Things Fall Apart Back when Cornell was choosing a book for all incoming freshmen (and the entire rest of the Cornell community) to read each year, they selected Chinua Achebe’s 1958 African classic about pre-Colonial Nigeria called Things Fall Apart. The novel tells a story of Okonkwo, a local village wrestling champion as he deals with the advent of white colonialism and Christianity into Africa and how that affects his family, village social fabric and…
You Sunk My Battleship! The war in Ukraine has had many interesting twists and turns, but none more so than yesterday’s sinking of the Russian Flag Battleship in the Black Sea, the Moskva. As all the news pundits have been saying, this was less a strategic military victory than a meaningful symbolic victory for Ukraine, who has claimed credit for the sinking. Naturally, Russia is denying that the ship was sunk by a Ukrainian missile…
Living Alone I returned home from a few weeks away yesterday. I had traveled from Rome to Munich to Newark, stayed two nights in Manhattan and flown home from JFK direct to San Diego. It is always a long ride back and forth from San Diego to Europe, but we make a point of using it to stop in NYC to see the kids whenever we can. This time I came home by myself since…
Me and Betty This is the start of day two since Natasha has gone home and before Kim returns. I can see that we have a routine and the secret seems to be to keep to that routine whenever possible. Betty has accustomed herself to sleep in the living room. I’m not sure why she prefers it to the bedroom, where she sleeps when Kim is here, but I must admit its easier for me…
Slammin’ Salmon Ever since I was a kid, I have had a strong aversion to fish. I, like most people my age, ate my share of fish sticks in my youth and I didn’t hate them, but they are coated with bread crumbs and fried or baked to the point of being a bread stick with some tasteless white stuff in the middle…and a lot of tarter sauce all over them. I think its fair…
Dining at Termini It’s Monday morning in central Rome and I have a mission. We are here for a little more than a week with our friends Gary and Oswaldo. We have stayed the last two nights at a nice boutique hotel called Capo d’Africa, which is in between the Coliseum and St. John Lateran. So far we have spent a day walking five+ miles around town to go see some sights like the Boca…
The Land of the Dollar Bill For some reason that 1974 song by a band called Paperlace, The Night Chicago Died is running in my head like the sound of running feet and the shouting in the street. I had a peaceful enough Saturday that had no particular connection to Al Capone’s gangland Chicago, but when does that matter when a line of lyrics gets wedged into your brain? The reason I suspect I am…
When Will You Make an End? In the 1965 epic film, The Agony and the Ecstasy, Rex Harrison as Pope Julius II has commissioned Michelangelo (Charlton Heston) to paint the Sistine Chapel. As we all know, the Sistine Chapel ceiling is the best of the High Renaissance artworks and was finally completed in 1512 after four years of effort by the ornery Michelangelo. In the movie, Pope Julius starts asking Michelangelo regularly, and eventually on…
My Personal Rainbow It is a transitional weather morning here on my hilltop. It rained and was stormy yesterday and last night and it looks like today it wants to alternate between that weather and clear and sunny by tomorrow. I am sitting at my desk on hold with some service provider or another. I have started to be in the habit of acknowledging that I now live on the West Coast and the rest…
The Burden of Refinement We live in a modern, civilized and refined world. The last few nights we have watched some movies set in the late 1950’s and we are reminded that it wasn’t so long ago (a mere sixty years ago) that things were a lot less civilized and refined. We have watched Far From Heaven and Loving, both stories set in that era when I was a young child and when the country…