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“Life Is a Battle”

Seneca

Seneca

Spite of all do you still chafe and complain, not understanding that, in all the evils to which you refer, there is really only one—the fact that you do chafe and complain? If you ask me, I think that for a man there is no misery unless there be something in the universe which he thinks miserable. I shall not endure myself on that day when I find anything unendurable.

I am ill; but that is a part of my lot. My slaves have fallen sick, my income has gone off, my house is rickety, I have been assailed by losses, accidents, toil, and fear; this is a common thing. Nay, that was an understatement; it was an inevitable thing. Such affairs come by order, and not by accident. If you will believe me, it is my inmost emotions that I am just now disclosing to you: when everything seems to go hard and uphill, I have trained myself not merely to obey God, but to agree with His decisions. I follow Him because my soul wills it, and not because I must. Nothing will ever happen to me that I shall receive with ill humour or with a wry face. I shall pay up all my taxes willingly. Now all the things which cause us to groan or recoil, are part of the tax of life—things, my dear Lucilius, which you should never hope and never seek to escape.

It was disease of the bladder that made you apprehensive; downcast letters came from you; you were continually getting worse; I will touch the truth more closely, and say that you feared for your life. But come, did you not know, when you prayed for long life, that this was what you were praying for? A long life includes all these troubles, just as a long journey includes dust and mud and rain. “But,” you cry, “I wished to live, and at the same time to be immune from all ills.” Such a womanish cry does no credit to a man. Consider in what attitude you shall receive this prayer of mine (I offer it not only in a good, but in a noble spirit): “May gods and goddesses alike forbid that Fortune keep you in luxury!” Ask yourself voluntarily which you would choose if some god gave you the choice—a life in a café or life in a camp.

And yet life, Lucilius, is really a battle. For this reason those who are tossed about at sea, who proceed uphill and downhill over toilsome crags and heights, who go on campaigns that bring the greatest danger, are heroes and front-rank fighters; but persons who live in rotten luxury and ease while others toil, are mere turtle-doves safe only because men despise them. Farewell.—Seneca, Letters

Happy 13.0.0.0.0!

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Nope, Not Quite the End of the World

Nope, Not Quite the End of the World

I hope you’re enjoying all the craziness about the upcoming end of the world on December 21, 2012—according to the (snicker) Mayan Calendar. On that day, Martine and I will be driving to Palm Springs, where we will stand in flowing white robes, holding hands, on top of Mount San Jacinto. No, wait, actually we’ll be spending time with my brother Dan and his family, who are renting a house in PS for the holidays.

After my extensive travels to the Mayan area between 1975 and 1992—about eight trips in all—I managed to learn something about the Mayans and their calendar. The most important thing to note is that it recycles at the end of every 5,125-year cycle. According to some interpretations, one of those periods ends on Friday, though there is widespread disagreement among archaeologists on correlating the date to our own calendar.

The Mayans have already gone through a good deal more than twelve of those cycles, which they call baktuns. There are even longer cycles, called piktuns. The next piktun ends around October 13, 4772. There are even larger cycles called kalabtuns, kinchiltuns, and alautuns, which stretch millions of years into the future.

It looks to me as if the Mayans were planning to be around for a long, long time. A good deal longer than the morons who think the whole shooting match is over.

So let me be the first to wish you a happy 13th baktun of the current piktun. I hope all of you have a great 13.0.0.0.0.

You can read more about the Mayan calendar at Wikipedia (here and here) and at Tikalpark.Com. Just remember that this is just another Moronic Divergence, or should I say Harmonic Convergence?

 

 

Celebrating the End of the World

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The 2nd Volume of Jack Vance’s “The Dying Earth” Series

This was my reading choice to commemorate the upcoming end of the world on Friday, December 21, 2012, the so-called end of the Mayan calendar according to conspiracy theorists and gullible fools. What better choice than one of Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth series of stories, in this case the second volume of the series, The Eyes of the Overworld.

According to Wikipedia, “The stories of the Dying Earth series are set in the distant future, at a point when the sun is almost exhausted and magic has reasserted itself as a dominant force. The Moon has disappeared and the Sun is in danger of burning out at any time, often flickering as if about to go out, before shining again. The various civilizations of Earth have collapsed for the most part into decadence and its inhabitants overcome with a fatalistic outlook. The Earth is mostly barren and cold, and has become infested with various predatory monsters (possibly created by a magician in a former age).”

Cugel the Clever is our hero, who finds himself in deep trouble when he is trapped by Iucounu the Laughing Magician attempting to burgle his manse. He is sent to find a certain magical eye cusp in a distant land to complete a matched set. To ensure Cugel’s cooperation, Iucounu uses magic to wrap a creature named Firx around his liver to prod it with sharp barbs whenever its bearer appears dilatory about returning to Azenomei and Iucounu.

The Eyes of the Overworld is a record of Cugel’s travels to return to Azenomei and use his cleverness to avoid being felled by magical spells and to use the people he encounters along the way.

Vance goes out of his way to imagine interesting peoples and situations:

The spell known as the Inside Out and Over was of derivation so remote as to be forgotten. An unknown Cloud-rider of the Twenty-first Eon had construed an archaic version; the half-legendary Basile Blackweb had refined its contours, a process continued by Veronifer the Bland, who had added a reinforcing resonance. Archemand of Glaere had annotated fourteen of its provulsions; Phandaal had listed it in the ‘A,’ as ‘Perfected,’ category of his monumental catalogue. In this fashion it had reached the workbook of Zaraides the Sage, where Cugel, immured under a hillock, had found it and spoken it forth.

While no one can truly admire Cugel’s selfish, immoral ways unless to his extreme social detriment, the book is an incredibly humorous introduction to the end of days and worthy of being read.
The volumes in the series are The Dying Earth (1950), The Eyes of the Overworld (1966), Cugel’s Saga (1983), and Rhialto the Marvelous (1984). If you like fantasy, this is highly recommended.

Suburban Inferno

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Evil Lurks in the Suburbs of America

Evil Lurks in the Suburbs of America

The motto comes from Walt Kelly’s late cartoon strip: “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Here I am, a white male, a member of a demographic segment that is causing incredible violence across the United States. We would much rather persecute gays, Muslims, African-Americans, Hispanics—but what about us? Adam Lanza, the Newport shooter, was one of us. Is it time to start profiling white males?

After the Second World War, while the people of Europe and Asia were picking up the pieces of their lives, we went through an unprecedented period of prosperity. We moved from the cities to the suburbs, thinking we could leave all our problems behind us. But that is not what happened: We took the problems with us, in the form of our children.

There we lived in our self-contained ranch houses on cul-de-sacs across the country, hiding the fact that inside our cute little homes were millions of dysfunctional families. When mental health care began to blink into non-existence in the 1980s, we hid our shame as much as we could. That, however, did not work. You can’t suppress the horror. It will out. It did out last Friday in a Connecticut suburb.

That Says It All

That Says It All

What to do about it? We can begin the long, slow road toward gun control. That wouldn’t have helped at Sandy Hook Elementary School because the weapons were legally obtained, and then stolen from the shooter’s mother, herself a victim. We could talk about better mental health care, but mental health in this country is at a strange crossroads, where we are repudiating many old methods and increasingly relying on anti-depressant medications to do all the heavy lifting.

Perhaps we just have to admit our vulnerability. The craziest people in America today are white males. And you are reading this blog post by a white male. Don’t worry about me, however, I not only don’t have any guns; but I never want to own any firearms. I’m all right, but watch out for all the other white males. Some crazy shit out there!

Gabriel Garcia Marquez Says Farewell

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Gabriel Garcia Marquez

If for a moment God were to forget that I am a rag doll and granted me a piece of life, I probably wouldn’t say everything that I think; rather, I would think about everything that I say.

I would value things, not for their worth but for what they mean. I would sleep less, dream more, understanding that for each minute we close our eyes, we lose sixty seconds of light.

I would walk when others hold back, I would wake when others sleep, I would listen when others talk.

And how I would enjoy a good chocolate ice cream!

If God were to give me a piece of life, I would dress simply, throw myself face first into the sun, baring not only my body but also my soul.

My God, if I had a heart, I would write my hate on ice, and wait for the sun to show. Over the stars I would paint with a Van Gogh dream a Benedetti poem, and a Serrat song would be the serenade I’d offer to the moon.

I would water roses with my tears, to feel the pain of their thorns and the red kiss of their petals… My God, if I had a piece of life… I wouldn’t let a single day pass without telling the people I love that I love them.

I would convince each woman and each man that they are my favorites, and I would live in love with love.

I would show men how very wrong they are to think that they cease to be in love when they grow old, not knowing that they grow old when they cease to be in love!

To a child I shall give wings, but I shall let him learn to fly on his own. I would teach the old that death does not come with old age, but with forgetting.

So much have I learned from you, oh men … I have learned that everyone wants to live at the top of the mountain, without knowing that real happiness is in how it is scaled.

I have learned that when a newborn child first squeezes his father’s finger in his tiny fist, he has him trapped forever.

I have learned that a man has the right to look down on another only when he has to help the other get to his feet.

From you I have learned so many things, but in truth they won’t be of much use, for when I keep them within this suitcase, unhappily shall I be dying.—Gabriel Garcia Márquez, Farewell Letter After Learning of His Lymphatic Cancer

I Make An Exception

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David Burks, Artistic Director and Conductor of the Torrance Civic Chorale

David Burks, Artistic Director and Conductor of the Torrance Civic Chorale

In general, I am not too fond of Christmas carols. I find them sappy and all too frequently a wheezy, whiny attempt to get shoppers to go into a buying frenzy. Mt annual exception is the Christmas concert of the Torrance Civic Chorale. Here there is no Little Drummer Boy PahRupUpUpPum, but rather an attempt to find the hidden heart of Christmas and Chanukah through music.

Under its genial and brilliant artistic director and conductor, David Burks, the Chorale has put on a series of concerts over the years that feature a combination of old standbys in new arrangements, medleys, and relatively unknown (to us) holiday music from around the world.This year featured the American premiere of “Wherever You Are,” a British carol referring to the enforced separation of families of Tommies during the Afghanistan conflict.

Martine and I started attending the concerts at the invitation of a good friend of ours who sings Second Soprano. But we wound up just loving the concerts as a heart-warming manifestation of the holiday spirit as we feel it should be—not the way it is in elevators and blaring over the speakers at shopping malls.

Best American Films By Year, Part Three

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Poster for The Wild Bunch (1969)

Poster for The Wild Bunch (1969)

This is the final installment of my series on The Best American Films By Year series, from 1915 to 1980. Why do I stop with 1980? Essentially, I think that by then, most of the great American directors were either not working or had passed on. As in the other postings, I begin with the choice of my friend Lee Sanders, who has seen far more films than I have.

Lee’s list stops at 1977. The choices for 1978-1980 are all my own.

When there is a second choice, it’s my selection when I have either not seen Lee’s choice or have my own preference. My choices are shown in red.

1961 – Two Rode Together (John Ford)
1962 – The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (John Ford)
1963 – The Birds (Alfred Hitchcock)
1964 – Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock)
1965 – Red Line 7000 (Howard Hawks); Inside Daisy Clover (Robert Mulligan)
1966 – Seven Women (John Ford)
1967 – El Dorado (Howard Hawks)
1968 – The Legend of Lylah Clare (Robert Aldrich)
1969 – Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone); The Wild Bunch (Sam Peckinpah)
1970 – On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (Vincente Minnelli); Patton (Franklin Schaeffner)

1971 – The Grissom Gang (Robert Aldrich); They Might Be Giants (Anthony Harvey)
1972 – Travels With My Aunt (George Cukor); The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola)
1973 – American Graffiti (George Lucas)
1974 – The Tamarind Seed (Blake Edwards); Godfather II (Francis Ford Coppola)
1975 – Night Moves (Arthur Penn); The Man Who Would Be King (John Huston)
1976 – A Matter of Time (Vincente Minnelli); Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese)
1977 – Twilight’s Last Gleaming (Robert Aldrich); 3 Women (Robert Altman)
1978 – Days of Heaven (Terrence Malick)
1979 – Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola)
1980 – Popeye (Robert Altman)

And that’s how the American Cinema ended, not with a bang but a whimper….

The NRA Is a Terrorist Organization

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Logo for America’s Newest Terrorist Organization

Logo for America’s Newest Terrorist Organization

I think it’s time to face the fact that—under the guise of allowing pudgy old white men to play with guns—the real intent of the National Rifle Association (NRA) is to facilitate the slaughter of innocents by confirmed lunatics.

The number of slaughtered innocents just went up today when a “shooter” (such a neutral term for such a hideous type of person) killed more than two dozen kids and teachers at a Connecticut school today.

Still, whatever happens, the Republican party will try to bury any negative response because so many of their supporters are pudgy old white men who like to play with guns. It doesn’t matter whether thousands of little boys and girls die under a hail of bullets, that’s just the price we pay for allowing pudgy old white men who like to play with guns to have a disproportionate say in the political process.

Perhaps what we need here is some computer matching: Camouflage clothing + body armor + assault weapons and, in general, multiple guns + young male + psychological problems + lack of education = possible “shooter.” It would take quite a bit of doing to link all that information together, but there does seem to be a pattern.

It’s a tough pattern to break. We look at ourselves as a nation of Marlboro Cowboys, whereas actually we’re a nation of psychopaths.

The Soup Diaries: Jazzing Up Ramen Noodles

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DSCN3272

Some Ingredients for a Perfect Ramen

This week it happened again. On Monday afternoon, I felt that premonitory tickling of the throat that means only one thing: Another bout with a cold or the flu. Fortunately, this time it turned out to be a cold.

The first thing I did when I got home was to ask Martine if it was all right if I made some soup for myself, as she had some leftovers in the refrigerator. I started up mincing or slicing up some carrots, serrano chiles, celery, and even a small potato and started it boiling furiously in three cups of water. I could have chosen other vegetables, such as cabbage, peas, spinach, onions, but I thought four veggie ingredients was sufficient.

It takes about twenty minutes of a furious boil before I add the broken-up ramen noodles, usually Chicken or Oriental flavor. (I like it but have no idea what makes it Oriental.) I stir the concoction for approximately three minutes before emptying the little flavor packet into the soup. Then I serve the ramen with two important ingredients, illustrated above:

  • Sesame oil, usually just a dash or two. Gives a really good flavor.
  • A Japanese chile powder mix called either Shichimi Togarashi (shown above) or Nanami Togarashi. Both add a little extra hotness (good for a cold) with the taste of black roasted sesame seeds.

IThe result is delicious, and a whole lot more nutritious than ramen on its own. What I’ve described here is enough for two people, but Martine will have none of my fire-eating ways, so I ate it all myself. It burned a little going down, but I felt it did me a world of good.

Eating Crow

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Eat That Crow Now! It’ll Only Smell Worse Later.

Eat That Crow Now! It’ll Only Smell and Taste Worse Later.

The New Yorker does it again in this hilarious cartoon by Peter de Séve in the November 26, 2012 issue.

Instead, what does the GOP do? They discount the results of the November 6 election and pretend they won it in a landslide. They not only lost it, but they are just-this-close to losing their reason for existence altogether.

The Tea Partiers will die off (remember they don’t like ObamaCare); the Libertarians will never amount to anything but a small, noisy minority; and the remaining wing nuts will gravitate elsewhere when the circus train rides out of town.