Dispatches from Vilnius

I've tried to avoid talking about Trump for the past two years, but my conservative friends keep posting memes like this one on facebook.  The meme comes on the heels of Trump giving out bottled water at East Palestine, Ohio, after the toxic train derailment last week.  Conservatives were upset that Biden would travel to Ukraine rather than deal with domestic catastrophes back home.  Trump being Trump saw a golden opportunity to peddle his new brand of bottled water, Trump Natural Spring Water , which I well imagine will be available on his website soon. Many conservatives are still under the deluded belief that Trump somehow gives of himself at his campaign rallies, forgetting how much money he siphons off campaign contributions. They honestly think Trump sacrificed himself for the good of the nation, by giving up his presidential salary, despite numerous accounts of how much his family businesses profited off his presidency .   Apparently, his brand is still strong enough among

We were of two minds on the book fair this year.  It's always fun to see what's new in the Lithuanian publishing world but at the time we didn't want to deal with all the people and we knew we would end up more money than we should.  In the end, curiosity won out and we went as early as possible to avoid the rush.  The music section has grown tremendously with the advent of vinyl in recent years.  Every local artist is now hocking their vinyls but it was the release of a two-volume Kernagis album that I wanted, put out by his children on their own label, a loving tribute to their father who passed away 13 years ago.  Tarp Girnų is Kernagis at his playful, a collection of cabaret songs, mostly his own but with a few of his favorite songs thrown in for good measure. He's one of the few Lithuanian musicians that I really enjoyed, a rousing mix of folk and rock ballads that recall the marvelously experimental time of the 60s, although he began building his repertoire a dec

We watch a lot of Polish and independent Russian news on cable television, as they offer segments not seen on the Western European channels.  Last night, the Polish channel was showing the latest Belarusian propaganda coming out of Minsk.  Not one to miss out on a current trend, the commentator noted sardonically, President Lukashenko has urged citizens to make trench candles.  No doubt the wily president had seen all the attention Ukraine was getting in supplying trench candles to the front line and thought he might seize on the initiative. Lukashenko has a habit of stealing from others and trying to call the spoils his own.  For years, he was happy to be spearheading the effort to push Belarus into the 21st century by modernizing Minsk.  He was very proud of the "rhombicuboctahedron" national library that was built in 2006.  Yes that is a word .  This was going to be the new face of the capital city.   However, people began yearning for a bit of historicism that wasn'

At 94 it is hard to really feel sorry about Burt Bacharach's passing , especially since his music will live on forever.  I think no one did more to define the elegant pop song than Burt, putting together a string of hits that defied convention.  His favorite chanteuse was Dionne Warwick, collaborating with her on a great number of songs, including my favorite Walk On By .  As someone described, his songs always had an element of surprise with unexpected chord shifts and nimble arrangements that made a pop song seem oddly operettic. Of course, having someone with such a beautiful voice sing these songs only made them more special. As the story goes, this combination was purely accidental.  Burt and Hal David were looking for someone to make a demo of Make It Easy on Yourself and hired Dionne.  When she found out they had given the song to Jerry Butler  she was hurt.  It was then that they realized they were missing out on a golden opportunity to work with Warwick, and the rest as t

With all this " de-aging " in Hollywood movies, it won't be long before they do away with the original actors all together and replace them with avatars, a la James Cameron's "blue world."  I see there are also anti-aging apps available for your cellphone and tutorials on YouTube so that you too can recapture your youthful glow, if looking back at old pictures isn't good enough.  I'd be lying if sometimes I wished I was 30 years younger when I saw a pretty young woman smile at me, but then it's an easily dismissed reverie. Star Trek foreshadowed this with  The Menagerie , two episodes that cleverly repackaged the pilot movie in which Spock hijacks the Enterprise to take the badly deteriorated figure of Captain Pike back to the notorious planet Talos IV.  Once there, Pike was restored to his youthful self and reunited with Vina to live the blissful life that had been denied him, albeit illusory. For the most part this de-aging doesn't any serv

Celebrating 100 years of the restoration of Lithuanian independence, 2018 I find myself collecting stamps again.  I kind of gave up after the US went to " Forever " stamps and Lithuania switched to the euro.  However, a lot of cool stamps have been issued in the years since, at least in Lithuania.  I like first day issue covers as well.  The only problem is that I ran out of pages to put them in, so they stay in folders.  Fortunately, it is quite dry up in the attic so no chance of the stamps sticking together. The Lithuanian post office has made some interesting choices over the years, including honoring Arafat with an envelope.  I couldn't believe it when I saw it, and bought one for my collection.  Of course, the ill-advised envelope got the country in a lot of trouble with the local Jewish community, but Lithuania has long had a soft spot for unrecognized nations.   When I first came to Vilnius 1997 there was even an honorary consulate for Chechnya, although the post

This whole egg war really got me, as if "Brandon" was to blame for the ever growing prices.  Turns out it was some kind of avian flu that had badly impacted hens across America.  As much as 25 percent of the egg-laying flock was eradicated.  They didn't want the virus to spread any further, so wiped out whole poultry farms to stop the spread of the contagion.  At its peak in December, white eggs seemed to be worth their weight in gold to see some of the memes on facebook, but the scare is apparently over as wholesale prices have collapsed .  Thank goodness!  Americans act like they live in a vacuum.  Egg prices have soared here too as a result of this contagion.  We had already been hit with high grain and dairy prices, as a result of the war in Ukraine, so that meant bread and pastry prices soared as well.  I'm more selective at the bakery these days.  The odd part is that this spike affected brown eggs here, the preferred egg in Europe, so it struck me suppliers we

Yesterday on the way to work we saw a military police van come rushing by us with its sirens blaring.  It stopped in front of the Ministry of Internal Affairs and a heavily armed soldier rushed into the building.  There have been any number of bomb scares since NATO nations announced they would be sending tanks to Ukraine.  We assumed this was another bomb scare. So enters phase two of Russia's "War with the West," terrorizing EU and NATO member states.  This is really nothing new.  Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia has been trying to destabilize Europe, the Eastern European countries in particular.  If it is not actively meddling in internal politics, it has mounted cyberattacks , stirred up protests , and now bomb threats .  No European country is immune.   It is difficult to trace these attacks back to the Kremlin, so Putin derisively dismisses each in turn.  His underlings even go so far as to blame other nations  for the attacks.  He sits back like the

I admit I said Andrea who?  I initially confused her with Alba Rohrwacher, whom I had seen in I Am Love and Hungry Hearts .  So, I checked out Andrea Riseborough on IMDb and found she had small roles in Birdman , Nocturnal Animals and a few other movies I had seen.  I was finally able to place her.   There has been a lot of fuss made about her nomination but pinning the blame on her for Viola Davis and Danielle Deadwyler being passed over is a bit much.  I haven't seen any of the movies in question so I can't really say who deserves an Oscar nomination, but I was struck by  no women being nominated for Best Director after women won the last two Director awards.  This seemed to be the greater controversy, if we have to generate one. #OscarSoMale Cate Blanchett called it a patriarchal pyramid in her acceptance speech at the Critics Choice Awards.  She sounded genuinely caught off guard by the best actress award but soon used the moment to praise all the actresses nominated f