Unpleasant evening at the Kimmel Center

I had tickets for Tosca, supposedly the hottest ticket in Philadelphia, for me and my daughter. It was a special occasion, a birthday celebration for her.   As we approached the Kimmel Center, we saw a group of activists blocking Broad Street.  The police were monitoring the situation--I think.  Not very well, it turned out.  These activists were all over the place, like ants at a picnic.  At least two of them approached me and more would have. They were in the street, in the lobby, everywhere.

What was it all about?  These mostly middle aged white women were protesting the orchestra's plan to perform in Israel.

The Kimmel Center was showing signs of age, or perhaps of deferred maintenance.  There were buckets here and there set to catch leaks from the roof, fallen plaster was all over the place and one of the water fountains was out of order.

There was a full house. We took our seats, the concert master came out, then the conductor,   Yannick Nézet-Séguin, . He bowed and tapped his baton on the lectern, and...a female voice erupted over the speaker system, shouting about justice for Palestine.  The conductor left the stage, and some of  the musicians also started to leave.  The woman continued shouting.  We could not see what was going on, but the disturbance lasted maybe ten minutes. Ten minutes is a long time when you are waiting for a musical performance.  Then order was restored, Yannick and the musicians returned and the concert commenced.  It was handled clumsily.

It was a sort of semi-staged version of Tosca.  I did not enjoy myself very much.  Trying to follow the action of the opera distracted me from enjoying the music, and the music distracted me from following the plot. I blame the Palestinians. They and their supporters have a lot to answer for.

It was a very long opera, made longer by an interval toward  the end when the action was interrupted while a couple of stage hands moved some furniture, without musical accompaniment.  The audience stirred, ready to leave, but a supertitle warned us the opera was not over.  That was awkward, not to say weird.

All in all, not what I expected when I plunked down $158 for two seats in the third tier.

I am sorry to hear that Melania Trump now has a "cause."

I liked her just as she was, heart-stoppingly beautiful.  Silent was good too.  A nice change from the noisy, opinionated Michele, who I don't miss..

To my readers, and maybe to myself

I know very few people read this stuff, but that's okay.  I write these blog posts as a discipline, and to reveal my real feelings.  For all practical purposes it's almost anonymous, which means freedom for me.

  I have a Facebook page, but I use it to display my artwork and post photographs.  Sometimes I mention Memorial Day or something, or talk about my relatives.  The only reason I don't post cat pictures is that I don't have a cat.  Mention my political views?  Not on your life.

  Back in the day, my stepmother was notorious enough to be on a file of Communist sympathizers. And that was before the Internet.

 I am nostalgic for the old days when bloggers with interesting or amusing ideas used to post a lot.  those days are gone.  Now they post amusing things on Twitter, and I am not on Twitter.  That is intentional.

Is there anything so small and insignificant that environmentalists won't make a cause.of it?

First they came for the  showerheads; then they came for the light bulbs.  Plastic bags.  Nothing is so insignificant that they can't make a cudgel out of it,  controlling people's lives, but not enough to make anyone really mad. enough to do anything.   It's like a series of little tick bites; they don't kill you but they annoy you 24/7.

I could go on.  Did I mention top loading washing machines?  Detergents that don't deter anything? CAFE standards for cars to save fuel so that there is more for Al Gore and Leo diCaprio to circumnavigate the globe, hectoring everyone from the comfort of their air-conditioned palatial mansions? This is a partial list, I'm sure.  So what's next?

  The latest is straws.  Drinking straws. In London, they are making them illegal.  They are trying to do the same in California.  Never mind that the State has super-high taxes, unfunded pensions, and people living in the streets because they can't afford housing. Straws are destroying the
Environment--it's an emergency!

  What's next?  Toothpicks, which are destroying the redwood trees?  Never mind, I'm sure they can come up with more.  It's what they do.

Leaning on something

You all know I broke my foot.  This led the doctors to give me various assistive devices, including a cane and a walker--not simultaneously, the walker came first.

  I can now report that walking with a cane makes you look ten years older.  Instantly, even if you have just undergone a facelift.  A walker adds another  ten years, plus the suspicion that you are either deaf or senile.  So people enunciate carefully, making sure you are looking them straight in the face.  Ugh!

What makes activists tick

I can remember protests in the late sixties--we were protesting the Vietnam War then.  Lo and behold, the war ended, not necessarily because  of the protests.  But the protestors thought it was caused by them.  By God, it felt good.

  The cessation of the war made people hungry for more..  It was like a drug,  It gave them a sense of control.   People missed the excitement, the crowds, the festive air, the fresh air.  So everybody started protesting something, or everything, or nothing.

  The environment was the next Good Thing.  And, boy, did everybody crumble.  Nobody stood up for pollution.  It was a heady success.  We were reminded of that success every time we went to the store and nobody gave us a plastic bag.

  Lately, there has been some pushback, but the protesters chose their targets carefully.  If anyone protested the efforts for gun control, you could shut them up by telling them they had the blood of children on their hands.  It turned out, no-one wanted to kill a child.  Of course not!  But some people still wanted to keep their guns, the murderers!   Not that they had killed any children with them, or even any adults; they just refused to give up guns no matter how passionately the protesters argued. 

 

It's poetry month

I've always liked this one.  I like gloomy poems.

Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action; and till action, lust

Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,

Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight,

Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had

Past reason hated as a swallowed bait

On purpose laid to make the taker mad;

Mad in pursuit and in possession so,

Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme;

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

    All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

    To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

My gofundme project

The news of Andrew McCabe's Gofundme project upset me until I came to my senses.  The man is, like me, a retired civil servant who has only his pension to rely on.  How can he afford legal fees?  True, his wife has money, and they live in a multi-million dollar home, but the man says he needs money for legal fees and who am I, whose relative had to pay a lawyer $50,000 to get out of a contract, to doubt him.  Andy--if I may take the liberty of calling him that--is a good example of a retired civil servant making lemonade out of lemons.  He has inspired me to start my own gofundme scheme.

  Naturally, I want the money for a worthwhile cause.  I don't want diamonds or European travel or anything like that.  But, looking through the New York Times magazine, I came upon a project which would certainly improve my mental health--a luxury condo in Florida.  You see, it really snows very hard up here in Delaware, and my doctor has forbidden  me to shovel snow.  So far, my neighbors have helped me with this, but it is really not fair to them to have this extra burden.

  So it would improve the morale of the whole neighborhood if I were to spend the winter in Florida, leaving the snow to pile up in my driveway until the crocuses and daffodils come out.

  I know asking people for a luxury condo is a bit much.  The optics, you know.  So I wont ask for a luxury condo in Fort Lauderdale, which is what was advertised in the Times.  I'd be satisfied with a modest--but not too modest--little pied a terre on the West Coast, even as far north as the panhandle.  I think I will ask for $400,000 , $350,000 for the condo itself and $50,000 to furnish it. That seems eminently reasonable.  I will even pay the monthly fees and airfare to get from here to there.  I could raise a little money from airbnb to supplement my very modest  income.

You go, Pennsylvania!

A Pennsylvania law that gives tax breaks to farms--and also golf courses and lavish private homes--is being criticized by the people who actually pay taxes.

Supporters say Clean and Green has helped shield millions of acres of farms and other pristine lands from being turned into strip malls, warehouses and Levittowns. The lowered assessments, they say, are a bargain compared to the expense of development and the strains it places on schools, roads and public services. Backers also insist that any problematic properties represent a tiny portion of the lands enrolled.

{snip)

Under the program, qualifying properties — those with at least 10 contiguous acres or that generate $2,000 in farm sales annually — are assessed on what the land is worth as a working farm or woodlot, and not its value on the real estate market. State officials estimate that on average, that works out to a 50 percent reduction in assessment, though the numbers can be as dramatic as pennies on the dollar.

The hardest hit communities were in rural school districts such as Northwestern Lehigh and Bangor Area. Last week, the presidents of each school board said they support the tax breaks for farmers, but feel it is unfair to the average taxpayer to provide them to mansion owners with large estates.
“Somebody has found a loophole in my humble opinion,” said Bangor Area’s Michael Goffredo. “You just got a bargain somebody else isn’t getting.”
Like others, Northwestern Lehigh’s Willard Dellicker called Clean and Green a well-intentioned law producing unintended results.
“Some leniency is needed for farmers, but I don’t believe that we should be giving millionaires property tax reductions because they own 10 acres to get into Clean and Green,” Dellicker said.

Why do they want to prevent development of land that would lead to more young couples owning their own homes  and raising children who would attend local schools?  There's an erroneous belief in this country that the population is too large and that people should avoid having children.  In fact, the population is becoming grayer.  We need children and young people to support us old people who are on social security.  Also to power the factories, to invent and create and think new things.
  Look at Delaware--a potentially nice area of the country which is covered with hospitals, nursing homes, and senior living facilities.  Is that what we want?

  Nursing homes or schools, which do you prefer?  Because you can't have both.

•  

Summer soldiers and sunshine patriots

It was a fine day for a parade Saturday, and the summer soldiers and their buddies the sunshine patriots made a fine display all over the country.

  I wonder how big the turnout would have been if we had been experiencing some of the weather we have been getting lately: snow, high winds, hail, and power outages?  But none of these happened, and if they had, the turnout would have been close to zero.  There was no price to be paid for protesting in the fine weather, aided by some  corporations who, as Kruschev said, would sell us the rope to hang ourselves.  Evil, evil corporations!  Or maybe just stupid, or cowardly like the Broward Cowards who didn't want to enter the school while the shooting was going on--man, you could have got killed out there! Better to hang out behind your cars until the danger has passed.  First responders, indeed!

Advice you can use: How to get anemic

When I was a kid I always fantasized about being able to eat anything I wanted to, whenever I wanted to.  My fantasies in those days ran to Wonder Bread--which my family would never buy, preferring challah or rye--non-Kosher lunch meats, and Heath bars.  I offer these memories to those who think that kids would eat healthy if you just let them choose what they would like to eat.

  However, in the middle of my journey, I found myself alone.  No one to cook for.  No one to share meals with, unless I wanted to.  So I started eating anything.  Or everything.  If I had a pound of macaroni salad, I would eat as much of it as I chose, maybe the whole thing.  Or Brussels sprouts with chestnuts and lots of butter.  Hard boiled eggs.  A baked potato, or two.  Yogurt with fruit.  Fruit alone, some days, in the summer when fruit was bountiful and available.  Meat was a great nuisance to make, the stove got dirty, and I had to turn on the oven fan.

  I don't want to exaggerate, I sometimes but not too often, made myself a nourishing soup or stew, generally in the crockpot.  I figured it would even out, somehow. 

  Then I found out I was anemic.  Now I have to take iron pills, which you can't take with meals or with other medications.  This means I pop one in my mouth when I think of it.  Or whenever.  This averages out to three iron pills a week, because I am usually either eating or taking pills, instead of the two a day I am supposed to take.

  Instead, I make healthy meals and have to clean the stove frequently, like a normal person.

Short memory

The Florida school shooting has raised everyone's consciousness about gun control.  That's because school kids are appealing victims.  It's great theater when kids walk out of school for 17 (get the symbolism?) minutes all over the country.  These appealing youngsters are featured on television news, looking young, vulnerable, and as if they know what they are talking about.  Which they don't.

Much is made of the police officers' caution, or cowardice, in staying in the safe haven of the parking lot, hiding behind cars for good measure.  I, too deplore it.  I mean, what are we paying them for?  They are supposed to keep the children safe.

But did anyone notice that when a gunman shot up a gay nightclub, with the shooter actually on the phone to authorities, that it took them almost three hours to arrive? Perhaps  they thought that by then the gunman might be out of bullets?  I guess these gay men and their friends and families were not as cute as the Parkland high schoolers, although they were just as dead.

There was the usual formulaic handwringing, but nobody's heart was really in it, and it blew over quickly.

  I guess it's really about the children.

Eating for beginners

My mother liked to make an opera--soap or grand, as the occasion demanded--out of little things.  For instance, she thought my brother was in imminent danger of starving because he had skinny arms and legs.  So she fed him at every opportunity.  After he had eaten dinner, if he left so much as a pea on his plate, she would take him to the drive-in and stuff him with French fries like someone stuffing a Strasburg goose.  This continued until the kid weighed 200 pounds, at 5'7".  She then started harping at him for being too fat.

 I was a fussy eater.  I liked hot chocolate, but if there was a layer of skim on the top of the cup, I not only would not eat it, I  ran out of the room screaming.  I wouldn't eat anything made with mayonnaise, because I couldn't identify the ingredients.  My father believed in stern discipline on the food front.  He made me sit at the table until I had consumed enough to satisfy him, or until bedtime, whichever came first.  Long dreary hours (probably only minutes, but they seemed like hours) passed as I stared at the congealed fat on my now tepid plate, without eating it of course. Mercifully, bedtime freed me.

  Then there was the morning milk.  Dad believed that milk was good for children, particularly at breakfast.  I could not, or would not, drink cold milk in the morning.  If I was made to drink it, I usually threw up.  Mealtimes were full of drama at our house.

How the Anglo-Saxons saved my life, with the help of the Bexley, OH library

Of course I'm an Anglophile, and have been since the age of 13.  That was how old I was when I read my first book by P G Wodehouse and discovered the wonderful world of country estates, servants, and the Drones Club.  What a great place to live!  Even at that age, I knew it was too good to be true, but that in no way detracted from its charm.  Fortunately, that was in the old days, when the Bexley  Library had not discarded any books, so I was able to read a dozen volumes by the Master.

  And then I discovered Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice, to be exact.  I loved that book so much that when I first finished reading it I went back to the opening and read it again.  Country houses!  Balls!   Gossip!   But it wasn't just the setting, I loved Jane Austen's style.  These two authors taught me to write, taught me what a great writing style could bring to a book, and got me on the road to being a lifelong Anglophile and a prodigious reader.   

  I'm not kidding when I said they saved my life, either.  I was a miserable kid, attending a new school, and two years younger than my classmates.  My parents were getting divorced, not that either of them mentioned the topic, but my father's total absence from our new house was noticeable even to an unobservant child.  I also didn't have the clothes the popular girls wore.  Even my shoes were not quite right. 

  In addition to this, I was so shy that I dreaded anyone even looking at me.  Needless to say, I had no friends.  My classmates scared me.  I hated that school with an intensity that frightens me to this day.  Once I went away to college, I never walked down the street where the high school was located.  I never wanted to be in Central Ohio again, and mostly I haven't been.

  I buried my head in P G Wodehouse and Jane Austen.  When I was in their world I was released from the realities of my own.  I don't know how I would have gotten through high school without them.  But I am eternally grateful to the library for making my continued existence possible.

   

I knew the Jewish Conspiracy would come up...

and by god, it has.   The left, of course, has given Israel the back of its hand for years, yammering on about the poor Palestinians.  But now anti-semitism has cropped up on what can be described as the nutter right.  Apparently, my people are big-time plutocrats, controlling banks and newspapers and generally telling others what to think while themselves rolling in money.  A nice lifestyle, I think, particularly the financial part.  So where's my cut?

  I have been left out of this Vast Jewish Conspiracy and forced to work for local government.  and not even the political part, where I understand bribes are an honored tradition, but in the library.  It is well known that when politicians want to cut spending, they cut back on funding the library. Politicians don't read anyway, so no-one is harmed.

  

A fortuitous find

I am always one book short of clinical depression without a book to look forward to. Sometimes I feel that I have read everything worth reading by my crochety tastes, andf will be stuck re-reading "When Patty Went to College" for the rest of my life.

  Then I get lucky.  On a pile of discards at the Good Will, I discovered "All Our Worldly Goods" by Irene Nemirovsky.  I almost skipped it because I noted that the author had been killed in the Holocaust and I thought her work might be gloomy and depressing. Au contraire!


I find it difficult to express  anything positive or approving about a book or movie.  Dislike is so much easier to articulate.  Nemirov, though, delighted me.  I think you will like her work if you like Tolstoy, or maybe Balzac.   The milieu is bourgeous France between the wars, and she is a keen observer of manners and mores, with a dazzling lightness of touch. 

  I downloaded another of her books to my Kindle, "Suite Francaise," which is even better, also taking place just before the German defeat, a period of great despair, confusion, and hysteria in France.  The advancing German troops disrupt everyone's lives and turn everyone into a refugee.  The fabric of society is torn and can never be reclaimed.  Except it is, after a fashion.

  Read the damn book!

I gave up on trying to understand politics a long time ago

I can't understand the brouhaha about President Trump.  He's probablly not the most charming man in the world but.  what has he done that's so awful?  Has he sent the secret police to your house at 3 a m to drag you away to prison in chains?  Stolen your bank account?  Kidnapped your children?

  I would prefer Winston Churchill, but that's just me.  He was not on offer.  And Trump has done some stuff I really like, like beat ISIS.  Increased employment.  And my personal favorite, caused, or permitted, the stock market to rise spectacularly, making my small savings, which could be accurately described as the widow's mite, a bit more mighty.  So he has orange hair and tweets a lot.   Compared  to Caligula, he's not so bad.  And he will serve for a minimum of 4 years and a maximum of 8, and will be gone.

  I long ago gave up trying to understand politics. I remember the exact moment when this happened..  It was when the Watergate break-in occurred.  I read the newspapers, listened to the news, and read the books ghost-written by the participants, but was still baffled.  And I am still in that state, but I don't try to understand it any more.  I felt a flicker of interest when Scooter Libby was jailed for spitting on the sidewalk or something, but it soon subsided, and I resumed my customary calm, not to be confused with torpor.

  I've got my own troubles.

Allowing three people a day to be jerks

I used to get excited over every little thing, particularly when I was behind the wheel of a car, so I adopted a philosophy that stood me in good stead for years:  allow three people a day to be jerks before you take anything too seriously.

  I don't know if I can keep it up much longer, though.  A philosophical question:  do the three people have to include Chuck Shumer?  Or can I make an exception and get my blood pressure up every time I see him on television without abandoning my convictions?

  I'm not extra fussy.  I can take Maxine Walters in my stride any day of the week, as when she announces that 600 million people will lose their health insurance or something like that.  Nancy Pelosi doesn't bother me, I know she's a big liar; Al Franken doesn't get my goat, neither does that old blowhard, Joe Biden.  But Shumer gets to me every day that Congress is in session.

  Thank God Congress is taking a vacation soon, so I can take a vacation from them.  It does wonders for my blood pressure.

Denunciation as a form of punishment

My father, who was a lawyer, had a conversation with me when I was a teenager on the subject of rape.  I can't remember how it started, but ultimately he told me that allegations of rape were hard to defend against, and that angry women might seek revenge against an innocent person by alleging rape falsely.  Therefore the authorities were hesitant to prosecute such accusations because they could destroy reputations and even lives of innocent men.

  Of course, that was before rape kits and DNA and such.  But he had a point. 

  Now this Me too business has gone too far.  Mere assertions of rape or even loutish behavior are enough to destroy lives. No proof is necessary.  After the first accusation, more complaints pile up.  The accused grovel in public statements and lose their jobs immediately. Their wives leave them.  I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the family dog has bitten the offender. 

  Take Al Franken.  I never thought the day would come when I would defend Franken.  But mere accusations of boorish behavior--which is all that has been alleged--should not have destroyed his career and his livelihood.  And that photograph of him leering over that unconscious woman clearly is not harassment.  Rather, it is sophomoric showing off.  If every man who behaved clownishly were deprived of his job, there would be far less employment in this country.

  Being a nasty person is not a criminal offense.  If a man behaves boorishly, a woman should have enough self-respect to defend herself, not to accuse him of harassment years later, when nothing can be proved and all witnesses have forgotten the circumstances.

  There are other ways of being boorish.  Of being a lousy employer, of picking on subordinates.  If your boss behaves criminally, report him to the authorities.  If he's just a mean son-of-a-bitch, suck it up or look for another job.  Behave  like a grown-up. 

  My fear is that men will be reluctant to hire women.  Hiring a woman would be like giving someone a loaded gun.  It's likely to go off unexpectedly. 

  No one gets a chance to defend himself.  No one gets to confront his accusers. The press acts a judge and jury and the public buys it.  It's not a good way to run a country.

The Trump presidency--how can we stand it?

Sarcasm alert, of course.  Trump has been president for almost a year, and the secret police have not visited me even once  The stock market is up  I am still as free as I ever was.  So are my friends and relations.I can live with this distressing situation indefinitely., but apparently they can't.  They are more delicate, I guess.

  What has he done?  A lot of this and that, none of it affecting me.  He made anti-semitic remarks.  Except that he didn't.  He's racist, so they say.  Apparently they can sense this through the air, they know it in their bones.  Except their bones are wrong.

  The last I heard this kind of talk, it was about Reagan.  That damn fool made a speech asking Gorbachev to tear down the Berlin Wall.  .  It was awful. The man didn't have a lick of sense. All his advisors warned him not to do it.  But he did it, and shortly thereafter the Berlin Wall was torn down, by a coincidence, no doubt.

  Trump haters, get a grip.