People pictures and a dosa from Saravanaa Bhavan

 Time to post some pictures.

I wrote this little story the other day and I find it cute enough to share.

The photos were taken on Martin Luther King Day this year, 1/15/2024 at two locations. The first was an Indian restaurant that specializes in dosas, Saravanaa Bhavan. They are a small chain with a global presence. We were at the one on Lexington Ave. in Manhattan. The other location is one of my favorites, Urban Space on Vanderbilt Ave. in Manhattan. 

The dosa was ordered by one of my party. I usually don't do the food picture thing, aka food porn but there it was, there I was and the camera was in my hand, so here it is.

The three people are a NYC couple and the woman's cousin. One is a teacher, one a psychiatrist and the third a risk manager. One is from Brooklyn, the others originally from south India but settled here now. Typical middle class New Yorkers.

The photos at Urban Space are the usual batch of posed and candid. The woman holding the latest issue of Public Illumination Magazine is a lawyer. She is originally from California but is working on becoming a New Yorker. The woman with the baseball cap works at Mystiik Masala, one of the food stands. as it happens, it's a great place to get Indian street food in NYC. I've been a fan since it's founder and owner, Yuva operated a food cart around the corner from Urban Space. The man with the interesting outfit is a world traveler. He's originally from Brooklyn but lives in Key West now. His hat's been to 22 countries so far. The last photo is another person who works at and for Urban Space. The other two, obviously candids. The couple staring up must be watching a TV behind me. I just can't tell for sure.

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Thoughts on Jews, Palestinians, Israel, Gaza and the Holocaust. Will this piss some people off?

What follows here is what comes from reading the news and following events including those of 10/7/23 and much earlier than that. These are my thoughts and opinions.

I wonder if this posting will piss some people off. It won't bother me because it's not my intention to anger anyone.

It's nearly eighty-five years since Poland was invaded and occupied by the German Nazis and turned into a combination of terror state, prison camp, ghetto, slave state murder factory and worse. I am at a loss for words to describe what I mean in full, and if you know me, that's a rare thing. The words will come later. The amount of time since is enough that people sympathizing with, when comparing it to 1939-1945 in Nazi occupied Europe severely over-inflate the destruction of Gaza and completely denigrate the experience of the Jews, the Romany, the other classes of people the Nazis scheduled for extermination such as the disabled, homosexuals of every type, and even most of the occupied populations of those places. This terror in Gaza will pass in weeks or perhaps months. The invaders and occupiers plan to provide succor to their foes when the fighting is done. For the victims of the Nazis and their allies the only end to the terror and agony was death. Liberation wasn't even a fleeting dream unless it was in the prayer for Messiah to come.

I believe terrorist anti-Israel groups, and even some non-terrorists are hones but no less despicable for their honesty when they call for the eradication of all Jews in Israel and even beyond. Any and all crimes committed agains individuals, against Jewish communities and organizations are justified in their drive to murder all Jews

That extremist Jews now take up the same call but apply it to Palestinians is just as despicable. The multiplying of wrongs only leads to more wrongs and never to a right.

States and individuals will defend themselves when attacked, this is their right yet I do feel the disproportionate slaughter of civilians in Gaza is uncalled for. And while it may be a war crime, that is for others to try and judge, it is not genocide.

Sadly, things won't change. Not only are there no honest brokers for a long term peace in the region, there are, it seems, no honest players in power now. Netanyahu believed he'd killed the two-state solution. He finds himself surprised, shocked and dismayed by its sudden resurrection as a proposal for peace. The sooner he is out, the better. The same goes for Hamas, their allies and their leaders and the doddering, corrupt Abbas as well. A search for peace must include a search for new leaders on all sides.

What's the alternative?

Perhaps, since the children can't learn to play together and share the land, none of them should have it. Perhaps the solution would be to schedule a total evacuation, have everyone from all of Palestine and Israel given a deadline to leave and visa to live wherever they decide to go. Set a deadline for their departure and when it passes, seed the land with enough radioactivity to make it uninhabitable for millennia. Then the Israelis, secular, religious, Zionist, et al. and the Palestinians, Sunnis, Shiite, Jihadist, secular, et al. can share their exile and mourn the land they couldn't share, lost to them forever except in prayers.

Am I kidding? You decide.

I am the child of Holocaust survivors. Here are a few pictures I took several years ago, and never posted to the web - possibly they were posted on Facebook. They are at a cemetery on Long Island where all the inhabitants were either Holocaust survivors or their relatives and children.

We meet there once a year to remember and to say Yizkor and Kaddish for those who have no grave.

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Weird times now and then; If cats ruled the universe

 Half a century ago, from 1967-1972 and beyond, the USA and elsewhere confronted political violence from both the right and the left. At the time, in the USA, the left was more prominent with its calls for social justice especially civil rights, anti-Vietnam activism and economic justice. On the right, though somewhat more subdued were white supremacism including neo-Nazi organizations and the KKK. There were bombings, assassinations and a violent police and state sponsored response to small and large scale protests of the left at places such as Kent State University, Jackson State University, the demonstrations around the Pentagon and at the Democratic Presidential convention in Chicago. In Washington DC tens of thousands of people were tear gassed, beaten, arrested and illegally corralled into RFK Stadium to quell what the government saw as an insurrection.

On the right there was a small but active Neo-Nazi party and the KKK was reviving in reaction to the Civil Rights movement. In 1968-69 Martin Luther King, Robert Kennedy and Fred Hampton were assassinated. The riots in slum neighborhoods of large and mid-sized cities around the US were televised and demonized the rioters rather than looking at the conditions that made the riots all but inevitable. 

In a phrase. things were tense.

They are tense again. This time there are a lot more guns around on both sides, and it looks scary for almost all the same reasons: economic inequality, racism, conspiracy paranoia, contempt for the opposition, resentment and a feeling of being treated unfairly and not getting ones desserts. Mix in a wannabe tyrant like Trump whose own sense of entitlement and resentment are off the scale, and people who see him as a messiah-like figure, we can be in trouble.

But I am an optimist. As we survived the troubled 1970s I think we'll pull through the troubling 2020s. I believe enough people don't want a civil war, don't want violent unrest that they will actively work to suppress the extremists. 

It's very weird times, but thinking about it, I think all times are weird, just that some are weirder than others.

As for photos, who wants to see pictures of cats, and the cats I share my home with in particular? I do!

Most of these are new, a couple were pulled from the archives. Enjoy.

If cats ruled the universe there'd be fewer rodents, more hairballs and a lot more purring going around.

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Flying Monkeys of the US House and a few photos in my backyard after the small snowstorm 1/9/24

Mike Johnson, the current Republican interpretation of the Speaker of the House did something the elected politicians are supposed to do, figure out a path to legislate. He came to a tentative spending deal with the Senate Majority Leader, Charles Schumer that will, if passed fund the government for a few months. What a surprise since Johnson has a reputation for being as much an obstructionist as some of the other members of that caustic caucus. Almost as soon as the news broke several of the do-nothing, know-less-than-nothings of the far right pulled their heads out of their collective litter box to condemn the deal and vow to kill it.

No surprise here. Then I read an article in Esquire online that exactly captured the tenor of this far right carcass in the House of Representatives, the Flying Monkeys. Visions of the servants of the Wicked Witch of the West, this time with radioactive orange hair and a belly that extends all the way from the tee to the green of a par three on one of his courses setting out to capture the bill before tearing it to shreds came into mind. The flying monkeys! Acting out their fantasies of serving the most indicted loser of a POTUS I can remember perhaps hoping to sup at the trough. 

Will the House Democrats support the deal? Will the Flying Monkeys exercise their version of the veto and exorcize the Speaker they elected just this past October and put their considerable, dysfunctional skills on display again?

Casey Stengel only had a lousy baseball team to deal with when he asked rhetorically, can't anybody here play this game? We have a House of Representatives and specifically a far right group who show they not only can't play but don't want to. 

But enough politics. It's winter and NYC still hasn't had 1" of snow in almost two years. We had a little more about 30 miles north of the city. It was pretty coming down and I am glad we didn't get more than we did. 

Still, a photo opportunity. After the snow stopped I went out in the back and took a few photos. Looking at these, a poem by Robert Frost came to mind, the one I had to memorize back in the fourth or fifth grade. I still like it. You can find the whole poem online I am sure. 

I certainly didn't have miles to go before I'd sleep.

"Whose woods these are I think I know..."

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A Portrait of Two Friends: Ron and Shalom, Easton PA 12/30/2023

Before I get to the pictures of Ron and Shalom, a brief digression on the current state of mind of people who can't seem to process anything that disagrees with their preconceptions.

We live in fraught times where the word truth has taken on meanings that have little and nothing to do with anything verifiable as, well, truth.

I will acknowledge this as I start: there are categories of human experience where truth is not a hard thing. The area of religious truth is perhaps the most obvious. To a believer in a god, any god, that is a truth they will not deny and there's no point arguing with someone about this. One might wonder why there are so many true gods whose believers deny that any god but their own is true, but that's the problem with faith: it doesn't require any demonstrable proof, cannot be disproven and must be taken on, hah, faith. If you don't have it of course you won't get it. 

There is another category of truth that bends reasonableness and that is truth based on anecdote and hearsay. Think about it, someone says something happened to someone they know and the speaker knows the person who told them the story is reliable so it must be true. Well, I guess so if you define true to include this sort of reporting. I know people who believed JFK was murdered by supporters of assassinated South Vietnam's President Ngô Đình Diệm in revenge for the CIA's murder. There's no evidence for this but a novel published in 1975, "The Tears of Autumn" used this as a major plot device and the idea was looked on as an "it must be true" if this novel says so. Flimsier evidence I cannot imagine but I know this theory is still current among some true believers.

Does the word truth need to be retired from discussions of factually demonstrable subjects, areas of knowledge open to experimentation and our direct experience of the world? What can we replace it with? I know it's possible for two people to hold opinions that are in direct opposition and both people are convinced theirs is the truth. Well, one of them must be wrong, right? It seems that the evidence is very strong, backed by facts that Trump lost the election of 2020 yet Trump and his supporters strongly deny this, claiming all sorts of unverifiable theories and already disproven conspiracies to the contrary. These folk are either ignorant or lying. If we call them liars we believe they know the facts and just won't admit them. If they are ignorant, at this point their ignorance is willful because the facts have been broadcast for the past several years, and being willfully ignorant and continuing to voice these lies makes them liars. Yet they will assert they are in possession of the truth.

I guess you can have your truth, I can have mine but at least admit that we will need to have one set of facts.

And yes, light is both a particle and a wave even if you can't believe it.

                                        The last Saturday of 2023 I met up with my friends Ron Kolm and Shalom Neuman in Easton, PA. Shalom is an artist, founder of the Fusionism movement and of the International Fusionism Museum. Ron is a writer of fiction and poetry, most recently his The Bookstore Book: a Memoir published by Pink Trees Press, as well as an editor on many small press anthologies, including the current Brevitas anthology and all of the Unbearables anthologies. 

                                           It was an overcast and chilly day, neither surprising for a winter in eastern Pennsylvania. We walked around for a bit. I was hoping to walk with them to the abandoned and desolate Easton train station on the south side of the Lehigh River. For several reasons we didn't get quite there, stopping on the Third Street Bridge about halfway across the river, just past and under the Jersey Central trestle over the bridge and river. We will make it to the train station another time.

Later we walked past Easton's restored central plaza at the intersections of Northampton and 3rd St. and then to dinner.

                                            

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