Traveling the World to Hong Kong
and
One of the Top Ten Places I’ve Ever Been
Jo and I have been to Boston once and to Portland several times since last March. Our staying put is not a surprise to anyone of course. We had just begun planning a spring trip to Argentina and were lucky we hadn’t paid for any of it in advance when it became clear we weren’t about to be going anywhere.
So, here we are wondering when and if we’ll be able to travel again. Until then we have our memories of the places we’ve been and this week I’m going to reminisce and take the only vacation presently available to me, a holiday break from current events.So, come along and as the announcer who introduced the Lone Ranger used to say, “Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear.”
For me Hong Kong and Budapest have something in common. When I went to Budapest fifty years ago, I didn’t know until I got there that Buda and Pest were two different cities separated by the Danube before they were united in the late 19th century. I knew before going to Hong Kong that it was an island but I didn’t know that across the bay from it another large part of it, Kowloon, wasn’t and is actually on the Chinese mainland.
In both Budapest and Hong Kong you find yourself going back and forth across, over or under the water to fully experience each of the halves of them. Then there’s Istanbul that also exposed my deficient knowledge of geography. It’s the only city in the world that’s split between two continents and I learned that only when I made a trip there.
Today, I’ll focus on Hong Kong where Jo and I were in 2014 and are both glad we had the opportunity to visit. It’s one of those places so unique, you should see it and I’ll also recommend that once is enough.
It’s the most vertical human habitat on earth. Six of the top ten cities in the world with the most skyscrapers today are now in China and Hong Kong has 4,000 of its own– nearly two hundred more than the closest runner up. Add to that its high rises and you have an additional 5,000 of them and more people living above the 15th floor than anywhere else in the world by far. You can have an apartment 40 stories up and never see the sun.
Hong Kong also has the most neon signs of anywhere I’ve ever been. It’s estimated that at one time there were over 100,000 of them but more economical LEDs have reduced that number dramatically and that’s too bad. I’m a neon fan and like to take a picture of any neon sign I see that I like. I snapped away like crazy in Hong Kong but the warmth of neon’s glow is not something you can really capture with a camera. Large cities are frenetic and it’s probably just wishful thinking on my part to believe that their neon helps to slow things down and wrap them in a warm cover.
If you’re interested in becoming a neon-o-phyte use this link to see a collection of thousands of the neon signs that light up Hong Kong at night…
https://www.neonsigns.hk/?lang=en
If New York is the city that never sleeps, Hong Kong is the city that never stops shopping. Imagine a city with a Starbucks on every block and then imagine that not only is there one on every block but on the same block there is also another Starbucks directly across the street from the one already there. There are an insane number of identical stores everywhere.
Shopping in Hong Kong resembled a TV game show I watched years ago called Supermarket Sweep where people had a couple minutes to fill a grocery cart with anything they could stuff it with. Whoever rang up the highest dollar amount at the checkout counter won something but I don’t remember if it was more than just the food. In Hong Kong we watched as people rolled suitcases into shops and bought so feverishly it looked like they were being timed. However, they weren’t grabbing sirloin steaks from the meat counter unless they were planning to grill Prada bags and Manolo Blahnik shoes.
Before we leave, let me lower us back down to street level where people are standing in line on the sidewalk to eat at the only Michelin star restaurant that I’ve ever been to. It was more like a small diner than a fancy brasserie. I’ve saved and framed my paper placemat. Jo found it and Dim Sum One will forever shine brightly in my mind. We ordered pretty much everything on the menu and it was all great. When we got our check I was stunned. For the two of us it totaled $22. We went back for another meal the next day.
While we were in Hong Kong in 2014 there were areas of the city that were blocked off. Protestors, many of them students, were camped out in opposition to a Chinese government decree that only pre approved candidates would be able to run in an upcoming election. Shortly after our trip the protestors were forcibly dispersed. The beginning of the dismantling of democracy in Hong Kong was happening right before our eyes and we hardly noticed.
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Traveling the World to Provence
and
One of the Top Ten Places I’ve Ever Been
The first filmmaker to be elected to the Académie française was Marcel Pagnol. I have framed replicas of the posters for three of his movies– the “Fanny Trilogy”– Marius, Fanny and Cesar —a few feet from my desk. All three were made in the 1930s and then combined into one to become a Broadway musical in the 1950s and a 1961 Hollywood film starring Leslie Caron, Maurice Chevalier and Charles Boyer, but the original movies set in the old port of Marseille are what I love.
Pagnol’s works were pretty much all I knew about Provence other than it was often mentioned as a cool place to have a house if you were thinking about becoming an expat. So, when Jo and her two best friends from college proposed that the husbands join them there for a week to celebrate a significant joint birthday year of theirs, I was all in. I’d never read Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence but the town nearest to the house we rented was Ménerbes, the same one Mayle lived in and wrote about.
I’m not going to drone on about picturesque villages and their bountiful markets. No, I want to tell you about an epiphany I had at a Roman aqueduct built in the first century AD. Pont du Gard was constructed to carry spring waters over 30 miles to a Roman colony that is today the city of Nîmes.
As best I’ve been able to figure out, the acquduct’s daily flow was enough to fill about a half dozen football field sized swimming pools to a depth of 10 feet. But here’s the amazing thing to me, from the beginning of the aqueduct to its terminus– that length of 30 miles –the vertical drop is barely over 40 feet. I often have to hammer more than one hole in the wall just to hang something level in our house.
Before I knew any of this I had that epiphany as I was looking up at Pont du Gard. It’s almost the exact height of The Arc de Triomphe, and I thought of the genius it took to design and build such a wonder with the know-how and technology at hand nearly 2,000 years ago. The structural engineers of their day had figured out the importance and utility of the arch and how to presumably get slaves to move some of the stones that weighed as much as six tons into place to create them.
So, my conclusion was that although the human knowledge base is cumulative and more or less fixed at any point in history (or at least it used to be), there must have been geniuses of comparable intelligence, inquisitiveness and inventiveness then as well as now. That’s what I thought anyway.
That was until coming across an article written a couple years ago about IQ scores and something called the Flynn effect. I remember taking an IQ test in junior high school and our school’s guidance counselor explaining its implications to me– “Peter, you’re capable of doing better in school if you studied.” I wasn’t upset with her analysis but she told a friend he was an overachiever and it really bummed him out. He became a university professor by the way.
Intelligence Quotient testing has been around for a century and during that time IQ scores have increased. The scores have increased so much that the article I found claimed that an average one today would have been considered a genius result a hundred years ago. As much as I was skeptical of this conclusion, it does seem to make sense. Sitting down in front of my computer and composing my cartoons requires a lot of cognitive demands that were not necessary to learn and use when operating a radio required only turning a knob and answering the phone merely picking up the receiver.
Our brains are only slightly larger than they were 400,000 years ago so our IQ increase, which until recently has been an impressive and mind boggling three points a decade, isn’t believed to be genetic. However, it may be due to environmental factors– better health and nutrition, less lead in paint and gasoline and the demands of new technology that require abstract thinking at an early age.
It is possible today to get by as a cashier at McDonald’s without actually knowing how to make change for a dollar but playing Minecraft successfully on an Xbox may be a different matter.
I just wrote that until recently human IQs have steadily gotten higher but guess what? In addition to all the other tsuris (Yiddish for troubles) in the world, since the 1990s the global average IQ score has begun to drop.You’ve likely heard of the concept of peak oil– the point at which the maximum amount of petroleum that can be extracted from the earth has been reached. Well, there is now a theory that human intelligence may have climbed to the top of its own summit and we may be living in the age of peak intelligence.
When I had my Pont du Gard epiphany I thought I was connecting humanity across millenia. Now, I wonder if I need to have my head examined? That’s a figure of speech of course.
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Traveling the World to the Equator
I may be the only person you’ll ever hear say that he was not wildly enthusiastic about being on the Galapagos Islands and I think the feeling was mutual. I had a sea lion bark at me and it wasn’t playfully and a giant tortoise hissed and snapped as I approached despite his decisively outweighing even the old me. In both instances I admit I had inadvertently invaded their spaces. The iguanas, which looked like a battalion of Godzillas, freaked me out.
At one point I did enjoy snorkeling with a shark. Apparently, sharks in the Galapagos have such an abundance of other food to eat that humans are not worth the bother. And the blue footed boobies whose feet are actually turquoise are certainly unique.
Mainland Ecuador was more exciting to me. Jo and I journeyed into the Andean highlands which I found spectacular and on our way there we stopped on the equator. We were travelling with another couple and a guide whose name was Wilson.
Me: “So, are you named for the American president?”
Wilson: “No, my parents named me after a character on a television show they watched at the time I was born.”
Me: “Really? What show?”
Wilson: “It was called Dennis the Menace.”
Wilson took us to a tourist stop that I have no reason to believe wasn’t the exact location of the equator as it passes through Ecuador. By the way there are 13 countries in the world on the equator and at least half of them are ranked among the poorest on earth. Although Ecuador’s economy doesn’t place at either the bottom or the top of that list, it does have something going for it.
Ever hear of the Happy Planet Index? I hadn’t but a British think tank called the New Economics Foundation ranks countries according to a small list of things that don’t include the square footage of your house or the size of your investment portfolio. They use four criteria: Citizens’ satisfaction with their own lives, their average life expectancy, the degree of income inequality present in their country and the extent of that country’s ecological footprint. Of 140 nations ranked, Ecuador comes in 10th. In case you’re wondering, Costa Rica is first and the United States 106th.
However, we do have something in common with Ecuador that is very convenient. You need not change money when you’re there. Its currency is ours. Ecuador doesn’t print its own notes but does have its own small change and to my surprise a lot of some of ours. Remember the Susan B. Anthony and Sacagawea dollar coins? Hardly anybody in America does. They were both minted for only a few years and never gained popularity here but they’re now abundantly in circulation in Ecuador.
But back to the equator and the Coriolis effect. You know what it is even if you don’t know what it’s called. Wilson demonstrated it for us.
There was a red line on the ground (a picture of it is at the top of this post) marking the center of the earth for us. Conveniently, on either side were sinks no more than 20 feet apart from each other. Wilson filled a jug with water on the northern side and proceeded to pour it into the sink. The water spiraled into the drain in a clockwise direction. Wilson repeated the process on the southern side and this time the water spun in a counter-clockwise direction.
Just like I was certain I was straddling the equator, I was convinced that Wilson had shown us the real deal that proved that flushed toilets behave differently if you’re in the outback of Australia or an Outback Steakhouse– and there is one actually –in Visalia, California. I’ll let you be the judge if I was, as it were, hosed by sleight of hand. You can check here…
Being on the equator made me realize that despite Ecuador’s high ranking for its quality of life, there was something about living there that would probably drive me crazy. Here in Maine the difference between the shortest and longest day of the year is six hours and 39 minutes. In Ecuador it’s barely one minute which of course means that sunrise and sunset are very much a Groundhog (the movie) Day scenario. Since last March I’ve had enough Groundhog days to last the rest of my days on earth so I intend to stay just where I am.
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Traveling the World to Wadi Rum
and
One of the Top Ten Places I’ve Ever Been
In my opinion Muhammad lV has only one rival for the distinction of being the “Best Tour Guide I’ve Ever Had” and his compettition will be described in my post tomorrow. But I hope I have your attention with the Roman numeral. There’s a story that goes with it of course and I don’t want to leave the impression that Muhammad lV was a sequel in a Hollywood movie franchise.
A few years ago when Jo and I visited Israel we took a side trip to Petra and Wadi Rum with our friends Cathy and Charles. When we crossed from Eilat in Israel into Jordan we met our first man named Muhammad who made sure we got through the process at the border checkpoint and then a second Muhammad drove us from there to our hotel in nearby Aqaba on the Red Sea. The next morning our third Muhammad picked us up for the two hour drive to Petra and was our tour guide for the day.
Is Petra spectacular? Yes! Is it full of hucksters waiting to pester you to buy tchotchkes (Yiddish for knick knacks) once you’ve reached the heart of it after walking through a narrow canyon for a half hour? Yes! And I am still amazed and puzzled by how something that looks as contemporary as the picture above of the “Treasury” was carved into sandstone over 2000 years ago by an indigenous Arab Bedouin tribe, the Nabateans. Yes!!! We came, we saw, avoided riding any camels and had a really awful lunch at a snackbar. Petra was worth all of it.
After overnighting at a hotel in which we were the only Americans among tour groups of Germans and Chinese– there had been a terrorist attack nearby a few months before — we met Muhammad lV and set off to explore Wadi Rum also known as the Valley of the Moon. As awe inspiring as Petra was, Wadi Rum’s beauty impressed me more and Muhammad lV turned out to be one of the more interesting people I believe I’ve ever met.
But first a bit about Wadi Rum. I lived in the Sinai for a year when I was in the army in Israel. It was empty and dry and sandstorms occasionally had their way with and repositioned the topography. The dunes could appear sexy much like Edward Weston’s photographs of vegetables. So, I thought I had seen the desert’s power of seduction but if the Sinai is Ravel’s Bolero, Wadi Rum is Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture.
We spent a windless day in Wadi Rum and I was blown away. That’s a sentence that will never win a travel writing award and I apologize. As the photograph above shows Wadi Rum is not a sandbox. The highest peak there is virtually the same elevation as Maine’s Mt. Katahdin. The colors are so saturated I realized afterward that I’d probably never seen them in nature before.
Movies give you a 180 degree view but they are projected on a screen with no depth. Oh yes, every decade or so Hollywood rolls out 3-D for the next generation up but it’s always a temporary fad. It and so called virtual reality where goggles attempt to immerse you in an alternate one, can’t or at least can’t yet substitute for real experience in real places in real time. I don’t think I have to worry about still being around if this ever becomes possible although seeing and hearing Glenn Miller or Billie Holiday or Frank or Ella perform “live” would be something I’d line up for.
But back to Wadi Rum. If you’ve seen David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or more recently Ridley Scott’s The Martian, you’ve been to Wadi Rum cinematically. Go see it for real and if you can get Muhammad lV to be your guide, you’ll have an even more memorable time.
The lousy meal in Petra the day before was erased by the feast in Wadi Rum in the picture above that Muhammad lV prepared for us out of the back of his SUV. He had other talents– beautiful handwriting that he demonstrated by spilling one color sand on top of another from his hand –but learning about him was what I found most captivating.
Muhammad lV was a Bedouin and he told us that his daughter was the first female Bedouin to have been accepted to medical school at the University of Jordan in Amman. He so gushed about this that he was like many a Jewish parent and reminded me of how my own mother once expressed her regret that neither I nor my brother had become doctors.
My mother: “I should have been like Lil and made you boys study.”
Lil, who lived across the street, had three sons. One grew up to be a neurosurgeon, another an anesthesiologist and the third an orthodontist. My brother is a doctor– a revered professor of sociology at Wellesley. I am a recovering journalist. If we were to be compared to stand up comedians, I’d say our home was a tough room to perform in.
Muhammad lV knew Charles and I were Israeli citizens and he surprised us with his objectivity about the rough neigborhood that is the Middle East.
Muhammad lV: “I admire Israel. You put one of your prime ministers in jail. That wouldn’t happen here.”
He was referring to Ehud Olmert who went to prison for bribery and obstruction of justice after his term in office. It’s the same fate that might await the current P.M. Benjamin Netanyahu who is doing his damndest to avoid a trial on similar charges and in the process closing the gap to nearly imperceptible between a democracy runamuck and a monarchy where nobody gets to run against the sovereign.
I won’t get any further into Middle Eastern politics. Anyone who thinks they can predict what’s going to happen there is being foolish. But one last observation. Everywhere we were in Jordan there were billboards with three men on them. One was the late King Hussein, another was of the present ruler Hussein’s son King Abdullah and the third was of Abdullah’s heir Crown Prince Hussein bin Abdullah. Nobody got to vote for them but in order to avoid being overthrown they have to tread a line between maintaining popularity and exhibiting strength. Isn’t that sort of what any head of state must do to stay in power?
Israel right now has its own billboards. Netanyahu faces another election next month and I just looked at his campaign poster and might have laughed if it wasn’t so ironic. It’s of him shaking hands with our most recent ex-president with just two words on it. Pronounced in Hebrew they would sound like “lee-gah ah-hair-it.” Translation: “A different league.”
That would certainly be accurate for the two of them but for me certainly, not in the way they intended.
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Traveling the World
to the Old City of Jerusalem
One of the Top Ten Places I’ve Ever Been
If you want to dig into the history of Jerusalem shovels are just as useful as books. The Old City has been where it is for over 5,000 years which makes it one of the oldest cities in the world. It is enclosed by walls and exists on 225 acres and 25 layers of ruins.
Jerusalem’s timeline includes the Bronze and Iron Ages, the latter being when King Solomon built the first Jewish temple. The temple was then destroyed by the Babylonians, who were defeated by the Persians, who were conquered by the Greeks, who were routed by the Romans and who then went on to raze the second Jewish temple as well as the entire city. I could continue but I’ll just skip to the Kurt Vonegut mantra in Slaughterhouse Five, “And so it goes.”
When Jo and I were in Jerusalem a few years ago I got my own succinct history lesson from two cab drivers who I asked the same question. The first was a Jewish resident of the city.
Me: “So, were you born here?”
Jewish cab driver: “Yes, of course.”
Me: “And how long has your family lived in Jerusalem?”
Jewish cab driver: “My family has been here since the beginning of the Spanish Inquisition. That’s 600 years.”
He was taking us to Yad Vashem, Israel’s memorial to the millions of victims of the Holocaust who were murdered less than a 100 years ago.
When we left Yad Vashem a Palestinian driver picked us up.
Me: “So, were you born here?”
Palestinian cab driver: “Yes.”
Me: “And how long has your family lived in Jerusalem?”
Palestinian cab driver: “Forever.”
I am not making this up. Jo is my witness although both conversations with the cabbies were in Hebrew, a language she does not speak. but if this isn’t the very heart of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, then what is?
When I lived in Israel I visited the Old City on occasion but could make no claim of real knowledge about it except for where to get the best hummus. That was on the Via Dolorosa which is believed to be the path on which Jesus carried the cross to his own crucifixion. The catchy name of the hummus stand was the Sixth Station of the Cross Snackbar or at least that’s how I remembered it being called. Either I had the name wrong or it had changed and was now known as Abu Shukri and none other than Peter Jennings corrected me about this.
It turned out that Peter and I liked the same hummus from the same place. Only Jennings, as he was wont to do, topped me and also put me down. The owner, the Abu Shukri, he told me, was his friend and anytime he was in Jerusalem he came home loaded with his hummus. The take down was sort of deserved. I had produced a story on a restaurant in Oregon that incorporated wild mushrooms into every dish they made including dessert. Not a groundbreaking bit of journalism for sure but the piece had been sitting on the shelf for weeks and I must have thought that Peter’s and my mutual love of the same hummus would help me get it on the broadcast. It didn’t.
Jennings: “Just because we like the same hummus, don’t think you can hustle the mushroom piece.”
I know I’ve taken my time getting to our day in the Old City but let’s go. And let’s thank Jo for finding the best guide to see it who I could ever imagine. His name was Dvir and I looked up his rating on the site Trip Advisor just now and out of 834 reviews all but one were four stars which is as high as is attainable. That’s better than the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine. I wonder who the “one” was?
The Old City is divided into four quarters– Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Armenian. Dvir, an Israeli in his 30s, not only knew what we could discover and enjoy in each of them but he also seemed to be on great terms with everyone in all of them.
It was Sunday morning so we started our day outside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. That’s its ceiling in the picture above. No fewer than six Christian denominations worship there– Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Roman Catholic, Coptic, Ethiopian, and Syriac Orthodox.
We stood by the entrance and watched the parade as the different sects took their turns entering the church for their Sabbath rites. Inside there were separate chapels for worship for some of them while others were shared. The church is recognized as being on the spot where Jesus died, buried and rose from the dead and I assume on any Sunday it’s as busy as Grand Central Station. The trains of priests and worshipers appeared to move with precision and run on time.
Next, Dvir managed to get us onto the Temple Mount which gets my vote for being the most contested piece of real estate on earth although I haven’t yet been to the Korean DMZ. Jews consider this site to be the place where God’s presence can be most closely felt. Muslims worship here in mosques that are among the holiest in Islam. And for good measure in Christian art Jesus is depicted as having been circumcised on the Temple Mount.
We had only fifteen minutes to be there and Dvir warned us that Jo and I should not touch each other. Muslims in police uniforms were all about to enforce that requirement and make sure we didn’t overstay our allotted visitation time. Israel has controlled the Old City since the 1967 Six Day War but ceded custodianship of the Temple Mount right afterward to Jordan and an Islamic religious trust called the Waqf (pronounced wok). Israel is responsible for security on the Temple Mount so although the Waqfs in uniforms made it clear they were less than happy to have us there, they had no weapons.
Only Muslims can enter the Dome of the Rock (pictured above) and the Al-Aqsa mosque from where Muhammad ascended to heaven, met God and then returned to the temporal world. For a moment things got tense when our time was up and we headed toward an exit that we were told we couldn’t use. Dvir explained calmly he had always been permitted to do so in the past and after a few minutes of discussion we were able to leave the way we wanted to.
If devout Muslims and Jews have one thing in common it’s their shared neurosis concerning a separation of the sexes and just below the Temple Mount at the Western Wall nobody has to remind you that it’s men to the left and women to the right. Since 1948 only Judaism as practiced by the Orthodox is officially recognized in Israel who also are the only authority on birth, marriage, divorce and death. In Orthodox synagogues men and women sit apart.
After the United Nations and the United States recognized the modern State of Israel in 1948 Arab armies immediately attacked it. At the end of that war Jordan had control of the Old City and expelled all Jews who lived there. When Israel retook the Old City in 1967, Jewish access to the Western Wall of the Second Temple was restored and Jews could pray there again. It was a big deal then and remains so now. If there is ever to be a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians, what to do about Jerusalem will likely be the weightiest stumbling block in the negotiation.
I am not religious but my Jewish identity is not prescribed by prayer or ritual. It’s all about the people I am descended from and the connection I feel toward them and our history. At the Western Wall there is a tradition of Jews writing prayers to God on slips of paper and placing them in the wall’s crevices. You don’t have to be Jewish to do so and so many notes– a million annually –accumulate that periodically they are collected and buried nearby on the Mount of Olives.
I have stood in front of the Western Wall at least a half a dozen times and placed notes in the wall. I don’t remember what I wrote on a single one of them but if there is a most sacred place for the Jewish people, this is it.
Three religions with holy and terribly important physical manifestations of their faiths are located within such a short and combustible distance of each other. So, let me correct their being terribly important to terrifyingly important.
Dvir took us to a building in the Muslim Quarter I had known nothing about. The Austrian Hospice was built in the 19th century as a guesthouse for Austrian and German pilgrims to Jerusalem. It still functions as a hotel operated by the Catholic Church of Austria. From its roof is the best view of the Old City from inside its walls. And while we were standing there, in only a few minutes we were able to witness the passions of the Old City pass before our eyes.
First we sighted a procession of Christian pilgrims retracing the walk of Christ on the Via Dolorosa with one bearing a cross on his back. Next, a smaller group of Orthodox Jews walking in the opposite direction, presumably to their homes in the Muslim quarter where a small number of them live. Moments after that we heard an adhan– the Muslim call to prayer which happens five times a day –and now the Via Dolorosa became a stream of Muslims hurrying to their mosques.
Our day wasn’t all about religions and their differences and disputes thankfully. Dvir led us to special places to eat specialities like knafe, buy spices like za’atar and look at Armenian ceramics. I spotted a T-shirt shop off an alleyway and had one made for my son. Among Gil’s list of gig economy jobs, he’s the organist for a professional hockey team. The Arab owner of the shop cheerfully printed my son’s team’s name– the Anaheim Ducks — in Hebrew letters for me to bring back to the United States. I guess that’s as good a description of Mideast peace that I can provide for now.
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Traveling the World to Maine and
Sometimes the Best Places I’ve Ever Been
Are Just Outside the Front Door
A Maine for All Seasons!
As of today I have completed my list of the Ten Best Places I’ve Ever Been and it’s nice to feel that where I live is absolutely one of them. In creating my list I’ve discovered that the majority of the places I’ve chosen have been deemed UNESCO World Heritage Sites.
Once we can travel again I’d hope to be able to create a new top ten list. There’s the Taj Mahal in India, the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg, the Terracotta Warriors and the Great Wall in China, New Zealand…
As the Dali Lama says, “Once a year go someplace you’ve never been.” Hmmm…. until now I thought Shangri-la was his real home in Tibet. It’s actually an invention of James Hilton in his book Lost Horizon. Perhaps the most optimistic filmmaker of all time, Frank Capra, directed the initial movie version and used locations in California– Palm Springs, the Ojai Valley, the Mojave Desert and the Sierra Nevada mountains. I’ve been to all of them.
I’ve been to Paradise, too. It’s the town in California that burned to the ground a few years ago. I’ve also been to Amity in Pennsylvania and Friendship, Unity and Hope are not that many miles from where I am now. If you’re driving to Augusta from here then Hope is on the way. Yes, in Maine there is Hope.
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I’ll see the Super Bowl but not today. I’ve gotten into the habit of watching sports only when I workout using the elliptical machine in our garage and I’m very happy we bought it to glide our way through COVID-19. I’ll be doing my stint before the kickoff this afternoon and since I exercise for an hour, I figure it will take three days to watch the entire game with the endless timeouts for commercials. I’ll skip the halftime show so maybe that will speed things up.
There have been 11 events in American television history that have had over 100 million viewers. Ten of them have been Super Bowls. I’ll let you come up with the one broadcast that wasn’t on your own. In fact 29 of the 30 most watched television broadcasts in America have been Super Bowls. But remember the chant “The whole world is watching”? I think it originated at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 as the police beat demonstrators who were mostly my age back then. Good chant but the whole world wasn’t.
Between 1974 and 1980 Muhammad Ali had five different fights that were each seen by over a billion people around the world. The funeral of Princess Diana and the memorial service for Michael Jackson were each watched by over two billion viewers. The last three World Cup soccer finals each attracted audiences five times larger than any Super Bowl ever has.
I think It’s good to put things in perspective. The most exciting Super Bowl game ever played– pick one –was only enjoyed by a third of the number of people who watched Princess Margaret marry Lord Snowden 80 years ago. As I recall Snowden was ejected from his match for offensive holding.
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Last month some of the country’s major airlines– United, American, Delta –banned emotional support animals on their flights. The Federal Department of Transportation recently changed its rules to allow for “common sense limits for the transport of animals in aircraft cabins.” Not that a lot of people are flying these days but things had gotten out of control with passengers claiming they needed to have their lizards, snakes and spiders in their seats with them for their well being and were permitted to bring them. A couple years ago Popeye’s turned the policy into a joke by offering “emotional support chicken” to flyers.
I don’t know when it was that I became aware that someone’s pet could be designated as an ESA– emotional support animal –by documentation from a psychiatrist or a psychologist but the practice of doing so goes back decades. I guess I failed to see the distinction between a service animal like dogs for the blind and the ones sniffing suitcases for drugs from those providing assistance for people with mental health issues.
A dog was a part of my family for much of the time when I was growing up. We spoiled it, my brother and I teased it. The only tricks we taught her were to sit and offer a paw to shake. She may have felt unfulfilled. I lost several pairs of shoes because she chewed them to pieces and maybe that was out of frustration that we didn’t allow her to realize her self-potential. Toward the end of her life my parents injected her with insulin every day for her diabetes. She never traveled with us but she was part of the family.
A few years ago before the pandemic, a study found that a dog’s behavior can mirror that of its owner’s. That’s certainly how, rightly or wrongly, I have envisioned the correlation between pitbulls and those who keep them chained in their backyards. We had a poodle but my image of poodles still tends to see them in stylish outfits with Barbie at the other end of the leash. I’m stereotyping. I know.
The study wasn’t about outward appearances however. It made findings about stress and anxiety and concluded that if its owner was exhibiting these, a dog could very easily feel them too. I don’t doubt this for a moment. COVID-19 has been hard on just about everybody and everything except the stock market. Dogs who have been confined inside for the past year may even have a more difficult adjustment than their owners when life returns to normal or whatever new normal we’re going to have after COVID.
Apparently, there has also been a positive outcome for dogs during the pandemic. Adoption rates for them have soared to the point that shelters around the country haven’t had enough animals to meet the demand.
I’m happy to know that and relieved that when and if we ever try to fly again, I won’t have to sit beside someone’s pet turkey, but if there’d been a dog in the middle seat who bought a ticket I wouldn’t have whined about it.
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“In America, anyone can become president. That’s the problem.”
– George Carlin
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“Sometimes I wonder whether the world is being run by smart people who are putting us on or by imbeciles who really mean it.”
–Mark Twain
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To see what is right and not do it
is the worst cowardice.
–Confucius
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It must have been at least 20 years ago when I was in my 50s that I thought I saw part of my future in a Starbucks.
“Wouldn’t this be the perfect place to pick up my prescription drugs when I was eligible for Medicare?”
There just seemed to be so many Starbucks then and there still are– 15,000 locations. And there were and still are so many Baby Boomers– around 70,000,000 at last count –that my vision made sense to me at the time. Add the Starbucks stores to the 88,000 pharmacies that exist today and I think it still might.
“I’ll have a double ristretto venti half-soy nonfat decaf frappuccino double blended and a rosuvastatin with some tamsulosin.”
I take four pills and one vitamin a day. Nothing out of the ordinary and I pick them up every three months at our local Walmart while parked at the end of a pneumatic tube so I don’t even have to get out of the car. From where I live in Maine the nearest Starbucks is 50 miles away so don’t open one here in Camden just for me. My neighbors would go bonkers in a bad way.
But I still see Starbiucks as morphing into something else once it’s discovered that coffee is worse for you than cigarettes. Hey, you never know. Remember the great cranberry scare of 1959? Mamie Eisenhower didn’t serve Ike any with the turkey that year because of a government advisory that warned cranberries had tested positive for a herbicide. Later it was determined that a person needed to have eaten the equivalent of a truckload of cranberries to get sick. So, never mind.
Anyway, I subscribe to my old local newspaper the Reading (PA) Eagle, which is not much of a paper anymore. The same guy appears to be writing the lead story just about every day and there aren’t a lot of other stories to complement his. But here’s the headline of the featured piece yesterday:
Former Queen City restaurant in Reading
to become medical marijuana dispensary
This is certainly not news that’s going to win a Pulitzer, but for me it has relevance. If the color of the building’s roof with its little cupola in today’s cartoon looks familiar, that’s because it’s in the Howard Johnson’s restaurant style of architecture. There were over 1,000 HoJos in America in the 1950s and 1960s. I loved their clamstrips but my patronage wasn’t enough to keep them in business.The last one in the restaurant chain closed in 2017 in Lake George, New York. So, maybe it’s not Starbucks that will be the first iconic American business to be repurposed for meds. If there are enough orange roofs with the cupolas left standing today, then about HoJos?
I can’t actually confirm that the Queen City in the headline was originally a Howard Johnson’s. It just might have been built to look like one. I knew it as Moore’s Diner which had a big sign in front with the words “It’s the cherry Pie.” Now, instead of serving pot pies, what was once a diner is going to be dispensing just the pot part. In place of the sign that claimed “It’s the cherry pie” there can be a new one that reads “Come in and get high.” It’s a sign of the times I guess.
And by the way in addition to being first in the hearts of his countrymen George Washington could have been first in the heads of them as well. Washington grew hemp on his farm in Virginia. It was allegedly used for making rope and sails at the time and not for smoking. Here’s a quote from George’s correspondence with his farm’s manager…
“Let the ground be well prepared and the seed be sown in April. The hemp may be sown anywhere.”
The South Lawn of the White House perhaps?
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If aliens ever visit us, I think the outcome would be much as when Christopher Columbus first landed in America, which didn’t turn out very well for the Native Americans.
–Stephen Hawking
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Happy Valentine’s Day!
Everything’s Coming Up Doses
You’ll do well! Don’t be late!
Gonna have that jab
Tho your arm might inflate.
Starting here, starting now
Honey, everything’s coming up doses!
Don’t need your cash for the vax.
Roll up that sleeve, just relax.
Don’t miss that chance, it’s your shot
Honey, everything’s coming up doses!
Things are spinning. Your turn is near.
You’ll be grinning. It will be just the beginning.
It’s for sure. COVID bites.
But you’ve had little to do for days and for nights.
You might swell. Nor feel great.
You’ll get well. Don’t you wait.
Or squawk about that vaccine that you’re due.
Honey, everything’s coming up doses for me and for you!
Ethel Merman sang Everything’s Coming Up Roses in the 1959 Broadway musical Gypsy. The music was composed by Jule Styne with lyrics written by Stephen Sondheim.
When Merman died I put together her obituary for World News Tonight with Peter Jennings. Although Everything’s Coming Up Roses was one of the songs associated with her, There’s No Business Like Show Business was really her musical signature. Everything’s Coming Up Roses was kind of close to “pushing up daisies” and maybe in bad taste for me to use but from what I’ve read about Ethel– by all accounts she had the proverbial mouth of a sailor –I think she might have prefered it being her TV finale.
Here’s a link to Merman singing the song on the Perry Como show in 1960.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9SxlO7tQLc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9SxlO7tQLc
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People will generally accept facts as truth
only if the facts agree with what they already believe.
— Andy Rooney
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Last month it was General Motors. Yesterday it was Jaguar. Soon enough it may well be all but a few of the others. Car companies are vowing to produce and sell all electric models and only all electric models in as short a timeline as the next few years.
But even if we may not be a nation united, we are still very much a nation unleaded. As of last year there were 287 million registered vehicles in the United States and over 100,000 gas stations that fueled nearly all of them. In a country of 325 million people with an average of eight gas pumps per station that works out to a pump for every 406 people.
As of last summer the infrastructure for “our next cars” is shocking in comparison. There were only 26,000 charging stations with a total of 84,000 plugs available in all of America for all electric vehicles. That’s one charging opportunity for every 3,869 people.
There are only 1.7 million all electric cars on our roads right now but obviously if there are suddenly going to be many more in a short space of time, EVs are going to be like bungee jumping for a while. Those of you who have one in your garage will be mostly traveling not too far from home so you can make it back to your house to recharge.
Which brings me back to Jaguars. I don’t care if it’s powered by a Saudi Arabian oil field or the water flowing through Hoover dam, isn’t that a great name for a sports luxury car? It just fits.
Names for things sometimes enhance them or don’t. The Chevy Impala had a very speedy animal for a name (a top speed of 55 mph, only cheetahs are faster) but not the sleek aura of a jaguar and has just been discontinued by GM for the third time. Chevy Broncos and Dodge Rams make a lot of sense as names for trucks. Koalas and Kangaroos are cute but no one has named a vehicle after them.
On the other hand Native American tribes have been popular– Jeep Cherokee, Dodge Dakota… Chevrolet used both Apache and Cheyenne and Mazda tried Navajo. The descendants of the tribes get no royalties because the tribal names aren’t copyrighted.
There have been head scratching names like Austin-Healey’s Sprites and American Motors’ Gremlins, insects– Hudson Hornets from a long time ago and VW Beetles of course. Even things you wouldn’t really want to be near but as cars some of us would want to take for a test run like Stingrays, Vipers, Cobras and Barracudas. What’s in a name? Sales appeal. Ask Edsel Ford.
EVs so far are associated with the Tesla, named by Elon Musk after Nikola Tesla, a genius electrical engineer who made the cover of Time magazine in the 1930s but failed afterward to get financing for his inventions– the forerunner of today’s drones among them. He died destitute. Other EVs– Nissan’s LEAF, which is a tortured acronym for “Leading Environmentally-friendly Affordable Family car” and Chevy’s Volt are together only accounting for 20% of the all electric car sales in the United States at this point behind Tesla.
But names aside, where are we headed with what we might be driving in the near future? Well, history has a funny way of repeating itself. Cable television is losing customers in droves as we “cut the cord.” I wonder how long it will take until cars will become cordless too and won’t have to be plugged in at all? I can envision a time when the cars we drive will be on roads electrified underneath them. Crazy idea? Remember slot cars?
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With the pandemic new terms have entered the language and our consciousness– flatten the curve, social distancing, herd immunity and another one I hadn’t come across until recently– learning loss. Hopefully, time will resolve the first three when life returns to whatever it’s going to be after COVID-19 but whether learning loss is going to be permanent learning lost is another matter.
It’s almost a year since most kids in America and much of the world have been attending school in person with any regularity. So, how much learning have they lost and what are the consequences? Is this something dire and irreversible? Or is it an unwelcome interruption that when schools can reopen for students to actually attend them again, will turn out to have been an insignificant bump in the road of their educational and socialization progress? Will they remember it as having been just an asterisk they moved on from or an exclamation point and even a momentous exasperation point in their lives.
I had two experiences in my career that have shaped my own opinion about what matters most in determining how one does in school as well as in society. Both involved walking into the homes of two different families. One was in Lancaster, California, a city 90 minutes from Los Angeles and the story I was producing was about places people were moving to find affordable housing. The furnishings in the house seemed typical. There was a big screen TV on the wall and nearby lots of video tapes and video games on the floor but I was struck by the bookshelves. They were empty and as we moved around, I started looking for a book, any book and never saw one. The family certainly didn’t appear to be illiterate but it felt like they were evolving toward it.
Home number two was in East Los Angeles and belonged to a Mexican American couple. Right inside the front door was a floor to ceiling bookcase. The shelves were filled and the titles were nearly all familiar to me as a survey of the great works of literature.
I was there to interview one of the couple’s sons who was graduating as valedictorian of Garfield High School. You may remember Garfield as being the setting for and the story of a gifted teacher named Jaime Escalante in the movie Stand and Deliver.
I don’t recall the boy’s name or much beyond the fact that he had been accepted at M.I.T. but I do remember what his parents did for a living to buy him and their other kids all those books. They sold shoes at flea markets.
Before my son was born my parents asked my ex wife and me to promise two things. Gil was going to be the first great grandson of my father’s father and one request was that part of his name be his great grandfather’s. It is. The second commitment we made was to “Never skimp on his education.” We didn’t.
You don’t have to name your children after a family member but their education begins at birth and is a parent’s responsibility until you’re an empty nester. I’m not one to preach about reading books. I mostly read articles and a ton of them but my ex wife and I read from a book to our son every day until he could read to himself.
I hope Plutarch would conclude that we didn’t just try to fill the vessel but also kindled the fire for our son to want to learn. In those two homes I visited years ago one appeared to be an intellectual desert, the other had apparently built such a desire and even a passion for learning. The coronavirus is responsible for a global pause of formal education but I’m not sure we should rush to blame it for whatever learning has been lost as the only cause.
Although the majority of the world’s children have missed a year in their classrooms, I believe their parents will be the difference between a possible lifetime disadvantage or that temporary bump in the road. Those children whose parents made that difference will recall this year as an asterisk and not an exasperation point.
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The Eyes of Texas is the University of Texas fight song and is sung to the tune of I’ve Been Working on the Railroad. I barely had to change any of the lyrics to make it relevant to Mr. Smith Goes to Washington… #*&%@ Scratch that! I mean Mr. Cruz goes to Cancun.
The ire of Texas is upon you,
All the live long day.
The ire of Texas is upon you,
You can not get away.
Do not think you can escape it
At night or early in the morn
The ire of Texas is upon you
But I bet you didn’t even think you’d be scorned!
The only comedian I can think of who became a politician is Al Franken although the professions have stuff in common. Both can make you laugh or make you cringe. It’s rare when either makes you think.
Mark Twain was America’s preeminent satirist and made me laugh quite often. Lenny Bruce was a rebel. Richard Pryor could certainly make you cringe. Woody Allen was a narcissist and Jerry Seinfeld was funny but like his TV show he’s about nothing and proud of it.
On the other hand George Carlin was not just a social critic, he was a prophet. He died in 2008 and yet his riffs on the future of our species are still as perceptive and deft as they are black. You may laugh but you’ve been warned.
Here’s one that ties into the powergrid in Texas and the behavior of one Ted Cruz who just wrapped up the state’s “Father of the Year” award for 2021 and it’s only February…
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Because of COVID-19 there wasn’t the traditional New Year’s Day football game played in the Rose Bowl last month. The state of California decreed that fans were not going to be permitted in the stands in Pasadena so the contest was moved elsewhere. But two days ago and only a few miles away at the Jet Propulsion Lab, NASA scientists celebrated as if they were witnessing a sensational game winning play as their Perseverance rover scored its own touchdown on the surface of Mars.
A jeweler named Garo Anserlian probably wasn’t invited to be there in person to share in the jubilation despite the fact that he had sold some in that room their watches. And why would he be? Those watches worn and coveted by Perseverance mission scientists were losing 37 and a half minutes a day which is exactly what Garo Anserlian built them to do.
The story of the intentionally “defective” watches goes back nearly 20 years and that’s when I first heard about it. In the summer of 2003 a couple of JPL engineers entered Anserlian’s store in Los Angeles and made a request he at first thought was a joke. Two Mars rovers– Spirit and Opportunity –had just been launched and would land on the red planet the following January. They wanted him to make them “Mars watches.”
If all went according to plan and the rovers stuck their landing, the days that NASA would have to operate them were going to be limited and so it had been decided that the earth based “crew members” should be on the same schedule as the machines they’d be working with.
Like the earth Mars spins on its axis but it takes 37 and a half minutes longer than it does for our own planet to complete a full turn. In theory this adjustment to work in sync with Mars time made sense but in practice it became an ordeal for those who attempted to live it. It threw their earthly schedules off and blackout shades on their windows at home weren’t helping them get their sleep when the clock on earth, which was moving ahead of the one on their Mars watches by roughly 90 seconds every hour. Slowly, earth days would become Mars nights and then just as surely reverse again. After a few months of earthlings coping with “Mars time” the experiment was abandoned and the watches became collector’s items.
Mankind has now sent spacecraft toward Mars 49 times– that’s including failed attempts. NASA still keeps their mission’s earth based staff on Mars time every time but only for the first few weeks. However all clocks, computers and even smart phone apps tied to the operation inside JPL must show MST– Mars Standard Time.
Twenty years ago when I pitched the story about Garo Anserlian to ABC News I couldn’t sell it but boy, after the watches became known about Anserlian certainly could. Now, so can other watchmakers and they can do it a lot more easily thanks to technological advances. Anserlian adapted his original watch using a 21 jewel self-winding mechanical watch. It took him two months to come up with the first one. Now, Mars watches are all digital, a lot cheaper and available on Amazon I’m sure… I wouldn’t mind having a Garo Anserlian original but if I ever did, don’t expect me to be on time with any more of my cartoons.
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A grim measure of COVID’s toll:
Life Expectancy drops sharply
in the United States
Headline from the New York Times
That drop in American life expectancy during COVID-19 in 2020 was a full year to 77.8 and it is indeed a finding that gets one’s attention. I was curious if events had occurred before in the nation’s history that had impacted life expectancy in such a way. Sure enough I found two.
A decade ago a historian using sophisticated research tools upped the estimate of America’s Civil War deaths to 750,000. At the time of that insurrection there were only about 30 million people living in the country and so the number of deaths was a massive and devastating figure. There were an estimated 675,000 deaths in the United States due to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. By then the population of the U.S. had increased to over 100 million but it was a huge number of deaths at that or any other time.
The graph in the chart I’ve posted above shows these human losses very clearly. But what also jumps out at you is how steadily and significantly American life expectancy has increased over time.
At the outbreak of the Civil War you could expect to live to be 40. By World War I life expectancy had increased by 15 years to age 55. In 1960 when John Kennedy became president it had risen by another 15 years to 70 and now, life expectancy in the United States had approached 80 before this past year’s pandemic relapse. Modern medicine and other learned and implemented health measures have had everything to do with it.
When I was in my twenties I had a severe case of strep throat. I might not have survived it if I’d lived a century earlier. Who knows what other illnesses I could have contracted if I hadn’t had my childhood vaccines. I have every reason to believe that the prescription drugs I take now are helping to prolong my life.
Yes, I also think because of my cancer diagnosis and COVID confinement I’ve been motivated to lose weight, stretch and exercise and that can’t hurt my chances to stick around a while longer either.
And there’s been an added bonus for baby boomers like myself. Have you noticed in movies made even as late as the 1950s that people who were playing characters in their 50s then looked like many of us do today in our 70s? Living longer yet looking younger than those who barely made it to our age in the not so distant past seems totally logical in the upside down world I frequently feel like I’m living in.
What’s helped? Some of us can be described as exercise and diet fanatics with memberships at the Y and Weight Watchers but most of us are now prescribed our pathway to a longer life. We belong to a nation of prescription drugs. Nearly half us are taking at least one. Over four billion prescriptions for drugs are now filled annually in America. For a substantial number of us our medications give us an improved life if not a lifeline.
That’s the message in our bottles and we hear about it incessantly. The United States is one of only two countries in the world where drug makers can market directly to their consumers. I doubt many of you will guess the other one so I’ll give you a hint. It’s not on a continent. It has significantly more sheep than citizens and it has battened down its hatches and dealt successfully with the coronavirus. It is not Taiwan and its initials are NZ.
By the way the price paid for prescription drugs in the country as well as in many others is less than one half of what we pay.
Drugs are such a normal part of our lives as we get older that I see yet unexploited marketing opportunities for pharmaceutical companies and real estate developers.
There are plenty of retirement communities that are already centered around things like golf and tennis, the arts and continuing education. Could it be that in the future seniors might flock to Club Meds where you can live alongside others with whom you share the same contents of your pillboxes? And just think if you’re self conscious about the number of pills you pop, you’d be able to literally swallow your pride together with someone else.
I have a few specific names for these residences I’ve come up with that might work. That’s what the cartoon below is all about. I think if we crowdsource and start raising the funding, we can break ground very soon.
And I’ll add a sweetener –artificial of course. If you get on board today, we’ll include a year’s worth of free refills from the onsite pharmacy and even throw in the potential side effects at no additional cost.
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I don’t doubt you’re wondering where today’s post is heading and how it might involve a cartoon of a lopsided X drawn on a map of the United States? That’s Ok and I will try to explain my way out of this.
It started yesterday with a question I sought to answer for myself. That’s when I took a map of the continental United States and placed the X’s on it. One goes from Eastport, ME to Chula Vista, CA and the other from Blaine, WA to Key West, FL.
These are the four furthest corners of the country from one another and I figured the cross point of the X’s would be the real middle of America. But of course as I should have expected, others had beaten me to it and you can see that the sign below lets you know exactly where that middle is.
For Dodge City, Kansas to be near the spot somehow seems appropriate but I don’t know whether to smile or grimace so I’ll do both. The very heart of America turns out to be very close to a historic frontier town near the Santa Fe Trail where legendary gunfighters and gamblers roamed with the buffalo, Wyatt Erp, Doc Holliday and Bat Masterson among them.
In the Old West Dodge City lawmen and outlaws could assume both roles interchangeably and sheriff and/or scoundrel, each had an equal shot at being mythologized. It figures that Dodge City would be the setting for the long running radio and television versions of Gunsmoke.
Learning that Dodge City could be seen as the bellybutton of America as well as part of our nation’s notorious underbelly led me to remember my own exposure to the place. It was when I was in film school and I took a film editing course. I’ve never been to Dodge City, KS.
Nowadays the editing of moving images– films, television, YouTube videos –is all but entirely done digitally with computers and I wonder if the “Gunsmoke” exercise is still being used in editing classes anywhere? “Gunsmoke” involved being given a portion of the raw footage from an episode of the show– a showdown actually, that turns into a brawl.
The assignment was to edit the “takes” into what you thought was the best version of that scene. You did this using a mechanical machine called a Moviola, which for many years was as essential to movie making as a Singer sewing machine was for making clothes.
At the conclusion of Editing 101 when we all had our efforts completed and were about to screen them one after the other for critiquing, our professor drove a stake into my heart with a brief preface.
“I hope you all have learned how to use a Moviola. That’s a technical skill. But the truth is whether you are a good editor or not is totally intuitive. It’s a talent you either have or you don’t.”
I was attending film school because I aspired to be a feature film editor and had an opportunity to apprentice to perhaps become one at one point and turned it down but that’s another story.
So, on that day at U.C.L.A. we showed our work and then watched the actual scene that had been broadcast on Gunsmoke. Immodestly, I will say I thought my own edit was the best in the class and at least as good as what made it onto the nation’s television screens. Call it chutzpah but it gave me the confidence to knock on doors for a year until ABC News hired me as a videotape editor on the basis of my projects from film school.
In time as an industry professional I began mentoring U.C.L.A. students, some of whom went on to have careers that I imagine eclipsed my own. I would always ask them the same first question. “What exactly do you want to do in the movies or television?” Often they wouldn’t be able to make clear for me what that was. But one day a student did.
Student: “I want to be a videotape editor.”
I responded without a moment’s hesitation but have felt guilty ever since.
Me: “Ok, but the truth is whether you are a good editor or not is totally intuitive. It’s a talent you either have or you don’t.”
I hope he did.
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Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden (published in 1938)
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone.
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crépe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song,
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong
The stars are not wanted now, put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
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Governors of Nation’s Four Largest States Under Fire for Alleged Mismanagement
Diogenes never found an honest man so he never voted for one either. He wouldn’t have been electable himself. He interrupted Plato’s lectures, insulted Alexander the Great to his face and he was a Cynic with a capital C– one of the first actually.
He couldn’t have been voted dog catcher, although if dogs had been able to cast their preference he might have. Diogenes considered canines more virtuous than human beings. So, he would not be at all surprised at the failings of American politicians. He might not even be surprised that despite lies, cover ups and malfeasance those we elect more often than not, if they’re running as incumbents for federal office, have had to really and totally screwed up to lose being re-elected.
Take a look at this graph for your chances to retain your seat in the House of Representatives over the past half century no matter what…
As you can see, your odds are usually 90% and they’re pretty much the same for the Senate. Holding on to the presidency is a bit tougher but before this past November’s election it had been 28 years since a sitting American president had lost a bid to get a second term.
At a state and local level things are pretty much the same. Once you’re in you likely close the door behind you until you either decide or are required by term limits to open it again and make your exit. Governors win re-election over 80% of the time and when they don’t, studies have shown that the reason they, or those in Congress for that matter, lose is most often because they presided over a sputtering economy. “It’s the economy stupid!” may be accurate but it’s depressing if that’s pretty much the only thing that brings about an incompetent and uncscrupilous incumbent’s demise. Unlike college basketball, there doesn’t seem to be a “one and done” state of affairs in play here.
Politicians have become the least respected profession in the country. Perhaps they have always been near the top of that list (which is really the bottom if I had worded this differently) but when I was growing up I thought the occupations most disdained were car salesmen and lawyers.
And you know what disgusts people the most about politicians? Three quarters of those who were asked recently stated it was their being more concerned about staying in office than making the best decisions on the issues they were elected to deal with. Unfortunately, if that’s what we think, we don’t act accordingly and vote the numbskulls out. Yeah, and we still buy cars from salespeople and hire attorneys too.
Those in Congress who have two year terms in office complain that they must spend much of the time campaigning and raising money to stay there. Maybe they don’t realize how entrenched they are and almost guaranteed to be able to do that without breaking a sweat? But adhering to their job descriptions and now even their fealty to the Constitution doesn’t seem to be requisite at this point. I guess I’ve forgotten to factor in how much raw emotion and tribal partisanship play a part today in all of this… As Roseanne Roseannadanna used to say, “Never mind.”
But still, will Gavin Newsom, Mario Cuomo, Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott pay at the polls for their indiscretions, deceptions, negligence and dereliction of their duties? Well Diogenes, if they do, we’ll hire a polka band and roll out your barrel and together we’ll have a barrel of fun that they’re done!
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Yesterday, I was driving up to Brunswick which is actually south of where we live in Camden. Real Mainers also say they’re going up to Boston to be consistent I guess with the concept of heading “down east.” When I try to put this upside down map in my head, it’s 10 degrees and snowing in Miami.
Anyway, a story I heard listening to BBC News on the radio puzzled me. Well, sort of. It wasn’t the story itself which was about a nearly two ton heroin seizure in Rotterdam. It had to do with where the drugs were found. The news reader said they’d been hidden in a shipping container full of Himalayan sea salt.
I had never heard of Himalayan sea salt. Now, after looking at its Wikipedia page I know it’s pink and costs 20 times as much as regular salt. If the Morton salt umbrella girl claims “When it rains it pours,” then I would think being so much more expensive, Himalayan sea salt comes with its own Sherpa to pour it.
And that’s what struck me– HIMALAYAN SEA salt. Today’s cartoon shows just how much of an oxymoron that is. How could salt with a name that’s a mountain range that’s at least 400 miles from the nearest sea be called that?
Actually, the salt is mined in the Punjab region of Pakistan so it’s not from the Himalayas and not from an ocean either. So, what gives? Somebody more clever than I had the best answer. He reasoned that once upon a time (like millions and millions of years ago) the Himalayas were actually submerged underwater when seas covered the earth. That’s a good enough explanation for me but it started me thinking about oxymorons and just how many of them we frequently encounter or use ourselves with perhaps unconscious awareness.
Down escalator, elevated subway, cold sweat, dull shine… The number of oxymorons is likely beyond infinity. I bet you think it’s a safe bet that there’s a 100% chance that I’ll make a pun today. Hey, just like Himalayan sea salt, puns add flavor to speech and writing and without them and oxymorons I’d be busy doing nothing.
The fact that I make a lot of puns is old news. Good grief I do make a lot of them. And although it’s difficult for me to give an exact estimate as to how many have been met with deafening silence, I understand there’s isn’t a huge shortage.
It’s an open secret that many of my puns are found to be missing the mark even if I may think they’re awfully good. I know others of you feel almost totally that they’re all pretty ugly but you’re clearly confused. Thank goodness there’s a small crowd that finds them seriously funny but of course that’s just my unbiased opinion.
I’ll stop now. I have to go out to buy some stuff. Nothing much, just a box of steel wool and a bag of jumbo shrimp. And I didn’t make any puns did I? Now all I gotta do is act naturally to show I’m cured. For now I’ll give you a definite maybe on that.
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“Every movie ever made is
an attempt to remake
The Wizard of Oz.”
–Joel Coen
Joel Coen and his brother Ethan have made some pretty dark movies compared to The Wizard of Oz— Blood Simple, Miller’s Crossing, No Country for Old Men, A Serious Man –so I don’t know what he meant when he said this. I mean yes, The Wizard of Oz has the Wicked Witch of the West and the scary Winged Monkeys but it’s not Frankenstein or Dracula. Even Disney’s Bambi becomes an orphan when her mother gets shot by a hunter. So, the idea that The Wizard or every movie tries to be a chamber of horrors likely wasn’t what Coen was referring to. It must be something else.
I once interviewed a filmmaker who told me…
“Making movies is the closest thing to being God. You create a universe, a world, people.”
So, maybe Coen singles out the The Wizard Oz because of that unique world that it exists within with its simple but noble ideas and mesmerizing imagery. When I looked it up and realized how many different versions and variations of the film there have been, Coen may well have been referring to this and the astounding number of times the beloved story of The Wizard of Oz has been paid homage to.
L. Frank Baum’s children’s novel was first published in 1900 and even before the most revered and popular movie version was made in 1939 there had already been at least nine others produced.
Now, here’s the interesting part. After 1939 it appears that there wasn’t another Wizard of Oz related film, television remake or adaptation until 1960. The movie languished all but forgotten. Then In 1956 CBS aired it nationally for the first time and Judy Garland and her fellow travelers became appointment TV for decades. Since since then there have been upwards of 50 additional redos and spinoffs.
When I saw this week that Hollywood plans yet another, I thought I’d offer an updated reboot of my own and I’m working on it but have already completed the casting and I think my selections for actors for the main characters will make The Wizard of Oz a sensation once again. All members of the cast are currently playing major roles off Broadway. In fact they’re appearing daily and nightly inside the Beltway.
Dorothy will be played by Susan Collins. I know she’s from Maine and not Kansas but a couple years ago Jo and I visited her hometown of Caribou and can attest that it looked like it had been hit by a tornado. I think she can do just fine with The Wizard of Oz’s most memorable song, too. We’ll just change a line from Somewhere Over The Rainbow to “Someone over my shoulder” with Mitch McConnell’s approval of course. As an understudy we’ll have Joni Ernst in case we can’t find enough Munchkins and we’ll need to have somebody on hand who knows a thing or two about castration.
For the Scarecrow we’ll use Ron Johnson. My only concern is that he may be playing against type and not really want a brain. But hey, he’s from Wisconsin so he should at least be able to milk his part for laughs. His backup will be Tommy Tuberville, who by all accounts only knows two letters in the alphabet– X ‘s and O’s. He’s a newcomer in D.C. and may be a bit too clever to assume the role since standing on the sidelines and failing upward is already in his playbook. In 2008 when he was fired as head football coach at Auburn he received six million dollars to go away.
Our Tin Woodman isn’t an inspired choice. He’s the only choice. Mitch McConnell doesn’t need to worry about his LDL or his HDL nor his triglycerides. No need ever for electrocardiograms, or angioplasty. He can eat whatever he wants. Unlike Dick Cheney, who is living with someone else’s heart, McConnell won’t ever be on a list waiting for a transplant. I think I’ve justified my pick. We were lucky to get him. He’s also signed on to play the lead in another Hollywood remake, The Three Faces of Eve–il. He’s got the the first two faces down pat but so far has refused to consider confirming the third.
The Cowardly Lion is/are the pride of my production– I don’t know how many can fit in the costume but the rest of the Republican senators with room for Joe Manchin of course will figure it out and I’ll understand if a few of them wiggle free from time to time and can’t stick to their lines.
Oh, and I forgot. I’m writing in an entirely new character who will eagerly join the others on their junket to Oz. It will be a reptile, part snake and part chameleon. He won’t need a brain or a heart or a spine. He won’t even need to act. Lindsey Graham just needs to show up.
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Rebranding a product can be risky and it can blow up in a company’s face especially when it’s an iconic product. Remember New Coke and Crystal Pepsi? Millions don’t. And of course spectacular failures can occur with product launches from the most successful of companies– Apple’s Newton and the Google Glass come to mind.
There have been other doozies I never even knew about before looking for noteworthy examples. Did you know there was an attempt in 2005 by Frito-Lay to get us to buy a Cheetos lip balm? Cheese puffy lips was a clever idea and cheaper than collagen but it got the kissoff from consumers. Clairol debuted a “Touch of Yogurt” shampoo in 1979, which didn’t even appeal to strawberry blondes. And there was a Harley-Davidson perfume introduced in 1994. That’s a joke I don’t really have to compete with but let’s call it for what it was, a waste of dollars and scents.
You thought I was kidding! These were real products that came and went without me and probably all of you noticing each one’s brief life and sudden death.
And speaking of death. What were the Planters people thinking just last year when they shelled out for an ad campaign to get rid of Mr. Peanut? Their commercial had him dangling over the side of a cliff clinging to a branch until he let go to save two humans who were out on the limb with him. Mr. Peanut was 104 for God’s sake! If he was going to die, it should have been in bed surrounded by his closest legumes.
That brings me to this week’s news from Hasbro that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head were losing their surnames. I don’t know if that means they’ll now be classified as life partners, which I see is the new term for married couples. Marriage isn’t a “life” sentence. People do get divorced. Does Mrs. Potato Head even have a maiden name? And what about the small fries?
Hasbro described the change as an effort to make the the Potato Heads gender neutral and more inclusive but a friend of mine pointed out that depending on which lips, mustache, eyebrows or purse you decide to afix to them, they are already the most transgender toy in the store.
Hasbro, you want to make the Potato Heads more inclusive? Lower the price.
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I haven’t played Bingo since I was a kid when it was an activity before the cake and ice cream at a birthday party. Now, I’ve reached a point in life when Bingo is perhaps again age appropriate but I’m not interested.
As the co-creator of Seinfeld Larry David is now richer than God after mega syndication deals for its 180 episodes have made both him and Jerry Seinfeld the wealthiest comedians on earth.
Since today is Homemade Cartoon #40 I believe a Noah’s Ark reference is appropriate and bittersweet. Noah only had to shelter in place for 40 days.You may or may not know that in Kentucky there is a 500 foot long virtual Noah’s Ark that opened for visitors four years ago. Frankly, I don’t know what’s more unsafe a contemporary cruise ship or an ancient ark with seven– YES SEVEN –pairs of bats! Check out Genesis. It’s not just bats, the ark actually appears to have been significantly overbooked.
“Emperor penguins are as vulnerable and important a symbolfor the effects of climate change in Antarcticaas polar bears are for the Arctic.” –Franz Lanting
“May: This is one of the peculiarly dangerous months to speculate in stocks. The others are July, January, September, April, November, October, March, June, December, August and February.” — Mark Twain—————–
What exactly is ‘doubling your bubble?’ It’s households picking one other household to interact with, and each of those households may then interact only with the other. They can visit with each other and be in each other’s home, share meals together, and I presume do shopping for and recreate with each other.And what could go wrong? Well, let’s say you’re elderly parents and you have several children with families that include all your grandchildren. If you pick one of your kids to double bubble with, are you hurting the feelings of the others? I’m sure there is a hornet’s nest of potentially uncomfortable scenarios that can be imagined but being Canadians don’t they have an advantage? Aren’t they supposed to be nicer than we Americans? That’s what I’ve always heard.So, I did a little looking into the question and came up with something that may help arrive at an answer. A couple years ago Bryor Snefjella, a PhD student at McMaster University in Ontario published a study that analyzed 40 million tweets over a one year period from both Canadians and Americans and concluded that “it might be the case that we construct our national identities via our linguistic choices.”How’s that? Well, here’s what he found. Words most represented in American tweets were more negative and words represented in Canadian tweets were more positive. Mr. Snefjella wasn’t even looking for this. He was initially studying differences in our dialects but found that even the tweeted emojis reflected this same divide between being naughty or nice. Just look at the two word clouds. Each represents the top 250 words tweeted by Americans and Canadians. The larger the word in the cloud the more times it appeared in tweets by those on either side of the border.Here’s America…
And here’s Canada…
The difference is striking, no? And it would be easy to sum up Snefjella’s work by simply calling it Great Shit.But there’s a caveat. The study relied on tweets tweeted (when you say that out loud it sounds like the name of a Looney Tunes character or a deceased Belgian harmonica virtuoso) from February 2015 to February 2016 which of course was a year that saw the rise and election of Donald Trump as President of the United States.No matter. In any event it’s kind of clear which country’s populous was and probably still is happier.—————–
Although paper originated in China in the second century B.C., the first recorded use of paper for cleansing is from the 6th century in medieval China, discovered in the texts of scholar Yen Chih-Thui. In 589 A.D, he wrote:“Paper on which there are quotations or commentaries from the Five Classics or the names of sages, I dare not use for toilet purposes.”And for your book group’s next meeting how about a dive into excrement in the Late Middle Ages. Yes, it’s a book…Sacred Filth and Chaucer’s Fecopoetics by Susan Signe MorrisonAnd here’s praise to convince those skeptics… “Morrison’s study offers an engagingly written book that makes a convincing case for the cultural significance of the medieval fecal and that elucidates Chaucer’s poetry in thoughtful ways.” — The Medieval ReviewOr if you are thinking of springing a surprise, you can just tell them that this will be a read that will keep them on the edge of their seats.—————–
Hey Groucho, social distancing as a means of safeguarding you or us from you has been around longer than you might think. As added protection we might be using masks right now but in the Victorian era enormous skirts inadvertently may have actually helped prevent the spread of smallpox and cholera. “Crinolinemania” –the fashion craze of the day– however, had a down side. Women actually burned to death if their giant hoop skirts caught fire. Still, this trendy style served another valuable purpose by keeping unwanted male attention at more than arm’s length pretty effortlessly.
Will we see fashion adapt in our time of COVID-19? Well, yesterday Adobe’s Digital Economy Index, which tracks more than 100 million product varieties online showed that pajama sales spiked 143% in April from March!Hey Groucho, and remember what you said about PJs in Animal Crackers?“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I’ll never know.”—————–
THE FRENCH LAUNDRYWe just started doing takeout on weekends and are lucky to have some really good options here in Midcoast Maine. So far it’s been Thai and pizza both of which are takeout standards for us. We do have a nearby KFC where a bucket of fried chicken is $14.99. The closest P.F. Chang’s is in Boston and their Kung Pao Shrimp would be $15.95. I know I could enjoy both but the takeout I’d really like to sample is 3,254 miles away from us at a place called the French Laundry.Thomas Keller opened his restaurant in Yountville, CA in 1994. The building had once been a French steam laundry, hence the name, and one would be hard pressed to find an eating establishment that’s been awarded more honors. It’s rated three Michelin stars since 2006 and been praised for being the Best Restaurant in the World by the late Anthony Bourdain among others.Now, in pre pandemic times a meal at the French Laundry would have cost you over $300 and perhaps as much as $600 a person for its prix fixe menu with or without wine pairings. Want to bring your own bottle? Fine, but the amount charged to you for drinking it will be $150.So, now in the time of COVID-19 with restaurants being kicked to the curb what’s happening at the French Laundry? Well, below is the takeout offering from Thomas Keller for last evening:
$23 WITH REHEATING INSTRUCTIONS INCLUDED!!! Looks like a gastronomic giveaway, no? Ok, not enough perhaps to jump in the car and drive coast to coast but could I have that delivered?Jo and I once had a pastrami sandwich sent Next Day Air as a birthday present for her father from Langer’s Deli in Los Angles to Rockland, ME. The cost was a $100. Expensive? Yes. Money well spent? You bet. He loved it. But record setting? Not even close.According to the Guinness Book of World Records (Who else?) in 2006 Niko Apostolakis in Wellington, New Zealand had a pizza flown to him from Madrid, Spain, a distance of 12,347 miles as the crow flies. For its trouble the crow got the anchovies.
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LET’S GET AWAY FROM IT ALL(with apologies to songwriters Tom Adair and Matt Dennis)You say that you’re such a big shotWhy can’t you just make a call Let’s sign a contract so we can go get packedLet’s get away from it allLet’s make the drive wearing pampersNo need to stop at a mallBut maybe Sag Harbor, you sure need a barberLet’s get away from it allWe’ll travel ’round along the SoundWe’ll check out each estateAnd act discreet but so eliteAs we our needs dictate Make sure you take your ViagraF___ me! Manhattan’s a pall Let’s leave our cage, dearIt’s all the rage, dearLet’s get away from it allCreating a parody of a song is fun and it can be a brutal vehicle for satire. This particular tune came to mind right away after reading the Times article. I certainly don’t have it in for New Yorkers. I was one for a couple years after college but the article is just such easy pickins. You know, long ago I thought that I’d still be listening to Stairway to Heaven as I got closer to climbing it but ever since we moved to Maine my musical preferences have been the Big Bands, Sinatra, Fitzgerald– the so called Great American Songbook. It certainly must reflect this stage of life. If I were to try to dance to Purple Haze now, I’d risk turning purple. Close to where I grew up in Pennsylvania was the Sunnybrook Ballroom in Pottstown. My father told me about going there to hear Benny Goodman and Glenn Miller back in the 1930s. When he talked about it I could imagine him as a young man and I sensed the energy and excitement he must have felt. But that doesn’t explain why I’m listening to his music these days and not my own. I don’t need to know why. I’m very happy time traveling. And so this was a nice opportunity to take my newfound affinity for the old standards a step further. And there’s one lyric in my parody in particular that I want to point out. It’s this one: “And act discreet but so eliteas we our needs dictate.” The great song “Body and Soul” has this: “My life a wreck you’re makingYou know I’m yours for just the taking.””MY LIFE A WRECK YOU’RE MAKING?”Whenever I hear Frank Sinatra sing that I break into a smile. And I just discovered that many native American languages place the verb at the end of a sentence and because they do they’re called “verb-final” languages.And I thought it was only Yiddish where this kind of thing you did!Here’s a link to Sinatra singing “Let’s Get Away From It All” with Tommy Dorsey and his orchestra…
Referencing historical touchstones to fit the moment is a given when something as huge as a pandemic happens. COVID-19 has been compared to Pearl Harbor as an act of war that we must respond to and repel and it’s been called a Sputnik like event that should wake us up to seize the opportunity to fix what’s broken.But there are also cultural touchstones that are part of our heritage and The Wizard of Oz is larger than a mere stone and more like a boulder in that hierarchy. For 40 years it was shown annually on network television except for 1963 after the assassination of President Kennedy. Knowing the flaws of each of Dorothy’s fellow travelers might as well be included on a basic American civics test. So, it didn’t surprise me that when I Googled the movie and coronavirus just now I got a list of articles with headings like these:The Message Of The Wizard Of Oz Is Fit For A Pandemic
Lysol Timeline 1889– First Lysol brand antiseptic disinfectant introduced in 1889 to help end a 
I am a big Buster Keaton fan and at the end of one of his short films, The Boat, his character is lost on the water and his wife asks, “Where are we?” He responds with the name of the boat they’re in and says, “Damfino.” That’s the answer for how long I’ll be doing these.Each of us is experiencing the pandemic in our own way and my coping mechanism turns out to be staying busy doing stuff like this and looking at our isolation as an opportunity rather than adversity.We all have our own unique story that we’ve lived which has formed us and through these cartoons I guess I’ve been telling mine. If you know someone who might like receiving them give them my email:
I guess you might call this one an inside joke…That’s a play on words, a pun. Yeah, you didn’t want to be reminded of that. So, why do so many people grimace and moan when they see or hear a pun? Don’t they realize how little work goes into making them?I don’t know when or why I began punning but I proudly pun and because I experience the slings and arrows of outrage on occasion from those who look upon this type of wordplay as my affliction and their misfortune. I happen to think a lot of it is feigned — fake boos. But maybe I’m kidding myself.I think for me punning is almost an involuntary reflex. My mind just goes there. I can’t shut it down. I PUN therefore I AM and I will continue to pun wherever I am. Now, there is a difference between smart puns and dumb puns and maybe it’s like knowing the difference between good wine and cheap wine. For many of us that requires education and experience.The source of humor is actually nothing to laugh about. A legendary professor of mine in film school, a man named Howard Suber, summarized it this way. “Show me a happy comedian and I’ll show you someone on the way down.” Case in point… I just read an article that contended that now that Jerry Seinfeld is nearly a billionaire he isn’t funny anymore.I don’t want to over analyze “funny” but I just looked this up and someone has compiled a list of the nine types of humor they think exist:1. Physical or slapstick2. Self-deprecating3. Surreal or absurd4. Improvisational5. Droll or deadpan6. Observational7. Potty or bathroom8. Dark or gallows9. PunsSo, physical comedy is first and puns are last. Hmmm… You know I actually had an experience that combined the two once. I went to this comedy club in LA where Chevy Chase was doing a standup act or in his case a fall down one. But that night he didn’t show up and another guy came out and was terrible and even worse he was doing a lot of stupid puns.A stranger at the next table heard me being critical and complaining that this wasn’t at all what I had come to see. He was smiling. In fact he was glowing when he said to me about the performer, “He ain’t Chevy. He’s my brother.”Got ya!—————–
Donald Trump, you might already know, is the first president in 120 years not to have a dog in the White House. Last year he explained why at a rally in El Paso.“I wouldn’t mind having one, honestly, but I don’t have any time. How would I look walking a dog on the White House lawn?”Human perhaps?Hey, it is his prerogative but maybe his son would like to have one? My family had a dog when I was growing up. She, a diva-like French poodle, was intended to be “the boys’ dog.” She quickly became our mother’s dog and I swear they used to play double solitaire together.Anyway, I’ve come up with a little poem, a doggerel if you will, that won’t make me poet laureate but could provoke a few barks from 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. and maybe some howls from the rest of you….I’m not a cat fanIn fact I can’t standThat cats could care less that I’m thereBut dogs I adoreMy faith they restoreWe’re both needy and that’s totally fairI’m happy to petThey’re happy to getMy reward is the pleasure they feelSuch a simple exchangeA cinch to arrangeIt is the true Art of the Deal—————– 
When I think of travel and especially air travel these days and in the future I think of a show tune. You know, from Oliver– “Who will buy…” I’m not at all sure when I will purchase a ticket and get on an airplane again. Flying had become enough of a horror show before COVID-19 and add the potential for psychological distress to the certainty of physical discomfort and there are officially no more friendly skies.And here’s the late great John Candy in a scene from Planes, Trains and Automobiles to sort of make the point that despite everything the skies can still be overly friendly, too…What’s notable about this bit is that it wasn’t in the final cut of the film. John Hughes, the director, left it out and apparently had shot enough footage to have made a three hour movie.., Talk about overbooking!
When in the past had you ever heard the word zoom used? For me only two things come to mind. One is a zoom lens for a camera and the other Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners when ZOOM! was part of Ralph Kramden’s rants threatening Alice with physical violence.If he had followed through, it would have had her reaching the moon ahead of Neil Armstrong. How that was acceptable in comedy and on television in the 1950s seems absolutely unbelievable and crazy today.So, where does this word zoom come from? Well, it appears it’s either from the Dutch or German zoomen or the Finnish zoomata. It’s an onomatopoeia– I had to spell that word correctly to get out of the 8th grade. This is the first time I’ve done it since. Zoom is an attempt to mimic the sound of something humming or whizzing by you.Investigator that I am I looked into whether there might be a deeper meaning for zoom. Couldn’t find anything so I employed a Kabbalistic approach– a form of Jewish mysticism that has attracted dabblers from Madonna to Marla Maples.Kabbalah uses letters and numbers to explain the universe. I wasn’t traveling that far so I stuck with just the letters. Hmmm… so, when you drop the first two letters of zoom you are left with om. Now, I thought I’m on to something. Was there possibly some transcendental connection? Yes! Who can deny that we in the West often zoom when we’d be better off if we’d slow down and om.I have been doing my own daily yoga routine for months now and although I’m not perceiving any spiritual awakening my body and my back in particular are very grateful that I chose this path. With the pandemic I’ve experienced, I guess, both the zoom boom and an om boon.However, I’m afraid I’m close to being Zoomed out at this point. Zoom fatigue has set in. But two last things about the burgeoning company Zoom that’s become as indispensable to many others as… well, toilet paper. First, according to Glassdoor, which evaluates such things, in 2019 Zoom was the second best place to work in the United States. I guess so. If ever there was a company where you could just call it in…And where did the company’s name come from. It took a bit of digging but I found that out. One of the early employees took it from a book he read to his kids…
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We’re a big country and many of us don’t have someone to remember who lost his life in a war, let alone fought in one. So what do we think of first when we hear the words Memorial Day? Little wonder that it’s a picnic or a shopping opportunity.I’m an admirer of the sculptor Claes Oldenburg. I just checked and he’s still alive and in his nineties. My absolute favorite thing of his is an idea for a sculpture that he never created. Back in the 1960s Oldenburg did a series of drawings that he called “Colossal Monuments.” One of them was a war memorial. I’m inserting a rendering he made of it below…
It was to be a giant block of concrete as high as the buildings that surrounded it that would have been placed in the middle of the intersection of Canal St. and Broadway in Manhattan. Oldenburg would have had the names of “war heroes” carved in it.Was Oldenburg making a serious anti-war statement with his idea to disrupt New York City traffic permanently in one place? Was his intent to have people curse being inconvenienced and war simultaneously? As far fetched as it seemed Oldenburg’s conception for this memorial made sense to me when I saw his drawing for the first time. Afterward I figured it was more like a satirical aside.Since then I’ve been to the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington and was quite moved. I knew people killed in that war that I myself didn’t have to go to– nobody who was a close friend but high school and college classmates whose names I could find on the wall. Seeing all the names of those who had died was a jolt. The Vietnam War Memorial is a destination you don’t just happen upon. You know where it is and why you’ve come to see it even if you don’t know how you are going to react..In retrospect I think plugging up Canal St. and Broadway would have made a powerful war memorial but it would have needed to be a temporary obstruction and constantly moved to someplace else without any advance notice. That way it might have pissed you off when you suddenly encountered it for two reasons and you could have blamed both the traffic and all wars for your being late.Our public reminders of the cost of wars are mostly way too polite. So, what should we think of today on our nation’s Memorial Day? For a start how about this? Let’s not call it a holiday. It’s not a celebration. It’s an observance. Memorial Day is the one day a year set aside to actually remember and think about those who died in America’s wars and didn’t get to grow old and be here for the picnics and the sales.—————–
About ten years ago I remember coming across a bizarre story. A study was published that had found that nearly nine out of ten bills circulating in the United States were tainted with traces of cocaine. Of course it wasn’t enough of the drug that you had any chance of getting high if you tried to snort your money but jeez! Drug dealers were obviously not laundering their cash with Tide.So, here we are with a current fear of contamination from just about anything and it’s potentially worse than getting busted. Can you get COVID-19 from merely touching money? The thought is that the risk is extremely low but like so many things about the pandemic many people, both buyers and sellers, are not taking any chances and using or accepting only credit cards and digital/electronic means for transactions. We were already moving on. The tag line in a credit card commercial “What’s in your wallet?” is asking about your plastic and not your Washingtons, Lincolns, Hamiltons, Jacksons or other members of this all boys club.I certainly haven’t had a need to use much cash since March and the only bills I have left are all twenties. As far as I know there are no ATM’s that dispense anything other than twenties even if I wanted smaller denominations but this lack of currency diversity really hasn’t caused any problems for me. It seems likely that COVID-19 will accelerate the demise of cash and certainly the $1 bill and even its more valued brethren may become about as useful as pennies, nickels and dimes.For now just as hands aren’t touching hands, bills don’t seem to be changing hands much either. I hope the ones tainted with cocaine have been in detox and recovery by now. I guess there’s not enough access to testing for the others. They’re in a lockdown just like us.—————–
I’m going to brag! I have lost a lot of weight so far since COVID-19 altered so many things about our lives. Was the pandemic my inspiration to do this? Well, it certainly provided a helpful setting. It’s a hell of lot easier to focus on dieting when you don’t have a lot of the usual temptations and distractions.I am still overweight but I’m not done and getting this far hasn’t been as hard as I expected. I’ve really stepped up exercising and Jo has been making us meals that adhere to the curb the carbs approach prescribed by a dietitian I consulted.Sure, it’s on me that I got fat in the first place but you see I didn’t come from a roughage neighborhood. I grew up in the pretzel and potato chip center of the universe– the Pennsylvania Dutch Country. The airport in Reading, PA had to adapt to the fact that the residents of Berks County are heavy– and I don’t mean frequent –travelers. How did the airport adjust? Well, I haven’t measured but I’ve been told that the runway is now as wide as it is long!But seriously, if you’ve had your medical specimens sent anywhere by way of Quest Diagnostics’ fleet of airplanes, guess where their home airport is? Being located at the Reading Airport probably saves a bunch of flights. The emergency room at Reading Hospital is the 10th busiest in the country with 135,000 ER visits a year. A ranking by Gallup-Healthways called the “Well-Being Index” ranked the city as having the 10th highest percentage of obese people in the nation so there’s the evidence that if you’re overweight in Reading your heart is probably in the right place.When I was growing up Reading called itself the “Pretzel Capital of the World” and a traditional grade school field trip was to a Bachman’s pretzel factory. Downtown on the main street there were soft pretzel vendors pushing their wares and their carts into the 1960s. I’d pay a nickel and hope I was getting one that had been made that same day but even the day olds were pretty good.In the summer at our public swimming pool pretzel rods along with frozen Milky Ways were the best sellers at the snack bar. The application of a generous line of mustard on the pretzel rod was as de rigueur as the pool’s medallion patch your mother sewed on your bathing suit.As far as I’m concerned the best pretzel you can buy today is still made in Reading. The brand is called Unique and they’ve even made their way to some of the smaller markets where we live in Maine.But I was always more of a potato chip guy and the Pennsylvania Dutch Country seemed to have as many potato chip companies as startups in Silicon Valley. And yes, I do have a favorite– Diffenbach’s. Like all the best chips, they only have three ingredients all of which are deemed life threatening: potatoes, 100% lard shortening and salt. When you eat these chips your skin gets greasy enough to slip out of handcuffs. However, the websiteFooducate.com gives Diffenbach’s chips a passing grade, a D+. In Reading food is pass/fail.My best friend Ken sends me bags of Diffenbach’s every year for my birthday. I now have two in our pantry. When I hit my target weight I’ll open one. Until then I intend to remain alive.THE BEST PRETZELS(11 oz. bag 1210 calories)
THE BEST CHIPS!(8 oz. bag has 1,217 calories)
There’s one supermarket in Reading that actually has two entire aisles for pretzels and potato chips. One is for the national brands. The other is for the local ones. In Reading “shop until you drop” is not uttered lightheartedly.—————–
I’ve just realized that I’ve never attempted to yodel. I don’t even try to sing either. 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 now I’m listening to WQXR– a classical music radio station in New York City. I listen to it a lot and a lot more since March. It’s soothing, 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 started to I was hooked, especially by the romantic offerings like Rimsky Korsakov’s Scheherazade and Dvorak’s New World Symphony.Each album came with a booklet that included information about the music and short biographies of the composers. 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 record player/radio consoles were a piece of furniture?Anyway, I couldn’t help myself and when our teacher would tell us about a work and its composer that I had read about, I chimed in with something I knew that she hadn’t mentioned. I even compounded my smart aleckeyness 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 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 final 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 sat 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.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 more than the other kids? Easy– I hear it differently!Below is what those record albums in the World’s Greatest Music series looked like. I saw on Amazon you can purchase the whole set for $100 but of course you need a turntable hooked up to an amplifier and speakers to play them. Who has that stuff any more?
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When I was a kid and needed a haircut my mother gave me two bucks and I rode my bike a couple miles to the barbershop. The barber was an Italian immigrant named George who worked alone. If I had to wait, it was Ok. George always had a stack of great comic books.I have one wonderful memory about getting my hair cut that goes back over 50 years. My last two years of high school were at a boarding school north of Boston where we were required to see the barber every month. He set up in a dormitory basement and appointments were scheduled every 15 minutes. A couple of mine early on just happened to be at 8 p.m. when the radio the barber brought with him was tuned to a station in New York City. “The Theme from Studio X” played and for the rest of those two years I made sure my monthly haircuts were always at 8 so I could hear it.I think I may have been the only kid in the school who looked forward to getting his hair cut. I loved that music. Thanks to the internet and YouTube “The Theme from Studio X” and I were reunited a number of years ago. It’s quite dramatic. Take a listen.
The puzzle book series “Where’s Waldo” was called “Where’s Wally” in Britain where the books were authored and first published in the 1980s. The Wally/Waldo books have sold over 50 million copies world wide.One of them was banned for a while in parts of the United States when something held offensive was uncovered. Waldo’s creator, Martin Handford, had drawn a beach scene with a topless woman sunbather. Once he found out about the censors he participated in a coverup.But where’s Biden? Did you find him in the sushi? I’ve been calling him the designated driver candidate– the guy who didn’t drink at the party and is entrusted with getting those who did home safely. I’m not sure however, if the country can wait for that ride home. The present holder of the keys to the nation’s fate doesn’t drink but the only thing he drives is a golf cart and he won’t let us see if he’s even capable of handling that. Biden needs to get moving. Sheltering in the basement may be a safe place to be when there’s a tornado warning but the country’s on fire now. I can’t think of anything more to say about Joe other than the future of the United States will be determined by who wins the next presidential election and if I have to risk my health to vote for him I’ll do it. I try not to think about what happens if he loses.But let’s move on to sushi.I confess I am a sushi snob. Here in Vacationland I live in crustacean land where the lobster roll is king and the spicy tuna roll is an outlier and I really haven’t found sushi that compares with what I’m used to.
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