Fladry * A New Word For Me

 Jacob poetically deplored all the bad news in a comment to the last post.  

So here's something entirely different.

I'm reading a book for my book club called Fuzz  by Mary Roach.  She shadows people who are dealing with animal/human conflicts around the world.  It started with bears, then to elephants, and now I'm in a chapter on leopards.  

The forestry official working with villagers in northern India has set up solar powered lights that intermittently go on and off during the night, which, they surmise, mimics people with flashlights, which keeps the leopards at bay.  But the villagers wanted to leave the lights on all night, which, they say, is less effective.  At that point, Roach tells us rangers had similar problems in Colorado trying to convince ranchers to use fladry.  

So here's something very different - an explanation of how to use fladry.  

Where did this word come from?  Here's part of a discussion on the etymology of the word from German Language/Deutsche Sprache::

"Fladry' is a comparatively recent adoption in English from Polish, with a putative origin in German. The Double-Tongued Dictionary gives this definition and partial etymology:

fladry n.pl. a string of flags used to contain or exclude wild animals. ... Etymological Note: According to Polish Scientific Publishers (Wydawnictwo Naukowe PWN, SA), fladry is the plural of flader, which comes from German. It is not specified which German word, but it’s probably related to flattern ‘to flutter.’ It is probably not related to the Polish flÄ…dry, the plural of flÄ…dra, which according to the Oxford PWN Polish English Dictionary (2002, Oxford University Press) means “1. flounder, flatfish; 2. slattern, slut.”

I have found 'fladry' in English in the sense of "a string of flags etc." as early as 1993, in a technical paper titled "Status and Management of the Wolf in Poland" (Biological Conservation; see, for example, the abstract)."

The Palisades Fire - Personal Connections And More General Thoughts

We're back in Anchorage.  As we went to the airport in the late afternoon Friday, there seemed to be a lot less smoke blowing from the Palisades fire toward the ocean.   By the time we took off, it was dark out and while we sat on the wrong side of the plane, we could still see the flames through the window on the other side as we banked to the north.  It was the first time we saw actual flames.  

I grew up in LA and my mom lived in our house for 65 years.  So I know the area fairly well.  Especially the west side where the Palisades fire is.  I've seen huge changes over time and I have some thoughts, having been in LA when the fire started.  

We discovered KCAL on the radio while we were driving - which had the most up-to-the-minute and detailed coverage of the fires.  You can watch the KCAL coverage here.  I listened again this morning from here in Anchorage.  I know the places they're talking about, but even if you don't it's pretty addicting and I don't recommend watching more than 15 minutes at a time.  

History - Marquez, Will Rogers State Park, UCLA, Santa Monica Pier

Here's a recent map from the Los Angeles County Emergency site.  These maps keep being updated.  I've done a screenshot of an area of importance to me.  The orange is mandatory evacuation areas.  The yellow is a warning area - be ready to evacuate.  I'd note I was still getting alerts on my phone as we were headed to the airport.  

My mom's house is down at the bottom, just below the Santa Monica Airport which is the border between SM and Los Angeles.  It's a long way off from the mandatory evacuation area.  It probably doesn't look that far, but the fire is mostly in mountainous areas - large lots, hillsides covered with (now) dry brush.  The land between mandatory evacuation and be ready to evacuate areas and my mom's house is much more urban.  Directly above my mom's house is the concrete and asphalt runway of the Santa Monica Airport.  

I went to school at UCLA.  As you can see, the Evacuation Warning area touches the northwest corner of the campus.

My last two years at UCLA, I was a noon duty aide and afterschool playground director at Marquez Elementary School.  It's one of two schools that burned down Thursday.  Every day, about 11:30am I took off from UCLA and rode along Sunset to Marquez Elementary School.  Sometimes I napped in the nurse's office between lunch and after school duty.  Other times I rode the last mile or so of Sunset to the beach where I played volley ball and body surfed.  

One of my favorite places in LA was Will Rogers State Park.  This was the great Cherokee cowboy/actor/humoristc's estate where he could escape Hollywood.  It had his house and other buildings including a large stable for horses and a polo field.  And the surrounding area had beautiful hiking trails.  It was pretty much the only thing around when I first went there.  I remember seeing quail there.  This picture is from a 2011 blog post.  More pictures of the area around the Will Rogers estate are in a 2021 post.  It appears to have all been destroyed.  Will Rogers died in a plane crash with Wiley Post, in 1935 outside of what was then called Port Barrow, Alaska.  

If you don't know much about Rogers, I urge you to read his Wikipedia entry.  And/or watch this Youtube talk from 1931 much of which applies today.  

In more recent years, when I come down to LA, I bike down to Venice Beach and then north along the coast up to the where Pacific Palisades meets the ocean.  In the previous post, I put up a picture from a recent ride, looking up at a couple of houses on the bluff above the ocean there.  

The Santa Monica Pier, which is just about where the SA of Santa Monica are on the map, has also been a favorite spot in the LA area.  We took the grandkids to the pier on New Year's Eve before going to see Cirque Du Soleil which was in a tent in the pier parking lot.  And the pier is still there and likely not in danger, despite earlier reports that it was, and what almost certainly was a fake photo of the pier with the sky full of flames behind it. Though the Cirque Du Soleil tents are gone.  

On Wednesday, the second day of the fire, I biked (with a good mask on) to the pier and a little beyond it.  Here's a video I took from the pier.  Downtown Santa Monica is where the  tall buildings are to the right.  

Today's map has the evacuation line right up to the ocean for a good part of it.  But at downtown Santa Monica, the air was relatively clear and was still reasonably so a couple of miles north or the pier.  I rode beyond the pier until I could see that up ahead the smoke was down on the highway and bike trail.  I didn't need to get that close to thick smoke.  But you can see, in the picture below, a runner, without a mask, heading for it.  I'd note that as a Jr. High and High School students, LA air frequently looked like that and on the worst days, we'd get a pain in our chest when we breathed deep.  

I'd also mention that Pacific Palisades was the home of "Weimar on the Pacific."  

"In the 1930s and 40s, Los Angeles became an unlikely cultural sanctuary for a distinguished group of German artists and intellectuals—including Thomas Mann, Theodore W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Fritz Lang, and Arnold Schoenberg—who had fled Nazi Germany. During their years in exile, they would produce a substantial body of major works to address the crisis of modernism that resulted from the rise of National Socialism."

If you don't know these names (and I acknowledge that most people probably don't, despite their being important cultural figures), and others mentioned in the linked book announcement, I'd urge you to google them.  They're pretty remarkable people.  My mother had connections to Schoenberg family through her work, and through the owner of the dress shop who was featured in the film Woman In Gold. who hired Schoenberg's grandson to represent her in her fight against the Austrian government to recover pictures stolen from her family by the Nazis.  My mom shopped at her store and sent me clippings from the newspaper of the lawsuit while it was happening.  

Another member of the group was Leon Feuchtwanger.  When I was a high school or college student, my father took me to visit an older German woman in West Los Angeles or possibly Santa Monica.  Close to the yellow evacuation warning area today.  I could be wrong, but I believe this was Leon Feuchtwanger's widow, Marta.  (My father also fled Nazi Germany in the 1930s.)

The End, But Not The End

I wanted this to be one integrated post, tying a number of different ideas together.  But while I think some of my readers could read on beyond this, I've got several more topics and there is already a lot in the links to explore.  So I'll save the others for tomorrow and maybe the next day.  

Coming:

1.  Development in the hills -  Why have people built way up in this area known for fires?

2.  Pacific Palisades and Malibu, and now Brentwood ( especially Mandeville Canyon), Encino on the valley side are some of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Los Angeles, probably the US.  Would we be paying such close attention if this were a poorer neighborhood?  Would a poorer neighborhood be getting all the resources coming in to help like this?

3.  The idea of ownership and loss - humans are short term inhabitants on earth.  We don't 'own' the earth, or anything else really.  We are the temporary guardians until the 'properties' are lost, sold,, destroyed, stolent, or by the death of the people who believe they own them.  

4.  Phone Alerts  - I kept getting loud alerts on my phone with warnings to evacuate immediately

5.  How television news (in particular) distort reality by showing the most sensational snippets and ignoring the fact that most people are going on with their lives normally.

6. Warning to Anchorage hillside residents, and people everywhere who live in wooded hillsides. Or any area that is threatened by nature's reaction to Climate Change.  

Parts Of LA Are Burning

 It was very foggy several days ago, from what I could tell, mostly within three or four miles of the coast.  

So, this afternoon, as we were driving home from errands that got us as far east as Beverly Hills, and we saw a wall of clouds off to the west, I assumed it was a fog bank.  Though it looked a bit odd, and it seemed to be more north and to the south was still clear.  

When we got home, I walked around the block to take some pictures.  

We were listening to KJZZ, and didn't hear any news of the Palisades fire.  It was pretty windy, and I thought the off shore wind was keeping the fog to the coast.  

It was much later that we heard about the fire.  And then, as I was reading about the fire, almost midnight - an alarm went off on my phone.  

We're about six or seven miles, as the crow flies from the Palisades.  Malibu is even further.  When I bike to the beach and then north through Santa Monica and to Will Rogers State Beach (back in Los Angeles), Pacific Palisades is above the ocean.  Those areas are up in the foothills of the Santa Monica mountains.  We're down in more city area.  

Here's a picture of a couple of houses up on the bluff at Pacific Palisades from my bike ride along the ocean the other day.  

But I did just go outside and while the moon is bright, the air is starting to get smoky.  

And we've had three more alarms go off on my phone.  The last one is for folks in Topanga Canyon to be ready to get out.  

And another alarm just went off but I didn't get a screen shot.  The alarms really screech.  It's 1:15am.  I really don't think we're in any danger.  When I was growing up, we would see the red glow up in the hills, but it never got out of the hills.  

But these are different times.  I probably should leave my phone on, just in case.  But I don't think I'll get much sleep if I do.  

Our tickets back to Anchorage are for Friday night.  

Here's the LA County Emergency map for right now.  We're about where the black star is.  That looks much closer than I realized.  But that orange blotch along the ocean is the evacuation area, NOT the fire area.  There is all of Santa Monica between the evacuation area and us.  As you can see there is another fire to the east.  But I'll leave my phone on.  It's 1:30 am as I post this.  

Stay Alive In 2025

1.  Happy New Year seems inappropriate as we enter 2025.  Yes, enter, like we are going into a different space.  Where the traditional rules of engagement are ignored by the incoming president of the united states.  The rest of us can no longer depend on the rules to protect us.  And by taking the high road and simply following the rules, we will be buried.  

We're still in this place where people are going about their lives almost normally, when in 20 days we get a broken human as our new president and he's surrounded by similarly afflicted people.  That normality is going to change.  Rapidly for some, more slowly for others.  The unhoused have been living in that world already.  LGBTQ+ and immigrants and people of color have also been feeling it, and it will quickly get worse.  

The rest of us have to help protect them, because it's the right thing to do.  But for those who need a more personal reason, well, eventually it will be you with a target on your back.  

There are times when following the rules can get you killed.  Like packing your suitcase and quietly following the directions of the Nazis to get on the train.  Times where acts of resistance and sabotage are the morally correct actions.  It's time to reread Saul Alinsky. 

"In his theory of means and ends, Alinsky puts across a question, which states whether the ends justify the means. According to the theory, the ends entail what individuals want, or goal, while means entail the activities of how to get what they want or to achieve the goal. In his discussion, Alinsky thought that the morality of actions did not require to be judged in itself, but rather be weighed against the morality of inaction. In the chapter on the means and ends, Alinsky stated that the issue of means and ends is usually viewed in a strategic and pragmatic manner by the man of action. In his arguments, he pointed out that the man of action only gets to ask of ends when they can be achieved and of means whether they will work for his plans."

Morally balancing ends and means is not a simple task and many have and will do it poorly.  Start with actions whose ends are not major violations to practice before taking more consequential actions.  Remember, many of our incoming President's supporters are rabid supporters of their interpretation of the Second Amendment, and they have and intend to use their guns. 

Examine your values.  List them. Prioritize them.  Know which ones are most important.  Then use your values to actively guide your actions.  

2.  Small But Vocal

United Against Book Bans offers an important lesson:

A small but vocal group is driving the current flood of book bans in school and public libraries across the country.

 Every resistance group, almost by definition, comes from a very small group that is dedicated to their cause.  We don't all have to fight every battle.  We each need to focus on one or two issues (while also supporting people fighting other battles as we can).  Here's United Against Book Bans tools:

"It's important to counter those voices by uniting in support of the freedom to read in your local community. How can you and your community unite against book bans? We've put together this action toolkit to help you get started.

Are you part of an organization? You can find additional resources to amplify and support the Unite Against Book Bans campaign in the UABB Toolkit PDF.

Talking Points

Contact Decision Makers

Contact Media

Grassroots Organizing

Social Media Tools

Branded Materials"

3.  Focus 

We took the grandkids to Cirque du Soleil yesterday. (An example of how we are still living what seems like a normal life.) All the performers break the rules of what normal people can do.  This woman, wrapped in a long red cloth found ways to seemingly defy gravity.  They are able to do these amazing feats by focusing on their skills, building the appropriate body and mind muscles, and then, during their acts, focusing on perfection.  

I challenge my readers to keep this image in mind as you focus on keeping our democracy alive.  

4.  My New Years Resolution 

My resolution is to perform at least one act of resistance every day of 2025.  I realize 'resistance' seems to be 'against' and I want to also include acts of affirmation, of strengthening democracy, but haven't figured out the right word yet.  

This can be as basic as speaking up to racists, misogynists, homophobes. You don't have to save the world each day.  Just plugging a hole in the dyke is resistance.  in Reading Alinsky's books and other books that give you tools for your spirit and for action.  Reading the United Against Book Banning group's Tool Kit to take action and applying them to your most cherished causes is a first step.  Go to all the links in this post and read.  Those are acts of resistance and building your resources.  Find other good resources and prescriptions for action and leave them in the comments.  

Agave, The Beach, Ethiopian Food, Bumps

 I'd like to write a post about key problems our democratic system hasn't been able to handle - like preventing a convicted rapist, etc. from being elected president.  Not the comparatively less important issues that pop up on social media and mainstream media headlines focused on this or that person or event, but the truly serious systemic failures.  The inability of the justice system to mete out timely justice to a well financed presidential candidate.  The inability of the First Amendment to cope with propaganda magnified by social media which rewards people for spreading lies and outrage, and enables foreign enemies to stoke fears and spread dissension.  

But that's a much longer post that requires a lot of documentation.  

So I was just going to put up some photos today

Agave

I wrote succulent on the photo titles, but agave was also in my head.  The link above on agave proved me right.  The first one is down the street. 

The second one is in my mom's front yard.  They don't bloom that often, but when they do they're impressive.  This flower is about 9 feet long.  I'm not sure how, in this droughty climate, it manages to stay upright.

There was a humming bird filling its tank, but it didn't wait around for me to get my phone out.  

There are speed bumps on the street, but these natural obtrusions - the roots from the Italian Stoney Pine trees - are much more effective.  If you don't navigate this just right, your car is going to make serious noises as the bottom hits elevated parts of the street.  There are others with cones up the street, but this one goes almost all the way across the street.  Where the cone is, it's higher than the curb.  

We hear this all the time, even cars going very, very slowly.  You have to go all the way over to this side of the street to get by without notifying the neighbors that you are there.  And then there are the cars that don't slow down before hitting this.  

This is a good example of the importance of good government.  The cost to drivers - at repair shops and then increased insurance costs - probably will be greater than the cost of repairing the street.  Though the street has been repaired and the roots come roaring back.  Other benefits of a good government are less tangible. Say the benefits of a good school system.  You just don't see the immediate effects of a bad school system the way you see (and hear) the impacts of these gnarly streets.  

It's also a reminder that if people disappeared, much of human activity would be hidden by nature reclaiming its space.  

We had dinner at an Ethiopian restaurant.  Underneath is the bread - injera - a spongy, pliable food that you tear off and use to scoop up the food.  We ordered two vegetarian combos and one serving of lamb.  (In the middle.) We also got extra injera  to use until we could easily get to the injera underneath.  

On Fairfax, between Pico and Olympic, is a row of Ethiopian restaurants and shops.  

Today (Monday) the ladies drove to the beach and I biked down to meet them.  It's not exactly warm by LA standards - in the mid to high 50sF - and there seemed to be a mix of fog and haze in the distance in most directions.  But there's something about sitting on the sand and having the waves pounding.  Enough to lure this guy in the picture into the surf.  I used to swim all year as well when I was a student at UCLA.  I worked as a noon duty aid and after school playground director at an elementary school in Pacific Palisades.  All my classes were early morning.  Between lunch and afterschool, I'd honda down to the beach where a regular group of guys played volleyball and body surfed.  

This guy was sitting with his bike and surfboard a little in front of us.  At some point he was getting ready to leave.  He pulled out a brush and started brushing sand off everything - the surfboard, the backpack, his wetsuit, his feet before putting on his shoes.  Then got the surfboard strapped onto the backpack and made his way to the boardwalk.  

I just wiped the sand off my feet with my hands before I put on my shoes and biked home.  But I'm intrigued by his use of the brush.  

Biden Left 3 Fed Prisoners On Death Row. Why?

 Of the 40 on death row, Biden commuted the death penalty of 37.  I was curious why he left three to wait for execution.  

First, who were the three?  According to the NYTimes they were:

• Robert D Bowers, 52, convicted for gunning down 11 worshippers in the mass shooting at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh
• Dylann Roof, 30, who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.  
• Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 31, who carried out the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013.

Bowers was also convicted of hate crimes as was Dylan Roof.  Tsarnaev, according to Wikipedia, was inspired by Al Qaeda.  

The people whose sentences were commuted  - taken off of death row, but left in prison without the possibility of parole - do not seem to have had an ideological motive.  

I didn't want to post this until I found some other source that identified a reason for why these three were different.  MSN.com quotes Biden himself.  

". . . Biden drew a firm line when it came to mass killings driven by hate or terror.  In his statement, Biden underscored his belief that while the death penalty should generally be abolished, exceptions must be made for 'cases of terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.'

"These three men represent the kinds of crimes Biden deemed beyond the scope of clemency, crimes that not only claimed innocent lives but also targeted entire communities with terror and hatred. "  [emphasis added]

According to City View, the four people in the military on death row were not pardoned.

Of course, there are also bigger issues of our whole justice system which convicts a certain percent of innocent people every year,   From the Innocence Project:

"Extrapolating from the 281 known DNA exonerations in the US since the late 1980s, a conservative estimate is that 1 percent of the US prison population, approximately 20,000 people, are falsely convicted."

Then there are the differences in justice due to 

1. the ability of the wealthy to hire better lawyers, and the inherent racism in the US society as a whole which affects police, prosecutors, and judge.  
2. the economic and social causes of crime (huge gap between the rich an poor, poor education, poor access to physical and mental health care.  If these were addressed, fewer people would be led to crime by economic or social desperation.  

LA - Skateboarding, Googie, Bernie's, And More

 

If you walk the path along Venice Beach, you'll come across the skateboard park.  

Skateboards first appeared along the beaches of Southern California, particularly Venice.  As a junior high student back then, I joined the others nailing half a roller skate to one end of a 2x4 and the other half to the other end.  We didn't have a lot of control. My street was one of the better hills.  One block to the south wasn't steep enough.  One block to the north was too steep for most.  I survived the steep one a couple of times. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.  You can read more about the history of skateboards from the Hermoso Beach Museum site.

Skate boarding has come a long way since then as have the places people ride them.  

Tuesday it got up to 75˚F and we spent a couple of hours at Venice Beach near the end of Rose Avenue.

Friday, when I biked down there, the fog blocked the view of the ocean from the bike trail.

 We went to the LA County Museum of Art on Thursday.  And passed this bit of graffiti on the way.  We also passed an Indian grocery store.  

This is just a part of the loooooooong spice shelf.  One of the reasons that Indian food is so good - lots of spices and thousands of years experimenting how to prepare them.  

We also passed Johnie's Coffee Shop.  It's an example of Googie architecture - but I didn't know that when I took the picture or I would have taken a better picture of the whole place.  My interest was that this coffee shop had been turned into Bernie's Coffee Shop. LAist has a January 31, 2019 story by Jessica P. Ogilvie about this transformation:

"Johnie's Coffee Shop was built in 1956 by architects Louis Armet and Eldon Davis, masters of the space-age Googie style. The restaurant came to be known for its striking design and by the 1980s, began making appearances in films like Miracle Mile, The Big Lebowski, American History X, Reservoir Dogs and City of Angels. In 1994, it was purchased by the Gold family, an entrepreneurial L.A. clan whose patriarch, David Gold, founded the 99 Cents Only Stores.

In 2013, Johnie's was designated an historic cultural monument, and for a short while, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority debated turning it into a Metro stop for the purple line."

That Metro stop is still being built kitty-corner from Johnie's/Bernie's.  The article goes on to tell the history of how it became Bernie's.  

This is at Fairfax and Wilshire.  Across the street is the old May Company department store - about 

2 1/2 blocks from where I lived as a kid.  Now it's the Academy of Motion Pictures Museum.  Fortunately the kept the historic facade of the building.  They used to have elaborate Christmas display windows right at that corner.  

We ended up checking out the Motion Picture Museum, but passing for now.  Instead we went to the Art Museum that is on the (now, there used to be a street between them) adjoining block.  But I'll save the museum for another post.  

Some of the apartment buildings on the street where I used to live.  Ours didn't have such fancy entrances.  

It was a hazy day which gave these buildings in Century City a surreal look as we drove home.  (None of the pictures in this post were edited except cropping.)

And I'm adding on this picture (below) of the LA airport.  I commented in an earlier post about the unsatisfactory taxi/Uber/Lyft parking lot that's a distance from the terminals.  The whole terminal traffic situation is beyond awful.  There are places where you can pick up arriving passengers.  But during Christmas vacation the three to four lanes are jammed.  You aren't supposed to be stopped unless you are actively picking up a passenger.  But it's near impossible to time when the car gets to the terminal to match when the passenger gets to the curb.  I pulled over at Terminal 5 with the expectation I'd move up to Terminal 6 when my daughter and family got out.  If a cop told me to move on, I could stop again at Terminal 6.  (I have been told to move on at LAX in the past, but no cops were sighted Saturday.)  If I got told to move on at Terminal 6, I'd have to go around the whole airport again.  I'm not sure what the solution is.  They're building a skytrain (which i assume will be similar to what they have in San Francisco) to get passengers out of terminal area.  I'm not sure it's just bad design.  More, just that LA's population grew so much.  They do have a target date to do something - the 2028 Olympics will be in LA.  The Metro line is also supposed to be all the way out to the airport.  The problem has been the taxis and other interests didn't want the Metro to get to the airport, I'm told.  

The airport was much easier to navigate back in 1967 when I drove a Yellow Cab out of the airport for several months between graduating from UCLA and returning to the second summer of Peace Corps training.  Those were good times - mornings at the beach playing volley ball and body surfing, evenings driving a cab.  I learned a lot about LA.  I'd never realized how many bars there were until I drove a cab.  

To the left us at this spot is the Los Angeles Airport (LAX) 'theme building."

"To truly immerse oneself in the world of Googie, a visit to the "Theme Building" at Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is an absolute must. Completed in 1961, this architectural marvel resembles a futuristic flying saucer perched upon four curving legs. With its observation deck, it was once a popular spot for locals and travelers to admire the planes taking off and landing at LAX. The Theme Building perfectly encapsulates Googie's out-of-this-world charm and stands as a testament to an era when the skies were no longer the limit."  from LA Explained Blog

I had a high school graduation dinner there with a dozen or more friends.  The restaurant is long gone.  

How to Live?

That's the question raised in a book I picked up at the Elliott Bay Bookstore in Seattle during Thanksgiving.

I've just started reading Sarah Bakewell's  How To Live or A Life of Montaigne.  The picture puts the book into the context of the life I'm living at this moment, which, I hope will make more sense after you've read a couple of excerpts.  

"This idea - writing about oneself to create a mirror in which other people recognize their own humanity - has not existed forever.  It had to be invented.  And, unlike many cultural inventions, it can be traced to a single person:  Michel Eyquem de Montaigne, a nobleman, government official, and winegrower who lived in the Péirgord area of southwestern France from 1533 to 1592."    

I no longer assume that people reading something like the end of the last sentence will automatically determine how long Montaigne lived (not quite 60 years), or the historical context (he was born forty years after Columbus reported the existence of a part of the world that Europeans hadn't known existed.  Or maybe some descendants of Vikings knew but others didn't.  I don't take this for granted because long ago I realized that things I do aren't necessarily the same things that other people do.  Though I expect that regular readers of this blog figured that out before I mentioned it.  Or would have if I hadn't placed this parenthetical paragraph here.  The author will offer some more historical context in the following.

"Montaigne created the idea simply by doing it.  Unlike most memoirists of his day, he did not write to record his own great deeds and achievements.  Nor did he lay down a straight eyewitness account of historical events, although he could have done;  he lived through a religious civil war which almost destroyed his country over the decades he spent incubating and writing his book."  

Again, if I didn't know what religious civil war was being referred to, I would have stopped reading and looked it up.  Here's a link to give you more about the French religious wars of the 16th Century.  Meanwhile further south, the Spanish Inquisition was going on.   I think the fact that he lived in difficult times makes the book more interesting to us today as we slide into our own version of an inquisition to rid the country of immigrants and other 'undesirables' in the eyes of Trump's people.  

"A member of a generation robbed of the hopeful idealism enjoyed by his father's contemporaries, he adjusted to public miseries by focusing his attention on private life.  He weathered the disorder, oversaw his estate assessed court cases as a magistrate, and administered Bordeaux as the most easygoing mayor in its history.  All the time, he wrote exploratory, free-floating pieces to which he gave simple titles:"

At this point author Bakewell lists a number of his titles.  I'll skip that.  I'm not trying to copy her book, but rather to focus on ideas I found stimulating.  This was just the context.  And you'll note that while she says he lived in difficult times, the fact that he went on with his life as a nobleman and ran his estate as well as served as the mayor of Bordeaux, suggests that despite the wars, he was privileged enough for them to be irritants rather than serious interferences into his life.  But this musing is based on the words in that paragraph, not further research, so take it with a grain of salt. 

 

"He used [his] experiences as the basis for asking himself questions, above all the big questions that fascinated him as it did many of his contemporaries.  Although it is not quite grammatical in English, it can be phrased in three simple words:  'How to live?' 

"This is not the same as the ethical question, 'How should one live?' Moral dilemmas interested Montaigne, but he was less interested in what people ought to do than in what they actually did.  He wanted to know how to live a good life - meaning a correct or honorable life, but also a fully human, satisfying, flourishing one.  This question drove him both to write and to read, for he was curious about all human lives, past and present.  He wondered constantly about the emotions and motives behind what people did.  And since he was the example closest to hand of a human going about its business, he wondered just as much about himself."

And now we'll get to some of the questions he pondered.  And I hope you will find them to be pretty close to ones we ponder today.  

"A down-to-earth question, 'How to Live?'  splintered into a myriad other pragmatic questions.  Like everyone else, Montaigne ran up against the major perplexities of existence:  how to cope with the fear of death, how to get over losing a child or a beloved friend, how to reconcile yourself to failures, how to make the most of every moment so that life does not drain away unappreciated.  But there were smaller puzzles, too.  How do you avoid getting drawn into a pointless argument with your wife, or a servant?  How can you reassure a friend who thinks a witch has cast a spell on him?  How do you cheer up a weeping neighbor?  How do you guard your home?  What is the best strategy if you are held up by armed robbers who seem to be uncertain whether to kill you or hold you to ransom?  If you overhear your daughter's governess teaching her something you think is wrong, is it wise to intervene?  How do you deal with a bully?  What do you say to your dog when he wants to go out and play, while you want to stay at your desk writing your book?  

In place of abstract answers, Montaigne tells us what he did in each case, and what it felt like when he was doing it.  He provides all the details we need to make it real, and sometimes more than we need."

Okay.  That's your appetizer.  I haven't read further in the book than this, but I thought that this book probably has lessons for the current world.  Though as I read it again to type the words into the blog, I also wonder whether the author is phrasing things in a way that sound perhaps a little too contemporary.  

I much prefer reading books that are not being reinterpreted today, so that the contemporary applications are ones I see, not ones that are spoon fed to me.  But since I haven't read the rest of the book yet,  or anything Montaigne wrote, don't blame Sarah Bakewell yet.  Though her opening paragraph was about people being fixated on telling the world, through the internet, their every action and thought.  

But I'm being overly careful (some would say picky).  I'll give you a better informed opinion later when I've finished the book.  But I think the book might help people overcome the temporal bias that we in the present are far more advanced than people in the past.  Technically that may be true, but as human beings capable of thinking, or moral contemplations, of understanding human behavior, and advanced concepts, the ancient people were just as capable as we are, given what humans understood about how the world worked.  Though many had a better lived understanding of how nature operated than many, if not most Americans today.  

A final note.  I'm not blogging as much as before, in part because life is keeping me busy on other things.  And I have too many things I want to write about.  If I don't get back here sooner, have a Merry Christmas or a Happy Hanukah, or Kwanza or Solstice, or whatever celebration you observe this time of year.  

ADDED Jan 8, 2025:  The image below is for my Jan 8 comment.  I've put it here since I can't put images into a comment.  

The Good And The Bad Of Today's Alaska Airlines Trip To LA [UPDATED]

You don't need to read this.  I just need to get it out of my system.  

[UPDATE Monday, Dec 16, 2024:  We each got a $75 discount code for for future flights.  This is fine with us since Alaska is our basic airline.]  

We had tickets (from Anchorage) to Seattle for 10:35am getting to Seattle at 3:11pm (You lose an hour going Anchorage to Seattle)

Then an LA leaving at 4:56pm arriving in LA at 7:45pm

The first delay notice was to 11am departure.

Then 12:20pm

Then 3:00 pm

We had this experience about a year and a half ago trying to catch a non-stop to Chicago.  After many delays, the flight was cancelled and we had to fly through Seattle about 10 hours late.

At this point we've been on the phone to Alaska Airlines changing our LA flights.  Then we got a notice that the LA flight was cancelled.  We were still in Anchorage.  

There was an announcement that another flight was taking off to Seattle at Gate 6.  We walked to Gate 6 and asked if we could get on it.  It was almost noon.  We could.  And we got two seats together.  But we had to get on right away and couldn't redo the LA flight from Seattle. 

Alaska had also sent us four $12 vouchers for today at ANC or SEATAC.  

When we landed at 4:30pm I texted Alaska Airlines and they quickly had us rebooked on a 5:58pm flight to LA.  Just enough time to use our coupons to get some yakisoba and board the plane.  

In the end, we landed in LA an hour later than originally scheduled.  

LAX a couple of years ago banned taxis and Lyft and Uber from the terminals and put them in their own spot.  So you can't get out of the terminal and grab a cab.  There are shuttle busses or you can walk.  When we've waited for the shuttle it's been a long wait, so we walked about 25 minutes.  Then there was a long line waiting for cabs.  It's a poor solution to the jam of Uber and Lyfts that caused them to do this.

But we're here, at my mom's house and the kids and grandkids are due when their schools are out.  So I'm not really complaining.  Just reporting.  

It seems that Alaska is able to quickly change things by phone, but people waiting at the counters seemed to have more difficulties.  And when our flight was changed to 3pm, why couldn't they move us to the other flight that had some empty seats and was leaving 3 hours earlier?  If we hadn't walked over, the plane would have left with at least two empty seats if not more.  

So I'm impressed with being able to book online or by phone so quickly.  And I realize that things happen and planes need repairs that delay them.  Though at one point I had to delete my app and then download it again because it stopped showing the changes we'd made.  

Our original flight didn't leave until 3:15pm.  We got to LA an hour after the original flight landed in Seattle.  

I'd also add that that if you are MVP, you get a phone number that seems to be answered much faster than the regular phone number.  We haven't flown that much in the last few years - not enough to get MVP - but Alaska has extended so called elite flyers status during COVID.  This year they let you get to that magic 20K miles using miles gained through use of your Alaska Airlines VISA card.  

And the people who answer the phone are soo polite and competent.  

AIFF2024: Closing Night Awards Clarification - 8:30pm Alaska Experience Theater

 I checked on the Awards ceremony today.  

It's at 8:30pm at the Alaska Experience Theater.

I couldn't find it online, on the Facebook page, or in the program where everything Saturday is listed.  

It is listed on page 17 of the Festival Program.