Art is 80

Congressman Ritchie Torres said it very well: “If a superpower were intent on engineering its own decline, it would antagonize its allies, paralyze its economy with the certainty of uncertainty, erode confidence in the world’s reserve currency, discard due process, defund medical and scientific research, sabotage the most critical form of critical manufacturing – domestic chipmaking – and grow its deficit until debt service devours the largest share of its budget. That is the story of America, circa 2025.”

Such a superpower would also be controlled by a dictator who believed himself above the nation’s court system. We are looking at many examples of Trump ignoring the courts, while pledging fealty to them. That is another example of a country’s decline – for its dictator to fool the people by convincing them that he is following the law, when in fact he is paying no attention to it.

Two of the most striking examples today are, I think, (1) the failure of the government to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia to the United States from the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador, and (2) the failure to allow an Associated Press reporter into the Oval Office yesterday for the press conference with Trump and the president of El Salvador.

The second is the easier to discuss. The Trump administration kicked AP out of the White House press pool because it refused to change the name of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America, a criminal refusal to be sure. U.S. District Court Judge Trevor McFadden ordered the administration to immediately readmit the AP to the press pool. The government has appealed the order (which has not been stayed) and there is a hearing of some sort scheduled for Thursday at the U.S. Court of Appeals to deterimine if the order should be put on hold until the case finally plays itself out.

Notwithstanding the current validity of the McFadden order, and the president’s statement that he always follows what the courts say, the AP is still being excluded.

As to the situation Mr. Abrego finds himself in, things are either murky or perfectly clear. Mr. Abrego, a native of El Salvador who has been living in Maryland for 14 years, and never been accused or convicted of criminal activity, was subject of a United States immigration judge’s order in 2019 that he could not be sent to El Salvador. According to the government’s attorney in the case before the District Court, the government had no explanation as to why Abrego was arrested and sent to El Salvador, and deemed it a mistake. The DOJ has put this attorney on “administrative leave”, saying he did not support the government’s position vigorously enough.

Yesterday, during his White House visit, the president of El Salvador said that it was ridiculous to think that Abrego would be returned to this country, and equally ridiculous to think that they would let him (a “terrorist”) free in El Salvador. Again, he has never been accused, much less convicted, or any crime. In 2019, a county sheriff, I believe, said they had evidence he was an M-13 member of a New York group. He has never lived in New York.

Trump (and his henchman Rubio) says: well, if El Salvador won’t return him, we can do nothing about it, and neither can the courts, but if El Salvador decides to return him, we will make sure he gets back here safely.

It is obvious, is it not, that Trump has not asked El Salvador to return Abrego to the U.S.? If he did, of course El Salvador would say “sure”. Why would they rather keep him in prison, rather than let him leave the country? If Trump thinks he can tell Zelensky, Putin, the President of Iran, Xi, and Netanyahu what they can do, you would think that he could tell President Bukele what to do. Especially since we have some sort of arrangement to send prisoners to CECOT for which we are paying El Salvador.

But do we have a contract with the country? Any written agreement? Where is the money coming from? Are these people going to stay in prison forever? No one seems to know the answer to any of these questions.

And, of course, a lot of this is based on the definition of the Supreme Court’s word “facilitate”, rather than the original District Court’s “effectuate”. What does facilitate really mean? And if the president of El Salvador says he does not want to “smuggle” him into the U.S., doesn’t the president at least have to request his return as part of “facilitating”?

One more thing. Finally, there is Harvard. Harvard has now lost $2 billion in federal funds because it has refused to bow to Trump’s determination that he should be able to tell Harvard whom to hire and what to teach. Google the letter sent by Harvard President Garber yesterday to the Harvard Community. It is hard to argue with what he said.

That’s all for right now. We are back in DC after one more long drive yesterday. Highlights? A very good onion omelet at the Galaxy Diner in Bridgeport CT, a drive down the Grand Concourse in the Bronx and both Lexington Ave and 5th Ave in Manhattan,  and an Adana chicken kabob at the Brooklyn Kabob in a Muslim shopping area near the Verrazano Bridge.

In Manhattan, we wanted to see how the congestion tolls were working out.

Now, yoi see.

There are two possible questions: (1) What Springfield is the oldest in America, and (2) Where did you spend yesterday?

As is typical, I learned a lot roaming around Springfield.  Things I didn’t know. First, we saw a lot of beautiful but older houses in a neighborhood called Forest Park. And, it is an extensive neighborhood and one of six in the city that have been designated historic districts. In fact, they are so extensive that Springfield was once known as “The City of Homes”. Many of these homes have been built between 1880 and 1930.

Those were the years that Springfield was a manufacturing powerhouse. We learned about much of the touring the wonderful Springfield History Museum.

Springfield was, for example, the home of Duryea Automobiles, one of America’s first, and until the 1930s had a large Rolls Royce factory. Here is, first, a Duryea, then a Rolls:

Springfield was also the home of Smith and Wesson guns, and Indian Motorcycles. The first dictionary in America, The Merriam-Webster Unabridged was published here. Friendly Ice Cream started here. And there were Milton Bradley toys and games, and Breck Shampoo. Why, even basketball was invented (if that’s the right word) here. Thatwhy the Basketball Hall of Fame Museum is here.

But all that is gone now. So a Springfield resident has much to be proud of and nostalgic about, but with a tinge of sadness.

The history museum is located on a campus which also contains two art museums, a natural history museum, and the Dr. Seuss Museum. He lived in Springfield.

The Michele and Donald D’Amour Museum of Fine Arts has some fascinating American paintings (its collection is much broader than just American). A few examples:

I could tell you about each of these, but I am afraid it would take too much time. The first is by Harold Rabinovitz, who was killed in the Pacific in World War Ii before he reached the age of 30. The third is a detail from a work by Paul Sample, who painted this church supper using people he knew as models. The gfourth, by Bill Vuksanovich is a work with graphite on paper (looks like a photo). The bottom one, by Reginald Marsh shows nurse Edith Cavell before her execution by the Germans.

This is just to give you a taste of the museum. There is much more. The other art museum contains only the work collected by  George Walter Vincent Smith. American paintings of the 19th century. Extensive Japanese, Chinese and Islamic works, and a large room of plaster casts of Roman statues. I galive you a few examples of the museum’s large netsuke collection.

After the museum, the second seder, with the same five kids and the same results. I should say one thing. Almost 10 year old Joan, the oldest of the five, not the youngest, did a masterful job on the Four Questions.

Today? Driving home.

When your seder has five children under the age of 10, things are a bit different.  For one thing, you start at 5. For another, the service is abbreviated. For a third, someone finds the afikomen before the Four Questions. For a fourth, there are a lot of frogs. And for the 5th, there is certainly no after-dinner completion of the Haggadah. So last night, we were back at the Hampton Inn by 8. I expect tonight will be a repeat.

Now, it is another 8, and it’s time for breakfast. We have a box of matzoh in the room and can get coffee downstairs, and yes, we are grateful for the freedom, but isn’t someone supposed to feed us manna?

I can’t say we accomplished a lot exploring cold (temperature never even hit 40) Enfield CT yesterday, but we did learn that things used to be better. Once, for example, it was the home of Bigelow Carpets. “A name on the door rates a Bigelow on the floor”, or something like that. The Bigelow campus was very large  and now looks to be a housing complex called “Bigelow [something]”.

It’s in a part of town called Thompsonville, I think, and is surrounded by what used to be company housing, including many fourplexes, some of which have been fixed up. Like this one:

Enfield also used to be the home of a sizeable American Lego factory. No longer. And George Washington never slept here, but Paul Robeson did live here. That reminded me of a trip a few years ago when we stayed in a different Connecticut town, Danbury, and learned that Marian Anderson had lived there (and we saw her studio).

We lucked into a place at lunch. Called Mark’s, it is a few blocks from the Bigelow campus. It has only 5 tables, seating I think 12 or 14, and is only open for breakfast and lunch. The prices are from maybe the 1980s:

I had a “Good Start” breakfast sandwich, made up of eggs, spinach, tomatoes and roasted red peppers on toasted marbled rye. Here is a picture of half of it:

Not much else happened.  I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the rest of the world yesterday, but saw an article a few minutes ago that said 84% of Republicans like the job Trump is doing. For shame.

One of those people is the owner of a funeral home here in Enfield. His family started the home about 140 years ago. The entire family are Democrats, involved in local politics forever, but he has broken away. Just couldn’t take any more Pelosi and Schumer, he said. Now, no one in his family talks to him.

That’s the way it is in the big city.

Did you ever wonder what spring was like in Enfield, Connecticut? Now, you know. Daffodils and, yes, snow.

We drove up yesterday for seders at Hannah’s inlaws’ house in Longmeadow Mass. Edie and I drove up with Hannah and about-to-turn 10 Joan.

Digression. But before I get to that, let me thank Harry Rado for reminding me that today is the 80th anniversary of the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. This is an important event, not only for the Roosevelt family,  but for me. It is the first thing I remember.  I was playing (?) in the room we called the library, and my grandfather was sitting in a chair listening to the radio when the news came across. I don’t know, at age 2 1/2, if I knew who FDR was, but it was clear that this was something REALLY IMPORTANT.  But for years, I have wondered that, if I remembered this, why couldn’t I remember what happened five minutes before. End of digression.

So our 6 hour drive yesterday took 9 hours. This was, in part, because we stopped for both lunch and dinner, and in part because of torrential rain that fell for about 80% of the ride.

Joan has told me that this blog post had to be about her. To quote: “You didn’t do anything you can write about today that didn’t involve me.”

Well, she had a good time, as did I. At one point, she told me that she had learned at school every important event that ever happened and I should quiz her. Of course, when I asked her about the Mexican-American War, she told me that it was a war between Mexico and America and people were killed. Then, I asked about Panama, and she said that (1) it was a country, (2) it existed, (3) people lived there, (4) it had trees and (5) it had animals. I then asked her the tallest mountain, and she said “Everest”. Good, I said, “Where is it?” Naturally, she answered, “Panama?”

Other questions she refused to answer on the grounds that they weren’t important events.

Well, we also had a good time reading signs, especially on trucks. We twice saw trucks for the Piece of Cake Moving Company, and thought that was the best.

One more thing. Joan is in the habit of complimenting people at times I find a bit weird. Like when she told a waitress “I like your hair” or a woman we passed “I like your lipstick”. I asked her why she did that (in a mildy disapproving tone) and she said. “Because it makes people happy. They smile and say thank you. That’s important.”

That looks like it for today.

Ask me if I understand any of this…..

I take Edie’s car to the car wash for its Passover deep clean. Our two neighborhood car washes are now owned by the same company, Flagship, and their charge for a super duper (not so super, really) car wash is (sit down, please) $44. I know that is an outrageous amount to charge for a car wash. Before Flagship took it over, the same wash at the same place was about $30, which was bad enough. And Flagship is the only car wash within 4 miles of our house. Maybe Trump’s tariffs will bring cheap car washes back to America.

[Digression. The car wash clerk is a very nice lady. She has been there a while. I have never really thought about her name, but looking on the bill, which I just did, I see her name is given as Wondwossen. I look it up. Ethiopia is filled with Wondwossens.]

On the short drive home from the car wash, I see a bunch of dashboard lights go on, like someone has just hit a grand slam. Then a sign pops up that says “Hybrid System Failure. Contact Dealer. Park Car in Safe Space”.

Of course, my first instinct is to ignore the sign. But because things keep flashing, I don’t, and pull over to the curb, right next to the sign that says “No parking anytime”. I should really put the car in a legal parking space, I think, but when I try to restart it, the same message appears, and it is clear that it is not going to restart.

Is there any good news in this story? Yes, the good news is that the service station we normally use (normally for the last 40+ years) is only one block away, so I walk there and tell them my sad tale. The fellow in charge today asks one of their technicians, a nice, tall African born fellow, whose name sounds suspiciously like Wondwossen, to help me. He tells me that we can walk to my car and he will try to jump start it and bring it back to the station. His terms are: “I will charge you $80 if we are successful, and if I can’t jump it and it needs to be towed, I won’t charge you anything. And the $80 is to me, not the station, and needs to be in cash.”

What can I do? Especially, since we are leaving town the next day for several days, and I am parked illegally. I say “OK”. We walk to the car, he opens the hood, connects his jumper cable and says to me “Get in!”. I do, and we drive for one block to the station.

But the lights are all still on, and it is unclear that the car will move again, or at least move very far. And he tells me that he has to check the Hybrid system and probably reset it. I have no idea what that means, but as I watch him for a half hour (only interrupted by the driver for the Kuwaiti ambassador coming in with his sleek black Land Rover which has a nail in its tire. Or maybe, since it’s a Land Rover, it’s a tyre.) as he dissects the car.

Yes, it was like high school biology class (which I don’t remember at all, really), where you had to dissect an amphibian of some kind. Or it was like going to a doctor and being told that he has to operate on you while you are conscious and watch him taking you apart, piece by piece.

Things come out of the hood. The trunk is opened and everything including the spare is taken out, so he can get underneath it. Same with the back seat. All of the innards piled next to the car. It is clear to me that this car can never be put together again.

He unscrews that, he sets his computer to this, he brushes off something else, he scratches his head, he says “uh-huh”, he tells me that he’s on it, not to worry. Then, after I pace around and around and around, he tells me to go home, and that he will call me.

Now, I said this is our neighborhood, so going home just means walking about 3 blocks, so that is okay. Several hours later, I get a text that the car is ready.

I walk to get it, it starts, it works, it looks fine, I am told by the station manager that Nunu (maybe it’s not Nunu, but Bugu, or Gubu, or something like that) has reset the Hybrid system. I act gracious (I was), but tell him I have no idea what he did. I don’t think the manager knew, either. Bugu or Gubu wasn’t there, so I couldn’t talk to him.

Now, I had no idea what the price would be. It turns out that it’s just over $300, and was for $282 labor and taxes. Is that a good price? Did he put in $282 labor time? Did he do a good job? I have no answer to any of these questions.

What the manager did tell me was: if it turns out that there is still a problem, let us know and we won’t charge you any more to fix it.

I drove it the half mile or so home. It’s in the driveway. Luckily, it’s not the car we are taking on our trip to Massachusetts. I will check it again when we return.

Let’s start with a digression: Bill Wyman is or was a member of the Rolling Stones. (I know virtually nothing about the Rolling Stones.) He is now 88, but when he was 52 he married Mandy Smith, an 18 year old with whom he had been in a sexual relationship for four years. They were together for two years after they married and then separated and were divorced. What I read yesterday is that Bill Wyman’s son Stephen later married Mandy Smith’s mother. (I am assuming, for the purpose of this digression, that what I read it true; I don’t otherwise know, one way or the other.) When they married, Stephen was 31 and Patsy (Mandy’s mother) was 46. That means that Stephen married his step-grandmother (right?) making him his own step-grandson (right?). I am trying to picture the tree.

End of digression.

We went out for dinner to a nice upscale restaurant (Le Chat Noir in DC) last night with old friends. Because of the amazing stock decline, I thought that I should hold back on my spending and consumption and, to do that, I decided I wouldn’t get a drink. But then the market climbed about 3000 points, and I decided a drink was in order, and I had a very soothing vodka gimlet. Now the market has declined about 1,000 points from it’s last night high, and there is only one thing that I am thankful for. I am thankful for my vodka gimlet.

So once again, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell was right. What he always says is that there is one thing you can always count on regarding the behavior of Donald Trump. When he proposes to do something bold (and crazy), you can always count on him to back off before he does it. And, once again, he did. He backed off his reciprocal tariffs, we can buy vanilla beans from Madagascar without paying a penalty, and life is back where it was, right?

Wrong. We still have 10% tariffs on everything, we still have 25% tariffs on all steel and aluminum imports, we still have the tariffs he put on Canadian imports and of course we still have the 1,000,000% tariffs on Chinese goods (or whatever the correct number is today). That is the reason, I guess, that the 3000 Dow rise yesterday has turned into a 1000 Dow decline so far today.

Apparently, the biggest problem yesterday was not the stock market drop (from the Trumpian perspective) but the unprecedented decline in the purchase of US bonds, which threatens everything in our economy. I am not sure where the bond market is today. The market can lose confidence in our bonds quickly, but how long does it take to regain confidence. Trump says that he had been “following the bond market” and that now it is “beautiful”.

As to who convinced Trump to back off, that’s another story. Probably everyone but Peter Navarro, the man whom Elon called “dumber than a stack of bricks”, and then apologized profusely to the bricks.

Another quick digression. Since whatever Trump does has a gargantuan effect on markets, and since so many in Trump’s circle depend on the markets and have so many conflicts, what are the odds there has been insider trading and market manipulation? 100% is probably a conservative guess.

End of digression.

Of course, the reciprocal tariffs that Trump was to put on the world have only been postponed for a 90 day period until mid-July. My own thought is that the 90 days mentioned in Trump’s Truth Social tweet is meaningless. Based on the market’s experience yesterday, the pause may last the remainder of Trump’s term. Or, Trump being the loose goose he is, the 90 day pause itself could be canceled, and the tariffs could be imposed this afternoon. You just never know, which is why the question of market confidence is so much up in the air.

And then (if this is true), Trump has said that 70 countries have requested meetings to discuss individual tariff “deals”, or as he puts it 70 countries have said that they want to “kiss my ass”. Maybe now, they won’t be so anxious to meet.

As to China, from which we get about 16% of our imports, who knows? Even if we are in a fight with China alone, that fight will affect us in some ways unforeseen. And as to what will happen to our federal workforce, our federal buildings, our claims to Greenland, Panama, and Gaza, the wars in the Middle East, the war in Ukraine, and the people being whisked off the street and sent to El Salvador………

We had an interesting conversation this morning with my Thursday breakfast group about the ethical roles of lawyers. The discussion was presented as the responsibilities of lawyers representing corporations whose activities create public health issues (tobacco companies, chemical companies, etc.), where the “client” is engaged in conduct which is dangerous and will be continuing (as opposed to representing a defendant in, say, a murder trial where the particular crime has already been committed and cannot continue), and the discussion quickly morphed into the responsibilities of lawyers who are working for the government and taking positions supporting actions which are both wrong (define that as you wish, or define it as positions which the lawyers themselves believe to be wrong) and continuing. The discussion goes to the definition of “client” when it comes to a government lawyers, the ethical responsibilities of lawyers which trump (now a cute word I guess) their responsibilities to their clients (however defined), and questions of failing to tell the truth in court proceedings or enabling witnesses to lie in court proceedings.

Guess what? It was an interesting discussion.

Every Tuesday, the Church of the Epiphany in downtown Washington has a free (donations requested) classical music concert. I used to go on a fairly regular basis, but when the programs had been canceled during the pandemic, I got out of the habit and now rarely seem to go. But I did yesterday and her a wonderful concert of Chopin by young Koren born pianist Jiin Kim, now working for her Ph.D. at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. It was a refreshing break at a fraught time. And it was nice to get some fresh air on a beautiful December day. (Yes, I know the calendar says it’s April.)

Oh, and to prove it’s April, look at this, just down the street.

Changing the subject…..

I recently received a gift from an old (yes) friend and law school classmate, now living in New Mexico. Three old publications, including this one:

Yes, “Watson on Cod-Liver Oil”, published 1868. Dr. Watson was writing about the effectiveness of treating tuberculosis with cod-liver oil, a remedy first used in England in the 18th century, but which seems to have been forgotten in America in the 19th. According to Watson, cod-liver oil, when used with other recognized treatments, helped stabilize or cure the disease.

I knew that must be Robert F. Kennedy-like nonsense, but I googled it and discovered that it is again today recognized by some as effective.

You don’t hear much today about cod-liver oil, but it is readily available, I think, and used as a source of Omega 3, among other things.

And I learned quite a bit about it from the article. I learned that there are gradations of cod-liver oil, and you only want to take it is it is a clear yellowish color, with no trace of red or orange. I learned that cod is related to haddock and pollock, but that the liver oils of these related fish do not have the same properties as cod-liver oil, and should be avoided. I learned that there are unscrupulous folks who purposely mislabel the oils. I learned that one other fish oil is as effective as cod-liver oil, and that is shark-liver oil, which is (no surprise) harder to get. I even learned that combining the oil with orange juice makes it more palatable.

The two other old publications were the 1864 report of the National Academy of Sciences made to Congress by Professor A.D. Bache, and a Discourse on the Objects and Importance of the National Institution for the Promotion of Science from 1841. I don’t plan to tell you anything about either of those.

It’s been a busy morning. It’s about 12:30 and I don’t even know how the stock market is doing. Back up to 45,000?

The question, as you might have already guessed (or perhaps even known – nah, I doubt it), “What is Uncle Vanya’s real name?”

“Uncle Vanya” is one of Anton Chekhov’s most famous plays, along with “The Cherry Orchard”, “Three Sisters” and “The Seagull”. It is now playing at Washington’s Shakespeare Theatre, the first time Shakespeare has put on a Chekhov play. We went to see it Sunday night, something that I was looking forward to. And, as often when your expectations are too high, you come away disappointed.

I have seen each of the four major Chekhov plays, and at least three of them I have seen more than once. These include “Uncle Vanya”. My impression of his theatrical works is that, when you simply read the text, they are fairly dry, but they have a sort of magic that becomes apparent when they are well performed. I have seen “Uncle Vanya” well performed.

Now, I have to start with talking about the current production of “Vanya” by talking about Shakespeare’s Harmon Hall, which seats approximately 750 people. To me, this is a theater that is much too large for a Chekhov play. Now, I am not a professional critic, so I decided to ask a real critic, like Google’s AI (which I assume is an amalgam of critics worldwide), and here is what it told me: “For staging Chekhov’s plays, an intimate, yet flexible, theater space is ideal, allowing for a sense of realism and allowing the audience to feel close to the characters and their everyday lives.” I agree 100%, and I think staging “Vanya” at the Harmon was a mistake.

(Now, on a personal level, I have to say that the mistake was compounded by our seats, which were in the fifth row of the balcony, meaning that we were really a long way from the stage, which was well below us. We seemed to be like on the third or fourth floor, looking down. No, I did not select these seats. These were replacement seats, because it turns out that we will be out of town on the day we were scheduled to see the show.)

But it wasn’t simply the vastness of the theater that created the problem. I think a problem at least as serious was wh”at I believe was simply poor casting. And that the poor casting was compounded by the decision to set the show in a massive, old, estate in rural Russia (which is where Chekhov set it), to make this clear in the opening oral introduction to the show at Shakespeare, in keeping the names of all of Chekhov’s characters, in referring to Russia, Russia, Russia, but in not having the actors play their roles as if they were Russian, much less as if they were in Russia.

Playing Vanya was Hugh Bonneville. Probably everyone but Edie and me know who Bonneville is. He’s best known, I have read, for playing a major role in Downton Abbey, a show that we have never seen. Don’t hold that against us, please. But those who know Bonneville know that he is English. And he played Vanya with a very English accent. No one told him that Vanya was Russian, not English, I guess. And no one told any of the other six or seven cast members that they should play their roles with English accents. The result was that each of the other characters had American accents, and dear Uncle Vanya spoke with a pronounced British accent.

My other problems (and I know I am going to sound like Donald Trump talking about D.E.I., but take it for granted that is not how I am trying to sound) come from the choices for the other cast positions. The story line, if you do not know it, has Vanya’s former brother-in-law and his new, much younger wife, come to live on the family estate, because it has become too expensive to stay in St. Petersburg on a retired professor’s salary. Vanya, and the local physician, Astrov, both fall in love with young (but married) Yelena, and complications result.

Bonneville was all right, I guess. The actor playing Astrov, though, did not seem up to the task. This was not all his fault. The role of Astrov is the role of a man so sexually appealing that women simply fall all over him, although he is, or pretends to be, not interrsted. This Astrov is not a heartthrob, and you wonder why either was attracted to him. Period.

The actress playing Yelena, Ito Aghayere, was born in Canada, and is of a Nigerian ethnicity. Why would anyone cast a Black actress in this role in a Chekhov play? (I told you I would sound like Donald Trump.) Now, I could understand it if you took “Uncle Vanya” and reset it to another location at another time. But this was not the case here. In this production, you are supposed to think that you are watching a very Russian family on their very Russian estate. Ito Aghayere, as attractive as she is, just does not look Russian.

Another Black actor, Craig Wallace, is also in the play as Ilya Ilyich, or Waffles, a retired landowner who also lives on the estate. I had a problem with his casting as well.

So, in this time bound, very traditional Russian estate, we have an English man, a Black man, a Black woman, and three other cast members, who  look to be White Americans.

Now, all of this could have been overlooked if the cast members could overcome their physical differences with fine acting. But this just did not seem to be the case. In fact, in a play where emotional relationships have key roles, none of the actors seemed to have any real connection to the others. It sounded to me more like a first read than a polished play.

(I should say that, with regard to the many plays I have seen with actors playing roles written for different ethnic or racial groups, I have no problem. But for this particular production of this particular play, it seemed to me that it just did not work.)

Now, the surprise ending. Edie and I (she pretty much agreed with me, I think) are the only two people who feel this way. The published reviews for both the production and the acting are glowing.

Can I blame it all on our seats?

Thinking outside the box? I was listening to the C-Span call-in this morning, and a Republican caller had an interesting take on America’s problems.  It is all the fault of Roe v. Wade. Can you guess his reasoning?

Were it not for abortions as a result of Roe v. Wade, the US population today would be 600,000,000. If our population was 600 million, with so many of them young, we would (1) have a working population ready to fill manufacturing jobs brought back to the country, and (2) we would have so many more people paying into Social Security that we wouldn’t worry about it going bankrupt. Can you refute that?

Thinking outside the box? So many people describe Trump’s following as a messianic cult, Trump as another Jesus or as a harbinger of the Second Coming. For those who believe that, the chaos that he is fomenting may actually deepen their belief, that a time of troubles and final battles may indeed pressage the Golden Age.

But of course, there have been many false messiahs, and I wonder if Trump may be more akin to Shabtai Tzvi than to Jesus. Know him? A Jewish would-be messiah who developed a following across the 18th century Jewish world, including famous rabbis and thousands of families who sold their homes and possessions to move to the holy land. What happened to him? He was arrested in Istanbul and decided that conversion to Islam was better than immediate death. If you see Donald prostrate himself five times a day, you will understand what is happening.

It’s 10 a.m., and the Dow is down another 1000 points. Treasury Secretary Bessent says that normal Americans are not concerned about daily market fluctuations, or about the possibility of a recession.

By normal Americans, he may mean billionaires. Even Warren Buffet is apparently not concerned that his life savings may disappear.

And Commerce Secretary Lutnick, the billionaire whose 94 year old mother won’t care if her April social security payment is delayed a month, put his other foot in his now overcrowded mouth over the weekend. When asked why Trump put tariffs on two islands in Antarctica which are inhabited only by penguins, he said (with as straight a face as is possible for him): if we didn’t do that, other countries would take their goods to those islands and be able to export them to the US without any tariffs at all.

Oh, Vanya. Last night, we saw Uncle Vanya at Shakespeare Theatre. When I opened up this app this morning,  I thought Uncle Vanya would be my subject. Maybe tomorrow.

Some time ago, I watched a film on Netflix called Subservience. It was one of those films that was by and large terrible, but by and large fun to watch. The gist of the film, which took place sometime in the not too too distant future, is that a young husband, after his wife became ill, went to a local firm that rented out robots (called sims) to help with household matters. The sim in question, whose name was Alice, looked just like a human being. In fact, she looked remarkably like Megan Fox, believe it or not.

The engagement of Alice was not that unusual apparently, and in fact, sims who looked like people were being hired for all sorts of uses, such as replacing human beings on construction projects. And, yes, there was a lot of backlash.

Alice did a fine job with the children, but Alice also took a fancy to her master and, boy, did that lead to complications, mostly from Alice’s determination (I guess an AI creature can be very determined) to win her master from his wife. In the fracas that followed, Alice was seriously injured and returned to her manufacturer.

But Alice is not to be brought down easily. In fact, what she does is replicate her “brain” in the bodies of other sims, and life clearly will become terrible for everyone.

Okay, that sounds like a horrible plot, right? Yes, it was, but the depiction of a society where there were human beings, and where there were these AI creatures as well, was really interesting and thought provoking.  (Take care, Elon Musk)

A similar society was depicted in the play we saw today at Theater J. The play, called Your Name Means Dream (not a great title), shows what happened when an elderly (pretty young elderly – 74), ailing woman is provided an attractive non-human AI creature to be her caretaker. (Naomi Jacobson, who does a lot of cursing and screaming, plays the unpleasant human.) All of the shows we have seen this year at Theater J have been excellent. Until this one. I thought this one so bad that it made me long for Subservience, something I never really thought possible. Luckily, the run ends today. So you don’t have to see it.

What was wrong with the play? Everything. With the exception of the acting of one of the two cast members, Sara Koviak, for whom the play was apparently written, I thought it was an enormous waste of time and even made me wonder if Donald Trump might be right about purging American theater of harmful influences.

And Koviak, who had to act like a robot (but a robot with too many human characteristics) in her communication and in her mannerisms, and whose role also demanded a great deal of physicality, played the role just right, once you accepted that this was the way to play the role (and since the role was written for Koviak, it obviously is the way it was intended to be played), you cannot fault her at all. I fault the playwright, however, with coming up with an AI character who was, on the whole, not AI enough (i.e., too human) and whose abilities, such as making telephone calls internally and becoming the character who she called as long as the call lasted, were someone outlandish.

(I should add that this play has been put on elsewhere to good reviews. Go figure.)

Luckily, we don’t live yet in a society where human-appearing robots compete with human-appearing humans for jobs and strike relationships with each other. Or do we? Can anyone prove that either Donnie or Lonnie are in fact 100% human? I can’t.

I keep reading and hearing that even Republicans are getting tired of them or their policies. But that they are simply afraid to say so. Cowards, all. Really.

Franklin D. Roosevelt: can I quote you? “The only thing to fear, is fear itself.”

I don’t understand it. Among all the problems with the Trump immigration actions, the fact that they sent the “wrong person” to that prison in El Salvador is not surprising (and not excusable). They have admitted that he should not have been sent there, and a federal judge has told them to bring him back to the United States. The government had argued, as I understand it, a number of things, including taking the position that once he was out of the country, the judge no longer had jurisdiction, and that once he was out of the country, the government had no way to get him back. In fact, the 20-something year old press secretary of His Lowness said, to a questioning reporter, something like: “You should be talking to the president of El Salvador”.

This pretty much typifies everything, doesn’t it? Total callousness on the part of the government to the individual involved and his family. Total disregard of an order of a federal judge. Total impertinence on behalf of the press secretary. Total disregard of law.

This is what is happening. The government is picking up people off the street whom they believe to be members of a gang that they believe is directed (at least to some extent) by the government of Venezuela, and is sending them (without any due process rights to, for example, prove that they are not members of a gang) to a prison in a third country, El Salvador. Apparently, these arrests are being made on the basis of a name (that’s the problem with the man who they admit was incorrectly arrested) and on the basis of tattoos (Pete Hegseth, watch out, you are next).

Once someone is picked up, they can be put on a plane and sent abroad without even any notice to next of kin. The wife (a citizen of the US) of the individual in question here found out where her husband was when she saw him being herded into the prison in El Salvador while she was watching TV.

How you can arrest someone on the basis, say, of tattoos, or on the basis of name recognition and nothing more, I don’t understand. Neither did the judge, I don’t think. The question of membership in the gang is questionable for many of them, and the entire question of whether the gang is under the aegis of the Venezuelan government is apparently only speculation, if that. Certainly, it is a bad gang, and I guess members have been engaged here in criminal activity, but what about someone who escaped to the US to escape the gang he was forced to be in in Venezuela? Just for example.

We have some sort of arrangement with the Salvadoran government to house people from third party countries whom we send there. But what is that arrangement? Even looking beyond the question of its legality (a real question, of course), what exactly are the arrangements? Is there written documentation of a contract? Or is it a handshake agreement? Or ….. ? Don’t you think we should see what it is?

I doubt that it says: we are going to send you a bunch of folks to imprison. They are from another country. Once you have them, they are yours. You can torture them if you want. You can starve them. You can free them. You can keep them three days, three years or three centuries. They are yours. We are washing our hands of them. If they say we should not have sent them to you, we don’t care. Again, it is up to you. It is like we never saw them.

Horrific. It can’t happen here, can it?

I have to run. Luckily, I have no tattoos, and my name is really not that common, certainly not in Venezuela. I think I am safe. For today.

ERRATA: I now see that the individual I was referring to was actually Salvadoran, not Venezuelan, and I can see how that could complicate things. Everything I said about Venezuelans was, I think, correct, and there are several Venezuelans now in El Salvador who are proclaiming innocence of gang membership.

I think my presentation went pretty well. I spoke about the failure of the Weimar Republic, and whether today in the United States we can learn anything from studying why it did not succeed.

I would like to upload my text (which I have in a Word file) onto the blog, but when I looked at the instructions on how to do that, they seemed to involve about a dozen steps, none of which I really understood and none of which I had the patience to learn about. So…..

The German Weimar Republic was the government set up after World War I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 ending the war, and placing significant burdens on the losing German Empire, including reparations, military limitations and territorial losses. A constitutional convention was held in the city of Weimar, resulting in the formation of a liberal republic that governed Germany until it was replaced in 1933 by Hitler’s Third Reich.

My presentation, which I think went well, was primarily based on a book titled “When Germany Put the Clock Back” by American journalist Edgar Mowrer and originally published shortly after Hitler obtained control of the country.

Germany had no democratic traditions, and Mowrer said the Germans, always aggressive in foreign affairs, were always docile in internal matters, leaving governing to their better classes, and that the idea of a western style democracy was brand new to them. They, for the most part, did not understand how it was suppose to work, making it easier for the opponents of the Republic to undermine it.

In addition, most elements of the population were against the new governing structure, including the old noble class, the military, the Catholic Church, and nationalist right wing groups, such as the brand new National Democratic Socialist Workers’ Party, otherwise known as the Nazis.

There was tremendous bitterness about the terms of the Versailles Treaty. There was a country which had been destroyed, and there was unbelievably high inflation coupled with unemployment. There were those who believed in Aryan superiority and could not except defeat, and there were those, including many Jews, who found a liberal democracy just what they wanted, and who succeeded in changing the books Germans read, the films and plays they watched, the art they produced, and the sexual practices they were accustomed to. All this fed opposition to the Republic.

Things settled down for about five years after 1924 when the Versailles terms were adjusted, but the global depression, which began in 1929 hit Germany hard and turned many of those who had voted with the Social Democrats ten years earlier into ardent supporters of the Nazis, who gained 38% of the vote for the German parliament in 1933 (as opposed to 2% of the vote which they won only a few years earlier).

Of course, the Nazis always based much of their program on “the Jewish problem”. The Jews just didn’t fit into the Nazi way of thinking. The Nazis believed that humanity’s unchangeable pattern was to have ethnic or national groups compete with each other for power. A cosmopolitan group like the Jews, who believed in tolerance within the communities in which they lived and who all seemed to have international connections, just did not fit in the German/Nazi worldview.

The Weimar government was led by a president, General von Hindenburg, a military hero and a man not identified with any of Germany’s 40 political parties, and by a Chancellor, the last of whom was Baron von Papen. The Chancellor ran the non-military side of the German government and reported to the President, who was also in control of the German military. In 1932, von Papen and von Hindenburg decided that Germany had become too unstable and fired all of the country’s ministers (something arguably not permitted by the constitution), replacing them with a more conservative, right wing group. In early 1933, von Hindenburg appointed Adolph Hitler as Chancellor. Von Hindenburg was not a Nazi, and not a fan of Hitler, but was afraid of him and believed that he would be easier to control in the government (in a high position, but one where he answered directly to von Hindenburg) than if he remained outside the government agitating.

The deposed cabinet ministers left without putting up a fight prior to Hitler’s appointment. They thought they were helping save the country from further instability, and had not contemplated Hitler as Chancellor. They were even more surprised when Hitler was able to put through the Parliament (the Reichstag) legislation known as the Enabling Act, which basically gave the Chancellor the power to adopt and enforce new laws without parliamentary approval and without the approval of the President. Von Hindenburg died less than a year after he appointed Hitler Chancellor. He was not replaced. Hitler was now all powerful.

This is the briefest of outlines. If you want my entire presentation, just let me know and I will send it to you.

The question is: can it happen here? No one thought it could happen in Germany until it was too late. And when it did happen, it happened very, very fast. And it happened because not enough people fought against it, and because the Enabling Act gave unlimited power to an individual who had much less power the day before its passage.

The United States in 2025 is not Germany in 1919. But even so……anything can happen anywhere, which means that “yes, it can happen here.”

I am writing this post quickly rather late at night. So let me get right to it.

(1) The Film. Our neighborhood, community theater had one showing tonight (all 450 seats filled) of the 2025 Academy Award winning documentary No Other Land, a joint Palestinian-Israeli film about the Palestinian villages comprising a region known as Masafer Yatta, in the southern part of the West Bank, and their continual destruction by the Israel Defense Force and – in recent times – by Israeli settlers. The villages, which had apparently existed since before 1900, were designated as unapproved settlements by Israeli authorities and designation for destruction when the land they were on was declared as a military training facility. A legal battle of two decades ended when the Israeli Supreme Court sided with the IDF, and said that the villages could be destroyed and the residents forced to move elsewhere. For most, elsewhere would be leaving their land, their animals, and their rural life, and moving to a West Bank city, probably Hebron, the closest.

It’s a well made film, showing collaboration between Basel, a young Arab and second generation activist, and Yuval, an Israeli of the same age, a journalist who is sympathetic to and supportive of the villagers’ cause. They both appeared to accept the Academy Award a month or so ago.

Not surprisingly, the film is a downer, makes you mad, and makes you wonder why everyone can’t just accept each other and live normal lives. And the film certainly lets you see the fragile lives lived by rural Palestinians in the West Bank. But for me, there was something else. For me, it struck close to home. My home. You know, the United States of America.

I imagined the same story set not in the south of Palestine and not in the 21st century, but somewhere (almost everywhere) in the United States, some time in the late 18th or early 19th century. The Palestinians would be played by Native Americans. The IDF by the U.S. Army. And the settlers…..well, by the settlers. It struck me that it was the same. The Indians always under attack, their villages destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, and so forth.

There is nothing new under the sun. And the Americans at that time (and now) who support Manifest Destiny and think of the Indian wars just as an inevitable series of events required to enable our country to become what it is today, and no different from the Israelis, who think of the West Bank as biblical lands given to the Jews by God as part of Israel’s Manifest Destiny, and view the Palestinians exactly as the Americans viewed the Indians.

(2) The Book. On Monday, I felt the need to read something light, so I went to my book case filled with books by people in the entertainment industry, and pulled one (primarily based on its size) to see if it was readable. It turned out to be quite readable.

The book, by Shirley MacLaine, is called You Can Get There From Here, and was published in 1975. Shirley MacLaine, who is now 90 (remember when that sounded old?), and has had an interesting life and career, to be sure. This book deals with a much younger Shirley, obviously, a Shirley who was in her late 30s or early 40s.

I still have a couple of chapters to go, but I think that I get the gist of what’s to come. The book can be looked at as having three major sections, and a fourth shorter one.

The first part of the book talked about the period during the very early 1970s, when the Vietnam War was raging, and opposition to it was raging. Apparently, this was a time when Hollywood was in the doldrums, and everyone was turning to television, something that Shirley never wanted to do, finding most TV shows mindless and a waste of everyone’s time. But she had to make a living and signed on to do a show called “Shirley’s World”, which was to be a comedy about a young woman trying to make her way through life, and was to be filmed in various cities around the world. From almost the beginning Shirley thought she had made a big mistake, and after looking at the first draft of the scripts for the first episodes she knew she did. The show was aired for only a few episodes, I think, received terrible reviews, and was canceled.

I had never heard of “Shirley’s World”, which was just as well, but she gives a very interesting description of how the show was put together, obviously from a very different vantage point than that of someone who simply turns of a TV.

The second part of book deals with her giving up show business for several months to campaign full time for, and very closely with, George McGovern as he ran first for the Democratic nomination in 1972, and then against Nixon for the presidency. I did not know that she had done this, and had done it at such an intensive level (she was even with the McGoverns in a hotel room on election night, to give you an idea of her centrality to the campaign), so again her writing here was from an insider’s perspective. This insider perspective, by the way, was quite critical of the way the campaign was run and, as time went on, quite critical of McGovern as a candidate.

The third part of the book (the one that I haven’t completely finished) involved a trip to China which MacLaine took in 1972 as the leader of a group of about eight “normal” American women, selected by herself, the first group of American women to be allowed into China shortly after the opening of the country to Americans. Again this was interesting, because China in 1972 was interesting, but was not a particularly successful trip, in part because the women were “too normal”, and not sufficiently prepared to be pioneers in this sort of travel, and in part because Shirley herself was so interested in China that she didn’t pay enough attention to her job as the leader of her pack. I should also say that, for whatever reasons, perhaps because China travel was so new and the country so unexplored by Americans, that I really didn’t trust her descriptions of the places she went or the people she was in contact with. China in 1972 was not the China that exists now at all.

Finally, the short part. After the end of the McGovern campaign, Shirley decided to visit her parents for several days, something that apparently she did not do that often. Her parents lived right here in the DC area, in Arlington VA, and her visit, as she describes it, was an interesting one. No need for a long description. Let’s just say that if Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton had not been available to play the Bunkers, MacLaine’s parents could have taken on the roles, playing themselves.

(3) The Presentation. The presentation is one that I am making at 9 a.m. this morning to my Thursday morning breakfast group. That’s the reason I am rushed to write this blog tonight, and would not have time to write it in the morning.

I know you have heard of L.L. Bean. But have you heard of D.D. Bean? No? You will, because D.D. Bean is the only company in the United States that makes matches. And without American matches, how will you light the bonfires you will need to rid yourself of all foreign made goods so you can feel truly liberated?

As Edie and I wonder (or should wonder) if we should be downsizing,  this does seem like one way to do it. I went to the D.D. Bean website, and wanted to buy some matchboxes with our name on them. I saw that the minimum quantity is 100,000 boxes. We have a lot of foreign stuff in our house, and sometimes we find it hard to get a match to catch on fire, so we might need two orders.

But it goes to show you how much we depend on foreign goods, not only high-tech goods, but…….matches. And how many things will be affected by liberating tariffs.

Digression: “tariffs” is not a beautiful word. Putting two f’s together does not make for beautiful music.

I am trying to remember what Donald Trump campaigned on…bringing down prices immediately, keeping Americans employed, ending the war in Ukraine before Inauguration Day, straightening out the Middle East. What else? Tariffs on all, ending our alliances, destroying the federal government, ending the role of lawyers and the courts, kicking qualified people out of essential jobs, picking people off the street and sending them to a prison in El Salvador without any recourse or due process, banning books, absorbing Greenland and Canada, controlling the Panama Canal, taking over cultural institutions and universities? Were these part of his campaign promises?

Liberation Day will be January 20, 2029. And this may be a very different country then.

And what if the thinkable happens? What if Trump’s dementia grows to the point that it becomes clear he can not do his job anymore?

Trump did one thing presidential candidates often do. Choose a vice-president so clearly incompetent that his incompetence becomes insurance that the president will be allowed to serve out his term. I have no ready response on this one other than to say a Vance regime would be short-lived.

In the meantime, higher prices are just around the corner. Buckle your Chinese made seat belt. It’s gonna be a bumpy ride in your Mexican made car.

By the way, did you catch Cory Booker’s speech yesterday? I missed it, but I am going to listen to it this morning, this afternoon, this evening, tonight, and tomorrow morning.

And I am going to be thinking about Liberation Day.

“Matchmaker, Matchmaker……”

As you probably know, Tim Snyder, his wife, and a third Yale professor are moving to Canada to teach at the University of Toronto. “Why Toronto?”, I asked him. He responded: “I wanted to find a city that reminded me of New Haven.”

Toronto is, of course, an extraordinary city. After the Anchluss, it will be the best large city in the United States by far. Well, maybe not. It will probably have a lot of competition from Vancouver, Montreal, and Calgary. You can see why Canada is looking forward to joining us.

But Snyder told me that his menage a trois (that’s French Canadian for “trio”) is not looking forward to Le Merge (that is not French Canadian for anything: it just looks like it should be), and that they will look for other cities across the world with that New Haven vibe. Believe it or not, there are very few.

By the way, as our president has signed an Executive Order making English THE official language of the United States, it is not clear what the French Canadians are going to do. They don’t want to speak the Official Language. We know that. But life sometimes doesn’t give you a choice, or as they now (but not for long) say, “C’est la vie”.

That last phrase is demonstrative of the problem that lies ahead. The fact that “c’est” and “say” are pronounced the same is a prime example of what drives President Trump both cuckoo and coucou. Yes, big changes are coming to Quebec.

One other change will be that there will be no Quebec. Canada will be only one state. It will be the equivalent of Rhode Island. That seems fair.

One other thing you may have noticed. The race is on between Greenland and Canada. The winner will be the 51st state, the loser the 52nd. Or the other way around. Whichever wins, both will become states. Canada will be our largest, Greenland will be number two. Poor Texas will flip to number 4.

And one more thing about equity. Greenland, with 50,000 people, will get 2 Senators. California and Canada, each with 40,000,000, will also each get 2. So will Caribbea.

What is Caribbea, you ask? That will be our 53rd state, combining Puerto Rico, the Canal Zone (A man, a plan, a canal, Trump), and the Virgin Islands.  There is also a move to combine Washington (now DC, but not for long) with Guam and Mars (to be known as The Great Canal Zone) to be our 54th, but I don’t think that will happen, do you? But we can dream.

Bye…

Elon Musk has apparently now paid $1 million to two young, white Wisconsin residents as part of his campaign to elect a Republican to the State Supreme Court, something which would, as I understand it, help Tesla sell more cars in the State. Musk stated that “I think this will be important for the future of civilization. It’s that important.”

I have done a little calculating. I think that, based on the current valuation of Tesla stock, he could give $1 million to about 350,000 Americans, and still remain comfortably a billionaire. Or he could hide $1 million in new Teslas over the next, say, ten years. At the 2024 rate of sales, that would be about 2,400,000 cars over the next ten years, with a $1 million gift hidden in about 15% of the cars sold. Of course, with so many opportunities to wind up with a million dollars, the number of cars sold would be greatly increased, bringing down the percentage of winners, but probably still enough to promote the sales.

In fact, why stop here? This would be a brilliant marketing device for any company, turning the US economy into a massive lottery which would raise consumption levels, benefit both buyers and sellers, and even help close the trillion dollar annual deficit for the federal government.

“Brilliant idea, Art”, you say, “But if you’re so smart, why aren’t you rich?”

We don’t have to answer that question right now. Let’s just move on.

Yesterday was the first day in a long time that I don’t think I watched any TV news. I guess what I missed was Trump saying that he might run for a third term as our president. I will tell you this: I have as much chance being elected for a third term as Trump does. This is not something to lose any sleep over. But perhaps Trump could run, in 2028, for the presidency of Greenland. I say that, without having any idea of the limitations of the Greenland constitution (or if there even is such a document), because there are only about 45,000 adults over the age of 18 in Greenland (this is an estimate based on information provided me by the friendly mental robots at Google AI). Let’s assume (Google AI could not really help me on this one) that this included 30,000 adults in two person families, and 15,000 who live by themselves. Let’s assume (for the sake of this demonstration) that everyone voted (I know what you are thinking: half of the Greenland population is always out fishing, and wouldn’t be available to vote on a given day), so Trump would need 22, 501 votes to win. Let’s also assume that the population of Greenland is less materialistic than the population of the United States and that they would be satisfied with $100,000 rather than $1,000,000.

You can do the math. Trump (even without help from Musk or Peter Thiel or any of the others) could buy presidency of Greenland in 2028, and then work to incorporate Greenland into the United States.

But, you say, there will be roadblocks. You would need the president of the United States (much less Congress and others) to agree. And you don’t know who the president of the United States will be.

Oh, but I think we do. By 2028, the Musk fortune (due to the Art-ful Tesla marketing campaign) will be growing exponentially, and Elon will have the ability to pay off potential voters once again, helping select the next president of the United States.

But who will that be? I can’t pinpoint specifically, who it will be, but I will predict this. THE 48TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES WILL BE A “DEI” SELECTION!

“Art, you gotta be kidding. DEI is dead in the water.”

No, it isn’t. In 2028 it will be alive and kicking: Don Jr., Eric, or Ivanka.

(And you thought if I didn’t watch the news, I wouldn’t have anything to say.)

Geography can be a mysterious subject. Take, for example, the distance between Washington DC and Philadelphia PA. When you look at a map, it seems that the distance between the two is the same irrespective of which one is your starting place, and which one your destination. But…..through years of observation, I have concluded that this is just not so.

Going from Washington to Philadelphia is a major excursion, something you do if you have family living in Philadelphia and you haven’t seen them in a long time (you wonder why they chose to live so far away) or maybe if there is a special art exhibit (or flower show, I guess). You do it rarely.

But going from Philadelphia to Washington is like driving to the grocery story. You do it at the drop of a hat. You don’t even think about it.

Take yesterday, for example. Even though we only have tickets to 8 or 9 Nationals games, our first 2 games were the team’s first 2 games of the year, against the Phillies. The Opening Day game where the announced crowd was a sellout of 41,500, and yesterday’s attendance was announced at about 38,500. Well, truth is that (I would bet) over half of those at the stadium, especially yesterday – a Saturday, rather than a Thursday, were Phillies fans. I guess some of them live in the DC area, but many (most? I don’t know) took the short drive down from Philadelphia. Our seats are in the second deck on the third base side. That’s the visiting dugout side (it’s also the shady side). I would guess that Phillies fans on that side outnumbered Nats fans at least 2 to 1, maybe even 3 to 1.

And this is not an unusual phenomenon. For the 20 years that the Nats have now been in Washington, massive Philadelphia fans have filled the stadium. And it’s not only the stadium (this should be obvious), it’s the restaurants and bars and streets surrounding the stadium, and its the Metro going to and from the Navy Yard/Nats Stadium station.

And it isn’t only at the baseball games. We used to have Washington Capitals tickets through my office when I was working, and it was the same when the Flyers came to town. And you know it must be the case when the Super Bowl champ Eagles come, and probably when the Warriors are here as well.

But have we ever gone to Philadelphia to see the Nationals, Eagles, Flyers or Warriors play? Of course not. It is just so far away.

At any rate, the first two games have not been auspicious for those of us here in Washington. The Phillies are a better team, thanks to the three ex-Nats who are their stars at the plate: Bryce Harper, Trea Turner and Kyle Schwarber. But other than that, on paper, our teams are probably not that different. We had two very strong outings from our starting pitchers (MacKenzie Gore and Jake Irvin), but our relief pitchers, starting in the 6th inning when the game was 2/3 over allowed 16 runs in the first two games. I can tell you one thing: if your relievers allow an average of 8 runs a game, your season is going to stink. You don’t have to know anything about baseball to know that.

Oh, well, let’s move on. I haven’t said much about food recently, because we hadn’t eaten out much since returning from our vacation. Two weeks of three meals a day at restaurants will have that result. But now we have had two very good dinners (Thursday and last night), so let’s give credit where credit is due. The first was at a restaurant called Mi Vida, located at 7th and G NW in the former Rosa Mexicano spot, right at the south Gallery Place Metro entrance. While I am told that the guacamole was too salty (I don’t eat guacamole, or anything else made with avocado), the two entrees we got were very, very good. I had the fried cod tacos, and Edie had what they called enchiladas rancheras, which consisted of open-face enchiladas smothered in vegetables and a rich sauce. There are three Mi Vidas in DC, the others on 14th Street NW and on the Wharf. You should try it.

Last night, we ate a Via Roma, which I would call a neighborhood restaurant on Connecticut Ave NW, near Calvert Street in the Woodley Park neighborhood. It is a unique restaurant in that it calls itself a pizzeria, but it doesn’t serve pizza (no, I don’t understand that, either). It serves what it terms “pinsa”, which is a Roman (not only 2025 Roman, but Time of Caesar Roman) dish which is pizza like, but does not use a dough which you throw into the air, but a dough which you press and then let ferment for three days before topping it and heating it. This makes an extraordinary crust, and the toppings on the pinsa we shared (including, if I recall, pesto, black olives, artichoke hearts, red peppers and cheese) were also perfect. If you only have that Pinsa via Romana, you will get out of the restaurant for $19 plus tax and tip. We added an anchovy and buffalo butter appetizer (you read that correctly) and two glasses of Lambrusco Secco, and made it a party.

One more thing about these two restaurants. Excellent service at both. And that is important, especially since both came right after our relief pitchers allowed 16 runs in two games. Or have I already mentioned that?

Last April, we went to Carbondale, Illinois in order to see the full solar eclipse, and it was worth it. Over the past few days, we learned there was to be another solar eclipse in DC, a partial eclipse, this morning at about 7 a.m. We still have our eclipse-viewing glasses (thank you, Warby Parker), and thought we might get up early go outside and have a partial reprise of 2023.

Last evening, I looked for the precise schedule. We decided to sleep in. The partial eclipse was to start at 6:57 a.m., be at its greatest at 6:59 a.m., and disappear in its entirety by 7:01 a.m. That’s pretty quick, but you haven’t even heard the most important statistic. The greatest amount of the sun covered by the moon at 6:57 a.m. would be exactly 1 percent.

The site of the eclipse is the Northeast. If you live in Portland ME, I read you had a 62% eclipse and it will last for 45 minutes. Worth getting up at 6:27 a.m. in Portland. But what if you are in the 52nd state? In Nuku, Greenland, the eclipse was set to be 87% and the partial eclipse will last about two hours. It looks like the Vances have left Greenland too soon.

My Googling about the solar eclipse (which, to be truthful, didn’t mean much to me) was myyway from escaping MSNBC last night, where we watched both Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow. So much is going on ….. and of course, none of it good.

There were two shocking events. One related to this Tufts University Ph.D. student Rumeysa Ozturk, whose student visa was canceled and who has been arrested and imprisoned. Okay, you say, she must have deserved it. Well, I don’t know. All that I have seen reported so far is that she and three other Tufts graduate students wrote an op-ed criticizing the University’s failure to follow up on student Senate resolutions regarding Israel’s actions in Gaza. If there is more, I don’t know about it. And I think I would.

But there is an additional element to this situation. No one from the government told Ozturk that her visa had been canceled. She did not know, and had no way to know. She was simply walking down the street, when she was stopped by a number of armed police officers, handcuffed, put into a police car and carted off to jail. That was it.

Ozturk, by the way is from Turkey. This is how things work in Turkey. This is not how things work here. Strike that. This is not how things are supposed to work here.

Now, Ozturk needs a lawyer (maybe she already has one; that I don’t know), and where will she turn? She won’t go to Wilmer Hale, now under a Trump sanction. She might hesitate to go to Perkins Coie or to Jenner and Block, because although their sanctions have been put on hold by District Judges, their cases are still alive and, who knows, the District court opinions may be overturned.

That leaves Paul, Weiss and Skadden, Arps, the two firms who have signed agreements with the government to, among other things, undertake a certain amount of pro bono works that support the Trump agenda. They are not now being sanctioned and can, in fact, undertake any business they want to, in addition to what they promised Dear Leader. So, all to the good, right? Not so fast. If they take a case that involves fighting the government and the MAGA agenda, such as the Ozturk case, they will probably have the sanctions slapped right back on them. So they will say “No” to her request.

But let’s say that you aren’t Ms. Ozturk. Instead, you are a corporation that has business arrangements with the federal government or is regulated by the government. Would you go to Skadden or Paul, Weiss? I wouldn’t suggest it. For one thing, you know those firms are not only in the Trump crosshairs, and they could be resanctioned at any minute. For another, you would doubt how strongly they would represent you before the government for fear of being resanctioned.

This is why I think the caving of those firms, even from a practical perspective, is misguided.

And this is why the entire law world is endangered, and with it, of course, the entire American legal system. All lawyers, whether currently under federal sanction, formerly under federal sanction, and never under federal sanction, and all potentially under federal sanction for taking and pursuing any case which puts you at odd with Mr. Trump and his minions. That’s just the way it is.

By the way, as to Ozturk, did you see what Marco Rubio said when asked about her? I quote: “We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas.” Yup, that’s our Secretary of State.

By the way, it is starting out to be a beautiful Spring in Washington. The blossoms all look beautiful and are coming out at the right time, in the right order, to basically blue skies. Has there ever been beautiful weather like this before?

The answer is yes. On 9/11, the weather was gorgeous when the Twin Towers fell. And it was equally beautiful, I am told, on September 1, 1939, the day the Nazis attacked Poland.

Luckily, there is that little thing called a partial eclipse, which may – even for just an instant – mar that beauty, and thereby let us avoid another tragedy.

Yesterday was Opening Day for the Nationals’ 2025 season, and we were there. The final score was Philadelphia 7, Washington 3. That doesn’t look very good, and it isn’t, but it was an extra-inning game, tied 3 – 3 at the end of nine innings.

We’ll come back to the Nats in a minute. But first……let us return to those exciting times of yesteryear. (Did I get that right?)

I went to my first major league game during the summer of 1950, 75 years ago. I was seven, and I went with my Aunt Millie and my Uncle Jules.

(Digression: Aunt Millie was my father’s sister, Mildred. My mother was also a Mildred. No one ever called my mother Millie. Make of that what you wish.)

The game, of course, was at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis, and the Cardinals were playing the Chicago Cubs. I have mentioned before that, due to the influence of my grandfather, I considered myself a St. Louis Browns fan, but most of St. Louis followed the Cardinals, and I assume that included Millie and Jules.

Like most seven year olds, I brought my baseball mitt with me, determined to come home with a foul ball. Imagine my disappointment when I found myself sitting behind home plate, separated from any possible foul ball by a screen. I had never considered that possibility.

The final score was Chicago 6, St. Louis 1. Except for yesterday’s game, that is the only score I remember after attending games for 75 years.

(Okay, let’s dig into that. I distinctly remember the score. I have always remembered it. There is only one problem. For some reason, none of the baseball statistics books, and there are many, remember any game during that period where the Cubs beat the Cardinals 6 to 1, except for a game in Chicago. That proves you can’t rely on the statistics books.)

Yesterday’s game against the Phillies showed two pitchers giving remarkable performances. MacKenzie Gore of the Nats (who struck out 13 in six innings) and Zach Wheeler of the Phillies. But the Phillies have something that the Nats don’t have – Bryce Harper, Trea Turner and Kyle Schwarber. And, as you know, all three are former Nats.

Last year, the Phillies won about 25 more games than the Nats. I don’t have much confidence that this year will be any different. The Nats added three veteran starting players to the club this year (Lowe, DeJong, and Bell). These three are not Harper, Turner and Schwarber, and I do not see them helping the club win games. (I should add that Josh Bell, who was with the club previously, seems to be an extraordinary individual  and a good, but not extraordinary ball player. He is our designated hitter, but his average doesn’t really warrant that position, and I guess his defensive play doesn’t give him an edge at first base.)

I know that I know nothing, but for those readers who follow the Nats, I would have liked to have come out of Spring Training differently. I would like to have seen Stone Garrett make the team. We would have had 5 outfielders – Crews, Wood, Young, Call and Garrett. I would rotate them (except for Young) and (except for Young) would have used one of them in each game as designated hitter, still holding one to go to the outfield if necessary.

I also would have used Jose Tena as our starting third baseman, and kept Nasim Nunez as an infield utility player. Should Bell or Lowe be the first baseman? I am not sure. As to DeJong? Sorry, just no room.

Okay, it is a long season, and maybe Wood will be another Harper, etc. We shall have to wait and see.

Meanwhile…..I will skip the Crackerjacks.

I think I will continue with a few other small incidents that I remember from past years. Today, the subject is air travel.

Like most of you, I cannot even begin to think of how many airplanes I have traveled on. Many hundreds, I am sure. And most of them aren’t particularly memorable. But a few of them were.

(1) Port-au-Prince to Cap Hatien, Haiti, February 1977. It was our delayed honeymoon, a week or so in Baby Doc Duvalier’s poor, but very very safe, Haiti. After several days in the capital, we were to fly to the north of the country and its historic capital. We were surprised when we wound up at the airport (if in fact, it was an airport) to find out that we were flying on a single engine, eight passenger plane and that there were to be nine passengers. I don’t recall the airline, but the pilot looked very un-Haitian. He was probably about 25, had blond hair and blue eyes, and was very good looking. There was no co-pilot. He told us that he needed to assign us seating to balance out the plane, and he began to point to us one by one and tell us what seat we should sit in. Soon, the eight seats were filled. I had my assignment. But Edie had not been given a seat. Our pilot then looked at her, smiled, and said, “you will sit with me and be my copilot”. Hmmm, I thought. What a honeymoon.

(2) Kennedy Airport, NYC, to Madrid, May 1972.

I had just left my job with the Department of Housing and Urban Development and was about, on June 1, to start my new career as a private attorney, and I thought a month in Spain and Portugal would be a good way to bridge those two positions. I was flying by myself and was to meet a friend in Madrid for the first several days, our vacations overlapping, and we were to meet at American Express at a set time. I had never been to Spain, and was very excited, as I took my seat. It was of course an overnight flight, and the plane took off without incident. We had a steward, rather than a stewardess, which was somewhat unusual in those days, and he had given us the normal safety message, and was telling us what a wonderful flight we were going to have, what films we could watch, and what we were going to have both for dinner and then for breakfast. Finishing his speech, which he gave through a microphone at the front of the coach section, and without missing a beat, he then said: “But first, we have to return to New York because one of our engines is on fire.”

This was not exactly what you wanted to hear, and you could see flames coming from the engine on the wing opposite where I was sitting. The steward, very calmly told us that, we in fact were not going to head directly back to New York, because first we were going to fly in several circles as we had to dump excess fuel into the ocean. The dumping and the flight back seemed to take forever, we did not get our dinner, but everyone on the crowded plane seemed remarkably at ease. When we landed, I remember we landed on some sort of foam that had been spread on the runway, and we were surrounded by fire equipment. I don’t remember anything special about the landing itself, and I think we exited the plane through the regular doors and our luggage was offloaded without a problem.

It was a long wait until another plane was ready to take us to Madrid. I lost a day of the trip. And of course, I could not meet my friend at American Express at the scheduled time. By quirk, however, I did meet him the next day. Not at American Express, but just wandering down a street.

(3) DC to Greenville SC, 198?. It was a routine business trip. I was heading down to Greenville for the day (or maybe it was overnight; I don’t remember), where I had a long time client. The flight left National Airport and all was fine. Until we got in the air, and the cabin started filling with smoke. A lot of smoke. Was it a fire? Was it poison? No one, including the crew members, had any idea. Having taken off from National, we landed in about 15 minutes at Dulles. The plane was cleared, and it turned out that there had been some sort of cleaning powder left in a duct. We were able to take off after a relatively short wait.

(4) Shannon Airport, Ireland to Toronto, ONT, probably about 1990. We were returning from a wonderful trip through Ireland. Our flight was on Air Canada, with a stop at Toronto before coming back to DC. What could be easier? The first thing that happened is that, waiting at Shannon for a late night flight, the flight was delayed for reasons that were unclear and we were eventually told that there was a mechanical problem, and that another plane (currently in Glasgow) would be sent to ferry us to Canada, but that there would be an additional wait of several hours. It was by now the middle of the night, and we were stuck at Shannon. For those of you who have been to Shannon, you are probably thinking that there are worse places, because Shannon has so much shopping and so many restaurants that we would all be well entertained. What we learned, though, is that all those shops and restaurants close at night, and there is nothing at all to do at Shannon, waiting for a boarding call that could come at any time.

When the plane finally arrived and, worn out we were escorted on, we knew that we had probably missed our connecting flight and wondered how Air Canada was going to take care of us. We landed in Toronto, went through Canadian customs (I think we had to do that), and then went into the baggage claim room. It was, once again, the middle of the night, but at least the hard part of the trip was over, right?

Wrong. We (the hundreds on our plane) mulled around the baggage claim for over an hour, with no baggage, and with not a single message about the delay. It was like we had been forgotten and abandoned. Finally, we were told that the delay was because the door opening the baggage department on the plane had jammed, and it took them that long to figure out how to get in. It was now maybe 3 a.m., or something like that, and no one knew what to do. We were told to go to a certain gate and that we would be taken care of. At that gate, there was one Air Canada representative, and hundreds of passengers. It probably took us more than another hour (maybe much more) before they told us when our connecting flight would leave the next day, and that they had food, taxi and hotel vouchers for us.

As you probably know, Toronto is not a small city, and metropolitan Toronto is enormous. We expected when we got into a taxi that we would be driven to a nearby airport hotel, but no. As I recall, the ride was over 45 minutes to the other side of town, and the next morning heading back to the airport was even longer because at that time there were other cars on the road.

For the amount of time it took us to get home from Ireland, we could have returned home form Bora Bora.

(5) Moscow to DC, January 1974. I should tell you my best plane ride, I think, at this point. It was getting on a PanAm flight in Moscow after a week in the Soviet Union. The food in the USSR was so bad in January 1974, that the chicken dinner we were served by PanAm was (and still in my memory is) the best meal I have ever had. You cannot imagine how tasty it was.

That’s it.

We sat around with friends last night, basically telling anecdotes about things that happened during our lives that were “interesting”. It may be that most days, you get up have three meals and go back to sleep, without anything happening that is particularly memorable. But on some days, interesting things do happen. You may remember these days all the time, or they may just pop up in your mind now and then. My question is: how do you preserve these small, and disconnected events, so that you – and maybe your children and grandchildren – will remember them?

We ca n start with a couple of incidents from my 1962 summer in Europe with three college friends (who are still my friends today):

(1) We are driving in our rental Opel Rekord toward the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. We had rented our car in Paris, and it had Danish plates. We are minding our own business when a police car behind us starts flashing its lights, with a voice telling us to pull over. I am behind the wheel, wondering what I could have done wrong, and naturally concerned. We stop, a young policeman gets out of his car and walks to us, and says (I don’t even remember the language he used): “My wife and I are planning on a trip to Copenhagen next month. I wonder if you could give us some tips on restaurants and sites.”

We relax, laugh and tell him we aren’t Danish. He is, as you would imagine, very embarrassed and says that he owes us a favor, thinks a bit, and says: “Would you like to see the Reichstag?”

To remind you: the Reichstag is the German parliament building, burned down in 1933 shortly after Hitler took control. It was most likely a false flag operation, but blamed on Communists, giving Hitler an opportunity to increase his control over internal German politics. The Reichstag remained a ruin during the 12 Nazi years, but was occupied by Soviet troops when Berlin was freed from Nazi control in 1945. In 1962, the Reichstag was still a ruin, now within the British quarter of occupied Berlin, and not open to the public.

We told our friendly policeman that that would be great, and he said “Follow me.” He pulled in front of us, turned his siren and flashing lights on, and led us to the gate to the Reichstag grounds. He said something to the guard at the gate, the gate opened, and we were driving towards the ruined building on a road on which such travel was verboten.

We parked, walked to the building, and entered. It was a completely gutted ruin, with no internal walls remaining – only the external walls and support columns. All over the walls on the inside was Russian graffiti (the equivalent of “Kilroy was here”) written by Russian soldiers. We walked up some concrete stairs and found ourselves on the roof, along with a number of British soldiers who maintained a lookout post from which they could see over the one year old Berlin Wall into Communist East Berlin. After we were given some information by one of the soldiers about what they were looking for in East Berlin, an British officer appeared, asked who we were and how we got there, admonished our friendly police officer, and kicked us out.

To our knowledge, we were the only innocent tourists to visit the Reichstag in almost 30 years. Today, of course the Reichstag has been expanded and restored beautifully. Edie and I were in Berlin some years ago, and toured the building, now again the home of the German parliament. The Russian graffiti is no longer there.

(2) On one of our first days in Paris in 1962, we wandered through Montmarte (it must have been a Sunday), looking at the work of the many painters lining the sidewalks and streets. One in particular struck me, and I bought it.

It didn’t take me long to realize that I had probably made a mistake. There were four of us who were going to be traveling in our small Opel all around Europe for another ten weeks or so with our luggage and with two pup tents. How was I going to protect and hold onto this painting?

The answer to every question an American had in Europe in 1962 was to be found at the closest American Express office, so that is where I went, with painting in hand. The AmEx clerk was an attractive young French woman, and I asked her if American Express had a way to hold this painting for me.

The answer was “no,” but after some more conversation, she told me that she would take it to her apartment and keep it for me. All I had to do was tell her when I was coming back, and she would bring it to work that day.

I knew I would probably never see the painting again, but thought at least it would have a good home. I don’t even think I knew her name, or that I told her mine. But on the appointed day, I showed up at AmEx, and there she was, maybe surprised that I showed up right on time, and there was my painting.

Today, 63 years later, we still have the painting. The artist, Rafael Daroca Benavent, was still alive in his late 90s a few years ago. Today, I am not sure.

Yes, the perspective is weird. But there something about the design and colors…..

I am so concerned about the government’s attacks on the country’s legal system that I started a column last night that looked just like the one I wrote a few days ago.

You know the drill. Executive Orders and sanctions on law firms that have represented the president’s opponents (read: enemies), even if only tangentially.  Threats (overt and assumed) against all other law firms, making it likely firms will turn away prospective clients. Instructions to the Attorney General to investigate and prosecute firms and lawyers who take any cases that challenge the federal government, including, for example, cases involving anyone accused of violating immigration laws. Threats to bring lawyers up before bar associations for censure or possible disbarment.

And then there is the cowardice of firms like Paul, Weiss and the others who refuse to, or actually don’t know how to, defend themselves.

Then, there are threats against mainstream judges who are being called leftist lunatics and who are receiving real-time threats from MAGA lunatics. Judge Boasberg lives about 3/4 of a mile from us. Want to know his exact address? Google it. Threats to ignore their rulings, some times by actions, sometimes by inaction. Threats to impeach them.

We are a country of laws? Don’t count on it.

But, guess what? I want to talk about something else. I want to talk about eggs.

I am not sure where we stand on bird flu. Is it spreading? Is it diminishing? Will it become the norm? Prices seem to have stabled, I think, but at an inflated level. So the answer of the Trump administration is to import millions of eggs. As I understand it, most European countries have refused, but South Korea and Turkey have stepped up to the plate and Trump says prices should be back to normal by Easter. Maybe so, since the Christian calendar has set Easter late this year.

But how do you set up a system to bring millions of eggs into the country so quickly? How do you establish that health and safety standards are being met, especially as you fire Department of Agriculture inspectors? How do you set up an internal distribution system so fast? How do millions of eggs suddenly appear. Do Korean and Turkish officials order their chickens to lay more eggs, or do Turks and Koreans seeegg prices rise in their own countries, or have to cope with egg shortages? I don’t understand.

That brings me to my final topic – the White House Easter Egg Hunt. Trump is looking for a sponsor for only $200,000. Let’s see. The Jewish National Fund Easter Egg Hunt or, on a more personal level, the Adas Israel Easter Egg Hunt. But let’s get serious. How about the Paul, Weiss Easter Egg Hunt? I could go on and on, of course. But whoever decides to sponsor the Hunt will face quite a pushback. Although they will hope to create a splash, my guess is they are more likely to create a splatter.

I am sure that someone could prepare a lecture, or even a book, on the relationship between the cities of Boston and Jerusalem. But for my purposes, the only connection that is important is that they are both subjects of today’s brief post.

Let’s start with Jerusalem. Yesterday, the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies (I am vice-president) held its first in-person Day of Learning since before the COVID pandemic. Our presenter was Jodi Magness, who is a world renown archeologist, and holds the somewhat strange title of Kenan Distinguished Professor for Teaching Excellence in Early Judaism at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. She had spoken for Haberman before, most recently in 2018, when she spoke about a current dig in Israel in which she was involved.

This time she gave three lectures about Jerusalem, which I think were part of a course she teaches to undergraduates in Chapel Hill. She recently gave the entire course on-line for the Orange County (CA) Jewish Federation; I listened to several of those lectures.

Jodi Magness is a personable and magnetic speaker, and the crowd yesterday at Kol Shalom in Rockville MD included several Jodi Magness groupies. Her three lectures were very well received.

I know that I can’t do her justice this morning, so I am not going to try. Yes, I am.

Her first lecture was about the early history of Jerusalem, and particularly about how the Old City, as we know it today, was an Ottoman creation, and did not represent the original boundaries of the city, which in fact included a part of today’s Old City, and the land to the south of today’s Old City walls which is now known as the City of David. She spent a long time on the topography of the city, it’s high and low places, how it slopes down from north to south, how the Temple Mount is at a very high point, and the City of David is much lower, but was the original part of Jerusalem because it was built around the water supply, a spring. She explained how, of all old ancient capitals, only Jerusalem was not built on water, nor on a trade route, but at an isolated, yet easy to defend, location.

A thousand years after King David, around the time of Jesus, Herod built a palace to the west of the Temple Mount, in today’s Armenian Quarter of the Old City, which was again on a high ridge, with the area between the Temple Mount and the palace being the region of homes of the wealthiest of the residents of Jerusalem at the time, mainly members of the Saducees, or priestly caste, some of which have been located through digs, and which were designed similar to Roman villas throughout the Roman Empire.

To protect Herod’s palace, a three towered fortress was built just to its north; one of the towers, now known as the Tower of David, remains. And, at the northern end of today’s Old City, near the Damascus Gate if you know the area, was another fortress, parts of which remain, and from the roof of which (if you are lucky enough to gain access), you can watch the comings and goings on the Temple Mount, against showing the need to build on the tops of the hills, and not in the valleys.

She spoke quite a bit about Jerusalem during the time of Jesus, including the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built about 300 years after Jesus’ death and after Constantine legalized Christianity. As you follow today the Via Delarosa, supposedly proceeding along the various stations of the cross, she showed again how this route was defined well after the time of Jesus, and that it was very unlikely that it was historically correct. She has concluded that the current path, demarked in the Middle Ages, running from north to south, is incorrect, and that the true path would have started near Herod’s palace and run north to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.

She spoke of burial practices of the day, of Herod’s reconstruction of the Second Temple, of the origin of the arched support system under the south end of the Temple Mount known today as Solomon’s Stables (like the Tower of David had nothing to do with David, Solomon’s Stables have nothing to do with either Solomon or horses), and the role of money changers during late Second Temple times.

A terrific day.

Okay, on to Boston for a shout out. Some time ago, Washington Post book editor Michael Dirda wrote that, when you go into a used book store, you should always buy at least one book. That is why, when ladt month we went into the Pamlico Book Store in Wilmington NC I bought A City So Grand; Boston 1850-1900 by Stephen Puleo. A pristine copy, signed by the author.

I didn’t really have any expectations for the book, but it turned out to be extremely well written and organized, and very, very interesting.

Here goes: abolitionists, the Fugitive Slave Law, Civil War recruitment, the Irish, the infilling of the Back Bay, streetcars, suburbs, universities,  railroads, first American subway, Italians, the invention of the telephone, exhibitions. They are all here.

The book was published in 2010 and was the author’s third book about Boston.. Highly recommended.

Until tomorrow.

Once upon a time, there was a supply company in Washington called the Atlantic Plumbing Supply Company. It was housed in an old building on V Street NW. The business and the building are now gone, and on the site is a modern apartment building with a 6 screen movie theater called Landmark Atlantic Plumbing Theater.

We hadn’t been to this theater since before the pandemic, but went this afternoon to see the Academy Award winning Best Picture of the Year, Anora.

Is Anora worth four Oscars and the Cannes Palme d’Or?

I think the short answer is “No way”.

The plot line: Ani (Anora) works as a dancer/stripper/escort/prostitute at a club in Manhattan called Headquarters, which seems, at all hours, to be filled with dozens of attractive young girls and even more not as attractive male customers.

Ani, who speaks a little Russian “because her grandmother never learned English”, is taken to meet Vanya, a young Russian customer. They have “a good time” and after a few more, Vanya invites Ani to his house for a private session. Vanya, by the way, is 21 going on 12, and Ani is 23. She knew from the club that he was a big spender, but was taken aback when she saw his much too large and much too fancy house in a gated lot overlooking water in Brighton Beach. It turns out that Vanya’s father is a major Russian oligarch.

After more “fun”, all of which you witness on the screen, and is so continual that it becomes as boring as possible, Vanya hires Ani to be his “girlfriend” for a week (he will pay her $15,000 in cash up front) and he takes Ani and four of his friends to Las Vegas. They stay in the penthouse suite (at least as large and fancy as his house) at a casino hotel, and they have so much more fun that they decide to get married at a Las Vegas chapel. And so they do.

Shortly after getting back to Brighton Beach, rumors of the marriage gets back to Russia, and from Vanya’s rich Russian parents to three thugs (one of whom seems to be an Armenian priest?) who are supposed to keep an eye on Vanya.

Knowing their jobs and maybe their lives are at stake, they break into the house. After trying to keep them at bay, Vanya runs away, leaving Ani with the thugs. The film is no longer a sex film, and is now a film based on an assault and break-in, and no longer tries to be tawdry, but becomes more of an off-beat, comic invasion, as the thugs turn out to hardly be a match for Ani, who really doesn’t know what is going on, and wrongly assumes that Vanya has gone for help.

The third part of the film shows the thugs and Ani as a foursome chasing around New York in an Escalade looking for Vanya. They find him at Ani’s old club, naturally, Drunk (with a capital D), with Ani’s rival who had told her that the marriage would never last.

The fourth part of the film shows Vanya’s parents arriving from Russia on their private jet to have the marriage annulled and their son brought back to Russia. After much travail, they succeed and return to Vegas, the only place the annulment can be accomplished. It turns out that Vanya is in favor of the annulment and never took the marriage seriously (or so he convincingly says). A sadder, but maybe wiser, Anora flies back to New York with Igor, a somewhat sympathetic thug who seems like he just got into the wrong business, and who knows? This just might be the start of something big.

I could tell you more about why I didn’t thing the film very good, but it probably isn’t necessary. Let me just leave you with one question. At a time when there actually seems to be fewer direct sex scenes, and less nudity, in major films, why have Mikey Madison (Anora) and Emma Stone (Poor Things) won the best actress awards the past two years? Was it based on their acting or their bravery? And what advice does it give young actresses as they look to the future?

I am not making a moral judgment.  Just asking a question.