Political Fan Culture: Democrats And Republicans Are Rival Sports Teams

Good  metaphors work well in love poems.

My love is of a birth as rareAs ’tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.

Mixed metaphors work for comedians. 

"We can talk until the cows turn blue."

But when metaphors are used in politics, they often  oversimplify and, if they catch on, magnify one aspect of the compared idea,  creating their own new distortion of reality.  

I don't like the tribal metaphor being used for today's politics.  We're uncivil because we are only associating with 'our tribes' and everyone else is the enemy.  From New York Magazine:

"How do you live peacefully for years among fellow citizens and then find yourself suddenly engaged in the mass murder of humans who look similar to you, live around you, and believe in the same God, but whose small differences in theology mean they must be killed before they kill you?" 

My problem here is that it gives tribalism and tribes a bad name.  In the USA, 'tribes' most often refers to Native American tribes.  This idea that tribes are ruthless and and irrational surely is a left-over of several centuries of depicting Native Americans as blood-thirsty savages, to justify taking their land and massacring them if they didn't leave it peacefully.

So, rather than tribes,  I compare (with caution) many partisans for either Democrats or Republicans or, broader, for liberals and conservatives, to sports fan .  But sports fans are us, not some 'other' that we traditionally vilify.  And we know people who are die-hard sports fans, whose highs and lows in life are correlated to the wins and losses of their beloved team.  A younger me enjoyed the joys and agonies of the UCLA Bruins, so I understand.  (But then I went on to graduate school at cross-town rival USC, but I still root for UCLA, but with much less passion.)

When you're a sports fan, you kind of know that you're exaggerating, stretching the truth, lying even,  when you brag about your team and vilify fans of the other team.  Everything is about winning or losing.  It's a game. (Or at least it used to be, before sports became a huge business. I can't find a perfect reference for this quickly, but here's one and here's another.)   Being a fan is a form of theater.   You are allowed to jump and scream and dress up funny and say terrible things about the enemy.  Your manic behavior is understood.

But it's different when people apply those same emotions, loyalties, and behaviors  to political parties and to politicians.

We see fans totally emotionally connected to their parties and ideologies - believing only the good about their team and calling the bad 'lies.'  (I believe that the Right has a lot more fans who ignore facts they disagree with, or simply ignore facts. College graduates earn more because they have better reasoning skills.*  And they seem less likely to be Trump fans.  There are studies that show that white males with no degree to be the strongest Trump supporters.  But people on the left are also susceptible to believing hoaxes that support their views. It's just, they're more likely to recognize it when their error is pointed out.  But the right has no monopoly on emotionally disturbed fans.)

Many commentators and academics tell us that emotion, not rationality, rules people's decisions.  But when we do this in sports, most fans don't hate their friends who root for the other team.  But in politics today, like in sports, winning boosts our spirits and self-esteem.  But the game doesn't end at the end of the day, or even after the election.  So turning back into a normal human being doesn't happen.

And as they say about some paranoid people - there really are people trying to get them.  And we're at a point where our democracy is in significant danger.


*About college grad reasoning skills.  This surely isn't universally true.  Some get into (and out of) college because they've learned how to succeed in educational settings, because their parents can help them with thinking skills at home and pay for extra learning experiences, not to mention college expenses.  And college grads can get that degree without improving their thinking skills.  Or maybe they had better skills before college and college didn't help them.  But the skills helped them get into college.

This footnote is here because just about any sentence one writes can be taken apart and criticized.  And I'd like to think that trying to minimize the risk of misinterpretation is one reason I write longer, rather than shorter, posts.  We're all told to keep it short, because that leads to better writing and more clicks.  But good, crisp writing is less important than accuracy.  And I'm not penalized here for fewer clicks.  

Simple writing works better when we all have the same world views. (When we all share the same erroneous beliefs.)   And the political fan culture of today, combined with social media, seems to relish misunderstanding the other team's words.  

"The Plural of Anecdote Is Not Data" Commission Member Dunlap's Problems With Presidential Advisory Commission on Elections

The Presidential Advisory Commission on Elections was controversial before it began   Today one of the Democrats on the commission (though they were shut out from viewing documents and meetings) published a letter he wrote to the defunct committee's chair and to the President.  First come experts from a news report, then below is the letter itself.


From the Bangor Daily News :  

PORTLAND, Maine — The now-disbanded voting integrity commission launched by the Trump administration uncovered no evidence to support claims of widespread voter fraud, according to an analysis of administration documents released Friday.
In a letter to Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who are both Republicans and led the commission, Maine Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said the documents show there was a “pre-ordained outcome” and that drafts of a commission report included a section on evidence of voter fraud that was “glaringly empty.”
“It’s calling into the darkness, looking for voter fraud,” Dunlap, a Democrat, told The Associated Press. “There’s no real evidence of it anywhere.”

Kris Kobach disagreed.

“It appears that Secretary Dunlap is willfully blind to the voter fraud in front of his nose,” Kobach said in a statement released by his spokesman.
Kobach said there have been more than 1,000 convictions for voter fraud since 2000, and that the commission presented 8,400 instances of double voting in the 2016 election in 20 states.
“Had the commission done the same analysis of all 50 states, the number would have been exponentially higher,” Kobach said. 

But Dunlap says:

In response, Dunlap said those figures were never brought before the commission, and that Kobach hasn’t presented any evidence for his claims of double voting. He said the commission was presented with a report claiming over 1,000 convictions for various forms of voter misconduct since 1948.
“The plural of anecdote is not data,” Dunlap said in his Friday letter to the shuttered commission’s leaders. 

But here's Dunlap's complete letter to Kobach and Trump outlining his complaints.  He doesn't mince words.

Matthew Dunlap Presidential Advisory Committee on Elections (PACEI) Docs Findings Letter - by Steve on Scribd

You can get 29 additional documents Dunlap received at the Maine Secretary of State website.

New Steps And A Footnote

Children are still separated from their parents, Trump's doing what Nixon and all other guilty folks do - denying everything, the ADN seems to be reporting gun and traffic deaths on a daily basis, but even with that backdrop, we all have to keep on maintaining our daily lives.*

Our front steps have been commented on by friends visiting us for a number of years now.  The railing snapped off last fall and had to be welded back together.  My attempts to envision a whole new entry way kept me putting off the new steps until I had a bigger plan.  But my attempts at that have proven fruitless and so finally today the workers began taking out the old, very cracked and split up steps.

Here's what they looked like Monday.

And here are some pictures from today.

Presumably, the new steps will get put in tomorrow, and we may be able to actually use the front door again in a few days.  It's not raining hard, but it's not sunny either.  And yes, I dug up those hostas that were in front and put them in another hole for a while.

*I've made comparisons to Nazi Germany at times.  Some people reject any such comparisons as hyperbole.  But many of the steps Trump is taking to dismantle democracy ARE similar to steps Hitler took.  We aren't talking about concentration camps, but Trump's detention centers treat immigrants as though they weren't human.  The  MAGA slogan isn't much different from Hitler's call's for reviving Germany's greatness after the humiliation of losing WWI and the Versailles Agreement.   The Trump administration's attacks on the media, the callous treatment of refugees and Muslims, the lies and alternative reality we hear daily from the White House, and the stirring up of hatred and violence, all happened in the 30's in Germany.  He's creating a whole new vocabulary - Fake News, Witch Hunt, the derogatory nicknames he repeats and repeats like Crooked Hillary - as did Hitler's regime.  Hitler too was elected on a populist wave of nationalism and making Germany a great nation again.  Hitler scapegoated Jews, Trump scapegoated Muslims and immigrants.

But, there are a lot of things that make it harder from Trump to pull a Hitler.  For one, he's not nearly as smart as Hitler, who actually did build infrastructure -  the Autobahn, not a wall.  His messages were more focused and consistent.  And the power was centered in Berlin.

Our advantage is states having much more independence from DC than German states had from Berlin.  The various state lawsuits against various Trump policies are examples of this. For me right now, fixing the steps is something that still makes sense.  That wasn't the case for my grandparents in the 1930's in Germany.  So in that sense, things are very different.  For me at least.  For immigrants with uncertain status, repairing steps is probably not something they are thinking about.

A Little Zen From The August Sun

The August edition of The Sun came today.  Each addition has an interview.  This month's is with
Norman Fischer, the founder and senior dharma teacher at the Everyday Zen Foundation.  He's interviewed by Corey Fischer.  They haven't found any family connection, but they decided to use first names in the interview to avoid confusion.  Here's just a bit, which seems useful to think about these days.

Corey: If you were to distill Zen Buddhism to its most basic, core concepts, what would those be?
Norman: [Laughs.] Oh, boy. Maybe the simplest and truest thing to say is that Zen doesn’t have a basic core concept. Zen is just appreciating being alive. There’s nothing to it beyond that. But if I said only that, it would be a little silly and disappointing, even though it’s true. So I will say more. . .

"Zen Buddhism is interested in awakening through different ways of looking at the world. It doesn’t try to tell you what the absolute truth is, the way Western religion does. At a certain point in history people began sincerely thinking, “Well, if you don’t believe in Jesus, your soul is in jeopardy. So we should do whatever it takes to straighten you out. That’s an act of compassion because we’re in possession of an absolute, metaphysical truth.” Forcing religion on unwilling others turned out to be a terrible idea."

You can read the whole interview here.

[We've had a lot of nice days and today is one.  It's going on 10pm and the sky is blue with puffy white clouds and I'm sitting on the deck in shorts surrounded by trees.  The picture shows the magazine on the outdoor table next to my computer.  The white lacy thing is a cover to keep bugs out of the food.  It opens sort of like an umbrella.  The bugs haven't been a problem, but some young Steller jays have been coming pretty close before we have to shoo them away.]

Anchorage Garden Tour 2018

The last Sunday of July is the Anchorage Garden Club's Garden Tour.  The newspaper used to feature the houses on the tour, but I think they were getting way too many people traipsing through their yards.  So notice is more discrete nowadays.  We've gone on lots of these tours and they are always inspiring - introducing new plants, ideas making gardening easier or more productive.

There have been overwhelming gardens that someone has spent a small fortune on and then there are much more modest ones, with ideas I can imagine duplicating in my own garden.

This year all the gardens fit in the more modest category.  I've decided to put up the pictures by categories rather than by the gardens they were in.  I also got pictures of all but one of the six hosting gardeners.

Ideas

This garden featured flower beds growing out of bales of hay.  Karen said she just dug out a hole and planted and things did really well.  There was something about adding nitrogen.  She suggested looking online for more details - so here's a link I found.

This gardener used a mail box token her hand tools in.  She also lined her flower beds with beer bottles.

This garden was billed as an example of 'upcycling.'   And there were lots of odds and ends all over the yard, like this giant pail with small waterfall.  Most of it was not the sort of thing that appeals to me during our decluttering phase.  These possible second uses of things are precisely the logic my mom used for not giving or throwing things away.




But I did like this use of an old bed post to put a new spin on the idea of a flower bed.

Some new ideas come in the way of plants I don't know, but do well in an Anchorage garden.  I did know that people have tried hydrangeas, with difficulty.  But this Hydrangea Annabelle has been doing well for nearly ten years she said.  It has a mint green flower that then turns white.  It is against a south facing house wall, which helps.  

And I didn't know about these orchid primroses.  

And this nine bark diablo was another.






Pretty Flowers 

Of course one of the delights of a garden tour is to see some beautiful flowers.  And I'm a sucker for the deep blues of delphiniums












And these white lilies in the same garden were exquisite.

The Gardeners

Karen Gonne-Harrell was the gardener with the straw bales.  These beds were from last year's straw beds with wood put around them.  She added some dirt on top. But she said the carrots weren't doing well - here she pulled up a couple to show me.  

Rona Spaar had the most 'perfect' garden - everything was in place, lots of beautiful flowers everywhere, not spots that weren't green or full of blooming flowers.

Rathe Rasmussen's garden had lots of ideas in it - like the beer bottle borders.  This was a fun and lush garden.

I thought I recognized Marti Black's Spenard garden from a previous tour - five years ago she said.  (It's the first one in this 2013 post.  The porch was added on since then.)

And yes, in all these cases the gardeners were women.  Though Lester Black was also here and showing people around.

This was the part that was a beautiful garden in the most traditional sense, including the apple tree.

The other side of the house had Lester's junk pile.

This is Vicki Russell - the upcycling gardener who also had a number of plants I hadn't seen before.


Other Thoughts

We parked at Spruce Park near one of the houses.  The sign on this white bicycle says:

In memory of Jeff Dusenbury
11-29-62
7 -19-14
Beloved husband, father, friend, and avid cyclist.
Killed here on July 19, 2014

 As someone who bikes a lot, this is a somber reminder of the dangers.  The link tells more about what happened.

This sign at one of the gardens reminded me that gardening is one of those activities that transcends political leanings.  Passionate gardeners come in all ideologies.  Gardening is a neutral ground for those of different views to remember they are all human beings with more similarities than differences.




I wasn't exactly where this picture of the elephant fountain fit, so here it is to close this post.

Blogging Output Decline

I've been missing days here and there.  We had visitors.  We're still uncluttering - the old sofa bed got picked up this morning, and we're still shredding old documents.  And there's taking advantage of living close to lots of incredible ways to get into the wild.  There's the taming of the wild in our own yard.  And books to read.

So there are ideas piling up.  Things I've thought about or even started.

I still have lots to document on the Graham v. MOA case.

A post on whether non-citizens should be able to vote.

More research on the airport construction that is causing so much noise - including observations on people who tell people to get over it.

Concerns about NPR's growing to cozy with their news formulas.

Filipino Food- Ed Badajos' great graphic book from the 1970s.

And thoughts on how blogging has changed since I started here, just to name a few things.  But I'd rather skip a day here and make sure what I write is worth people's attention.  

I should also mention the peaches.  The Costco peaches were delicious - but there were so many of them.  And they were each so big.  And they all got ripe at once.  We just ate a bunch and  J made some peach and blueberry compote last night.  And before that I used peaches in my oatmeal.

Water Cutoff, So We Get Out Of Town

There was a green card hanging from our door the other day that said the water would be shut off between 9am and 3pm on Thursday.  I checked on line and found this:
[UPDATE Aug 21, 2018 - I've corrected the formatting for this project and I've posted an update]

AWWU Construction Projects

• Project Manager
• James Armstrong
• Phone Number    
• 907 564 2776
• Public Description
• Work will consist of the Contractor to furnish and install approximately 2,000 linear feet of 16-inch PVC pipe, three (3) double pumper fire hydrant assembly, and eight (8) 16-inch gate valves and valve boxes, three (3) 8-inch gate valves and valve boxes, and one (1) 6-inch gate valve and valve box.

So we decided it would be a good day to be out in the woods.  The shut off the water by 11am just before we took off.

And the street was blocked off.   We drove straight down to Portage Glacier.  I'd been there a couple of weeks ago with the little kids and I really wanted to go see Byron Glacier and spend some time relaxing in the van at Black Bear campground.  It was raining too much last time to take the kids to  Byron Glacier, and since there was a rare iceberg floating by the visitor's center it didn't seem necessary.  We stopped at the visitor center first.  It was raining some, but with the fierce wind of last time, and the iceberg was gone.

The white in the middle is the glacier.  It used to wrap around and over the hill and sit in the water of Portage Lake.  And there used to be icebergs all the time.  The ranger said the berg had lasted about two weeks, melting and breaking up fairly quickly.

Then off to Byron Glacier not far away.  (I"ve been debating whether this should be in chronological order or if I should just put up pics from the day.  General chronological order won by one vote.)

Here's a ripe salmon berry we passed on the way.

And here's what's left of Byron Glacier.  I remember first seeing it when the whole mountain side was solid glacier.  Now the lower part is pretty pitiful.  When you talk to people in Anchorage about climate change - the long time residents just point to Portage and the nearby glaciers as how they know it's real.  These changes are really dramatic.  And in a short span that humans can notice.

Here's a decent sized chunk of glacier but it's really a tiny fraction of what used to be here.

This is looking up.  The clouds have lowered since I took the first Byron glacier picture above, but you can see the eerie blue ice often found in glaciers, especially on cloudy days.

Walking back we started talking to a couple from North Carolina.  They were originally from Calcutta and they were on a whirlwind tour of Alaska.  In a week they'd been to Denali, Anchorage, Seward, and were spending their last full day at Portage and then went to hike Winner Creek in Girdwood.

And in the car next to ours was a young Israeli who was touring Alaska.

This fern lined path is near Black Bear campground in the Portage Valley.  We'd stopped her last time and it was so beautiful that I wanted to explore the area a bit.  We had lunch, read, and snoozed.  I'm just starting Charles Eisenstein's The Ascent of Humanity. Someone told me about it when I was talking about how the Protestant Work Ethic doesn't work any more now that technology can do much of the work that people had to do.  That we need a knew way to think about the distribution of wealth - other than it being only paid-work connected.  (Here's one post I did on that thought.  Looking for it, I see I've started, but not finished a few others.)

Eisentein's message includes that thought, but in a much broader perspective of how many of our conceptions of the world are failing to accurately portray what's happening around us.

"In the face of an ecological, financial, social, and health crisis that isn't going away, our tools - political, technological, and cognitive - are revealing themselves as impotent.  As that happens, the belief systems that embed those tools lose the gloss we call 'reality.'  Our defining narratives are coming apart at the seems.
"This dissolution reaches to the deepest imaginable level.  Not only our social institutions, not only our ecosystems are collapsing, but along with them our answers to the basic questions of life: "Who am I?" "Why am I here?"  "Where did we come from and where are we going?" "What is the purpose of life?"

But he's also optimistic.  And in a way that might be reasonable.  He talks about how humankind's thousands of years of accumulated knowledge and technology have failed to make people happy.  How along with greater material wealth and better health for many, there is still genocide, hunger, massive destruction of the natural world.

"Something [is] so fundamentally wrong that centuries of our best and brightest efforts to create a better world have failed or even backfired.  As this realization sinks in, we respond with despair, cynicism, numbness, or detachment.  

OK, I know I promised more optimistic and that was the opposite.  Here it comes:

"Yet no matter how complete the despair, no matter how bitter the cynicism, a possibility beckons of a world more beautiful and a life more magnificent than what we know today.  Though we rationalize it, it is not rational.  We become aware of it in moments, gaps in the rush and press of modern life.  This moments come to uss lone in nature, to with a baby, making love, playing with children, caring for a dying person, making music for the sake of music or beauty for the sake of beauty.  At such times, a simple and easy joy shows us the futility of the vast, life-consuming program of management and control.  

Reading that yesterday in the van surrounded by trees and a glacial river nearby and about to go for another walk, I knew I would put these quotes into this post.

"We inuit that something similar is possible collectively.  Some of us may have experienced it when we find ourselves cooperating naturally and effortlessly, instruments of a purpose greater than ourselves that, paradoxically, makes us individually more and not less when we abandon ourselves to it.  It is what musicians are referring to when they say, "The music played the band."
"Another way of being is possible, and it is right in front of us, closer than close.  That much is transparently certain.  Yet it slips away so easily that we hardly believe it could be the foundation of life;  so we relate it to an afterlife and call it Heaven, or we relegate it to the future and call it Utopia.  (When nanotechnology solves all our problems . .  when we all learn to be nice to each other. . . when finally I'm not so busy . . .)Either way, we set it apart from this world and this life, and thereby deny its practicality and its reality in the heart and now  Yet the knowledge that life is more than Just This cannot be suppressed, not forever."

He goes on to take about the title - The Ascent of Humanity - as being an ironic take on Jacob Bronowski.'s The Ascent of Man. Ironic because he's arguing in the book that the idea of man's ascent to a better life through technology that takes us beyond nature, that has us conquering nature to improve human life, the idea of progress as we know it is false.  We've been 'improving' since the Stone Age and futurists keep telling us about new technologies that will solve our problems.  It's not going to happen he tells us.  We need to rethink our relationship to the world, to nature, and to each other.  That better life won't come from technology, but from knowing ourselves and our role in the natural world.

It's not a new message in some senses, but he's got 500 pages of back up for the argument.  I've only read the Introduction (where he outlines the arguments chapter by chapter) and the beginning of the first chapter - The Triumph of Technology - where he picks up the theme I've followed about how the promises of more leisure through technology have fallen flat.

OK, back to Portage Valley.  Despite how beautiful it was and the many pictures I took, I'm afraid these are just a pale facsimile.  You can't feel the mist drizzling on your face, or see these shots in their large context.  But I was feeling that 'more magnificent world' as I walked through this with a much lightened heart.

These are shelf fungi growing on the bottom of a cut tree.









I'm looking forward to reading all of Eisenstein's book.  I'm hoping it's as good as it seems to be in the fist 20 pages or so.

I do want to mention the idea of separation which is a key point he's making - and you can see it on the cover page (if you click on it and enlarge it).  I'm guess from the little I've read so far, this will be about many separations from what's real that humans have made.  Separation from nature.  How science has broken down into uncountable specialities so that few actually see the big picture and how everything is connected.  (Again, a big theme in The Invention of Nature, Andrea Wulf's book about Alexander von Humboldt.)  He's talking about how we have separated humans into different groups - by gender, by race, by ethnicity, by nationality, by religion.  And how humans have been separated from their true selves by the narratives of the societies they live in.

I think Esenstein would take hope from how the Trump administration is forcing so many people to rethink their conception of the United States.  The old world view has to die before the new one can be adopted.  It's not easy, but it's how things work.

And the water was back on when we got home.

LA Loses Gold - Their Venerable Food Critic Who Knew Good Food And How To Write About It

Jonathan Gold was my guide to eating out in LA.  As a food critic, he wasn't snobby.  As Sunday's LA Times article tells us:

"Food criticism before him — and even during his time — focused on the austere, the high-end, the Michelin stars. Gold redefined the genre, drawn more to hole-in-the-wall joints, street food, mom-and-pop shops and ethnic restaurants than he was to haute cuisine. Although he appreciated and wrote beautifully about fine dining, he revered the taco truck more than the tasting menu. . ."

“Jonathan understood that food could be a power for bringing a community together, for understanding other people,” said Ruth Reichl, who edited Gold at The Times and at Gourmet. “In the early ’80s, no one else was there. He was a trailblazer and he really did change the way that we all write about food.”

"Gold was mission-driven as a critic, hoping his food adventures through the city’s many immigrant enclaves would help break down barriers among Angelenos wary of venturing outside their comfort zones. In the process, he made L.A.’s enormousness and diversity feel accessible and became one of the city’s most insightful cultural commentators.
“I am trying to democratize food and trying to get people to live in the entire city of Los Angeles,” he said in a 2015 interview with Vice. “I’m trying to get people to be less afraid of their neighbors.”
In 2007, when he was writing for L.A. Weekly, Gold became the first restaurant critic to win the Pulitzer Prize for criticism. "

His death at 57 is a great loss not only to LA, but to the art of writing about food.  So it is with sadness, I post about him today.

And I've had a draft post up for nearly a year now because I was so taken by one of his reviews last year.  It was over-the-top, but then the restaurant itself was beyond that even.  Was the chef a true artist who sculpted not only the food, but the whole dining experience and, with Gold's help, found people to pay for his art? (Dinner for two was $1000.) Or was he spoofing restaurants who gave people a square plate with couple of artfully placed asparagus and dribbles of colorful sauce for $40?

I never posted about that review, but it seems appropriate now.   Especially because today's article tells us:

"Gold was protective of Los Angeles and how it was portrayed. For years, when the Los Angeles food scene was overlooked by critics who preferred dining in New York and San Francisco, Gold was quick to defend and champion it.
After New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells disparaged the Oakland location of Locol, a fast-food chain that originated in Watts, Gold penned an impassioned essay in response.
“Locol is less a replacement for a fast-food restaurant than a better version of it,” he wrote. “Someday, if he’ll allow me, I’d like to take Mr. Wells to Watts.”
Perhaps to make a point, when it came time to pick his first Restaurant of the Year recipient three months later, Gold chose Locol."

Verspertine is about as far from the the Southern India spot in the Culver City strip mall or the food truck anywhere.  His review begins:

If you were looking for the oddest dish being served in an American restaurant right now, you should probably start with the fish course at Jordan Kahn's new Vespertine, a dish that nudges the idea of culinary abstraction dangerously close to the singularity. It doesn't look like fish, for one thing — it looks rather like an empty bowl, coarse and pebbly inside and out, of a blackness deep enough to suck up all light, your dreams and your soul.
If this were Coi or Alinea, to name two modernist temples, your server would instruct you on how to eat the dish, or at least on where you might direct your spoon. At Vespertine, the server, wearing a severe frock like something out of "The Handmaid's Tale," does not. If you prompt her, she may whisper the word hirame, which in a sushi bar can mean either flounder or halibut. She will leave before you discover that the flounder has been pounded thin, crusted with charred-onion powder, and pressed into the bowl over a kind of porridge studded with minced shallot, perfumy bits of pickled Japanese plum, and bright, crunchy bursts of acid that could either be finger-lime vesicles or chopped stems of the wildflower oxalis. You are not sure exactly what you are eating. You are not meant to know. You have traveled from darkness into light, and that is enough.

The link here is worth it just for the pictures, but also for his words.  Gold knows that few of his readers will ever go to Vespertine:

I would say that a meal at Vespertine is mandatory for a certain kind of diner, but mandatory in the way that the James Turrell show at LACMA a couple of years ago was mandatory, or Berg's "Wozzeck," or the current season of "Twin Peaks." It's not dinner; it's Gesamtkunstwerk.

But for most of us, reading Gold's description (it's way beyond a review) of the Vespertine experience makes me, at least, feel like I was there with him.  Vespertine was his Restaurant of the Year for 2017.  I imagine he saw it not as a spoof, but the work of great artist, and like a Lamborghini, something to admire, but something only a few would experience.

May Anchorage's food critics read Jonathan Gold's old reviews and set their sights much higher.

Babylon Berlin NEIN

I follow NEIN ('No' in German)  (@NEINQaurterly) on Twitter.  I think I saw his book first in a Seattle bookstore and then his Twitter feed.  He tweets with extremely wry irony and wit.  He tweets in German but mostly in English.

We've also watched the Netflix series Babylon Berlin which takes place over a couple of years prior to Hitler's rise to power.  (Well, while he was rising, but not yet there.)  It's an incredible production.

For those who dismiss anyone who makes comparisons to Nazi Germany, I highly recommend this show.  Yes, the soup Nazi and other such inappropriate usages have often diminished more serious comparisons.  And to a certain extent, the omission of ways Hitler improved the lives of many Germans, has blinded Americans and others to how someone like Hitler could have risen to power.

So a show like Babylon Berlin is important in getting a better understanding of the conditions in which a person like Hitler could come to power in a country that had been the cultural, scientific, and intellectual power of Europe.

So when I saw this Tweet today, I'm intrigued - an online course on Babylon Berlin.

Zu Asche. Zu Staub.
Dem Licht geraubt.
Doch erst ab 20. September.*

Join me for a course on #BabylonBerlin and Weimar politics, philosophy, and culture at ⁦@DeutschesHausNY⁩. Details soon.

Pre-course reading via @NoahIsenberg and @nybooks: https://t.co/1sFyE5x5B2 pic.twitter.com/9k5k7sWIQG

— Nein. (@NeinQuarterly) July 21, 2018

I was hoping this was an online class, but it appears it will be limited to a few folks in New York who can get to DeutchesHauseNY.  But there's some extra reading here to follow up on.

If you have Netflix and haven't seen this series, at least watch the first episode.  Great characters, powerful story, and it will pique your interest in the times, which are definitely relevant (not the same as but relevant) to what's happening in the US.


*To Ashes. To dust.
Stolen from the light.
But not until the 20th of September.

Surprise! Departure Time and Costco/Citi Bank Billing

Surprise 1:  Departure Time

I got up yesterday (Thursday) thinking that my daughter and granddaughter were flying home today (Friday) - that we had one more day of human sunshine at the house.  But my wife informed me they were leaving that day (yesterday) at 3:30pm.  This was about 9am.

Whoa, how could I make that big a mistake?  I checked my computer calendar and I had them down for today - the 20th.  So I looked for the email and got the Alaska Air reservation.  There it was:  July 19.  But it wasn't 3:30pm.  It was 11:07am!  (3:30 was their arrival time.)

Needless to say when I told my daughter, who was still in bed, there was a bit of hustle and bustle. But we got them to the airport ok.

It hurt to see them go.  But the last minute burst of packing and rushing was distracting.

It means we can get back to our cleaning out the house activities - more paper shredding, more sorting, tossing, giving away, the crumbling front steps will be replaced.   I think I've decided to not put so many pictures back up on the walls.  Instead, we'll just change what is up now and then and leave many of the pictures in the 'archives.'  It's just that we're trying to minimize storing stuff we don't use that much.


Surprise 2:  Paying Costco Bill Still A Pain

It's not the amount that's the problem, it's the complicated way Costco and Citi Bank (their credit card) do things.

When we had to change to the Citi Bank Costco credit card last November, we didn't realize that we would get two cards with two different numbers.  And since my wife happened to be the person who signed up for them, she was automatically the primary card holder.  I have no problem letting her be 'primary' except that I'm the one who pays the bills.  So the first bill we got I had lots of trouble - the website didn't recognize my card number.  You see, when I use my card, it all goes to her card number.

And I couldn't even call in and work it out.  I had to give the phone to her to get permission to pay the bill.  She gave it.
So I was able to set up the user name and password.

Until a couple of months later, they didn't work.  I couldn't get past the security questions.  Turns out my card number has no value at all in identifying myself.  I have to use her number, but she still had to give permission.  Despite our pleas to let me have the ability to call in and talk to them without getting her permission - and their saying ok they were doing that - it didn't happen.

So when I tried to pay the bill they emailed me today, it didn't work again.  The rep this time was much more sympathetic than last time.  (Last month she denied that I had ever been made an 'administrator' even though we knew we'd called in and asked for that to happen.)  So Jazzalin made me an administrator yet again.  But I can't change a mailing address or security questions without my wife's permission.

I understand that some couples might want to put restrictions on one another or other users including children, but I don't understand why we can't have the option of one card number and equal access for both of us.

But then I got transferred to the tech side to figure out why I couldn't log in.  The rep did say that I had logged in successfully at 2:06pm (so I knew he was on East Coast time).  But the messages I got all said something like "Your info does not match our records."
He asked how I had gotten to the website.
Me:  "I used the link in the email statement I got."
Him:  "Ah, don't use that.  Go straight to CITI.com"
Me:  "You're saying the link in the email statement doesn't work?"
Him:  "There have been some problems."

There are enough refunds using Costco's preferred card to make not using it a real decision.  Besides, using their credit card doesn't give them any more information on what I buy than they already get from their membership card, and I don't usually carry much cash on me these days, and you have to have the credit card to get gas there.  So I'm resigned to using the card.

[UPDATE July 28, 2018: A reader emailed me to say she gets gas using her Alaska Airlines credit card, and that having two different card numbers was helpful when she lost her card.  Her husband's card still worked.]]

He also said it was Costco, not Citi, that requires the two different account numbers.  So I did send in my complaint to Costco too.

Another issue we discussed was Security Questions.  He said he's asked at meetings how and why they pick the obscure questions they pick.  He was told that so much info is available on social media these days that they need to be more obscure.  But he also realizes that some people - particularly older people - don't remember 'their first' whatever any more.  And I pointed out that you have to remember exactly what you wrote.  Spelled exactly the same.  Did you give your youngest brother's birthday as July 1, 1996 or just July 1?  Or July1?

But I also raised the issue of potentially giving hackers even more detailed information about a person.  Think of the recent scam attempts lately where someone calls and says, "We've kidnapped your granddaughter and you need to buy gift cards for $5000 and give us the codes within 30 minutes."  They now can convince grandma with obscure details like her granddaughter's first dog's name, or first car or the street she lived on when she was in elementary school.

Or someone stealing your identity can have that information too.

How much are we willing to pay for convenience?  And is it our convenience or the company's convenience?

I've spent at least three hours of my time dealing just with Costco billing in the last six months - that really isn't convenience.