The Professor Grades: Obesity, Tattoos, etc.

By Tom Kando

I just returned from a wonderful Hawaiian vacation (are there any other kinds of Hawaiian vacations?), hence my long silence. While over there, my mind was not entirely on hold - just somewhat.

Even so, the trip produced some musings. I want to share some of these with you today, and also introduce a new rubric, under which I hope to post more essays in the future, no doubt aggravating many of you.

In Hawaii, I spent a lot of time on the beach, at pool side, and hiking in the wilderness. Here are some of the things I noticed, looking at the people around me:

1. The spread of obesity is accelerating. This becomes clear when you are surrounded by nearly naked people. It seems that the epidemic has attacked women more than men, although one sees grotesque corpulence in both sexes.
The obesity epidemic becomes a personal problem on the airplane, when one sits (as I did) next to someone who should have been charged for two seats, not one.

Also, sadly, there are more and more hamburger joints opening up everywhere, each claiming to sell the "best hamburgers on the island."
For America’s obesity problem, I give our country a "D-."

The reason why I don’t give an "F" is that (1) there is at least awareness of the problem, which might be prelude to action, as it was when we became aware of the evils of tobacco, and (2) most of these obese people are such nice people.

2. I experienced an interesting sign of our bad health habits: One day, I went on a 10-mile hike in Kauai’s Alakai Swamp, a vast and magnificent rainforest cris-crossed by valleys, torrents and canyons. On a rare occasion, one crosses paths with another lonely back-packer or two.

But here is the thing: of the, say, 12 people I came across that day, only 2 were Americans. The others were Australian, German, British, and French. What this tells me is that our country’s recreational habits are less wholesome than those of foreigners. We Americans prefer to sip Mai-tai’s at the swim-out bar. My problem with this is not just the health issue, again. My problem is that hiking through the Alakai Swamp is a far superior form of leisure. Communing with that natural magnificence is a transcendental experience. But sadly, most vacationers - especially Americans, it seems, from my unsystematic sample - don’t get to enjoy that experience. Grade: D.

3. Another epidemic which becomes more apparent on the beach than back home are tattoos: I’d say that over half of the people I saw swimming and sunbathing had tattoos, many of them covering huge parts of their bodies, some practically from head to toe.
Now, if you want to tarnish your body with a small, relatively inconspicuous blemish, be my guest. I wont reject you for it (although the best tattoo is no tattoo).

Here is the thing about tattoos: The naked human body and the human skin are beautiful. Tattoos don’t enhance anything. Instead, they are a form of self-mutilation reminding me of the inmates whom I used to teach at the California State Prison. Tattoos are permanent, and they become uglier as you age. They are also unhealthy, increasing your chances of disease and infection.


It is said that tattoos will follow the history of earrings, which were also frowned upon by retrograde people like me at one time. I doubt it. I see tattoos as a form of self-mutilation, largely practiced by young people of limited means, by colonized people such as the Hawaiians... and inexplicably, by the NBA. Maybe tattoos are a refuge, or an expression of resistance, or some identity thing, I don’t know.

But imagine how beautiful Pamela Anderson, LeBron James and even Dennis Rodman would be without their tattoos! Grade: D- leave comment here Read more...

IMMIGRANT

by Madeleine Kando

The word ‘Immigrant’ has become a dirty word of late. It conjures up images of someone sneaky and not so trustworthy. It’s a grade below ‘terrorist’ in many an upstanding citizen’s mind. So here is a story that might lighten up this gloomy image.

I consider myself a professional immigrant. I have a lot of experience and have been an immigrant for most of my life. Even before I was born I was destined to become an immigrant. I feel it my bones. If I hadn’t become an immigrant, who knows what might have happened: I could easily have slipped into a life of complacency, debauchery, neglect..

I started my immigrant career when my parents moved to France from their native Hungary. They packed up their three young children (me, my twin sister and my older brother), boarded a train to Paris and off we went, never to return to Hungary as a family again.

In France our status was that of ‘political refugees’ and, in the eyes of the French, that is even worse than being an immigrant. Immigrants at least are expected to do some kind of useful work, like cleaning toilets or sweeping the streets. We were just running away from somewhere else, without even having been invited.

In Paris the Red Cross issued us food stamps, clothes and shoes with wooden soles. (On the way to school I had to walk like a robot because you cannot bend your feet in wooden shoes). I was an A-student in the ‘école normale’, which surprised my teacher, pleased my parents and made my twin sister really jealous. We soon forgot how to speak Hungarian, my siblings and I. My mother’s conversations with her Hungarian friends became a series of incomprehensible sounds to us.

The next step in my immigrant career took me to The Netherlands when my mother remarried a Dutchman.The Dutch welcomed us with open arms. What a change from our French ‘refugee’ status. Even though we were ‘immigrants’, they looked up to us, believe it or not. We came from France, which was still the center of culture and art in Europe. We spoke Dutch badly, and our Red Cross issued clothes looked funny to them, but the Dutch children were nice to us and our house became the ‘go to’ place. If you wanted to be ‘in’, you were friends with the ‘Kandos’.

That’s when I was first tempted to forfeit my immigrant roots. I thought: ‘Mm, being Dutch isn’t so bad. I could work for the government, vote, say good-bye to Red Cross issued wooden shoes, be part of a ‘group’. Why not?'

Thankfully, I was saved from such a terrible mistake at the last minute. After graduating high-school I decided to get a taste of some of the neighboring countries. I went to England as an au pair, to Spain as a student of literature and to Morocco (just for the hell of it).

But when I turned 21, I finally threw in the towel. I wrote a letter to the Dutch Queen and asked her permission to become a Dutch citizen. She sent me a polite letter back saying that she granted me that privilege and could I please send her a $100.00 administration fee. I had mixed feelings about my decision. I felt like I had sold my soul to the devil. But I was young and had other things on my mind, like boyfriends and adventure.

Being Dutch didn’t sit well with me. I missed my wooden soled shoes. I missed being everywhere and nowhere. So one day, without much warning, I embarked on my third and final stage in my immigrant career. I decided to come and get a taste of America. I came by boat, a big rusty second hand cargo ship called the ‘Big Dipper’. The crew was Greek and the passengers were all Dutch students.

It was mid July. As soon as I stepped onto the tarred New York pavement that felt like marshmellows because of the heat, I knew I had made the right choice. I felt like Alice in Wonderland. I had taken a bite of the mushroom that made me be just the right size. Holland was too small, Paris was too ‘French’, but in America I am just the right size. Here, almost everyone else is an immigrant. They are my true compatriots. Here, I have fulfilled my destiny. I don’t have to be anyone else but me, a true immigrant. leave comment here Read more...

Gardening

by Madeleine Kando

I must confess that I am not a very good gardener. I am a novice gardener, a pretend gardener. Only recently did I come to the shocking realization that 90% of what surrounds me has been invisible to me for most of my life. All that abundance of flowers, trees, bushes.. I just took that for granted, never thinking much about it. Yes, it’s pretty. So what?

I was going my merry way like a commuter on the subway, never looking at the other passengers. They were just there. I was always too immersed in my own little, boring world. Until one day I realized that behind every little flower bed in someone’s yard, every little bush or plant, there was a pair of invisible hands that had taken the time to care for them. To water them, trim them, mulch them..

Then, I knew that my days of blindness were at an end. There was no going back.

On a sunny spring day, I took my very first baby steps into a plant nursery. I tried to look self-confident like the other shoppers. I sneaked sideways glances at these other ladies (most of them were ladies) with their pull carts full of plants. ‘How do they know what to spend their money on?’ I thought. ‘Out of the hundreds and hundreds of varieties, why choose those?’ I walked through the isles completely at a loss on what to buy. So I just followed one of the other shoppers and picked up whatever she was buying. (Most of it went back when I realized I was going to spend 300 dollars on plants that I had no clue what to do with).

I noticed a nice sturdy tomatoe plant that looked like it could withstand some mistreatment. Months later it grew into an enormous monster four feet tall. I had neglected to look at the tag which read: ‘Great White’. (No, it wasn’t a shark plant, it just grew huge white tomatoes the size of socker balls). I eventually had to build an entire scaffolding arrangement so it wouldn’t topple over.

My numerous mishaps into the world of gardening would take up many many pages. But I love plants, I love to watch them grow. I am not so sure if plants like me all that much, though. I am just not a natural. I remind myself of the many aspiring ballet students that have come through my studio doors over the years. Most of them just aren’t meant to become ballet dancers. The will is there, but the talent isn’t. That’s me with plants, you see.

But I consider gardening to be one of the more creative human activities. Just like cooking. It really is creating something out of nothing. For me it has to do with hope. Hoping that something will happen. It speaks to a childish desire in me to want to do magic. Every morning, at the break of dawn, I go out in my slippers and scrutinize my little patches of freshly seeded soil. Hoping for the slightest sign of life to emerge. And when I see a little baby nasturtium push it’s tiny head up to the sky, when a forgotten patch of morning glories comes back to life without the slightest encouragement, or when the trumpet flowers are surrounded with hummingbirds.. how can I not believe in magic? leave comment here Read more...

Austerity Measures

by Madeleine Kando

As many of you have done over the past week or so, I watched the quite violent demonstrations against the new ‘Austerity Measures’ that the Greek Government has voted for. This they will put in place under pressure from the EU and the markets. In return they will get bailed out by the other European countries (mostly Germany) so that the country won’t go kaput.

As I understand it about 10 percent of the Greek population works for the government. They work 12 months but get paid for 14. They retire at age 54.

So I thought to myself: ‘well, that does warrant some form of austerity.’ It wasn’t easy to find information on what exactly the protesters were so irate about but this is what I found on the Reuters site:

Half of the fiscal adjustment will be generated from spending cuts and half from tax increases.

First the tax increases:

1) Sales tax will go up from 19% to 21% (In other words a $595 computer will cost you now $605)

2) Tax will go up on cigarettes (not such a bad thing, if you ask me), on electricity and on luxury goods.

3) Church property and income will be taxed (well, it’s about time I would say).

4) One-off tax on big property holdings (very fair and austere) and one-off tax of 1% on those who earned over 100,000 euros in 2009.

5) They are reintroducing a progressive tax on large property holdings and will introduce a capital gains tax.

Now for the spending cuts:

1) 30% cuts in salary bonuses for Easter, Christmas and vacation for government employees. (I don’t think I every received a bonus in my life).

2) 7% cut in bonus and pay reductions in utility salaries (how dare they cut in bonuses of those poor poor employees).

3) Cuts in subsidies to pension funds (which come from tax revenue. Everyone knows that Greeks never cheat on their taxes).

4) Public sector supplements will be cut by 12 percent in total, compared to 10 percent announced previously. (what supplements?)

5) State employees’ overtime pay will be cut by 30%. (how dare they cut in one’s overtime).

6) A hiring freeze for public sector jobs. (well duh.. 10% of the population is more than enough I would say).

7) Increase the average retirement age by two years to 63 years (oh, how cruel can they be!?).

8) 10 percent reduction in social security expenditures in 2010.

So my question is: what exactly do the demonstrators want? Do the Greeks live in another galaxy, far far away? Do they live in la la land? leave comment here Read more...

E Pluribus Unum

By Tom Kando

What is this "mandate" that America should largely stand for individualism, separatism, localism, autonomy, self-reliance, and so forth? Good values, to be sure. But the opposites are equally essential: Collectivism, union with others, the greater good of the commonweal, mutual interdependency.

Of course, the dialectic between these two poles is the eternal political question. The contrast between the right and the left, individualists and "socialists," conservatives and "progressives," the Tea Party and "liberals."

What troubles me is the presumption that the Tea Party, and conservatives long before them (Ronald Reagan, William Buckley, George Will, etc.) are more in touch with America’s true political soul than are their opponents. Quoting the Constitution, Thomas Jefferson and the other Founding Fathers, they incessantly remind us that America was founded on such principles as the protection of strong local (e.g. states’) rights, and individual rights (most of the amendments). We are told that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights emphasize "negative" rights, i.e. things which the government may not do (deprive citizens of their freedoms), rather than affirmative rights, i.e. things which the government must do (e.g. provide every citizen with a minimum level of safety and a minimally adequate standard of living).

True enough. However, what is not true, is that America’s basic political soul is therefore located on the individualistic side of the political spectrum. After all, the country was founded on the principle of union for the greater good of all. Our name is the United States. The Civil War was fought in order to preserve the Union. Our motto is E Pluribus Unum. One of the bases of our political system is that we are our brother’s keeper, and that together we can accomplish far more than if we each go our separate ways.

Some of the current political debate reflects appalling ignorance. For example, the other day Chris Matthews was interviewing libertarian Ron Paul, asking him whether or not he agreed that the government has a responsibility to provide retirees with a minimum standard of living (through Social Security), or all citizens with health insurance. In sum, should there be a social compact?

To me, such a conversation is idiotic. It re-invents the wheel. These things were settled long ago. Has no one heard of John Locke or Thomas Hobbes? What about the Federalist Papers and Alexander Hamilton? The conversation has been taking place for centuries. While everything in life is a matter of degree, even so-called Jeffersonians agree that civilized society is only possible through the social contract. The question is not whether we should give up some of our individual rights and resources (e.g. submit to income taxes) in exchange for a better life for all, but how much.

The fact that America has been the most successful society in all of history is due, precisely, to the fact that it was able to unite a larger group with greater collective resources than any previous society. Is this what the Tea Party wishes to dismantle? leave comment here Read more...

Vive La Différence!

by Madeleine Kando

I am back in my cramped little airplane seat on yet another visit to Holland. It is as if the plane, the crew and the passengers had been put in a state of suspended animation since my last trip, all waiting for me to return. The same bald heads are peering at me over the back of their seats. Bald heads, baseball cap heads, turban heads.... They are all still there as if I had never left.

My flight promises to be long and boring. As I am studying my co-passengers' crowns I cannot but admire nature's propensity for variation. I pass the time wondering what kind of individuals are attached to these little pieces of hair. Take the person in front of me. The ears on his head are beet red and stick out like Dr. Spock's. I wonder if he speaks Vulcan.. And what about that gorgeous tuft of red hair two rows down? Her sunglasses nested inside that abundance of red curls, totally wedged in even when she bends over to read (mine would fall off and crash to the floor). Oh oh! I see a sinister looking head with a hood draped over some dark hair. What if he is a terrorist who is waiting for the right moment to blow us all to kingdom come? I wonder what the back of my head reveals about me? Someone must be wondering about that excentric woman who forgot to comb her hair that morning.

Diversity doesn't stop with crowns of heads, you know. Take my co-passengers' voices for instance. Most of them are muffled by the sound of the engines. They constitute the background noise for my long, boring flight. But five rows down there sits the inevitable rotten apple. Not only has nature endowed this individual with a queue-tip shaped bald head, but his voice is so loud that it could wake up the dead. We all have to listen to his life's confession, whether we like it or not. His perfect English has such a strong Dutch accent that it sends shivers down my spine. Unable to concentrate on my writing, I finally put in my earplugs.

Sitting here in my little cubicle, I feel like I am trapped in Plato's cave. The only way I can experience reality is through the eyes of the flight attendants who keep reminding us to keep our seat belts fastened. I envy their freedom. Is it like that in jail? Prisoners must be gaging time by their meals, their once a week visits, their time to go for a walk.. Us unfortunate passengers aren't even allowed that luxury.

Holland has also been put in a state of suspended animation, all my friends, the buildings, the trams... all frozen in time since my last visit. Including Ata, my 96 year old mom. Except that she might soon disappear altogether because of her age. Suspension is temporary but death is permanent, you see.

I have arrived in Holland. I am dragging my memories behind me, comfortably piled up on a long tailcoat following me with every step. The trees are in bloom. The fresh Dutch air on the polders around my mom's flat are flavored with childhood memories. Diversity also extends to my thoughts here. I am all over the place in my head, free from the drudgery of everyday life.

I will meet my mom's friends and admirers (she is a famous ex-photographer). They will all be very interested in each other, less so in me. In their eyes I am the one that has been put in a state of suspended animation since I left Holland many decades ago. I practically don't exist any more. My visits are usually too short for me to unfreeze and become part of their small, insulated world.

But that's ok. There wouldn't be any room for me here. I am used to living a stretched out life and being back in Holland feels like I have to keep an imaginary seatbelt on. Too many rules and regulations. Too many cliques. This diminutive, well-organized country couldn't function without them. That is the price you pay, I guess, to live in a 'just' society, a society without extremes.

I will soon leave again, revisit my hooded, balding, red-haired friends in my small window seat. I will hopefully fly over the notorious Eyjafjallajökull volcano, back to the land of the free. For me, Holland will revert back to a state of suspended animation and my mom's acquaintances will put me back in the refrigerator until my next visit to this beautiful little country. Bye bye Holland. leave comment here Read more...

Eyjafjallajökull

By Tom Kando

Having just returned from Europe, I suppose I should report to you about the recent air crisis.
On April 14, Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted. As a result, there began the next day a near-total cessation of all air travel in and out of Western Europe. All air traffic was grounded. Hundreds of thousands of passengers were stranded at airports from Oslo to Milan, from Belfast to Frankfurt. Local and transatlantic travel came to a complete halt. The days passed, soon a week went by, with no end in sight.

This unprecedented disruption of world travel and commerce even dwarfed 9/11, when flights resumed after 4 days. Coincidentally, yours truly happened to be in the thick of things, having just spent nearly a month in Holland and scheduled to fly back to California on April 21. Miraculously, I suffered no delay. For it was precisely on April 21 that KLM and the Dutch authorities, among a few others, decided to resume at least some flights in and out of Amsterdam. I was one of the few lucky people whose flight was re-instated. Hundreds of thousands of others were no so lucky. Airports in Brussels, Dusseldorf, Copenhagen, all of Britain and Scandinavia remained totally shut down.

Among my own acquaintances, the unlucky people included this blog’s co-manager Madeleine (maybe she’ll report her frustrations to you herself). Madeleine was scheduled to fly to Holland on April 17, and of course that didn’t happen. Others close to me who were also negatively impacted included my French Aunt Maria who was visiting from Lyon and couldn’t fly back, a young California friend named Tyke, who got re-scheduled to fly back from Holland an entire week (!) later - he is still in Amsterdam as I write this!

As we all sweated things out over the past few days, not knowing when we would be able to fly, and who among us would get out and who wouldn’t, there was a lot of conjecture about the situation: Did the authorities handle things right? What about the pain and the cost to stranded passengers (many sleeping on the floor across European airports for a week), to the airlines (losing $200 million a day), to the economy, to Iceland?

Looking at the superb, cloudless, clear-blue sky over Holland, I said something un-educated but common-sensical, early on: "It’s hard to believe that flying is dangerous...Is it really necessary to ground all flights all over Western Europe ?"

I know, safety must come first. Those tiny silica critters that make your engine stop and make you crash are invisible, floating at 40,000 feet. What do I know? Still, clear-blue skies, all the way to the sun; zero ashes anywhere in Holland, in the air or on the ground.

When Mount St. Helens blew in 1980, the sky over Sacramento - thousand miles away - got really dark. When Mount Spur blew in Alaska in 1992, I happened to be in Anchorage. You should have seen the city: carpeted with a centimeter-thick layer of ash. We had to wear breathing masks outside. But now? Absolutely nothing noticeable, not in Holland anyway.

After about five days, I began to read articles (in the Herald Tribune, the NRC Handelsblad) and I saw televised panel discussions which vindicated my own uninformed feelings: Many experts said that the authorities had over-reacted. True, flying in some areas was dangerous - in Britain, Ireland, anything close to the event, any place affected by the wind. However, air travel in many other sectors was perfectly safe. This was confirmed by dozens of test flights. (The wholesale prohibition on flying had been based on computer models). If you avoided Iceland by safely flying to the south, transatlantic crossings should be no problem.

Of course, the airlines had been saying this all along. So, slowly, Europe realized that the blanket grounding of nearly all flights was costly and unnecessary, and bit by bit flights resumed. I was one of the early beneficiaries of the authorities’ return to their senses.

And another thing: The Boeing 777 which took me back to San Francisco had over 400 passengers, but I noticed many empty seats, with some people sleeping comfortably sprawled out over two or three adjacent seats! What’s going on? Why is Tyke still waiting in Amsterdam, along with thousands of others?

Finally: If you can spell and pronounce the volcano’s name - Eyjafjallajökull - you deserve a PhD in linguistics. leave comment here Read more...

97 Years Old, Travelling around Europe

By Tom Kando


I have been in Europe for several weeks. Twice a year I go to my mother, who lives in Bergen,an hour North of Amsterdam. She is almost 97, and going strong.

Last week, we decided to drive down to see my Swiss cousin Hans and his wife and kids. They live in the town of Solothurn, an hour South of Basel, about 1000 kilometers from North Holland.
We took off around 10:00 AM. Although it's possible to get to Solothurn in one day, I decided to do it in two days, for my mother' sake. After all, there are some special requirements for a 97-year old, things like frequent pit stops, and so on.

So I drove, mom sat next to me, sometimes we chatted, sometimes she dozed off, I played the CDs of Cannonball Adderley, Serge Gainsbourg and Maria Callas. We were both warm and comfortable, even though it was raining cats and dogs outside.

We drove through the Belgian Ardennes and across the famous battlefields of Bastogne,then through Luxemburg. My mother slept through that entire country - all 35 miles of it. By 5:00 PM, we were racing down the French Autoroute across the Alsace. On our left we could see the beautiful Vosges mountains, still snow-capped in April.

We got to the town of Epinal around sunset, and we decided to look for a hotel. The first three establishments were all fully booked. Finally, I found a road-side Formula One motel (a French chain) which had one room left, for the unlikely price of 29 euros, with an optional 3-euro breakfast.

Mmm.... How could this be, I wondered? What do you get, for such an implausible amount? I asked to see the room. It turned out to be a matchbox, a nearly cube-shaped room about 9 feet long, with a bunk-bed consisting of a regular bed at the bottom and a much narrower bed on top. The nearest toilet was down a totally dark hall, around the corner and up the stairs. The room did have a sink.

We had little choice but to take the room, since every other hotel seemed to be full.

Before retiring,we decided to sample the vaunted Alsacian cuisine - you know, maybe one of those mouth-watering Franco-German sausage dishes, with a great Alsacian or Moselle white wine. Unfortunately, the only restaurant which we found open happened to be Serbo-Croatian. But what the heck, we were hungry. Skewered lamb, kabob, such things can also be good. Unfortunately, my meat dish turned out to be nearly 100% pure fat. What I ordered should have been listed on the menu as skewered grease, or skewered lard. That was my French culinary experience on this trip. I washed it down with coca-cola.

Next came the challenge of sleeping. Climbing up the ladder to the upper bed was an impossibility for my mother, and a severe challenge for me. I reached the top bed at the cost of a seriously strained side muscle and a banged-up knee. I spent the first half of the night up there, hitting my head against the ceiling every time I turned in my bed.

After a visit to the bathroom in the middle of the night, I refused to climb up the ladder again. Instead, I grabbed the upper mattress and tossed it on the floor, where I spent the remainder of the night - getting very little sleep.

The next day, we hit the road early, tired and eager to reach the comfort of cousin Hans' beautiful chalet-like house in the fairytale-like medieval town of Solothurn. First, we had to cross the Vosges and the Jura mountains, and cross into Switzerland in the city of Basel. Easily done, I thought. With less than 400 kilometers left, we should be at Hans' house by early afternoon.

Everything went well, until we reached Basel. That city - the metropolitan region - straddles three countries: France, Switzerland and Germany. We reached the main Franco-Swiss border, but then decided not to cross there, because if we did, we had to purchase a damn $40.00 tollway sticker in order to proceed on the main motor way. I told the custom guy that I wanted to take a secondary road into Switzerland, and drive to my cousin in Solothurn on a free and leisurely two-lane road.

So he gave me some vague instructions as to how to do that, beginning by turning back into France and driving to a minor border crossing a few kilometers away.

This is where our problems started. Our car didn't have GPS. I still use an archaic device called a map. It's made of paper, and I like it. But my map didn't do me much good. I did manage to cross back into Switzerland, but then I got hopelessly lost in the suburbs of Basel. I tried to weave my way through the city in the direction of Solothurn, i.e. South, relying on road signs and on instructions from the people I accosted. Sometimes, these people spoke French, sometimes they spoke German, sometimes Schweitzer Deutsch, an utterly incomprehensible patois - Basel being a multi-lingual city. This went on for a few hours, in heavy city traffic.
At one point, we seemed to have finally left the city behind us, driving once again across open rural land. Thank God, I thought, we are doing better. A moment later, we approached a farmer walking down the road. I stopped and asked him to confirm that we were, indeed, driving towards Solothurn. His answer:

- Ach Nein. Zat is totally wrong! Zis ist Germany!

So back we went, to Basel. And across the city.

In time, I did find my way. By 4:00 PM we had finally found the proper road signs and the proper roads. By 5:00, we pulled up in front of Hans' house. Since morning, we had crossed six countries, darting in and out of some of them multiple times!

Our three-day visit was an absolute delight. Trips to mountain chalets, a boat trip down the AarRiver, raclette and fondu for dinners, and delightful company. It doesn't get any better.

However, we only sampled the idyllic life of my Swiss relatives for three days (remembering that guests, like fish, reek after three days).

So, on Monday morning we took off again. Hans had shown me the most efficient return route on my map, avoiding Basel and the Vosges mountains. The return trip was mercifully uneventful. This time, I was so efficient that I reached Holland in one day. We didn't even have to spend 29 euros to sleep at some godforsaken motel. By 8:00 PM, we pulled up in front of my mother's apartment. Mission accomplished. The headline should read: 97-year old visits six countries in one day. leave comment here Read more...

Texting and Driving

by Madeleine Kando

I was driving to work and listening to NPR when I heard that a ban is looming on texting while driving in the state of Massachusetts. I immediately texted this news to my friend while driving.

I am joking, of course. I am one of those morons that cannot even text when I am not driving. When my friends ask me why I don’t text, I blame it on my antiquated cell phone keypad. But the truth is I just don’t have enough coordination to do the ‘2-thumbs’ keypad dance that I so admire when I watch my daughter text.

I am not sure how this new law would be enforced though. There are so many things you can do at ‘below the window level’ of your car. I will let your imagination roam on that thought, but who is to know whether you are innocently folding a piece of paper, taking the cover off of your coffee cup or just twiddling your thumbs?

On the other hand, I am surprised they haven’t started regulating what you can do while driving a lot earlier. If I had to make a list of all the things I am doing while driving, it would by quite extensive. I have been known to eat, drink, sing, talk, occasionally think, dance in my seat and of course swear at other drivers. I regularly do my facial exercises while driving (that often scares other drivers more than anything else), I have been known to pick my teeth, comb my hair and put on lipstick. I could go on but I don’t want to loose your interest, so I’ll stop.

A hundred years ago people would have laughed at the need to regulate our activities while driving. Driving was almost unheard of to begin with, but pushing on a minuscule piece of plastic with two thumbs would have been thought of as the actions of a lunatic.

A hundred years in the future, however, we might have to design laws against other lethal combinations. There might be a ban on drinking in the dark. (Soft drinks in the future might contain such bizarre additives that they would undergo a deadly chemical reaction in the absence of light). Or we might need laws against eating while flying. Our food will be engineered in such a way that it might explode at high altitudes.

Reading and chewing gum might be against the law. Why? Well, what if the book you are reading is so shocking that you swallow your gum, choke to death and your family sues the author for involuntary manslaughter?

Don’t misunderstand me. I am all for regulating texting while driving. I am just surprised that no-one has come up with the following brilliant idea: If texting means looking down or away from the road, why not design a steering wheel with a built-in keypad? Holding your steering wheel and using your thumbs for texting wouldn’t be any different than a handheld device.

If you decide to steal my brilliant idea and market it, I will come after you and demand a cut. So be forewarned. Bwahahaha! leave comment here Read more...

Child abuse: a secular or religious crime?

by Madeleine Kando

Ever since the French and American Revolutions, a cornerstone of modern Western society's legal and political system has been the separation of Church and State. Only ONE law applies to ALL citizens: The civil-criminal law of the STATE. Before that, until a couple of hundred years ago, there were TWO parallel and competing legal systems - that of the secular authorities, and ecclesiastical law (Canon Law).

These are some questions I have been asking myself:
If a bishop becomes aware of a priest or other bishop molesting a child: does he report it to the church or to the police?
If he reports it to the church: does the church have a duty to notify civil authorities?
If the bishop does not report it (to either the church or the police): is he charged with a crime himself?
If a child is abused by a priest and reports the crime to the priest’s boss (the bishop): does the bishop have a duty to report it to HIS boss (the Pope I guess)
If the Pope doesn’t report it to the police, should he not get punished himself?

What are the legal obligations to report to the authorities a crime known to you? I am not a legal expert, and this is a murky area. But certainly, there are circumstances under which failing to report a crime known to you makes you an accomplice, subject to criminal prosecution.

What I am reacting to, is the curious position of the Church. The Church seems to feel that this is still the 12th or the 17th century, when Ecclesiastic law was as valid as the laws of the state. That the Church can handle the crimes committed by some of its members IN HOUSE.

You see, this is what I cannot figure out: We live in a civilized society where the rule of law is supposed to be sacrosanct. That’s why we gasp when we hear stories of family members not being charged with murder when they stone an unfaithful wife to death in some remote barbaric Muslim country that is ruled by SHARIA LAW.

Now: what exactly is the difference between that and our society condoning the protection by canon law of pedophile priests or bishops or Popes ? It seems weird to me that the church's efforts to handle these crimes in-house are not unanimously condemned. It is as if employees of the Bank of America had committed some crimes, then their supervisors found out about these crimes, and only reported them to the CEO, thinking that this was their only legal (and moral) obligation.

But it is my understanding that in the 20th and 21st centuries, there is no legal difference between the Bank of America and the Catholic Church: When their employees commit crimes, they must undergo punishment at the hands of the State. Not in-house.

I read up a little bit on what the punishment is under CANON LAW for priests who molest children. They get removed from the priesthood (sometimes permanently). You see, they don’t lose their freedom and get put in jail. They are not prevented from working as teachers in secular schools where they can go on molesting children. They just loose their job. That is what CANON LAW has to say about punishment for child molestation.

Maybe that is why there are so many priests who abuse children. The punishment under canon law is really not so bad for a child molester. They just get defrocked. It sure beats spending time in a tiny prison cell. leave comment here Read more...