We Laugh and We Cry Kim’s best friend Cecil died this morning. He had a heart condition for some years and despite Kim’s best efforts to medicate him, exercise him, cook healthy fresh food for him, and brushing his teeth every evening to keep the plaque monster at bay, he still died. We can’t be sure, but the very empathetic vet who cared for him in his last hour said he believed it was his…
He Made Me Laugh He was not 2,000 years old, but only 98. He did not invent the cure for cancer or climate warming. He did not lead the nation through a devastating war. He did not make any big feature award-winning films or wright Top-40 songs. He did not run for or hold any grand public offices. He did father one of the great movie-makers and TV sitcom stars of our age in Rob…
Water, Water Everywhere Samuel Taylor Coleridge went on to say, “Nor any drop to drink”, in his famous The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner poem. It is the story told by a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage as told to a stranger wherein the tale rambles through all the sensations of storytelling by invoking exhilaration, danger, boredom, serenity, and abject feelings of doom. My last name always drew me to the…
Succulentamentality Succulence is said to be tender, juicy and tasty. But succor is about help when in distress, of military reinforcements and of giving aid especially to those who need it the most. The help it represents came from Latin, through French and into Middle English. Succulent plants are those which are engorged with water to last them for long periods of time in arid climates. They are by their very nature, drought resistant plants,…
Leprosy is for Sissies To me the most notable movie scene involving Leprosy is from the great Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman epic, Papillon, which is about the Penal Colony of French Guiana and the trials and tribulations of Papillon the petty thief and Louis Dega the forger of French National Defense Bonds floated in 1929. During one of Papillon’s daring escape attempts before being sent to the infamous Devil’s Island for his final incarceration,…
The New York Dreams Kim, through her Facebook traipsing, heard of a series called American Experience: New York done by Ric Burns, younger brother to famed documentarian Ken Burns. It is a historical perspective from the western origins as a Dutch colony in 1609. There are chapters of this documentary like any good series and it is all done chronologically naturally. Given my forty-four years living in New York and Kim’s thirty years, the city…
COVID Part Deux We’ve all seen the charts and are probably all equally scared by what we see. The comparison of the curves showing pandemic infections for the United States and the European Union tell the story of the failure of the United States to combat this pandemic effectively. It shows very similar initial rise of the infections in both regions with the U.S. just a few weeks behind Europe. That is where the similarities…
June Gloom I’ve already taken to debunking the notion that it never rains in Southern California (thank goodness) and I was about to report that the phenomenon known locally as June Gloom was also fiction, but then that changed a few days ago. June Gloom is a local colloquial term for a marine layer effect caused by a temperature inversion with the cool ocean water off the coast combining with a warm air mass from…
Handout to Mouth The other day I went to the Apple Store at the North County Mall near here. Let’s start by understanding that I am not at all a Mall Rat. In fact, I stay as far away from Malls as I possibly can. I have a problem with consumer inundation and the specialty of big department stores and, indeed, malls overall, is to inundate the consumer with choices. I’m always amazed when I…
Project Sailshade “Mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun” according to the 1931 Noel Coward song and reinforced in the titling of Joe Cocker’s 1970 album of similar name. Noel Coward wrote the song while traveling from Hanoi to Saigon, so he had tropical heat on his mind. One of the great lines in the song refers to the “Noonday gun” in reference to the fact that in Hong Kong the noonday…