|
Donald's Blog
August 24, 2014 Get me outta here Arthur Goldman, a lawyer in suburban Philadelphia, is an oenophile, which means that he takes wine very seriously and collects fancy stuff. Unlike most of us, who look for bargains and enjoy a nice glass of wine, Mr Goldman has a collection of 2,426 bottles which might be worth up to $125,000. And the state of Pennsylvania wants to take it away from him and destroy it. This is because like most of us around here, if he wants to buy wine from out of state, he has it shipped to an address in New Jersey and drives across the border to collect it. Everybody knows this goes on and even Pennsylvania's Bureau of Liquor Control Enforcement knows better than to try to control that; unfortunately however, Mr Goldman started doing it for a small group of a dozen or so like-minded friends, and even if he isn't making a penny, the bureaucrats who work for the most corrupt state legislature in the USA cannot allow him to "sell" wine without their permission. I should say here that the people who work in Pennsylvania's state-owned liquor stores are the salt of the earth, and the stores have a pretty decent selection, even if they can't cater to high-end collectors like Mr Goldman. Nevertheless I am very glad -- SO glad -- to be moving from a state that has never approved of the repeal of Prohibition to a state that is actually undoing another, later prohibition. August 24, 2014 LP I have ranted in this space before about the pop divas who scream out their non-songs and never shut up, so that their so-called music never has a chance to breathe. I speak of Celine Dion, Mariah Carey and others of that ilk. Now there is a new one: Barnes & Noble are currently playing a CD in their stores by a young woman who apparently doesn't have a name; she is known only as LP. She yells at the same volume almost all the way through almost every track. Her voice is not particularly attractive; she seems to yell in tune, but with today's technology we can have no idea whether she can actually sing or not. What we know is that she has no style or taste. Listening to that in the store for a while, all I can think of is that if I had an animal in that kind of pain I would shoot it. August 24, 2014 In Time magazine This week there's an article about the state of the nuclear site in Japan that was destroyed by the tsunami of March 2011, which contains this:
I love that "for example". This is the central issue. Nuclear power would be the answer to a great many of our problems; plants can be built anywhere to be safe (though it will always be foolish to build one in a risky location); the problem of disposal of the waste materials is not even as bad as it used to be: with today's technology there is less of it, and a lot of it can be recycled. But a report commissioned by the Japanese Parliament said that "What must be admitted--very painfully--is that this was a disaster 'made in Japan'." If the clever and pernickety Japanese can't do it properly, who can? Perhaps we may as well turn the clock back 200 years, make our own soap and our own clothes and read at night by candlelight. August 24, 2014 Also in TIme magazine The very amusing Joel Stein writes in favor of the humanities, and points out that he was never going to be a physics major anyway. This line killed me: "This column, believe it or not, is the best use of my brain." I know exactly how he feels. This little bit of blogging I do now and then, the writing I have done in the past (still being read), my correspondence with a few friends, is all I have to offer. The rest is art. At the moment I am listening to a string quartet by Virgil Thomson, which deserves to be better know than it is; in the truck this week when I am running an errand, it's Michael Tippett's first two symphonies which are refreshing me ten minutes at a time. Without the humanities, sentient life would be intolerable.
|
