Not Maru, Part 4

I'll close out this posting week with something that doesn't involve anything more than possible feline humiliation with the paw warmers & headband:

Mandela archives

Here’s something by way of antidote to helicopter parents fighting each other over plastic eggs & political wangles over who should have access to the quality of life that decent healthcare coverage brings: Nelson Mandela’s papers have been digitized, & are now (as of Tuesday) available online.

The archive is a joint project of the Google Cultural Institute & the Nelson Mandela Centre of Memory. Letters, photographs, manuscripts, church membership cards videos—all available to anyone with Internet access.

Here’s one, a letter to his daughter, Zeni, from his prison cell; blue ink on ruled paper, dated 1 March 1979, remembering Zeni’s birth:

“Your birth was a great relief to us. Only three months before this, Mummy had spent fifteen days in jail under circumstances that were dangerous for a person in her condition. We did not know what harm might have been done to you and to her health, and were happy indeed to be blessed with a healthy and lovely daughter. Do you understand that you were nearly born in prison? Not many people have had your experience of having been in jail before they were born. You were only 25 months old when I left home and, though I met you frequently thereafter until January 1962 when I left the country for a short period, we never lived together again.”

It’s always amazing to sift through archives, to go to the primary source. To have these materials, on this man, available at the click of a mouse is…well, where I come from, that would be called a real mitzvah.  

Smells like rotten eggs to me...

You know, every time you think you’ve reached the absolute pinnacle of parents behaving badly, you find that you’re only at the base camp & still have 6500 feet to climb.

I’m referring, this time, to the cancellation of this year’s Colorado Springs, Colo., Easter egg hunt primarily because last year there was basically a parental riot.

There was a roped-off area with little plastic eggs scattered over the grass of a local park. But the Lexus Louts apparently swarmed over the ropes to scoop up the bunny booty for little Brittany & Harley.

It’s not like the eggs were hidden—the biggest danger to the little ones would be stepping on the eggs. & it’s not like the eggs had any intrinsic worth—they were stuffed with candies & coupons from local businesses.

It’s all to do with the adults’ unbelievably skewed view of what’s owed to them & their spawn, & their determination to make it happen, regardless of how reprehensible their actions may be or how cringeworthy they look.

I never got that whole “Baby on Board” sign thing—that proclamation that the greater world should somehow cede right-of-way because your Range Rover is transporting a child. It was immediately clear to me that the “baby” involved was behind the wheel.

& now, apparently, they’re spilling out onto the fields of plastic eggs.

I suppose people should feel relieved that they weren’t armed with lacrosse sticks.

Supreme health care

Can I be the only person who finds the juxtaposition over the case currently before the Supreme Court & the news that Dick Cheney had a heart transplant Saturday…well, a little cherce?

I mean—three days of argument around whether all Americans should have access to health care, even if it means government stepping in, versus a 70-year-old guy having no problem getting his health insurance to foot the bill (around $250K for the procedure alone; tens of thousands to follow) for a heart.

Doesn’t it seem like the argument for having universal health care is made by that surgery right there?

I’m leaving aside the issue of why Cheney needs the heart now, since he’s obviously managed to survive 70 years without one.

Whorls & wars

Okay, now I'm starting to wonder about the Discovery Channel franchise's hiring practices. I was surfing the other day and was struck by this caption as I was passing by the Military Channel:

"Worl War II" is certainly in the same sloppy bucket as "Beast of the Bulkens".

Can it be possible that they've off-shored the task of writing up programming information?

Are you feeling lucky still?

As follow-up to the CBS Colonoscopy Sweepstakes story, here’s a piece from NPR: healthcare insurance companies are squawking at paying for anesthesia during the procedure.

No surprise there that carriers are looking for ways to cut costs wherever they can. I’m just wondering if CBS will fork over for the anesthesia if you win the sweepstakes?

Sweet sourdough

One of NPR’s science writers takes on the foundations of making sourdough bread, which makes me think of a couple of things.

I’m a good baker of cakes, pies and cookies, but I’ve never had luck with making bread. (Well—I did manage monkey bread, but it was under someone’s direct tutelage and it was in the last millennium.) I think one of the major issues is the temperature in our kitchen—I just couldn’t get anything to rise.

But back in the 70s, when my dad was an engineer for the Wolf Range company, he studied the science of heat distribution in ovens, and took up bread baking. He got to be quite adept at it, and was making whole-wheat sourdough bread before you could find it anywhere else.

He solved the temperature issue by rigging a 75 watt light bulb in one of the cabinets. It gave off just enough heat to effect the rising of the dough. For him it was an engineering problem.

(He also, after consulting the county agricultural expert, used to bake dirt for potting soil, to get rid of nematodes. But that’s a different story.)

The other thing NPR’s story reminds me of is the advantage of living in California—there’s almost no restaurant that won’t give you the option of sourdough toast with breakfast. They have varying degrees of sourness, of course, but it’s really nice to have that tooth enamel-cleaning sensation of chewy sourdough toast.

Yum.

Rocky road to Padua (Minn.)

Another “America, goniff” story from Saint Patrick’s Day—this time a celebration in Padua, Minn.

Seems they were setting up the town parade (and, let me just say—only in America will there be an Irish parade in an Italian-named town), and a pick-up truck caught fire.

So far, a dog-bites-man story, yes?

But when the time came to put out the conflagration the responding fire squad was helped out by a few local volunteer firefighters who’d been part of the parade. In drag:

Seriously—where else on the planet would the confluence of Irish-Italian-firefighting-hunks-in-evening-gowns-manning-(er)-fire-hoses happen?

A worm in the Apple

So, I thought this was amusing; but, of course, I'm one of the 67 people on the planet who don't own any Apple products:

The title is, "So, Dad, how do you like the new iPad we bought you?"

Justice delayed

John Demjanjuk’s long and mostly prosperous life finally came to an end Saturday. He died in Bavaria, not in prison (as befits a convicted war criminal), but in a nursing home, age 91.

The retired autoworker has spent the last30 years denying his work in Nazi death camps, fighting extradition for trial and then claiming ill-health as a reason to avoid prosecution. Prior to that, he’d had quite a tidy life, arriving in the U.S. in 1952, taking up work and raising a family in suburban Cleveland.

NPR’s story about Demjanjuk’s death has one element that just sticks in my craw. It quotes Professor Michael Scharf as saying that Demjanjuk was probably conscripted into Nazi service but “spent the rest of his life as a model citizen trying to atone for that.”

It’s clear that Demjanjuk did nothing that even approaches the time zone of atonement. The past 70 years were an exercise in hiding, denial and dodging justice.