Dispatches from Vilnius

I was bored so I started watching Sweet Tooth on Netflix.  I read a  good review  so why not?  It is based on a set of DC graphic novels that ran from 2009-21.  Looking at the graphics , I wish they had made this an animated rather than live action series.  It's a little bit too cute but fun to watch just the same. The most popular shows on television these days all seem to be dystopian visions of the future, where viruses have killed off most of the population and the few healthy ones that are left have to literally fight off zombies or other demented beings to survive.  Not exactly bedtime stories for children, but this is the way Sweet Tooth is presented. A relative handful of hybrid children hold the answer to the plague that has covered the earth.  The only problem is that many consider them the source of the plague so there is a bounty on their heads.  The lead child, Sweet Tooth, boasts a rack of 6-point antlers.  You would...

It seems everyone is a peacemaker these days, as if they can magically come up with a solution that will please both sides in a war that has stretched for over a year now and shows few signs of letting up.  French President Macron has been trying shuttle diplomacy with China.  Brazilian President Lula is trying to build a " peace coalition " among G20 countries.  Today, the Pope landed in Hungary in an attempt to promote his peace initiative.  What it is no one is exactly sure but the Orban government hails the pontiff's visit as a diplomatic triumph, given that Poland would have been the more obvious place for the Pope to go if he wanted to visit the Ukrainian border. However, Poland has been very supportive of Ukraine's war effort.  Too much so in the Pope's mind.  He favors Hungary because Orban has refused to provide military aid to Ukraine.  In fact, the head of the armed forces was sacked when it was learned that he allowed NATO to deliver arms...

It seems Rupert treats his television hosts the same he does his wives, texting them when their time is over.  Tucker Carlson went home Friday not thinking for one moment that it was his last day at Fox .  For the past six years he has cultivated his celebrity in the MAGA world, considered second only to the big man himself.   You really have to wonder what anyone ever saw in him.  He failed to distinguish himself at CNN and MSNBC. He was memorably schooled by Jon Stewart on  Crossfire .  He has cultivated the image of a collegiate debater for 17 years, as if trying to emulate George Will, but as Jon rightly pointed out Tucker didn't have the chops.  In the Age of Trump it no longer mattered what his credentials were as long as he swore allegiance to the Trump brand.     It's pretty funny to read the speculation surrounding Tucker's sudden dismissal.  It was obvious that Rupert had enough of all this horseshit after settling a...

Spring is upon on us.  Fruit trees are in bloom.  We turned off the gas heating at the start of the month.  It was very cold at first but now the days have warmed up to 20 degrees Celsius with the bright sun warming the house.  Passive solar energy ; ) We have to rethink our heating system for next winter as our bills were two to three times more than what we paid the previous heating season.  This despite a major drop in natural gas prices at the start of the year.  Lithuania had bought all its natural gas at late 2022 prices. Natural gas had been seen as a viable form of sustainable energy given its natural abundance, but after Russia's attempt to extort the West that's no longer the case.  It can be bought in liquified form so that European countries are no longer reliant on gas pipelines from Russia, but LNG terminals aren't cheap and transportation costs similarly soared in 2022. If the war has taught us anything it is to cut out fossil fuels....

If there is a guy that gets my bile up as much as Trump, it is Bill Clinton.  I can't stand when he gets dragged back in the news, especially for something he played very little role in.  Yet, here is hogging up the limelight on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement.  George Mitchell was the chief negotiator for the US in reaching this historic power sharing agreement in Northern Ireland.  Bill just happened to be president at the time, bogged down in the Monica Lewinsky scandal that for a brief moment threatened to undo his presidency.  What was left of it anyway. Bill has been offering a lot of mea culpas recently, like getting Ukraine to give up its nuclear arsenal in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum in exchange for security guarantees and a pathway toward EU ascension.  That didn't work out very well.  Russia was soon able to install a proxy in Kyiv and efforts to bring Ukraine into the European community came to a screeching halt. ...

Fortunately, I still have my old VHS tapes, although I don't think I have any of these little gems that are fetching thousands on ebay and other online auction sites.  Back to the Future appears to be the holy grail, having collected a whopping $75,000 on the open market.   Why, you might ask? Part of the reason is that there are apparently a lot of forgotten titles on VHS, particularly campy horror classics.  There was even a "found footage horror anthology" entitled VHS that came out in 2012 honoring this tradition.  The same must be true for obscure foreign titles like Taxi Blues , which I was unable to get on DVD but found an old VHS tape at amazon some years back.  However, the titles fetching the biggest bucks are blockbusters like Jaws and The Goonies .  I think it is a nostalgia that won't last long, so you better cash in before this 80s feeling evaporates.  It has me looking through my old titles to see what I can fetch on ebay.  ...

I tried to watch Uncut Gems the other night, given the rave reviews, but just couldn't get past Adam Sandler in the lead role.  I never liked him as an actor and there was nothing that I saw in the first fifteen minutes that would convince me otherwise.  It was also the case with Punch-Drunk Love , which I had been shamed into watching only to find the same annoying Adam that I had grown to despise on screen.  He was one of the reasons I swore off SNL in the 90s only to regain interest in it during the Trump era. Adam is probably a really nice guy.  Everyone says he is and recently he won the Mark Twain Prize for American Humor , which means he has the full respect of his peers.  It just isn't my kind of humor.  I can say that for a lot of comics these days, wondering out loud what anyone finds so funny about them. I've tried watching what passes for humor on Netflix.  There are a slew of stand-up comics out there but the only guy I found really funny...

It didn't take long for King T w itter to recover from his massive losses last year.  He had hoped to ride the Republican red wave last Fall, putting in his chips at the very last minute , but when that didn't happen he laid low for a while.  Now, he is back with a vengeance. He slashed prices on his Teslas, which like its stock was greatly overvalued; further downsized T w itter and named his dog CEO after losing a T w itter poll  on whether he should step down.  Oh, and he decided to slash the w from T w itter as some sort of puerile prank to get back at his San Francisco landlord. This is the man that many regard as a genius.  Musk has been able to project himself like Eddie from Limitless , a disheartened writer who takes a wonder drug and suddenly can see 50 steps ahead of everyone else.  Elon only wished he could look as good as Bradley Cooper.  The problem is that Musk doesn't like to be challenged, especially by those he considers beneath hi...

There is an eerie parallel in the recent decision to expel two Tennessee legislators over guns and the gag order imposed on any discussion of slavery in the Antebellum South, especially when you consider the white woman legislator, who similarly spoke out on gun violence in the state, was not expelled.  The same fascist streak is alive and well in a political party that continually complains that it is being stifled by the mainstream media.  No worry as the story coming out of Nashville is gaining all kinds of attention. Great strides in America are met with tiny little steps backwards until you find yourself right back where you started from.  Justin Jones and Justin Pearson will most likely be reelected to their seats in special elections as they represent overwhelmingly black and liberal districts in Nashville and Memphis.  Both are representative of the growing young Millennial and Gen Z electorate that is tired of seeing all the gun violence in the country, mos...

We probably won't be seeing the Flaming Bush of Mar-a-Lago behind bars anytime soon, but this was an important first step.  New York didn't back down in issuing an indictment against Trump despite the many threats against Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, including a photoshopped image Trump posted of himself wielding a baseball bat against the chief prosecutor on Truth Social.  The Chosen One didn't hide his contempt against the judge either in his first speech after the indictment, none of which will hold him in good stead before the bench. It's too bad no mugshot was taken.  We could have found out how tall he really is.  His campaign made him even taller in the fake mug shot they are peddling on their website - a whopping 6'-5"!  Other fake mug shots have been less flattering . It doesn't really matter in his followers eyes, who believe all these charges (34 counts in all) are just part of a great conspiracy against their "Moses," who has been lea...

Most people think horses have always been in America.  They see the Westerns with Indians riding bareback and assume the stallions were likewise indigenous, but there is no record of horses still being around when the Spanish arrived in the Americas in the early 16th century.  Equus scotti  breathed its last breath on the American continent roughly 10,000 years ago, along with other mythical creatures like the saber-tooth tiger and mastodon.  Unlike the buffalo, they were not able to survive the Ice Age. Nevertheless, it doesn't stop the memes  and other conflicting accounts of horses being here long before the Spanish arrived.  Pre-Columbian horse effigies and other ritualistic images have been found that suggest horses or horse-like creatures have long been a part of native culture for millennia.  However, DNA evidence suggests that the horses we see in America today, roughly 19 million, were all derived from the early Spanish stock.   I s...