Posted in Life and culture, People, Politics, Reflections on Sep 11th, 2007 3 Comments »
“The New Yorker”, for me during my first several decades on earth the finest publication in the entire world and in recent years once again for me at least one of the finest, has now weighed in with its customary sylish grace, expertise, and authority on the continuing brouhaha about Sen. Craig’s apparently endless [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Events, Life and culture, Music, People, Politics, Reflections on Aug 31st, 2007 Comments Off
Immediately after Japan’s “sneak” (ha!) attack against Pearl Harbor, Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt damned December 7th, 1941 as “a day that will live in infamy”. I submit that his eloquent terminology also applies, for all time, to that entire abominable era in American history when the country’s administration totally forgot F.D.R.’s earlier assurance that “We [...]
Posted in Events, Memory Lane, People, Politics, Reflections on Jul 3rd, 2007 2 Comments »
The facts, folks – just the facts, as summarized by The New York Times: I. Lewis Libby Jr., the former chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, was convicted March 6, 2007, of lying to F.B.I. agents and grand jurors investigating the unmasking of a C.I.A. operative amid a burning dispute over the [...]
Posted in Memory Lane, Politics, Reflections on Jul 1st, 2007 Comments Off
Missouri-born Lucien Agniel, the first American I had the rare good fortune to meet when I arrived in Germany in 1951, worked for the United States Foreign Service in the Munich Press Office of the U.S. Land Commissioner’s office; six years after the end of World War II, Munich still had no Consulate proper in [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Reflections on Jun 27th, 2007 1 Comment »
By sheer coincidence, our classy tri-national German-language satellite television network called 3sat has just knocked me for a considerable loop with factual reports of recent alleged artistic phenomena that move me to write this bulletin. What little exposure I’ve ever accidentally had to the deliberately morbid rock freak called Marilyn Manson sufficed to turn me [...]
Posted in Life and culture, Politics, Reflections on Jun 23rd, 2007 Comments Off
A nice Jewish boy in exotic Albuquerque, who recognizes a passionate practitioner of the true Christian ethic on the rare occasions one rises up to slap him right smack in the kisser, has just kindly brought to my outraged goyische attention an alarming example of white-supremacist racist discrimination, in this case against those original Australians who [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Life and culture, Reflections on Jun 22nd, 2007 3 Comments »
Blog, blogosphere, blook, cookie, facebook, folksonomy, godcast, me-media, netiquette – do those philological horrors have the same emetic effect on you that they do on me? According to a poll just published, they rank high on the list of repulsive Computer Age neologisms as ascertained by the linguistically fastidious (and presumably British) Lulu Blooker Prize, a literary [...]
Posted in Events, Memory Lane, Music, People, Reflections on Jun 20th, 2007 Comments Off
Something that happened in – and over – the small German city of Braunschweig (pop. 260,000) last week has plunged me into some long, long thoughts about this musical phenomenon, who since shortly after World War II has held rank at the very top echelon of the hard-core, most uncompromising musical avant-garde. You might, as [...]
Posted in Letter from Berlin, Memories, Politics, Reflections on Jun 19th, 2007 Comments Off
Two things during the past 24 hours have taken me on a backward stroll down my own personal German political Memory Lane. Last night a hard-hitting television documentary (from our classy tri-national German-language satellite network 3sat) took an exceptionally sharp look at the neuralgic issue of old Nazis in positions of power after the postwar establishment of [...]
Posted in Commonplace Book, Letter from Berlin, Life and culture, Memories, People, Reflections on Jun 15th, 2007 Comments Off
During my San Francisco years (1982-95), “Time” once began its report on an election there with this sentence: “San Francisco is a tree-house for adult delinquents.” I believe that story reported the November 1982 election that listed one candidate for the city’s Board of Supervisors as Sister Boom-Boom, with the explanatory addendum one line lower [...]
Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner
Life, people, and Kultur
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