Dispatches from Vilnius

Tom Cruise was never an actor you could warm up to the way you could Brad Pitt or even Johnny Depp.  He always came across as cold and aloof.  But, here he is the rage of Cannes and for that matter the world over, as Top Gun: Maverick soars to the top of the box office, displacing Dr. Strange and his Multiverse of Madness.  I wasn't left with any great impression of the first Top Gun so won't bother with the new one.  Personally, I think Hollywood has a golden opportunity with The Ghost of Kyiv, a far more compelling story than this rubbish. Yet, the critics have fawned over Top Gun too.  Even the Village Voice was surprisingly enthusiastic, calling it a " blockbuster joyride ."  I suppose it does provide its vicarious thrills for those who dream of racing across the skies in an F/A-18, but I think comparing Cruise to Nureyev is a bit much, especially since the latter didn't need a hypersonic jet to defy gravity. There were some beefs, like why didn't the p

It had the feeling a dead soul had been resurrected to see Kissinger , albeit on a monitor, at the World Economic Forum at Davos.  the old goat might be considered the godfather of Realpolitik, at least the oldest living practitioner of it at 98.  This was the driving force during the Cold War when the US and Europe tried to find a way to lessen hostilities with the Soviet Union and stave off Nuclear Armageddon.  Of course, all that changed in 1989 when the Berlin wall came down, followed by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, without a single nuclear weapon being fired.  However, Kissinger is still pitching his old ideas, believing Ukraine represents a bridge to Russia, and if we close it off, we face another Cold War, with Russia once again isolated from the Western world. Garry Kasparov offered a counter argument at a recent conference in Vilnius organized by the Free Russia Forum.  He believes that the only way to have peace is to defeat Putin. Any further attempts at appeasement

America is less a country than it is a concept.  Having lived and traveled extensively through the country, I saw quite a bit of it, and no two parts are alike.  People identify more with the towns they grew up in than they do the country or even the state they reside in.  For political purposes, pundits like to divide the country into red and  blue states, depending on whether they are Republican or Democratic led, but fact is there are many divisions within the states themselves.  Having grown up in Northwest Florida, the political temperament is markedly different in the "panhandle" than it is in the peninsula of the state, and even within the panhandle you see major differences between cities like Tallahassee and Panama City.  So, when someone asks me what it is like in America, I say which part? Alabama is considered a deep red state.  It has voted Republican for decades and prides itself on its conservative nature.  However, I spent a summer in Birmingham documenting th

I am as guilty as the next person in treating COVID like it is over.  I was glad to shed the mask in public, although I do make an effort to keep my social distance.  But, COVID is still there and will never go away completely.  Who knows what other variations we could have in the immediate future even if most countries now treat it as endemic? It was interesting to read that many scientists believe the principal cause for these animal to human viruses is the vast deforestation taking place all around the world.  This National Geographic article was from 2019 before COVID broke out.  The boundaries between the natural and man made environments have broken down and so we are now literally inheriting all the ills that come with it. The viruses travel from wild animals to domestic animals and then to humans.  COVID was believed to have come from bats in China, with pigs as the intermediary of the virus.  Now, there is a monkey pox creeping into Europe that normally would only be passed d

There have been so many compelling images coming out of Mariupol the past few weeks, as the Azov battalion tried to stave off the inevitable.  They knew they would never defeat the Russian army, which literally threw everything at them, including a barrage of phosphorus bombs that increased the heat inside the steelworks to as high as 800 degrees Celsius.  The soldiers took cover in the vast honeycomb of tunnels underneath, but of course that meant they had no means to retaliate.  They were at the mercy of the Russians.  They held out for the simple reason that they wanted to buy time for the Ukrainian army to fortify its positions at other key points on the eastern front of the war.  This bravery will no doubt immortalize the battalion, which eventually surrendered with the condition that there would be a prisoner swap between the two countries to bring them back home.  Other attempts to facilitate these soldiers evacuation had failed. In large part that is because the Kremlin regards

I've been having a hard time motivating myself to run again.  There is a fun run coming up at the end of the month.  I had hoped to be ready for a 10K but have done nothing more than walk the dog the past few weeks.  I'm not sure why that it is.  It goes back to the early days of this pandemic.  I had been running fairly regularly, but with all the tight regulations at the onset of the lockdown, I became a homebody and have had a very hard time getting myself to move again.  However, I see all these other persons running along the river and I get jealous. It wasn't always like that. When I first came to Vilnius in 1997 there were very few runners.  I had Vingio Park pretty much to myself.  I would see this small man with a headband, maybe a few years older than myself, on a fairly regular basis but that was about it.  Running began to increase with EU ascension in 2004,  The Vilnius Marathon was resurrected that year, as one of the Maxima directors was an avid runner, and w

When you see a screed like this kid wrote, it is hard not to laugh, until you find out the teenager drove 200 miles to carry out his vendetta on the black people of a community he has absolutely no contact with.  The absurdity that Jews are trying to replace white people with Black and Hispanic immigrants should have 99% of the population rolling their eyeballs, but to read recent polls  half of Republicans apparently think this way.  It's been softened somewhat with Jews left out by conservative commentators like Tucker Carlson, but the antisemitic origins remain. Thanks to talk shows and social media, the "great replacement theory" has become mainstream among conservatives.  They firmly believe they are being displaced in American society, and indeed the world over.  Marie Le Pen has essentially ridden this issue in her two runs for French President, and you hear it all throughout Europe, but fortunately you don't see the mass shootings like you do in America, at

I'm a reluctant Eurovision watcher.  My kids sucked me in years ago, and my wife and I continue to watch it, even if it lingers past our bedtime with the voting.  I tried my hand at  The Guardian quiz  but only mustered a 13/26 score.  Obviously not a hardcore fan ; )  Most of the acts follow a tried and true formula, the result of which is many songs sound the same, but there are a few that stand out, like this novel one from Serbia, in which Konstrakta ponders the question, "What is the secret to Meghan Markle's healthy hair?"  Showing once again that a little bit of humor goes a long way.  Not sure what Meghan thinks though. The Lithuanian entry isn't half bad this year.  Not my type of song, but Monica Liu cuts a stunning figure and managed to get past the first round.  I give her credit for coming up with the song herself.  Most of these acts hire writers to craft catchy Eurovision ballads, so it is always refreshing when a performer takes her own stab at i

I don't use Twitter so I really don't care what goes on in that platform.  I've always viewed it as scatological, as you can post no more than 280 characters at one time.  Of course, a lot of persons have run-on tweets, like Steve Schmidt's latest rant on McCain, which stretched over 11 tweets, in which he dredged up the old story of how Mackie was in bed with the Russians.  I read a 2008 article by Mark Ames and Ari Berman in The Nation that covered the exact same territory.  Schmidt supposedly offered added insight, having been called in to clean up the mess during McCain's presidential run.  Not that it helped as Mackie lost. What bothers me more is how much these platforms are valued today.  Elon Musk had to round up $44 billion for his hostile takeover of Twitter, most of it his own money.  That's more than 160 times what Jeff Bezos paid for the Washington Post!  Jeff's $250 million purchase was considered quite a shock at the time.  This amply illu

Judge Alito pondering the fate of Roe v. Wade One of the problems with innovative medical technology is that you can see things you never saw before like a beating heart in a 6-week old fetus.  This allows persons to readily identify with this embryo, both as prospective mother and religious conservative.  If you're ready to become a mother, you're happy to know that there is a life beating inside you.  If you are not, this consigns you to a 9-month pregnancy that you did not want for whatever reasons of your own.  Such was the case with a woman in Texas, which John Oliver highlights in his latest segment of Last Week Tonight.  This woman had to go to Oklahoma to get an abortion because Texas didn't allow it.  Fortunately, for her this was before Oklahoma passed similar fetal heartbeat legislation of its own. Conservative states have been playing fast and loose with Roe v. Wade ever since it was decided upon in January 1973.  They find all kinds of ways to make it difficul