Lapsed Modernist

yesterday on the old rickety bus, stuffed with humans, I watched a little boy, maybe two and a half or three, he was holding a perfectly round, translucent yellow fried plantain chip up to the window, where it glowed, like his own personal sun.

we drove through clouds and down into the valley at the other end. there is scalding hot water in one of the hot springs here, to soothe my body, unused to 5 hours on a motorcycle, on unpaved mountain roads.

On the hopeful side:


Reovirus, which lives in human respiratory and gastrointestinal tracts without causing any symptoms, can help magnify the effects of radiotherapy in treating even the most advanced cancers, laboratory tests have shown.

Tumours shrank or stopped growing in every patient who underwent radiotherapy coupled with a new drug, Reolysin, which contains particles of reovirus.

One patient had a large tumour mass in a salivary gland which was reduced in size enough to be surgically removed after undergoing the treatment. Another who was close to death with a serious form of spreading skin cancer was still alive 17 months later.

For those for whom it might be relevant--a link to clinical trials currently going on in US, UK, and Canada

On the horrible side, these people will probably need this soon:


More and more stories about sick fishermen are beginning to surface after the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The fishermen are working out in the Gulf -- many of them all day, every day -- to clean up the spill. They said they blame their ailments on the chemicals that BP is using.

One fisherman said he felt like he was going to die over the weekend.

"I've been coughing up stuff," Gary Burris said. "Your lungs fill up."

Burris, a longtime fisherman who has worked across the Gulf Coast, said he woke up Sunday night feeling drugged and disoriented.

"It was like sniffing gasoline or something, and my ears are still popping," Burris said. "I'm coughing up stuff. I feel real weak, tingling feelings."( the rest under the cut )

I just made veggie sushi and California rolls. I didn't watch Gossip Girl earlier because I fell asleep, but I am gonna watch it now.

A very different sort of food:

Pour Quaker oats out of a box into a small pot, pour in enough milk so that it covers the oats, and the oats are basically swimming in it, bring the milk to a boil while stirring continuously, keep stirring until creamy consistency is reached. Put it in a bowl, and add ripe banana--estimate about half a banana per person. Mash the banana with a fork and stir it into the oatmeal. Add a spoon of butter, stir it in as it melts. Add yellow raisins and either almond slivers or walnut crumbs.

It is very yummy, if I say so myself.

Fionn (pointing at a picture of a train): is that a train?
me: yes. Are you a train?
Fionn: noooo, I am a balloon. [stretches his arms out to the sides and lifts his hands up] Also I am an umbrella.

I have this giant Lonely Planet "One World" book of photos, which I got as a thank-you gift for doing a lecture on the Millenium Development Goals for this student organization back in the fall, which is basically a large collection of National Geographic type of photos. Fionn is super into it lately, and likes to sit with me and ask "what's that?" or "where's that?" for each picture, and I read the captions and explain them to him. There are a number of images from Morocco in the book. Every time we see a Morocco photograph, Fionn asks "where's Mr. Black Bear?" Mr. Black Bear, Fionn's first teddy bear (predating Mishka), was accidentally left behind in Marrakesh during our trip last summer.

Having said that, I think it's pretty nifty that Mr. Black Bear is leading an ongoing pleasant life in Morocco, as per Fionn. Fionn periodically talks about Mr. Black Bear going to the beach and swimming in the ocean. Of course, there is no ocean in Marrakesh, but that's minor details.

me: Fionn, are you my little star?
Fionn: I am a little star and a little moooooon.

I reproduce here the email I sent theophile from Domodedovo airport, describing (?) the wonderful play I had just seen on my last night in Moscow, called "River":



The trip has been a trip...I saw a wonderful play last night that involved:

two policemen, one of whom accidentally almost kills the other one while drunk
then the almost killed policeman is rescued by a kind-hearted man on a float on a river
and the other policeman dons a fake beard and runs away to the woods
and this is all witnessed by a harmonica player
in fact they all play the harmonica, all four of them at once, while the harmonica player is supposed to be on a romantic date with his blonde girlfriend, and she cries because it is all so Russian-ungay
but also the wounded policeman starts understanding the language of nature
and there is another sub plot about a woman who cheats on her boyfriend, a poet, and he throws his cell phone into a river to not talk to her, and the kind man on the float finds it and he and the woman talk on the phone a lot, he consoles her
meanwhile the poet's hat flies away, because it wants to be free, and the Northern wind is in love with it; it befriends three moths and they fly around together and have adventures, carried by the lovesick Northern wind
finally there is a Detective, who was taking evidence about the almost-murder of the policeman
and he has a cat, who turns out to be a talking cat, and who leaves him, because he doesn't tell it he loves it enough and is either asleep or drunk at home...it is all very gender-metaphor
and at the end, as if in Aristotle's grand unifying play space, they all come together, and it ends with the hat and the Northern wind waltzing together

isn't that lovely?

on the interwebs I found some stills from the play:

these are the moths and the hat ("the freest hat in the world"):


this is the romantic date about to be derailed by the harmonica quartet


and this is the cat leaving the Detective (although on the night I saw it the actor was a different one)


more more more about Moscow to come, some under the lock, some in a public post.

As an exception I went to freerepublic.com this morning, for the purposes of [see subject], and goshdarnit, half of America is a nasty, nasty, ugly country full of illogical morons. I know, this is not a revelation or anything, but what makes me seizure every time is utter willful disregard of any and all facts in favor of batshit-insane logic. And I don't even mean, like, the grant batshit-insane logic of the War on Drugs or something--I mean, just this total delusion about, well, everything:

( just for fun, screencaps! )

There was someone on my lj list--I feel like it was either pdanielson or hoyvenmaven posted something brilliant some months ago about what really defines American character is (sorry if this is badly paraphrased here): an American is totally willing to be homeless live in his car under a bridge shooting pigeons with arrows and grilling them on the car battery, as long as his neighbor under that bridge, a black, Mexican, or gay person, has no car, and no pigeon to cook in the car oil. Can someone link me to the original phrasing of that plz?

PS: do you think the Abundy handle is for "Al Bundy"?

For the second year in a row, for Carnival week I did as the Romans do, which, in this city, means decamping for the duration of the debauchery. Last year I went to Venice for a carnival that was more up my aesthetic alley. I like pretty masks and not so much lots of jester-type costumes in the cold/rain with cheap beer everywhere. Those types of carnivals are for warm weather, not final-stretch-of-winter Holland. This year I turned to Eurostar instead of Ryanair and, with Fionn in tow, went to London to visit my friend Wench:

Her daughter, the lovely Maddy, was turning 3 on Valentine's Day.

Fionn and I were invited as international guests to the birthday party, and, of course, just to hang out in London for four days, simply dreamy. So Fionn made a friend (more than one--he kept calling all the adult in the house "big friends" and in the morning would wake up and say "want to go downstairs and see if big friends are awake"), attended his first birthday party, delighted in practicing saying (en route) "happy birthday Maddy!" and giving her a present (a kaleidoscope), threw stones into the Thames not far from the boat launch place near the Putney Bridge, and, impromptu, attended a soccer class.














( and much more black-and-white London under the cut )

Bonus: Fionn with his new Paddington Bear toy and book:

In my ignorance I never realized that Paddington came from "the darkest Peru." We are just going with "Peru" to dial down on the colonial turns of phrase.