Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising - A Terribly Not Funny Movie

by Tom Kando

 My wife and I made a mistake. We went to see “Neighbors 2: Sorority Rising” We did this on the second day the movie was out, after reading the rave review it received from Katie Walsh, of the Tribune News Service (Sacramento Bee, May 20), who gave the film the maximum four stars.

I found the movie rarely funny, and always in catastrophically bad taste. The opening sets the tone, when Seth Rogen and his wife Rose Byrne are in bed, attempting to make love, and she barfs all over his face. This is toilet humor, or what the French call pipi-caca humor. I have never found jokes about vomiting, farting, pissing or diarrhea funny, not even when I was eight years old.
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Archie Bunker is Alive and Well, and Still Slinging His Ethnic Insults

by Anita and Tom Kando

We have a couple of groups of friends with whom we often get together. One group, in particular, travels overseas a lot, so the conversation is often about various nationalities and foreign countries. What is mind boggling is that this group is also exceptionally ethnocentric.

These people enjoy ridiculing many categories of foreigners, but one ethnicity upon which it is absolutely open season are the Italians. It’s not clear why, and it is very unwelcome, in that one of us is partially Italian-American. Since the group is very aware of this fact, the incessant anti-Italian barbs can only be a form of sadism, a form of bullying. Their “jokes” are the usual racist vulgarities - Italians are dirty, lazy, they are thieves, etc. The more alcohol these people consume, the worse it gets.

You may ask, why do we even bother to BE with such people? The truth is, we have compromised ourselves. We fear that if we are excessively “pure” in our moral judgments, we’ll end up without very many friends... Also, naively, we have thought we could perhaps educate these people, the way schools try to educate bullies. This is probably a lost cause, as bigots are usually set in their ways. Worse yet, when these individuals see that you are upset by their comments, they do not apologize. It’s a very uncomfortable situation for the few in the group who do not engage in such insults.
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A Century's Worth of Living (Part 4)

copyright: Ata Kando

by Madeleine Kando

When I was six, I went on a hunger strike. I don't exactly remember what I was protesting, but it was one of the few weapons I had in my six-year old arsenal to protest the injustices that were done to me. I am a twin and my mother had the habit of always buying two of the same things; two identical dresses, two identical coats, two identical haircuts, so I was probably protesting my mother's decision to give the red one of two new dresses to my sister, which left me with the yellow one.

If you are not a twin, you cannot possibly know how much competition is involved. The thought of my sister in that red dress and me next to her looking like a canary was too much. The only way I could feel somewhat in control of my fate, was to stop eating. My sister’s far more effective strategy to get what she wanted, was to cry. Not just a sad little girly cry but a wolf cub howling kind of cry. Something told me that if we both adopted the howling strategy, it would backfire. Besides, I was the ‘quiet’ one, the ‘shy’ one. I just didn’t have it in me to howl. I preferred the passive aggressive approach. Not eat, give people the silent treatment, get them to guess what was wrong with poor Madeleine. Read more...

The Intruders

by Madeleine Kando

I sometimes envy my mother. She is as deaf as a doornail, but what do you expect at her age? She is going to be 103 in a few months. At least she has a permanent acoustic guard on duty, although barring entrance to any sound might be too much of a good thing. It’s different for me. Short of wearing earplugs or buying an expensive noise-cancelling headset, I am exposed to all sorts of unwelcome acoustic intruders.

Noises are part of living, you’ll say and suggest I see a shrink instead of waste your time writing about my predicament. You might conclude that I am suffering from ‘misophonia’**, the hatred of sound. But I am not averse to sounds in general; I forgive sounds that cannot help being sounds, like the sound of traffic, or police sirens. And I couldn’t live without music. Read more...

The Casanova of the Pyrenees

by Madeleine Kando

Pyros (Greek for ‘fire’), a.k.a. ‘the Stud’

Species: Ursus Arctos (a.k.a. Grizzly)

Pyros is a 500-pound alpha bear, born in Slovenia. He was relocated to the Pyrenees in 1997 as part of an effort to bring back the bear population. Hunters killed the last remaining native bear, a female called Cinnamon, so two Slovenian bears, Ziva and Mellba, both already pregnant were brought in, followed by the dominant male Pyros.

Pyros saw, came and boy, did he conquer. He sired over 30 little boy and girl Pyros and is still going strong as a geriatric bear at the ripe old age of 29.

Sponsored by French actor Gerard Depardieu (no relation to Pyros, appearances notwithstanding) he has become a symbol of virility. Spanish Pyros fans started a Twitter account under his name identifying him as the “father of all the bears” and the French call him “the stud of the Pyrenees”. Read more...

On Phobias, Philias and other Etymologies

by Tom Kando

Like most people, I have some phobias, as well as a number of philias: This means that there are things which I like, and things which I dislike. Duh.

Etymologically, the words we use for people’s (pathological) likes and dislikes (or fears), usually contain the postfixes “-phobia” and “-philia,” or the prefix “mis-.”

These are derived from Greek:
Phobos: Fear
Philia: (Brotherly) Love
Misos: Hatred

For example: Philadelphia: The City of Brotherly Love:
Philos = Friend
Adelphos = Brother
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Did the Democratic Party Forsake the Middle Class?

by Madeleine Kando

In his new book ‘Listen, Liberal or Whatever Happened to the Party of the People’, author Thomas Frank (‘What's the Matter with Kansas?) points out that the Democratic Party’s historical role of protecting the working middle class has all but vanished. Since the 80’s, many policies implemented by both Republican and Democratic administrations have hugely benefited the ‘professional class’ as well as the ‘business class’. By ‘professional class’ Frank refers to affluent professionals, lawyers, doctors, investment specialists, etc. This class is very liberal in a cultural sense, but very conservative economically.

The shift in policy in the Democratic Party came after George W. Bush’s victory, when the ‘New Democrats’ tried to be centrist by combining right-wing economic policy with left-wing social policy, which they called the ‘Third Way’.

Frank is especially harsh on Bill Clinton. He was the prototypical New Democrat. He signed the NAFTA agreement, deregulated Wall Street and ‘reformed’ Welfare by putting pressure on the unemployed. Barak Obama continued this trend, trying to fast track the TTP and, although he put the Healthcare Bill into law, Big Pharma and the insurance companies are still in control of health insurance. Read more...

A Century's Worth of Living (Part 3)

by Madeleine Kando

My mother Ata sleeps a lot. She is often in pain because of some nerve damage in her feet, but is happy that I have come all the way from Boston to visit her. It is peaceful here in Bergen. Ata lives in an assisted living abutting the 'polders', vast meadows where sheep, horses and cows share the lush, green grass. The enormous sky dwarfs this flat landscape; I have stepped into a Vermeer painting, the church steeples and windmills dotting the low hanging horizon.

I am trying to come to terms with Ata's life ending soon. Part of my life will also come to an end and I don't know how to separate the two. Soon, I will no longer come to Holland. I will no longer sleep in this little guest room, waiting for the day to break while the smell of cow manure, the cawking of the seagulls, the muffled sound of a truck on its morning delivery mingle in the air. It will all be as faded as the photographs that hang on Ata's walls.

Visiting my mother has always been an intense experience. With all that moving from country to country, she has managed to always bring the family past with her. There are so many boxes where I find pieces of myself, boxes stuffed with old letters, drawings, poems and of course, photographs. Read more...

A Century's Worth of Living _ part 2

by Madeleine Kando

Soon, I will go to Holland for another visit to Ata, my soon to be 103 year old mother. If I am lucky, she will still be able to see my face, probably only the outlines, but her memories will fill in the blanks. She has had enough practice, taking pictures of her children in her long career as a photographer. Her most beautiful photographs are those of her three children. We were her surrogate models, since there was never any money for professionals.

Since I left Holland and the circle of photographers to which my mother belonged, I have always looked forward to my visits and the inevitable submersion into the world of photography. Bookshelves full of the most amazing photography books, boxes and boxes full of slides, negatives, contacts and prints. It felt like I was given the key to a candy store with no limits to how much I could gulp down. This is what I remember as the child of a photographer: a world of art that has shaped who I am. Ata was driven by a need to create and she used us, her children as the clay. Read more...

A Century's Worth of Living

by Madeleine Kando

(The following is part of a longer essay, in honor of my mother and her incredible life story, still in the making as of this writing)

My mother's name is Ata. She was named after Attila the Hun, the fierce 5th century warrior, nicknamed 'the Scourge of God', whose descendants founded Hungary. She was born in Budapest in 1913, at a time when the Austro-Hungarian Empire and its capital Vienna were the center of culture and art. Budapest, the Empire's second capital, rivaled Vienna in intellectual and artistic life and my mother was born smack in the middle of it all. Her own parents, both intellectuals, made sure she received a top notch education, which included learning Greek and Latin, Mathematics, Physics and Biology.

Ata looks nothing like Attila the Hun and were it not for her beautiful wrinkled face, framed by a thick mane of silver white hair, her tiny, fragile frame could be that of a small child. She has a hunchback, inherited from my grandfather, which makes it difficult for her to maintain her balance without her cane. She will celebrate her 103rd birthday soon, although she says she would rather be 102 forever. Read more...