Jonathan's Coffeeblog RSS 2.0

Translatio Imperii (Part 1 of 3)

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:41:51 -0700

Technorati Tag: RomanEmpire [A "public thing," a res publica.] While putzing around the Internet I came across an obscure but interesting Wikipedia article which, I believe, has great relevance to the world of our time. The Wikipedia authors gave it the Latin title "Translatio Imperii," whose precise meaning is "transfer of command." A French historian of the Middle Ages, Jacques LeGoff, is credited with describing translatio imperii as a typically medieval idea. Undoubtedly some medieval political entities, such as the so-called Holy Roman Empire, founded by a German King named Otto, were based on that idea: as various empires have risen and fallen, the imperial names, ruling dynasties, geographic centers of power, and sometimes the official languages have changed, yet proceeded in a clearly traceable linear sequence. I am convinced that this is a useful and helpful theory of a process which applies far beyond the Middle ages and began long before, and makes it less difficult to make sense of the complex geopolitical events of our time, and of history. Here are two examples: [Continues…]

Cappuccino

Sun, 8 Jun 2008 22:55:50 -0700

Technorati Tag: Cappuccino [One-third espresso, one-third milk, and...] The other day I received an alarming notice from the California State Bureau of Coffeeblogging. They were concerned that I had not posted a coffee-related item to Jonathan's Coffeeblog since August of 2007. Had I not posted a cafe-related item in January of 2008, my Coffeeblogging license would already have been revoked. I was in deep trouble, and there was only one way out of the mess: post something to Jonathan's Coffeeblog having to do with coffee, and post it fast. And so, here it is: the subject of today's Coffeeblog post is cappuccino. [Continues…]

Crisis Averted

Tue, 3 Jun 2008 15:22:16 -0700

Technorati Tag: Blogflux [Software hassles can happen to anyone.] Over the last five days my Coffeeblog reader stats plummeted. When I tried to look at the blog itself it kept hanging up and wouldn't load completely. I finally tracked the problem to a button which I had installed in the sidebar years ago: the Blogflux mapstats button. [Continues…]

Chili

Wed, 21 May 2008 10:45:18 -0700

Technorati Tag: Chili [Yes, there is the bean question.] On an unusually hot day last week I wanted to eat something substantial but not heavy in a local restaurant. I ended up sharing a salad and ordering a huge glass of ice tea and a cup of chili, a food that I usually ignore. The chili was just right for the occasion, and I realized that chili is a dish worthy of more attention. This blogpost is the result of that attention. (I also cooked and just ate some homemade chili just before writing this last night.) Chili, of course, is the standard American English name for chili con carne, meaning a sauce made from a Southwestern capsicum pepper combined with meat. (The Spanish spelling is "chile con carne.") Chili, the dish, is a proletarian workhorse in the USA, eaten by the cup or bowl in diners and road-houses, with saltine crackers, spread on frankfurters (sausages) in a "hot dog" bun, even eaten on spaghetti (in Cincinatti, Ohio), and available as an instant meal in cans. There are several things I find especially fascinating about chili: the seemingly infinite variation in its recipes and preparation, and the quest for its origin. But first a personal story. [Continues…]

Rants and Raspberries: Video Commenting

Thu, 15 May 2008 15:33:51 -0700

Technorati Tag: Seesmic [See someone's face.] Captain Video and the Video Rangers. Remember them? If you do, you were a kid when I was, back in the 1950's. In those days there was an American company called Dumont, who manufactured a television set of the same name, and started a TV network. One of their shows, broadcast live in what would become the early prime-time slot, was a science fiction/adventure serial named after the good captain and his sidekick. A full hour of the program has been salvaged, and can be seen here on YouTube. But cowboys? Yes, there were cowboys in the show, because reruns of Westerns could be used for filler. Advertisements were frequent, long, venal, and aimed at children. The captain and his Ranger dressed in military-style uniforms and flew a spaceship resembling a propeller-driven World War Two aircraft. But that was not important; what was, besides the ads, was the video. The captain, most recordings of the show, Dumont televisions, and the Dumont network are long gone (they passed into oblivion in 1955), but their legacy is more prevalent than ever on today's Internet: the advertisements, of course, and the video. [Continues…]

Bacn

Fri, 9 May 2008 18:08:20 -0700

Technorati Tag: Bacn [One man's noise is another man's signal.] Poor Hormel. That's the meat-packing company that invented the canned luncheon meat in the late 1930's whose brand name has become iconic: Spam. I googled Spam and found out all kinds of cool stuff. For example, there is a kind of spam sushi, called spam musubi, popular in Hawaii. Then there is Spam Spread, which is reportedly halal, which means kosher for Muslims. Who knew? Spam, of course, is the internet nickname for unsolicited, unwanted, and deservedly deprecated email concerning strategies for enlarging the membrum virilis, keeping said membra viriles in a state of precoital readiness, and, for those who are unconcerned about the state of their membrum virilis, or have no such membrum, mortgages. Oh, yes, and get-rich-quick schemes out of Nigeria. But I digress. Why? Because I am not intending to write about Spam here. I am writing about bacn. [Continues…]

Nations and Empires

Sat, 3 May 2008 21:51:48 -0700

Technorati Tag: Empire [Can we all get along?] I've added a new category to the Coffeeblog: Nations and Empires. Originally I had thought of adding a "history" category. Then I realized that everything I post to the Coffeeblog is some kind of history: the history of Bettie Page and the Kefauver Commission, or the history of Andres Serrano and his "Piss Christ" image with the resulting kerfuffle. Even a movie review is a history of sorts. Thinking it over, I realized that the kind of history that has begun to interest me lately is the history of empires and the nations, peoples, tribes, ethnic groups, language groups, and other societal entities engulfed, absorbed, or instrumental in the development of such empires. I would have never predicted such an interest as a college freshman who felt overwhelmed by the huge reading assignments of my required basic history course. But back then there was no hypertext, Internet, or Wikipedia. Why such a powerful interest now, so late in life? It has to do with the world events swirling around us about which the dead tree media and the idiot box generally keep us in abysmal ignorance. Why do Shia and Sunni Muslims attack each other in Mesopotamia (the dead tree pundits call it Iraq)? There are reasons for it. "Civil war" the treekillers call it. Sort of like Antietam or the Battle of Bull Run? Please. And then there's Central Asia, the route of the Silk Road, where the focus is not silk any more but petroleum., land of many fallen empires. To paraphrase George Santayana, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to write for CNN." [Continues…]

Denixonizing China

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 13:55:42 -0700

Technorati Tag: Tibet [Is there a double standard in Beijing?] Recently when the Olympic Torch passed through San Francisco, city officials engaged in well-intended skulduggery when they extinguished the original torch and successfully routed a second torch in another part of town. On the announced route, fans, onlookers, and angry demonstrators on both sides of the "Free Tibet" issue had gathered to show their enthusiasm and outrage. It turned out that the rerouting subterfuge prevented violence, but I was struck by the era-defining implications of this event, and other demonstrations which had begin on March 10 in China's Tibet Autonomous Region and soon after had become internationalized. I decided to write something about this in the Coffeeblog, and this is it. The more I learn about Tibet, however, the more complex the issue appears. Read on. [Continues…]

Mashup Mish-Mosh

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 15:39:57 -0700

Technorati Tag: Mashup [Twitter! Twitter! Twitter! Twitter!] Lately the course of events I have been following on the Internet has demonstrated that the technological tail has been wagging the dog, the dog being content. In other words, what is written and shown is becoming increasingly influenced by the high-tech ways of showing it. One of the best illustrations of this increasing influence is this cartoon by blogger Hugh MacLeod, who announced that he was leaving the social networking site Twitter because it was "too easy," and because it was distracting him from the content ("art! ideas! poetry!…") that he sought back in 2005. Twitter, about which I wrote previously, is a child of the mashup phenomenon. What's that? Keep reading. [Continues…]

The Stress of Not Blogging

Tue, 8 Apr 2008 20:23:32 -0700

Technorati Tag: Productivity [A productive way of telling stories.] It's Tuesday, April 8, 2008 5:17:01 PM US/Pacific. I just looked at the Coffeeblog and learned that my last post was March 20: Purim. It's over. It's been over for 17 days. And yet, until this item, I haven't posted anything to the Coffeeblog. Seventeen days. Two weeks and three days. And that troubles me. I experience it as stressful. The stress of not blogging. And that brings me to a recent meme purveyed in the dead tree medium known as the New York Times. As their recent headline (April 6) trumpeted (in part) "Writers Blog Till They Drop." [Continues…]

The Whole Megillah

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:42:48 -0700

Technorati Tag: Megillah [Recited every day. It has never ended.] At sundown this evening it will be Purim again, the Jewish festival when Jews read from the biblical Book of Esther, traditionally recorded on a scroll of rolled-up parchment, papyrus, or paper. A Hebrew word for "scroll" is megillah, and the holiday has given rise to the Yiddish phrase, the "gantze (whole) Megillah." Since the rabbi reads the whole scroll aloud to the congregation in an ancient tongue, and seeming, for children at least, to go on forever, the "whole Megillah" refers to a prolonged, predictable litany which we have heard before, and are banefully expecting to hear over and over again. As it happens, "the whole Megillah" is a very timely topic today, and not just because it's Purim. [Continues…]

Universonal

Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:38:35 -0700

Technorati Tag: NeoVictorian [When the personal is universal and vice versa.] I've been more and more satisfied with what I've posted to the Coffeeblog over the past few months, and I'm getting more page views from visitors. How much these visitors read of what I've written, I don't know. But they're visiting, and some of them, according to my statistical software, stick around and read other things I've written after they read the stuff they were searching for. There is another trend, however, over the past few months: I've been posting to the Coffeeblog less often. What does that mean? Am I getting bored with blogging? (No.) Are my standards getting higher (Yes.), and therefore am I intimidating myself about writing more and posting new images? (Maybe.) I think I know what is happening. The Coffeeblog has transcended mere ego-tripping, hobbyism, and showing off, though it is all of the above. It has become nothing less than a repository for my sense of personal identity. In decades past, that role was filled by college, job, ideological identification, and to a lesser extent, lifestyle. Now, as a certified old geezer (I collect Social Security!) I have needed to rewrite the whole saga before my demise, which even if it should happen fifty years from today, will be untimely. (I guess my health is good enough for me to still think that way.) What all of this lengthy paragraph implies is that the Coffeeblog is very, very personal. But there's much more to it than that. [Continues…]

The Imperial Eagle

Tue, 4 Mar 2008 20:50:18 -0700

Technorati Tag: Eagle [Hail to the Chief?] Eagles are a family of birds knows as raptors, from a Latin word for "robber." The words rob, bereft, rapid, and maybe even the slang term "rip-off" are all related. Eagles have very good eyesight, the better to spot their prey from far off, with sloping brows to protect the eyes from the sun. They also have strong heads and necks, and huge sharp, curving beaks. Romans who had noses like eagle-beaks (aquiline) were associated with nobility. Eagles have a no-nonsense look which has given them iconic status throughout history. The mythological Native American thunderbird was like an eagle, but large enough to create thunder when it flapped its wings. The European gods Zeus, Odin, and Jupiter also were said to have the power of thunder and lightning, and eagles were associated with these gods in stories and as symbols. In military terms, the eagle, King of Birds, could be said to have "air superiority," although I doubt an eagle needs to waste energy fighting other birds. I find this all fascinating. Even more than fascination, however, my primary motivation for blogging about eagles is the fact than an extraordinary event is taking place as I write this, an event whose outcome is unknown, which I will address in the last few paragraphs of this blogpost. [Continues…]

Milos Obilic and the First Battle of Kosovo

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 21:27:51 -0700

Technorati Tag: Kosovo [Never again? Please.] Later in life I'm becoming a history buff. In college I considered the study of history burdensome, with all those details to memorize for the exam, but now, whenever I hear a news headline about some world trouble spot, I want to go immediately to the Internet to get the background. This impulse has led to previous Coffeeblog posts such as The Right-Left Politics Meme, Anselm Kiefer's May-Beetle, and Ismail and the Safavids. Well, it's happened again. This past week or so, the new nation of Kosovo declared its independence, following which it was recognized by the US, following which there were huge demonstrations in Serbia against the US, plus riots by angry Serbs who set fire to a US Embassy office, a McDonalds restaurant, and multiple American Flags. "So what else is new?," you might be saying if you're a Christian, a Jew, or an atheist, who has not kept up-to-date on your Serbian history. "Of course the Muslims are burning the US Embassy. That's what Muslims do. The US must have been caught flushing another Koran or something." But guess what? The Serbs are not Muslims. They are Christians (Serbian Orthodox) or atheists too. So why are they angry? Well, the brand-new nation of Kosovo is populated primarily by ethnic Albanians (there is also an independent nation of Albania}, and most of the ethnic Albanians in Kosovo are Muslims. So the US supports a new Muslim nation and the Christians burn our flag? Well, yeah. For me, that means it's Google time again. [Continues…]

The Gefilte Fish Line

Mon, 18 Feb 2008 23:00:44 -0700

Technorati Tag: GefilteFish [Sugar? In fish?] The plot, like the jelly which surrounds a piece of gefilte fish, thickens. I am referring, of course, to knowledge I have gained since my post about Yiddish. It appears that my mother's parents, both Jews, were each born on the other side of a great linguistic-religious-culinary divide known to mavens of Ashkenazi gastronomy as the Gefilte Fish Line. (Thank you, Michael Steinlauf.) All right. I realize that some of my readers are vegans, Shia or Sunni Muslims, and possibly High Church Episcopalians. Therefore I must explain what gefilte fish is before I go any further: The Jewish holiday of Passover will be coming up soon (April 20, to be exact), and in those stores which sell Passover food (most urban California supermarkets do), you will find jars of lozenge-shaped fish patties swimming in juice or jelly. That is the mass market version. To the Jewish women from whom we are descended, however, gefilte fish was a delicacy made from fresh-water fish, bones carefully removed, then lovingly shaped into fish-like shapes, cooked, and served with horseradish. The most fanatical gefilte fish makers would actually stuff the skins of the fish used to make the delicacy with the fish mixture: hence gefilte, or "filled." However, my own eyes have never observed an actual stuffed fish version of the dish. [Continues…]

The Case of the Vanishing Airport Express

Mon, 4 Feb 2008 18:15:35 -0700

Technorati Tag: iTunes [Does the Bermuda Triangle have a branch in Cupertino?] Since 2004, Apple has had a nifty product called Airport Express, a $100 wireless router with an audio jack that works with iTunes. Run an audio cable from the gadget to your stereo system or TV sound system, and you can play back iTunes from any computer in the house that has wireless access. It's a great way to listen to your MP3's and purchased iTunes over your best speakers. For years I've coveted Airport Express, but held off buying one, making do with a wired connection from an old iPod. [Continues…]

Yiddish

Wed, 30 Jan 2008 13:11:22 -0700

Technorati Tag: Yiddish [Oy, is it Jewish!] What chutzpah! I should schmooze with that schmegeggie? Oy, vey! Yes, we're talking Yiddish here, the fershlugginer Jewish language that refused to die. After being urged by Ksenya Gurshtein, an up-and-coming blogger, curator, and art historian, I added a Yiddish page to the Coffeeblog. As a kid, however, I was encouraged to avoid the use of Yiddish around starchy white Protestant Anglo-Saxons and other neighbors who might look down on this all-too-colorful linguistic remnant of the East European ghetto, or at the very least, find it bizarre, very foreign, and well, too Jewish. And they should have found it very, very Jewish. Because Yiddish is, you should pardon me for saying so, very, very Jewish. Oy, is it Jewish! In fact, Yiddish means "Jewish." In Yiddish. As a kid I heard some adults call the language "Jewish" rather than Yiddish. They were speaking English when they said that, of course. [Continues…]

Jes' me an' my iPhone.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 14:17:15 -0700

Technorati Tag: Blogging [There's blogging, and there's blogging blogging.] This morning I left my fat laptop at home. (I call it my fat laptop because next month there will be thin laptops, even though I don't really need one.) I'm enjoying a brief sunny respite from the Northern California winter rain, seated out on the terrace of Espresso Roma. Heck, I was even able to take a self-portrait with the iPhone for the image which you now see above if you are not using the text-only version of Jonathan's Coffeeblog. [Continues…]

What Hath Jobs Wrought?

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 18:23:35 -0700

Technorati Tag: Wireless [Taking wireless to the next level.] Yesterday was the last day of this year's (2008) MacWorld Expo, the huge Apple event in San Francisco, and as usual Apple CEO Steve Jobs was going to knock our socks off with his presentation of astounding, revolutionary new products. This year, his main offering was an ultra-thin, ultra-light laptop computer which Apple calls the MacBook Air. As I left MacWorld Expo, I was humming that great Peggy Lee standard, "Is That All There Is?" I was kinda disappointed. [Continues…]

An American Folk Hero: The Dropout

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 14:54:12 -0700

Technorati Tag: Dropout [Everything a decent kid was not supposed to be.] This past weekend I celebrated another year of my life with an annual visit to Big Sur on California's central coast. Named in Spanish for the big river of the South, El Rio Grande del Sur, Big Sur was barely accessible until the 1940's when Highway 1 was built along the precarious cliffs where the mountains of the Ventana Wilderness meet the rocky shore of the Pacific. Writers Robinson Jeffers, Jaime de Angulo, and Henry Miller brought fame to the region as a place for Americans and Europeans who wanted to get away from it all; in other words, to Drop Out. [Continues…]

Bad Parent Movies

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 14:38:33 -0700

Technorati Tag: Hollywood [Is the new Hollywood really the old Hollywood?] For some reason I haven't written for Jonathan's Coffeeblog for a few weeks, but I've been busy with other stuff, including much frustrating interaction with bureaucracies. However, I did watch a few movies during that time, three of which, by strange coincidence, all dealt with impassioned young people who were overreacting to nasty, overbearing "control freak" parents. Did I discover a new Hollywood obsession, a meme as it were, or perhaps an unconscious personal motive in the choice of films to see next: Into the Wild (in a theater), Transamerica, and Factory Girl (the latter two on DVD)? In the first of the three, a recent male college graduate resentfully makes a charitable donation of $24,000 given to him by his parents to buy a new car. He then disappears and goes on a grim journey, which he considers liberating, during which he works as a Dakota combine operator, travels with sympathetic hippy couple, tries life as a wetback (he abandons his ID before re-entering the US from Mexico), as a homeless street person and as a daredevil river kayaker. He becomes a surrogate grandson to a lonely old man, and finally tests his mettle alone against Alaska's Denali wilderness. The wilderness wins. [Continues…]

Oil and Regime Change

Sat, 8 Dec 2007 16:12:42 -0700

Technorati Tag: Hanukkah [Jews confront a Syrian Nut-Job.] It's Hanukkah again, 5 candles tonight. For Jewish children living in Christian lands, Hanukkah has become a substitute for Christmas. In fact, it is nothing of the sort. The Jewish holiday is celebrated on the 25th day of Kislev, which is a Babylonian name for a month which occurs around the same time as the Roman month of December. The resemblance ends there. The first Hanukkah commemorates an event which took place in Jerusalem 164 years before Jesus was said to have been born nearby in Bethlehem. The event was the rededication of a temple rebuilt on the site of a previous temple built by King Solomon. The word Hanukkah, in fact means "dedication." There is a villain in the story: the king of Syria, Antiochus IV, whose admirers called Epiphanes, meaning "shining" in Greek. The Jews had another Greek name for him, Epimanes, which, translated into the contemporary American vernacular, means "Nut-Job." [Continues…]

Are Christians an endangered species?

Sat, 1 Dec 2007 16:23:35 -0700

Technorati Tag: Christ [From the Milvian Bridge to Lebanon] As a boy growing up in Pennsylvania I felt like a small Jewish fish swimming in a vast, boundless sea of Christians, while Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus were the stuff of storybooks. Now, however, I am repeatedly encountering the idea, on the Internet and in the mass media, that Christianity is running out of time. Today I Googled the phrase "demise of Christianity" and got 766,000 hits. The themes under that category included secularization of former Christians; the choice not to have children; a preference for personal spirituality over organized churches, and escalating geographic relocations due to competition from other, more assertive religions. Many believe that Christianity is not only vanishing from places like Lebanon and Iraq, but drastically losing numbers in Italy, the UK, and elsewhere. These dramatic current events described aroused my curiosity about where all of the Christians came from in the first place, and that led me to the story of the Roman emperor Flavius Valerius Aurelius Constantinus, and that of his mother Flavia Iulia Helena Augusta. [Continues…]

I am Curiousyellow

Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:07:02 -0700

Technorati Tag: 1968 [Long? Boring? Banned in Massachusetts?] The month after I started Jonathan's Coffeeblog, I was curious about the process of starting a blog using the Blogger website. I gave my exploratory blog the title "Curious" with the username (changed later) of "curiousyellow," which I made up on the moment, suddenly recalling the 1967 Swedish film I am Curious (Yellow). Since then, curiousyellow has been my username on many social websites, including Flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, and Seesmic. Recently I decided to see the movie again to see if my opinion of it had changed. It has changed. [Continues…]