bonorris.com

 

 

                          ave et atque
 

 

 

Lear, Act I, scene iv

 
I grow old ... I grow old ....
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock

Ring Mountain came through with some solid wildflowers on the day's respite from two weeks' worth of rain.  Pulled in the purple sanicle, as well as the elusive (for me) owl's clover.  It took a closeup photograph for me to realize just how apt the name was, for a change. 

I should underscore here, that wildflower identification and blogging is only for the manliest of men, notwithstanding what you might hear from teenaged boys, who might think slightly otherwise.  I mean, it is only the most rugged of high-testosterone cowboys that can blithely coo over spotting that cute li'l owl's face to the left, no?

Ring Mountain, 21 March

The Marin wildflower community was spot on -- Wolf Ridge is a powerhouse.  Not too shabby in the views, as well, although I notice that I didn't look up much.  finally saw the suncup, and a variety of other species....more shooting stars and milk maids in profusion.

Wolf Ridge

Boldy chasing after wildflowers, even with a nasty flu (notwithstanding a flu shot this Fall!) and some rainy weather.   Having dropped off the young soccer player at practice, I had a loose hour or two, and advantaged myself of the Bald Hill trailhead off Oak Road in San Anselmo.  The beginning was inauspicious, as i slipped my way up the watershed, seeing only the typical sparse undercanopy shrubs of the area. 

But once I popped onto the ridge, I was back in business with all the old friends of early Spring -- a profusion of shooting stars on a couple hillsides; a riot of milk maids in a shady spot; and buttercups everywhere.  Some mysteries popped up, too, as I saw yellow flowers similar to buttercups.  And on the left is the new flower of the day -- the fiddleneck, Amsinckia menziesii. 

Musical accompaniment today: Philip Glass's Akhenaton.  As I told Jules, it was very hard not to walk in time to the minimalist beat, swinging the arms as though I were a bas relief Egyptian.  Thanks be the flower gods, that I didn't see another soul the whole time.


More rainflowering March 2011.
New: online shopping sites encourage us to create lists of consumer non-durables that they'd like to get.  well, I have my wildflower wishlist now.

Spring is stealing back into Northern California, and I am again determined to implement Wm. Blake's suggestion "To see .... a heaven in a wild flower."  As usual, though, the good and ferocious naturalists at the Marin chapter of the California Native Plants Society have beaten me to it, boldly striding into the late Winter terrain and finding a great variety of ethereal wildflowers.  The chapter flaunts their lists of their finds almost weekly, and suffice it to say, this junior botanists is lucky to spy maybe 10% of theirs.  For instance, when I trod the Sun and Ocean View Trails around Muir Woods yesterday, there was little to be found, apart from the trillium, which I saw for the first time.  But, as usual, the Marin Headlands came through for me today -- whereas yesterday even the coastal lupine was demurely in bud, but high above 101 and the Pacific Ocean, the same lupines were blooming riotously. Perhaps it's sunnier there, or the temperature is better moderated by the San Francisco Bay, but it is a different world.  The din of the freeway below is somewhat jarring, but the iPhone, with its Carla Bruni tracks, served well.  To the right is a new flower, one that occasioned some illicit off trail tromping by me and others.  Although it resembles milk maids, Cardamine californica, I think it's some species of wallflower (Erysimum franciscanum or Erysimum menziesii).

This is the more common white milk maids, seen abundantly throughout the day's hike (and in the Muir Woods, too)    --  a foot or two in height, with cluster of small white flowers rising well above the leaves.

As I have succumbed to this inevitable joy in the wildflower (is it born of sense of aging, and will it culminate in floppy khaki hats, walking sticks and zinc oxide on the nose?), no little portion of the pleasure flows from spotting the same friends at the same point of the year, before they recede into green anonymity for the other eleven months.  And, as I've grown to know the headlands pretty well, I see the same flowers at the same places each year.  The shooting star in the wildflower page linked below faithfully appears at the same small escarpment, where it finds balance with the fleshy sedum.  Later on, it's a field of baby blue eyes, but the white variety.  Well played, old friends!

More wildflowering february 2011.

As my elder son finds himself on the brink of college, I find myself dreams of college.  Sometimes i am pawing through enormous catalogs of course offerings all of which are have extensive and contradictory prerequisites.  Other times, I'm revisiting college myself, through the eyes of a 17 year old.  In the real world, I am envisioning a last hurrah, a trip with him in olde Europe before dropping him off in the land of bricks, and grassy lawns. 

For some reason, though, this has gotten me to thinking about the burden of the past (pace Samuel Johnson), and how the 21st century deals with the the heavy weight of past creativity.  For instance, when classical composers sat down to write music, they'd maybe heard a couple hundred performances, if that, as live performances were difficult to get to outside of major metropoli.  today, what with recorded music and all, we've heard all there is to hear, and more.  has this made it harder to be original?  I wonder whether the prevalence of sampling other melodies isn't part of this -- the originality lies in accepting the weight of the past, manipulating it to a new strain. 

in academic circles, though, there's a great premium placed on echt originality, lest one run afoul of plagiarism.  but today it's so much easier to learn that someone else is pawing around in the same furrow of ideas --  ssrn.com acts as a bulletin board where academics stake out turf, indicating their intention to push out an article about a certain theme.  To combat this,  I encourage the students in my midst to use this profusion of easily accessible writing, by thinking up outre hypotheses, then using the sheer mass of words out there to substantiate it, at least a little bit.  This stands in marked contrast to the way in which past scholars established there reputations, by knowing things, or as Gladwell puts it, knowing how to find things as Eco's library served.  As search has become a trivial act, it is the manipulation of symbols that matters. 

in a personal sense, too, the burden of the past has pressed upon me greatly in the past weeks.  my mother's birthday was the 18th, and she died on the 19th of february 2006.  So, the walls of my home echo those of my childhood home, wearing the photographs of the lost generation.  Less sad, those childhood photographs are increasingly relics of the past, too.

 

 
Building on the runaway success of the new tradition of lobster and champagne for father's day, the crustaceans in our midst sacrificed themselves in creating a post-Thanksgiving, pre-Christmas food ritual -- December crabfest.  Some San Francisco bay dwellers substitute Dungeness crab in for the Thanksgiving turkey, and there's a long tradition of crab eating in these parts, dating back to the Gold Rush.

I cast about to figure out how worried I should be about feasting upon a possibly scarce resource: but it isn't clear how poorly or well the crab population is doing. The Dungeness crab harvest has been increasing in recent decades (per Wikipedia), although this may be more a sign of improved and enthusiastically applied fishing technology than a robust population of crab. Average crab size was 2-3 lbs. a century ago, while the typical crab today is more at 1.5 lbs, often an indicator of a younger, less stable population. Through trial and error, the California Department of Fish and Game eventually realized delaying the opening of the seaon to protect recently molted crab, as well as increasing the minimum size of the catch, could prevent destruction of the fishery entirely.  As with any fishery, the catch ebbs and flows: 2008 was a tough year for the crab fishery locally, though it seems to have rebounded.

With most world fishing stocks in decline, the practice of eating wild game may well be considered an act of barbarism by future generations, akin to the way we contemn the Hemingway big game hunter for the gratuitous, self-indulgent squandering of a resource.  This loss of the wild in our diets, though, may well be yet another disconnect from what is natural and healthy.  I suspect that there are benefits to absorbing a wider range of nutrients than farmed products: Pollan writes about the virtues of grass-fed beef over corn-fed beef, for one.  Perhaps I should cast around for more sustainable traditions -- perhaps the December pickleweed loaf, garnished with Madrone berries?

In any event, I cooked up in they style of Cua Rang Me with tamarind (and this is the recipe I should've used).  The tamarind and crab innards infused sauce is a powerful dark smelly thing, not to be trifled with.  Should've cracked the claws so the meat itself was better infused with the sauce in the stir fry.  Well, perhaps the tradition will be better executed next time around, if the harvest cooperates and the guilt stays manageable.....
 

 
Turns out that America is really an exceptional place, at least its kitchens. We are an exceptionally weak people, so tired of political factionalism, a sagging economy, the threat of climate change and all, that we are incapable of slicing a pan of brownies by hand.  I mean, that involves taking a knife out of a drawer, roughly estimating the appropriate brownie unit size, dividing that by the size of the pan itself, painfully pulling said knife through the cooked brownies perhaps five or six times, then placing the brownie cutting knife into the sink for clean up.  This is simply too much work for us, hence the genius behind Slice Solutions.

This circular also raises another troubling issue -- beyond being rather fatigued and stymied by the prospect of cutting gooey confections, the American people's steady consumption of reality TV and Sarah Palin tweets has destroyed our will to eat. Hence, the clever disguises: I mean, who eats a plain ole cake any more (well, actually, I do: a recent mad affair with Susie Cakes and her deft touch with buttercream ended very poorly, with a hundred pound weight gain in less than a month and many tears).  But, I demand a cake that looks like a cookie.  Only thing better would be a cake that looked like a salad, I suppose, and could talk to me about how nutritious and healthy it was....

update: 14 December 2010

The plot thickens a bit (a lesser person might note that the batter thickens, but that would never get past the editorial board of this tony website), as I noticed a particularly fine object today, "the Baker's Edge Brownie Pan," which guarantees that each brownie will have at least two crusty edges. 

   At least we exceptional Americans can be assumed to be capable of dragging a knife through the brownies, All By Ourselves.  But, perhaps more disturbing, is the thought that we are such a prissy bunch that we simply cannot be expected to eat a gooey mass of chocolate, flour and sugar.  And we're willing to pay $32 to avoid that dread unpleasantness. 
 

  The reality TV star Sarah Palin gave a speech today on US
monetary policy, of all things.  I suppose there's no getting around the fact that she's planning to run for the White House in 2012 and is the presumptive favorite to be the nominee of the grand old tea party. Given that I once resided in Alaska, albeit briefly, I apologize to the entire country and world for the fact that I didn't have coffee with her in Wasilla and persuade her to use her talents in a way that would be less socially destructive.

In any event, Palin enlightened the crowds today with her perspective on the Federal Reserve Board's planned quantitative easing, as she argued that real Americans are already seeing inflation in grocery stores (tho' increases in food prices is at .6% a historic low) and that US inflation will approach levels seen in Weimar Germany.  It's interesting to see that her speechwriters are getting smarter, what with the allusion to historical events of almost a century ago, but they're not quite there yet -- if Obama is Hitler, then he cannot also be Reichskanzler Stresemann, the leader of Weimar Germany.  Note to the speechwriters: Nazi Germany was a response to the scorned political and social liberality of the Weimar era (which incidentally begat Brecht, Bauhaus, and other fine "B" things, I'm sure). 
 
On the factual point that Palin avers -- that inflation is surging in food prices, and will only get worse, Sullivan had a field day parsing the mistatement: actually inflation in food prices has been near 0% for some time.  A blog commenter was pithier:  "Yes, even I can see inflation from my back yard."
 

   

At some point, my father became my best friend, hence doubling or squaring my sadness at his passing.  The last months were difficult for him, as the heroic efforts of a succession of cardiologists hit the wall of structurally wounded heart.  His daily regimen of more than ten pharmaceuticals no longer sufficed to circulate sufficient oxygen to his organs, and the effort of rising out of a chair had become a considerable trial, triggering autonomic panting. He bore all the deteriorations stoically, without complaint.

It seems to me a cruel irony of fate that his heart was failing him, for it never failed anyone else: he loved all people, and could find something interesting, something good in just about everyone.  Just as I can never recall him swimming in water, or breaking a sweat in pursuit of exercise, or plying a handtool (tho' he had an extensive collection of socket wrenches), I never heard him speak of anyone in spite, ever.

The feeling was mutual, mostly.* 

Having been the one to watch over his increasingly rigorous regime of tests, doctor visits and medications these past months, I am in awe of how dad was able to do all this, and much more, for my mother whose "benign" brain tumor made her last years a tortured, abominable loss of physical and mental function.  I am relatively robust yet this grueled me, and have no idea how an 80 year old man with a 30% ejection fraction was able to tend to a decaying spouse, all the while grieving her manifold suffering and the loss of a wife of 45 years.

and so, my sister and I are now suddenly middle-aged orphans, separated from the two that knew our first words and watched us toddle upon the floor. 
==============
* I have an old volume written Panagiota Bonorris, entitled Let Me Tell You How Long It Took For George Bonorris to Propose to Me (or make any decision, for that matter).

this past year, I have found myself living in a "traditional" California 50s era subdivision*: an absence of sidewalks, broad ribbons of spaghettied asphalt roads, sprawling one-story ranch houses with integrated garages, etc. Soulless, it could be said. 

But what's fascinating to me, is the landscaping, which is my personal Proustian tea-soaked madeleine, unchanged from the original plans of the period: xeriscaped rock gardens, curving stone and brick masonry retaining walls, exotic shrubs (bird of paradise, brazillian princess flower, yuccas and the bottlebrush tree (Callistemon rigidus) with its red hairbrush flowers chiefly used to comb pollen through elementary schoolers' hair), but most of all SERIOUS TOPIARY, in the manner of the High Geometric American School.  I mean to catalog all the specimens, but have already risked arrest a few times in this very security conscious 'hood when I've tarried more than a second or two in front of my targets.  I have to wonder whether some of the sales contracts for these homes have required the new owners to maintain the topiary in pristine condition in perpetuity. 

   

I highly admire the commitment to shrubbery evinced at the right here -- a dedicated brick planter no less.  I don't know that there's a term of art for this dumbbell styled specimen, but there ought to be.

------
* First subdivision law enacted in California in 1893, Chapter 80, Statutes of 1893, and "Among the Act's purposes are to encourage and facilitate orderly community development, coordinate planning with the community pattern established by local authorities, and assure proper improvements are made, so that the area does not become an undue burden on the taxpayer."
Gomes v. County of Mendocino (1995) 37 Cal. App. 4th 977, 985. Somewhat surprisingly, there is no mention of "topiary," whatsoever.                     

stumbled across some wildflower pictures from Big Sur.  I never figured out what this smallish white flower was, but loved its very dry look.

   
                     

in honor of the solstice, made a quick trip to Shasta this past weekend.  despite an early concern about summiting, the entire team made it to the top just fine.  note well the fact that the sunglasses cracked under the effort of summiting, and yet, somehow,  I did not.  this is not to say that I haven't been recuperating ever since.....

shasta 2010


   
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finally hit upon a tradition for this hallmark holiday -- lobster, champagne and briam, the mediterranean roast vegetables, accented with tomato and cumin.  this is a keeper.  next year, need to find someone willing to clean the lobster pot.


   



                     

I found myself in Cincinnati for a rowing regatta (go Redwood!), but it would seem that I managed to have a blast sampling the regional cuisine and seeing the sights: five-way chili, goetta, turtle sundaes, and the fountain of bourbon that is central Kentucky.

more roadtripping

    
                     

a curiously moist and cool Spring/Summer means the hunt is still on.  Tried on a new hike, out of Fairfax and Porteous Rd, and the Deer Park School; ridge trail, to bald hill trail, through six points, skirting the Yolanda Trail.  Unshabby.

more May 2010 wildflowers

    
                     

I've been a little droopy lately -- low energy, general feeling of achiness, a sense that
I won't be going to Greece this Summer.  What better remedy than a big hike up my old favorite Mt. Tallac for some vigorous motion, and a strong dash of risk (incoming storm front).  Plus, a welcome contrast to the heavily proc essed world of the casinos clotted upon the south shore. 

more Tallac 2010


                     

as previously described here, during my daily bike commute (merrily avoiding Mini Cooper sized potholes, aggressive drivers and the occasional surprise! door opened in my path), I periodically spot a random note left upon the street.  Yesterday, I found a treat -- a poem about Mount Tamalpais, the mystical 2000 foot peak that dominates Marin (basically, all Marin housing occupies the flat and not-so-flat areas surrounding the mount; when returning home from the eastern part of the state, one spies its slouching ridges from 20 miles away, in the marshes of east novato). 

here's the thing itself -- a cheesy long-exposure shot of a wooded, cascading stream is backed by a cheesy bit of woody, cascading amateur poetry.  It must be shared:

  

Now, I am no great student of things poetical, but let me take a stab at parsing the meaning behind these five stanzas....<>but let me say this up front, I think it would be absolutely delightful if this were a lost poem of Walt Whitman, and I'm hacking away at it like a blogging Zorro!< style="font-family: monospace;">

Why be at the East Peak   [ok, we start in the East, the metaphorical beginning of everything -- each day, the font of human culture -- towards the rise of the sun/Son – an easter allusion? 90 degrees on the compass rose; what's more, the poem challenges our very right to exist, we must justify ourselves and our lives.  A ripsnorting start!]
When the pale yellow light
Of sunset thickens in  [! oddly, the poet is on the East Peak, looking away from or /towards the sunset? Or are they just cardinally challenged?]
The frizzed moss of the laurels [laurels, greek symbol of honor and Apollo, the god of the intellect?] by the way, I like the language in this stanza the most, esp. the image of the sunset's golden syrupy light thickening, and "frizzed" is nice too]

Why peer into the madrone leaves,
Heaped and brittle [another clue about the Poet -- she's apparently got x-ray vision, capable of looking through autumnal piles of leaves from evergreeen (!) shrubs]
On the North side?  [second stanza, North, setting up of the four points of the compass tailored to four stanzas? a little trite, I suppose, but an acceptable structure for a four stanza poem.  We’re moving against the stream,  counterclockwise, to 360 degrees, I can’t wait for West!  This counterclockwise motion, does this suggest a poet who's out of joint with nature?]  < style="font-family: monospace;">

Why stare at the creeks,
Or the willows
With their tongued leaves [hott!  the leaves are childishly taunting the poet, by sticking their tongues out?  or perhaps this is a minor romantical allusion to a sexy kiss?] 
In gold and green [bummer, stanza three doesn't lead us to the West, but it's an adroit capture of a watershed, with the moisture-loving willow tree]

Why set your eyes
To the throated slope [howzat?  how does a ridge line look like a throat, and does a slope somehow “speak”? i suppose this could be a reference to the throaty gurgle of a mountain creek, but it's strange imagery, nonetheless --  the trees and the mountains are depicted as human in these stanzas, but a human the poet seems strangely distant from; as my son Julian would ask – “what does this say about society as a whole?”   Tantalizing!]
Or seek out the wildflowers,
Tiger lily, violet,
Woodland star [now we’re in my wheelhoouse!  as a wildflorist myself, that’s one question easily answered – “I seek out wildflowers to take close up pictures  and make faux earnest blog posts." And yet, I've never seen any of those flowers on Tam.]

Why address the raw land? [first things first, here – why is this protected open space raw?  We usually talk about a raw landscape after it’s been despoiled by man; to be sure, Tam was deforested a century ago, as its redwoods were harvested to rebuild San Francisco post the earthquake, but what are we supposed to do with its "raw" land now, cook it? I suppose that if it were developed, we could call it “addressed” – is this a sneaky pun planted by pro-development forces in Marin who'd seek to pave Tam and put addresses on its slopes?]
..hy lift yourself
..nto the mountain? [gratuitous swipe at distance runners --- indeed, perhaps this is a plaint against the hurly burly of the forthcoming Dipsea race, as thousands of runners stagger up its throated slopes, degrading its humanity and eroding its trails?]
..y live a season on Tam [sadly, the poem dissolves into fragments, just when it’s compass point architecture and human imagery were coming to fruition.  We can only guess as to the meaning that’s lost forever in the missing letters….] <>

Overall, the repetition of the subject who lives, addresses, stares and is on Mt. Tamalpais is a powerful recollection of  Wallace Stevens’ “The Snowman” and its themes of the subjective/objective in nature – as well as that ole Buddhist pensee about the flag flapping in the breeze – is it the wind that moves, the flag that moves, or our perception of the flag moving that “moves.” Is the poet suggesting that without our sensing/being on Tam, that Tam itself doesn’t exist, is this the kernel of truth that lies behind the repetition of "why"?  Or is it more austere than that -- does Tam even notice our spasmodic, fleeting progress across its throated slopes?
 

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somewhat preciously and precociously, as a callow Los Angeles youth I had much of the down-the-nose attitude about LA of my current fellow residents of Northern California: LA is a shiny mistake, the progenitor of many of the disasters of 20th century America: the grotesque freeways and un-green commutes, the unfettered paving of citrus orchards in a mad quest to sprawl the entire basin with strip malls (an LA invention!), cookie cutter subdivisions (with draconian HOA  structures) and cheesy franchised fast food (McDonald's and Carl's Jr. both emanated from the environs).  And yet, a few miles away from the hurly burly is spectacular hiking, vistas of the Pacific and beloved wildflowers.  To top it off, Santa Monica hosts the most outrageous farmer's market: species and varieties never seen before.  Lots of great colors.  Very surprised to see a bit of a sad story, some miner's lettuce born and raised in captivity.  thought I should liberate the box of prisoners, and return them to nature, but didn't have sufficient capital to do so. 

more LA Wild.

             

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The mystery about the identity of the vernal pumpkinflower has been resolved, perhaps.  This past weekend, I saw many of these specimens along the side of the trail.  After ransacking the web one last time, it seems that they surely must be day lilies.  the six petals, the contrasting throats, the lily-like nested spear-shaped leaves?  But how did they find themselves on the trails of the Marin Headlands?

more April flowers.

             

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So, in the course of fashioning a greek-styled leg of lamb for Easter, I decided to use a new mandoline to slice the five pounds of potatoes into 1/8" slices.  Sadly, my trusty v-blade mandoline is lost in a pile of still-unpacked boxes in the garage (may they rot in peace!), so I turn to a serrated edge straight blade Zyliss.  I'm merrily ignoring the safety instructions printed in red on all sides of the box, for, you see, I am an Experienced Cook, who knows his way around a kitchen.  This does not stop me from julienning my right thumb.  Very Painful, thoughts of being Disfigured for Life, and Blood Everywhere, etc.  But, in the spirit of my spartan forbearers (and in particular, my mother), I wrap some paper towel around it and keep on cooking -- the show must go on!

Before I finish slicing the potatoes, I looked underneath the mandoline's blade, and spot my missing thumb tip, a very pale looking sliver of flesh about 3/8" long by 1/16".  Hmm. While I have no license to practice medicine in the fine state of California, perhaps I can essay a thumb graft?  So, I unwarp the thumb stump (blood duly re-gushes) and slap on the tip, hopefully orienting it the proper way.

But, this odyssey of stupid just gets better.  I leave the mandoline aside for a few days, in part to remind myself that I am not above the laws of physics (sharp stuff cuts soft stuff) nor the laws of stupidity (we are all human, sadly).  Comes time to fold up the mandoline and put it away where it cannot get at me, but I'm forced to use my off hand to depress the springloaded switch to scissor it back up.  And yes, it slips out of my hand and slashes my left hand this time, and even cleaving the fingernail.  As the pictures show, the second cut was even deeper, although an easily closed slash, while the thumb graft looks a bit iffy.  I suspect that the bulk of it will die off, although it would be nice to keep some of it as a souvenir.  The slash was doing great until I reopened it typing, sadly.  Secretly, though, I like the fact that the body slowly starts reflecting the character and personality -- the wrinkles on the face are a permanent record of favored expressions, the random hockey scars here and there, and now, the ode to kitchen hubris on the thumb.

What's amazing is how many co-hubrists I have out there: a web search of "finger tip sliced off by mandoline" yields a staggering number of fellow idiot travellers.


             

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perhaps not so oddly, with the growing years, I have become very intrigued by what is natural and what is not natural in the daily life.  the interest is not just a matter of abstract ideology -- "it's better to be natural" -- but more at asking whether being less processed is better for the health, particularly as the glossiness of hair dulls and elasticity of sinew grows sclerotic.  the first revelation has been brewing for a while now (I've written before about the Clark shoe dynasty scion who parted with the thick sole of the signature Wallabee and created a lightweight slipper shoe company), and I marvel at the huge business of podiatrists and the prevalence of plantar fascitis.  Could our distant ancestors have been as delicate as we seem to be today, laid up for weeks with maladies of the foot, when they were far more active than the sedentary, sedated American? 

the first step is getting away from the heavily cushioned shoe, which encourages an oafishly long stride and aggressive heel strike, all of which surely must contribute to foot and joint problems (as the media reports).   slipping on the Vibram Fivefinger (below) or the Vivo "Barefoot" changes the game immediately.  the gait shortens; the entire foot alights at once and the impact of footfall lessens throughout the body.  but this misses the childish and puckish delight in having each toe be given the freedom to wiggle and go its own way.  my youth wasn't exactly Tom Sawyer's, but i can recollect the long days of summer freedom from the shoe, as well as the occasional cut from an unnatural shard of glass.  here's where the Fivefinger rules: a rather flexible but sturdy, contoured sole guards against the minor challenges to a natural foot.  The very first time I wore the Vivo, I had an inadvertent 23 mile hike, and it was only towards the end that I felt any sense that the lack of support was an issue; probably more a product of an out-of-shape foot than anything else. 

              

step two in the quest for the natural is the embrace of slightly oily hair.  much to my shock, the other month i found myself getting a haircut in a beauty salon, with severe, lab coat-besmocked hair stylists offering herbal teas to the clientele.  Amanda was aghast when she learned that I shampooed my hair twice a day, and not without pride informed me that her locks only saw shampoo once a week, if that.  It got me to thinking what it was about hairwashing that appealed to me.  I think it's primarily the clean smell, and the associations that various scents have with different times in my life. the smell of faberge shampoo conjures up the exciting, anxious years of college, better than any faded photo or name can, something about the direct connection that the oflactory nerves enjoy to the limbic system of the brain. 

so, I now go days at a time without washing the hair, and when I do, i use dr. bronner's which apparently doesn't have the detergent sodium laurel sulfate that strips away all the hair oil, and triggers a "create oil" alert in the scalp.  and it seems to have worked; the hair doesn't get nearly as oily any more, even after the daily bike ride. 

I wonder what's next....toothbrushing? I bet that a diet free of high glycemic foods would promote better tooth health than the daily rituals of brush/floss and the periodic trips to the dentist's pavillions. 

yesterday was theater night, to be sure, and yes, the theater treated me well.  but the Martini was the real star.  I'll never understand how such a simple combination of sharp, cold, sour and sweet can taste so good.  That first sip is utterly transporting.  Sadly, I haven't yet figured out how to balance the sheer taste sensation with the utter blast of inebriation, but I'm practicising, and willing to work hard at it.  I wish I could reveal the name of this fine Martini establishment, but to do so would threaten my ability to find seating there. 

             

Unexpectedly, Spring has returned to Northern California, and it occurred to me that the wildflowers of last year might have also returned.  Sprinted out to the headlands and was shocked that the wildflower race was on.  It was delightful seeing the old friends once again, as well as meeting a slew of strangers in the early array of the silent, early Spring.

February 2010

    a little wildflowerist joke here -- a snapshot of shooting the Shooting Star.

Back to the trough of culture after the theater's traditional cash-cow Christmas Carol spree in December (which likely bankrolls a whole season of quasi avant-garde performances).  Racine's Phèdre  (1689) is a wild ride of an anachronism, set in a world of royalty, heroism and romantic skullduggery, and played as it was by dudes dressed up like the three musketeers, with those fey folded down boots, flowing locks and puffy shirts.

In brief, Phèdre gives us two forbidden loves, one, of the eponymous character for her stepson, Hippolytus, and the other, of Hippolytus for the daughter of his father Theseus's political rivals (take that Shakespeare!).  When Phèdre seeks to cover her guilt by leading Theseus to believe that Hippolytus raped her, Theseus invokes the wrath of his pal, the sea god, to kill his son.  Phèdre later commits suicide.

a few random thoughts: the classics (both the ancient Greeks and the middle-aged French) were obsessed with forbidden love in a way that we modern types simply aren't.  I suppose we are still obsessed with a few categories of forbidden love (the right wing's screeching about the evils of gay marriage, for instance), but particular instances of forbidden love seem less interesting to us today.  Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky proves this -- why else would there be so much melodrama, unless it was the improbable idea of President unfurling for a 20 year old intern.

Also, while I suppose that the ancients looked no different than modern people, what lies inside their heads is completely different.  In this, the play gives us a look into a diametric world view.  For one, love is oft considered a curse, visited upon humans by fickle, and often malevolent gods.  Here's Phèdre complaining about Aphrodite, who punished Hippolytus for his neglect to honour her (he was chaste), by causing Phaedra to fall madly in love with her stepson:

O fatal animosity of Venus!
Into what wild distractions did she cast
My mother!

Three years ago, the lads and I hit an Original Pancake House in southern California, and were all blown away by the pancake artistry (not to mention the 60 minute wait on a Sunday morning, the place was packed).  I had a dutch baby pancake, and added it to the breakfast repertory.  It's basically a yorkshire pudding baked in a preheated cast iron skillet (although it may be made with cream substituted for the milk for a plush version).

dutch baby recipe (with apples):

4 eggs, beaten with 3/4 c. milk and 3/4 c. flour, as well as 1/4 tsp. salt and 3/4 tsp. vanilla. 

Meanwhile, saute two thinly sliced apples in a tablespoon or two of butter. 

The skillet has been heated in a 400 degree oven, and then a couple of teaspoons of butter is melted in the pan. 

Either cook the batter in the hot butter for fifteen minutes, and add the apples on top (with a brown sugar/sugar/cinnamon sprinkle); cook another ten minutes or so.  Or just throw the whole thing together and bake for 25 minutes.  Serve with powdered sugar, or maple syrup.  Or both.  Life is short, after all, and children are only children for a little while.

 more pictures
 

I have long heard rumor of a large-scale minimalist sculpture installed in the Corte Madera wetlands back in the 80s, and finally stumbled upon it, in my quest to spot the damned, elusive Clapper Rail (which I finally saw, by the by). Not much is written about the sculptor Anna Werklich-Niemann, unfortunately, so I was mostly left to my own devices in raising questions to match this monumental grouping of four heavily oxidized demi-cylinders, planted in the wet clay of the San Francisco Bay.

Strongly evocative of the formal aspects of Richard Serra's massive curving, unprimed metal works of the 70s and 80s (did they meet during their years at the University of California?), Sentinels departs from Serra's themes: instead of attempting to shape attitudes towards public space, it comments instead on the demarcation between the natural and manmade.  From a distance, the site-specific installation seems to form a berm against further incursions of human habitation on the flat land below the Corte Madera ridge, although it may also be viewed as a loose metaphor for the insubstantiality of human endeavors, as the sculpture sinks haphazardly into the earth, and the COR-TEN steel oxidizes from its contact with wind, salt and water, and time itself. More pictures here: Sentinels.
 

  A new year's resolution? Re-reading The Great Gatsby more often.  Done!
 
This time around, I felt more connection to Gatsby than Carraway.  While they're roughly the same age, Gatsby's unhinged romanticism, his defiant wistfulness sit more comfortably than Carraway's curious non-judgmentalism and restless idealism.  Plus, there's something oddly youthful about Carraway beyond his mere calendar age in his response to his thirtieth birthday with this blast of angst:

  I was thirty.  Before me stretched the portenous menacing road of a new decade...Thirty -- the promise of a decade of loneliness, a thinning list of single men to know, a thinning brief-case of enthusiasm, thinning hair.

Funny stuff, particularly in view of the full-bore nervous breakdown that he'll surely have at forty, which opens up a baleful, slimy maw of a looming decade -- what with the loss of parents, the decay of vision and the slipping of vitality.  But Gatsby himself heroically fights against time, keeping the water in the pool longer than he ought, entertaining the masses until the morning hours, and wearing the pink woolen suit even though it cannot look good in the August light, lifted by his unbounded fascination with the idee fixe. That Daisy might not be worthy of this attention would be altogether unsporting to observe.

My recent immersion in the television show Mad Men occasioned this re-reading of Gatsby.  The lead character, Don Draper, has a lot of Gatsby about him, a studiously self-made and self-renamed man, risen from an unhappy childhood of poverty on a mid-western farm to make a shining success of his hair, and career in Manhattan.  Both are essentially alone in the world, set amongst people whose voices were full of the sound of (old) money. and, both attract the easy attention of women, and seem to have a casual contempt for them; just as they seem to take little pleasure in the world, in general.

The differences are numerous, and more telling, however.  Gatsby is imbued with "sensitivities to the promises of life" whereas Draper dulls his sensitivity with a variety of toxins --- tobacco, whiskey and contempt.  And more to the point, Draper wields extraordinarily persuasive force in convincing the American consumer that happiness lies in the purchase of the next product of the early 60s, be it Clearasil, Playtex bras, diet Cola, or Lucky Strike cigarettes.  Yet he hasn't even a glimmer of an idea of where his own happiness lies.  Yes, he chases success and is reflexively alpha-male competitive when it comes to social prestige, or even chasing women (such as Rachel) who show initial uninterest in him. In contrast, Gatsby knows exactly what he wants -- Daisy Buchanan. She has inspired him to make his illicit fortune, and buy a mansion to stage ostentatious parties across the bay from her, in hopes of luring her back into his life. 

I suppose that Gatsby leaves it slightly ambiguous whether Daisy is what Gatsby should desire (although without her acting as an gossamer anchor, Gatsby has no identity at all), as she's protrayed as insubstantial and lightweight -- "the caught wind died out about the room and the curtains and rugs and the two young women ballooned slowly to the floor." Daisy is nothing more than an advertisement's tantalizing offer of purchased happiness, in truth.  Scott Fitz describes her voice as a "promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and that there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour" and yet, this bit of advertising promise is never delivered upon.  She acknowledges as much: "I always watch for the longest day of the year and miss it."

Fitz/Carraway does observe: "No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart," suggesting that the deficit of worthiness isn't Daisy's fault, but rather a product of Gatsby's (over)sensitivities to the promise of love.  He cannot accept that Daisy is not his soul mate, or rather, he doesn't see that she doesn't actually exist.  If so, it might be that the book and the television series are a bit closer than I might have thought: Draper is not Gatsby's diametric twin, perhaps, but rather he's the Gatsby that married his Daisy, and then didn't know what to do next, and lost the raison d'etre of the quest.  Gatsby was dead before the bullets entered his body.

I dipped into the theater of the absurd last month, and I seem to be having trouble leaving. 

After viewing the show, I learned that The Bald Soprano is the most popular work of theater in France (and I suppose the fact that America's longest running play is Cats tells you all you need to know about the two countries). Further, I learned that the Romanian Ionescu was inspired by the flat, mechanical dialogues of French language primers.

I didn't manage to learn the definition of "absurdist," though I have some thoughts.  The play's structure itself is loopy, in a literal sense, as the first scene a couple recaps the events of a dinner party they hosted; the interior of the play unfolds the dinner party itself. The last scene features the same dialogue as the opening scene, but recited, now, by the guests from the party.* Given how atrocious the memories of the characters, it could be that they've simply forgotten which role they were to play, but also, I can't imagine that Ionescu wasn't implying that our social roles were just constructs, to be adopted randomly, with a particular shot taken at the artificiality of haute bourgeois mores and gender roles.

Ionescu's brush with language primer nihilism provides one perspective on the way the characters talk past one another, seemingly not hearing what the other is saying.  For instance, Mrs. Smith accuses the guests of coming over uninvited, while Mr. Smith blames them for being four hours late. Does this mean that Ionescu thinks that all human interaction is inherently flawed, and that communication even about basic facts (let alone intangible emotions and personal histories) is not possible, that we're all prisoners of our own imperfect understanding of language, or more concerning, our imprisonment in cages of unwitting solipsisms?  Or, is this just a tragically dysfunctional couple in action, avoidable through more diligent listening and communication?

Further, the classic set piece in the play depicts a man and a woman introducing themselves at a dinner, discovering that they share so many attributes ("my bedroom, too, has a cover that is green eider-down," "What a bizarre coincidence! I, too, have a little girl.  She is two years old.  She has one white eye and one red eye.") that they are forced to conclude that they must be married, though oddly, they don't recognize each other.  It is true that we take for granted the people closest to us, but this is surely absurd; after all, each remembers the color and materials of their bed coverlet(s).  Next, the maid administers the coup de grace in an aside to the audience, observing that not only that Elizabeth in mistaking that Donald is Donald, her husband, but that Donald himself is mistaken in thinking that he is Donald.  At root, then, not even the Cartesian nostrum holds; we think, but we aren't.

One last absurdism, for me at least, was the intimacy of the theater itself; the audience is basically on stage with the performers.  Not to the extent that I was in a performance of Pere Ubu, where I was liberally splashed by the perspiration of an actor playing Ubu as he stood behind me.  Again, we might all be considered to be actors in plays that are very poorly written about us -- we are all performance artists, now.†  At least that means there's no one in the audience clapping slowly and sarcastically, right?

---

* Absurder, still, early drafts of the play left the original couple reciting the opening scene as the last scene.  This dovetails with the fractured identity sense of absurdism, I suppose; I like the fractured social role spin a bit more, as the play is currently performed. 

† Recently, I found myself at a dinner, and very much felt like I was attending a performance of some sort, p'raps entitled "We are all of us Pretending to be Very Happy, For Some Reason."  I had a lovely time, but wasn't sure whether to applaud, or bow at the end of the evening.  Still not sure about the title of the piece, though, it could have been something else, entirely! Rather like Ionescu's play itself -- it was named "The Bald Soprano" because one of the actors mispoke the working title of the play, and Ionescu liked the garble of the error.

I don't think I've ever given a thought to Richard Avedon, other than offhandedly thinking of him as a celebrity photographer of celebrities.*  my bad.

I thoroughly enjoyed his recent retrospective at SF MoMA: first off, his technical abilities are astonishing -- ebony blacks, luminiscent greys in the eyes and details, rippling three dimensional textures in skin, impeccable compositions , and a breathtaking ability to get honest, soulful expressions from all of his subjects whether politicians, artists or his father or artists.  Also, I didn't realize that so many iconic photos of the 20th century were all his.

The early work is beyond charming: high fashion shots for Harper's Bazaar set in the streets of Paris, luring one into a graceful, and thrilling world of glamour.  I know nothing about haute couture, but that doesn't stop me from wondering whatever went wrong with the world of fashion since then.  What happened to the joy captured in the Homage to Munkacsi to the left, a picture ostensibly hawking a fab Cardin overcoat but capturing an eternal moment.  I have to confess, though, that it conjures up a bit of mary poppins for me -- I think the model will never touch earth again, and is ready to be wafted away. 

During this era, Avedon shot the famed pictures of his muse Dovima with circus elephants, too -- shots that work on so many levels: the contrast between the rough elephant skins and the sleek sinewy model and the silky dresses, the formal element of the underexposed dark grey of the elephants pushing the viewer to gaze at the subject, and the incongruity of an apex of human civilization (expensive clothes that scarcely protect from the elements) against the animal, content in its own skin.

The rest of the exhibition is mostly portraits -- of workers, civil rights warriors, athletes, Warholians -- famous people (if not faces) who were reknowned at the time, and sometimes not so much so now.  Curious, is that he photographed them beautifully, although most of the pictures don't glamorize physical beauty, per se, particularly as Avedon liked to evoke strong emotion from his subjects during the shoots.  I am not sure if "soul" is the right word for it (Avedon said that he wasn't trying to photograph below the surface), it's more that he captured the beauty of being human, of being weary, of being old or being scarred (as in the photo of Warhol's extensive surgical incisions on the chest).

Funny, too, how it's clear he loves his subjects, all of them.  And through the self-portraits we see that he carried on a strong and long love affair with Avedon, too.

---

* Raising a whole 'nother question -- when did the cult of the celebrity begin, and why?  elsewhre, I have speculated that spectator sports -- baseball (1850s), basketball (1870s), soccer (1880s), and football (1880s) -- were invented and popularized simultaneously with the Industrial Revolution because a) efficiency gains opened up leisure time for the working class, and b) railroads and trolleys, as well as more densely populated urban environs enabled crowds to get to events, en masse.  similarly, I suppose, the prevalance of cheap offset printing, magazine distribution networks and such fomented the first big American explosion of celebrity around Hollywood in the 20s and 30s.  And more recently, digital transmission of photos has exploded Internet gossip into the stratosphere, or so says Perez Hilton.  Still, celebrity gazing might be as old as humanity itself.  Music historians dish stories about women throwing hotel room keys on stage as Liszt played the piano in the 19th century, for instance.  And the opening scene in Plato's Republic is a scream, as a bunch of Socrates groupies threaten to kidnap him for a chance to converse with him.

I've long had affection for opera, even if the years of rearing small children cut into the attendance schedule.  Great memories of slightly ragtag yet spirited, innovative productions by Sarah Caldwell and the Boston Opera Company in Boston in the 80s.  If forced to put words to this affection, I think it would be that in opera, and perhaps only in opera, protaganists wear their ideals right on their sleeve, stating their belief in love, family, and honor.  And, willing to prattle on about these ideals at length, and loudly and ultimately, willing to die for them.  Granted, this is not a pragmatic strategy for getting through 70 odd years on this earth of compromise and difficulties, but that's the very appeal of opera for me, and perhaps part of its cautionary utility.  Our challenge, my challenge, is to figure out to balance the lofty ideals with grubbier, competing factors, such as the need for health insurance,  records organized sufficiently for annual tax preparation and bourbon. 

Flash forward to the year 2009 and my mini-subscription to the San Francisco Opera in the 30,000 foot seats.  In the first act of Donizetti's The Daughter of the Regiment, we see these young lovers, Marie and Tonio, who vow that they will die if they can't be together.  The lederhosen-y chap goes so far as to join the invading army in order to qualify for her hand, as she has pledged to marry only one of the soldiers of the regiment that adopted her as an infant.  By the end of the first act, however, she has been whisked off by her long-lost relation, and the young couple is ripped apart. 

Cut to the second act -- a year has passed.  Marie has spent her time learning how to strap on crinoline and to sing for salons, whereas Tonio has been trooping around Europe with the regiment.  They're both a bit sad to be sure, but there's no adherence to the operatic high ideals, whatsoever.  No arias delivered form the death bed, no swooning, no sudden onset of mysterious yet fatal diseases whatsoever.

Granted, it's a opera buffa, meant to have a happy ending and all, but Donizetti broke the rules, and for this he must be punished.

On a personal level, I tend to avoid labelling people and myself, understanding that so much of our behavior is specific to context, and our own theories about how we are ("loyal," "steadfast," "altruistic," and so on) may be right much of the time, but are as likely as not to fall prey to circumstance and impulse, leaving us not-so-gracefully hoist on our own petards.  But I don't see how Donizetti is helping matters at all.  Cancel my subscription!
 

Some 165 million people would move to the United States if they could.  Part of the reason that America remains a desirable place to live is the enduring, if fragile, freedom that America affords to its residents.  The left would note that the PATRIOT Act and associated surveillance state methods leave such liberties as political freedom increasingly suspect; the right would observe that government regulation of health care and other industries increasingly leaves the rights of economic association vulnerable.  I, however, would note that Americans would seem to be free from having to be rational, and this freedom has expanded exponentially from the august days when a bunch of bewigged slaveowners cooked up this experiment in democracy.

Ron Suskind reported long ago about the Bush Administrations contempt for the so-called "reality-based community," which foolishly believed that "solutions merge from [the] judicious observation of reality." The blatant disregard for facts amongst the Palin-teabag-birther axis of the Republican party is somewhat legendary, by now.  But, what we're starting to observe, is their disconnection from logical thought and rational discourse.  Facts, after all, can be verified and established, so if the conversational partner is willing to have a rational discussion, then minds can be changed, and consensus may develop.

Not so, however, if the very rules that govern rational thinking have been discarded.   Noted Big Thinker (and revered architect of the Iraq War) Bill Kristol noted in 2007 that "[the] Bush tax cuts have been thoroughly vindicated: National wealth is up, unemployment is down, and the federal deficit is lower than the day the 2003 tax cuts were passed." The latter part of that is wrong for several reasons -- yes, federal revenues ticked up in the later part of the Bush Administration, but absent the tax cut, cumulatively we would be looking at roughly $2 trillion more federal revenue over the entirety of the Bush years (thus reducing his damage to the long term fiscal picture of the US some 40%). 

Smug jackanape Jim Pinkerton argued the other day that "the stimulus package led to a loss of jobs" (8:50). In fairness, at other points Pinkerton notes that the stimulus should've directly employed people as in FDR's WPA program and that the stimulus package did nothing to reduce unemployment, a more defensible, if flawed, position.  And of course, this is an odd argument, as well, that you have a Fox news type lauding FDR, and the creation of government jobs, whereas RNC chair Michael Steele intoned that government jobs weren't real jobs.

Both Pinkerton and Kristol are arguing based on vaguely chronological grounds about complicated economic phenomena: because event B follows event A, therefore event A caused event B.  This is known in logic circles as the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, and it's special to see top-drawer pundits fall victim to it.  And no one calls them on it.

In Kristol's case, he suggests Bush's 2001 and 2003 tax cuts caused the mild economic growth seen in the later years of the Bush term.  I'm glad that those were the only variables in that system, and that we can so confidently see a one-to-one relationship between those factors: economics doctorates should be available freely through mail order! Pinkerton's bit of disingenuous balderdash is far worse, for the argument that the stimulus actually caused unemployment to rise is risible on its face.  He doesn't argue that any aspect of the stimulus destroyed jobs, but he seems to suggest that since other measures would've increased employment that therefore Obama's stimulus killed jobs.  If this kind of argument is valid, we should be able to apply it to other circumstances.  For instance, if Joe Lieberman fillibusters the health care package, and an uninsured person dies in America for failure to receive health care, then Joe Lieberman caused that person's death.  And should be prosecuted.
 

This might brand me as irredeemably stupid, but I cannot quite believe how disconnected the fringe/base of the Republican party is from reality.  First, there's their vaguely threatening and threateningly vague "take our country back" plaint -- well, how do they plan to do this?  With another splendid showing at the polls as in '08, or something more 2nd Amendment oriented?  And whose country is it anyway?  There's the veiled point that there's something un-American about having a non-Anglo in the White House, I suspect?  As Sullivan points out, though, America has always been a melting pot, and its culture -- music, arts, language -- has always reflected its racial diversity.  I digress, however.

More gobsmackingly, there's the Beck-fueled complaint about runaway federal spending and taxation.  As Bruce Bartlett, the heretic conservative, ably points out, 2009's bump up in the federal deficit stems from a greater than expected drop in federal revenues and not spending increases.  In fact, federal revenues as a proportion of GDP are lower today than they have been in 60 years.  That's right, even the patron saint of low taxes, Ronald Reagan, soaked the American public more ruthlessly than the socialist Obama.  And yet, the fringe of the fringe is screaming about federal taxes.  This makes Obama the most aggressive taxcutter in American history....good grief, this calls for a chart:

  OMB data here.

Kind of astonishing, isn't it -- just look at the downward slope of that curve.  The Bush was responsible for a bloodthirsty 25% increase in federal revenue over the eight long years of his gouging administration, in contrast to a respectable 16% drop in the first year of the Obama administration, nearly rolling back Bush's best efforts at killing American entrepreneurship.  If Obama can keep the good work up, we'll see a 0% effective tax rate by the mid-point of his second term.  A little more seriously, yeah, this is a product of a declining stock market (and hence, reduced capital gains), a dramatic drop in corporate income tax, and the disparity between nominal and effective tax rates exacerbated by high unemployment, but don't get in the way of a little fun.  More seriously still, in terms of the long-term budget picture, here's a look at federal revenues benchmarked against the U.S. gross domestic product:

Commerce data; OMB data here.

The lesson from Bush's tax cuts in his first administration would be their decoupling federal receipts from the GDP, setting us up for the structural budget deficit.  In addition, unlike those communists in China, the fact that the U.S. was deficit spending both on consumer side as well as the federal side greatly constrains our options in terms of spending our way out of this recession.  China's apparently opening up the spigot of Keynesian tools.  Although I read today that China has clamped down on personal loans, to tamp down emerging asset bubbles in their stock market and residential real estate.  Too bad Greenspan didn't study modern communismus a little closer....but then, we live in an America where government officials apparently cannot cite harmless platitudes of disfavored people, even if some of it makes sense.  For instance, here's Mao in 1939: "We should support whatever the enemy opposes and oppose whatever the enemy supports."  Sounds like a play out of the Republican party's playbook -- oppose health care reform just cause Obama favors it....

This is priceless, our former leader George Bush is turning to his true calling, motivating regional sales managers on how to squeeze a little extra effort from their staff, all for the bargain price of $19 per office.  No joke, here's the website.  At first blush, any reasonable person would have to ask herself, "why would anyone pay for the collected wisdom of this guy"?  Unfortunately the great Bush doesn't tip his hand about the gems that he's going flash in front of the arena-sized crowd, but judging from his co-speakers, his speech will run along these lines:

• How to Improve Processes, Organizations and People [New Orleans might note the example of FEMA]
• How to Remain Focused in Crisis [what of Bush's nearly 3 years of vacation time during his war presidency]
• How to Forge Winning Alliances [do we have any alliances left; and did any of the old ones win anything?]
• How to Draft a clear, Concise Blueprint for Success [oops -- neither a plan nor "success" was glimpsed in 8 long years]
• Keys to Creating Diplomatic Solutions [check, and mate]

But then I read a little further and saw some of these points:

• The Bulldozer Method for Eliminating Your Obstacles
• How to Get Everything You Want [say what you will, but Bush wanted tax cuts, war on Iraq and tax cuts, he got all three of those priorities; and nothing, not decency, a split electorate in '00, a huge federal budget deficit got in his way....]

And, after all, Bush's life story is perversely motivational -- here's a classic underachiever (2.35 GPA at Yale, they say), born on third base (to steal a line), who stumbled and bumbled his way to middle age (two failed oil companies), only to become president.  If he can achieve that with so little, why shouldn't any of us build edifices of excellence everywhere?

The Master of The Unexcitement

Diogenes ISO a serious republican

Hypocrisy

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