Category Archives: Library

It’s hard to leave Texas

Posted on May 14, 2011 | Comments Off on It’s hard to leave Texas

D.G. Meyers, the online editor of Commentary Magazine, who once taught English lit at Texas A&M, but now lives and works in Ohio:

“My four kids are Texans. For twenty years I was an interloper in Texas—an Orthodox Jew who lived without benefit of barbecue. I’ve only been gone nine months now, and I miss the hell out of the place. None of my exes live in Texas, but I left my heart there.”

His A Commonplace Blog is a great stop for new (and old) book advice.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Library, Scribbles, Texana

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So wave your flag

Posted on May 10, 2011 | Comments Off on So wave your flag

Cool song from Aish dot com. Video here. Happy 63rd, Israel!

Via Simply Jews.

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Posted in Blogosphere, Israel, Library

The marijuana laws are a terrible injustice

Posted on May 4, 2011 | Comments Off on The marijuana laws are a terrible injustice

Great quote on the subject from Ann Druyan, the widow of Carl Sagan:

“I really believe that the marijuana laws are a terrible injustice. They make no sense scientifically, ethically, legally, or any way. They cost a fortune to enforce and we incarcerate hundreds of thousands of people who have done nothing else, but possess or distribute marijuana. Maybe it’s because I’m a child of the 60’s and marijuana has been such a positive part of my life. I have never seen it as being addictive, having spent weeks, and months, and days of my life (and years) without using marijuana in any form.For me, it’s a kind of a sacrament, something that should be used wisely and in the context of a loving family existence. There’s a place for alcohol too, but there’s no reason why adults shouldn’t be allowed to do something which not only doesn’t add harm to themselves or others, but is a way to enhance the beauty of life, the beauty of eating, of listening to music, of being with friends and family, of being with the one you love.”

—Ann Druyan in the video podcast At Home in the Cosmos with Annie Druyan.

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Posted in Library, Science/Engineering, Scribbles, Space

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Nhu Quynh: Rule 5

Posted on April 29, 2011 | Comments Off on Nhu Quynh: Rule 5

 

The beautiful Nhu Quynh, whose singing is as sweet as her looks.  Song’s translation here. She grew up in Quang Tri province, now lives in Philadelphia. Photo from a 1998 calendar. (As you can see at the singing link, the photo didn’t require much retouching.)

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Posted in Library, Music, Rule 5, Viet Nam

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Paris By Night

Posted on April 28, 2011 | Comments Off on Paris By Night

Found another good, melodic duet by a Vietnamese man, Manh Dinh and a woman, Y Phung. I decided to look for a possible YouTube video of them performing. Found it (their love ballad begins at 2:10 here, at the Houston Grand Opera, no less) and I noticed, hey, that guy’s wearing an ARVN uniform with jump (or pilot?) wings.

All these thirty-six years after the ARVN (the Army of the Republic of (South) Viet Nam) fled their Northern cousins, the communists?

Turns out to be a performance of Paris By Night, a video series of variety shows featuring 1960s-era Vietnamese ballads from Saigon nightclubs, and some new material.  Like a Broadway or Las Vegas show. The tapes have been produced and sold throughout the world’s Vietnamese refugee community, particularly the Viet Kieu, the Vietnamese Americans, since 1983.

The communist government of Viet Nam considers them a “reactionary cultural product” and tries to block them from sale in the People’s Republic, but they reportedly still get through to the interested via the black market.

The theme of many of the songs is the lost war, hence Manh Dinh (much too young to have been in the war) wearing full ARVN, including U.S. Army jungle boots. It makes sense. Many of the refugees, at least the initial waves, were middle- and upper-middle class urban South Vietnamese. The intelligentsia. With enough discretionary income to buy videos. And to be sentimental about what was, and was not to be.

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Posted in Library, Music, The War, Viet Nam

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Katie Couric resigns. Yawn.

Posted on April 27, 2011 | Comments Off on Katie Couric resigns. Yawn.

You remember Couric, the so-called journalist who did the hatchet-job on Sarah Palin during the 2008 presidential campaign? Well, Sarah’s still viable. Couric is leaving cBS. She’s become even more irrelevant than the network she used to work for.

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Posted in Library, Obituaries, Scribbles

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Yad Vashem

Posted on April 23, 2011 | Comments Off on Yad Vashem

This is the main hall of Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in Jerusalem. Yes, the walls really do lean in that way, giving you the feeling of being trapped and about to be crushed. One is not supposed to take pictures there, but I wanted this one and so I did it secretly. Most of the exhibits are in the rooms off this disquieting hall.

Most of it I knew, having read a dozen survivor narratives over the years and taken a college history course on the Nazis in the 1960s before the teaching of history slid into its present relativistic swamp.

The pictures, the faces and names of the dead, were the emotional part of the exhibits for me. And the simple quotes, especially the short ones: “Today they came and took my only child away.”

For the first time, though, I got a real understanding of why there was not more resistance among the lambs driven to the slaughter: because the Nazis were very careful, right up until they turned on the gas, to make the people think that death was not the aim of it all.

No one getting off those freight cars at the extermination camps, however already grossly humiliated, could be sure what would happen to them and their families until it was too late.

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Posted in Israel, Library, Obituaries, Scribbles

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