fauxklore

I also did some things in July. I will spare you details about home repairs and household paperwork.

Fourth of July: Aside from dealing with condo woes, described in a locked entry, I went to a friend’s house for holiday socializing. That incl I uded dinner - and the inevitable smoke alarm going off as the steaks were grilled - and lots of good conversation, as well as sitting out on her balcony to watch fireworks. Lots of fireworks, since Kathleen lives in Crystal City part time for now, though she’s giving up her apartment in October to live full time in her house in South Carolina. You can’t see the DC mall fireworks from her apartment, because part of the building is in the way, but there are a lot of fireworks in Maryland (and some in southern DC) which you can watch. And, of course, there are lots of planes taking off and landing at DCA also. Overall, it was a nice evening, despite my being stressed out over my AC woes.

The Flushies: A few days later was The Flushies, one of the two big Loser parties of the year. (The other is the post-holiday party in January.) There was the typical potluck array, to which my contribution was cheese and crackers (and some leftover hummus) because I was going away right after the party. There was plenty of good conversation, followed by the awards to various people for their accomplishments. Judy Freed won Loser of the Year. Her inkblots included this particularly brilliant take on a bad idea with the book title Self Esteem for Dummies.

Big-D Con: This year’s NPL con was in Dallas. It is worth its own entry, which I will try not to be so bloody slow in writing.

Book Clubs” R.E.A.D. discussed Mad Honey by Jodi Picot and Jennifer Finley Boylan. It was an interesting book with great pacing and, surprisingly, everyone liked it. The Travelers’ Century Club read The Curious Case of William Baekeland by Harry Mitsidis, which has to do with a con man who ripped off a lot of extreme travelers, including TCC members. It was an interesting book, but not particularly well-written, in my opinion.

Speaking of TCC: The book club meeting ended a while before the monthly virtual exploration, which had to do with Fernando de Noronha and the Falklands. I’ve done a fair amount of reading on the latter, but I really knew nothing about the former except for its existence. Bottom line is that it looks very appealing, though it is also expensive and possibly a bit too resorty for my tastes, since I’m not a lie on the beach and do nothing sort of person.

This past weekend was our chapter’s regular lunch meeting. There was plenty of wide-ranging travel conversation. I particularly enjoyed talking with one of the new people, who appears to have similar tastes to mine.

Bad News: My brother had a heart attack. Apparently one artery was 100% blocked, while the other two were 60% blocked. They put in a stent in the blocked one and he goes back to the doctor this week to learn about the way ahead. He said he feels okay and he is home and resting.

Good News: I got some resolution on the household crisis. It turns out that there was a clog in the main drain clog, so it is the condo association’s responsibility to pay for repairs related to it.

Eye Have Really Good News: I had my second cataract surgery last week. It went well. My vision was still blurry the next day when I went in for my follow-up appointment, but cleared up by the next day. Really, these intraocular lenses are quite miraculous. As for the surgery, I remember being more conscious than I was for the first eye, but the only specific thing I remember them doing was cleaning my eyelashes. And there were some purple, green, and yellow blobs, presumably due to the laser dissolving the cataract.

I've had a pretty sociable week.

Storytelling Show: Saturday night’s storytelling show went well. We had a good and responsive audience. The venue was easier to get to than I expected it to be. And they had an excellent sound system. My story went okay, but I left out a couple of things I had planned to say, but so it goes.

Medicare: I had my appointment on Monday to go down to the Social Security office to show them my proof of age. I am sure that I clicked the “I have an appointment” button on their check-in kiosk, but somehow it gave me a number for a drop-in, instead of an appointment. Which meant that I ended up waiting much longer than I should have. But I got everything sorted and should have my Medicare card any day now. I still need to get my Social Security account on-line sorted. They could reset my password, but not my cell phone number for two-factor authentication. So I had to fill in the stuff on-line that has them send me something to fix that. (Last night, I stumbled upon the piece of paper on which I’d written down my password, but the old cell phone number would still have been a problem.) What is particularly annoying is that, if I hadn’t set up the account a long time ago, I could have circumvented all of that, because I could have logged in using my login.gov account, which I set up to get global entry.

Knitting Group: We normally meet at the police station, but the community room gets used for early voting, so we were at Wegman’s instead. We had a good group, with two new people. I’m making progress on my Tunisian crochet afghan, but it may not be completely done by the end of the year. It’s still a good project for social crafting as it is pretty brainless. Also, I brought some knitting pattern books from the 1950’s to give away and Tom took two of them.

Needles and Crafts: My other crafting group, which meets on line, had been on hiatus over the summer and just started up again yesterday afternoon It was great seeing everyone and I got some more done on the afghan. We’ll actually be meeting at a member’s house on alternate weeks, which is, of course, less convenient, especially because she lives in darkest Maryland.

Buy Nothing: I got rid of three things last week. So far this week, I got rid of one item (two furnace filters that were the wrong size) and am waiting for someone to pick up another thing (a trivet made of wine corks.)

Baseball: I had been rooting for the Marlins, primarily because I think Kim Ng is cool, but, oh well. (She is being talked about for the BoSox GM job.) I find the Dodgers the most tolerable of the teams who are left. The Twins are okay, I suppose. I wouldn’t mind the Phillies so much (I do like their GM, Sam Fuld), but I hate mascots in general and the Phanatic is the worst of the worst of them. I detest the Orioles because of all the effort their leadership put into trying to keep Washington from getting a team, as well as their failure to sing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” during the 7th inning stretch.

Genealogy: Wednesday night was the Litvak genealogy group I am the subject matter expert for. One of the good discussion topics had to do with what resources are worth paying for. My opinion is that it is perfectly fine not to renew relatively expensive sites like Ancestry and My Heritage until you need to use them. They don’t delete your account, so you can start up again when it makes sense to.

One quick follow-up. It turns out that the experience of starting to dream before falling asleep is not actually uncommon. It’s called hypnagogic hallucination and about 70% of people experience it. I am less unique than I thought.


Celebrity Death Watch: Steve Wilhite invented the GIF (and still managed to pronounce it incorrectly). Ralph Terry was a pitcher who spent several seasons with the Source of All Evil in the Universe. Peter Bowles played Guthrie Featherstone in the Rumpole of the Bailey TV series. Scotty Mitchell was a television actor, who often appeared on game shows, as well as having recurring roles on a couple of sitcoms. Winfield Scott Jr. was an Air Force general and superintendent of the Air Force Academy in the mid-1980’s. John Roach led the development of the TRS-80 microcomputer. Kip Hawley directed the TSA from 2005 to 2009. Charles Boyd was a combat pilot in the Air Force and was the only Vietnam War POW to reach 4-star rank in the military. Edward Johnson III ran Fidelity Investments from the 1970’s on. Taylor Hawkins was the drummer of the Foo Fighters. Kathryn Hays was an actress, best known for appearing in As the World Turns for almost 40 years. Bobby Hendricks sang with The Drifters. Cat Pause was a fat studies activist. Bethany Campbell wrote romance novels. Patricia MacLachlan wrote Sarah, Plain and Tall.

C.W. McCall was a country singer, best known for the song, “Convoy.” Estelle Harris played George Constanza’s mother on Seinfeld and voiced Mrs. Potato Head in the Toy Story movies. Sidney Altman won a Nobel Prize in chemistry for his studies of RNA. Nehemiah Persoff was an actor whose roles included the father in Yentl. Bobby Rydell was a pop singer who played the role of Hugo in the movie version of Bye Bye Birdie. Mimi Reinhardt was Oskar Schindler’s secretary. Gilbert Gottfried was a comedian whose shtick included a really annoying voice. Mike Bossy played hockey for the New York Islanders. Liz Sheridan played Jerry’s mother on Seinfeld. Wendy Rieger was a news anchor in D.C. Barbara Hall was a British crossword constructor and puzzles editor for the Sunday Times. Cynthia Plaster Caster was a groupie who went on to create plaster casts of famous men’s erect penises. Guy Lafleur was a Hall of Fame hockey player. Mike Summer played football for the Washington Redskins. Susan Jacks sang the song “Which Way You Goin’ Billy?” Andrew Woolfolk played saxoophone with Earth, Wind & Fire. David Birney was an actor who is probably best known for the TV series Bridget Loves Bernie but also performed in a lot of serious theatre on Broadway. David Walden contributed to the development of ARPANET. Neal Adams was a comic book artist. Joanna Barnes was an actress whose movie credits included Auntie Mame and The Parent Trap. Naomi Judd was a country singer/songwriter.

Regine was a singer and nightclub owner. Jerry verDorn was a soap opera actor. Rick Parnell was the drummer for Spinal Tap. Norman Mineta was the Secretary of Transportation in the 2000’s. Mary Fuller was a sculptor. Midge Decter was a neoconservative, probably best known as the wife of Norman Podhoretz. Randy Weaver was a survivalist and the key figure in the Ruby Ridge siege. Robert McFarlane was the National Security Advisor under Ronald Reagan and a key figure in the Iran-Contra Affair. Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan was the president of the United Arab Emirates. Ben Roy Mottelson won the Nobel prize in physics for his work on the geometry of atomic nuclei. Vangelis was a musician and composer, whose work for films included Chariots of Fire and Blade Runner. Bob Neuwirth wrote the song “Mercedes Benz.” Rosmarie Trapp was one of the Von Trapp Family Singers.

Madeleine Albright was the first woman to be the U.S. Secretary of State. She was also famous for her collection of brooches, which I once saw at the Smithsonian.

Ann Hutchinson Guest was an expert on dance notation. She lived to the age of 103 and earned me 29 ghoul pool points.

Robert Morse was an actor. He won a Tonyin 1962 for playing J. Pierrepont Finch in How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying and another in 1989 for the one-man play Tru about Truman Capote. He later appeared in the TV series Mad Men. I believed in him.

Orrin Hatch was a Republican Senator from Utah for 42 years. He also wrote and recorded Christian music.

Roger Angell wrote about baseball, primarily for the New Yorker, for about 75 years. Saying that is like saying that Herman Melville wrote about whaling. He was eloquent and insightful, a true poet laureate of the sport. He earned me 21 ghoul pool points.


Non-celebrity Death Watch: Ernest Cravalho was an MIT professor of Mechanical Engineering. I don’t remember if I had him for Thermodynamics, but I am fairly sure we used a textbook he had co-written. He died in April 2021 but I only just learned of his death a couple of weeks ago.

Suzy Pietras-Smith kept an on-line journal at https://www.mutteringfool.com. I met her only once and briefly (at Journalcon several years ago.) She wrote well - not surprisingly, as she was a professional journalist. She had been in the hospital for well over a year, so her death was not a total surprise, but still sad.

I knew Patricia Hansen from FlyerTalk (where she went by the handle, Lili). She was a lively person and a good traveler and I always enjoyed seeing her at FT Dos.

Don’t Analyze This Dream: I worked in the offices of a large corporation. There was some sort of invasion by armed intruders. I locked myself in my office, but somehow I could see what was going on. Several people ran down a hallway to try to escape, but even though they were wearing hazmat suits, they got trapped in a hallway and mowed down. Two women started running in that direction but got away and ran into an office catty corner from mine and, like me, were able to see things happening. The intruders were mostly in a big open room downstairs and were trapped there, where they were killed, so all three of us survived.

Yemandja: I saw this show (play? opera?) at the Kennedy Center a couple of weeks ago. I went to see it largely because of Angelique Kiddo’s involvement. In addition to co-writing the music (with Jean Hebrail), she played the title role. Yemandja is the Yoruba goddess of water and healing. She has a running conflict with Oro, the god of wind. The story involves the influence of these spirits on a girl named Omulola as she tries to rescue her uncle from the slave trade. This is made more complicated because her fiancé , Olajuwon, is the son of the slave trader, De Salta. Throughout all of this, music is used to influence events and, eventually, provide healing. Overall, it was an interesting show and worth seeing.

Maryland Sheep ad Wool Festival: The first weekend of May brought the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival, which is, essentially, a cross between a county fair and the world’s largest yarn shop. I met up with a few friends there, but mostly shopped on my own. I did not buy any sheep and confined my purchases to two books - one on sock architecture and one called What Would Madame DeFarge Knit? because how could I resist that title? I also bought a gradient yarn kit - several skeins in a blue, green, and purple color way called “They’ll Be Writing Songs About This.” That will eventually get turned into a shawlette.

Re-Boosted: I got my second COVID booster last Monday, I had gotten Pfizer previously and opted for Moderna this time because there is some evidence that mixing the vaccines might give more protection. I did have more side effects (arm soreness, headache, fatigue, mild nausea) but nothing intolerable.

Leading Jewish Minds - Daniel Jackson on Software: MIT Hillel has a series called Leading Jewish Minds at MIT and the most recent speaker was Daniel Jackson. His talk was on software and why it does and does’t work well. A lot of what he said had to do with user interfaces. But the broader question was what the key concept is that makes a technology useful. He was worth interesting and entertaining and I plan to check out his blog in the future.

Story Swap: The monthly Voices in the Glen story swap was last Saturday night. I told a story from Azerbaijan that I had heard from my guide when I was in Sheki. There was also a story about - and a lot of discussion about - pigeons.

Genealogy Meetings: I went to two genealogy talks over the past week. One was on Immigration and Naturalization correspondence files, which had a lot of information, but I need to go back through the slides to see how useful it is. The other was on tracing ancestors before they had surnames. That one seemed less useful, because almost all of the sources the speaker talked about were from southern Germany and Galicia.

Lunar Eclipse: I had looked forward to the lunar eclipse / blood moon of Sunday night. But, alas, the weather here in Northern Virginia did not cooperate. Damn clouds.

White House Webinar on Jews and Baseball: This was, apparently, an event for Jewish Ameriican Heritage Month. The moderator was Chanan Weissman, who is the White House liaison to the Jewish community. The speakers were baseball historian John Thorn, former player Shawn Green, Justine Siegal (the first woman to coach a professional baseball team), and Misha Halperin from the Museum of American Jewish History. Overall, this was entertaining, but I can’t say that I learned anything new out of it. Well, one thing - Shawn Green is still astonishingly good-looking I suspect that wasn’t the message the event was intended to get out. (The real subtext was that baseball was viewed by Jewish immigrants as a means to Americanization. In fact, Thorn said he learned to read English from the backs of baseball cards.)

Abortion Rights Rally: I went to the Jewish Rally for Abortion Justice on Tuesday. That deserves its own post, which I will try to write in the next couple of days.

I am too tired to write anything interesting tonight. I had to get up early because I'd scheduled my COVID test for 7:35 a.m. This was probably a smart move, because it meant I had a short wait - maybe 10 minutes. The place I went to does drive-thru testing, with them coming around and scanning the QR code they'd emailed you while you were waiting. It was all quite efficient and I was actually done before 7:30. They said it would be about 72 hours for results.

On the way home, I stopped at the post office and stuck the last batch of holiday cards (and one bill) in a mailbox. I decided I didn't have time to go back to bed before one of the sessions of Yiddish New York that I wanted to watch. Some day I will learn that caffeine is not an adequate substitute for getting enough sleep.

The friend I’d gone out to dinner with on Wednesday night called me yesterday and told me she was feeling a bit unwell (congested and fatigued) and went to get a COVID test. Today she called and told me she was at the emergency room because her blood oxygen level was low and she was having chest pains. She did test positive. But her blood oxygen was fine when she was at the hospital. And they gave her an EKG and said she was okay, so she is back home. She called me back and said that she was feeling better and, in fact, had felt worse during her reaction to the booster shot.

Of course, this means I have now been exposed. I have no symptoms, no fever, and my blood oxygen level is 96. Kaiser said I should wait 7 days from exposure to get tested, but the first appointment they had for a PCR test wasn’t until Friday. I don’t really trust the rapid antigen tests given that: a) they have a false negative rate of approximately 20% and b) there are some questions about whether they can detect the omicron variant at all. I’ve looked online to see if I can find somewhere else to get tested sooner, but no luck so far.

There is some question about whether I have to quarantine, given that I am vaccinated and boosted, but I will stay home out of an abundance of caution. That means I won’t go to a get-together on Thursday for a friend who is in town in Texas. At any rate, I am pretty much occupied for most of the week with Yiddish New York. (I have two other zoom meetings tomorrow, too.) I have plenty of food in the house. And, alas, no shortage of household chores to get done.

Three things for now:

1. I am really frustrated with the sleep issues I’ve been having. I fall asleep just fine, but wake up 4 or 5 hours later to pee and then can’t get back to sleep. Usually, I give up after at least a half hour and get up and futz around on-line. I may get another hour or two of sleep later on in the night, but I’m definitely not getting quite as much sleep as I need.
   
   Oddly, heavy rain seems to help me sleep. What definitely does not help is waking up from a weird and violent dream like the one I had last night that involved hiding from a guy with an uzi and several biological weapons.
   
   
2. I really enjoy being able to bring together people who can help each other. I’ve had two opportunities to do this in the past couple of weeks and both made me happy.
   
   
3. I am still enjoying what I refer to as cooking for the end of the world. This week’s grocery shopping was at Wegman’s and they had kosher Italian sausage, which led me to buy peppers as well. When I got home, I had a quick inspiration and found a recipe for Cajun jambalaya, which apparently differs from Creole jambalaya in not containing celery or tomatoes. I made it last night, which also used up the last of the chicken I’d had in the freezer and it was really delicious.
   
   

But, first, a local oddity and some politics...


Strange Ad: This is on the Nextdoor group for my neighborhood: "As we enter the warmer months, I want to remind everyone that I’m available to identify and relocate snakes from your property FOR FREE. I offer my relocation services as a last resort, in other words, if the snake is in danger of being hurt of killed. The majority of the time there’s no need to intervene."

Is it just me or does this make anybody else wonder what the advertiser is doing with the snakes? And, by the way, a disturbing number of the replies (i.e. more than one) are asking specifically if the advertiser will deal with copperheads.


Super Tuesday: Amy Klobuchar’s withdrawal from the Democratic primary race left me with a tough decision. In the end, I decided that Biden’s positions are closer to mine than Warren’s were and I voted for him (along with most of Virginia). Sanders was not even a consideration – if I want to be yelled at by an old Jewish man with a New York accent, I have plenty of relatives who can do that.

Now Warren has pulled out so it really does look like a two person race. (Yes, I know Tulsi Gabbard is still in it, but she has no chance. And she’s a bloody lunatic.) I thought I would reiterate something I’ve said before and was reminded of when Hillary Clinton lost. Namely, I still believe / fear that the first female president of the U.S. will be a conservative Republican. That drive for ideological purity is what it would take for a lot of men (and some women) to overcome rampant misogyny.


One More Thing re: Politics: My other takeaway from Tuesday is that early voting and, particularly, requiring vote by mail (as Colorado does) continue to be bad ideas. Absentee / early voting is fine for situations that require it (travel, disability, etc.) but it should not become the norm precisely because too many people will end up voting for candidates who are no longer in the running. That is less true of the final elections, of course, but there have still been situations where, say, a candidate has died before the election.

We do need to fix the problems in some states that led to long waits, but that can be handled by having adequate numbers of polling places with sufficient voting machines at each.


Hand washing: So we all know we are supposed to wash for 20 seconds, right? I have traditionally used the alphabet song to time myself. But I’ve seen some interesting alternatives, of which the ones I liked best were "Karma Chameleon" and "Africa." It occurred to me that nobody has suggested any particular show tunes, however. (Well, there was one Andrew Lloyd Webber song mentioned, but no. Just, no.) My offering, based entirely on what song I am most likely to think of when standing at a bathroom sink is "I Believe in You" from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. (You just need to do the part from "You have the cool clear eyes … " through "I believe in you." That should be about 23 seconds.)

You can thank me (or curse me, as the case may be) later.

Celebrity Death Watch: Boro Maa was the matriarch of Matu Mahasangha, a Hindu reformist sect in West Bengal. Carolee Schneemann was an artist. Charlie Panigoniak was an Inuit singer, best known for his version of "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" in the Inuktitut language. Carmine Persico was the head of the Colombo crime family. Ralph Hall was the oldest person ever to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives. Dan Jenkins was a sportswriter, as is his daughter, Sally, who wrote a particularly excellent obituary of him in the Washington Post. Jed Allen was a soap opera actor. Raven Grimassi wrote books promoting an Italian form of Wicca. Asa Brebner was a guitarist who, among other things, performed with The Modern Lovers on a couple of their albums. Hal Blaine was a prolific session drummer.

Jerry Merryman was one of the inventors of the handheld electric calculator. I am old enough to remember when calculators were not ubiquitous. If I recall correctly, it wasn’t until 11th grade physics that we were allowed to use them for exams. And those early calculators just did addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, and – if you had a really fancy one – exponents. That fancy one was, in my case, the Bowmar Brain, which cost $75. It was only a couple of years later, when I started college, that I got a Texas Instruments scientific calculator. I think it may have been a programmable one. It cost over $100 and had terrible battery life. By the time I graduated, I could buy a Sharp scientific calculator for about $20. That used AA batteries and lasted a couple of decades.

Non-celebrity Death Watch: Another former colleague, Sy Horowitz, died last week. He was a really nice guy, always interesting to talk with during a lunchtime walk on business trips. I wasn’t completely surprised, given that he was over 90, but having lost so many colleagues over the years makes me feel old.

Mostly Better: However, the cold viruses grabbed my vocal chords with them on their way out. Sigh.

Daylight Savings Time: I think I have found all the clocks that need to be reset. I cannot, however, figure out how to reset the owl that is nesting in our courtyard.

For the record, I would favor staying on DST year round. I love lots of light late in the afternoon. Please don’t remind me I said that if you should happen to be in the car with me at sunset, when I am likely to be whining about glare.

Social Media Annoyance: I can’t update my facebook status for some reason. Nor can I see my timeline. So, of course, I have all sorts of clever things I want to say.

That College Admissions Scandal: What I really want to know is how much the students involved were told about what was going on. I don’t think that, in general, students care as much about the alleged prestige of various schools as their parents do. (And, by the way, there are only two schools on the list that I would consider actual elite colleges, but that’s probably my academic snobbery at work.) I know there are students who have unrealistic views of what their dream school is, but it isn’t doing them any favors to get them into somewhere that isn’t a good fit for their abilities and interests. Of course, It appears that in some cases, their interests are partying and skiing, so I can understand why parents might not want to finance their little darling's dream education.

Celebrity Death Watch: Nick Cafardo was a sportswriter, who specialized in covering the Red Sox. Jeraldine Saunders wrote the memoir that inspired the TV show, The Love Boat. Mark Hollis was the lead singer of Talk Talk. Katherine Helmond was an actress, best known for roles in Who’s the Boss and Soap. Kevin Roche was an important architect, whose works included the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Denver Performing Arts Complex, and several corporate headquarters buildings. Ted Lindsay was a Hall of Fame hockey player for the Detroit Red Wings. T. Jack Lee directed NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in the early 1990’s. Carrie Ann Lucas was a disability rights advocate. Janet Asimov was the widow of Isaac Asimov and a writer, primarily of science fiction for children, in her own right. Andy Anderson was the drummer for The Cure. Doug Sandom was the original drummer for The Who, before Keith Moon. Andre Previn composed music for a lot of films and conducted several orchestras. Zhores Alfarov won a Nobel Prize in Physics for work involving semiconductor heterostructures, which have something to do with solid state devices. Johnny Romano played catcher for the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox in the 1960’s. Luke Perry was an actor, who became a teen idol for appearing in Beverly Hills, 90210.

QOTD: "I wouldn’t believe Donald Trump if he had his tongue notarized." – Alair Townsend, ca. 1990

Discovery of the Day: There is such a thing as Picture Yarn. This is a step beyond self-striping yarn. Alas, all the ones I really love are sold out, but it isn’t as if I don’t have way more yarn than I will use in my lifetime. Still, Abigail Grasso is a genius.

Ah-choo: I got struck with a cold on Saturday afternoon. What’s weird is how suddenly it hit me. I was fine one minute, and had a sore throat and couldn’t stop sneezing the next. I stayed home and in bed both Sunday and yesterday, but made the dubious decision to go into work today. I have not been particularly productive, however. Sigh. I did make plans for various entertainment events and some travel (both work-related and not). But I have a high priority task I am struggling to finish. It looks like it will have to wait until the snot production lessens.