Why do mothers send their adult children newspaper clippings?

I just got my fat yellow envelope full of news stories from my Mom (defying stereotypes, she turned Berkeley-radical in her old age and so the clippings are of a certain slant, left-leaning shall we say).

I think she must still be holding a grudge about my primary voting behavior (reminder: she remained a loyal “Deanie” while I was already an “Edwardsian”), because many of the stories she sends point to character traits in Kerry that she knows I would find reprehensible (at the same time that she understands that the issues are moot since just about nothing would cause either of us to cross over and cast a vote for the GWB-DC ticket).

It is difficult not to love your candidate. I remember a long time ago when I taught social psych (to a class of 350, made worse by the fact that I didn’t really know what I was doing), I tried to explain the common phenomenon on imputing traits onto a person based on traits already in their possession. In Kerry’s case, one would tend to think that because he is a Democrat, running as a populist against a conservative Republican, he would be, therefore, more likely to give generously to charity, feel kindly toward the little guy, scorn ostentatiousness and pretension, and in general opt for a certain level of moneyed simplicity (no, this is not an oxymoron), regardless of the affluence that marks his life.

Au contraire.

True, Kerry’s current and past wealth are grounds well trampled by the press. However, in one article, the packaging of facts unfortunately creates an image of a man who is a big spender on himself and not so much on the little guy. In the SF Chronicle story, sent by my CA Clipper Supreme, the reporter mentions Kerry’s mansion on Beacon Hill and recalls how a fire hydrant in front prevented Kerry and his wife from parking their SUV there. They asked the city of Boston to remove the hydrant and the city obliged. In Nantucket, Kerry spends leisure time in a sprawling house and a power boat, the latter worth well over half a million (which he purchased recently for cash). Kerry comes with privilege written up and down his shirt sleeve: his mother was from one of the oldest WASP families in the state of Massachusetts. More importantly perhaps, while living on a senator’s salary of $100,000, Kerry’s total contribution to charity in one year was $135. During that same year he purchased a brand new imported Italian motorcycle (priced at $8,600). The locals in Boston and Nantucket report that he routinely cuts to the front of the line in airports, theaters, clam shacks, and at the Registry of Motor Vehicles.

It’s irrelevant of course – all of it, down to the Italian motorcycle. My Mom just wants to rub it in. She liked Dean’s frugality. As to Kerry’s life-style choices – well, a Berkeley-radical is not going to go for any of this. I expect my Clipping Service is going to be hackin’ away at the newspapers in the months ahead.

Nonconformity

A blogger-reader-friend (her blog can be seen here) did a neat round up of “odd stories” in her post. Among the items is the following (from a Wisconsin paper, found here):

A bear is hibernating in a bald eagle nest at the top of a tree … while several of the birds look on.
``You can imagine they're thinking, 'Now what?' `` said Ron Eckstein, a state Department of Natural Resources wildlife biologist.

This sounds like something that would happen to me: I would pick the wrong place to recline in, completely inappropriate to my species, dispossessing some bewildered souls of their lair and then have the whole community just laugh and laugh from below. Or, translated to human terms, I would plunge into doing something [in the manner of: “oh, this sounds neat.” plunge.] that most would consider rather batty, not realizing, not caring maybe, forging ahead because it seemed interesting, not seeing the oddity of it at all.

But let me focus on the bear for now. Why is he up there in that tree? Typically, bears hibernate in caves or other hollow places on the ground. The DNR specialist speculates that perhaps the bear had had some unpleasantry happen to it on the ground and was escaping the mean world below. Eagles are tolerant of other species: they’ll stare, but they wont be aggressive toward the visitor.

There is a fine for humans who would get it into their heads to disturb a hibernating bear. Just entering the den of a sleeping bear carries a maximum fine of $10,000 and 9 months in jail. Somehow it doesn’t seem right to put a person who entered a den of a bear in prison along with the Martha Stewarts and druggies of this world, but I suppose it would make for interesting, lively conversation during morning prison yard exercises (and what are you in here for? “insider trading” “possession of narcotics” “disturbing a bear”).

[photo credit: bear with us, inc.]

Rooms without a view

Every time I travel and stay in a hotel, I ask for a room with a pleasant view. This could be regarded as compensation for my early years in a Warsaw apartment that looked out on the ugliest church in the world (in a terrifying and gothic sort of way), adjacent to a highly trafficked tram stop; or for the years after, when our New York bedroom looked out on the back of the YMCA, where men routinely, unabashedly sat by their windows and stared right at our apartment. Creepy.

A good view should not be a hotel priority and I chalk up my request as belonging to the “dumb things I like in life.” After all, you come back late at night, it’s dark, you close the curtains, turn on CNN or check your email, and go to sleep. Still, unless there’s a price issue, I ask for the view.


So why do I eat with some frequency in places that offer at best a parking lot for your viewing pleasure? Or a gas station? Or a ridiculously busy intersection? Or –as in today’s lunch place—all of the above (did someone say Sunprint Café? Damn, you’re smart!). Yes, of course, a view can be sacrificed for the company, the food, or even (third on the list) the ambience of the interior. But I long for it anyway: a place to eat and talk and people-watch, with potted bay leaf trees or baskets of flowers at the entrance and maybe some winding little street or dirt road just outside, and let’s go for broke here: a boy pedalling an old bike, with a baguette sticking out of his basket, heading for an alley lined with tall cypress trees. Yes, totally idyllic—such stuff as dreams are made of.

Ah well, if something should be sacrificed, I suppose it has to be the view. Even a boy pedalling down a cypress lane isn’t going to overcome ratty food or tiresome company. Sitting through a meal where after ten minutes you wonder if it would be transparent to play the “sick dog at home” card (and after five more minutes you no longer care if it’s polite, you play it anyway), as you stare miserably at your plate of buffalo stew can ruin a day.

Life imitates cheap Russian perfume

I once purchased a gift for someone who had done us a tremendous service. I picked out a giant blossoming jasmine tree and left it on her doorstep with a gushy note attached. She called shortly after thanking politely but letting me know that she could not accept the gift. Even though she was a horticulturist, she said she could not tolerate perfumes of any sort indoors, and so she could not bring in the jasmine plant.

Only slightly hurt (the return of gifts is always a painful experience, moreover, I would have never known had she made a bonfire of the tree—I was not a frequent visitor to her place), I took back the tree, and plotted how I could rescind the gushy message as well.

The tree stands in my home ‘office’ and every few months it bursts into bloom, exuding the intense fragrance of jasmine throughout the entire lower portion of the house.

I should be pleased. However, I was conditioned to cringe at the sickly sweet smell of artificial so-called floral perfumes. For me, they are associated with the forceful Russian women who traveled to Poland frequently to stock up on our superior cosmetics. The odorous jasmine, I’m sorry to say, smells a bit like them.

I should pass on the well-intentioned tree to someone who will appreciate its willingness to sprout blooms with such regularity. But I’ve already had one tree chopped into firewood this year (see post somewhere below). I can’t live with the idea that I killed one off and orphaned another. It’s too much. I’ll just move my papers and work on the living room floor for all the weeks (the many weeks) of its blooming life.

Occasionally, one must write about politics

The IHTribune has an interesting comment (by Ian Buruma, who lives mostly in Asia and is the author of "The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan.") on the US presence in Iraq (here). Buruma compares the Western imposition of principled values (personal and religious freedom, democratic elections, etc) on a reluctant nation with the Napoleanic wars, when a true despot waged wars in the name of liberty, equality and brotherhood (and what French person doesn’t choke with pride over “Liberté Egalité Fraternité,” to this day?).

The author takes a sweeping look at the two hundred years that followed Napoleon’s crusade. He writes:

France's armed intervention was deeply resented. Some nativist reactions were relatively benign: romantic poetry celebrating the native soul, or a taste for folkloric roots.
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But in other cases the native soul, especially in Germany, turned sour and became antiliberal and anti-Semitic. (…)

As soon as Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo, the liberal laws he instituted in Prussia were annulled. And a century later, the resentments planted by Napoleon's armed liberation sprouted their most bitter fruits in Nazi Germany.
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Arab and Muslim extremism may never become as lethal or powerful as the 20th-century German strain, but it has already taken a terrible toll. Once again a nation with a universalist mission to liberate the world is creating dangerous enemies.(...)
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This is not necessarily because the Islamic world hates democracy, but because the use of armed force - combined with the hypocrisy of going after one dictator while coddling others, the arrogant zealotry of some American ideologues and the failures of a ham-handed occupation - are giving America's democratic mission a bad name.

(…) There seems to be little doubt that most Iraqis were more than happy to see Saddam go. Most would have remained grateful to the United States and Britain, if only the coalition forces could have somehow gone home quickly, leaving Iraq with a functioning administration, electricity, running water and safe streets.
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This, of course, would not have been possible even if Britain and America had done everything right. The fact that the coalition got so much spectacularly wrong has made things far worse.

And herein lies the real issue: was it not predictable that the ‘mission’ would be impossible? That internal conflicts would bolster extremism, making it difficult for the moderate Muslims (in all corners of the world) to maintain their stance against fundamentalism without appearing like puppets of the West?

A friend from Poland wrote that the nation is becoming skittish about supporting the coalition forces in Iraq ever since the recent dismantling of terrorist plots to attack the airport and a railway station in Poland. That, of course, is a curious reason to pull out support (but then, the reasons for initial support were also curious). However, it may be that the time has come for Europe to coalesce around the idea of forcing another round of discussions about the future of Iraq. That discussion will not be initiated by anyone in this country in the next seven months, and waiting until November seems dangerously long.

It could be snowing bugs

To stave off my complaints about the weather (snow AGAIN this morning), a friend sent me this CNN image from Australia (she is especially insect-averse):

[story about Australia's plague of locusts can be found here]






Of course, I could retaliate and send her this ---->, as a pleasant reminder of what’s ahead, after the snow. Morning bantering of this kind can really jumpstart the day.

Of all things, a post about God

To think I almost missed the article (in the Guardian, but not in the form of a major headline – rather, buried in the science/education section, as if it was only marginally important to the majority of its readership) that gave me a scientific formula persuasively stating that indeed, there is a God. Well, perhaps not too persuasively: odds are, according to the scientist who worked this through (read about it here), as ‘high’ as 67% that God exists.

I see the cautious way the newspaper is approaching this finding. After all, 67% isn’t that great. Not enough to be reassuring to “Passion” viewers, for example. Does the Guardian really want to underscore a study that says that there’s a 33% chance that life is all about a meaningless Darwinian pursuit of food, mating, and survival?

I want the blog readers who have some methodological acumen to tell me that I know what I’m talking about when I say the study is odd to begin with. It starts with the premise that there’s a 50-50 chance of there being a deity. Why that high (or that low, depending on your perspective)? And the factors that are then worked into the formula (for example: the existence of miracles) – do they not tilt the outcome somewhat?

Wait. Perhaps the math is credible, but the conclusion is wrong. Maybe the data should indicate that there is only a 67% of a God out there – that he or she isn’t all that we make him/her out to be? In which case we would have a God that is divine, yet as imperfect as the rest of us.

But I don’t think that is the author’s intent. It’s a yes – no type inquiry, reassuring to those who want science to be on their side. And BTW, the author himself is 95% confident about God’s existence. The discrepancy is a little befuddling, though maybe the author’s lack of impartiality helps explain the final outcome – on the side of God.

Bubbles

As I am not even remotely Irish, I have no special privileges on March 17 and moreover, nothing about the world appears green today (fresh snow outside). However, I do have a nephew whose name is Patrick and I know that in Poland, where he lives, name-days are even more important than birthdays and so at least one member of my extended family is certain to be celebrating today, though most likely he will be doing so not by dancing jigs, but by chanting with his Krishna friends (yes, that appears to be his calling—no secret there, he has a website with all details made public).

Still, even in my non-Irish frame of mind, I appreciated a reader’s email with a link to a CNN article on Guinness. Not so much because I am a Guinness Stout fan (predictably, my Eastern European DNA would prefer a pilsner), but because the phenomenon described in the article is baffling and incomprehensible to me. Guinness bubbles go down, not up. Really. I am assured of the correctness of this since it has the seal of approval from a joint team of Stanford U and U of Edinburgh experts who studied the bubbles and came forth with a definitive statement on the matter.

Nothing is certain in life after all, even the trajectory of bubble movement.

A Passion for the Cross

Thanks to the reader who sent me the story (here) about an unfortunate incident in Maine. I hope there wasn’t a suggestion that perhaps this is conduct worthy of me or anyone I know. Most likely the story was forwarded because much has been written lately about movies with crosses in them and this added an interesting new twist to the idea of religious fervor.

It appears that a 23 year-old man attempted to nail himself to a wooden cross in his own living room last week. Why did he do it? He said he had been seeing images of Christ on his computer screen. Having accomplished the act of nailing one hand, he then realized that he could not nail the second one and so he called 911. The article states that it was not clear if he was calling 911 to get medical assistance or to ask for help with the nailing of the other hand.

He committed no crime in his undertaking of this project and so after being treated for wounds, he was released. BTW, he had not (yet) seen “The Passion.” Since he seems highly impressionable, one has to worry what ideas will strike him after watching the film.

Food soliloquy

Who cooks these days? –asks a reader from Poland. Her son had just completed a translation of a cook book from English to Polish and both were a little perplexed at the complexity of the recipes and the number of ingredients used to prepare each dish.

It’s an interesting question. I suppose you could divide the country into foodie types and normal people. Foodie types insist on fresh ingredients, rarely serve leftovers, make a big production of most meals, are passionate cookbook hounds, and have stacks of magazines telling them how to do all this better. I admit to being a foodie type. I would think that most card-holding members of Slow Food are foodie types: it’s our mantra, after all, to cook slowly and eat in ways that promote social discourse.

But being a foodie person and following complicated recipes are not the same thing. Over the years, my own fastidiousness with having the “right ingredients” has gone down, to the point that I can now make a ginger sauce without even procuring the ginger, though maybe it should then be called “ginger-less ginger sauce.” If you’ve ever baked a spice cake, you’ll have had the experience of being on spice ingredient number 239 and wondering if ANYONE on earth would notice if you skipped finely grinding ingredient number 240. By your tenth bake of the cake, you’re down to only 10 spices and still no one comments on the omissions.

For once I can lay it on the French for having complicated out cooking lives. The Italians are quite different in their approach – none of this saucing, fussing with ingredients: simple and fresh suffice. After all, just switching a brand of olive oil with significantly alter the taste of a dish. You needn’t confuse the palate with 30 additional ingredients. But the French—oh, how they can strain your patience, particularly with their sauce obsession. Making the broth base alone requires ten herbs and thirty vegetables – and that is only the beginning. But in all this fuss you learn to respect each product, fall in love with the scent and texture of every item brought to the table. Behind this reverence for food is, of course, a high regard for the work of the person who crafted it with such care and with attention to the land, the climate, the history that conspire to give food its unique, regional character.

Of course, all this growing and preparing is not done in isolation. Working with food should never be a lonely act. And eating it? Even cave people huddled together over their buffalo stew, didn’t they?

So far away… doesn’t anybody stay in one place anymore?

(Carole King)
Almost the entire day was spent on rectifying a scheduling mistake, of the type you make when you are either over 40 or under 35. (In between you have a window of opportunity to behave in a rational and sane manner, with the benefit of experience, but with the ability still to remain attentive to detail.)

Next month I am to return to Japan to complete my interviews with court personnel in every corner of that sprawling country. I will, as before, go from the northernmost island of Hokkaido to southern Kyushu, hoping to discover some variation in the way that customary law intersects with the civil code, to produce the uniquely Japanese brand of conflict resolution in family disputes.

This project has been difficult from day one. For one thing, I don’t speak Japanese and so an entire dissertation could be written on whether I am entitled to draw conclusions based on interviews that are painstakingly conducted with an interpreter or two at my side. I continue with the project only because I have gotten my hands on such wonderfully telling information that I have not the courage to throw it all away. So, this spring I am about to work through my final round of interviews.

Except that in setting these up, I forgot about the Japanese Golden Week. The Golden Week is something we just don’t associate with the working people of that country. We imagine them to be industrious, after all, putting in an average of 80 hours a week, with overtime for especially demanding tasks (like entertaining foreign visitors). Because we operate with this fixed bias in our heads, we simply do not expect the entire country to look at a calendar and say: “oh! all those national holidays so close together! why don’t we simply close down the nation for ten days and not work at all?” Well, from April 29 until May 9 this year I can expect all government offices to be shut down in observance of this spring holiday period. And where will I be then? Trapped in the middle, waiting for the country to “reopen” again.

I could, I suppose, fly home in between my already scheduled meetings, but something tells me that spending 13 golden hours on the plane each way to escape this golden week of Japanese leisure makes little sense. Thus I will kill time on the islands, waiting for the holidays to be over.

Today I tried to find a spot in Japan where I could hide for ten days and not go nuts in my solitary state of disengagement (in the “Lost in Translation” sense), at the same time that I could experience something breathtakingly beautiful, at a reasonable price, on days when the entire nation will be hell-bent on travel and holiday merrymaking. I have several email messages out to different places where I may hole up for the period, but I am certain they will only produce the typical miscommunication I am famous for with my polite and non-comprehending pals in Japan.

I was discussing all this with a reader and a friend today. I got the distinct impression that she thought that a month of solitary work and travel would be too much for the likes of me – even though I generally am terrific at solo treks and enjoy talking to myself on sightseeing expeditions where the only person within a 100 mile radius that speaks any familiar language is me. She suggested that I turn to my usual list of people who in the past have not minded accompanying me on these ventures, just to see if they’d tag along this time, but I know it’s hopeless. The trip is barely a month away and Japan is expensive.

All I can say is this: be prepared for some odd blogs in April and May as I make my way through many weeks of conversational solitude, trying yet again to understand what the hell people are saying around me. It will be a challenge. Am I looking forward to it? But of course.

Admission

I admit to sitting through a late night showing of Monster last night. In addition to our small group, the theater had 4 other people in it, 2 of whom made odd noises throughout, making me think that perhaps they had randomly picked an empty theater to find a warm spot for their extra-cinematographic activities. If any movie does not lend itself to action of this sort it is Monster.

It was interesting to watch Monster in March, after the Academy buzz has faded and the only speculation that remains is about Charlize’s next acting stint, or about Christina Ricci and whether she is terribly grating because of the role she plays or the acting she brings to it.

And, of course, in this quieter period, one could view the movie and think more about the story line. Or is it that an anatomy of a murderer is no longer riveting because we accept the idea that anyone, if pushed hard enough, can plumet and commit heinous acts, verging on insanity? I doubt that we truly buy this. It’s so much safer to feel one’s moral superiority to the next person.

In high school, our history teacher used to like to get us going on the “what would you do under those circumstances?” spin. Mostly she redescribed for us World War II atrocities and placed us in the middle of them, asking Sophie’s Choice type questions about available courses of action. But we never played this game of mental anguish from a German’s perspective. There was no credible dilemma there for her or for us to reflect on—only the evil nature of the deeds and the deed-doers. [An aside: my history teacher was a bit of a character: a huge, muscled woman, she had a voice that carried. I remember a class period where, after reviewing the carnage wrought by some gruesome European battle, she stood up, pounded the desk and screamed out “I fear death!!” There was complete silence as we processed her words. I mean, what could you say to that? It certainly had the effect of temporarily abating any note-passing and random seat-mate kicking, both highly popular activities in the Polish public school.]

A movie like Monster takes you down that forbidding path where the perpetrator is also human. It’s a sobering experience to watch “Aileen Wuornos” turn her angry eyes on the court as she screams that they are sentencing a rape victim to death. My history teacher would have dismissed this scene and given us a lecture on taking responsibility for our actions. Aileen had done that initially and gotten exactly nowhere. Surely she was not the only one responsible for what happened then.
[photo: Zmichowska High School in Warsaw Poland]

Picking a Vice

A misleading title, to be sure, but the day’s young and needs some punch to get it going.

In the last New Yorker, Hertzberg offered a quick glance back at the democratic primaries and a look ahead at the selection of the Vice Presidential candidate. The process itself couldn’t be simpler: the Presidential candidate points a finger and that’s it. In the interim, the public engages in months of speculation.

The article notes that in the past, the VP’s job was virtually worthless. Hertzberg writes:

“My country,” complained its first occupant, John Adams, “has in its wisdom contrived for me the most insignificant office that ever the invention of man contrived or his imagination conceived.” A century or so later, Woodrow Wilson chimed in, “The chief embarrassment in describing it is that in saying how little there is to be said about it one has evidently said all that there is to say.”

But times have changed, and there are now reasons to covet the VP position:

The Vice-Presidency is a much, much better job than it was in the old days. Back then, you drowsed through endless sessions of the Senate, lived in a flyspecked boarding house on a muddy street, and nursed your resentments. Now you get a mansion, a staff, and a plane worthy of a Saudi arms merchant. And, if you like undisclosed locations, no longer have detectable Presidential ambitions of your own, and serve a callow President so in thrall to you that when you headed his Vice-Presidential search committee you felt free to find yourself, you can end up achieving total world domination.

The biggest reason people want to be Vice-President, though, is that it has become the royal road to the Presidency, even if one’s boss remains in perfect health…. Four out of the last eight Presidents were ex-Veeps, only one of whom ascended on account of his predecessor’s death.

The article falters a bit when it comes time to speculate about Kerry’s running mate. No matter, it’s anybody’s guess at the moment and guessing is all we have for the next several months, to keep ourselves interested in the long long stretch before the election.

Some are born great…

If you can’t do something great, just do something to an excess and you’ll achieve greatness. What else can be said of a person who applied 18,000 layers of paint to a baseball to get into the Guinness Book of Records? And what can you say about the Indiana town that was so proud of him, that they named last Saturday “Ball of Paint Day?”

I wonder how he kept tabs, or whether he withdrew from life to devote himself to the task: “kids, I’ll be out painting layer number 14,236 today.” Or “for my birthday, I would like another can of paint; this time make it fuchsia.” And now that it’s done, does it enter a museum? Perhaps touring, along with select pieces from the Hermitage that I hear are making the rounds?

At the very least, the man and his big green baseball were spotlighted in a story on CNN (here). Millions of people around the world read it and wondered, “why?”

Turning red?

The Washington Post identifies Wisconsin as a Gore state that may well swing toward the Republicans in these presidential elections (article here). Along with the Gore-win states of Pennsylvania, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Mexico, Wisconsin seems on the brink of turning a Republican red. Why? The GOP is blitzing the state with ads attempting to move the focus of voters here away from the economy onto cultural issues.

Not being much of a TV watcher, I’m not sure what that means: is the state more culturally aligned with the Republicans these days? What is the source of the alignment? Culture: is it that the Republican-to-his-shrinking-midriff, Tommy Thompson, is at the forefront of the war on obesity (and Wisconsin both has an unreasonable case of Tommy-worship and a problem with obesity)? Is it that Kerry has historically supported gun control, while for many in this state, bliss means draining the contents of one barrel (beer-filled) and filling the contents of another (gun)? [An aside: I have recently learned that there is a town in Texas CALLED Gun Barrel—see site here—how odd is that?]

The Post states that only 18 states seem still in the running: strategists for both sides have all but conceded the remaining to one another. I suppose it is somewhat of an honor to have Wisconsin still in the race, though I was happier when we were heralded as a progressive Edwards-Kerry battle ground. This new image of Wisconsin turning toward the GOP is more disconcerting: haven’t we incorporated enough red already into our Badger state culture?

Evidence of Spring Break, continued

Spring Break is in full swing. Need evidence? Consider the following:

1. Students are blogging more (after all, they have more time), faculty are blogging less (after all, they have more time);
2. The Madison temperature outside is plummeting again to levels generally associated with regions of the Arctic tundra;
3. I could cross University Avenue on a red light without being run over by a steady stream of traffic (crossing on a red light is such a cultural thing. No one in NY would be foolish enough to wait for a green light—why follow rules made for everyone but you? ..whereas in Japan, it may be empty, it may be 2 a.m., it may be raining, sleeting, thundering—no matter, you wait for the little green man and the chirping bird to give you permission to cross);
4. My stack of “to do” lists grows each day, as I spend a considerable amount of time slumped in a reclining position thinking about what else should be added.

Since there is no holiday or event associated with Spring Break (meaning nothing to cook for), the week becomes one long guilt trip, filled with remorse over not doing enough. Can’t wait for classes to resume: the stress of the Break is killing me.

The (lost) art of winning

An interesting take on the movie “the Miracle” appears in the New Yorker this week.

Most people would say that I am the last person to ever blog about sports. That may be true, but I am a great fan of the Olympics – especially the Winter Games. Maybe it’s because I was raised with skis and skates strapped to my feet. For a brief spell, my mother believed that ruddy cheeks were a sign of healthy upbringing (her theories on this bought my sister and I noses and cheeks that look like we’re perpetually nipping at the flask: frost bite never goes away) and so we were out skidding on icy surfaces (you could hardly call that skating) and on hills where you had to CLIMB back up after each crazed run, frequently each winter. My passion for this nutso winter physical stuff continued into my adulthood, though over the years I adopted the label of “fair weather skier” – meaning I’d only do it if the snow was perfect, the sun was out, and the temps were decent. But I still love watching the stuff every four years on TV.

No surprise, then, that I was glued to the set for the 1980s hockey match between the Soviets and the US team. It was a shocking victory, and I remember feeling pleased in the way that one always is pleased when the underdog wins. Still, to me, it seemed that the Russians were always getting punched at from both sides – they had the tough lives, the corrupt government, and also the disrespect of the West. Beating the Soviets or Poles or Czechs always felt so good for the Americans –in a way that beating the Americans or other Western teams never did for Eastern bloc players, for whom it was always just a game, not a political statement (maybe “beat those damn imperialists!” just isn’t as catchy as “beat those damn commies!”).

Thus, predictably, in the States, the game became over time more than just a game: it became a STATEMENT about how these young, enthusiastic American players could undo the iron fist and the grim strength of the Soviets. That’s how winners from the Eastern bloc were always portrayed here: they were all robotic machines, cheerless, determined, without souls.

In the New Yorker, the author talks to Igor Larionov – now an NFL player, once a Soviet hockey star. Larionov was too young to make the Soviet team in 1980, but he watched back home in disbelief as the game progressed and it became clear that the Soviets would lose.

The irony is that the Russian players were anything but passionless machines. Larionov, for example, has the reputation of loving his Pushkin and his chess as much as the hockey that he plays so well. In the article, he describes how it felt to see the recently released “Miracle” – the movie about the historic hockey match:

At the multiplex, Larionov said, he had sat quietly, admiring the approach, as it was depicted in “Miracle,” of the American coach, Herb Brooks. He heard Brooks use the old Russian expression “The legs feed the wolf” and saw his compatriots depicted, as usual, as talented but humorless automatons. He was caught up in the movie, riding the emotion. He liked the story.
“At the end of the movie, there was a standing ovation in the theatre,” Larionov said. “I just left. To be honest, I felt like I’d lost. My friends played there—Krutov, Makarov, Fetisov, Kasatonov. I wish the guys in Hollywood had spent more time, maybe even just five minutes, to show the Russian side of the story. They should have showed a little bit of what happened inside the Soviet camp. But I know American movies are always like that.”

It’s sad that even in our victory, we can not appear gracious to the other side.

It ain’t over…

What Julia Child did to French food in America, Luciano Pavarotti did to Italian Opera worldwide. I’m a sucker for Italian music of any sort – especially the kind that climbs along full blown crescendos and explodes into an orchestral climax. And so it was with shock and sadness that I read the NYT headline today stating “Pavarotti Dies.”

It took only a minute to realize that his death was a stage death. I do remember vaguely his desire to retire from opera and concentrate on his new wife and family. And I’d picked up his lovely CD of Italian pop last year so I know the man’s branching out in other directions. But for a minute I thought we’d lost a great.

Hang your shingle

My sister is a freelance translator. I know a large number of freelance writers and cooks (aka caterers). Add to it the freelance teachers, tutors, even lawyers. People striking out on their own, fighting the institutional/bureaucratic model of service, opting for the personal touch. And don’t forget the freelance embalmer. NPR reports on one of the last in his trade (here).

Hurry up if you want to take advantage of his experience and expertise. He still makes housecalls. But he’s been at it for 41 years (that’s 40,000 bodies), and may retire soon so speed up the carbs and enlist his services now, while he’s still taking new clients.

Too many words, too few ideas

A writers group that I am loosely affiliated with posted this week a list of the most overused expressions in writing. Most of these words could be eliminated from any text without great detriment; the cuts would add crispness to a story or paragraph.

I can’t reprint them all without the writer’s permission, but I’ll post a few – just so you can laugh out loud at how often you’ve found them liberally sprinkled throughout the posts below. I read through posts with my finger poised on the backspace key, but I am not careful. After I’m done, oftentimes, here’s what remains:

actually
all of (replace with "all")
apparently
as it were
as you know
at an early date (replace with "soon")
at the present time or this time or this point in time (replace with "now")
at the same time as (replace with "while")
basically
be in a position to (replace with "can")
completely
despite the fact that (replace with "despite")
due to the fact that (replace with "because")
during the time that (replace with "while")
essentially
extremely
first of all (replace with "first")
for the purpose of (replace with "for")
generally
etc.

I make closet editors happy by feeding their ingrained sense of superiority.