Armchair Travel
Thursday, September 27, 2007
  Birdbrain Party
Here's our favorite contestant on "America's Next Top Model " at a recent "Birdbrain Party"


Our pal Catherine



Our buddy Star






Sarah's proud dad
 
Friday, September 21, 2007
  In Case You Missed It
In case you missed the show, here's Sarah all dolled up. You can see an interview at the show's website.
 
  A Great Moment for a Stooges Fan

We had a little party at the GoNOMAD Cafe to celebrate my daughter's television debut on a show called "America's Next Top Model."


As she approached the judges, she had a little piece of paper sticking out of her nose. Then she pulled it out. It was one of those paper wrappers they put on soda straws, so it looked like she was pulling a big white worm out of her nostril.


She learned the trick from her mom's mom Morning Star, but for me, a lifelong fan of The Three Stooges, it was a great moment.


Before your kids are born, you hope they'll be kind, because if they're not, nothing else means much. And then you hope they'll be smart and beautiful. And you hope they'll have some talent that will bring them happiness and satisfaction. But you don't anticipate that they will be funny, at least I didn't, and so that becomes a delightful surprise.


I remember Sarah and I used to make a fake radio show with a tape recorder while we were driving around. Our first opening worked so well, that we used it all the time. I would start out, "We're here live..." and she would say, "Well what else would we be?"


What a wiseguy.
 
Thursday, September 20, 2007
  A Cool Way to Get Around


I saw these guys flying their powered paragliding in a field near my house. It's a cool way to get around if it's not too windy. You can find out more from the US Powered Paragliding Association.
 
Monday, September 17, 2007
  My Friend, Saint Ed
This entry is about a fairy tale that could not possibly have happened, which caused me to rethink my values about truth and justice. It's also about a real-life situation in which a guy well known for doing the right thing was able to save the lives of two really dumb cousins.

The fairy tale was told to me in a bar in Greenville, Massachusetts, by a guy who was talking about "The Lake" in Newton, a community where Italian is the predominant language. I had been a police reporter in Newton and knew somewhat the lay of the land, and everything he told me matched up with what was well known in that area. For instance, the fact that a certain mayor "liked the pretty ladies."

But he also told me things no one outside of a certain organization would ever learn - stories about rooms literally stacked with money. Needless to say, I listened with interest.

At one point I thought, "This guy talks too much to be the real thing," but too much other stuff added up and you have to remember, he had no idea I had worked as a police reporter in the town he was talking about. We were 100 miles away. He thought I was just some guy.

Then he told the fairy tale. It was about a poker game with some leaders of the local criminal organizations and a couple of police chiefs! That could never happen, right?

Well, in the fairy tale, it turned out that some guy had the bright idea to rob this game. In one of those flashes of brilliance in the middle of the night, he reasoned that none of the players would be able to report being robbed without admitting they were breaking the law gambling, and gambling with the other team at that.

Well, not surprisingly, the guy turned up dead, and my chatty friend from The Lake happened to mention his name and I happened to recognize it and he happened to mention the guy who made the decision to euthanize the individual in question, something that might become really important if someone were to decide that this fairy tale could have actually taken place.

I suppose that someone could have been me, but you know, there's only so far I'm willing to go to get a story, and I had a strong sense that this wasn't it. I decided that it was not up to me to interfere with the process of evolution. When the snake charmer gets bit, he ought not to expect a lot of sympathy.

Now my friend Saint Ed, with whom I greatly enjoy playing poker and talking about Hannibal, had a similar situation in his neighborhood. Two of his cousins, one smaller and a little bit smarter and one tall and goofy, were painters. They decided to improve their lot in life by robbing the big game. They put on masks, but they didn't take off their paint-spattered sneakers and everyone knew who they were.

They might have ended up like our brilliant friend in the fairy tale, but the guys who got robbed spoke to Ed, who was, then and now, known as a guy who could straighten things out, and was known also as the cousin of the two knuckleheads involved. The upshot was they gave back the money and went far away, owing their lives to my friend, Saint Ed.
 
Friday, September 14, 2007
  Celebrating Ari Brown-Weeks
Our family had a bit of funny news when my daughter Sarah got picked for "America's Next Top Model." Then we read that Ari Brown-Weeks was killed in Iraq. His dad was one of Sarah's teachers.

Friends of Sarah might like to watch the show, but no one in our family is celebrating, because we're heartbroken.

Ari Brown-Weeks signed up to serve his country. If no one signs up, we don't have a country. That's getting more and more likely. We're taking the most dedicated members of the armed services and making them sorry they ever signed up. Ari Brown-Weeks was scheduled to come back in November.

You can't celebrate when you're heartbroken. Except to do honor to the patriotism of Ari Brown-Weeks.
 
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
  "Lemme Go, Ya Stupid Butthead"
Here's the third image that I mentioned in my entry "Fun in Mesopotamia." These incredibly detailed Assyrian reliefs usually depict mighty warrior kings fighting and storming cities and enslaving and executing and skinning their enemies, and they usually look fairly stiff and static, but here I think the artist really captures the spirit of the lion cub being held by a warrior. Notice that the ancient Assyrians wore wrist watches!




 
  The Frightful Monster H*mbada
This is "the frightful monster H*mbada. The asterisk stands for a 'u'; it's unlucky to spell it out or say it. According to the Lost Horizons Book of Lost Worlds, "Because his ominous features, foreshadowing evil, were sometimes seen in the innards of a sacrificed beast, his face was envisaged as a mass of entrails."
 
  One Last Look
Here's the relief I mentioned in my last entry. These guys are being led away into exile and the guy on the left is taking one last look at his homeland.



 
Monday, September 10, 2007
  Fun From Mesopotamia
One of the types of books I most enjoy collecting are the thin, hard-bound, Time-Life kind of volumes, written for the average reader. They always seem to contain insights I had never known before and photographs that give life to our ideas of ancient peoples.

I have an enormous volume here with me now called "Lost Worlds" with magnficent images from the world of the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Assyrians, the Medes, the Persians, etc.

I found what I was looking for: the historic sources of the Etruscan/Roman culture. One was the arch. That you will find in Babylon: it was general knowledge. The other was a fascination with the entrails of goats and sheep and cattle.

It appears that the Mesopotamians had a sinister god/divinity named H*mbada. The asterix stands for a u; it's bad luck to spell out the name. This particular divinity was always appearing in animal entrails and so is pictured as a confluence of entrails.

The other image in this book that I would like to pass along is an image from Assyria. The reliefs we find from Assyria are always of peoples being massacred, peoples paying tribute, peoples being relocated, but there is this one of a warrior holding a lion cub, and the lion cub, no respecter of persons, is wrestling around trying to get away.

Yet the most moving image, for me, is when the primitive Assyrian artist shows the peoples being led away into exile, and one of the figures is looking backward (to the left), at the life he once knew, while all the other chained figures are looking right.

Here is a man looking back for the last time on what was once his world...
 
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
  A World Without Aunts and Uncles? Unthinkable!
One of our great new GoNOMAD writers, Moumita Deb, wrote about how often Chinese people told her how lucky she was to have a girl and a boy. I think, really, they were saying how lucky she was to have more than one child.

If the one-couple / one-child rule is enforced over several generations, do you know what that means? No brothers and sisters, therefore no uncles and aunts, and, therefore, no cousins! To me, that's a very barren landscape.

According to my favorite mystery writer, Tony Hillerman, it is Navaho uncles and aunts who provide what we might call primary parenting to their nieces and nephews.

Now, I am not now, nor have I ever been, in a position to offer advice to the Chinese people. I'm sure they are doing what you or I might think of: that is, adopting unrelated nieces and nephews.

Kids need people in that position: people who knew their parents when they were just as young and vulnerable as they now find themselves. Adults who actually act as friends and take their side and temper the absolutes of parental judgment.

I just had a wonderful visit with the most wonderful aunt and uncle anyone ever heard of, my Uncle Nat and Aunt Valerie, and I thought of all their kids, my cousins, who are so dear to me, generally speaking, and I give thanks and wonder what life would be like without aunts and uncles and cousins.
 
Literary gadfly Stephen Hartshorne writes about books that he finds at flea markets and rummage sales.

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Location: Sunderland, Massachusetts, United States

Stephen Hartshorne worked in newspapers and magazines around New England for many years and served as Information Officer in the New Hampshire Senate under Senate President Vesta Roy. He worked as a material handler for nine years at the Yankee Candle Company until the company was taken over by corporate weasels. He is currently the associate editor of GoNOMAD.com, an alternative travel website, which gives him the opportunity to correspond with writers and photographers all over the world. He lives in Sunderland, Massachusetts, with his daughter Sarah, a student at Drew University, and their cat, Dwight D. Eisenmeower. This blog is dedicated to his mom, who made him bookish.

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