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Tag: misc

  • The Pearl of the Levant

    The Pearl of the Levant

    Our home in Beirut (near the Greek Orthodox part of town, which my wife swears was just a coincidence).

    If you look closely you can that our 4th floor landing was once a sniper’s nest. The bullet pock marks on the wall are outgoing (incoming can be found if you lean over and look down). It’s amazing (and sad) that there doesn’t seem to be a single building that was around during the war (1975-1990) that wasn’t the scene of a battle.

    But why talk about war when we can talk about cheesy breakfast sandwiches across the street?

    On Hamra Street, looking at the Starbucks. You forget just how many
    chain coffee shops there are until you see them all within three blocks.

    The ever-romantic corniche.

    And the fashionable (and up-scale mall-like boring) downtown.

    With free concerts on five stages.

    From our hike, between Jezzine and Barouk. In the mountains can be found the famous ceders of Lebanon, the oldest of which is about 3000 years old.

  • Fourteen Evenings in Beirut

    Fourteen Evenings in Beirut

    I’m off to Beirut to see the missus, who has been there for a month already. Yes, Beirut, the Pearl of the Levant, The Paris of the East, Chicago by the Sea. 

    Except for rolling blackouts, a near civil-war next door (in the country that imposed peace in Lebanon, naturally), and some burning issues in the city of Tripoli in the north, I hear it’s great this time of year. Wish me luck and an uneventful two weeks. We plan to do some hiking (seriously). Don’t expect much here in the meantime.

    I expect our average evening to unfold something like this:

    I picked up this
    record from the $2 bin at a record store in Greenpoint the other night. Nothing has changed in Beirut since the 1960s, right?

  • “There’s a stigma with these situations”

    Sad and yet strangely touching story about dementia and sociologist Irwin (not Erving) Goffman in the New York Times.

    Once as a cop I remember spending hours with a very nice and well dressed elderly man. He knew all his info except where he lived. I drove him around the neighborhood. I walked with him around the Monument Street Market asking other people if they knew him. Nothing. Finally, as my shift was nearing its end, he saw a church and said he wanted to be dropped off. The church was closed, but he insisted he knew that church and everything would be OK there. So I let him go.

    It felt good to try and help somebody, though I’m not certain if I actually did.

  • Now that’s a playground!

    Now that’s a playground!

    I was looking on google earth and couldn’t help but notice a plane sitting in the middle of a playground in the Bushwick homes. “Cool,” I thought, “Must be fun for the kiddies. I like how it’s painting all kind of trippy colors. I gotta check it out, esse.”
    Then I went to street view and, of course, it wasn’t there. Because, you know, turns out it’s just an actual plane flying.

  • America causes Christian Exodus

    We did so in Iraq. Syria will probably be next. I’m not too confident about Egypt… but that wasn’t our fault. Still, shouldn’t we be more supporting of strong secularleaders?

    I’m not generally one to comment on geo-political religious issues. I’m not really religious, myself. But I do think it’s shame, and strange, that country by country, American presence seems to mark the end of religious communities, usually Christian, that have survived, literally, for millennia.

  • Happy Pulaski Day!

    Pulaski Day was our favorite day off from school, growing up in Illinois. Even then we knew it was special.

    From the Chicago Sun-Times:

    But why is Casimir Pulaski honored here rather than any other Polish war hero from the Revolutionary War? Because Pulaski is easier to pronounce than Kosciuszko.

    There you have it. Here in New York, Pulaski and Kosciuszko are just a couple of bridges between Queens and Brookyln. And we get Jewish holidays off.

  • I’m on Twitter

    For those who believe this whole “new media” thing isn’t simply part of liberal fiction and the socialist agenda, you can follow all my twats (that is what they’re called, right?) @petermoskos.

    Personally, I’m skeptical. I think Twitter is a plot to get us to believe global warming is real and everybody should have health care. What I doknow is that my IBM Selectric IIdon’t lie (And if it does, no worries… I’ve got correcto-ribbon)!

  • Poor Greece

    Poor Greece

    Well the bastards burnt down my favorite movie theater in Athens.

    Perhaps in the big picture of cultural destruction, it doesn’t rank up there with the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan, but man, those red seats were comfy.

    Supposedly the theater will be rebuilt. (And supposedly a train will once again connect Athens and Patras).

    Meanwhile minimum wage in Greece is to be cut drastically to about €600/month. That’s less than $5/hour (and not even that, if you’re under 25). You try living on that. Thank you, Angela Merkle.

    Why should you non-Greek don’t-give-a-damn kind of person care?

    Because it’s the Republican solution. Cut spending. Cut pay. Balance the budget. No welfare. Limit unemployment to a year. Don’t worry so much about getting the rich to pay their taxes (after all, if they paid tax, they may not produce all those jobs for swimming pool cleaners).

    Screw the economy because it feels morally right. Gotta balance the budget. F*ck the working poor. After all, I heard on the radio they’re kinda lazy.

    Bet it won’t work.

  • Misquoted in Salon

    Not me. But my father. And he died in 2008.

    Linda Hirshman seems to have a bone or two to pick. She writes in Salon.com:

    If any evidence of this [“warfare is the business of heterosexual men, the penetrators”] agenda were needed, the same person who created and defended the dreaded “don’t ask, don’t tell” — military sociologist Charles Moskos — was the loudest advocate of excluding women from any combat roles.

    Woman’s “compassionate nature” Moskos speculated in a 1990 Washington Post op ed, would be a real hindrance.

    That doesn’t sound like my father. It just didn’t ring true.

    So I looked up the Washington Postop-ed (“Women in Combat: The Same Risks as Men?” Feb 4, 1990) and could not find those words or that meaning. I wonder where the quote is from. Regardless, it seems low to misquote a dead man.

    In fact, in that op-ed my father made exactly the oppositeargument: “The problem of a trial program of women in combat roles is not that it will prove women cannot fight, but that it will prove they can.” He thought society wasn’t ready to have women forced into combat situations. Twenty-two years ago, he might have been right.

    But I guess such facts get in the way of Hirshman’s agenda.

  • Merry Christmas

    Merry Christmas

    I hope everybody goes gaga when they find a nice new Victrola under the tree!

    [thanks to Bob]