Dear Everyone,
It’s hard to believe that we’ve been back for two weeks
already. When we came home it felt like
we had been gone for a long time, and now our trip Down Under has moved into
long term memory storage. People in
Australia are going crazy right now - - no one could have anticipated that the
semi-finals would be England vs. Oz, and Spain vs Sweden.
It has been a pretty busy couple of weeks in Chicago. The day after we got back we returned Cheryl
to the airport on our way to Aaron, Ariana, Enoch, and Cyrus’s home for a
fantastic barbeque and a meet-up with Gabe and Meng. It was nice to finally put a real person on
top of all of the Facebook images we had been seeing for the past 3-4
years. We also got a chance to see some
of the work that had been done on the house in Evanston. Enoch and Cyrus are so
smart and well-behaved.
The day after I picked up my old Exeter roommate, Chip
Nichols, and his girlfriend Cheryl at the Forest park ‘El’ stop, and brought
them to Hinsdale for a couple of hours prior to their flight out of Midway back
to Florida. Chip met Cheryl through his
hobby of stand-up comedy. They both get
regular bookings in Jacksonville, but they have been able to combine that with
European travel, so I know that they have played in clubs in Germany and Spain. Chip is still working his full time job as a
radiation oncologist; however.
In the mid-week we saw Barbie, and then a few
days ago we saw Oppenheimer. Both movies were good, but I think I liked B.
more. O. struck me as a bit heavy and obvious Oscar bait (of course, any film
of this type is up for awards). I go to
movies to be entertained - - my favorite category would be something like a
comic heist film, and Barbie was closer to fulfilling that category. Afterwards, I did wonder how Ken managed to
completely subvert Barbiedom in only a couple of days - - how did he accomplish
that? As for O., it certainly inspired
me to get American Prometheus out of the library - - I’m number 80 on the wait
list, so it will be a while. I also
thought that they made Admiral
Strauss too much of a villain - - he certainly clashed with Oppenheimer, and
had some unsavory political activities, but he did a lot of valuable work during
WW2, and he was an important Jewish philanthropist. We just started watching Gaslit about Martha
Mitchell, and other people with complicated and compromised political
histories.
Last Sunday Andy and Gail were kind enough to invite us to
watch the Cubs beat the Atlanta Braves.
It was a pretty good game, with the score seesawing between the teams in
the middle innings, but in the end the Cubbies triumphed. The weather was pretty gross, although warm;
it was foggy and randomly spitting drizzle at us. It felt like Auckland except that it wasn’t
50F.
We found a conveyor belt sushi restaurant (where a robot
also delivers drinks and condiments) in Oakbrook - - so amusing! And the sushi
was ok too.
Tomorrow is the book club.
We read Trust
by Hernan Diaz. I’ve read this book twice, as well as his
other novel, In
the Distance. Diaz is a literary
genius. I’m looking forward to our
discussion, as well as reading whatever he writes next. Also recent books that I liked include Chain
Gang All Stars, and Dead Country.
Two good non-fiction books include Life, A Journey Through
Science and Politics by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich. Ehrlich is the biologist who co-wrote (with
his wife Anne Howland
Ehrlich) the book The Population Bomb
in the 60s - - their Malthusian outlook hasn’t come to pass – yet. Still, in some ways the world is in much
worse shape environmentally today than it was 60 years ago, and many people
(including me) do not see enough political will to fix these self-evident
problems. His book is memoir edited by
his daughter (Ehrlich is over 90 now) with a lot of name dropping. Some parts are good (e.g. his research on
butterflies), others not so much. The
other one is called Eight
Bears, about the eight bear species (there are only eight in the world),
and their interactions with humans (usually not so great for the bears). Some species like the panda, the American black bear, and the American
brown bear (the grizzly) will probably do ok with increased urbanization and
climate change, not so much the polar bear (probably extinct by the end of the
century), and some of the Asiatic bear species. It’s depressing.
BTW, the Bears won their first pre-season game against the
Titans.
Love,
H
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