Category Archives: DISPATCHES & RAMBLINGS

COINCIDENCE

POSTED: JUNE 1, 2025

Any regular visitors to this website know that I don’t understand exactly how everything works in the world. There is some stuff that escapes me – almost everything in the world of science for example! But the other things that often have me baffled, just when I think I have a good handle on them, are the things that occur in life. Coincidence is just such a notion. Sometimes its serendipity, sometimes neutral and sometimes bad, but regardless of the context I always find it more than a bit spooky.

Ian Fleming wrote (and I am paraphrasing) “something occurring once is happenstance, twice is coincidence and three times is enemy action”. Well, this week I was talking to my buddy Jim and he told me about just such a situation. Actually enemy action is not exactly accurate but some serious overlaps in events.

End of The Road Ukulele Group, Gardens Hotel, Key West

It started with his partner Janice playing with her Ukulele group in Key West about six weeks ago before Janice and Jim made the tough decision to head back to Canada early. The ukulele players range from professional to recreational musicians who play in various parks, pubs, and at events just for the fun of it. The ukuleles when played en masse are quite a formidable sound. So, a couple of weeks ago after playing in a pub one night for about sixty people and then playing a few days later at an outdoor garden party that was a fundraiser for local worthy cause they found themselves at an evening event to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the HINDU, a fine old wooden hull schooner that had recently been rebuilt and this was the relaunch. Various nautical and sea focused songs were performed and it was a good time. The day had seen all sorts of musical acts, and various tributes and stories about the fine old boat and this was one of the last of the acts to perform.

Now Key West is a small community so it was not really a coincidence that they were playing there as one of the ukulele players was related to the owners.

End Of The Road Ukulele Group Paying Dockside At HINDU Relaunch

What was a coincidence however is that the HINDU was the boat that my buddy Jim and Janice went on in Provincetown, Massachusetts in 1978 as part of their honeymoon. I don’t have any pictures of them on the boat at the time but Jim had a couple of shots from their honeymoon trip camping through New England.

1978 Janice & Jim Honeymoon Camping Trip

I had heard about this fine old wooden schooner.

The reason is that more than one person had mentioned it too me as it was one of the few schooners left that had been designed by William Hand, a naval architect in the United States. The reason it had been referenced to me more than once is that my boat, En Plein Air is a William Hand designed powersailer with a pilot house design. There are only a handful of these boats left on the planet. This Naval Architect William Hand was much like the architect Charles Rennie MacIntosh in Glasgow who when designing a building, would also design the crown molding, baseboards, casing and backband, windows and lots of little details like little nooks for books or space for a vase of flowers and the furniture for the place.

She is a 1925 gaff rigged schooner, but looks like she was just built. And that’s because of the magnitude of the refit she just went through. Her owners offer sailing charters in the winter in Key West and in the summer in Provincetown. On her way north during the pandemic at about 3:30 in the morning she hit a submerged keel boat and did significant damage. During the pandemic a lot of owners of large keel boats that were financed were sunk to collect the insurance. The owner of this one had created the holes in the hull and air chambers to make her sink but had neglected to put holes in the water tanks and sewage tanks, that were partially filled with air, so when the keel boat “sank” it was only to just below the surface and when the Hindu hit it might have well been running aground for all the damage done.

So after a long time, and considerable cost the Hindu is better than ever and has a new lease on life.

I love the fact that in this crazy complex and huge world, there are some things that just continue to have ties to other places, times and experiences and it is those connections that make them all the more significant to us.

Django

P.S. Just as I was posting this, I got an email from my buddy Jim who is now back in Canada from Key west but wanted to tell me that he and Janice went out for a sunset cruise on the HINDU, just a few days before they left the island, for the drive home.

I think it was particularly poignant for them because with Trumps declaration of economic war with Canada they will be challenged by the question of whether to return to Key West, a place they love and have friends who are important to them.

ONE HUNDRED DAYS

POSTED: MAY 1, 2025

A lot can happen in one hundred days. Apparently if you are an American President you can:

continue to support a war criminal in the middle east;
continue to support a war criminal in Russia;
round up a variety of people you think don’t belong in the country and send them to prisons in other countries;
propose taking over with force a sovereign country in Central America;
rename an international body of water;
threaten to invade a remote island in the North Atlantic because it is strategic to your plans;
terminate large swaths of Federal civil servants with no regard to employment contracts, tenure, or equity, and even eliminate entire departments of government including one department that has had so much positive outreach in the world in softening the hard edge of so powerful a country;
threaten former allies and major trading partners around the world;
impose unrealistic tariffs on both democratic and non- democratic states without regard for the impact on world stability or the very livelihood of many of your own citizens;
execute many of these plans with the assistance of a private citizen who benefits financially from much of the decisions made;
ignore the rule of law and the institutions created to enforce it.

And what is even more amazing is you can do these things with virtually no opposition from the elected representatives who are actually charged with making most of these decisions. It is one thing for domestic political opponents to not be able to stop these actions but inconceivable that these actions can be taken without at least some of the members of the majority party stepping up to do the right thing.

One hundred days is a very short time to do such damage. The decades of positive work done on so many fronts can be eliminated with the stroke of a sharpie.

Being on this planet gives me a stake in this war he is waging, but being a Canadian also makes me an active combatant. The trade war waged on Canada is already devastating for both economies, but longer term it will be worse for Canada.

The rhetoric surrounding the taking over of Canada by economic force however has rallied the country like never before. I am seventy-one, and it’s the first time I have seen supporters of all political stripes uniting to this extent.

In that same one hundred days, in Canada we have seen the Prime Minister step down, a leadership convention, leading to a new Prime Minister, and a federal election occur over just several weeks. We also witnessed the early front-runner in that election who patterned himself partially off the American President, go from twenty percent ahead in the polls to his party not winning the election and not even winning his own seat in the House of Commons.

Mark Carney is the adult in the room. He is the adult in any room he is in and a very smart, disciplined, ethical person, who has the support to take on this battle. It is an unfortunate truth however that he can not solve the problems created by Trump, but he can work to rethink the Canadian economy to catch up with the Canadian psyche. That psyche is very much elbows up. We are scared, feel betrayed, but like the Ukrainians are gearing up for the fight.

Let the games begin.

Django

QUILTING MEMORIES AND MEMORY QUILTS

POSTED: APRIL 1, 2025

Regular readers of my little posts may recall that last August I did a post on Tulip, the Dutch Sheep Dog who was part of Janice and Jims family and who passed last summer.

Tuli had been a wonderful part of the family and at one point in the grieving process last August their daughter Jade came up with the idea of making quilts from Tuli’s scarves. To some this may sound like an ill-conceived plan, but not in this circumstance. You see as a very long-haired dog, grooming (brushing out that long hair) is necessary every week, so fifteen years ago when they decided to get another long haired type, Janice and Jim contracted with a local groomer to bring her in every week. Most weeks would just be a brush out and every two or three weeks would be the more complete “spa day”. LOL.

The groomer they chose had a policy that any dog in for grooming regardless of the type of service, would go home with a little scarf around their neck. A nice treat for a pup who occasionally goes to the groomer. But in Tulips case, even with them going south for a few months in the winter, where that Key West groomer did not put scarves on the dogs, fourteen years of weekly scarves creates a lot of fabric. And of course, its not just fabric, they were scarves that Tuli would wear and that family members would have memories of her.

But lots of fabric scarves don’t make a quilt without some effort. That pursuit is one that Janice, who studied fashion design, had her own fashion label and continues to have textile art as part of her art practice, has down. She had made many quilts in the past and vintage quilt patterns are ones that have been part of her inspiration for her painted pieces. She does abstractions of quilt patterns with acrylic paint on Baltic birch panels or vintage ironing boards.

So they set off to learn to make quilts with their mom. They both had a background in art and design but neither of them had ever used a sewing machine or learned any textile art techniques. From August to December 2024 they worked away on their quilts every Sunday with their mom while Jim would work on dinner and get them coffee and help out where needed. The process had much in common with an Irish Wake. As they would work on their quilts the stories of Tuli’s life would spill out, some with laughter, some with tears.

By late December when Janice and Jim packed up to go to Key West the quilt tops (the detailed part) of each of their quilts were finished and all that remained was for them to start up on the project in the spring when their parents would make it back to Toronto.

But parallel with this exercise Janice was doing one of her own. It started much later than Jade and Jason as in the early weeks she was teaching them techniques, but by the middle of autumn Janice was at it full time, hoping to finish in time to enter an art show in Key West.

That art show she has been in before, called From A Woman’s Hand. It is held at the Custom House Museum, a fine old brick structure that is home today to a lot of key west historical art and memorabilia including a significant collection of Mario Sanchez Intaglio wood carvings. I will do a piece on that at some point.

So the quilt was finished and lovingly packed up for the trip south and shortly after arriving she learned the judges had liked it and it would be in the show, running from Mid January into April. Here are some images from the show.

Custom House Museum, Key West

Django.

THE TURN

We all know the turn. Its that point when everything shifts -often in a significant way. In the book where the protagonist is seemingly losing whatever battle has been waged but then some event occurs and that underdog is now moving ahead. Optimists look for the positive upswing, pessimists know there will always be a downswing.

In the ebb and flow of most things the turn occurs and when it is a dramatic turn well that’s something we can’t take our eyes away from.

Usually most of us will have an interest in some big world events that are going well or not, and at the same time some personal things, health, happiness, financial security, love, that will be going well or not, but the whole thing is a mixture of some aspects getting better and some getting worse. It keeps us on an even keel psychologically.

But every now and again a lot of stuff will turn so powerfully bad that its hard to see the elements that have remained positive.

Donald Trump has really shaken me. I am losing count of the new American States that Trump is musing about annexing: Canada – 51^st , Greenland – 52^nd , Panama Canal 53^rd , Mexico 54^th , Palestine with Gaza as 55^th and West Bank as 56^th or are they to be 55A and 55B?

And this of course to be part of the United States that are not really that “United”.

And how are these states to be treated – like they currently treat Puerto Rico? YIKES!

While this is going on down here on earth, the Musk Monster is musing about which planets should also be annexed.

And those employees at USAID who had dedicated their careers to trying to have a positive outreach for the U.S. are now about to be unemployed. The incremental inroads the United States has made in outreach in a treacherous world over decades was wiped out with the stroke of a sharpie. This is one of the organizations that kept events like 9/11 from happening much earlier. At this point every month of hardship created by actions like Israel and the U.S. destroying Gaza is pushing more young men to be prepared to die for the cause of fighting America.

So why am I going on with such a perspective that is all about the negative. Well, there is not much that is positive right now. As I age, I am increasingly seeing friends health change quickly. One day they are thriving and the next struggling to survive from one condition or another. Another big example is climate. In a relatively short period of time our planets health has swung from coping to perilous.

Oh, oh, I can feel a metaphor coming on……

THE TURN

Newfallen snow,

Lovingly rolled,

And assembled.

Now reduced

To a tophat

And carrot

In a pool of water.

But perhaps I have just tuned in to the movie at the wrong point. Things were bad, then they got worse, then another level of worse …… and now perhaps…… the turn.

Django

THE LOSS OF A FRIEND

Posted: Feb 1, 2025

This business of learning to be a human is tough work. Last week I turned Seventy-One and I am still learning the right and wrong way to be. At my little birthday celebration, a friend of many years decided to say some very upsetting things to me and about me. She had consumed a good amount of alcohol but that just loosened her lips – the thoughts were already swirling around in her brain before she started drinking.

I was gutted. She was not a partner or sibling or child of mine or one of the people who I would put in my top five closest friends. But she certainly was someone I saw as a friend, enjoyed her company and respected her thoughts.

The loss of someone who matters to you is a big deal. I have had friends who are divorced who are living happily today in a new relationship but still feel the loss of the marriage, and the loss of the shared memories with their old partner. For some it has been compartmentalized and they move on and focus on the here and now, but for others that loss moves with them like a shadow.

Friends with siblings they are estranged from, or children or parents they are estranged from often are like this. I have seen it with one of my buddies who became estranged from his sister and never reconciled before she died. The pain of that just lingers, and I can’t imagine kids not having a relationship with parents or vice versa.

Now I am not talking about the cases where someone has turned out to be a monster or who has willfully set out to harm the other person but most of these situations are not that – they are very conventional, garden variety disputes between people who otherwise would have an ongoing relationship.

So how do I learn from this and move forward? Well, the adult thing to do is to apologize to her for whatever it is that I said or did to make her so upset. I am quite opinionated and at the drop of a hat will opine on many topics, some of which I really do know about and can add some value to the conversation and others, well not so much. The friend who was so upset with me is much the same. When our thoughts are in sync, its fine but at times if not in sync the dialogue can go off the rails.

I did try to apologize at the time but she was too worked up so will try that again at one point so we might go forward with some level of relationship. But with that said, some things once said, can not be unsaid, so while I will apologize for whatever it was that I did to upset her, I know the relationship will never be the same.

In a volatile world with so many challenges ahead of us, it is our relationships that are more important than ever, and I am starting my seventy- first year down one, but the silver lining is for me that in future this experience has taught me to dial back sharing my opinions as often or with such vigor. It is important to learn from every experience.

Django

KNOWNS, UNKNOWNS, KNOWN UNKNOWNS, UNKNOWN KNOWNS & THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR

POSTED: January 1, 2025

A few nights ago, I had a call from my buddy Jim. He was ranting on about moving to cash. Apparently if you have any investments this is something you do when you think the investment world is at a turning point. While it may affect me if the investment world is at a turning point, it is not something I can really do anything about as all my investment funds are tied up in perishable foods for the week in my pantry.

But for him, this is a big deal. Like me, he is seventy, and while he has travelled a different path we have both seen ups and downs in the world, whether armed conflict, recessions, political coups and regime change and of course a major pandemic and the erosion of the atmosphere. But his income is derived from the investments he has made, not from a pension or government assistance or doing any work for an income, so there is some pressure to not get it wrong. So while he was chattering on about leading indicators, fundamentals, break up values and the like I was able to translate this to mean he was anticipating THE KNOCK ON THE DOOR.

Because we go back so far as friends, I think this term originated with the risk, while sitting in one of our bedrooms, smoking, or looking at magazines we should not have had, or drinking something pilfered from one our parents alcohol cabinets, that there would be the knock on the door from a parent.

For us, the term was just reduced to The Knock, but the definition remained the same – a term for anticipating that somewhat foreseen event, with unknown timing that would change the direction of future events. Of course, the term has literal and very negative applications for fallen military and police personnel, but there are good examples as well. Certainly, every woman I have known who is in her third trimester of pregnancy has a bag packed and by the door ready for the quick trip to the hospital for the big event.

But most often the unknown timing of whatever the event is, poses a problem. Friends who are very elderly know what is to come, and usually make a lot of preparations ahead as they don’t know when that knock on the door will come but that it is inevitable, and with the passage of time its inevitability becomes more certain.

Like many things in life, its all about the preparation. If the knock is a power failure for example its best to have some non- perishable foods put aside to get you through several days and some cash as your credit cards wont work.

And yes, this heavily relates to the Jahori Window from the work of the psychologists Luft & Ingham in the 1950s and the heavy use of the terms known knowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns at Nasa, that Rumsfeld repeated in his speech to the U.S. Department of Defense when trying to justify an attack to find weapons of mass destruction. A knock on the door is foreseeable (a known unknown) in some cases, like living in a hurricane zone in hurricane season, the only variable is when it might occur, in contrast to an uncharted meteorite which is an unknown unknown.

This conversation, like many with my buddy Jim involved considerable time, and with me in Malta and him in Toronto occur at strange hours of the day to be consuming a fair bit of wine so sometimes the wine is consumed at one end of the line and coffee or tea at the other. This one involved wine on both ends so the discussion of known knowns and unknown knowns regarding a knock on the door takes on a special dimension when wine is involved.

At our age we are both grappling with the meaning of everything and how it fits in the world – an ever-changing world. In this case our big epiphany (I expect self evident to anyone else) was that while it is important to be prepared as much as possible for various things that might be a knock on the door, it is equally important to recognize that we can not anticipate some of those things – a negative medical diagnosis for example – so we need to very much live in the moment. Yes, make plans for the future and yes be organized for those predictable risks that we can foresee, but enjoy the moment, and the people we are with.

We have a whole fresh start on the year. I am going to make 2025 a memorable one, and hope you do as well.

Django

STORM CLOUDS

POSTED: DEC 1, 2024

The U.S. election happened. The worst thing occurred and yet the sun came up the next day. The election of Trump was so clearly a win for so many who want the world to go back to an awful place, where we pollute at will, don’t let women make their own choices in reproductive health, exploit the lower and middle class to benefit the wealthy, and only help those who are being oppressed if there is something in it for us. Its hard not to talk about it.

But I am going to try to not talk about it much. Trump is a monster – that’s clear. But he was elected by the majority of those who voted. To some extent that tells us that the American electorate is very self interested. Seeing the exit polls, in many cases, for many it also came down to people being upset with inflation and the cost of living and the only thing they can do is to vote against the person in power.

Yes, there were other factors: the terrible management of Israel’s bombing of their neighbours with seemingly no guardrails, and worse, America as a co-conspirator; a decision to run (at the 11^th hour) a replacement candidate who was not the best the Democratic Party had to offer and without the usual soul searching and clearing of the air, that occurs with a leadership convention; and an electorate tired of inflation, uncertainty and not getting ahead. This is the case around the world of course and has little to do with the Biden Administration. Every responsible country tried to bail out the individuals, businesses and institutions that needed it during the pandemic and that money was printed by each government and today, we have inflation as a result. We all want the goodies but we don’t want to pay the price. The classic question the party not in power loves to ask in times like these is “are you better off now than before the existing leader took office?” Well of course not. It will take decades to work our way out of the debt/inflation we created to solve that short term crisis. So, if you are in power at the time of rapid growth, job creation and stability, you will probably get re-elected whether you had anything to do with those things or not and if you were in power when the economy needed bailing out, your term will be short.

But the nature of democracy is that everyone gets to vote. They don’t have to justify their decision, or even show up to vote to be part of the society affected by the decisions. Over a third of the eligible voters did not bother coming out to vote for what was clearly an important time in history. Less than a third of eligible voters chose Trump and even few than voted for Kamala Harris. For a country that presents itself as the beacon of democracy, that beacon is pretty dim.

It may seem that I am able to put this in perspective. I am not. The world is a mess, and it is now about to spiral downward with an irresponsible person in the Kremlin, and an irresponsible and less predictable person in the White House, a war criminal running Israel, China just waiting to choose its timing, and most other governments scrambling to satisfy their unhappy citizens. In my own country of Canada there is a strong movement to the right and no shortage of bad decisions occurring. It will get worse of course with Canadas largest (by far) trading partner now run by a bad real estate developer.

I am part of the generation that was going to fix things. Over the decades even though progress has been slow on human rights, minority representation and only limited progress on the environment, the sawtooth has had a slightly positive slope until the pandemic and we now appear to be sliding backward.

I watched a bird recently trying to make its way in terrible weather. It tried without success to fly strait to where it wanted to go and kept getting pushed back. I was sure it would lose its strength but then it attacked the wind on the diagonal and used the winds power to gain altitude and then gravity to gain forward movement. In sailing terms the bird was tacking but able to do it not in a two dimensional world like us on the sea, but in the three dimensions of the sky.

So, what are we to do about this world we are now in? I don’t really know other than as individuals making good personal decisions every day. In my case I will hug the people I love, treat all respectful people with respect, and continue to support the causes that matter in the communities I can influence. And try to apply tacking where I can.

Django

A single bird tries to weather the storm

IN THE MOMENT

POSTED: NOVEMBER 1, 2024

The combination I have of loving to cook and not having much extra cash means I am rarely out to dinner at a restaurant. But a couple weeks ago I decided to splurge and take Captain Ciera out for a nice dinner at a place here in Malta that is one of the best in town. It has some traditional meals of the region but is more focused on current food trends but of course works with lots of the local fish as well. Its much more upscale than I would frequent even if I had the income, and its market is more celebration than consumption. So, among the various locals who were there celebrating anniversaries or other life milestones, and business people out with clients, there were a few (very few) tourists.

We were seated very close to a tourist couple who were obviously American. Now many who come to Malta are not really tourists in the traditional sense. Many people come for a month or a season and really become entrenched in the place. Some come year after year as an alternative to their climate in northern Europe or elsewhere. This couple looked like that type who were not just off a cruise ship or here for a week, but were very comfortable with the community. What made them look American was exclusively his wardrobe and demeanor. She was very nicely dressed, and had prepped for the night out. He was in shorts, running shoes and a T shirt and after a few minutes took off his baseball cap. He also was very relaxed about everything and whenever he wanted something would not wait for his server to come by but just snatch the attention of any staff member close by.

The lesson of not judging a book by its cover it seems I need to learn over and over. While he was inappropriately dressed and his behaviour was not up to the standards of most restaurants let alone a premium one, once we chatted with them that book cover lesson came back into the picture. He had asked about the Seabass dish on my plate and we got to talking.

It turns out that their home was Tampa Florida. Now this was October 8^th and the news was all about the pending impact of Hurricane Milton that was expected to make landfall the next day as a Category 3 hurricane, or potentially a Category 4 and the forecast was a direct hit on Tampa. I guess the look on my face gave away the fear in my mind for the loss they would incur, and at about the same time Captain Ciera expressed that they seemed very calm about what was to come. And that is when they shared with us their story.

She had been a teacher for most of her working life and he was in investments. When she retired she became a personal trainer. But the real story was that over the years she had been diagnosed with cancer four times and beat it each time. With each iteration however they learned to live more in the moment and after this last battle decided to take a big trip to Europe for several months and do some of the things they had always wanted to do. One was to walk the Camino Portugues section of the Camino de Santiago. This section of that walking trail is 268 km (167 miles) long and starts in Porto, Portugal and goes north along the coast into Spain. It was clear that they were both in their late seventies or early eighties, and part of the fun of this trip was about sixteen days of arduous walking! Yes, some great views along the way but it is getting that eighty-year-old body out there every day for many hours on your feat on what is not always a flat, or a regular surface and regardless of the hot sun or the rain.

This was only one of the things they were taking on when in Europe. Another one that surprised me was skinny dipping in the Blue Grotto in Malta. The trip was for many months and involved living in Portugal for a month, and about a month in each of Malta, Italy, France, Croatia and the U.K. At the end they had a transatlantic cruise booked to take them back to Florida.

They explained that if you have stared down death a few times, the loss of a building, even your home, while upsetting is not the worst thing that can happen. They had learned to focus on the activity they were doing right now – hiking, seeing, dining …..whatever the activity was, might be the last thing you do, so you should savour it. And with that they focused on their dinner, as the here and now is what really matters, instead of watching the news and getting wound up about losing their home.

This chance encounter really shook me up and left me somewhat inspired. I have bumped into some obstacles in my time, largely of my own making, but have never really been challenged on an existential level. This couple, who one might think would be burdened by the aging process, or the risk to their home, where so many memories had been made and kids had been raised, were just enjoying a wonderful meal on a vacation they had designed to do many of the things they thought would be wonderful life experiences.

When the next day I watched the coverage of Hurricane Milton making landfall on the Gulf Coast of Florida, and seeing the way so many lives would be changed forever, I knew two people who would not only survive the storm, but grow from the experience of coming out the other side of that challenge. I am seventy years old and continue to learn that lesson of using all your life experiences to help you put things in perspective and to cope, and part of that is to enjoy the activity you are doing at the time.

Django

RIPLEY

POSTED: October 1, 202

My last post took us all down the nasty dark gutter of current American politics. Well now I need to crawl back up to the light. At least somewhat up to the light as I recently watched a Netflix series Ripley. For those who have seen it, well you won’t learn anything new from me. I am not a film critic or even a very astute film afficionado, but damb it has been a long time since I have seen a film of this quality.

It is a remake… and not. The story was written back in the nineteen fifties by Patricia Highsmith and was made into a film in 1960. She was already well known for her book Strangers On A Train that Hitchcock did such a great job on.

About forty years later, The Talented Mr. Ripley reappeared as a film and introduced another generation to this story and author. In both of these films the settings in Italy deserved character credits. That later film I enjoyed when it came out in 1999. It was disturbing and dark when so many films were becoming more formulaic and fluffy.

But this interpretation is its own version. Steven Zaillian wrote and directed it and by the looks of the final version was allowed to realize a cohesive product that appears to have minimal damage to his creative vision. Andrew Scott as Tom Ripley is in virtually every scene and from the start has us under his creepy spell. It has gone back to a black and white format but instead of doing it just for a measure of the time period, the greyscale depth and lighting has been used to create a different dimension. Think of the difference between looking at a low pixel digital image in comparison with an Ansel Adams silver print.

And like those Ansel Adams prints, every shot has been crafted as a setting, a scene, an image in its own right, not just a background for the characters to interact in, or in front of. As a start it works with some very nice settings in Rome, Atrani and Venice. The lighting is as big a character as any in this film. And part of that cinematography involves hanging on an image as if to say “hey, this is important, can you see the missing clues?”

Within this film noir, the makers also have had fun with homage – there are scenes reminiscent of the absurd Fellini scenes from Amarcord, and many Hitchcock moments. John Malkovich appears in a small role and had been in a 2002 film featuring this character, Ripleys Game.

The film is also quite an allegory for our times today. A shallow and immoral but very sly imposter taking over the identity of a person, and half of the characters in the film see him for the monster he is, and everyone else buying into the ever changing narrative he spins.

If you have not seen this film, it is a miniseries on Netflix well worth your time.

Django

REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION, DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION, and THE OLYMPICS

POSTED: September 1, 2024

Regular readers of my posts will know that sometimes I like to dive into topics like recipes, or little experiences with nature or some small epiphanies I have had regarding insignificant things. For those of you who like a diet of these light sweet morsels this post is not that. I have prepared for you the equivalent of a large beer mug full of battery acid.

Yes, today we are back to talking politics.

Like a lot of people, I watched some of the coverage of the Republican National Convention. I was not alive in January 1933 but imagine it was much the same as being in Germany at that time. Backroom deals, deceit, backstabbing and a lot of “othering”. Well by most accounts the takeover by Hitler of that party was not nearly as nasty as what has happened to the Republican party since Trump came on the scene. The absence at this convention of most of those seasoned Republican politicians both past and present, including George W. Bush was telling. I have never been a supporter of the ideas of this party, but in the past, their right of centre philosophies stayed within the bounds of the law, conventions of polite behaviour and some sense of morality. The turnover of power from George W. Bush to Barak Obama has been well documented as very respectful and helpful by the incoming President. Contrast that to the activities of January 6^th 2021, when the Trump supporters stormed the Capitol.

The RNC convention was difficult to fathom. One lie would pile on top of another and I was wondering if one of them would start to argue that gravity was a conspiracy created to keep Trump from soaring to the heavens. It would have been hilarious to watch if this was not a person who really might win office again.

So yes, for most of us these are the bad guys and the only ones in that party who are not bad are too weak to do anything.

There is a little lag for me in watching these conventions as I am not in the same time zone, but beyond that I just cant take more than about an hour a day of this stuff so I tape them and watch little segments as I can, usually in the evening or if its raining. So the gap in when I finished watching the RNC and the start up of the DNC was not very long. It was also because I had taped a lot of the coverage of the Olympics and would watch segments of it to clear my head of all the politics to watch these incredible athletes do their stuff.

The truth is I actually binged on the Olympics between watching these two political events. Most Olympic events are only subject to accurate timing, not subjective elements. And most are not dealing with complex topics. There may be a lot of complex elements that go into training and execution, but the outcome is measurable. In most cases the competitors are not really even competing with others but with their own ability to complete the task faster, or otherwise better as most of these events (at least the traditional track and field events) are non contact. I love the idea of the Olympics in bringing the world together. As an institution it has many problems, but has stood up fairly well in comparison with other organizations that have attempted to bring the world together to find some common interest to build relationships on.

So after my Olympic binging and a bit of a breather I moved on to the Democratic National Convention.

Now Joe Biden claims that he really had no intention of stepping down until the point when he did. I don’t think so. This lad has been a politician all his life. He as found ways to find consensus when it wasn’t on the table and to get many skeptics to come to his way of thinking long before Donald Trump was on the scene. And I say that with respect. A big part of the job of any leader is to find some consensus to move forward with plans, and in politics that often involves consensus where many parties are on the record of being in another camp on the topic.

My take is that this shrewd, seasoned old politician knew his time was up but waited until the Republicans had used up all their air time to swing the Democratic Party into full gear. And man have they done that. Watching the Democratic National Convention was such an amazingly orchestrated, flawless production of hype and hope I was practically standing at attention and singing the Star-Spangled Banner myself.

Well not quite. While moved by the personal stories, told by some great orators, many of the usual things that have hurt the American society kept being chanted. The notion of locking up the bad guys, praising not just veterans but the notion that being the biggest, best equipped miliary in the worlds history will create true happiness on the streets of some burned out town in Ohio, is what I expect of that other party, not the Democrats. Any talk of even a hint of Bernie Sanders social justice, equalization, and tax reform was gone.

And that’s to put a polite spin on it. Only after days of these rousing speeches was there any reference to this parties disastrous handling of Israel’s attempt to eliminate Gaza. Yes, Israel is an ally of the United States and of most democracies. And yes, Hamas initiated this war and took hostages and killed many innocent Israelis. But the behaviour of Israel over the decades with respect to “settling” the west bank, and the economic squeezing they have done to Gaza needs to be remembered. A wife who has been subject to continuous acts of abuse at the hands of her husband who finally rises up and puts some kitchen scissors in his gut will never be convicted by a jury of her peers. This terrible act by Hamas needed a response, but that response also needed to be a reset of the relationship, not the annihilation of the Palestinian people.

But what is an ally to do? If I am at a party with a good friend who has had too much to drink, I would give him or her a hug, tell them I love them and that for their own safety and the safety of others I am taking away their car keys. Someone needs to be the adult in the room. Netanyahu was on the run from justice when this whole mess began. He has nothing to lose in blowing up the conflict to take the focus off his personal legal problems. So in that analogy of the intoxicated friend what the Biden administration did was not to take away the keys but instead they loaded up the car with more bottles and headed out to do some driving and when the booze would run out they would just buy more along the way. History will not be kind to this support.

When I was younger there were times, I actually thought the roll of a massive U.S. military was to be the world police. Well, if that’s the case Mr. Biden and his bunch have had their knee on the neck of Gaza and need to be stopped.

Kamala Harris has a great smile. I love that smile. I love her laugh. And I love her personal story. On many policy fronts she may bring some freshness to the challenges of running so huge a federation with such diverging challenges. But she can’t just take off the coat she was wearing when she was part of that group cheering on the drunk driver. Sorry Kamala, the other guys are nasty but you come with this baggage.

Fortunately, there are some inspiring and encouraging things I have taped to get this nasty political taste out of my mouth. The Paralympics are beginning.

Django