Diary

Lawrence of Arabia

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Watching one of the great films in the history of the art form always fills me both with excitement and trepidation, particularly when the film was made a long time ago. Some films are timeless; others translate very poorly from the past into the present. Gone with the Wind bored the teenage me beyond belief image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

The Baader Meinhoff Complex

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In 1997, Heinrich Breloer made a spectacular docudrama (a documentary interspersed with acted drama) about the abduction of Hans Martin Schleyer, the head of the West German employer’s union, by the Red Army Fraction, a home-grown terrorist group, formed by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhoff.  The Baader Meinhoff Complex goes all the way to image [Read More]
Drama, Movies

Angels and Demons

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The opening scene at the CERN physics laboratory where an experiment to create anti-matter (The God particle) takes place is visually stunning. Rome and its Catholic rituals provide a beautiful backdrop for the film. The next two hours, however, are a wild car chase through Rome that I found pretty annoying after a while. The image [Read More]
Asia, Travel

Tokyo & Kyoto, Japan

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For many years, I dreamed about going to Japan.  This is my first time visiting an Asian country. What strikes me right away is how friendly Japanese are not only to strangers but also to each other. Perhaps this is just show. Not understanding Japanese at all, I cannot figure out what goes on behind image image [Read More]
Europe, Travel

Frankfurt, Germany

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I had a few hours to kill after landing at the Frankfurt airport. Since Frankfurt is not one of the obvious tourist attractions of Germany, I had never visited the old city center. I entered the historically significant Paulskirche, where representatives from all over Germany met in 1848 to discuss German unification and a constitution image image [Read More]
Diary

Hellhole: Is solitary confinement torture?

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I knew that humans beings are social creatures and that we need others to reach our highest potential. But I had no idea that the brain completely disintegrates after longer periods of solitary confinement that is now practiced in many U.S. prisons. Read this fascinating story by Atul Gawande in the New Yorker. He happened image [Read More]
Humor, Situations

TAILS OF MANHATTAN

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I no longer have the patience to watch Woody Allen movies, but his short pieces in the New Yorker are still fun to read. Here is a wonderful postscript to the Madoff Ponzi scheme that made many jewish people wonder why they would be so credulous. Woody Allen in New Yorker, March 30, 2009: Two image [Read More]