Midsommar and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

by Tom Kando

The Sixties were formative for me, as they were for anyone of college age at that time. I was heavily involved in the Peace and Civil Rights movements, I dug the music and the sex, not so much the drugs, and I examined some of the cult-like groups, as my doctoral major was social psychology.

The Counterculture was both for better and for worse. It was the last time that society had a true “prise de conscience” (Awareness experience). The contrast with today is vivid. The “normalcy” to which we have returned consists essentially of materialism and survival mode. We basically don’t want to be bothered (by stuff like the Muller Report or global issues).

The problem with the Sixties was that chaos is not a sustainable long-term state. It had to stop. On the other hand today’s “normal,” unsatisfying and cacophonous as it is, is likely to go on for a very long time.

Two movies which raise issues and remind us of that time period, are Midsommar and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. The former is a horror film directed by Ari Aster. It takes place in Sweden. This movie surprised me. I had no prior idea of what it was about. I had read something vague about a “summer festival,” so I thought it might be about some Swedish version of “Burning Man,” or something like that.

 According to Rotten Tomatoes, the movie critics give it an 83% approval rating. One reviewer calls the movie “upsetting” (but worthy) (Minneapolis Star/Tribune), another one says that Aster is the next Kubrick, another one writes that the film is “superlative, disturbing horror,” another critic says that it’s “unsettling and truly terrifying,’ etc. So I am in good company. Read more...

My Monarch Caterpillar Adventure (Continued)

by Madeleine Kando

I resigned myself to the agony of waiting for 14 days before Julie and Max would emerge from their chrysalis.

A week passed, but on the morning of the 7th day, Julie disappeared, chrysalis and all. I suspected foul play, since the adult butterfly does not eat the empty chrysalis, and there was nothing hanging from the underside of the milkweed leaf.

You have no idea how long I spent scrutinizing every inch of the large plant. I was devastated. Max was still there, with golden droplets encircling the upper end of the cocoon, like a golden necklace. The breeze shook him gently back and forth, but he was strongly anchored by his two pro legs.

How naive had I been, thinking that by the time a caterpillar turns into a cocoon, predators wouldn’t be interested. A chrysalis looks so much like a hanging green leaf.

‘Ok. That’s it’, I thought. ‘This is too much for my blood pressure.’ I decided to take matters in my own hands and quickly set up a terrarium in my sunny living room. I know, its not kosher to interfere with nature, but by now Julie and Max had not only taken up a special spot in my garden, they had morphed into semi-pets. Wouldn’t you do anything to protect your cat from marauding predators?

Max, whether he liked it or not, was gently transported on the leaf and branch that he was attached to. I stuck the branch in a vase, filled it with water and covered the whole thing with mosquito netting. Just because he was now indoors, didn’t mean that some house spider wouldn’t try to turn him into lunch.



Another agonizing week went by. I read somewhere that moving is more stressful than divorce. Max wasn't married, so I wouldn't have blamed him if he had not survived. It was hard to tell what he was up to, being wrapped up like that. I was nervously looking for signs of discoloration, which would mean that some parasite got hold of the chrysalis. Read more...

My Monarch Caterpillar Adventure

by Madeleine Kando

When I did the usual rounds of my vegetable garden this morning, I saw one of the stems of my milkweed plant covered with tiny yellow spots. They were moving. I know nothing about yellow moving spots, so I googled it and found out that they were aphids, known to damage milkweed plants. I cut off the stem and put the whole thing in a bowl of water. Aphids do not qualify for equal rights protection, in my book.

My milkweed plants are sacred territory. I planted them for the sole purpose of attracting monarch butterflies, which are fast disappearing. If you don't know this, monarchs can only live off of milkweed. The plant provides all the nourishment the monarch needs to transform the caterpillar into the adult butterfly.

Lo and an behold, I saw a magnificent yellow and black striped caterpillar on one of the leaves. And a few feet away, hidden under a leaf was another one. I named them Julie and Max. Maybe Julie is a boy and Max is a girl, but that’s ok. Now, every day, I check on them.

Yesterday Max disappeared. I checked the underside of leaves, the stems, the tops. No Max. Maybe a bird had taken him? Maybe he didn’t like his residence and had moved on, although I doubt he could have traveled far, even with all his legs.

Today, as I was watering my pepper plants, I saw Max lying curled up in a spiral on one of the leaves. He wasn’t moving, so I thought he must be dead. Just to be sure, I snipped the leaf and gently slid Max back on one of the milkweed leaves. Almost immediately his antennae wiggled, his head popped up and he began to crawl up and down, making constant U-turns. What was he doing? Did the fall cause brain-damage? Did he loose his sense of direction?

He then found a milk-weed pod and started to scrape off the skin until some milk came out which he started to drink. ‘Good old Max, you sure gave me a fright’, I thought.

Julie is no trouble at all. Since I discovered her, she hasn’t moved much from her original spot. She eats, sleeps and poops a lot. When one leaf is half eaten, she moves on to the next, then takes a nap. Maybe I am imagining it, but it looks like she is gaining weight. I read that a caterpillar’s skin doesn’t grow or stretch, so it has to go through 5 moultings before it turns into a chrysalis. Cannot wait for that to happen. Read more...

Our Trip through Oregon

by Madeleine Kando


Traveling has been my middle name for most of my childhood and my teenage years. From my native Hungary, via Paris and Amsterdam, through London and Madrid, I finally landed in this gigantic country called America. I am not sure why I chose the US as my last landing strip. I don’t think I chose it, really. I just wanted to leave where I was at the time. You know, thinking: ‘I need a break from my life. I need a vacation. I have this green card anyway, thanks to my older brother’s sponsorship, who was already an American citizen, so why not give the New World a try?

Which I did, thinking that going on a cross country trip for a few months and getting a taste of America would satisfy the remnants of my need for wanderlust. Then I could go back to my life in Amsterdam. I landed on the East Coast, again not really knowing why, except that it felt a lot more like Europe than other parts of America.

All of this is so long ago, it almost feels like someone else’s life. Then I got married and the cross-country trip morphed into a honeymoon. I stayed put for decades. I love that expression ‘staying put’. I stayed put so I could raise a family, deploy a career, and I became completely embedded in my new country. I knew I had the biggest back yard anyone could wish for, just in case my wanderlust started to tug at my sleeves again.

I had had my share of traveling through Europe, but it is a different cup of tea altogether. Many countries are the size of postage stamps and before the Schengen Agreement, it was a big deal to travel to other countries. Visas, permits, drivers’ licenses etc. Here you can drive through your backyard for days, weeks, and still not have to speak another language or even know which state you are in. In the tiniest nooks and crannies of this vast country, you can fuel up on a MacDonald or a Starbucks coffee. No matter which motel you land in, be it in Missouri or Wyoming, you can always look forward to the same watery coffee and soggy breakfast sausages (it wasn’t hard for me to give those up, after I became vegan).

I am more than old enough to remember the Howard Johnson roadside restaurants serving that same watery coffee, soggy breakfast sausages and home fries. Who could ask for more? The HoJo’s followed you like the moon at night. No matter how far you traveled, they were there. This country is custom made for traveling.

So let me take you with me on my trip to Oregon.

Off to San Francisco
There was a time in my life when I would have thought nothing of hitch-hiking cross country, but now I was glad to pay for extra leg room on our flight to San Francisco. Packed like sardines in a smelly can, I was counting the hours until we would land and the flight could be catalogued as just another bad memory.

We would stay in the city by the Bay for a short week, enjoy the company of my seven-year old grandson Marshall and his parents and then explore Oregon with my husband Hans. Funny how distances seem to grow the farther out West you go. In Europe you have decent, bite sized kilometers. Here in New England, kilometers have expanded to miles, but distances are still reasonably digestible. It is when you find yourself in California, the third largest state in the country, that you realize you were living in a bubble. It is the distances on the East Coast that are the exception. The rest of the country is unimaginably large. I felt like an ant living on the surface of a balloon that was inflating. It got bigger and bigger and I got smaller and smaller. Read more...

Mass Shooting Victims: 250; Other Murders: 17,250

by Tom Kando

August 3-4. Two more mass shootings. This time, in one day. El Paso, 20 dead, Dayton, 10. 

So far, this year’s death count for mass shootings is 58 (Source: Mother Jones). Annualized, this comes to about 100. This is roughly the annual average over the past decade or so (except for a couple of years which experienced a very large event, such as the Las Vegas mass shooting in 2017, where 58 people died.
Using a different definition, Wikipedia’s number for 2019 so far is much higher: 246. (See Mass Shootings in the US ). For the full year, this would be over 400. However, the vast majority of the events on Wikipedia’s list resulted in only one death. So One could quibble about what constitutes mass shootings and what does not.

So here we go again, with the same old refrain: The media, the politicians, the main talking points:

1. Most obviously: “We need (more and better) gun control. Outlaw assault weapons, do background checks, etc.” Correct.

2. This is a uniquely American phenomenon. It doesn’t exist in other comparable (highly developed) societies. Correct.

3. The main obstacle to progress consists of power groups such as the NRA and their toadies, largely GOP leaders such as Mitch McConnell. Correct.

4. The problem is mental illness. The problem is that the mentally ill have access to guns. Hmm... Isn’t this subsumed under item #1, above? Do the Europeans, the Australians, the Canadians, the Japanese have less mental illness? I doubt it. So this argument is a diversionary tactic by the defenders of the status quo.
Read more...

Spontaneous Generation: Can Non-Life Create Life?

by Tom Kando

I was listening to Science Friday, the excellent NPR program hosted by Ira Flatow. He was interviewing the historian James Strick about the debunked theory of spontaneous generation.

You may recall that this theory was destroyed by Louis Pasteur in the 19th century. It is the idea that living organisms can spring into existence from non-living matter. This had been the general belief ever since Aristotle. Only in the 17th century did the Church begin to oppose this theory. At that point, scientific materialism was on the rise, and the theory of spontaneous generation seemed to suggest that natural chemistry was sufficient to produce life (combined with solar radiation and what have you), thereby cutting God out of creation.

In the middle of the 19th century, the debate about spontaneous generation - essentially, whether life can spring from non-life or not - was raging. French biologists Felix Fouchet and Louis Pasteur were at loggerheads over the question. In 1859, Pasteur conducted a famous experiment which settled the issue, proving that life CANNOT arise spontaneously from inanimate matter. The French academy of science declared Pasteur the winner of the controversy, and his position has been the generally accepted standard in all biology textbooks since. Read more...

Universal Health Care 2020

by Madeleine Kando

During the debates, all democratic presidential candidates were for universal health care. It would be weird if one of them had said: ‘I don’t think everybody should be able to afford health insurance. It’s against the freedom of the individual.’

At least they all agreed on the Universal Healthcare part. What they did not agree on was on how to achieve it. Sanders and Warren were the only ones for a Single Payer health care system, which is the same as Medicare for All, i.e. a government funded system. Plain and simple.

The other candidates were all over the place. Some were proponents of building on Obamacare, others were for a ‘Medicare for most’, meaning lowering the age at which you qualify for Medicare, and others still had a problem with doing away with the employer-provided health care system. The whole debate was so confusing and contradictory that most viewers probably tuned out and just watched the candidates’ lips move.

Everybody agrees that the health care issue is incredibly complicated. But is it? Or does it seem complicated because the candidates purposely keep it opaque, ambiguous and only talk about it in generalizations?

What makes it confusing is that they give one option different names. For example, single payer and Medicare for all is the same thing. It means that the government pays for health care. But they don’t specify what kind of single payer system they envision. Is it a government that pays and provides the services, like in England, or is it a government that pays the bills but a private sector that provides the services, like in Canada?

Contrary to what most people believe, universal health care in most European countries, entails a government-regulated network of private insurance companies. The government heavily regulates the industry, including hospitals and doctors. Hospitals are non-profit and heavily subsidized by government. This would be one advantage of a single payer system. If the services and payment for those services are one and the same entity, i.e. the government, it wouldn’t make sense to charge exorbitant hospital fees. It would self-regulate. That is where the ‘Public Option’ comes in: An insurance plan provided by the government that would compete with the private insurance companies. If it is cheaper, why not choose it? A government has much more bargaining power than all the private insurers combined.

The different options on how to achieve Universal Healthcare

Contrary to a true single payer system, like Canada or Britain, Medicare in the US is NOT free. Most people on Medicare have supplemental insurance to cover many gaps that Medicare leaves open.

Most European countries have Universal Healthcare. It is universal because everybody has insurance. Not only do they have insurance, but they have to have insurance. That is what the Republicans scrapped in 2017. It’s called the Individual Mandate.

Can you imagine if car insurance was voluntary? Only the people who got into an accident would have to pay and the cost would skyrocket. Now we are stuck with an expensive system in which the cost is not shared by the whole population, healthy OR sick. Read more...

The Brussels South Station Incident

by Tom Kando

Our European trip this time took us to three countries: We first visited Holland for a week, then we spent a week with our friends in rural Belgium, and then we moved on to Paris, France. 

For our weeks in Holland and in Belgium, we rented a car from Avis. But we didn’t want a car in Paris. Who needs a car in Paris?! No way!

So we drove our Avis car from Holland to Belgium, and we used it there for a week. Then, we planned to return the car in Belgium at the end of our visit to that country, and take the train there to Paris.

The train to Paris is the TGV, the Thalys bullet train. We had to catch it at the Brussels Midi Station - the South Station. So that’s where we also had to return the rented car.

On the morning of our departure from our friends’ house (about an hour outside of Brussels), we punched into the car’s GPS the address of the Avis rental car return at Brussels’ South Station: Rue de France 2. Read more...

A Visit to Quebec City

by Madeleine Kando


We just returned from Quebec City, my husband and I, and I can honestly say that it is the most beautiful city in north America.

We made a stop over on our way up from Boston, to visit some friends who live in the northern most part of New Hampshire. The North Country is part of the Great North Woods, a vast wooded area stretching across most of the Eastern States. It is the area north of Franconia Notch in the White Mountains, that most tourists find too far and too remote. That is why we like it so much.

The North Country is a mix of pine forest, and mostly non-working dairy farms and, as is often the case when cultivation meets wilderness, the result is a unique landscape of rolling fields covered with yellow dandelions against a background of dark green pine forests.

Our friends live on a 300 acre property, set deep in the forest, away from the small town of Colebrook. Sadly, ATV’s (All Terrain Vehicles) are taking over this northern-most corner of the state. Giving these monstrous vehicles access to the habitat of the remaining wildlife will certainly kill the goose that lays the golden egg, but the locals see it as one of the few sources of income for an area where most residents are on welfare. The local authorities have opted for a shortsighted and temporary solution by allowing their pristine forests to be destroyed. It’s either the deer and local fauna or food on the table.

The day we left, the ATV season opened. There is a hunting season, a snowmobile season and an ATV season. We heard them thundering down the peaceful country lanes, usually in groups, which made the noise deafening. At the local gas station we saw them stack up on six-packs and cigarettes before hopping onto their ‘quads’ and ‘goosing’ them until the air was filled gasoline fumes.

Ten miles up the road, we arrived at the Canadian border. Gone are the good old pre-9/11 days when all you needed to cross was a driver’s license. Now, you need a passport. It is not les Canadiens’ fault. The US won’t let you back in without proof of residency and valid identification. Because I was a political refugee for most of my childhood, I felt the butterflies having a field day in my stomach while we were waiting for the border guard to come back with our documentation.

With a sigh of relief, we drove on. Speed limit signs in kilometers left us guessing at our speed, so we just followed other cars’ lead, hoping that they were are law abiding Canadians. Read more...

Why do we Age? *

by Madeleine Kando

According to Hemingway, getting older happens two ways: Slowly over a stretch of time and then all at once. He compared it to bankruptcy, but I like to compare it to falling asleep, since I am an insomniac.

The slow way is what gets you. There are no signs on the road of life marked ‘hazardous period ahead’ or ‘bumpy stretch of road’. Then, out of the blue, you find yourself on a road with a large ‘dead end’ sign looming in the distance.

You see, most life stages give you clear warning signs that changes are ahead. It is no longer acceptable to suck your thumb and you need to recluse yourself in a small room instead of staying put, when you have to pee. You start growing boobs and get your period, clear signs that things will be different. Pregnancy gives you 9 months to recover from the shocking realization that you are not the most important person in the world and although raising kids is too time consuming to worry about what comes next, just watching your kids grow is clear evidence that things are about to change.

Kids gone, free at last, you think. But that’s when the trouble starts, because once you are done reproducing, the road signs are few and far between. Who cares about those few wrinkles? It makes you look exotic. Prescription glasses? No problem. Don’t young kids have them too? Grey hair is in these days, isn’t it? Life is good! Until one day, it isn’t. Read more...