Dispatches from Vilnius

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....

Signs of black magic in Ukraine, according to Russian state media Russia so intently clearing Kherson of inhabitants is a very ominous sign.  It lends credence to the theory that Putin wants to render the city and its immediate surrounding uninhabitable so that he can create a buffer zone between Ukraine and Crimea. There's been a lot of talk of a dirty bomb or blowing up the Kakhova dam  in recent weeks.  In both cases, Russia has been making unwarranted claims that Ukraine is plotting such actions, but it would be Moscow not Kjiv that would gain from such a devastating plot.  Nevertheless, Russian defense minister Shoigu has gone out of his way to warn the world of these actions, claiming it is part of a powerful anti-Russian campaign carried out by Ukraine. The narrative is constantly shifting in Moscow as it continues to lose face in this war.  The recent attempt to block the grain ships blew up in Putin's face when he was called on his bluff.  Erdog...

I mailed my ballot to King County Washington yesterday.  Seattle was my last place of residence in the US before settling permanently in Lithuania.  It is kind of hard to sort through all the referendums on the ballot since they don't directly affect me, but I took the time to research them and make what I thought to be an informed vote.  Mostly, I wanted to cast my ballot for Democratic candidates in Congressional and state races. It is similarly hard to figure out what is going in the polls.  I've seen the 538 Senate Forecast go from a 70-30 chance the Democrats would retain the Senate to a 45-55 chance that the Republicans will regain it in little over a month.  Michael Moore and other liberal pundits are dismissing this startling turnaround in voter sentiment, saying that it is all part of a narrative the mainstream media is pitching that economy trumps social issues in the midterms.  You hear almost nothing these days about the infamous Supreme Court ...

Every year there is talk of a reunion but the only thing still continuing from The Office is the merchandising.  Last year I bought my daughter a Funko Pop advent calendar with the characters reduced to minis in various guises including the notorious "Prison Mike."   At her insistence, Daina and I had watched the show from beginning to end a few years ago.  What began as a fun romp became ever more annoying with the arrival of Andy.  I never could figure out what his function was other than to make Michael look good.  What had been easy-going humor with the occasional cringe moment now became very cringy all the time.  Neither of us could figure how anyone could tolerate a guy like this on or off the screen.  You figure this was pretty much Ed Helms' character as he plays the same role in everything he does.  When we started watching it again recently, we quit after the third season.  It just isn't worth it to endure his particular bran...