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Air Lazarus

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The Museum of Flying in Santa Monica

Once upon a time, the Museum of Flying in Santa Monica was two or three times bigger. Founded by Donald Douglas, Jr., of Douglas Aircraft fame, it was originally located north of the Santa Monica airport beginning in 1989 and included many exhibits furnished by an independent partner. In 2002, the museum folded.

After ten years, a new, smaller museum anchored by the Donald Douglas, Jr. collection opened south of the airport in smaller quarters.

Martine and I have always liked aircraft museums. Our favorites were the Palm Springs Air Museum and the Pima Air and Space Museum in Tucson, Arizona. What made all these aircraft museums interesting was the existence of numerous volunteer docents who piloted the planes during the wars of the late 20th century. As many of these docents reach a certain age and pass on, I suspect that the museums themselves will lose a lot of their present appeal. But for now, I think they are wonderful places to visit and learn aviation from Kitty Hawk to today.

Waco GXE Model 10 Biplane

When I first moved to Southern California, the Santa Monica Airport and much of the land surrounding it were all part of a gigantic MacDonnell Douglas Corporation factory, which after being merged out of existence sold its property to developers and to the general aviation facility that today is the Santa Monica Airport.

So even if the Museum of Flying is something of a Lazarus raised from the dead, we will continue to visit and enjoy it.

Writer of Epitaphs

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Poet Edgar Lee Masters (1868-1950)

He lived a long life, yet he was famous for writing epitaphs, which he published in two books: The Spoon River Anthology (1915) and The New Spoon River (1924). Curiously, his own epitaph was just as poetic:

Good friends, let’s to the fields …
After a little walk, and by your pardon,
I think I’ll sleep. There is no sweeter thing,
Nor fate more blessed than to sleep.

I am a dream out of a blessed sleep –
Let’s walk, and hear the lark.

D SAPS DT C CINQ MOC

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I learned most of what I know about English grammar and style in 9th Grade, when I was fourteen years old. My English teacher at Chanel High School was the Rev. Gerard Hageman, S.M. In the first week of classes, he handed out a single-sided mimeographed sheet on yellow paper entitled “Random Rules of Grammar and Style.”

Thereafter, in the frequent themes we wrote for class, there were only two possible grades: 100% or 0%, the latter if we violated any of the rules on the infamous yellow sheet. Since at our high school, all grades were stated as percentages, any mistakes were disastrous to our grade point average. That first semester, I got an 89%—and that was the high grade in our class.

In this blog post, I discuss the first five lines on the yellow sheet, which opened with a strange line that went:

D SAPS DT C CINQ MOC

The line was a mnemonic of sorts. The letters stood for Direct Address (D), Salutation (S), Appositives (A), Parentheticals (P), Series (S), Dates (D), Titles After Names (T), Compound Sentences (C), Contrasting Ideas (C), Introductory Adverbial Clauses (I), Non-Restrictives (N), Direct Quotations (Q), Mild Interjections (M), Omitted Words (O), and Common Sense (C). Late in the game, Father Hageman also included City and State, but it didn’t fit the mnemonic. Maybe that’s why he put it in parentheses.

An appositive is a noun, pronoun, or phrase placed next to another noun, pronoun, or phrase to rename, identify, or explain it. For example: Jack, a real chess whiz, beat me in three moves.

A parenthetical is very much like an appositive. The same example above applies.

Here is an example of an introductory adverbial clause: As expected, Tyler won the race handily.

As for non-restrictives, that refers to clauses which give additional information that is not vital to one’sunderstanding of the sentences. For example: Cleveland, which is situated on the shores of Lake Erie, used to be the seventh largest city in the country.

Casa de Hopes-You-Die

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Villahermosa and the Grijalva River

It was December 1979. My brother and I had just landed in Villahermosa in the State of Tabasco. It was a humid tropical evening, and the Grijalva River was in flood. At one point, I saw the bodies of cattle that were drifting by in the rushing current. I had never before experienced such humidity.

Villahermosa—“Beautiful City”—was anything but. It was a city located in the middle of an extensive swamp.

I had planned a trip that roughly followed Graham Greene’s itinerary in Journey Without Maps, starting in Villahermosa and heading over the Sierra Madre to San Cristóbal de las Casas and thereafter to Oaxaca and back to Mexico City.

Only I hadn’t planned for Villahermosa. At a local eatery, my brother ordered shrimps that were delivered to the table partially coated in tar. We didn’t have a hotel. It didn’t take us long to discover that all the hotel rooms were block-booked by Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), as we were near the Cactus oilfields of Tabasco.

All we could find was a small Casa de Hospedaje (guest house) where we spent a restless night. My bed had a lateral groove in the middle, whereas Dan’s bed had a vertical groove down the middle. And the beds felt wet with the humidity. We were near the cathedral, where the bells chimed every quarter of an hour. That was not the worst of it: There were chickens on the roof, and the rooster among them crowed every few minutes through the night.

When we woke, we found that the shower head was directly over the toilet, which we had to straddle to wash ourselves off.

Dan summarized the experience by referring to the place as the Casa de Hopes-You-Die.

Januarius 2026

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Me in My Library in 2004

As in previous years, I have decided during this month of January 2026 to read books only by authors I have not previously read. Yesterday, I started with a bang with Colson Whitehead’s Pulitzer-Prize-winning The Underground Railroad.

I have code-named this annual project Januarius. If you look at the early January entries on my blog site, you will find numerous references to Januarius. I like the name because it suggests the Roman god Janus as well as the month of January.

Next on my list is a book edited by Keath Fraser entitled Worst Journeys: The Picador Book of Travel. It contains selections from fifty-five authors on the subject of bad trips, including bad flights, bad roads, war, and other events that can wreck the best-planned journey. My intention is to discover new authors of travel books, travel being one of my favorite book categories. I hope to incorporate at least a couple of my finds in books I read later this month.

Tentatively planned are reads from Pierre de Marivaux, Apuleius, Ariel Dorfman, Péter Nádas, Louisa May Alcott, an obscure biography of the Emperor Tiberius (I forget the name of the author), and Valeria Luiselli. Typically, I finish between twelve and sixteen books in one month. (The joys of being retired.)

At the end of the month, I will post a list of the “new” authors I have read and their books. Stay tuned to this spot for the latest developments.

“Bleak Shore”

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Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)

I’m starting the New Year by quoting a poem from Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Sonnet IV-X

I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed shall escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand.
I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

I know it’s sad, but it is at the same time beautiful.

Quai des Orfèvres

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The Quai des Orfèvres, Former HQ of the French Police Judiciaire

Right across the way from the cathedral of Notre Dame on the Île de la Cité is the Quai des Orfèvres, former headquarters of the French Police Judiciaire and office of Inspector Jules Maigret, Georges Simenon’s hero in some seventy-five mystery novels.

What better way to end 2025, I thought to myself, than to read a Maigret novel I had never read before. Since I have read most of them by now, that was not an easy decision to make. Fortunately, I dug deep in one of my book piles and came up with Maigret and the Apparition (aka Maigret and the Ghost), published in 1964 as Maigret et le fantôme.

The book starts with the shooting of a detective inspector from the 18th Arrondissement who was a friend of Maigret’s. At first, nothing seems to make sense; and there are no Sherlockian clues that give the crime away. Simenon’s Maigret novels are not tales of ratiocination à la Edgar Allan Poe. This is not the Anglo-Saxon world of crime: What Maigret adheres to is a Gallic combination of thoroughness and intuition. The solution eventually emerges only when he has looked hard at every detail in the case.

Famously, Maigret does not come up with any theories as he follows through on the investigation. The active principle here is not ratiocination, but se débruillier, to, in effect, “defog” the mass of evidence and suspects. As Google’s artificial intelligence summary has it:

Débrouiller (reflexive: se débrouiller) is a versatile French verb meaning to manage, cope, get by, sort out, or figure things out, especially when facing challenges, implying resourcefulness to overcome obstacles and find solutions, like “I can manage” (Je me débrouille) or “to sort out a situation” (débrouiller une situation). 

Apparently, it worked for Simenon, whose works continue to enthrall after many decades..

Bardotlatry

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French Actress Brigitte Bardot (1934-2025)

What can one say when the most beautiful woman in the world grows old and dies a divisive figure at the age of 91? When I was a young man, I thought that Brigitte Bardot could do no wrong. She was Venus de Milo personified. I saw her films And God Created Woman (1956) and Contempt (1963) multiple times.

But Brigitte was far from perfect. In her later years, she espoused rightist causes, campaigning for the LePens in French elections and reviling Muslims and even calling the residents of Réunion, a French island in the Indian Ocean, “savages.”

Okay, she wasn’t perfect—except in the way she looked in the 1950s and 1960s. Then, she was a goddess. As a young film freak in Los Angeles, I worshiped the ground she walked on.

Then I heard she was a big animal rights activist. “That’s all right,” I thought. But then I started hearing uglier things. By then, Brigitte was a hermit of sorts living on the French Riviera.

There’s a lesson to be learned there. We are all human, we are all likely to err, we will all eventually lose our looks and die.

Easy Breakfast Quesadillas

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Rajas de Jalapeño

This is perhaps my most common breakfast, which I have with my morning tea. It contains only three ingredients: (1) Good quality flour tortillas; (2) Monterey Jack cheese; and (3) Pickled jalapeño peppers.

If you can’t tolerate chile peppers, I suppose you could try something mild like Ortega chiles, but I can’t imagine that would taste good. I use either canned Mexican rajas de jalapeño, which may also include pickled carrots, onion, and even pieces of cauliflower or else any pickled jalapeños.

For the cheese, I always prefer Monterey Jack. A particularly good brand on the West Coast comes from Joseph Farms and is available at Ralphs supermarkets (owned by Kroger).

Of primary importance are the flour tortillas. My brand of choice is El Comal or La Banderita. Avoid cheap flour torts that tear easily along the edges or that taste like cardboard. Unfortunately, most of the popular supermarket brands fall into this category.

To prepare the quesadillas, I preheat the oven to 350° Fahrenheit ( 175° Celsius). I take a quarter cup of jalapeños and chop them up fine. Then with a cheese slicer, I cut four slices of Monterey Jack cheese. I take two flour tortillas and on the upper half of each place two slices of cheese and half the chopped jalapeños, Then I fold the torts in two, being careful that they not tear in the process. (This is one way of learning whether you’ve bought the right flour tortillas.) Place them in the oven and cook them until the edges of the tortillas begin to turn dark brown.

It is very likely that some of the cheese will drip, so I always place a sheet of foil underneath.

The result is a bit spicy, but a very pleasant way to start your day.