SmokeSound

About fifteen years ago, not far from here, my head felt as if an artesian well were about to burst my skull.  "High blood pressure!", the doctor said.  "Take these!" Then it was high cholesterol.  "Take those!", the doctor said. A few years later, by then in Minneapolis, while on my almost-everyday walk, early in the morning, around Lake Nokomis, I broke a bone in my foot.  At least, that was my first diagnosis.  I could not bear to put any weight on my foot.  "Gout!", my new doctor said.  "It comes from a long commitment to a dissipated life."  He explained what uric acid crystals were, and what they did, and said, "Take these pills!"  He advised that they might destroy my liver, or kidneys, or something, "but, oh, well!".  "How old are you, anyway?", he seemed to be asking. I have come to terms with it.  I am a chemical factory, a somewhat erratic chemical factory, and I needed inspection, regul...

So here I am, a couple of years into my eighties, making matzo ball soup, and fearing for my access to ingredients! (I shall not enter into the contest for a preferred spelling for matzo, or matzoh, or matzah, etc., and have chosen to use the spelling on the container of Matzo Meal provided by Manischewitz, except that I cannot spell "Manischewitz", either.) In the first place, I am not Jewish, so I have no profoundly religious reasons for making matzo ball soup in the first place.  And I am confident that somewhere in the Torah (or is that Tora?) it surely states that no one of derivative, second-hand, runty Norwegian immigrant persuasion shall be permitted to desecrate the most sacred place in the lives of an ancient Mesopotamian, Palestinian, Ukranian, or Miami Beach religious persons by messing with the matters of their hearts. I understand that my pots are polluted, and that my taste buds have not been reared under the watchful eyes of a genuine guilt-producing,...

Bill Nye, the Science Guy, and Ken Ham, the Turtle Talk Guy, had a public debate about which millenium we are living in: this one, or the magical-mystery one, when dinosaurs played tag with Shem and Ham and Japheth. It brought to mind what happens when Jehovah's Witnesses show up at the door and ask for your opinion about the end of the world: whether it will be next Tuesday or Wednesday, and ask if your Ascension Robe is ironed. The Science Guy or the Turtle Talk Guy. Turtle Talk guys get their information  from what people used to think; almost always from old religious books. It doesn't matter what the subject is: if the book was written in the 17th century, it will be expressed in 17th century terms, and will reflect the worldview of the 17th century, at the latest, and perhaps of an even earlier time. If people then believed in a three-storied universe, the ideas will be three stories tall. If the earth is flat, and rests on the back of a Gr...

By the late 1890s, it was evident that Native Americans were going to lose their land, and their way of life.  The White Men kept coming, like a storm, wave after wave of trappers, explorers, soldiers, hunters, prospectors, soldiers, farmers, merchants, miners, soldiers, railroad men, cattle buyers, wagon trains, families, towns, cities, soldiers, and disease.  They shot the bison, plowed the ground, cut the trees, dug great gouges into the earth, and claimed the land with fences. Out in Nevada, there began a kind of religious/cultural movement that was, in fact, an admission of defeat and, at the same time, a howl of defiance.  They danced.  The time was coming, they said, when the plague of destruction brought by the White Men would come to an end, and the skies would shine bright again, when new soil would roll out over the prairies, and the bison would return, and the good life of the people who land this had been would return, and the land would be clea...

It is my hope now, after the first round of carping about the condition of the Russian Olympic facilities subsides, that we can enjoy the games themselves.  Of course Russia wants the world to see that they are a great nation!  And they are. I recall how I used to puzzle at the history of western Europe and its eastern neighbor, and try to imagine what they were talking about.  They were talking about the eastern and western ends of what had once been the Roman Empire.  Rome, in the west, came to represent one political and military and religious center, and at first, Greece and Constantinople (now Istanbul) represented the other, somewhat Mid-eastern side.  Gradually, Russia, and Russian Orthodoxy, became the other pole of western civilization. What Russia had been was symbolized by the music and art of the figure skating competition, when it seemed that every skater had chosen the glorious music of Russian musicians. We, here in the United States, h...