Category: Uncategorized

My Dad smoked cigarettes by the carload. At present day prices of those tombsticks, if he were alive today he wouldn’t have been able to afford to eat or buy new socks with what was left over after a trip to the tobacconist. They eventually were what killed him.

I seem to have adopted his habit, but with a twist.

My appreciation for incense of all sorts was recently rekindled, and now you can find them smoking in more than one spot in our little house at one time. Rarely the same scent, they are in essence competing with one another. I think it got started with that article I mentioned some time ago that spoke about the elderly having their own aroma, which was part of what makes nursing homes all smell the same.

The article grossed me out entirely, and I was momentarily overcome when I had to consider that the aging process was already making me shrink, slow down, wrinkle up, and forget everything but to breathe … and now to think that I was possibly identifiable in yet another way, even to people who couldn’t see me. It was too much.

Anyway, there are now incense burners in three of our rooms, and I am shopping for a fourth. If that dreaded aroma (which I don’t know that I have) can stand up to being beaten to death by patchouli and pine sap, I will concede defeat, but not until then.

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I think it is perfect that the Arizona Republicans have shown how far off the track they are by invoking an 1864 law against abortions. This should come as no surprise, not after the reversal of Roe v. Wade. The law allows no exceptions but for preserving the life of the mother. This last term has proved itself in the past to be notoriously subject to interpretation in both directions.

The conservative court opened the tent flap to the circus which we now are watching play out. While lawyers and zealots play their games in courtroom after courtroom the list of women whose lives become immensely complicated grows longer.

To me the reliance on a court decision handed down one year before the Civil War was concluded is not as lunatic as the Alabama Supreme Court’s declaration that a fertilized ovum is a child.

When jurisprudence is not prudent at all, but radical and/or misinformed , all sorts of mischief is possible.

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Our elder cat, Poco, is now almost eighteen years old. His joints bother him quite a bit so chasing his dinner out in the long grass is a practice long forgotten. He probably also has a kitty form of dementia, causing him to make decisions much more slowly.

Usually he will come to wake me at around 1:00 AM, having come to the conclusion that his happiness absolutely requires one teaspoonful of food at that moment. He can be quite insistent about it all but I humor him (as I imagine Robin humors the other 84 year-old in the house) and give him what he wants, then return to my bed.

Poco, I love you but you’re an #*+#@$ idiot. Why wake me so early?

Is it early?

Of course it is, Can’t you see that?

See what?

The big hand is on the twelve and the little hand is on the ten. Plain as day.

Well, you see, I can’t tell time.

Wait …

No one ever bothered to teach me how.

But …

And I have no watch of my own to employ when darkness dims the clock’s face. So I guess when we start to allot blame around here we better think it over before we open our mouths, hadn’t we? Remember that famous quote of Abraham Lincoln’s:

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.”

Did you have a watch picked out?

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Friday afternoon we took our boats to Chipeta Lake, a small body owned by water just on the south edge of town. A lazy and warm afternoon, no one else on the water but Robin, myself, and about sixty coots.

There were fishermen scattered along the banks, and we saw a few small trout landed.

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As members tell their stories at AA meetings, what is striking is the similar tales coming out of very different people. There are those who spent time in jails, lost jobs, lost families, lost health and years of their lives. Then there are those who say these things never happened to them, but either they could see them coming or they realized that they had been rolling dice all along and sooner or later the wrong number was going to come up.

There are scads of tales of driving cars when they absolutely shouldn’t have, ending with “I could have killed somebody, and it’s only by chance that I didn’t.” Then there was the night at a meeting when a visitor spoke up and said “I did kill somebody with my car when I was driving drunk.” Unlike all of the other recitations we’d heard or given, this guy had been someplace none of us had been, and we were stunned to silence by his admission. He was sober, he was straight, he was trying to rebuild a life he’d spent tearing down. And there was an amend he was never going to be able to make to a person he had not known.

A young man named Wyatt Flores comes out of Oklahoma and plays what is called country music. His few recordings have all the twang and guitars you could ask for, as well as the sincerity that new artists often have and which established ones do their damnedest to try to hold on to. Here’s one of his about that guy at our meeting who set a somber tone indeed.

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This whole drama of her year can be a teaching lesson. We are almost daily given instructions somewhere in the media about “letting go.” Most of these admonitions deal with past traumas or difficult choices we’ve made. But letting go applies just as well to happy times and for a very few, fame. If we have a great day, and expect that we will still have it tomorrow and the day after that, we will eventually run into one that is pretty ordinary. Followed in time by one that sucks. Good to practice letting go on all of those. What does that mean? It means recognizing that both good and bad times are transitory.

Everything changes, doesn’t it? Nothing is permanent. The mountain becomes the hill. A lake goes dry. The man I was when I wrote in this blog a week ago is not here any longer. Instead, you get a slightly different version of me, and that only for today.

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From The New Yorker

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Here are the last three signs from the El Arroyo restaurant in Austin TX. My favorite of all of them is the last one. It is dark. BTW, I think after abusing the privilege of using their signs in the blog, I should at least provide you with a link to their website, which is interesting in itself. They sell photobooks of their signs, with hundreds of pix like these in each one. (If you have a clever thought, they accept people sending them suggestions for new messages.) They sell caps and tee shirts.

And, surprise surprise, they prepare and sell food. Even ship it.

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Back in 1956 there was a best-selling novel entitled “The Last Angry Man.” I read it at that time and can remember very little about it, but then I can’t remember most of what I did yesterday. However, today I nominate Garry Trudeau for “Last Angry Man of the Last 50 Years.” Don’t bother looking it up, I just invented the category.

Trudeau will be 76 in July of this year, and I am grateful that he continues to share his sharp eye and his even sharper tongue with us. Personally, I think he nails it in this one. The thing is with Cluck, you don’t have to make stuff up. He speaks in satire of himself.

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In his book Awakening the Buddha Within, Lama Surya Das quotes from one of his teachers, a very wise and very old Tibetan Buddhist monk. When the man was asked to sum up his life one day, he answered: “One mistake after another.”

Gotta love a guy like that.

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We were nowhere near the “eclipse zone,” but looking out our front door at 1:32 MDT Monday we saw this and snapped the pic. A ring around the sun that contained color. The colors were like a smudged rainbow (red, orange, yellow) and are not shown as well in the photo as they were to the naked eye. (That blue-green dot is a lens artifact.)

I googled it and apparently this an uncommon event. It’s formed by the sun’s rays coursing through ice crystals in a cirrus cloud. No matter, even if it happened every day at 1:30 PM it would still be a lovely and fascinating thing to see. Of course, I am still a person who will pull the car over for a rainbow. Almost any rainbow. My knowledge of the heavens is probably as deep as the average Neanderthal’s, and I am easily amazed.

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From The New Yorker

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More juicy bits from El Arroyo restaurant

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With a windy weekend coming up, Robin and I decided to take advantage of a quieter and very sunny Thursday to break in the new kayaks. We chose to do it on Lake Ridgway, a lovely reservoir surrounded by mountains and only 25 minutes away. The water level was down about twenty feet, which is normal for this time of year, but this meant that the spot where we launched the boats was a nasty gravelly gumbo at the water’s edge.

Nearly losing our footgear in the mud, we scrambled onto the decks and took off. It turns out that our old paddling skills worked well with these very different boats. The new ones are not nearly as fast but quite stable and maneuverable. We cruised the western shoreline where there were still patches of snow. After spending an hour going out we turned around and almost at that moment the breeze picked up to provide more of a challenge on the return trip.

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I don’t often put jokes in here, and especially not those about seniors. Mostly they are unimaginative. Except maybe this one …

One Friday night a dapper 95 year old man walked into a bar and spotted an attractive woman seated alone, sipping on a whisky.
After sitting on the bar stool beside her, he turned and said, “Hello, beautiful. Do I come here often?”

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I admire David Brooks for his thoughtfulness, openness to change, and a healthy low level of ego in his scribbling. A conservative with a modern brain, fancy that.

But I never thought of him as humorous. However, here he is affirming my own pet theory that inanimate objects are far from lifeless and are often out to get us.

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The above clickbait photo and caption caught my eye. My first thought was that there is no state more landlocked than Colorado. Even if one gets into a boat on the mighty Colorado River you run out of water long before you reach the sea.

And then I thought:

• Being a senior-friendly cruise, will there be adequate Metamucil provided at the buffet? This could be a deal-breaker.
• How good, really, is the dolphin-watching in New Mexico?
• When the norovirus inevitably hits, will we be kept on the ship, or would we be issued one of those little camping trowels along with four squares of toilet paper and put over the side?

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From The New Yorker

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There has been talk for years about building, if not an exact replica, a new version of the ship Titanic. In the stratosphere where the rich and eccentric live, it actually might happen. It’s bit controversial, especially with those who lost relatives when the original went down.

Let’s say that a modern reimagining of what is maybe the most famous ocean liner of them all does make it to being tied up at a pier somewhere. Who will get on it? The only connections with the original are the name and in the mind of billionaire promoter Clive Palmer. For the sea-going traveler there might be the smallest bit of a frisson at they walked up the gangplank, but unless one is exceptionally weak-minded, that would be about it.

There would be no Rose and no Jack. Steerage would undoubtedly be cleaned up quite a lot from those old days when you jammed non-affluent people into very close contact with one another, and paid less attention than you should as to whether they actually had a lifeboat seat to count on if things went south.

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More signage from El Arroyo

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We were to have house guests this Easter. Amy and her family were to join us on Saturday, to return to Durango the following day. But weather has intervened. Just recently Robin was trapped for two extra days on a visit to Durango by snow in the mountains, and the reverse is exactly what threatened the Hurley family if they had followed through on the plan. So those plans have been scrapped.

The mountains are beautiful, often inspirational. Daily reminders of forces at work in Nature whose power we can barely imagine. Too big for my mind to really appreciate, no matter how much i might understand the science involved.

A crack in the earth appears, and one side of that gap raises up and slides over the other at a rate so slow that one human lifetime is not enough to track the progress without very sensitive instruments. But one day … voila! … the Rocky Mountains have risen. We come along and name them, and we use them as examples of solidity, changelessness. Which of course, they are not.

Before they were even fully formed they were already being worn away by wind and water. The Black Hills of South Dakota were once bigger than the Rockies, but now the tallest peak there is 7200 feet.Thinking about this whole process makes me feel … I don’t know … less of a big deal?

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This post is a day late. Not my fault. WordPress.com was having a bad day.

I was never a fan of Ronald Reagan’s. To me he was an affable guy propped up by the powers-that-be in his party. A likable frontman for a group of largely unlikable people.

So when he left office I did not miss him. When he was officially diagnosed with dementia a few years later the news came as no surprise. But this week I became aware of a public letter that he had written in 1994, when his condition was first made public. I thought it was particularly graceful, and link to it here.

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One place where I wasn’t surprised was this week’s park bench talk from a princess. I thought that she carried it off extremely well. Dignified, straightforward, without maudlin appeals. The lady has class. (Even though class is something of which I have never been accused, I know it when I see it.)

Times like this I am glad to be a nobody and thus no one cares what I choose to make public or not. Kate’s widely broadcasted message will probably not stop the attacks from the weak-minded and the cynical, who will continue their carping no matter what. But it may be enough for the rest of us, and hopefully this family can get the room and time they need and deserve.

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This morning I ran across one of those science pieces in the Times that just make my day. Where I learn something completely new and unexpected about the biology of our planet. Today I learned that there was such a thing as an olm.

They are so careful about not wasting energy that one member of the species was observed to not move for seven years. Okay, that last bit about not moving for many years … that’s not news. There are members of congress who do that, and fail to make any contribution to the public welfare for decades. Take former Senator Strom Thurmond, for example:

Retrospectively, a Senate aide stated that “for his last ten years, Thurmond didn’t know if he was on foot or on horseback”, while a 2020 New Yorker article stated that he was “widely known” by the end of his career to be non  compos mentis.

I guess that somehow I had expected more of salamanders.

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I’m getting better at avoiding clickbait. Early on in my internet life I really thought that I would eventually see the image that had attracted me. I know now that it never happens.

Clickbait consists of a never ending loop of advertisements with a handful of images sandwiched in there which bear only the slimmest relationship to what you were looking for. Let me give an example. Here is the headline:

My experience is that the image you wanted is never reached. Eventually you slump in your chair contemplating throwing that paperweight at the cat but catch yourself before you do something you’ll regret. The cat then relaxes and goes on with her self-assigned task of pulling your perfectly good wool carpeting to shreds.

However. Every once in a great while what looks like clickbait turns out to be a chest filled with treasure. Such was the case of a notice of a restaurant in Austin TX called El Arroyo. It is locally famous for having a clever sign out front, and a host of pictorial examples were provided.

I’ve captured some of them, and will post them here in the days to come.

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From The New Yorker

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Spitting rain/snow intermittently now for several days. It’s the sort of stuff that takes away just slightly from the glory of going out the front door. Yesterday we went for lunch with a friend who was leaving for a month’s trip and which involved getting into a warm and dry automobile, a short travel, then a quick dash into a warm and dry restaurant. Instead of charging up and down the hill down along the Uncompahgre River, we walked on the indoor track at the recreation center.

I can actually stand quite a bit of meteorologic hardship when it serves a purpose or there is nothing to do but bite the bullet. For instance, on our trips into the Boundary Waters, friend Rich and I had made a pact that if it was pouring rain on the day we were to enter the wilderness, we would rent a cabin instead and do day trips in between rain showers. But if we were already out there when the rain started, we would change nothing and proceed in the soggy state which was by now a fait accompli.

How to put it another way? I do not deliberately seek to be miserable, but can accept it with something approaching good grace when it is unavoidable. If I have to, I can come up with as stiff an upper lip as anybody. The operative words are “have to.”

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The British claim to have a laser that will shoot down drones and missiles for only $13.00 a shot. This compares rather favorably with the present approach using a defensive missile to down an offensive one at two million a pop.

This is all well and good but my question is can we scale it down so that it would be useful around the home? There are many vexing problems that could use a boost with technology.

For instance, a guided anti-mosquito laser that would continually search the air around a picnic table and blast each winged terrorist as it comes into range.

Or take the example of the children who have lately been ringing our doorbell and then running off before we can catch them and tie them up while we look for their parents. They do no harm, really, but I think a response more than just standing at the door like a dummy is called for, if only to add a little spice to the conflict.

I have also thought of installing a camera that would be activated by ringing the bell, and then posting the picture of their cherubic little faces on the community bulletin board by the mailboxes with the accompanying legend:

If anyone knows the identity of this little s**t of a bellringer, would they please have a talk with them?

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In both of these instances I would be upholding the time-honored tradition of the old geezer yelling “Get off my lawn.” I think that traditions serve a useful purpose, and I would be glad to add my contribution, now that I have worked myself up to that esteemed status.

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From The New Yorker

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Robin left on Tuesday for a planned two-day visit to check in with grandchildren, but has been trapped there by an inconvenient snowstorm in the mountains between Paradise and Durango. It’s not likely that travel will be possible until Saturday, and in our conversations I remind her repeatedly that she is safe, warm, with a bed to sleep on and food to eat where she is, and doing anything riskier than staying put should not be on the table.

She chafes at this advice, and resents being held back from what she wants to do by anything as ephemeral as the weather. But we both know well that the weather is absolutely indifferent to our wishes. It holds all the cards.

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From The New Yorker

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A couple of years ago Robin and I were drawn into the air fryer universe for two reasons. One is that we didn’t want to appear to be just one more set of out-of-date senior citizens. The second is that one day we Zoomed with grandchild Elsa and she told us that she owned one and found it to be useful. That was enough for us, so we went out and purchased the exact same model that she was using.

Before plunking down the cash, however, we did a small amount of web research on fryers, and were amused to find that each review started out like this: There is no need for you to buy an air fryer if you already have an oven of any kind anywhere in your house because that’s all it is, a teeny version of a convection oven.

We did have a perfectly usable oven of large capacity in our kitchen, but went right ahead and got an air fryer anyway because we (mostly me) desperately needed to feel au courant. Sometimes you just have to go out and waste money to feel … I don’t know … alive.

But this morning I came across this article about Best Buy having to recall a quarter of a million of their air fryers, which if the stories are accurate, are the appliances from hell. Imagine having an electrical device on your countertop that can overheat, and if it does, several interesting things could happen:

• the handles could melt
• the handles could fall off
• the glass viewing window could shatter and slash you
• it could catch fire

Sort of makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up, no?

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Let me finish with something that might be a bit more uplifting. It is Sunday, after all. One of the pleasures of getting into a boat with my friend Bill H. is that if the fish are not biting every once in a while he will come at you out of the blue with a question so non sequitur that you are caught flat-footed. One such exchange went something like this:

Do you pray?

Yes, I do

I know that you are an agnostic and Buddhism is a non-theistic religion, so why do it?

Longish pause.

Because whenever I do, I feel better. Not at some unspecified future date, but right away.

Longer pause.

I don’t get it, really.

I don’t either. In Buddhism there is this kind of meditation called metta, where you say repeated phrases that are just like prayers, without the expectation that there is a deity that is listening.

Still don’t get it.

Believe I have a bite!

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Leonard Cohen wrote so many great songs that I don’t even try to pick a favorite. But if I did, If It Be Your Will would be a contender. And it is a prayer.

When asked in 1984 which song, “you wish you had written?” Leonard Cohen famously replied, “If It Be Your Will and I wrote it.”

There are loads of renditions available to choose from, but one of the most distinctive is by the performer Antony, and I offer it here.

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A metta meditation for you –

May you be safe
May you be happy
May you be well
May you live at ease

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It was one of those magical unscripted moments in life. Robin and I were taking our first brisk walk of the year on unpaved paths. We climbed up a rather steep section and voila! We were greeted by a flock of about twenty mountain bluebirds.

As we continued to move forward so did the birds, fluttering up and resettling a few yards further along time after time. After a few minutes they decided to try another part of the park and at that point took off without us.

Beautiful birds with that iridescent blue plumage shining in the sun. Natural magic.

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From The New Yorker

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I am presently fermenting mushrooms and cucumbers, and am about to start some sauerkraut. Fermentation is an interesting discipline with its own lore. For me it’s a new hobby but once it was a large scale mode of home food preservation.

As hobbies go, it’s a very inexpensive one to get into. A few jars, some salt, a handful of vegetables and off you go. Wait a few days and get a (so far) pleasant surprise.

Unlike the heady aromas when I used to brew my own beers, lacto-fermentation produces only the mildest of odors, all of which are compatible with life.

One of the websites promoting this process warns that if you ferment for long enough one day you will likely get a jar that has gone off, and the odor produced is “putrid.” That is a word that doesn’t even look good on paper.

I’ll keep you posted. BTW, the mushrooms were delicious.

[BTW – that image above of the beautiful vegetables in jars on a shelf was taken from the internet to illustrate an article on fermentation. They only look like that for a day or so and then they begin to lose that bright color and appear much more subdued and dull. But it makes for a better photo.]

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Watched yet another video clip of Caitlin Clark, as Iowa beat Nebraska for the Big Ten title. It is phenomenal what she has done for not only women’s basketball but for basketball in general.

When I was a teenager and watched tournament play I would afterwards be inspired to go out in the backyard, turn on the yard light, and play a game of 1 on 1 with my brother, imagining myself as playing in the game I had just watched.

That was, of course, men’s basketball. When I was a kid the women’s game was invisible.

Today if I were a teenager and had just watched Clark play I would be out there at that backyard hoop once again. Pretending I was sinking those dropback three pointers. Just like #22 did. It’s come to this. I have a girl for a hero.

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The movie Barbie didn’t win much at the Oscar ceremonies, but let’s face it, the Oscars are a self-promotional exercise for the movie industry and why should you and I care about who gets what honor? But Barbie will be forever (which means at least until next Tuesday) remembered by me for this short speech by America Ferrera’s character. Not being a woman, of course, brings into question my legitimacy in even making a comment, but if it isn’t the truth … well … I bought it as the truth.

I thought it encapsulated the impossibilities and contradictions inherent in being a woman in America very well. I thought to myself how exhausting that life would be. How much easier to be a man, which of course has its own set of impossibilities and contradictions, but that’s another story for another movie character to tell in a movie that hasn’t been made yet.

Kudos to Barbie for telling truths and making them look so good we almost don’t notice that coloring gut-wrenching pain and sorrow a vibrant pink doesn’t mean that they hurt one bit less.

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From The New Yorker

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Back when I began to explore Buddhism, more out of curiosity than anything else, there was a recurrent theme that attracted me very strongly, and it went this way:

Wanting to be taller, better-looking, smarter, more athletic, a better dancer, more successful, and more empathetic are all just stories that you are telling yourself and they make you miserable. There is no reality to these unhappy tales that you don’t give them. So why not stop?

Now that I think about it, the way was prepared for me by reading the book The Four Agreements. Same theme. We daily judge ourselves by the laws written in an imaginary book that are read into our heads by parents, schools, churches, and random others throughout our lives. Rules and laws that are 95% wrong, but that we agreed to way before we would ever have been able to defend ourselves against them.

The book asked the same question: So why not stop?

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For gardening 2024 Robin and I will probably focus on tomatoes and various greens, which have worked out the best for us. We’ve had poor luck with spinach, but some leaf lettuces and kale have done well. I read an article just the other day about the newest candidate for “superfood” status, which is collard greens. One of the original “soul foods.”

According to the advance notices, collards are so health-promoting that they need to be ingested with care and in small doses at first. One doesn’t want to take one’s body from sad sack to tower of strength in a few short minutes.

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We have two gardening problems here in Paradise that we didn’t experience in the Midwest. The first is that there isn’t adequate rainfall, and so we have to be very consistent in our watering. Consistency, you may recall my mentioning in the past, is not my strongest suit.

The second is that there’s way more sunshine than is needed. Enough that it sometimes causes visible physical damage to the fruits of the plants. We move containers from place to place, provide sunscreens, anything we can do to run interference for the growing things. Sometimes we win, sometimes we lose. Some days are diamonds, some days are stones.

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From The New Yorker

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Several days a week I force myself to go to the rec center and accept the many small humiliations. Yesterday I waited at one station for a 220 pound muscle at least a foot taller than myself whose t-shirt read “Combat Ready” to finish his exercise. I know his height because the message on his shirt was at my eye level. His body rippled in a myriad of places where mine has only creases.

When my turn comes at such times it takes me several minutes to lower weight and resistance levels on the machine, down to numbers that I can deal with. Numbers, if you want to know the truth, that are sort of poignantly minute. But you do what you can, as Robin tells me over and over as she whips past me on the walking track with her titanium knees. Sometimes she goes by so quickly I can smell the odor of burning Vibram.

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Let’s suppose that late in this autumn we can be blessed to be in a country where a racist fascist sexist immoral deplorable sexual predator of a candidate is soundly defeated. So badly that it wakes up the scapegraces, cowards, and fools in his party and they begin to actually act like a GOP and make this defeated person (who may or may not be an unnatural color) irrelevant.

What is obvious that even if we enter a happy day without this demented person in it there are millions of his followers who are filled with fear. Of what? Could be social change. Could be job insecurity. Could be that they really believe that there are Marxist hordes at our gates and only John Wayne Donald Cluck can keep them from overrunning the country?

Even if Cluck is exiled (0h joy, oh rapture), those millions are still here and we need to find the way to live with and work alongside one another. If not as soulmates, at least as countrymen.

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From The New Yorker

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One last thing this morning. I think that Mr. Biden nailed it on Thursday night. I especially liked when he called out the Supremes for downing Roe v. Wade. The expressions of the court’s members who were present looked like they were trying to swallow millipedes as the President spoke.

I haven’t watched a state of the union speech for years, but I found myself turning on the television with a heart full of apprehensions while waiting for the President to show up.

After the first five minutes of the speech I began to relax. This was not a doddering old fool in front of us, but a knowledgeable political warrior with way more experience than the majority of his listeners, punching hard at his opposition. And he was singing a song I longed to hear.

I am reassured. Count me in.

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Lastly, do not call me, text me, or send me an email that requires a brisk response Sunday evening . I am going to watch the Oscar ceremonies and will not acknowledge any interruptions.

I know it’s a waste of several precious hours of my life but do I care a jot, tittle, atom, or whit? I do not.

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For the longest time I have had an interest in fermented food. Of all sorts. In fact, one could say that I pursued my interest in wine, beer, and distilled beverages (which all involve fermentation) with more vigor than was good for me, and could have spared myself an embarrassment or two by being less of a fan.

But I also like sauerkraut, buttermilk, fermented pickles of all types, kefir, kombucha, tempeh, yogurt, kimchi, miso, and apple cider vinegar. And cheese. OMG – cheese!

So far neither my doctor nor the police department have shown any interest in how much I consume of this latter group of foods, which is a good thing.

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There is a remarkable woman … hold on there … A remarkable woman? … let me rephrase that. Among the many remarkable women that I have met and never met, there is one that I would like to mention this morning, and her name is Jennifer Berezan.

I was introduced to her work by a fellow AA member quite a while ago, when he loaned me a copy of her album “Returning.” It is basically a meditative song/chant that lasts the entire album, and is a beautiful thing for someone to have added to the world. Someone put the entire 52 minute recording on YouTube.

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As if that weren’t enough, Ms. Berezan put together a concert of yet another chant “In These Arms,” which is two hours long and when you have finished watching it, you have not subtracted those two hours from your life but added something special, I think. The concert is on YouTube along with some commercial interruptions.

It is a thing of joy, and the meditation that underlies the entire performance is one of lovingkindness, or metta. You’re all smart people, you can take it from there.

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Perhaps my enthusiasm has overwhelmed you, and spending hours listening to/watching someone you never heard of before seems like a bit much. Here is a three-minute version of “Song For All Beings: In These Arms”

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So far this year in Paradise we have had two kinds of days with regard to air flow. Either the air is still or it moves down the street at 40 mph or more, causing objects that belong to Robin and I to relocate into the yards of neighbors east of us. Occasionally they just vanish altogether.

Today is one of the breezy ones.

The cats hate windy days. They will stick their heads halfway through the pet door to sample the weather, and a wind velocity more than 15 mph will spin them right around and back into the house. I sympathize. If my nose was only 6 inches off the ground, I would do the same.

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But it bothered me.

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I learned this morning that our Supreme Court has revealed that they couldn’t identify an insurrection if it bit them on their robe-covered behinds.

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Once again we have learned that the only Supremes you can count on to do the right thing have Diana Ross singing lead.

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I look back fondly on yesterday, when the wind blew in up to 40 mph gusts, peppering our eyeballs with dirt and sand if we were unwise enough to venture outdoors. What?, you say. Fondly? How odd!

Let me finish. I can say that only because today the wind is still blowing but now it is colder and a sleety rain is falling as well. It is all very un-Paradisic.

So I sit looking out the window with my suite of discomforts to accompany me. A couple of weeks ago I caused injury to my lower back somehow, perhaps by picking up a dropped napkin or thinking an errant thought. You know how those things happen. You do nothing that you don’t do every single day but now you are suddenly a patient and can take care of yourself only if you don’t have to bend over, cough, or laugh.

So today I watch the rain and whine to Robin who is finding many things to do that keep her away from home just to get that annoying nnyyaaaahhhh sound out of her ears. I am popping my ibuprofen like a good boy, and Robin buzzes my complaining areas with a handheld electronic pounding device that could be used to drive fenceposts into soft ground.

One sunny day these discomforts will be gone, and my outlook on life will return to its baseline, which is a moderate level of crankiness.

Nothing stays the same. Everything changes. I have it on the best authority.

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From The New Yorker

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Moderator: Gentlemen, if you are ready then let’s begin.

Trump: I’m ready but you better wake up Joe, I think he’s nodded off

Biden: I’m more awake than you’ll ever be, you spray-painted ninny

Trump: Easy Joe, you might have a big stroke and need to be carried off

Biden: Remember your wife’s name yet, Donnie boy?

Moderator: Gentlemen! Let’s get back to debating, shall we?

Trump: Look, he’s drooling!

Biden: His Depends needs changing!

Trump: I don’t need any help down there

Biden: That’s not what Stormy Daniels said

Moderator: This your last warning. Obey the rules or we’ll shut this thing right down

Trump: I didn’t want to come anyway

Biden: Hard getting away from the “Home,” is it?

Trump: Pedophile!

Biden: Jackass!

Trump: Senile old fool!

Biden: Peckerwood!

Ad infinitum, ad nauseam

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Each year I reach a point where I am so fed up with winter that I begin to resent all that I have to do to stay alive outdoors. And that happens even in this mild climate that the Uncompaghre Valley provides. I want to put away the puffy jackets and the flannel shirts and parkas and wear shorts and camp out and … whatever.

I’m at that place this morning.

It’s a juvenile thing, I know, but I don’t give a flying hoot if it is. I find that being juvenile at this age is much easier for two reasons.

One is that my acne hasn’t come back because of the behavior. The other is that younger citizens have such low expectations where seniors are concerned that acting childish is tolerated as long as you are continent.

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From The New Yorker

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The above New Yorker cartoon uses a coarse four-letter word, which is highly unusual for this genteel magazine. Of course it’s precisely the shock value of the word that makes it funny.

The New Yorker can be risqué, but (until now) it was nevah, evah coarse.

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A tale of two jalapeños found next to one another in the same bin at City Market. Exactly the same length and firmness and color. Identical twins.

My habit when cooking with chiles is to take a very small bite at the tip to assess how hot this particular pepper is. They can vary quite a bit in ferocity, and I like to know what I’m dealing with in order to avoid the spectacle of our guests dashing from the dining table to the closest water faucet with those horrified looks on their faces.

I took that small bite of one of these and it immediately tried to burn my lips away, destroy my oral cavity, and somewhere I’m sure that I could hear the concrete slab over my grave being lifted into receiving mode. I applied various cooling agents and nostrums and within half an hour the drama was behind me.

It was the hottest chile I’d ever tasted.

It was the hottest anything I’d ever tasted.

An hour later and with much trepidation I tried the tiniest nip from the second jalapeño. It was mild enough that I could have eaten it like an apple.

My problem, of course, is that now I know that there is yet one more thing out there that wants to kill me. Or worse, something that might ruin the dish that I was preparing. And the only way that I can see to sort it out is to put my mouth on the front line as I have done for years.

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Robin and I share an appreciation for beans here at Basecamp. They have so many things going for them and very few drawbacks. You could live on just beans and rice. You might not want to, but you could.

Good things about beans

• So many varieties
• Economy
• Versatility
• Availability
• Easy storage
• Excellent nutritional values

Less good things about beans

• Flatulence
• Bad breath (see citation below)
• Fewer social invitations as a result of the first two items in this list

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When you block a fart from escaping, some of the gas can pass through your gut wall and be reabsorbed into your bloodstream. From there, it can end up being exhaled through your lungs, coming out of your mouth via exhaling.

Healthline

(Reading this short quote changed my way of looking at the world. To learn at my stage of life that not all halitosis is due to improper flossing was a mind bender and makes the thought of getting together in large groups even less appealing .)

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From The New Yorker

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Below is a great recipe for preparing pinto beans for those who are into pressure-cooking. Find the original recipe at From Valerie’s Kitchen

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From The New Yorker

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Alright, that’s about enough of this. Too silly by half.

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I took that to mean that there were fish in the pool, and I flailed about in the water for 15 minutes before I yielded the space to the heron and made my way on down the river.

By the time I got back to my car it was so dark I had to use the interior lights to take down my Tenkara rod and stow it away. I had only one small bite that evening and no fish caught. But that line of bright orange clouds against a blue-green twilight sky and that grand-looking bird fishing nearby. Ay ay ay, too good … too good.

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In 1974 I moved my family to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, to a small town named Hancock. We loved it there, but by 1980 it was obvious that if I was going to help my kids with college expenses down the road, I was going to have to work in a different part of the country. My pediatric practice in the U.P. was nearly 75% Medicaid, and without boring you with a lecture on medical economics, that is a number that does not equate with survival. It means that you go broke slowly but unrelentingly.

But while we lived there, we thrived in other ways. For me personally, the forests and lakes and craggy shorelines were the sort of stuff that were manna for my soul. I didn’t even mind the fact that five months of the year my head couldn’t be seen above the snowdrifts. Well, that’s not exactly true … but it was and is a special place.

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I am still processing Alexei Navalny’s death. He joins the heroes in my personal pantheon, along with folks like Martin Luther King, Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Thich Nhat Hanh, Harriet Tubman, Crazy Horse … it’s an ever- growing list. All of them people whose courage made me feel both large at sharing humanity with them and small at my own performances.

Not all of my heroes had to die to make it to the list. When I worked at the county hospital in Buffalo NY there were the grandmothers who brought babies in for well-child checks and immunizations and who had long journeys on buses involving the need to transfer twice to get to the clinic. These women were raising those kids at a time in their lives when they might have been slowing down and enjoying the shade of oak trees or putting up preserves from their gardens. Those buses traveled from and through some of the rougher neighborhoods in Buffalo, but the women came anyway and never missed an appointment.

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Thursday a Democratic candidate for the US House stopped in Montrose for what was billed as a “meet and greet.” He was here for about an hour and a half and then zoomed off to his next event in another town nearby.

His name is Adam Frisch, he’s a well-heeled fellow from Aspen, and he seemed awfully sensible. Not exciting, but sensible. He is what is described as a centrist Democrat which means you couldn’t get a feather between him and a centrist Republican, back in the day that there were centrist Republicans. He calls himself a conservative which means that every twelfth word in his short speech was “business.”

But that’s all okay with me at this point, since most of what I’ve been hearing from nthe world of politics recently comes from people who actually should be in padded cells for their own good. And ours.

To listen to someone who speaks in complete sentences with nouns and verbs and everything was a real treat. Frisch was supposed to be running against the Happy Fondler from Rifle CO, but she smelled a loss coming her way and switched districts to try to avoid it.

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Robin and I took a day trip this week to Crested Butte, which is a smallish ski town about a two hour drive from Paradise. We like CB a lot. Of course it is a touristy village, but it is unusual in that it is still quaint. Lots of pastel-painted buildings, unshoveled sidewalks, a nice little bookshop. There is a barn-like pizza joint called The Secret Stash that serves up excellent pies, and which we never miss on our trips there.

Before it became a tourist town, Crested Butte had a strong mining and ranching history, with its own versions of the cattlemen vs. the sheepherder tales. Most of those stories went like this: cattlemen occupy an area of the valley, sheepmen move in with 1500 sheep, cattlemen put on masks to ride out one night and massacre those 1500 sheep, sheepherder leaves town.

Summers there is grand hiking and sight-seeing, and some of the very best alpine wildflower viewing there is. Good place to visit, wouldn’t necessarily want to live there.

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Monday morning I woke up early and in a mood, and sitting there in the dark I thought: I’m through with writing this blog, I’m going to sign off on the damned thing and give the world a break. I’m a silly person and it is a silly exercise and what’s the point?

I even had a quote from a Cole Porter song to finish up with: It was great fun, but it was just one of those things.

And then I read what was basically an obituary of Alexei Navalny, a man who had extraordinary courage. Who rolled the dice in a very dangerous game, standing in for everyone who believes that autocracy and tyranny must be resisted wherever they spring up.

I thought – is this the time to quit? Do we need fewer voices raised in that struggle or more of them? Please don’t think for a moment that I am comparing myself and what I do with Mr. Navalny and his work. He roared while I pule. He sacrificed all and died in a prison above the Arctic Circle, while I spend a few minutes a day in a warm room with a cup of coffee and a computer.

Nope, I thought, what I do may be trivial but I can see at least two reasons to continue.

• There might be somebody out there who needs encouragement in their own endeavors and can take heart from reading this and say to themselves – By god, I can do better than this guy without even trying – and who will then pick up the banner and carry it higher and better than I ever did.
• There might be some hard-core fascist out there who accidentally stumbles onto this blog and by the time they have read a few lines and realized their error their heartburn has already acted up.

I therefore resolved to continue my whimpering.

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A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way.

Mark Twain

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On Monday afternoon the February temperature was 62 degrees. I dug out the trusty bicycle and took off for enough of a ride that I regretted it for the last two miles coming home, as the part of me that was in contact with the saddle was getting quite tender … almost to the point of needing to stand up to pedal. Those first rides in the Spring can be a caution.

Out of town a few miles I spotted a golden eagle at the top of a bare tree, with the late afternoon sun bringing out the gold and red in its feathers. These photos are not my own, as I was not expecting such an opportunity and was without a camera, but that’s how it looked. Magnificent bird.

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Liz Cheney has coined a phrase that actually might stick when she refers to the “Putin wing” of the GOP. These people are challenging us to call them out and deal with them, with their behavior having crossed to the wrong side of the line separating out those “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” from the rest of us.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend

Arabian Proverb

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Periodically, I feel the need to publish this photograph, taken in 1944, just to show my readers what they are dealing with. The arrow points to myself, standing in the middle of the Second Avenue Gang, who were heavily involved in cod liver oil trafficking and neighborhood espionage.

You deserve to know everything.

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One of the least reassuring news items I’ve come across this week showed up on CNN online early Wednesday morning.

A European Space Agency satellite is expected to reenter and largely burn up in Earth’s atmosphere on Wednesday morning.

CNN Online

This first quotation is only mildly alarming, with only the word “largely” to wonder about.

“As the spacecraft’s reentry is ‘natural’, without the possibility to perform manoeuvers, it is impossible to know exactly where and when it will reenter the atmosphere and begin to burn up,” according to a statement from the agency.

CNN Online

Still no need to panic, I thought.

The ERS-2 satellite has an estimated mass of 5,057 pounds (2,294 kilograms) after depleting its fuel, making it similar in size to other space debris that reenters Earth’s atmosphere every week or so, according to the agency.

CNN Online

Wait … 5,000 pounds? “Largely” burning up? They don’t know when or where it will come to earth? This happens every week?

At around 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth’s surface, the satellite is expected to break apart and the majority of the fragments will burn up in the atmosphere. The agency said that some fragments could reach the planet’s surface, but they won’t contain any harmful substances and will most likely fall into the ocean.

CNN Online

“Some fragments could reach the planet’s surface”? “Most likely fall into the ocean”? Does anyone see a pattern of quibbling here? I don’t think that words like “largely” and “could” and “most likely” belong anywhere near a news item about 5,000 pound things falling from the sky. Especially when even a doorknob falling from that height and onto your cranium would at a minimum make you forget where you put your car keys, perhaps forever.

Personally, I think that the people who put that up there should be a bit more responsible. We have seen that when space agencies want to know where something is going to land so they can meet it and get the pilot out, they can do that quite well. What this article is talking about is nothing more than space littering and someone being awfully careless, if you get my drift. In Colorado, if I toss a soda can out the window of my car, I can be fined from $20-$500. If the highway patrol saw me dumping out an ERS-2, the fine would almost surely be even higher.

All I know is that I’m not going outdoors until Thursday, and even then I’m going to start wearing my bicycle helmet on all such occasions. I will do that until someone in authority tells me that all of the large chunks of crap out there in space have already fallen to earth. Can one really be too careful? Really?

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I wouldn’t consider myself a hard-core Frank Sinatra fan, only buying a couple of his albums back when that was what one did in order to listen to music at home. But there are some of his songs that enriched my young adult existence. I bonded with them and I can’t imagine anyone singing them better.

It almost goes without saying that my favorite of his albums would be a collection of songs of longing. Music well-suited to someone with a melancholic disposition. A soundtrack for suffering with themes like Oh I’m so lonely or I’ve just been dumped again or Where is my perfect person? … you know the drill.

Ay ay ay … just thinking about it I can hear a certain twenty-ish angst-filled man pacing in a basement apartment somewhere in my memory. Memories of nights with this record on a turntable, on repeat play.

Maybe I am a fan after all … Type 2.b, perhaps.

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From The New Yorker archives

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The elderly patient chuckles: Doctor, when you are my age everything is trying to kill you. The cars of impatient drivers leap at you at crosswalks. Every new infectious disease that comes to town has your name at the top of its list. All of your organs are hovering on that thin line between just being able to do their job and failing. Your heart and your brain are filled with plaqued-up and narrowed blood vessels that could plug up at any minute and that will be the end of your story.

All of us run a gauntlet between dangerous things all of our lives, but when you get very old, you slow down.You slow down, but those dangerous things do not lose one bit of their vitality. They are just as swift as ever, which means that the odds of one of them catching you go up rather steeply.

So I know that I should have come in earlier and I am grateful that what I have is something you can treat. But it was never the only threat out there I had to worry about. Only one of many.

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From The New Yorker archives

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David Brooks is a thoughtful man, which makes him quite an outlier in today’s raucous social and political scene. He’s also an aging white male, which positively marks him as someone to be ignored, because that makes him a member of a group that is being held responsible for everything that is bad in the world.

But let’s keep our minds open, shall we, and allow for the possibility that this old dude might say something worth thinking about.

More of us have to embrace an idea, a way of thinking that is fundamental to being a citizen in a democracy. That idea is known as value pluralism. It’s most associated with the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin and is based on the premise that the world doesn’t fit neatly together. We all want to pursue a variety of goods, but unfortunately, these goods can be in tension with one another. For example, we may want to use government to make society more equal, but if we do, we’ll have to expand state power so much that it will impinge on some people’s freedom, which is a good we also believe in. … these kinds of tensions are common in our political lives: loyalty to a particular community versus universal solidarity with all humankind; respect for authority versus individual autonomy; social progress versus social stability

Brooks, David: The Cure For What Ails Our Democracy

So why would I even bother to read his Op/Ed and recommend it to you? Well, there are several reasons, actually.

• He’s way smarter than I am
• He loves this hot mess of a country
• He refuses to make each social or policy question a matter of black vs. white, but finds the world to be everywhere shaded, and no one has all the truth on their side
• When on a televised panel he is invariably polite and respectful to everyone else, even the dolts
• He never yells at other panelists, and lets them finish their thoughts before offering his own

It’s difficult to see how we could get to the place he describes, but I agree with him that it is essential if we are to begin to get out of this poisonous stew we’re in.

I really hate to admit that, because it will mean that I have to lighten up on my strong tendency to use sarcasm and my assumption that I have always been and will always be right about everything … but, hey, if it means that the noise quiets down … might be worth it.

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Just finished a massive housekeeping chore. I was running out of storage space on WordPress with hundreds of posts going back six years or so. Those tunes and photos and videos took up a bit of room. The next step would have been to move up to what was essentially a commercial-sized cloud parking area.

Time had caught up with me because I didn’t follow my own prescribed path. When I originally thought about writing this thing, my idea was to keep it short and sweet, and delete old posts periodically. Even in my most narcissistic moments I realized that there was nothing I was going to say that was worth preserving for very long. Truth is, I traffic in ephemera. Each blog entry is a pebble dropped into a pond which causes a small ripple that spreads out and eventually disappears.

So over the past several days I took down about 500 old posts and everything that went with them as I repeatedly pressed the delete key. Needed to be done.

I feel ten pounds lighter.

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Native Americans have meaningful descriptive ways of naming full moons. The Moon of Popping Trees, for instance was the frigid December of 1890, when nearly 300 Lakota people were massacred by the U.S. Army at Wounded Knee. The “popping” was of frozen branches snapping off from bare trees.

February has been called the Snow Moon because it is the coldest and snowiest. During my student years at the University of Minnesota February could have been named the Moon of People Flying, because those gray days, frigid temperatures, and fear of spot quizzes would occasionally gang up on a sensitive student and they would jump from the old Washington Avenue Bridge into the dark cold water of the Mississippi River.

Now I had my down days while in college, but there was never a moment when an impromptu winter swim in Ol’ Man River seemed like a good idea to me. Because I knew with a certainty rarely granted to human beings that I would survive the jump and spend the last several minutes of my life astronomically more uncomfortable than I had ever been and I simply wasn’t having that.

Even when the winter dragged on and my car wouldn’t start (again!) and the pipes froze in my cheap apartment and the entire ancient plaster ceiling in the bedroom fell onto my bed and a 9/11-style mushroom cloud of dirt and asbestos and mouse poop and squirrel chewings going back to 1920 ballooned out through the bedroom door into the living room. Not even then.

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From The New Yorker

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I find YouTube to be a great resource, although these days I read a lot of sniping and sneering about it. But how else would we doofuses of the world learn how to take a bathroom drain apart to clean it? Or to properly sharpen a buzz-saw blade? Or jailbreak our iPhones? 

I now have thousands of bits of information and scores of possibly useful skills as arrows in my quiver that I did not have before YouTube came along. But be warned – there is nothing more dangerous than a half-educated man with a cordless drill in his hand.

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(In the unlikely event that my heart softened and I opened my door to him, gave him dry clothes and a cup of hot coffee … even though I knew how … I would still not make him those scrambled eggs. Boundaries, my friends, boundaries.)

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In the above scenario, if it were Mr. Cluck dripping on my doorstep, I would not even go that far. I might simply turn off the porch light and call the police to report a waterlogged trespasser. Might even sic the cat on ‘im.

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From The New Yorker

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Interesting article in the Times of New York on Monday about the company Patagonia, which makes excellent outdoor apparel that I can only afford when it is seriously on sale. I was given a Patagonia fleece pullover fifteen years ago that is cut better, sewn better, is made of better material, has a better zipper, and will probably outlive me. In addition, they have one of the best guarantees out there.

Patagonia will repair all our gear, covered by our Ironclad Guarantee, free-of-charge. Once your repair is complete, we’ll ship your item back to you with the return shipping costs covered by us. Please note, if your garment is not sent in freshly washed, you may incur a laundering fee.

Patagonia advertising blurb

(That last sentence tells me that some unpleasantly fragrant garments must have been shipped to them in the past, and they are guarding the sensibilities of their employees.)

What’s more, the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, is a promoter of simple fly fishing (Tenkara), and therefore a man after my own heart. He even wrote a book about it.

But that’s not the story the Times is talking about. That story is what they are doing with their profits, and that is to donate to projects and people that are working to better the environment. Good practice, that.

(BTW, that little jacket Yvon is wearing retails for $399.00. The waders are $699.00. I would have to be a much better fisherman to think that I needed to be outfitted in such raiment. I am much more the $100 angler than the $1000 version.)

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One of the reasons comedians do as well as they do is because we humans are such a silly lot, and often all they have to do is report on our behavior. YouTube’s algorithms served up this gentleman last Monday morning so I could start the day with a couple of smiles, and I share him with you. 

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I have a fondness for Steve Earle’s music. And since he’s quite a bit left of center politically, I admire much of his politics as well.

But there was a period in his life when drugs threatened his existence. Fortunately that hairy time is long behind him. While those addictions were active he put out a song called Copperhead Road, which is a fave of mine, and his biggest hit.

It’s the story of a young man who returned from his tours in Viet Nam to take up the family moonshining business and plans to add the illegal growing of marijuana to his portfolio.

In 1988 he was invited to do the song on the Letterman show, and a video of that performance is below. It is remarkable for two things.

One, it sounds nearly as crisp as the studio version. It is a fine rock and roll performance, with his band dressed in a motley collection of garments and everyone looking like they just got out of bed.

Two, you need to take a look at his eyes. His gaze is that of a person who is not quite in the same universe you are. Definitely not the look of a man to whom you would lend your pickup for the weekend or put out the red carpet for if he wanted to date your daughter.

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On Thursday the Supremes took up the case of Benedict Cluck’s incitement of an insurrection, and we get to watch history being made once more. One way or another.

Some people say that Mr. Cluck is a no-good lying sack of doo-doo, and that his continued existence is a complete waste of the planet’s oxygen, but I partially disagree. When, I ask you, have we had a better education in our form of government, as he has continually exploited its weaknesses at the same time he was butting his head against its strengths?

Now I happen to presently be a resident of the great state of Colorado, which has taken this matter to the Supreme Court. Some people say that it shouldn’t have been done, and that we should “leave it to the voters.” I think that’s a crock, to borrow a phrase.

When people are accused of crimes, we don’t have elections to decide whether they are guilty or not, we have trials. (Even so, there was a recent editorial on CNN which makes the case that we’ve already had a trial, where majorities in both the Senate and House of Representatives already declared that there had been an insurrection and that Cluck incited it.)

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From The New Yorker Archives

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The 1928 Republican Convention opened with a prayer. If the Lord can see His way clear to bless the Republican Party the way it’s been carrying on, then the rest of us ought to get it without even asking.

Will Rogers

That line fits so well with today’s news it is uncanny.

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Steve tells stories in the best traditions of that genre. His voice has been described as the place where Tom Waits meets Hank Williams. And this is only my personal opinion, but I think he looks exactly how a serious socialist/activist/troubador oughta look.

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In the darkest hour of the longest night
If it was in my power I’d step into the light
Candles on the altar, penny in your shoe
Walk upon the water – transcendental blues.

Happy ever after ’til the day you die
Careful what you ask for, you don’t know ’til you try
Hands are in your pockets, starin’ at your shoes
Wishin’ you could stop it – transcendental blues.

If I had it my way, everything would change
Out here on this highway the rules are still the same
Back roads never carry you where you want ’em to
They leave you standin’ there with them ol’
Transcendental Blues.

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From The New Yorker Archives

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Most of my life I have been out of the loop. It explains a lot of things about me, nearly all of which aren’t interesting in the slightest, not even to me. But in my defense, at least I used to know where the loop was. That is no longer true. For example, I offer the following.

Today is Super Bowl Sunday. I have never watched a Super Bowl, which makes me such a foreigner in my own country that I probably should carry a green card. Most Americans will line up in front of their television sets today to watch a group of highly paid athletes who are the playthings of a large group of billionaires run out the clock in a brutish game where the already scarred brains of many of those athletes will be further damaged by their participation on that very day. 

Next year or the year after we will read headlines involving some of these men as they lose control of their lives and minds and commit serious crimes. They may murder their wives or their girlfriends or other men after what might have been small arguments or no argument at all. Some will even murder themselves to escape their mental torment.

There are no crowds present at the commission of those crimes, but I am pretty certain that if they were being streamed, there are many who would purchase tickets for the event. And there would be commercials, you can bet on it.

This year I have read that commercial time during the big game costs 7 million dollars for a 30 second slot. They are yet another arena for billionaires to compete with one another.

Advertising agencies put out the best they can imagine for a “family” audience, and sometimes these are quite clever. The granddaddy of them all, the one that took commercials to a whole ‘nother level, took place 40 years ago in 1984.

And they wanted to have its coming out party be something special, so they made a commercial which was run only once, at Super Bowl XVIII. Here it is.

You can see that there is something strange about this commercial. You never see the product. They don’t even tell you what it is. And yet by the midsummer of 1984 I owned a Macintosh and so did millions of others. The Times of New York had a short piece dealing with the creation of the ad in Saturday’s edition.

I don’t know how many Macs I have purchased since 1984, but it’s a bunch. This blog is created on a MacBookPro which is now six years old, making it a dotard in the world of technology. It is not the biggest nor the fastest computer and it has a few highly annoying quirks, but I still love it when it does what I want it to do.

As an example of the threadbare Buddhist that I am, I cling to my Mac and thus it can make me suffer whenever it desires.

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So much this week about the two old men running for president. Mostly negative. Although CNN did round up a few older voters to ask what they thought about it. One lady of a very certain age said “Well I’m eighty and I’m on our town council and I take college courses for credit …” as proof that not every octogenarian is drooling continuously and couldn’t find their feet without a guide.

Proves nothing. In fact, call me callous, but I think the demands of being POTUS might exceed those of a small town council member. For all of the glaring differences in their politics, what Biden and Cluck share is clear evidence of the significant wear and tear that time can bring about.

For them to pretend that it isn’t happening is neither reassuring nor evidence of good judgment on their parts.

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There I was, washing up at the kitchen sink and looking out the window into the back yard. Six feet away from my nose, perched pertly on a bare branch of the ash tree, was a bird I had never seen before. It was blue and a little bigger than a robin. Suddenly there was another one in the tree, and another, and soon there were ten of them hopping from branch to branch. I had time to call Robin over to see them and marvel along with me before the whole bunch grew bored with our tree and moved next door to try the neighbor’s.

There were enough identifiers present, and I had such a good long look at these beauties, that I was easily able to identify them as Woodhouse’s Scrub Jays using the Sibley Guide to Birds of Western North America.

I consider myself a “birder,” even though I recognize that there is a great difference between me and the sort of person who deliberately plans their vacation around some spot on the globe where they hope to see a new bird species. I am the sort of birder (Type D) who, if he spots a bird he’s never seen before while reclining in a hammock with an iced tea nearby, gets excited and looks it up.

• Type A birder: will drop a baby they are carrying in order to grab their binoculars to identify a bird in the vicinity
• Type B birder: will plan a vacation trip to see a chestnut-sided tomtit and be depressed for months if they don’t find one
• Type C birder: never leaves the house without binoculars and a copy of Sibley, even if only going across the street to buy milk for supper
• Type D birder: as above
• Type E birder: regards all bird species as pests who might poop on their BMW. Cannot tell a crow from a peacock and doesn’t care.

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There are probably thousands of great books and videos about birds that I’ve never seen, but one of the most beautiful that I have viewed so far is the documentary Winged Migration. It is extraordinary. I found an extended preview for you to watch when you have the time, and if it whets your appetite for more, Prime Video will let you watch the entire film for the cheap cheap price of $3.99. 

Now if you rent it, and are anything above a Type E – your day will be improved and your life’s schema broadened for less than four bucks. That, compadres, is a banner deal.

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It was my fifth grade teacher, Miss Behrens, who turned me on to watching birds. She brought her copy of John James Audubon’s Birds of America to class for us to look at, with its dramatic illustrations. I pored over that book, and still am drawn to the art even though it has come under some fire over the years because the birds were painted in postures at times that were inaccurate, and might have not even have been achievable in life.

(Audubon is said to have killed his subjects, then posed them. A common practice for naturalists of the day)

In spite of these criticisms if I were to find a copy of that big book on my coffee table later today, I wouldn’t be much good for anything else for the next several hours as I slowly turned the pages.

More recently Mr. Audubon’s name has stirred up yet another controversy when it became more widely known that he had been a slave owner and slave trader, and some of his writings have been described as racist. Although several chapters of the Audubon Society around the country have changed their names to avoid being associated in any way with these abhorrent practices, the national organization has retained the name Audubon, as has our local chapter here in Paradise.

Personally, I think a name change is probably inevitable and it would be good thing for the organization to go on and get it done.

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I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not, but the grand old disease of syphilis is back in style once again. It was never completely eliminated, but the incidence was low enough that a graybeard like myself only saw one case in his professional lifetime.

The CDC statistics tell the story pretty well, I think. There were 5,979 cases in the USA in 2000, and 133,945 cases in 2020. A 2,140% increase!

Some historians believe that it was Christopher Columbus’ Crew that brought syphilis back with them to Europe, since prior to his voyages it had been a disease only of the Western Hemisphere. What is certain is that when it hit Europe, every country blamed it on a neighbor, especially one they might have had hostile relations with.

So, the inhabitants of today’s Italy, Germany and United Kingdom named syphilis ‘the French disease’, the French named it ‘the Neapolitan disease’, the Russians assigned the name of ‘Polish disease’, the Polish called it ‘the German disease’, The Danish, the Portuguese and the inhabitants of Northern Africa named it ‘the Spanish/Castilian disease’ and the Turks coined the term ‘Christian disease’. Moreover, in Northern India, the Muslims blamed the Hindu for the outbreak of the affliction. However, the Hindu blamed the Muslims and in the end everyone blamed the Europeans.

NIH

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And I personally would round up some sackcloth to wear and start in with self-flagellation this very afternoon if I thought that was all there was to the story. But wait … how many Millennials, Gen Z, Gen X, or Gen whatevers do you know whose lifestyles and choices are more environmentally sound than those made by the “boomers?” I see little difference between the consumer habits of different generations.

It’s one big boat and we’re all in it, friends. If people want to argue about seat assignments I won’t interfere, as long as they pull on their oars.

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From The New Yorker

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HOPEFUL SIGNS THAT THE APOCALYPSE MAY NOT BE UPON US AFTER ALL

• The noxious censorship battalions traveling under the name of Moms For Liberty may at last be losing ground and influence. School boards and librarians aren’t caving like they used to do. BTW, the name of this group is right-wing newspeak pure and simple.
• E. Jean Carroll’s day in court was a huge win and she gets 83 million dollars from her rapist. Yay for the lady!
• Lauren Boebert’s campaign is having many difficulties which surprisingly don’t involve the fondling of her male companions in public places. The other wolves in the Republican primary pack have tasted blood and are eager for more. Howls of “carpetbagger” fill the air on each full moon.
• The National Rifle Association’s Wayne LaPierre is being tried for corruption involving his misuse of millions of dollars of association funds. Other good news on that front is that the NRA itself is losing membership and revenues are dropping. For way too long the NRA has vigorously opposed sane discussion on how to work together to deal with the issue of firearms.

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From The New Yorker

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We’re halfway through winter and I’ve been barely blooded by it. Still have all my fingers and toes, no visits to emergency rooms have been necessary, and my mood is not nearly as sullen as usual by this time of year (I do not have independent confirmation of this last point). It certainly doesn’t hurt that each day has a few minutes more of sunshine in it than the one before.

We’re planning a trip to the Midwest this summer to connect with family, and I’m looking forward to that. Most of our trips are by car, which is my preferred travel mode.

I like air travel less each year. Even before doors started flying off airplanes in mid-flight the problem is that what used to be a pleasant adventure had become a slog involving being bullied by TSA tyrants, bamboozled by airlines, and shoehorned into seating spaces more suited to something the size of a gerbil.

Not to mention that those sleek but self-destructing aircraft are responsible for 3% of carbon emissions worldwide. Not a good thing, that.

Much of the romance of flight has definitely been lost. A favorite genre of old films is those involving the early days of flying. Movies like Wings, for instance, with intrepid men and women all over the place, fluttering about in cloth-covered aircraft .

Never mind that Wings (1927) was made even before my time, and was a silent film as well. It was all about the planes, man, the planes … and the freedom of the skies.

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We’ve not talked much here about mindfulness, but I wanted to alert you all to an opportunity. Sharon Salzberg is offering what she calls a 28 day challenge. Basically an online meditation course, free of charge (although there are instructions as to how to donate if you are so moved).

She’s an excellent teacher, and one of the premier American lecturers in mindfulness meditation and Buddhism.

The link to the series is here: https://www.sharonsalzberg.com/real-happiness-challenge

The course starts on February first, and January 31 is the last day to sign up.

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I mentioned the movie The Holdovers a couple of days back, but neglected to include one of my favorite lines from the film. I was reminded of it this morning as I slogged through CNN online where they were interviewing Cluck voters in New Hampshire.

(This does not mean that I think all Cluck voters can be described in that way. Not my intention at all. I think that there might have been some selection and editing going on because all of those being interviewed on CNN this morning … well … every one of them could have used a boot check.)

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There aren’t too many things that instantly get me riled up. Well, that’s not actually true, there are quite a few of them, come to think of it. One of them is stories about infectious diseases making comebacks, diseases for which we have effective immunizations.

It’s one of the most harmful things that can happen when politics intersects with public health. Politics can be a mindless beast that thrives on controversy and vituperation, and we saw so much of this during the pandemic years that it became an experience painful enough to sear itself into my shrinking brain.

At the onset of the Covid 19 story, I thought there would be a period of fear, confusion, and a lot of deaths at first, but in a year or two a vaccine might be produced that would carry the day for us. I was wrong twice.

First, I did not realize that there was new technology for vaccine production just waiting for such an opportunity to be used, and a vaccine was put into play within months rather than years. (That seemed miraculous to me, who once had waited 25 years for the chickenpox vaccine to come to where pediatricians had access to it for their patients.)

And then the second mistake in my prediction. Some of the meanest-spirited and most ignorant mouths in America opened in a collective yawp and instead of having a good chance of throttling this viral invader, we found a large contingent of our “leaders” shouting down the scientific community in the absolutely most witless and venal sort of way, attacking those workers who were doing their best to protect us against this threat.

You know the rest. We are still dealing with Covid and we still have a large number of people who refuse to be vaccinated and that are providing the population needed to keep the disease going.

Meanwhile, those citizens who are not suckered in by the mountebanks and the politicians are still getting their shots and are still doing much better as a result.

When you read the stories of people over these past several years who are literally dying of Covid-related disease but refuse to accept that they even have it because they have been told that the whole thing is a hoax … well … what can I say? The gap here seems almost unbridgeable.

The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind.

H.L. Mencken

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What got me going on this rant this morning (Thursday) was a story in the Times of New York about measles making a comeback. Vaccination rates have fallen in Europe to the point where it was absolutely possible to predict that an outbreak would happen soon, and it appears to be doing just that. No surprise at all. 

Viruses have no brains, the only thing they seek is to reproduce, and the only thing needed for that to happen is opportunity. Too many parents have listened to the anti-vaxxers and now … the predictable whirlwind is being reaped. It is children who will suffer, children who depended on grownups to do the right thing for them.

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As a child I had measles, rubella, mumps, whooping cough, and polio. If you had told my mother that there was a vaccine available for any of these and did she want her child to receive it she would have laughed at you, because the answer was so obvious. OF COURSE I WANT MY CHILD TO BE IMMUNIZED, she would have said, because these diseases were not hypotheticals to be argued about over afternoon coffee, they were potential killers that were right then tearing up the family three houses down from ours.

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Here’s the good news. 

Thanks to vaccines, measles, rubella, and polio have officially been eliminated in the United States. But that could change due to imported cases of these diseases and low vaccination rates. None of these diseases have been eliminated globally, and there have been measles outbreaks and rubella cases in the United States in recent years. Efforts to increase vaccination rates are critical for maintaining elimination of these diseases.

Health.gov

Here’s the worrisome news. Immunization rates for these diseases are below the 95% threshold necessary to eliminate the possibility of epidemics. Which means that should a case be imported from another part of the world, we are becoming a fertile ground for that virus to grow in.

In the political climate of today, where scientific ignorance is not only bliss, but often rewarded by election to public office, I don’t see these numbers changing any time soon. I earnestly hope that I am wrong in this, and that we drop the glorification of nonsense and the lines start to go around the block at the immunization clinics. 

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Drove to Grand Junction to see the movie American Fiction, having decided that although Paradise is 99% perfect, part of that 1% that is missing is in the film department. To make it short, AF was a fine movie, and Jeffrey Wright got his chance to be the lead and really show us what he could do.

Since we hit “Junction” with some time to kill, Robin and I walked over to a strip mall where there was a store she wanted to visit. I forget the name of it, but it was devoted entirely to cosmetics, and to a person like myself – it was a foreign country. Bewildering. Not sure how a real customer could ever navigate such a place.

But I was fascinated by how you could get a cream, balm, ointment, or oil for basically any part of the body. The question I kept asking myself was is this variety really necessary?

My insecurities started to mount, as they always do when I find that I’ve been unaware and ignoring something completely that might be important to my life.

I wondered … do I need some B-Tight? Have time and gravity been doing anything back there that I can’t see but everybody else can and that needs my attention? Am I too late in discovering this product? Are there limits to the power of the unguent and I must now remain un-lifted and un-firmed for the remainder of my days?

It was all too depressing, and I had to leave the store. There are some questions that I am just not brave enough to hear the answers to.

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A piece in the Times of New York entitled Train Yourself To Always Show Up deserves mention, I think. It tells the story of an old Judaic practice. There are many good lessons here, and the author writes so well that I will only quote from it and not thin it out with my scratchings.

A somewhat obscure text, about 2,000 years old, has been my unlikely teacher and guide for the past many years, and my north star these last several months, as so many of us have felt as if we’ve been drowning in an ocean of sorrow and helplessness.

Buried deep within the Mishnah, a Jewish legal compendium from around the third century, is an ancient practice reflecting a deep understanding of the human psyche and spirit: When your heart is broken, when the specter of death visits your family, when you feel lost and alone and inclined to retreat, you show up. You entrust your pain to the community.

Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up

We desperately need a spiritual rewiring in our time. Imagine a society in which we learn to see one another in our pain, to ask one another, “What happened to you?” Imagine that we hear one another’s stories, say amen to one another’s pain, and even pray for one another’s healing. I call this the amen effect: sincere, tender encounters that help us forge new spiritual and neural pathways by reminding us that our lives and our destinies are entwined. Because, ultimately, it is only by finding our way to one another that we will begin to heal.

Sharon Brous: Train Yourself To Always Show Up

Reading this I became interested in the author, who I found out was a rabbi of a Jewish community named Ikar, located out there in wicked, wicked Los Angeles. Going to Ikar’s website led me to a recorded talk she gave, and I am glad that I took the time in the early morning hours and listened. Really, it is amazing what listening can do for a person … perhaps I should do it more often. But how to do this when I have so many wise things to say … a puzzlement … indeed … when my mouth is open my ears seem to close up.

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The title of George Will’s column in the Washington Post on 1/16/24 really says it all, at least for him:

Iowa nudged the nation closer to a revolting rematch next fall

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While the title of Will’s op/ed is catchy and may be the opinion of scads of folks in both parties, it also raises some questions that perplex a certified moderate and highly sensible individual like myself.

• Is this the best that a country of 300 million can come up with as choices, or is it finally revealing that both parties have become little more than shiny but vacant shells of what they portray themselves to be?
• What if President Biden had spent time finding a good and solid replacement for himself, and then began working for the election of that person? Think what a service he would have done for his country, instead of dragging us kicking and nauseous and screaming into a Who’s more senile, you or me? contest.

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At long last our local theatre was showing a film that was not based on a comic book. So of course we went to the movies.

The film was “The Holdovers.” The action took place at a posh prep school in Massachusetts during the Christmas break. Held over at the school are a cook who is grieving her loss of a son, a curmudgeon of a professor, and a snotty and over-privileged kid.

It’s a story you’ve seen parts of before, but a story is all in the telling, and here the telling is very good.

In fact, Paul Giammati’s pipe-smoking professor was done so well that I began to get the itch to go pipe shopping, after quitting smoking thirty-plus years ago.

I thought … seriously … if I added a major vice at this age … wouldn’t be much of a big deal at all, would it? Of course I’d have to puff away outdoors, and not in my comfortable den like the professor did. Nahhh. I forgot about the coughing and the stained teeth and the burned tongues.

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Sometimes like this morning I am overcome. Images, regrets, confusions of the past wash over me like a monstrous wave as when the Atlantic Ocean shows its truest face, black and cold and green and terrible. I am drowning before I know what is happening and can get my defenses up. There is sand in my hair and tears and saltwater in my mouth and I am swept from my chair with time to take only one long breath before I wash up against the wall and then the wave recedes, leaving me gasping and shivering.

I think … what a small thing I am to have worn so completely through my welcome here on earth. 

And then I wonder, what’s for breakfast?

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[As I post this it is one o’clock on a Sunday morning and my refrigerator just sent me a message that it is quitting as of
right this minute, and immediately after I read the manual in order to interpret the error code on the appliance’s door,
our older cat walked over to where I was sitting and threw a couple of ounces of his last meal onto the rug in my office. 
Things come in threes … right?]

Finally we have some snow that will last a while. Just a couple of inches fell but the weather has turned colder. Single digits recently. Nothing remarkable. Winter.

Not enough on the ground yet for XC skiing here in the valley. There are more reliable conditions up at Black Canyon National Park and on the Grand Mesa. Because of knee surgeries we’ve skipped skiing for two winters in a row now, so we’re way rustier than usual.

The snow conditions on the Grand Mesa are uniformly as beautiful as anywhere I’ve ever been. You ski in mixed evergreen/deciduous forests in areas where the nearest snowmobiles are miles away. A local club maintains excellent groomed trails, and they accept free will donations from non-members.

There are hundreds of lakes on the Grand Mesa, but Robin and I generally steer clear of them unless we’ve been assured by a panel of at least three people that there is adequate ice thickness. In 2019 there were two drownings in lakes on the Mesa when incautious people went through the ice.

One of the nicest things about winter on the Grand Mesa is that it keeps the mosquitoes down. There are still a few around, but only the biggest and the strongest can handle the cold weather. These hardy bloodsuckers are about the size of robins, and make a sound like a Stuka dive bomber as they come at you. Fortunately they are slow and awkward fliers that can fairly easily be stabbed with one’s ski poles.

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A pathetic thing to watch is the belief of the Cluckists that they are following in the train of the Glorious Orange One, and when he comes to power they and theirs will be well cared for as The Second Coming starts to roll.

The thing is that there is no train, but only a heap of bodies, including theirs, that he is treading on to get what he wants.

If they would only take a step back and look at the damaged followers he has already left behind, licking wounds and mourning damaged careers … but they don’t, or won’t, do this. It couldn’t happen to them, they think, as they mortgage their integrity, common sense, and occasionally the family farm.

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I have been told that I sorely neglect whole genres of music in what I post here on the blog. I freely admit it. Actually there are musicians and types of music that I don’t like at all, some that I dip into and take what I admire, and some that I fully enjoy. The latter variety is what I usually post.

This day I am going to share a piece of classical music by a guy named Vivaldi. It’s the violin concerto Winter, from his larger work The Four Seasons. To introduce it I have invited a guest post-er named Chad Griffin-Porter-Theroux to describe the chosen piece. Take it away, amigo.

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Thanks, Jon, this is an easy one to talk about because so many people know these works of Vivaldi that they are almost classical pop. His “The Four Seasons” is a set of violin concertos, each representing a season. It is renowned for its vivid musical depictions of nature and is a baroque masterpiece.

“Winter” is captivating with its brisk, icy atmosphere. The violin’s depiction of cold winds and the warmth of the fireplace creates a vivid musical experience. Vivaldi skillfully captures the essence of darkness in “Winter.” The haunting melodies and intense passages evoke a sense of cold and solitude.

The opening movement resembles a shivering person, stamping his feet in rhythm to stay warm. The middle movement portrays the pleasure of getting warm inside through a crackling fire. The final movement offers people outdoors walking down icy paths, while people inside houses feeling the relentless chill finding its way inside. 

ChadGPT 1/10/2024

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…

(BTW – if I remember to do it, I plan to play the other seasons when their time comes around.)

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Bradley Cooper starred, directed, produced, and co-wrote the screenplay for the movie. This guy is moving up to be one of the more creative ones in this industry. A couple of years back he remade the movie A Star Is Born, and darned if that wasn’t awfully good as well.

There was some mild controversy a few months ago because his makeup preparation for his scenes included a bigger nose. Its purpose – to make him look more like the composer, and it did its job. The problem was that quite a bit of antisemitic cartooning over the years Jews has portrayed them as people with exaggeratedly big noses. 

There’s a particularly good review in The Saturday Evening Post that you could check out if you’re interested. As the quote below indicates, there is one scene that is like nothing I’ve seen before. Outstanding.

As memorable as Maestro is as a whole, the sequence that will follow you for weeks is one that comes near the end of the film, as Lenny conducts Mahler’s Resurrection at Ely Cathedral. It’s a legendary moment in 20^th century music history: You’ll find the entire original concert on YouTube, and it is clear Cooper studied every frame of Bernstein’s performance: that great head of hair flying, the rivulets of sweat on his brow, the conductor nearly bursting from his tuxedo, the Incredible Hulk of classical music.

Bill Newcott, Saturday Evening Post, December 21,2023.

Actually, if every movie were as engrossing and took as much energy to watch as this one did, I would soon be exhausted, depleted. So it’s good, I guess, that there are so many lesser films out there to act as diversions.

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This morning, like a burst of lightning, a plan came to me for dealing with the ongoing mess at our southern border. I can’t imagine why it hasn’t occurred to anybody before. We need to take a cue from Vladimir Putin (an unsavory source of inspiration, I’ll give you that) and annex Mexico.

There is ample precedent in that we already took 55% of that country back in 1854, and then just for good measure we invaded them one more time in 1914. So after the annexation – presto! Our present way-too-long border becomes history, and the much more manageable one with Belize and Guatemala on the other end appears.

Mexico could become our fifty-first state, instantly reducing Texas to an also-ran in the size department, and we all know that Texas needs some serious shaking up. Oh sure, there would be commentaries in the world’s media, but the attention span of humans has become so short that within a week the globe’s attention would turn somewhere else.  In fact, if we could time the annexation to the opening ceremonies of the World Soccer Cup Finals it might not be noticed at all.

Just think how happy we would make the FBI. They’ve not had a solid enemy they could get their teeth into since the Mafia became a television series. We’d be giving them the Christmas present that keeps on giving with the newly-opened opportunity to work on taking down the cartels. 

All those presently seamy and troubled towns like Tijuana, Matamoros, and Ciudad Juarez would have the chance now to become gentrified. It shouldn’t take too long to push out the present impoverished residents and replace them with a more affluent population looking for sunny places for their third home.

I think I’ll collect my thoughts and put them in a letter to our senators and representatives in Congress. I probably won’t send a copy to Rep. Boebert who I understand still can’t find Mexico on a map.

And then I’m signing up for Spanish classes.

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From The New Yorker Archives

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This is not unusual, since I have long ago discovered that my education has been truly a hit and miss affair. The number of worthy books that I not only haven’t read but am not even aware of must be awfully long since hardly a week goes by that I am not put on notice of my deficiencies.

But why be excited about Pedro Paramo? Because it was the novel that inspired Gabriel Garcia Marquez to write his beautiful One Hundred Years of Solitude, that’s why. And One Hundred Years of Solitude has two distinctions for me personally. It opened my eyes to the wonders of magical realism, and is the only book that no one I recommended it to ever finished. Most of them grumble and turn away whenever I ask how they are coming with their reading. Some of them have stopped returning my calls.

The world continually surprises me.

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Yesterday a small amount of snow fell, just enough to cover the ground completely and put our cats into a funk. They hate stepping into anything that gets their paws wet. At such times the usage of the litter-box increases greatly, as does the chore (for me) of keeping it presentable.

I haven’t been keeping up with how the ski areas in Colorado are doing regarding snow depths. My interest in this sport fell off years ago when the rituals of wearing those uncomfortable boots and standing in lift lines began to tip the scales toward “What am I doing here?”

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From The New Yorker Archives

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It’s always hazardous to have litmus tests for voting, and letting them be the kicker in one’s decision. It’s a closed-minded thing to do. But here I am suggesting one for you to consider. Any candidate who doesn’t promise to wear themselves to a nubbin through working on climate change from the day they take office should not be considered, no matter what other opinions or positions they hold. If we don’t solve the big one, arguing about the others becomes sort of moot.

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Cooking rice should be easy, right? It’s only a smidge more complicated than boiling water. You put dry rice in a pot, add the suggested amount of water, and turn on the burner. One problem is that you are sort of locked into the area near the stove to watch for spillovers, scorching, and other minor kitchen catastrophes. You also have to watch to see when the rice is at the point of tenderness that you wanted in the first place and has not moved into the area of unattractive mush. 

Enter rice cookers. You add rice and water, push START, and off you go to take a nap while it creates a perfect mound of fluffy grains ready for whatever you want to do with them. More than a decade ago, when I decided that such a cooker was worth having around and taking up space in the pantry, I scorned the cheapest versions and went with an upscale model. More expensive means better, more sophisticated, bigger smiles on the cook’s face … right?

Wrong. Although the internet suggested that the higher-end machine would be a much better choice, when it was delivered I discovered that the English portion of the owner’s manual was written by someone who was obviously an extraterrestrial. It was less than useless, because whenever I tried to read it I ended up irritated and unhappy. Through trial and error I figured out how to turn the device on and cook some rice, but I never discovered what all that extra money I’d paid would do for me because one day in a fury I took it out into the driveway and reduced it to rubble it with a sixteen pound sledge. Then I started a campfire with the manual. 

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From The New Yorker archives

As I wrote the above entry I was reminded of Robert Pirsig’s book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. One of the topics touched on was the art of writing technical manuals, and how important (and rare) it was to find really excellent ones as you journeyed through life. Many of these were opaque, some were foolish, some were actually dangerous. 

When I was involved in teaching medical students, I structured my lectures and discussions along lines similar lines to what he had suggested. Instead of taking everything I knew about a subject and compressing it into a sixty-minute diatribe, I took a step back and asked the questions:

• What did I want the student to take away from spending that hour with me? 
• How could I communicate this in the clearest way? 
• Since I wasn’t really an “expert” but a generalist, what was worthwhile about my perspective?

 Once I had answered these questions for myself, I could then work backward and build that hour of educational interaction. I used much the same approach to patient care in my office. For example if the child had an ear infection, and required medication as therapy, what did the parent need to know to feel competent and to follow my instructions?

• How to store the medication I’d prescribed
• How and when to give the medication
• What and when to look for in improvement
• When to call back if things didn’t seem to be getting better
• Why followup was a good idea

Unfortunately I had to learn the value of such a list piecemeal, often by making the error of thinking that somehow the parent would absorb everything I said and remember it entirely when they got home, and had also spent two years in a medical education setting before becoming a mom or a dad.

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I have become a winter wimp. I’ve reached the point where temperature, wind velocity, humidity, and depth of snow cover are all fit into a formula that decides whether I will go out for a romp. Most of the time my formula tells me to sit in my recliner, pull an afghan up around my neck, and stare out the window in the most creative manner that I can muster.

I don’t know when or how this happened. I tried to look up the subject in Egregious. P. Gallbladder’s immense book, How To Explain Everything That Ever Happens To You. Although the book is 2100 pages long and can give you a hernia just moving it from place to place, there is a common thread that runs through the entire tome. 

Everything nasty, painful, awkward, troublesome, messy, and embarrassing happens to a person exactly one hundred times more often when they become a senior citizen. The term “senior citizen” is actually a euphemism for Dartboard of the Universe.

Therefore, I’ve given Robin a large pointed stick and permission to jab me with it whenever I pause at the open front door and start to claim an infirmity of any sort at all as a reason to stay indoors. I do have one small concern, and that is the gleam that came into that worthy woman’s eyes when I mentioned the word “jab.”

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From The New Yorker archives

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In a well-written article on owls in our local paper today, the writer used the phrase “ethical hunter” when referring to himself. These words appear to be used by hunters as a salve for their consciences when at some level they sense that killing another sentient being for fun says something about who they are that needs defending.

I googled the phrase and found this interesting piece on the subject, written from a philosopher’s perspective.

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Ally and Kyle were guests at Basecamp this week. Entertaining in January does not play to the strengths of life here in Paradise, but they operate a small farm, and winter is their “free” time. In spite of cloudy skies and chilly temperatures, we enjoyed ourselves thoroughly. 

Their farm grows vegetables for market and local restaurants, and if you want to see how beautiful a well-tended garlic plant can look like, schedule a visit. 

During one conversation, the subject of the “Barbie” movie came up, and when I learned they hadn’t seen it, I wished that somehow we could have set it up. Because it’s hard for anyone who hasn’t been to accept that that there was so much meat there in what could have been only a superficial film comedy. This clip is part of what I am talking about.

I find myself wishing there was such a movie for men. Not to take away anything from the struggles that women go through, but they are not the only ones living with unreasonable expectations and impossible contradictions. When Buddhists talk about suffering that we cause for ourselves, this is some of what they mean. 

Knowing how difficult life can be, why are we not more supportive of one another? Why should anyone have to deal with low self-esteem when this is a concept created entirely from whole cloth? On a ferociously crowded planet, why is loneliness so pervasive? 

You can play life as a zero-sum game, but you only have to take a glance at this morning’s newspaper to see where this approach has gotten us. There are other ways to live. 

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It’s January of 1970. I’m stationed in Omaha, Nebraska with the US Air Force. When I arrived at Offutt AFB in late July, I replaced a man who had been only a year ahead of me in my pediatric residency. We seemed about the same size, so I bought all of his uniforms. Turned out that I was a teensy bit taller than he was, but the USAF didn’t care if my pants were slightly of what used to be called the “high-water” variety.

The war in Viet Nam was still cooking awfully well, and although I seemed relatively safe in Nebraska, where no Viet Cong had been seen in months, there were never any guarantees in the armed forces in wartime. There were 37 draftee physicians at that hospital, and we knew that any one of us could be picked up and deposited in Southeast Asia if a need was felt. It happened twice to guys who were serving there with me.

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Earlier in the week I had read about a new album done by Simon and Garfunkel. Up to that time, I knew them only for the tune Sounds of Silence. But this new effort of theirs was getting raves, so I bought the album, and one icy afternoon I finally had time to put it on a turntable for a listen. The album title was Bridge Over Troubled Water, and I positively loved it.

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For the next couple of years it was in constant rotation at our casa. It has held up well, and when I put it on yesterday I felt that old connection. I remembered how it had cut through the gloom I had felt in 1970, serving during a war I knew was the result of a series of bad choices by our government. Lethally bad choices. 

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Of all the ballads I’ve listened to in my life, there is none that I have liked better than Simon and Garfunkel’s version of The Boxer. Its durability is revealed by the scores of covers out there, and that they each reveal the core of truth in the lyrics in their own way. A song of the human spirit, and a view that I happen to hold. We are a mongrel lot, we humans, but we are an absolute bugger to completely beat down.

… Or cut him till he cried out in his anger and his pain
I am leaving, I am leaving, but the fighter still remains …

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Here’s an a cappella version from England.

A version done by Portuguese musicians.

Waylon Jennings does a fine country-western version.

It’s all in how you tell the story, non?

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One Sunday morning at the Unitarian Church in Omaha NE, there was a part of the service where members of the congregation were given the opportunity to share. I had to miss that particular meeting because of being on call, but when a fellow stood up and said he had puppies to share, my family voted to accept his offer.

She turned out to be an excellent and well-behaved member of the family. Maybe the best-behaved of all of us, actually. She had one quirk, and we have no idea why this was so, but she only tolerated people with fair skins. There was a dark-skinned meter reader who came to the house periodically and we had to bring the dog in and put her in a room until he had left because she would go into a fury. 

And a young boy in the neighborhood had a hereditary liver disease which made him perpetually jaundiced, which also put him on Lady’s short list of people I might very well bite. Whenever Peter was nearby we were especially watchful.

When we lived in Buffalo NY there was a power line that reached from the alley to our home, and which passed through the branches of a huge butternut tree. A squirrel would regularly traverse that line from the alley as far as the tree to gather nuts, and Lady would run back and forth beneath the line, barking as the rodent made its rounds. She was frustrated every day that this happened, until about a week before we moved out of that house. When the squirrel made a misstep and fell to the ground, where Lady waited. 

End of story.

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