Breathe Easy

Monday, March 23, 2020

The president has offered businesses the opportunity to voluntarily do the right as they see fit in providing critically needed supplies in our healthcare crisis.  Those businesses, of course, have been granted the right by the United States Supreme Court to spend tons of money in political campaigns, equating corporations to ordinary citizens.  OK, but as we have had to do at other times of peril, let's conscript these citizens in the battle to save American lives and put them in virtual khaki.  Make those masks, gowns, gloves, ventilators and cleaning and disinfecting supplies right now!  Don't worry, you'll get paid.  Army privates get paid.  

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Sorry, but quarterback Tom Brady should have parked himself on a couch instead of leaving for another team after 20 years with the New England Patriots.  Eli Manning not only beat him in two Super Bowls, but he showed how to retire with class.

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A slightly belated Happy Birthday to Stephen Sondheim who turned 90 yesterday.  His work has delighted me so mightily for decades, although I got a late start.  I spent the '70s in exile on the Left Coast, while Sondheim was having his most prolific decade -- "Company," "Follies," "A Little Night Music," "Pacific Overtures," "Sweeney Todd."  I missed all of them originally on Broadway, but I've since seen each several times in various venues.

Allow me to share two of his brilliant rhymes in case you haven't come to appreciate him as much as I do.

From "Pacific Overtures":

The tea the Shogun drank'll

Make the Shogun tranquil.

From "Follies":

Faced with these Loreleis,

What man can moralize?

. . .

When we inquired on the condition of a friend who spent a year as a young girl hidden in a basement from Nazi troops, she replied, "Having lived through worse times, I take solace and hope from the following: I have food, shelter, electricity and running water AND no one is trying to kill me!"

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

Last week, as we were getting used to confinement to quarters, I found some comfort in the 12 hours of daily rebroadcast of New York Rangers hockey games on the MSG cable network.  Of course, they showed only thrilling victories, overtime wins, come-from-behind wins, extraordinary individual performances.  It was a very effective non-narcotic mood elevation.

But, it was too good to last.  This week, the station is running New York Knickerbocker basketball games.  For the many of you who have been wisely ignoring this team, allow me to inform you that it has won 126 games while losing 284 in the last 5 full seasons.  Under these circumstances, you have to admire the station's heroic effort to find games worth replaying.  However, they can hardly serve as the tonic for the deflated spirits surrounding us.  Bring back the '86 Mets!

Wednesday, March 25, 2020

I thought that "dishpan hands" was a term that emerged in the 1950s, in time for the explosion of television sets in American living rooms.  In fact, I imagined that dishpan hands was no more than a malady invented by Madison Avenue, though less grave than the hundreds of fictional diseases in books, movies and computer games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fictional_diseases). 

A look at Google, however, finds "No More Dishpan Hands" appearing in a newspaper advertisement for Lux dishwashing soap as early as April 1927.  Regardless of its origins, I never considered dishpan hands a personal issue until now. Washing my hands 8 or 10 times every day, whether or not there are dishes in the sink, has produced red, splotchy, scaly areas on the back of my hands.  So, I will have to break into my trove of little lotion bottles accumulated from hotels around the world and why was I saving them anyway?
. . .   
 

I think that the late Eli Miller's hands must have been rough and red.  After all, he was a seltzer man, delivering heavy wood crates of seltzer bottles to households in Brooklyn for 57 years.  

 

 

Even though the Gotthelf family fortunes never rose much above misfortune, there were always regular deliveries by the seltzer man, whether Miller or not I can't confirm.  Before SodaStream, when ritzy people had "siphons," we had those thick glass seltzer bottles on the table every night.

 

R.I.P. Seltzer man.  https://nyti.ms/2QCYCo4

 

Thursday, March 26, 2020

If we weren't beset by the Trump Virus, today would be the opening day of the baseball season, a day especially welcomed by us Mets fans.  While the team's overall record over 57 years is 4,448 wins and and 4,808 losses, a .481 percentage (I know, not really a percentage, but that's how we talk in baseball), it has prospered on opening day, 38 winds, 20 losses, .655.  Amazing.

 

Friday, March 27, 2020

The quote of the day comes from a movie review:

"With its generous helpings of cannibalism, suicide, starvation, blood, guts and feces, how could it not be a crowd-pleaser?"

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We finished watching the four-part series "Unorthodox" tonight on Netflix.  It's based on a memoir by a woman who fled the nearly hermetically-sealed Satmar Hasidic community in Brooklyn and went to Germany to join her mother, an earlier exile.  Subtitles are used, because conversation is in Yiddish, English and German.  What's odd is when the Jews pray, which Satmars do on occasions large and small throughout the day, the subtitle reads "Yiddish prayers."  Hey!  Jews pray in Hebrew.  We have been for thousands of years.  This goof is surprising in that the program gets so many details right about the manner and mores of the Satmars, to the degree that I can determine (read The Pious Ones by Joseph Berger).  There are two possible explanations: A) the creators of the program are Jewish, but don't want to seem too Jewish; B) the creators of the program are Gentiles and what can you expect?

. . . 

 

"Senate Republicans inserted an easy-to-overlook provision on page 203 of the 880-page [economic rescue] bill that would permit wealthy investors to use losses generated by real estate to minimize their taxes on profits from things like investments in the stock market.  The estimated cost of the change over 10 years is $170 billion."  Now, you can relax.