Mainstream personalities such as Fox News host Jeanine Pirro recently warned Swift not to “get involved in politics.”
Who is Pirro to tell any celebrity not to get involved in politics? Apparently the Right is worried. Not like there isn’t any precedent:
Ronald Reagan
Jesse Ventura
Arnold Schwarzenegger
Mehmet Oz
Donald Trump
With the exception of Oz, all actually won office, and all except Ventura were Republicans. Ventura was with the Reform Party.
So it apparently works when celebrities run for office. Maybe Swift should run for president.
Oh, no, she is not qualified because she is not old enough, per the constitution. She is only 34 now. However, she would be 35 by inauguration time. Close enough for me.
There is another candidate running who is not qualified, that one for instigating an insurrection in the past. It does not seem to stop him.
Whether any of these people know how to govern does not seem to be a question anyone is asking. You just have to be popular, rich, willing to spend lots of money and time, and win elections.
So Pirro, in my opinion, is way out of line telling a celebrity not to get involved in politics. If I were Swift I’d get involved out of spite.
Pip is a young orphan living in mid-Victorian England in a village in the country. He is being raised by his older sister and her husband. His sister is impatient and has a brutal temper. Joe is the village blacksmith. He is a gentle giant, simple minded, but he loves and protects young Pip like a son.
One evening Pip is passing by the local graveyard where he is assaulted by an escaped convict who forces him to steal some food for him, and a file so he can cut his leg irons. This traumatic experience haunts Pip for the rest of his childhood.
One day, as an adolescent, he is surprised by an unexpected and anonymous benefactor who leaves him money and sets him up to get educated in London to become a gentleman. Suddenly he finds himself in possession of means and “great expectations.” He spend many years trying to solve the puzzle of his fortunes when eventually it all comes together in a most unexpected fashion.
Great Expectations is my first Dickens novel. It was the last one he wrote, and it is generally praised as his best. Reading it pulls you right into the life of Victorian England. My copy was an illustrated one and I enjoyed the many ink drawings of some of the key scenes. The environment and the clothing of the characters came to life for me.
The plot is crafted masterfully. Great Expectations could easily be a play. The book is 544 pages long. One might think you’d get lost in all the characters. But people who appear in the early chapters seemingly in peripheral roles tend to come back as pivotal characters later. Every character has a deep role in the overall plot. Great Expectations would make a great textbook in a class in writing fiction – and it probably is. (You can tell I am not a scholar of English).
I learned a lot about life in Victorian England and London in particular, a world I only know from a distance, from movies and from books. The gulf between the classes is vast. Workers and peasants have no options and no “expectations.” It does not seem possible to work your way out of poverty and “low” birth. People with money, gentlemen, don’t seem to need to work, they just spend, even get into debt, but there seems to be no general stress. Everyone treats a “gentleman” differently. And the common folk all dream of “coming into means” by some miraculous way, through inheritance or some benefactor. I am sure I am oversimplifying matters here but this is the world of the London of Charles Dickens. ‘
If you haven’t read Dickens, like I, and you want to pick up one of his books, this is a good one.
Maestro tells the story of the life of Leonard Bernstein (Bradley Cooper), the conductor, composer and pianist, who is considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time. He was also the first American-born conductor to receive international acclaim. The story mostly focuses on his love and tumultuous marriage to Felicia (Carey Mulligan), a Chile-born actress with considerable fame of her own.
Produced by Stephen Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, directed and written by Bradley Cooper himself, the movie was nominated for seven Oscars and many other awards.
I knew very little about Bernstein’s life and acclaim, other than that I used to buy his records of the symphonies of Mozart and Beethoven in my early twenties, when I listened to a lot of classical music. Bernstein were the records I went for when given a choice.
I didn’t know he was bi-sexual, and maintained affairs with women and men throughout his life. You might imagine that that complicated his marriage and added endless drama to his life. And that’s what you feel and experience when watching Maestro.
Then there was the endless, constant smoking. Bernstein was a heavy smoker all his life. I could almost smell the smoke coming out of the movie, it was so present in every scene.
But in the end, I didn’t think I really learned much about Bernstein through the movie itself. The first half was slow and in black and white – for some reason they thought it would make sense to show black and white when there were only black and white movies in the 1940s and 1950s. It was slow enough that I picked up my phone and checked Wikipedia for Bernstein’s life, biography and highlights, and I think I learned more about the man from what I read in the Wiki article while the movie was rolling, than I learned from the movie itself.
The story focuses on Bernstein’s sexuality and it skips quickly between the phases of his life without much substance to the story or noticeable transitions. We know he pined for his wife and mourned her death, but the jump from suffering while his wife was ill to his teaching performance some ten years later was abrupt, as if they wanted to get the movie over with.
My favorite scene was the conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. I really showed Bernstein’s passion for the music and his talent. For those of us like myself, who do not know much about orchestral music and particularly conducting, the whole thing looks more like magic than craft. I trust it is craft. The scene was amazing, and that scene is worth watching the entire movie for.
When I checked IMDb afterwards, I found out that Cooper actually did this live himself and he said the following about it:
That scene I was so worried about because we did it live… I was recorded live. I had to conduct them. And I spent six years learning how to conduct six minutes and 21 seconds of music. I was able to get the raw take where I just watched Leonard Bernstein [conduct] at Ely Cathedral… And so I had that to study.
Maestro is a mediocre film with moments of genius and passion sprinkled around in it.
I just saw this post by Anthony Sabatini, a 35-year-old member of the Florida House of Representatives:
I have no problem with his statement that the state (or any government) should have power to force vaccines upon citizens. Government should leave people and their bodies alone, and let people make their own decisions about what they put into their bodies, or what they do with their bodies.
I might add that I have voluntarily taken five separate Covid vaccines, upon consultation with my physicians, and I am glad I did. But it was a decision I made, not my government.
Having said that I support Mr. Sabatini’s right to an individual choice, I would like to know what he thinks about a woman’s right to make her own healthcare decisions with regard to reproductive processes?
Or does that right stop when the citizen is a woman? Or when the citizen is a pregnant woman?
Should people have the power to make decisions about their own bodies or should they not? We can’t have it both ways.
I knew very little about rowing. The son of one of my colleagues was on the UCLA rowing team during his four years in college. I knew it was a strenuous sport, and somehow I associated it with New England, particularly Boston. During visits to Boston and Cambridge I remember seeing rowing teams practice on the river there. I didn’t know it was an Olympic sport.
A friend recommended the book by Daniel James Brown, and when he stated that the movie was out, I thought I’d skip the book and go right to the movie, directed by George Clooney.
The story is a fairly predictable sports drama set in 1936 in Seattle, Washington, during the height of the Great Depression. A few underprivileged but ambitious boys applied for the junior rowing team at the University of Washington, not because they thought of themselves as champions, but because the were desperately trying to somehow pay their way through college. Getting on the team came with room, board and tuition.
The sport is brutally hard, not only on the physical level, but also emotionally. It is truly a team sport. Eight rowers and and one coxswain must be completely coordinated as one machine. There is no room for any ego or heroes on the boat. It’s all about the boat.
The Washington team is the underdog. It shows their training by a very competent coach and it follows them through local and national tournaments all the way to Hitler’s 1936 Olympics.
I found myself in the edge of the seat, as it is expected in a sports movie (remember Rocky, Chariots of Fire, Ford v. Ferrari, and a hundred others). At the end I walked out of the theater very satisfied. The underdogs won. I learned a lot about a sport that I had not paid much attention to. I gained respect for rowing.
I very much recommend you go see The Boys in the Boat.
This past week we went to Borrego Springs for a couple of days of camping. Here is our little camp, not fully set up yet. We just got there.I was working during the day, but there was plenty of time to enjoy nature and feel the desert at night. On the second evening, I decided to go for a little hike up the ridge on the mountain you see in the picture above. It was actually further away than it looked. I clocked 0.6 miles when I got to this spot where the desert ended in a wash, and the ridge started. This is where I started climbing.
Very quickly the terrain got rough. I had to watch my steps, as there were plenty of prickly cactus and thorny shrubs. The rocks themselves are also sharp. Not a place where you want to lose your footing and fall. The terrain is also steeper than it looks in the photo below, since I pointed to camera upwards. My hiking poles were essential accessories.
Finally I got to a spot where I decided it was time to turn around. I didn’t want to be caught on this mountain in the dark, and the sun was getting ready to set. I took a picture of our campground from the highpoint of my hike. You can see it in the center of the picture just in front of the yellow stripe of desert in the distance. That’s the terrain I hiked across to get to this spot.
I also took a parting shot straight down to the wash from where I started the climb. This picture is also strange in perspective, because I am pointing the camera straight down. It’s actually very steep down from here over this outcropping in front of me and you can see the wash in the distance on the very bottom.
As I took the picture above and looked for a good path to make my way down, I heard something shuffle behind me. Startled, I turned around and saw this:
A big ram was standing right behind me, not 30 feet away on the ridge, checking me out. I took a deep breath, zoomed in and took another quick picture. I was worried that he’d scramble away and be gone.
After taking about 8 or 10 more pictures of him just to make sure one would come out great, I started heading back down. After a few steps trying to find a good way down, I noticed that I was actually surrounded by an entire herd of bighorn sheep, not just the ram. It’s almost like they had snuck up on me. I never noticed them on the way up.
I looked in all directions, and there were more and more. I counted at least 20 animals. I kept quiet and didn’t make any fast moves. They were eyeing me carefully, but never got startled and never bolted.
Here are some more, just chilling and checking me out.
I realized that they weren’t afraid, so I took a video so you can get a better sense of what it felt like to be there with them.
It was magical.
Then it was really time to head down. After a few minutes down the slope, I turned around and now that I knew what I was looking for, I was able to see them. Here is a photo with blue arrows that might help you spot them. As always, you can click on these pictures to zoom in.
I thought you might be interested where on that mountain that spot was. So I took the picture of our camp with the mountain in the background and you can see the ridge. The blue arrow marks the high point of my hike (I know it does not look very high from this viewpoint) and the very spot where I ran into the herd.
All in all, it was a great couple of days in the desert and a magical hike right into a herd of bighorn sheep.
Oppenheimer is a biography about the physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the effort of the United States to build the world’s first atomic bomb.
Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is America’s foremost theoretical physicist with nobody of his stature challenging him. Driven by the military with relentless pressure, led by Major General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), Oppenheimer almost singlehandedly assembles a team of world-class scientists, builds a town from scratch in the New Mexico desert, and creates a terrifying technology that nobody, including himself, fully understands. At one point he states that he does not know for certain whether setting off the bomb would not create a nuclear chain reaction that could destroy the world.
Along with the tremendous work and achievements of the scientists, the politicians of the time are paranoid about leaks, spies and Nazi infiltration. Communism looms large as the enemy, and anyone with communist connections is automatically suspicious. It does not help that Oppenheimer brings his brother into the project, who joins the Communist Party against Oppenheimer’s warnings. His wife (Emily Blunt) and his mistress are both former Communists. Interleaved with the storyline of the development of the bomb is always the congressional investigation into Oppenheimer and the scientists around him.
The story is huge, and its participants include Einstein and Truman. And with a running time of three hours it is of epic length. I found it overwhelming at times, slow and repetitious at other times, but exciting nonetheless. When I walked out I was quiet and dumbfounded about the stupidity and arrogance of humanity.
I am giving this movie “only” 3 stars, but something is nagging me: I think this is the kind of movie I need to watch more than once. The first time is just to get familiar with the story and the characters. It won too many awards, it is too highly lauded, for me to give it a down-graded score. I will take another opportunity and watch it again – and I may write another review at that time.
This week I visited the State of Louisiana, and as it is my custom, I took a picture of the State Capitol building.
It is 450 feet tall and has 34 stories, which makes it the tallest skyscraper in Baton Rouge and the tallest capitol building in the United States. It was completed in 1931.
The Lake Miramar Recreation Area is a great place in San Diego for an easy bike ride or a nice long walk.
The trail around the lake is exactly 5 miles long and completely paved. Here is the official web site link. We bring our bikes and ride around, usually once clockwise and then turn around and do it again the other way for variety and it’s a nice 10 mile ride. We did just that this afternoon.
The terrain is mostly flat. On the weekend it’s quite busy and you have to watch for walkers and other bikers, but it never feels crowded. It’s also a good and safe place to bring small children to teach them to ride their own bikes in a traffic-free environment.
Only one thing about the place is curious. Check out their sign:
Can you even read that? Depending on the angle of the afternoon sun, this sign can be completely unreadable. See for yourself what it looks like from the road:
Now you can see why I missed it the first time I went there.
As a young girl during the Civil War, Rosa was sent to Philadelphia, where she studied mathematics and astronomy. By chance, she was introduced to Edward, a wealthy lawyer. They were married and had a son, Daniel. The marriage was very unhappy for Rosa and she knew right away it was a mistake. But this was in the late 19th century and there were not many options for a woman. When Edward committed serious sexual abuse on her then teenage son, she saw no more options but escape.
Guardian tells of their travels and adventures to get away from the abusive husband and father while staying ahead of the private investigators he sent to catch them. Their journey took them first to Missouri, but soon on to San Francisco, Seattle and the Alaska wilderness during the gold rush.
Seemingly guiding her is a guardian which appears to her as a raven that speaks.
Guardian reads like a journal for most of the story, until the raven takes on a mystical persona that results in some time travel by Rosa which allows her to “do it over again” and change a bit of history along the way.
I enjoy Haldeman’s writing very much and I have read and reviewed a number of his books. You can find the reviews in my Book Reviews list. Haldeman is a science fiction writer, of course, with the classic The Forever War being one of my favorites. In this book he veers off into an entirely different direction and I found the alternate history portion of the story distracting.
In my real life, in late August, we were just in Alaska, and we visited Juneau and Skagway, two of the places that play a major role in the story of Guardian. Seeing how those exotic places came into existence through the Alaskan gold rush, and what they were like before modern cruise ships deposited thousands of tourists into them on an ongoing basis was fascinating to me. I enjoyed the descriptions of their ship working its way through some of the narrows between the islands that I was watching more than a hundred years later from the balcony of our cabin during our voyage. Sometimes old books and modern life connect in mysterious ways.
The Armor of Light is the 5th book in the Pillars of the Earth series.
The story plays in England, centered around Kingsbridge, in the 1770ies and goes through the Napoleonic Wars all the way to Waterloo in 1815. That was a period in western history when a new era of manufacturing disrupted the status quo. The wool industry in England was upset first by spinning machines, then automated looms. Workers who were used to making a living spinning and weaving now found themselves displaced. The entire establishment, the legal system, and the class system of common men and aristocracy by birth was rigged against the worker.
Follett tells the story through the eyes of a handful of people who lived through that era. One of the young boys whose father died through the negligence and arrogance of the son of their landlord grows up to be a brilliant engineer. He eventually joins the army and goes to war on the continent, as an aide to the Duke of Wellington, who is most famous for defeating Napoleon in Waterloo. Right after I had finished reading The Armor of Light I went to see the movie Napoleon, and I enjoyed the scenery and graphical images of war in Waterloo that I had just read about in this book. The book and the movie complemented each other for me.
Through the experiences of the various protagonists we learn about the plight of the working class and the immense injustices inflicted upon the hapless and unfortunate during that period of history.
As with the previous books of the series, the Kingsbridge Cathedral with the pillars of the earth is still there, many centuries after is was built by John the Builder. But the people who live in Kingsbridge are all new. There really isn’t any continuity other than it’s the same town.
I don’t know why the book is called The Armor of Light. I can’t seem to remember the title and I kept having to look it up when someone asked me what book I was reading at the time. The obscure and hard to remember title notwithstanding, I loved reading every page, and as it is always with Follett books, I learned an immense amount of history of the time that I would otherwise not have known about. When I put a Follett book down I always think to myself: So much to learn, so little time.
If you have read the Pillars series, you will like The Armor of Light. If you have not read the series, I recommend you start with Pillars of the Earth and work your way through the five books.
As I have done every year for about 15 years or so on New Years Day or a few days after, today I went again and hiked the Palm Canyon out of Borrego Springs in the Anza Borrego desert.
This year I didn’t go by myself, but Trisha and our two good adventure friends, Linda and Dick, came along.
Here is a map of our hike. We took an alternative route back, which was very scenic. The total hike was 3.34 miles long and we were out for 2 hours and 22 minutes. It was very leisurely, and we took lots of stops to look for bighorn sheep (no luck, otherwise I’d be boasting off the pictures here) and to take in the scenery.
Here is a group shot of us at the palm grove after the hike up:
Hmm, what were we thinking? Two couples in black glasses? Maybe we should have taken our hats and glasses off and you could have actually seen us!
Here are the only two mountain goats you would have seen out there today:
The grove has grown in substantially since last year. Here is last year’s shot from Jan 1, 2023:
And today from the same spot, myself not included.
The undergrowth is much thicker now a few years after the fire.
Finally a parting shot done by Trisha in her artistic ways:
A long, long time ago when bookstores were still a thing, when we had B. Dalton at the malls, Waldenbooks, Book Star, Borders, Crown Books and many mom and pop stores, I used to spend a lot of time (and eventually money) at bookstores. I noticed a curious phenomenon: Whenever I was at the bookstore I got the urge to go poop. I knew where the bathrooms were. It never seemed to fail. Bookstore visits led to bowel movements.
Eventually I had kids and from time to time when they would get constipated, I would, half jokingly, tell them that they just needed to go to the bookstore.
Fast forward 30 years, and now my daughter’s two-year-old son likes to “hold it in” for some reason. When toddlers do that they get cranky and miserable, which of course is utterly frustrating to the parents. Anyone who has had kids knows that. The other day she texted me and said that it was so bad, she had to choose the nuclear option and — you guessed it — take him to the bookstore.
IT WORKED! She sent me a video of him standing at a little table with games visibly “pushing.” I wrote back and said that it proves he’s definitely my grandson.
Then she looked it up and found the “Mariko Aoki phenomenon.” IT HAS A NAME!
The Mariko Aoki phenomenon (青木まりこ現象, Aoki Mariko genshō) is a Japanese expression referring to a sudden urge to defecate that is felt upon entering bookstores. The phenomenon is named after Mariko Aoki, a woman who described the effect in a magazine article published in 1985.
Good old Mariko discovered the phenomenon in 1985, which was many years after it was already a certain thing in my world.
Two days after the the first success with our grandson, she went back today and recorded success within two minutes of arriving at the bookstore.
Which makes me worried: Please, let’s keep Barnes & Noble in business! We need at least one bookstore chain left standing. While I am a bookstore mooch (see my post to this effect from 2013), I resolved that I need to go to the local Barnes & Noble regularly and BUY SOMETHING every time. Our digestive health depends on it.
I told my daughter that her son would be a reader, being introduced to frequent visits to bookstores at an early age.
One of the signs says “Don’t blame me, I voted for Trump.” And the other one is a 2020 campaign sign “Promises Made, Promises Kept.”
Trump promised he’d build a border wall and Mexico would pay for it. There is no wall.
Trump promised he’d repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act. He never repealed it, and certainly he never even offered an alternative.
Remember the endless “Infrastructure Weeks” in the first year of his presidency? The weeks happened, but no infrastructure bill was ever proposed, let alone passed. Biden did that eventually.
Then there was the matter of bringing back coal. Beautiful, clean coal.
The fact is, generation of electricity by coal declined more under Trump than any other president since 2012, and it actually rebounded a bit when Biden took office.
He was going to “drain the swamp.” His administration has presented no anti-corruption legislation and Trump himself did not divest from his businesses. In fact, I would argue that it’s gotten worse. Trump put members of own family in key government positions and his properties profited from government business.
