- Hunter Biden. His gun trial starts today, I think. He bought a gun without giving accurate information as to drug use on his application. I am waiting for Donald T to come out with a defense of Hunter. I am waiting for him to say that this is a political trial, instituted by a corrupt Department of Justice, etc. Or have I missed it and he’s already said that?
- Fast Food Restaurants. Yesterday, after I walked about 3 miles down to Dupont Circle, I thought I should get something to eat and, more importantly, something to drink. I went into a coffee house, Roasting Plant Coffee, on Connecticut Avenue which promised coffee and more. They had three sandwiches listed on their menu board – cheese, ham and turkey. I ordered a turkey and an iced coffee. Sorry, they said at noon, we are out of everything but ham. So I walked around the corner and just stopped into a Subway and got a 6″ sweet teriyaki chicken and a coke. The ice machine was out of ice and the coke was at room temperature. After I finished the sandwich, I decided to go to the men’s room before I hit the road. There were two bathrooms. The man behind the counter (probably the franchisee on a slow Sunday morning downtown) asked me if I wanted to wash my hands. Weird, I thought, and said “not really”. Then, he said, “Don’t go in there; it’s blocked up.” “OK, I’ll use the other one.” “No, they are both blocked up.” “OK”, I said, very sorry that I had eaten the sandwich and given him a tip. My tip should have been “Call a plumber.”
- Tattoos. I should do a broader study of tattoos, but I never know how one should react to them. Do people with tattoos want you to look at their tattoos (and hopefully admire them), or do they tattoo their bodies in the hope that you will ignore their tattoos completely? (“What? I have a tattoo?”) A question well above my pay grade. Maybe you only can look at a tattoo once you get to know the person well. (“Excuse me, but is that skeleton on your shoulder a tattoo?”) I began thinking about tattoos (as I occasionally do) this weekend because of three that I saw. (1) I normally think of tattoos on the bodies of people much younger than I, but yesterday I saw a tall woman, who looked about my age, wearing a sleeveless dress, with a large and colorful tattoo on her exposed shoulder. I thought she looked perfectly silly. Why did she do this? (2) At a Mexican restaurant where we had lunch on Saturday, there were a number of Hispanic men eating lunch – they were dressed for work, their work being a landscaper or a construction worker or something. One of them at a nearby table had a large tattoo on the inside of his forearm that read, in big black letters, ROBERT GARCIA JR. Now, maybe that is his dead best friend, or even his young son, but, gee, for the rest of his life, he is going to see that name staring him down whenever he looks at his arm. (3) I was walking behind an ordinary looking youngish (40s?) woman yesterday, who also had a tattoo on the backside of her forearm (so easy for me to see behind her). I walked closer in the hope that I could read the script and it said “Well, that is mighty White of you”. She, by the way, was White (by appearance). What could make you put that on your arm as a permanent reminder of…..what?
- The Film. We saw that well-touted French Film, “Au revoir, M. Haffmann”, at the Avalon last night. A little disappointing as a film (what else is new?), but an interesting story about a talented Jewish jeweler in Paris in 1941, who sends his family to the unoccupied south, and sells his store to his apprentice, planning on meeting up with his family shortly. His timing is bad, there are roundups, his smuggler has quit smuggling, and poor Mr. Haffmann cannot get out of Paris. Where should he hide? Back to his former shop’s basement. And that’s when things get confusing. Not a must see, but certainly not a must stay away from. A depressing film, to be sure, but not without its interesting facets (that a jewelry pun).
- The Book. More about this later, but I am reading Arkady Ostrovsky’s The Invention of Russia, which tells the story of the evolution (probably not the best word, if evolution connotes progress) of Russia from Stalin to Putin. I am in the section that deals with Gorbachev and his fall, Yeltsin and his fall, and pretty soon we will have Putin. Throughout this period of Russian chaos, when oligarchs were trying to outsmart each other, and good government types were in short supply, it was unclear where the country would wind up. Sadly, and in spite of the obvious factual and situational differences, there is a lot in this particular period of Russia’s story that reminds of me of the USA today. But we will talk about that at another time….
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Art is 80 