Rainbows and things

 One of my favorite pieces of music of all time is Judy Garland's rendition of Over the Rainbow in the opening scenes of The Wizard of Oz. Come to think of it, The Wizard of Oz is probably my favorite movie of all time.

"Birds fly over the rainbow; why, oh why, can't I?" Nobody ever put hopes and dreams and longing into music better, and whether we're dreaming of a better world, relief from pain, or just hoping that tomorrow will be better than today, there is something powerful about tying that longing to a rainbow.  It's not an accident that the LGBT movement has taken on the rainbow as its iconic symbol. Because it embraces diversity - we just want to stop being excluded - and because, more simply, because its beauty is uplifting.

I've been on a serious Chopin kick for the past couple of years, as well as going all out as a follower of that young piano genius from Korea, Lim Yunchan. I've followed a couple dozen pianists' careers, but nothing has blown me out of the water like Yunchan's superhuman talent has.

If you've missed the link I'm trying to make, here it is: One of Chopin's most notable pieces is his Fantasie Impromptu in C-sharp Minor (Opus 66).  All sorts of famous pianists have made memorable recordings of it: Artur Rubenstein, Daniil Trifonov, Sviatoslav Richter, and Evgeny Kissin, to name just a few.

There is a melody in the Fantasy that became a popular song called I'm Always Chasing Rainbows.  Judy Garland picked it up in 1940, the year I was born, and now had two memorable songs to her credit about rainbows.  

Two different genres, both inspiring.

Here's a version of it by a guy who picks the Chopin version apart and explains why it's such a difficult piece to learn.  I sat through it this morning and appreciated the close look at the piece.

I then went to a version by Yunchan.

Performed when he was nine years old.

So there.

Long live the king

I'm sure there are some Americans who don't like the British Royal Family, and far more who couldn't care less one way or the other, but most Americans I know are pretty gaga over this undemocratic institution. Queen Elizabeth's popularity took a brief dip when she fumbled that flag-lowering decision when Princess Diana was killed, but it's back up now to where it was most of the time: she was viewed favorably by more than eight in ten Americans. And her son's visit to the U.S. recently shows that a surprising amount of that affection has been passed on to him.

I could be wrong about this, obviously.  I'm not coming from a neutral place. I grew up partly in Nova Scotia and slept in a bedroom with Queen Victoria's portrait hanging on the wall.  And even in Connecticut, when Elizabeth married Philip, our school shut down classes, and we all went to the auditorium where a TV set was placed on the stage for us to watch the wedding live. And I don't remember anybody finding that out of order because she was not our queen.

The next thing about the Windsors I remember was when Prince Charles was born.  His birth was the feature story in our Weekly Reader when I was in the fourth grade, and that event too was taken as a matter of course.

It was only many years later, after I had developed a socialist consciousness, that I began making snarky remarks about the royals. I took it a step further, not so much making fun of their elite status as feeling sorry that they had no say in how their birth had sealed their fate and made them give up any hope of having a private life or eating a normal meal in a restaurant.  I still hold that view, even more firmly now that I have lived so many years in Japan and got to watch the women of the imperial family have nervous breakdowns.  There is something inherently wrong about giving somebody status and wealth they didn't ask for just so you could have a bunch of living dolls to play with.

I just listened to Prince Charles deliver a speech before the German Bundestag.  And before that, last week, I listened to him address the U.S. Congress.  Brilliant address!  Just brilliant.  And I thrilled at his reminder of the importance of NATO and of helping Ukraine get out from under the Russian invasion; I loved watching Trump sitting behind him applauding away and pretending Charles was not making a fool of him.

There is something we could do right away to lessen the chances of a repeat of this ugly Trump phenomenon.  We could separate the role of head-of-state from head-of-government, the way most modern nations do it. Much as I want to feel sorry for King Charles and other members of the British royal family, I understand that they provide a place for Brits to locate their love of country.  Whether you do this by establishing a constitutional monarchy, as in Holland or Norway or Britain and give up expecting politicians to behave in their personal lives, or do something similar to what Germany does by having a president and a prime minister, both elected, the country's name gets to keep its dignity unsullied and out of politics entirely - more or less.

Maybe it's not Charles that's bringing all this credit and prestige to the British crown these days; maybe it's his speech writer.  He still deserves the credit, in my book, for knowing how to pick his speech writers.  And admit it: once upon a time he came across like a goofball, but these days he's showing a lot of class.

They don't all have it - class.  Prince Andrew (correction: ex-Prince Andrew) blew it by playing around with Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.  But most of them do.

Before you need to show some class, you can be adorable - Check out Prince Louis, William and Kate's youngest, and grandson of Charles (now there's some serious future shock!). Makes even the most dyed-in-the-wool advocate of abolishing the monarchy think twice.

Charles the First lost his head; Charles the Second might have done likewise if he had had more success bringing governance of the English church back to the Bishop of Rome, and if he had not had the great misfortune of being king during the Plague (1665) and the Great Fire (1666).  But Charles III - at least so far - seems to have turned all that bad luck around.

God save the King, I say.

Flossing the nose and ears

A sure sign that the American Empire is on the way out is the rise of China's political and economic power.  We are losing the convenience of having the United States run the world. The dollar ain't what she used to be.  And President Asshole has taken the country to war and now we are having trouble filling our gas tanks.  But what is bugging me the most at the present time is the evidence that China has caught up with Japan's ("please use the toilet finely") way of using English without worrying about accuracy or style.

Case in point:  I have been planning for about forty years to buy an electric toothbrush.  At  my last trip to the dentist to have my teeth cleaned they found and filled a cavity.  A cavity!  I'm 86 years old!  How the hell can I have cavities?  I brush and floss after every meal and twice before bedtime!

Anyway, now that I'm accustomed to spending money like it's going out of style after the thousands of dollars Taku and I have spent recovering from my broken hip, I went online and googled "Water-Pik" and went straight to the most expensive model. Why not?  It's only seventy dollars.

The package finally comes.  Direct from 301, No. 2, Hualangjia Industrial Park, No. 28 Tongfuyu Area, Kukeng Community, Guanlang Street, Longhua District, Shenzhen Yuxinyuan Electronic Technology Co., Ltd.

It comes in a box labeled "Tragebare Munddusche", which is (not quite correct) German for "Portable Mouth Douche" (or "shower," which is less funny, but equally mysterious for something that sprays water inside your mouth) - and the first e (after the g) in tragbar isn't supposed to be there.  The side of the box indicates that the product is for a "mündliche Situation" (an oral situation) (sic).

There is mention of a warranty, but no warranty form was included with the product.  Sloppy, sloppy.

Also nowhere does it tell you how to charge the damn thing.  But that's not their fault.  They included a USB port and according to my younger-generation husband, "USB plugs have pretty much replaced regular plugs these days - plug it into your computer."  Done.  Now to wait six hours for the damn thing to charge.

Meanwhile I'm reading the user manual in English, German, French, Spanish and Italian. Interesting stuff.  For example, in Italian, Warning #6 reads "Non dirigere il getto sotto la lingua, nelle orecchie, nel naso o altre parti sensibili."  In English, that is "Do not inject water into the bottom of tongues, ears, noses, or other sensitive body parts."

Now I'll freely admit I ought to be ashamed of myself poking fun at non-English-speaking people's use of my native tongue, especially after decades of encouraging English-learners to eschew any inclination to apologize for non-native things that come out of their mouth while they are still learners.  Errors go with learning. But it's not just the lack of English "Sprachgefühl" (feeling for the language) that's giving me the giggles; it's the thought that they think people need to be told not to stick this water-pik into their ears.

Theme park in Shenzhen, China

It's not as if Shenzhen couldn't find native speakers of English when they need them.  It's the third largest city in China, after Beijing and Shanghai, with a population of thirteen million people, and it's not far from Hong Kong. It's that the mouth douche manufacturer has taken the attitude that the boss's nephew needed a job so they left the English translation of the manual to him.  Makes me think of my friend Norm's saying, "close enough for government work!"

A very trivial issue, this.  But I couldn't get past the water-pik in the ears image and just had to comment.

The red light has turned green.  Time to water-floss the teefs and see how well this thing works.  In addition to steering clear of the nose and ears, I'm starting on "child" setting.  Not sure how much pressure my gums can take.

Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda

Tomorrow is my Tante Frieda's birthday. Try as I may, I cannot locate her actual birth year, so I can only guess it must be somewhere in the vicinity of my grandmother's birth year, which was 1895.  That would put her at 129 today. Nice old age for someone who is still very much alive in your memory.

I've blogged before - probably several times; I tend to repeat myself a lot these days - about my time in Berlin and my connection with one of my favorite people of all time, my Aunt Frieda - so I won't go into detail here, except to repeat that some of my favorite family members are chosen, not birth family. My "great aunt" Frieda Müller, was the Lebensgefährte (life companion) of my mother's mother's second husband (i.e., not my mother's father)'s brother. Guess you can't get more non-biological than that.

For friends and family who want to read more, check out my blog entry from November 13, 1999, entitled "We Don't Care About the Berlin Wall Very Much." It's a reaction to the lack of interest my Japanese students were showing in the Second World War and the Cold War that followed it that made me kind of grouchy. I understand that it's a universal human truth that adults are going to wail over their kids' lack of shared interest in the things they think are important, but I also feel that some parts of history should be kept alive if, for no other reason, so that we can learn from mistakes and not repeat them.

There was an article in this week's Sunday New York Times about Cambodian efforts to teach their kids about the Pol Pot regime. I'm also acutely aware that the last of the Holocaust Survivors are now almost all gone and despite heroic efforts to keep those memories alive, they will eventually go too.

Each of us fights this battle on a personal level as we age. I'm now 84 and am aware that I'm the last German-speaking member of my mother's side of the family. Many of them never knew the grandparents I grew up with and practically none of them feel any connection with Germany. That saddens me, because that is still a living breathing part of my identity.

So for the next few days I'm going to be toasting my beloved Tante Frieda and talking my husband's ear off, ignoring his rolling eyes as I repeat something I've bored him with half a dozen times before. As long as I'm alive, she will be alive.

The photo above is one of several I managed to pull from her collection. It now hangs on the wall on a staircase and I see it every day (when I take time to notice it). I believe it was taken in about 1910 when she was about 15, give or take - I could be off by several years. In a world in which Germans are famous for their precision (think cameras, cars and trains running on time - in the old days, I mean, that's gone now too) I'm a lousy representative of the tribe.

In any case, Herzlichen Glückwunsch zum Geburtstag - Happy Birthday, Tante Frieda. Du bleibst unvergessen - you are not forgotten.

Zs and Apostrophes

I doubt anybody gave much thought to the fact that when Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race that linguists and English teachers were about to be called on to explain a couple mysteries of the English language as she is written. Let me try to get ahead of the game.

Vice-presidential candidate-to-be is Tim Walz, from Minnesota.  By some counts, nearly a third of Minnesotans have German ancestry, so it's not surprising the state's current governor should have a German family name.  It is apparently the most common ancestry in the state and according to the World Population Review website, more than ten percent of Minnesotans over the age of five actually speak German at home, which I find really hard to believe in this day and age. But moving on...

Everybody knows what a waltz is - it's a dance where you go one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two three and people immediately think of Johann Strauss and the (beautiful) Blue Danube. So even though Tim Walz leaves the t out of his name, most people will want to pronounce it like the dance. But don't. His name got Americanized at some point and it is now pronounced walls, as in a room has a ceiling, a floor and four walls.

It's not that we can't say waltz. We may not have a letter for the sound of t and s (or t and z) put together like Hebrew does with the 18th letter of its alphabet צ, which the website "Hebrew for Christians" is happy to inform you is pronounced "like ts in nuts." Or the 21st letter of the Cyrillic alphabet ц, which does likewise.  Japanese also has っ, but enough of this tangent.   My point is Walz uses the English spelling pronunciation of z as in zebra and not the ts sound of the tse-tse fly.

And, for my fellow Germanophiles (für meine deutschbegeisterten Kollegen), let me acknowledge in passing that the German word for Waltz is not Waltz, but Walzer.  The Beautiful Blue Danube Waltz is simply Der Donauwalzer. And note that the addition of a t wouldn't change the pronunciation. It's not there in German probably because it would be redundant. I have no idea why one got added in the English word waltz (assuming, perhaps mistakenly, that the German word came first), but because it was, we can now draw a distinction between waltz and Tim Walz that can't be made in German.

OK.  Now for the second issue, where to put the apostrophe.

Historically, the apostrophe in English was used either to show a place in a word where a letter has been omitted, as in contractions such as don't for do not and couldn't for could not, or to mark the so-called "Saxon genitive," more commonly known as the possessive case of nouns as in Mary's lamb as opposed to the phrase the lamb of Mary, which is suggestive of a higher register such as biblical language. (Ever wonder why we say the Lamb of God and not God's Lamb?)  There are two more usages of the single apostrophe, to mark a quotation within a quotation, or as an alternate to double quotation marks around a single word, but that's not relevant to the discussion here.

Where the plot thickens is where spoken English and written English part ways. The apostrophe-s flows freely in both written and spoken English in the sentence: "Mary had a little lamb, and oh look there's Mary's lamb right there!"

But what happens when the possessive comes on a word ending in an s or z or sh or ch (a "sibilant") sound? Mary has a little lamb and so does James. I see Mary's lamb but I don't see James's.

In this case, there is no problem. We have a name for this. It's called the epenthic schwa. A schwa is the sound we make when we're looking for a word and can't quite come up with it, a sound commonly written as "uh".  "I'd like to, uh, maybe, uh, kind of, uh, get your permission to spend the night with your daughter." James's lamb is pronounced "James-zus lamb," 

Lost in the sands of time is the explanation for why we have an alternative in which we are all left to wonder how the wee little apostrophe got to not only play its stand-in role as an epenthic schwa but actually create another s-sound on the word as well: We can write this without the second s: James' lamb.

Here's where people go running to dictionaries and books on style, hoping to find an authority to tell them how to do this properly.

I'm not going to do that because my linguistics training has made me a descriptive linguist, and not a prescriptivist. I consider telling people what to do is not science; describing what people do is.

Problem is I'm also trained as an English teacher (i.e., as a "prescriptivist") and am a bit of a fussy queen to boot. I cringe whenever I see people confuse it's with its. All my linguistic training is for naught when I see a student composition with a sentence like, "The cherry tree in my front yard is so beautiful in the spring before it starts to lose it's blossoms." Or when I see an apostrophe used with plurals, as in, "This parking lot has room for fifty car's."

But back to James's lamb.

Consider the sentences "Henry James and his brother William live next door.  I've known the James brothers all their lives." They pose no problem. But what about if the two brothers own a car in common?  Is it the James car? The James' car? The James's car?  Many will want to write this as the James' car and cite the grammatical rule that an  apostrophe is used to mark plural possession. 

I can't tell you what's right. I can't even tell you what most people do, although I'm sure somebody can, since we now have the ability to count no end of trivia to the last jot and tittle.

There. How nice to get back to fussing over language and language usage.

I'm looking forward to the Democratic Convention in Chicago when the Harrises come out (one of whom kept his bachelor name, Emhoff) with the Walzes (Walz'?) (Walz's) to the roar of the crowds.

It feels so good not to have to fight the depression that trumpism has spread across the land and to feel a bit of hope again. And freedom to turn my attention to things like punctuation instead of a possible loss of democracy.

P.S. (added Aug. 13) - I apologize for leaving the impression that the English word for waltz and the surname Walz both come from the same German origin. That is not the case.  The surname is apparently a derivative from the name Walter, and the verb to waltz comes from the proto-germanic word walt- meaning to turn, revolve and only in the 18th century became applied to "that riotous and indecent German dance."

Germans Rapping about Rhubarb - an update on Bodo Wartke

Twelve years ago come September I posted a blog in which I identified myself as a serious fan of the German liedermacher/cabarettist Bodo Wartke. I was - and still am - really taken by his marvelous talent as a composer and performer. He combines music and wit with an extraordinarily creative use of language. I bewailed the fact that you needed to be a German-language speaker to fully appreciate the quality and extent of his skills and I made a feeble attempt to give a rough translation of his poetry into English, hoping some of his talent would cross the language-and-culture barrier.

To my delight he - or somebody on his team - picked up my blog and recommended it on their website. Misspelled my name, but hey, even monkeys fall from trees, as the Japanese saying goes.

To my double delight, he has made excellent use of the years since then and, most recently, has hit the millions of viewers of his videos on YouTube. He has greatly expanded his talents as a cabaret artist and counts today as probably Germany's best-known writer of this genre of poetry known as the sprachgesang,  (I write it in English, i.e., without a capital letter, since it has evidently entered the English vocabulary), literally a "speech song."

Let me give you an example. Here is Bodo Wartke saying his poem, "The Fat Roofer." I know. It lacks appeal as a concept, but get past that into the rap-like delivery. Note how it differs from rap. Rap is counter-cultural and ventures into the offensive; this is very mainstream entertainment that borders on (and can even cross the boundary into) the nerdy.  Here are the words, if you want to follow along, in the original German with an English translation evidently done by a literal-minded machine:

The fat roofer covers the roof

Der dicke Dachdecker deckt das Dach

Not my roof, no, the neighboring roof

Nicht mein Dach, nein, das Nachbardach

This woke me up at 8am this morning

Davon wurd ich heute früh schon um 8 Uhr wach

I never imagined how much noise that would make

Ich hätte nie gedacht, wie viel Krach das macht

I wonder what he's trying to achieve with all this noise

Ich frage mich, was er mit diesem Krach bezweckt

The fat roofer who covers the roof there

Der dicke Dachdecker, der das Dach da deckt

And why he doesn't cover the roof a little more carefully

Und warum er das Dach nicht etwas sachter deckt

And whether this still extends across the entire Tach today?

Und ob sich das so heut noch übern ganzen Tach erstreckt?

I'll be specific, this roofer is leaving

Ich sach es konkret, dieser Dachdecker geht

I'm so crazy about an alarm clock

Mir sowas von fett auf 'n Wecker

With his electric roof tile cutting device

Mit seinem elektrischen Dachziegelschneidegerät

From Black & Decker

Von Black & Decker

Unfortunately he works with him from morning to night

Mit dem arbeitet er leider von früh bis spät

I'll go over there and complain

Ich geh da gleich rüber und mecker

Before this goes on like this forever

Bevor das hier ewig so weitergeht

And pull the plug

Und zieh den Stecker

But also the next day, oh dear

Doch auch am nächsten Tach, ach du Schreck

The roof will be boldly covered again from eight o'clock

Wird ab acht wieder keck das Dach gedeckt

I am rudely awakened from the night

Ich werde unsanft aus der Nacht geweckt

About the fat roofer's crash comeback

Von des dicken Dachdeckers Krach-Comeback

But while I'm there from the aft deck

Doch während ich da so vom Achterdeck

Watch him cover that roof there

Beobachte, wie er das Dach da deckt

I notice, oh, he's doing it correctly

Fällt mir auf, oh, er macht es korrekt

The roof is becoming more and more of a magnificent object

Das Dach wird immer mehr zu einem Prachtobjekt

Respect, I'm peeking over

Respekt, ich luge hinüber

And admire the roof deck tactics

Und bewundere die Dachdeck-Taktik

Hey, this guy could easily write a book about it

Ey, der Typ könnte glatt 'n Buch schreiben über

Roof deck didactics

Dachdeck-Didaktik

I've been dealing with the fat roofer ever since

Ich befinde mich seitdem mit dem dicken Dachdecker

In perfect, intimate harmony, Digga

In perfekter, trauter Eintracht, Digga

And wish me directly, immediately in emotion

Und wünsch mir direkt, sofort im Affekt

He'll be covering my roof soon too

Er deckt demnächst auch mein Dach

Source: Musixmatch

Songwriters: Matthias Kraeutli / Bodo Wartke

These days (and I don't know how far back this goes) he has teamed up with others to produce popular cabaret-style musical performances, and now has extended even into dance. In the 90s he published a series of pieces about German tongue twisters, once again showing off his facility with language.

There is a  silly German tongue-twister that has been around for years about a girl named Barbara - also called Bärbel - known for her delicious rhubarb cakes. She is good enough to open a bar to sell them in. Living in the neighborhood are three barbarians. They become regulars at Barbara's Rhubarb Bar and become known as Barbara's Rhubarb Bar Barbarians. You can see what you can do with these word/concepts in German: Barbara is Barbara in German; rhubarb is Rabarber; bar is Bar; barbarians is Barbaren.

The poem is available in its entirety, line by line in the original German with an English translation here.

The song has gone viral and is widely becoming known as simply, "That German Song" - now in sprachgesang form.  It is now crossing language barriers and is available in Italian, English, and French, albeit in literal forms without the rhythm and rhymes of the original.  Kids (see here minute 2:39) in Uganda are dancing to it. And it has even led to a sequel [actual sequel begins just after minute 10], in which Barbara teams up with Bärbel and becomes a lesbian. Barbara and Bärbel have a baby named Emily to add to their (warning: German pronunciation of English word family = femily.) If you want more about the background to the poem and the content, have a look at the website of Feli from Germany, who does a bang-up job with that. 

But back to Bodo Wartke. Here he is, teamed up with the well-known musical artist, Marti Fischer, doing the original. And here are the Australian couple, Jasmine and James, who, I believe, created the dance, gone equally viral. They met in ballet class in Dresden - she's German, he's Australian and they are now married and living in Australia posting their dances on their website.

There are many more - too many to list here, proof that the world has not lost its appreciation of the absurd.

All is not lost!

Getting from here to there

I asked my niece, Amy, the other day what she would be doing if she had not chosen international relations as a profession, if she had it to do all over again. "Geography," she said. "I'd study geography." I absolutely loved that idea, since I play that game all the time. Not sure I'd want to be a geographer professionally, but I would love to spend a good chunk of my childhood as a geography nerd. I've been doing that in recent months, as the destruction of Ukraine continues to dominate the news and I need to have other things to focus on. 

"Poor Mexico," they say, "So far from God and so close to the United States." You'd have to say the same for Ukraine. At least we don't try to spread the fiction that Mexico is not a real place, that it's a part of the U.S., and we have the right to bite off chunks of it at will. (We did that when my home state of California was taken from them and turned into an anglo-saxon enclave, but that's another story.)

So are the blunders that Putin has made another story. But there is a tie-in with geography there too.

Just as the war criminal George W. Bush, who started a war in Iraq because he couldn't tell a Shia from a Sunni and missed the fact that the 9/11 attackers were Saudis... just as his war in Iraq killed an estimated 300,000 Iraqis, and considerably more if you add in the results of illness, disease, malnutrition and the like, and handed the Iranians a Shiite victory over their Sunni neighbors, Putin's war, waged to conquer Ukraine and push back against the growing specter of NATO on his doorstep ended up getting neutral Sweden and Finland to give up generations of neutrality and join NATO. These jokers are leaders?

The idiocies don't stop there. Putin tells his media-captivated countrymen he's fighting Nazis. The president of Ukraine, a guy recognized by both Ukrainians and most of the world as well as a national hero, is a Jew. Putin annexes much of Eastern Ukraine, where many people speak Russian as a first language. But they also would prefer life outside of Russian control, much as the citizens of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, Georgia, Kazakhstan and other former soviet republics do. And that's just the eastern half of Ukraine. The western half has long been more conspicuously anti-Russian, pro-European. There is such irony in the fact that Putin, just as he blundered by driving Sweden and Finland to want to join NATO, has managed to unite the Russian-speaking part of the country with the Ukrainian-speaking part against him.

I need to escape the intensity of the war news from time to time, and one of the things I have fun with is geography.  I've been enjoying the fact that Google maps provides you with just about all the geography trivia you can  handle. 

Consider this: if you were to travel from the northernmost town in the U.S. to the southernmost town, how long would it take you by plane, car, bicycle or on foot?

If you took the most direct route, how many Canadian provinces would you go through and how many states?

I don't like playing guessing games when the answers are easily available, so I'll give you the answers. First off, you can walk the just over three miles from Prudhoe Bay (the northernmost town in the U.S.) to the Deadhorse Airport in Deadhorse, Alaska. That would take you about an hour. Or you could go by bicycle in about fifteen minutes. Or by car or taxi in about seven to ten.

From Deadhorse Airport (SCC) you would fly to Key West (EYW), stopping three times: in Anchorage (ANC), Seattle/Tacoma Airport (SEA) and George Bush International Airport in Houston. If you want to avoid any association with George Bush, you can pay $151 more and fly via Tampa, instead. Both Tampa and Houston have direct flights into Key West. Houston also has flights that touch down in Charlotte, Fort Worth or Miami along the way, but you can fly direct if you want to.  Best get an experienced travel agent to give you the time it would take because there are many choices of routes and airlines, and the direct routes are not necessarily the cheapest.  But I'd count on not getting there in less than twenty-one hours, and many take ten or more than that.

You could drive, of course, and that trip, a distance of 5487 miles (8830 km) would take you about 90 hours. A very hard nine days, driving ten hours a day, or a more reasonable two and a half weeks, more or less, driving about five hours a day.

And if you're hardy, and can handle the hills, you could go by bicycle. If you do that, you can cut about twenty-four miles off the journey, and do it in 5463 miles, or 8791 km. That should take you about 450 hours, give or take.   That's forty-five ten-hour days, and since there are precious few athletes alive who could handle that, I'd suggest you allot three months, and cut that down to five-hours a day on the bicycle.

Then there's the third option: to hoof it. Don't know how that works those long initial miles through the Yukon Territory. I have no idea whether it's ever been done. It's 56 km from the first town, Beaver Creek, to the second town, Koidern, or about an eleven hour and a half walk. And if you make that, it's another 86.7 km to the next town, Quill Creek, or a seventeen and a half hour hike on foot. And those long treks don't end there. From Teslin, still in the Yukon, to the next town, Swift River, Yukon, a route which takes you into the Northern parts of British Columbia, it would take you over 23 hours. No thank you by a long shot.  And we haven't begun to tap into the long endless treks through Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Northern Minnesota before you get to even slightly more populated places in Wisconsin (or Iowa - you can choose either route) and Illinois.

Once you get to Illinois you have to hike the entire state from north to south. Then you walk through a little part of Western Kentucky, and you get to Tennessee, another state you traverse from North to South. Then Georgia - again full trek North to South. Then Florida - again full trek North to South.

I suppose there are venturesome folk out there who might want to give it a go, but I've just completely wiped myself out, particularly now when it's all I can do to walk twenty minutes around a couple blocks here in Berkeley.

Those who can, do; those who can't, teach, we used to say; and somebody would usually pipe up, "And those who can't teach teach teachers how to teach."

I see a parallel here.

Those who can't walk anymore imagine walking from one end of Estados Unidos to the other, just for the hell of it.

Back now to the Netflix menu of mass shootings, car accidents, crime, corruption or social decay that seem to be all the rage these days.

Mine eyes have seen better days. I actually used to read ten or more hours a day, but now two is a real stretch.

And I used to be able to hike at least half that much.

You'll understand now why I've turned to Rachmaninoff and Chopin.

And, of course, Google maps. 

Do you know how far it is from Lavry, in the Pskov District of Russia, right up next to Estonia, to the Big Diomede Island, from which (pace Sarah Palin) you can see the United States?  Those are the westernmost and easternmost points in Russia. Google maps tells me, and I quote: Sorry, your search appears to be outside our current coverage area for driving.

I know it's about 8000 km and spans ten time zones, but I can't seem to find anybody who can tell me how long it would take to walk or bike it.

Shawn, rhymes with get off my lawn

One of the ways I believe our quality of life has improved since the onset of the internet age is that we now have easy access to all sorts of bloggers and vloggers now sharing their views on what matters to them. Like with fire, or any other powerful entity, how you spend your time in front of a computer screen has to be properly managed. Fire can burn you; it can also heat your soup. Dumb blogs can bore the bejeezuz out of you or lull you into closing down your brain; good ones can further your lifelong quest for new information and greater understanding.  And you don't need to go to a library, a lecture hall, or a public debate to take these new things in. All you need is an internet connection and a monitor to watch things on. 

Covid has been a perfect nightmare for a lot of active people, but for me it was a turning point. I realized immediately, now that Netflix and Amazon Prime can provide you with more movies than you can realistically take in, that I could easily become an even bigger couch potato than I already was.  I could also bewail the fact that I (and everybody else) had become housebound. But I could just as easily do something about becoming more selective about what I take in.  Faced with the opportunity to select from among an almost infinite amount of new information, I soon found myself shutting down movies I once might have watched to the end, searching for ever more reliable sources of news, and renewing my faith in the human race by watching world-class classical musical performance after another. I could also sit and allow to parade through my living space an astonishing array of young people with magnificent minds and keep myself from falling into despair over America's dumbed down embrace of fascism and the destruction of the planet, and focus regularly on a plethora of pick-me-up bits of evidence that all was not lost, that there are young people out there who might just keep us from going under. I began to take serious note of possibilities I had not seen before. Or seen but not paid much attention to. I don't believe in any gods, but if I did, their name would be YouTube.

Let me mention just two examples of whiz kids who have provided me with endless hours of education and entertainment.  There are so many more.  And I know my interests are parochial and that what turns me on may not turn you on. But let me show you mine, and invite you to show me yours.

Here's just a few:

1. One is a gay couple in Nova Scotia who have decided they want to live off the grid. They travelled for a time in a camper, but then settled down in the woods north of Halifax and built a geodesic dome to live in, cleared the land, brought in solar panels, built a garden and generally went about making a life for themselves while waiting (two years now) to be able to build a permanent home out of shipping containers. They have a huge following and post a fascinating update on their accomplishments every Sunday. I always look forward to Sunday for two reasons: The Sunday New York Times and Tyler and Todd.

2. Another is a recent Oxford university graduate in philosophy and theology named Alex J. O'Connor. He runs a blog he calls Cosmic Skeptic in which he advocates for a greater understanding of atheism (as opposed to being an evangelist for atheism itself), for animal welfare and for vegetarianism, and is, in my view, a powerful argument for going to university to not merely get a degree in philosophy, but to become a philosopher in practice. His videos have been viewed 50 million times and he has 450,000 subscribers, including yours truly.

Alex has a steel-trap mind and I couldn't do him justice. If you have time and the inclination, you can jump in anywhere and hear what he has to say.

There are so many more, cooking shows, political discussion groups, debating clubs. But I'd like to focus for the rest of this space on one guy in particular. He is perhaps not as impressive in the same way as Alex O'Connor, but he's somebody who nonetheless blew me out of the water as I began to see the extent of things of which he was capable. I'm talking about somebody named Shawn.

Shawn is a mystery. Whether by design or simply because I haven't done all my homework, I can't be sure. I have not been able to find out his full name, nor where he comes from. His blog name reveals the fact that he has a good sense of humor - and I always associate humor with intelligence; call it a prejudice, but I think you have to be smart to be funny. He goes by "imshawngetoffmylawn." The name has nothing to do (that I can see) with what he does. He is just about the most amazing polyglot I've ever come across. And he's so damned young! God knows what he's going to be capable of as the years go by.

I started out with his trashing of the Hebrew alphabet. He tells us he's been speaking the language most of his life, which led me to assume, once I saw his Russian and English were also native, or near-native, that he must be among the many Russian Jews who emigrated to Israel, and then moved on to life in an English-speaking country.  He can't write Hebrew, he says, and that would fit with his having left as a child. Click here for a taste of that video (or, of course, the whole thing.)

Shawn has a magnificent obsession.  He wants to support the efforts to bring dead languages back to life, as in the case of Cornish, and keep endangered languages from disappearing. The reasoning is the same as the effort to maintain plant and animal species. (I just heard that one in 8 species on earth is at risk of distinction.) The argument runs like this: It's not just human beings that should be treasured but especially the diversity that exists among human beings and all life species as well.  We never know, for example, when a plant species goes extinct, whether we've lost a chance to develop a cure for all kinds of diseases by medicines yet to be discovered. And when it comes to human language, anybody familiar with how differently the world is constructed in the mindsets of speakers of diverse languages will understand what a loss of a human language means to the richness of human civilization. And if you're familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis you know the theory that the world you are able to take in is to some degree directly affected by the language you speak, because that language determines what it is

you focus on.

So let's hear it for ranters, I say.

Shawn is a polyglot and he may be a good linguist as well - many polyglots get seriously into linguistics sooner or later. I'm not sure about the extent of his linguistic knowledge. But there's no doubt he's an exceptional whiz kid when it comes to mastering languages. He's got this great thing going with his followers where he gets them to pick a language for him to learn and he then goes at it intensely for a couple weeks and shows off his knowledge and his proficiency. Mind-boggling what he accomplishes this way.

But let me finish my speculation on his mystery identity.

But here's what I've been able to surmise from watching the videos I can find under his name.

I discovered that he speaks near native English, Russian, and Hebrew early on, so my first guess was that he must be a Russian Jew who found his way to Israel and then to North America. I then noted that his Russian, like his English, is near-native, but not-native, and that led me to think he may have been raised in one of the non-Russian countries of the former Soviet Union, maybe the Balkans. I then discovered a vlog he did in Latvian in which he says he grew up there but is not Latvian. He obviously speaks Latvian either natively or near-natively, to add to the pile.

Here is a video of his about the Latgalian language, the language spoken by many in Eastern Latvia, aka Livonia

He's got a great sense of humor, evidenced by his videos where he speaks English, Russian, Hebrew and Latvian in various foreign accents.

Here he is speaking Hebrew, which he claims as one of his native languages.

And here he is speaking Hebrew with various foreign accents. He needs to get together with Trevor Noah.

 

And here he is showing off his ability to read the UN Declaration of Human Rights preamble in all identifiable Slavic languages:  . Not too many people could pull that off.

And here he is showing off his ability in another fashion - counting to 100 with each number in a different language from all previous ones. Here he's just show-boating, but when you got it, flaunt it, I say.

My ears really perked up when I saw him take on a bit of Nova Scotia history, as well, because I have Nova Scotia roots, and am familiar with the Mi'kmaq Indians, the aboriginals of the Maritime Provinces.  Mi'kmaq is an Eastern Algonquin language and Shawn talks about the Mi'kmaq interaction with the speakers of Algonquin and the Pidgin language that ensued. 

If you want a more thorough linguistic take on that example of languages in contact, as well as a bit of history of the French expulsion from Nova Scotia, check out this blogger, "History with Hilbert"

And if you want to hear the sound of Mi'kmaq, here is a young lady singing the Beatles song, Blackbird, in Mi'kmaq.

And while we're on the topic of Nova Scotia, my memory of the Gaelic-speaking priests from St. Francis Xavier University who came to visit me when I was stranded at the age of 16 in a hospital in Antigonish, Nova Scotia, was jogged. Here Shawn takes up the topic of "Canadian Gaelic," and he is, of course, talking about these wonderful men I knew as a kid: 

Here he is discussing the Keres language. A linguistic isolate (like Basque), that is a language with no connection to any other language on the planet.

And Breton. 

And Cornish. 

 

I mentioned his sense of humor. Here it is again as he points out, with barely hidden glee, that "I speak English" in Chinook is "Naika wawa Kinchotsh wawa." naika = "I"; wawa = both "speak" and "language"; and Kinchotsh (King George) = English.  And - how's this for an ironic tidbit of interest only to advocates of keeping endangered languages alive - the Chinook jargon (it doesn't even have the standing of a language, but is referred to only as a jargon) was once a widely spoken lingua franca in the Pacific Northwest (Oregon, Washington and British Columbia), used in trading, in court proceedings and elsewhere, but at its peak, in 1870, according to Shawn, it was spoken by no more than an estimated 100,000 to 250,000 people. And here's Shawn being gleeful again when he points out that there was a textbook published in 2018 for Chinook Jargon, titled  La Chinuka Interlingvo Per Esperanto, which, if your Esperanto is up to snuff, is The Chinook Jargon, in Esperanto.

When they took away our language, they took away our ability to think in our own way.      

Clare Swan, a Dena'ina elder in 1985 (and I doubt she had any idea who Whorf was.) 

Kind of sums it up.

And speaking of polyglots interested in language maintenance, here's an interesting tale about a French guy who decided to make the preservation of Eyak his life's work.

And the Dena'ina language of Alaska.   It's worth noting in passing that the Dena'ina language of Alaska has been shown to have a linguistic connection with Navajo and Apache. So there, those of you looking to prove Uncle Henry came over from Russia millions of years ago by walking across the Bering Strait.

Did you know? - bet you didn't, but now you do - that if there is a field of study on the Latgalian (Livonian) language called - wait for it - Latgalistics. And if you decided to pursue it, that would make you a Latgalistician.

Moving on...

Here's his report on Estonian.

I won't go on. There is much more, if languages are your shtick. And if you're tired of this messed-up world and find it encouraging, as I did, to come across young people with the kind of skills we all wish we had, a way of seeing a bit of hope for the future, Shawn-of-unkown-origins will be a treat.

If you ever do discover his roots, do let me know, will you?

Living Latin

I have known since college that "Vermont" is "Mons Viridis" in Latin, because I'm so damned old that they still used Latin at my college in their diplomas. I have a diploma not from "Middlebury College" but from "Collegium Medioburiense." I'm surprised the "titulo graduque" (graduate degree) was not awarded to Alanus McCornickus.

One of my many fun activities during the lockdown, when we have had little chance for distractions outside the house, has been googling all manner of trivia. One of those has been digging into how Cicero and Virgil might pronounce the other forty-nine states of the Civitates Foederatae Americae (USA to you).

Fortunately, there is a Latin version of Wikipedia (it's Vicipaedia, in Latin) where you can look this kind of thing up. 

A great many states have names that work as is in Latin.  There's Georgia with its capital at Atlanta. And there's Indiana, where even its capital, Indianapolis, works as is, provided, of course, you allow room for Greek loan words like -polis.  And there's California, for example, with its capital, Sacrament(um), requiring the bare minimum of Latinization. And when it comes to the Greek loan polis, there are also these states/state capital combinations: Terra Mariae (Land of Mary) - Annapolis; Virginia Occidentalis - Carolopolis (Charlestown); North and South Dakota (Dacota Meridiana and Dacota Septentrionalis) and their capitals Pierre and Bismarck, respectively: Petropolis and Bismarcopolis. Iowa and Des Moines (Iova and Monachopolis) take a bit of extra work, but they make sense once you press your French into service. And there's Montana - Helenopolis. And Ohium and Colombopolis. And last, but not least, Texia and Austinopolis.

Minnesota, with its capital at Sanctus Paulus, is an easy one, as is Novum Mexicum and Sancta Fides.  The city of Campifons is likely to throw you until you learn it's the capital of Illinoesia. And the state of Nova Caesarea may also challenge you until you learn its capital is Trentonia.

Pennsylvania and Harrisburgum and Rhodensis Insula and Providentia are no challenge. Neither is Uta and Urbs Lacus Salsi. If you happen to know that Ludwig is the German version of Louis, then you're ready for Ludoviciana and its capital at "Red Stick" (Rubribaculum). 

I won't go through all fifty states, but I do need to give special attention to my neighboring state (speaking now as a Vermonter) of New Hampshire.

That one is a real muddle. The reason is the original Latin for Hampshire is a muddle. "Hampshire" (with apologies to my British friends for explaining to my American and other non-Brit friends who may not know) is a county, and not a town, in Britain, as the suffix "shire" indicates. Before the Normans invaded in 1066 and renamed the Anglo-Saxon "scir"s as comptés (counties in Anglo-Norman), "Hamm" the settlement in the bend of a river carried the name of Hamwic - "wic" being the word for "trading center."  But for reasons I have been unable to fathom, it also carried the name of "Hantune," which evidently evolved into Hantonia, the current name of the county in Latin, if the Great Seal of New Hampshire is any indication. It reads Sigillum Reipublicae neo hantoniensis."

I say "muddle" because the Vicipaedia page which carries a map of the United States calls New Hampshire "Nova Hantonia" on its list of states below the map, along with their capitals (Nova Hantonia's is Concordia), but "Nova Hantescira" on the map itself.

A quick phone call to Bishop Peter Anthony Libasci at (603) 669-3100 might clear this up. He's the Archbishop of the Diocese of Manchester, which serves the entire catholic population of New Hampshire, and as far as I know the Roman Catholic Church is the only organization (besides Collegii Dartmuthensis, of course) that still uses Latin with any frequency in their official dealings. He may know.

This reflection on Roman Britain stems from about a year ago when I was up to my ears in that popular Netflix history of Viking Britain, The Last Kingdom, and googled to find out when the Romans left and the Danes moved in. (Answer: The Romans left about 410, the first recorded Viking raid was in 789, so considerably later). One of the things I always pay attention to in historical dramas is how they handle language. How did the invading Danes and the local Saxons communicate?

And that led to the question of how much Latin still remained, if any, outside of the church and in academia.

So many things to fuss over.  Why does Mons Viridis (Vermont, you remember)'s capital, Montpelier, comes out Mons Pessulanus? The answer, it turns out is that  Mons Pessulanus was the ancient name of the city of Montpellier (with two l's) in France. Somebody's actually paying attention to historical detail.

Latin is not dead. It's just hibernating. There's still so much you can do with it.  You can say, for example:

Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!

 (Out of the way, peasants! I'm on imperial business!)

or

Quantum materiae materietur marmota monax si marmota monax materiam possit materiari?

(How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?)

Me and Jonas and Dmitri

Kaufmann and Hvorostovsky in Moscow
singing the Pearl Fishers' Duet

You know all about "six degrees of separation," right? Pick somebody you know and call them Somebody 1. They are connected to Somebody2, who is connected to Somebody3, who is connected to Somebody4, who is connected to Somebody 5, who is connected to Somebody6.  Each somebody becomes a Somebody 1 and if you add up all the connections you are connected to every other human being on the planet. You just don't know where all the connections are.

I remember the time I was at a New Year's Party with the British Commander in Berlin. This was in the early 1960s, and there wasn't much for him to do by this stage in history, with Germany well on its way to becoming the free modern democracy it is today, so he found time to play chess regularly with Rudolf Hess, who was in Spandau Prison, in the British Sector and therefore directly in his charge. He was a delightful conversationalist, way out of my social league. He probably would not have engaged in conversation with me, an American soldier in his early 20s, except that he and I were both members of the occupying forces - him at the top of the totem pole, me at the bottom - and it's possible he was relieved to find a native speaker of English in the crowd.

I don't know if it was right then I realized this meeting put me within three degrees of separation to Adolf Hitler - and everybody I knew within four. I could see how this six degrees of separation thing worked.

*            *            *

From left to right: Giuseppe De Luca (Zurga), 
Frieda Hempel (Leila) and Enrico Caruso
 (Nadir), in the New York Met
 1916 production

I discovered another way you can play the six degrees game yesterday. I had been listening to one of my favorite pieces of
music - the Pearl Fishers Duet from Bizet's opera, The Pearl Fishers. I keep going back to it because it's a recording made by Dmitri Hvorostovsky, my favorite singer of all time, and Jonas Kaufmann, whom I'll go ahead and say is Number Two.

In chasing down Kaufmann's history, I learned that he got his start at the Munich Conservatory (official name: Hochschule für Musik und Theater München, or, in English, the University of Music and Performing Arts in Munich), just 600 meters down the street from the dormitory I lived in in 1960 and 1961. The address of the Munich Conservatory is Arcisstrasse 12; I lived at Arcisstrasse 31.  Practically neighbors.

Except for a couple complicating details. The Music Conservatory only moved into that building in recent times.  At the end of the war, the Americans used it as one of two storage locations for Hitler's loot, the paintings and other treasures Hitler had taken from all over Europe.  And more interestingly, before that, it was the building in which Neville Chamberlin and Hitler signed the Munich Agreement of 1938, giving a meaning to the word appeasement that would go down in history.

left: The Führerbau - (Führer's Building) in its present day form as the University of Music and Performing Arts, at Arcisstrasse 12.

Hitler's office was on the second floor in a room now used as a rehearsing room.

right: The Führerbau as it was all gussied up for Chamberlin's arrival for the signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938.

photo credits:

Kaufmann and Hvorostovsky

Caruso and company in a performance at the Met of Pearl Fishers in 1916

Führerbau, (both photos) and more recently the Hochschule für Music und Theater (Music Conservatory)

my room, 62 years since I occupied it

Meanwhile, in another room just a block up, I shared space first with a guy who lived on one boiled egg and a slice of dry bread with lard for lunch, while I, with my $80 a month stipend, was able to dine out on Wienerschnitzel every night if I wanted to. Then with a guy three friends of mine and I bought a '48 Volkswagen with and totaled one night in Strasbourg. We argued over whether we should reimburse him his share. I'd like to think we did, but I live with doubt. $40 was half a month's income. If I knew how to find him, I'd contact him and ask, but the only other thing I ever knew about him was that he would lay his socks on the window sill to air at night. I think he only had one pair and he washed them maybe once a week, if that. I can still see them in that window above. And I don't remember the radiator.

Above: My room (or one identical to it) in the dormitory of the Evangelisches Studenten-wohnheim in der Arcisstraße as it looks today. In my day, there was no built-in closet or bath in the room, only a table under the window with two chairs and two beds along the right wall, and closets along the left wall.  All rooms were double rooms. I can still get the feel of the room from the picture, despite the 62 years that have transpired between this photo and the one in my memory. The building is no longer a church-owned dormitory. Today the building is (part of?) the Collegium Oecumenicum.

Finding this connection, this "x degrees of separation", with Jonas Kaufmann (and thus also with Dmitri Hvorostovsky, of course) is a bit of a stretch, I know. But only if you make a big deal out of time.

And while we're wallowing in trivia, all this googling made me realize I might get an answer to a question I had sixty years ago that nobody I knew could answer. Where does the name Arcis, as in Arcis Street, come from? (It's pronounced AR-TSIS in German.)

Still don't know for sure, but there was a battle in the town of Arcis-sur-Aube in France where the Austrians clobbered Napoleon in 1814. Among the forces line up fighting with the Austrians against Napoleon were the first and third Bavarian divisions. That's my best guess of why Munich would name a street after the place.

What did we do with our time before Google?

Torrington from the air

Didn't spend the morning, as I usually do, watching child prodigies at the piano keyboard, or Russian folk dancers performing Olympic level athletic moves with their superhuman young bodies. This morning I relaxed into some serious nostalgia.

A friend sent me a link to a Facebook site with a three-and-a-half-minute video of the town where I was born.  Somebody apparently got a drone to fly over Torrington, Connecticut, film it, and post the film on Facebook. In the wintertime, when industrial revolution-era New England towns are at their drab-most.  It really is ugly, when filmed from this perspective. An overgrown village, of about 36,000 people, 2010 census, criss-crossed by great swaths of long straight city streets, which remove any last trace of charm the village might once have had. Boulevards made for drag-racing, with names like Main Street, East Main Street, and South Main Street.

Thanks to the durability of my baby-sister-the-great-grandmother's marriage, my spousal unit and I had cause to revisit Northwestern Connecticut last month. My closest biologicals, as I call them (to distinguish them from my chosen family) were celebrating their 60th anniversary. In our free time we drove all over the place marveling at the changes a bit and marveling even more over how much had not changed in the sixty plus years since I lived there.

Torrington is the town where I was born. Where my mother, who came to America in 1923 with her aunt and uncle at the age of 8, grew up and lived until she married my father and they moved nine miles up the road to Winsted, where I grew up. Another town with one long Main Street, much wider than it needs to be, the main difference being Winsted's Main Street runs east and west, Torrington's runs north and south.

Sometimes these towns expanded their streets to include tree names. They and so many other New England towns all have a Maple Street, an Oak Street, an Elm Street or a Walnut Street.  As do American towns all over the country which took their cue from what I take to be the country's original Puritan appreciation of trees. Torrington doesn't have a Maple Street, actually, but it does have a Maplewood Street and a Maplewood Drive. And a Willow Street. Other names include things like Water Street, Prospect Street, Park Avenue, Park Drive and Church Street - pretty dull next to names like Sepulveda Boulevard in Los Angeles or Madison Avenue in New York City. But that comparison is unfair. In small town New England there's no reason to get too big for your boots.

My father and his brothers grew up here as well, went to Torrington High School, because their father from Scotland and their mother from Nova Scotia settled there when they could no longer handle the hustle and bustle of Boston and my grandfather got a job teaching carpentry at the local trade school. Many of these folks died in the same hospital where I was born.

So as I look down on the Yankee Pedlar Inn and the Nutmeg this and the Nutmeg that (Connecticut is known as "the Nutmeg State") I am aware of how different the place where I have made my home is, with names like San Francisco, San Diego, Santa Monica, San Rafael, and Sacramento, and how very English my American birthplace is. Torrington was named after a small down in Devonshire, in Southwest England, next to Cornwall. (There is a Cornwall, in Connecticut, by the way, a few miles west of Torrington. Their main street, if I can call it that, is Pine Street. It's a village of fewer than 1500 souls, has a lovely covered bridge, and was the birthplace of Ethan Allen, of the Green Mountain Boys, according to the town's website. A bit of a stretch, since the town didn't actually exist when young Ethan was born, but his family did settle there while he was growing up. Whereupon he went off to do his thing in the Revolutionary War. And established the state of Vermont. But I digress...)

Torrington, speaking of English colonial towns that birthed famous people, is the birthplace of John Brown, whose body lies a-mouldering in the grave.  It prides itself as being a center of the abolition movement from early days.  A lesser claim to fame is the fact that Gail Borden made the original condensed milk there, which fact you might have overlooked last time you opened a can to make Vietnamese coffee.

But boring as the names are and dull as the town looks, especially mid-winter, and happy as I am to have left the snow and ice behind, this drone's-eye view of the place fills me with nostalgia. I spent much of my childhood with my grandmothers, one of whom lived on Water Street, the other on South Main Street. I joined St. Paul's Lutheran Church - also on South Main Street - back when I wanted to be associated with my German roots and with Martin Luther. 

The road leading out of town to the north was called (and still is) the Winsted Road. We in Winsted called the same road the Torrington Road. Call it lack of imagination, if you will. New Englanders will call it simple practicality. Or common sense. The road to Litchfield carries the name Litchfield Road.  The road to Goshen carries the name Goshen Road.

You won't find a Winsted in England, incidentally. That's because it's a contrived name for the commercial village that grew up between the towns of Winchester and Barkhamsted. Win- of Winchester, -stead of Barkhamsted, in case you missed it. Winchester, England, despite its small population - barely 10,000 more souls than Torrington, Connecticut, is obviously a more substantial city than Torrington, England, and has a magnificent cathedral and the honor of being England's first capital city. Barkhamsted is named after Berkhamsted, in England, home to John Cleese of Monty Python fame.  Also Graham Greene, by the way, if your tastes go more literary. I assume the vowel "e" got switched to the vowel "a" in America because the Americans decided if you're going to pronounce it to match the way a dog barks, then maybe you ought to spell it that way.

Same goes for Berkeley, of course, except in reverse.

In any case, if you've been dying to fly over and look down upon a small town in New England, now's your chance.

Quaint, it ain't.

But it means the world to me, being the place I first got to express my feelings when the doctor spanked my bare bottom to make sure I was born alive.

photo credit - photo is of Charlotte Hungerford Hospital where I was born, 82 years ago.  5th floor, if I am not mistaken. Postcard and I were created at about the same time.