Dispatches from Vilnius

I hate it when I can't shake something out of my head at night before falling to sleep.  Usually, it is an insipid Christmas song or movie this time of year, but last night it was the news that Russell Wilson had been benched for the remainder of the season so that Denver didn't risk triggering a clause that would guarantee Russ an additional $37 million if he was injured in the two remaining games.  Why do I even care? I quietly shouted at myself as I didn't want to wake Daina up. This forced marriage between Sean Payton and Russell Wilson wasn't going to work out.  It was just a pleasant surprise when Denver won five games in a row and was on the cusp of staging one of the most remarkable comebacks in NFL history.  All that came to a crashing halt Sunday night when the Broncos lost to the Patriots, leaving pundits to ponder what next?  It didn't matter that Russ almost pulled off a Christmas miracle.  His days at Denver were done.  Bring in Jarrett S...

As the year winds down I find the blog getting more hits than usual.  At least this time people are looking at posts.  Mostly old posts, like Colonel , when we actually had discussions and this was a pretty lively place.  The contributors went their separate ways.  Only Trippler is still around.  I suppose the posts get shared and others look at them but no comments.  It's like a curious form of voyeurism. Blogging isn't very cool anymore.  I've shared some of my posts on facebook and gotten some response but no additional followers.  I had written a few articles on LinkedIn, mostly to do with architecture like a high school my wife and I designed in Vilnius.  But response wasn't overwhelming so I stopped writing. An old high school buddy promotes himself on facebook and has managed to garner 3.4K followers.  His is a garden variety philosophy mixed with religious observations in the form of memes that you can pick up anywhere, but it s...

I had an interesting taxi ride home.  The driver was Lithuanian, which is pretty rare these days.  He was complaining about the Central Asians taking over Bolt, which is the service I use.  They don't speak English.  They don't speak Russian.  It is impossible to communicate with them, he said.  God knows how so many got in but Bolt doesn't seem to care what language its drivers speak as long as they can meet the heavy demand for rides this time of year. The driver became even more animated when I told him I was an American married to a Lithuanian wife.  How do you guys meet all these Lithuanian women?  There are only 3 million of us and more than 300 million of you.  I would think it virtually impossible.  Just lucky, I said.  He laughed as we putted along in heavy traffic.   He spoke between Lithuanian and English.  I could pick up most of what he said as long as he didn't speak too fast.  His biggest frustrati...

A24 bought the film rights to Musk's biopic and signed Darren Aronofsky to direct the film.  Given the type of movies A24 is known for , one can only hope Aronofsky will turn it into a horror movie.  At the very least, pull no punches like he did in The Wrestler . I've covered Musk way too much in my posts.  It was refreshing to see John Oliver take a turn at him this past weekend, but he did seem to pull a few punches.  Maybe HBO was worried Musk might go " nuclear " on them, so John was asked to do a "net positive" piece on the tech billionaire.  But, John did point out some glaring red flags like Musk now controlling 50% of the telecommunications satellites orbiting the earth.  If anyone saw Moonraker that is not a good thing.  What I'm more worried about is how this man has come to insinuate himself into our lives to the point he is probably the most talked about person in the multimedia universe next to Trump. According to John, much of the prob...

While Zelenskyy is in Washington to make a last ditch appeal to Congress for continued funding of the war effort in Ukraine, Netanyahu was on the phone with Putin admonishing him for the "anti-Israel positions" Moscow's envoys have taken in the UN.  The massive shelling of Gaza the past two months has distracted nearly everyone from the ongoing war in Ukraine, and breathed new life into Putin, who has been presenting himself as a " peacemaker " in Israel, much to the chagrin of Western allies.   With munitions rapidly depleting, Ukraine has failed to make anymore advances and is losing ground in key areas, resulting in what its top commander called a " stalemate ."  This is perfect for Russia, which just wants to hold onto the ground it gained in its initial offensive in the Spring of 2022.  Putin can bide his time, rebuild his military infrastructure and at some point in the future renew his assault on Kyiv. Throughout this ordeal, Israel offered no...

I've never seen Love Actually from beginning to end.  Over the years I've picked up bits and pieces of it on television.  It is cluttered with a whole bunch of disjointed scenes with a who's who of British actors that makes it hard to believe all these scenes come from the same movie.  Look at that cast !  There's even Bill Nighy doing a Christmas version of The Troggs' Love Is All Around .  Unfortunately, it is insufferable to watch for more than five minutes at a time, yet the studio is rolling out a  20th year anniversary edition  for theaters this holiday season. We get hung up on these "old movies" much the way It's a Wonderful Life with Jimmy Stewart  became venerated over time.  They all try to be heartwarming and clever, giving their saccharine-coated stories a little twist like a curled lemon peel in a Christmas martini to give the unnecessary syrup a bit of zing.  It works because people are less discerning this time of year...

I've been seeing a lot of MTG license plates recently.  Seems like the Lithuanian motor vehicle departments is near the end of its M series.  I resent that Marjorie Taylor Greene is the first thing that pops into my head. She branded herself MTG  like some trailer trash rapper from the boondocks of Georgia. The media has not only done a great job of making Trump front page news again, but has elevated a number of his MAGA cult members to celebrity status by constantly running stories on them.  When they are not trying to shutdown federal government, they promote non-issues like Sister Sarah's recent effort to lead 16 red state governors in demanding the Biden administration ban the sale of American farmland to Chinese investors .  It doesn't matter that China holds less than one percent of foreign-owned property in the US, it's the principle that's at stake.  The media blythely obliges them by putting these stories at the top of my news feed on yahoo and ot...

  It is interesting to see so many news outlets flirting with the idea of a second Trump administration despite nothing that suggests it will happen.  I suppose the news media likes to cater to the doom and gloom so many people seem to feel in this world, largely the result of hyperbolic news stories and opinions like this one in The Guardian.  I have no idea who Jan-Werner Muller is but I don't find his arguments very compelling. We have had a number of election cycles since Trump was first elected in 2016, and they have all gone against His Orangeness.  The most devastating was the " Blue Wave " in 2018 when the Democrats swept the House.  It was largely seen as a feminine backlash to Trump.  This killed any more attempts to push pernicious legislation through Congress by the Republicans, namely the repeal of "Obamacare."  Republicans had previously used "continuing resolutions" to bypass filibusters in the Senate by Democrats. Then came 2020 when R...

  I was overhearing the news from Daina's cellphone as she listened to a Ukrainian politologist talk about the death of Kissinger.  He was saying that old Henry was cultivated as a Soviet agent many years ago.  I was curious so I began perusing, and sure enough this turned up on the CIA page.  According to an article written by Frank Capell in 1974, young Henry was first approached when he was in Poland during the later stages of WWII, as part of the Counter Intelligence Corps, and then actively recruited when he was a professor at Harvard in the 1950s.   Kissinger was fully investigated by military intelligence in 1955 but unfortunately the article trails off with no definitive conclusions. There's more of course, including a book by Capell in which he explicitly links Kissinger to Soviet espionage that was published in 1974 at the height of Nixon's downfall.  I do recall Kissinger suffering some fall out from the book but not enough to deter future ...

It's an interesting year in cinema with so many biographies and true stories being brought to the big screen.  This past summer I was very much impressed by how Christopher Nolan handled Oppenheimer , and now find myself debating whether to try to sit through another 3+ hour epic this holiday season, given my tight bladder.  Reviews of Napoleon haven't been very good, much to Sir Ridley Scott's chagrin, but the same critics have been very favorable of Killers of the Flower Moon .  There's also Maestro for those who love Bradley Cooper, I mean Leonard Bernstein. Part of the problem in Scott's epic is that he tries to span the entire life of Napoleon rather than focus on a particular aspect of it.  We all know who Napoleon is so it's not like Sir Ridley had to give us a refresher course.  Owen Glieberman notes that what makes a "biopic" good is when it explores the inner dynamic of its central character and uncovers something we weren't aware of b...

Not that I'm an investor or know a great deal about AI, but it has been interesting to follow the events surrounding OpenAI the past two weeks.  Like many, I didn't know anything about the research organization until Sam Altman was dismissed shortly after launching customized versions of ChatGPT, making AI accessible to virtually anyone curious as to what it can do.   There was already a lot of consternation over such products as they could do everything from write songs, to movie scripts to books based on a vast database culled from the internet.  All kinds of alarms were being sounded.  Nothing was sacred.  Certainly not whatever personal information you had on the web.  Mostly we heard from screenwriters, musicians and novelists who felt their work was being openly plagiarized and that there was little they could do about it. Enter Elon Musk in an effort to save the day .  He seemed to be the one pulling the strings at OpenAI that led to Altman...

 I signed up for the Christmas Run on December 9 but things are looking pretty bleak at the moment.  Winter fell on us like a cold heavy blanket after what was a pretty mild autumn.  I was shoveling snow out of the driveway last week and there is no way to run on the icy sidewalks.  I've taken enough spills over the years and at 62 would like to keep my hip intact.  Nevertheless the festive season is upon us.  The city decided to use a real tree this year, standing it up on a 5 meter tall platform with metallic gold apron.  Looks like it will also serve as a stage for the official opening on December 1, looking down on a little village of white vendor stalls.  Not sure what is more sustainable: to use a real tree or a metal frame with tree branches stuck into it as is usually the case? Back in October, Vilnius beat out Guimaraes, Portugal, and Graz, Austria, for European Green Capital in 2025.  It has always been a green city with its parks ...

There's a general wackiness in the air that is a bit disconcerting.  While the off-year elections in the United States were quite promising with Democrats winning in Virginia and Kentucky and thereby turning back anti-abortion efforts in these two states, Argentina fell for "El Loco" and Geert Wilders is once again in the news as his "Party of Freedom" took the most seats in the Dutch parliamentary elections.   El Loco is a bit of an enigma as he seems to have sided himself with the Western world by promising to pull Argentina out of BRICS so as not to deal with "communist countries" like China and Brazil.  He has also vowed to privatize everything with the zeal of an Ayn Rand Libertarian, and peg the Argentine peso to the US dollar.  I imagine Putin and Xi are not happy with this turn of events.  For a social welfare state like Argentina it is interesting to see how people are going to react when the cost of their their basic services soar through th...

Not surprisingly, I jinxed my blog again.  No sooner do I write a new post than my stats tumble.  Makes me feel a little like Joe Biden whose poll numbers once again have sagged in the aftermath of the Israeli-Hamas war.  Granted, I would like to see the President exercise more influence over Israel but that's not going to happen.  His advisors have worked out the mental calculus on the issue and determined it is better for him to side with Israel as all presidents have done.  He can show his sympathy for Palestinians but that's about it.  The bigger issue, however, appears to be how he is being projected in the media. Joe turned 81 yesterday and once again the issue of age came up with pundits wondering how many "good years" he has left in him.  We are still more than 11 months out from the general election, but everyone is pointing to the poll numbers that indicate Trump would win if the election were held this month.  I highly doubt it as most ...