The evil that men do

The viciously sectarian-hate monger Ian Paisley died today in Belfast, age 88.

Paisley, an ordained evangelical Protestant minister, was huge in the anti-Catholic campaigns in Ulster during the second half of the 20^th Century. To listen to his guttural voice spewing hatred on the news was to call to mind some of the speeches of the Nazi greats, spittle and all.

He fomented violence because, you know, God was a Unionist.

I understand British Prime Minister David Cameron pronounced Paisley “one of the most forceful and instantly recognizable characters in British politics.” Yeah, like Martin Bormann. Or Tomás de Torquemada.

(That would eat his lunch, being compared to a Dominican.)

We’re told that Paisley suffered from heart ailments, but I find that a bit of a stretch. Because you would need a heart in order to have problems with it.

Yes, in the past seven years or so, he acquiesced to the notion of a “shared” government in Northern Ireland. But by that time both Ulster and Britain had reaped the whirlwind he’d sown with such fervor.

My take is that whatever good was in him leached out of his bones at least 70 years ago; the evil he is responsible for will be with us for a long time.

Working cats

It’s a universally acknowledged fact that cats pretty much rule the Interwebs.

Oh, yeah—you got yer Dog Shaming sites and yer international anti-dog-poop reports and yer police dog Twitter accounts. But basically, without cats and cat videos, no one would have bothered to build out the ARPANET. No eBay, no Drudge Report, no nude selfies of Anthony Weiner going viral.

Well, maybe that last one is a bit of a heavy burden to lay on the feline spine.

In the proud tradition of How Cats Saved Civilization, then, here’s a story from NPR about distillery cats. Those are the hard-working…er, diligent…um. Well, distillery cats fulfill a vital function in ensuring that those precious waters of life keep flowing, on both sides of the Atlantic.

In times of yore, they protected the grain used in distilling whiskies from marauding mice. Apparently they were fierce and fearless in the pursuit of their duties, as evidenced by Towser the Mouser’s Guinness entry of 28,899 kills at the Glenturret, the oldest distillery in Scotland. (Although I do worry about who might have been keeping track.)

These days, mousing skills aren’t as important as they used to be. I expect that EU and FDA helth regulations have reduced a distillery’s options as to how they can store grain, so non-human vermin aren’t as problematic as they might have been 50 years ago.

But—and this is kind of a self-fulfilling beauty of the Internet—it seems that having a cute, photogenic cat purring around the visitors center is instant and almost free marketing. Hint: it’s not photos of a plastic thimble of whisky in the tasting room that people are tweeting the hell out of.

I got a kick out of the still master at the Woodford Reserve distillery in Kentucky admitting that no one knew whether their long-time resident cat Elijah was any good at mousing, because “everybody fed him. He didn’t have to mouse that much.”

But he gave great photograph.

Well, different times, different capabilities. The thing I really like about these distillery cats is that even when they’re sleeping on the job, they’re on the job. They’re the perfect employee—working 24x7.

Sadly, Glenturret’s most recent DC was struck by a car and killed just before NPR’s story aired. But look at what a great job he was doing:

The real mistake is if they keep their jobs

Wow. According to the Telegraph, here’s the situation report two weeks after it was revealed that over a 16-year period, 1400 girls were systematically raped and abused by a group of men in Rotherham (South Yorkshire), while police, politicians and public welfare representatives did nothing:

In a nutshell, those on whose watch this happened for years are still courageously admitting that mistakes were indeed made, by...someone, but that they personally really didn’t know what was happening and therefore their responsibility is limited, and of course, their moral culpability is nil.

The director of children’s services (and, in the context, ain’t that an oxymoron of a title?) told a parliamentary committee, and I swear I am not making this up, “All of us could have done better.”

And, therefore, she should keep her job.

The town council’s chief executive also slithered up to the committee and admitted that key files with details on the years of organized child rape by “men of Pakistani heritage” have gone missing, unaccountably. (He won’t specify whether they were destroyed, just that “they are not within the council’s archives.” Which is why you bloody well need cloud back-up.)

But he never saw two of the reports on the abuse-on-an-industrial-scale that had been submitted to authorities (one in 2003 and one in 2006), so, really…not his fault. Year after year after year, not his fault.

The chief police officer of the area doesn't appear to have graced Parliament with his presence, but he's definitely singing from the same songbook. About knowing nothing.

What’s interesting to me is the “we’re not criminal, just criminally incompetent” explanation. It’s not like we haven’t seen that before from people trying to evade prison sentences. I’ll be curious to see if it’s a good career strategy.

Because the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. And these people have demonstrated that they know how to do just that one thing very, very well.

Uomini...

Okay, this photo was on an Italian gossip Facebook page:

There are just so many stories one could spin from this picture, one hardly knows where to start.

Among the many interesting comments was one insisting the man is looking at the bottle in the retreating woman’s hand. After considerable study, I’m thinking…not so much.

However, I’m betting this will end badly, one way or another.

Really mean streets

Y’all know how I like to keep up on matters ophidian, wherever in the world they might be or whatever the season. In a pinch, I’ll go with performing crocodiles.

And—as you know—I do not make any of this stuff up.

And it’s my own home town, the great city of Los Angeles that gives me the most recent adventure, because it seems that an albino cobra went on the lam for four days, before it was taken into custody by authorities.

Four days, folks. Four long, hot and anxious days.

(The snake might look something like this.)

It turns out, according to killjoy WaPo, that this particular serpent isn’t so much albino as leucistic (meaning it lacks pigment, but has blue eyes instead of pink). 

However, I don’t believe you’d think that particular hair worth splitting if you came across the cobra in question on your way home from your gang initiation or the medical marijuana dispensary.

Gratitude Monday: spun beauty

Today I’m grateful for art in all its incarnations and artists in all their manifestations. If you are willing to look, you can find extraordinary creativity and beauty in some of the most seemingly unlikely places.

Here’s an example. I first saw it Saturday, and I must have replayed it about five times since. Because: beautiful, delicate, flowery cotton candy!

As I was watching this street vendor spend more than two minutes to create a multi-colored cotton-candy flower for what I imagine is pennies, my heart lightened. Here’s a guy who suits up every day to go stand for hours in a not-very-salubrious-looking location, putting his all into creating stunning sculptures out of spun sugar.

In my world of strip malls, software engineer ninjas and apartment complexes with hundreds of units, this cotton-candy artist is a true innovator; every single one of his creations is unique. And lovely.

And that just makes me smile.

Even more so because his work is so ephemeral. None of them is going to make it intact five meters from his stand. They’re all going to be devoured. Yet he keeps on making them.

Thanks for that, cotton-candy dude. Thanks.

Painting the town red

Utterly désolée that I am not in Breda, the Netherlands this weekend. Because it’s Redhead Days, and it would be just awesome to be surrounded by thousands of my people.

I mean:

But since I can’t be there, I’ll pass on a bit of knowledge that y’all might be interested in regarding the flame-haired set.

I will vouch personally for the data on redheads having pain receptor issues. I first heard about this phenomenon from an anesthesiologist during a pre-surgical consultation. She took down all the usual information, then commented, “I’ll administer an extra amount, given that you’re a redhead.” She explained that this had been known anecdotally to her colleagues for some time, but that studies were finally confirming it.

The next time I went under the knife, during the pre-surgical anesthesiologist consult, I merely pointed at my hair. Since he was also a ginger, he just nodded and made a notation on his clipboard. (This is how long ago this was: no iPad in use.)

But this information about redheads and anesthesia would explain why, when I had outpatient surgery using a local back in my college days, I kept kind of jumping around the table. Because the pain was still getting through. It was unnerving the surgeon until the anesthesiologist finally expanded the target area.

(In my case, they also have to mix in an anti-nausea prophylaxis, because the worst thing for me is the post-anesthesia puking. But that's just me.)

Sorry I can’t be in Breda today, my brothers and sisters. Perhaps next year.

Can we talk?

Comedian, actress, talk show talker, celebrated-for-being-a-celebrity Joan Rivers has died, age 81.

If you’ve had any television service—even broadcast-only—in the past 50 years, you’ve heard Rivers. If you’ve had cable, you’ve heard and seen her, probably much more than you’ve seen your siblings.

Rivers was a comedic pioneer, not only because she was a woman, although she certainly blazed the trail for the women who followed her, but because she was absolutely fearless. She’d take on anyone and anything, including the Israelis and Palestinians, her own plastic surgeries and the suicide of her husband.

Everything was a legitimate target for her sharp and brash wit.

In recent years I could only take her in small doses—I didn’t watch her on all those red carpets, I caught the soundbites on YouTube. But she still made me howl, because she was saying what anyone with half an eye was thinking.

(I almost said, “what anyone with a modicum of taste”, but let’s face it: Rivers could take the piss with some of the outfits she herself wore. Didn’t matter—if someone wanted to take her on, let ‘em. But they’d better be prepared for return fire.)

I’m not going to go into detail; I’ll let her do it for herself. She was amazingly good at that.

Sharing the road

I was in one of the twin left-turn lanes from El Camino to Lawrence Parkway yesterday, and could not help but notice that the car next to me was composed mostly of stereo speakers, and there was something very lively on. But it was kind of a killer beat, so I let my inner spirit run free (as much as it can when you’re strapped in completely with your seat harness, which I never go anywhere without using, in case the CHP is reading this).

By which I mean I was car-boogying, head-bopping and hand jiving like nobody’s business. Look—it’s a long wait for the left-turn arrow at that intersection; I could have performed the second act of Swan Lake before we had to move. But I sadly did not have a tutu with me.

I didn’t bother to look for anyone who might be watching me; traffic on that part of El Camino runs about 45 MPH. The only person whose vehicle wasn’t moving was next to me, in the very loud car.

And what made me laugh and laugh was that—as cranked-up as he had the volume, and as irresistible as that beat was—this guy was as still as one of the guards at Buckingham Palace. I mean, not one millimeter of movement. It was like he was completely frozen.

He didn’t even look around to see who was laughing like a maniac.

Literary matters

There’s this thing going around Facebook—you’re supposed to list ten books that have “mattered” to you. No specification on how they matter, but of course the challenge is to pare the list down to just ten.

Well, here’s mine:

Eye Deep in Hell: Trench Warfare in World War I, John Ellis.

This was my introduction to the First World War. I don’t even know why I read it that summer, but it was my WTF moment, such a vivid description of the ghastly life in the trenches that it sparked my concentration in New Military History, with a particular focus on mass warfare of the first half of the 20^th Century. When people ask me for recommendations on what they should read to “learn” about that war, Eye Deep in Hell is it.

The Periodic Table, Primo Levi.

This is the book that goes with me if I’m ever sent into exile. It’s possibly the most beautiful piece of writing I’ve ever encountered. Levi was a chemist in Turin; in 1943 his life was interrupted when the Germans occupied the part of Italy not held by the Allies, and he was sent to Auschwitz, where he was a slave laborer in I.G. Farben's Buna plant. He wrote many books, novels, essays, etc., but The Periodic Table is the one I keep returning to. It’s a series of autobiographical short stories, each one tagged to one of the chemical elements. The one I love the most is “Iron”; Levi’s friend Sandro is my ideal of how a good life is lived.

The Odyssey, Homer.

I read The Odyssey in high school, and we basically jumped joyfully into the whole sea-cruise-from-hell thing. It seemed so full of panache, and adventure, and had that happy ending where Odysseus shoots all those sons-of-bitches suitors. And his dog remembers him. After 20 years, which made the dog about 25 and remarkably long-lived. TO was my introduction-in-depth to Greek mythology, and archetypes and all that stuff; I enjoyed it. But by the time I got to college and read The Iliad, I was considerably less inclined to put up with chapter after freaking chapter of a monumental testosterone-powered whizzing contest, amongst both the mortals and the gods, especially when the butcher’s bill is so high. I could hardly wait to move on to Aeschylus, where Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon. Good riddance, I say.

The Joy of Cooking, Irma Rombauer.

Long before there was the Internet to ‘splain the fine points of roasting lamb or making meringues, The Joy of Cooking was my go-to reference. In retrospect, I think I may not have actually made a whole lot of the recipes in the book, but I certainly consulted the daylights out of it when I was looking for technique. Eventually it was superseded to some extent by Julia Child. And then, of course, YouTube. But it goes with me everywhere, because—hey, it’s just the classic.

The Wind in the Willows, Kenneth Grahame

TWITW is the prototypical buddy story; Rat and Mole are about as good a pair of friends as you’re ever going to find, inside and outside the pages of a book. Yes, they have to deal with that whackjob Toad, and with the Weasels—don’t we all? Rat and Mole make me think it would be a good thing to go messing around with boats, even though even the thought of being on the water renders me queasy. Every year at Christmas I reread “Dulce Domum”, because this is what the spirit of the season is.

Pictures of Perfection, Reginald Hill.

I’ve already told you how much I love Reg Hill’s police procedurals about Dalziel and Pascoe; this is my favorite. It’s so…daft, so delicate, so delicious. And watch out for the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra-la.

The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten.

My BFF gave me this, and I read almost the entire book on my flights back to LA from Seoul. I loved the wit, earthiness and perseverance Rosten described in the Jewish peoples. The understanding it gave me proved foundational when I was studying 18^th, 19^th and 20^th Century European history, and it was also helpful in navigating the executive stratum in film and television production. I read, reread and consulted JOY until my copy literally fell apart. I sort of felt I should give it a Viking funeral, because it gave heroic service to my careers. However, I don't like the idea of burning books.

Lives of the Noble Romans, Plutarch.

This is a holdover from a college humanities class on Ancient Rome. The thing that impressed me about Plutarch was that he wrote about his subjects with a certain degree of honesty. The one I remember was Cato the Elder, whom Plutarch held up as an example of a man dedicated to the civitas; even though he was really tight with a denarius, and when his slaves became too old to work, he turned them out to fend for themselves. I carry it around in my car in case of breakdown, or for doctors’ waiting rooms where the only entertainment they have is a TV set to daytime talk shows or sporting events. Plutarch is way better than anything on TV.

The Art of War, Sun Tzu.

I laugh every time some ninja rockstar self-styled techno-business-innovator next-big-thing guru spouts some sound bite and attributes it to Sun Tzu. As opposed to them, I’ve actually read this book, and understand its implications for a lot of arenas. I’ve also read Clauswitz’s On War, which has applications to the business world as well, but for some reason the gururati haven’t latched onto that one yet. One of the big challenges for implementing some of the precepts in TAOW is that they’re predicated on understanding yourself, understanding your surroundings and understanding your enemy. Most people can’t manage that first step.

The Long Good-bye, Raymond Chandler.

It’s not the first Chandler I ever read, but it’s my favorite. (Okay, there’s a line from his short story “Red Wind” that pretty well blows away everything ever written about LA, but this is the best of his novels.) I bought my copy for 90p at a news stand in Gatwick Airport the night before returning to the US from my bicycle trip through France and Spain. I had no money and nothing to do until the Laker Air flight to LA the next day; TLGB got me through. Look, Chandler had me at the opening line: “The first time I laid eyes on Terry Lennox he was drunk in a Rolls Royce Silver Wraith outside the terrace of The Dancers.”

What's on your list?