Sunday, March 17, 2024

Happy Saint Patrick’s Day!

Shamrocks at our local garden store.

At Trader Joe’s: shamrocks wrapped up for St. Patrick’s Day.

Shamrocks that we saw in Ireland.

On St. Patrick's Day I love to think about the times we have traveled in Ireland. Our trips have always been centered in Galway because my brother has spent several sabbatical years working at the university there, so we were there at least four times. We managed to visit Dublin, the Rock of Cashel, and a few other places as well. I've posted some of these photos before, but it's been a while so here they are again!

Children playing in a park in Dublin.

The Rock of Cashel, “The High King of Irish Monuments.”

Ironwork on a bridge in Galway.

Ashford Castle.


A crafts center near Galway with an interestingly painted building.

A mural on an outdoor cafe in downtown Galway.

The bar at Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Coole for Elizabeth’s celebration of drinks.

Note: As far as I've been able to discover, there's no green beer in Ireland for St. Patrick's Day or any other time. Green beer is strictly American and was invented in New York in 1914. So no pics here! (source)

Photos © 2000-2024, mae sander
Shared with Sami’s Monday Murals

Saturday, March 16, 2024

Weekend Update

 Recent Reading

Help Wanted, published March 5, 2024.

Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman has the clarity of a fable. I enjoyed reading it both as social commentary and as a good story of individuals struggling to make it in a society that hasn’t given them many opportunities. Virtually the entire novel takes place in the present time (mid-2020s) in a big-box store, part of a chain called Town Square that resembles a Target. It’s located in a middle-sized town that was once much more prosperous, and neither the town nor the store is as nice as it used to be. The novel is written with a good sense of humor and plenty of irony, though my summary doesn’t especially show this.

The employees at Town Square represent a slice of American life. The novel focuses on one group, which is responsible for unloading the trucks that bring the merchandise every day. As they appeared to their boss in their morning meeting:  “The diversity of race, gender, and ethnicity in the faces before him would have filled the headmaster of an elite private school with envy.” (p. 28) The characters, though each is fully portrayed, also seem to me to represent a set of types in our society. They realize this, and show it — for example, “Val threw her head back and laughed breezily, the way she imagined people do at fancy cocktail parties.” (p. 237)

The characters have a variety of reasons for being employed by a corporation that underpays them, makes sure that they don’t work enough hours to qualify for benefits or overtime pay, and gives raises that barely cover inflation. They are highly aware that there are not enough of them to restock shelves or assist customers effectively, particularly not to the standards they would set for themselves. This mistreatment of employees was intentional; further, the corporate policy of understaffing the store was purposely unacknowledged: “To keep customers from recognizing that the lack of employees on the sales floor was a deliberate choice, corporate constantly posted large banners reading help wanted—the implication being that any lack of staff on hand was a function of the tight labor market and/or a lazy populace’s unwillingness to work service jobs.” (p. 150)

Most of the characters have varying degrees of self-awareness and they are highly conscious of the way society has limited their options. They also see their own shortcomings. For example, Diego, an immigrant from Central America, considers why the white people seem to him to be better off, to live in houses that their parents or grandparents have owned, and to be better able to cope with their poor wages and lacking benefits. “Diego thought of a conversation he’d had with a guy named Isaac who used to work with them. Isaac had said that even at a store like Town Square, where they’re all paid shit, white people were still better off than black people. It was part of a bigger, historical picture, Isaac said. … When the jobs started to go away and wages started to fall, it was like a game of musical chairs. The people who already had stuff—white people—got a chair. Black people were left standing, with nothing but our civil rights.” (p. 175-176)

Each character has his or her own problems: some drink, some take drugs, some lose their tempers too readily, most have problems with spouses or partners, they never get enough sleep, and one has trouble reading because she suffered from lead poisoning from substandard housing during her childhood. All of them are struggling to provide themselves and their families with food and shelter, and often work a second job besides the one at Town Square. Mostly, they wish they could provide their children and partners with more extras such as a birthday party at Chuckie Cheese or good toys, or more healthful food. 

Most of the workers had higher aspirations when they were younger, and are slowly sinking into hopelessness. They all worry that they will never advance, even at Town Square. They feel held back because they haven’t finished college or never went to college at all or in fact didn’t even have a high school diploma or GED. For example, “What did Nicole know about college? Nicole’s own line on the subject had long been: Of course she wasn’t going—she’d barely gone to high school, and that had been free. Why would she pay to go to more school?” (p. 164)

The plot of Help Wanted centers on an announcement that the store manager is about to be transferred to a much-preferable location, and thus there will be an internal promotion of one of the lower-level managers. The employees at the center of the story decide that they would like their own manager to be promoted, not because she’s competent or likable (she’s neither one), but because they want to get rid of her. They know they will be interviewed by visitors from the corporate headquarters, to ask them what kind of leadership and initiative she has. Obviously, I’m not going to tell how this comes out, but I do recommend reading this very well-done fable for our time.

The Guardian reviewer says:
 
“Help Wanted is an acidic comedy about contemporary American serfs. It’s a kind of communal novel about the people clinging to the bottom of the social cliff: the two-jobbers, the drop-outs, the working poor. … A superb, empathic comedy of manners …. Perhaps the most impressive thing about Help Wanted is that Waldman manages, in telling her small story, to describe not just the American economic prison but the global one. So: both a novel of manners and a systems novel, a book that shows us, perhaps, how intimately linked these apparently disparate genres were all along.” (source)

 

Other books reviewed this week



On TV this week



Agatha Christie’s novel Murder is Easy was published in 1939, and it follows the conventions of a mystery where the detective thought he was an innocent bystander to events (specifically, murders) that he did not cause, and in which he has no stake. Christie was remarkably inventive, and was a master of many plot types in her mysteries. This is definitely a good one, with a whole series of murders that are more and more apparently done by one truly evil criminal. It’s been remade into any number of TV and movie adaptations, and we recently watched the latest one, which was released in 2023.

This newest version of Murder is Easy introduces a radical change in Christie’s plot: the person who is dragged into investigating and solving the murder is not a professional detective, but is a newly arrived Nigerian man, Luke Fitzwilliam, who is about to take a job in the British foreign office. He meets an elderly woman on a train, and she enlists his help because she says she must get to Scotland Yard and get help putting a stop to a series of murders that are happening in her village. The next thing that happens is that right in front of Luke she is knocked down and killed by a hit-and-run driver. But he — and we, the audience — know that it couldn’t have been an accident. As another famous detective (quoting Shakespeare) said: “The Game’s Afoot!”

The date for this new dramatization of Murder is Easy has been moved to 1954, which was a time when Nigeria was working towards independence from British rule; it achieved independence in 1960. This revision enables the script writers to introduce a fascinating characterization of Luke Fitzwilliam, who becomes the central character in the drama. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that he penetrates the relationships and motives of the village people and figures out the identity of the evil mastermind.

The reaction to the arrival of a black African in the English village shows the varying views of the local people — some more bigoted than others.The introduction of racism to the Agatha-Christie-typical environment is an interesting twist added to their reaction to the uninvited investigator. For a Christie fan, it’s also a delicious interpolation into her oeuvre, as her books and her attitudes often embodied a good deal of racism, both explicit and implicit. (See this article for a recent attempt to clean up this issue in her books for new edition: “Agatha Christie Novels Reworked…”) 

Springtime in the woods





Reviews © 2024 mae sander
Shared with the Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

Friday, March 15, 2024

Turtles

Of Time and Turtles by Sy Montgomery (published September, 2023)

Of Time and Turtles is mainly about the work of a turtle rescue center where injured turtles have their broken bones and shells repaired and are nursed back to health. If all goes well, these turtles can be returned to their native habitat. If they can’t recover enough to live wild again, they are given a permanent home at the center or in another safe human-controlled place. And if they don’t make it, they receive a respectful burial. The book is a beautiful portrait of several dedicated turtle rescuers and how they function. However, for my taste, it’s a little too detailed about the medical procedures and about the road accidents and intentional harm that is done to them — though the fact that turtles can heal so many more injuries by regrowing damaged parts when treated well is encouraging.

Of Time and Turtles is also about time itself. Turtles are slow; mythically slow (but slow and steady wins the race, you know.) Scientifically the turtle’s ability to perceive movement is slower than that of humans, and vastly slower than that of some creatures like birds. So time in some sense is different for them than for us.

The events at the turtle rescue center that are described in this work of natural history proceed with intense slowness because they occur during the pandemic in 2020. Four years ago this week, the new and virulent coronavirus was declared a national emergency, and the nation began to close virtually all activities, while hospitals were flooded with desperately sick patients.

During this global crisis, time itself changed for many people, including the author Sy Montgomery and the proprietors and turtle rescuers that she immersed herself with, in order to research this book. She wrote the following about the early days of the pandemic:

“For so many people waiting out the crisis, time has lost its boundaries, and life is drained of meaning. But when we are with the turtles, our experience of time—in fact, our experience of almost everything—is completely different from those of our fellow countrymen. Michaela’s girlfriend, Andi, for instance, feels caught in the pandemic time warp. She had hoped to find some direction taking photography in college, but Zoom classes were lame, and now she doesn’t know what to do with her life. But for Michaela, working with the turtles gives her ‘calm, stability, and a sense of purpose’: ‘I’ve dived into something that’s really meaningful, doing something to help a living creature.’ Thanks to the turtles, we are profoundly immersed in spring’s unfolding, and deeply connected to the progression of the dramas in the turtles’ daily lives.” (Of Time and Turtles, p. 106)

Besides rescuing, rehabilitating, and releasing injured turtles into the wild, the team also rescues turtle eggs and makes sure that they incubate, hatch, and find an appropriate home. These dedicated volunteers are educators as well, and they present information to schools and invite groups of children to visit the center. The educational activities (obviously) were also on hold during the pandemic, another way the workers were isolated and deprived of a sense of time.

Natural history books can be a delight if they succeed in portraying non-human creatures in an appealing way. Turtles, it turns out, have rather distinct personalities, and despite the many different-from-human features in their brains, in their sense of smell and taste, and in their thought processes, they can relate in many ways to the humans who care for them. Before reading, I was unaware that twenty-five different species of turtles inhabit the US, and I knew nothing of the numerous differences among the species. I didn’t know that sea turtles are often caught by rapid onset of winter weather and then freeze to death on the beaches of Cape Cod — but brave rescuers can save some of them. I didn’t know that turtles love to eat bananas. I didn’t know lots of things…

The potential of the turtle personality — and the intense commitment of the turtle rescuers — makes this book fun to read. I liked the unusual perspective on these normally ignored reptiles, and I loved the quirky names that the rescuers gave them, and how attached they were. Above all, the author causes the reader to focus on the many dangers that turtles suffer because of human intrusion into their slow and peaceful enjoyment of their environment, and how this fits into a bigger picture of our rushed, dangerous, climate-threatened era.

Turtles and tortoises I have met when traveling

A sea turtle covering itself with sand on a beach in Kona, Hawaii, 2014.

Turtles on a pond near Albuquerque, NM, 2015.

Turtles at Huntley Meadows near Alexandria, VA, 2016.

200-year-old Galapagos tortoises that we saw there in 2010.
Tortoises live on land, while turtles are mainly aquatic.

A tortoise in the Peruvian jungle during our Amazon river trip, 2017.
Tortoises are one of the families in the order of Testudines, which includes all the turtles as well.

It’s spring here, and soon the turtles will be sunning themselves on logs and stones in our local ponds and streams. When I see them in a few days or weeks, I’ll have much more to think about than I usually do!

Photos © 2010-2024 mae sander
Shared with Eileen’s Critters.

Thursday, March 14, 2024

Pie — $3.14 a slice for 𝞹 Day

It’s Pi Day — also Pie Day. We celebrate 𝞹. And Zingerman’s Bakehouse offers slices for $3.14.

As you probably learned in elementary math classes, 𝞹 is the ratio of the ratio of a circle's circumference to its diameter. The symbol 𝞹 (the Greek letter, Pi) has been used to represent this ratio since 1706, though the mathematical ratio had been known for centuries. In fact: “As a ratio, pi has been around since Babylonian times, but it was the Greek geometer Archimedes, some 2,300 years ago, who first showed how to rigorously estimate the value of pi.” (source) 

Pi Day celebrates this fundamental mathematical constant, and just for fun, pies — which are circular — are the perfect food to eat for this.



I bought two slices of pie for our lunch.

And for the next holiday:



Purim is March 23-24 this year. Zingerman’s has the classic hamentaschen.

Photos © 2024 mae sander

Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Coffee Magic

“The coffee served at the café was made from mocha beans grown in Ethiopia, which have a distinct aroma. But it didn’t appeal to everybody’s tastes—though deliciously aromatic, some found its bitter fruitiness and complex overtones a little overbearing. On Nagare’s insistence, the café only served mocha.” (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, p. 67)

“When Nagare made coffee, he usually brewed it using the siphon method, by pouring boiling water into a flask, then heating it to allow the evaporated steam to rise through a funnel and extract the coffee from the ground beans held inside the funnel. However, when he made coffee for Kohtake and some other regular customers, he brewed the coffee hand-drip style. When making hand-drip coffee, he put a paper filter in a dripper, added the ground beans, and poured boiling water over them. He thought the hand-drip style of making coffee allowed for greater flexibility as you could change the bitterness and sourness of the coffee by changing the temperature of the water, and the way you poured it. As the café did not play background music, it was possible to hear the soft sound of the coffee dripping, drop by drop, into the server.” (Before the Coffee Gets Cold, p. 122)

In the wildly popular Japanese novel Before the Coffee Gets Cold (published in Japanese 2015, in English 2019), Nagare, the proprietor of a small urban cafe called Funiculi Funicula, is temperamental about just how he brews coffee for his customers — as the above passages explain. Author Toshikazu Kawaguchi must love drinking coffee, I think, as the descriptions are so precise and tempting.

Nagare’s coffee not only pleases drinkers with its distinctive favor, it also enables them to travel magically forward or backward in time while sipping a fresh cup from one of his carafes. This time travel has several restrictions. For one thing, the patron must sit in a particular location in the cafe — a spot that’s normally occupied by the ghost of a woman dressed in a white summer dress, who drinks coffee endlessly while reading a novel. She leaves the seat only once per day to go to the bathroom so the person wishing to visit another time must wait patiently. Forcing her to move is not an option. 

Further, one’s brief time spent in the past or in the future is limited: one must remain in that precise seat, and stay only while one’s coffee is hot. The time traveler must choose the right moment to visit in order to find a particular person of interest who would have been there while the coffee is getting cold.

Knowing that you can go into the past usually invokes the desire to alter something that you regret. However, the time travel at Funiculi Funicula doesn’t enable you to change the present: explicitly you can’t do that. Each story in the novel concerns a person who has painful reasons to wish they could change something about their lives and relationships. Each one believes they can spend a few moments in the cafe at an earlier (or later) time, even years before or after the present, and that they can resolve some issue with a person who was there. Each time-traveler learns a lesson about human relations and the human condition, and comes out with deepened understanding despite having changed nothing in a literal sense.

These stories are sad, sentimental, and a little cloying. I find that the insights that the stories provide to the time travelers are somewhat adolescent and didactic. Each character’s discovery underscores that you can’t change the past, but you can appreciate and comprehend it, but it’s a little superficial or maybe too predictable. I kind of liked the book, but in the end I felt as if I had been patronized or maybe manipulated by a very skilled hand at telling tale with a moral lesson. I’m glad I read this one, but I don’t think I’ll read the sequels, and I don’t particularly want to see the movie.

Scene from the Japanese movie of the book, which is titled “Café Funiculi Funicula.” (IMDB



Review © 2024 mae sander

Monday, March 11, 2024

Saturday Afternoon

Saturday we decided to have lunch at a local restaurant called BigaLora.


BigaLora’s specialty is pizza. We chose the one called “Agrodolce” which means sweet-and-sour in Italian. It had bits of red sweet-sour-peppery garnish along with house-made sausage, but it was a “white” pizza meaning no tomato sauce, just a nice deeply browned crust. Of course I ordered a Diet Coke.

Before the pizza we had salads, and I particularly liked my beet salad, which had chunks of beets distributed in a mix of arugula, olives, walnuts, goat cheese, red onion, and vinaigrette. I thought the amounts of each ingredient were just right. (Photo from the restaurant’s website.)

In the Mall

After lunch, we decided to walk around the small outdoor mall where the restaurant is located. We looked in the windows of Antrhopologie where I saw a really exaggerated prairie dress with several contrasting flower prints and lacy ruffles. Not like anything they would actually have worn in pioneer days! In fact, more extreme than the “hippie dresses” in that style from the 1970s, when I sewed one or two of them.

Between Antrhopologie and the restaurant is a shop in the chain Sur la Table, which has a wide selection of housewares as well as a classroom where we could see people kneading dough. (Len thought they were probably over-working it.) 

We also checked out the kitchen gadgets, though we have so many that we didn’t feel the impulse to buy any unplanned ones. Len did buy a gadget he had been reading about: a dough whisk (in photo). It’s supposed to make the early stages of mixing a small amount of dough more manageable.

Over the last several months, my blogger friend Elizabeth (at Altered Book Lover) has been slowly posting images of all the cups, mugs, and other drinking vessels, as well as other products, at her local spice and housewares store, and when I saw the big selection at Sur la Table, I decided to do the same.



Cups, Mugs, Carafes, Coffee Pots












NEWS FLASH: 

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates “Flat White”




Shared with Elizabeth.
Photos © 2024 mae sander. 



Sunday, March 10, 2024

Airports Anywhere

Inside Airports

As we headed for airport security at LAX a year ago, I noticed this large mural:
many airports have added interesting art to their decor to distinguish them a tiny bit.

The book I read last month — Filterworld by Kyle Chayka — mentioned how airports seem to all look alike so you can almost forget where you are. Of course everyone knows this and it’s been true for decades. I checked some photos I’ve taken at various airports over the years that pretty much confirm this idea. When you are in an airport, the only unpredictable element is how much the snack shops, coffee shops, and drink kiosks will gouge the prices. Current consumer reactions on the gouging issue are even a reason why airports are in the news lately. For example,  “Chex Mix has become the symbol of overpriced airport snacks," describes how people feel about this. Also see Paul Krugman’s recent article pointing out why airports are more and more geared to the demands of richer travelers: “The Rich Spend Differently from You and Me.”

Airports look alike, mainly:


Detroit Metro Airport. Lots of airports look like this, wouldn’t you say?

Tel Aviv airport, 2016. Murals depicting great Israeli researchers, including a friend of ours.


Atlanta, December 2023

Detroit, January, 2024. Same Coca-Cola vending area as Atlanta. I bet there are more!

Salt Lake City, 2021. Murals along a passageway between terminals. Alike or different?

San Francisco, February 2023. This display was a bit different, but the rest of the airport is the same.

San Diego, 2023.

Amsterdam airport, 2022.


Waiting to board an Alaska Airlines flight last year.
 Note: we hope we never have to fly Alaska Airlines again. They really messed us up.

Anywhere any time. The harsh lighting is definitely universal!

Paris, Charles deGaulle Airport, 2013. High-end shops — you can just make out “Dior” and “Hermes.”
More and more airports are offering luxury brands for shoppers.

Photos © 2013-2024 mae sander.

Waiting in Line: the Universal Airport Experience

Security lines, luggage-check-in lines, customs, immigration, emigration (from other countries), lines for boarding the plane, lines for MacDonalds, lines for restrooms — the possibilities for waiting at airports are numerous and the atmosphere cut-throat. While waiting in these lines I’m usually frazzled. Do I have things organized as required for security, liquids in a bag (when there’s no TSA pre-check privilege), boarding pass ready? And of course one can’t waste time taking photos of this painful experience! Here are some airport line photos I culled from the web.






I’m getting anxious just looking at these photos!
I can only bear to post this because I don’t have a plan for flying very soon.