Author Archives: Brad Warthen

No, not THAT St. Hillary…

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Depiction of St. Hilary’s ordination, painted 1,000 years after he lived.

I’m studying the USCCB’s daily scripture readings, and I see that the alternative reading for today is dedicated to Saint Hilary, Bishop and Doctor of the Church.

This Hilary, by the way, was a man. He lived in the 4th century AD. Interesting fact: He was married, because that was allowed in those days, and he had a daughter who was also a saint.

I mention this because every time I see a mention of this saint, I’m reminded of a certain other person who was called “Saint Hillary” in a satirical manner. Below is the image that appeared with that headline in The New York Times Magazine on May 23, 1993:

When I saw that, only four months after Bill’s inauguration, I knew that this administration’s honeymoon with the press was pretty much over.

Here’s the article, if you want to read it. Here’s an excerpt:

Since she discovered, at the age of 14, that for people less fortunate than herself the world could be very cruel, Hillary Rodham Clinton has harbored an ambition so large that it can scarcely be grasped.

She would like to make things right.

She is 45 now and she knows that the earnest idealisms of a child of the 1960’s may strike some people as naive or trite or grandiose. But she holds to them without any apparent sense of irony or inadequacy. She would like people to live in a way that more closely follows the Golden Rule. She would like to do good, on a grand scale, and she would like others to do good as well. She would like to make the world a better place — as she defines better.

While an encompassing compassion is the routine mode of public existence for every First Lady, there are two great differences in the case of Mrs. Clinton: She is serious and she has power….

Back to the real saint. To lift the tone of this post, here’s an excerpt from the readings offered in his name:

Matthew 5:13-19

Jesus said to his disciples:
… “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets.
I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.
Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,
not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter
will pass from the law,
until all things have taken place.
Therefore, whoever breaks one of the least of these commandments
and teaches others to do so
will be called least in the Kingdom of heaven.
But whoever obeys and teaches these commandments
will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.”

Watch out; here comes the surge!

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You could be like one of my fave depictions of a politcal pro — Peter Boyle in ‘The Candidate.’

Just a heads-up…

You know that job posting site I’ve mentioned a few times before, called Daybook? It lists a lot of political and governmental openings, and I’ve been getting the notices daily ever since I worked with James Smith’s campaign. I have zero interest now in applying for any of the jobs (you know those stress dreams I keep mentioning — even as recently as two days ago? — one of the recurring plots is that once again, this time against my better judgment, I’m involved in a campaign), but I sometimes find the jobs interesting, or even entertaining.

Anyway, yesterday they posted this, under the heading “Surge of political campaign positions:”

For those who haven’t been to Daybook lately, we have exciting news!

Over the past week, there has been a surge in job and internship listings to work on political campaigns. With the primary elections approaching in the coming months and the midterm elections in November, campaigns are staffing up right now! Currently, there are more than 700 open campaign jobs on Daybook with over 100 posted in the past week…

Here’s the list, if you’re interested. If you end up being hired for one, don’t blame me. I’m just warning you that the surge of madness is rolling your way. For political professionals, this may be exciting. For the rest of us, it’s a reason to dive into a bomb shelter, or at least duck…

Just tell me how much, OK?

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I’ve complained here a couple of times about the obscene current practice on news sites of teasing readers rather than informing them.

Now I’ll deliver a swift kick to folks attempting to do business online.

You’re familiar with the practice. You see something on, say, social media about some product that stirs your curiosity. I say, “stirs your curiosity” because you don’t have enough information to know whether you would ever consider buying it.

What’s the one thing you want and need to know? The price, of course.

So you click on the offered link, and what’s the ONE piece of information that they NEVER provide on the landing page?

You’ve got it. Or rather, you don’t…

Oh, the price is usually just another click away, although I find that, often as not, you have to scroll to the bottom of an unnaturally long landing page to get to that link.

Yeah, I know why they do it — to give themselves a chance of holding onto your attention just a BIT longer before scaring you away with the price. Maybe, they think, you’ll be charmed just enough by what you see on that landing page that you won’t mind the price.

Maybe it will work. But in the meantime, you’re royally ticking me off. I don’t like being stiff-armed…

By the way, here’s the page with the prices on this one…

It was good to see the monks pass through town

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Technically, I didn’t see them, although a number of people I know did (such as the pastor of my church). But you might say I felt their presence.

I was on my way to Lowe’s Saturday morning between 9:30 and 10, and had some trouble getting there. My elder son and I were aiming to pick up some more lumber for a project, and Highway 1 was jammed because the monks were on their way from Lexington toward downtown. But we eventually got what we needed, and I shot the pictures you see above and at the bottom while on the way to my son’s house, of the people waiting for the monks.

What monks? Well, these monks. Not your Mepkin Abbey kind of monks, but the kind I ran into in Thailand. They were hard to miss there, because they were everywhere. My daughter who was then serving in the Peace Corps lived across her country road in Khorat province from one of their wats. You also run into them on public transportation, where they have preferred seating.

Speaking of preferred seating. On a bus to Kanchanaburi, I met a retired roofer from England who had settled in Thailand with a Thai wife and kids (a lot of farangs do that, it seems. He and I had a high old time sitting and chatting on the back seat. The very back seat is of course the coolest seat on any bus, as I had learned in school. (You’re too far back for the teacher on bus duty to see you, and it bounces more than the forward seats, which is cool when you’re a kid.)

Alas, my wife and daughter were forced to sit farther to the front, because women are not allowed to sit on the coolest seat in those parts. (I think the reason why is because monks sit there.)  I felt bad for them, but Mark (I think that was the retired roofer’s name) and I had a good time anyway, bouncing along, and at one point I took a selfie that included the monk sitting next to us, also enjoying himself. I’m sorry I didn’t manage to get the monk beyond that one into the picture, but you can see his robe:

But I digress….

Anyway… I can’t say I’m fully hip as to the details about the monks’ walk across the South in the cause of peace and mindfulness, but for what little I know, I’m for it. Y’all know I’m not on the whole very fond of public demonstrations, but this is the kind that seems to have its head in a good place. They’re not out to bother anybody (except for maybe slowing down traffic, and what are we in such a hurry for, anyway?).

And you know what? I really liked seeing my fellow Lexington Countians turn out to stand along the road and wait to see them. Some of y’all across the river don’t think we’re cool enough to get into something like this, but we are.

And now you know that…

Old School in the real world

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Oxford and other universities awarded honorary degrees to Mark Twain. He adored the fancy duds, and went away happy…

For the next several months, I’ll have yet another excuse for not blogging very often:

I’m going back to school — tomorrow. I’ve enrolled in a course at USC designated LING 300, Introduction to Language Sciences. And yes, I’m taking advantage of the deal that offers free tuition to SC residents over the age of 65. Which makes me feel like I’m sort of throwing money down the drain if I don’t take something.

The reason I’m taking this particular course is that many times over the last 50 years (I last attended school in 1975), I’ve thought that maybe I should have studied philology. Or etymology. Or something else in that general realm. Words have been my profession, but my interest in them extends beyond using them the way a mason uses bricks. My exposure to various languages — the years I spoke Spanish as a kid in Ecuador, my two years of high school Latin, my very brief study of German, my recent dalliances with Dutch and Italian via Duolingo — has fascinated me to what most would regard a ridiculous extent. I’m interested in the relationships between various modern and ancient languages (at least, those of the Indo-European sort), as well as how human languages developed both before and after our ancestors gave up hunting and gathering.

I’m signed up as a nondegree-seeking graduate student, which apparently allows me to take undergrad courses as well. And that’s good because I’ve never taken anything in this area before, so I need to start on an introductory level.

Depending on how this course goes, I may continue this line of study. Or, since these doors are now opened, I may branch out. I might return to my second major from undergrad days, history — if I see courses that grab me. Or maybe I’ll dig into some specific language or other. I dunno. The options seem fairly unlimited.

But first I’ve got to get through this one. I opted to take this for a grade rather than simply auditiing. I figured I would slack off too much if there were no grade to work for. Here’s hoping I don’t come to regret that decision.

My plan is to do much better than I did my one previous semester as a student at this university, in Fall 1971. That should be achievable, as long as I don’t lapse into a long-lasting coma.

Perhaps I can even do well enough to put an end to those dreams. You know, the ones in which you have to go take your exam at the end of a term, and you suddenly realize that you have no idea where the class meets, because you haven’t attended it even once. You’d meant to, but somehow never got around to it.

There are variations on that dream. For instance, the Superintendent of Dreams decided at some point to use that same template, but transfer the anxiety to the more frequent (in my life, anyway) challenge of trying to get a newspaper out when everything is going wrong. But still, for old times’ sake, I occasionally experience the college version. Seems like I had one of those just a week or two ago.

Frankly, I suspect that such dreams are a lifelong affliction, so I’m not going to hold my breath in expectation of them going away. Maybe I’ll just have to settle for learning a bit about linguistics.

Oh, and before someone mentions “Old School.” Well, I love that movie. (In fact, I may have to go back to my Top Ten Comedies list and bump something off to make room for it.) But I don’t intend to emulate it. I’ve never at any time had the slightest interest in the Greek life. You can be almost certain you won’t see me at a football game, even if I continue into the fall. And streaking? Admittedly, I was an undergrad during that madness in the ’70s, but I did not partake then, and do not have plans to do so this time around. Much to everyone’s relief.

A few words regarding this Venezuela thing…

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Hey! Whatever happened to U.S. determination to deal with THIS guy?

Last week, I referred to my recent lack of interest in the sort of news that used to fascinate me, and as an example mentioned my unsettling (to me) failure to keep up with what the U.S. was doing in and near Venezuela.

And then, BANG! My eldest granddaughter woke me on Saturday morning with a text that asked me to call her because “I don’t understand what happened in Venezuela.”

I took it something new had happened there overnight, and I was able to confirm that immediately. But if I was to explain it, I had to do a bit of scrambling. Knowing how good The New York Times is (or at least has been in the past) at providing overall perspective on events and the background behind them, I looked there. Unfortunately, I encountered one of those “live update” stories, which provide no easily accessible perspective at all.

So I turned to the editorial page, and found what I needed in this lengthy editorial the board had put together while I was sleeping. “Trump’s Attack on Venezuela Is Illegal and Unwise.”

It’s a pretty good piece, especially for something thrown together quickly. But it has its flaws. For instance, it asserts that “If there is an overriding lesson of American foreign affairs in the past century, however, it is that attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse.”

Well, yes, it can. But that doesn’t mean it must, as so many in our country — on the left and the right — now believe. Many of you believe it. So the NYT has used a convenient post-Vietnam lever here — We know intervention is always a bad idea! — as an easy device to persuade us that this foray into another country is a bad idea as well.

Which really doesn’t explain what’s wrong with this latest action. In making its easy point, the board of course mentions Afghanistan. As though it was a similar situation. It was not. As the Times and a huge proportion of America seem to have forgotten, we had an ironclad reason to go into Afghanistan — we needed to make sure it would never again be a haven for Al Qaeda. You know, that group that had just deliberately murdered almost three thousand Americans in their own country.

We’ll discuss later, if you wish, what happened later. The point here is that Venezuela does not in any way offer such a justification. Mumbling about “narcoterrorists” and the like does not constitute a viable explanation. Nor does mention of the Monroe Doctrine. I wonder who told him about the Monroe Doctrine? Well, no matter. The fact is, it doesn’t apply.

But on the whole, the NYT piece did a good job of explaining the situation, and condemning this unwarranted action by Mr. Look-at-me-now-I’m-suddenly-a-neocon.

To appreciate how good the piece was, you have only to look at the mad raving that was published in The Washington Post under the headline — and I’m not making this up — “Justice in Venezuela.”

The Post, which was once a great newspaper, seems unable to see past the happy fact that Nicolás Maduro is now out of power. And it is a happy fact, as the NYT acknowledges:

Few people will feel any sympathy for Mr. Maduro. He is undemocratic and repressive, and has destabilized the Western Hemisphere in recent years. The United Nations recently issued a report detailing more than a decade of killings, torture, sexual violence and arbitrary detention by henchmen against his political opponents. He stole Venezuela’s presidential election in 2024. He has fueled economic and political disruption throughout the region by instigating an exodus of nearly eight million migrants…

But that’s not the point. The thing is, if the man in the ruins of the White House is in a mood to pull on his big-boy pants and throw his nation’s weight around, there are more urgent needs in this world.

You want to take bold action? International priorities indicate the place to demonstrate your strength and determination would be Ukraine, or the Near East. But no, not the same kind of action. No, no, no, no, no.

Since the adversary in Ukraine possesses — you may have heard about this — nuclear weapons, a far more subtle approach is called for. Something like what we saw the Biden administration doing — exercising soft power where we could, and gradually beefing up Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. This was working,, before an off-and-on Putin admirer took over.

Or you could concentrate your efforts on trying to sort out the mess in the Mideast. Don’t expect overnight success, but we need to continue to try — as American leaders have tried since about 1967 — to keep the peace and realistically reassure our ally Israel of its survival. And if you’ve decided regime change is your new thing, try doing it the hard way — by convincing Israelis, via diplomatic means, that they can survive without Netanyahu.

But, you say, why can’t we get rid of Maduro and then do that more important, harder stuff?

Because… as I acknowledged in response to the NYT’s simplistic condemnation of interventionism, attempting to oust even the most deplorable regime can make matters worse. Every such venture is a risk, often in ways we’re unable to anticipate.

There can be far-reaching negative effects, even horrific effects, from this action in Venezuela. And I’m not just talking about the straightforward, housekeeping considerations such as answering the question, “So what happens now in Venezuela?”

Let me pull one such consequence out of left field: For more than thirty years, China has very effectively been buying friends all over the planet, particularly in the Third World. (I’ve occasionally written about this since my first week on the editorial board of The State in 1994. Here’s an update from the NYT.) Building airports and local economies, it has promoted an image of itself as poor countries’ kindly, helpful friend. This action in Venezuela can play right into China’s hands as it tries to become the next America (in hegemonic terms). We’re the Bully Boys; they’re the ones in the white hats. Maybe you don’t think that and I don’t think that, but we’re not the only people in this world.

For that reason (and many others), you don’t do things such as this unless you have an extremely good reason — as we did in Afghanistan, before we all forgot what it was.

Digression: Of course, we can’t do what China does because we are not run by leaders who spend money as they like in pursuit of their careful plans. Try spending a few extra bucks on a needy country, and the folks who currently run our democracy will holler, “America First!”

America First. Speaking of that… we could talk all day about Trump’s inconsistency in this instance, but what’s the point? What are we going to say — that he’s not following his own doctrine? The power he currently possesses is not the result of philosophy of any kind. How could it be? Philosophy means “love of wisdom.” It’s hard to imagine a word less at home in TrumpWorld.

Trump does what makes him, personally, feel good. And that may be the most dangerous thing about this venture in Venezuela — it has greatly expanded his own sense of what he can do, and get away with, and feel good about.

So going into Venezuela was a bad thing. But it wasn’t the worst thing Trump has ever done. It’s not even the worst thing he’s done this week.

I’ve written about 1,200 words so far on this, and I need to move on to some other things. So I’ll just mention in passing my nomination for worst thing of the week: Withdrawing the U.S. from 66 more international organizations, and making America more of a pariah in the world. That was not as noticed the way removing Maduro was, but it was way worse…

Musicians we lost in 2025

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I almost skipped over my email about “The Musicians We Lost in 2025,” figuring it would be about people I’d never heard of. But no. It turns out that at my age, the people I remember are the ones dying. Which makes a sober sort of sense, I suppose.

The NYT’s Amplifier feature does a good job with these kinds of things. Here’s the whole article, with playlist. I’ll just share below some of those that meant most to me…

  • Sly Stone. The Amplifier chose “Dance to the Music,” which I suppose is fine. I chose to share “Everyday People.” That’s just me. It’s odd the things you remember about people. What I remember is something a psychology professor said to our class about him at Memphis State. This prof was an Indian woman, who seemed mature and sensible enough. But she was talking about drugs — the kinds kids like us tended to stray toward — and telling us that being a drug addict wasn’t a problem, as long as you had enough money to feed the habit. Look at Sly Stone, she said — he’s high-functioning. She also told us at about that time that cocaine wasn’t addictive. (And what was Sly addicted to? Crack. Ahem.) So enjoy yourselves, kids, as long as you can pay the bills! I had some good instructors in college, but some were wanting in perspicacity.
  • Roberta Flack. I’ll go with the one they picked: “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” My random memory, which you will share if you’re the right age, is about hearing it for the first time in the Clint Eastwood change-of-pace film, “Play Misty for Me.” It made more of an impression than the song mentioned in the title. Unfortunately, that hauntingly beautiful song is permanently tied in my mind to the image of a sleeping man suddenly opening his eyes to see above him a murderous madwoman with a butcher knife. But it’s still beautiful.
  • Sam Moore and Steve Cropper. Wow, I didn’t know we’d lost not only the tenor half of Sam & Dave, but the legendary rhythm guitarist who played on their greatest hit. The Amplifier notes that “Moore famously immortalizes Cropper’s playing on “Soul Man” with the exclamation, ‘Play it, Steve!’
  • Mark Volman. Volman and the other Turtles were embarrassed by their first and biggest hit, “Happy Together.” They didn’t think it was cool enough. They were wrong. It’s one of the finest pop songs of the 1960s.
  • Marianne Faithfull. This is not possible, because Marianne is 17 years old and always will be. And you can’t see her picture without your heart melting, just a bit. I don’t know whether Mick Jagger was the melting sort, but he was certainly open to her appeal at one point. Of course he was. The NYT chose “The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,” but I’ll go with “As Tears Go By.”
  • Brian Wilson. They saved the biggest for last, and so will I. And while I was afraid they’d miss on the song, they didn’t. Good for them. They chose “God Only Knows.” If you doubt the choice, I refer you to this scene from “Love and Mercy,” in which Paul Dano, as the young Wilson, shares the song for the first time with his heartless creep of a father. It’s painful to watch, but the beauty of the song comes through. The Amplifier notes that “that Paul McCartney once called the greatest ever written.” Paul was on the right track.

May they all rest in peace. They gave us what they could while there were here.

‘Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three…’

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In this first day of the year, I thought briefly about diving back into politics, global affairs, etc., which I’ve generally ignored (by my usual standards) since last January. I mean really ignored, to the point of not knowing enough about recent events to comment. Occasionally I’ll tell myself I really should look into why the honor of the U.S. Navy is being fouled by the task of blowing up small boats coming out of Venezuela, but what good would it do?

And now I’ve seen that almost everything being offered by the various papers I peruse — items in the subject areas I had always assumed were most important — are as absurd and dispiriting as as they’ve been for awhile now. So much for that re-engagement resolution.

But… I did find one bright spot. It’s this item from the NYT:

Your Wait for These Space Events Is About to Pay Off

This is encouraging. Homo Sapiens actually trying to stretch itself forward again, the way we used to do. Rather than sitting about stewing in our little obsessions.

For awhile, I’ve had to look backwards to get a glimpse of what it’s like to look forward. Remember when I wrote about my recent interest in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era? Well, I think a lot of that was because that was a time when this country saw its possibilities as unlimited, and had a positive view of its future. America had survived the Civil War and overcome slavery, the issue that had inhibited the national spirit since our founding. Americans believed they could to anything, and they went out and proved it in a variety of fields.

Which means it was a lot like the time in which I grew up, when we had whipped the Nazis and the Japanese imperialists and were leading the free world in the advancement of liberal values — and the advancement of everything else: Technology, exploration, high and low culture, etc.

It was the Space Age, a term that excited us then, but has seemed so quaint in recent decades.

And now we have this one encouraging news story telling us:

NASA is sending astronauts back toward the moon. No, for real this time.

It has been more than 50 years since humans exited low-Earth orbit and traveled around the moon. In the time since, space agencies have built space shuttles and space stations, but their crews have remained within our planet’s close embrace.

Early in 2026, astronauts from NASA and the Canadian Space Agency will again travel around the moon and back….

And that’s not all. We can also look forward to:

  • More great pics — fancy, high-tech pics — from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. Yeah, I know: That sounds kind of like the name of a house of fashion design, but it fits. This is an stunningly beautifully designed universe, and we’re just getting started at admiring it.
  • More trips to Mars and its moons — by us, by the Chinese, and Japan’s getting in on the act, too.
  • Another solar eclipse, in August. OK, this isn’t mankind doing stuff, but it’s fun to watch, if you can get there. This one won’t be local.

And more. Things to look forward to. This is a good start to the year…

I want to go to there! Or to then…

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I say “then” because what I need to reach my destination is a Time Machine.

What does it take to make me post again after a week? This:

Science girl is apparently not making this up. Remember when Volkswagens were cool? Well, I didn’t even know how cool until I ran across that on social media.

The best part is — or would be, if I had the Time Machine (why am I capitalizing Time Machine? because that’s what H.G. did) — is that I could actually buy one of these babies, new, for less than $1,000 if I could bring it back with me. Coffeemaker included. Because, you know, that was another of the coolest things about the People’s Car back in the day. Chic cheapness.

Sure, there are several things we haven’t worked out yet:

  1. How to build a working Time Machine.
  2. How to make it big enough to bring back a then-new Beetle. This one wouldn’t work, although I admit it’s got plenty of style. (Doc Brown thought his machine had style. Huh. It wasn’t as ugly as a Cybertruck, but it was almost as boxy.)
  3. How to — and this is the hard one, for someone as financially challenged as myself — how to take the money back with me in a form that would transfer to a spendable grand in the desired time and place. I mean, you don’t want to try to go back and earn it, because that wasn’t the easiest thing to do in 1959. It was like coming up with more than $11,000 today. It might take you a couple of hours.

Which I suppose is why we mostly just drive our cars to a Starbucks now.

A new change in the rules

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The first image I came up with to illustrate this didn’t work. So here are some more…

A few days ago, I received a comment that mildly violated my civility policies, but raised a point worth addressing. The reader was complaining about a comment from someone else that was off the subject of the post. It referred to that other comment as “ranting.”

After it sat there awhile, I went ahead and approved it, just so I could respond to it thusly (which I’m now editing a bit to make my point clearer):

Well, you present an interesting dilemma…

I WANT people to always address the subject of the post, and to address it in a civil manner, refraining from trying to tear down the other folks involved in the discussion.

But I’ve always been fairly tolerant of folks wanting to address something else. I generally just post such comments and then ignore them, hoping someone else will help us get back on track.

Maybe I’ll change that. In fact, I’ll engage in an experiment: From now on, I will expect everyone to address the subject of the post, and to do so in a polite, civilized way. Those comments that fail to follow those simple rules will not be approved.

With one exception: You can bring up your own topic, as long as you follow the civility rules, on posts that are labeled “Open thread” in the headline.

We can watch and see how that words. Or rather, I’ll watch and see how that works. Because as much as the fact seems to offend some, this is my blog. If you don’t like my approach, there are millions of other places where you can say whatever you like. Here, you can only say MOST things…

This will remain in effect until I decide it’s not working. Yeah, there’s that first-person singular pronoun again. That’s just the way it is…

I’m running out of living authors

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When I was a little kid, around the time I first learned to read, I loved the card game “Authors.” This made a big impression on the adults. They were amazed I “knew” all these writers and their greatest works.

In fact, my mother mentioned it just the other day, and I’m 72 years old. (Which tells me maybe I haven’t been very impressive since then.) I immediately pointed out that I hadn’t read them; I just knew them the way I knew the suits, numbers and face cards in regular deck. In fact, come to think of it, I still haven’t read some of those books. Maybe I’ll take another crack at finishing Moby Dick…

But that’s not my point. My point is that while lots of people write books, that bunch — Louisa May Alcott, James Fenimore Cooper, Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Washington Irving, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Sir Walter Scott, William Shakespeare, Robert Louis Stevenson, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Mark Twain — were the ones I thought of at that age as actual authors.

And that hasn’t changed much. Oh, I’ve learned that the term technically applies more broadly, extending even unto the writers of self-help books, I’m still sparing with my use of the word. I’m even more sparing with my personal definition of writers worth reading.

And my list has a lot in common with the card game. You’ll note all most of those folks — with the glaring exception of Shakespeare — were active in the 19th century. Which didn’t bother me then — I wasn’t demanding that members of my generation be included or anything like that.

And over time, my adult tastes developed along similar lines. And not just with regard to literature. Consider church music. When I’m in Mass and hear a hymn, or would-be hymn, that really stinks (and yes, I sometimes do have such judgmental thoughts during Mass), I check in the hymnal to see who wrote it. And it pretty much always turns out to be someone writing within my own lifetime. My generation may have come up with the Beatles, and the Beatles were awesome, but they weren’t shooting for timeless sacred music. Except maybe with “Let it Be.”

I’ve mentioned before how stupid I think the annual “books of the year” lists are (and hey, it’s that season again!). I probably won’t ever read any book written within the past year, or if I do it will be by chance — simply a matter of a contemporary work being worth the trouble. The thing that gets me is that in order to compile such a list, or critique the list as a reader, you have to have read scores or even hundreds of books right off the press.

Which is an enormous waste of time.

Let the old man tell you, boys and girls, life is very short (and there’s no ti-i-i-ime…, just to give the Fab Four their due again). If you look over the list of works of literature written in English (and that’s all I’m thinking about here, because that’s a long-enough list on its own) over the last few centuries (before that, it’s hardly English), you will probably never get around to all the books that you should read (for your own enjoyment, and for the betterment of your mind and soul). Not in this life. Sure, lots of people read faster than I do, but still… well, this post is about me running out of living authors, not you.

All that said, peer pressure to keep up with the moment being what it is, especially for those of who lived through the frantically kinetic culture of the ’60s, I do like occasionally to trot out a short list of actual living writers that I’m really into.

But I’m running out of them.

Once, I could have claimed, if I wanted to:

John le Carré
William Faulkner
Alex Haley
Joseph Heller
Ernest Hemingway
John Hersey
Harper Lee
Patrick O’Brian
Philip Roth
J. D. Salinger
John Steinbeck
Hunter S. Thompson
Leon Uris
Kurt Vonnegut
Tom Wolfe

… those just being a few that come immediately to mind. And some of them — such as Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck and even my great fave O’Brian — died before I read them. OK, to be honest, I still haven’t finished any novel by Faulkner, but everybody tells me he’s great.

And now we’ve lost another one. He died several months ago, but I just found out about it the other day. I had just finished rereading Rose — yes, again — and went to Google something about it, and found out that Martin Cruz Smith was dead.

That’s a real loss to letters — to the kind of stuff I like, anyway — and that’s what caused me to write this post.

I mean, who is left for me to really, really appreciate?

There’s Nick Hornby, who wrote such brilliant modern classics as High Fidelity — which inspired this blog’s Top Five lists.

And then Roddy Doyle comes to mind. You know, the Irishman who wrote The Commitments. But as brilliant as that film was, the book was — and this flies in the face of the cliche — not as good at the film. Because you couldn’t hear the music. I think Doyle’s best is another book from the Barrytown Trilogy, The Snapper. I can also recommend A Star Called Henry.

I read a piece Hemingway wrote, as a journalist, when Joseph Conrad died, in which he engaged in some self-flagellation for, as he put it, having used up all his Conrad. He’d read all Conrad had written, and now there would be no more. I could understand what a bad feeling that would be.

Happily, I still have some Doyle and Hornby to read — and come to think of it, plenty of Smith and O’Brians, and even a le Carré or two left.

But I need to come up with some more living writers I dig, before I run out completely…

Hate the latest iOS update? I don’t blame you…

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WHY would you fade out the ONE thing I need to see clearly in the middle of the night?

Last night, sometime after dinner, a dialogue box appeared on my iPhone screen. It wanted to install an update. With reckless abandon, I allowed it to do so.

I agreed on the basis of vague concern that something I rely upon might not work right in the future, at a moment when I really needed it, if I didn’t go along. In other words, the device was saying to me, “Nice setup ya got heah. Shame if sometin’ was ta happen to it…”

Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those discreet, unobtrusive, polite updates. This iOS 26.1 is more of a tear-down-everything-you-like-and-replace-it-with-something-far-less-appealing update.

A lot of my problem had to do with what I sometimes refer to as my Tory sensibility — my instinctive conservatism. I’m like those Age of Sail foremast jacks Patrick O’Brian describes. Their daily existence might be strenuous and harsh, but it “was what they were used to, and they liked what they were used to.”as

Amen. I like new things well enough — nothing like a new toy. As long as I don’t have to throw away my old toys to get one.

This time, they’ve messed with the visual appearance of practically everything that is completely within Apple’s control– camera, clock, settings and such. Worse, they’ve messed with the functionality. Actually, I’m exaggerating a bit. The visual and functional design of only a few things have changed. But they’re the things you most often use quickly, without having to think about it. Now you have to stop and think.

As I often say, nothing wrong with thinking. But I’d rather spend that mental energy on more important, complex matters than setting my alarm clock.

Example: When I wake up in the middle of the night, I’m used to glancing at my phone’s lockscreen, without putting on my glasses, to see what time it is. Not the date, not the weather forecast, just the time. In previous iOS versions, they made the time the biggest thing on the screen, apparently recognizing that’s what people needed to see. NOW, it’s the one thing on the page that’s faded into the background. This is a pain. (And don’t dismiss this as an old man’s complaint. I’ve been nearsighted since I was in the third grade.)

But rather than give you a list of all the things I don’t like about it, I’ll push myself to be positive and name the one improvement (and remember, there’s no reason to change things except to improve them) I’ve found so far:

In the past, those alternative camera settings that can be fun but which you seldom use — time lapse, slo-mo, cinematic, portrait, etc. — sometimes got in the way when you didn’t want them. Your finger might have accidentally touched that part of the screen and ruined your shot. Sometimes, I would swear it would drift to those settings on its own.

That won’t happen now. After a fraction-of-a-second glimpse when you first open the app, those settings disappear, leaving only “VIDEO” and “PHOTO” readily available.

As someone on the boob tube used to say, that’s a good thing. But it’s the only one of those I’ve noticed so far…

Oh, wait, I almost forgot the nut graf. Here goes: Why won’t technology companies leave their wonderful products alone and let customers enjoy them? Why do they have to create a constant state of unsettled confusion by gratuitously chaning them? I can only think of one good excuse: Their beancounters would make them fire all the R&D folks if they didn’t keep producing these visible changes.

Hey, I want people to keep their jobs. But a wise company would employ these people to constantly seek ways to improve their products by addressing actual existing problems. Just don’t let them make the change unless it is undeniably an improvement, rather than change for change’s sake.

 

The best podcast you can find: The Rest is History

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Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, hosts of “The Rest is History.”

I’ve previously mentioned my favorite podcast ever: “The Rest is History.” I’ve only mentioned it in passing, though, and have meant for some time to say more about it in a separate post.

And now I have the perfect news peg for doing so.

Apple, which provides the podcast app through which I listen regularly to hosts Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, has named this brilliant gem its 2025 Show of the Year.

And rightly so. I had never heard it before this prize-winning year, but I can attest that what I have heard stands far above any podcast I’ve heard previously. As Apple said:

Apple is proud to celebrate The Rest Is History with the Apple Podcasts Award for Show of the Year, a recognition that honors a show that demonstrates quality and cultural impact in podcasting. Produced by Goalhanger, the series has captivated a global audience with its witty, insightful, and endlessly entertaining exploration of the past, becoming the first UK-based show to be named Show of the Year.
Hosted by acclaimed historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, The Rest Is History has become a fixture at the top of the charts worldwide by bringing history’s biggest moments to life. From the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, to the sinking of the Titanic, the hosts blend deep expertise with gripping storytelling and unexpected humor to make complex subjects accessible and compelling for millions of listeners…

Absolutely. I don’t know about those millions of listeners, but I certainly love it. And in my opinion, their audience should be in the billions — or at least, whatever the number of people who can understand English well enough to follow.

And not just because I think everyone should enjoy the same things I do. As I’m always saying, the failure to understand history is possibly the greatest problem facing our country today. Not that Americans were in general great historians in previous generations. But the gross ignorance today is more dangerous than ever, because we live in a time when dimly-perceived history is one of the favorite weapons of the warring tribes into which our once-great society has been divided. The armies of left and right charge again and again into battle waving their opposing misconceptions like so many heavy, dull swords.

It’s not about names and dates, or about which tribe got wronged by which other tribe in the past, but about understanding. It’s about perceiving and accepting, on a deep level, the people who came before us, and lived normal human lives day after day, just as we do. They’re not black and white object lessons, they’re people, like our families and friends.

And their stories are fascinating. And sometimes hilarious as well. Apple mentions these guys’ “unexpected humor.” Well, it’s not unexpected at all once you get to know these guys. They are brilliant historians, and so comfortable with their material that they fully appreciate the human comedy they are telling about. And while they don’t neglect the serious stuff, sometimes they go off on wonderful digressions about the really fun stuff.

You’ll hear that if you listen to this one short (half an hour, compared to the usual hour) episode they released this week to celebrate their award. They review some of their favorite episodes this year such as:

I became besotted with this show in April, when I ran across it in the middle of their four-part series on the year 1066, a year that of course has tremendous meaning to these two Brits. I immediately found that the site allowed me to go back and hear the previous episodes in the series — and for that matter every one of the more than 800 episodes since the show began.

I hadn’t listened long before I signed up to become a member of the show, which means I don’t have to “tune in next week” to hear the rest of the current series. I also get to hear their bonus episodes either riffing further on the current topic, of going far off the track on something they enjoy talking about.

All that is well worth $6 a month. Go give it a listen. You’ll be glad you did. You’ll also walk away smarter. You could start with the one celebrating their award.

Oh, and as Americans, don’t be put off by their constant “Bully for England” shtik. They worry about that a bit, although it doesn’t stop them:

Tom: What makes us particularly humble is that we are the first non-American show ever to win show of the year. So it’s a victory not just for us, but for Britain.

Dominic: Yeah, in a very real sense, for Britain.

Tom: Yeah. So Dominic, I’m a bit worried that our tone of British smugness may have scared away lots of readers who are tuning in wondering what the fuss is all about, and they’ve never actually listened to us before, so why don’t we just talk a little bit about what we do….”

Which they go on and do. Then, to celebrate the giver of the award, they riff on the Top Five Apples in History. Give it a listen…

Why not a QUIET ‘hold’ option?

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I’m on hold as I type this.

I’m hearing instrumental music — bad, staticky, extremely monotonous “music” — which I could stand, if I must.

(It’s now been 10 minutes.)

What gets me is the earnest robot message about every 30 seconds explaining “we are currently experiencing extremely high call volumes,” followed by a suggestion that we leave a message on the website. Which of course is the point, to the institution from which I’m seeking information that the website does not provide.

At least I’m not being subjected to the bitterly laughable, “We value your call” shtick. This is more honest, but it requires translation: “We don’t want to pay enough humans to help you in a timely manner, so we’re going to torment you until you go away.”

Oh, this just in…

A different recording kicked in to tell me that it would remain connected with me no longer, and that I must now do what it’s been telling me to do and go to the website and leave a message in a location that sounds like the description of where citizens could find the notice that local government was going to tear down Arthur Dent’s house:

“But look, you found the notice, didn’t you?”
“Yes,” said Arthur, “yes I did. It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard.”

In other words, the machine had had it with me and my patience, and wasn’t going to take it anymore. The call ended at the 16-minute point.

But back to my original suggestion, before that last insult: Why can’t these waits at least be quiet and peaceful?

Never mind, I know the answer: The water-torture irritation is key to the institution’s strategy…

So do you have this ‘new’ form of dementia?

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No, this doesn’t show dementia. It’s just an image that was in the public domain.

My wife brought this graf to my attention when she was reading in the NYT about a “new” form of dementia:

He used to have a “wonderful vocabulary,” he said, “but now, my field of words is far reduced.” He still reads books, exercises at a gym and socializes with friends, but he increasingly forgets names and details. He was particularly distressed when he immediately forgot the minister’s homily at church one Sunday, though he’d been listening avidly. “That’s really scary,” he said…

My wife’s reaction was to say she’d had this since she was 4 years old. I don’t want to brag or anything, but I think I had it earlier. Whenever it started, I’ve had it ever since, no matter how well I might have done in school or in my working life.

He forgets names and details? Been there, for about 72 years. He forgot the homily? Hey, I’m lucky when I hear it! And even before my hearing loss began back in 2012, I had a terrible time “listening avidly,” unless it was a really engaging sermon. I felt bad about it, but there it was. It happened, a lot. I’d set out to listen, and the priest would make an interesting point, and I’d start thinking about that point, which would remind me of something else, and I’d think hard about that, and next thing I knew we were reciting the Nicene Creed.

(It’s not that religion bores me — quite the contrary. I’ve long been that way in a lot of secular situations, even when I’ve been well paid to listen. It would occasionally happen in editorial board meetings. Somebody would say something really interesting, and I was off to the races, thinking about what a great column topic that would make, and how it reminded me of something I’d read previously, and … fortunately, Nina Brook and Cindi Scoppe got spookily good at recognizing that look in my eye (Nina in particular seemed alert to it), and would call me back to my duty. At which point I would have to beg the board’s pardon and try to catch up. And I was the guy presiding. I’m not making this up.)

Not that every point the man was making was silly. I, too, have an extensive vocabulary, but there are some words that have eluded me for many years. Take “futon,” for instance. I can usually recall it after a moment or two, but if I need to refer to one in a hurry, I have to change the subject, or fall back on something lame like “one of those pieces of furniture like the daybed thing I have in my office.” Which doesn’t fool anybody.

I don’t know why it gives me trouble. Maybe because I’d never heard of one until I was well into adulthood. Or maybe because, even though it sounds kind of French when you first hear it, it’s not from any of those Latin-derived languages with which I have some passing familiarity. (Of course, even if it had been French, well… that’s the Western language I understand the least.)  Futon is, in fact, Japanese. I might know a handful of words in Japanese — sushi, zori, kimono, hai and banzai, for instance, but I can’t explain the etymology of any of them. I just know if a bunch of guys who are hopped up on saki (hey, another word!) are running toward you yelling “BANZAI,” you might have a problem.

Another such word is “yogurt.” Again, I don’t know why.

OK, I’m avoiding the subject.

The truth is that lately, I’m forgetting more words. Names, too. I’ve never been great at names, but now I’m worse.

This might be about aging, of course. But at the moment, I’m taking something for an old spine injury (dating to when I was 17) that has made me goofier than usual. Gabapentin helps me sleep while this is acting up, but I’ll be glad to stop it. It’s not just forgetting words. It’s also remembering why I just walked across the kitchen. If I think about it a moment I’ll remember, but it’s still not fun.

And sure, I’ve done that sometimes when I was young as well, but now it’s much more common. Which is tiresome. I’m really hoping it stops when I’m not on the drug anymore. Otherwise, in another few years, my vocabulary is likely to descend to Trump level. On the bright side, maybe that means I can go into politics, and win.

The first time I ever had a memory lapse that I felt sure was age-related was something I’ve mentioned before: About 20 years ago, I suddenly realized that I no longer knew all of the lyrics to every Beatles song. This was a shock, but I got used to it. It’s not really something that comes up much anymore.

Anyway, I’m curious what y’all have experienced. For my part, I think I’m going to post more on the subject of aging from a first-person perspective. Might as well make use of whatever new expertise that getting old brings…

A less-subtle meaning of ‘banzai’… (screenshot from a clip I’m having trouble finding now)

Is this a regional difference, or familial?

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One or two of you out there are into genealogy. I wonder whether you’ve noticed patterns similar to what I’ve seen, and what you’ve concluded as a result.

When you’ve built a family tree to more than 10,000 relatives, you start to notice certain trends. Especially when you look at incoming DNA matches on a large scale.

One that makes its presence felt every time I try to find new matches for my tree via DNA is that my previously unknown maternal relatives are far, FAR more likely to pop up on the list than folks on my Dad’s side of the family.

I’ve tried to explain this to myself in various ways. One is that my mother’s family has always seemed closer than my Dad’s. Dad stayed in touch with his parents while they lived, and his four siblings and their families, but that’s about it. And we seldom saw them in person, except when my grandparents lived in South Carolina during my toddler years.

During those years, my Dad did whatever he could to stay in South Carolina — and his detailer obliged by putting him aboard a couple of ships out of Charleston, and Columbia for a year in a recruiting station.

That kept us close to some of his family, but to ALL of my mother’s. And even after we started moving around after my paternal grandfather died when I was 4, we spent almost every summer entirely in SC, and attended every family gathering possible. So I knew loads of maternal second and third cousins, plus all the necessary uncles and aunts. Not so on my Dad’s side, because after my grandfather died, they were mostly up in Maryland.

Still, when I started doing this genealogy stuff and had my DNA done, it initially seemed that the Warthens were more interested in tree-building than the Collinses. Three of my paternal first cousins have had their DNA analyzed, and only one first cousin on my Mom’s side.

But that was too small a sample to draw conclusions. Once I started really digging into the matches, and going beyond the people I knew well, I found a very different pattern.

Look at the illustration above. That’s the top of the results I get when I filter the list for just new matches who have an identifiable (according to the reckoning of AI) common ancestor. I find that to be a useful beginning for finding people I can reliably post on my tree.

That’s carefully cropped to remove identifying information. But you’ll see that in the top eight matches, ALL are maternal. That’s just the beginning. I couldn’t show you more without the image getting ridiculously vertical.

The full list starts with 14 maternal matches. Then there’s one paternal. Then 10 maternal, pausing for one more paternal. Then 13 more maternal to fill out the top 40, where the filtered list ends.

Are the Collinses just mad about tracing family, while the Warthens are less interested? Or is it a regional thing? Are South Carolinians far more interested in finding roots than folks who live in Maryland? Or is it a big-city thing to be less interested? For the last couple of centuries the Warthens had lived in Montgomery County, Maryland, which contains the sprawling northern suburbs of the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area.

Recently, I’ve run across this sort of thing on my wife’s side of the family, which I’ve carried back past the 14th century, where I found our latest common ancestory. (Yes, I’m married to my 18th cousin once removed. Befored you gasp at the scandal, let me point out that the current king of England is my 16th cousin once removed, and he’s NEVER invited us to the palace. It’s quite likely you’re more closely related to your spouse — and the king — than I am; you just haven’t been crazy enough to do all that tracing.)

Anyway, I had done all that without any DNA evidence. Finally, one of my children sent her DNA to Ancestry. (Previously, three of my kids had done 23andme, which had not been quite as helpful to my tree-building. The two services concentrate on different things.)

My wife, you see, is a very sensible lady and has no interest in doing her own DNA. But my daughter’s data got me started on her fam.

And I found that those folks from Memphis and elsewhere in West Tennessee are, if anything, less interested in sending in their saliva than most of my Dad’s family. (On the other hand, I’ve filled out my wife’s side of the tree pretty well to third cousins — and back well into the medieval period, despite that lack of DNA. Indicating that maybe interest in DNA doesn’t correllate to closeness of families at all.)

But is that because people who moved that far West were less interested in where they came from, while the East-Coasters — especially southerners — were more into establishing their pedigrees?

Or is it just something about Phelans and Warthens in contrast to Collinses?

I don’t know. Perhaps if you have run into something like this, you have some insight…

DeMarco: A.I., my mechanic, and my patients

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The Op-Ed Page

By Paul V. DeMarco
Guest Columnist

Like many of you, I am struggling to understand the repercussions artificial intelligence might have on my life and on my neighbors around the globe.

I’ve read some articles and listened to many podcasts about AI. I’ve heard opinions from the sanguine to the apocalyptic. Experience being the best teacher, I have observed how AI has affected my life and my practice, and thus far, I am cautiously optimistic.

That said, it’s frustrating to have such a small window on the impact AI is having on so many of us. I know it’s eliminating some jobs, while creating others. I sense from a distance that it is transforming the way we educate our children. How do you teach children to think critically and write insightfully when AI can do both for them? AI is already changing the way we interface with the world. Have you called a business and spoken to an AI assistant yet? If not, you soon will.

There are myriad ways AI could influence my corner of the world, primary care medicine. Two are currently top of mind. First, I hope that AI will eventually do most of my documentation. Although there has been some buzz on this front, I have yet to see a system that is anywhere close to a human scribe. However, it’s possible to imagine an AI scribe that would be faster, less expensive, and more helpful than a human one (albeit less enjoyable to work with).

Second, and more interesting to me is how AI will be used in the exam room. A recent visit to my mechanic may give a clue. Several months ago, a vibration began emanating from the front passenger side of my trusty 2016 Ford Escape. The noise had some peculiar characteristics – it was loudest when I first started the car and tended to improve as the engine warmed up and achieved high gear. Once I was at cruising speed, it was barely noticeable.

I took the car to my local mechanic, in whom I have absolute trust, for a regular service. The noise had just began and I had not listened carefully to it at that point. Based on my vague description, he replaced a sway bar link. There was no improvement. Since the noise wasn’t diminishing the car’s performance, I waited several months to return to him. Then I did what I tell my patients not to do. I went to the internet. Prior to AI, I found searches for questions like this one to be mostly unhelpful. In my patients’ hands, medical searches have often led to inaccurate and needlessly anxiety-provoking results. AI has changed the game. Well-constructed prompts can return genuinely useful answers in seconds. I described the noise in detail, and ChatGPT gave me a differential diagnosis. After several rounds of back and forth, the leading candidate was a faulty engine mount.

My mechanic called me that afternoon with a different diagnosis involving the axle. But because the noise was loudest with the car in park, I was dubious. He wondered if we were each hearing different noises. “Let me come first thing tomorrow morning,” I said, “and we can talk about this.”

As I sat with him in the car the next morning, I told him about my AI research. I was uncomfortable as a true amateur (I had no idea what an engine mount (or a sway bar link was until ChatGPT informed me) disagreeing with an expert. But we had a relationship, and I asked if he would replace the engine mount first. If that didn’t fix the noise, he would investigate the axle. Two days later (the mount had to be ordered), I was back on the road and the noise had disappeared.

This could be a guide to how AI will affect my practice. As a generalist, I accept that there are many specialist physicians who know more about a particular aspect of my patients’ illnesses than I do. I expect to need help from them and other parts of the medical team (nurses, pharmacists, social workers, counselors, therapists, etc.). AI could be another member of the team. Since AI can be accessed from both directions– by the patient and the provider– it could also be a bridge to improve patients’ engagement in managing their chronic medical conditions. ChatGPT is imperfect, but often provides reasonable answers to well-written lay medical questions. Providers have access to an AI-powered tool called OpenEvidence that is even more reliable than ChatGPT.

I’m curious about how AI could alter my conversations with patients. I sometimes use OpenEvidence in the room with a patient and let the patient know what I’m doing. I haven’t yet used it to try to change a patient’s mind – for example, to urge acceptance of a vaccine of which the patient is skeptical. But it would provide an authoritative, neutral voice in that discussion.

I don’t perceive AI to be a threat. Nor do I believe primary care doctors could be replaced by AI. Human beings need other human beings to care for and about them. I hope that AI can be successfully incorporated into the doctor-patient relationship to better inform and connect both parties.

A version of this column appeared in the Nov. 14th edition of the Post and Courier-Pee Dee.

The Beloved Children of the Holocaust

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I’ve mentioned my neighbor Mary Burkett before. We had one of her campaign signs in our yard ahead of the last election. She won election to the Lexington District 2 school board.

Hers was one of five signs we had in our yard, four of whom won, but no one running for school board won as big as Mary did. And if you knew her, you would understand why.

But Mary’s more than a pleasant neighbor and someone with real concern for our schools. Several years back, she took on a new avocation: She started drawing portraits of children who died in the Holocaust. This was in January 2017. Over the course of the next seven months, she produced a collection she calls “Beloved: Children of the Holocaust.”

Why did she do this? She explains:

I felt that not only their lives, but their voices had been taken from them, and I wanted to give them a chance to speak to the world. Simply put, I wanted to honor their precious little lives. My hope is that you will be blessed by them as I have been.

She had no great ambition in taking this on. She doesn’t even see herself as an artist. But her work has been celebrated. Three years ago, a film about her project was shown in Greenville at the Peace Center. If you missed that, you can find it on Amazon Prime.

Anyway, I suppose that’s enough to set up what I wanted to tell you about. I saw this a few days ago on her Facebook page:

I’m going to open us up for a little discussion today, but please remember not to name specific politicians or parties from any country.
Here we go… A major university in the US recently denied a faculty request to show my exhibit, In the Land of Wooden Shoes. Their reason? It is too political…now if you have followed Beloved for any time at all, you know that this work is purposefully non-political.
So, here’s our point of discussion –
How does this type of action relate to Germany in the 1930s, if at all? Perhaps it is simply prudent on the part of the university not to exhibit historical portraits that might be deemed controversial. On the other hand, does the silencing of history matter and where might it lead?
We have a large worldwide audience here; let’s see what people think…

When I called Mary to ask about this, she explained that “In the Land of Wooden Shoes” is a sort of offshoot of her initial “Beloved,” and is “a joint project between myself and the Anne Frank Center at USC.” (Mary was a recipient of the Anne Frank Award in 2024.) It consists of six portraits of Anne at different ages, plus 20 of other children taken from the Netherlands by the Nazis and sent east to their deaths. The portraits are accompanied by biographies.

That’s it. “I don’t tell people what to think. There’s never a punch line.
Look at the pictures, read their stories, and walk away with what you perceive…. I don’t show and don’t talk about numbers of trains” or other details of the Final Solution.

The exhibit has been presented to 5th-graders without causing a problem. Yet for a “major university,” it was too much. Too “political.” (Speaking of universities, though, there was also a showing at the South Caroliniana Library.)

The thing is, Mary is very, very careful to stay away from politics. Note her appeal to commenters “not to name specific politicians or parties from any country.” Makes her kind of the opposite of me, huh? But I appreciate what she’s trying to do, and it’s a version of what I’ve praised and called for in the past. It’s a worthy goal for me, and for all of us, if we’ll only embrace it.

Yet in her unassuming work, she’s run into “politics” in recent years. Take that Facebook page. Before Oct. 7, 2023, she had a huge following — about 5 million at one point, from all over the world. Then, it dropped to about 20,000. Apparently, there were complaints that it was “offensive.”

She thought the drop was something Facebook was doing deliberately. Then she hears from the social medium that “Because of your high-quality content, we’re going to extend your reach.”

Her following has gone back up (to 53,000 at the moment), but is “nowhere in the range of where it was.” She is sad that “Very few from Europe, Canada, Australia comment any more.” She suspects they’re not able to see it. This is because she frequently gets FB messages from abroad asking where her page went.

Note that Mary doesn’t name the university or the faculty member who proposed to show the exhibit. The last thing she wants to do is hurt anyone. I didn’t press her on that. I just wanted to share what I’ve shared here.

By the way, at her website, you can learn about some other projects she’s taken on, such as “Beloved: Legacy of Slavery.”

Wonder where I’ve been?

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No, it wasn’t THESE three IT folks who helped me. Mine were more effective, but less funny,

Maybe you haven’t, since I’m in the habit of going walkabout these days.

But for a suprising number of these last days, I’ve been completely unable to do anything with the blog — post, moderate, comment, or even READ it.

Just 504 and 505 error messages. I even got a 503 once.

I hoped it would go away for days. Sometimes these things do. Finally, I gave up and reached out to my host for help. I was on a chat with a tech person — actually three different IT folks — for more than three hours today. It took awhile, but they got it up and running. Huzzah!

I’m going to take a nap now. I’ll try to post something tonight.

OK, I’m tired — but quite happy with the result

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At some point during the extra innings last night — or perhaps it was after midnight this morning — I thought about sending out a Tweet about the tense, exciting, protracted 7th game of the World Series. With everything in doubt, I would have said something like:

Whoever loses this game is going to be far more disappointed than they would be losing any Series I’ve seen up to now…

I didn’t post it because I didn’t want to recognize that my Dodgers might lose. But really, truly, anything could have happened until that very last second when Alejandro Kirk’s bat broke, and my favorite Dodger Mookie Betts scooped it up, hustled to second then threw over to Freddie Freeman for the double play, ending it all. (Here’s a great picture of that moment, with Freddie towering over the Blue Jays’ catcher, leaping with joy while Kirk seems to do a sort of dance of sadness on first base.)

Both teams deserved to win. And those Toronto fans, as well as the players, seemed to want it more. So I felt bad for them. Too bad the last game wasn’t in L.A.

On the other hand, my sympathy had been somewhat tempered because I was sick of the announcers going on and on about how the poor things hadn’t seen their team win a championship for 32 years. They kept saying it. At one point, there was this montage as they cut from one anxious, longing face in the crowd, while yammering again about those 32 years.

You know what happened 32 years ago? I do. So does John Smoltz. At my age, that’s like 18 months ago. They had won the year before that, too! I had been there in Atlanta for the first game of that previous Series, and I’ve always thought it was cool to have been present to hear a foreign anthem played at a World Series — even though they ended up beating my Braves. But come on, guys! You win your first Series ever, and then you win again the next year, and what — you expect to win them all now?

But still, I sympathized. So when I spoke afterward with my brother-in-law, who had rooted for Toronto, I was able to offer my condolences sincerely, and tell him that his guys had deserved to win. But of course, so had the Dodgers. One thing we agreed on — if everybody in America had watched this whole amazing Series, baseball might once again approach something like its former popularity. And America could return to its former greatness.

I’ll just toss out a few things that made this Series wonderful:

  • Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The pitcher who is made of iron. As Chelsea Janes wrote, “Yamamoto threw 2⅔ innings of scoreless relief to close out the 5-4 win a day after he threw six innings in Game 6, a performance that combined with his complete game in Game 2 made him the World Series MVP.” Oh, and you know that complete game? He went all nine innings in the game in his last game before that.
  • Guys who showed they appreciated getting a chance. I’m thinking about Miguel Rojas, whom I hadn’t seen (or at least hadn’t noticed) in the series before Game 6, who was falling down when he through the ball to Will Smith (because the bases were loaded) to barely, just barely saving the game and the Series, and the season — one of many such moments in Game 7. Also, he hit a rare (for him) home run tying the game. I’m also thinking of Andy Pages, who had just been put in at center field, jumping on top of Kiké Hernández to catch the ball on the wall and… again, saving the game, etc. He was so happy, but he seemed a little worried when he looked back and saw Kiké lying there possibly dead. But he was OK.
  • Shohei Ohtani, of course. By this time, his amazing performances in previous days were overshadowed, but hey, he did pitch again — if not as wonderfully as before. And he did have two hits. Which ain’t nothing.
  • Will Smith. There’s nothing harder in baseball than catching, and he did it every inning of every game in the Series, including the 11-inning final game and the 18-inning nightmare several days earlier. Try doing that in a squatting position without committing a Series-losing fumble of a wild pitch. He caught 73 innings, “the most by any catcher in World Series history.” Never mind such shining moments as, you know, hitting the homer that put the Dodgers in the lead.

I could, as usual, go on and on. But let me mention some of the other guys for a moment:

  • Vladimir Guerrero Jr. — That surname means “Warrior,” by the way. Nobody wanted it more than this guy, who underlined his yearning by writing the name of Diós in the dirt each time he came to bat, and hit as though the Lord was definitely taking his side. And he played some tenacious D, such as his diving catch on the first-base line, and that ball he fielded and threw to second in time to have it thrown back to him for a key double play. No one was more passionate, more celebratory about his own achievements and those of his compadres. And the saddest moment came when the camera caught him apparently weaping in the dugout when it was over.
  • Addison Barger — That guy was a terror (from a Dodgers perspective). The internet claims he’s NOT related to Sonny Barger of Hell’s Angels infamy, but think about it — can’t you get “Sonny” as a nickname if you’re called “AddiSON?” Did you notice how several times, Dodgers baserunners decided NOT to try to take an extra base for the simple fact that the hit had gone to right field? That’s because Barger has a cannon for an arm, as he demonstrated to L.A.’s woe a couple of times with throws to home and third base.
  • George Springer. The guy was really racked up. He had a bad arm, a bad leg and a bad haircut. But he stood there at the plate and tried, although quite a few swings looked like they could be his last. Yet he managed to hit with very good effect (from a Toronto perspective) a couple of times, and once for an RBI.
  • Alejandro Kirk. First, he’s not as short as he looks. He’s 5’8″, but looks shorter because he weighs 245 pounds. I think it’s all muscle, the way he hits. At first he looks clumsy, swinging so hard that he sometimes falls down. But thing his next swing sends the ball over the wall…

OK, that’s enough. I know I’m getting a little like Shooter when he was in rehab, raving so about the game that they had to put the straitjacket on him. Like Shooter, I love “the greatest game ever invented.” He’s just confused about which game that is.

And now it’s over. We have the long, empty winter ahead of us. But this Series gave me enough to tide me through those months — even though the Red Sox weren’t in it.

If there’s another baseball fan out there somewhere, perhaps you’d like to add some words…