Art is 80

When Mitch McConnell disappeared because of illness, there were Democrats and Democrat-leaning pundits who imagined that McConnell was really, really, really sick (he probably was; he might still be) and that, because his office was so non-communicative about his condition, that he might have already died. While he did return to the Senate for one vote before the recess, whether he will be back after the election break is not clear. He is obviously very ill and very frail.

Digression: When we went to see Treemonisha at Lisner Auditorium in March, the McConnells were there, as well. This was before his current debilitation, but even then it looked like he was hardly able to walk; in fact, he wasn’t walking, he was barely shuffling. And looked like he was in a daze. End of digression.

Well, the speculation on his death might have started something. Much more recently, when Texas Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico got the flu (complicated by his weakened immunity from stage one diabetes) and disappeared from the campaign trail, two Republican-leaning pundits (no, perhaps they aren’t qualified to be labeled pundits) posted on Facebook that Talarico did not have the flu, but that he had checked into a mental hospital in Ohio for treatment following a mental breakdown. Although they apparently had no grounds for this, they made some up – conversations with hospital officials that did not exist for an example.

Talarico has returned to the campaign and denied that he was in a mental hospital, and all the evidence shows that he was just where he said he was, at his house, convalescing.

Now, the rumors that McConnell had died were, in effect, harmless rumors, if totally speculative. The rumors that Talarico had some sort of nervous breakdown was not a harmless rumor. It was meant to change the course of the Texas election, where Talarico was pulling more and more ahead of his opponent, Ken Paxton. This type of fragrant and groundless lie, in order to sway an election, should be a crime. Perhaps it is. I don’t know.

What I do know is that this rumor went beyond just going viral, and could have really influenced the outcome of the election.

Two interesting side notes about all of this. First, right winger Rhein Amacher, one of the two who started all of this, was scheduled to go on someone’s podcast to discuss the situation, but apparently canceled yesterday afternoon, basically saying that his lawyer had advised him to shut up, because he already may be called to account for spreading falsehoods that seem to meet the standards for slander or libel – public spreading of news he knew to be false about a public figure, and doing so with purposeful malice. (That’s my interpretation of the standard; I think it is pretty close to the actual standard.)

Second, in his many denials of his stay at this Ohio mental hospital, one of the things that Talarico said was “I’ve never even been to Ohio”. I have to tell you that I found that hard to believe. Who hasn’t been to Ohio? You have to cross Ohio to get anywhere. Poor James Talarico. Stuck in Texas his whole life.

On a different topic, Trump has a new press secretary, Katie Zacharia. I heard her opening press conference today (a short one, only 14 minutes, with only a few questions from friendly reporters – maybe preset questions), and she is getting strong boos from both the left and the right. Okay, so she didn’t do a good job today. I agree, but Jeez, giver her a chance. Really.

One thing she did say is that there was going to be a new facility, very large, in Cleveland, to repair submarine parts. Obviously, Ohio is an important state and it looks like the Democrats might flip both the Senate and the Governor positions in the midterms. But my reaction was – why would you build a submarine parts facility in Cleveland on Lake Erie. How could a submarine possibly get there? I know that you can’t just sail one up through Canadian waters to get to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and then up the St. Lawrence by Quebec City and Montreal, into and Lake Ontario, and then put it in a barrel and have it navigate Niagara Falls before getting into Lake Erie.

So, apparently, this facility is not to refurbish full submarines. That will be done elsewhere. This facility will repair or replace submarine “parts” – and they will have to be transported by rail or truck to the facility, and then back to the submarine port. Yes it reeks of politics.

And I must add that this is one of three submarine facilities that Trump has promised. The other two are in Maryland, a strongly Democratic state, but one which actually has water that a submarine could reach. Trump has said that there will be a new submarine shipyard and a “nuclear attack submarine parts plant”, both in Baltimore. As to nuclear attack submarines, I think that refers to the ship’s power source, not to its weaponry. Why isn’t this facility combined with the one to be put in Cleveland? Politics, I would guess.

Of course, Trump has a history of promising large employment-driven facilities that somehow never show up. I am still suspicious that there is going to be a steel mill spoiling the upper Mississippi in Iowa. You know, this mill is proposed to support a new iron mine in northern Minnesota, and Minnesota had hoped the mill would be built right there. But politics intervened and, like transporting submarine parts to Cleveland, transporting raw iron to Iowa seems totally uneccesary.

But we will see what actually happens.

Meanwhile, Trump flies to Alaska and pardons two admitted, confessed crooks. Unless those guys have enormous families, I don’t think that will win him many votes. But it does give me an idea for Donald’s next promise: “Okay, this is for all you crooks and felons out there. And I know who you are and I love you all. You are the best. No question. So, here is what I am going to do. And no one else has even thought about doing this. But Trump will. You vote Republican….and you are pardoned. You vote Republican…and you are pardoned. How great is that?”

As we were celebrating (not) Indigenous Peoples Day yesterday in the District of Columbia, I kept my ear on the news of the world, and got madder and madder at everything I heard. Then it occurred to me. What we really need is an Indignant Peoples Day. Maybe that is in fact what No Kings Days are (the next one is this coming Saturday), but it goes well beyond being indignant at Donald Trump. I am mad at every one who identifies with today’s Republican Party. And that includes the Jews who are supporting Republicans because some left wing Democrats question Israel’s right to obtain unlimited weapons support from the United States. And it even goes beyond that. I am mad at every nationalist and militarist, world wide. And that includes a lot of people.

You have to see the bigger picture here, and the bigger picture is that there is only one known planet with life on it (much less, human life), and that planet is endangered by a growing population and by personal, national and religious rivalries that sap progress and lead to destruction and environmental chaos.

All great empires have fallen. That is just the way it goes. And if the United States wants to be a great empire, it too will fall. And if Israel wants to dominate a section of the Middle East with a mixed population, it too will fall. And the more there is an America First or an Israel First attitude controlling political decision making, the more likely it is that we are simply feeding our own destruction.

I obviously have no proof of this, but if history tells us anything, this is what it tells us.

In such an interconnected world, only international cooperation at all levels can work against the dangers of an over emphasis on nationalism and religious/ethnic hierarchies.

I grew up being told in schools that the pen is mightier than the sword. I don’t know that that is at all true. In the short run, at least, the sword seems to hold the power. Perhaps some ideas stick around longer than most armies, but their influence may not be spread as widely.

Am I making any sense at all? Perhaps, not. I don’t know.

Let me do this another way. There are a lot of bright people in this world. There are those who are bright intellectually, and those who are bright in their understanding of how to help their fellow humans. But these days, everyone seems to be working in relative isolation. You read about people running a marvelous food bank, or writing a remarkable oped about glorious future possibilities. You read or hear about them, and you become a tad optimistic. But in 10 minutes, you are on to something else. Everything you read or hear about progress seems operating in its own cocoon.

Who are the future oriented intellectual leaders in the United States today? Who are the most influential activists? I would guess you are hard pressed to identify them, and I guarantee that those you name will be different from those named by your closest friends and family members.

We are living in an extraordinarily interconnected world. We are also living in an extraordinarily fragmented world. Dickens:

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.”

Dickens was talking about 1775, the dawn of the French Revolution. What came next was ideological hubris, change, and then complete destruction and chaos that only led to more of the same. Dickens could have been talking about 2026, the dawn of the ________________ (?).

We need people who see the forest, not the trees. The United States and Israel are both only trees. Yes, they may give shelter and nourishment, but when a forest vanishes, the trees disappear.

Not quoting Dickens, but thinking about today’s political leaders: They are the strongest of national leaders, they are the weakest of national leaders……and so on. We can and must do better.

I think we are learning that individuals, no matter how bright or well intentioned, are limited in what they can accomplish, given the world in which they live. I wrote that we went to see Woody Sez, a bio-play about Woody Guthrie. He was a stalwart supporter of unions. You needed unions, dedicated people working together for the common good. Perhaps now, we need a different sort of union – one not bound by national or religious or ethnic or racial characteristics, but one thinking about, writing about, planning, and carrying out a new supranational vision of world society. And, perhaps we are learning that, without some form of organization, people working in a fragmented manner and in semi-isolation are unable to have sufficient influence to really accomplish anything.

I would propose calling this organization (or movement) The Solution. To start, there would have to be a organizational (movement) platform (it is outlined above, quite simple), and a public sign up sheet. I don’t think it needs a bureaucracy. Maybe not even a CEO. Just self-identification with a group to foster international cooperation, and to ensure that international cooperation is not made subject to the national, ethnic, or religious differences that govern us today.

Now, have I made more sense? If your answer to that is “no”……., then we don’t stand a chance.

There is so much going on, but let me start with #1.

#1. Happy Indigenous Peoples Day from me right here in Washington, DIP (District of Indigenous People-ia). Seven years ago, the DC City Council abolished Columbus Day and replaced it with Indigenous Peoples Day, but they didn’t try to change the name of the District, which is still the District of Columbia. Now perhaps, after he decides which ocean he is going to rename the American Ocean, Trump (who is a big Columbus fan, by the way) will try to rename the District to the District of America. Then he could rename the city to Washington/Trump (sorry, Trump/Washington) and then determine that the renaming of the Day by the City Council was null and void, so we will again have Columbus Day, right here in Trump/Washington, DA. Stranger things have happened.

#2. I saw a post yesterday from someone on some platform that gave the best explanation of the diesel deal with Russia. It went something like this:

The United States is at war with Iran

Russia is supporting Iran in this war, and supplying Iran with materiel

We are buying diesel fuel from Russia

Russia is using the money we are sending them to send military equipment to Iran to fight us.

We are therefore funding the war against ourselves.

Again, thanks to Walt Kelly, “we have met the enemy, and they are us”. (By the way, “us” can either stand for “you and me and the rest of everyone” or the U.S. – but I guess you figured that out.)

#3. I present two charts:

I present the top chart not to laud the government of Cuba, which certainly has its problems (both internally and externally driven), but to demonstrate the failures of so-called American capitalism.

I present the second chart to demonstrate something that those who live in the states on the left of the chart already know – if a state is well educated, it will vote Democratic. In this regard, I call to your attention an article in Sunday’s Washington Post by James Marriott titled “Reading the Signs of a Post-Literate Age”. His premise is that, for the reasons he described, we are becoming less literate. If he is correct, this really augers well for the future of the Republican Party.

#4. We saw The Score at the Shakespeare Theatre yesterday, and I must say I didn’t find it very appealing. It starred Brian Cox, an 80 year old actor (plaudits to him) playing 62 year old Johan Sebastian Bach on his 1747 visit to Frederick the Great. Bach lived in Leipzig and Frederick’s court was in Potsdam.

The play takes a real event, the visit, and fictionalizes is into a “what might have really happened” narrative – a narrative of things the history books don’t tell us. What we know is that the visit occurred, that Frederick was a true Renaissance Man who was, among other things, a fine musician and composer, and that he really wanted to meet Bach. C.P.E. Bach, the composer’s composer son, worked at the court of Frederick and arranged the visit. Frederick and Bach were very different personalities – Frederick fairly secular for his age, Bach quite religious, and their musical tastes were different. Frederick composed a complex melody and challenged Bach to turn it into a three part fugue on the spot, which Bach did. Frederick then asked Bach to compose a six part fugue based on the same melody. Bach responded by telling him he could not do that ad lib, but that he would do it when he returned home and send it to him. Frederick did not anticipate that Bach would be able to do it, but he did, and later published the peace, called The Musical Offering, dedicated to Frederick. That is what we know.

The play cannot decide if it is an historical drama or a comedy, which I found disconcerting. There seem to be historical anomalies. For example, in the play, Prussia has occupied Leipzig militarily to the great consternation of Bach. In real life, unless I am overlooking something, the Bach visit occurred 6 or 7 years before Prussia moved into Saxony and occupied Leipzig. The play introduces an overly silly French character – none other than Voltaire – unnecessarily as a fly on the wall at the meeting. It is true that Voltaire spent three years in Potsdam, but again, this came well after the time of the Bach visit. The play introduces three composer friends of C.P.E. and they and Frederick himself make a large bet that Bach will fail – the other side of the bet was taken by C.P.E. (who had no money, in case he lost). This never occurred, as far as anyone knows.

So, I didn’t like the play. I thought the acting was spotty. Clearly, Cox is a good actor (you don’t need me to tell you that), but he played the part differently than I think Bach himself would have played it. My basis for that? I have none at all, but I think the fact that I think it shows something lacking in Cox’s interpretation of the role.

#5. After the play ended, we went immediately to the Martin Luther King Library (it’s only 2 or 3 blocks – depending how you count blocks – from the Shakespeare Theatre) to see the last feature of the Washington Immigration Film Festival. The film, titled Left Lane Straight, tells the story of the film maker’s family – Sephardic Greek Jews who survived the Holocaust and wound up in the United States. The movie is really well done (if a little too long at the end), and tells the relatively unknown story of the Jews who were exiled from Spain, wound up in the friendly Ottoman Empire, but began to have problems when nationalism affected the Empire’s European territory, including Greece and Bulgaria. Most of the Jews of northern Greece, a prosperous and prominent community, wound up dead at Treblinka, but this family survived, by hook, crook and a lot of guts and luck, making for a very interesting story. The filmmaker and, I think, a cousin of hers, had taken a lot of videos of their parents and grandparents in the 1990s (don’t many of us wish we had done that?), and they formed the basis for the film and the story line. Perhaps there is a way that I can get the film shown by the Haberman Institute. Keep posted.

What are these, you ask? These are three portraits drawn by high school students and in display at the OAS Art Museum of the Americas on 18th Street NW, just north of Virginia Avenue, one of DC’s lesser visited museums. With no permanent collection on display, the rotating exhibits are often well worth your time. It is a small museum, with only about six or seven rooms of art.

The current exhibit is entitled Passport to Patriotism and is co-sponsoredvby the State Department. I didn’t take notes, thinking I would find information on the museum website, but it is sparse, saying nothing about the national art contest that featured elementary and middle school, as well as high school artists. I thought all of that work remarkable.

Again, because I took no notes, here is a little of what else is on display.

As to the photo right above (one of dozens of photos), it seemscto me to represent an oxymoron? See what I mean?

The exhibit closes after next weekend, so if you want to see it….now’s the time.

Last night, we joined 100 or so other leftist radicals at Dupont Underground to watch and listen to Woody Sez, part of Ari Roth’s Voices season, and it was fun, even though Guthrie’s life was anything but. Familiar and unfamiliar songs (about 35 of them), four performers, each playing multiple instruments – guitars, mandolins, banjos, zither, piccolo, harmonica, bass, violin, viola, bones, spoons and more. All acoustic.

The familiar songs included This Land is Your Land, SobLong, It’s Been Good to Know You, The Sinking of the Reuben James, Riding in My Car Car, and This Train is Bound for Glory.

Not included in the show is his 1954 Old Man Trump, written about Donald’s father and housing discrimination. You still have time to see the show. Do.

Gotta run, or I would tell you more. Woody Guthrie, a true patriot, along with the others. But he was hounded his entire life and accused of all sorts of things. But you know that. This show is a fine tribute.

There was more to yesterday. Services at Adas Israel, and a failed attempt to find parking for the State Department book sale, but…..you don’t care about that.

A man, a plan, a canal, Panama. Years ago, I read a book about the building of the Panama Canal. At one time, there were 40,000 people working on the canal, and between the initial failed French effort in the 1880s and the successful American effort twenty years later, over 25,000 died of disease or accident (20,000 or so under the French). The workers were mostly Black and from Barbados and Jamaica. The French and Americans were almost all White. The Whites were engineers or had desk jobs. The Blacks were by and large laborers.

The canal was completed about 400 years after Balboa crossed the Darien Gap on foot and saw the Pacific Ocean, just under 50 miles from where he started at the Atlantic. I would be willing to bet that Balboa did not envisage the Panama Canal.

Just as he did not think about a canal bringing the two oceans together by boat, neither Balboa, nor the thousands involved in the design and construction of the canal, thought that there would one day be a city near the canal that would look anything like today’s Panama City, housing over 2 million residents, and with 31 buildings at least 50 stories tall. The picture above is Panama City.

I think of this today because of the strong earthquake that shook Panama City yesterday, and was centered in a tourist area about 125 miles from the city.

One of the more interesting things about Panama City (to me) is that it has a Jewish population of almost 20,000. Not only that, but its Jewish population is primarily Sephardic (not Eastern European) and largely Syrian, and primarily Orthodox. Panama City has the largest kosher supermarket outside of Israel, and (ready for this?) about 40 kosher restaurants. The mayor of Panama City is Mayer Mizrachi Matalon, and Panama the country has had two Jewish presidents.

Anyone ever travel there?

Closer to home, I want to extend my condolences to Donald Trump, for once again failing to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As Donald said, it is a great embarrassment for Norway and all Norwegians that the prize was awarded to an unknown liberal.

The award went to Navi Pillay, a South African jurist who had been active in anti-apartheid matters there, as well as with matters involving Rwanda and Israel/Palestine while acting as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. She led the study concluding that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza.

Whether she was a good choice for this award will be debated, I am sure. Interestingly, she is the fifth South African to get this award. This too might be something to look into.

The one thing to be certain, she will not follow in the footsteps of the 2025 winner, Maria Corina Machado of Venezuela, who (I still can’t believe this) gave her Nobel medal to Donald Trump who, confident in his entitlement, actually took it. And, as you know, even after Trump kidnapped Venezuelan dictator Maduro, basically took over the country’s oil industry, and claimed that he was now in charge of Venezuela, Machado (an opposition leader) is unable to safely return to her country.

Okay, full circle time. Where does Machado live in exile??? Of course……Panama.

By the way, between Venezuela and Panama is Colombia. I am reading a recent novel by Colombian born Ingrid Rojas Contreras, Fruit of the Drunken Tree. I highly recommend it.

Once again, we start with a photo.

The photo is on a postcard sent to a feed I get of old postcards. The man on the left is Prince Felix Yusupov, who was in line to be one of the wealthiest men in imperial Russia. He was forced to leave Russia after the 1917 revolution, and moved to Paris with his wife, Princess Irina Alexandrovna, whose uncle Nicholas was the last Russian tsar.

Before I get to Felix, I want to show one more photo I found of Irina, maybe the most elegant portait I have ever seen. (I understand that it was later colored.)

Moving to Felix, he does look like a nice (if very rich) young man. Couldn’t and wouldn’t harm a fly, right?

Well, not so fast. Felix Yusupov was the leader of the group of young men who killed Grigori Rasputin in the lower level of the Yusupov Palace in St. Petersburg. He wrote about that night in a book I have published in Russian in Paris, The End of Rasputin.

Wonder what the Yusupovs’ house in St. Petersburg looks like?

We visited it when we were in St. Petersburg and saw the exhibit of the Rasputin murder, as well as the palace theater. You have a theater like this in your house?

Of course, it was those damn socialists who forced the Yusupovs to move to France.

What is a socialist, anyway?

For a long time, I have complained about people using words like “socialism” without having any idea what the word means, so that the issue becomes really about “a word” and not about a word’s definition. I have always thought it would be difficult to prove that specific people were using a word like “socialism” to mean something other than what it actally means. But today, I heard our esteemed Vice President, Mr. Vance, actually tell us what he thinks “socialism” means. He said:

“I think, in reality, what it actually means in the American context is that you want to replace American workers with foreign workers, and you want boys to play in girls’ sports.” That, he said, is socialism.

Vance’s definition of socialism was so bizarre that the Trump administration had to come up with deflect attention. They have already used the threat of Iran bombing San Diego, so that wouldn’t work. So they came up with poor Cassidy Hutchinson.

Now, Cassidy is a talented young woman, who was lucky enough to get a White House job, and honest enough to testify at Trump’s second impeachment hearing. If you recall, she testified that someone who had been in the car with Trump told her that Trump, on Jan 6, lunged at the steering wheel when told by the Secret Service that he had to go back to the White House, and could not join the rioters.

The claim is that this was a lie, and therefore perjury. Simply put, this can not be proved. Period. The case will fail. But it will cost Cassidy a boatload of money. Thus, she will be poor Cassidy Hutchinson.

Let me end with this. I do have some concerns about the Senate races. Chris Papas is still struggling to beat the name Sununu in New Hampshire. Troy Jackson is clearly not a strong campaigner in Maine. James Talarico has not appeared in Texas for about two weeks. Recovering from flu, or something more? Jewish fear of El-Sayed in Michigan. Jon Ossoff becoming TOO aggressive in Georgia? All worries. Nov 3 may be right around the corner, but it is a long time away.

Whole Foods, at least “our” Whole Foods, has a “show me your ID, no exceptions” policy when you buy beer or wine. They take your card and scan it unto their system along with your invoice. Silly, of course, but if you want beer or wine,….

Today, I decided to buy a Sam Adams six pack when I was at Moti’s Kosher Market. The clerk, a regular, said, “I guess I can assume you are 21”. She smiled, and I thought about it and told her, “I am 21 times 4”. First time I thought about it and it makes me seem very old. On the other hand, I have only been old enough to buy liquor for 75% of my life. That sounds like maybe I am still a spring chicken.

Speaking of chicken, here is the worst joke I have heard in a long time:

where do you find a chicken without legs?

right where you left it.

What’s interesting about that joke is that you can tell it with all sorts of animals – chickens, cows, muskrats, dogs, cats. Yes, the list goes on and on. Try it.

We attended a small breakfast yesterday with Sarab Abu-Rabia Queder, a truly remarkable woman who teaches in the Education Department at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, and is the university’s Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion. She was the first (not the last, by any means) Bedouin woman to receive a PhD in Israel, about 25 years ago, from BGU.

She was born in Beersheva and has lived there most of her life, except when she did post-graduate work at The Hebrew University and at Oxford. Her field, perhaps not surprisingly is the study of Bedouin women and she is perhaps the most respected scholar in that field. Her father is a physician and (this sort of thing must run in her family) and the first Bedouin physician in Israel. She attended a number of different schools before entering BGU as an undergraduate, including Bedouin schools and Jewish schools (in one, she was the only Arab out of a school of 400).

Her father married out of his tribe (which is the largest Bedouin tribe in the country), when he married a woman of Nazareth, a primarily Muslim and almost exclusively Arab city in the north of Israel, and I am sure that created a stink in Bedouin circles at the time. Sarab’s husband is Bedouin (I believe he is an accountant) but from a different (and it the Bedouin hierarchy, a lower) tribe, and the marriage created a tremendous amount of opposition at the time. They have three children, and I did not get a chance to ask what their children were doing (they are probably in their late teens or twenties). She is very personable, and very well spoken (she speaks at least Arab, Hebrew and English), and uses her own story and struggles to show how Bedouin women can succeed in Israel.

As Vice-President of Ben Gurion University for Diversity and Inclusion, her job, as I understand it, is to ensure that the university finds places for, and treats well, Arab students, women, students with disabilities, LGBTQ+ students, and so forth. That is the kind of job that in this country, today, Donald Trump would probably insist that the university eliminate if it wanted any federal funding. Good to know it still exists in Israel.

She has written her memoirs, but they have not (yet?) been translated into English. I would like to have her speak for the Haberman Institute, and am trying to see if that is possible.

We did watch the Capitals 5-3 victory over the Penguins last night. The Caps are going to be hard to beat, in my opinion, in this, 41-year old Alex Ovechkin’s last year playing. So if you are looking for a team to follow….

And I did hear a part of Trump’s San Antonio speech, where he said that if Republicans don’t get elected, we would fall into a great recession, and discover that Iran would obliterate San Diego. And of course, if they do get elected, everyone (national debt be damned, and who cares about inflation?) will be $5000 richer.

Go, Trump (as both sides say).

On Tuesdays, we pick up our 11 year old granddaughter at middle school and take her to religious school at Adas Israel. When we got into the car, I set the GPS. Not that I don’t know how to get to the school, but I am beginning to find that, even when you don’t necessarily follow the GPS-selected route, it is helpful because you always know what time GPS expects you to arrive. And I wanted to get to the school when Joan got out, not too much before or too much later.

So I turned on the GPS, and set my destination as Ida B. Wells Middle School, which is only about 15 minutes from our house. We got into our car at about 3:15. The GPS quickly put up on the car’s screen a map with our route, and estimated time of arrival, and a note (which I had never seen before). The note said: “The Ida B. Wells Middle School closes at 3:30 p.m. Are you sure you want to go there now?”

Well, this shows that the GPS is thinking, I guess, but it isn’t thinking very well.

By the way, I also saw a headline on the DC News Now website that I thought could have been worded more carefully. It stated: “Man accused of entering McLean home arrested.” Well, first it made me glad that I don’t live in McLean. Can you imagine being arrested just because you were going home? But then, what I wanted to do is open my window and shout: “Defund the police. Defund the police.” But I didn’t.

Speaking of the police, let’s talk about the fire department. I was sitting on my porch reading this afternoon, when I heard the tell-tale sounds of a fire engine, with a loud siren, which was getting louder and louder. I looked around, saw no smoke and no panic, and assumed the fire truck was not going to stop in front of my house. But it did stop right across the street, and three fire people got out, took their EMT stuff out of the truck, walked up to the door of a house across the street and politely knocked, and knocked, and knocked again. There was no answer, so the three turned around, went back to their fire engine, and headed towards Connecticut Avenue.

I had a number of thoughts. First, what if the reason that no one answered is that there was an ill or injured person inside that couldn’t get to the door. Second, I thought to myself that this must be a false alarm, and who would do such a thing? Third, I realized that maybe that simply had the wrong address and, because of that, the person who called the fire department might die. I certainly wasn’t satisfied with the response.

When I opened the mail today, I saw what looked like an invoice from T-Mobile. I thought this unusual because I have not been a T-Mobile customer for several months, and when I canceled my account, I went over everything with a customer rep on the phone and was told that everything had been accounted for and I owed them nothing more. I was concerned that something had gone wrong in the T-Mobile bureaucracy, and perhaps it had. What was in the envelope was a standard T-Mobile invoice that didn’t tell me that I owed them anything, but told me that they owed me about $110. What they didn’t tell me is what I am expected to do with that information. I looked closely and confirmed that there was no $110 check in the envelope, and their invoice referenced the fact that the account had been closed. Oh, the little annoyances of life.

Speaking of that, while the drive from my house to Ida B. Wells was smooth, getting back on the road after Joan got into the car was complicated because there were many cars stopped at the school waiting for kids (as there always seems to be) even though it is a no parking/no standing area because there is only one lane going north and that lane abuts the curb. And there was one car that really wasn’t parked parallel to the curb, but was sticking out, making it harder for cars to pass. Coming the other way was a bus (the bus Joan usually takes to go home) and for what seemed like a longer time than I am sure it really was, we just sat there, waiting to see who would be in a position to make the first move. it wasn’t me.

On the way from Wells to Adas (a 20 minute drive), things started smoothly and I thought we would just make the 4 p.m. start time, when coming up Tilden Street, we saw one of the ominous “Road Work Ahead” signs, followed by a second sign that said “Road Closed” and a third that pointed to a detour to the right. I followed (slowly) the detour, because that’s what everyone was doing, and turned left on Upton Street, planning to turn left again onto Connecticut. But when I got to Connecticut I saw that there was more road work and a makeshift sign that said “No left turn” in graphics, not in words. I had to turn north on Connecticut and then make a U-turn when I got beyond the barricades in the middle of the street.

I could also see that going north on Connecticut (that is what I would normally do to get home after dropping her off) the traffic was very backed up (I think there was a lane closed a few blocks up the street, so I decided that we should avoid Connecticut and drive up Porter to Reno, and take Reno to Davenport. But guess what! Everyone else decided to do that, too. It was a complicated ride home.

But the weather was beautiful, I got a nice walk in, and I finished the Molly Crabapple book, Here Where We Live is My Country, a book primarily about the Jewish Bund first in Tsarist Russia and then in Poland until it was pretty much wiped out in the Warsaw ghetto. It’s a well written book, containing a surprisingly large amount of diverse material, although it is a bit biased by Crabapple’s progressive political philosophy which leads her to make continuing comparisons between things going on in the 1930s and 1940s to things going on right now in the Middle East and elsewhere.

While having supper, we watched the first of the Maine Senatorial debates, between Susan Collins and Troy Jackson, and I was disappointed by Jackson, the current Maine State Senate President. I haven’t heard what any of the pundits thought of his performance, but if I lived in Maine and was a political independent, I would have a hard time casting a ballot for him.

By the way, I didn’t think I would be able to watch that debate, as none of the 500 (or is it 5000?) channels on the cable feed was carrying it. But on my computer, I found it being streamed by a Portland TV station, and we could watch it, full screen with subtitles, on a computer.

Finally, we watched the fifth (of six) Gifford lectures from the University of Edinburgh, given by emerita Boston University professor Paula Fredrikson, on the the early growth of Christianity and its separation from Judaism. I’d tell you some of the things she said in this lecture (I don’t recall how much I told you about the first four), but it will have to wait. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe after we see the sixth and final lecture.

This post will get more and more interesting as we go along. Take my word for it.

We start with a picture.

And we go from there.

I learned a lot as we drove from Seattle to Missoula in July about a part of the country I hadn’t seen before. Perhaps one of the most significant things I learned, as it turned out, was in the small town of Cashmere, Washington (named not for the sweaters you may wear, but for the Vale of Kashmir, in India and Pakistan). Cashmere, located just a few miles west of the comparatively large town of Wenatchee, has a population of a little over 3,000, but is the home to Liberty Orchards, the maker of Aplets & Cotlets candies. Its factory, in fact, is at the corner where Aplets Way meets Cotlets Avenue. (The word “aplets”, of course, refers to apples, and the word “cotlets” to apricots. Perhaps you guessed that already.)

Why am I even telling you this? Well, it’s because we went to take a tour of the candy factory (because when you are in greater Wenatchee, you do want to do everything there is to do), but got there after the last tour of the day. So all, we could do was look at the factory’s retail store, and talk to the two women who worked there. In part because I had been very reticent to buy too many souvenirs on this trip, and in part because the two women were so friendly, I thought we should buy a box of their candies, although I had no idea as to how they would taste, or really what they were. I just knew that they made a lot of them.

Basically, they are Turkish delight. You know what Turkish delight is? Look again at the picture on the box and you will see. I think this brand is particularly good. We bought two boxes while we were there, I later ordered two boxes to be shipped to our house, and I then ordered two more, which came last week. I am disciplining myself to one candy a day for obvious reasons.

Art, you say, fine, you found some candy you liked. Why are you telling us all of this? And the answer to your question is to show you how, when you start to look at something (anything), you never know where it is going to lead you.

Liberty Orchards was started about 105 years ago in the tiny town of Cashmere by two young Turkish born, but ethnically Armenian best friends (they actually became brothers in law) named Mark Balaban and Armen Tertsagian (I know that Balaban does not sound like an Armenian name, but apparently Balaban’s father was named Balabanian), who had come to this country from Turkey around the turn of the 20th century, moved west to Seattle, found it hard to earn a living there and decided to move into the eastern part of the state of Washington, where they thought they could buy some land and grow some fruit. They did that, and also built a factory to make candy just like they remember from their Turkish upbringing.

Their enterprise was a big success, as you would imagine since the company still seems to be thriving. And Tertsagian’s children and grandchildren stayed with the company until 2021 (the Balaban kids went in other directions), when the company was sold.

So? Big deal. But this is where the only modestly interesting story gets more interesting. So stick with me.

The company that acquired Liberty Orchards was KDV USA. You have probably never heard of KDV USA, but it is one of a large number of companies primarily owned by a Russian oligarch/billionaire named Denis Shtengelov.

Here is what I know about Shtengelov. He was born in the Siberian city of Tomsk, and not to a wealthy family. He went to Tomsk State University, graduating in 1994 (he is still only his 50s), and went into the sunflower seed business, basically buying up sunflowers from growers and selling some retail, and pressing some into oil, which he sold. This turned out to be successful enough that he could purchase a small candy company three years later, and according to Gemini, over the next 25 years, Shtengelov built up his holdings, which he called KDV Group, by acquiring or developing various snack companies, starting a grocery chain that eventually had 1300 stores in Russia, and then acquiring assets in Europe, Australia and the United States. His United States holdings now include Liberty Orchards. His companies expanded to have almost 40,000 employees world wide, and one site told me that it became the second largest snack conglomerate on the planet. His wealth was estimated to be more than $2.5 billion.

Shtengelov is obviously a very astute fellow and was astute enough to realize that he would be better off living somewhere other than Russia, and he chose Australia, where he now lives in the city of Gold Coast. Now, I have to admit that I assumed that Gold Coast was the name of an area, probably an area of Sydney or maybe Melbourne. That is what I assumed. But no (and maybe everyone but me knows this), Gold Coast is in fact a city in Queensland, about an hour south of Brisbane, and has about 750,000 residents, making it Australia’s sixth largest city. As I often say: who knew?

At any rate, this is where Shtengelov and his family now reside, apparently along side of a large group of wealthy Russians who have chosen this city, perhaps because they couldn’t find another location less like Mother Russia. In addition to being the head of the KDV enterprises, Shtengelov has a resort complex in Gold Coast, with a hotel, 20 tennis courts, two golf courses (one 9 and one 18 holes), pickleball courts, a gym, a spa, restaurants and so forth. He is a citizen of Australia, as well as Russia.

Well, Art, you say, that’s all moderately interesting, a Russian billionaire owning a candy factory in Cashmere, Washington, but I am not sure it is so interesting that it was worth a full blog post.

I say, hold on, stick around, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Shtengelov is no friend of Vladimir Putin, and he has been public about his opposition to Russia’s war against Ukraine. This led to charges being filed against him by the Russian government about a year ago in Moscow, alleging (perhaps accurately), that not only was Shtengelov badmouthing the Russian military activities in Ukraine, but was in fact engaging in commercial activities selling food and perhaps other merchandise to support the Ukrainian army. Additional charges were brought against Shtengelov’s father, who still lives in Russia, for providing various types of assistance to Ukraine.

KDV was designated by the prosecutors, and then upheld by the Russian courts, as an “extremist” organization, which was earning money in Russia and exporting the proceeds to help the enemy in Ukraine, thus in effect becoming a treasonous organization. The Russian government also claimed that Russian assets had been taken out of the country to invest in enterprises in countries unfriendly to Russia, such as the United States, the Netherlands, and Australia. The remedy that was requested by the government was the right to take and nationalize, without compensation, all of the assets of KDV.

Once the courts approved the condemnation of the assets in October last year, the assets of KDV’s Russian factories and the 1300 store chain of groceries were taken from Shtengelov. Because the courts have no jurisdiction outside of the borders of Russia, the state could not lay claim to European, Australian or American assets, which remain under the control of Shtengelov and KDV. It appears that Shtengelov did not challenge the decisions of the Russian court, nor the expropriation of its assets by the government, having concluded that there was no real chance for a reversal.

I knew nothing about any of this, of course, but have now seen that commercial properties of entities believed to be operating against he interests of Russia and for the interests of Russia’s enemies have been seized by the government in increasing numbers. Most of the businesses so condemned have apparently been foreign owned business with Russian locations. There have apparently been few other assets owned by Russian citizens expropriated for this reason, and the KDV seizure was one of the biggest, if not the actual biggest, seizure that the government has made.

I guess the mainstream media just hasn’t been following these stories. There must be much else we don’t know about what is going on there, as well.

So, we by chance go to Cashmere WA, we by chance go to the Liberty Orchards candy factory and don’t immediately walk out when told we can’t take a tour, we for no good reason buy some of their candy and like it, and then because this is the kind of thing I do (but still only by chance), I decide to look at the history of the company, and all of a sudden we are dealing with the largest expropriation of commercial assets belonging to a Russian citizen accused of aiding and abetting the enemy. Just by chance.

I hope reading to the end was worth it.

You might, but my guess is that you don’t. It’s Russian writer Anton Chekhov, and this photo appeared on my phone yesterday for unknown reasons, and it intrigued me because about 125 years ago, when the photo was taken, you rarely saw a picture of someone with a twinkle in his eye, a subtle smile on his face.

But here it is.

Chekhov, in my opinion, was a genius. If there is a writer that I would like to emulate (and I am not big on emulation), it would probably be Chekhov. There is no drama as compelling as a well acted and directed Chekhov play, and no fiction as appealing as a well done Chekhovian short story. And he did it (1) while maintaining a full time medical practice, and (2) suffering from tuberculosis. And he died at age 44. Just imagine what his output would have been had he lived what we would call a full or a long life. Just like what would Mozart or Schubert have composed if they had lived past 35 and 31, respectively? Or Bizet or Henry Purcell past 36? Or Mendelssohn or Gershwin past 38? Chopin past 39?

Those of us in or near our 80s (and that is a large percentage of the readers of this blog) have lived longer than most people (even contemporaries, not just in the past), yet may not feel done, or even that old. Yet we have been very lucky, and I hope that all of that luck continues for years to come.

But not all are lucky, and some have accomplished so much in lives much shorter than ours. Let’s look just at celebrities: James Dean (24), Marilyn Monroe (36), Bruce Lee (33), Elvis Presley (42), Natalie Wood (43), Grace Kelly (53), Richard Burton (59), Gilda Radner (43), Michael Landon (55), River Phoenix (23), Tommy Rettig (55), Tupac Shakur (25), John Denver (54), Madeline Kahn (57), Ricky Nelson (45), Errol Flynn (50), John Belushi (33), Sid Vicious (21), the Notorious B.I.G. (24), Sharon Tate (26), Jean Harlow (26), Jimi Hendrix (27), Janis Joplin (27), Kurt Cobain (27), Jim Morrison (27), Amy Whitehouse (27), Heath Ledger (28), Edie Sedgwick (28), Hank Williams (29), Carole Lombard (33), Sam Cooke (33), Jayne Mansfield (34), Andy Kaufman (35), Bob Marley (36), Princess Diana (36), Sal Mineo (37), John Lennon (40), Dorothy Dandridge (42), Romy Schneider (43), Judy Holliday (43), Marvin Gaye (44), Freddie Mercury (45), Judy Garland (47), Whitney Houston (48), Alan Ladd (50), Michael Jackson (50), Veronica Lake (50), Diana Dors (52), Vivien Leigh (53), Betty Grable (56), Prince (57), Hattie McDaniel (57), Susan Hayward (57), Humphrey Bogart (57), George Harrison (58), Clark Gable (59).

And writers? Stephen Crane (29), Anne Bronte (29), Emily Bronte (30), Sylvia Plath (30), F. Scott Fitzgerald (44), Robert Louis Stevenson (44), D.H. Lawrence (44), Arthur Rimbaud (37), Lord Byron (36), Percy Shelley (29), John Keats (25), Lorraine Hansberry (34), Nikolai Gogol (42), Guy de Maupassant (42), Jane Austin (41), Franz Kafka (40), Jack London (40), Edgar Allen Poe (40), Flannery O’Connor (39), Alexander Pushkin (37), Charlotte Bronte (38). And these, who I think all died in their 40s or early 50s: George Orwell, O. Henry, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Mitchell, Carson McCullers, Stieg Larsson, Honore de Balzac, Richard Wright, Kate Chopin, and Emily Dickinson. And even Shakespeare at 52.

Artists? Modigliani (36), Beardsley (26), Caravaggio (39), Schiele (28), Eva Hesse (34), Franz Marc (36), George Bellows (43), Seurat (32), Toulouse-Lautrec (37), Van Gogh (37), Basquiat (27).

I am not sure what brought this on, other than appreciation for long life (even when it doesn’t seem long) and sadness for those whose lives were cut off so early, and who did not have the time to express the fullness of their talent.

I know this is an odd blog post. But it does make you think, no?

The title is my latest poem.

I was reading yesterday’s Washington Post and several items caught my attention. One was an editorial titled Who Can Save California, and the thrust of the article seemed to be that California’s Democrats should stop blaming Trump for all that’s wrong with their state and begin to look at themselves. “Something, eventually, will need to change”, it said. It then compared California with Oregon and Connecticut, saying these three blue states had the highest unemployment in the country, and castigated California’s Democrats for over regulating construction and having a large homeless population.

Well, gee, Jeff Bezos. California is an enormously complicated place. It has environmental concerns that many states do not have, it has a large Spanish speaking population, it has enormous cities and metropolitan areas, a lot of things. But I decided to look into the question of unemployment – do blue states, by and large, have more unemployment than red states? The answer is that they do.

But there are reasons. Blue states tend to have larger cities and more minorities, and many blue states have older industrial bases that have been in decline. Blue states tend to have more of certain problems than red states tend to have. The problems need addressing and this is one reason these states elect Democrats.

On the other hand, blue states tend to be ahead of red states in education and technology, and in average incomes. And there is one other thing. Blue states do tend to take care of themselves. You probably know this, but let’s say it again. Blue states tend to give to the federal government more than they receive back. Red states tend to take from the federal government more than they contribute.

So it’s a mix. The Post does not recognize that mix.

Another article that struck me in yesterday’s Post is titled “While the U.S. debates AI risks, China mandates training its youth”. While both countries are modifying their education systems to accommodate AI, it appears that China is doing considerably more. They are already ahead of us in so many areas, and it looks like, in the near future, AI may be added to that list. Whether this is a curse or a blessing, I am not sure.

Speaking of AI, I just added Muse, the new AI service app, to my phone, and I met Muse, my new AI assistant, a cute little guy who aims to please. He asked me a bunch of questions about myself that I didn’t want to answer, so that I told him that he scared me. He was very polite and apologetic and told me that he did not want to scare me, and that he would never hold onto more information than he needed to help me. He then went on and told me that he would promise me not to hold onto any information whatsoever unless I specifically authorized him to.

I then realized that, with or without giving him my bio and private thoughts, I had no idea what he could do for me. I have seen lists of what Muse is able to do and, frankly, either I do those myself, or I don’t need to do them at all. Maybe one day after a deep snow when I can’t go outside anyway, I will devote some time to this and figure out how Muse can enrich my life, rather than just complicate it. I told Muse that I really didn’t understand what he could do for me now that would help. His response was, as you might suspect.

“That’s okay, Arthur, just come back to me when you think of something. And if you never think of anything, that would be okay, too.”

That last sentence did bother me a bit. He obviously did not think I was as cute as I thought he was.

Last night, we had dinner on The Wharf with friends at a palindromic restaurant, Zooz. The Wharf is a half mile of new office and residential buildings on the Potomac in SW DC. Here is a photo of the Zooz building from across the street.

The photo was taken as we left the Arena Theatre, where we saw the newest production of that extraordinary dance group, Step Afrika. Maybe more on this group tomorrow.

Now, it is 9:30 a.m., and I am going to watch a football game, Washington and Indianapolis. From London.

I have been looking for someone who seems happy with the world, and I found him on a shelf in a closet. I am going to leave him there, so that he is not exposed to the rest of the world.

I am trying to ignore much of that world, as well. Looking for other things to think about.

For example, today I thought about something that happened in 1968. Depending on how you look at it, 1968 is a long time ago, or just yesterday. To me, it is pretty much just yesterday, although 1968 is 58 years ago. When I was born, 58 years ago was 1884, and I certainly never thought of that as just yesterday. But I digress.

In 1968, when I was living in St. Louis after law school graduation, a co-worker was a volunteer with the Missouri School of the Blind. He spent his time with the youngest children, I think elementary and middle school age, chaperoning groups of them to various places in the city, places they would otherwise not get to. I remember him coming to work one Monday morning, extraordinarily upset because he took a bunch of those children on Sunday to a bowling alley, but when he got there, he was told that the alley would not let the children bowl. Why? Because one of the kids in this group was Black, and the bowling alley excluded Blacks. I remember him saying: “These were just young kids. They couldn’t see. What did they know of Black?”

Another Digression: Yes, the 1964 Civil Rights Act required all places of public accommodation to stop any racial exclusion, but there was a movement among some bowling alleys to deny that they were subject to the act, saying that they were not a place of public accommodation, but just a place where people got together to play a recreational sport (recreational sports were not covered by the act), while some became “private clubs”, where you could join for $1 if you were white. I don’t know the details about this particular St. Louis venue. End of another digression, but…..

A further digression: It wasn’t until the Americans with Disabilities Act was passed in 1990 that a bowling alley was clearly identified as a public accommodation under federal law. End of further digression.

Moving back even further in time (i.e., even before 1884), I remember the story that my grandmother told, growing up in the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, living in a locale where there were apparently very few Jews. She went to a Catholic convent elementary school, and her mother (my great-grandmother Tovah Dicker) planned a party for her fifth or sixth birthday, inviting all the children in her class. No one showed up, and they learned that the kids were all forbidden by their parents to go to a party in a Jewish house. That would have been in the late 1870s.

And then there is the well known story, from about the same time, of the wealthy Jewish banker, Joseph Seligman, who was turned away when he and his family showed up at the hotel in Saratoga Springs, NY, where they had stayed for years and where they had made reservations. That was also the late 1870s, and apparently marked one of this first times Jews had been excluded from a hotel in this country, or at least the first time such an event became a major news story.

And, yes, I am going somewhere with this.

When I was growing up, St. Louis was a pretty segregated city. Except for the Blacks who worked as housemaids or laborers, I had no experience with members of that race. I never thought of it in terms of right or wrong. That is just the way it was. There were many places where Blacks were not allowed (restaurants, for instance). But, after all, there were places where Jews were not allowed. Mainly country clubs and certain residential neighborhoods (perhaps the majority of residential neighborhoods), and Jews took that, too, as just the way things were. We Jews never wanted to join clubs that wouldn’t have us. We never needed to move into neighborhoods that didn’t want us. We were fine. How the Blacks felt at the time, I don’t know. There was nothing they could do about that, that’s for sure. And this is just the way it was.

But since the 1870s and even the 1960s, many changes have taken place. Starting with the passage of federal and state antidiscrimination laws, and moving on to changes in the way most people looked at their social and societal environments, things changed and, even when the law may not have specifically required integration, integration happened, right? (Let’s leave out the problems with integrating schools, and the apparent shortfalls in integrating churches.)

Do you know the journalist Catherine Rampell from MS NOW and The Bulwark? I find her a very professional journalist and easy to watch TV personality. She was a guest on a TV show yesterday morning talking about the economy and the new jobs report, and while she was talking, I decided to look her up on Wikipedia (I do that a lot, as you might imagine). She was raised in Palm Beach FL, and her parents were the name partners of the largest accounting firm in Palm Beach. They served very rich clients, and I am sure made a very good living doing it. Her background seems clearly to have been economically privileged, and she was educated in private schools and then Princeton.

After I read her bio in Wikipedia, I went on to her parents, starting with her father. In reading about her father, I came across an incident that reminded me of my grandmother’s story of 150 years ago, and then of my co-worker’s experience in the bowling alley in 1968.

In 1990, Catherine Rampell’s brother was four years old. He went to a preschool and one of his classmates had a birthday party. All the children in the class were apparently invited, but young Rampell was not. This was because the party was to be held at the Palm Beach Bath and Tennis Club, which did not permit Jews, even 4 year old Jews, to come onto their property.

The story goes on to show what Richard Rampell did about it, but I don’t need to go through that here.

My purpose of all of this, I guess, is to show that, even when things look like they have improved, retrogression is always just around the corner. While you have courts and governments that are progressive, rather than retrogressive, those who want to move backward tend to be marginalized and dealt with one at a time, as necessary. But when your government changes, and the retrogrades wind up in charge, you find that there were more people than you may have thought longing for the 1870s. That seems to be where we are today, and we have to change that. Vote blue, as they say, in November.

In the meantime, I will continue to make sure that my Mensch on the Bench (not to be confused with an Elf on the Shelf) remains sheltered from the evils in this world. When things improve I will let him out.

So on Fridays, after a long, hard week of not working, sometimes all I want to do with this blog is throw some things out that might (should?) be interesting to my readers.

For example, I have just calculated the first full month with my new Prius, and I went 614 miles, and averaged 53.8 miles per gallon. I think September was a typical month for me when we are in town, an average of about 20 miles per day, with some days twice that, and some days much less. I do like to drive, you know. If I annualize the 614 miles, I get 7,368. Our lease gives us 12,000 miles per year before we have to pay a premium, so we should be good for 4,000 miles of road trips. Will I drive 4,000 miles a year on the road at ages 84, 85 and 86? Not sure (and that is being optimistic).

You might remember (ha!ha!ha!) that on our road trip not to Maine, we averaged 63.8 miles per gallon. The estimated mpg for the car was 57 mpg both highway and city, which I couldn’t quite believe would be accurate, but if you add the numbers that my car turned out for the month of September, and the road trip, you get 58.8, which is pretty close to 57, so I can’t complain.

By the way, the color of my red Prius is “Supersonic Red”. Our Israeli friends reminded me that when they were last here, and I had a red 2015 Prius, it was “Absolute Red”. They asked the difference. I was embarrassed to say that I didn’t know (it took me a while to remember the old color was Absolute Red; they remembered it as Totally Red, and that didn’t sound right to me, so I had to wrack my brain).

Gemini tells me that Absolute and Supersonic Red are “two completely different paint colors, with distinct paint codes, formulas, and visual effects”. Okay, go on……

1. Absolute Red is “a classic, vibrant, non-metallic bright red…..It looks essentially the same flat shade of bright red whether it is in direct sunlight or shade”.
2. Supersonic Red “features a specialized multi-layered process that uses a metallic/pearlescent base layer topped with a translucent, red-tinted clear/mid-coat. Because of this formula, the color has a massive range: it looks liked a deep, rich crimson in the shade, but literally glows and pops with an intense, bright candy-like depth when direct sunlight hits the metallic flake.

How is it possible I did not know?

I like Google’s Gemini mainly because it is right there when I Google something, but also because of its sense of humor. I am not one of those who engage Gemini in long back and forth conversations, I just ask it a question and maybe one follow up question for the most part. (By the way, when I ask anything of it, I try to be very polite, as if I am talking to a very sensitive person. I am not sure why that is, but I think it a bad sign for the future of the world.)

Sense of humor, you ask, while scratching your chin?

We were looking tonight at a picture of English intellectual, Bertrand Russell, who was a tall (I think, tall) and very skinny (I know, very skinny) guy. I decided to ask Gemini “Was Bertrand Russell fat?” just to see what it would say.

I quote: “No, Bertrand Russell was not fat. He is consistently described as exceptionally lean, thin and slight. His most famous book, The History of Western Philosophy, was described by a New Yorker reviewer as a “fat book”.” Gemini also mentions that Russell’s father, on the day of Bertrand’s birth in 1872, wrote in his diary that his son was “found to weigh 8 1/2 pounds, and he looked fat.”

It went on to offer some tidbits that I wasn’t looking for, telling me that Nietzsche and Wittgenstein were also skinny, but that David Hume was quite stout. Maybe it thought that I was going to ask about these three fellows next.

Because yesterday was Thursday, you might be wondering what happened at my breakfast meeting. The topic was something like “The Jewish History of Prince George’s County, Maryland”. I found it very interesting, but my guess is that the typical reader of this blog will be happy to know that I am not going to say anything about it. If you are curious, you can ask me, or you can ask Gemini.

What else? Let’s see. Well, I was in the Dupont Circle area yesterday afternoon, and I stopped into Emissary, which calls itself a place to stop for “coffee and conversations”. I wanted neither, but I wanted something cold and settled for a glass of strawberry lemonade, which only set me back $6.60, to which I added a 10% tip. I want to give credit where credit is due. Made with fresh strawberries and fresh lemons, it was delicious!! And it was large enough that I was full on the first half, and Edie got the second half, so we each had a strawberry lemonade for only $3.30 a person. I couldn’t recommend it more highly. Just go with a friend.

Pretty big weekend scheduled. A Sukkah party, a Japanese dinner, Step Afrika at the Arena Theatre, and Sunday dinner at an Italian restaurant, La Speranza, to celebrate son-in-law Josh’s birthday.

Today? Hopefully, get a lot of paperwork done. You remember paperwork?

It was a beatiful day yesterday, so instead of going to a museum, we took a walk. We went to the Palisades section of Washington that sits high above the Potomac River. We took a simple route- Davenport to Nebraska/Loughboro down to its end at the Delacaria Reservoir and water works, at Potomac Ave. We walked up Potomac Ave, admiring the beautiful homes built with beautiful views of park, river, and Virginia, and then noticed a marked trail that skirted the river side of the fenced reservoir grounds. This is what we saw:

Perhaps “two trails diverged in a yellow wood”, but we only saw one trail and the woods looked green, but we took it, not really knowing where it was going, or how long it would take to get there.

Our first clue:

It’s a 19th century boundary marker, and on it is the following message: B & O R R, the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. That meant we were in an old railroad right-of-way, and that meant we were heading to the paved Capital Crescent Trail, which runs 11 miles from Silver Spring to Georgetown.

Before we reached the Capital Crescent (and it wasn’t that far), there were some nice views, this one looking over Canal Road:

And after we reached the trail, we ducked many speeding bicycles and said hello to joggers and fellow walkers, and we soon passed from the District of Columbia into Maryland, and saw two benches, each dedicated to a deceased cyclist.

We stopped at this one:

This bench is dedicated to Hume Horan, “diplomat, cyclist, friend”, and for some reason, it led me to the question: who was Hume Horan?

Hume Horan (1934-2004) was a member of the United States Foreign Service, who served as our Ambassador to Cameroon, Equatorial Guinea, Ivory Coast, Sudan and Saudi Arabia. His born name was Hume (his mother’s last name) Entezam (his father, who divorced his wife when Hume was three) was an Iranian diplomat, who also was head of the National Iranian Oil Company. His mother later married a journalist named Horan.

Among other things, Horan had the knack of being kicked out. He was sent to a prep school in Rhode Island, the Portsmouth Priory, and was kicked out (he was happy to be kicked out, apparently). And he was kicked out of Saudi Arabia by King Fahd. Why did this happen? According to the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, it started when King Fahd decided to by some ballistic missiles from China after the United States had cut off all military sales to the kingdom. Horan was told to send a strong message of disapproval to the king, which he did. But at the same time, the U.S. from Washington apparently sent a different message to King Fahd which was much milder than the one set by Horan under instruction. The king was very angry at Horan, and his ambassadorship ended after nine months. (And yes, there was a back story – Pres. Reagan did not want to cut off arms sales to Saudi Arabia, but Congress did, and passed a law to that effect, back when Congress could do something. Reagan vetoed the law, and Congress overrode his veto. Thus, Horan was in a difficult position, being required to inform King Fahd of the American position, while Horan’s president wanted to make clear to Fahd that it was all Congress, not himself. )

Horan’s last diplomatic position was working with Paul Bremer in Iraq after the U.S. “won” that war. He died of prostate cancer that must have cut short that position.

So, don’t blame Hume Horan. Yes, he was kicked out of Portsmouth Priory, and kicked out of Saudi Arabia, and even benched in Montgomery County, but over all, his career seems very successful.

but this tree wins the prize for the best bark.

Today is a day where neither of us have anything on our calendar. Always enough to do around the house, but maybe we should go somewhere. For example, we have never been to Planet Word, the no longer very new DC museum devoted to, as I understand it, words. Everyone loves it, it is apparently for adults as well as others, and why haven’t we gone?

Another place we could go is the National Geographic Museum. I used to see every exhibit at the National Geographic Museum, because it was only one block from my office, but then I retired and then they closed the museum to go through a multi-year renovation, and in fact they just opened it a month or two ago, which partly explains why we have never been there. It is getting raves, so maybe that is what we should do this afternoon.

(Okay, keep this quiet, but even though the National African-American History Museum has now been open for ten years, we have never been there, either. That is sort of embarrassing and I would never say this in public. I don’t think that not going is a sign of subliminal racism, although I guess if it’s subliminal, you don’t really know. In part, it’s because I think I know a lot about the African American experience and, like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, how many times to you have to be voluntarily kicked and knocked on your head? In part, it’s because everyone says that the museum is so large and so interesting that you need to devote more than one visit to see it all. In part, because there is no parking, unless you are lucky enough to find a street space. If you look up parking options, you see that they give you directions to parking lots that cost about $20. In part, it’s because getting out to go to a museum is just more difficult than it used to be since, in spite of the title of this blog, I am no longer only 80.)

Of course, if we do go anywhere…..you will be (among) the first to know.

Speaking of age, I did have a mortality dream last night (I do not like them, Art I am), where I was showing someone around (he was a stranger who somehow came to our house for an overnight stay, and he had a girl friend with beautiful translucent gray eyes which perfectly matched her equally gray lips), and we went into a church which seemed to have a concentration on things having to do with death. I ran into my old (make-believe, not real) friend Marc Tennenbaum (somehow I even knew he spelled Marc with a “c”), who told me he was dying and was at the church because if they were right about dying and afterlife, he did not want to be left out. The dream got a bit more complex, but you get the point.

Perhaps it was related to the third lecture that we watched yesterday by Paula Fredrickson, titled something like “From Jesus to Christ” in which she gave her (somewhat evidenced) opinions about the life and death of Jesus, how the earliest writings about him were Pauls, and then through the synoptic gospels and John. She hasn’t yet got to the point where he becomes a divine figure himself, rather than simply a Messiah, and except to say that back then there were many definitions of “mashiach”, she doesn’t pin one definition on Jesus. With all the ambiguity in her lecture, she does make it clear that there is no evidence that Jesus ever thought about anyone who wasn’t Jewish (he never preached to the Gentiles), and that Paul denied that the resurrection of Jesus was bodily, saying it was a spiritual resurrection (not until a generation later with the gospels did the concept of bodily resurrection appear in writings).

The lectures (3 more) are worth watching, but she is less adept at handling the Q and A from her Scottish audience. Of course, some of the questions are not answerable: “What do you think was really on Jesus’ mind when……..?” or “Where were the women in the story; why aren’t there more of them?”

The hi-jacking, if that’s the right term of the Flydubai plane on its way to Ben Gurion Airport was shocking, to be sure. It looks like the co-pilot wanted to make a name for himself posthumously by crashing a plane with 180 Israelis on board. His first act was to stab the pilot and take over controls. Apparently, aware of noise three Israelis went into the cockpit (I guess it wasn’t locked?) and took down the co-pilot, while two others (not Israeli) on board who were deadheading (no pun intended at all) pilots for Flydubai went into the cockpit, took control of the diving, spinning plane, eased it back up and made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Quite an incident. I guess no one was hurt (other than the pilot) and it will make a great movie one day, but not today. It is an example of a tragedy avoided by both skill and chance, and shows how easily things can go wrong.

Finally, speaking of Ben Gurion, let’s move for a second to the university, not the airport. When I was involved with the American supporters of the university, it received a gift of more than $500 million dollars from the Marcus family of southern California, an enormous gift that enabled the university to do many things that would otherwise not have been possible. Some years later, beating the Marcus family, Michael Bloomberg gave Johns Hopkins University (his alma mater) about three times what the Marcuses gave BGU, an extraordinary gift.

But yesterday, topping even the Bloomberg gift, billionaire Ken Griffin (whom I know nothing about – is he a good guy, an okay guy, or an overall villain?) gave Carnegie Mellon University $3,000,000,000. Yes, that is with a “b”, one third of which will go to do things in Pittsburgh at the CM campus, and two thirds of which will be used to establish a brand new, second Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami, which will apparently be devoted to solving today’s societal problems, as well as giving its students an education and a degree.

I don’t know how many billions of dollars Griffin has, or why he has them, but this might be a good way to get rid of part of his holdings. Certainly better than giving $3 billion to the Republican Congressional Campaign committee.

I borrow from Guinevere to start today’s blog. Here is why…..

We went on an expensive cruise this summer. Our income taxes were very high because some mutual funds in which we have investments decided that capital gains would be nice, and that means our quarterly estimated payments are higher than the budget of most foreign countries. Our property taxes, paid twice a year, would provide 365 days of meals for a family of 100 in Bangladesh, I am sure. We each have concierge physicians we hardly ever see. We redid our wills a few months ago, along with updating all the accessory documents. Today our furnaces were given their biannual inspection, our washing machine is being repaired, and one of our cars is being tuned up. I know I am forgetting something.

But you add that together and get to a very large amount paid out over the past couple of months in addition to our normal living expenses.

What do the simple folks do?

Of course, I can’t help but think this is just people taking advantage of an old man. Especially when I realize our furnace is taken care of by Polar Bear and our washer by Andy Duck, and that our auto mechanic is called Mommadoo.

Okay, let’s move on. I thank cousin Gay Slesinger for finding the obituary of my college thesis “advisor”, Valentine Boss. Here is the link, but I don’t know how to make it a link on WordPress, so I guess you can cut and paste. He seemed to have done all right. https://share.google/HjuVppQMuiTPTntOJ.

For those of you interested in the Haberman programs, I would suggest you go to our website, habermaninstitute.org, and see what is coming up. We have three lectures scheduled in October and six in November. The next presentation will be on October 6 and it will be on the October 27 Israeli elections, by Adam Odesser, who leaders the Stuart Lessans Israel Action Center at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Washington. Adam, a native Israeli, has been closely following Israeli politics and lecturing on the political situation in Israel on a regular basis locally, and we are happy to be able to present his talk to a wider audience next week. These elections are very important for the short term future of the Middle East, so you may want to understand better what is going on there.

I have mentioned before that Brandeis University is putting on YouTube the 20+ lectures of its special course on 250 years of Jewish presence in the United States. I have been watching them as they are dropped on line (so far I have seen seven, all worth while seeing), and am pleased to announce that Brandeis Professor Emeritus Jonathan Sarna will be repeating his lecture on Jews during the American Revolution and the presidency of George Washington for Haberman later this fall.

We have also watched the first two of the six 2026 Gifford Lectures by Professor Emerita Paula Fredrickson, given at the University of Edinburgh last month. The first lecture was called “A World of Gods”, and talked about the many gods who inhabited (if that is the correct word) the Mediterranean region 2000 or more years ago, and how they interacted with each other. The second lecture was titled “Israel Abroad: Jews Among the Gods”, and discussed the Jewish world at the time, more or less, of Jesus, both inside Judea, and outside, east and west of the Jewish homeland. One of the points that she made was that, with the destruction of the Second Temple and the changes it forced upon the Jewish population everywhere, the Jews were in fact prepared by having had such a longstanding and large diaspora (although she does not use that word, because the Jews had settled everywhere not because of pressure, but voluntarily).

I would suggest, if you are interested, that you go to YouTube and search for both the Brandeis and Gifford talks.

What else? The prospect of the Democrats having a very successful mid-term election seems to be growing, but I don’t count chickens, sometimes not even after they hatch. But I was interested in the announcement that Mr. Trump (otherwise known as Sir) made yesterday in Iowa. He announced that an Indian (Asian Indian) conglomerate would build an steel plant in Iowa, and that it would provide a large number of both construction and permanent jobs. The announcement was not made because construction was about to start. In fact, it appears that the Indian company does not yet have a site, and that the Iowa legislature has not even had their first sessions on what type of tax or other concessions they will give the company to build the plant.

It is to be built in Lee County. The two largest cities are Keokuk and Fort Madison, each a town of less than 10,000 people. The county abuts the Mississippi and the Mississippi in Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota is beautiful, clean and fresh. One wonders what the environmental impacts of a steel plant would be, even a modern one, and whether the locals will really want it there, jobs or not. The iron to be made into steel will come from a mine in northern Minnesota owned by the same Indian conglomerate, and opened for the first time this month. That mine was 20 years in the making, with much stumbling along the way. The new steel mill, probably announced prematurely as a pretty much done deal, may not take 20 years to complete, but then again it just might. It will be interesting if this announcement has any impact on the Iowa races, where the Democrat Josh Turek, by the latest polls, has been leading the Republican by 8 points.

Busy day today, starting in a few minutes with a drive to Rockville, and ending up picking up Joan at her middle school and taking her to her Tuesday religious school classes at Adas Israel.

But I don’t mind driving people around. After all, that’s what the simple folks do.

We start with a photo of our friends, Yoram and Smadar Levy the night before they returned to their home in Israel. Missing are Josh, who couldn’t make it, and Joan, who was our photographer.

I want to follow up with a few hanging chads from last week.

First, Michelle and Josh came over and jump started Edie’s car and then drove it on an errand. I am going to make sure it holds its charge, so perhaps we don’t need a replacement battery.

Second, I did find out how to get my cursor back on my Asus Vivobook. Turns out it was pretty easy. You just had to know how to do it.

Third, the book I mentioned yesterday, A Man Could Stand Up by Ford Maddox Ford, was the third volume of his World War I tetralogy, written in the 1920s. I went back to look at the Wikipedia articles on the other volumes, and realize that I would have appreciated A Man Could Stand Up much more had I read the first two books earlier. Mainly because I would have understood the characters better had I known something more about their back stories. A Man Could Stand Up is, to a large extent, a book about active warfare – think All Quiet on the Western Front or A Red Badge of Courage. I understood that from my reading. But it is also a story of England before the war, a story of the changes in the life and of the thinking of a young, wealthy Englishman (known as “The Last Tory”) between 1912 and 1918, moving from the certainty of pre-war Britain, through the tragedy and tumult of the war, and then into the absolute uncertainty of what was going to happen next.

I should add that Ford had mentioned that the one minor Jewish character had changed his name to avoid anti-German prejudice during the war. In fact, Ford Maddox Ford was born Ford Hermann Hueffer, and changed his own name as well.

Okay, the regular baseball season is over, with the Nats beating the Mets 6-4, and in the great rivalry between the Nats and the Cardinals, the winner was …….. a tie, each finishing 77-85. For the Nats, this was better than expected at the start of the season. For the Cardinals, this was the first time they finished below .500 for the second year in a row in the last several hundred years. But that does not mean that baseball is over – the playoffs and World Series will run another 5 or 6 weeks into November.

But baseball also made the front page of the New York Times this morning, as there is apparently a proposal by MLB that a game be played in a national park, and our president loves the idea and decided to build a stadium in Grand Tetons National Park. Now, I ask you. What could be dumber? It would be easier to declare Yankee Stadium a national park.

But having major sports teams playing in strange places must be the thing to do. Which means, it must be very lucrative. The NFL game yesterday between the Baltimore Ravens and the Dallas Cowboys was not played in Baltimore or Dallas or even in a national park. It was played in Rio de Janeiro, at the Maracana stadium. It was quite a game, with Baltimore getting a field goal to break a 31-31 tie with (take a deep breath) exactly one second left on the game clock. And next weekend, the Washington Commanders (who upset the Super Bowl champions from Seattle 33-31 yesterday) will play Indianapolis not at Yellowstone or Yosemite, but at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London. The game starts at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday in the Eastern Time Zone, so church attendance in DC, which may never be very high (I don’t really know) will face stiff competition.

Meanwhile, the ice hockey Capitals, who have won all three of their pre-season games, open their season Friday night against the Hurricanes in Raleigh. The NBA Washington Wizards do not open their season until October 21.

I was feeling a little under the weather yesterday (I seem to be good today), so we didn’t go to our two scheduled Sukkah parties (both basically moved indoors because of the rain) so that I would not infect anyone. So the day was quiet and after supper and the game in Rio, we decided to watch the MTV Video Award show for 2026. I hadn’t heard any of the music that was played – or maybe I have (you could play it all for me now, and I wouldn’t recognize it) – and it didn’t seem very appealing to me. There was a lot of glitz and fancy staging, all of which left me cold. Snoop Dogg (I really don’t know who he is – I guess he is not the guy that went to jail) was the most boring host imaginable.

Madonna (age 68, mind you) sang the opening number with a younger person named Carpenter which displayed an extraordinary amount of energy (although the song and choreography were pretty dreadful, I thought) for a senior citizen, or for anyone else. She also won many awards, although I left the sound off for most of the non-musical goings on. But she seemed to want to talk and talk and talk. I saw there were several performers who only had one name – Raye, Lila, and I think some others. Bruno Mars was restrained and actually sang what I would call a song. And then was Taylor Swift, who spoke like a very ordinary person, thank you, and premiered her newest video, which left me totally cold.

My ambition was to use that show to catch myself up on popular culture. I did not succeed. Did anyone of my readers watch the MTV award show? I think I know the answer to that question.

Finally, I started to read Molly Crabapple’s Here Where We Live is Our Country, the story of the Jewish Bund in Russia and beyond, and I read the first 30 or so pages, but then I got diverted and turned to an extraordinary monograph called (in full): “The Bund and Social Democracy, 1903-1906, History Honors Thesis, Spring-1964, Arthur R. Hessel”. 88 typewritten pages, plus footnotes and bibliography, only a few typos, and……brilliant.

When I started the thesis, I was assigned a mentor, who was a graduate student in Russian studies, and who was writing his PhD thesis on a history of Russian Orthodox Church bells. As you can imagine, we were not sympatico, and when I handed him my first draft, he said (and this is when I stopped listening) something like “because you have picked such an uninteresting topic, I would suggest you cut it by about a half; no one will want to read something this long”. My mentor (Valentine Boss, where are you now?) never saw my second draft. We never met again. I did it my way.

Joke from Israel: The Ministry of Health has declared it acceptable to get your medical condition diagnosed by ChatGPT. But it says you should always get a second opinion. It suggests Gemini.

My favorite three Jeapardy jokes.

(1) Answer: Chicken Terriyaki.

Question: Who is the only living kamikazi pilot?

(2) Answer: Dr. Livingston I. Presume.

Question: What is Dr. Presume’s full name?

(3) Answer: 9W

Question: What did Richard Wagner say when asked if he spelled his name  with a V?

Okay, enough of that.

I recently mentioned how I often look for a Jewish character in a book that doesn’t need a Jewish character. This time it is in Ford Madfox Ford’s World War I book, A Man Could Stand Up. A young, wealthy, educated British officer leading a batallion in combat against “the Huns” has an encounter with a British Jewish enlisted man (details not important). He finds out the man, who enlisted as Private Smith, is really Private Eisenstein, and that he changed his name because a German sounding name in Britain during a war against the Germans was a handicap. The two of them have a conversation and Smith/Eisenstein goes on its way. This took all of one and one half pages.

Not understanding why this was there, I asked Gemini, not expecting much, but Gemini gave me a very long explanation of this encounter, telling me the aristicratic British officer discovered he could talk to a Jewish private man to man, that they were intellectual equals, and that this was meant to be an example of how World War I was to completely change British society. Maybe so. I had no clue. Gemini 1, Arthur 0.

Speaking of Germini, we were at a dinner last night with 10 of our good friends. One told a story of a business trip he had made to Moscow years ago, and he couldn’t remember the name of one of the participants, but he remembered certain things about him.

I put the rather unique characteristics into Gemini and asked if they could identify him. They gave me some additional characteristics, but said his name was not known. I pressed Gemini further and asked where they got the information they had. They cited the friend sitting across the table from me.

Here we go loop de loop.

A minor annoyance, I guess, since I have a touch screen, but it is a bit annoying when you know longer have a cursor that you can operate from the touchpad on your computer. It happened all of a sudden. Here one minute, gone the next.

Should be an easy fix, right? I tried AI, which gave me an 8 step solution, but lost me after step 2. So, I went to YouTube. A number of videos. I picked one, which was 3 minutes 38 seconds long, and lost me at 51 seconds.

Maybe if I turn the computer off, it will be there when I turn it on. Or maybe the computer won’t even turn on. Like Edie’s car.

I am getting a late start on this post today. We just had a very nice lunch. Fresh salmon, broccoli, and mujadara. Musjadara? An Egyptian dish made of lentils, rice and onions. Why did we have such a nice lunch on a cool, rainy Saturday? Because that is what we had for dinner last night (with some other things), and these were left overs. We can have the same thing tomorrow if we want, although the salmon will be a day older and maybe better in fish cakes than on its own.

Yes, I know this is the first day of Sukkot, as well as Shabbat, but we did not go the synagogue today. Services on Sukkot are a bit much for me. I think Sukkot back in Second Temple times (around the turn of the millennium) would have been fun. The services in Jerusalem were apparently very musical and festive. And when we put a sukkah every year, and entertained in it, we had much fun. And this year, we have been invited to four sukkah parties and will be able to make three of them, weather permitting (a big question for tomorrow). But services at the synagogue where you wave the lulav, and march around the synagogue, and have a service even longer than usual? Not for me, thank you.

Our good Israeli friends are now at Dulles Airport, about to board their plane for Rome, where they will change planes and head home. They, and two of their sons, were (in various combinations) our house guests for the last two weeks and they are always welcome. The two elders (only about 15-20 years younger than we are) left in the middle (leaving the two younger sons with us) for one of the two weeks, when they wanted to do a driving tour. They have been here many times (and lived in the U.S. for a couple of years about 25 years ago), and wanted to go somewhere new. So I suggested they follow the route we took in August with a few changes, which they pretty much did, and had a great time.

They spent two nights at the restored Lackawanna Radisson Hotel in Scranton, toured a coal mine, visited the railroad museum, and went on to Troy, NY and then up to Saratoga Springs, NY and over to Williamstown MA and the Clark Museum. Saratoga Springs and Williamstown were not part of our August trip, but part of a trip taken two years ago, and were places I suggested they would enjoy (which they did). But then, they went to their other advisor, a man whom I also know, named ChatGPT, who suggested that they drive east to Plymouth MA, which is not something I would have suggested, but it was good for them, as the landing of the Mayflower and things related appear not to be items found on Israeli elementary school curricula, so they learned something. Chat (dear ChatGPT: do I know you well enough by now just to call you Chat?) then suggested they go to Newport RI and to Mystic Seaport (good choices), which they did before heading home with a stop outside of Philadelphia to visit old friends there. But, Chat did not tell them to make a stop that I would have suggested before Mystic, and that would have been the Whaling Museum in New Bedford MA, which is something special.

Hopefully, we can relax the rest of today. We have a dinner tonight (we being ten of us) with a bunch of friends – a group that has a pot-luck (is it pot-luck if the dishes are all coordinated beforehand?) dinner every couple of months. And then tomorrow, two sukkah parties and dinner with Michelle and Josh.

Watching off and on the news of the day – it seems that Mr. Trump is soon going to be running out of feet to shoot himself in, but he seems to have phoenix-like qualities, so we can’t get too cocky. For example, I just saw an article that says that independents in Texas may be breaking for Paxton over Talarico. Hard to imagine, so it looks like some additional work is needed there. And I also saw something that said that an AI platform had hacked into three government websites. That is pretty disturbing: government websites control things like atomic bombs. Maybe AI will actually be able to destroy us all.

But which of the AI platforms will first be able to do that? It will be quite a rivalry, and humans may not be involved at all. It may simply be a race AI to AI to see who can be the most destructive first. In this no-holds barred competition, I guess it is possible that the AI systems will be able to destroy each others before they destroy us. We may just get out of this first after all.

Can I play the odds at Kalshi?

I dreamed last night that I was, for the first time, in China, in one of their major cities. While often my dreams concentrate on architecture, I don’t remember really looking at any buildings. I remember that there was a lot of pedestrian traffic, and a very large number of bicycles, on the streets and that everyone looked young, healthy, prosperous and happy. I remember thinking how much ahead of us China was on day to day life, and how exciting their cities were. This particular city, for example, had one element that I had never seen elsewhere, and never imagined possible.

There was a large central city park. It was probably two blocks or so long on one side. On the parallel sides, I am not sure. Maybe the same, maybe deeper. The park was flat and green, and looked just right for the center of big city. But there was a trick (if that is what is was). In the late afternoon, the park, like the roof of an enclosed arena, receded. Just split open in the middle and slid sideways under the adjoining city blocks. Then, like on a stage in a well funded theater, once the floor was removed, something rises from underneath. In this case, what arose was a mountain, a pretty large mountain, changing the entire feel of the city from a city in the plains to a city surrounded by high peaks. Yes, everything’s up to date in China’s cities; they’ve gone about as far as they can go.

Of course, maybe I was dreaming about China because I was sad that I could not attend (from the comfort of my own house) last night’s state dinner for President Xi. Or not. I was very interested in the reaction of CNN and MS NOW to the Trump ban on their coverage. All of a sudden, all of the news of the world pretty much vanished from their programming. After saying “we hate to be the story ourselves”, they spent the entire day and evening making the story of themselves. I guess it’s human nature, but I found it pretty tiring. And it is still going on this morning.

I saw yesterday that Bob Pettit died at age 93. Most of you don’t know who Bob Pettit was, I know. He was the star player on the NBA St. Louis Hawks (now the Atlanta Hawks) from 1955 to 1965. He was the National Basketball Association’s first Most Valuable Player. As I have said before, in 1953, my 10 year old heart was broken when the baseball St. Louis Browns announced that they were moving to Baltimore. I never became a rabid Cardinals fan, and my sports allegiance transferred to the Hawks, who moved to St. Louis from Milwaukee in, I think, 1955, and stayed until 1968. The Hawks moved to Atlanta in 1968 (they are still there), a year after St. Louis got its first National Hockey League team, the Blues. I lived in St. Louis, more or less, for the first two years after my 1967 law school graduation (and then moved to DC), and during those two years, my sports allegiance belonged to the Blues.

At any rate, Bob Pettit had an illustrious career, although I never heard anything about him after his retirement. Apparently he had a successful career in his home state of Louisiana as a banker and financial advisor. There were other Hawks of his time whose memory is etched into fans of the team – Ed Macauley, Slater (Dugie) Martin, and Cliff Hagan, to name the three most memorable. The entire 1957-8 team (that’s the one I looked up) is gone now….the only exception being Cliff Hagan, who will turn 95 in December. Hagan apparently now lives in Owensboro, KY, his home town. Information about his post-basketball career (except for a few years of coaching right after he retired as a player) is hard (i.e., impossible?) to find.

The holiday of Sukkot starts tonight. We were invited to two Sukkah parties Sunday afternoon, but the weather is ominous. My phone says 65% rain likely on Sunday, so we will see. Always a risk. I remember when we used to put up a Sukkah annually. Usually the weather cooperated, but sometimes…… As I understand it, in Jerusalem of old, when pilgrims commingled at the temple for the Sukkot festivities, rain was never a problem.

Today, I have one major task. Edie’s car, a 2018 Prius C, is dead as a doornail. Looks like it may be the battery. A new Prius C battery looks to be north of $1500. Guess I’ll start a Go Fund Me. Modern life.

Last week, I wrote about my trials and tribulations in buying tickets for the Washington Opera’s Madame Butterfly. What a First World Problem, you say. Okay, you are right, but what about my experience yesterday?

I know. You can’t answer that if you don’t know what my experience yesterday was. Here goes: I had a Haberman Institute leadership meeting at our Rockville office. Rather than our usual start time of 10:30, we started at noon, to accommodate a West Coast board member on Zoom. To save the staff the agony of ordering food for everyone, I asked those in attendance to bring their own lunch (because our offices are in a synagogue, the food had to be dairy or parve – no meat) if they wanted to eat. I was going to handle this very simply, by stopping at Goldberg’s New York Bagels, and getting some hummus on a bagel and something to drink. I have had this particular meal at or from Goldberg’s many, many times (maybe 3).

I walked up to the counter, placed my order and was met with “Sorry, we are out of hummus.” Say, what? Out of hummus? First, how can a deli be out of hummus? Second, how long does it take to mash up some chickpeas? The website Budgetbytes.com tells me it would take 5 minutes. Third, since they are located next door to a kosher grocery, why couldn’t they just go and buy some pre-made hummus there, if they didn’t have the ingredients at their place?

Digression: reminds me of another old joke. Did you hear that the Titanic hit a goldberg and sank? Hit a goldberg? You mean it hit an iceberg. Okay, goldberg, rosenberg, iceberg – what’s the difference? End of digression.

I finished reading Katharine Farrer’s The Cretan Counterfeit yesterday. I would tell you not to bother reading it, although I know you won’t and I know you haven’t. It was written in the 1950s by a woman who maybe should be best known as the long time next door neighbor of J.R.R. Tolkien. It is what you would perhaps call an intellectual who-done-it. The intellectual part is related to the focus of the book being Minoan archeological digs on the Island of Crete, and whether or not certain artifacts (pottery and rings) are real or fake, and whether if they are fake, they are being sold as real. Farrer says that she consulted with archeologists (which I am sure she did) to write the technical parts of the book, which are somewhat interesting. The who-done-it part of the book involves the murder of the dig foreman’s 16 year old son and of the leader of the expedition, and the stabbing of the leader’s assistant. It turns out (spoiler alert) that the murderer was not any of the suspects whose motives and actions are followed in detail, but the father of the 16 year old, a Cretan who believed that his son was killed by the leader of the dig and engaged in a rather typical, so she says, Cretan blood vengeance. The fact that the murderer himself was only mentioned once or twice in the entire book, and played no role until about three pages from the end of the book meant that everything else in the book was totally meaningless.

But there were a few good lines. I will quote two.

(1) “He had drunk….a glass of neat ouzo, a Greek liqueur rather like absinthe, consisting of almost pure alcohol with a burning flavor like furniture polish.”

(2) “The rabbit, meanwhile, sat still and stared at its owner with that look of timid obstinacy only found in rabbits and minor functionaries.”

I always look for Jewish references in books that have no need of Jewish references, and there always seem to be some. In this book, there were two. The first, to a London policeman who works with the book’s protagonist: “He found a curious scene, Samuelson (his best man), a London Jew of the toughest, clever, decisive and devoured by ambition…..”. The second, “[T]hey were made in Rotterdam by a shady little jeweler called Louis Rosenau…”

Neither Samuelson nor Rosenau played any role in the book beyond what you read in the above paragraph. Why were they placed there by the author? And why does this always happen?

You can see from all of this that I am short of topics this morning. Not sure why. I just got off an interesting Thursday morning discussion of the history of the Yiddish Forward newspaper, which in 1930 had a daily circulation of 250,000, more than the NYT had at that time. One of the interesting facet of the Forward was its advice to the lovelorn column (which later inspired Ann Landers and her sister Abby) and which, says Google’s AI (SI? I guess not), were all real letters:

“Dear Editor: I recently met a good girl, but there is a problem. She has a dimple in her chin, and people say that if someone has this their husbands will die early. At first I did not believe this, but I have seen this to be true. When I meet a woman that has this dimple, her husband dies early. So I don’t know if I should keep seeing this girl. Please help me.

Answer: the problem is not that a girl has a dimple on her chin, but that some people have a screw loose in their head…….”

There you have it. Nothing formal on my schedule today. Just watched Abbas give a speech to the UN General Assembly – he always sounds so reasonable and moderate. The Netanyahu speech comes later today – he never sounds reasonable or moderate.

What a world.

(1) With the collapse of the Kennedy Center, I decided that we should increase our support of both the Washington Opera and the National Symphony, each of which lost their long time homes and some of their financial support. We started last year when we went to see Leonard Bernstein’s West Side Story. In fact, as the Opera is playing at a number of different venues, we went to see it at the Lyric Theater in Baltimore (an experience in and of itself almost worth the price of admission), and I have just completed ordering tickets for the Washington Opera’s production of Madame Butterfly in November. This one will be more convenient in that it is at Constitution Hall, which GPS says is only 4.2 miles from our house (Lyric Theater is 34 miles away).

Do you remember the days when getting tickets to anywhere was easy? When all you had to do was (a) walk up to a window and buy a ticket, or (b) make a phone call and order a ticket? Now, it seems that buying a ticket to anything is an ordeal. I started to buy our Butterfly tickets a month or so ago, but they weren’t on sale yet. Then I tried again a few weeks ago, and was unsuccessful. I don’t remember why, but I remember making a few attempts online, none of which went through for reasons beyond human understanding, and when I tried a third time, a note popped up that said that there was something wrong with your account information and to please call the box office. It gave me the Opera office hours, which were not particularly convenient (I think all this happened on the Friday afternoon before Labor Day and the box office was going to be closed for 3 days and then open from 10-4, or something like that). At any rate, by the time Tuesday came, I forgot about getting the tickets.

Until yesterday, when I remembered. I went back on line, the website didn’t even look the same, and I think that is because I was on the Ticketmaster site, not the Washington Opera site (now that I am thinking about it). At any rate, I ordered the tickets (Nov 15 matinee if you are interested in joining us), told them I had read the fine print, which I hadn’t, and told them I did not need ticket insurance or $22 parking on a Sunday afternoon. I then had to put it my email and my Ticketmaster password (you would think that this would have been a sufficient hint that I was on the Ticketmaster website, right?) and, of course, it told me my password was wrong. I tried again – still wrong. Then “Forgot your password?”.

I then received a code by email to reset my password. I decided to use the same password that it declined and inserted it, only to be told “you cannot use your previous password as a new password”. Makes sense, but if they knew that was my previous password, why did I need a new one? At any rate, I changed my password.

Okay, all done? No, not quite. They then told me they needed to do a double security check and asked me for my phone number, which I inserted, and then I opened my phone to get whatever message they were going to text me. Nothing came, and meanwhile my phone started ringing; I was getting a call from an unknown number, which I didn’t take. Then, a second call from the same number, which I took at the last minute, and it turned out it was a computer call (not a text, a call) from Citibank giving me orally a code for me to put into a box which was now open on the Ticketmaster screen. I went to put the code in the box, and suddenly got a message from Ticketmaster that said: “Time is up. We must give others a chance. Try again later.” The only thing missing from that note was the “Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha”.

Jeez. I decided that later should be right now, but I quickly learned that I had to start from scratch. When did I want to come, where did I want to sit, how did I want to pay, did I want to insure my purchase, did I want parking, etc., etc. I went through it all again, this time being on to their tricks, I used a new password for Ticketmaster and they took my money and sent me a confirmation.

Now, I will admit that I am rather cheap (it appears) when it comes to buying tickets, so that when we go to an event in a large venue, we tend to sit far enough away that we might as well be listening on the radio. That may be the way it will be at Madame Butterfly. We are paying only about $60 per ticket, so we will be sitting near the ceiling. But the seats that I saw (which do not include the really good seats, apparently) come in three prices, $59, $127, and $256. Opera is enjoyable, to be sure, put paying $512 for two tickets seems like a bit much, although plenty of folks must do it without blinking an eye.

I went back on the Ticketmaster site, by the way, to see what ticket prices looked like for other performances. I started with Steve Wonder, who is playing at the Capital Center, which has approximately 20,000 seats for a concert. The show is apparently basically sold out, but there are over 1,000 left, and the cheapest of these seats are a little over $1,000 (and in the Capital Center that means that all you can see is the Jumbotron), and if you want a second row floor seat, you will have to shell out just under $15,000.

Olivia Rodrigo is a 23 year old singer about whom I know little (and have never, to my knowledge, heard). She is also playing the Capital Center next month on two separate nights. What does it cost to hear 23 year old Olivia Rodrigo? As little as $700 or so, and as much as about $5000, if you want close-in seats.

I know the price of shows is a matter under a lot of discussion. And I know it has little to do with me. But who can afford these tickets to fill up one 20,000 seat venue after another again and again?

(2) How about some good news? I am generally not a fan of Moti’s Kosher Market, where we get most of the meat (that means 99% chicken) that we eat our house. I am not going to get into why I find shopping at Moti’s less than a great experience. Instead, I am going to say something very positive about Moti’s. They have a section that sells sushi and nigiri. On a whim (and because it looked good), I bought salmon nigiri this morning and brought it home for lunch. You get six large pieces of salmon on rice, along with wasabi, ginger and soy sauce for $13. It was absolutely first rate. Absolutely.

(3) There is so much in the news that you may have missed something. Like all official US government documents will now call Artificial Intelligence by the name of Super Intelligence. SI, not AI. This is a major change that could not have been initiated until the other SI, the Smithsonian Institution could also be renamed. It will now be the Artificial Institution, or AI. Thank you for your attention to this matter.

Although I was not there, I understand that my grandson and a young girl who has been a close friend of his have decided they are going to get married. We like her a lot and think that they would make a fine couple. But before you congratulate me, I think you should know that my grandson is 5 and his girl friend is 4. My wife said that it will be a fun wedding. I told her that maybe it will but that if, for example, they marry when our grandson is 25, I will be 103 and she will be 99. Maybe not so fun.

That was probably the most interesting thing that happened during our Yom Kippur. Well, maybe equally interesting were my parking spaces. During the High Holidays, Adas Israel sets up an enormous tent in the parking lot to hold one of its three simultaneous services outdoors. When I say an enormous tent, there are apparently about 3000 seats inside the tent, and usually the crowd is overflowing. I am not sure why they do this every year, and I don’t find services in a tent very appealing, with potential temperature, precipitation and humidity issues, but it does put a lot less strain on the building itself; there are usually another 2,000 or so attending services inside. Adas always says that there are about 5,000 at the High Holiday services.

One thing that is obvious is that when they put this large tent on the parking lot, plus another tent for children to play in, and a lot of security apparatus, there is no room for cars. This means that the surrounding streets become clogged and parking hard to come by. One advantage Adas has it that is on the Metro Red Line, which is just about 2 blocks away (you only have to cross one street). But most people do find a place to park, although that place may be 1/2 mile away or more.

For Kol Nidre services, my daughter Michelle had a brilliant idea. Let’s go down early and have dinner at a Cleveland Park restaurant, rather than eating at home. Not only will it avoid cooking and rushing, but we should be able to get a good parking space. And she was right. I made 5:30 reservations at Dakshin Indique, on Connecticut Avenue just across from the Metro stop, and we got the parking space on Connecticut Ave closest (and I mean closest, I think – okay maybe there is one across the street a little closer) to Adas Israel. Mission accomplished.

Yesterday morning was trickier. We wanted to be there for the Torah service that began at 10:30. I dropped Edie off at the door, and then started my hunt. This would not be easy. I first realized that we had forgotten to bring her handicap parking placard, so I drove home to get it (we live less than 10 minutes away), and I then saw that that there were no parking places available on Connecticut Avenue south of Tilden Street, which is just about 1/2 mile from the synagogue. Not good enough, I decided.

I knew that daughter Hannah had parked on a street that looped behind the shops on the east side of Connecticut Avenue in Cleveland Park, which would probably be about a quarter of a mile. I tried there, but there was nothing. So I decided to go for broke, and drove back to the entry door at the synagogue.

Now Adas Israel is at a strange intersection where Porter and Quebec Streets sort of meet together just east of Connecticut Avenue, almost like at a fork in the road. While Porter Street is a major east-west street, Quebec Street actually reaches a dead end a little beyond Adas Israel and a large apartment development. There is parking on both sides of the street, but obviously, between Adas Israel and the apartments, it is very hard to find.

I drove to the dead end. Nothing. I made a u-turn and as I was coming back, lo and behold, right across the street from the entrance door to the synagogue, a parking space had opened up. Wow, I said, how is this possible. There were two security guards (two of a larger number serving Adas yesterday) there and one of them told me that I couldn’t park there. Someone had beat me to it, and was down the block making a u-turn (they wanted him to let traffic move) and they were holding it for him.

It was a large parking space (not sure what had been there), and I thought there might have been room for two (there probably wasn’t), and I asked if I could wait and see. They said “no”, again because of traffic, but if I went to the apartment entry ahead on the right and waited, they would hold the space if it looked like there would be room.

In the meantime, the car they were holding the original space for didn’t come back, and now the space was mine, but I had to wait until traffic cleared, back out of the apartment drive way, drive back to the open space, make a u-turn, and park. All handled smoothly. And I was the second car from the synagogue door – while there were 5000 people attending services.

I really appreciated the help the security guards gave me. As I walked to thevdoor, I heard one tell the other, “It’s nice when you can make someone happy.”

With this, you would probably think that I missed the Torah service. But no. When I entered, they were only on the third aliyah.

Mid-day, we left Adas and went home, joined by children and grand children. The plan was to leave home about 5:30 and trek back for the final neilah service that started at 6 and ended about 7:45. This would be one more search for parking. But at about 4, the rains started (the rains that were scheduled to fall for almost the next 36 hours) and it seemed like too much to try my luck again. Hannah and her family did return for neilah, but Edie, Michelle and I streamed the service from home (first time).

Because of this, we were not present when Izzy and his young friend announced their planned marriage. His 11 year old sister, Joan, I am told, said that – when he got older and really interested in girls – she would remind him that he already had made a commitment. Joan, by the way, for I think the first time, fasted the entire day, her own decision and without complaint.

It is autumn in Washington, 60 degrees and raining, and not expected to get much warmer today. Some of the leaves are beginning to turn. The High Holidays are behind us and Sukkot doesn’t start for another 4 days.

By the way (and to close), I thought the three sermons I heard at Adas Israel were fine, but not earth shattering. I didn’t read much more online, but I do want to call your attention to the Yom Kippur message of Congressman-to-be Brad Lander that he mailed out to his followers. I thought it was extremely thoughtful and well written. I am sure that there is some way that I can paste it on the blog, but I can not figure out how to do it. But it is wroth looking at, so if you want to see it, let me know and I will send it to you by email. Or you can look for it yourself.

Lander, as you probably know, is running for Congress on Manhattan and will probably (i.e., definitely) be elected in November. He is the former comptroller of New York City and a progressive, with carefully delineated views on Israel and its neighbors. He is also St. Louis born. His father was a friend, and his uncle my college roommate. When he first moved to Brooklyn about 35 (?) years ago, to take a job with a housing non-profit, his father had him call me up for advice (as that was my field). I remember telling him that he was going to work for a respectable organization, as far as I knew, and that the job sounded like a good one, but…..I told him if the job involved New York City or New York State politics, he would probably find himself a permanent outsider, young Midwesterner that he was. Shows what my advice is worth.

On Yom Kippur, as always, a day with no formal post.