ON REFLECTION

“Va-yivra Elohim et ha-adam b’tzalmo; b’tzelem Elohim bara oto...” (And God created man in His image; in the image of God [He] created him...) - Genesis 1:27

“For a human being stamps many coins with one stamp, and all of them are alike; but the King of the kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He, has stamped every man with the stamp of Adam the First, and nevertheless not one of them is like the other. Therefore every man may say: The world was created for my sake, hence I must be upright, just, etc....” - Babylonian Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin, Chapter IV, Mishna III)

* * *
During our morning services today, the topic of discussion was how we humans were created b’tzelem Elohim - in the image of God, as it is phrased so eloquently in the Scriptures.  But what can this mean? Our Deity is eternal and invisible, without form or body, unlike we mortal humans. How can we claim to be made in the image of God?

It occurred to me that God, though He cannot be seen directly, can nevertheless be seen by reflection. [In this manner we see that God is the exact opposite of the Transylvanian vampire.] And we - we mortal humans - are the reflected images of God.

The quality of that reflection, of course, is highly variable... because every individual is reflected in a different, unique mirror. Some of those mirrors are nearly flawless, but that is the exception. Most of us are reflected through mirrors that are cracked or distorted... in some cases, veritable funhouse mirrors, the shiny surfaces of which may be obscured by grime, bespattered (so to speak) with an encrustation of sins and misdeeds.

There’s good news: We all have the capability of doing good, of helping to repair the world in a myriad of small ways, of being better people... and when our actions take us in those directions, we scrape away some of the crud that diminishes our reflected images. Spiritual Windex, you could say. And if our personal mirrors are warped or cracked, what of it? We can still try to keep them as clean as possible, for even a distorted reflection carries the image of God within it. Humans don’t need to be perfect, after all - what is required of us is that we do the best we can.

WOBBLE

I sing you these words of great renown:
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

Whether nude or wearing a dressing gown,
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

Furrow your brow with a thoughtful frown:
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

In an ocean of wisdom your soul will drown:
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

As sure as Bozo’s a red-haired clown,
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

Shout it from the tallest tower in town:
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

Wear this knowledge like a golden crown:
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.
Weebles wobble but they don’t fall down.

[Image credit: The Life of JWo]

TAKING THE CURE

When people used to speak of “taking the cure,” they’d be talking about visiting the spa in order to enjoy the hot mineral waters. But not me.

I take the cure and rub it all over my meat.

No, I’m not trying to go all Nasty Grandpa on you, dear Esteemed Reader. I’m talking about charcuterie: the fine art of curing meat.

Yesterday I finished making a nice batch of pastrami. You take whatever meat product you’re using - usually a beef brisket - and apply a rub composed of curing salt (salt and sodium nitrite), black pepper, ground coriander, brown sugar, and garlic. After the meat has cured for a week, you rinse it off, soak it in water to remove excess salt, and then cover it in a mixture of black pepper, ground coriander, garlic, and powdered smoke. Bake it at 250°F over a pan of hot water until cooked through, then steam. Presto: hot pastrami!

The amazing peppery, garlicky fragrance that wafts through the house? That’s just a bonus. (The Glade and Air Wick folks can eat their hearts out.)


Pastrami... fresh out of the oven.

You wanna kick it up a notch? Simple: make it out of duck breast instead of beef brisket.

Ohhhh, yeah.

Update: Duck pastrami and scrambled eggs. Need I say more?

IN WHICH I DESPOIL A SCIENCE FICTION CLASSIC

Science fiction fans will remember Frank Herbert’s 1965 novel Dune, a landmark work that eventually gave rise to a whole series of books. Herbert ended up writing six Dune novels in total, ranging in quality from “meh” to “excellent,” with none of the sequels quite measuring up to the original. (After his death, his son Brian, along with collaborator Kevin J. Anderson, would milk the property relentlessly with additional sequels and prequels.)

Dune was a rarity: a science fiction novel set in a fully realized imaginary universe, one that had a complex society, technology that was simultaneously highly advanced and yet limited in comparison with our own, and memorable characters. It cried out to be filmed, yet was so intricate as to be practically unfilmable. That did not stop people like Arthur P. Jacobs and Alejandro Jodorowsky from trying, although they never succeeded in getting a project off the ground... too damn bad, because that film would have been amazing. (Imagine Dune as envisioned by H. R. Giger. Yeah, that H. R. Giger.)

Instead, after a decade or so of Development Hell, executive producer Dino De Laurentiis hired David Lynch to write and direct his own version of Dune. At first blush, one would think that the creative mind behind films such as Eraserhead and The Elephant Man - not to mention the enigmatic television series Twin Peaks - would be just the person to bring Dune to the big screen with the appropriate creative vision. One would, alas, be wrong.

The 1984 De Laurentiis production of Dune was, to put it mildly, disappointing. The art and set design were the sole bright spots in a movie that featured weird voiceovers, huge narrative and motivational gaps, and plenty of scenery chewing. That’s too bad: the property deserved so much better.

It had its moments. Kyle MacLachlan and Sting in a knife fight! Sting wearing a glorified diaper! Mentat Piter de Vries (played by Brad Dourif with majorly bushy eyebrows, a complete 180° turn from his later, eyebrowless portrayal of Grima Wormtongue in the LOTR films) mumbling the Mentat Mantra, a glorious piece of nonsense Lynch created for the film:

“It is by will alone I set my mind in motion. It is by the juice of sapho that thoughts acquire speed, the lips acquire stains, the stains become a warning. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion.”

Baron Harkonnen in his antigravity belt, soaring around the room and laughing like a maniac! And, of course, the bizarre Guild steersmen, so mutated by constant exposure to the melange spice that they resemble giant versions of Donovan’s Brain.

Nevertheless, some people see something salvageable in this glorious mess of a film. At least, film editor Michael Warren did. He decided to patch together the original theatrical film along with numerous deleted scenes, storyboards, and extended television footage to create what he thinks is a New and Improved Dune, which he was kind enough to upload to Vimeo.

Is it any good? Well, I just started watching it, so it’s too early to say. But one thing caught my eye, and that was some of the early footage that featured illustrations of José Ferrer in his role as the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. Why, that face and uniform looked sorta... familiar!


General Elisson and the Padishah Emperor. Separated at birth?

Update: It appears that the video has been taken down, no doubt because of the spike in attention it received as a result of the Digg link. Perhaps the nice folks at Universal had some intellectual property concerns.

Oh, well. That’ll save me the three hours I would have pissed away watching the thing.

NIHON-NO KAKUTERU

Japanese Cocktail.

This semi-opaque little gem is the Japanese Cocktail (Nihon-no Kakuteru, 日本のカクテル), which is a peculiar name for a drink that complements a French base liquor with tiki ingredients. But I didn’t make the name up.

From what I can glean from my various sources, the cocktail was created by “Professor” Jerry Thomas back in the early 1860’s, the formula having been published in his landmark 1862 anthology How to Mix Drinks, or The Bon-Vivant’s Companion. The name came not from the ingredients - there’s absolutely nothing Japanese about ’em - but (probably) from the fact that the first Japanese mission to the United States was staying in New York at that time.

In its simplest and most original form, a cocktail is simply a base liquor, a sweetener, and bitters. The Old Fashioned, for example uses rye whiskey or bourbon as a base, with sugar or simple syrup as a sweetener and, most commonly, Angostura bitters. Substitute Cognac for the whiskey and orgeat for the sugar, and you have a Japanese Cocktail. Think of it as a tikified Old Fashioned, or perhaps the bastard child resulting from a hookup between Cognac and marzipan. Mmmmm, marzipan.

Japanese Cocktail

2 ounces Cognac
½ ounce orgeat*
3 dashes Angostura bitters

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice. Stir well and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lemon twist.

*You can use ready-made orgeat, which is expensive and often made with crappy ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup. Or you can make your own.

If you like tiki-style drinks - Mai-Tais and the like - give this fellow a try. It’s a delightful little nip.

STEAMPUNK COUNTY, TENNESSEE

There’s a little bitty county in northeast Tennessee
And if you should go there, some strange sights you’ll see
The trailer parks and yards are filled with junk
But the whole dang county has gone steampunk

They wear them dark steampunky goggles
When they fly in their steam-powered dirigibobbles
They don’t care ’bout the TVA and electricity
’Cause they sit on a coal seam and the fire is free

You see steam-powered cars on the Interstate
Don’t need no Exxon - oh, boy, it’s great
Even their computers run on steam
They’ve got the water vapor-motivated calculatin’ machine

The girls wear leather helmets and Victorian skirts
And the men got dusters over their puffy shirts
Not a wrinkle to be found - creases sharp and clean
It ain’t no surprise - their irons have steam

So come on up and visit us in Steampunk County
We don’t care if you’re a Yankee or Canadian Mountie
Just don’t bring no batteries – ’lectricity’s unseemly
Here in the county where the punks are steamly

[Inspired by Alex Bledsoe’s novels of the Tufa... which, incidentally, have nothing whatsoever to do with steampunk.]

EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED

“If you expect the unexpected, it is not unexpected: it is expected, I expect.” - The Bard of Affliction

Sometimes I think the Big Guy Upstairs is trying to tell me something, and I’m not sure it is something I want to hear. At least, that’s the feeling I had when I prepared to sit down at my office desk and work on the Torah reading I’m doing tomorrow morning.

Reading Torah takes some preparation. You’re essentially looking at a large parchment scroll filled with carefully handwritten text... but said text consists only of Hebrew consonants. The vowels that enable you to pronounce the words correctly and the cantillation (trope) notes that provide the melody are not there. Even more fun - there’s no punctuation. You have to know the material well enough to fill in the missing data - on the fly.

What’s it like? Here’s an example:

Y HV FTN WLKD DWN THS STRT BFR BT TH PVMNT LWYS STYD BNTH MY FT BFR LL T NC M Y SVRL STRS HGH KNWNG YM N TH STRT WHR Y LV R THR LLC TRS N TH HRT F TWN CN Y HR LRK N NY THR PRT F TWN DS NCHNTMNT PR T F VRY DR N TS JST N TH STRT WHR Y LV ND H TH TWRNG FLNG JST T KNW SMHW Y R NR TH VRPWRNG FLNG THT NY SCND Y MY SDDNLY PPR PPL STP ND STR THY DNT BTHR M FR THRS NWHR LS N RTH THT WLD RTHR B LT TH TM G BY WNT CR F CN B HR N TH STRT WHR Y LV

If you can look at this (apparent) gibberish and belt out a flawless rendition of Lerner and Loewe’s “On The Street Where You Live,” you have some idea of what I’m talking about. Now, pretend your native language uses a different alphabet - to you, Roman letters are just a bit mysterious - and you have an even better idea.

So: preparation. Especially since I’ll be reading the Ten Commandments (the version from Deuteronomy, which differs slightly from the one in Exodus), a reading so central to our religious identity that the congregation stands during its recitation.

What I did not expect was that, as I sat down, I heard a sharp CRACK! and my office chair deposited me on the floor in a heap. Part of the metal frame had given way due to a hitherto invisible stress fracture.

That chair was guaranteed for ten years. It was ten years and six months old. Damn.

The bad news is, I need a new chair. The good news? There’s a tax holiday this weekend, so I can maybe save a few bucks on said new chair. But that’s kinda not good news, because it means the office supply emporium will be packed with eager bargain hunters. Gaaaah.

Well, the chair is broken. At least I’m not. Things could be worse.

MICHELANGELONIMBUS

Today I saw a cloud that looked like the Pietà.
A testament to Heaven’s glory, thought I. What could be greater?
But as I watched, the cloud dissolved and slouched,
Becoming, so it seemed, a chubby woman on a couch.

With yet more time the lofty breezes did their work,
Turning God’s art to just so much chaotic murk.
O, Entropy, thou changest beauty into dross:
Perhaps that was the testament that was meant for us.

BRUSSELS BILLIARDS

The Fart Ball Rack.

Are you sick and tired of your fart balls Brussels sprouts rolling all over the fucking place? Have you ever wondered how professional chefs keep those little green gas-bombs evenly distributed on their roasting pans?

Well, wonder no more. We have the solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had: the official Fart Ball Rack™! Simply place your Brussels sprouts in the triangle, move it around until they form a nice, tight pattern, and then apply your seasonings.

The photo above shows a wooden prototype, but the final product will be made of heat-resistant silicone and will include several sizes in order to accommodate any size of choux de Bruxelles, from those tender little quail egg-sized beauties all the way up to humongo-sprouts with Rocky Mountain Oyster dimensions. Its just the thing for every anal-retentive chef!

If you feel especially playful, you can get a chopstick and practice your three-cushion billiards shots. A standard half-sheet pan has about the right aspect ratio. Sharpen your game while you keep your kitchen orderly and those pesky Fart Balls in their place!

Dee came up with this concept as I was preparing some roasted Brussels sprouts with balsamic vinegar. I think it’s Kickstarter-worthy. What say ye, Esteemed readers?

YET ANOTHER HOLIDAY YOU DIDN’T KNOW ABOUT

A rare treat: a distiller’s reproduction of the Scotch whisky that was abandoned in Antarctica by Ernest Shackleton in 1909 and found over a century later... in perfect condition.

I have been informed that today is National Scotch Day.

I really have no idea who makes these faux holidays up. Sometimes it’s the obvious work of the greeting card industry: Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and all of the other Trivial Celebrations of Close Kindred all started as individual attempts to honor a beloved family member but eventually mutated beyond all recognition thanks to the likes of Hallmark, et al. This one would seem to be the doing of the Scotch Whisky Distillers’ Collective, who probably got the naming rights via the time-honored method of applying palm-greasage in the right locations. (Apparently they did not secure an exclusive, for it is also National Crème Brûlée Day. And, perhaps more complementary in theme, it’s Bagpipe Appreciation Day. )

Of course, the appropriate thing to do would be to have a wee dram... or perhaps a cocktail based on Scotch whisky. Single malts generally don’t play well with others - prima donnas! - but blended Scotch is the base of several nice tipples, including the Rusty Nail (Scotch and the Scotch-based liqueur Drambuie), the Mamie Taylor (a Scotch whisky version of the Moscow Mule), and the Rob Roy (a Martini using Scotch in lieu of gin) - the latter having been a favorite of my late mother.

Naah. Screw the cocktails. It’s single malt for me... and to put us in the proper frame of mind, here are a few Scotch whisky-inspired limericks:

It’s National Scotch Day - rejoice!
The Balvenie’s often my choice.
Sometimes I’ll be havin’
A wee dram of Bunnahabhain,
Though those Scottish names just sound like noise.

Laphroiag tastes like coal tar or pitch,
And for many, that flavor’s too rich.
If you drink Lagavulin,
You’re really not foolin’ -
That’s one smoky son-of-a-bitch.

The warm malty drams of the Highland
Are tasty, no matter their stylin’.
When the glass hits my lips
And I take a few sips,
It’s not long before Elisson’s smilin’.

FAREWELL, WHEEZY JOE

Actor Irwin Keyes, 1952-2015. Barukh Dayan Emet.
[Photo from www.lukeford.net. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons.]

I was saddened to hear of the recent passing of Irwin Keyes, a gentleman of unusual countenance who made his living as a Hollywood actor.

You may or may not know Irwin unless you are a horror film aficionado: most of his work was in that genre, including a star turn in House of 1000 Corpses. But you may have seen him on The Jeffersons, where he appeared several times, or even on Police Squad!, where he was cast in one episode. The mainstream movie audience was also likely to see him in the two Flintstones films (The Flintstones (1994) and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas (2000)), in which he played Joe Rockhead. And then there was my personal favorite, Intolerable Cruelty, in which he played Wheezy Joe, a hapless hitman whose asthma proves fatal in an unexpected way.

Irwin’s death - from complications of acromegaly, the glandular condition that gave him his somewhat scary appearance - hit me a bit harder than most Hollywood fatalities. That’s mainly on account of Irwin being my age - just a few months older, to be exact... which makes perfect sense, because he was also my high school classmate.

Irwin’s photo from my
high school yearbook, 1970.

I’ll confess to not spending a whole lot of time with Irwin in high school. By that time he had become a brawny young man, someone who spent a lot of time involved in athletics. Football, which made perfect sense. But he and I spent a lot of time together back in our middle school days, mainly because we attended the same synagogue and were in the same Hebrew school class.

Alas, I never reconnected with Irwin on Facebook the way I did with so many of my old friends from as far back as elementary school. I would have liked to measure his recollections of our congregation’s clergy against mine.

Requiescat in pace, Irwin. May you be bound up in the bonds of life amidst the holy and the pure under the sheltering wings of the Eternal’s presence. Godspeed, buddy.

I SHOULD HAVE WAR-SEEN THIS COMING...

This morning, Houston Steve proudly displayed his latest acquisition.

“I finally got them! Polish laces!”


Polish laces... the genuine article.

And indeed, they were laces. Black dress shoelaces, to be precise. They were authentically Polish, too, having been brought back from Warsaw by our rabbi, who had just completed a two-week congregational trip to Eastern Europe.

Of course there’s a story.

It seems that when Houston Steve was a young midshipman at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, there was a cobbler shop just outside the gate with a sign in the window that looked something like this:

(Artists’s rendition.)

For years, that sign was a source of bewilderment to Steve, who wondered just exactly what these “Polish Laces” were. He could not figure out why anyone would want shoelaces from Poland, and why would they be a big enough deal that a shoe shop in Annapolis, Maryland should feature them so prominently in their window. Now let’s let Houston Steve tell the story in his own words, shall we?

“In 1976, as a somewhat freshly minted officer in the Navy’s JAG Corps, I was back in Washington, DC for the annual JAG Conference, and I took a side trip to the alma mater. I went by the old cobbler shop, and there was the sign. Yup: still there. And then it dawned on me. Polish... Laces... what a dumbass!! It’s the stuff you shine the shoes with and the stuff you keep them on with. Two nouns, not an adjective and a noun.

“But, then, last month my synagogue was sending a group to Eastern Europe, led by my friend Rabbi Shalom Lewis. I stopped by his office before he left, and I asked him to have a look around while he was in Warsaw and Krakow to see if he could find any. And he did! And he brought some back for me.”

Polish laces, Esteemed Readers. Now: What does this one rate on the Dolt-O-Meter?

A THREE ON THE DOLT-O-METER

I am an idiot.

Let me rephrase that: Sometimes I do amazingly idiotic things. The specific degree of idiocy may vary; past results are not a guarantee of future performance.

Yesterday I did something that, on the Dolt-O-Meter, probably registers about a three. It wasn’t something that endangered any lives or jeopardized any property, nor was it anything that would have resulted in my arrest. It was just something silly. Something that would cause, in a normal human being, a brief sensation of Fu-Na, our special made-up word for extreme embarrassment.

While getting dressed yesterday morning, my shirt buttons felt strange, somehow. I should explain that I was wearing what Dee refers to as my Traveling Shirt, a dark green shirt made of some bizarre high-tech fiber that stays cool in the hottest weather and which can be washed in a jungle river, hung up to dry in a 98.9% humidity environment, and be perfectly dry and ready to wear the following morning. It has snaps in lieu of normal buttons, presumably so one can dress oneself after one has gnawed off one arm after a bizarre hiking accident.

As I was snapping those buttons, they just didn’t feel quite right... but I ignored that subtle feeling. In retrospect, that subtle feeling was something I should have paid more attention to... a bit like the feeling I had when I had committed a similar Act of Idiocy almost eleven years ago.

Cut to a few hours later, when I was at the eye doctor to pick up an order of contact lenses for Dee. As I stood there waiting for the receptionist to return with the package of lenses, I caught a glimpse of myself in a reflective surface. Hmmm, thought I. What’s that tag doing hanging off the side of my shirt? My shirt doesn’t have tags hanging off of it... on the outside.

Bing!

Glancing over at my shoulder, I could see that there was a pronounced seam where my shirt’s sleeve was attached. Oops. I had somehow managed to put my shirt on inside out... and proceed to wear it for hours without noticing anything amiss.

Of course, I had to take the shirt off and put it on properly, just in case a random stranger might notice my sartorial faux pas and think less of me before wandering off and disappearing from my life forever. But where? Not in the eye doctor’s waiting room. That would be nekulturny.

The restroom was the obvious place. As soon as I had Dee’s Box o’ Lenses in my hot little hand, I made my way to the men’s room, which was (thankfully) unoccupied. I went into an empty stall and proceeded to remove my shirt and then don it properly. Ahh, that’s the way those snaps should feel!

By this time someone else had entered the men’s room. I flushed the toilet to provide a cover story - what was that dude doing in the stall if not to drop a deuce, after all? - and of course washed my hands afterwards. Because ewww. (Ya gotta wash up, even if you’ve only dropped an imaginary deuce.)

When I related this story to Dee later that evening, she laughed almost unto the point of involuntary micturition.

Yes, I’ve done plenty of waaaaaay stupider stuff... but it’s nice when my antics are just dopey enough to be entertaining without being dangerous.

THE MAN WITH THE GOLDEN HAIR: A PAEAN

Donald Trump
Is in a funk -
His campaign may have hit a bump.
There’s many think he is a chump
With all his brains wedged in his rump
For squeezing when he takes a dump.

Donald Trump,
You smarmy lump -
You live your life with the assump-
Tion that you are the Camel’s Hump,
The Cat’s Meow, and all that junk.
But you’re not. Just one rich cunt.

SCOOBY BLU

[Duetto per tenore italiano e parlando cane Great Dane]

Penso che un sogno così non ritorni mai più
Mi dipingevo le mani e la faccia di blu
Poi d’improvviso venivo dal vento rapito
E incominciavo a volare nel cielo infinito

Volare, ruh roh...
Cantare, oho ruh roh...
Nel blu dipinto di blu
Felice di stare lassù

E volavo, volavo felice
Più in alto del sole ed ancora più su
Mentre il mondo pian piano spariva, lontano laggiù
Una musica dolce suonava soltanto per me

Volare, ruh roh...
Cantare, oho ruh roh...
Nel blu dipinto di blu
Felice di stare lassù

Ma tutti i sogni nell’alba svaniscono perché
Quando tramonta, la luna li porta con sé
Ma io continuo a sognare negli occhi tuoi belli
Che sono blu come un cielo trapunto di stelle

Volare, ruh roh...
Cantare, oho ruh roh...
Nel blu degli occhi tuoi blu
Felice di stare quaggiù

E continuo a volare felice
Più in alto del sole ed ancora più su
Mentre il mondo pian piano scompare negli occhi tuoi blu
La tua voce è una musica dolce che suona per me

Volare, ruh roh...
Cantare, oho ruh roh...
Nel blu degli occhi tuoi blu
Felice di stare quaggiù

Nel blu degli occhi tuoi blu
Felice di stare quaggiù con te

[Apologies to Domenico Modugno]

THE DEAUVILLE, YOU SAY

The Deauville Beach Resort... a slice of the 1950’s.

After eleven sweaty hours of driving spread over two days, I have finally returned home from an epic week-long trip to Florida.

Marge + Pisco sour = trouble.

I had decided to drive because I wanted to stop enroute and visit with my Aunt Marge, who now resides in Tampa at an independent living facility. Marge is always a pleasure - she always has a few stories about my mother that I haven’t heard before, the kind of stories only a BFF from high school days would know. And she introduced me to a new tipple, the Pisco Sour, with which we both got pisco’ed.

The visit with Marge was a bonus, though. The main reason for my journey was to attend the biennial International FJMC Convention, a gathering of members of the Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs. I’ve been going to these little affairs since 2007, and they’re always a pleasure - a chance to catch up with old friends and make new friends, to refresh and learn leadership skills, to exchange knowledge, and to enjoy a unique blend of spirits and spirituality. This one was no different... except for the venue, which was (to put it mildly) several notches below previous ones.

Now, the decision to have a convention in Miami Beach in July is not as insane as it may appear at first blush. Yes, it’s ridiculously hot. Blast furnace hot... almost (but not quite) as hot as Houston. But most activities are indoors, and you have a pool - not to mention the whole honkin’ Atlantic Ocean - where you can cool off and even catch some rays.

The choice of the Deauville Beach Resort... ahh, that’s where things went a bit pear-shaped.

When a hotel is described as “historic,” it generally means “in serious need of renovation.” And the Deauville is, indeed, historic. Its main claim to fame is that it was the venue for the Beatles’ second appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show, which was taped on February 16, 1964 in the Deauville’s Napoleon Ballroom. The hotel - fictionalized as the Miramar Hotel - also was used in location shots for the Starz television series “Magic City,” which ran for two seasons in 2012-13.

The Deauville pool, AKA “Beatle-Juice.”

As glitzy as the place may have been a half-century ago, though, it has not aged well: It has gotten a bit crumbly around the edges. Adjectives such as “well-worn,”  “shabby,” and “rumpled” come to mind. The pool looked nice enough from a distance, but a thin film of human grease and detritus floated on its surface. The Beatles swam in that pool fifty-one years ago, and it is entirely possible that some of their skin cells are still floating around in it.

To call it a “dump” would be praising it with faint damn... and yet it was not truly abysmal, not quite sinking to the levels of “toilet” or “shithouse.” Just worn out. 

It’s a little like a superannuated call girl. You look at the lobby and you think, “not bad.” but when you get under the covers, so to speak, you realize that your double sawbuck would have been better spent elsewhere.

The carpeting on the mezzanine level looked tired and sad, desperately in need of replacement... and the place had the aroma of your grandma’s house. Not your grandma that bakes chocolate-chip cookies, but the one that went to live in a nursing home and pees into a bag.

The staff was friendly and courteous - when you could find any of ’em - and a few even spoke passable English. Valet parking was nonexistent, bell staff vanishingly scarce. Thank Gawd I am capable of schlepping my own bags.

Extra entertainment was provided by the army of fifteen-year-old girls from Argentina, who were in Miami Beach enjoying their quinceñera vacation and helping to ensure that the one regularly functioning elevator (out of four) was constantly packed to Tokyo subway car capacity.

Genuine Art Drekko lobby furnishings.

If you wanted coffee, you could choose between the vile brew offered at mealtimes in the Richelieu dining room, AKA the Ricky Ricardo... or you could go to the little coffee shop adjacent to the hotel and get a café Cubano - a tooth-shatteringly sweet Cuban-style espresso that could wake you out of a coma. I had a couple of those and I’m still wired, five days later.

My room was nothing to write home about, but it really wasn't all that bad. The hot and cold water taps worked, the shower functioned properly, and the balcony faced eastward, providing me with spectacular sunrise views across the murmuring surf of the Atlantic. And yet, as I surveyed my little kingdom, I could not help but remember another trip a decade ago, one where my choice of lodging was, errr, ahhh... a bit disappointing. At least this time, I was not the one who selected the venue, and Dee was not present to give me The Look.

Ah, the Deauville, AKA the Deau-Vile, the D’oh! ville, the Doo-Dooville. Our Convention was a blast despite you, and you gave us so many stories to tell - not like one of those boring high-rent cribs. Seriously - how often do you get to live in an honest-to-goodness Time Crapsule?

Hey, the place wasn’t all that bad.

TAP, TAP

Hail to thee, blithe spirit -
Boid thou never woit.

- Poicy Shelley, from “To a Skylark”

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door...

- Edgar Allen Poe, from “The Raven”



As I pounded away at my keyboard, I heard a bizarre tapping sound, a sort of clickety-click coming from the nearby foyer.

What was Stella up to? I thought. But then I realized that she was stretched out on the floor next to me... and Dee wasn’t due home for another hour. Hmmm.

A quick look upward and I saw the source of the sound: a yellow bird that had perched on the palladium window above our entry door, pecking intermittently at the window as if to entreat entry.

This little guy had visited us before. Several weeks ago, Dee had caught him doing the same thing... but he flew away before I could photograph him. Now he was back, and he was bolder. The camera’s flash didn’t faze him in the slightest.

I’m guessing he is a canary, or possibly some other kind of finch. It looks like he is missing his long tailfeathers. An encounter with a cat? Bratty kids? Who knows? His flying abilities appear to be unimpaired.

No, I’m not looking for a pet bird. Nothing good comes from adopting the random exotic critter that flies into your window - at least, so I’ve heard.

Update:
The little bastard’s back... again. And again.

FIREFLY AT NOON

as i was getting into the car the other day
i noticed a bug that had adhered himself
to the drivers side window
it was a firefly i observed
his abdomen having the familiar neon signage

as i drove away he tried with all his might to hang on
but eventually the mighty slipstream carried him away

so many lessons in so short a time thought i
the one that first occurred to me was that
you cannot stay still when the winds blow
you must bend or break if you wish to not be carried away
two other thoughts also occurred to me boss

one is that there are few things sadder or more useless
than a firefly at noon
another is how the fuck is a cockroach driving a car

i leave you to ponder these mysteries boss
while i search for my daily sustenance

 - archy

[apologies to don marquis]

HANK HILL MEETS ERIC CLAPTON

If you want to cook out, you’ve gotta take it out - propane
Take that tank on down, set it down on the ground - propane
It’s a fine fossil fuel, that’s no lie -
Propane

If you want to smoke a brisket and you don’t want to risk it - propane
Let me tell you, Son, it makes your grillin’ fun - propane
It’s a fine fossil fuel, that’s no lie -
Propane

When the cookin’s done, and you want to ride on - propane
Don’t forget this fact, bring your empty tanks back - propane
It’s a fine fossil fuel, that’s no lie -
Propane

It’s a fine fossil fuel, that’s no lie -
Propane

HILLEL, BUDDHA, AND ME

If you ever want to luxuriate in the shower for a looooong time, get yourself a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Castile Soap - I prefer the peppermint version - and relax.

It’s not that the soap itself is so wonderful. It is a fine liquid soap, and the peppermint does provide an invigorating tingle, but that is not what will keep you in the shower. It’s trying to read all of the tiny print on the bottle.

Dr. Emanuel Bronner, you see, was no mere soapmaker. He was a religious philosopher who firmly believed in the Unity of Mankind, taking his key philosophical points from a mishmash of Jewish and early Christian sources. For instance, he parsed the first line of the Sh’ma (Deuteronomy 6:4, the text that serves as the Jewish declaration of faith and which is commonly rendered in English as “Hear, O Israel: the LORD our God, the LORD is one”) as “LISTEN CHILDREN ETERNAL FATHER ETERNALLY ONE!” And Bronner would always append his own comment: “Exceptions eternally? Absolute none!!!”

There’s oh, so much more. Reading a Dr. Bronner’s soap label in the shower is a little like reading War and Peace with a magnifying glass... while you’re covered in soap and trying to keep from (a) getting that soap in your eyes, and (b) slipping and falling on your ass. It’s a novel-length screed printed mostly in a teeny-tiny typeface that would scare a boilerplate-writing attorney, and in an idiosyncratic style - lots of caps, hyphens, and exclamation marks - that puts me in mind of a manifesto written in microscopic handwriting by a mental patient. (Which, by the bye, Dr. Bronner was, for a while.)

But one thing struck me as I was washing up the other day, and it had to do with one of my favorite topics: connections.

Buried in amongst all that tiny print on the Bronner bottle, there are mentioned the names of all manner of philosophers, scientists, and influential people. Abraham. Israel. Moses. Hillel. Jesus. Buddha. Mohammed. Einstein. Cleopatra. Buddha. Confucius. Lao Tse. Zoroaster. Socrates. Hippocrates. Cicero. Chaucer. Spinoza. Sagan.

Yes, Sagan. Carl Sagan.

Of the people on that list, only two of them had lifetimes that intersected with mine: Einstein and Sagan. Einstein died when I was a toddler, but Sagan walked the planet until 1996... and I actually met him once as we were both checking in for our flights at Washington National Airport.

Thus, at least owing to the mystical thought processes of the now-defunct Dr. Emanuel Bronner, I can claim a vague six-degrees-of-separation connection to all of those luminaries.

And if you really believe in such connections, I have some soap I can sell you.

THE NUOC MAM BOMB, or ADVENTURES IN STINKINESS

If I am not for myself, who is for me?
And if I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
- Hillel the Elder

If I cannot laugh at myself, everyone will laugh at me anyway.
- the Bard of Affliction

Every once in a while, Yours Truly will do something so boneheaded that I have to tell people about it... even if I am, so to speak, the butt of the joke.

So this morning I’m in the garage, screwing the refrigerator’s light bulbs back in. (Yes, we have an extra refrigerator in the garage. We also have one in the basement. Weird, but useful for storing all the crap that won’t fit in the main fridge.)

“Why are you monkeying with refrigerator light bulbs, Elisson?” Inquiring minds want to know, I am sure. Simple: I had unscrewed the bulbs so that Dee’s brother Aaron, who had been visiting us, would not violate the Sabbath.

Turning lights on and off is considered by observant Jews to be an unacceptable form of work on the Sabbath... and Aaron is observant. So unscrewing the bulbs would allow Aaron to raid the fridge between sundown Friday and sundown Saturday without causing the refrigerator lights to come on. (While not particularly observant myself, I nevertheless try to be knowledgeable about the Law so that I am at least aware of all the rules I may be breaking at any given time.)

But now it was time to put the bulbs back in operating mode, and there were a couple of bulbs that were located such that I had to back the car out of the garage to get to them. (They were tucked behind a drawer that cannot be removed unless the fridge door can be opened all the way, and when the car is parked in the garage it obstructs the door.)

So, with car backed out, I crouched down and removed the drawer. But as I reached for the bulbs, I was startled by the sound of the car horn in full alarm mode.

BLAAAAART!
BLAAAAART!
BLAAAAART!
BLAAAAART!
BLAAAAART!

Startled is perhaps an understatement. I jumped three feet in the air, and in doing so dislodged one of the shelves from the refrigerator door. BANG. SMASH.

It was immediately obvious what had happened. No, nobody was trying to break into the car. When I had crouched down, I had somehow managed to activate the key fob’s panic button. A real Feckin’ Eejit move.

Alas, the shelf I had knocked down was loaded with various bottles of This ’n’ That. There were mason jars of moonshine and of various pickles - pickled garlic cloves, pickled Fresno peppers, et al.
There were various syrups and preserves. And they all survived... except for one bottle of Vietnamese fish sauce.

If you are not familiar with nước mắm, you should be. It’s a staple ingredient of Southeast Asian cuisine, similar to its Thai cousin nam pla, and is made by fermenting anchovies in brine in the fierce Southeast Asian sun. To call it fragrant is an understatement.

Dee and I spent a goodly amount of time sweeping up the broken glass, mopping the garage floor, and anointing it with bleach in an effort to eradicate the vile fishy stench. We have not, as of this writing, succeeded.

Our garage now smells - as Dee put it - like an Asian grocery store. I’m sure any number of other analogies will occur to my Esteemed Readers and Commenters. Have at it.

JUNE GUILD EVENT

It’s once again time for the Sommelier Guild’s annual banquet, and once again we will be celebrating the event at the Chops Lobster Bar.

Guild events, like pretty much everything else in life, vary in quality. Some are uniformly excellent; others are marred by substandard wines or food. The annual banquet tends to have a higher batting average, perhaps because the Guild administration likes to be sure everyone enjoys the event that immediately precedes Board elections. I’ve never been disappointed by the June dinner, and the Lobster Bar has proven itself to be a fine venue in the past. Call me an optimist if you will, despite the fact that my glass is usually less than half full in accordance with standard tasting practice.

Here’s the menu. Feast your eyes:

Reception
Charles de Casanove Brut Tradition Tête de Cuvée Avize – Champagne, France***

First Flight
2004 Kistler Chardonnay, Kistler Vineyard - Sonoma North Coast, California***
2010 Mount Eden Chardonnay Estate - Santa Cruz Mountains Central Coast, California**
Signature flash-fried lobster tail, honey mustard aioli, drawn butter

Second Flight
2008 Tenuta Monteti Monteti -Tuscany, Italy**
2007 Tenuta Monteti Monteti - Tuscany, Italy*
1999 Château Monbousquet Saint-Émilion – Bordeaux, France*
Lamb rib chop, Brussels sprout leaves with wild mushrooms

Third Flight
2011 Anderson’s Conn Valley Eloge Cabernet Sauvignon - Napa North Coast, California***
2010 Liparita Yountville V Block Cabernet Sauvignon - Napa North Coast, California****
2010 Anakota Cabernet Sauvignon Helena Dakota Vineyard - Sonoma North Coast, California***
Filet mignon, sauce Béarnaise, Parmesan crusted jumbo asparagus

Dessert
2003 Château La Gravière Tirecul Monbazillac – Bergerac, France***
Roquefort and figs

Lagniappe
1990 Anderson’s Conn Valley Eloge Cabernet Sauvignon - Napa North Coast, California*
2012 Arkenstone Estate Syrah - Howell Mountain, Napa Valley, California***
2008 Rivers-Marie Cabernet Sauvignon - Napa Valley, California****
2012 Myriad Cabernet Sauvignon Spring Mountain Vineyard - St. Helena, California***
1999 Château d’Yquem****

[Editor’s Note: Tirecul is French for “pulls asshole,” which makes me wonder what effects this sweet Sauternes-like wine may have on the digestive system.]  

Per my usual practice, I will post a post-event update in order to share my worthless opinions on the potations and provender.

Update:
Not much winely excitement in the first two flights, but things started to get interesting in the third round. And the extra bottles people brought to pass around (see “Lagniappe” above) were mostly very nice, including a real Sweet Sixteen: a 16-year-old Château d’Yquem. Hoo-HAH.

DOODLE

A mother-daughter conversation, here reproduced verbatim. (Mother is 87 years old and has just moved to an independent living facility, where she has been told “guys will hit on you.”)

Mother: I’m all dried up down there. I think I need to get myself a doodle.

Daughter: You mean a dildo, Mom... and you don’t need one.

GRIMMER LICK (NOT QUITE A LIMERICK)

I whistled past the graveyard
Whilst coming home from school
The zombies came
And ate my brain
Now I’m a whistlin’ fool

ON THE PERILS OF BETANIN, or WHEW

Of all the foods I sometimes eats,
The scariest, I think, is beets.
The Missus says, “They taste like dirt!”
But that’s not why this dish can hurt.

The problem comes but one day late,
When I’ve forgotten what I ate,
And drop a deuce that oozes red:
My first thought is, “I’ll soon be dead!

“My guts are full of little holes -
How else explain this crimson bowl?”
But recollection then kicks in;
Across my face there spreads a grin.

What’s that I dined upon last night?
If it was beets, I’ll be all right!

DUST

He has been dust for well over a century, but his image still shines in the ephemeral reflection from a silver-plated sheet of copper.

This is a daguerreotype, an image captured by the first commercially successful photographic process. The technical details were made public in 1839, and daguerreotypy became a craze. For the first time in history, average people could afford to have their portraits made.

But by the time of the American Civil War (AKA “The Late Unpleasantness”), the process had largely been displaced by newer, less costly technologies. We can be reasonably certain, therefore, that this photograph was made sometime in the span between 1840-1860.

The subject is unknown. Who was he? What was he like? We can only speculate. Yet there is, at least, more than a weathered, semi-illegible tombstone to mark his brief passage on Earth. There is a photograph.

GET A HORSE

A few days ago, as Dee, the Mistress of Sarcasm, and I were enjoying a spot of lunch in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, I could not but help noticing an elderly couple tootling away on their smartphones.

Except for the wrinkles, bent postures, and slow, shuffling gaits, one could have easily mistaken them for a couple of teenagers. I almost expected them to take a selfie, complete with semi-obligatory duckface.


“You want duckface? I gotcher duckface right here. Now fuck off.” [Photo: Buzzfeed]

There is no reason why technology should be something reserved solely for the young. I know a ninety-one year old gentleman who is a regular morning minyan attendee at our synagogue (he divides his time roughly evenly between our shul and the local Chabad), who still drives a car quite skillfully, and who has no problem navigating the ins and outs of the Internet and his various e-mail accounts on his smartphone.

And then I think of my late Daddy, the estimable Eli, hizzownself, who was old-school all the way... at least when it came to Ars Electronica.

He had no trouble adapting to digital technology when CD’s (remember those?) began, slowly and inexorably, to displace long-playing vinyl audio discs. But in the office, he still dictated letters to a secretary, and used a shoulder rest in order to allow him to perch a phone next to his head. I’m surprised he didn’t develop the habit of walking in circles. (I’m also surprised that he didn’t use Dixie cups and threads in lieu of telephones.)

It was difficult enough to convince him to get a cellphone for emergencies. He and his wife would make the round-trip drive to Florida every year, and eventually they allowed that yes, it would be prudent to be able to get in touch with someone just in case THEIR CAR, GAWD FORBID, WERE TO BREAK DOWN IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FUCKING OKEFENOKEE SWAMP. So there was that.

But a smartphone? You know, like all the Kool Kidz are carrying around these days?

No Frickin’ Way.

Strange, innit? I mean, my grandparents all were perfectly happy to use newfangled contraptions like telephones and television sets... and automobiles, for that matter. None of them would have said “Get a horse!” to the guy on the next street who just bought a beastless carriage. But Dad was different. What was it that made smartphones and computers such objects of Fear and Loathing?

I mean, aside from the fact that they suck all the data out of your house and bank account and feed it into giant enterprises run by the government, the Russian Mafia, and Amazon?

THE YELLOW-GOLD BAR

Some people like to carry a touch of home with them when they travel.

Stories abound of seasoned businesspeople who never pack a suitcase - whether for a quick one- or two-day jaunt or for an extended overseas trip - without taking along some family memento. It could be a framed portrait of the spouse and children, or even a favorite pillowcase. The specifics do not matter overmuch: It is just a way for the Road Warrior to be able to adjust strange surroundings, even if ever so slightly, to bring a touch of comfort.

During my years of toil for the Great Corporate Salt Mine, I logged my share of time away from home, but schlepalong touchstones never filled the little void in my life that came along with being away. Maybe I didn’t want to make myself too comfortable in my random hotel rooms. My discomfort - the lack of the familiar - made me eager to get home at the end of my trips all the more.

What made me think of this was glimpsing the assortment of shampoos and soaps on a shelf in our hotel room’s tub a few days ago. There was a good-sized bar of yellow-orange Dial soap. There was an array of bottles containing Neutrogena T-Gel shampoo (extra strength!), Rainbath shower gel, and a few others I recognized from our own bathroom at home.

It’s not that the hotel provided these things. Sure, a well-equipped hostelry will set out a bar or two of soap - facial! bath! - and a few thumb-size bottles of shampoo, conditioner, shower gel, and body lotion. And sometimes the stuff the hotel provides is of reasonably good quality. As a Traveling Man, I always looked forward to using the various hotel toiletries - it was a way of reminding myself that I was away from home in an exotic locale. Like Akron, Ohio. Or Tomah, Wisconsin.

Exotic. Right.

Hey, there were a few truly interesting locations I traveled to, back in the day. And I will even confess to amassing a collection of the sundry incidentals that decorated the bathroom counter. It’s a sickness, I know.

But when I saw that oh-so-recognizable chunk of Dial soap and its accompanying fluids and unguents, I immediately felt right at home. Here is was in a distant (albeit not too distant) part of the country, and yet I could luxuriate in the shower-bath as though I were in my very own Zone of Personal Comfort at Chez Elisson.

It is, of course, Dee who brings all of this crap along. It matters not whether we are a three-hour drive away or on the far side of the planet. There must be yellow-orange Dial soap and its various fellow-travelers. Not for her the game of Hotel Soap Russian Roulette. Oh, no.

Does she do it to create a familiar atmosphere in alien circumstances? Is it a reminder of home, much like a framed portrait of the family dog or a spouse’s T-shirt?

No, not at all. She brings this stuff because that’s what she likes to have in the shower... and it’s worth the minor inconvenience of  carrying around her favorite toiletries. It’s simply where the needle falls on her personal Comfort versus Convenience scale... and who would be foolish enough to argue with that?

HUSH or, THE UNMENTIONABLE PACHYDERM

Shhhhh... don’t say it. [Click to embiggenate.]

(Sung to the tune of “I Whistle a Happy Tune”)

The elephant in the room
We dare not speak his name
For fear that he’ll run amok
It’s such a happy game all the same

The elephant in the room
Pretend that he isn’t there
You don’t want him running wild
And sitting in your chair everywhere

The result of this deception
Is very plain to tell
You know that he’s there
Because of his hair
And his pachydermous smell

The elephant in the room
He just might crush us all
Because he is so damn big
And we are very small (we’re so small)

[Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein]

DOING IT BY THE NUMBERS

WTF is this? You may well ask. Keep reading...

My long-time bloggy friend Leslie - she who drives the Omnibus - posted a piece on Farcebook about coloring pages for adults, which (along with the comments appended thereto) reminded me of the ancient and estimable art of Coloring by Numbers.

Painting by Numbers, with its sibling Coloring by Numbers, were massively popular amusements a half-century ago. You had a piece of cheesy artwork - a jumping fish! a tribe of Native Americans! a sunset in the mountains! a horse race! - deconstructed into its component colors, the various segments and slivers delineated by light blue lines. Each segment would be marked with a number to indicate which little cup of paint or which pencil you would use to fill it in with the appropriate color. And when you were done, voilà! You had a piece of artwork on heavy paper or - in the case of the paint-by-numbers sets, a thin canvas-covered board - suitable for framing.


A typical Venus Paradise color-by-numbers set. [Photo credit: The Fancy Tail.]

I loved those damned things. I cared not whether they involved paint or colored pencils (although I strongly suspect my parents had a strong preference for the far less messy pencils). All I knew is, coloring by numbers provided hours of semi-idle amusement, a fine way to pass the time during warm afternoons in Florida while visiting the grandfolks. You couldn’t stay at the beach 24/7, after all.

There was another way to waste pass the time, and that was with a kit that bore the delightfully spelled moniker “Kopeefun.” The principle behind Kopeefun - a product that dates back to the mid-1930’s - was simple: You took a page of newspaper comics (or the specially provided cartoons that came with the Kopeefun kit - see above), laid a sheet of specially treated Kopeefun paper on top of it, and rubbed the paper with a popsicle stick, thus transferring the images to it. You then would use the same method to transfer your images from the Kopeefun paper to a blank sheet. Those with a perverse turn of mind could put Dick Tracy’s head on Nancy’s body, or have Charlie Brown duking it out with Snuffy Smith. Hours of hilarity, I tells ya.


Kopeefun. This package design (circa 1952) mashes up the crappy typography of the early 1950’s with charming artwork from the late 1930’s.

For all of the wonderful electronic amusements today’s kids have at their disposal, I wonder whether they’re really any better off. Nowadays you could get the same results using Photoshop, but you’d be missing out on the tactile pleasure of holding a pencil in your hands or scraping a damned popsicle stick over that glorified piece of wax paper.

Ahhh, those were the days.

NON MOLESTARE I CANGURI

Do not provoke the kangaroos
And do not try to give them booze
Do not invite one on a cruise
For if you do, you lose. You lose!

[Poem inspired by a news story concerning the above-pictured giant specimen recently seen wandering the streets of Brisbane, Australia. At over six feet in height and massing close to 210 pounds, “Dave” is not the sort of beast one wants to encounter whilst taking a neighborhood stroll.]

FIREFLIES

There are sights, sounds, and smells that instantaneously transport me back in time some fifty-odd years, back to my childhood. And for some reason, so many of these mental touchstones are associated with spring or early summer, the days when Nature has completed its awakening.

Some days ago - it was a warm, pleasant Sunday morning - Dee and I had taken a walk to the Local Bagel and Smoked Fish Emporium and back, a round trip of some two and a half miles. On the way we passed a few patches of fragrant honeysuckle, the combined sight and smell of which brought me back to the days when, as free-range kids, we would walk past hedges festooned with honeysuckle blossoms. We would pluck the flowers and, gently tugging at their bases, would extract their pistils, a drop or two of sweet, delicately perfumed nectar clinging to their tips.

Yesterday evening, after supper, we took a stroll around the neighborhood. (When I was growing up, our neighborhood’s streets all ran at right angles, so one could walk “around the block.” In our Atlanta suburb, however, there are no orderly, rectangular blocks. The streets go every which way, with loops and culs de sac. So I suppose we took a walk around the loop.)

As the sun began to dip below the horizon, we began seeing the intermittent flashes of fireflies. First one... then another, then another, until the Morse code of yellow glows became almost continuous static. And suddenly I was a ten-year-old again, seeing the world through curious, wondering eyes.

* * *
This year, Memorial Day coincided with the second day of Shavuot, the Jewish Festival of Weeks, AKA the Festival of First Fruits, AKA the Season of the Giving of the Law. It’s not entirely commonplace, this particular superposition of holidays. The last time it took place was a mere three years ago, on a day that also happened to be my father’s eighty-seventh birthday. But the time before that was back in 1985, and before that, 1971.

Nevertheless, it is a felicitous combination. In the United States, as elsewhere in the Diaspora, the second day of Shavuot is one of the four days during the year that the Yizkor service is held, a service of remembrance for departed loved ones. It is a service that fits hand-in-glove with the overarching theme of Memorial Day, the day on which Americans remember those who died while serving their country in the military.

Although several of our relatives served in the United States armed forces - my father, my uncle Phil, Dee’s father Bill and stepfather Dave - none of them died while active members of the military. That painful honor fell to Dee’s cousin Donnie, after whom she was named - the first resident of Tarrant County, Texas to be killed in the Korean conflict. Neither Dee nor I ever had an opportunity to meet Donnie, but we honored his memory twicefold this day.

And I thought of those fireflies.

I thought of those flashing, glowing lights, small and evanescent, fluttering over a lawn on a warm spring evening. In my mind’s eye, I could see that each one was the soul of a loved one - a mother, a father, a relative, a friend - or perhaps someone unknown to us, someone who had died while defending our country. Like fireflies, those souls surround us always, whether or not we know they are there... and sometimes, as the dusk comes on and the shadows deepen, they send us a little flash, a little glow, to remind us that they are forever with us.

DESIGN FLAW

Houston Steve demonstrates the head-cracking technology employed at a local business center. I smell lawsuit!

There’s a retail center/office complex a few of us have been frequenting these last several weeks, one which boasts a minor architectural design error. You can spot it in the photograph above if you have a sharp eye... or even if you do not.

A decorative concrete cornice runs along the outside of the building between the ground-level floor and what we here in the States would call the second story. Normally, that would not be a problem... except that there is a business on that second story, the access to which is through a door that is reached by way of an outside staircase.

That staircase - a rattletrap construction of metal risers and concrete treads that had no doubt been added as an afterthought - had been deteriorating for some time. Rust had begun eating holes in the risers; it was only a matter of time before the entire thing collapsed. So the management acted preemptively and brought in a squad of construction jocks to rebuild the stairs.

They approached the task in stages, working on the rightmost sections of the stairway while leaving the left side open to those who wished to brave the ascent. (For those too fearful or lazy to do so, an elevator was conveniently accessible.) Finally, after several weeks of seemingly slow progress, the right side was reopened for business while the left side was sealed off to be rebuilt.

Alas, there was a flaw... probably one that had been there but that we had not previously noticed. An architectural boo-boo of the sort that sometimes happens when you add a feature - an exterior staircase, say - that was not envisioned in the building’s original design. The cornice, you see, overhangs roughly a quarter of the right side of the staircase... a rude surprise to anyone who keeps to the right as they walk upstairs. I suspect that whoever designed that decorative cornice never thought that it could be decorated with splatters of blood and bits of cracked skull.

Not to worry, though. There’s a nice flat area along the outside of the cornice where the local Ambulance Chasers can affix their business cards.

A MANLY, MEATY MEAL

Hanger steak with green peppercorn sauce. [Click to embiggen.]

Earlier this week, I had an evening to myself as Dee ran some errands across town.

More often than not, I won’t pay much attention to what I eat when I’m on my own for the night, but Alone Time does allow me to monkey around in the kitchen to my heart’s content.

You’d think I would use the time to prepare the kinds of foods that Dee prefers not to eat. Things like duck, venison, lamb, liver and onions, that sort of stuff. And, yes, on occasion, that is exactly what I will do. But not this time.

Hanger steak - a cut the French call l’onglet, whatever the hell that means - is one of my favorite kinds of beefsteak. It’s not widely available here, but the local Whole Paycheck Foods generally has a few sitting in the meat case on any given day. When I saw them there last Sunday, they had to compete for my attention with a huge beef shank - the kind that looks like it could serve as a Neanderthal’s club, complete with six inches of bare protruding bone. But the shank, glorious as it was, would have to wait, I decided. Hanger steak... that’d be Just The Thing.

You don’t really have to do much to these babies. Salt and pepper ’em, give ’em a light dusting with ground thyme, and then sear ’em in a hot skillet until medium-rare. Then slice ’em up. A twelve-inch slicing knife is my preference, but a straight razor or a Gerber mini-magnum would work just fine.

For extra decoration, I just defrosted some leftover green peppercorn sauce... homemade veal demi-glace, green peppercorns, shallots, red wine reduction... and supplemented it with the wine I used to deglaze the pan. And for the vegetabobble, I roasted some sliced Brussels sprouts along with capers, dried barberries, and diced-up preserved lemon. As Shockheaded Guy might say, those sprouts were taking a ride to Flavortown.

I suppose that to make this a completely Manly Meal, I should have preceded it with a Martini... or at least polished off a bottle of wine with it. But I did not. Instead, I had some soda water, which permitted me the luxury of a manly, yet discreet, postprandial belch.

PALINDROME WEEK

Madam, I’m Adam.

And let me introduce you to a few more of my Palindromic Buddies... namely, this entire week.

Beginning this Sunday immediately past, and continuing for the next nine days, every date is a palindrome - at least, when rendered in American style. Viz:

5-10-15
5-11-15
5-12-15
5-13-15
5-14-15
5-15-15
5-16-15
5-17-15
5-18-15
5-19-15

Now, aren’t you glad you know about this?


“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a shit.”

TWO LIVES

Elder Daughter and her proud Daddy.

Everyone’s life is marked by milestones, the signposts along the Road of Earthly Existence that we use to mark significant events as we travel from the initial on-ramp to the Final Exit. Lifecycle events, some call them. Baptism or B’rit Milah. The first day of school. Bar or Bat Mitzvah. Confirmation. Quinceañero. The first date. Being graduated from high school and college. Getting married. Buying a car or a house for the first time. Getting a job.

When I look at the big milestones in my life, perhaps the one that stands out the most is Becoming a Father. When Elder (then Only) Daughter was born - an event that I both eagerly anticipated and dreaded at the same time - it marked a dramatic change in my circumstances. I was now responsible for another human being, a baby girl who stole my heart with her very first breath.

I can divide my life into two parts: Part I - Before Fatherhood and Part II - Fatherhood. Nine years ago, the two parts were of similar dimensions, but Part II has been gaining ground ever since. And, truly, it is almost as though they are two different lives.

Being a dad means having your emotions amplified. You feel love and joy more than ever before, and with that comes the fear of loss, a dread the starkness of which is unimaginable during Part I. The world is simultaneously more pleasurable and more fraught. In 1997, when Dee and I dropped Elder Daughter off in Boston to begin her university career, we watched our no-longer-quite-a-baby disappear into the maw of Boston’s T. It’s hard to describe the bittersweet import of that moment, the combination of elation and terror that we felt as our taxicab pulled away to take us to the airport.

Nevertheless, I’ll take Part II any old time.

The “two lives” analogy is especially apropos today, as it is Elder Daughter’s thirty-sixth birthday.

Because letters serve both as consonants and as numbers in the Hebrew alephbet (well, where did you think the word alphabet came from, anyway?) we Red Sea Pedestrians often assign numeric values to words, and vice-versa. The word חי (chai = life) is written with the letters chet and yad, corresponding to eight and ten, respectively: thus life = eighteen. Thirty-six, then, means two lives.

Elder Daughter can appreciate this analogy as well, for she has spent eighteen years as a dependent and eighteen years on her own. Call them First Life and Second Life, if you will.

She is quite a young woman, this Elder Daughter of ours, filled almost to overflowing with vitality, creativity, and intelligence. As Dee so beautifully puts it, she lights up a room with her smile and personality.

Happy birthday, Elder Daughter! Enjoy every moment. We love you!

THREE MOMS, TWO KIDS

My mom Bernice, of blessèd memory.


Dee and her mom.


Dee, flanked by the Mistress of Sarcasm and Elder Daughter.

The three moms are my mom, Dee’s mom, and Dee herself. The two kids - children without whom Momlihood is impossible - are, of course, our own two daughters.

Today is Mothers Day, and despite the fact that it was originally created to be a Greeting Card Occasion, this second Sunday in May really is a perfectly appropriate time to remember the mothers in our lives, the people who - probably more than anyone else - have shaped our lives and personalities and made us what we are.

My own mother has been gone from this Mortal Coil for twenty-seven years now. Perhaps my biggest regret is that she never got to see her granddaughters grow up, never got to know them as intelligent, creative, and thoughtful adults. And for my daughters, she is but a fading memory. Alas.

But we still have plenty of mothers to be thankful for. Have you hugged a mother today?

SMART CARTS FOR DARK ARTS

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry now offers courses in Driver Education.

Everyone is entitled to at least one Nerdly Sphere of Excessive Fascination, and for the person that owns the car above, that would be the fiction of J. K. Rowling.

Other folks have other obsessions: guns, toasters, vacuum cleaners, rare coins, comic books and the like. And you have to figure that a media empire worth billions of dollars is going to provide plenty of grist for the old Obsession Mill. I mean, you have actual Harry Potter theme parks, fer cryin’  out loud.

A couple of days ago, Houston Steve and I were cruising along one of the neighborhood streets when we noticed a green Honda Element sporting the above license plate.

I’ve been the proud owner of my own Honda Element - the one and only Elissonmobile - for ten years now. Honda no longer manufactures them, but I see them on the local roads every day. They’re just unusual enough to be noticeable.

That DARKART license tag, though... that really stands out in a crowd. I’ve seen it several times before, but this is the first time I was able to get a really clear picture of it. And it seems we have a real Potter fan on our hands here. If the tag itself isn’t enough to convince you, perhaps the “Hogwarts Alumni” license plate frame will. Or the “Republicans for Voldemort” bumper sticker on the lower left.

It might be a good idea to stay out of this guy’s way. The combination of road rage and wizardry is not something I ever care to see. Being the target of a Electrovoltaicus Defunctus spell just would not do...

THE DOCTOR IS IN

The Doctor Cocktail... it’ll cure what ails you.

Feeling under the weather? Try one of these.

Doctor Cocktail

2 oz Jamaican rum
1 oz Swedish Punsch
1 oz freshly squeezed lime juice

Combine ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice; shake vigorously and strain into a chilled cocktail glass. Garnish with a lime twist.

What the hell is Swedish Punsch? Glad you asked. It’s a spice-infused liqueur traditionally made with Batavia arrack, a sort of Indonesian rum, which makes it a fine complement to any rum-based concoction. Because it can be hard to find at your local Adult Beverage Emporium, I make it myself using a recipe I discovered at Serious Eats.

Although the traditional Doctor Cocktail formula calls for Jamaican rum (Myers’s dark rum is an excellent choice), I’ve made it with Haitian and Venezuelan rums with excellent results. The drink pictured above was made with Wray & Nephew White Overproof Rum, a highly potent Jamaican popskull. I ought to call it The Anesthesiologist.

TIME, GENTLEMEN

It’s Star Wars Day (May the Fourth be with you!), and so all kinds of science-fiction driven nerditry is being splattered all over the Internet in honor of the occasion.

The various Star Wars films are to have taken place in a fictional setting “a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.” The “long time ago” business was a nice twist on George Lucas’s part: We’re all accustomed to thinking of advanced technology as being something associated with the future rather than the past, and what’s more advanced than a civilization that can travel the stars? On the other hand, “a galaxy far, far away” is a bit redundant, since any galaxy other than our own Milky Way is, by definition, pretty Gawd-damned far away.

Thinking about things that may (or may not) have taken place a long time ago in galaxies far, far away got me to thinking about time travel, a staple imaginary technology of science fiction. The idea of being able to travel in time has long been a pet fascination of mine since seeing George Pal’s 1960 production of The Time Machine as a not-quite-eight-year-old kid. Even without obsessing over details like the Grandfather Paradox, there are plenty of other niggling technical details to worry about.

Immunity to the diseases of the past or future, for instance. How ironic would it be to travel hundreds of thousands of years into the future only to be felled, not by some dread Morlockish descendant, but by the billionth generation of today’s increasingly antibiotic-resistant bacteria? Blecch.

What about the electromagnetic radiation that surrounds you as you travel? As you move faster through Time, would sunlight become shifted toward unimaginably high frequencies, turning into a deadly hail of X-rays and gamma rays? Would the speed of your travel attenuate their effects?

Yes, sometimes I actually wonder about this kind of stuff.

Do you ever find yourself thinking about time travel (you nerd)? And if so, which Time Machine would you rather have?

This one?



This one?



Or this one?



Leave your answers in the comments - and the rationale behind your preference, if you feel like getting all ’splainey.

HAPPY STAR WARS DAY

Q: Who was Darth Vader’s big sister?
A: Darthy Vader.

“May the Fourth Be With You.” - the Lisping Jedi

THE CHEESE AISLE DICTIONARY, Vol. 22

More stuff that should be in the dictionary but isn’t.

Long-time readers of my previous site may recall the Blog d’Elisson Dictionary, installments of which may be found in that site’s Archives. For other entries in the Cheese Aisle Dictionary, simply click on the sidebar link for Cheese-Dic.

And now for today’s entry:

carnyvore [car-ni-vor] (n) - person who subsists on a diet consisting primarily of turkey legs, nachos, cotton candy, Dippin’ Dots, and funnel cakes.

“Last time we went to the State Fair, George nearly killed himself eating all that crap at the midway. He’s a real carnyvore, that one.”

BONUS QUESTION

Back in the days of stone knives and bearskins, I was the lone engineer amongst my friends in college, all of whom were studying things such as international politics, English, history, and the like. One of my roommates went so far as to write a 600+ page (!) thesis on the politics of the Commonwealth of Virginia. (Writing a thesis was a requirement for securing a bachelor’s degree; writing a thesis the size of a cinderblock was more an exercise in testing the patience of one’s faculty advisor.)

As an engineering student, my course load was heavily weighted towards the mathematical and the scientific - things like physical, organic, and inorganic chemistry; thermodynamics; fluid mechanics; separation processes; engineering statistics; multivariable calculus; differential equations; and biochemistry. I had my share of electives, which I used to pursue interests such as typography, photography, and Shakespeare. But nary a course in politics or history did I take, and there are times I regret not having done so.

Like now, f’rinstance.

That is mainly because my good friend Houston Steve has a son who, while completing his Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Georgia, has been an instructor for an Introduction to Comparative Politics course. And despite my general loathing for things political, taking Josh’s course would probably be entertaining as well as educational. Submitted as evidence is part of the final exam he has been administering to his students this week, some of whom had requested that he include a bonus question for extra credit. And Josh was only too happy to oblige:

Bonus Essay

Part I: Take one item from Column A and one item from Column B and do a comparative political analysis of the two, using an argument/theory/set of arguments that we have touched on this semester (midterm material is fair game here).

Part II: Choose one item from Column C and add it to your analysis from Part I. Would the argument change at all? How would item A and B deal with item C?

Be creative. If you can source from memory, do, but it will not hurt you not to source. Feel free to bring in culture, religion, economy, violence—anything; the world is your oyster on this one.

Column A
Volturi (Twilight)
Death Eaters (Harry Potter)
The Matrix (The Matrix)
Australia (Mad Max)
The UGA Football Team

Column B
United Federation of Planets (Star Trek)
The Wall (Game of Thrones)
Gotham (Batman)
Pandora (Avatar, or “Dances with Smurfs”)
The Jedi Council (Star Wars)

Column C
Zombies (Your pick of universe)
The Aliens (District 9)
Cthulhu (H. P. Lovecraft)
Cylons (Battlestar Galactica)
Dragons (Your pick of universe)

I suspect that there may be a few of my Esteemed Readers who might want to have some fun with this... specifically Eric and Kevin. So, what say ye? Anyone wanna try your hand at writing this Bonus Essay? I might even prevail upon Josh to grade it for you, now that he has successfully defended his dissertation and is now officially Piled High and Deep.