A boardwalk slides around a few blocks of waterfront where pine needle-like seaweed accumulates…

where decrepit Danish windmills stand, refitted as seaside bars…

where mahi mahi (Coryphaena hippurus) catches are weighed…

and fileted (the thrashing fish are tarpon (Megalops atlanticus), scrapping for scraps like underwater seagulls).

Narrow streets and many tourists create parking challenges. Here my wife admires my car-plus-13 inches accomplishment: back, forward, back…and done!

From Christiansted we drove east to Point Udall, the easternmost point of land under an American flag, by direction of travel, omitting embassies. Note that the westernmost point of land, using the same definition, is Point Udall, Guam.

The east Point was named for Stewart Udall, Arizona Congressman and Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. The west Point was named for his brother, Morris “Mo” Udall, who succeeded him in Congress and later ran for President.

Stewart’s Point sits in the breakers above my ear.

Before I retire this blog, I shall strive for a bookend photo of Mo’s Point above my other ear.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The fort, a U.S. National Historic Landmark, houses a rather modest museum. There is little to see other than the cannon’s view of the harbor, a few pre-Columbian Taino and Carib artifacts (Columbus landed on St. Croix in 1493), and a room of Caribbean mahogany furniture, including several cradles, a bed, chamber pot cabinets, a bidet, and a gentleman’s liquor box (see below). Preservation of historical and cultural artifacts was not a priority until relatively recently, so much of St. Croix’s past is only now being recaptured.

As we exited the fort and passed by the territorial legislature building, we heard a paradiddle, turned a corner, and watched what was probably the entire student body of St. Patrick School drilling in preparation for this weekend’s patron saint parade.

Frederiksted is the site of the 1848 uprising that ended slavery on St. Croix. Accordingly, Saint Patrick is honored by Crucian Catholics because he, a Romano-Briton, was captured by Irish raiders in the 5th century and enslaved in Ireland for six years before escaping, taking holy orders, and returning to Ireland as a missionary.Lunch was charming. We ate at Polly’s at the Pier, an almost-year-old, organic, nearly vegetarian eatery run by partners Steven Schawl and Seth Wilcoxon, transplanted Midwesterners, now committed to St. Croix.

Gentleman's Liquor Box

They have a full bar, but I was most intrigued by their beer. They call it micro-brewed, but nano-, pico- or even femto- would be more accurate. They brew in five-gallon batches, exactly what I do at home. Their signature is Polly’s Pale Ale, but I sampled their Bock: excellent…brown-eyed, not over-hopped, with notes of cassis, piñon, and Abba-Zaba.

Steven and Seth. Polly is the beloved female pictured above the bar.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

SFO—We will be gone eight days.

Tip #1: After checking to make certain that the shuttle schedule meshes with your flight plans, stay overnight at lodging near the airport if you have a 6:30 a.m. flight.

Tip #2: Choose a motel (we picked Red Roof Inn) that will let you park your car for the entire length of your trip. Their parking fees are almost always less than airport lots.

The total cost of lodging plus pre-paid parking was only two-thirds of what parking nearer the airport would have cost…plus, we did not have to get on the road at 3:30 a.m.

MIA—One of the most international of American airports. JFK undoubtedly welcomes more xenoes, but here, I gauged, the share of out-of-country faces and accents could be higher (although somewhat light on the Asian).

Airport Food—Now that airlines no longer include food in the price of the ticket, the majority of passengers either don’t eat or bring their food on board. The welcome result of this is that airport food quality has greatly improved without a concomitant increase in price (one of the rare triumphs of Milton Friedman’s free market economy). Breakfast and carry-on sandwiches at Guava & Java in SFO were high-quality and reasonably priced. Dinner at Sushi Maki in MIA (soba noodles, sushi roll, and miso) was delicious and even more reasonably priced.

STX—We deplaned down rollable stairs into a night warm rain. Today’s temperature had ranged, a bulletin board announced, from a high of 81° to a low of 77° F. A rep from Centerline Car Rental was holding my surname aloft at baggage claim. In minutes we had our car and were heading from the south shore to the north…in rain…in dark…on unlighted narrow roads…in a strange lane. The US Virgin Islands is the only American state, territory, possession, protectorate, or commonwealth where one drives cars build for the right lane in the left lane.

When we finally parked at our home-exchanged condo, I, who had been entirely focused on staying on the correct side of the road at each turning or merging, offered kudos to my wife, a self-admitted cartographic illiterate, for correctly relating the map in her hand to the dark and wet reality sweeping past our headlamps.

Tomorrow…we walk the beaches.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

The largest earthquake ever recorded was the 9.5 magnitude 1960 Valdivia earthquake, also in Chile.

Just to put the Great Chilean Earthquake (an alternate name for the Valdivia quake) in its perspective, scientists estimate that the Yucatán Peninsula bolide (meteor) impact that created the Chicxulub crater 65 million years ago and led to mass extinction of the dinosaurs and other species had the energy of almost 600 Valdivia earthquakes.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Winter in Southern California is barely winter. But colds, coughs, and bad dreams can besiege a child in any clime.

I was six. My older brother was nine. Our baby brother was just months old. Dad came into the big boys’ bedroom to solve some medical or psychological problem. He carried two glasses of what appeared to be milk. My brother and I immediately noticed globules of melted butter floating on the surface of the warm liquid. We questioned.

“It’s a guggle-muggle,” Dad explained. “Drink.”

The name was intriguing and, I was sure, fabricated to entrance his boys. The concoction was sweet, warm, and delicious.

We feigned illness several times thereafter in order to occasion repeats.

His recipe, we eventually learned, was simply milk, butter, and honey, warmed until the butter melted. I can’t imagine it had any real medical efficacy, especially for those illnesses where phlegm might be one of the symptoms, but a search has revealed the guggle-muggle’s widespread use in Jewish folk medicine. Who knew?

Clearly, almost everyone but me. But once I looked, I found guggle-muggles galore!

I even found one in an Uruguayan bookstore’s blurb for a book entitled, Gogl Mogl! El Gran Libro Del Humor Judi: “El Gogl Mogl es un exquisito postre muy popular entre los judíos de Europa Oriental.”

The name has various spellings (not surprising since it is a tranliteration into English of Yiddish, which is written with Hebrew letters). Gogl-mogl, gogol-mogol, gogel-mogel, kogel mogel, gurgle-murgle, and uggle-muggle are the ones I’ve found. There are undoubtedly others. I found one source that claimed the name comes from a cantor named Gogel who sang in a synagogue in Russia. He lost his voice and couldn’t sing, only regaining his voice by drinking a mixture of raw eggs and wine…with sugar, because he had a sweet tooth. This is, IMO, bogus.

Do not confuse the guggle-muggle with the muggles in Harry Potter’s saga. Not Jewish!

The recipe is even more varied than the spelling. It is always hot, and most preparers include a raw egg yolk…some the whole egg. Some use sugar instead of honey. Cinnamon, occasionally. Maybe grapefruit or lemon juice. Many include a bissel bronfen (a little slivovitz, rum, or brandy—maybe a lot!). Hot tea? Yeah, some.

I even found this reminiscence: “If I am not mistaken this was a concoction of cod liver oil and chocolate syrup. My father would take me to the druggistnik to make a guggle muggle when I was constipated or just had the blahs.“

Oy!

There’s an old saw about two Jews having three opinions. There is no definitive recipe for a guggle muggle. It is to be made exactly how bubbie used to do it.

Former NYC mayor Ed Koch spoke of it on his radio show. Barbra Streisand said her mother gave it to her to strengthen her voice.

And from the beginning of a short story that won third prize in a 1997 online literary contest:

I came down with a heavy bronchial cough one year to the day after my Bar Mitzvah and on the very day that my mother went to the hospital to give birth to her third child, a baby girl, my little sister. My father tended to me in her absence. When on the third day of my illness the cough hadn’t disappeared in spite of my taking medicine prescribed by a doctor, my father took matters into his own hands. He put together a concoction that his own parents had given him when he was a child: the yellow of eggs, one squeezed lemon, one spoon of honey, and two or three teaspoons of sugar, all mixed together and taken down as if I were drinking a milkshake or an egg cream in the candy store downstairs. Unlike all other medicines, this tasted fine. In fact, I made note of the ingredients so that I could put all that stuff together for myself secretly, even when I didn’t have a cold.

“What is it called?” I asked my father.

“In our shtetl in Galicia and in Russia, an uggle-muggle,” he said. “In Rumania, a guggle-muggle. In France, a chateau, but what do they know.”

You could say the same about me. I thought my father invented the whole thing. What do I know?

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

I recently learned that in addition to the Jesters’ very successful 1948 album, Little Songs on Big Subjects (described by me here and here), there was almost identical album released on Vox Records by the Bachelors. I have not yet determined which album came out first.

The Bachelors album was also entitled Little Songs on Big Subjects and included all the songs on the Jesters’ album, plus one additional Zaret/Singer tune, The Poor Old World (see below for the lyrics). Other than that one tune, the lyrics are the same on both albums; the arrangements are quite different.

Listen and compare:

Traveling Broadens One by the Bachelors

Traveling Broadens One by the Jesters

Which do you prefer?

A bit of the history behind these songs is included in the Bachelors album liner notes:

I had never heard any of the Bachelors’ versions. There is nothing about them on the Internet. Please comment if their arrangements are the ones you remember.

© 1947 Argosy Music Corp.

*     *     *     *     *

Thanks to the Judaica Sound Archives
at Florida Atlantic University
for research assistance.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

In the sixth grade, the Boys’ Vice-Principal threatened to suspend me from school unless I stopped carrying around The Catcher in the Rye I think because it had the word “fuck” in it. Since the Boys’ Vice-Principal hadn’t read the book – and I don’t think he’d ever read any book – he couldn’t tell me why.

But Mrs. Gordon was cool. She let me keep the book at my desk and read it at recess as long as I kept a brown wrapper over the cover.

I think J.D. Salinger would have liked Mrs. Gordon. She wanted to save me from the world’s vice-principals, the guys who wanted to train you in obedience to idiots and introduce you the adult world of fear and punishment. Mrs. Gordon wanted to protect the need of a child to run free.

That’s, of course, how the word fuck got into Salinger’s book. For the 5% of you who haven’t read it, the main character of the book, Holden Caulfield, tries to erase the f-word off the wall of a New York City school. He doesn’t want little kids like his sister Phoebe to see it, that somehow it would trigger an irreversible loss of her childhood innocence:

I thought Phoebe and all the other little kids would see it, and how they’d wonder what the hell it meant, and then finally some dirty kid would tell them—all cockeyed, naturally—what it meant, and how they’d all think about it and maybe even worry about it for a couple of days.

Which is where the title came from. Salinger’s Caulfield, pushed to the edge of his own youth and directed to prepare himself for the job market, could see for himself only one career: as a catcher in the rye. He imagined a bunch of kids playing away happily in a rye field, but a field on a cliff’s-edge. Every time a child, lost in their game, would drift toward the edge, Caulfield’s job would be to catch them before they fell.

Any other job would just turn you into a “phony,” that is, an adult. All adults were phonies, even the nice ones, who took jobs they hated, taught textbooks and catechisms they didn’t believe and lived lives of self-inflicted disappointments, while pretending it was all OK. Then with phony grins, they’d demand that you join their painful parade of delusion and decay.

Nearly half a century after I covered up Salinger’s book in a carefully folded brown wrapper, I thought I’d read it to my twins. They were now eleven, in the 6th grade.

But I couldn’t. In his 1956 book, Salinger had railed against a post-war world of boys in school blazers trying to get to “first base” with their steady dates. America itself was an adolescent, and despite the police beatings of marchers in Alabama, despite the “drop, tuck and don’t look at the flash!” drills we did weekly in Mrs. Gordon’s class to prepare for the Russian nuclear attack, America was still weirdly, optimistically child-like.

We knew then that the world could only get better: we would go to the moon and eventually, vacation there. JFK announced the Alliance for Progress and poverty would end in Appalachia; and Paul McCartney wanted to hold our hand. Every nasty meanie, like the police in Selma, was met by a legion of victorious innocents led by Martin Luther King. So we all held hands in a circle while Pete Seeger strummed “We shall overcome.” Everyone would get a scholarship; and we really, truly believed we would overcome.

Even the social critics – Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, Jack Kerouac – were just big, mischievous kids.

Yes, there were a bunch of old phonies like Joe McCarthy and the Boys’ Vice-Principal, but their days were numbered.

Then we fell over the cliff.

A bullet through the skull replaced Kennedy with Nixon. We shall overcome was replaced with the vicious “Southern Strategy;” the Cold War exploded in hot jungles; then came the idiot wasteland of the regimes of Ford and Carter and Reagan and Clinton and Bushes, a degenerative march as the machine of America rusted and died.

And here we are today, begging for spare parts from China and my daughter glued to YouTube videos of Lady Ga-Ga’s crotch, and my son slicing off a cop’s head in Grand Theft Auto and a President, telegenic and painfully hollow, playing the lost and ineffectual shepherd over an electorate divided between the terrified and the greedy. In place of prophets, we are offered a caravan of kvetching clowns piling out of the Volkswagen on MSNBC.

Jerome David Salinger 1919-2010

Well, it’s better than a real job, but no less “phony,” no less of a petty illusion.

I’m holding this book, the brown wrapper lost who the hell knows when, and I know it would just be laughable, inscrutably ancient to those wisened, worldly children of mine.

I’ve put it back on my shelf.

You stand on the cliff edge and there’s no one left to catch.

I have read that sages in every era have mourned their time’s descent from past intentions and glories. Perhaps all these sages (including Palast and, immodestly, me) are fuddy-duddies.

Perhaps, in the present instance, not.

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

“I consider it completely unimportant who in the party will vote, or how; but what is extraordinarily important is this — who will count the votes, and how.”

—attributed to Josef Stalin in Boris Bazhanov’s
Memoirs of Stalin’s Former Secretary, publ. 1992

*     *     *     *     *

Bev Harris is one of democracy’s watchdogs. She leads Black Box Voting, a non-partisan group that seeks transparent and honest elections. Here’s her unsentimental, hard-facts take on today’s important Senatorial election in Massachusetts.

SHINING A BRIGHT LIGHT ON AN UNDEMOCRATIC TACTIC

For 10 years, I’ve been watching a trend to manipulate elections through premature “call” of the race by a media outlet. See below for predictions on what may follow a media call for either candidate in Massachusetts.

Bev Harris

The media “call” can be manipulated because the public doesn’t know that projected winners come from a system that is not even a governmental source! In fact, the media “calls” elections based on data from just one media outlet — usually a quiet little division of the Associated Press that occupies a little corner somewhere and answers very few questions. Volunteers call in result reports to the corporation. The reports are often inaccurate (see below for examples). The names of these volunteers are not part of the public record. We will never get the list of names for those who will call in the 351 numbers which will result in “calling the election” for Tuesday’s Massachusetts election.

HOW THE MEDIA “CALL” MAY ULTIMATELY CONTROL POLICY

Martha Coakley

Scott Brown

Sixty votes are needed. If Coakley is called and installed, they’ve got the 60. If Brown is called and stalled, they’ve got 59. Either way, the media “call” on Massachusetts is going to be under exceptional political pressure.

No matter where you stand on the controversial healthcare bill, be aware that what you see reported on Election Night is not only not “official” or “final”, but is not even real, and may not even be the numbers written down by poll workers or printed out by the voting machine.

ISSUING FALSE NUMBERS TO THE MEDIA TO CREATE A FALSE “CALL”

In the recent controversial NY-23 race, volunteers in multiple wards called in zeroes instead of votes for Conservative candidate Doug Hoffman. There WERE votes, but they called in zero and later said oops. This was not a plausible oops, because the zeroes were not called in randomly for various races, nor did the zeroes spread themselves among different candidates. Doug Hoffman had false zeroes reported while votes were called in for the others. Incorrect figures provided to the media resulted in a margin which appeared thousands of votes larger than it actually was, goading Hoffman to concede prematurely.

In the Florida 2000 presidential election, impossible numbers were provided to the media producing exactly the margin needed to “call” the race for George W. Bush. Minus 16,000 votes were reported for Al Gore, and (not knowing the margin was false), Gore conceded privately to Bush and nearly conceded to the nation.

In New York City’s 2008 presidential primary, more than 50 wards falsely reported “zero” votes for Obama (but not for Hillary), creating a superficially low result on Election Night.

In Maine’s 2009 election, the media reported called-in results for Lewiston and Augusta, two of Maine’s largest cities, for seven ballot questions each with two possible choices (7×2=14 results per city), a total of 28 vote results for the two cities. Not a single one of the 28 results was correct, and eight were off by large margins.

In New England, even preliminary governmental results from each municipality are not compiled for a day or so. Results are typically sent by courier or brought by the police to the secretary of state. The results you see on the news are therefore not government results at all, but results generated by unnamed volunteers (or sometimes paid part timers) working for a corporation.

The media “call game” is a political game that can be played dirty, and in Massachusetts, the media “call” could ultimately control national healthcare policy.

Usually, these premature calls can be unraveled if they are incorrect because elections aren’t certified for several days and winning candidates aren’t installed into office for a month or more. But in Massachusetts, because of the special situation with an imminent vote on a controversial bill combined with a temporary senator, the media call can create an undemocratic mess.

JOURNALISTIC MALPRACTICE

When the media calls an election based on non-governmental verbal information from unnamed volunteers, it displaces legitimate election procedures. Media volunteers can — and HAVE — issued false numbers in order to get the media to call an election for a candidate. The US Congress can — and HAS — installed new voting members of congress before the votes are counted or the contest is determined.

If a media outlet calls the Massachusetts race based on verbal reports from names that are never disclosed, we need to call this what it is: Journalistic malpractice, and a danger to democracy.

If what you see Tuesday night ain’t right, be prepared to speak up. Or shout loudly. It’s our duty.

Coakley and Brown photos: The Boston Globe

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Commonly—and erroneously.

The internet offers near-instant access to information. It is ironic that in some cases this easy of access decreases accuracy.

Wikipedia explains the term clearly and correctly:

A blue moon is a full moon that is not timed to the regular monthly pattern. Most years have twelve full moons which occur approximately monthly, but in addition to those twelve full lunar cycles, each solar calendar year contains an excess of roughly eleven days compared to the lunar year. The extra days accumulate, so that every two or three years (7 times in the 19-year Metonic cycle), there is an extra full moon. The extra moon is called a “blue moon.” Different definitions place the “extra” moon at different times.

• In calculating the dates for Lent and Easter, the Clergy identify the Lent Moon. It is thought that historically when the moon’s timing was too early, they named an earlier moon as a “betrayer moon” (belewe moon), thus the Lent moon came at its expected time.

• Folklore gave each moon a name according to its time of year. A moon which came too early had no folk name – and was called a blue moon – bringing the correct seasonal timings for future moons.

• The Farmers’ Almanac defined blue moon as an extra full moon that occurred in a season; one season was normally three full moons. If a season had four full moons, then the third full moon was named a blue moon.

But in its March 1946 issue, Sky & Telescope magazine unintentionally set the record wrong, misinterpreting previous definitions and stating that a blue moon was the term given to the second full moon in a single calendar month. The new-and-wrong definition caught on, and even thought the magazine eventually corrected its error (in its May 1999 issue and again in a good-hearted, self-effacing press release two days ago), over that half-century, the new, easier-to explain definition had almost completely supplanted the old.

That’s the way of language; it changes.

It’s me replaces It’s I.

I’m  like… replaces I said…

Blue moon gets a new definition.

So on New Year’s Eve, this wrong new definition shone around the world.

Singapore’s Straits Times got it right: “The original meaning of ‘blue moon’ was the third full moon in a season with four instead of the usual three.”

The Jerusalem Post wrote: “But a real blue moon – not a reference to the moon’s tint but designating its appearance a second time in a single calendar month – was visible Thursday night where there were no clouds – along with a partial lunar eclipse that could be sighted throughout the Middle East.”

The Times of India noted correctly, “It is basically a calendar event and has no astronomical importance as such.”

Some of this New Year’s references to blue moon were benign, even charming:

A segment on Omaha’s WOWT-TV included, “It happens once roughly every two and a half years. Thirteen moons in a twelve month period—when two fall in the same calendar month, it’s called a blue moon. And the saying “once in a blue moon” refers to a rarity—something that doesn’t happen very often….And just before midnight a wedding.”

Some were educative.

Richard Brill, writing in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin, noted correctly that “A full moon on New Year’s Eve is rare, but when it happens it is always a ‘blue moon.’”

Others were simply inaccurate, misleading, or both.

The Christian Science Monitor mis-cited the initial Sky & Telescope article: “But in 1943 [sic], Sky and Telescope Magazine erroneously wrote that the second full moon in any calendar month was called a blue moon. The label stuck and is still used today.”

China View got the definition entirely wrong. In a caption to this photo, it wrote: “The sunset is reflected on the wing of a commercial airliner as the full moon rises over clouds in the horizon over Athens December 31, 2009. For only the second time in nearly two decades [sic], Earth is illuminated by a “Blue Moon,” the name given to the second full moon appearing in a single month.”

NASA, as should be expected, referenced the Sky & Telescope error-and-restatement correctly, but blundered when it stepped down from its ethereal bailiwick into song lyrics: “In music, [blue moon is] often a symbol of melancholy. According to one Elvis tune, it means “without a love of my own.” On the bright side, he croons in another song, a simple kiss can turn a Blue Moon pure gold.”

A quick search will show that those two musical interpretations occur in the same immensely popular Rodgers & Hart song (Blue Moon), recorded variously by Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Bob Dylan, and scores of others, but made most popular by the Marcels’ in their #1 do-wop version (1961).

Do the research. More frequently than once in a blue moon, the internet will be wrong.

But if the tune is good…sing along!

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Photo credits: Blue moon---canyonhiker (who admits to PhotoShopping it blue); Jetliner---Xinhua/Reuters Photo

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.

Once the eye candy is consumed—and it is uniquely delicious—a residual trace will be left in the wiring of those multimillions who sat down to be entertained, but were unconsciously lulled into the comfort of Cameron’s non-reality. I am not referring to his alien worlds. It is the triumph of the little man over the futuristic military-industrial juggernaut that poisons.

While Cameron is over-stimulating audiences with the endorphin rush of brilliant CGI imagery, he unselfconsciously shows bows and arrows triumphing over modern weaponry. We cheer the underdog, not realizing that this impossibility, while thrilling in Avatar’s fiction, dulls, demeans, and diminishes our real-world concerns about power-and-greed’s relentless quest to take all that is available now without regard  for future consequences.

What if Avatar ended with the arrows bouncing harmlessly off the military armor (as they did in the film’s first encounter between the humans and the Na’vi)? What if the military thoroughly destroyed the native Pandorans? It would be honest. It would be a repeat of reality (e.g., U.S. Calvary vs. Native Americans, Australian settlers vs. Tasmanian aborigines, and innumerable other one-sided contests). Audiences would hate it, but they would walk out reinforced in their concerns about their children and grandchildren.

But Cameron, in his quest to remain “king of the world,” has made certain that viewers will feel good, not concerned.  When they exit after the planet Pandora is saved from destruction, the warm feeling will stay with them like extra pounds, adding flab to their unwillingness and inability to take charge of their real lives and the real world.

In the middle of the societal and intellectual curve, where most citizens reside, the corporations offer the addictive soma of an Avatar. Who can resist?

©2010 Steve Cotler's Irrepressibly True Tales. All Rights Reserved.