File this under “Leave Well Enough Alone”
October 20, 2009
So there was a praying mantis on the screen outside our kitchen window this afternoon. When Pat first spotted it, the mantis appeared to be about to grab a lady bug, and we tapped on the window and expressed our disapproval. The mantis desisted and the lady bug went on its way.
I was glad, because I like both lady bugs and praying mantises. Well, I did anyway. Many people cringe at the site of a mantis, but I’ve always thought of the mantis as kind of regal, introspective — sort of a symbol of peace.
I got to wondering why it is that one sees only one praying mantis at a time. When was the last time you saw two of them together? I always tell my students that when a question like that arises in their minds, they shouldn’t let the moment pass without searching out the answer and adding to their store of knowledge.
I took my own advice and looked around the Web for the answer. I didn’t find an answer to my original question, but I learned a lot of other things, disgusting things, about these creatures. I guess I knew they were carnivores, because they get credit for keeping the insect population under control. I didn’t know that they can get as big as six inches long — not in the United States, fortunately, and that they will attack and eat almost anything. I found a video of a mantis devouring a mouse.
And then … then I came to the part about cannibalism — including sexual cannibalism. Trust me, you don’t want to know.
Before I had the wisdom to stop reading, I found out that the mantis is thought to have evolved from the roach family, which now strikes me as fitting.
For a couple of generations, kids have been told by presumably well-meaning adults that it is a crime to kill a praying mantis. I found several sites, including Snopes, that claimed that there is no such state or federal law. I also found sites that claimed that the mantis is protected in Connecticut, where it is the state insect, but the Praying Mantis Page on the state’s official Web site doesn’t mention that.
You can read Connecticut’s rationale at this link:
Netflix Update No. 21: “Millions”
October 19, 2009
ALEX ETEL
We watched “Millions,” a British fantasy from 2004 in which a seven-year-old boy finds a small fortune in English pounds and learns a few things about the good and bad potential in money.
Frank Cottrell Boyce adapted his novel for this screenplay and the film is directed, with a lot of whimsy, by Danny Boyle.
The story revolves around a fictional event, the deadline for Britons to either deposit their pounds in the bank or convert them into euros. A very large amount of the obsolete currency is being shipped by rail to a destination where it will be burned. A ring of thieves conspire to steal the money and toss it off the train bag by bag to be recovered by colleagues who are waiting trackside. One of the bags goes bounding into a cardboard “rocket ship” and brings it crashing down onto young Damian Cunningham (Alex Etel), who constructed it out of cartons and was playing inside.
LEWIS McGIBBON
Damian confides in his older brother Anthony (Lewis McGibbon), and the brothers immediately disagree on how to dispose of the cash before it becomes worthless. Damian, who is obsessed with saints to the point that he regularly meets and converses with them, wants to use the money to help the poor — though he isn’t quite sure what condition qualifies as “poor.” Anthony wants to spend some of the money on creature comforts and invest the rest — in real estate, for instance.
The windfall, and the manner in which the boys handle it, eventually brings their father, Ronnie (James Nesbitt), to grief — as though he didn’t have enough trouble, what with being recently widowed and trying to shepherd his sons on his own. The domestic and financial matters are further complicated when Ronnie meets and connects with, as it were, an attractive woman named Dorothy (Daisy Donovan), who met the boys — and inadvertently discovered their wealth — while conducting a charity drive at their school. In the end, thanks to filthy lucre, all the principals learn something about themselves and about each other.
KATHRYN POGSON
This is a difficult film to categorize, because it mixes some childhood hijinx with some serious themes. I have found some heated debate on movie web sites about whether it is even suitable for children, although the two boys dominate most of the scenes. Among the most ingenious and entertaining passages are Damian’s encounters with saints, including Joseph, Peter, Francis of Assisi, Nicholas, and Clare. These are not necessarily reverent portrayals, although the insight Damian gains from these conversations is usually therapeutic. And, after all, these are not presented as the actual saints but the saints as they exist in the imagination of a seven-year-old boy. Kathryn Pogson as St. Clare (“patron saint of television … it keeps me busy”) and Enzo Cilenti as St. Peter (“I’m on the door”) are especially hilarious.
Approach this with an open mind, and it’s a worthwhile experience.
LEWIS McGIBBON and ALEX ETEL
“The last Republican president who cared about the poor was Richard Nixon.” — Garrison Keillor
October 17, 2009
RICHARD NIXON
The AARP recently pointed out in its monthly bulletin that President Richard Nixon in 1972 proposed a health-care reform program that was shot out of the sky, with U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy wielding one of the guns.
“Nixon’s plan,” editor Jim Toedtman wrote, “required employers to provide health care insurance for their employees. It provided federal subsidies for the poor and created rural health clinics and a network of state committees to set industry standards, guarantee basic coverage and coordinate insurance for the self-employed. In the process, it would have extended health care coverage to almost all Americans.”
SEN. EDWARD M. KENNEDY
According to Toedtman’s commentary, Kennedy told the Boston Globe earlier this year that Nixon’s initiative was a “missed opportunity” and that, “We should have jumped on it.”
Should have. What were the chances that a Democrat, and a Kennedy at that, would support a sweeping program like that coming from Nixon? Ted Kennedy had his own ideas about health-care reform, and the twain never met. As a result, 37 years later, the problems perceived with health care then — cost and accessibility — are exponentially worse, partisanship still trumps the general welfare, and fundamental reform is no more likely, no matter what bill Congress may pass.
Nixon, meanwhile — if he can hear the debate from where he reposes — is probably as surprised as anyone to learn from his own party that he was a socialist.
"Barber Shop" by Robert Cottingham / http://www.seavestcollection.org
I conducted a wake service this week for a man who had operated a barber shop for more than 45 years less than a mile from here. His father operated the shop before that. I hadn’t known either of them, but I appreciated their story as soon as I heard it. Places like that barber shop have always interested me because of the role they play in a community that transcends the immediate purpose of their existence. When I go to the barber, even now, I listen in on the proprietor’s conversations with the Man in the Chair — not because I’m nosy, but because I enjoy being plugged in to this conversation — or, rather, these few links in a conversation that has been going on since, perhaps, 3500 BC — the Bronze Age — to which the oldest known razors have been dated.
I grew up listening to that conversation. There was a barber shop in the building my family owned and lived in, and I hung out in there perhaps a little more than the barbers would have liked. But the Mariano Brothers, Louie and Joe, had been cutting hair there since before I was born — they cut hair there for 62 years all told — and they no doubt thought of me as a small inconvenience within such a broad context. Perhaps, too, they thought exposure to the shop would improve my grooming — something that didn’t happen until I was in my 20s.
By my estimate, the customers who contributed to the conversation at the Marianos’ shop were drawn from five generations. If it’s true that all spoken words are still floating around somewhere in the ether, and if it were possible to capture some of the links in the chain forged in the Marianos’ chairs, there no doubt would be observations about what Roosevelt promised Stalin at Yalta, whether the Cardinals would ever win another pennant, what was really going on between Jane Russell and Howard Hughes, why everyone didn’t just get off Nixon’s case, and whether ground beef at 90 cents a pound didn’t mean that the Whole Works was going to the dogs.
I was in the shop one day when a 10-year-old boy “getting his ears lowered” got into a heated argument with a customer-in-waiting, who was old enough to be the lad’s grandfather, over whether Rocky Marciano or Joe Louis had been the Bigger Deal. Anywhere else, the boy would have been thought precocious. But, you see, they were Two Guys Talking in a Barber Shop, so it was OK.
"The Barber" by Nikolaus Gysis (1880)
“It was contagious … seventy pages.” — Jimmy Durante
October 15, 2009
THE FORMER MEYER BROTHERS
Every time I leave Paterson after teaching my classes, I pass the ornate building that once housed Meyer Brothers Department Store. Before the malls sucked the life out of downtown districts, Meyer Brothers was the place to shop in North Jersey. The big attraction for me when my mother shopped there was the book store, which was located on an elegant little mezzanine at the head of a grand staircase. Mom could take her time elsewhere, because once she dropped me off in the book store, she knew where she’d find me no matter how much time had elapsed. The keepers of the shop must have a patient bunch, because I used it as if it were a library. We went there fairly often, and I returned to the same books again and again, hoping they wouldn’t be sold out before I had read them through.
Browsing at Meyer Brothers provided my first opportunities to buy books, which had not been part of the routine in our house. Both of my parents read a lot, but they read periodicals. I read the newspapers and magazines, too, but once I got the feel and smell of books into my system, I slipped into a lifelong addiction. Mom accommodated me when I started buying the “Peanuts” anthologies that began to appear in the very early 1950s, and humorous little “history” books by Richard Armour.
When chains like Borders and Barnes & Noble started making it fashionable to hang out in the stacks it seemed as if book browsing had become a post-modern institution, but now the trend toward buying and reading books on line threatens to make that experience a thing of the past — like Meyer Brothers, with its boarded-up windows and its for-rent signs.
Carolyn Kellogg, who blogs about books for the LA Times wrote about the trend this week. Her blog is at this link:
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/jacketcopy/2009/10/in-praise-of-browsing.html
Got a match, effendi?
October 14, 2009
Dr. BASHAR AL-ASSAD
I’m glad Peter Lorre wasn’t around to see this: The president of Syria has banned smoking in public places. President Bashar al-Assad did this by decree, so at least that characteristic of Syrian life has been preserved, but will Syria be Syria without smoke-filled cafes? Assad is a medical doctor, so he is very conscious of the harmful effects of smoking and of exposure to second-hand smoke.
I’ve never been a smoker, so these bans are irrelevant to me from that point of view, and I’m sufficiently convinced of the health risks to believe that the practice should be confined to the great outdoors or to strictly private places. Still, I can’t help feeling a twinge of melancholy over the loss of atmosphere — hazy as it was. No such decree has been imposed on my landsmen in Lebanon — not that any one in Lebanon pays much attention to decrees. The last figure I saw indicated that more than 53 percent of Lebanese adults are smokers and that they suck ’em down at the rate of 23 a day. When we visited there at the end of the Clinton administration, we couldn’t calculate which were more ubiquitous in Lebanese hands — cigarettes or cell phones.
As long as President Assad is messing with the ambiance in and around Damascus, he has also imposed sharp restrictions on the use of the argileh, or hookah. Give him credit for chutzpah — if I may use that term with respect to Assad; popularity of the argileh is on the rise, especially among young people.
Not only that, but the president isn’t going to tolerate little Syrians sitting around mimicking the images they might see in old movies and getting the idea that there is something dramatic about taking a long drag, slowly exhaling, squinting through the blue haze and demanding of some quivering lackey, “Did you get the information?” Assad has also banned any candy or toys made to look like tobacco products – and tobacco advertising.
Hey, a little arbitrary rule never hurt anybody.
“… but, baby, it’s cold outside!” — Frank Loesser
October 12, 2009
AUDREY CARSON, 3, PLAYS IN THE OCTOBER SNOW IN OMAHA / AP PHOTO
When I was a kid, one of my jobs at home was to take all the trash from the grocery store, haul it out back, and burn it in an incinerator. Everything went into that trash barrel, including aerosol cans that exploded with a blast that could be heard for blocks. Air pollution? In the 1950s that meant static on WMCA.
I once interviewed a Catholic priest who was running for a seat in the state Legislature. He told me that when he was a teenager he got a summer job with a chemical company in North Jersey, and one of his chores was to ride on a truck that went into the Meadowlands where he and the driver would empty drums of water that had been contaminated with mercury. If I have my science right, the mercury is still there.
And that was just the future priest and the future deacon. By what factor should we multiply that to calculate the damage that we all have done out of ignorance — to say nothing of what was done deliberately.
SEPTEMBER SNOW AT COOPER MOUNTAIN, COLORADO / Cooper Mountain Photo
The BBC reported today that the earth is not growing warmer, rumors to the contrary notwithstanding. In fact, according to the Brits, global temperatures have not increased in 11 years. The Pacific Ocean, apparently a bellwether where this subject is concerned, has been cooling off for the past few years after running a fever in the 1980s and 1990s.
I’m surprised the “junk science” crowd isn’t all over this. What an opportunity to derail the Obama administration’s plan to make up for eight lost years in American participation in international environmental agreements. But not so fast. Global temperatures are a red herring anyway. Fluctuations are a result of a bewildering complex of factors, some of them just as influential as human activity. But we know what kind of liberties we have taken with the environment, and two kids dumping mercury in the marshlands and launching sulfates into the atmosphere are just the poster boys. Let’s put the thermometers away and act responsibly once and for all.
The BBC report is at the following link:
The human element
October 10, 2009
RON GARDENHIRE
Ron Gardenhire is a stand-up guy.
I liked his reaction to the terrible call — against the Minnesota Twins — in last night’s playoff game against the Yankees. The mistake by right-field baseline umpire Phil Cuzzi couldn’t have come at a worse time as he ruled what should have been a double by Joe Mauer a foul ball. The replay clearly showed that Cuzzi was wrong, even though he was in a perfect position to see the play.
Instead of railing at Cuzzi or at umpires in general or at the Fates, Gardenhire said that what’s done is done. He didn’t mention — so far as I know — that his team was the beneficiary of a bad call in its one-game playoff with the Tigers when plate umpire Randy Marsh missed the call when Brandon Inge was brushed by a pitch in the top of the 12th inning – a call that would have scored a run for the Tigers, who lost the game in the bottom of the 12th.
PHIL CUZZI
The conventional wisdom is that bad calls even out, which is a lot more demonstrable in a 162-game regular season than it is in a one-game playoff. Still, I was glad to see Gardenhire’s observation when he was asked if more videotape reviews should be introduced in baseball.
“The great thing about baseball,” he said, is the human element …. and I hope we keep it that way.”
I’m with Gardenhire. Probably enough technology exists to eliminate umpires altogether, but where would be the fun in that? I don’t like when the call goes against my team, but I’d miss complaining about it — and gloating when the call goes the other way.
Just stand in and hit.
“I am a person who loves beginnings.” — Elie Wiesel
October 9, 2009
ELIE WIESEL
Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and author, made some of the more salient points I’ve heard today about the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Peace to President Barack Obama. Wiesel was interviewed by Steve Inskeep on National Public Radio. The core of the interview, from the NPR web page, was as follows:
Mr. WIESEL: I’ll tell you. First of all, it’s strange for me to think of him now as my fellow Nobel laureate. … After all, he’s the president of the United States. But at the same time, seriously, he made history by allowing the American people to correct its own old racial injustices. After all, he’s the first black person to have been elected to that high office, and in doing so he did bring hope and dignity to the fact, to the very position. And therefore I think he gave something to the Nobel Prize.
INSKEEP: He added to the Nobel Prize rather than the other way around.
Mr. WIESEL: It goes both ways. But in this case, really, for the president of the United States, a sitting president, who is nine months in office, it’s true that he tries and tries – I’m sure he tries in many areas to do the right thing, and he will succeed, but in this case the prize will add or increase his moral authority.
INSKEEP: Moral authority. Well, let’s talk about that. Because this is a president who has begun many efforts around the world and the Nobel committee cited them, from reducing the threat of nuclear weapons to reducing nuclear arms stockpiles, efforts to bring peace in different parts of the world. But it’s been widely noted this morning that although many efforts have begun, none have really been concluded. Do you think it will make a big difference in those efforts that the peace prize goes to the president?
Mr. WIESEL: First of all, I think he is being recognized for his efforts and his beginnings, as you say. But I am a person who loves beginnings, I love beginnings. The mystery of beginnings is part of Jewish mysticism. And in this case, in politics, of course, because it’s also – it’s also politics – it is a good thing, it’s a promise. The Nobel committee says that he represents a promise and I’m sure that he will try to fulfill it.
INSKEEP: And they do say that they want to encourage him on his way. Is that normal for the Nobel Prize to be used to encourage rather than just reward people?
Mr. WIESEL: Not really. But the Nobel Prize committee has its own rules, and they may decide anything they want. They may decide that encouragement is part of the experiment.
“How about that?” — Mel Allen
October 9, 2009
JOHN STERLING
I was amused to read an Associated Press story today by a writer who had the naivete to suggest that John Sterling is a successor to Mel Allen. It is true that Sterling has a job analogous to Mel’s old job, but he’s about as much a successor to Mel as I am a successor to St. Stephen.
The writer refers to Sterling as “the voice of the Yankees,” which is what Suzan Waldman calls Sterling when she introduces him on the radio broadcasts. Frank Messer, who took over when Mel was inexplicably fired, had the grace to always introduce Mel as “the only real voice of the Yankees.”
Sterling and some other baseball broadcasters today are like carnival barkers. I had to laugh the other night when he was making his usual complaints about all the noise in the Blue Jays stadium. What about the noise he makes on the air during every game? Every home run is “high” and “far” whether it’s high and far or not …. and some fly balls are “high” and “far” that aren’t home runs at all. Anyone can find an old Yankee broadcast on the Internet and hear the difference between that and Mel’s mellow “going, going, gone.” And that’s to say nothing about the contrast between Mel’s “and the ballgame is over” and Sterling’s “theeeeeeeee Yankees win!!!!!!” Whenever I hear that I chuckle about the critics who used to call Mel a “homer” — meaning a Yankee partisan.
MEL ALLEN
The quality of baseball broadcasts isn’t helped any, of course, by the fact that almost every word that comes out of the announcers’ mouths is commercialized. The fifteenth out is sold, the call to the bullpen is sold. It won’t be long before there’s a sponsor for every time Nick Swisher looks up at the sky to make sure God is still there. “This look to the heavens is brought to you by ….” Announcers like Mel and Red Barber had it easier; they could talk about baseball for whole half innings at a time. But frankly, I’d rather hear Mel pitching White Owl cigars or Ballantine ale then listen to Sterling shrieking, “the Melkman delivers … that’s the Melky way!”
The AP report says Swisher likes that stuff.
He would.
The AP story is at the following link: http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jUoeWQsFlz_CsbkUuN-rVb6x3AGgD9B72ASG2
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