Philadelphia 2008, Day 2

LATER POST: Despite some rough moments earlier, a very nice evening. Kate had a review of Dante & Luigi's Corona del Ferro, (Crown of Iron?), allegedly Philadelphia's oldest Italian restaurant, so we all packed up and went there. A great place, out in little Italy somewhere and apparently near nothing at all, and had a tremendous meal. (WArning: no credit cards, though out of town checks were okay.)

Coming home, sharing a cab, me in the front seat with the driver.

"Where you from?"

"Tunisia. Do you know it?"

"Sure. I took my honeymoon in Sidi Bou."

"Sidi Bou Said?"

"Of course. And I've interviewed your President."

"Who?"

"Ben Ali."

"Ben Who?"

"Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Ra'is al-Jumhuriyya. [President of the Republic.]"

"Oh., Ben al-LEE." [No Tunisian pronounces it that way, but Americans do.)

Next question from him: "Are you CIA?"

Anyway, another step in the messing-with-cabbies'- minds operation.

EARLIER POST:

As I write this Sarah and Tam are in the pool; I'm taking a break from proofreading to make note of the events of the day. We joined Kate for breakfast and then Brenda joined us as well and we went to see the Liberty Bell. (Kate had to be back at 2 for interviews and the earliest timed-entry
admission to Independence Hall was 2, so she'll have to catch that another time.) Then we took a carriage tour -- the slightly longer version than we'd taken last year, and with more sights -- and then had a nice colonial lunch at the City Tavern. Kate and Brenda had to leave, so Tam, Sarah and I made our way via an old-fashioned ice cream parlor and Elfreth's Alley, then a subway ride back to near our hotel. By this time Sarah was tired, my feet hurt, Sarah started complaining and we had a row. A blow-up. What in Egypt is called a dawsha, a "noise." We all eventually calmed down but it was a sign we had been pushing too hard. For all of us.

Anyway, this is an interlude before the evening's plans. More later if time per.

Philadelphia 2008, Day 1

On the road again...on Boxing Day.

Not the most efficient launch. We discovered we could not find our DeLorme atlas for Maryland and Delaware, so had to be limited to the main highways but weren't planning on back roads anyway. But as a map nut it meant I got off to an annoying start being mapless for two whole states. By the time we discovered I couldn't get a new one at Borders, Safeway or Staples, hopes of an early departure had faded.

We did manage to visit the Brandywine River Museum, known for the works of Andrew Wyeth and his sisters and his cousins and his aunts (or father and son anyway); there was a Christmas exhibit of model trains which Sarah enjoyed; though interested in art, Wyeth was not her cup of tea, though we did buy a print by another painter of the Brandwine school. And we did see some Howard Pyle paintings for Treasure Island,including a classic Long John Silver complete with pegleg and parrot.

We arrived in Philadelphia about five. Our downtown Hampton Inn is next to the Convention Center, which is now undergoing an expansion, so we may have some construction noise. It's only a couple of blocks from Tam's sister Kate's hotel and we hope to see her tomorrow. She's here for a philosophy conference.

We took Sarah to the old Wanamaker's by the city hall; complete with organ in the main hall. Like all historic urban department stores it is now a Macy's, but I suspect the locals still think of it as Wanamaker's. We showed Sarah the Christmas windows, something new to her: department stores at suburban malls don't do animated Christmas windows.

We stopped for a drink at the local Hard Rock Cafe, Sarah's first at a Hard Rock and, based on reaction, not likely to be repeated soon. Once they opened one in Cairo I knew they'd overextended the franchise.

Just ate at a local pizzeria, very downmarket. More likely we'll have a nice evening with Kate tomorrow.

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A Merry Christmas to All

Merry Christmas. A quiet day today. Sarah proclaimed it the "best Christmas ever" and kept saying "you guys rock!" because she got most of what she wanted. (One high profile item, a Nerf Gun N-Strike Long Shot, has missing pieces and no instructions and will need to be replaced, but we've assured her it will be.) She's had a good day, we've had a quiet dinner, and tomorrow we hit the road for Philadelphia. More from there. Everybody's mellow. I'm still having some (mostly gassy) aftereffects from last week's bug, but feel okay.

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Recovering Just in Time

Okay, I vanished over a week ago. Here's the story: Tuesday night (December 16 -- a week ago tonight) I got home, picked up Sarah, and then started having diarrhea. By later that evening I was running a fever. Wednesday I called in sick and gambled I had a one day virus. By Wednesday night I knew better, and added throwing up to the repertoire. Thursday I saw my doctor. Probably the norovirus, he says, the nasty thing that's going around. (He also sent me to see the surgeon about my hernia as he was alarmed about its state during all this. It was okay but I was read the riot act about getting it fixed soon.) For several more days I couldn't hold down much solid food -- mostly broth and toast was my sustenance, plus gatorade.

Even by the weekend I was no fun. Starting to be able to eat a little, the fevers gone, but still with lower intestinal troubles and, well, constipation to boot. I won't go into any further details. That's more than you want to know.

Anyway, today, the one week anniversary of my coming down with it, is the first genuinely normal day I've had. Losing a week of work/family time the week before Christmas is no fun.

Fortunately, the Middle East Institute decided to close all week anyway this week: they were already committed for one reason or another to closing Dec. 24-25-26, so they just folded. I'll be doing proofreading at home and on our trip to Philadelphia to see Aunt Kate, about which more anon.

Sarah has all week off; had been signed up for summer camp but when she learned I was off, that became moot. Today, my first day as a human being again, we spent as a father-daughter shopping day, one visit to Toys R Us (I am not qualified to identify the Pokemon cards I'd promised, so she agreed if I took her with me she'd put them under the tree), then Trader Joe's and Safeway for Christmas fixings, and Office Depot for some supplies. A nice (if expensive -- shopping with Sarah costs more than alone, even at Office Depot--"I need more erasers!"--but still a nice Daddy-daughter day).

More later if I can. Tomorrow is Christmas eve. We are doing Christmas as we did Thanksgiving, "mini-chickens," or cornish game hens, rather than Turkey. Easier on Tam, preferred by Sarah. What's wrong with that?

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The Tree

Christmas season can officially begin. We got our tree today. Sarah: "This is my favorite part of Christmas!" Me: "Does that mean we don't have to give you any presents this year?" Sarah: "Get serious, Dad."

Left, the before and after. Sarah picked out the tree herself, was really into the decorating, and is getting to know the stories behind many of the ornaments we have acquired through the years. I may talk more about this as the holidays draw nearer, but I wanted to at least take note that the tree is up. Her first Christmas, 2001, when she was just 18 months old, she couldn't yet say "tree," but would smile and say "gee" with a hard "g". Now she's an old hand at decorating trees.

Klaatu Barada Nikto

Okay. Normally I wouldn't blog about a movie I haven't seen, but desecration is desecration, and if the reviews are true, I need to speak out.

One of the greatest movies ever made, a classic in the sci-fi genre, is The Day the Earth Stood Still, made back in 1951, with Michael Rennie, Patricia Neal, Sam Jaffe as the Einstein-like scientist (he had the hair for it after all), and Frances Bavier (Aunt Bee, of course) as a resident of the boarding house. Also Hugh Marlowe, who starred in Earth Versus the Flying Saucers (special effects by the immortal Ray Harryhausen, still alive at age 88 and revered by Spielberg and Lucas as their inspiration and honored by Disney/Pixar in the name of the restaurant "Harry Hausen's" in Monsters Inc. If you're of my generation and don't know who Harryhausen is, he did the dueling skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts, What more do you need to know?) and (Hugh Marlowe -- I got a bit astray there) is therefore part of the pantheon of classic SF movie stars. (I always confuse him with Richard Carlson, who starred in It Came From Outer Space and Creature from the Black Lagoon. They had the same stiff 1950s acting style and didn't smile much, so you knew the monsters were a serious threat. Both pretty much the same Hollywood issue not-too-famous moderately handsome unsmiling serious white guy. I still have trouble telling them apart. The acting -- to stretch a phrase a bit -- doesn't distinguish either one.) Now they have remade the thing with Keanu Reaves, and instead of warning the world about nuclear weapons he's apparently upset about global warming or some such. Ah, even the aliens have gone PC. (Perhaps this explains Al Gore's famous stiffness: if not an alien himself, perhaps he's channleing either Hugh Marlowe or Richard Carlson.)

Fine. Remakes are acceptable, though there are some movies (Citizen Kane, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, A Night at the Opera) that cannot be remade. I dare you to recast Duck Soup. Somebody some years ago remade Psycho, but it flopped. Of course. You can't remake the true greats.

I said to Tam a while back that while I was very dubious about a remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still, it would be okay as long as they used the immortal phrase Klaatu Barada Nikto, the alien phrase that is the most famous artifact of the movie for most fans. Based on a very lukewarm review in the Washington Post, (which may require a free registration to read), they omitted "Klaatu Barada Nikto" from this version. Okay, you might as well have made Casablanca without "Round Up the Usual Suspects" or Gone With the Wind without "Frankly, My Dear, I Don't Give a Damn,". Or Night at the Opera without Groucho. Okay, or Citizen Kane without "Rosebud." Feel free to add your own as comments. The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance a) without John Wayne or b) Jimmy Stewart or c) Wayne never calls anyone in the movie "pilgrim." Easy Rider without "We blew it." (Actually, that's the only thing I remember from that movie.)

So I'm not going, though I note the fact that many reviewers have noted that Keanu Reeves is well cast as an alien creature. Typecast perhaps?

Another gripe. In the 1951 version, the flying saucer lands in Washington, on the Ellipse near the White House. There are a lot of scenes of DC in 1951, not just of the monuments but of neighborhoods as well. Many of the chase scenes pass through Dupont Circle, a block from my office (admittedly, they pass by two or three times). I gather in the new version he lands in Central Park. No fair. If you want us to Take You to Our Leader, you've got to come here. What, you expect the UN to do something? Bush will be gone soon if that was the problem.

On the good side, the American Movie Classics (or whatever AMC stands for) channel has been running the original all week, and I have the DVD anyway. Besides (since on our local cable AMC is 93, while Disney is 92, so Sarah sometimes mis-clicks) Sarah told me "Look, they're running The Day The Earth Stood Still!" She still won't watch the whole (1951) movie with me, but she recognizes it now. Progress.

Klaatu Barada Nikto, y'all. Rent the video instead.

And watch the skies. I know, I know, that's from The Thing From Another World, otherwise just The Thing, but it's of the same vintage (also 1951), and hell, the Thing was played by James Arness (Matt Dillon of Gunsmoke for you young whippersnappers), though you mostly see him as a shadowy shape or bursting into flames. Watch the skies anyway.

BELATED UPDATE (January 2, '09): I hadn't known about Ronald Reagan's fascination with The Day the Earth Stood Still. See details here. Neat.



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The Usual Excuses

Okay, I've been scarce. The usual reasons: busy at work getting the Winter issue out; one day off with a stomach complaint; runup to Christmas, shopping etc. Stay tuned.

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Pearl Harbor Day +67 Years

What I said last year. Pearl Harbor still matters.

Haven't had much time to blog. Soon I hope.

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Winchester Trip, Day Three

Okay, I'm going to try to at least summarize the weekend, though I'm tired and it's nearly midnight. But I've bot a busy week ahead and may forget details by Friday.

Later: sorry, too tired to blog. Maybe tomorrow. It was a good weekend.

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Winchester Trip, Day Two

A long day. A good one, but Sarah needed a bath and a shampoo, and didn't get to bed till past 11. It's now past 12, and I'll blog from DC on both today (now, yesterday) and tomorrow (now, today.)

If that makes no sense, be glad I'm not posting more.

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Winchester Weekend, Day 1

Although this is "Black Friday," the big shopping day, and I read where one Wal-Mart employee on Long Island has been trampled to death and there's been a shooting in a California Toys-R-Us, we didn't go shoppping. As previously noted we are spending a couple of overnights in Winchester to enjoy the Valley a bit. Got out here by noon and ate at the Snow White Grill, took Sarah to show her the Cedar Creek battlefield, since she had seen Phil Sheridan's horse Rienzi at the reopened Smithsonian Museum of Amcrican History last week, and I read her the famous (I do not say great, just once famous) poem "Sheridan's Ride" as we rode the rode over which Little Phil rode Rienzi to rally the troops. Dinner at a good Italian restaurant. More tomorrow.

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Thanksgiving: Night of the Mini-Chickens

Thanksgiving 2008. At Sarah's request, we didn't do a turkey: we did two rock cornish game hens, or what she likes to call "mini-chickens." Quicker, more tender, and less to deal with afterwards than turkeys.

Otherwise a lazy day: I've been a little off my feed this week. Everybody's tired. I've been through both my own Middle East Institute Conference and the Middle East Studies Association Conference, finished getting queries off to the authors of the Winter Middle East Journal, and so forth. Time for a rest. Tomorrow we leave for Winchester: history, the Civil War, mountains, the Snow White Grill. More from there. Photo is the mini-chickens, coming out of the oven on their little, well, I guess they're rock cornish game hen cooking doodads that sit them straight up with the holder going up their hindquarters. If there's a technical name for the device perhaps Tam will post it. More from Winchester.

UPDATE: Something is weird about the photo. Our stove and wall do not have white spots against the darker ivory. This thing got weirdly pixelated and I'll replace with a proper photo over the weekend.



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On the Verge of Relaxation?

Okay, the MEI Annual Conference is over, I've done my stint at the Middle East Studies Association Conference, finished a chapter for a book and a tenure review for an old friend. Two more work days to Thanksgiving, and I have a sneaking suspicion I'm not going to be the world's greatest ball of fire on those days.

Stand by for blogging. I feel a burst coming on. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon. (Not, to break with the Casablanca quote however, for the rest of our lives. I've got to work for a living still.)

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Update

A quick late-night update. Still trying to upload a workable video of yesterday's stuff to YouTube: need to split it to reduce the size.

Today: went to see Bolt. Excellent. Really funny. The hamster Rhino is my new role model.

I didn't note that Saturday was the 45th anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. I want to blog on this, but not at 1 am. UPDATE: Oops, I guess I did mention it. See below.

Out for now. We're going to Winchester, VA the Fri-Sat-Sun after Thanksgiving.

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From R2D2 to Yankee Doodle: A Good Day

A good day.

As I noted in my last post nearly a week ago, this was heavy duty week, the week of the Middle East Institute's Annual Conference, when I'm on duty more than usual (and work my usual Friday off), and we have a banquet Thursday night, and our usual babysitter was sick and we had to hire the more expensive one, and ... oh well, you get it. By Friday night I was drained, exhausted, and fell asleep at 10:30. I'm a night person. I can stay up half the night if I don't have to get up the next day, but last night I collapsed like a punctured baloon. All this even though I didn't chair a panel, didn't give a presentation, and my superb staff did most of the work at the Journal's booth. It was just a long, always-on, networking day.

One of the advantages of going to bed early is that, even without an alarm, I woke up early. After a rough week, I was determined to have a really good family fun day. We went down to the reopening, after about two and a half years, of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, which has been significantly rebuilt and renovated with a new central atrium, a new home for the original Star Spangled Banner, and much more. Sarah liked the museum even when she was six or so, and wanted to visit it; I am of course a history buff (oh yeah, also a Ph.D. if that counts) and always loved the museum in its earlier incarnation.

It's nearly one am I want to go to bed so let me make this short, with more later: there were reenactors (George Washington, several Revolutionary types I didn't identify, Mary Pickersgill who made the original Star Spangled Banner in Baltimore, a civil rights activist talking about the first Greensboro NC sit-in in front of the original lunch counter seats, etc. Sarah tried out the hands-on "science in American history" stuff and an old lab that she'd loved when four or five, revived but not much changed. Much else had changed. There were bands (we heard a kids' Yorktown fife-and-drum group twice, a bluegrass group, and I understand Jazz, Dixieland and other groups played during the day), and, to add to the oddity, the Washington DC R2-D2 builders' club, which is what it says, guys who build working, moving, beeping R2-D2 robots. These guys obviously have more time on their hands than I do (I won't say too much time on their hands, because they've obviously got money to burn as well, neither of which applies to me.) (Sarah: "Is that a sand-person?" Geek: "No, that's a Jawa. Sand-People are quite different." Bear in mind that the Jawa in question is life sized, and for all I know may move. The other robots did.)

At first we filmed one R2-D2 going by, beeping and its upper turret revolving like, well, like a droid. Then two or three were roaming about (these are all full-sized, mind you, with flashing lights and beeping just like the real R2-D2, if there was a real R2-D2), while the fife and drum band was playing "Yankee Doodle" and "The World Turned Upside Down": this is either quintessential Americana or complete surrealism, or perhaps there's no distinction between the two. The R2s seemed to proliferate like cockroaches, though apparently they require a great deal of effort and dedication to build. I know this couldn't happen in Egypt and I rather doubt it could happen in France.

Because the new museum didn't have hot food yet in their cafe we went next door to the Natural History Museum (the dinosaur museum as Sarah has long called it) and then returned. We heard more music, looked around, listened to a presentation on the Star Spangled Banner's creation (the lines to see the original flag were quite long: it's been off display for years while being restored, so Sarah has still never seen it but will when the lines shorten).

Wonderful re-imagining of the central parts of the museum. The Star Spangled Banner is back (though we didn't see it yet), and in December, they'll reopen the First Ladies' inaugural gowns. Those two items long made this the most popular Smithsonian museum.

We stopped at Best Buy to get some necessities and a few frills, went out to dinner, discussed Thanksgiving plans and parameters for Sarah's coming allowance (I won't record for the world since it's family stuff), and generally had a good day.

A video of many of the reenactors and the R2s and other stuff is going up on YouTube as I write this on a different computer. Drop by if you're authorized to see our family YouTube stuff. If not, cheers.

Only as I was moving video and still photos around the Web did the date hit me: November 22. It's 45 years since JFK was killed. I didn't see any mention in today's Washington Post. 45 years. I grow older.

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