Saving the World

Why is everyone disappointed because President Obama hasn't been able to save the world?  Why did they expect him to?  He may have promised the moon in campaign rhetoric, but you have to do that to be elected.  Remember Walter Mondale, anyone?  I'm extremely happy that we have Obama in the White House, and not John McCain, or, God forbid, Sarah Palin. 

The White Rolls-Royce Stretch Limousine

Saturday night a white Rolls-Royce stretch limo was in the right lane when I was in the left.  It was a beautiful thing. Gleaming white, dark windows, spare tire cover on the trunk, emblem on the hood.  You have to wonder who is inside when you see a car like that.  Who could be worthy?  I wanted to think it was a celebrity who'd come from a performance at the Arena, going to the airport, but it was too early in the evening.  More probably some tacky couple was on their way to the Woodlands to dance and get drunk. 

Some years ago I saw a creamy brown Rolls on the Harveys Lake road.  The license plate had something to do with Andy Warhol, who'd already been dead a long time. I've wondered ever since who owned that car. 

Evil Serial Killers

Saturday at Barnes & Noble on the bargain table I saw a book called "Evil Serial Killers," and thought, "as opposed to all those good serial killers out there?"  The only supposedly good one is Dexter, a fictional character on HBO.  Is the author making a distinction between evil killers and mentally ill killers?  Couldn't a case be made that all serial killers are both evil and mentally ill?  Maybe evil and crazy are the same thing.  Nevertheless the word "evil" in that book title is seriously redundant. 

Plastic Containers and Paranoia

There is no uniformity among the makers of plastic containers so that the lids of one container will fit a container made by a different company.  Two plastic sandwich-size containers, to the untutored eye, look exactly the same.  Yet the lid to one is, in some subtle way, the wrong size for the other. 

Competition cannot explain this.  It is pure chance which containers I buy the next time I shop.  I'll probably end up with a third kind that doesn't match the other two.  And I'm certainly not going to bring the lids of the containers I have at home with me.  If I were that organized I wouldn't have this problem and wouldn't have time to write about it.  I'd be spending hours obsessing over plastic containers, much as I am now. 

What can explain this?  The logical answer is that the containers are not made by different companies, but by the same corporation under different names.  It's an evil corporate plot designed to make us buy more containers, and blame ourselves for not remembering which kind we already have.  It's a devious monopoly designed to take advantage of the thousands, nay millions, of tiny ways a lid may differ from its accompanying bottom.  Where are the anti-monopoly laws?  Where is the Sherman Anti-Trust Act? 

Blue Dress Dream

Last night I dreamed I was looking at the side of a blue dress with a narrow black sash, dangling from the waist, not tied.  It was not an attractive dress, rather cheap-looking jersey, in a blue similar to the "Save Now" shade at the bottom of this posting window.  It would not have looked good on me. 

Ulysses Chapter 3

I've been reading the Gifford annotations for Chapter 3  - which I did read first - and find an alarming number of theological references, Thomas Aquinas and Arius, among others.  Somehow just reading the chapter it did not seem so religiously oriented.  So many people, for so many hundreds of years, have argued over how the Christian god is divided up, which parts are more divine than others, which came first and from where.  Mobs ran amuk over these questions and people were burned at the stake. 

Yet I think if I lived back then - I imagine myself as an artisan, skilled in some sort of handworking - I would not have cared anymore than I do now.  I think it was all political, really, a question of who you felt more personally comfortable with as your bishop, for example.  Many questions in Congress are equally trivial yet arouse such emotion.  It was a struggle for power back then, as it is now, and all that fruitless speculation about the nature of the Holy Ghost was just an excuse to take sides. 

Week in Review

I nearly always feel like responding to Frank Rich's column in the Sunday Times. I'm not sure why, since I nearly always agree with him. I suppose it's because he provokes thought. This week he writes about "box-office dread" - continuing failure of movies and TV shows about the Iraq war. The apparent lack of interest of the general populace is not due to lack of concern. The public has already weighed the Iraq war and rejected it. Almost no one is on the fence about this, or even curious. We all just want it to go away, but we know this won't happen until George Bush is out of office. Mr. Rich's final sentence perfectly sums up the situation, "Unable to even look at the fiasco anymore, the nation is now just waiting for someone to administer the last rites."

Maureen Dowd seems to believe Barack Obama's nomination is almost an inevitability. I truly hope she is right. I have wondered why, when Hillary is answering the red phone in the White House at 3 a.m., she is fully dressed and wearing make-up. Shouldn't she be in pajamas, with rumpled hair?

The selection from "Opinion Online" from Olivia Judson, "A Mutual Affair," about the mutually protective behavior of the goby and the shrimp, is very interesting. As a single item, I think mutualism is fascinating, but I know I wouldn't read an entire book about it. I am aware of my deplorable habit of behaving as if buying non fiction books is the same as reading them. Learning through osmosis, the mental image of a book under a pillow. Why isn't there a head on the pillow? It is very hard to remember details I think I should learn from reading. I don't think it is age. I've always had a pretty vague mind. 1066 and 1492 are the only dates I've truly absorbed. This is one reason blogging will be useful, as a personal archive and bibliography.