Jan 16, 2022

Dear everyone,

Yesterday Cindy and I had an early dinner in Hyde Park with Jasper and Vivian at Ascione.  This restaurant has the duo advantages of being located in the mall with Trader Joe’s, so there is plenty of parking, and Jasper lives just across the street.  The food is pretty good – we shared tuna tartare and beef carpaccio.  The others had either mushroom tortellini or gnocchi, while I had grilled branzino.  For desert we shared tiramisu.  It’s our second meal there, and both have been very good.  We delivered to Jasper and Vivian some items left behind at our house from Xmas vacation, as well as some acetazolamide (Diamox) for its potential to help mitigate altitude sickness.  I’ve used it a few times – and I haven’t gotten sick, but I didn’t see any pink elephants either.

We had the dinner early, because afterwards Cindy and I subsequently drove to the United Center to watch the Blackhawks dominate over the Anaheim Ducks 3-0.  The Hawks have been a mediocre team at best this year, so pretty much every team they beat is a real victory.  The Ducks are in the upper half of teams.  I’d estimate that the stadium was filled to about the 80% mark; not so good.  The Hawks are offering up a lot of freebies and deals with ticket purchase now, for instance, a ‘beer package’ can be purchased with upper level tickets.  I think they are already giving out a free package of concessionary food with those tickets.  They haven’t been a top echelon team for a few years now, but hockey is still a great sport to watch live, win or lose.

Thing are not so great for the Bears either..  They fired Matt Nagy, the head coach, who was supposed to be a great offensive coach - - he did not do well at this.  Also gone is Ryan Pace, the General Manager, who made some bone-headed personnel decisions.  The Bears is where young talented quarterbacks are drafted to the ruination of their careers.  Even though they have had a losing season, the ‘socialist’ NFL (as the Tribune called them this Sunday) made sure everyone made money.

Last weekend we had a Baltimore style snowstorm – a bit of snow, with warmish temperatures so it melted, accompanied by a fine mist of rain. All of it then froze into a glaze of black ice all over the area.  Lots of car accidents, and people slipping and falling.  Gail and Andy rescued some man who fell on a sloped driveway, and could not stand back up (the people of the house were all in a Covid quarantine, and were unaware of the street drama).  It’s all melted and dried off now, and we just have typical January weather.  Our porch has become the occasional hangout of a Cooper’s hawk (I saw it (or another Cooper’s) take out a robin this spring).  We have two feeders and an electrically warmed birdbath (from 1261) outside now, so we are an attractive venue for small birds, and I guess a bit of a smorgasbord for Accipiters.

While house bound, I participated in an excellent book club discussion with Ariana, Isaac, Danica, Nicola, Tamara, Sarah, and Bill Watkins on the Start-up Wife.  This is a satire about Silicon Valley technos, but I think we all found it a bit heavy-handed, if truthy.  Personally, I preferred Dave Eggers duology The Circle and The Every.  Silicon Valley is a rich vein that has been much mined by (economically jealous) literati. Recently I read an excellent book, When We Cease to Understand the World. This was shortlisted for the International Booker prize.  It reminded me of W.G.Sebald, with long digressions, unexpected connections, and a somewhat depressing view of the world.  It’s fictionaled non-fiction (where I guess I would call Sebald non-fictionalized fiction).  Instead of a walking tour of Southern England, the author presents mostly a walking tour of early-to-mid 20^th century physics luminaries. All that was missing were the grainy black-and-white photographs.  It’s pretty short, and I enjoyed it a lot. Also fun was Anthony Doerr’s Cloud Cuckoo Land (which reads much shorter than its 600+ pages - - it’s an engaging tale, with a lot of blank pages), which reminded me a lot of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, another story broken up into lots of pieces over centuries.

Not so much fun was a book by Antonio Damasio, Feeling and Knowing.  Damasio, a neuroscientist, posits that the origins of consciousness comes from some mixture of our brain as well as the somatic sensations of our bodies.  I don’t disagree with him, but you could read the first twenty pages and be done with it.  I kept waiting for him to produce some empiric evidence; none was forthcoming, he just kept repeating his central argument.  I guess you had to feel it.

Cindy and I also recently saw a good film, the Last Vermeer, which is the fictionalized account of a true story about the repatriation of Dutch artworks from the Nazis after WW2, Dutch collaborationists, the art world, forgery, and more.  The movie keep changing what it is about - - it starts off like a police investigation, turns into a story about government interference/cover-up, and then into a courtroom drama.  We liked it a lot   I was not aware that the Netherlands had the highest number of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in WW2 - - although this doesn’t get mentioned explicitly in the movie, there is a lot of innuendo about the attempts of the post-war Dutch government to whitewash what happened there during the war.

I’ll be in Colorado skiing with Jacob (Christine), Alison, Lucas, Vivian, and Jasper in two weeks, Covid willing.

Love H.

By the way, I was just awarded my 5^th degree black belt in Aikido. Longevity counts for something, I guess.