Dispatches from Vilnius

When I first joined facebook, I was surprised to see how many of my old high school friends were farmers.  I had grown up in a rural Northwest Florida community so it wasn't a stretch.  Well, it turned out they were all playing FarmVille , trading crops and livestock as if they were real things.  They invited me to join in but I said no thanks.  Turns out you needed to buy "farm cash" to build any sort of capital.   Not surprisingly, Bitcoin came into being about the same time.  I saw it as just another form of "farm cash."  What could you do with it?  Turns out you could do a lot if you had a nose for this sort of thing.  Mostly fool other people into buying it so that you can build its value over time.   Non-fungible tokens became a big thing.  They can take any digital shape or form, even art work.  This so-called cryptoart was very popular a couple years ago but like cryptocurrency hit its peak and started tumblin...

There was a time when the future seemed so bright you needed to wear shades, but such is not the case anymore.  Either we have lost our innocence or we just love to wallow in our own misery.  The future is now primarily seen as a post-apocalyptic nightmare that we have to scratch and claw for survival, often with little hope that things will get better. For some the only way out is to leave this planet all together and start a new life on Mars or somewhere else within our yet to be determined cosmic reach.  Not that we are designed for space travel.  Human beings have never spent more than 437 days in space.  Our bodies have a hard time handling weightlessness, not to mention the amount of water and nutrients necessary to sustain life in transit or on some inhospitable planet.  Science fiction has given any number of possibilities for extended space travel, principally suspended animation, but I would think the only way to transport human life from one plan...

The Nemunas River at Žemosios Panemunė Sometimes the old ways are the best ways.  My son dug a battered wood snow shovel out of the basement that worked much better than the new plastic one in cutting through the packed snow.  As a result we were able to get our respective driveways cleared much more easily.  It's my winter exercise.  I'm not confident enough to run in this weather as the city doesn't do a very good job keeping the streets and sidewalks cleared in the suburbs.  I've had my share of falls over the years and at 61 don't want to bust a hip.  It takes about an hour to clear the long driveway at a relative leisurely pace.   I will wait till Spring to start running again. I'm hoping I will be more motivated this time around.  COVID really zapped my vitality.  Not the disease, as I didn't get it as far as I know, but the general sense of malaise that comes from working at home.  I started going to the office three times a ...

You really have to hand it to Republicans.  They went all out on Herschel Walker the past four weeks with many prominent GOP senators visiting Georgia in an effort to bolster his candidacy.  In the end, he will be remembered most for his werewolf meme.  While such comments are  comedic gold , they only served to prove how incredibly unfit the former football player is for public office.   It goes without saying that the Republican Party finds a new bottom in each election cycle. This is what happens when you let Donald Trump call the shots.  Any other Republican probably would have unseated Raphael Warnock.  Kemp won the governor race by a relative landslide back in November, but it wasn't enough to drag Walker over the goal line , as Chris Christie put it.  Just enough Republicans couldn't bring themselves to vote for Walker, including the state's Lt. Governor , who called Herschel "one of the worst candidates in our party's history."...

Judging by the size of the Christmas tree and myriad of lights, there's no great worry about electricity bills in the city council.  Same around the country as these ornamental trees are more brightly lit than ever.  I suppose it is a way to cast all our cares and worries behind us and enjoy the holiday season.  Yet, much of Ukraine remains plunged in darkness, so I'm not sure what kind of message this is sending. For Vilnius the cake tree represents the 700th anniversary of the city in 2023.  The remote location made sense back in 1323, placing the capital closer to the heart of the Grand Duchy that stretched all the way to the Black Sea, encompassing much of present day Belarus and Ukraine.  Ruthenian was the language spoken between the nobility.  However, Mindaugas had chosen Catholicism over Orthodoxism, earning him a crown hand delivered from the Vatican in 1253, the only Duke to be coronated by the Pope.  Not sure what the story was with Gedimina...

Jimi would be 80 today.  Hard to believe it was 53 years ago that we lost him.  He was at the peak of his powers and will forever be remembered as the greatest rock guitarist.  Don't take my word for it.  Here is what every other great guitarist had to say about Jimi , including John McLaughlin who had the opportunity to work with Jimi shortly before he died.   They all hailed his virtuoso skills and stage presence, even those who are loathe to give praise to anyone like Keith Richards .  While he and Jeff Beck rued Jimi's assault on London in 1966, as making it difficult for anyone to follow in his wake, Eric Clapton went out of his way to make Jimi feel welcome, including jamming with his band Cream. It was like unleashing the Kraken.  Everyone was so wrapped up in being truthful to the Blues and along came Jimi with a style all his own that shook Blues to its core.  He could take any classic standard and make it his own, like Killing Floor...

In this Retro age when you can buy little Kodak 35mm cameras and Victrola record players at Black Friday discounts, it is no surprise that enterprising journalists are recycling popular mythological theories from the 1970s and repackaging them on Netflix.  The latest effort is  Ancient Apocalypse , an 8-part mockumentary that has all the heavy-handed production qualities of In Search Of... although Leonard Nimoy made for a much more engaging host. Graham Hancock is not interested in conventional theories of early civilizations.  He believes these pyramids are all interrelated.  This was a view held by Thor Heyerdahl, who was determined to see if the Egyptians could have sailed to the new world centuries before Columbus or the Vikings on a papyrus boat he called Ra.  He was convinced the Egyptians provided the technology to the early Meso-American cultures, as the pyramids of Mexico were so similar in design.  He tried to cross the Atlantic on his Ra Expedi...

Can't say I really looked forward to winter.  The first snow is always nice but after that it is a slushy mess.  The city once again overdid the sidewalks with rock salt.  I thought we got past that but apparently not.  I keep the dog in the yard because I don't feel like washing his paws each time we go out for a walk.  I covered the roots of the rose bushes and magnolia with peat to get them through winter.  Loki anxious to dig up my work.   Good thing our son changed the tires on the car.  He said there was a long waiting list at the shops, but he managed to find a friend to mount new winter tires on the rims and put them on the car himself.  Still need to do wheel alignments but will wait till the rush is over.  Same thing every year. One of the charity drives this winter is for metal cans to make little fuel cannisters, or trench candles , for Ukrainians.  There was a short segment on LRT news with two women collecting pet...

I tried to take my mind of politics by watching the Netflix documentary Pepsi, Where's My Jet?   Daina was asleep on the sofa.  Otherwise, I don't think she would have been so amenable.  This was strictly a boy's fantasy replete with Cindy Crawford as a guest. For years, the soda company was trying to gain converts through its Pepsi Challenge , hoping to make up ground on Coca-Cola.  It's not like Pepsi wasn't already a big player.  PepsiCo owned fast food giants like KFC, Taco Bell and Pizza Hut, and signed exclusive deals with chain restaurants across the country to compete with Coke.  But, celebrity endorsements don't hurt and Pepsi was paying big bucks to lure the top entertainers at the time.  They struck gold with Cindy Crawford, the "it girl" of the 90s.  Her commercial sparked a new generation of Pepsi drinkers.  But, this is a fast paced industry and they constantly needed something new. The most audacious commercial campaign was th...

When your own daughter turns on you , things are not going well in Mar-a-Lago.  Donnie Jr. also missed his father's coming out party, but it was because he was unable to secure a flight home in time from a hunting trip out west.  That left the in-laws to fill the empty seats.  Not a very auspicious beginning for another run at the White House. He had to announce his candidacy after all the flack he was getting over the midterms.  To put off his presidential bid would have essentially been to admit defeat.  Can't have that. I really don't care at this point.  I just hope that all the charges being leveled against him finally play out in court, making his final presidential run a memorable one that lands him in jail.  Still, a few lawyers couldn't resist the temptation to imagine Trump governing the country from a prison cell .  While you can't vote as an inmate, the Constitution allows persons to run as president from behind bars.  Lyndon LaR...

It's been nearly a week since the election and there is still no clear winner in the House.  A number of races are too close to call out West, as the balance of power in the US House of Representatives lays in California and Arizona.  If you wonder why it is taking so long to count these votes, it is because the mail-in ballots keep trickling in.  You can only count them as they arrive.  This has led to a lot of frustration on the Republicans' part as they see their narrow leads erode in key races, but then it was their Patron Saint Donald who told his followers to vote in person. I was listening to Charlie Dent on CNN.  He's a former Republican US Representative from Pennsylvania.  Charlie said there was a time Republicans would have gladly mailed in their ballots but the dynamic changed when Trump insisted that his supporters voted in person and cast unmerited claims of fraud on mail-in ballots.  No surprise the overwhelming number of these ballots f...

I let out a big sigh of relief Wednesday morning.  The biggest loser may be Nate Silver, whose 538 projections had the Republicans feeling pretty good about themselves heading into election day.  All the crucial elections seemed to be tilting their way but in the end the Democrats held their ground.  I was a bit surprised to see the forecasts turn so heavily in Republicans' favor in the closing weeks.  There was really nothing to indicate why this should be the case.  Yet, there they were with a 59% chance of regaining the Senate and an 84% chance of taking the House . One of the problems was that polls were all over the place.  Nate was basing his projections on aggregates.  He also got a lot of governors' races wrong.  Most notably Arizona, where his forecast gave Kari Lake a 68 percent chance of winning.  It looks like Katie Hobbs will pull this race out as her narrow lead is widening with the counting of the notorious mail-in ballots....