On a scale of 1 to 10, how thrilled am I with this?

The NYTimes has an article today (here) about the expansion of high speed internet access. Yes, its availability is expected now in hotels, cafés, airports. But trains? Planes? Automobiles?

The article addresses the difficulties of establishing Internet connections in moving vehicles with metal “skins.” Still, I think the expectation is that soon, the world will be one big hot spot.

Do I welcome these developments? Hard to say. I am thrilled that I can now work on my computer at Borders bookstore. But why is that so? It’s a bookstore, darn it, why do I feel compelled to take my work or my Internet surfing to a bookstore? Shouldn’t the ethicist speak out about this? Am I in any way contributing to the sales of books? And how about cafés: I like taking my computer there as well. But wait: what if my favorite cafés in France had a row of laptop users pounding away. Here, take this photo (below, taken just last year) and use your imagination. Place Parisians with computers at all the sidewalk tables. It’s WRONG!

Yet, just me sitting there blogging about the joys of people watching in Paris – I can make an exception for that…

I’m inconsistent. I want the options for myself but I want the rest of the world to take heed: laptops on long flights? Maybe. But not in French cafés. Please, let there be a few sacred spots in the world.

Paris now, before Wi-Fi 

A seasonal adjustment

Sometimes when I post something here, I cannot wait to post again, just so that the previous post does not stand out with its atrociously glaring title. Now is such a moment. Christmas on the blog is significantly out of place when I am chasing mosquitoes as I walk. So, just to appease my inner sense of balance let me post three pictures from this morning. They were taken in a place that is a five-minute walk from my house (Owen Woods). Whenever I groan too loudly about life in the suburbs, I am reminded that I have Owen Woods while New Yorkers have trees growing out of concrete slabs every thirty blocks and then I become quiet. [Until my next unhappy suburban moment.]

The prairie restoration project at Owen Woods is wonderful enough, though I think I want to set limits on what in the prairie I want restored. For example, the Black-eyed Susan and Echinacea are just fine, but the bugs – oh the bugs! They are obnoxiously intrusive and if I remember correctly from reading Laura Ingalls Wilder books, they caused one of the girls in the “Little House on the PRAIRIE” to go blind. So, yes to prairie restoration, but can we please do it with an eye toward plants that are repugnant to insect life? [Is that even possible?]

prairie flowers and grasses (and bugs) 

only in nature does this pairing of colors work 

happy looking Susans 

Christmas, communism and the return of the kid with the classy shoes

BoringAng is blogging about Christmas imagery and JeremyF is linking to Christian websites that warn against associating with atheists (might that include Communists? Do these websites see them as overlapping sets? Probably). Putting the two posts together reminds me of the FAQ that came my way (though not recently, and not in July): how did we deal with Christmas in Communist Poland? Given the prevalence of Catholicism even (or especially)in postwar Poland, was it celebrated? Repressed? Berated? Condemned?

Though as I have said before, my non-Catholicism kept me out of the churches during the holidays, I certainly did not mind otherwise horning in on Christmas celebrations. And Poland did (still does) Christmas in a big way, centering it mostly on feasting, but with music, tree-trimming and St. Nicholas thrown in as well (though St. Nick does a disappearing act after St. Nicholas Day early in the month, so as not to detract from the birth of Christ theme around the 24th and 25th). The churches appeared to me crowded year-round and so repression of religion has to be viewed as being somewhat at the level of abstraction. And governance, of course. Government offices had no religious iconography or ornamentation and I never saw a Christmas tree anywhere near the Communist Party headquarters. [Contemporary Poland seems to now scorn the “quaint” idea of separation of church and state.]

I do have to say, though, that I was a jaded kid. Did I “believe” in St. Nick and his sack of presents? My mother tells me I stopped when I was 5, immediately following the visit to the Warsaw Department store where my sister and I had this picture (below) taken. You can see the “yeah, sure” look on my face (I’m on the right). I am told I went up to “St. Nick” afterwards and told him loudly “you are SO not real,” much to the dismay of the children in line. I am quite ashamed of this now – what a spoiler. Note, as well, the postwar Poland haute couture. I don’t think I realized that people wore shoes for reasons other than protecting the feet from mud and sharp objects until I traveled to the States at the age of 7.


Warsaw, Poland, December 1958