Fires and a battle

Trying a different typeface today.

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Terrible fires are threatening expensive homes in Southern California. We called some friends there, who told us that the fire was about a mile away from their house. The firefighters are there, hundreds of them, trying to get the thing under control. We pray the weather will help keep the danger from spreading.

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The Battle of Buçaco

When driving through northen Portugal, stopping at a small town north of the university city of Coimbra on the way to the beautiful forest of Buçaco will be a treat. The town is called Mealhada, and it has one speciality that will appeal to connoisseurs of hearty Portuguese fare: leitão assado, roast suckling pig. Along the road that runs through the town are restaurants by the dozen with billboards advertising this local delicacy. Meals there tend to be gargantuan: heaping platters of leitão, seafood and rice, with the customary Portuguese accompaniments of green salad and batatas fritas (French fries), fresh-baked country rolls, and a chilled bottle of the fine green wine called vinho verde branco. And for dessert, there is toucinho do céu, the sweet bacon of heaven, or pudim molotov, a frothy, eggy confection said to have been named for the notorious Soviet Foreign Minister rather than the lethal cocktail. After a meal like that, the seatbelts in your car will have to be readjusted before you resume your journey up the road towards the imposing Palace Hotel in the forest of Buçaco.

It was here in September 1810 that Arthur Wellesley, the 1st Duke of Wellington, with 49,000 men, half of them untrained Portuguese recruits, defeated a superior French force of 66,000 trained men. On a ridge overlooking the valley, the Iron Duke and his Portuguese Caçadores (hunters) gained one of the great victories of the Peninsular War.

“The Allied army suffered a loss of only 1252, half of whom were Portuguese . . . . French soldiers never fought more courageously than at Busaco, but their commanders had assigned them impossible tasks. So convinced was Massena of French invincibility that he had rushed headlong into a battle without proper reconnaisance . . . . The French . . . were surprised by the change in the Portuguese army which could be said to have come of age on that 27th September. The amalgamation of British and Portuguese units produced divisions whose quality was essentially equal to an all-British force of the same size.” (Jac Weller, Wellington in the Peninsula 1808-1814, London, Kaye & Wood, 1969.)

“ [The French] sent in eleven more battalions under General Marchand on the left of the two ravines. To them, at least, an easy victory seemed assured, for only four battalions, and these all Portuguese, faced them on the summit. They knew nothing of what a small nation in arms, inspired by Wellington and organized by Beresford, could do. Its young soldiers delivered a fire as steady and deadly as its veteran British allies. For all his resolution Marchand had to retreat from an impossible enterprise . . . . Massena’s first trial of the despised Portuguese army and its leopard partners had resulted in 4600 French losses to 626 British and 626 Portuguese -- an exact Allied sharing of casualties as of valour.” (Elizabeth Longford, Wellington -- The Years of the Sword, New York, Harper & Row, 1969.)

There is a small chapel and museum on the grounds of the Hotel, and a monument celebrating the victory on a hill behind it.

San Francisco

Herewith some typical shots of one of America's most beautiful cities.

Just so . . .

Fall is here. You go out the front door to pick up the paper, and the flavor of the morning air tells you that as much as the fallen leaves. Northern California this time of year offers some surprises in its weather. A thunderstorm may blow in one day, then comes a hot, dry day twenty-four hours later, followed by a cool, overcast day.

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Friends are important. Old friends especially, some of whom we have known since our youth. There are times when friends can and do care more than one’s relatives. As they have demonstrated.

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We are surrounded nowadays by electronic gadgets in great variety, most with their always-on green or blue lights. Wonder how much energy would be saved if these gadgets were not always lit up. Gas prices are rising ever higher.

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The future of film photography is uncertain, what with the advent of digital imaging. I still have a big collection of color slides that have to be scanned and transferred to my computer. Also reels and reels of old movie film, and boxes of video tape in different formats. Memories in every bit of them; enough to keep me busy for several winters.

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I was thinking about those popular ‘food supplements,’ those ‘natural’ pills, capsules, or tablets, and sometimes powders, purporting to contain health-giving or -restoring properties. On their labels are statements containing vague claims (in which the word ‘may’ appears with commendable regularity to defend against the threat of litigation) about their powers to maintain or improve health: “may help mental clarity and memory retention by maintaining healthy blood flow to the brain”; “may lead to a feeling of mood elevation”; “regular use may help maintain a healthy prostate”; “may be suitable for supplying bulk in the treatment of constipation.”

How can a person possibly know whether such food supplements will do any good, given the hesitancy and vagueness of the words on their printed labels? References to ‘clinical tests’ in the literature might suggest some obscure result or other, yet there is seldom any medical authority provided to support their claims. Not only that, but there are so many of these products clamoring for our attention and our dollars—how can we possibly decide which ones to pick?

What on earth do we do? The answer is really quite simple. We rely on advertising and on word-of-mouth recommendations. We are quite prepared to ingest these food supplements by the bottle because someone we trust or admire has been telling us that they worked. (It helps if an ad features a celebrity – usually one past his or her prime but flashing a nice smile and a sincere manner.) Heaven only knows if the food supplement will work for us, but, by Jove, we’re willing to take that chance because so-and-so said this or that about it. Just as we may be ready to try the latest fad restaurant that a friend or a critic suggests, so we will now try the latest fad food supplement. And so we go out and buy the stuff, increasing our collection of bottles of echinacea, ginkgo biloba, saw palmetto, St John’s wort, shark cartilage, and others whose names we can’t begin to pronounce, and by so doing we propel the food supplement industry to ever greater profits.

The Normandie and the Graf Zeppelin

It has been a few days since my last entry, due to houseguests and a wedding followed by a family gathering. The guests have since left, and it will be several weeks before the next one arrives. We enjoy the company of our houseguests, but we must recognize that their presence presents an added dimension to our daily routine, which has to be adjusted to suit all concerned.

“Goodbye, Lenin” [2003] is a German flick I enjoyed. I played the DVD on my computer screen rather than on the living room TV, as not everyone likes movies with subtitles. The movie was a lighthearted comedy-drama centered on the fall of the Berlin Wall and German reunification. There are some hilarious moments in it, but I don’t intend to spoil it for you by giving anything away.

My bedside table has a pile of half- and quarter-read books, ranging from one about the liner “Normandie” , perhaps the most beautiful passenger vessel that ever sailed the Atlantic; a treatise on digital video editing, “The Orientalist” by Tom Reiss; and Christopher Hitchens’ “Why Orwell Matters”. I used to be able to read until the wee hours when I was younger. Nowadays, it takes less than a chapter, and sometimes only just a couple of paragraphs, before I fall asleep.

As much as I would have loved to have traveled on the “Normandie” during its heyday in the 1930’s, I would also have traveled on the “Graf Zeppelin” on its round-the-world trip in 1928 .

When I was a kid, one of my favorite toys was a tinplate Zeppelin airship made in Germany. It was silver-colored, had little twirling propellers and a gondola with lithographed passengers and crew at the windows. It was about a foot and a half long and about the diameter of a baseball at its midsection. There were little wheels at the bottom so you could push it along the floor. It may have had a clockwork motor also, but I can’t be sure about that.

That toy Zeppelin would command quite a decent price today among collectors.

More Pictures

Autumnal Equinox

I would like publicly to thank all my friends who have commented on this blog, and offered encouragement and ideas. These friends are located all over the world, and as far away as England and Australia. But most are of course in the U.S.

After hurricane Katrina, there is another,possibly more dangerous one named Rita headed towards the same devastated area. It's due to make landfall on Saturday, and winds currently have been measured at 175 mph. Truly a terrible, terrible storm.

The leaves are beginning to fall, and the equinox brings to mind a Frank Sinatra ballad about growing older. It's called "September of My Years", and a more poignant summation of life's autumn can hardly be imagined - not even the Chairman's "It Was a Very Good Year" or "My Way" can capture the sadness of lost love and the passage of time. We miss ya, Frankie.

Big-screen TV

Well, it's come to this. Our 27-inch Sony, circa 1988, though still working well, will soon be replaced. To keep up with the times, we have decided to get a new television -- one of those new large high-definition jobs (plasma, magma, whatever) that looks like a large flat painting that you can hang on a wall.

Along with that, of course, we have to get a new a/v system, meaning a new home theater receiver with all the bells and whistles, new loudspeakers ('high end', so-called), new recording and playback devices, even new wires (monstrous they are these days). Having done the required homework on the subject, I am still wrestling with the esoteric terms and acronyms that the technology comes with.

But we spend enough time in front of the darn televison anyway, and we may as well go with the flow and update the system.

Itsy-Bitsy Spider

This little guy resides upon an intricately constructed web just outside my kitchen window. He's been growing quite steadily, though I have never seen evidence of any food leftovers on the web. Maybe he eats up his victims to the very last morsel.

When the morning sun hits him just right, his legs are luminous, almost transparent.

My wife happens not to like spiders. Indeed, she's terrified of them. But so far she has not asked that I get rid of this one, for which I am grateful. I'm actually growing rather fond of him.

Or it may be a her, for all I know.

Time

The Internet reminds me of the Borges story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” since it lends itself to such an immensity of possibilities across space and time, linking and re-linking in endless permutations.

The time spent at this keyboard could no doubt be put to better use in attending to other duties awaiting our attention. Other duties that wait, and wait, and wait. But never fear, if they do not get done, they may soon be forgotten, and weigh on us no more.

Cameroon and Cameroons

A history, real and/or imagined

In the early 1400’s Portuguese mariners, urged on by Prince Henry the Navigator from his famous naval school at Sagres in southern Portugal, began a series of voyages that would lead to the discovery of the sea-route to India, to Malacca and the Spice Islands, and ultimately to China and Japan. The names in the history books epitomize Portugal’s Golden Age – Vasco da Gama, Bartolomeu Dias, Diogo Cão, Gil Eanes, Afonso d’Albuquerque, Jorge Álvares. These are some of the famous seafarers who made those daring and dangerous voyages into the unknown, at a time when maps and charts were primitive and warned of sea-monsters, when men thought that a giant named Adamastor guarded the edges of the maritime world, and that the ocean near the equator would boil.

It is surprising that these famous men never made a discovery that was named after them. The places they visited, and where they erected carved stone pillars (padrãos) to commemorate their landing, were typically named for the saint whose feast day it was, or a local topographic feature, or an item of flora or fauna seen along the way. The discoverers appeared to have been modest men, at least when it came to naming the places they discovered.

There are, however, a couple of notable exceptions. Their names are Tristão da Cunha and Fernão do Pó.

Tristão da Cunha was an admiral. Sailing in the South Atlantic on his way to India, be came upon three islands. The largest of these, a volcanic cone 2000 meters high, is even today called Tristan da Cunha. Along with some other remote and desolate island groups in the South Atlantic, it remains a part of the once-global possessions of then-great Britain. In 1961 the volcano erupted, causing the inhabitants to evacuate to Britain. Some three hundred later returned, making a living from fishing, canning, and the sale of postage stamps. (Tristão da Cunha the admiral was an emissary to the Papal court, and his son Nuno, who captured Basra in what is today’s Iraq, was appointed governor of India.)

Fernão do Pó (or Fernando Po) is another Portuguese mariner who gave his name to an island. Reaching the Gulf of Guinea at the point where the African coast again turns southward, Fernão and his men found a river full of shrimp (really a kind of crayfish) and so they called it Rio dos Camarões, River of Shrimps. The river today is known by its native name, Wouri, but the country there has been called Cameroon – in one spelling or another – ever since Fernão’s crewmen had their fill of shrimp. The main topographic feature in the country is Mount Cameroon. Fernando Po the island later came under Spanish control, along with a small parcel of real estate on the mainland called Río Muni. Of the later career of Fernão do Pó, mariner, not very much is known.

Through the ensuing centuries, Cameroon was occupied by different European colonial powers. France, Britain, and Germany controlled it at various times – the French spelt it Cameroun, and the Germans, Kamerun. Under German control, Kamerun was known also as German West Africa. After the First World War, the two biggest colonial powers in Africa, France and Britain, signed an agreement dividing Kamerun between them. So for a while it became the Cameroons, British and French. In 1960 French Cameroon gained independence to become the République de Cameroun. In British Cameroon a year later they had a vote; the northern part aligned itself with newly-independent Nigeria, and the southern part with the new république.

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The history of dice is a very old one, going way back to the ancient civilizations of Sumer and Egypt. The Greeks and Romans also were fond of rolling dice. Julius Caesar made important decisions (such as whether to cross the Rubicon) on a roll of the bones. Roman soldiers at the Crucifixion gambled (presumably with dice) for Christ’s bloodstained robe.

There is a dice game for two to ten players, using ten dice, a dice cup (usually a leather-bound one well-conditioned with the sweat from many hands), and a score sheet. The maximum number of points in this game is 214, and it works something like this – 5 points for 5 Aces, 10 points for 5 deuces, 15 for 5 treys, etc., 21 points for a low straight (1-2-3-4-5-6), 30 points for a high straight (2-3-4-5-6), 28 points for a full house, and 30 points for a five-of-a-kind. It is a dice game with poker undertones that in times past was popular in social clubs. The game is known as Cameroons.

What might be the connection between Cameroon the country and Cameroons the dice game? It is a fair question, but one for which our research has not yet come up with a clear answer.

Still, it is not too difficult to imagine a scene in Equatorial Africa in 1919. A French colonial administrator and his British counterpart sit down to dine at the former’s residence in Douala. Their job is to decide what to do about the new colony their governments have jointly inherited through an agreement of the League of Nations.

Having vanquished their common German enemy in The War To End All Wars, Britain and France must now define the boundaries of their new possession. How to do so in a gentlemanly way? A game of billiards, perhaps? No, that is hardly a suitable method to settle such complex matters as water and mineral rights, forest resources, population shifts, access to the excellent German-built railway.

A game of chess, then? No, again that would be too simple; one side wins, the other loses. They refill their brandy snifters, light up cigars.

The Frenchman has an idea. It is too great a responsibility for just two people to decide these important issues, n’est-ce pas? Might he suggest the participation of five members of the respective staffs on either side, one for each of the issues to be decided. He proposes a dice game such as that he had played while a cadet at St. Cyr. At the end of the game the points are added for each of the several issues. One side wins on one, the other side may win on another. No one really loses. Paris and London will be none the wiser. The Englishman concedes by saying, jolly good, but do tell, what is this dice game called? Ah, the Frenchman says, since we are dividing one Cameroon into two, let us call it simply Cameroons.
D’accord? 2



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1.Magellan (Fernão de Magalhães) was of course sailing under the patronage of the King of Spain, so he does not count. Besides, he sailed southward off the east coast of South America, and found a way into the Pacific Ocean through the strait that still bears his name. An archipelago named Fernando de Noronha lies off the northeastern coast of Brazil, with a fort whose name is Fortaleza dos Remédios (an interesting bit of trivia for those with that last name). On the main island are both a national park and a penitentiary (à la the old Alcatraz in San Francisco Bay).
There is another group of islands in the Indian Ocean called the Mascarenes (named for a certain Mascarenhas); they are Mauritius, Reunion, and (after another Portuguese discoverer) Rodrigues. We shall leave their story for another time.

2.The history books tell us that the French ended up with four-fifths of the territory and the British only one-fifth.

Harvest Moon

Tomorrow is the Mid-Autumn Festival, the fifteenth day of the eighth month in the Asian lunar calendar. The moon will be at its fullest. Delicious, if cloyingly sweet, cakes (‘the size of hockey pucks’, someone wrote) will be shared and eaten in many households in China. I prefer the ones without the salted egg yolks in the center, the ones with only lotus seed paste as filling. You bite into it, past the lacquered pastry crust, and the khaki-colored filling, about the consistency of spackle, will stick to the roof of your mouth. Wonderful stuff, but laden with calories and saturated fat.

I just read a story in the latest issue of the New Yorker about a New Orleans teenager who had just started twelfth grade in Brooklyn, and the journey that her mother and she had to make to get there, through their initiative and determination. A wonderful story and a tribute to the human spirit.

Listening to Music

After a tough day -- at work, at play, whatever -- there is hardly a better way to relax than comfortably listening to music.

By music I mean something classical, preferably with a violin solo.

Which is what I am doing at this very moment. The piece happens to be "Poeme" by Fibich. If you need your brain soothed, this is the easy way to do it.

Next in line comes the "Adagio" from "Le Pavot Rouge" by Reinhold Gliere.

Day of Prayer

Another brilliant September morn.

At the national Cathedral in Washington, a service honoring the dead from the devastation of Katrina.

Wonder how many mothers will now name their baby daughters "Katrina"?

Let's all hope that the recovery will be swift and unimpeded by partisan bickering.

Poem

I wrote this after reviewing some color slides I had taken in 1984.

Holy Week in Guatemala City

Everything shouted: Tourist!
Betrayed by height and skin tone:
sallow and solitary in a landscape
of purples, reds and browns;
he watched the procession go by.

White-veiled school girls,
boy scouts in khaki,
matrons in black,
chanting in unison,
fingers busy on rosary beads
of onyx or jade,
their Mayan faces
devoutly gleaming.

Flower-decked floats
swayed in the noon sun;
people in the crowd
crossing themselves
to see the bleeding Christ
on a velvet-covered pallet,
borne by a phalanx
of squat and sweating men
over the cobblestones
across the plaza
towards
the cathedral

Random thoughts

I called this blog the "Daily Muse". Which looks like it may be a misnomer, as this blogger has missed a couple of days.

Well, here I am back again, with some thoughts on movies.

Two that I can recommend for sure are now out on DVD:
"The Long Engagement", a French flick that seems to have everything in it -- war, love, history, loss, gorgeous cinematography, wit, story, poignancy. Adrienne Tautou stars. "Zhou Yu's Train" with Gong Li and Tony Leung -- if you like trains, this is your movie. There's also love, terrific shots of the Chinese landscape, though the story line is a bit tough to follow.

You can tell I like foreign movies. My next is "Monsieur Ibrahim", also a French one.

Getting late, ought to turn in. More tomorrow.

Adding some pictures to this blog

Still trying to figure out how to do this. Got a whole slew of photos that I want to add, a few at a time. Mostly landscapes and cityscapes. Let's see if this works.

Well, how about that? Here we go.

About camera collecting

Over the years I have been collecting cameras and other photographic paraphernalia, and now my collection is outgrowing the space for it. Mainly I collect the older mechanical, manual-focus, metal-bodied cameras manufactured before 1970 (if you will pardon the alliteration). In the earlier part of the 20th century, the Germans had the field almost entirely to themselves, producing the classic Leica and Zeiss cameras, which today are so prized as collectibles. Then around the middle of the century, the Japanese came into the picture, and Nikons and Canons, which began as copies of the German products, won the hearts and pocketbooks of the serious picture-taking public.

There is beauty in these fine mechanical cameras with their shiny chromed brass bodies, and their black vulcanite coverings. On eBay these would today be classified as 'vintage' cameras. Their mechanical shutters are still working (at least mine are) but those with built-in light meters are likely to be of questionable accuracy due to their age, and sometimes because the old mercury batteries are no longer available. Though I have some cameras with selenium cell meters that still work remarkably well.

I would sometimes take one of these finely-crafted artifacts in my hands and put it through its paces, clicking the shutter at different settings, setting the exposure and focus rings, and generally playing with it as though it were a toy. Just handling it provides a tactile pleasure that surely the inventors way back when must have considered when they produced these beauties.

Besides still cameras using film of various sizes (mainly 35mm), I also collect 8mm and 16mm movie cameras. The mechanism is clockwork, and the craftsmanship of these, such as the Swiss Bolex and the German Nizo cameras, are such that, though they may be half a century old, they purr like new.

Perhaps I have been fortunate in finding pristine examples that have hardly been used by their former owners. Most of my collection is double-run 8mm. If one can even find the film today, chances are that finding someone to process it will be both expensive and difficult.

I'm just getting started in the blogosphere

Well, time will tell whether I can keep this up, because there are so many things to occupy my time nowadays. Still, it's worth a try.

Today I took down the flag from in front of my house. It had been up to commemorate 9/11 yesterday.

The series "Rome" on HBO is very well done, and certainly worth spending an hour a week to look at. Most of the actors are British. The fellow who plays the centurion is a Vladimir Putin look-alike. There is a lot of sex and violence, but it's about par for the course for HBO offerings -- as in "Sopranos", "Deadwood", and "The Wire".

I am working on a new oil painting 24"x28". It's a California landscape. I'm happy to say it's turning out quite well.

Been doing some reading. Kazuo Ishiguro's "We Were Orphans", which I rate lower than his "The Remains of the Day"; John Le Carre's "Absolute Friends", a real page-turner, though ultimately the author's anti-Bush, anti-Blair stance is a bit over-the-top; and finally, just finished Sarah Dunant's "The Birth of Venus", this last recommended for women, art-lovers, and historical novel buffs.

I'm not exactly sure what goes into a blog. May have to do some refining of my style and material as time goes on.