Bill Murray's Blog, page 68
February 15, 2018
What the World Has Been Waiting For
On the other hand, something with real value. At last! A machine that sorts M&Ms by color:
February 14, 2018
Scratch This
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Is this a thing? C’mon. Honest?
I guess you can actually get out there in the world, or you can hang back and try to sell dumb stuff like this for the amazing price of just “$23.99, or 46% off.”
46% off what?
February 13, 2018
Brash
In the early 1990s I had the good fortune to accompany an Atlanta-based group called the Friendship Force, founded by Presbyterian minister Wayne Smith and then Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter, on a trip to Jerusalem.
The Friendship Force organized home stays, pairing, say, people in Atlanta, Georgia with people in Tbilisi, Georgia, to promote cross-cultural familiarity and understanding.
The idea behind that particular trip was for American Jews, Palestinians and others (like me), to stay in one another’s homes, with the aim of extending cultural understanding across religions just a little bit, day by day, step by step.
With much less background out in the world at that younger age, I sat astonished with, I think, everybody else in our well-meaning little peacenik assembly, when a young Likud parliamentarian, fluent in English from his high school in Pennsylvania and later MIT, bounded up to the podium to caution us on trusting those damned Palestinians, whose Green Line was within nine miles of the Mediterranean Sea at the closest point, and who had designs on it all!
Benjamin Netanyahu’s remarks were perhaps not the most appropriate welcome to our particular group.
The Prime Minister has been a public figure since that day, more than twenty-five years now, much of an adult life. And now we read today (New York Times):
“The Israeli police recommended on Tuesday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu be charged with bribery, fraud and breach of trust, casting a pall over the future of a tenacious leader who has become almost synonymous with his country. The announcement instantly raised doubts about his ability to stay in office.”
This thing and others like it have been dogging the Prime Minister and his family for years:
“The Netanyahus have long occupied pride of place in this crowded field of wealth-seekers. In 1994, a Jerusalem paper wrote about the family’s penchant for dining and dashing. Their appetites grew after Netanyahu became prime minister for a second time in 2009: a $2,500 contract for gourmet ice cream at their official residence, and a $127,000 bed installed on a government plane so they could nap on the five-hour flight to London. Netanyahu’s wife, Sara, has been investigated for stealing patio furniture, and his son, Yair, for accepting free Mariah Carey tickets. None of this seemed to put a dent in the Netanyahu family’s political fortunes. But it all made for good headlines.”
I wonder if all this time ought to be enough for any one person to be in proximity to power, particularly in a small and tightly-knit land like Israel, but maybe, anywhere at all.
February 10, 2018
That’ll Show ‘Em
To the long list of stiff upper lip-wielding Brits, including the Duke of Wellington, who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo, Sir Francis Drake who defeated the Spanish Armada and Henry V, the king who defeated the French at the Battle of Agincourt, we may add King George VI, father of the current Queen Elisabeth.
King George woke one desperate May morning in 1940 to a call from Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands, who was just then desperately holed up in an air raid shelter in a palace garden against an ongoing assault from the Germans.
“She begged me to send aircraft for the defense of Holland. I passed this message on to everyone concerned & went back to bed.”
Attaboy.
Quoted in Last Hope Island by Lynne Olsen.
February 9, 2018
Weekend Reading
It often happens here in Appalachia that our dreams turn to spring and our weather turns torrential, and this weekend we are told to expect more than an inch of rain. We do not, however, anticipate rain like in the photo. In that event, our few short days in Guatemala were attacked first by a volcanic eruption that stranded us there for a few missed days of work (the volcano that ate our homework) and then by a tropical storm off the west coast that flooded our little town and required a careful evacuation to Guatemala City.
None of that is on tap for this weekend here. There should be ample time for staying out of the rain with a few good reads.
I have been instantly engaged by this week’s new arrival in hardback, No Friends But the Mountains by Judith Matloff. It looks like a book to be enjoyed slowly, maybe a chapter at a time across a few weeks. Ms. Matloff describes conflict at altitude, the irascible nature of mountain folk in Albania, Central America, the Himalaya and Caucasus regions. In her introduction, Ms. Matloff hits on something I’ve always thought about the Assad Alawites’ peculiar version of Islam up in the Latakia Mountains, when she writes, “Religion imposed by colonial outsiders fails to take firm root, or is incorporated into indigenous beliefs.” My impression is that the Alawites have been up in those hills so long, the outsiders were Arabs bringing the original Islam.
Shorter form, try The Edge of the Petri Dish by Charles Mann at thebreakthrough.org, subtitled “Can Humankind Avoid Its Biological Destiny?” Mann is known for 1491, a survey of the Western Hemisphere world awaiting the Europeans.
I mostly agree with Damir Marusic’s The Dangers of Democratic Determinism at The American Interest (There is a paywall after one article per month). He tries to explain Eastern Europeans’ reluctance to admit refugees, saying “the events of 1989 are best understood not as a casting off of the false god of communism and an embrace of universally true western values” (as Western Europeans and Americans understood them) but rather as “emancipation from crumbling empires.” The last thing you want to do when you get your nation back, Marusic suggests, is dilute it right away with foreigners.
At thebaffler.com, Yasha Levine asks, “Why are internet companies like Google in bed with cops and spies?” in an article titled Surveillance Valley.
And one more: As we peek through our fingers at Cape Town to see what will happen next, consider The African Anthropocene by Gabrielle Hecht at Aeon.com, subtitled “The Anthropocene feels different depending on where you are – too often, the ‘we’ of the world is white and Western.”
Have a lovely weekend. I leave you for now with a couple more photos from that weekend in Guatemala.
February 7, 2018
Quotes: The People’s King
King Haakon VII of Norway, as quoted by Lynne Olson in Last Hope Island,
“was known to his people as ‘Herre Konge’ (‘Mr. King’) rather than ‘Your Majesty.'”
February 6, 2018
Quotes: On the Berlin Wall
Remarkable. According to Leonid Bershidsky writing on another matter at Bloomberg, the Berlin Wall has been down now for as long as it stood:
“The Berlin Wall divided the city for 28 years, two months and 28 days starting Aug. 13, 1961. It ended on Nov. 9, 1989, when Guenter Schabowski, a top East German official, erroneously announced that crossing into West Berlin was now permitted. Now that the same amount of time — 28 years, two months and 28 days — has passed, it’s fitting that the next German government is expected to end the solidarity tax created to even out economic differences between both sides.”
These photos are from a few weeks later, New Year’s Eve in 1989, the only time I’m pretty sure I was where the most important thing happening on earth was happening that day.
Just off to the left of the midnight photo, David Hasselhoff had been standing way up in a bucket raised above the crowd, singing all night. Okay, so there’s no accounting for taste.
February 4, 2018
No Need to Visit This Website
I expect this may become a series. Here I may, from time to time, suggest mostly useless websites, but websites with perhaps some redeeming features. Or, perhaps not. Let me know what you think.
Here’s the first try. It’s a waste of time. Don’t click this.
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