I am fairly sure this is the latest I have ever done a year in review. Let’s just say that I’ve been crazy busy. Anyway, here we go in the same format I’ve used for several years now.

The worst thing that happened in 2024 was the whole fiasco with the HVAC leak in late June / early July. Which turned out to be due to a blockage from a line in a unit above mine, so didn’t involve as much money as it might have, but it was still very stressful.

Beyond that, there was also some medical stuff. Having cataract surgery was actually a really good thing. It was quite miraculous the morning after the first eye was done when I could read titles of books across the bedroom without putting on my glasses. (The second eye also went well, but that was a less dramatic change.) The knee issues that I had later in the year were also a big deal. Let’s just say I have good days and I have bad days. Getting old sucks.


Books: I read only 36 books in 2024, which is pathetically few for me. That was 14 non-fiction books and 22 fiction books. Favorites were Sleeping With the Fishes by Mary Janice Davidson, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, Sounds Like Titanic by Jessica Chiccehotto Hindman, Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, and a couple of Dick Francis mysteries. The worst book I read during the year was The Naked Face by Sidney Sheldon, a suspense novel full of racism and homophobia.

I didn’t manage any used bookstore runs over the year, though I did give away 4 books. I have at least 60 waiting to go out.

I belonged to three book clubs, one of which has disbanded.

As for book-related events, I went to the Moby Dick Marathon in San Francisco in October and even read one chapter (Chapter 8, The Pulpit).

Ghoul Pool: I finished 6th out of 14 players with a final score of 117 points. People I scored on were Jimmy Carter, Daniel J. Evans (unique), Shannon Doherty, Janis Paige, Jean Malaurie (unique), Bud Harrelson (unique), and Faith Ringgold (unique).

Travel: My only international trip of the year was to Portugal (Porto and Lisbon) and the Azores in May / June. But I had plenty of domestic travel. I went to New York City in late January / early February. Then to Salt Lake City in late February / early March for Roots Tech. The total solar eclipse took me to Bruceville, Texas (near Dallas) in April, including an Israeli dance camp. Also in April, I had an overnight trip to Richmond for the Virginia Storytelling Alliance gathering. In May I went to Colorado for RhinoStock (a memorial for a friend) and also had a quick trip to Indianapolis to go to a baseball game, which unfortunately got rained out. I flew back to Dallas in July for the National Puzzlers League con, adding on a train trip to Oklahoma City to go to a baseball game. In August, I went to a Jewish genealogy convention in Philadelphia, and added in a couple of days in New York City for Lollapuzzoola (and theatre going, of course). And in October, I made a quick trip to San Francisco for their Moby Dick Marathon.

Genealogy: I’ve continued mentoring members of my local Jewish genealogy society on Lithuanian Jewish genealogy. As I’ve probably mentioned before, when I was starting to do genealogy research, other people helped me, so I feel happy to be able to help other people.

In February, I went to Roots Tech, which is a large genealogy conference held annually in Salt Lake City. The most interesting thing there was the presentation on using DNA from an old envelope - amazing, but not ready for the general public yet. I also went to the IAJGS convention in Philadelphia in August, at which I finally got to meet a cousin in person, as well as doing some volunteering.

Baseball: As I mentioned above, I had a failed attempt to go to a minor league game in Indianapolis (damn rain!) but a more successful game experience in Oklahoma City in July.

Culture: I went to 10 musicals and one non-musical play. My favorites for the year were Tick … Tick .. Boom at the Kennedy Center, Harmony on Broadway, Soft Power at Signature Theatre, and Suffs on Broadway.

I saw 7 movies in theaters and two on airplanes. Favorites were Next Goal Wins, Shari and Lamb Chop, and My Penguin Friend.

Storytelling: I performed in a Better Said Than Done show in February and emceed at the Women’s Storytelling Festival in March. I told a story at the Artists Standing Strong Together New Year’s Eve storytelling show. I went to several local story swaps (some in person, some over zoom), as well as zoom story swaps in Los Angeles and in Ottawa, Canada. I saw a friend’s storytelling show as part of Artomatic. And I participated in several discussions of Grimm fairy tales.

Museums and Art: I went to an exhibit of Dorothea Lange’s photos at the National Gallery of Art with a friend (and looked at some other art in the museum afterwards). I saw a Judy Chicago retrospective at the New Museum in New York City. I went to much of Artomatic. And I went to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza in Dallas and the American Banjo Museum in Oklahoma City.

During my trip to Portugal, I went to a stained glass museum in Porto, the Museo Nacional de Azulejo (National Tile Museum) and Oceanario (aquarium) in Lisbon, and the Museum of Myths and Legends in Sintra.

Other Stuff:

I participated in Lollapuzzoola (a crossword contest) in August. I played board games, sometimes with the National Puzzlers’ League, sometimes with people I know from the loser community. I also went to other loser events, including a few parties and a couple of brunches.

I went to Kochavim, an Israeli folk dance weekend (in association with the eclipse).

I did a tour of M&S Schmalburg’s fabric flower factory (via the New York Adventure Club).

I attended a few lectures in the Leading Jewish Minds at MIT series (over zoom). And I went to a reception for MIT president Sally Kornbluth.

I’ve probably forgotten something or other among this, but it was a weird and stressful year. And I think that compared to normal people, I still did a lot of things.

Goals: So how did I do on my 2024 goals? Frankly, not very well. I did not circumnavigate the globe going westward, though I did map out about half of a general plan for doing it, so I’ll give myself a 5% on that goal. I didn’t make it to any national parks. I also did nothing about cleaning out my saved files of genealogy emails. I read 37 books out of my goal of 80, so I get only 45% there. I did make some progress on organizing my bedroom, but I don’t have a good metric for that. I’ll estimate that I accomplished about 50%. I finished just about 2/3 of one afghan (out of a goal to finish 3 afghans) so I’ll give myself 22% on that goal. I still haven’t found my parents’ slides. I made it to one AAA ballpark (Oklahoma City), and had an attempt at going to a game in Indianapolis, which got rained out. So I’lll get 25% on my goal of 4 AAA ballparks. I did fairly well on exercise the first part of the year, but my knee injury meant that I did very little from August on, so I’ll give myself a 60%.

So, overall, I’ll give myself a rather pathetic 23% for the year.

Which brings me to goals for 2025:

• Circumnavigate the globe going westward. I think I have a plan for somewhere in the October / November time frame.
  
  
• Go to at least 4 minor league baseball games.
  
  
• Finish 4 crafts projects.
  
  
• Read 80 books, with a stretch goal of 100.
  
  
• Finish going through my parents’ photographs and slides.
  
  
• Revisit / update my life list.
  
  
• Organize genealogy files.
  
  
• Go to at least 3 national parks.
  
  
• Learn to read Hangul (Korean writing system).
  
  
• Sort through cassette tapes.
  
  

Errands: I have been been absurdly distracted on all attempts to get caught up on things here. The first half of August was just errands, with dealing with things like updating insurance (because the company I had used for years decided to pull out of Virginia) and trying to make some plans for where to focus some decluttering efforts. It doesn’t help that a couple of friends call me to chat when they are trying to procrastinate on doing their housework.

Local Theatre Going - Nine: The only halfway interesting thing I accomplished in the first half of August was seeing Nine (the Maury Yeston musical) at the Kennedy Center as part of the Broadway Center Stage series, which is a scaled down minimally staged series. I like the score for the most part, though there are some songs that annoy me. (Fortunately, one of the ones I really dislike, “The Germans at the Spa,” was omitted altogether. And my favorite song from the show, “My Husband Makes Movies,” was done well.) The two most interesting things to note were that: 1) nearly every time I go to the Kennedy Center, I run into somebody I know. In this case, there were 5 women from my Chavurah there. And, 2: I had decided to go last minute and got a rush ticket at the box office for $38.50 for a center orchestra seat, which was a great deal given that the list price was over $100.

Book Club: Oh, wait, I did also have a Crones & Tomes book club meeting. We discussed Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver. I think I had an advantage reading it since I’m familiar with Appalachian Virginia and a late friend was Melungeon so I felt like I knew more about the cultural milieu than some of the other people in the group. On the other hand, I’ve never read David Copperfield (and I am not really big on Dickens.) Overall, I found it interesting, but it was too long and my wrists hurt getting through it.

IAJGS Conference: Later in August, I took the train up to Philadelphia to go to the International Association of Jewish Genealogical Societies conference. This was supposed to start with going to a baseball game (Phillies vs. Nationals) but I had a stupid accident. The conference was at the Sheraton, but I had decided to spend Saturday night at the Marriott, which was a bit cheaper. I got out of a taxi, grabbed my backpack and was putting it on, when I somehow stepped backwards onto the curb and tripped and fell, injuring my back. This was very painful. It was also not helped by an alarm going off at the hotel at 12:30 a.m., though that proved to be nothing major (aside from sleep deprivation). Anyway, I moved to the Sheraton in the morning, which was more convenient for the actual conference sessions. I didn’t think
I was badly injured, so I managed to limp through the conference.

As for the conference itself, here’s a brief list of presentations I went to:

Monday


• The Mess of New York City Vital Records - I was already pretty familiar with the work that Reclaim the Records has been doing, but this was interesting.
  
  
• Researching Small Landsmanshaftn Synagogues - this should have been interesting, but there wasn’t really enough detail.
  
  
• JRI-Poland Luncheon / JRI-Poland Annual Meeting. The luncheon talk by Andrew Carroll about his activities collecting war letters was particularly intriguing, though not especially relevant for me. I also liked that they’d seated people by what part of Poland their families were from, so I could chat with other people who had roots in Lomza Guberniya.
  
  
• BOF: Vinius District Research Group - good general discussion
  
  
• Landscape of Dreams: Jewish Genealogy in Canada - I’m still trying to figure out some details on how my great-uncle got to Canada (and then on to crossing the border to Buffalo).
  
  
• JewishGen Annual Meeting - mostly various awards. I was pleased to see that they named a new award series after Dick Plotz (who was a friend from both the puzzle world and the genealogy world).
  
  
• The Ron Arons Game Show Night - Jewpardy! is always a fun activity, but I was exhausted halfway through.
  

Tuesday

I’d planned to go on (and paid for) a morning walking tour, but my back was not in any condition for that, alas.


• The Importance of Memory in Building a Jewish future - Mostly an overview of the holdings at YIVO
  
  
• Litvak SIG Meeting - the annual catch-up of what is new.
  
  
• Holocaust Compensation and the United Restitution Organization - Since I am fairly sure both my father and grandfather got reparations money, I need to spend some time delving into these records
  
  
• Genealogy Death Match - This is another game show, featuring two people competing over whose records go further back. Old people like me are at an obvious disadvantage.
  
  

Wednesday

I had again planned on another walking tour, but was still not up for that. Sigh.


• Entering Eretz Israel: Getting Around Government Limitations - This covered legal possibilities during both the Ottoman Empire and the Britihs Mandate. I was particularly interested in learning about religious grounds for immigration, since I’ve been told my maternal grandfather studied at a yeshiva in Petah Tikva.
  
  
• When Traditional Genealogy and Genetic Genealogy Collide - I think everyone gets frustrated over people who expect either one path or the other to “cousin hunting” to be the be all and end all to solving genealogy mysteries. Unfortunately, this talk didn’t really come to an answer.
  
  
• BOF: Tracing the Tribe - Tracing the Tribe is definitely one of the better Jewish Genealogy groups on Facebook. This was an interesting and amusing talk by one of the moderators of it.
  
  
• Jewish American Life Beyond New York: The Industrial Removal Office, 1901-1917 - Most of this was focused on the East Coast, Midwest, and Great Plains, so was not particularly relevant for me, though there was some discussion of cities like Atlanta (where a large branch of my father’s family settled). There was, alas, not really any discussion of the Pacific Northwest, where my earliest immigrants from Lithuania to America went. Still, there are some sources I should check out.
  
  
• Gala Banquet - Arthur Kurzweil was the banquet speaker. He spoke well enough but didn’t really say anything I didn’t already know.
  
  

Thursday


• Letters Have Wings: Digitizing, Annotating, and Exhibiting Family Letters - I was volunteering as a session manager for this session. This had some good material about how to preserve and document family letters.
  
  
• Jewish Gen Belarus Research Division Meeting / Jewish Gen Belarus Research Division Luncheon - There was some material about the history of Belarus in light of the 1905 Russian revolution, but not a lot on good resources.
  
  
• Mentoring - I spent a couple of hours helping people find some Lithuanian data. I always enjoy doing this, since I benefited a lot from other people helping me when I first started doing genealogy.
  
  

Overall, the conference was reasonably useful though being injured was annoying. I traveled onward to New York on Friday. I will write about that in the next entry.

I saw a Facebook ad for a Get Organized conference, held on-line from 11-15 September. While there was an option to pay for unlimited access, I thought that the free access to the sessions (which was only good for 24 hours for each one) would be good enough for me. I didn’t make it to all the sessions I wanted to because I had important things to do (errand running, reading, napping), but I did make it to several. As one might expect, some were not really helpful, but there were some excellent tidbits mixed in. By the way, most of the sessions were on the order of 20 minutes or so, which was certainly more tractable than a full hour would have been.

Monday

On Monday I started by going to Decluttering for Beginners by Donna K. White. I don’t really consider myself a beginner seeing as I’ve been attempting to declutter for years, but I certainly haven’t made huge amounts of progress. My key takeaway was that organizing and decluttering are not the same thing. Organizing is problem solving, while decluttering is just getting things out of the house. She defined clutter as anything that consistently gets out of control in your house. You need to declutter first in order to get organized. The key is to just jump in.

She had what she said was a 5 step decluttering process. I’m not sure I actually captured her five things, there. But here’s what I caught:

1. Start with visible places, not hidden spaces. In my case, this means that I am free to ignore the filing cabinets.
   
2. The goal isn’t to store things but to give everything a real place to live. You should ask, “if I needed this item, where’s the first place I’d look for it.” This should be based on instinct, instead of analysis.
   
3. Give yourself permission to ignore emotional associations that things have.
   
4. Take things to where they belong now.
   
5. The goal should be to make the space better. Removing anything from the space counts as decluttering.
   

Overall, as a person who tends toward the perfect as the enemy of good enough, this was reasonably useful advice.

After that, I went to the Kickoff, which had been presented earlier in the day by Laura Smith and Tasha Lorentz, who ran the whole conference. They said some similar things. Namely, being organized requires everything to have a home. They advised beginning with the end in mind and focusing on what makes you smile. They also advised focusing on a few small things. Finally, they suggested that the way not to get overwhelmed by the conference was to prioritize watching the live events, instead of the prerecorded ones.

Next I went to How to Assess Your Routine to Avoid Overhauling Your Entire Life by Ashley Brown. I think part of my issues are that years of school and work imposed routines on me and I haven’t really established routines since I retired. She claimed that everyone does have routines, but I think I would say it would be more accurate that everybody has areas of life that should have routines, e.g. self-care, cleaning, planning, cooking, etc. Some of my takeaways were:

• Identify what routines will be most supportive for you to focus on and focus on one at a time.
  
• The goal is to solve consistent problems using consistent solutions.
  
• Use feeling vs. fact to decide where to start. Identify which areas of life feel chaotic and out of control and which make you feel anxious or stressed.
  
• Lead with curiosity. Pay attention to how routines make you feel.
  

The final presentation I watched on Monday was Chaos to Calm: Uncovering the Roots of Clutter and Creating a Peaceful Home by Katy Joy Wells. She identified several common causes of clutter and suggested how to deal with them.

1. Procrastination is really about avoiding stress, not the thing itself. Identify what you’re really avoiding and implement a starting ritual countdown to begin the task.
   
2. How we perceive value is not necessarily the real value. Some examples are frequency with which we use something, how difficult it would be to replace, emotional attachment, monetary value, and potential usefulness. It helps to reference your core values as a person, e.g. simplicity.
   
3. Scarcity mindset vs. abundance mindset. The search for a good deal is associated with a scarcity mindset, as is keeping things in case we might need them later on. She suggested writing affirmations and keeping them where you see them and reading them out loud, which is the sort of thing I absolutely loathe. More usefully, she noted that it’s hard to get rid of things that represent who you used to be (e.g. college textbooks) and who you want to be.
   
4. Mainstream culture pushes acquiring things. To deal with this, focus on shopping more intentionally
   
5. Perfectionism, which leads to shame. Instead, remind yourself that your home should get messy and just because it’s not optimal doesn’t mean it isn’t beneficial.
   

By the way, there was a mid-day meet up every day, which included 10 minutes to focus on decluttering one type of thing. Monday’s was clothing. This is actually an area that isn’t a problem for me, so I used to time to try to clear out some email, which is a problem for me.

Tuesday

The first session I went to on Tuesday was Three Easy Things to Declutter in Each Room by The Carla Project. I had a significant issue with this presentation because she went room by room and asked people to find 25 things to declutter in each room. She did have some example suggestions which were, in some cases, just three categories of things (e.g. for the bathroom, she suggested packaging, anything expired, and anything you don’t like). But, overall, I thought this was misleading and not particularly useful.

Next up was Time Management Tips for Empty Nesters by Suzy Mighell. I’m not really an empty nester since I was never actually a nester per se, but I’m in the right age group. There were a few potentially useful takeaways:

• Don’t make decisions when you are Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired = HALT. (Advice givers and self-help types love acronyms.)
  
• Make lists every evening for the following day.
  
• Only start things you know you can finish. Keep your schedule realistic and don’t compare yourself to other people.
  

Tracy Linn presented Organize Your Home With a Home Hub. She defined this as a a designated place for coordinating events. She showed some options for types of calendars. Things she included in planning are calendar, scheduler, chores, cleaning lists, and menus, and suggested identifying the top 5-8 areas you plan to streamline. Frankly, her presentation skills were not great, e.g. she didn’t know how to screen share, so I wasn’t impressed.

The Tuesday mid-day 10 minute decluttering challenge was a 10-minute tidy up. I spent a little time going through a backlog of unopened snail mail. Given how much I am away from home, that is an ongoing issue for me.


Wednesday

I started with watching Three Steps to a Sparkling Home by Becky Rapinchuk Her main point was that you should just start and do something. Then she did go on with her three steps.

1. Quick declutter. She suggested aiming for 5 bags of trash in 15 minutes, which seems like an awful lot to me.
   
2. Then clean the kitchen sink. Since I’m a “wash dishes as I go” type of person, this is about a one minute task.
   
3. Finally, catch-up on laundry. This is actually another non-issue for me. I do my laundry roughly every 1-2 weeks, depending on how much I’m home and I always put everything away right afterwards.
   

She went on to daily and weekly task lists. While there are many things I could definitely stand to do more often (e.g. nature abhors a vacuum and so do I), her issues were not the same as mine. I did like her statement that consistency is the key, but, overall, her talk wasn’t particularly relevant for me.

Organizing Your Photos by Casey von Stein (aka Miss Freddy) was definitely one of the best sessions of the conference. Her advice was the start with digital photos and write a list of everywhere your photos are. Ideally, you want your digital photo hub to be on an external hard drive. Then follow these 4 steps:

1. Centralize all your photos in one place (this is the digital photo hub). You can use copy and paste to do this.
   
2. Get rid of duplicates.
   
3. Sort. Note that software can do steps 2 and 3.
   
4. Back-up. Best practice is to have 3 copies. She suggested hard drive, one copy off site (the cloud counts), and services like Amazon photos or dropbox.
   

Then you can create albums, photo books, and custom videos. Note that albums reference photos but don’t create additional copies. After the digital photos are organized, scan printed photos. It’s also worth playing with facial recognition and keyword search. She also mentioned having a consistent naming scheme.

She also suggested doing a daily clean-up, which seems excessive to me. It’s a good idea to save screenshots to your notes app rather than keeping them in photos.

Next, I watched Surviving and Thriving with Chronic Illness by Sarah McDonald. I’m not dealing with chronic illness, but I thought she might have something to say about having limited time to deal with housework. Overall, this wasn’t particularly useful for me, but I did capture a few takeaways:

• Not all chores are equal.
  
• Sometimes, convenience is a matter of survival. I interpret that as not feeling guilty about things like buying pre-chopped vegetables.
  
• Simplifying things is not inferior.
  

Justine Hovey’s talk, titled You Don’t Need a Craft Box was more relevant. Her focus is paper crafts, but I think her ideas are more broadly applicable.

• One of the things she showed off as not being needed is a Brand Box. This is an absolutely gorgeous German product that I definitely don’t have room for. But, ooh, if only. Of course, her point was that you don’t need it, but then she has one.
  
• What she did suggest was a bunch of 12 x 12 inch boxes, each of which has the supplies you need for a specific technique, e.g. embroidery.
  
• Paper is tedious to organize, so limit buying a lot of it. Buy a multipack of cardstock and don’t buy more until you use up a given color. Buying a sampler lets you figure out what you will actually use.
  
• Pieces of paper smaller than about 1/4 sheet get tossed. Er, not gonna happen. They’re useful for collaging.
  
• She uses evernote to keep a digital inventory of supplies.
  
• Instead of going overboard buying a bunch of organizers first, take out what you need to organize and then look for the right bin or box for it.
  
• Avoid micro-organizing.
  

The Wednesday mid-day 10 minute challenge was a digital declutter. I spent the time working on deleting email.

Thursday

I started by watching a Wednesday presentation by Michelle Brooks titled Get Out of Your Own Head and Make Progress Towards Your Goals. She had a fairly obvious step by step approach:

1. Dream big. Acknowledge where you want to go and write it down.
   
2. Identify where you are. This will change over time.
   
3. Get to work. Do one thing every day. If you’re not moving forward you’re moving backwards.
   
4. Celebrate. Figure out what motivates you and make rewards fun.
   

This all sounds easy, but the devil is in the details.

Then came Folding 101 by Sophie Liard. I found it hard to believe that I actually watched a 17 minute video of someone folding clothes. Actually, it was somewhat reassuring. In short, my folding methods are generally pretty good. She is excessively fond of folding things in thirds and loves drawer dividers, but aside from that, most of what I do is similar to what she does. I was, however, disappointed that she didn’t demonstrate folding fitted sheets.

Crystal Paine presented 3 Simple Shirts to Radically Improve Your Productivity. This was mostly an attempt at motivational self-talk, most of which completely defeats the purpose as far as I’m concerned. Her three shirts were:

1. Change “I have to” to “I get to.”
   
2. Instead of saying “I don’t have time,” say “I am choosing to spend my time differently.”
   
3. Ask the question “what will it matter at the end of my life?”
   

I don’t know about you, but that’s the sort of thinking that got my place into such a mess.


The last talk I watched was Get a Game Plan: 3 Steps to Design Your Winning Week by Anna Deamon Koranick. This appealed to me because I tend to like planning things, sometimes more than I like actually doing them. At any rate, here are my notes from that session:

• To decide what matters most, apply the Pareto principle (80/20 rule). Frame things to do in terms of roles.
  
• Prioritize in three categories:
  
  
  
  1. Boulders are immovable, important but not urgent, and routine
     
  2. Big rocks are high priority, important and/or urgent
     
  3. Pebbles are everything else
     
  
  
• Watch out for productivity pitfalls and consistently underestimating how long tasks will take. To overcome these, batch tasks together. Block time by placing boulders first, then adding in standing meetings and routines for morning, evening, workday startup, workday shutdown, and weekly planning.
  
• Building a weekly game plan is the most important thing you can do. You should decide what it will include, what tools you need, and when to make your plan. But you should also make it fun.
  

The mid-day challenge for Thursday was a 10 minute decluttering frenzy. I continued working on my inbox.

The conference continued on Friday, but Rosh Hashanah started that night, so I had other things to focus on. I still think I got a fair amount out of at least some of the presentations I watched, though I am glad I just went for the free option. As for immediate actions, I decided to focus on getting rid of things by listing 5 things a week on my local buy nothing group. I started that this week and so far have given away an alarm clock I never even opened and a digital thermometer that my former employer sent me at the beginning of the pandemic (which was never opened because I already had / have a perfectly good one). I have a taker for the plastic horse I was going to use as a hat decoration before I took a different direction and she plans to pick it up on Monday. If nobody wants them, a pair of shoes will go into the thrift shop donation box and a koozie will probably just get tossed.

Celebrity Death Watch: Isamu Akasaki was a physicist who worked on LEDs. Tony Pola was the drummer for Beasts of Bourbon. Arthur Kopit was a playwright who wrote the book for the musical Nine and is best known for the play Oh Dad, Poor Dad, Mamma’s Hung You in the Closet and I’m Feelin’ So Sad. B.B. Dickerson played bass for Eric Burden and War. Simon Bainbridge was a composer who set poems by Primo Levi to music. Paul Ritter was an actor, best known for the tv series Friday Night Dinner. Joey Hummel ghost-wrote over 70 Wonder Woman comic books in the 1940’s. Hans Kueng was a theologian. Albee Hastings was a Congressman from Florida. Howard Weizmann was a lawyer with a lot of famous Hollywood clients. John Naisbitt was a futurologist, whose book Megatrends was on the New York Times bestseller list for two years. DMX was a rapper and earned me 19 ghoul pool points. Ramsey Clark was Attorney General of the U.S. under LBJ. Rusty Young was one of the lead members of Poco. Bernie Madoff made off with a lot of other people’s money. Felix Silla was best known for playing Cousin Itt on The Addams Family. Helen McCrory was a British actress. Barry Mason wrote the song “Love Grows (Where My Rosemary Goes)” among other things. Charles Geschke co-founded Adobe. Black Rob and Shock G were rappers. Jim Steinman wrote, among other songs, “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Tempest Storm was a burlesque star. Idriss Deby was the president of Chad, whose assassination should have gotten more news coverage. Joe Long played bass for The Four Seasons. Dan Kaminsky was a computer security researcher. Billie Hayes played Mammy Yokum in the Broadway musical, Lil’ Abner, but is better known for playing Witchiepoo on H. R. Pufnstuf. Eli Broad made a lot of money as a real estate developer and became a philanthropist, expanding the arts in Los Angeles and funding the Broad Institute for medical research at MIT. Bobby Unser won the Indy 500 three times. Yitzhak Arad directed Yad Vashem (a Holocaust memorial / museum in Jerusalem) for 20 or so years. Lloyd Pe=rice was an R&B singer. Lucinda Franks was the first woman to win a Pulitzer for national reporting. Geoff Crowther wrote for Lonely Planet.

Frank Jacobs was one of that usual gang of idiots, i.e. a writer for Mad. In particular, he wrote a lot of song and poetry parodies.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh was Queen Elizabeth II’s consort. He earned me 20 ghoul pool points.

Walter Mondale was Vice President under Jimmy Carter and lost the 1984 Presidential race.

Michael Collins flew the Apollo 11 command module, while Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon.

Olympia Dukakis was an actress, best known for Moonstruck, as well as playing Anna Madrigal in Tales of the City.


Non-celebrity Death Watch: Marvin Moskowitz died of COVID-19 in January. He and I had dated briefly in the 1980’s in Los Angeles and reconnected on Facebook. I lost saw him a couple of years ago, when we went to the Museum of Jurassic Technology together during my layover in L.A. on the way to Tahiti. He almost certainly contracted the virus from unmasked people on public transit. I am furious.

Both Merrilee Palansch and her husband, Bob, died abut a week apart in January. She was a talented storyteller and he was a great supporter of her storytelling, as well as a musician in his own right. They also collaborated over 60 or so years of marriage in performances, activism, and raising their family.

I knew Michael Loo from flyer talk. We had dinner together during some of his trips to Washington, D.C. and mine to New York. He was kind and generous and a fine violist. I particularly admired his efforts to continue traveling over the years, despite health challenges.

I hope to experience less loss during the rest of the year.


Non-human Death Watch: Amphora in Vienna closed in mid-January. This was a huge family restaurant, open 24 hours a day, and was the place everyone here went to, often after something like a concert at Jammin’ Java. Their Herndon diner is still open, but is considerably less convenient for me.


Don’t Analyze This Dream: I was at an airport and panicking because I couldn’t find my mask. Then I discovered I had a white paper mask in my pocketbook, but I couldn’t figure out how to put it on.


Mental Health: A few weeks ago, I went to a William Barton Rogers Society talk that had to do with student mental health services at MIT. While the talk was generally encouraging, one of the speakers kept talking about “the stigma of mental health.” Er, I know that she meant the stigma of mental health treatment, but I still found that annoying.


Leading Jewish Minds at MIT: This is a series that has gone virtual, which lets me attend. Over the past months, I’ve been to a couple of talks. One was by Jay Kayser about Modernism. His chief argument was that there isn’t a common language for understanding modern arts and everything depends on Easter eggs. My opinion is that’s a lazy position. It may take more effort but it is still possible to understand, say, that the key word in the title of Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” is “descending” and that makes the painting about motion.

This week, there was a talk by David Autor about “The Faltering Escalator of Urban Opportunity.” This really came out of a study on the future of work. His key point was that the jobs that exist now often did not exist in the past and that this has led to increased inequality.


Ahhhscars: My friend, Paul, and I have gone a few times to the California State Society Ahhhscars party, which is a nice excuse to get dressed up, dance, have fancy food and cocktails, and have photos taken with Oscars-themed props. This year it was virtual and started with a trivia contest. Fortunately, most of the questions were not about movies, though there was a picture round which had to do with vampire movies. It turns out that Paul was really good at identifying those. I have seen a lot of vampire movies but have a terrible visual memory, so was pretty useless. (I was better at the other sorts of questions). Anyway, we were on the winning team. (And the other team was the one that had a congressman on it.) As for the other activities, both of us failed to correctly predict the Best Picture winner. I did enjoy some of the snacks they sent (cheese popcorn, sparkling wine, Oscar-shaped cookies) and gave away others. An in-person party would, of course, have been more fun, but this was still fun.

New Garbage Disposal: I don’t think I mentioned that I finally got my garbage disposal replaced. I have learned that if you google what something should cost, you can expect to pay 2-3 times that amount. I am okay with that as I am not interested in doing much beyond changing lightbulbs myself. At any rate, the new one is remarkably quiet. Next big household project is probably getting the ceiling lamp in my bedroom replaced, largely as part of my quest to get rid of things that have unique lightbulbs.

Earworm: For some reason, Jonathan Richman's "Here Come the Martian Martians" popped into my head the other day. And I can't get rid of it. At least it's a song I like.