The young man at Whole Foods who helped me put my groceries in my car was certainly happier than the occasion warranted. As he waved away the tip I was trying to give him, he said: "It was lovely to share this moment with you!" Do you think he meant it, or does he just come from California?
Police in Peoria, IL invaded a citizen's home and dragged said citizen off to jail for posting to a Twitter account parodying the Mayor of said town.
That's why the cops need those red light cameras and speed traps: ticketing people individually takes lots of time and personal effort. So does showing up at the scene of an auto accident, which they no longer do either.
I used to believe that the police used the time they saved to sleep in their patrol cars or play games on their computers. Now I know they were involved in worthwhile activities like harassing their employers, the citizens who pay them.
I was an early adopter of E-Z Pass. I must have been using it for twenty years. I was sold on this service with the promise that I would save both time and money. We were promised discounts of 10 percent or more. The promise of time saved has worked out. The money aspect, not so much.
The discount is long gone. Theoretically, time is the only thing saved. To be fair,it is.
E-Z Pass takes money from your credit card, in advance. The last amount they took was $135. But when my credit card was stolen, I had to get a new number, and E Z Pass had no way of knowing that, so they simply stopped accepting my transponder, without explanation.
So I racked up $36 in toll payments due and $98 in "administrative fees." Nice little profit point there.
Another government racket. like red light cameras and speed traps; Take money from the customer's credit card in advance, money which the customer could theoretically invest, then charge him punitive fines without notifying him in advance. Government is in the three card monte business.
It is Spring, and it's starting to show. The trees are different; they are not greening yet, but they are alive in a different way. Expectant! Flowers and shrubs that are yellow are showing their colors. And since this is poetry week, I thought this one was suitable:Daffodils
I wandered lonely as a cloudThat floats on high o'er vales and hills,When all at once I saw a crowd,A host, of golden daffodils;Beside the lake, beneath the trees,Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.
The waves beside them danced; but theyOut-did the sparkling waves in glee:A poet could not but be gay,In such a jocund company:I gazed--and gazed--but little thoughtWhat wealth the show to me had brought:
William WordsworthFor oft, when on my couch I lieIn vacant or in pensive mood,They flash upon that inward eyeWhich is the bliss of solitude;And then my heart with pleasure fills,And dances with the daffodils.
Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity [in a library], most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered, and owed the honours which they once obtained, not to judgment or to genius, to labour or to art, but to the prejudice of faction, the strategems of intrigue, or the servility of adulation. Nothing is more common than to find men, whose works are now totally neglected, mentioned with praises by their contemporaries as the oracles of their age, and the legislators of science." Johnson: Rambler #106 (March 23, 1751)
I not only can't upload pictures to blogger, now I can't upload links. The thing is becoming more dysfunctional by the day.
If I were able to post something, which I am not, I would comment on the attire of generals. It struck me, on observing the general who gave a press statement on the latest shooting at Fort Hood was wearing combat fatigues. Now I am pretty sure that the military has dress uniforms for military officers. Some of them even include swords! What is the use of military officers if they don't get dressed up? Check out the photos of General McArthur wading ashore at the Phillipines. Did he look special or what? And when he accepted the surrender of Japan on a naval vessel, with the emperor wearing top hat and tails, did McArthur let the side down by wearing something more suitable for cleaning out the garage?
Yes, even General Petraeus wore fatigues when testifying before Congress. If that is not an occasion demanding formal wear, what is? Yet the general looked like he was wearing his jammies, albeit with a chest full of medals.
If I ever testify before Congress, which is highly unlikely, I will dress up in a fetching business suit or becoming dress, not in my paint-stained blue jeans. But that's just me.
To all my readers, a group for whom I do not have to rent a large hall: I will send you a preview copy of my new Kindle book, tentativeely called "Nothing Much," All you have to do is turn in a favorable review to Amazon. No, forget it, just comments and suggestions would be enough.
I should stay away from libraries. They are all right when staffed by people who report to me, when I run up a total of 50 overdue books everyone takes it as a good joke. And the children's librarian has a longer list than me. But the local libraries insist I play by their rules.
About that latest library book I lost: Damn it, I didn't even finish reading it!I have looked everywhere at least twice, and am beginning to entertain the idea that I dug a hole in the garden and buried it, Except, wait!--the ground has been too hard to dig in as well as covered with snow.
I keep trying to reduce my inventory of books, which are not only filling shelves but exploding in piles in every room. No one can believe the number of books I donate to the AAUW, the Good Will, and other charities. But they keep multiplying.
The Democrats like to choose some meaningless phrase and run with it; right now it's racism of those who disapprove of Obama's actions. I remember when it was "No war for oil." Well, we had the war--where's the oil?
These mantras are meaningless; they are never expanded upon or explicated. This is what bubbe called "hocking a chinek," which I discovered after arduous research, means, beating on a teakettle--preferably an empty one, I suppose, or tea would get all over everything.
I just got to the part where he foresees the weakness and eventual disappearance of the federal government. We all know how that one came out. I think I can stop reading him now.
I left my coat in California. It's in its third season, so I looked for a new one. I thought they would be dirt cheap, since the Winter is almost over. I got the dirt part right.
Being someone who doesn't know enough to come in out of the rain, I ignored the fact that this coat did not come from Amazon itself--thereby not being shipped free-- but from one of its associates. So they charged me $15 for delivery of a fifteen dollar coat. It was awful and did not fit.
I e-mailed them for permission to return the wretched thing, and they sent me directions, which included me paying postage(!)
So I bundled it up and took it to the post office, where I paid $12.72 to ship if back. So I paid 27.72 for a coat I don't even own. It's worth it though, I didn't want to have the thing in my face all the time, demonstrating to me what a fool I had been.
While you are puzzling your head re a title for my book. how about coming up with a classy epigaph--preferably from The Wasteland? Or something in Latin, like Justicia fiat or Dolce et decorum pro patria mori. Neither of these works, somehow.
I am the only person I know who does not care for Downton Abbey. All my friends watch it faithfully. I liked the clothes in the early segments, but drifted away when World War one entered the picture. People fantasize about living in the early years of the twentieth century, thinking they would be members of the Upper Crust, bossing around a house full of servants and living a life of leisure and ease. Myself, I am pretty sure that if I had lived during those times I would have been below stairs, probably a tweeny who had to get up while it was still dark and light the fires and bring shaving water up six flights of stairs to the gentry. I do love the clothes, though. They look very elegant on the cast. The very few photographs I have of my ancestors in this garb are not flattering, though, possibly because you had to hold still for twenty minutes to have your picture taken. Oh yes, and they wore corsets.
It rankles me to see people, starting with Bill Clinton, quoting de Tocqueville, to wit: "America is great, because America is good." This saccharine statement would never come from a Frenchman, especially one as discerning and intelligent as Count Charles Alexis Henri Maurice Clerel de Tocqueville. It sounds more like something a pitchman selling a baldness cure would say on paid television programming.
So I have taken it upon myself to read his masterwork, "Democracy in America," in full. I have in my hand the Complete and Unabridged Volumes I and II. Unfortunately I neglected to read it in college, not even the Cliff Notes which were undoubtedly consulted by Bill Clinton, because I was so busy thinking about boys and fixing my hair in the latest styles. By the way, this work is far harder and less fun than "Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling." Just so you know.
I dug in to the first few chapters and found myself reviewing the material I learned in the compulsory civics class I took in eighth grade in Columbus, Ohio. Talk about deja vu! To be fair, French children don't have to take the course, so de Tocqueville clued them in. Now any French person interested in American municipal government can learn all about it in the original French.
I don't think Americans are any better than anyone else, or greater. We have a better system of government, and that is what deTocqueville is trying to explain, but it takes two volumes to do it.By the way, someone got snarky with me because I mis-spelled exhilerating. Or, er, ex--oh, the hell with it! It never looks right no matter how you spell it, so I am going to leave it alone in the future.
Julie Z asked me how Ross King knew that Michelangelo used a scaffold. I scoured the book and came up with an answer: M wrote a poem about it, illustrated with a sketch of him painting the ceiling, reaching his arms above his head and bending backwards like Ginger Rogers dancing with Fred Astaire--okay, not leaning that much, but definitely leaning, and complaining about it. As he seemed to complain about everything, especially his rotten family, a bunch of do-nothing brothers who just lounged around his father's house, enlarging their carbon footprints.
Now I am reading about Robert E Lee, a biography by Charles Bracelen Flood. It's almost a hagiography. Apparently Lee had some quality that led other men to like him, look up to him, and follow him, even unto death. He was offered the command of Union forces, but turned it down, unwilling to fight against his native state, Virginia.
Apparently he had something that did not outlast his life. Call it charisma. I remember how people worshipped Roosevelt when I was a tot. Nowadays he is receding into history, but Churchill said that meeting him was exhilarating, like your first taste of champagne.
Update: Apparently leaning back to paint had little or no ill effect on Michelangelo, who died at 89.
The brouhaha about theGeorge Washington Bridge scandal raises some questions about the intelligence and efficacy of the plotters. The lane closings were meant to wreak vengeance on the mayor and citizens of Fort Lee, but did that happen? Most of the frustrated drivers who were inconvenienced at the bridge were simply traveling through Fort Lee. Fort Lee was not their destination; they simply had to go through it to get from Point A to Point B.
Most people who use the GWB come from elsewhere, not necessarily even elsewhere in New Jersey. People commute from as far away as Upstate New York and Pennsylvania. They take the bridge (or one of the tunnels) because Manhattan is an island; they work on the island, but live elsewhere. So in what way did these lane closings single out the residents of Fort Lee? This was just a bunch of dumb politicians playing games with the public welfare because they could. I can't imagine Christie having anything to do with it. He seems to me an intelligent man and an effective politician.
It's terribly frustrating to commute via the bridge at all. I once lived in Westchester County but worked in New Jersey. It took me an hour and a half to get 20 miles to work. By the time I arrived at my destination I was a gibbering idiot. It took me an hour to calm down. On evenings when there was a baseball game at Yankee Stadium, it took two and a half hours. In fact, I sometimes headed up to the Tappan Zee Bridge just to avoid the inevitable traffic jams on the GWB.
My default position on occasions like this: Open a book; read the whole thing; put it down; open another. Rinse and repeat. If I followed my natural inclination I would sit and read all day. But that is a good way to get nuts. After a while I start to think I am a fictional character, and look behind me to see if I have cast a shadow.
So I exercise, take a walk, watch a movie, cook something, eat something, clean something, call someone, do laundry. Or blog, perhaps about something I am reading. I am now reading about Michelangelo and how he came to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. It is called "Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling," by Ross King. I bought the book at the Good Will store, a place where you never know what books you will find.
He was first hired to design a tomb for the Pope, Julius II. Julius was not one of those namby pamby popes such as we have today, always going on about charity, greed, yada, yada, and other things he knows little or nothing about. Julius was a patron of the arts with a bad temper. A really bad temper, so bad that he used to beat up the people around him, like a schoolboy. He beat up his servants when they displeased him, and sometimes beat up anyone he felt like beating up. He also hired soldiers to beat up other nations. The Venetian Ambassador to the Vatican, on his deathbed, said that one of the reasons he didn't mind dying was that when dead he would not have to cope with Julius, patron of the arts as he might be.
Anyway, I hate to disappoint anyone who has visions of Michelangelo lying on his back while painting the aforementioned ceiling. He had a scaffold built and he and his subordinates stood on a platform to paint. It was tough enough as it was. The ceiling had to be painted while it was wet.
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