Now My Computer Is Dead, Too
Yesterday, when I got home from work, I noticed that my computer would not turn on. The culprit appeared to be my UPS (uninterruptible power supply) unit, which looks very much like the above, and which just emits a sick squeal when the button is pressed. So I called my friend and system consultant Mike Estrin and asked when he could drop by and replace it. Until then, I will probably not write many blog posts. So it goes….
Original French Poster
Because of my broken shoulder, I took today off from work. (Tomorrow, I’ll work half a day and see the orthopedic surgeon in the afternoon.)
Fortunately, the Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel was playing Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 Le Salaire de la Peur (better known in the U.S. as Wages of Fear). In the whole history of cinema, there are relatively few action films that can hold their own with the classics. Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai is one of them, and I can think of several Westerns, including Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch and Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo that are real action classics. Think of Wages of Fear as France’s contribution to the genre.
Starring Yves Montand, the film is set in some unspecified Latin American country in which there is an oil well fire. The American Southern Oil Company hires four foreign drifters to drive two trucks full of nitroglycerin over horrendous washboarded roads on the theory that at least one of the trucks will make it. They are to drive half hour apart in case one of the trucks explodes.
Along the route, they meet a number of obstacles that up the excitement level to the boiling point. These include a sharp right turn forcing them to back over a half-finished bridge full of rotten boards, a huge boulder in the middle of the road, and crossing a huge puddle of petroleum formed when a pipeline is ruptured.
There were two remakes, including a fairly decent one by directed William Friedkin called The Sorcerer (1977) with Roy Scheider. But the French original is much better.
Yechhhh! I Did It Again!
I went halfway around the world in 2006 to break my right shoulder by slipping on the ice in Ushuaia in Argentina’s Tierra Del Fuego. Last night, I did it again—this time to my left shoulder—right across the street from where I live in West Los Angeles. Last week, the city had scraped off the surface asphalt from the street in order to lay down a fresh layer, eventually. Unfortunately, the street surface was wildly uneven, and it was dark. While returning from a Persian restaurant across the street with my friends Bob and Suzanne, I stepped off the curb all right but missed the second step-down. My body twisted and I fell down hard on the street.
Fortunately, my head did not make contact either with the street or a nearby parked car, but my left knee and right hand got bruised. Suzanne, who is a nurse, immediately suggested I go to emergency; and they kindly drove me to the ER at Santa Monica UCLA Hospital.
Tomorrow morning, I will have to make an appointment with an orthopedist. Although my left shoulder is disrupted in several different directions and I may require surgery, the pain level is tolerable. I won’t be able to drive for a few weeks. Actually, my bruised knee bothers me more than the shoulder; and I’ll have to have that looked at as well. (In the ER, as Suzanne explained it, my shoulder trauma prevented my knee pain from throbbing .)
So it goes.
Not My Cup of Tea
The following post is a reprint from my posting on Yahoo! 360 on June 28, 2007:
No one I know loves iced tea as much as I do, especially when the hot days follow one upon another. And I like fruit juices, though I prefer to eat fresh fruit with all the pulp and fibers included. But the one thing I will not abide is a mix of fruit juice with iced tea.
Los Angeles in particular is replacing regular iced tea with what is called “tropical iced tea,” consisting of tea mixed with essence of raspberry, passion fruit, kumquats, or turkey giblets. Today, I had lunch at the Noodle Planet in Westwood, where an excellent China Mist iced tea was typically on hand. But no more! The cute young waitress informed me that their China Mist was replaced by a “tropical” iced tea. She sidestepped with remarkable agility, I thought, as a three-meter flame roared out of my mouth and singed several adjoining tables.
I asked her, “How would you feel if I sprinkled some banana or coconut juice into your coffee? or if I spiked your Coca-Cola with essence of oregano and nopal cactus juice?”
The way I see it, there is a tendency to making everything tutti-frutti, whether soups, snacks, steaks, fish, beverages, or—where I do not generally object—desserts. If that is the main contribution of Southern California to haute cuisine, then I say, “Back to the basics!” Henceforth, I shall wear a brown turban and gather around me other iced tea fundamentalists. We shall strike terror into the hearts and pocketbooks of those who would adulterate tea.
Let’s face it, instead of fruit, the additives taste more like refined petrochemicals, at the same time killing the refreshing, slightly acidic taste of the tea itself.
In the end, I had to settle for water. At least, they haven’t gotten to that—yet!
NOTE: I make an exception for fresh slices of lemon, lime, and occasionally orange. This way, I can control the taste of the tea. No oil company or coal tar manufacturer is allowed to tinker with my tea!
Looking at How People Cross the Street
Right outside the building where I work is one of Southern California’s busiest intersections, featuring a four-way crossing that makes for an interesting sociological laboratory. There are two behaviors that I would like to note at this time: First, some people jump the gun each time because they think they know how the signal works.Usually, they have to duck out of the way of the ten or so cars turning left onto Wilshire because they thought that the walk sign would come on right away. It doesn’t, and the Real Cool Guys showing how much they know risk getting flattened by motorists who just don’t care.
Even if the RCGs (Real Cool Guys) got the signals right, the signal occasionally does a “Crazy Ivan.” If you’ve ever seen the movie The Hunt for Red October (1980), you’ll know this is a major plot point, in which the Adam Baldwin character establishes his intelligence cred by predicting that, at regular intervals, Russian submarines do a 180 degree turn to flummox any pursuers. Sometimes the pedestrian crossing signal does the traffic equivalent by not letting any cars turn left during that cycle.
Much less dangerous is the cool persons’ sins of omission: One has to push the button for the pedestrian crossing signal to engage. One cannot rely on people crossing Wilshire on the other side of Westwood because that’s a separate system. Today, as I was coming back from lunch. A large woman was bogarding the crossing button without pressing it. That cool individual then had to deal with the sardonic leers of other pedestrians who must wait for the next cycle to cross. The coolness metamorphoses into shame which I occasionally make worse by commenting aloud, “Looks like someone forgot to press the button” while staring at the bogarder.
Looks Good: I Think I’ll Have Three Cups
All the blog posts in this series are based on Czeslaw Milosz’s book Milosz’s ABC’s. There, in the form of a brief and alphabetically-ordered personal encyclopedia, was the story of the life of a Nobel Prize winning poet, of the people, places, and things that meant the most to him.
My own ABCs consist of places I have loved (Iceland, Patagonia, Quebec, Scotland), things I feared (Earthquakes), writers I have admired (Chesterton, Balzac, Proust, and Borges); locales associated with my past life (Cleveland and Dartmouth College), people who have influenced me (John F. Kennedy), foods I love (Olives), and things I love to do (Automobiles and Books). This blog entry is my own humble attempt to imitate a writer whom I have read on and off for thirty years without having sated my curiosity. Consequently, over the weeks to come, you will see a number of postings under the heading “Tarnmoor’s ABCs” that will attempt to do for my life what Milosz accomplished for his. To see my other entries under this category, hit the tag below marked “ABCs”. I don’t guarantee that I will use up all 26 letters of the alphabet, but I’ll do my best. Today the letter is “T” for Tea.
Ever since I was a small child, I have preferred tea to coffee. I don’t even like the smell or even the look of coffee, let alone its taste. You won’t find me asking for a Venti anything at Starbuck’s. Barristas would have a difficult time making a living if they had to depend on people like me. What they do at their place of work, I could do more satisfactorily in my kitchen. And then, as my pot of tea cools, I have several additional glasses of iced tea.
While my favorite variety is Darjeeling, I will occasionally switch to Ceylon or Assam for variety. I also love green tea and several non Camellia sinensis local varieties, such as Té Manzanilla (chamomile) in Mexico or Yerba Mate in Argentina. People talk about herb teas as if tea is not an herb, but it is. I generally avoid more flowery teas, though a good Chinese jasmine is not bad on occasion.
While others spend many hundreds of dollars a year on coffee, my total expenditure on tea is considerably less than fifty dollars for far more tea than I can drink. A pound of loose tea leaves makes 240 cups of tea. By contrast, how many cups of coffee does a pound of beans make? Nowhere near, I’d wager.
Tonight, as I finish reading a book of Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulić ’s essays, I will have a tall glass of unsweetened iced tea made of Ahmad of London’s loose Ceylon blend.
Turtles at Mulberry Pond
There is a Native American rain ritual involving turtles, which, being a Hungarian American, I feel would not work if I performed it. So I watched the turtles at Descanso Gardens, which seemed to be having a population explosion. Maybe they’re doing the rain turtle ceremony themselves; and maybe, later in March, we will have a proper inundation.
I have come to suspect, however, that weather forecasters are evil sorcerers. Whenever we get some measurable rain, and we’ve had more so far than last year at this time, I believe that the forecasters suck it all up for filling their swimming pools. They take such pleasure in telling us after every rain that it did nothing to relieve the drought: In fact, it probably made it worse.
Then, whether the weather gets hot and dry, they take even more pleasure in announcing how lovely the weather is, what with all the surrounding brown hillsides with are bound to catch fire in the fall.
There’s more here than meets the eye!
That’s Dutch for “Tulip Mania”
Tulips are my favorite flowers. Sadly—in Southern California anyhow—they are in bloom only during the months of March and April. Wouldn’t you know it: That’s just when I am most occupied doing overtime work on taxes. When I got an e-mail from Descanso Gardens saying the tulips were in bloom, I wasted no time getting out there with my camera. Even though Martine has not been feeling good lately, the flowers and the warm weather made her feel a little better. As for me, it was a major lift for my spirits.
There was a time in the Seventeenth Century that tulips were big business in the Netherlands. Introduced to Europe late in the previous century from Turkey, tulips spread like wildflower (sorry about the pun). British journalist Charles Mackay wrote a book in 1841 called Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, in which there was a chapter about Dutch tulip mania, or tulpomanie. At its height around 1637, a single bulb for the tulip called “The Viceroy” (see below) cost between 3,000 and 4,200 guilders—this while the average skilled tradesman made around 300 guilders for an entire year.
Catalog Picture of “The Viceroy” Tulip
If you are interested in reading more, you can still find the Mackay book around, and you may be even more interested in reading Alexandre Dumas Père’s The Black Tulip, which dramatizes the whole tulip mania period in Holland. When the City of Haarlem offers 100,000 guilders to anyone who can produce a black tulip, all hell breaks loose.
Heurtebise and Orpheus in the Underworld
In just three hours, Turner Classic Movies is going to show one of my favorite films: Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950), starring Jean Marais, Maria Casares, François Périer, and Marie Déa. Cocteau took a Greek myth and adapted it to the French experience in the Second World War and came up with a majestic dreamlike work which not only works but sticks in the memory. (Also great is Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, which also takes a myth and somehow improves on it.)
Particularly memorable are the scenes in the underworld, where Orpheus (Marais) goes with Heurtebise (Périer) to bring his wife Eurydice (Déa) back. According to the myth—and the film—Orpheus is not supposed to ever look upon his wife again once she has been rescued from the world of the dead. That did not work, and before long Orpheus himself is shot and finds himself walking by the ruined barracks where Cocteau’s underworld is set. One new difference is that Death herself, played by the severe and beautiful Maria Casares has fallen in love with him. This was not part of the Greek myth, either, but it makes for a better story.
I do not remember how many times I have seen Orpheus. However many times it was, it was apparently not enough.
Wildfires in Argentina’s State of Chubut
Whenever one is traveling anywhere in the world, one must keep up with the news. When Martine and I went to Argentina in 2011, for example, there was a major Chilean volcanic eruption that spewed ash all over the State of Rio Negro, forcing us to remove San Carlos Bariloche from our itinerary and replace it with El Calafate. This time, there is a huge wildfire near Los Alerces National Park and the town of Cholila. While the eruption of the Puyahue/Cordón Caulle volcano in 2011 lasted for months, I am confident that the Chubut fires will be doused well before November, especially as there will be an intervening rainy season.
Among the Chubut locales I hope to visit are El Maitén, Esquel, and Trevelin.
The Area Around Cholila Before the Fire
Tarnmoor 
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