By Inclination If Not Practice

Many friends from my Dakota days, bless them, know that I am, as one recently put it, “an amateur cartographer by inclination if not practice.”

Perhaps those of you who have been reading this cartographically named “Mouth of the River” blog for any length of time have noticed scattered blogs over these past six years on the subject of geography. As well as many more about history that include maps as featured images.

As a graduate student at South Dakota State University, I took an undergrad cartography course at 2/3rds credit for the sake of adding my own maps to a thesis titled The Forgotten Realist about Edward Eggleston, a contemporary of Mark Twain, best known for The Hoosier Schoolmaster, a serial novel in the 1870s which still circulated in the children’s section of libraries back in the 1950s.

Maps of Indiana, the Ohio River Valley, and the Great Lakes were well-done enough to impress the English Dept., but not enough to dissuade them from adopting a new rule at semester’s end restricting grad students from taking undergrad courses. They wanted us taking nothing but their courses. Must admit that my map of the USA was so embarrassingly bad that it ought to be ripped out of every copy, though I just can’t bring myself to do it to my own.

Must admit as well that I had also taken a music class at the same 2/3rds rate, which helped tip the scales for the minor-keyed English profs who thought it flat-out heresy to be answered with sharp rebuke. I was safely back in Massachusetts by then. It was called “the Garvey Rule.”

Also got myself in some salt water twelve years ago when the North Atlantic started whacking Plum Island with serious erosion. Never occurred to me that the owners of homes that were knocked down, compromised, or left vulnerable were already planning to rebuild and reinforce right on the very spots reclaimed by the Atlantic.

My second column about it began thus:

Not long ago, I told you that Plum Island is not an island but a barrier beach.

Geography 101 will tell you as much, but my penchant for verbosity—a polite word for BS—led me to add the phrase, “glorified sandbar,” a remark that did not exactly endear me to some of my neighbors.

Where to hide from people offended by what they read?

Hello Public Library!

Rolled my sleeping bag in the history aisles where no one ever goes and started looking for something else to plagiarize when a book about the Hudson River—or so I thought—grabbed my attention.

I’ll attach a link to the full column down below, but that passage and the next offer a useful background for what has happened in recent weeks. My reaction to the book’s intro:

… I was surprised to learn that the Lower Hudson, the 150 miles from Albany through the Palisades to NYC, is technically not a river but a fjord—“a long and broad tidal estuary.”

That’s why it is so direct, with slight angular bends rather than the constant twists and curves of rivers. Salt water reaches over 70 miles inland.

All because a glacier cut it wide and deep—which made Henry Hudson think he could sail his Half Moon up there and find China.

Instead, he found Poughkeepsie.

No idea how he could tell the difference. Thought it looked a lot like Barbados myself, but maybe that’s just on account of the crowd my daughter ran with.

Headline that I submitted for that column was “Pounding PI Sand Up an NY Fjord,” but the editor softened it. And the book is titled simply The Hudson, a History, although it’s so incisive with history and ecology and so much in between, it ought to be titled, Up Yours, Albany!

This memory was refreshed by a recent day trip to the Hudson Valley on which a friend and I joked that we should have brought our state flag to wave as we declared New York State re-named “New Massachusetts.” Instead, about halfway between Albany and quaint Saugerties, we stopped at the New Baltimore Rest Area for the same coffee now selling alongside I-95 and I-495.

That, of course, hints at why my cartographic leanings have become so prominent since, oh, say, January 20 of this year. But that’s not my inclination, that’s my practice. And this is still the weekend.

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My Hudson River column, April 2013:

https://www.wickedlocal.com/story/archive/2013/04/24/sitting-in-off-plum-island/39785754007/

As you likely know, the standard maps that have been placed on classroom walls for years have been criticized for distorting shapes and sizes. This is a consequence of having to project a round surface on a flat paper. Try pressing the peel down on a table top next time you have an orange, and you’ll get the idea. Furthermore, because there is so much more land in the northern hemisphere than in the south, Gerardus Mercator moved his 1569 projection so that the center is north of the Equator, further exaggeration sizes to the north over the south. I’ve always preferred the 1963 Robinson Projection that lessens the distortion with curved corners and moves the Equator back down to where it should be.

In 2016, a Japanese designer offered an alternative which beats Robinson for size and shape, but at the expense of positioning. Not bad, but I think the moral of the story is, if you want the unaltered truth, get a globe.

Hajime Narukawa won Japan’s prestigious Good Design Award for developing the AuthaGraph World Map, a groundbreaking projection that preserves the true proportions of continents and oceans.

https://www.architecturaldigest.com/story/accurate-map-authagraph

Welcome to Garvey Island

Many friends are having no land’s end of fun spoofing the ridiculous dictatorial decree to rename the body of water framed by Florida on one side and the Yucatan Peninsula down below.

The cowardly compliance of Google Maps and, more recently, of the Axios news agency, has given them more reason to ridicule the move with imaginary moves of their own.

Some are truly funny. “The Gulf of This-Won’t-Lower-The-Cost-Of-Eggs” is a yoke of a joke, peppered and scrambled with political satire. And “Gulf of Loco Gringo” is seasoned with the hilarity of possibly offending rabid Republicans not because of what it means, but because it is in Spanish and they don’t know what it means. Press one for latitude!

So many revisions of The Gulf of Mexico, to use the name “assigned at birth,” people are now renaming other bodies of water. To protect Canada against the American dictator’s brainless threats, one renamed the Great Lakes, starting with Superior as “The Gulf of Molson, Eh?” Democratic Gov. JB Pritzker has called for Lake Michigan to be renamed “Lake Illinois.” And some Brits want the Atlantic to be known as “The English Ocean.”

Closer to home, a local wag called for Massachusetts Bay to be renamed the “Gulf of Newburyport.” This is one of those cases where laughing with someone turns into laughing at them. Those posting it don’t even seem to notice that Newburyport is nowhere to be found on their own map. The bay, no matter what we call it, is defined by Cape Ann on the north. It doesn’t touch Newburyport, or even Plum Island–which I think should be renamed Garvey Island, but that’s another yoke for another omelet.

Possibly this wayward cartographer meant The Gulf of Maine. Few people realize it, but this chunk of the North Atlantic that fits itself between Cape Ann to the south and Fundy Bay up north is named for the state that has most of its coastline. To rename it for Newburyport–or even for New Hampshire–would be as mathematically senseless as it is cartographically absurd.

The Bay of Fundy, by the way, separates New Brunswick from Nova Scotia, soon to be renamed respectively, though without any respect from us, “North Maine” and “East Maine” (with Newfoundland soon to be Far-east Maine, Prince Edward Island to be King Donald Island, and Labrador, Boston Terrier). The bay itself will be renamed “Musk Sea.”

Oh, Canada! Ah, Canada! Look out, Canada! Let’s fill it out, shall we? From west to east: The Yukon will be USAkon; British Columbia will be American Columbia; Alberta, Northwest Montana; Saskatchewan, Northeast Montana; Manitoba, Dakota Heights; Ontario, Lakefront Properties; Quebec; American France (with a ban on the French language). Across the top, Nunavut will be Allofit, and the Hudson Bay will be renamed Trump Faucet.

Enough! No matter how inane the American dictator sounds–or appears to be enacting a Three Stooges skit, as he did in 2019 with his idiotically Sharpied map of Hurricane Dorian–we laugh at our own peril.

The edict to rename the Gulf–and also to restore the name “McKinley” to Mount Denali in Alaska–exists as an executive order. No matter what anyone does to comply or resist, that order can and will serve as a pretext for Republican governors and state legislatures to screen all history, geography, and literature textbooks used in public schools. Do you think they are going to limit their censorship to a few names on the North American map?

By the way, the word “Alaska,” in the same language that gives us “Denali” (the tall one), translates as “that which the sea breaks against.” A bit too involved for the MAGA crowd, I’d say, plus it’s a foreign word. How about changing the state’s name to “Pound,” something they can not only understand but will make them snicker?

“Restore” McKinley? Textbook manufacturers who fall in line with the cowards at Google Maps and Axios stand to make a huge haul. They will secure it by “restoring” the lie of “benevolent institution” and “very well treated by plantation owners” to abbreviated passages on slavery. Furthermore, they will paint the American labor movement as a passing fad of immigrants under the spell of Bolshevism, if they mention it at all. As the first American dictator calls it, “Patriotic Education.”

Why not? For those now willing to call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America,” the word patriotism is nothing more than a euphemism for “willful ignorance.”

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A map draw by Newburyporter Lucinda Cathcart for my book, *Keep Newburyport Weird*. The nine-mile long, pencil-shaped barrier beach attached to the mainland just under the Mouth of the Merrimack is navigable at high tide, and therefore qualifies as an island. As you can see, the name Plum Island has already been removed in preparation of the new name if I can ever figure out how to superimpose text without the whole image going dark. Then again, maybe going dark is the point of this name-change idiocy.

Garvey Island

As seen on Facebook. To have the name “Boston” so prominent right next to it makes it even more absurd.

Far from Home Schooling

A long time fan of the actress Julianne Moore, I’m stunned to learn that her children’s book, Freckleface Strawberry, has been banned from schools run by the US Department of Defense for the children of enlisted men and women in America’s armed services.

Of course, I soon remembered that our new Commander in Chief is America’s first dictator, a reckless buffoon whose supporters are so gullible, so paranoid, so intolerant of those who don’t resemble them in appearance, thought, and action, that the idea of a mixed-colored face and day-glow hair must seem a dire threat.

Or it may have been another edict from the dictator himself, afraid that the color strawberry might upstage orange. Or one of his lackeys reacted to the name of the actress and thought that Boogie Nights, Far from Heaven, and The Big Lebowski were about to be screened for third-graders.

Maybe the lackey heard that her current role is in Spanish Director Pedro Almodovar’s The Room Next Door. The Screening Room is already showing the trailer and, though I don’t know for sure, it does appear that Moore’s character is involved in, as the promos put it, “a strangely sweet situation” with the character played by Tilda Swinton. Can’t risk that, whatever that is.

To be honest, it did surprise me to learn that Moore had written a children’s book. But I myself play happy little jigs and maudlin versions of “Greensleeves” at a Renaissance faire when not calling for the heads of Newburyport’s mayor and city council president in the local paper, so it’s not that much of a stretch.

Ironically, as the daughter of a Vietnam veteran, Moore graduated from the American High School in Frankfurt, Germany, run by DoD. Now, she’s left wondering why “kids like me… will not have access to a book written by someone whose life experience is so similar to their own.”

Let’s pick our way through the book’s synopsis to see if we can find clues why it has been banned by a government bound by a Constitutional right of all citizens to free speech:

If you have freckles, you can try these things:

Ah, right away we have an inducement for children to act without first consulting their parents!

1) Make them go away. Unless scrubbing doesn’t work.

And now she’s giving what amounts to medical advice! She’s not a doctor, nor has she played one in any film I’ve seen. And I’m a projectionist, mind you! Let’s get RFK Jr. to worm his way in here and make an official medical ruling!

2) Cover them up. Unless your mom yells at you for using a marker.

See! I told you! She’s anti-parent, anti-family! And if she wants kids to cover up freckles, what’s next, their genitals? This book is looking more and more like a gateway drug to transgender procedures!

3) Disappear.

And now she’s telling them to run away from home. Who the hell does she think she is? The Pied Piper? She blasphemes my ancestor! I’d never tell kids to disappear. Well, not all of them, but you know…

Um, where’d you go?

Oh, there you are.

Oh, now she wants to play dumb! Best leave that act to our new dictator. Ever notice how often he begins an answer to a thorny question with “I haven’t seen it” or “I don’t know her” or “Some people say” or some such dodge that allows him to make a point or float an idea without taking any responsibility for its veracity? He has mastered playing dumb. Moore can only act the part.

There’s one other thing you can do:

4) LIVE WITH THEM!

And now she’s yelling ALL CAPS at American children! Child abuse!

Because after all, the things that make you different also make you YOU.

And there it is! This is America where we only say that we value difference. In truth, it’s just another word for “diversity,” which leads to “equity” and “inclusion.” All the things that drove up the price of eggs, flooded North Carolina, burned Los Angeles, and are now making airplanes fall out of the sky!

No more of that! This is the “land of the free and the home of the brave”–free of strawberry, whatever she means by that, and home of blood red, pure white, and true blue!

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https://variety.com/2025/film/news/julianne-moore-donald-trump-bans-book-freckleface-strawberry-1236310153/

An Agenda of Gender

When I first heard of JD Vance’s failed joke about Greta Thunberg at the Munich Security Conference, I was alarmed.

No matter how far right, how bigoted, how soulless, how snake-like a MAGA politician can be, I thought, no one could sink that low. My concern was not for the already bottom-of-the-barrel reputation of Vance, but for fellow liberals and progressives who might fall for a fake quote. This has harmed us in the past when we haven’t fact-checked.

But it is not fake. Vance actually did say this to an audience of European officials:

“Trust me, I say this with all humor, if American democracy can survive 10 years of Greta Thunberg’s scolding, you guys can survive a few months of Elon Musk.”

No one laughed. Unless you count my laughter at the built-in excuse of “with all humor.” Very much like his dictator boss, a phrase here and there to have it both ways. Yes, I’m serious, but oh, I’m only kidding. “Trust me” indeed!

Much has been made of Vance’s thuggish dismissal of the young Swede who burst onto the world stage as an environmental activist while still a schoolgirl in 2018. Whatever anyone thinks of the attempted joke, there’s no surprise in it. As a senator from Ohio and now as US Vice-President, Vance represents a constituency that includes young men, and perhaps women as well, who fear for their testosteroned pick-up trucks, decked out with supersized tires, gun-racks, American and Confederate flags, upright exhausts, heavy smoke and all. For a few months, the name “Greta” frequently appeared on the rear of such vehicles, always with the F-word before it.

All of which defines two sides of a current issue, and we are all free to pick which one we deem the better–whether we seek what is better for our country or for ourselves, for the world or for our tribe, for our health or for our amusement, for the future or for the present.

Vance’s analogy is ridiculous on its face. No one has ever handed Thunberg the keys to any government agency or the personal data of its citizens. However, what’s being missed and needs attention is Vance’s choice of the word “scolding.”

Ironically, the jab was part of a diatribe against what he, and all MAGA Republicans, consider “free speech.” In Europe, limitations guard against against lies that give rise to conspiracy theories, that in turn give rise to hate groups. For instance, German schools teach students of the Holocaust that happened there. Meanwhile, the Republican administration to which Vance belongs wants to put a stop to teaching American students the history of Jim Crow and segregation that happened here.

To Vance, and to the MAGA Republican Party, “free” means any insults you can hurl once the air has been white-washed of any uncomfortable truth. In effect, Europe does what it can to insure that truth is a condition of free speech, a condition which Vance and his ilk disdain. The result? He was literally scolding Europe while complaining about being scolded by someone making environmental statements with all research and evidence on her side.

And what does Elon Musk have to do with scolding or with Europe? Vance’s reference can only be to the money that Musk is investing in European politics. Musk was the largest donor for America’s first dictator, and now he hopes his money will work its magic in, most notably Germany. Vance, in order to give the boss of his boss an assist, met with leaders of a neo-Nazi group now partly financed by Musk while shunning Germany’s elected leaders.

Perhaps the mention of Thunberg was to take our attention away from America’s new alliance with neo-Nazis, but the word scolding raises another question. Musk is not scolding so much as he is manipulating, something that Thunberg cannot possibly do. Same is true of America’s first dictator. So how do the dictator and vice-dictator discredit and dismiss her?

Vance would never use the word “scold” to describe any male opponent. The word is indelibly part of the Republican stereotype of women who don’t stay in place. Compare it his treatment of Kamala Harris during the campaign, including calling her “trash.” He never said that of Joe Biden or Tim Walz, or of his opponent for Ohio’s senate seat, Tim Ryan.

Trash and scold are coded words. Another is “nasty,” which the American dictator has always been sure to use and repeat when responding to or commenting on any woman he doesn’t like, most notably right off the cuff to women reporters who ask questions he’d rather not answer. Can you name one time he ever used that word to describe a man? Answer: No, there are none.

Given that context, Vance wasn’t so much attempting a joke as voicing dismissal. Greta Thunberg served as the face of what he had in mind. Any and all women who challenge MAGA authority are the targets of his very bad jokes.

Truth is, however, that he is not joking, which is cause for alarm.

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https://news.meaww.com/jd-vance-faces-backlash-for-attacking-greta-thunberg-while-defending-elon-musk-in-europe

Ask What You Can Dodge

Biggest loser of the election has yet to be mentioned.

Since then, we’ve had Veterans Day, the holidays, Martin Luther King Day, the inaugural, and the most truly American event of all, the Super Bowl.

So perhaps Presidents Day is best to finally identify and consider the foremost victim of 2024.

Not a candidate or referendum question or anything on the ballot, but an ideal, a concept, an attitude. The founders never spelled it out, but it is easy to infer from the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers.

Washington implied it in his farewell, as would Eisenhower. Lincoln didn’t say it, but it’s in the spirit of his Gettysburg and Second Inaugural addresses. FDR didn’t say it, but his New Deal put it in action.

Not until 1961 did JFK spell it out: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

Seems safe to say, following an election in which the price at the pump outweighed the price-gouging of those who own the pumps, that Kennedy’s rallying cry for citizenship is dead.

And fitting that the president who met that call to the end of his century-long life would die days before a con artist who sells Bibles is sworn in without ever putting a hand on one.

We’re all consumers now. And nothing more.

My friends still wonder how so many voted for the Republican candidate despite the felony convictions, insults, flagrant lies, praise of dictators past and present, cruelty, crudity, hinted threats of violence, and incoherent speeches—including a weird admiration for Hannibal Lecter and worrying envy of Adolph Hitler.

The answer is glaringly obvious, but no one wants to say it. Well, at my age and with nothing left to lose, I’ll say it:

Over two-thirds of the American electorate want authoritarian rule—one that excuses their indifference to others and conceals their fear and distrust of anyone not like them.

Whoa, you may say, Trump gained just 49% of the vote! Sorry, but anyone who did not vote said, in effect, that they want government left to others.

Ask not what I can do for my country, I don’t wanna be bothered!

Trump gained 31% of eligible voters, edging Harris’ 30%. The landslide was non-voters, 38% of eligible adults. Added to Trump’s vote, by any honest measure, it is a landslide for authoritarian rule.

Doesn’t matter if non-voters consciously want it. The Constitution is premised upon an informed, educated, participating citizenry.

By definition, then, if you do not stay informed, if you do not participate, you forfeit self-rule and welcome, or at least allow, authoritarian rule.

If election day was an alarm, then Veterans Day was its snooze button.

Social media was flush with tributes to veterans who risked their lives in wars they believed necessary to protect democratic rule. I lost count of such posts made by people who avoid politics as fiercely as they’d avoid a skunk, who refuse to see or hear or read any news.

You like irony? While all veterans who began their service after January 1973 did so as volunteers, many who today sing their praises dodge any and all implied commitment of “an educated citizenry.”

The veterans they praise risked death for the USA, but they can’t even pick up a newspaper.

For all the disdain aimed at draft dodgers over the years, it is democracy dodgers who have failed America.

Worse were so-called progressives who refused to vote or voted throw-away-party due to Biden’s uneasy dealing with an Israeli leader wanted by the International Criminal Court for intentional attacks on a civilian population.

A friend’s daughter, a teacher just two years out of college, said weeks before the election that she couldn’t wait for Harris to secure a win so that we could “start attacking her and Biden regarding Israel’s genocidal war.”

With Harris we had a chance if we kept working, participating, making our case known and keeping it in front of officials we could influence.

With Trump? Ask not me. Ask any of our most revered presidents. Or simply read the US Constitution.

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Before the address: JFK asking what Robert Frost could do for the country while LBJ assists with the wind-blown pages. Photo: Associated Press.

This site includes a video of the address: https://www.sott.net/article/269048-President-John-F-Kennedys-1961-Inaugural-Address

At Least the Least I Can Do

When anyone asks why I’d make a 200-mile round-trip in the dead of winter to read for ten minutes in the Moby-Dick marathon, I throw a punch-line:

I’ve been plagiarizing Herman Melville for 45 years. It’s the least I can do.

Almost always gets a good laugh, although it surprises me how nervous some people are with their own laughter. I wonder if it may be due to how suddenly aware people are of AI and the possibility of being fooled by it. Anything I write–indeed, anything anyone writes–is now suspect.

There are some who just don’t get the joke. A newspaper reporter assigned to preview the event this year went silent over the phone at my answer to the question. Finally, as if slowly coming out of hiding: “You mean you quote without giving attribution?”

While setting him straight, I could sense a memory surface after years out of mind. Over fifty years ago, it may well have been clouded over as soon as it happened in a room filled with the smoke of marijuana. Now that the statute of limitations is well past, and now that I can find no trace of the two college friends who took part in this crime, it is time to confess.

No, not a civil or criminal case that might call for a courtroom trial, much less time in jail, but an academic crime. The kind we hear of every few years that might knock a candidate out of, say, presidential primaries, as it did a young Delaware senator named Joe Biden in 1988.

The stakes for Rick, Kitty, and me were far less. A failing grade in a class, or maybe suspension from Salem State College (now University) back in 1970 or ’71, maybe ’72, whichever came first.

Time was a blur back then. The anti-war movement was at its height on college classes, and those of us in it barely cared that we were delaying our degrees a year or two. I went in as Class of ’72, finished my last class in December ’73, and graduated with the Class of ’74.

But we attempted to complete what we could of our requirements at the end of each semester. And it was within weeks of one when I found myself with Rick and Kitty seated in the corner of a room adjacent a large kitchen where a dozen of us had been planning a demonstration on campus. Planning done, it was time to “alter our consciousness” as we said back then.

Rick, a quintessential history buff, or a “nerd” decades before the word was coined, worried over a paper he had to write for a psychology class. One of those liberal arts requirements he had no feel for.

Kitty, a child psychology major, lit up: “Wish that was my assignment. I loved that class!” She took a hit and slumped back in the chair, “I have to write a book report. Charles Dickens! Hard Times! I can’t even look at it!”

A huge fan of Dickens at the time, I lit up: “I read that during spring break. That’s a damn good read. So relevant to now!” I took a hit, “Mine is a history essay. I have to cough up something about the role of Thomas Paine in American independence.”

Rick lit up, “I could write that paper right now.” He took a hit and raised his eyebrows.

It all unfolded like a round of bidding at a card game. Though not one of us was a math major, all three of us immediately did the math. And all three of us took hits getting higher and higher on the pact we made.

Rick proved he wasn’t kidding when he handed me his, or rather my paper on Paine the very next day, footnotes and all. That prompted me to compile what I had already written of what may be Dickens’ most focused novel and turn it into essay form. Delivered to Kitty that night, it may have pushed her into dusting off a paper she had already handed in and re-writing it with different examples before handing it to Rick for his psychology class just two days after our illicit academic and high-as-kites tryst.

Three students terrified of a looming deadline, we all handed in papers a week ahead of time. And we all received As for our, or rather each other’s efforts. Kitty admitted that she toned some of my vocabulary down, such as changing “famished” to “very hungry” to “make it sound more like me.”

“And a good way to increase the word count!” I added. Rick, however, was so put off by the whole subject, that he merely checked the spelling of his name on the title page and handed it in. Read it? He didn’t even scan it.

For my part, I streamlined some of Rick’s phrasing. But only after a careful and fascinated read. That paper taught me as much about American history as any single class or chapter in a history text that I’ve ever seen.

Maybe that helped me rationalize my one slip into plagiarism over fifty years ago. That and the fact that it wasn’t as if I did nothing. I did write a paper, and it did get an A.

Or I could just chalk it up to all those hits of marijuana.

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A Breakfast I Never Forgot

My recent account of a three-day hospital stay drew numerous get-well wishes, for which I am most grateful, but it also opened a debate which took me by surprise.

One friend acknowledged both sides:

Most hospitals I’ve either worked in or was a [patient] serve things to eat that do not qualify for food. Adding insult to injury is that it is most unhealthy and in some cases sickening. But there are a some I’ve encountered that were really fine. One had a daily menu of 3 specials along with their standard choices. And yes, wonderful desserts also. This was done in a gourmet style and quality. I didn’t want to leave but was glad I was able to!

The rest of the responses were all about breakfasts. Never thought I’d hear of people who live near hospitals making a habit of having breakfast there. In each case reported to me, the food is fairly good, and the prices very low. And, as I wrote, breakfast omelets were the best of what I had at Anna Jaques last week. Furthermore, the comments unlocked a recessed memory from 1977:

Hitchhiking from spring break in Arizona back to South Dakota, I took a long-distance ride out of Flagstaff with an English prof to Salt Lake City. A bit out of the way, but it took me out of a snow storm on the high Plains and put me on a city on I-80, a major east-west highway. An English prof and an English grad student. Plenty to talk about. More than that, I had an offer of a place to stay that night and “a breakfast you’ll never forget” next morning.

Didn’t take long after I awoke in the bedroom of a kid gone off to college in Boston (of all places!) to realize that this prof and his wife prized me as an excuse to go out for this breakfast. They never named the spot, and so it was from the backseat of their hippie VW bus that I watched in disbelief as we rolled into a University of Utah Hospital parking lot.

The room was windowless, and the ceiling was oddly high, which made me vaguely uncomfortable and less hungry. I never saw the menu. The wife ordered for the three of us as we were sitting down. Okay, well, the coffee was very good and I was feeling better right away. Then the plates came.

Did I start laughing right there? Probably not, but I’m laughing at the memory of it right now. Three mountains of food! Pancakes the size of hub-caps piled on each with eggs once over and bacon and sausage generously layered in them. Thick, dark maple syrup on the side. All so good I felt a certain largesse that, in those days, I always denied myself. When the couple wouldn’t let me pay, I asked them where the bus depots were, Greyhound and Trailways always within sight of each other don’t’cha know? They took me downtown where my wait for Sioux Falls was just an hour away.

Best ever? Certainly in the top twenty. A B&B in Stratford, Ontario, and another in San Luis Obispo where my daughter got married are up there, as is–or was–a spot in downtown Salem, Mass., in the early ’80s nicely named As You Like It. Helen’s in Machias, Maine, and The Drumstick in Bismarck, North Dakota, both in places where I once lived. The Early Bird not far inland in Plaistow, New Hampshire, where I rendezvous with Cousin Sheila once a month. The Athenian in Seattle, although it has since changed hands, and Mitchell’s in Chicago, though friends there don’t care for it, are also memorable, perhaps because I landed there while traveling.

No, Anna Jaques’ omelets are nowhere near the list, but if I lived within a walk away, and if the price is as low as I hear they are in Beverly and Portsmouth, I might just give my own frying pan a rest now and then. But not tomorrow morning when that skillet will be doing overtime as I attempt to replicate what I had on a drizzly March day in Salt Lake City 48 years ago.

In a hospital. In a windowless room.

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Put three eggs once-over in that shuffle, and more syrup on top, and this is what I was looking at in Utah. https://www.pinterest.com/pin/crispy-bacon-and-maple-syrup-in-a-plate–473300242090370596/

Looking for Laszlo Toth

In the supermarket today, a woman stopped me to ask how the film currently playing at the Screening Room has been doing.

This is common, but today’s inquiry came with a serious tone and an expression of worry which made me think for a moment that she was asking about my hospital stay the previous week. I had to snap out of it:

“Fairly well, I’d say, considering that it’s three and a half hours.”

Make that 3:45, with the built-in 15-minute intermission. The Brutalist is the first film I’ve ever shown with an intermission in my 27 years as a projectionist.

“Glad to hear it!” Smiling, she tapped my shoulder and went on her way.

Maybe she was concerned that such a long film might put Newburyport’s cherished, quirky little cinema out of business, but it’s more likely she was relieved to hear that people were willing to absorb that long a tail of immigration and fleeing the Holocaust.

That much can be gleaned from the ads. But few realize that “brutalist” is an architectural term for a movement that reached America soon after World War II. The style is heavy on concrete blocks and the exposure of natural, raw materials with geometric shapes rather than any decorative design. Best known example in New England is Boston City Hall.

I had forgotten it, even though I always took visitors to see an invigorating and somehow charming example during the two years I lived in North Dakota. Just south of Bismarck on a bluff overlooking the Missouri River, Mary College (now the University of Mary) was a must-see. Tellingly, Mary’s website proudly describes the architecture–without the word “brutal.” As another former Bismarcker just wrote me, “I have fond memories of exploring Mary College. It always seemed as if it had been deserted.”

Yes, it’s inspiring while at the same time putting us in our place. So, too, is the film which seems to fly by more quickly than many two-hour flicks. An intoxicating soundtrack and score sure help. By the time the break arrives, it’s more like a 15-minute intrusion than intermission.

Reminds me of There Will Be Blood, in which the Daniel Day Lewis character is a composite of oil prospectors in Texas in the 19th Century, and Martin Eden, in which the title character is Jack London’s fictionalized version of himself.

Adrien Brody’s performance is as convincing as that of Day Lewis, and the character appears be a composite of two Hungarian architects from the Bauhaus School. “Laszlo Toth” surely owes his high temper to Erno Goldfinger who lived and worked in England after fleeing the Nazis in 1934. But the primary model is Marcel Breuer who fled to the USA in 1937 and whose buildings–many of them churches and synagogues–are easy to find in Pennsylvania where the film is set, as well as in Connecticut. He also designed, as I used to tell visitors to Bismarck, Mary College.

There’s been confusion about this. Is it a true story? Was there a Laszlo Toth? If you can accept “historical fiction” as a classification of books, then yes, this is history told as drama with dialogue filled in to make sense of what we know happened. From Shakespeare’s histories to Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and BlackKklansman, it’s a time-honored form. The Brutalist‘s architectural story is certainly true. What complicates such talk of this film is that, yes, there was a Laszlo Toth.

Unfortunately, Toth was the Hungarian geologist who, after declaring that he was Jesus Christ, vandalized The Pieta with one of his little hammers in 1972. He spent two years in an asylum before disappearing into obscurity. Is this a director’s inside joke, a brutal clash of art?

There’s a parallel for this. Remember Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino? Eastwood played a character named “Walter Kowalski,” same name as a celebrated wrestler in the 1950s-early-60s who went by “Killer Kowalski,” a favorite son of Detroit, same city where Torino is set.

And then there’s the sculptor Peter Wolf Toth, likely a cousin, possibly a nephew, also from Hungary, who landed in Akron, Ohio, before traveling to every American state and Canadian province to create the Trail of the Whispering Giants. When I tracked him down in Ontario in the mid-80s, with a very tall Iroquois just beginning to emerge from a tree trunk, he seemed leery of me for a good fifteen minutes before opening up.

In retrospect, I wonder if he thought I might ask about Laszlo. More than that, I wonder what he thinks of the name’s selection for this film. Then again, the woman in the supermarket never asked about the character’s identity.

What matters is that such stories, no matter how uncomfortable, be told. And that there be places to see and hear them.

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Annunciation Priory, University of Mary, Bismarck, ND
https://www.umary.edu/about/history/our-architecture

The Brutalist: Who Is the Real László Toth?

Peter Wolf Toth and His Trail of Whispering Giants

For the Love of the Games

Two weeks ago, Boston Globe sports columnist Dan Shaughnessy had a piece headlined “If elected King of Sports” which sounded like the ultimate fan’s wish-list. A long-time fan of Dan, I started to click toward the text until something slammed my brakes on.

Why not write my own and then see how close I come?

Upfront I’ll admit that I am writing from the point of view of a television spectator. And that this is limited to the four sports I enjoy watching: Baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Nothing against dozens of other sports, but I see the Olympics too infrequently to have opinions of how they are played. And sports such as tennis and golf seem just fine as they are, perhaps because they are played one-on-one.

Furthermore, given that each sport has different rules on different levels, my calls for change are aimed at the pros: Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, the National Basketball Association, and the Women’s National Basketball Association. Glad to name them here at the start because my first decree is for all of them:

FOR ALL: No more trades in season. It is a conflict of interest to have the best players on teams falling out of playoff contention playing against teams they might join later in the season. Worse, it is a violation of the interests of fans of those teams, especially those holding tickets for seats near the end of a season, to have the players they want to see shuffled off to another city. From the first pitch on opening day–or from the opening game’s kickoff, tap-off, dropped puck–to the crowning of a champion at season’s end, no trades.

FOR the NHL: Leave it as is. Not just that, but use it as an example…

FOR the NBA & WNBA: Delay all foul calls on the defense until they get the ball or it goes out of bounds, as refs do in the NHL. The “continuation” call is a half-assed compromise implemented 20, 25 years ago to address a glaring wrong. Great! They got half, now get the rest and expand it: Give the offense the option to decline the foul and take the ball from out of bounds in the back-court with a full 24-second clock and all defenders confined to the front court. Those agonizing foul-shooting contests that now mar the end of most close games? The very phrase, “strategic foul,” is as much a violation of the game as it is of the English language. Good riddance!

FOR the NBA alone: Home teams must wear white, or a light yellow or powder blue if those are team colors. Visiting teams must wear team colors, orange or darker most prominently. No more black uniforms unless black is a team color.

FOR the NFL: You may have noticed that I also used football as a model for how basketball might be improved. That may help soften and sell my radical plan to make the NFL reasonable again. This could take awhile:

Restore the intentional grounding rule to what it was before the merger. When a quarterback moves a few yards to the right or left and then throws a ball into the twelfth row, that–according to definitions of English words and the common sense of any honest, intelligent person–is an intentionally incomplete pass. The defense made that happen and deserves the reward: Either the quarterback takes a chance with a pass or is sacked. If he throws it at a beer vendor or a beer-drinking fan, ten yards and loss of down.

No more pass interference calls for underthrown passes. Ever wonder how many are deliberately underthrown? The receiver simply turns around and slows down, and what else can the defender do? That’s not interference. That’s a bag job. You can’t reward teams for screwing up.

Restore the rules of kickoff to 20 years ago allow for the surprise and higher percentage on-side kick. Too obvious to explain.

Extend the 4th Quarter rather than have overtime. No more coin-flips. If the game is tied at the end of regulation, the team with the ball continues play from right where it is. However, this will not be sudden death. Instead, a team wins when it goes ahead by at least five points. One field goal will not be enough, but it will force the other team to follow a touchdown with a two-point conversion.

Alternative proposal. If we are to insist on a stop-and-restart at the end of regulation, then make overtimes sudden death with the first possession going to the team that attempted the most two-point and fourth-down conversions during the game. The most important thing is to do away with coin-flips. Rewarding risk is a sporting way to do it.

FOR MLB: I hasten to say that I fully approve recent rule changes such as the ghost-runner in extra innings and the pitch clock. I do it for the record because I know that my call for getting rid of the designated hitter–and restoring the ingenious managerial strategy that has been lost due to it–will label me a neo-Luddite. Okay, so it will never go away, but then why not apply the logic behind it to another strategic moment, especially in late innings of close games?

Make the intentional walk more costly. If we are to be spared the sight of pitchers at the plate, why should we see the bat taken out of the hands of our best hitters in crucial, tense moments of a close game? Like a football coach declining a foul, let a baseball manager decline ball four on a batter to keep him at the plate. Up until ball eight when he will be awarded second base, all runners advancing two bases. For the pitcher’s sake, any foul ball after two strikes will be a third strike, so there’s risk both ways.

Limit the foul balls. After two strikes, the fourth foul ball is strike three, batter out.

Call an error an error. Again, too obvious to explain. And this, of course, has nothing to do with how the game is played, but only how it is scored. Official scorers should be assigned by MLB to games in which their hometown teams or teams to which they have any connection are not playing. They will also determine…

The winning pitcher. No more should we have a starter pitch a gem into the late innings only to have a closer blow the lead and then steal the win when the team rallies back. The official scorer should designate which pitcher gets the win according to how well the pitchers did.

Start times. One for the league itself: No more late afternoon starting times that make towering fly balls and 105-mph line drives impossible for outfielders to see in the glare of a low-hanging sun. These games are scheduled for the sake of a TV schedule, and as such, the start-time violates the integrity of the game. No more. All games start before 2:00 pm or after 7:00 pm local time. Games in domed stadiums are exempted, as they are for my last move…

Weather conditions. As is, the decision to start a game rests with the home team. After the first pitch, it rests with the umpiring crew. Result is that we are watching games played in monsoons for the sake of television contracts and sponsorships. Enough! I say put the decision to delay or postpone a game in the hands of the National Weather Service from four hours before the scheduled start.

Tropicana Field. Blow it up! Now! Put the Rays in Montreal, Nashville, San Antonio, Oakland, Buffalo, Havana, San Juan, the cornfields of Iowa, anywhere that has a vacant MLB-ready park.

Ejection of fans who reach for balls that are in play. Go heavy on the pre-game reminders and put some signage where this happens in the front rows. Just because they missed the ball doesn’t mean they did not attempt to interfere. Get them out, and set the example.

Credit Detroit Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga with a perfect game, June 2, 2010. The umpire admits he blew the call and has made this case to overturn his own ruling. The batter called safe agonized over it because he knew he was beat–though, to his immense credit, he busted it down the first-base line. And replay makes it clear. In fact, it is the play that sealed the deal for including replay in calling games the very next year. Since a change in that one call would have no consequence in the game’s outcome, let replay change it.

For All: No more TV ads featuring players on the teams playing in that game. Another conflict of interest, and I might extend it to a ban on all ads featuring anyone from that league. In other words, you may see Mahomes-Kelce-Reid in ads during a college football game, but not during any pro game, even if the KC Chiefs aren’t in it. Put another way, with all the money poured by sponsors into Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge also poured by those same sponsors into MLB games, isn’t there an incentive for MLB to want their teams–the LA Dodgers and the NY Yankees–to advance to the World Series?

Put another way: Last fall when we heard the announcers and analysts all enthuse that “This is the World Series that everybody wanted!”, did you wonder just whom they had in mind with the word “everybody”?

Like my first rule-change to stop all in-season trades, this has to do with conflict of interest–not just the actual fact of doing it, but the potential to exploit it–or, what in legal terms, it is simply called “the appearance of conflict.”

Who knows? If we started doing it in sports, there’s an outside chance we might recognize it in, say, the Supreme Court or in Cabinet appointments.

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A defunct team, a defunct logo, and a not-quite-yet defunct fan of the Past as much as the Pats.

Call Me Chicken Quesadilla

I roll my eyes at people who complain about spending time in waiting rooms.

Whether at a doctor’s office or an auto shop, awaiting a late train or waiting out unexpected rain, I’m always grateful for the chance to be still, to look out a window, to read a book or magazine, one of which I’m always sure to bring, anything to escape the never-ending demands of my own commitments, if not the necessities of my very existence.

So it was last week when I went for an annual check-up with a specialist who tends to things I’d rather not mention. As my old college pal, Fort Myers, says, “At our age, it’s all about the plumbing!”

So early was it, that I had only coffee before getting dressed and grabbing the still-unopened February issue of Harper’s to take with. Breakfast could wait, I figured.

Dr. Small is a friendly fellow probably half my age who, like me, is a fan of Herman Melville, or at least of the hyper-thinking, kaleidoscopically-talking, bumptious narrator of Moby-Dick. He has attended the marathon reading in Provincetown much like the ones in New Bedford where I read. I wore my new “Call Me Ishmael” t-shirt to give him a laugh.

Dr. Small agreed that breakfast could wait. So, too, could my employment that afternoon and the next day if not also a third day. The word “procedure” was in the air. When I asked if that could wait a couple days, Ismael walked the plank and I was face-to-face with Ahab: “This is serious!”

And I knew it. My check-up had been scheduled for March, but I was noticing a change in color by mid-January. Darker and darker. Maybe that’s why I wore the t-shirt. Ishmael is full of double-entendres. A burgundy shirt might help hide what was about to happen.

About 90 minutes later, I’m in the waiting room of the hospital’s ER. Feeling beat up, though relieved I’d been cleaned out, I was content to sit for hours with my magazine. Guess my appetite had also been vacuumed, but I needed to call an employer expecting me to show up in just three hours, and there are times when cellphones ring out disengagement rather than the usual busy signal. I couldn’t leave a message. After a dozen tries, I called the folks expecting me the next day, and asked them to get through. They agreed, but I had no way of knowing if they were successful.

Two hours or maybe a third of Harper’s later, I was on a gurney up and down the hall for a CAT scan. On the way back, rolling toward ER, I spotted people in the overflow seats out in the corridor. They had been empty when I left, so I was grateful for the early appointment until I remembered skipping breakfast. And I hear a woman’s voice calling my name, “There’s Jack! There’s Jack!” She was in the nearest seat and had a cellphone to her ear while waving frantically.

My arms weren’t doing frantic, nor was my voice doing loud, and the nurse, who knows me as “John” not “Jack,” turned the gurney through the doors closed to the public. I still do not know who the woman was, if she was looking for me or was there for her own problem.

Into a room I went where another nurse told me that things looked good, but I’d have to stay the night for the sake of seeing if they still look good in the morning. They also needed results of tests, the scan, I guess. I responded with one word: “food.” She laughed, handed me a menu, and showed me how to use the phone for room service.

Let me put the menu aside to tell you that all the tests came back in my favor. But they were still taking samples of my O-neg to be sure, and by mid-afternoon, Newburyport was hit by a serious ice storm. Dr. Small’s associate bounced into and around the room like a tennis ball while telling me I could be released, and feeling here and there asking, “Does this hurt?” “How about here?” And “Here?” No, no, and no.

But, he said bouncing back up and away, the storm would be too much for me in my weakened condition. Fine by me. I knew that PBS was airing a documentary on Wilmington, North Carolina, 1898 that night. You know, the kind of history that Republicans are erasing from public education. Might as well see it there. My only regret was taking another dubious chance with the dinner menu.

The menu, ah the menu, oh the goddamned menu!

Knowing that hospital food does not have a great reputation, on that first night I ordered meatloaf, figuring I was playing it safe. They can’t screw that up. Well, the side of green beans was good, but the rest of it was just heavy filler. The lemon meringue dessert was light filler, but the coffee was excellent.

Next morning, a ham-cheddar omelet was pretty good, while lunchtime’s grilled cheese seemed to disappear before it reached my taste buds. But the chocolate cookie dessert offered consolation, and the coffee as good as home. Dinner was so bland, I can’t recall what it was, but the green beans were good, and the chocolate cookie seemed a reward for finishing it.

Waking up after the ice storm, I decided to play safe with the same omelet. Good move! And only then did I notice on the menu that breakfast is served for all three meals. If I’m sent there again, I’ll have it for every meal because of what happened next.

A delay in paperwork they told me, but yes you will be going home. I looked at the sign on the wall: “Our goal is to always release you before 12 noon.” What was left in Harper’s wouldn’t get me past 9:30. Unless I wanted to re-read one environmental horror story after another. And I can never watch TV with any daylight in the windows. A psychological thing, I guess, very depressing.

After noon passed, I was resigned to another hospital lunch. Several nurses were at a loss to tell me the reason for the delay. Maybe Dr. Tennis Ball had bounced over the fence, down the hill, and into the Merrimack. Whatever, lunch was still their serve. Oh, why did I not backhand another omelet? Or volley ten sides of green beans?

For no reason I can recall, imagine, invent, or at this point even believe, I thought a chicken quesadilla would be a good idea. Maybe because the word itself appeared so exotic on an otherwise Father-Knows-Best, white-picket-fence menu. Neither of my parents nor any aunts and uncles would have recognized the word quesadilla, nor would I until a college spring-break took me to Tuscon.

Now I wonder if it’s the hospital’s idea of a joke. For me to ever order it again should be ruled attempted suicide. The stench of it should have been warning enough. How do any health workers let it get past them on the rolling tray from the cafeteria to any room? I held my nose, but the burned, metallic taste was worse than the barf. Where were the green beans when I needed them? I noted the sour cream and salsa on the tray and thought I could smother the taste with either. Neither worked, and after three horrific, self-punishing, self-torturing, death-defying swallows, I pushed it aside, tore open the chocolate chip cookie, shoved it in my mouth and sucked hard and long before chewing.

Coffee helped, but I was shaken in a way that was beyond a bad taste. How can anything that horrible exist? On a menu? On a hospital menu? To take my mind off it, I picked up the magazine only to find that I had read the entire issue. My mind went full-tilt-boogie into free association: Chicken quesadilla in a magazine? Yet more pages of toxic waste? Or just a lettuce to the editor? As an ad? In an app? On a map? In a halftime rap? From a barroom tap? In a maple’s sap? Caught in a trap? Cut the crap! For an opening zap:

Call me Chicken Quesadilla. Meals ago, never mind how many, with little or no salsa in my purse or sour cream in my pocket, I set out to see the culinary part of the coop, leaving behind all mundane cares of green beans and concerns of chocolate cookies…

Couple hours later, about when I befriended a harpooneer named Omelet, I was finally told to get dressed and ready to go home. I looked at the clock. It was just over 25 hours since Dr. Tennis Ball said I could leave if not for a white whale smashing the Pequod outside. That’s just about the time required for the Moby-Dick marathon–which is to say, for the Pequod to sink. To the parking lot Nurse Starbuck rolled me in a wheelchair named The Rachel from where I made my way to my tugboat and am now snug at home.

Call me anything you want. Next time, I’ll bring a novel.

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