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Unregenerate

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Speaker of the House Boehner

Speaker of the House Boehner

Excuse me, but didn’t the Republicans just lose a major election because they were as out of touch with their people as Louis XVI, the Tsar Nicholas II, Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak ever were? Doesn’t that imply a period of self-examination, of wondering what they could have done wrong?

But no! The Republican house leadership is pretending they won the election. Speaker of the House John Boehner is pretending that Americans want billionaires and millionaires to pay less taxes because—by golly, by gosh!—most Americans want to be millionaires and billionaires. And where should the money come from that fuels the government? Just take it away from the poor and the Middle Class! Oh, you know, those 47-percenters who are such a drag on the rest of us.

I would urge President Obama to take Boehner out to the woodshed and liberally apply a two-by-four to his orange face. Nothing else seems to be getting through to him.

Look, if the Republican Party has a massive suicidal urge, that’s all fine and good. But don’t let them be like those inarticulate bastards who take an arsenal to their workplace and blow everyone in sight away before pointing a gun to their own empty heads. I think it’s time for an intervention.

Not Learned in School

Classroom

Classroom

I’ve been making a list of the things they don’t teach you at school. They don’t teach you how to love somebody. They don’t teach you how to be famous. They don’t teach you how to be rich or how to be poor. They don’t teach you how to walk away from someone you don’t love any longer. They don’t teach you how to know what’s going on in someone else’s mind. They don’t teach you what to say to someone who’s dying. They don’t teach you anything worth knowing.—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman

Tuscany on the Pacific

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Erin Hill’s Painting of Montalcino in Tuscany

Erin Hill’s Painting of Montalcino in Tuscany

When I first moved to Los Angeles during the last Ice Age, everything that was classy had a French name: The restaurants, the big real estate developments, and so on. Sometime over the last twenty years, suddenly Tuscany became the measure of all things ritzy. Although it is still filled with empty storefronts with “For Lease” signs, I can see the developers trying to turn it into a little Tuscany.

I can’t think of Italian food in Southern California as being so rarefied if for no other reason than it tends to be pretty mediocre. Take meatballs, for instance: If one is a gourmet chef, one doesn’t make meatballs that are nothing but differently-shaped hamburger patties. It is necessary to mince onion, garlic, parsley, and perhaps a few herbs into the ground meat mixture first. Even my Hungarian Mom knew that when she made hamburgers. But in L.A. that never happens.

I remember a huge meatball at a Buca di Beppo in the San Fernando Valley that was nothing but a large hamburger hockey puck.

So I don’t take Los Angeles’s Tuscan dreams with anything but a grain of salt, and perhaps some minced onion, garlic, parsley, and perhaps a few herbs.

The painting above is from the Erin Hill studio website. It’s quite pretty and a steal at $220.00. Maybe my hijacking the JPG file will make you want to buy the painting.

Shampoo Your Way to the Poorhouse

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So Many Shampoos, and So Expensive!

So Many Shampoos, and So Expensive!

For many years, I have been using relatively cheap, non- or minimally-scented shampoos. Every couple of years, my brand of choice disappears from the market. No doubt some junior vice president recommended adding desiccated rat turds and tripling the price, thereby guaranteeing himself a bonus and a promotion.

My latest choice has been Suave Naturals Aloe & Waterlily, which is reasonably cheap and not too stinky. But it is no longer being stocked at my local drugstore, so I will probably have to order some on the Internet. (Hmm, it looks as if WalMart is buying it up the entire production run.) In the meantime, if I run out too quickly, I’ll try another cheap brand, Alberto VO-5, to see if it’ll do as a stopgap.

The personal care industry really wants you to buy shampoo that costs upwards of six to ten dollars a bottle. Something that’s demographically targeted to the way you feel about your hair. As a male with unruly white hair of silky thinness, I am not too eager to try some witches’ potion that will burn what remains off my scalp. And I am not eager for anything that advertises “fragrance that lasts.” What the heck type of fragrance do sweet young things look for in a fat old guy with thinning white hair? Eau d’argent? How about durian or eggplant?

Things can get ridiculous quickly in the shampoo section of your market. Not surprisingly, the active ingredients in all shampoos are pretty much the same. What you pay for is something that will make you feel special, something that will separate you from the herd. Perhaps something with a touch of whooping crane or passenger pigeon. Or Vladimir Putin’s special Polonium Blend. Or essence of saffron. Something that will go with my titanium left hip and my love of the poems of George Mackay Brown.

Actually, all I really want is a clean head.

Read this blog by TreeHugger on the subject for some more interesting observations. Also, I hijacked the picture from his website. Sorry, guy!

The Frogs Who Wanted a King

When the Log Is Not Enough

When the Log Is Not Enough

The Frogs were living as happy as could be in a marshy swamp that just suited them; they went splashing about caring for nobody and nobody troubling with them. But some of them thought that this was not right, that they should have a king and a proper constitution, so they determined to send up a petition to Jove to give them what they wanted. “Mighty Jove,” they cried, “send unto us a king that will rule over us and keep us in order.” Jove laughed at their croaking, and threw down into the swamp a huge Log, which came down splashing into the swamp. The Frogs were frightened out of their lives by the commotion made in their midst, and all rushed to the bank to look at the horrible monster; but after a time, seeing that it did not move, one or two of the boldest of them ventured out towards the Log, and even dared to touch it; still it did not move. Then the greatest hero of the Frogs jumped upon the Log and commenced dancing up and down upon it, thereupon all the Frogs came and did the same; and for some time the Frogs went about their business every day without taking the slightest notice of their new King Log lying in their midst. But this did not suit them, so they sent another petition to Jove, and said to him, “We want a real king; one that will really rule over us.” Now this made Jove angry, so he sent among them a big Stork that soon set to work gobbling them all up. Then the Frogs repented when too late.—Aesop, Fables

The Arbat Trilogy

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Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat

Anatoli Rybakov’s Children of the Arbat

For me, this has been a year in which my reading has been strongly colored by Russian history and literature. I am currently reading the third volume of Anatoli Rybakov’s Arbat trilogy, which consists of Children of the Arbat, Fear, and Dust and Ashes.

The Arbat is a street around the center of Moscow that dates back to the sixteenth century and is famous for its picturesque buildings and as the home of artists, academics, and petty nobility.

What Rybakov does in these novels is take a group of young people who knew each other in school in the Arbat and follows them through Stalin’s purges of the 1930s and into the Great Patriotic War (the Second World War). In addition to his fictional characters, Rybakov also gives us a glimpse into the minds of Stalin, Voroshilov, and other Russian political and military leaders.

Suppressed for many years by the Soviet authorities, the Arbat trilogy finally saw the light of day after twenty more than years of circulation via the samizdat underground press. In the meantime, he had served for three years in the Gulag, after which he was a tank commander during the war.

I read the first volume, Children of the Arbat, in 2008, while Martine and I were on vacation in Canada. Then, at the beginning of this year, I joined a European History discussion group, which in the end turned out to be a Russian History discussion group. This was no disappointment for me, as I delighted to learn more about Peter the Great, Catherine the Great, Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, the Russian Revolution and Civil War, the purges under Stalin, and now the Second World War in Russia.

The literature of Stalin’s purges is vast, including Victor Serge’s great The Case of Comrade Tularev and Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. But I have a special fondness for Rybakov’s trilogy, as I have gotten to know the characters as they manage to walk on eggshells during one of the darkest periods of their country’s history while still retaining their essential humanity.