Musical Wanderer

When I was a kid, Christmas was the big ask for toys.  The playset you saw advertised during Saturday morning cartoons all year.  The toy that NONE of the other kids had.  Below are two highlights of my childhood. As I became an adult, Christmas was the gathering of family, the frantic shopping a couple days before Christmas Eve, the onslaught of holiday movies, wonderful and awful (everyone has their own list of each:  I've only recently learned the folly of saying out loud what I thought the awful Christmas movies were: inevitably they will be at the top of someone's wonderful list), and the welcome vacation from school, both as a student and a teacher.  Sacred TV rituals of "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "Charlie Brown Christmas Special" sometimes gave a meaning to Christmas (I still lose it when Linus says "Lights, please?"). For years Christmas Eve was actually a reflective alone time for me.  When I was a music student in Ohio, everyone...

View from Amtrak's California Zephyr train.  America's Siberia? Fiona Hill became an unlikely celebrity during the course of the Trump impeachment hearings.  The expert on Russia rose to national prominence mostly because of her slaying testimony regarding President Trump's actions with the government of Ukraine but also because of the resonance of her biography, the child of a poor family rising through education and hard work to a position of respected authority.  That she came to the United States to escape the enduring class and regional biases of her native United Kingdom was another source of her appeal. Fiona Hill testifying before Congress One of her books is  The Siberian Curse: How Communist Planners Left Russia Out in the Cold , about the enduring difficulties of Russia that date back to the state planning era of the USSR during which the nation essentially colonized Siberia.  First populated with the forced labor of the Gulag and then with subsidies ...

Michelle Obama’s renowned catchphrase, “When they go low, we go high” in not relevant merely as a response to negative rhetoric.  It also explains how the two American political parties have diverged over the past five decades in the basic process of elections.  The legislative history of the United States features a few landmark moments which dramatically changed the nation for the better. Among them are two related laws, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, which clarified that people’s rights are universal, not based on race. Both laws were resisted by filibusters by southern Democrats in the Senate but eventually passed thanks to the vote wrangling skills of President Lyndon Johnson who pushed both parties for bipartisan support of the bills.  The votes by party are listed below. Reviewing the percentages today, 55 years later, may bring mixed feelings of surprise, dismay, and perhaps bitter irony.  Republican support for both laws ...

The death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg has left most Democrats despondent for our future.  She will likely be remembered longer than most her colleagues (and far longer than Republican Senators rushing to replace her) for her never ending fight for rights of all Americans.  Fear is widespread of a deeply conservative court addressing voting rights, reproductive rights, and other social and economic issues in coming decades.   Republican nominees have been reliably conservative since the Reagan administration (yes, O’Connor and Kennedy were sometimes “swing” votes, but they were overwhelmingly conservative).    Since 1986 all Republican nominees have been Roman Catholic with the exception of David Souter.    Whether the nominations were to court the Catholic vote or to appear to choose an anti-abortion jurist is an interesting question.  If they were meant to appease anti-abortion activists, such efforts were rather superficial at best, as most juri...

For the past four years, I've infuriated friends when I've told them that, in the long run, Trump being elected in 2016 was the best result for liberals and America in general in the long term.  After my friends stopped screaming at me, I would describe four scenarios: 1.  Bernie Sanders elected president in 2016  With Republican House and Senate majorities, nothing Sanders would propose would have a chance of being enacted.  As Saunders would probably not have chosen Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General, Jones would not have been elected Alabama's junior senator in a special election, leaving the Republican majority in the Senate at 52.  In the midterms of 2018, with a Democrat in the White House, Democrats would probably have lost the red state Senators they managed to keep and would have lost even more seats in the House, so we're talking about Republicans holding 55-56 Senate seats and maybe 250 House seats after the midterms.  There was plentiful supp...

Fall, 1941.  A young draftee in the US Army meets a young woman in Los Angeles. They go dancing.  They write letters to each other.  He works in the headquarters of a fighter plane squadron.  He sends her a letter that he typed in the office. She wrote him a letter that she either never sent or rewrote.  Some is in shorthand, probably a connection they discovered, as he had gone to business college before being drafted and she was going to business college when they met. .  The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.  He was subsequently sent overseas. He wrote her a letter in March, 1942 from his tent in India, of which he enclosed a photo with the letter (above).    She was excited to get it. The young man mentions a place in Los Angeles where they danced called the Palladium.  Here's a photo of the place from the time. They kept on writing in 1942 and 1943.  I can't stop looking at how he signed his name "Klyne."  ...

I wrote a couple weeks ago about naval ship models I built and included some photos of the ships. When I outed myself in having such a strange hobby, a couple old friends from college chimed in that they built similar models when they were kids, including a several who raved about models they built produced by a Japanese company called Tamiya.  Well I built some of them myself as well, both as a kid and as an adult, mostly about 10 years ago when I was working part-time while taking care of my folks.  Building models was a good distraction from watching them decline.  Here are some I built by Tamiya and other companies. A vehicle invented for the US Army during the Second World War was the Jeep, a vehicle which has endured in modified forms to this day.  It was used by all of the Allies of the US, including the United Kingdom.  During the campaign fought in the North African deserts of Libya and Egypt, a new British Army organization, the Special Air Service, us...