supply is not an issue either. No, my problem is with the bagels. Where I live there aren’t any to schmear about.

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The Winter Soltice or the Day of the Year that’s Not the Mostest

Today is the shortest day of the year but if the past nearly two years feel to you as if they’ve been short then you must have spent them in a coma. They have not flown by and here we are again wondering when we might ever fly anywhere at all again.

Last year on this date I posted a cartoon that wasn’t a cartoon but instead a photograph I took of a snow covered road beside the ocean here in Maine that I had walked the day before. I also added a parody of  the lyrics to September Song. Here it is again…

Oh, it’s a long, long while since March, who cares to remember
We’ll hope for the best from now, this day in December

When being stuck indoors drives us insane

We will endure and bellow Trump’s to blame

As vaccines trickle down to the precious few

His defenders, Mar-a-Lago members

And all these precious days until he’s through

These precious days just let him stew

Well, there isn’t and there still is Trump a year later. His and the Republican wrecking ball is still swinging and smashing American democracy although at the moment the person who is quite literally deserving of the most coal in his Christmas stocking is a Democrat senator from West Virginia.

A year later there is a vaccine available to all in the United States that can help mitigate and even prevent the effects of COVID-19 but the failure– and it’s perhaps the biggest self induced failure of the country in my lifetime –is that so many of us are refusing to get jabbed endangering themselves and others who are elderly and/or immunocompromised like myself. Who takes one for the team anymore?

I realized I haven’t been doing a lot of laughing recently. Humor and pain are not mutually exclusive. My favorite professor in film school had a saying, “Show me a happy comedian and I’ll show you someone on the way down.”

I consider myself happy and I make quite a few jokes. I look at humor as sort of a suit of armor I wear to keep smiling and feeling fortunate on the inside while wincing at what’s all around me on the outside. But I also am aware of how lucky I am with what I have in my life which includes the friendship of many of you and I keep hoping for better tomorrows.

Below are three frames from movies traditionally watched at this time of the year. I’ve taken actual lines from the films and changed them a bit. They may or may not be funny but the very essence of comedy is that it’s more often than not the truth.

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Enjoy! And if you didn’t get what you hoped for today, then may you continue to hope that you will…

Perry Como https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eHrODQsSGek

Chuck Berry https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dafn020Q52k

Peter, Paul and Mary https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nABowLcQlHc

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Somewhere in America someone is committed to watching every minute of every college football bowl game that is being played this year. That total originally stood at 43 but at the moment has been reduced by four to 39 due to the latest spike in COVID-19 illness.

Football needs the most players available to compete of any sport. The NCAA requires teams to have a minimum of 85 on their rosters and with a bunch of them now reduced by half that number due to COVID protocols, bowl watching has gotten less exciting for some and less tedious for others.

The height of the bowl barrage actually begins today with six games and that slate is also a prime example of how bloated the post season college football schedule has become. Only six of the 12 teams playing have winning records. However, when it comes to televised sports quantity trumps quality.

The New York Times may claim that it publishes “All the news that’s fit to print” but during my career in television news we might as well have had a different slogan– “All the news that fits between the commercials.” And that’s why we have this year the Lending Tree and the Guaranteed Rate bowls if you’re strapped for cash and the Cheez-it and Duke’s Mayo bowls if you’re snacking in your seat. There’s even the Famous Idaho Potato bowl if that seat is a couch.

Unfortunately, the bowl with my favorite sponsor this year is one of the games that was canceled. It’s the Wasabi Fenway bowl that was to be played in Boston at Fenway Park between Virginia and SMU. I assumed the wasabi part was the Japanese horseradish that comes on a board with your sushi. But no, turns out this Wasabi is a company that stores data in the cloud and has just notified me that I can save 80% on my own cloud storage by going with them.

And I think I just figured out why they call themselves Wasabi. The company claims that they have “changed the cloud storage landscape.” They call their innovation “hot cloud storage.” I wonder if I’m right?

Anyway, I can hear a tune that might have replaced Sweet Caroline if the football game had been played at Fenway…
Buckle down, Wasabi

Buckle down

You can win, Wasabi

If you knuckle down

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Over 40 years ago I spent a year in the desert. It was the same one where Moses had wandered for 40 lugging the two stone tablets inscribed with the Ten Commandments. I don’t know how old Moses was at the time or how he managed to do it but I was in my late twenties and only had to carry a knapsack and an M16 rifle. I had been drafted into the Israeli army and assigned to an artillery battery not too far from the Suez Canal. It was 1974, the year after the Yom Kippur War and the time passed slowly but peacefully.

Why I’m thinking about this experience right now has to do with a radio station in New York City that plays classical music. If you have been a reader of mine, you may be aware by now that if my brain were a car, I’d likely be pulled over for a sobriety test. Moses may have meandered about on foot but my mind bounces around like a Superball– remember those? You threw them down on a hard surface and they ricocheted as high as a three story building. Talk about an amazing product. Try to do that with a Tesla!

So, where was I? Yes, I mentioned WQXR, the classical music radio station I listen to pretty much every day. Each year at this time the station asks its listeners to vote for their favorite pieces of classical music and then plays the top 100 throughout the week between Christmas and New Years. I’ve never voted so I have no right to complain and I’m not, but I have observed that if this countdown were a week earlier, the WQXR hosts could have done their shifts and their Christmas shopping simultaneously.

Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 clocked in at 59 minutes, Orff’s Carmina Burana at an even hour and Schubert’s 9th at an hour and three minutes. And that was just between noon and 5 p.m. yesterday!

Ok, that covers the radio station but if you’re still with me then what about the desert?

So, after my basic training I arrived in the Sinai and at 27 was the oldest soldier in my artillery unit. Why artillery? Simple. I was still learning Hebrew and artillery was the branch of the army where you needed the least. Most days were uneventful although at one point we had a serious rat infestation and I was bitten twice. There are no purple hearts for that, just tetanus shots.

The daily routine also consisted of a nightly routine which was guard duty and unless your shift was first or last you never got to sleep through the night. It was shortly after I had gotten there that I got pranked by a battery mate. I had an early shift that evening and it was time to be relieved. When my replacement arrived he didn’t have his weapon with him.

“Ok if I finish listening to a song on the radio and then come back?” he asked.
I said sure, thinking I was being a mensch (a good guy in Yiddish) and not a “frayer” (a sucker in Hebrew). My gesture of goodwill turned my guard duty that night into a double shift. The reason was an Egyptian singer named Umm Kulthum.

I had never heard of her but when she died less than a year later four million people in Cairo lined the streets to witness her funeral procession. Umm Kultum was the Maria Callas of the Arab world as well as the Beatles, Elvis and the Motown catalog rolled into one. Her songs were events. One of her most popular varied between 45 to 90 minutes in length depending on her mood. I have no idea what she was singing that night and took what I perceived as my indoctrination into my unit like a good sport. What’s an hour and a half if there’s a chance I might get to be like Moses and live to 120? Of course that’s a sucker’s bet, too.

One of the few material things I’ve ever lost that I regret is the ballpoint pen I was given when my year in the desert ended. That ballpoint pen was inscribed “To Avram (my Hebrew name) from Battery Gimmel.” 

You might have heard the joke about bar mitzvahs where instead of the bar mitzvah boy claiming “Today I am a man” he blurts “Today I am a fountain pen.” Nobody uses or gives fountain pens anymore as gifts. In fact when I was bar mitzvahed I didn’t get any and could have said “Today I am a thermometer/barometer.”

I got a stack of those. But boy, I wish I still had that pen.

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I used to think that when anthropologists in the distant future uncover relics from our era that they might spend a great deal of time trying to figure out the function of a salad shooter. And when they did they would conclude that we so loved firearms that we even shot our vegetables. But our behavior is even stranger than any device for any purpose that humans have come up with until now.

With the current rise in COVID cases in New York the Westminster Dog Show has been postponed until spring. The press release states that it’s out of concern for the safety of all participants. When I read the word “all” I immediately checked to see if dogs can contract COVID and the answer is yes.

There haven’t been many instances of this happening but enough of them for the CDC to have guidelines posted for how to take care of your pet and yourself during the pandemic if this were to happen. It appears the dog owner can transmit the virus to the dog but the dog won’t give it to its owner. Out of an abundance of caution the Westminster Kennel Club has shut down its event for now. Score one possibly for the dogs.

I wrote earlier this week about college football’s bowl schedule being disrupted and a number of games canceled because teams lacked enough healthy players. But tomorrow the really big games are slated to take place and the Cotton and Orange Bowls are sellouts. It’s possible 150,000 fans may show up. It’s huge money for the network carrying the game and big money for the schools participating. You can be sure the athletes on those teams have been virtually locked in their rooms this week when they weren’t practicing.

Yes, it’s true there apparently haven’t been “super spreader” incidents as a result of large crowds attending sporting events up to now. And it’s also true that the more we’re learning about the Omicron variant, the less dangerous contracting it appears to be for all but the unvaccinated, elderly and immunocompromised. But the see-sawing rationales for what’s more safe and less safe stoke no small amount of ever present anxiety and frustration for some of us. I’m confused and I bet you may be too.

You know it’s so confusing I might just need to relieve some stress and get out a salad shooter and blast some cucumbers.

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The Scot Robert Burns wrote the poem in 1788 that was later set to music and became what will be sung around the planet tonight when some clocks still strike midnight but most of today’s digital devices will silently signal the beginning of a new year.

Once the poem became a tune it didn’t take long for musicians of the time to compose their own arrangements for Auld Lang Syne; Joseph Haydn and Ludwig von Beethoven being foremost among them. It was originally sung in Scotland to mark occasions both happy– graduations –and sad– funerals –and other events both large and small such as the election of a new government or the end of an evening’s dancing and even the closing of a store for the day which became customary in Japan.

Of course the song is now mostly associated with New Year’s Eve gatherings and, as you might already be aware, we have a Canadian bandleader to thank for that.

Guy Lombardo grew up in an Italian family in the province of Ontario, a region settled by Scots, and first heard Auld Lang Syne after he and his brothers formed a musical group and performed at church socials. They came to America when they were still teenagers and by 1929 after a successful stint in Chicago they relocated to New York.

The band had become so popular that two radio networks were competing for its services. On New Year’s Eve of that unsettling year– stocks had already lost almost half of their value in October’s crash –Guy Lombardo and His Royal

Canadians started their evening being broadcast on the radio by CBS and signed off just before midnight so they could be switched over to NBC. To cover that gap Lombardo had the band play the tune he had learned at home– Auld Lang Syne.

Thereafter on New Year’s Eve for nearly 50 years until Guy Lombardo’s death in 1977 he led His Royal Canadians in celebrating the end of one year and the dawn of another on both radio and television.

LIFE magazine once wrote that if Lombardo were for some reason not to play Auld Lang Syne, Americans would not believe that a new year had actually arrived and Variety claimed that he was “the only Canadian to ever create an American tradition.”

In the British Library Sound and Moving Image Catalogue there are 935 versions of Auld Lang Syne. Here are a few I have found to represent the range of what’s available. If you only choose one to listen to, I suggest it be the bluegrass…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=19-Giy1g8V0
Early recording from 1910

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5DnjPSTuXo
Blues Rock

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PT1qsNagugY
Bluegrass

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwCmWPqHGA8
Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians in 1939

HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYBODY!