Dispatches from Vilnius

I took the dog with me to the bakery this morning.  It's the first time I've taken him for a walk this winter as the sidewalks are usually covered in pink salt, which the city imports from Morocco.  It's hell on the little doggy's paws.  Our previous Corgi had part of her pads eaten away from this salt as we didn't clean her feet thoroughly.  Don't want to make the same mistake twice. Residents had been complaining that the salt doesn't melt the ice anyway.  What do you expect from African salt, one person griped.  But, the science department of one of the universities checked and sure enough the Moroccan salt works just fine.  You just have to spread it out before the snow comes, not afterward.  The head scientist said coarse sand is just as effective, and it doesn't eat away at dog paws.   Vilnius has become more pet friendly.  Most establishments let you bring your dog in.  On Saturdays it is a gruff woman behind the counter...

I get a lot of unsolicited posts on facebook that are music related.  Most of these posts I scroll past.  However, this morning was a list of 25 best albums from 1994 by Radio X .  It was the era of grunge, so those albums topped the list.  Not that I didn't like some of these albums, but I didn't see any of my favorite albums on there so I added Tom Petty's Wildflowers , Black Crowes' Amorica , Dave Matthews Band's Under the Table and Dreaming and Rusted Root's When I Woke .  There was music other than Grunge and Electronica.  For me, the 90s was the return of jam bands.  Widespread Panic was another one of my favorite bands from the era but they didn't release an album in 1994.  Although I should have added Phish's Hoist . I've only recently discovered Radiohead.  I found out about them through one of these unsolicited posts.  They straddled 1994 with Pablo Honey and OK Computer , which explains why they weren't on that list.  M...

Bombed out flats in Bakhmut It's really hard not to get this war out of our heads.  We retreat to our cellphones each night to get the latest news - Daina in Russian and Lithuanian, me in English.  It's reached a painful stalemate once again with Ukraine begging NATO for high-powered tanks so it can seize the initiative in the battles at Soledar, Bakhmut and other key places along the battle front.  We are told these battles have little strategic importance, but are wearing thin Ukrainian military supplies.  We simply can't understand why NATO doesn't do more to supply Ukraine the military ordnance it needs. Germany is seen as the biggest stick in the mud, but other major countries have been even more reticent to supply Ukraine with high grade military equipment.  France doesn't even make this list provided by Statista .  Tiny little Latvia has supplied more military hardware to Ukraine than has France.   The US has provided far more munitions tha...

A couple of summers ago I bought a t-shirt with a big Z on it, similar to the logo in Life Aquatic . It represented Team Zissou.  Since last February, I've kept it in the drawer as Z has became a symbol of fascism.  It's not the first time an autocratic country has appropriated a letter or symbol, but people are still asking why Russia would adopt a Roman letter and not a Cyrillic letter?  They could have just as easily used 3. Oddly enough, Wes Anderson is obsessed with the letter.  He used it as a fascist symbol in his period drama  The Grand Budapest Hotel .  It was a squiggly pair of Z's  similar to the notorious SS of the Nazis. Maybe Putin liked it and decided to adopt the letter for his special military operation?    More likely his propaganda team took the letter from World War Z , imagining their fearless leader as Brad Pitt battling a world overridden by spirited zombies. It wouldn't be the first time someone imagined the future as ...

Today is a solemn day in Lithuania.  It is the morning after tens of thousands of citizens stood down the Soviet tanks in front of the barricaded parliament building and demanded their independence be recognized.  Gorbačev thought he could use the cover of the Persian Gulf War to go into Vilnius and subdue the country but the press quickly picked up on events and televised them around the world.  Jonas Mekas recorded all the news stories coming out of the country and presented it as a 5-hour documentary .  Most of it filmed directly off his television set in New York.  It was an evening that rocked the world.  A tiny country no larger than a postage stamp in comparison to Europe had stood its ground against the mighty Soviet Union.   32 years later the memories are as vivid as ever as my wife recounts that night.  She was just 25.  She and her younger brother took part in events, much to their father's chagrin.  After all, she had a...

I've tried not to think too much about the royal squabble but it's pretty hard not to have an opinion with all the attention Harry & Meghan's docuseries garnered, and now Harry's book that is due to hit the shelves this week.   Reading the reviews of his most recent interview, my opinion is that he should ditch the royal family.  He is never going to get the satisfaction he is looking for.  There will be no public apologies or even private apologies if half of what he says is true.  The royal family will circle its wagons, to borrow an American colloquialism, as it did with the high profile divorces of Charles and Andrew and death of Diana.  If the Crown could survive that, it will certainly survive Harry's accusations.  He needs to move on, build a new life for himself and not worry about Pa or his brother William or any one else in that dysfunctional clan. I never really could understand what people see in this royal family or any other royal f...

Daina wanted me to go to Mindaugas bakery to get some palmiers.  Drive don't walk, she said, as she had already made herself a cup of tea.  There was a line.  I could see there wasn't much left on the shelves.  It was past eleven.     The guy in front of me turned around and I saw that it was Nidas.  I never quite know how to react to him as he can be either nasty or quite pleasant depending on his mood.  He was pleasant today and we started to chat in Lithuanian.  I was surprised how smoothly it went but then he was asking pretty simple questions like how is the little girl?  Not so little anymore, I said.  She's 21.  Oh-ho, he replied, shaking his head.  I said she was in London.  He told me his oldest daughter is in London too.  40 though, he said.  He has a few years on me.  Fortunately, he took the three-grain sourdough bread, leaving the two remaining palmiers for me. The snow had started to ...

The cat wasn't very excited about venturing outside.  She stood at the door, assessed the temperature and came back inside.  The dog barked the whole time.  A second time yielded the same results so I took the dog outside.  The polar plunge (-16 C this morning) didn't seem to bother him but then he has two layers of fur and well padded paws.  When I brought him back inside, the cat was now ready to go out, although she was soon back up at the window sill meowing to come in. It's another weird winter.  It got quite cold the first half of December.  We had an inordinate amount of snow but then as Christmas approached the temperature warmed up and a big thaw was underway.  By New Year's Day the snow was almost all gone and the temperature a balmy +12 C.  Another false Spring.  We were warned it would get cold again but judging by the two-week forecast it will be short lived.  By next Wednesday temps will be back on the plus side again....

Go away for a few days and the blog is almost dead!  I suppose persons had better things to do over the holidays.  My wife and I were laid low by a nasty virus.  Hard to say what it was but it hit us both with flu-like symptoms in the nose and throat and then migrated to our stomachs, leaving us incapacitated for the better part of two weeks.  Doctor said it wasn't COVID.  Not the best Christmas, but our daughter came home for a few days so that livened our spirits. We ended up watching movies to pass the time.  It was hard to concentrate on anything in particular.  The only movie we managed to see all the way through was Glass Onion and that because no one had the energy to reach for the remote to turn the television off.  Daina had fallen asleep.  The cat was curled up on my lap and Akvilė didn't want to budge from her couch.  She was also complaining of a sore throat.  It's too bad as Netflix had a wide array of new selections....