Hondurans Invade American Space

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Honduran Invader Armed to the Teeth

Even as thousands of Hondurans are making a bid to upset the American government, I am planning to invade Honduras. On Friday, I went to the Bretton Woods Foreign Currency Exchange in Brentwood and bought $140 worth of Honduran lempiras. (That’s not a food: It’s what their currency is called.) I checked to see f they had any Guatemalan quetzales, but they were dead out. I’ll just hope to get those at La Aurora International Airport in Guatemala City.

My Honduran destination is only a few miles shy of the Guatemalan border: The Maya ruins at Copán. It will be the first Maya archeological site for my upcoming trip. The others are Quirigua and Tikal, both in the Petén region of Guatemala.

Five Lempira Note

The Five Lempira note illustrated above has a portrait of Francisco Morazán, the only figure in Honduran history I have ever heard of before. He figures in John Lloyd Stephens’s Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatán as the generalissimo of the Central American Republic, which existed briefly before splitting up into its component parts.

I hope the Hondurans manage to find some place in the world of the Norte after they succeed in overthrowing the Trumpf Dictatorship.

 

Portrait of the American Voter

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Villagers with Torches from Frankenstein

It suddenly came to me this evening that, whatever happens with Trumpf, America is in for a rough time of it. Martine and I were at the Siam Chan, a local Thai eatery, and we overheard two elderly couples praising our Presidente’s performance over the first two years of his term. My reaction surprised even me: I toyed with the idea of getting up and giving them a tracheotomy with the fork that had plunged into my stuffed chicken wings. (No doubt, they got their money in the real estate business.)

Sad to say, the American voter is like the villagers in the Frankenstein movies. It doesn’t take much to get them all outraged and go after the monster with flaming torches. Except, instead of the monster, the victim of their wrath is anyone who doesn’t agree with them. I wanted to fricassee these two couples, shove them into their car, and set it alight. Not exactly a rational response, but that was the way I felt.

Now, the other side is exactly the same. I sincerely doubt there is much of a chance of compromise with a MAGA-hat wearer. Just as there was no love lost between many flyover Americans and that nigra Obama.

In this environment, political arguments can escalate to lethal plus in microseconds. This country is going to be riven between two opposing armed camps until we all learn that we inhabit the same land and have to find some way of coexisting peacefully. Is that possible? In time, yes; but in the near term, we’re all in for it.

So when you meet up with that crazy uncle of yours at some family dinner, it’s probably best to change the subject if anything like politics or religion is discussed. I mean, they burned heretics, didn’t they?

 

 

A Book Designed to Last

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The Statement at the Lower Left Used To Be on All Dover Paperbacks

As long as I can remember, I have been a big fan of Dover paperbacks. I was reminded of this as I started reading Howard Carter and A. C. Mace’s The Discovery of the Tomb of Tutankhamen (1923). There, at the bottom of the back cover, stood this bold claim:

A DOVER EDITION DESIGNED FOR YEARS OF USE:

We have made every effort to make this the best book possible. Our paper is opaque, with minimal show-through; it will not discolor or become brittle with age. Pages are sewn in signatures, in the method traditionally used for the best books, and will not drop out, as often happens with paperbacks held together with glue. Books open flat for easy reference. The binding will not crack or split. This is a permanent book.

Alas, this claim does not appear on more recent Dover paperbacks. In my collection, I have at least several hundred Dover books on chess, Shakespeare, ghost stories (a Dover specialty), mysteries, G. K. Chesterton, Anthony Trollope, John Lloyd Stephens, and numerous classics in the public domain. Not only were Dover books well made, they used to be relatively inexpensive. No more. I still follow them at their website and still occasionally order from them.

 

 

A Short, Unhappy Life

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What King Tut Looked Like at the Age of 18, When He Died

King Tutankhamen had a short and probably not very happy life. He became pharaoh at the tender age of nine, but he was bedeviled by illnesses that caused him considerable pain and shortened his life. Tut’s father was his uncle and his mother was his father’s sister. Apparently, incest was not expressly forbidden for the pharaohs and their families.

Notice the club foot: King Tut was accompanied with a number of canes on his afterlife journey. By the end, he also had a compound leg fracture, malaria, Köhler Disease, and possibly also sickle cell anemia, Marfan syndrome, mental retardation, adiposogenital dystrophe (note the feminine hips in the above reconstruction),  Kleinfelter syndrome, androgen insensitivity syndrome, aromatase excess syndrome, in conjunction with sagittal craniosynostosis syndrome, Antley-Bixler syndrome, and temporal lobe epilepsy. Oh, and he also had buck teeth and a cleft palate.

In other words, the mighty pharaoh was an unholy mess. There are signs that his burial was conducted in haste, as the paint on the walls of his tomb did not dry properly.

 

Tut Tut

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The Guardian Ka for the Afterlife of the Pharaoh Tutankhamen

There has been a major exhibit of treasures from King Tut’s tomb at the California Science Center in downtown Los Angeles. The exhibit started in March and is ending in a few days, so I decided I had better hustle if I didn’t want to miss my second chance at one of the world’s great archeological treasures. (I missed my first opportunity some years back.)

In the end, it was not a pleasant experience. The exhibit was well mounted, but it was mobbed with family groups who were intent on SmartPhone snapshots of everything on exhibit. It was as if instead of people with minds attending the exhibition, the attendees were actually digital devices. No one understood what was being photographed: They were merely putting together a portfolio that could be used to demonstrate to friends that, yes, they had been in the presence. The children were mostly bored and acting up.

In the end, I seriously suggested that, at the entrance to the exhibit, all SmartPhones be collected and smashed to smithereens with mauls. That got a few laughs from the museum staff, but I seriously doubt they acted on my well-intentioned comments.

Although I have been interested in Pre-Columbian archeology for many years, I know very little about Egypt under the Pharaohs. I know I have Howard Carter’s book somewhere in my library about his discovery of King Tut’s tomb, as well as a few other volumes on the general subject, I have been extremely remiss. Resolved: After I return from Central America at the end of the month, I will try to catch up on the subject.

And that is my only New Year’s Resolution for 2019.

 

 

The Tea Drinker

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I Am Addicted to Drinking Tea

I drink mine not from bone china, but from a Harris Ranch mug, which I bought to replace an earlier one broken while being washed. The nights in Los Angeles are getting cold (down to the forties in Fahrenheit and the single digits Celsius). What keeps me going is mostly Indian black tea. In the mornings, I brew a pot of mixed Darjeeling and Ceylon. For lunch today at the Moon House, I had about four or five cups of green tea, Tonight, as I read Cara Black’s Aimée Leduc mystery Murder in the Sentier,  I brewed myself a cup of Indian chai masala.

Coffee? What’s that? I’m told I’m probably the only person in the Continental United States who never touches the stuff. In fact, I am repelled by the taste and the smell of bitter beans, as I refer to them.

As I look forward to the coming new year, I will probably drink hundreds of cups of hot tea and, when it gets hot, hundreds of glasses of iced tea (the same blend as my morning pot).

I make no special claims for tea, other than that I love the smooth taste. Drinking it makes me feel calm, even just before going to bed.

My parents told me that, as a small child, I used to sip their coffee. What happened in my childhood years that made me turn so vehemently against the stuff? Did I have a bad cap of joe? Did I spill some on myself and burn myself? Apparently, even my mother and father didn’t know.

 

Boldog új évet!

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And My Computer Is Now Working!

I will start 2019 with my old office computer, which has been newly updated with additional memory and a new graphics card. Apparently, the computer freezes I described were mostly the fault of the graphics card, which was installed late in 2015.

As long as the Trumposaurus is occupying the White House—or, even, earth, above ground, that is—2019 can’t really be a great year. But we can make the best of things. It’s how we tackle adversity that really counts. We cannot expect to live a live that is devoid of adversity. Real happiness is not the result of living in lucky times: It’s creating our own luck in dicey times.

So, to all my readers, I wish you all the best.

By the way, the title of my post is Happy New Year in Hungarian. All of you, be boldog.

 

Fighting Off an Invasion

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Cimex lectularius and Progeny

At the same time that I was facing seemingly insurmountable computer problems, Martine and I were fighting off a bed bug (Cimex lectularius) infestation. I am writing about it only now because I wanted to stay mum on the subject until I felt we had licked the problem. It has now been a week since neither of us have received any new bites; so, I feel comfortable talking about it now.

If you follow my posts, you may remember that Martine last left me early in October, returning a few days later because she was unable to get a good night’s sleep. During her last getaway, Martine stayed at a shelter in South Central Los Angeles which housed hundreds of women, where I suspect she picked up a few “hitchhikers” of both insect genders. At first, we were bit a couple of times, which enabled the “pioneer” invaders to mate and lay eggs in our living room couch. From there, they migrated to the bedroom and took up residence in our box spring and the bed frame.

We counterattacked on several fronts:

  1. We encased both the mattress and the box spring in a zipped fabric that trapped bed bugs within and prevented further incursions.
  2. We threw out some old wood we had been using between the bed frame and the box spring.
  3. Where the wheels of the bed frame met the bedroom carpet, we used a double-bowl that contained diatomaceous earth (poisonous to bed bugs) in the inner bowl and soapy water (also poisonous to the critters) in the outer bowl. Note that bed bugs can neither fly nor jump, so the traps present an insurmountable barrier to them.
  4. Martine used a canister vacuum with a bladelike accessory for sucking up a large cache of bed bug eggs she found in the crook of the right arm of the couch.
  5. In addition to aggressive vacuuming, we washed and dried our clothes and sheets at the hot temperature setting.
  6. In case we find any more egg caches, we got some bed bug poisons from BedBugStore.Com.

I was the first victim of the little beasts’ attacks. I usually sit on the right hand side of our coach, and I picked up a pattern of bites on my right arm and the right side of my back.

During this time, Martine and I have noted the large number of mattresses and couches that are being thrown out from nearby apartments. I suspect that most of them are related to bed bug infestations. Our couch and mattress were both expensive and worth saving, as we both prefer extra firm and don’t want to pay out a small fortune.

 

 

Making Slow Progress

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A Slow Return to Normal? (I Hope!)

While my computer consultant was out of town during the Christmas holiday, I have made several attempts on my own to understand why my computer would hard-freeze at irregular intervals. During the Christmas holiday, I would start each session with a scan, based on the suspicion that the problem could be the result of a virus or other malware. Whenever I selected the Full Scan option of the Microsoft Malicious Software Removal Tool (MRT), the system would scan all umpteen million files on my computer in a little more than an hour. After that, the computer would not freeze for the remainder of the session.

Today, my computer has been up for approximately ten hours—a record!

In any case, I will not rely on this little trick, which may in fact be a fluke. I have two computers, both over five years old. My consultant will copy the hard drive on my existing computer, take the other computer to his lab, and install Windows 10. (I have been running Windows 7.) My alternate computer will have all my files (except for changes made in the next few days), and a new operating system. When he returns it, it will become my main computer, which will be fine with me as it has more storage and memory.

With luck, I will be able to resume my blog postings using my MRT trick as described above.