Latest Parries
December 2012
Some Consumer Affairs
I’ve tried to enjoy schlepping water, thinking that it serves to keep us to some human roots.
April 2012
From Nokia N95 to iPhone 4S
Annoyances and upsets with the iPhone 4S have been more than offset by its screen, the silkiness of its surfaces, the camera, and the third-party market for both software and hardware.
February 2012
2001: A Space Odyssey: Dry, Juicy, Linear, Luminous
After they finished watching the Bond movies, I figured the next series John Gruber and Dan Benjamin would discuss on The Talk Show would be Stanley Kubrick’s oeuvre. But Gruber refused — too personal for podcasting, he said. Disappointed, I rewatched 2001.
January 2012
A Scheme of a Number of Friends
Instead of acknowledging the wisdom of leading from behind, the Right jumped on the Obama administration’s handling of Libya as yet another example of at best incompetence. They lost me there.
October 2011
The Mouse and the Cantilever
Steve Jobs we lost at the age of 56; when Frank Lloyd Wright reached that age it was still only 1923, the time of merely his second comeback with Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
March 2010
Friendship is for Weenies
It’s amazing, given the adulation he enjoyed elsewhere, that the Israeli public knew from the start not to trust this US President.
Before the Setup
Nobody from usesthis.com has asked me what my setup us, nor is likely to anytime soon. So I’m just going to mouth off here about it. But first, some background.
February 2010
Walter Russell Mead steps gingerly into the Wieseltier/Sullivan imbroglio
On the Leon Wieseltier/Andrew Sullivan spat, Walter Russell Mead seems to want to have his strudel and eat it too.
October 2009
My Hope: Obama’s Change
Defeat in the Olympics bid may focus the mind in the Oval Office where it should be: Afghanistan.
July 2009
At Modi’in Mall
There’s nothing else around here except empty desolate pretty hills. The Israel Trail passes by a bit to the west. It’s a hot July Wednesday morning. Things are reasonably busy. The shops are mostly franchises, almost all homegrown — Super-Pharm, Aroma, Tzomet Sfarim, Cup O’ Joe’s, LaMetayel, Mega, Fox, Castro, H&O.
M y dear man, I’m of the generation wherein whereupon seeing a moving image, a screen, a monitor, mine eyes sadly are dragged to it.” Or I could have said, “Turn around.” Eh? “Just turn around.”
Instead, I said, “I’m watching the screen. I’m watching TV, big man. Look behind you.” Neutral. No wit. A veneer of blandness over a hint of madness, a short man telling a tall man that he’s a big man, but speaking more loudly than the other, using the other’s demand that you “say that again” as an opportunity to throw the point harder. A making of the situation into something more unpleasant than it had initially been.
For a few seconds after I spoke it was like an old movie. The two older men on either side of me spoke kindly in that suck-up-to-the-man-of-the-moment way. Actually only the second one, the older one, was obsequious. “He’s out of here, looks like,” said my neighbor, though I paraphrase. But the first had said, “Not your day is it?” Which has a shade more than a shade of condescension. All this is the most anyone’s ever said to me at the Wetherspoons pub here on Queens Road, where I go occasionally yet regularly for their vegetarian English breakfast — £2.79 for two free-range eggs, two qorn sausages, a portobello mushroom, a ghostly half-tomato, baked beans and the relative rarity: hash browns, three of them. And this time, if I may crow, my tea was free as it was my 6th.
I am a tad fearful here in Britain, I am. More than in Israel. There, while it may be aggressive it’s not murderous; getting into a fistfight is not really a very socially valued thing. Here “a bit of rough” is in the language as rather a splendid thing. Looking back, I need not have reacted so violent and fearfully, as if those glass double doors belong to a wild saloon wherein one must repulse brigands just for a peaceful drink.
Had he not noticed there was a screen there? They’re all over the establishment. At the time I presumed he had not known why I was looking in that direction. But what if he did know and was put out merely by my looking in his general direction? In that case, what he wanted was for me to move back from the bar in order to watch the screen so that he would not be in my line of site. An outrage!
And if I had indeed been looking at him for 20 seconds or more, how could I have not seen him? Even as he was talking over to me it took me a moment to understand that he was talking to me. “It’s making me paranoid,” he concluded. I guess he was more freaked out than menacing.
Look at me, minding my own business — so much so that I’m even withdrawn from the very minor scene at the bar, watching TV instead — and in actuality I’m firing lasers at a volatile personality.
He actually did seem like a nice guy. I didn’t. We Scots, so dour. We Israelis, so edgy.
Previously
A Crawl Across Crawley, Part 1