Been Working On My Surrealism Talk For February

This is fun stuff. Surrealism has definitely affected "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul."

Weird Fitness Mystery - November 21, 2021

Who ARE these people! I saw the flags and assumed it was a political demonstration of some sort that was about to pass my house: maybe some pro-Trump rally. Instead, it appears to have been a mass jog by some fitness studio. No real explanation.

No One Wants To Date Conservatives Because They Are Moral Lepers

The whiny white-boy babies are pouting again. Too bad. No one will ever love them:

"Young Dems more likely to despise the other party," blares Tuesday's Axios headline, noting in the article that "5% of Republicans said they wouldn't be friends with someone from the opposite party, compared to 37% of Democrats," and "71% of Democrats wouldn't go on a date with someone with opposing views, versus 31% of Republicans."

...On the right, there was a lot of trumpeting how this supposedly proves the left are the ones who are "really" intolerant. Radio talker Matt Murphy whined that liberals "don't believe in our republic cannot abide people who think differently than them." As if not getting to have sex with or go to parties with liberals is exactly the same as having your basic rights as a citizen stripped from you. "This doesn't bode well," complained GOP lawyer and ABC commentator Sarah Isgur, who previously defended the Trump administration's policy of separating families at the U.S.-Mexico border as a former spokesperson in the Justice Department.

...This is about desirability, not "tolerance." Democrats are desirable as friends and lovers, not just to their fellow party members, but to Republicans, as well. But Republicans? They apparently don't have much to offer to Democrats as friends, and certainly not as lovers. Digging into the polling shows why this is. 

As the Axios write-up by Neal Rothschild notes, young Democrats believe that GOP positions "spearheaded by former President Trump — are far outside of the mainstream and polite conversation." In particular, "human rights, and not just policy differences, are at stake." Which, no duh. Just last week, the GOP-controlled Supreme Court made it clear they plan to strip basic bodily autonomy rights from everyone with a uterus. The Republican Party is rallying around violent and white supremacist rhetoric.

Covid Vaccinations For Children - Kaiser Roseville Hospital - December 3, 2021

Children and their parents line up in the hallway.  Not enough children are vaccinated yet to avoid a winter spike, but at least this is a start.

I found the bottom label on the fridge amusing.

Kiki Dee Band - I've Got The Music In Me - 1974

I've had a cold the last several days, but I'm beginning to feel better again. I took one of those BINAX Covid tests, and it came up negative. Beginning to feel - good! 

Good theme music for the moment...

 

Rat Jumped To Conclusion

My big urban moment yesterday came while driving through the pharmacy parking lot. To exit the parking lot, I was faced with a choice. Do I turn left, or do I turn right? 

I started to turn right, but then changed my mind and turned left. I surprised a large rat, exposed crossing towards the pharmacy, who thought, for sure, that I was turning right.

That Damned Delta

It looks like the post-Thanksgiving disease rush has started in earnest. Covid cases zoomed 62% in the past week - the fastest percentage increase of the entire pandemic! The northern tier is bad: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan. New England is bad: Vermont, New Hampshire, with increases moving into the urban northeast too (particularly Rhode Island). New Mexico is bad. I'm hoping the mass inoculation of school-age kids will blunt Delta's impact, but despite that, it looks like we'll see a bad winter after all.

Culinary Forensics

I’m not terribly good at cooking and related domestic arts, and don’t even know much about what’s in my own cupboards. I remember back in the 90s, when a sudden fly infestation revealed that a hidden 20 lb. bag of potatoes had aged and liquefied. Goopy! Those were the days! 

Still, I’ve been cleaning out old food, and noticed a box of brownie mix, so I whipped up some tasty brownies. I noticed the box had an expiration date of January, 2016, but age doesn’t seem to have affected quality or taste. Just a big scare notice. Next up, some powdered green chile mix that, if memory serves, dates to about 2006.

Nite School: Haunted New Mexico

Amusing Albuquerque-oriented by the improv types at the Vortex Theater.

 

RIP, Stephen Sondheim

Ah, the master passes away:

NEW YORK (AP) - Stephen Sondheim, the songwriter who reshaped the American musical theater in the second half of the 20th century with his intelligent, intricately rhymed lyrics, his use of evocative melodies and his willingness to tackle unusual subjects, has died. He was 91.

...Sondheim influenced several generations of theater songwriters, particularly with such landmark musicals as "Company," "Follies" and "Sweeney Todd," which are considered among his best work. His most famous ballad, "Send in the Clowns," has been recorded hundreds of times, including by Frank Sinatra and Judy Collins.

The artist refused to repeat himself, finding inspiration for his shows in such diverse subjects as an Ingmar Bergman movie ("A Little Night Music"), the opening of Japan to the West ("Pacific Overtures"), French painter Georges Seurat ("Sunday in the Park With George"), Grimm's fairy tales ("Into the Woods") and even the killers of American presidents ("Assassins"), among others.

Tributes quickly flooded social media as performers and writers alike saluted a giant of the theater. "We shall be singing your songs forever," wrote Lea Salonga. Aaron Tveit wrote: "We are so lucky to have what you've given the world."

"The theater has lost one of its greatest geniuses and the world has lost one of its greatest and most original writers. Sadly, there is now a giant in the sky," producer Cameron Mackintosh wrote in tribute. Music supervisor, arranger and orchestrator Alex Lacamoire tweeted: "For those of us who love new musical theater: we live in a world that Sondheim built."

Six of Sondheim's musicals won Tony Awards for best score, and he also received a Pulitzer Prize ("Sunday in the Park"), an Academy Award (for the song "Sooner or Later" from the film "Dick Tracy"), five Olivier Awards and the Presidential Medal of Honor. In 2008, he received a Tony Award for lifetime achievement. 

Sondheim's music and lyrics gave his shows a dark, dramatic edge, whereas before him, the dominant tone of musicals was frothy and comic. He was sometimes criticized as a composer of unhummable songs, a badge that didn't bother Sondheim. Frank Sinatra, who had a hit with Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns," once complained: "He could make me a lot happier if he'd write more songs for saloon singers like me."

To theater fans, Sondheim's sophistication and brilliance made him an icon. A Broadway theater was named after him. A New York magazine cover asked "Is Sondheim God?" The Guardian newspaper once offered this question: "Is Stephen Sondheim the Shakespeare of musical theatre?"

A supreme wordsmith - and an avid player of word games - Sondheim's joy of language shone through. "The opposite of left is right/The opposite of right is wrong/So anyone who's left is wrong, right?" he wrote in "Anyone Can Whistle." In "Company," he penned the lines: "Good things get better/Bad gets worse/Wait - I think I meant that in reverse."

He offered the three principles necessary for a songwriter in his first volume of collected lyrics - Content Dictates Form, Less Is More, and God Is in the Details. All these truisms, he wrote, were "in the service of Clarity, without which nothing else matters." Together they led to stunning lines like: "It's a very short road from the pinch and the punch to the paunch and the pouch and the pension."

Taught by no less a genius than Oscar Hammerstein, Sondheim pushed the musical into a darker, richer and more intellectual place. "If you think of a theater lyric as a short story, as I do, then every line has the weight of a paragraph," he wrote in his 2010 book, "Finishing the Hat," the first volume of his collection of lyrics and comments.

These Central and Northern European Values Are Just Out-of-Sight!

Jesus on a Tortilla - A Very New Mexican Story

A touching retelling of a strange episode in New Mexico's history:

One October morning in 1977, Maria Rubio was in her small green stucco house in southeastern New Mexico, preparing her husband’s lunch. It was 6 a.m., and she was making burritos—cooking beans, scrambling eggs, and preparing tortillas from scratch. And then she saw it, as she was putting together the second burrito: a burn mark on one of the tortillas, in the shape of a little face. Maria felt chills, and she could sense her body moving, though she wasn’t sure if it was out of joy or fear.

Maria shouted at her 17-year-old daughter, Rosy, to come into the kitchen. She asked Rosy what the burn mark looked like to her. “Oh, my God,” Rosy recalls thinking. “That looks like the face of Jesus.” Maria agreed. She hadn’t wanted to say it out loud, because she didn’t want Rosy to think she was crazy.

...That image was about an inch tall and an inch wide. If you look at photos from back then, the likeness is unmistakable: It’s Jesus Christ in profile, complete with a beard and a crown of thorns. Maria and Rosy were overwhelmed with excitement. But Eduardo felt warier. He worried the tortilla might be a bad omen.

...By the end of 1977, more than 6,000 visitors had signed Maria’s guest books. People streamed in from all over New Mexico, many of them Latino, drawn by word of mouth and local news stories. “We related a lot more to the Mexican Catholic people,” Rosy says. “Those were the people I remember just coming in with a lot of faith, with a lot of intention.” The visitors prayed for sick relatives and lit votive candles. One woman said that she was “looked down upon because she [was] poor and Mexican American.” She believed that Jesus had appeared “in a poor person’s house to show … people are all the same.”

...Maria and Rosy did a lot of interviews. But the one they taped in 1994 was their biggest yet. The Phil Donahue Show was recorded in front of a live studio audience in New York City. That trip was the first time that Maria had ever been on a plane. As they took off, Maria said, “I think I’m going to die now.” For Rosy, it was thrilling to be in New York, but Maria was overwhelmed. When they went to a nice dinner downtown, Maria was too nervous to eat her apple pie.

Filming the show itself wasn’t any easier. The studio audience started laughing less than 30 seconds in, when Donahue uttered the phrase “Jesus in a tortilla.”

...On The Phil Donahue Show, Maria and Rosy got presented as potential scammers. “If you give up your caution and your common sense,” one guest, a well-known debunker of phony religious miracles, said, “any charlatan with a pocketful of magic tricks can come in and take your money and sometimes your life.” Later in the episode, an audience member told Donahue, “Although I’m not much for tortillas, I am going to keep a close eye on my potato chips.”

On the outside, Rosy managed to keep her composure. But on the inside, she says, “I remember just seething.” What she wanted to do most of all was give that potato chip woman the finger.

After that experience in New York, Maria told Rosy that she was done with TV interviews. The next year, when The Oprah Winfrey Show called, Rosy went to Chicago without her mother. But her second big television appearance didn’t go much better than the first. “I just don’t know why Jesus would want to be on a tortilla,” Oprah said. And the crowd roared with laughter.

...By the 1990s, Jesus on a tortilla had become a kind of small-scale meme. Kurt Cobain wrote in his journal, “I saw Jesus on a tortilla shell.” The Simpsons referenced it. (“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to appear on a tortilla in Mexico,” God tells Homer.) There’s even a feature film, Tortilla Heaven, about Jesus’ image miraculously appearing on a tortilla in New Mexico. The Rubios weren’t consulted for that movie, which critic Justin Chang called “as flat as a tortilla and considerably less nourishing.”

In Tortilla Heaven, everyone tries to make a buck off the holy image, charging admission fees to see it and selling tortilla merchandise. That was the popular conception—that anyone who saw Jesus on a tortilla surely had impure motives. But for Maria, the tortilla was always a duty. Something she’d been asked to share, for reasons she didn’t understand. In 1977, she opened her home to the entire world. But over many years, very gradually, that sense of obligation to the public started to go away. 

...The tortilla broke sometime around 2005. “My mom says she lent it out to one of my nieces,” Angelica says. But she thinks nobody wants to tell the real story. “They’re afraid of what might happen,” she says, “which is nothing. Like, the tortilla’s a tortilla, it was bound to break at some point.” The tortilla now sits in pieces, and the part with the actual burn mark has gone missing.

Europe's Got Big Covid-19 Issues

In the United States, Covid-19 rates are beginning their expected, steep wintertime increase, just as the holiday season starts. (Rates in California are still edging downwards.) Nevertheless, U.S. rates are still moderate compared to elsewhere. Rates in central and northern Europe are really soaring. Austria looks scary - a steep increase with no sign of leveling out.

 

Taylor Swift - All Too Well - SNL

A very impressive performance by Taylor Swift! 

As the author here notes, her performance emphasizes that one should never, ever break up with Taylor Swift, unless you're willing to pay a very high price.

 

Marc Shark At The Zoo 6 - Who Are You, Flamingo Forty-Two?

Friday November 13, 2021

 

Republicans are the Totalitarians Now

I've been up to my usual tricks - corraling Walt with arguments reviling his precious GOP. This article from a year ago, by a Chinese historian, makes exact parallels between Trump and Mao, and shows how the GOP is decaying from a Leninist party (Hastert Rule!) into a Maoist one.

The process of Leninist degeneration in both China and the GOP was completed through the apotheosis of the charismatic leader. There are many differences between Mao and Trump, but their similarities are uncanny. Both are sons of wealthy landlords. Both rely on ties to propaganda machines to stoke hatred of ostensible enemies. Both sabotage international alliances. The political rallies of both men are vermilion spectacles of adulation as the legions hold aloft their “Little Red Books” or adorn their crowns with red MAGA caps. Such populist extravaganzas manifest their unparalleled political advantages. 

The Maoification of the GOP enables President Trump to do whatever he wants in the ostensible advancement of “conservatism,” a term which, like “communism” in China today, is rendered increasingly meaningless as it is equated with nothing more than party power and loyalty to the supreme leader. Such a party needs no electoral platform beyond supporting the president’s “agenda.” The GOP is the “party of Trump,” and Republicans who beg to differ have now “self-purged,” to paraphrase Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah).

SoCal Has Some Interesting Places

I need to see these things:

That’s a pink brontosaurus foot in the foreground, because you can’t get back to L.A. without passing the cement dinosaurs at Cabazon, built in the ‘70s and ‘80s to promote a restaurant that’s gone now. Kids still love them. So do Instagrammers since management went to bolder colors in 2020. What’s not to like about a road trip that ends with a big, green Tyrannosaurus rex that loves California?

Annette Hanshaw - Happy Days Are Here Again (1930)

Traffic Collision Involving Structure

I could hear the sirens. Pulse app said ‘Traffic collision involving structure.’ Sure enough, someone took out the storefront at Famous Pizza on Freeport.

Veteran's Day, 2021

My father rarely spoke of his days with Baker Battery, 666th Field Artillery Battalion - the Battle of the Bulge, and the run-and-gun race across northern Germany, but fortunately Nathan Blumberg (who grew up in Denver and after the war moved to Montana) in adjacent Charlie Battery wrote a book about his experiences ("Charlie of 666: A Memoir of World War II"), and his self-appraisal during the Battle of the Bulge: 

___ 

At some moment during a lull in the artillery battle in those first four days in the snows of Belgium, I walked into the woods near our howitzers, exhausted and disoriented. I rested my carbine against a tree, brushed the snow off a log and sat down. After minutes of silence broken only by the muffled sounds of military vehicles from the highway, I talked with myself. 

Look, I said out loud, four things can happen before this thing is over. 

You could be killed. 

Okay. 

You could be wounded and survive, possibly to spend the rest of your days crippled in some way. 

Okay. 

You could be taken prisoner. But you know about the Malmedy massacre and you have a pretty good idea of what the Germans would do to a captured Jewish corporal who is also a forward observer helping to call fire down on them. Also, since you aren't an officer or a non-com, you wouldn't be exempt from forced labor. Being a POW was a possibility you had ruled out long ago. You'd made up your mind that you would never allow yourself to fall into the hands of those fucking Nazis. You'd die first or try to escape, no matter the risk. You've hated the bastards since you were a kid, listening to the speeches of that crazy Hitler on the radio, and now you've seen with your eyes what they can do. No prisoner - or not for long. Fuck 'em. 

Okay. 

Or, at last, you could survive and come through the damndest experience of your life sound of body and knowing that never again would you experience an adventure so thoroughly dangerous, thrilling, exciting, interesting, exhilarating, fascinating, terrifying - and satisfying. Yes, satisfying. You said this is what you wanted when you enlisted. You have to rise to a dimension that allows you to accept, without reservation, whatever fate has in store for you. You have to go from "What the hell am I doing here?" to "Of all the places I could be, I want to be here. I am lucky to be here. I am honored to be here." 

Okay!