Fast and Furious

Posted on July 24, 2016 by Tarnmoor | 1 Comment

Too Many Tragedies in Too Short a Time Frame

It seems that flags have been at half mast for so long— beginning with the Dallas police shootings—that one no longer knows which disaster is being commemorated. With the 24-hour news cycle, the shootings are coming fast and furious, and the border between events is being blurred.

When one big news event happens, it triggers a news orgy in which the particular story fills all the news time until it is abruptly replaced by the next disaster. I cannot help but think that all the breaking news stories work on the minds of disturbed individuals, making them think that a mass shooting would be a good idea.

I don’t think the perpetrators do it with suicide in mind, but, hey, their minds don’t work all that well anyhow. The San Bernardino shooters, for instance, thought they could stage a getaway. If one is unable to reason well, one gets a certain amount of magical thinking going that, once “the point” has been made, an escape path is possible. Killing multiple human beings with a Bushmaster, however, is so traumatic that it isn’t likely that the shooters could waltz out of the slaughterhouse they have created.

So I never ask why the flag is at half mast any more. It might as well always be at half mast. I wonder if the person who raises and lowers the flag even knows.

Euripides and Moderation in Love

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Tarnmoor

The Greek Playwright Euripides (480-406 BC)

On the Laudator Temporis Acti website, I ran into two quotes from Euripides which go a long way toward explaining the genius of the ancient Greeks.

From the David Kovacs translation of Medea, lines 627-641, comes these lines:

Loves that come to us in excess bring no good name or goodness to men. If Aphrodite comes in moderation, no other goddess brings such happiness. Never, O goddess, may you smear with desire one of your ineluctable arrows and let it fly against my heart from your golden bow!

May moderation attend me, fairest gift of the gods! May dread Aphrodite never cast contentious wrath and insatiate quarreling upon me and madden my heart with love for a stranger’s bed! But may she honor marriages that are peaceful and wisely determine whom we are to wed!

I am reminded of the truth of this observation from a birthday party I attended many years ago. An acquaintance whom I will not name, in the middle of all his friends, gave his bride thirty pounds of potatoes, one for each year of her life. Their love match had clearly turned sour, and the party broke up early after his shaming of his wife.

The next lines come from Euripides’s Iphigeneia in Aulis, also translated by Kovacs:

Blessed are they who with moderation
and self-control where the goddess is concerned
share in the couch of Aphrodite,
experiencing the calm absence
of mad passion’s sting. In love
twofold are the arrows of pleasure
golden-haired Eros sets on his bowstring,
the one to give us a blessed fate,
the other to confound our life.
I forbid him, O Cypris most lovely,
to come to my bedchamber!
May my joy be moderate,
my desires godly,
may I have a share in Aphrodite
but send her away when she is excessive!

I, too, could have been in this situation had the beautiful young pediatrician I was pursuing had turned around and acceded to my passion. But she didn’t, and I found someone better—though I did go through a few rocky years in the interval.

Serendipity: Just Try and Destroy Armenia!

Posted on July 22, 2016 by Tarnmoor

Young Armenian Soldiers

The following is a quote from author William Saroyan, whose novel The Human Comedy I am currently reading. It comes from a short story called “The Armenian and the Armenian.”

I should like to see any power of the world destroy this race, this small tribe of unimportant people, whose history is ended, whose wars have all been fought and lost, whose structures have crumbled, whose literature is unread, whose music is unheard, whose prayers are no longer uttered. Go ahead, destroy this race. Let us say that it is again 1915. There is war in the world. Destroy Armenia. See if you can do it. Send them from their homes into the desert. Let them have neither bread nor water. Burn their houses and their churches. See if they will not live again. See if the race will not live again. See if they will not laugh again. See if the race will not live again when two of them meet in a beer parlor, twenty years after, and laugh, and speak in their tongue. Go ahead, see if you can do anything about it. See if you can stop them from mocking the big ideas of the world, you sons of bitches, a couple of Armenians talking in the world, go ahead and try to destroy them.

I Am Disappoint

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Tarnmoor

Poverty Certainly Abounds in Buenos Aires’s Villa 31

Yesterday, I did a little bit of research on travel in Ecuador on Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree website. There I encountered the following complaint from a user called nemo_dat:

I’m a month into a two-month stint in Ecuador (enjoying a nice break between assignments). It’s my first time in South America and unfortunately I’ve been disappointed so far. I need to decide whether to stick it out in EC [Ecuador], go elsewhere in South or Central America, or perhaps cut the trip short and return home.

I’m having a hard time dealing with the air pollution, poverty, and sprawl. I’ve spent the past month in Quito and Cuenca. I left Quito because of the air pollution. I’m happier in Cuenca but was really looking forward to taking a scenic drive through the countryside today to see some unspoiled wilderness and breath fresh air. The scenery was nice in parts but my clothes reek of exhaust after spending the day driving. And while I saw some nice scenery I also saw some truly horrid buildings amidst the countryside.

I’ve been to several less-wealthy areas of the developed world, and while those places can be rough around the edges, I was easily able to find scenery and architecture to more than compensate. I just haven’t had the same “wow factor” in Ecuador.

I chose the Andes of Ecuador because I like mountain scenery and I’m not a fan of heat or humidity (not a beach person). But this isn’t working out. Are there places in Ecuador or elsewhere in C or S [Central or South] America I should consider?

I feel like an ass for saying it, but I think somewhere more “European” might be more in line with my preferences (I know that probably brings to mind Argentina).

Any advice on how to proceed is greatly appreciated.

Actually, I am rather sympathetic with nemo_dat: The fact of the matter is that some people are not cut out for travel in developing or undeveloped countries. Their curiosity is trumped by the discomfort factor, which can at times be considerable.

I had the misfortune to visit Yucatán in the early 1980s during a major heat wave and came down with some kind of tropical illness. I went to the front desk of the Hotel Cayre and asked them to send a recommended doctor, which they did—and promptly. He gave me an injection and wrote out a prescription, which I had filled out at a local farmacia. It did lead me to change my plans. I grabbed a flight to Tuxtla Gutiérrez in the State of Chiapas, high up in the Sierra Madres, and took a bus to San Cristóbal de las Casas, where it was reasonably cool at some 5,000 feet of altitude.

The complaint of nemo_dat is more about pollution and a certain ratty quality prevalent in many if not most Latin American cities. Martine, for instance, complains bitterly about the broken sidewalks in Argentina and Mexico, which forced her to watch her step at all times. (In 1979, while watching for a break in the traffic at Insurgentes and the Reforma in Mexico City, I fell into a 10-foot ditch; so I can understand her.)

If that sort of thing is a problem, I suggest sticking to the mountains of the First World, like the U.S. or Canadian Rockies, the Swiss or Tyrolean Alps, or perhaps Australia. You’ll find a more “paradise-like” (translated: Disneyfied) environment there.

What you won’t run into there is the poor Aymara woman I met in Puno, Peru—now there’s a ratty city!—who was dragging around her home made knitwear. It was an icy morning at 12,500 feet altitude and I badly needed a scarf; so I bought one from her. She was so grateful that tears came to her eyes, and she stroked my arms as if I were a favorite family member.

On Guidebooks

Posted on July 20, 2016 by Tarnmoor

Occasionally Useful, But Not as a Crutch

In my forty years of travel, I have run the gamut from slavish reliance on the accommodation and restaurant information in guidebooks to merely supplemental use. When I first went to Yucatán in 1975 and Britain in 1976, I was frankly afraid to go to a place that was not blessed by the footsteps of thousands of tourists before me. Then, little by little, I began to take chances. When I discovered that taking pot luck was no worse than strict adherence—which, in any case, was impossible in those early pre-Internet days when one took one’s chances. Also, I found myself meeting more interesting people.

Now, when I go to South America, I’ll take a Lonely Planet guidebook such as the one illustrated above with me—but mostly for the maps. One cannot always get to the tourist office in time for their freebie maps, and sometimes those freebie maps are not very good.

For accommodations, I now use TripAdvisor.Com more frequently (and I review for them as well). Even the reviews in TripAdvisor have to be taken with a grain of salt, as the world is full of whiners and kvetchers. As for restaurants, I have a number of rules of thumb that have never let me down:

Don’t go where all the tourists go, especially if they are backpackers
Better restaurants are usually on side streets a bit off the main beaten path
If the menu is not in the language of the country you’re in, walk out
The best restaurants are usually fairly crowded
Eschew all signs of snobbery

I suppose if I were just starting out on my travels, I would probably clutch my guidebook as if it were a life preserver in a storm. But I now know that it’s best to travel by what I call Mexican Rules: Be alert, be willing to switch gears at a moment’s notice, be skeptical.

When my brother and I went to Villahermosa in 1979, we couldn’t find any decent places to stay, because they were all block-booked by oil executives and workers. So we stayed in a miserable little Casa de Hospedaje (which my brother pronounced as “Casa de Hopes-You-Die”). Then we spent hours looking for the bus station, which was not where the guidebook said it was. Finally, we just called a taxi and had it drive us to the brand new bus station on the outskirts of time. Finally, the dinner we had was wretched: My brother’s shrimp had tar on it.

Dan and I enjoyed that trip anyhow: We had a lot of war stories associated with it.

Poor Cleveland

Posted on July 19, 2016 by Tarnmoor

I Have Many Happy Memories of the Place

No, this is not about the Oompa-Loompa coronation ceremony taking place in my old home town, nor of GOP dumpster fire that threatens to engulf the United States. This is about my happy memories of Cleveland going back to my childhood.

No one outside the Chamber of Commerce would think of Cleveland has a happening sort of place. But I did when, as a student at Saint Henry School on the East Side. Back then, the metro area was the seventh largest in the nation, with a population of approximately 900,000. There were huge auto plants, and the city was a major machine tool building center. That’s the industry my Dad worked in, building giant gear-hobbing machines for Lees-Bradner. My Uncle Emil ran a small factory in the Flats of the Cuyahoga River.

The symbol of Cleveland was the Terminal Tower—oh, how unfortunately symbolic!—on downtown’s Public Square. (You can catch glimpses of it in the movie A Christmas Story (1983), many of whose exteriors were shot in the area.) It was during those school years the largest building in the country outside of New York. Underneath was a large concourse and the main rail passenger terminal for Northeastern Ohio.

When I graduated from high school in 1962, I marveled that so many of my classmates were leaving town. And, it turned out, never to return. By then blight had set in, the auto industry was beginning to tank, and many machine-related industries were moving to Asia. Worst of all, people were starting to laugh at Cleveland. The Cuyahoga River caught fire from the pollutants flowing downstream from the factories in the Flats, and one mayor—Ralph Locher—was photographed with his hair on fire when he refused to wear a hard hat when visiting a steel mill. Worst of all was Maynard G. Krebs (Bob Denver) on the “Dobie Gillis” show always going to see a film called The Monster That Devoured Cleveland.

Until the Cavs won the NBA championship this year, the records of local sports teams have been dismal. For a while, we even lost the Cleveland Browns NFL franchise, until they re-formed in 1999.

I wish Cleveland well, and I hope they survive this week’s political onslaught.

Serendipity: The Solitary Traveler

Posted on July 18, 2016 by Tarnmoor

London’s Vauxhall Gardens in the 18th Century

Here, straight from the 17th Century, is what I feel like during my travel. The source is Sir Richard Steele’s essay “A Ramble from Richmond to London”:

It is an inexpressible pleasure to know a little of the world and be of no character or significance in it.

To be ever unconcerned, and ever looking on new objects with an endless curiosity, is a delight known only to those who are turned for speculation: nay, they who enjoy it must value things only as they are the objects of speculation, without drawing any worldly advantage to themselves from them, but just as they are what contribute to their amusement, or the improvement of the mind.

In Praise of Old Cars

Posted on July 16, 2016 by Tarnmoor | 1 Comment

Cadillac El Dorado Dashboard

Martine and I drove to Oxnard today to pay a return visit to the Murphy Auto Museum. We began our trip with a big surprise. When we were there in April, Martine had left her Magellan cane seat in the rest room. After three months’ absence, a volunteer went into the back room, fetched it in a few seconds, and handed it over to Martine. We were both bowled over. That put our visit on a good footing from the word go.

Unlike the two major auto museums in L.A., the Murphy concentrates on American cars, many only 10 or 20 years old, that are beautifully restored and cared for, such as the metallic blue El Dorado from the above photo (I forget the model year) .

There was a special exhibit of vintage trailers, including a large Airstream and a small teardrop. It led me to dreaming about getting a small camper van for visiting desert campgrounds. (If only I had the money!) A number of the trailers were custom-made and manufactured from a variety of materials with varying degrees of professionalism.

Oh, No, Not Again!

Posted on July 15, 2016 by Tarnmoor | 2 Comments

Any Sort of Tragedy Brings These Termites Out of the Woodwork

Maybe it’s because I was raised a Catholic, but most public displays of prayer leave me cold. What is this thing about holding your arms out while emoting excessively? Is it to prove conclusively to God and to your fellow man that you do not have round-the-clock protection? And what’s all this mummery with candles and flowers and cutesy stuffed animals?

Perhaps I am disturbed by the similarity of that holding-out-one’s-arms prayer gesture to a fervent “Heil Hitler!”

Am I knocking prayer? Not at all. I believe in God, though in a somewhat heterodox manner; and I have even been known to pray. But my prayer is a private matter between the Creator and myself. I eschew all mummery, and I have no desire to prove myself holier than anyone else. (Which I certainly am not.) Demonstrative public prayer is just … well … a form of showboating.

Whenever there is a terrorist act or a mass shooting or some horrendous accident, you will see them making some sort of pseudo-Evangelical religious demonstration. Our awful news media even likes to interview them—even though they have never had anything to say. It’s kind of like hiring an official mourner to keen for your loved ones. Can you wonder why I can’t stand to see how television reports “tragedies.”

“That Came to Pass This Also May”

Posted on July 14, 2016 by Tarnmoor | 1 Comment

Anglo-Saxon Court

This blog posting consists of three views of an Anglo-Saxon poem called “Deor.” First I suggest you click here to see the poem being recited aloud in the original language.

Next, here is Seamus Heaney’s translation of the poem in modern English:

Welund himself knew misery by worms.
The brave man knew hardship,
had to himself for company sorrow and longing,
winter-cold misery; He often found woe,
since Nithhad by force laid a thin sinew-bond onto the better man.