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Donald's Blog
January 14, 2015 When do the snarl-ups end? I don’t know if it’s because I’m getting old or if it’s my family or what, but each year I seem to enjoy the holidays, then I’m glad when they’re over, then things never seem to get back to whatever normal is. This year has been complicated by the big trek west, easily the most disruptive move of my life, or so it seems. I want to write down the whole story of the move (replacing a piece I managed to insert here six weeks ago), but it's hard to get to it. There has been a lot of trouble with refrigerators which I won’t go into. We bought a new gas cooker and after about two weeks it exploded: wires underneath it arced, apparently (the oven burns gas but has an electric convection fan): popping noises, burning smells and smoke, but no blown fuses and the clock and the lights still work. All very mysterious. On Christmas day we had to take one of our dogs to an emergency vet; something wrong with his butt (he’s fine now). (Every year there is an emergency during the Holidays; in Pennsylvania it usually meant calling RotoRooter, which we will never have to do again, thanks to an unexpected expenditure of several thousand dollars on our sewer line from the new house in Colorado to the street. More about that later.) This morning my son had to go to the doctor; this afternoon his wife leaves for Stockton to see her family and then goes to Korea for a year; tomorrow morning I have to go to work at Barnes & Noble at 7 A.M. shelving, which is no fun because the receiving crew are zombies, unlike most B&N employees the dourest people I have ever known, and in the afternoon Ethne has to go to the doctor... When do I get to go to the doctor? After wearing glasses for 65 years I am having a hell of a time getting my eyes examined: there are ophthalmologists here who don't do prisms. Imagine a mechanic who doesn't have a full set of wrenches. Meanwhile, yesterday I tried to do something on my website for the first time since October: I was updating my Horenstein CD discography with Pristine Audio’s recent issues; I was trying to copy the French ç in the name of the French national radio orchestra (trying to be oh so clever), and the first time it was the wrong font and the wrong size, so I was trying it again, and half the file disappeared, from STRAUSS to the end, including the fascinating story of Chief Records leasing the M4 from EMI… I wasn't going to compile it all over again, so I thought I would just delete the whole thing, but I found an earlier version still on Len Mullenger’s Musicweb site (without the Chief story). Now when I get my CDs unpacked I'll have to check the Horenstein shelf... Do I need this? Would I be better off without the website? One less thing to have on my mind. I don’t even get 60 hits a day on my Encyclopedia. Maybe I should throw the whole damn thing away. Not just yet. I confess I like to see my words in print. Whatever "print" means nowadays. January 14, 2015 America's Bitter Pill Malcolm Gladwell, reviewing Steven Brill's new book about the Affordable Care Act, America's Bitter Pill, writes in the New Yorker:
This is spot on. Gladwell also reminds us again that we might be better off without the president's gatekeeper, Valerie ("the President wants you to bring us your solutions, not your problems") Jarrett, who merely seems to be in the way; but then this has to be blamed on Obama, for needing a gatekeeper like Jarrett in the first place. If I were a president contemplating historic legislation or important foreign policy moves, I would want to know what the problems are likely to be. It is scary that no one seems to have been responsible for the disaster of the Obamacare roll-out. January 14, 2015 Al Sisi gets to the point Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, speaking at Al-Azhar University in Cairo on 28 December, quoted in the Wall Street Journal:
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