Art is 80

Sorry to do this two days in a row, but yesterday a read through another short Penguin titled “Two Satyr Plays”, one by Euripides and one by Sophocles. I didn’t know what a “satyr play” was (other than I figured it must involve satyrs), and was told that these were short plays that were performed in Greek theaters when tragedies were performed, and they were meant to be light and humorous. Very few remain extant. These are two that do.

The Euripides play “Cyclops” was a retelling of Homer’s story of Odysseus and the Cyclops, and it was fun to read. But the Sophocles play, which suffers by the unpronounceable name of “Ichneutai” (which probably explains why none of us have ever heard of it) is something else. Given a verse translation by Roger Lancelyn Green, it begins with a speech by the god Apollo as follows:

“I am Apollo! Hearken, all below,

To what a god proclaims! For you must know,

And gods above, what great Apollo vows:

A rich reward to him who finds my cows!

My heart is racked with pain: I’ve lost them all!

There’s not one single heifer in my stall,

Nor cow, nor smallest calf. Where they can be

Is more than this all-seeing god can see!

I really did not think that god or man

Would dare such treason, such stealthy plan

To steal my cattle, not leave a trace!

I have been hurrying from place to place

Since first I heard the news, and I proclaim

My loss to gods and men. All are to blame,

And here I give them warning clear and fair,

Those who pretend that they are unaware

That I have lost my cows: they tempt their fate

Who would deceive me – I do not prate!

For I’m Apollo, I would have you know

Where in the world did my poor cattle go?

(Now how much of this is Sophocles and how much Green?

The answer to me of this – unseen.)

Back to my Penguin collection. Today’s blog post will mention the six most recent books I have read. What could be more interesting?

I’m not keeping precise figures, but I think I have read, or read through, about 150 Penguins since I started doing this. It’s been interesting reading books I would not normally read, and being able to transport myself out of the 21st century morass back into the (equally horrific, I guess) 19th and 20th.

Anyway, here goes:

1. Tacitus on Britain and Germany. That’s the title, but the book actually contains two long essays/short books by the Roman writer Tacitus. One, called Agricola, is the biography of his father in law, who helped Britain gain control over much of what is now England, and who became the Roman governor of England in the first century C.E. Tacitus clearly liked his father in law and relished his accomplishments. The second essay, Germania, gives Tacitus’ opinions of the German tribes who lived in what today would be the north of Germany and were, by and large, not under Roman occupation (although some of the tribes were allied with Rome). He talks about a sparsely occupied country with nothing one could call a city or even a village, about people who love to fight (internally or against foreign invaders, and who when not fighting are just lazy as they sit around waiting for the next fight. Tacitus’ Germans are strictly moral and monogamous (the punishments for transgressing morality are severe and rarely needed), poor agriculturalists who wear out their soil and move on, and who live a simple (if alcoholic) life style. They are all attractive and strong, with blond hair and blue eyes, and value their independence and lifestyle. The book also contains a 50 page essay by the translator, H. Mattingly, which nicely sets the tone for Tacitus’ writing.
2. Salome and Other Plays by Oscar Wilde. These were enjoyable to read if a bit simplistic; probably better to see if staged well. The story of Salome is simply that – Salome is the god daughter of king Herod, is attracted to and frightened by John the Baptist. She is promised anything she wants by Herod, and asks for (and gets) the head of John on a platter. Weird story, to be sure. The second play – A Woman of No Importance – tells the story of a member of the British aristocracy who hires a young man, a protege, to be his secretary, although the man seems to have no qualifications for the job. It turns out that the young man is the aristocrat’s son (a fact long hidden from the son) with a woman whom the community thinks is widowed, but in fact is an old lover of the aristocrat. The young man – who himself is in love with a young American visitor – finds out, and a bit of chaos results. The third and last play in the book is An Ideal Husband, similar to the Women of No Importance, is also the story of British aristocrats. A woman married to an up and coming politician is proud that her husband is a paragon of ethics, and supports him in avoiding making decisions that would compromise his ethical standards even if they are unpopular. But she does not know that his entire rise as a politician is based on the lack of ethics in his early political life and when she finds out……
3. The third book is a book of Maxims by La Rochefoucauld. The books starts with a nice background piece by the translator, L.W. Tancock, on the status of French intellectuals of the 17th century during the time of Louis XIV. Theatre was big (Moliere, for example), there were salons with regular attendees each trying to outwit the other, one of whom was La Rochefucauld, who put together maxim after maxim (a popular written art form of the time). The maxims himself bored me to death, so I read a few pages and skimmed the rest. Times have changed, I guess. The book contains 641 maxims. Give me a number and I’ll tell you what it says.
4. The fourth book, Edmund Campion, by Evelyn Waugh. Not a novel, like most of Waugh’s work, but a biography of a churchman living during the time of Elizabeth I. England was in religious upheaval, with Elizabeth determined to have the Church of England pretty well completely displace the Roman Catholic Church in England. Campion was a brilliant student, attractive in every way, who became an Anglican priest as a result of his Oxford studies, but who grew more and more attracted to Catholicism. He left England and went to northern France where a Catholic seminary had been set up to train Englishmen as Catholic priests, as this training was no longer available at home (who knew?). Campion taught there and the went to Rome where the Pope designated him as one of a small number of English Catholics who would return to England, without publicity, to assure English Catholics that the Church was still alive and to attract more into the priestly training abroad. Campion did so and, after a fair amount of success, was arrested, refused to recant his religious affiliation and was hanged. A true story. Very well told.
5. Book five was a novel, Greenmantle, by John Buchan. It’s the second novel by Buchan I have read as a Penguin; the first – set in Scotland and telling the story of a bunch of young bored educated Englishman who wanted to have some daring fun to destroy their boredom and get them back into the swing of things – had a stupid plot (I thought), but was so well written that the plot could be excused. Greenmantle, set during World War I, involves a young Englishman recruited to be a spy by infiltrating first Germany and then Ottoman Turkey to interrupt a plot by the Germans to enlist the entire Muslim world as German allies. The book, very politically incorrect for 2023 reading, was, to me, not worthwhile.
6. Finally, Life in Shakespeare’s England, an anthology of short Elizabethan pieces (written when Shakespeare was writing) to give a flavor of England at the time. The chapter titles tell the story: Stratford, The Countryside (Folk, Sport, Festival), Superstition (Ghosts, Witches, Fairyland, Astrology), Education (Child and Parent, Grammar School, University, Travel), London (the Road to London, First Impressions, Disorders, Temptations, Dress and Fashion, and the Plague), Books and Authors, Theatre (Morals, Playhouses and Beer Gardens, the Audience, the Actor, Puritan Opposition), The Court (Queen Elizabeth, the Courtier, Masques, the Death of the Queen), House and Home (Houses and Furniture, Gardens and Orchards, Housekeeping and the Table, Sleep and Health), Rogues and Vagabonds, and the Sea. Interesting to read through (for the most part); interesting reference.

Today’s subject is belief. People want to believe; I think that is clear. There are so many questions that aren’t susceptible to factual answers, that they either must be answered by “I believe that ……” or left unanswered. Unanswered questions seem to bother a lot of people, so they fall back on belief. And the belief that they fall back on becomes so much a part of their thought process, and therefore their identity, that the belief itself becomes, to them, fact.

People want, to take a small example, to believe that there is a God. Some people need to believe in God in order to anchor their lives. What, they ask, would be the purpose of life without a God? Others, just take belief in God as something that is obvious. Still others don’t think about the God question at all, or even decide that there is, or probably is, no God at all……that is, until they are in serious trouble, when they say (to themselves, no doubt), “Oh, God, please help me”, or until they survive a serious situation and they say “God, thank you”.

Of course (I am sure that this is a case of “of course”), none of these “beliefs” are relevant to the question of whether there is or is not a God. And even this statement begs the question of – if there is a God – what does that even mean?

Western civilization (and now civilization even broader than that) is based upon the God first worshiped by the Israelites of 3000 years ago. This God is so ingrained in our thinking that, for most, the concept of worshiping, or even recognizing the existence of, gods other than this God is unthinkable, primitive, pagan. But, again, this ingrained belief has no relevance to the underlying question.

The elements of the Western God (if I may refer to him that way) is that he is basically anthropomorphic (or, to be more accurate, we humans are deimorphic – a word that does not exist), that he “thinks” in ways that we can understand even if his conclusions sometimes seem inexplicable, that he “cares” about us more than about any other creature or place, that he can (in varying ways) intervene in our daily activities, and that he has a plan for us both when we are alive and after we die. Try looking at this from the perspective of someone (or some thing) not raised in this Western tradition, and it might look a little ridiculous, yes? But here we are – stuck with our belief.

Are you religiously Jewish? You may believe that this God chose the Jewish people out of all the others for certain teachings and that he expects the Jewish people to worship him by living in certain ways (that these ways are very different from the ways of Jews 2000 to 3000 years ago becomes irrelevant), and that he gave the Jews the right to certain real estate on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean Sea (like the American republic – if they can keep it). If you are not Jewish, the concept of a God as a real estate agent seems a little odd, right?

Are you religiously Christian? You may believe that this same God decided 2000 years ago to expand his “people” beyond the Jews, that people generally were born into sin and needed to be redeemed before they could expect a beatific afterlife, and that this redemption came with God’s chosen mate giving birth to a son who was crucified to wash away the sins of mankind, or at least of that portion of mankind who believed this general story. But if you are not Christian, it is pretty hard to give this tale any real credibility.

Are you religiously Muslim? Well, then you believe that this God told what he really stood for only to Mohammed, an illiterate Arab, whose followers spread this word of God and made it known that by following these precepts, but by no others, could people, and therefore the world, be saved.

All three of these story lines – the Jewish, the Christian and the Muslim – are clearly fantastic. Yet those who truly believe tend to think that they understand the true God, and no one else does. They believe that followers of the other two religious systems are in error and that, once they die, they will discover just how wrong they were.

Yet, and I repeat, all this means is that people have a need to believe, and that they tend to believe so strongly that they ignore the possibility that their belief is just that – just a belief. They believe that they have discovered truth or fact, not only for them but for everyone, and that it is their job to convert everyone to their cause. For non-Muslims all this brings about is fear.

OK, perhaps all of this is obvious. To me, anything about the creation of the world (where was it created, when was it created, why was it created, was it in fact ever really created?) is well above my pay grade. And that doesn’t bother me. Or, at least I don’t think it does.

So why do I bring this up? Only because this concept of “belief = truth” permeates more than one’s conception of God. I think that it is not an accident that most followers of Donald Trump or other right wing avatars tend to one or another form of religious fundamentalism. Or that most followers of Donald Trump or other right wing avatars tend to believe that their nation is the best, that it is exceptional and destined to lead the world. These are people who need beliefs to anchor their lives – the belief in a certain God (and acceptance of the presumed program of that God, the belief in the superiority of a certain nation (which just happens to be their nation) and the belief in a certain politician (and acceptance of that politician’s program) are primarily the same phenomenon.

And of course, this is not strictly an American phenomenon – you find it replicated world wide, in the past, the present and undoubtedly in the future. It’s the human condition, turning beliefs into facts, and relying on those facts to control one’s own life and the lives of others.

And so it goes.

Some days do lend themselves to diary entries more than others. Yesterday was one of them. Not that anything too exciting happened, but everything was interesting, and nothing was too personal to write about..

A day in the city:

I woke up at a normal hour, looked at all my normal smart phone apps, showered, dressed, came downstairs, read the Times, had breakfast (Heritage Crunch), and wrote yesterday’s blog post. I then had email and text correspondence with a number of people regarding both the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies and the Jewish Funeral Practices Committee, and then updated the sale registry for our on-line book business. At about 11 a.m., I left the house.

A beautiful walk to the Metro, down 32nd Street to Brandywine and out to Connecticut, marred only by someone cutting the grass with an oversized lawn more which covered me with grass chips. The walk is about 2/3 of a mile. The Metro, not very crowded, came about a minute after I arrived at the Van Ness station, and I got off at Farragut Square. I used to do this all the time because for 35 years of the 40 that I practiced law in DC, I worked within a block or so of Farragut Square (in four separate buildings). But I hadn’t got off there in several years, and this time my destination was not near Farragut Square, but at Metro Center, about a mile away and a 20 minute walk. But it was 11:45 and I had to be at my destination at 12:10, so I had plenty of time.

I walked down Connecticut Avenue, by the Army-Navy Club, the AFL-CIO, and St. John’s Church and through Lafayette Square, which looked very green and appealing except that the fountains were not turned on. There were people walking with a purpose, walking without a purpose, and sitting (ala Bernard Baruch) on the benches and, because this is Washington, after all, there was a big demonstration by the TRP Alliance, waving flags with butterflies on them and shouting in unison. The TRP alliance supports making the amnesty for people who have come from certain countries (like Cuba, Haiti and Ethiopia) a permanent one, not just a temporary one.

I walked by the White House lawn, the Treasury Department and a number of shops and cafes until I got to the Church of the Epiphany for its weekly Tuesday noon concert. As usual, an excellent program featuring flutist Carrie Rose, and pianist Szu-Yi Li, playing duets by Handel, Barber and Copland, and Szu-Yi Li playing a solo piece by Liszt. The Copland piece was a duo for piano and flute, written to honor the chief flutist at the Philadelphia Orchestra, William Kincaid, who had passed away. It’s interesting how Copland’s music is recognizable as Copland through the first two notes of the flute. The Barber piece, which I can’t say that I understood, was apparently the basis for the piano concerto that won Barber a Pulitzer Prize. I really don’t know Barber’s music at all.

At 1 p.m., I walked to the Martin Luther King main library, and went to the new cafe there, run by DC Central Kitchen. A first class chicken salad on a brioche sandwich and a glass of iced coffee, all for about $11.

From the library, I walked another block to the Gallery Place Metro stop and took the train back to Dupont Circle, getting off to look at the $4 books outside Second Story Books. For years, I have tried to figure out how they decide what they put on these bargain shelves, but there seems no rhyme or reason. Today, I bought (1) Susan Rice’s memoir, “Tough Love”, signed by Rice on the title page, and in top notch condition, (2) “The Carrot and the Stick: Israel’s Policy in Judaea and Samaria, 1967-68” by Major General Shlomo Gazit, also in top notch condition, signed in Hebrew and English lettering by the author, published by B’nai Brith, and (3) an even rarer volume, “Political Documents of The Jewish Agency, May 1945-December 1946, published in Israel by the World Zionist Organization in 1996, also in perfect condition.

I looked to see what these volumes were selling for. I found the first two listed each at $100 by, ta-da, Second Story. Are these the $100 volumes they decided to sell for $4? They are still listed for sale on their website, so I don’t know. Maybe these are second copies, maybe they were inadvertently pulled off the shelves? I just don’t know. As for the third volume, I cannot find it listed for sale anywhere. Perhaps it is in many research libraries, I don’t know. But it’s a treasure trove for anyone interested in the topic.

I lugged the books to the L-2 bus stop, about five blocks away. The bus (which let’s me off a block from my house, not 2/3 of a mile, like the Metro) came in about 15 minutes. I got on the bus, pulled out by Metro smart card and started to pay, when the driver said “you can just go and sit down”. Why did he do that? He liked me? He felt sorry for such an old man? His machine was broken? Who knows? But I saved $1.25.

Strangely, the bus was relatively empty for the entire 30 minute trip. Only one event worth noting. Sad and funny at the same time. I guess more sad than funny. There was a lot of paving work going on at 18th Street and Columbia Road, and there was fresh concrete poured into a raised mold which was broadening the sidewalk. A middle aged woman, wearing a skirt, was walking by and somehow (I did not see how) tripped and landed right in the fresh concrete. She was OK, except for the fact that she looked like she was in a Three Stooges film, covered from head to knees in wet concrete. The workmen tried to help her out, but I think succeeded only in spreading the concrete further all over her. I am sure it was extraordinarily upsetting – but I think six months from now, she’ll be laughing about it.

I got home, and got back on the phone on Funeral Committee business. Our treasurer and 30-year board member has announced he is resigning so we are working to replace him, and I think we are just about there. All would be set up for Board approval next month at our next board meeting.

Then came supper, and then we watched a disappointing baseball game. Well, it wasn’t disappointing until the last pitch of the game, which wound up in a walk off home run by the Marlins, who beat the Nats 5-4. Until that pitch, it looked like the Nats, who took the lead in the 8th, were sailing to victory.

The game was followed by Episode 5 of The Diplomat on Netflix. Three more to go – I will say I think it is getting better, although I still find it a rather shallow production of very limited worth..

Then, it was an hour or so of reading. Still going through my Penguins (about 3 years worth left), I am now reading, for the first time, some Tacitus. Last night it was the second half of Agricola, a biography of his father-in-law, who was the Roman governor of Britain from the year 77 to 85. Like a lot of these classics, I am finding out, it is interesting, easy to read, and not at all intimidating. The Penguin Tacitus I have contains one more long essay, Tacitus’ impression of the Germanic people of northern Europe.

I will start with an admission. I have not read all 300 pages of the Durham report released yesterday, and probably never will. But I am glad it was released, because it shows that John Durham, having spent four years investigating the issue of the FBI and Donald Trump, came up with nothing. Truly, he should be known as Bull Durham.

He was given this task by Trump (via Bill Barr) to counter the findings of the Mueller report. I think I have written about the Mueller report, stating my disappointment that Mueller felt bound by DOJ limitations on investigating a sitting president and therefore determined that, while he saw nothing to lead him to think that there were prosecutorial crimes committed by members of the Trump administration, he couldn’t say that such crimes hadn’t been committed because of the DOJ restrictions. (This is a paraphrase/my read)

But Durham’s job was to find that the crimes were committed on the Democratic side, not the GOP. According to Wikipedia, he “secured one guilty plea and a probation sentence for a charge unrelated to the origins of the Russia investigation, and two unsuccessful trial prosecutions”

His report showed nothing new. At all. He repeated a lot of the findings of the Mueller report and report of the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, and he made no recommendations for further investigations, prosecutions or even FBI procedural reforms. But he did go out of his way to defend himself, by (again, my read) twisting things around to make it look like the FBI was anti-Trump and pro-Clinton and that senior FBI officials acted accordingly.

I don’t understand. I did read the first part of the Durham report, where he repeated, and in fact emphasized, the disinformation efforts that the Russians employed during the 2016 presidential campaign, how the Russians clearly supported Trump over Clinton, how there were several documented contacts between Trump campaign officials and Russians, but how there was no evidence (or at least insufficient evidence) presented there was actual collusion or conspiracy between the Trumpists and the Russians.

He then went on to talk about how senior FBI officials relied on the Steele Dossier (I am still not clear why there hasn’t been a more definitive report on the contents of the Dossier), when there was insufficient corroboration for the conclusions presented in it. This, I think, is what DOJ IG Michael Horowitz wrote about years ago.

So to me, all Bull Durham did was try to justify his wasted four years. And I predict that, like the Mueller report, the Durham report will, not very many years from now, gather dust.

As to the FBI itself, a look at its history would show, that it has always done a very credible job in pursuing criminal activity, but has always destroyed that credibility when it reached, or reaches, into ideology or politics. For its first 48 years (!!!!), the FBI was run by J. Edgar Hoover, no friend of American liberals, who kept secret files on prominent Americans (other than conservatives and ultra-conservatives), for the purpose of having leverage over them and hog-tying even American presidents out of fear. Then, remember James Comey, the man I believe responsible for Donald Trump’s victory, having come out just before the 2016 election with a statement that he was reopening a theretofore closed investigation involving Hillary Clinton because of major new information. Was this only bad judgement on Comey’s part, or something even more insidious?

The FBI and its investigators have always had the reputation of being biased towards conservatives, as I recall, until perhaps the Trump years. I like to think that the senior FBI officials who led the investigation against Trump were patriots who saw the irregularities of the Trump administration and were seriously concerned about them. Again, as to the use of the Steele dossier, I am still uncertain and would welcome more information as to sources and process. But it appears we are not going to get that.

So, what we should be aware of, is that the Trump presidency, which all that it has led to, was helped by a major Russian disinformation campaign that perhaps did not even need again active collusion with Trump’s team, and then through the action of then FBI Director James Comey (whom also I would welcome more information as to his motivation). Were it not for these two matters, Hillary Clinton would have been elected president.

Russian disinformation also took place in 2020, but was not sufficient to give Mr. Trump (also known as “SIR!”) another term. And we can be sure that the Russians are active now and will be more so during the 2024 campaign, although I do not believe that today’s FBI will repeat the egregious errors of James Comey.

And that’s the way it is.

One thing that I didn’t consider when I started this blog last November? I didn’t consider that I wouldn’t remember what I have already written about. When I started, I assumed that the blog would be more a diary of an 80 year old. But it has turned out to be different – a bit more complex, I guess. And, because I don’t keep an index, and perhaps because my memory is that of an 80 year old, I may be prone to repetition. Of course, I realize that you don’t remember what I have written either, so even if I have discussed it before and if you have read about before, it will all be new for you. So, I can relax. No stress here.

Which reminds me of a digression I am about to make. I have given many, many tours of DC (the last one, last week – I think maybe, perhaps I wrote about it), and I have been asked how I remember what every building is used for. Just like Errol Garner admitted he hit a lot of wrong notes, and that his talent was knowing what note to hit after he hit the wrong one, I must admit that I have been asked “what is that building?” more than once where I had no idea. My answer typically is “That’s the Commerce Department”. The advantage of that answer should be obvious. No one cares where the Commerce Department is, and no one remembers that I identified a building as the Commerce Department. I figure I can call four buildings the Commerce Department before anyone realizes that I have no idea what I am talking about.

That was clearly a digression, apropos of nothing. Apropos is a weird word, no? Another weird word is okay. Where did that come from?

Okay, let’s proceed. I decided to write today about what I learned in Basic Training. I know I already wrote about what happened when we learned that Martin Luther King had been shot, and then Bobby Kennedy.

Which reminds me of another diversion – I do not like famous people or people with certain credentials called by their first name. And I blame this trend on fans of Martin Luther King who call him Martin (as if he was their brother or BFF) and the Catholic Church (Father John et al). But now, all the rabbis are called by their first name – but not by me. Okay, that was apropos of nothing…..

Living in Basic Training is in many respects similar to living under a totalitarian regime, which is something that everyone seems to be worried about. I learned three very important things. And they will be the main reason for this post.

(1) When you enter a totalitarian regime, it takes you about 4 seconds to acclimate to it perfectly. There is no learning curve.

(2) Being under a totalitarian regime, you seem to find people who think like you very quickly and very easily, and you become closer to them than you would if you met the same people while living under a relatively free regime.

(3) You think more than you do in a free society, and you discuss your thoughts more.

Of course, this assumes that you are not being targeted for special treatment.

Finally, baseball: I don’t think that baseball bats are manufactured to be used as weapons against Congressional aides in a Congressional office. I don’t know why the guy (now under arrest) attacked two of Rep. Conally’s staff today, but I bet he doesn’t vote Democratic. And, with their 10-3 victory against the Mets today, the Nats split the 4 game series. The Nats were supposed to be the worst team in the league(s) this year according to most critics. When we saw the first two Spring Training games in Florida in March, it seemed to us that they looked okay and wouldn’t embarrass themselves. After falling to 8 below .500 in the beginning weeks, they are now 5 games below .500, a better average than a half dozen other teams, and they are on the upswing. They aren’t going to win the pennant, but they will have a respectable season, I am certain.

The day after your daughter’s wedding, even if it is a small wedding, which this was, what you mainly feel is………tired. There were only 12 of us at the wedding, the bride, the groom, the bride’s parents, the groom’s parents, the groom’s two children, the bride’s sister and brother-in-law, and the bride’s niece and nephew. Is that 12?

The officiant was an old friend of the bride’s, as was the photographer (who came with a second). The ceremony was simple, and I think largely written by Michelle. The chuppah was glittery and made by three of Michelle’s friends. The glass for stomping was provided by your truly. The venue was in deepest Baltimore, about an hour from our house. The only others involved in the affair were three employees of the venue, who decorated, cooked, served, and cleaned up.

So that no one would drink and drive (especially from unfamiliar territory), we decided to rent a van and driver. Everyone (but the groom’s parents) met us at our house and Daniel the Driver (perhaps the only one of India’s billion plus natives named Daniel?) first drove to Laurel MD to pick up Michelle’s now in-laws, and then on up I-95 to Baltimore.

The venue, the Artifact Coffee House, is part of the Union Mill complex in the Hampden neighborhood of Baltimore. Don’t know it? Neither did we. The mill, which Wikipedia (the source of all truth) says was once the largest producer of cotton duck fabric in the world, was built of locally quarried gray stone in the 1860s, and is now home not only to Artifact, but to offices for non-profit organizations, and rental apartments, which are primarily rented to teachers, who are given substantial rent discounts.

The coffee shop, once of the best ranked in the city, is a very popular place and serves very good, and healthy-looking, lunches, and closes every day at 3. It is a popular night time venue for small, private events.

The photos were taken outside before the event, and inside before and during the ceremony. Almost 8 year old Joan, Michelle’s niece, acted as photographer’s assistant, an unscheduled and unpaid gig. Thousands of photos seemed to have been taken. We can’t wait to see them.

The food consisted of appetizers served with a variety of liquids (Josh’s son said that the drinks included the best Shirley Temples he ever tasted), along with a cheese board, deviled eggs, pickled vegetables and more. The meal, elegantly served family style in a separate room with a long table, included salad, both rockfish and steak, pasta and grits, vegetables and potatoes au gratin. Desserts included strawberry shortcake, butterscotch puddings, brownies, and cookies. And of course there was coffee.

Shortly before 10:00, we re-boarded the van, and redid the trip, in reverse.

Could not have been better.

Come back tomorrow.

There was an op-ed piece in this morning’s Post written by (or in the name of) four United States Senators, two Democrats and two Republican. The subject was youth and social media. The premise was the young teenagers spend much too much time on their “devices”, that overuse of social media is an addiction, that this has led to a serious increase in mental health and suicidal thoughts, and that the social media companies recognize this, say they are fighting against it, but clearly are not doing enough. They are proposing legislation that they believe will help.

Although I cannot get into the mind of a 2023 teenager (at all), since their world is so different from my world, and since I am clearly excluded from their world if only because we are doing different things in different places (not to mention other obvious reasons), I certainly understand the problem. For I, too, probably spend much too much time on my “devices”.

Before I do anything else in the morning, I generally spend a half hour or so on my smart phone, looking to see what happened over night. I looked at my Google news feed, at the CNN website, and my Flipboard news feed, at the Times of Israel website, at the headlines on the Post, Times and Journal sites, at the Jewish Insider, and often Haaretz, the Forward, Al Jazeera, WTOP, the weather, and elsewhere. I check my three email accounts. And, of course, when looking at all of this, if something interests me, I will click on it and read it.

When I come downstairs, I turn on the TV and generally watch Morning Joe, while I am having breakfast and also glancing at the Post and Times in print. If I am then going to work in my home office, I will often leave the TV on for the rest of the morning. If I am not doing something that I can do with the TV on in the morning, and am having lunch at home, I will watch Andrea Mitchell while eating. Throughout the morning, I will check my phone for messages (emails, texts and FaceBook posts) every 15 minutes or so.

My work at home (generally personal stuff, or work with one of the two organizations with which I am active) includes a lot of email and text communication, reviewing material on my screen, and so forth. It also involves a number of Zoom sessions (probably in all I am on 5-8 Zoom sessions every week). I also look at some lectures or classes on line, and when I am riding the stationary bike in the basement, I generally watch a Netflix (or its equivalent program) for 30-60 minutes.

Around dinner, the TV goes back on for Nichole Wallace, Wolf Blitzer and the like. After dinner, it is usually more screen time (often with a book in hand simultaneously) while we watch a ball game, a film, or more Netflix. The, of course, I check all the websites before I go upstairs.

Oh, and of course, I don’t stay home all day – generally I have somewhere to go. And that means my car radio goes on while I am driving, especially if I am alone. And, yes, I spend 15-20 minutes each day writing this blog, and more time writing presentations or other things. And – I must admit – I often have dessert – no matter what I am doing on line, there is always time for several minutes of TikTok, or its equivalent – those little reels that make life so pleasant.

And there’s more. I keep all of our financial records on the computer on Quicken, and our entire used book business.

So when this morning, in the article I cited above, I read that the average teenager spends about 9 hours a day on devices, I was shocked. But when I looked at my day, I realized I probably do the same.

Now, the presumed teenager and myself do not do the same things on line. At least not for the most part. I assume that what I do is more educational, and more positive. (Of course, I may be wrong thinking this.) I don’t engage in group chats, and I don’t play any games (except morning Wordle and Quiz Daily, and these take less than ten minutes together, I would think). And we probably look at, for the most part, different things on TikTok.

And I don’t do anything that depresses me, or makes me think of suicide. But I can see how teenagers could easily fall prey to this. For one thing, being on a screen is different from being with people, and I see how it could make you feel lonely and rejected, especially as you might be seeing that others are doing things that you are not. Secondly, every one you connect with does not have to be your friend and if you find yourself at the wrong end of bullying (or maybe even the bully end), frustration and sadness and again loneliness can result). Thirdly, on TikTok and other reel programs, you can see young kids and teenagers who are extraordinary athletes, or talented musicians, or smart as a whip. You can see teenagers who have friends and friends and friends, who are as attractive and fit as can be, who are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year putting together TikTok reels, or who travel the world, and seem to have unlimited funds and freedom (not to say sexual experience beyond one’s imagination). Of course, this can lead to unhappiness, to feelings of isolation and hopelessness, and to suicidal thoughts or temptations.

Like with everything else in this world, unfortunately, analyzing the problem is relatively easy. Solving it is another story.

Did you watch the Trump town hall on CNN last night? If you didn’t, let me tell you what I learned.

I learned that you should support Donald Trump in 2024 because:

1. He is going to end the Russia/Ukraine war within 24 hours of becoming president in January 2025.
2. He is going to reinstate the policy of separating families at the border, as a way to stop families from trying to come.
3. He is going to move us to energy independence by adopting a policy that he calls “Drill, baby, drill”.
4. He is going to attack the legitimacy of the 2024 election unless he decides there was no fraud involved.
5. He is highly supportive of abortion restrictions, and takes full credit for the Supreme Court passing the Dobbs situation.
6. He is going to pardon most (maybe all) of the people convicted of Jan 6 criminal activity
7. He is going to end inflation by approving more oil drilling.

I also learned that

1. He still believes he won the election in 2020.
2. He never even met E. Jean Carroll.
3. The country is falling apart and will continue to fall apart (with everyone laughing at us) unless he is elected in 2024.
4. Those who oppose the Dobbs decision would abort babies any times during the 9 months of pregnancy, and maybe after birth.
5. The strong military that he left the country with has been destroyed in the past two years.
6. He would reinstate Title 42 to keep sick migrants from coming into the country.

There was also a bit of ambiguity. Did you know that Trump finished the Wall, and that he wants to build more of the Wall because he hasn’t finished it. And that not only will he end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, but he will force Europe to provide more military funding for Ukraine to take the burden off of us (Europe, as usual, is taking advantage of us).

What is most clear, I think, is that Trump (and therefore his supporters) do not believe in the American legal system. They don’t trust the courts, which turned down over 60 attempts to find fraud in the election results. They don’t trust the New York State prosecutors, they don’t think that there can be a fair jury in either New York or Washington, and any judge who rules against Trump is corrupt. What could be more dangerous?

One more point:

Kaitlan Collins was a very unusual town hall moderator, and this was an unusual town hall. Most political town halls that I have watched have been designed to have audience members question the candidate, with the moderator acting as a neutral and generally keeping order and deciding when it was time for a new question. Last night, though, the moderator was there, in part, to fact check Trump; this itself was very unusual. And fact check she did, but fact checking meant that she made clear her own positions while she was challenging the “facts” stated by the candidate, and she did so not by waiting until Trump finished a comment (which admittedly could have taken a long time), but by interrupting him or trying to talk over him. And if you agree that this was her role, she did a fine job. But many – especially Trump supporters, of course – will not think this was her role and will not think that she did a good job. And she better watch her step and her social media, because she is now going to be a likely target of right wing hate.

And as for CNN. Was this a smart or proper thing for them to do? Most likely, Donald Trump will be the Republican candidate for the presidency in 2024, whether or not he kills someone on Fifth Avenue, and therefore cannot be ignored, as some would like CNN and other rational news sources to do. But this is so early in the campaign – and will this mean that CNN will need to provide other Republican candidates with a similar opportunity? DeSantis is not yet a candidate, but what about Asa Hutchinson, for example? And when will they do this?

But there is another question. What was the purpose of this town hall? Was it to give New Hampshire voters, or voters in other states, the opportunities to size up Trump redux? Or was it a “trick”, an event designed to allow CNN correspondents to slam and criticize him? If the latter (and that is what it seems like), even more questions arise? Will it help the reputation of CNN? Will it hurt the odds that Trump will become the nominee, or will it backfire? And is this the way the CNN executives planned this out, or was this the CNN journalists getting back at management.

Keep tuned. We may find out.

A good friend, about two months older than I am, passed away over the weekend. The third friend who passed away in the last six weeks. The funeral was yesterday.

It was an interesting funeral, for many reasons. There was a good sized crowd at Adas Israel for the funeral, plus many more who streamed the funeral on line. I would guess that I knew at least half of those present, and I knew everyone who spoke.

Many of those who attended are people I see on a fairly regular basis, and others included some I had not seen since the pandemic began three years ago. The most striking thing about all of these people is that they are old. Some are older than my 80 years, and some younger. But they all looked old, some looked a bit haggard, some struggled with mobility, some looked to have lost a considerable amount of weight. This is what happens when you near or pass 80. And of course, we are the lucky ones.

There were three speakers. One a rabbi emerita of the congregation, one another rabbi who was very close to my friend, and one a congregant whom he had known over 50 years. All spoke beautifully and very personally, much more personally than normal, because all had a long time personal friendship with my friend. They went through a lot of history – personal history, and they named a lot of names.

My friend, for example, belonged to a study group which has been in existence for over 50 years. We are not part of that study group – we have only belonged to this congregation for about 40 years. The members of that study group who have passed away were all named – probably about ten people, all of whom I had known. It certainly demonstrated the passage of time.

Often, I think about when I was very young, and how none of the adults whom I knew as a child are alive today. But yesterday, I realized how many of the adults I have known as an adult are also gone.

The burial was at one of the larger Jewish cemeteries in this area, in a portion of the cemetery which “belongs” to our congregation. The grave sites were mainly purchased years ago by Adas Israel and then resold to members. My wife and I have our plots in this location. Looking around, I realized I not only knew those of us who came to the burial, but I know many, if not most, of those who were lying under the ground. Was that frightening? I didn’t really look at it at fright – it was more comforting than frightening. Emotions are such strange things.

When I was very young, I felt very proud to know that scientifically, bumblebees could not fly. Clearly, they flew, but this was because they didn’t know that they couldn’t. This was one of the great mysteries of my young life. If bees, which could not fly, could fly, maybe there was a God after all.

Well, it wasn’t long after that when I realized that what I had heard was just plain wrong. Bumblebees could fly. (And that this whole question had little, if anything, to do with the existence of a God)

Today, it isn’t bumblebees, it’s the American economy. I can give you reason after reason as to why the American economy is doomed to failure. Yet, time after time, all this clear knowledge not withstanding, the American economy seems to prosper.

OK, not a great analogy. I know that. But there are similarities. And one major difference. Ask ten entomologists, and they will give you the same answer about bumblebees. If you can find two economists who agree as to the reasons for the success of the American economy, you are a better man/woman than I am.

In academia, you expect economists to disagree. But what about in government? Why is it that the Federal Reserve, with all of its power, believes that crushing inflation is the most important thing, and is willing to sacrifice American jobs, and consequently family incomes, to bring inflation into a reasonable range? And why does the Fed thing that the way to fight inflation is to increase borrowing rates to slow down the economy?

The economy itself seems to defy the Fed. Interest rates have risen dramatically, but every month, when the nation’s job reports come out (assuming that they are accurately reflective of the economy, which is a different question), hundreds of thousands of new jobs are created, and unemployment remains at a record low.

The reaction of governmental officials to these strong numbers is instructive. The Fed’s position is clear – we have to keep the pressure on, keep raising interest rates, the economy will soon respond and slow things down. The current jobs and employment statistics are unfortunate.

Meanwhile, the President and the executive branch is saying the opposite. Look at all the jobs we are creating!! Look how low unemployment is!! We are doing great!!

How is that little kid, who just learned that bumblebees really can fly, whether they know it or not, to process all of this? How is he to process a Fed, filled with experts, who can’t bring inflation under control? How is he to process a president, touting job increases, when inflation is destroying a family’s budget?

More importantly, how are all those American voters, who start with a suspicion of Joe Biden’s competence, and who don’t understand what the Fed is in any event, and who see prices rising and their incomes not rising, or rising more modestly, going to vote? We already see that the polls show that more voters, by far it seems, trust the Republicans (and specifically Donald Trump) more than the Democrats and Joe Biden on the economy.

Unless something changes, this trend will undoubtedly continue. In politics, the old saying “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know” does not seem to apply. Or, perhaps in this case, when you know both devils, you always hope the one out of power can do better.

I don’t look at every poll that’s taken, and I understand that a grain of salt must be added to each recipe. But the fact is that polls generally turn out to be pretty accurate.

For this reason, you can’t discount the new ABC poll that shows President Biden’s approval at 38%, or the other reason polls that according to the 538 website, shows Biden’s overall approval around 42%. You also can’t discount the same ABC poll that shows that Trump would beat Biden (at least by popular vote) in an election held today. And, finally, you have to respect the poll that says (in spite of what you might consider considerable evidence to the contrary) that Americans feel that Trump was much better for the economy than Biden.

You also can’t overlook the fact the Joe Biden is now 80 years old and, at the end of a second term, would be 86. Yes, the average 80 year old male may live another 7 years or so, but the average 80 year old does not work under the stress of the presidency or have the time demands put upon a president, and the average 80 year old does not live those additional seven years in perfect health.

There are other things you must keep in mind as well. For one thing, Kamala Harris is set to be on the Democratic ticket to serve an additional four years as Vice President, and (given the health and life expectancy statistics alluded to above) may wind up President at some time before the end of 2028. It is possible that she would be a terrific president, of course, but the fact is that almost no one thinks so. Apparently, with the end of COVID restrictions, there will be even more people crossing our southern border, and the Democrats have not shown a way to control border crossings in a way to give any assurance to the voting public. Finally, you need to take into account Hunter Biden and the additional stress his situation will probably lay upon President Biden over the next several years, as well as the grist for the Republican political mill that his situation will provide.

My conclusion is that the most important Democratic priority at this time should be to convince Biden that in fact he should not run for reelection, and to come up with a viable alternative in the near future. A viable alternative is not only someone who will support good policies (that is almost any Democrat), but one whose personality would allow these policies to be sold to the American public. There are many who could fit that bill – the Hessel household likes Cory Booker.

Of course, the Republicans have their own problem, as it looks more and more like Donald Trump again being their nominee. Yes, we know that some old-line Republicans want someone new, but the majority of Republicans don’t see it that way. They want Donald and by getting Donald, they may lose some of their usual voters. This is a different situation from that of the Democrats, the majority of whom would rather see someone new get the nomination, not Joe Biden.

Sensible people, it seems to me, should not want either Biden or Trump as the nominee. Trump, for obvious reasons, and Biden for the reasons stated above. You may agree with me that the majority of Democratic voters vote sensibly, and that the Trump portion of the GOP does not. Nevertheless, no one has ever accused the overall American population of being sensible. Or smart.

In the meantime, although Biden has done a good job over his first two years, the Republican House of Representatives can thwart much of what would otherwise be further progress. And the Republican voices seem to have the ability to turn Democratic victories into Democratic losses, contributing the overall feeling that the Democrats are bad for America. The next big test will be the debt ceiling increase. The position of the GOP (that we need to agree to future budgetary cuts as a condition to agreeing to pay bills we already owe) may be nonsensical (as well as dangerous), but for the not very sensible Republicans, it does sound good. And my guess is that, if the credit of the United States collapses, it will be viewed by most as a Democratic problem. And that it will end with a compromise viewed as a Republican victory. The blame will fall on Biden, the figures will show an economy in deep trouble, and the Republicans will be unscathed. Just you wait and see.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg didn’t retire and her death led to a Conservative super majority on the Court, a serious problem. Diane Feinstein is not retiring and we don’t yet know where that will lead, perhaps to a serious problem. Joe Biden is not retiring, and he is probably going to stick to his guns. This could be the most serious problem of them all.

Did anyone else catch any of Bill Barr’s remarks to the City Club of Cleveland this week? I caught part of the Q and A on C-Span radio while driving in my car, and mouth fell (to use a crossword puzzle word) agape. I now see that the entire speech is available at http://www.cityclub.org, and I think I will listen to it.

The gist of the Q and A was two fold. First, not surprisingly, that Bill Barr, during his time as Attorney General, did nothing wrong. But second, that Donald Trump is the worst of the worst.

Barr seemed quite critical of Trump in his answers to several questions, but the highlight was when he was asked if he thought that Donald Trump was mentally fit to be president. His answer (which you may see on Democratic party ads in the future) was extraordinary.

He didn’t answer the question with a straight yes or not. Rather, he said “If you believe in his policies – what he’s advertising to be his policies – he’s the last person that could actually execute them. He doe snot have the discipline, he does not have the ability for strategic thinking or linear thinking, or setting priorities, or how to get things done in the system……It’s a horror show when he’s left to his own devices. You may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver his policies. He will deliver chaos.”

Trump has responded in part, by calling Barr “a weak and slovenly man”.

It could be, of course, that they are both right.

As you know I am sure, this is not the first time that Barr has criticized Trump, and he has written a book “One Damn Thing After Another” that might be worth reading. I don’t know what he said in the book, but I do know that previously he has said that, although he was highly critical of Trump, he would vote for Trump if he were the nominee because even Trump is better than putting the nation at risk with four more years of the progressive Democratic agenda. Whether he still feels this way, I don’t know. I don’t think this question was directly asked of him in Cleveland. The question referenced above was the last question of the morning. It was, in fact, asked by reporter Geraldo Rivera, which makes one wonder if it was prearranged. Inquiring minds would like to know.

I only heard a little of what Barr said otherwise. He was clearly critical of what he called the Democrats attempt to tie Trump to the Russians before and during the Muller investigation. His claim seemed to be that there was no reason for the Democrats to even suggest such a possibility, other than a dastardly attempt to make political hay.

Now I admit that Barr knows, and was privy to, much, much more information than I was on this subject. But based on what I do know and have seen, I don’t understand that reaction for a number of reasons, such as (1) Trump was going to extremes to try to get permission and financial assistance to build a tower in Moscow and pave the way for further development across Russia, (2) Trump has always praised Vladimir Putin’s leadership of the country and even went out of his way to suggest that he valued Putin’s statements to him on Russian intent more than he valued the information provided by the American intelligence organizations, (3) it is clear that Russia created a disinformation campaign to help Trump get elected, (4) the Muller report did not conclude that Trump was not colluding with Russia – it said that there was not enough evidence at this time to reach such a conclusion and (5) Muller was apparently bound by an internal Department of Justice position not to bring charges against a sitting president. We also know that, prior to releasing Muller’s report, Barr – still then Attorney General – issued a brief summary, which distorted some of Muller’s findings. To me, Muller’s findings were not conclusive (and not meant to be), but rather, as the line of “Portnoy’s Complaint” says, “Now vee may perhaps to begin, Yes?”. Of course, with crisis upon crisis, the Muller report seemed to be the end, not the beginning it should have been.

I should conclude this, I guess, with a comment about the Steele dossier and the use of the Steele dossier to get the FISA court to issue a warrant against Trump aide Carter Page. The conclusion of the DOJ inspector general was that the FBI knew that the dossier could not be relied upon, and misrepresented its reliability to the FISA court. OK, I will accept that. But I don’t we ever learned why the Steele dossier was so faulty – and to say that the Clinton campaign paid for it does not answer that question. Am I right in thinking that Steele never resurfaced – does anyone know where he is? He was clearly deemed very reliable at one time. Was there an investigation as to how unreliable the dossier was, and what led to it turning out as it did? I don’t remember one. Was there one that was not disclosed to the public? Inquiring minds want to know once again. And as to Carter Page himself – do you remember when he was on all the cable news shows? He came across as a likeable buffoon, right? Not like someone whose antics should be taken as seriously as apparently they were.

So the whole thing is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Now, where have a heard that before?

(By the way, I watched zero of the King’s coronation yesterday. But I did see a picture of Camilla with a crown on her head. Talk about a duck out of water…..)

During the heart of the pandemic, when Edie and I decided we could probably get out now and then if we were careful, we started to take weekly day trips. Then, as things opened more and more and our calendar began to fill, our weekly trips disappeared into the past.

But we have decided to try to start them anew, and this afternoon we took a short trip (i.e., only a half day trip, leaving our house at about 2:30 and getting back about 6) to one of the places we visited a few years ago. We went to the Monocacy Aqueduct which carried the C & O Canal over the Monocacy where it emptied into the Potomac, about 25 miles from our house. A few photos have been posted on Facebook.

The Canal itself follows the Potomac from Cumberland Maryland for 184.5 miles and ends in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington DC. (When the Canal was built, Georgetown was a separate city from Washington) The Canal was completed in about 1840 and was in operation until the early 1920s.

Obviously, it was a problem for a canal paralleling a river to see another river emptying into the river. As 2 1/2 year old Izzy would say “You can’t go through it. You can’t go around it. You can’t go under it. You gotta go above it.” So, the canal and towpath had to be raised to cross over the river. Depending on which sign you read, the first version of the aqueduct was completed either in 1833 or 1850. It operated until 1924, when a flood damaged and closed the aqueduct forever. It was rebuilt in 2005, but does not carry water at this point.

But it’s a beautiful and peaceful site and well worth our second visit.

I am trying to remember where else we went several years ago. Shepherdstown WV, Brunswick MD, Occoquan VA, Antietam Battlefield, Bowie MD, Chesapeake Beach MD, Ft. McHenry (Baltimore) and more.

I think our next venture will be Harpers Ferry – for some reason, we missed that one on our first round.

As I think about it this morning, I start with three American villains.

First, Donald Trump for destabilizing the world and turning Americans against each other.

Second, Rush Limbaugh for destroying the concept of truth.

Third, Atonin Scalia for his creation of the artificial concept of originalism, which turned American jurisprudence on its head.

Beyond these major villains, I blame (1) the opportunistic Republican Party for caving into the desires of those with the worst instincts, (2) the leadership of Congress for their total inability to work together for the benefit of the country and their failure to set appropriate priorities, (3) the right wing media for putting greed so far above truth, and (4) cultural, intellectual and religious leaders who have no concept of public responsibility or private morality.

It’s easy to name all the problems of the world, but hard to say that any of them are being solved. And now you know whom I blame.

It is sad, of course, to see how many Americans don’t see who the villains are,but it isn’t surprising. People throughout history have been duped by their leaders. There is no American exceptionalism at work here.

Let’s start with last night. Dr. Rachel Ukeles, Director of Collections for the National Library of Israel gave a fascinating presentation last night at Adas Israel. The NLI is going to open a beautiful new building in Jerusalem near the Knesset later this year and move its collection there and move its extensive collection there from its current home on the campus of The Hebrew University. She talked about the history of the library, and about eight items of particular interest in their collection.

Starting with the phrase “the Jewish people may be the People of the Book, but they have not been the People of the Library”, she talked of the history of Hebrew manuscripts and books, how they were maintained, bought and sold, but never placed into what we would call a library. Even the first attempts at a comprehensive Jewish library in Palestine in the late 1800s failed because, in part, of opposition of Orthodox rabbis to having a “Jewish” library contain anything other than approved religious books.

But the concept of a library did take off and the university library also acted as a national library (with a lot of moving books caused by the location of the Mt. Scopus campus after 1948 in Jordanian controlled Eastern Jerusalem, causing moving the library to the West Jerusalem Hebrew U. campus). In 2007, the Knesset unanimously passed a law creating and directing the mission of a national library, and finally, in 2023, the library will have its own home, separate from the school.

Her selection of parts of the collection to discuss included the original manuscript of Maimonides’ Mishneh Torah, an old Gez-language Jewish bible from Ethiopia, a women’s prayer book from Salonica, and the original handwritten version of the song Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold).

I still have not been a regular event goer since the pandemic, and although this was not my first Adas evening event, it was one of the first. I was surprised to see over 100 people there, and it was nice talking to some folks I had not seen for years, and even helping a couple home after their car wouldn’t start.

Then, this morning, I left the house early to go to my Thursday morning breakfast group meeting at Beth El in Bethesda. We are now meeting in person one week a month, and staying on Zoom the other three. We will see what happens to our schedule in the future, but I know we won’t give up Zoom, because we now have a few members who are not able to travel to Beth El because they have moved to Florida and we don’t want to leave the Floridians out in the cold.

At any event, today’s presentation was on the City of Chicago (part 2) by Ed Kopf, who is good at this sort of thing because he spends a lot of time in Chicago, and because he used to be an American history professor. If I could pick out one important point he made in the development of Chicago, it was as a transportation and distribution center. A place where you had water transportation (the Great Lakes and a canal to the Mississippi), where railroads from all over the country came together, where there was an extraordinarily large amount of prairie land in the Midwest waiting for cultivation and livestock. Chicago became the home of meat packing, grain distribution, lumber transport and so much more. He pointed out those men (yes, men) who helped shape the city – railroad men, canal developers, stockyards owners and so on.

He also, of course, talked about cultural development and race problems, and fires and the Columbian Exhibition of 1893. All fascinating – and did you know that the Chicago River, which now flows to the west, at one time flowed into Lake Michigan? Well, that’s quite a story in and of itself.

Finally, I agreed to give my second presentation of the year on July 13. It’s going to be on Saul Alinsky, and much will be based on the biography of him written by my friend Sandy Horwitt, who passed away a little over a year ago. My premise (not Sandy’s) is that Alinsky, a very talented guy, was basically non-ideological in his community organizing (although he has become a symbol of left wing organizing) and that the person who had the largest success in putting Alinsky’s principles into action was none other than Newt Gingrich in connection with the development of the Tea Party. Stay tuned.

This is not the first time I have had a blog. But the other times have been when I was still working, so it has been a while. When I look at my earlier blogs (I have them all printed out and in three ring binders), I see a different person. Back then, I did things. I went to work five days a week (at least), and we went to the theater, saw movies, went to museums, ate at restaurants, saw friends, and read books. All this is in the blog – a lot of reviews of plays, films, books, exhibits and so forth.

It’s different now. Is it because of age, or pandemics, or Netflix, or something else? I am not sure. But, take yesterday, a typical Tuesday. I only left the house to drop things off at the laundry. Oh, yes, I took a walk of probably less than a mile late in the afternoon. That’s it.

What did I do at home? Actually, yesterday was a fairly active day. Here goes:

(1) I watched a program on line sponsored by the Baltimore Zionist District, a group that I had never heard of. It was entitled “Jewish Odessa Tour: From the City of Dreams to the Gates of Zion”, and included three contemporary videos (pre-war) and a presentation by a Ukrainian woman who runs tours of Odessa. What was amazing is that there were over 400 screens open, if Zoom’s statistics can be trusted. And, if anything can be trusted, Zoom statistics can. The program was long (the presentation itself over an hour), the videos were very attractive, but showed a lot of old buildings that began to blur together (rather than giving a feel for the overall city – e.g., where were the Potemkin Steps? The speaker was very knowledgeable and equally dull and humorless. The program dealt with 19th century Odessa, which – I saw by the Q and A – disappointed some because they wanted to know what happened during the 20th century, or what was happening today. But I learned quite a bit – especially as I very recently read Charles King’s book “Odessa” (which did not concentrate on the Jewish elements of the city, although he certainly dealt with them).

(2) I the evening, I watched another program, this one sponsored by the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, of which you probably know by now I am vice president. This was a discussion of “jealousy” in the Bible and in early rabbinic writing – jealousy, I would say, as a normal emotional reaction to certain situations (real or imagined), and an emotion which can itself get out of hand, leading to marital and/or societal disruptions. The talk, by Assistant Professor Sarah Wulf of the Jewish Theological Seminary, was interesting – although I was not sure that “jealousy”, as we think of the term, was the right term to use to discuss the various reactions a man can have when he knows or suspects that his wife has eyes, or other body parts, elsewhere.

(3) I did start a new book, as I keep going through my Penguins. This time it’s “Greenmantle”, a World War I novel by John Buchan, otherwise known as Baron Tweedsmuir, who became Governour General of Canada in his later years. I had read one other Penguin novel by him, which I did enjoy, but was quite different. The first one, “John McNab” was set in Scotland; “Greenmantle” was set in the Middle East and, it appears to me from the first 60 pages, could never be published today because of the attitude taken by Buchan towards the Muslim religion and Muslims; they were both evil and stupid, it appears, at least at the start. We will see what happens, as our protagonist tries to find a way to keep the Germans from bamboozling the Muslims to join their anti-British cause.

(4) The Nationals beat the Cubs, 4-1, and the game was on without sound during Prof. Wulf’s presentation. The Nats are in the last place in the East, to be sure, but they are one of the better last place teams in Major League Baseball. So far.

(5) I spent some time watching TikTok and YouTube clips of Dame Edna. I really don’t know much (i.e., I don’t know a thing) about Dame Edna, who so recently and so sadly passed away. I know she was a he, and his name was Barry Humphries, and that he was Australian, and that she had (or was it “she often had”) purple hair. Had I ever seen Dame Edna before today? Maybe, but I really don’t recall.

But I saw a few clips today and I have to say they were very funny. Now here’s a downer: I am not posting the clips here (I have no clue how to do that), so you will have to use your imagination to “see” them.

Clip 1: It is an opera house in London, and Charles and Camilla, dressed to the nines, are sitting in what is obviously the Royal Box. The door to the box opens, and in walks Dame Edna. She says hello to the royal family, the audience cheers and is already laughing, and while Camilla has only a hint of a smile on her nervous face, Charles is laughing away. Dame Edna sits down and, a second or two later, a proper looking man (a proper looking valet type man) walks in and hands Edna a note. She reads it, looks pleased, stands up and starts to leave the box. Before she does, however, she turns back to the royal families and says, with a hint of apology, “They found me a better seat.”

Clip 2: Dame Edna is on stage somewhere, and she is conversing with a member of the audience, a young woman. I don’t know if she knows the woman, or if the woman is someone famous – after all, this is just a clip. But she tells the young woman how nice she looks and how much she just adores her clothes. The young woman looks pleased. Dame Edna then says “Yes, and I am trying to think of the word that perfectly describes that outfit.” The woman looks at her expectantly. Dame Edna thinks for a minute and then says: “Ah, I have it……….affordable.”

This got me thinking. Who wrote these skits? Dame Edna? Or a comic writer? You may have seen that the comedy writers have now gone on strike, and all of the comics are apparently besides themselves because they can’t think of anything funny to say or do. This raises a lot of questions in my mind.

(6) Talking to my 2 1/2 year old grandson, Izzy. We were looking at a plate of figs (why not?), and I asked him. “If I had one fig and picked up another one, how many would I have?” Looking at my figs (I guess), he responded “Two”. “OK”, I said. “Now if I have two figs and I eat one of them, how many have do I have left?” Proudly, he looked at me and with great confidence said “Five!”.

As a preliminary matter, you should read yesterday’s post “Are You Hungary” before you read this one.

One thing I did not say yesterday about being in Budapest 50 years ago. When you were behind the Iron Curtain, in a way you felt like you were on another planet, or – perhaps better – in a parallel universe. Everything seemed the same, but different enough to throw you off a bit. And you were out of contact with your world. Obviously, there were no cell phones, but I think even to make a regular long distant phone call was an ordeal, and you could not guarantee that you can arrange it, or that it would work.

From Budapest, I was going to Prague, and I went by train. I don’t recall a great difference in the train I boarded in Budapest compared to trains in western Europe. I think they were quite similar, but perhaps I have forgotten. What I do remember is that it was a long trip, longer than I had anticipated, and that the scenery was sort of ordinary – rural, small hills, a lot of greenery. I don’t remember much more. (I just looked it up – there is now a high speed train that can get you between the two cities in 6 1/2 hours, but the normal train ride is between 12 and 13.)

I shared a compartment with a middle aged couple. I don’t think there was anyone else there. They couldn’t speak English at all, but between my pigeon Russian and my pigeon German, we were able to make sense of each other. And the German seemed easier. They were from Hungary, they were members of the Communist Party, he was an economist (I don’t remember her background), they were Jewish, they lived temporarily in Prague, and he was Hungary’s economic minister (his title was something like that) to Czechoslovakia. They were friendly, but between our language differences and general suspicions, our conversation was limited to the basics.

I had told them about my problem with my reservation in Budapest (they were apologetic as if it were their own fault), and that I was a bit fearful as to what would happen in Prague. They understood and then did something totally unexpected. They gave me their apartment phone number and said that if I was really in trouble – and they meant REALLY in trouble – I could call them.

The train reached Prague and I went right to the Park Hotel, then a brand new hotel (a rarity in Communist Europe) and presented my voucher. Guess what? I was told that they had no record of my voucher (which was for two nights), and that they had a room for the night, but not for the next night – they were booked. I obviously accepted the one night offer, hoping that a vacancy would show up for the next.

Two American men were checking into the hotel the same time I was. They obviously overheard my conversation.

An hour or so later, I went down to the hotel restaurant (I had not yet ventured out into the city), and found myself in a short line behind the two men I had seen in the lobby. They expressed their condolences and understanding at my dilemma and asked if I wanted to join them for supper. Of course.

It turned out that these two Americans (they were maybe ten years older than me) worked for the International Labor Organization (a branch of the United Nations) in Geneva and were in Prague for a day or two on business of some sort. They were both nice fellows, but I really don’t remember one of them and I really can’t forget the other. Why? Because he seemed to me that absolutely smartest person I had ever met.

Well, now perhaps I know better. He may or may not have been “smart”, and he probably didn’t have the world’s most winning personality. He was more like a “savant”, more like a walking trivia container. I remember two areas that he seemed particularly adept at. The first was opera – he not only knew every opera ever written (name, composer, librettist, plot, etc.), but he seemed to know every opera’s performance history (where it premiered, where it had played to raves or boos, the casts, etc.), and of course he knew everything about every opera singer and operatic conductor. Everything. And he wanted to make sure you knew that he knew – I couldn’t tell if he assumed you knew nothing, or if he assumed you know quite a bit – just not as much as he did. I was in the “nothing” category.

The second subject matter was baseball. He knew even more about baseball, it seemed, than opera. He was a follower and fan of the New York teams (now and historic), but his knowledge of games and player statistics had no boundaries. Whew.

The next day I wandered around Prague. Now many of you have been to Prague during the post-Communist years. What a city it has become! Much of it has been restored to pre-World War II glory. New hotels have been built. And everything has been built around an enormous tourist trade. If central Prague resembles anything these days, it resembles a real life Disneyland.

Not in the early 1970s. Then, Prague was the most grayest, dirtiest, down-at-the-heels city you could possibly imagine. The streets were filled with unhappy looking people, and you sensed that nothing uplifting ever happened there. After the buoyancy of Budapest, the depressive nature of Prague was overwhelming. Nothing good will ever come of this place. The Czechs have clearly given up, or escaped to the west.

After a day of wandering these streets, eating at down and out restaurants, and looking in antique stores that showed something of what Prague may have been like in years past, wandering through the old Jewish ghetto, seeing the synagogues and the overused cemetery, I realized that I had nowhere to stay.

What to do? I could go to Cedok, the Ibusz of Czechoslovakia and see what if anything they had to offer (although there was no way I could pull off my Budapest personality in Prague), or I could figure out how to use a payphone and call my friends from the train. I decided on the latter, although I was a little hesitant.

I made the call, they offered me a place to stay, and gave me instructions. They lived on the outskirts of the city. I took a trolley, which went through parts of Prague I would otherwise not have seen, and eventually saw acre after acre of Soviet-style high rise apartment developments, one of which they lived in. When I got to their stop, I saw the buildings from much closer, and saw that their condition was subpar, and that the roads and sidewalks connecting the buildings were also in need of major repair. I found their building, could get into the lobby. And the elevator worked.

There was nothing wrong with their apartment. It was well furnished, as I recall – not stylish but comfortable. They did have hot water. I remember they had both a toilet room and a bath room. Separate.

They told me that there were occasional problems with the plumbing, and the electricity went off now and then, and the elevator didn’t always work. They were clearly happier in Budapest than Prague. But this is where they were. His job was a good job and they had no regrets. We had dinner in their apartment, and breakfast the next morning.

They accompanied me down the elevator and made sure that I knew the way back to the trolley stop to go back to the city. I thanked them profusely. They made something very clear. They were happy to host me. But this was it. I was not to try to communicate with them in any way after this morning. I was certainly not to send them anything like a thank you present or try to correspond with them after I got back to America. This time together never happened. If anyone found out that it did, my host would lose his government job.

That’s pretty much what I remember about Prague. I took a train from Prague to Frankfurt. In Frankfurt I transferred to an over night train to Rome. I spent a day and night in Rome, wandering around with some people I had met on the train and having dinner with them at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the forum, and the next morning took a train to Naples. But that’s a different story – not for today.

Just one more thing. About a week after I got home from this trip, my office receptionist buzzed my intercom, and told me that two men were in the lobby and wanted to see me. OK. They showed me their FBI credentials and said something like “We hear you just spent some time in Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Why did you go there? What did you do there? Did you have any personal contacts with anyone there? Did you bring anything to anyone there? Did anyone give you anything to bring back? Did you pack your own luggage?

I lied to the FBI, but nothing came of that, I guess. I didn’t go to jail, at any rate.

And, boy, have things changed.

As to the man whose death notice led me back to all of this? Mixed reactions, at best.

Is there a scandal on the Supreme Court? There are to be hearings today in the Senate, but will there be any witnesses? We have four scandals: There is Clarence Thomas’ getting expensive luxury vacations from Harlan Crowe, as well as his selling properties to Harlan Crowe. There is Clarence Thomas’ wife working with all of the right wing organizations that appear before the Court or take strong positions on cases before the Court. There is Neil Gorsuch, who, along with family members, sold an expensive property to the managing partner of Greenberg Trauig, a law firm with business before the Court. And there is Chief Justice Roberts himself, whose wife works for several important law firms who have regular business before the Court. Is there any surprise that Roberts does not want to testify at the hearings?

Who needs Supreme Court justices anyway. Why can’t Artificial Intelligence do the job? You submit your briefs and memoranda and Artificial Intelligence, which has at its command all American law precedent, British common law precedent, and more common sense than any Supreme Court justice, churns out the decision.

(By the way, you see in the paragraph above that I said “at its command”. I said this in a reflexive manner – I really don’t know Artificial Intelligence’s preferred pronouns. I will at this to my list of things to ask it/him/her/?????)

I was looking at the New York Times this morning. There are all sorts of issues discussed – matters of importance for the future of humanity, micro and macro matters. Can’t AI solve them all?

For example. It appears that New Orleans is a mess – “an exhausting history of inefficient bureaucracies, deep seated political corruption, entrenched poverty and a water system so decrepit that city officials regularly issue boil water orders.” And it has the nation’s high murder rate, terrible problems with car thefts, lagging basic city services, not to mention an unbalanced economy too reliant on tourists and, oh yes, climate change. What to do? AI will know.

And the same must be true with the looming staff shortages at U.S. prisons. What do we need to do to attract proper staffing? And how should current staffing be organized? And do we have too many prisons, or too few? And can’t our prisons be better designed and operated? All these questions – just right for AI.

If you go to the Arts section of the paper, you will find a review for a new novel, “Death of an Author”. This is the first novel reviewed in the Times written by AI. It’s a murder mystery with some unique twists and, apparently, not the most gripping writing. But nevertheless……

The facts were fed into three different AI apps by a presumably real man named Stephan Marche, who is a writer himself. The primary character in the novel is also an author, and she is murdered. But, somehow, she comes back to life (or not) to help solve her own murder.

OK, I am not a lawyer anymore, but tell me this? If a novel is written by AI, based on questions posed by a human being, and if three AI apps are used, who owns the work? Who can get a copyright? What a contentious issue this may be – it may be challenged all the way up to the Supreme Court, where the AI justices will have to decide.

Now go to the Business section of the Times. Here is exciting article is “A.I. to Read Your Mind Is Up Next”. Yes, in Texas, they have developed an AI system that can read your thoughts and translate it into text. Not perfected yet, but it probably will be by next Tuesday. Can’t quite remember that dream? Wait until your Smart Watch records the dream and prints it out, so you can see it first thing in the morning. Of course, it may also send the printout, or at least the text, to your “friends” or your “mental health A.I. assistant”, or your “government monitor”. Who knows? So exciting.

All of this explains (going back to Page 1 of the today’s Times) why Geoffrey Hinton, the Canadian scientist who perhaps has had more influence into the development of A.I. than anyone else, has quit his high level position at Google. He says that he “now regrets his life’s work”, and can console himself only by saying that if he had not developed this new branch of science or technology, someone else would have. But, as the Times says, he has gone from “groundbreaker to doomsayer”.

This blog post only reflects what I have seen this morning. Had I written it yesterday, it would have been different. It would have talked about how much better AI is than doctors in diagnosing disease and appropriate treatments, for example. Every day now brings something new, something that shows that human society is either in danger or superfluous.

No joke.

I was listening to the Leadership Conference of the Anti-Defamation League this afternoon on my car radio. Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker, the man who held off the attacker last year in Colleyville TX last year speak. He told an interesting Talmudic story. Here is what I heard:

There was a man born with two heads. The question was whether he/they was/were entitled to one inheritance, or two. A group of rabbis was consulted and the opinion was that a test should be conducted. A pot of boiling water should be poured over one of the heads. If the second head screamed, then they were one person and entitled to one inheritance. If the second head did not scream, they were two persons and entitled to two inheritances.

He then talked about Rabbi Soloveitchik’s interpretation of this Talmudic discussion. Rabbi Soloveitchik said that the purpose of this story was to demonstrate that we are all, all of us, connected. If you pour boiling water on one of us, the other will feel the pain.

I liked this .

But to digress a minute. After Cytron-Walker finished, ADL executive director Jonathan Greenblatt came out to praise him, and praise him he did. He talked about what Cytron-Walker accomplished in Colleyville, and how he is now assisting with the ADL. And then he said “So hats off to the Rabbi!”

Well, my gosh, Jonathan Greenblatt. There is one thing you ought to know. You do not tell people in front of a rabbi that they should take their hats off.

It was a gaffe. And it happens. Just like when I heard Don Rickles on a clip today try to insult a Swede by telling him they put too many holes in their cheese. It’s a gaffe.

But, then again, three gaffes and you are out.

Sometimes I do hear a funny joke. Should I repeat it? Like the one about the man whose neighbor is in his upper 90s and somewhat senile. And every morning, he comes to the man’s door and asks him if he has seen his wife; she isn’t at home this morning. And every morning the man must tell his 90+ year old senile neighbor that his wife died several years ago.

He told this story to his friend, who said: “Why do you talk to him every morning? Why not just not answer your door?”

The man responded. “I thought about that. It’s hard telling him every morning that his wife died. I should stop……..But I’d really miss that smile on his face.”

Now, is that a funny joke? I’m not sure. I thought so. I read something else yesterday, talking about writing, not about comedy. It was the advice that someone gave someone else. He said something like “No matter how well you write, there are going to be people who don’t like it. And no matter how poorly you write, there are some people who are going to love it.”

Same with humor.

Speaking of humor, I missed the White House Correspondent’s Dinner this year (on TV). I would be very surprised if Joe Biden told a joke that I would laugh at. Very surprised.

On the other hand, I am not sure that I could say anything that Joe Biden would laugh at. Unless he needed my vote.

Which he doesn’t.

One of the things that all (and I am sure I am not exaggerating) 80 year olds do is to look at the obituaries every day. Not, as the old “joke” says, to see if they are there, but – IMHO – because it’s the one place where it is unlikely that it’s fake news.

About a month ago, I saw a death notice of a man whom I had never met and whose name I had not thought of for about 50 years. But it was a name that brought back memories.

It was the early 1970s and I decided to take a trip behind the Iron Curtain. How this came about, I don’t quite remember, but someone advised me to call a certain Washington travel agency that arranged trips to Eastern Europe. The man who had died had been the owner of that agency.

[A diversion: Where is Eastern Europe? Much of what we think/thought of as Eastern Europe is more properly Central Europe. Do Poles think they live in Eastern Europe, for example? No way. “Mieszkamy w Europie Srodkowej!” or “We live in Central Europe!” In fact, based now on many trips, I realize that Eastern Europe seems to be located 100 km east of wherever you are at the time. What’s more, in Lithuania, some 30 km or so north of Vilnius, you pass a road sign that says: “Welcome to the geographic center of Europe.” Well, if you include Russia to the Urals, Norway towards the Pole, Iceland to the West and Sicily down South, this is pretty accurate.]

Whatever.

I called the dead man’s agency and arranged a trip (I was traveling alone) to Budapest and Prague. After Prague, I figured I’d relax in Italy, where I had traveled before.

Now today, people travel to Prague and Budapest like they travel to Rockville and Gaithersburg. But not then. Pleasure travel to Czechoslovakia and Hungary was very rare. And hard to arrange.

I flew first to Vienna and spent a few days there. I had been there before, and I have been there since, and frankly I don’t remember much of what I did there on this trip. I had booked a hotel which was relatively inexpensive and discovered that it wasn’t a free standing building but one floor of a regular office building that had doctors and lawyers and what have you. It was the first, but not the last, time I had seen such a hotel. I arrived in the late afternoon, checked in, and had an experience unique for me. The room I was given was small. No, it was tiny. No, it was miniscule. A rectangle with a single bed, a room so narrow that you could almost touch both walls while lying in the bed. There was a small chest of drawers, but you couldn’t open any drawer fully because you hit the side of the bed. Oh well, I said, just a couple of nights.

I asked where I could get a good meal nearby and I remember being directed to a small restaurant a block or so away with the name Zum Something or Other, that I was told was one of Schubert’s favorite places. It wasn’t crowded, I had a simple meal and perhaps the first Austrian wine I had ever had. Good wine, I thought. I looked for Schubert. He was not there.

I went back to my hotel and the small room. But I couldn’t sleep and in the middle of the night I left, walking the dark, empty streets of the old city of Vienna until I found a very nice small hotel with a larger room.

That is all that I remember about that trip to Vienna. I had booked passage on a hydrofoil to Budapest, a trip of a few hours up the Danube, and it was a beautiful day. The boat was modern and it was hard to believe that it skimmed on top of the water, but I guess it did.

I was a bit disappointed with the Danube scenery, and I was a bit disappointed that we didn’t stop at Bratislava, which we passed and looked interesting. I was intrigued by the guard towers, which appeared every 100 yards or so; I couldn’t tell if they were occupied. What did impress me were many of my fellow passengers who were Hungarian-Americans, many of whom were returning to their home country for the first time since they left, and most had left in 1956 during the failed revolution. They were the friendliest, most energetic, most welcoming of people, and they all convinced me that I would love Budapest, that it was heaven on earth. I was convinced.

If you have ever been to Budapest, and if you have arrived on the water, you know how magical the city is. You also know that you arrive at the pier, with the castle looming over you on the Buda side, and the Parliament on the Pest side. You climb a few steps to get to central Pest.

In those days, all travelers had to report in at Ibusz, the national travel agency, which controlled the life of all visitors. I had been told to report there and give them my voucher to the hotel arranged by the Washington travel agency. Ibusz was in a small building, and there were two young staffers, about my age, one male, one female. They took the voucher, did what they do, and told me two things: first, they had no record showing that I had a reservation and second, there were no vacancies in Budapest.

Now, I admit to being surprised, and you would possibly think that I would have been discouraged. But no. This was Budapest. The most wonderful place in the world. Nothing could discourage me. I simply changed my personality and acted as if these two Ibusz staffers were my oldest and best friends and surely together we would figure something out. And, lo and behold, these two loyal Communist functionaries seemed to change their personalities, too, and we went to work.

Before long, they told me that they found me a room not at a hotel, but with an elderly woman who took in travelers, but it was a cold water apartment, and she didn’t speak any English. No problem, I said, we worked out the details and I got the address.

Again, if you have been to Budapest, you know that central Pest is filled with (maybe) 6 story brick apartment houses, with flat fronts and an interior courtyard. You enter through the courtyard and, because there are no elevators, you climb interior stairs to balconies that run across all four sides of the building, and the apartment entries are off these balconies. Our landlady was quite elderly (it seemed to me at the time) and she was welcoming, but I couldn’t really communicate with her. She didn’t speak English, of course, but we couldn’t manage with my poor German, either. All I remember is that she wanted to buy my American blue jeans for her grandson and that she was willing to pay me $40 for them. That is the equivalent of almost $300 today. Where would she get that kind of money, I wondered. And if she could scrape it up, certainly that was something better to spend it on.

I did love Budapest. It was a very lively city with very active and attractive people – it certainly didn’t fit my image of a Communist city. The stores and markets seemed filled, and everyone you saw on the streets was well dressed. I visited the central market, and I ate some wonderful meals. The dollar was very strong then, and elegant meals, served in elegant settings, by very professional waiters, were dirt cheap. While I don’t remember all of the restaurants, I do remember Gundel, and a Russian restaurant on the Buda side called (in Hungarian) something that translated into Golden Caviar, where I ate on a subsequent trip, as well.

My other Budapest memory was my “night at the opera”, where I saw Don Giovanni done in Hungarian. It was a great performance in an old, then down-at-the-heels opera house, and I was amused at the sound of the opera in Hungarian – sounded to me that it was being done in baby-talk.

During the first act, something flew into my eye and I couldn’t get it out. At the intermission I went to one of the ushers (the ushers all looked like elderly Jewish women), and asked her in my best poor German where the restroom was. She smiled at me and responded in good German that the bar was in the room to the left. I realized she had not understood me, so I repeated it, louder and more slowly. She nodded and told me that the bar was in the room to the left. I was certain that my German was failing me, but I tried again, this time telling her that I had something in my eye and that I needed the bathroom to wash it out. She looked at me again, and told me that she knew that, and that the bar was to the left and that what I needed was not the restroom, but a cognac. I took her advice, got a cognac, chugged it, and my eye was fine.

From Budapest, I went to Prague and more adventures. Tune in tomorrow.

Probably not.

Now on to today’s program…….

It’s been raining all day here and, while the normal temperature reaches into the low 70s, I don’t think it hit 60 today. So I pretty much stayed where I am.

I also didn’t really turn the news on, so if anything important happened today, I have yet to hear about it, and I am clearly the better off for that.

And, to tell you the truth, my mind is pretty much a blank.

Now a normal person in my position would simply send a series of parameters to ChatGPT and see what it comes up and print it out as my own. But I am not a normal person. So that is off the table.

So let me tell you about the book I am “reading” (my latest Penguin). Called “Life in Shakespeare’s England”, it is a compilation of 16th and 17th century English writers, covering a number of subjects – Countryside, Superstition, Education, London, Books and Authors, Theatre, the Court, House and Home, Rogues and Vagabonds, and the Sea. The typical entry is about a page and a half. The Compiler was a man named John Dover Wilson, who was a pretty prominent guy, it appears, mid-20th century in Elizabethan studies circles.

I just began the book last night, and I barely opened it today, but I must say it is a real page-turner. Just not in the way that phrase is normally used. It is a page turner not because you can’t wait to see what the next page will bring about, but because you certainly can’t read all of these Elizabethan authors (their language, it does not appear to have been modernized) word for word, so you look at the first paragraph and a line or two after that (unless it really grabs you), and turn the page.

I have read Countryside, Superstition and Education. The English countryside was just as you thought it was, and just beginning to become a bit less so. The problems of education then were not that different from the problems of education today, but not the same either. And superstition in those days seems to have been much more ingrained than today – it wasn’t just knocking on wood, or avoiding black cats. It involved the Devil (who could infest anyone), witches (who feasted on foods made from the blood of children) and ordinary people who seemingly could do miraculous things (and therefore must be possessed of demons and therefore tortured until they confessed). Did they really believe that? We will see what the rest of the book brings.

SPOILER ALERT. Maybe I should also mention “Night Action”, in case I already haven’t, the Netflix series (10 episodes, I think) I am watching while cycling without gaining ground. It’s a show set in Washington DC, but filmed (of course) in Vancouver. Someone blew up a Metro, and then a couple (seemingly ordinary, but really spies) was murdered by a man with a mustache and an accent and his kinky girlfriend. Their attractive, but down on her luck, niece was in the house and escaped, reporting her adventure to a number that she had been told call in an “if something every happens” note her aunt had given her. Little did she know that she was calling a basement phone in the White House and that she was going to meet a guy who (my guess) will wind up to be the love of her life, as they dodge the two murderers, trying to figure out the meaning of a second her aunt had left for her, warning her that something terrible was afoot and it was all occurring at the direction of someone in the White House. Who can you trust? Who is trying to destroy the country, and who will be its savior? (By the way, the U.S. president is an attractive woman – but of a certain age, or getting there – and I surely don’t trust the vice-president. I didn’t trust the assistant director of the FBI, either. But he already dead.)

Do I recommend this show? Not really, but it isn’t so bad that I want to abandon it. Yet.

We have house guests staying with us for a few days. They are in town for a friend’s wedding. Two of them wanted a tour of Washington today. We got in my car about 11 or so. We decided to drive until we stopped for lunch and then decide if we wanted to do any more. We got home at 3:20.

This was strictly an automobile tour. Except for lunch, we stayed in the car and looked out the window.

Where did we go?

We drove west on Davenport to Connecticut Avenue and turned left, towards downtown. I pointed out the building where Harry Truman lived while he was Missouri Senator (he lived there from 1941-1945 and paid $120 a month for apartment 209) and then Vice President as well as other neighborhood hot spots, like Bread Furst (Bread Furst is primarily a bakery, but they have carry out foods and shelves filled with wines, chocolates and expensive olive oils). We then turned west on Van Ness Street. I explained the history of the brutalist/modernist building that once housed Intelsat and now sits virtually vacant and is looking for a new tenant or buyer. We looked at the Embassy of Singapore and China, and then the other embassies on International Avenue south of Van Ness, including Jordan, Ghana, Kuwait and Israel. Portions of the park in the center of the embassies seemed to have been fenced off – I didn’t know why, and it meant I couldn’t show them the apple tree grafted from Isaac Newton’s tree. Then we crossed Van Ness to look at the other embassies, including Slovakia, Austria, the UAE, Bangladesh and Pakistan. I explained what I knew about each building.

Back down Van Ness, we crossed Connecticut Avenue and drove to the Howard University Law and Divinity Schools (I explained that these schools were separated from the main campus), and then down Upton Street, past the Levine School of Music (in a building formerly part of the Carnegie Institution) and the varying houses on Lenore Lane (and saw their swimming pool already open). We drove down Linnean past Hillwood (the home of Marjorie Merriweather Post, famous for its gardens and Faberge egg collection); of course, Ms. Post also owned Mar-a-lago, but that is for another day) and across Tilden to look at the Cezch and Hungarian embassies. We then looked at Sherman Adam’s house, and the other buildings that make up the Peirce Mill complex, now over 200 years old. The Adams house was built by Peirce as a distillery – probably before 1800.

We climbed back up the Tilden Street hill, turned left on Connecticut, but soon found ourselves caught in the middle of Construction Central and terrible traffic, so we backtracked a bit, went up Rodman to Reno, and turned left on Reno. We stayed on Reno only to Newark Street, where again we turned left, this time to look at some of the houses in Cleveland Park (the oldest house in Newark Street was built in the 1890s and I think most were built before World War I). Coming back to Connecticut, we looked at the Cleveland Park business district (having some trouble since the closing of the Uptown Theater and the disruption of a number of parking places, but now the home of a number of new restaurants, along with the old standbys), the library and we drove past the Zoo (home not only to pandas, but to the newly opened refurbished bird cage), the Woodley Park Towers Condominium (where I once lived) and the Kennedy-Warren Apartments (where a number of friends live), before continuing through the Woodley Park neighborhood) and over the Taft Bridge over Rock Creek Park. We talked about the plan to put higher barricades on the bridge to prevent suicides, and wondered if this indeed prevented suicides or just directed them elsewhere.

I turned off Connecticut onto Kalorama (which apparently means “beautiful vista” or some such thing in Greek), and we explored several streets in that neighborhood, pointing out the large homes of the Portuguese and French ambassadors, the Ukraine House, and the Slovenian embassy before reaching Massachusetts Ave, where we turned right and looked at the Turkish embassy with a statue of Ataturk, the South African embassy with a statue of Mandela, the old Iranian embassy (empty since 1979), the Mosque, the Kahlil Gibran sculpture park and the Finnish, Vatican and Norwegian embassies. We looked at the entrance to the Naval Observatory (where the Vice President lives, and where the country’s most accurate clock is said to reside). I then made a U-turn, and we looked at the British embassy and the Churchill statue, and the Japanese, Bolivian, Brazilian and Italian embassies before turning up Whitehaven Parkway to see the Danish embassy, the Clinton house and the Harvard Center for Hellenic Studies.

Coming back towards Massachusetts, we crossed, staying on the continuation of the road, past more large houses, and into Massachusetts Heights. We came out of that area onto Calvert Street at the Omni Shoreham and turned right, turning right again on Connecticut and again going over the Taft Bridge. This time we stayed on Connecticut, going past the Washington Hilton, and under Dupont Circle, remarking how the COVID pandemic and resultant work-at-home movement has taken its toll on downtown restaurants and office buildings.

We went down Connecticut (I pointed out my first law office at 1025), by Farragut Square (I pointed out the Army-Navy Club) , the OMB, the Executive Office Building, the Ellipse, the former home of the Corcoran Gallery (now part of George Washington University), the headquarters of the American Red Cross, the D.A.R. (housing Constitution Hall), the O.A.S and the World War II Memorial. We then went around the Tidal Basin.

I was planning on heading towards the Wharf, but one of my passengers wanted to see the Mall, so instead I went towards Independence, turning north on 14th and making the first right onto the Mall from 14th Street. I pointed out where the Holocaust Museum was down the street to the South. We then saw the main Department of Agriculture Building, the African American History Museum (where we have yet to go), the American History Museum, the Natural History Museum, the National Gallery and East Wing, the Smithsonian Castle, the Smithsonian offices, the Freer, the Hirshhorn, the Air and Space Museum and the American Indian Museum. We then went south on 4th across Independence, and I pointed out the Voice of America and the Bible Museum. We cut over to 7th and saw HUD, and then went south towards the Wharf where we drove around a bit turning back at the entrances to the garages. We saw that there were a number of people eating at the restaurants overlooking the Potomac and wondered how all of these buildings were ever going to be filled and what their effect has been on the downtown economy.

From the Wharf, we passed Arena Stage, and drove east on M until we crossed North Capitol and wound up on Half Street near Nats Stadium. We parked and had lunch at Gatsby’s. The choices were a Greek omelet, a pastrami sandwich and a farro salad.

After eating, we returned to the car, drove through the Navy Yard area, pointing out what I could, like the DOT building, the Water Department, some of the new construction and the walkways and park along the Anacostia River. We drove past the Navy Yard, discussed the museum to be built there, and then turned north on 8th street, heading through Barracks Row, looking at the Marine Commandant’s house,passing all the restaurants (these not looking too busy today) and winding up driving through parts of Capitol Hill, until we got to H Street NE.

We looked at H Street and the status of development there, and then saw Union Station, but turned up North Capitol only for a block or two, turning off the show the new office and residential construction around there. Then we turned northeast up New York Avenue, passed the Gallaudet campus and into the Union Market area, where we saw the apartment construction, the market itself and both the wholesale food shops and the new restaurants and shops.

From there we went back to North Capitol and drove past McMillan Reservoir (talking about planned development there) and the hospitals, the cemeteries and old soldiers’ home (actually the home for “distinguished veterans), turning right on Upshur and heading to Mathewson, then into the Park, out by Broadbranch, and finally reached home.