The Week (Feb 19-26) in Review

We had some good days and some not so good last week. We had some good friends in for lunch and saw a popular movie. A restaurant manager surprised us, we went to a birthday party for a 90-year old woman, and I had a root canal. Cold weather slowed down work on the renovation of the porch.

We saw Eight Below, the story about Antarctica explorers returning there to recover sled dogs left behind because there was no room on the plane when the people left in a blinding snowstorm. I agree with the movie critics who say the best thing about the movie is (are?) the dogs. Other parts leave you wondering: why don’t viewers see the actor’s breath while they talk out of doors at the bottom of the world. (Football fans will note this occurs frequently in Green Bay.) And as for flying off in that storm in that small plane which sets up the movie, believing it is a stretch. You don’t have to be a dog lover to enjoy this film. It is that good.

I ordered a chocolate cake for dessert while at Sunday brunch and when the waitress asked how it was I told her the cake was old, dry and not moist. The manager came by shortly after and said she had taken the cake off our bill. “I never order desert in a restaurant,” she said, “because it is usually undersized, overpriced and stale.”  For this frankness I omit the name of the restaurant. Would not want that manager fired.

The lunch with long-time friends from Columbia, S.C., opened the week enjoyably and the birthday party closed it in the same manner. I told the elderly lady she has a way to go to catch up with our neighbor who is 99 and currently off on a cross-country trip to visit a daughter in Southern California.

As for the root canal, what is there to say other than the Endodonist did a good job on three roots in about 90 minutes with a minimum of pain. I now, emphasis on now, believe my anxiety was worse than the actual event. But, what the hell, I have never been praised by nurses (as has my wife) for being “a good patient.”

Hemingway & Evans

Today I viewed the Ernest Hemingway & Walker Evans exhibit at the Gibbes Gallery here in Charleston. The collection celebrates three weeks the two men spent in Havana in 1933 in close company meeting, talking, drinking and dining. Hemingway loaned Evans $25. He later forgave the loan. During this time Evans entrusted 44 photos to Hemingway who took them to Key West where they stayed in storage for years and passed to a friend after Hemingway shot himself in 1961. From that friend the pictures made their way to the Kennedy Library and eventually to this touring exhibit. Despite the thousands of pictures Evans – one of the great photo-journalists of the 20th century had published in numerous magazines these originals did not appear in any collections of his work.

Hemingway’s suicide by shotgun in Idaho was a severe disappointment. I recall that on the Sunday morning I read of his death I felt he cheated his family, his friends and his fans, of which I was one, and I took it as a personal betrayal. He had always carried himself in life and written as a man’s man. Suicide, I thought at the time when I was thirty years old, was a coward’s way out and unworthy of a man. Some forty-five years later I continue to believe suicide is wrong, but not necessarily “a coward’s way out.”

The exhibit is on tour and will move to another city in late February, early March.

Madden's Rules

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton, insisted that all 15 Security Council members show up to meetings on time: at 10 a.m. Asked recently by a reporter how this was working out, Bolton said, "I took a list of when they came in. We started just before 10:15. I brought the gavel down at 10. I was the only one in the room, though."

Bolton should have given them John’s (as in John Madden) Rules: Show up on time, listen and play like hell.

AXIS Information and Analysis (AIA)

AIA is an information agency that unites professionals having years of experience in collecting and analyzing information about Asia and Eastern Europe. AIA's main attention is focused upon those states that represent a threat to regional and international security, as well as upon areas of ethnic and religious conflict. At the same time, AIA follows the events in those countries that are going through political and socio-economic cataclysms.

I am adding AIA to my links page at my website .

Where the Ice Bowl was played

I read today in an AP story about how the pleasant winter weather around the country is coming to an end. The story reported that January past was the warmest on record in Green Bay, Wisconsin. No further details were given. I assume therefore – just based on the mere coupling of “Green Bay” and “winter,” the temperature was probably about 20-25 degrees Fahrenheit.

Shortest interval of time

Wednesday night as I watched the news about all the security precautions being taken in Detroit for Sunday’s Super Bowl, the thought occurred to me that if Osama bin Laden and his fellow terrorists want to see hell-come-to-breakfast on Monday they should do something stupid at the 40th Super Bowl.

Tuesday night while driving to a social gathering, I lived the immeasurable nano-moment George Carlin calls the “shortest interval of time:” that flashing moment between when the traffic light turns green and the guy (Carlin used a different term) behind you blows his horn. Our paths paralleled on the eastbound highway for less than a half-mile when the horn blower pulled his SUV off the highway to use an ATM machine.

The dog situation about which I have written earlier appears to have succumbed to a “mild solution.” A talk with the neighbor resulted in her promise to tether the animal when she lets him out in the morning (the city requires dogs to be on a leash or under control of the owner.)

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