Dispatches from Vilnius

Chelsea Walsh will soon be a media sensation after her unabashed interview with Hari Sreenivasan on Amanpour & Co. last night.  She has been helping to fill voids left in nursing staffs around the country ever since coronavirus broke out in March.  She can tell you what this virus is really like, how it ravages both young and old, and is most definitely not something to play with.  As she says in the end, "you either have had to be there or you can trust me or you can wait till you have your own experience." Several things stand out from the interview.  Perhaps the foremost is that she is uninsured, as she serves as a contract employee and can't afford her own health insurance.  She said she has felt COVID symptoms at least three times over the past 8 months and figures her time will come at some point, as it has for many other nurses she has worked with.  Nurses are the frontline workers.  She said doctors often keep their distance, relying on th...

It has been like a bad reality show where the loser refuses to leave the set after being voted out by the viewing audience.  Trump was determined to remain in the White House past January 20 even if the numbers told him otherwise.  His last ditch effort to stop the certification of the ballots in Michigan failed yesterday, when one of the two Republicans on the statewide canvassing board accepted the results.  The other abstained.   The canvassing board officials had no authority to determine whether the votes in Detroit should be audited.  Yet, the fate of Michigan's 16 electoral votes hung in the balance until the very end because Trump and his Michigan operatives had exerted an inordinate amount of pressure on the Republican officials to deadlock the certification and send the matter to the state supreme court, where I assume Republicans felt they had the advantage.  Aaron Van Langevelde was finally convinced he had no other option and did the right...

I was looking for a championship chess set after watching the The Queen's Gambit .  Not that I was ever a great chess player, but I wanted to play again.  Of course, you can buy cheaper sets but it is something about the look and feel of the pieces that draws you to the quality sets. My first chess set was a plastic set I got through my mother's S&H green stamps, inspired by Bobby Fischer winning the World Championship in 1972.  I was 11 at the time, and learned the game with this chess set .  My mother bought me a beginner's book , and we sat down together and went through the moves until I eventually figured most everything out.  I would play against classmates and usually get the upper hand, but it never went beyond that.  In time, I bought a Strato chess set but it was too difficult to remember that a piece occupied all three levels at once and I lost interest.  Other sports began to dominate my life and chess faded into the background. I sup...

I have to say Trump puts on a really good show.  He manages to capture everyone's attention even in the agony of defeat.  Who else can generate media buzz over a 12,000-man march on Washington or the loony attempts to stop the certification of vote counts in states with the help of his intrepid lawyer Rudolph Giuliani?  He's managed to pull most of the Republican leadership in Washington behind him as he tries to stave off the inevitable conclusion to this election that he will have step down on January 20, 2021, whether he likes it or not. Some have tried to argue that this is all part of some strategy to energize Georgia conservative voters in the Senate run-off elections in January, but Trump never thinks about anyone other than himself.  More likely he imagines there is still some way he can hold onto the reins of power, desperately trying to avoid his return to civilian life where he faces a mountain of lawsuits and criminal charges being filed against him....

It seems that the Donald gives off a musky odor that is extremely attractive to some women.  How else to explain his astonishing poll numbers among white women, where once again he garnered 55 percent of their vote?  It makes me think of the attempt to create odorama movies back in the 60s.  Yes, it was a real thing .  John Waters even used it in his film Polyester in 1981, briefly reviving this odorous technique.  Scents were put into the seats of the theater and triggered by scenes in the movie so that you get a good whiff of what is going on.  Trump may have the scents piped into his rallies, making peroxide blonde women swoon at his every word.  Of course, this doesn't explain how he manages to attract women outside his rallies, but maybe he finds some way to trigger olfactory sensations through the cadence of his speech that is irresistible to white women but repellent to women of color. Whatever the case, pollsters are scratching their heads as ...

It had been a few weeks since I checked out what Netflix had to offer in the way of new movies and I was pleasantly surprised to find Mary, Queen of Scots .  I had long wanted to watch this 2018 movie, which had received relatively favorable reviews, but I was surprised that no critics referenced Schiller's Mary Stuart.  He is the one who set up the fictitious meeting between the rival queens in his early 19th century play to determine the fate of the British Isles.  Beau Willimon, the screenwriter, had obviously read it as he used the play as the basis for his political game of thrones, playing the two queens off each other as one would a chess match. Whereas Schiller presented a more tightly defined script centered on the Scottish queen's last days in an English jail, Willimon decides to spread his action far and wide, encompassing all of Mary's 25-year reign on the throne, while Elizabeth tried to figure out what to do with her troublesome cousin, before leaving it up ...

We are seeing a new reality show play out before our eyes as His Trumpness continues to deny the results of the election with his so-called legal team threatening to challenge results  in as many as 10 states.  The shameless Ronna Romney McDaniel is asking for time to produce evidence for these outrageous claims that are feeding a social media frenzy.  I have to think her father Mitt is sorely disappointed with her, having congratulated Joe Biden himself  on his victory. For those with a short memory, Hillary Clinton made no such accusations when her "Blue Wall" crumbled in 2016.  In fact, she didn't even ask for a recount, much to the chagrin of many Democrats, despite the closeness of the races in Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.  She lost by a total of 70,000 votes in these three states.  She knew that you are lucky to come up with a few hundred votes in a recount.  Jill Stein, apparently feeling guilty that she might have cost Hillary th...

It must feel like death by a thousand paper cuts for the Donald as the mail-in ballots are counted in tight races throughout the Midwest, Southeast and Southwest.  Wisconsin and Michigan have now finished counting and gave Joe Biden a slight edge.  Wisconsin can be challenged as the difference is less than one percent, but Scott Walker, the former Republican governor, said 20,000 votes is a pretty high hurdle to overcome.  When the 2016 vote was challenged, only 131 additional votes were found, and those for Trump.   The Donald's last hope is that he holds onto Georgia, where he has a very narrow 23,000 vote lead, North Carolina and Pennsylvania and somehow magically turns Nevada or Arizona, which resume counting today.  However, with only mail-in ballots left to count the prospects look pretty dim for His Orangeness, who is bemoaning all these late-counted ballots despite knowing full well Democrats encouraged their voters to mail in their ballots.  T...