We boarded the Viking Sigrun river boat at 4 PM yesterday and at 6 PM. We had our first trip briefing from the Cruise Director. He opened with the disappointing comment, but after six weeks of carefully monitoring the rain, River water levels and still making the passage from Amsterdam to Basel and from Basel to Amsterdam repeatedly, Viking has determined that continually has to end with this voyage. He told us that on Saturday…
On Sunday we head off to Amsterdam to start our Viking Rhine River cruise. As it turns out, the Vikings raided up the Rhine repeatedly during the Viking Age, and it’s a genuinely good history to know given our Viking Rhine cruise. In the 9th Century Norse raiders discovered that rivers like the Rhine, Seine, and Meuse gave them a highway straight into the heart of continental Europe. Their shallow-draft longships could sail far upriver,…
Years ago, I cut out a New Yorker cartoon that struck me as particularly funny. It showed a Viking warrior, pushing up against the tree and said, “Even the Vikings had to stretch.” Interestingly enough today we are on our way to be Vikings, so stretching is on my mind.This morning I am dressed and packed and ready to go on a long car service ride to LAX for a flight on Lufthansa that takes…
Medicare was established in 1965, when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law as part of the Social Security Amendments of 1965. It began covering enrollees the following year, on July 1, 1966. Johnson signed the bill in Independence, Missouri, with former President Harry Truman present. Truman had proposed a national health insurance program back in 1945, and Johnson gave him (and his wife Bess) the first two Medicare cards as a symbolic gesture.…
Remember in the the beginning of the Wizard of Oz when the tornado, the iconic Midwestern natural disaster, tosses the Kansas farmhouse and lands it on top of the Wicked Witch of the East in Munchkinland? We see in the flowerbed the telltale black witch shoes and socks and they begin to shrivel until they disappear under the house. Then Dorothy starts her trek across Oz to find her way back to Kansas at the…
In 1967 a movie called To Sir, With Love starring Sidney Poitier came out. Poitier played Mark Thackeray, an unemployed engineer who takes a teaching job at a tough secondary school in the East End of London while he’s otherwise out job hunting. He’s assigned a class of rowdy, disrespectful working-class teenagers nearing the end of their schooling, who’ve run off previous teachers. Rather than sticking to the standard curriculum, Thackeray, who was classically well-educated,…
Every once in a while I find it necessary to write a story about Kim. Sometimes she does something extraordinary that is worthy of a post. Other times its about my deep appreciation about some act of kindness I see her undertake. And then there are times which I will characterize as “down times” when I am just siting there with her by my side and I find myself thanking the Universe and Gary Kremen,…
The older I get and the more into retirement I delve, the more I find myself wondering about the value of memories. We are generally raised to believe that keeping memories is a good thing. It’s a pretty deep cultural assumption. Photos, journals, archives, “never forget,” nostalgia as a positive emotion. The whole apparatus of human development treats memory as inherently valuable, and forgetting as loss or failure (dementia, “senior moments,” a fading photograph). But…
The Canadian trade dispute has escalated sharply this week. In January Mark Carney, a Harvard-trained and Goldman Sachs employed economist who is now the Prime Minister of Canada, gave a widely-discussed address at the World Economic Forum in Davos, titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path.” The core message of that was that the rules-based international order is effectively over. He argued that Canada was adapting by building strategic autonomy while still holding to values like…
It’s Monday morning and we’ve just completed a weekend that was mostly in the high 90s. I see that yesterday topped out at 98, but I think I saw 105 on the truck thermometer at one point in my travels. The good news is that it didn’t put a damper on our fiesta on Saturday evening. We had a marvelous time, as did most of the attendees from what we have heard. Everyone got into…