Balls and Walnuts
more than you ever wanted to know
About Walnut
View all posts by Walnut
New Years Days gone by
I used to look forward to New Years Day for one reason and one reason only: one of the local stations would show Underdog for an hour. I think it must have been a special two-parter. I remember it was always the same episode, and it was something truly epic, like: Underdog loses his power. Or, Sweet Polly Purebred nearly gets iced. Something like that.
Lying in bed this morning (dragging ass), I tried to recollect the words to the theme song. I didn’t do too badly — I remembered most of them.
The little guy whose head is shaped like a rotten molar tooth, that’s one of the bad guys, Simon Bar Sinister. The wolf is (if I remember correctly) Riff Raff. I had to check the Wikipedia article to remember “Riff Raff,” and it turns out most of the episodes were multi-parters. I recall that Underdog was a notorious pill-popper, but what I didn’t know was that the network had a problem with that:
For many years starting with NBC’s last run in the mid-1970s, all references to Underdog swallowing his super energy pill were censored, most likely out of fear that kids would see real medication that looked like the Underdog pills (red with a white “U”) and swallow them. Two instances that did not actually show Underdog swallowing the pills remained in the show. In one, he drops pills into water supplies; in the other, his ring is damaged and he explains that it is where he keeps the pill – but the part where he actually swallows it was still deleted.
Aside from Underdog, New Years Day held nothing for me. As much as the Rose Parade bored me* (watching it on TV, that is — far be it from my folks to take us to a parade), college football was worse. So by about 10 AM, long after Underdog had saved it for Sweet Polly, my day was already going to hell.
D.
*But just wait another couple months and our city would throw its annual gala, the Camellia Festival, wherein we would prove that we could make floats like the big boys in the Rose Parade, only, say, 1/100 scale, and with camellias and not roses. Thing about camellias? After you pick them, they turn a lovely shade of brown.
Surfipedia
Today, I finished Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, a rollicking good read*, and I was surprised by his postscript, wherein I learned that he hadn’t pulled this whole story out of his ass. For starters, there was indeed a Khazar Empire (7th to 10th Century AD). See:
And they did, in fact, convert to Judaism sometime in the 8th Century, or at least their nobility did. If Chabon can be trusted (and it seems a solid speculation, at the least), they chose Judaism in order to maintain some neutrality between their Christian and Muslim neighbors. Previously, they followed a shamanic tradition.
Oh! Wikipedia concurs.
Some researchers have suggested part of the reason for conversion was political expediency to maintain a degree of neutrality: the Khazar empire was between growing populations, Muslims to the east and Christians to the west. Both religions recognized Judaism as a forebear and worthy of some respect.
Within the Wikipedia article on the Khazars is an interesting subsection concerning the relationship of the Khazars to modern-day Jews. If most Jews nowadays are descended not from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob but from a bunch of Turkic converts, then their “ancestral claim” to Palestine loses any historical footing. (This ultimately gets back to the historicity of the Old Testament, which is a huge messy can of worms that I won’t dive into right here.) It’s a claim that goes back to the 1880s, and keeps getting recycled by a variety of antisemites and anti-Zionists. Trouble is, the Y chromosome data doesn’t support it.
By various twists and turns primarily involving the Diaspora and the Lost Tribes, I found myself reading about British Israelism, one of the odder concepts I’ve encountered:
British Israelism (also called Anglo-Israelism) is the belief that people of Western European descent, particularly those in Great Britain, are the direct lineal descendants of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. The concept often includes the belief that the British Royal Family is directly descended from the line of King David.
Despite a lack of any historical or scientific evidence to support this notion, a number of folks have promoted it, even into the 21st Century. Herbert W. Armstrong, founder of the Southern California-based Worldwide Church of God (now called Grace Communion International). I presume British Israelism is a great doctrine for justifying Western exceptionalism to Fundamentalists. In any case, Grace Communion International dropped the belief in 2009, following Armstrong’s death. But beliefs do not change lightly among the faithful: “Church members who disagreed with such doctrinal changes left the Worldwide Church of God/GCI to form offshoot churches. Many of these organizations, including the Philadelphia Church of God and the United Church of God, still teach British Israelism.”
But getting back to the Khazars . . . their coin was called a Yarmaq, and since I like me my coins I tried to find a picture of a Yarmaq, but could only find this image of a man choosing the most difficult manner possible for a nipple piercing.
I also surfed over to an article on the Radhanites, who figure prominently in Chabon’s book. Jewish merchants on the Silk Road? Yup, they’re real too — not simply an invention of Chabon’s.
Ibn Khordadbeh described the Radhanites as sophisticated and multilingual. He outlined four main trade routes utilized by the Radhanites in their journeys; all four began in the Rhône Valley of France and terminated in China. The commodities carried by the Radhanites were primarily those which combined small bulk and high demand, including spices, perfumes, jewelry, and silk. They are also described as transporting oils, incense, steel weapons, furs, and slaves.
All of this goes to show that if you’re looking for something interesting to read on Wikipedia, purposeful surfing is a lot more productive than hitting the random article button, which gave me this article about an underwater submersible called the VideoRay.
Which is kinda interesting, come to think of it, but can’t hold a candle to itinerant Jewish slave-drivers.
Oh, and HAPPY NEW YEAR!
D.
*Downgraded by some Barnes and Noble readers because “i found myself trying to figure out the language that I completely missed what was going on. it was a very hard read.” But I did like the comment, “Imagine C.S. Lewis’ ‘A Horse and His Boy’ in which the horse does not talk and there is no underlying Christian allegory and you have ‘Gentlemen of the Road’.”
Fitness guru
Trying to think here if any of my readers work out. My Sis does, but I don’t think she’s ever made a study of it, nor worked with a trainer. Kris Starr, but does Kris still visit? I think I lost her along with Kate and most of the other Romance crowd when I got old and dull and boring. If I’m not writing tarantula porn, they simply don’t love me as much.
Anyway, I am trying to figure out why I can work like a horse on the elliptical trainer and not feel at all tired afterward, yet I can’t do shit on the treadmill. According to the heart monitor on the elliptical, I’m getting my heart rate up into the 140s and keeping it there for a good 40 to 50 minutes or more. But on the treadmill, if I run hard enough to get my heart rate into the 140s, I’m lucky if I can keep that up for three minutes.
So I ask you, what gives? Why can’t I run? Why does even power walking (which for me means anything over 3 miles per hour!) tire the crap out of me and give me shin splints? And yet I can set the elliptical to a resistance of 10 or 11 and go at it for an hour.
Another question: is it a good aerobic exercise if I’m not suffering? Running (or even fast walking) feels like work. So I’m going along at a heart rate of 125 thinking This is kicking my ass, but if I hop on the elliptical and get my heart rate up to 145, I’m hunky-dorey. (More dorey lately than hunky, but we’re working on it.)
I want my trainer back. But she jumped ship when my health club changed management, and she’s off at some Other Gym training other guys, and I’m all alone with the yutzes at my current club who sometimes try to trick me into signing a contract for training. The most recent guy demonstrated such ignorance of the subject, though, that I pegged him as someone who had been sent away to the Three Day Trainers’ Camp rather than someone who had studied this shit in college (like my trainer).
Ugh. Maybe I need to bite the bullet and pay day rates at the other gym to use my old trainer. Meanwhile, I’m trying to work from Eric Heiden’s fitness book in order to do it myself. But it’s a long hard road.
D.
Just finished, just started
Just finished Terry Pratchett’s The Fifth Elephant, which was a real treat. Sam Vimes is my favorite Pratchett character, so it was delightful finding a Vimes novel I hadn’t read yet (although The Night Watch may still be my fave Diskworld novel). Pratchett, like Christopher Moore, is so very very good when he’s on his game. Which he is, most of the time. Both authors have an uncanny knack for balancing humor, suspense, and poignancy. I admire these guys far more than I do any of the “serious” authors I read.
Just started Michael Chabon’s Gentlemen of the Road, his nod to the swords and swashbuckling stories of Michael Moorcock. Only since this is Chabon, his rogues are both Jewish and they dream of Khazar, “the fabled kingdom of wild red-haired Jews on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, the Jewish yurts and pinnacles of Khazaria.” This is my second Chabon novel (The Yiddish Policeman’s Union was my first), so from my N of 2, I would have to declare that what Chabon really is, is not a “serious author,” heaven forbid, but a Jewish fantasist. Think of Borges writing novels. About Jews. There you go, that’s Chabon for you.
D.
Now the Coen Brothers are all right with me.
So y’all know I wasn’t down with A Serious Man, right? But being the forgiving sort, I took myself to see True Grit today. I read the Charles Portis novel this last summer and loved it. Would the Coen Brothers give it their No Country For Old Men (i.e., slavishly faithful) treatment? I hoped so.
Happy to report that they did, indeed. While they felt it necessary to add at least one scenelet to punch up the drama (a bit between Mattie and LaBouef, wherein she tells the Texas Ranger that she “threw in with the wrong man”), they followed Portis’s novel quite well, cribbing whole swaths of dialog. One slight misstep, in my opinion: they include the novel’s coda (which the John Wayne version, to my recollection, dropped) but Mattie’s voice-over was lacking. If ever the Coens should have taken something whole from the novel, it was Mattie’s dismissal of Cole Younger’s and Frank James’s traveling road show. This was Mattie’s (and Portis’s) way of saying goodbye to the myth of the Old West, and it would have been a nice touch to include it in the movie’s end. Instead, we get some bland comment that time goes by, or some such.
Anyway — see it. You’ll have a good time. The Coens played it more for laughs than did the John Wayne version, which is in keeping with Portis’s own sly humor. And while I think Kim Darby was the best thing by far about the old version, Hailee Steinfeld does a stunning Mattie, and I hope she gets at least a nod from the Academy for her performance. Jeff Bridges does a fine Rooster Cogburn, chewing and gargling his lines, and Matt Damon’s LaBouef crushes Tom Campbell’s performance (but any non-comatose actor could have done that).
D.
Not in Vegas
Jake came down with some sort of weird flu bug — fever, fatigue, vomiting, but no upper respiratory symptoms. We decided to cancel everything (and the damn airlines have upped the fees to $180 per person . . . wasn’t that long ago I remember it being $50 per person) which was for the best. Yesterday afternoon he wasn’t on the computer. He was sleeping. That’s how I know my son is sick.
Not much to do this weekend; I’m thinking of seeing True Grit, which got a whopping 95 over at Rotten Tomatoes. I’m poking around in the books I bought to research my writing project, plotting, plotting, thinking. And I’m roasting a boneless leg of lamb for dinner tonight — this recipe, or something quite like it. (I did look at the turkeys today, which are appealing only because they’re so cheap. But then I remembered that no one in this family, and I do mean no one, likes turkey.)
So to all my goyische friends, Merry Christmas! And the rest of you can enjoy your godless holidays too.
D.
Vegas-bound
The plane leaves tomorrow at four and goes to Vegas by way of Phoenix. What’s the chance it will take off on time and not be glitched by weather at any of the three cities? Will I regret the decision not to drive?
We drove for Thanksgiving last year. The trip home was grueling: stop and go most of the way. It took something like eight hours to make a four hour trip.
Not sure what to do in Las Vegas this time around. Too cold and rainy to go to Red Rock Canyon, so who knows, maybe we should just go watch a bunch of movies. Unlike most Americans, I find Vegas to be very, very boring.
Almost makes me wish I liked to gamble.
D.
40 Days and 40 Nights
I am continually appalled by the failure of desert communities to plan for rain.
When I grew up in the LA suburbs, street flooding was commonplace. Auto brakes were as water-resistant as the Wicked Witch, so heaven help you if you happened to stray into the deep water. Forget about driving under overpasses.
And here I am in flooded Bako. (No, really — Karen saw a news clip showing some guy paddling a canoe down his street.) Thing is, this is not a storm. It’s more of a sustained sprinkle. I found myself thinking, “Gee, I hope this keeps up. That way my raised bed will get nice and wet for planting,” and before I knew it we had great nasty puddles in our backyard.
Driving home today was a trip. Something must have happened on the freeway . . . this was some of the worst traffic I’d seen since moving here. I took surface streets instead, and it only added 20 minutes or so to my drive time. It’s even worse on the first day of the season’s first storm. On the oil-slicked roads, cars careen like air hockey pucks, and the 99 is a parking lot.
I’m on call and hoping I don’t GET called. I’d hate to get anywhere in a hurry.
D.
What the hell was that all about?
A Serious Man is a Coen Brothers movie. How could I go wrong? Not to mention it’s received all sorts of awards and critical acclaim, an 88% from Rotten Tomatoes. And it’s all about the tribe (my tribe, that is) back in the late 1960s.
The equations? Don't tune your laser on 'em.
The film centers on physics professor and shlimazel Larry Gopnik (pictured above), a sad sack who bears the brunt of one bad turn after another. His wife is leaving him, but not before draining the bank account and kicking him out of the house; his brother — who is working on some sort of Map of the Universe-as-betting system theory called the Mentaculus — has moved in with him, so when Larry departs to the Jolly Roger Motel, the brother goes with him; one of his students is trying alternately to bribe or sue his way to a better grade, and the Tenure Committee promises that they’ll try to ignore all those anonymous letters accusing Larry of moral turpitude.
Oh, and then there’s this shtetl-tale at the movie’s beginning, which as far as I can tell was tacked on to provide narrative drive to an otherwise drive-less film. No, really. I would have quit watching half way through if it hadn’t been for the little tale in the opening, because — well, you know, it’s the classic “mystery drive” — I had to know what connection this opening had with the rest of the movie. Turns out, none. According to the Wikipedia article, it’s meant to set the mood. To which I call bullshit, since in a movie, as with a short story, there should be no spare parts.
As Larry’s world crumbles, he visits one rabbi after another. Their vacuous platitudes, their complete and utter inability to provide Larry with anything approaching help or understanding, was the only thing which resonated with me in this whole film. Which is really saying something, considering I was a Jew growing up in much the same era as Larry’s son.
By the end, I’m lost. If I don’t understand this, not even a little, then no one can*. Once again I call bullshit. This is the emperor without his clothes. All those critics who raved, all those awards: these are people who do not want to admit they didn’t understand A Serious Man.
Karen saw a point to it, though. Her summary: “Jehovah’s a bastard.” Anyone who has perused the Old Testament would have to agree, I think. So I guess one has to ask what it is about us Yids that we cling to the Guy who on a bet smote the crap out of Job’s world, then berated Job for looking at Him crosswise. Who thought nothing about destroying the world and starting all over again.
But that deity only makes sense in the archaic world of the time. Think of the Greek pantheon (or any of those ancient pantheons) and all the gods’ shortcomings and petty evils. They were humans with the powers of a god. Modern day Jews and Christians would like to think their God is somehow above all that, but the scriptures don’t give much support. And while Jesus made the attempt to make it all about love, forgiveness, and charity, how many nowadays live that message? It’s almost as though they’re more content with their bloodthirsty God than with his hippie Son.
Anyway, I’d say give A Serious Man a pass, unless you’re so OCD you have to see every Coen Brothers movie.
D.
Or else I’m stupid. Arrogant and stupid.