hmmm

So much confetti on the street, the pavement isn't visible
Kids in costume
Floats, loving made locally
Bands
Horses with riders
It must be carnival.

I do love these local fêtes, locally arranged and just part of the joy of living in my village.

No big thing

But there was something wonderful about wandering out this morning for fresh baked bread, beautiful broccoli, a nice chat with the butcher and the green grocer. Such a sensible way to live and eat.
The village is the middle of carnival with its costumes and parades as well.
AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

The Reading

http://www.hotel-templiers.com/gb/sommaire.htm Les Templiers, is a restaurant in Collioure, with paintings lining the walls, some from impressionists who had no money to pay for meals, or so the legend goes.

Last night I got a chance to read from my novels to a lovely mixed-language group, but I also got a chance to wear the T-Shirt my daughter gave me for Christmas. In case you can't read it from the too dark photo, it says, "Be careful for I'll put you in my next novel."

Maybe Llara thinks that because in The Card, there is a smart mouthed blond teenager, and she was once a smart mouthed blond teenager.

Or should I stay smart fingered? There was the time back on The Riverway in Boston and I was busy writing. Finally, I was ready to get my hero and heroine into bed after constant delays.

The phone rang.

I answered it. When I came back, I found on the computer screen, the smart-fingered blond teenager had added the line "Not tonight dear, I have a headache."

Fortunately no headache at the reading.

Changing Lives Again

Here I go again changing from Geneva to Argeles,
From chai lattés to Franck's chocolate chaud,
From lunches at Mikado and Manno to Cayrou and Les Flowers,
From buses to walking,
From roaming a country to roaming a village,
From spending more times with writers to spending more time with artists,
From a lake to a sea,
From Alps/Jura to Pyrenées, Corbieres and Alberes,
From a large cozy house to a tiny cozy studio
From shopping at Migros to marchés

But what stays the same is writing (although Experiment is not going well) be it fiction or newsletter, sharing with others and loving it all.

Someone stole the lake

As I do every morning, I wandered into my housemate's room to look at the lake and the mountains from her balcony. One of the typical views above I snapped when I first came back from Washington. The houses are always static, but the trees, flowers the face of the lake and the mountains vary.

However today there was no lake, just a sheet of gray after the houses. Whoever stole the lake, please bring it back.

Play/work balance

With the newsletter out of the way having worked all day Monday, I scheduled a play day, starting with appreciation of the rocks that my housemate uses in her vase. The tulips had dropped their petals and the rocks were in the sink. What a pleasure to see the shades of beige and brown, feel their smooth surfaces. A last sushi trip before I go to sushi-less Argelés, and discovered I had left my money at home. Fortunately No. 2 son bailed me out.

I ambled into Sherlock Holmes only to almost walk out, probably the second worst movie I've seen. Song of Norway wins the worst movie. It was so bad I enjoyed its badness. Ah well, I will get an espresso brownie, I thought, but as I left the theatre the No. 27 bus was there, a miracle. I hopped on and planned to get the brownie at Rive. At Rive, the bus was there. The universe was against me having a brownie. I can live with that.
Over the weekend My housemate and I escaped the Geneva cold and grey. We trained through postcard perfect snowy mountains to Lugano. We are used to bilingual French-English living. However, our Italian is limited to raviolo, risotto, lasagna, prego. Her German is fluent, mine is mini-functional but we managed with lots of laughter between all the languages. We took boat rides and bus rides...we explored an antiques mini marché, we meandered through a park admiring all the statues. The blue skies and above freezing temperatures were wonderful. The picture above is a gate to nowhere, and I got a chance to add to my cow photo collection. Click to appreciate the originality.

So tomorrow I face paper work for dumb stuff like taxes, and setting up an email account for the woman serving as my associate editor with the newsletter and and and...

Not a complaint...I like the play/work combination.

Reprinted from Tom Dispatch--a bit of sanity

Hold Onto Your Underwear: This Is NOT a National Emergency

by Tom Engelhardt

Let me put American life in the Age of Terror into some kind of context, and then tell me you're not ready to get on the nearest plane heading anywhere, even toward Yemen.

In 2008, 14,180 Americans were murdered, according to the FBI. In that year, there were 34,017 fatal vehicle crashes in the U.S. and, so the U.S. Fire Administration tells us, 3,320 deaths by fire. More than 11,000 Americans died of the swine flu between April and mid-December 2009, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; on average, a staggering 443,600 Americans die yearly of illnesses related to tobacco use, reports the American Cancer Society; 5,000 Americans die annually from food-borne diseases; an estimated 1,760 children died from abuse or neglect in 2007; and the next year, 560 Americans died of weather-related conditions, according to the National Weather Service, including 126 from tornadoes, 67 from rip tides, 58 from flash floods, 27 from lightning, 27 from avalanches, and 1 from a dust devil.

As for airplane fatalities, no American died in a crash of a U.S. carrier in either 2007 or 2008, despite 1.5 billion passengers transported. In 2009, planes certainly went down and people died. In June, for instance, a French flight on its way from Rio de Janeiro to Paris disappeared in bad weather over the Atlantic, killing 226. Continental Connection Flight 3407, a regional commuter flight, crashed into a house near Buffalo, New York, that February killing 50, the first fatal crash of a U.S. commercial flight since August 2006. And in January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549, assaulted by a flock of birds, managed a brilliant landing in New York's Hudson River when disaster might have ensued. In none of these years did an airplane go down anywhere due to terrorism, though in 2007 two terrorists smashed a Jeep Cherokee loaded with propane tanks into the terminal of Glasgow International Airport. (No one was killed.)

The now-infamous Northwest Airlines Flight 253, carrying Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab and his bomb-laden underwear toward Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, had 290 passengers and crew, all of whom survived. Had the inept Abdulmutallab actually succeeded, the death toll would not have equaled the 324 traffic fatalities in Nevada in 2008; while the destruction of four Flight 253s from terrorism would not have equaled New York State's 2008 traffic death toll of 1,231, 341 of whom, or 51 more than those on Flight 253, were classified as "alcohol-impaired fatalities."

Had the 23-year-old Nigerian set off his bomb, it would have been a nightmare for the people on board, and a tragedy for those who knew them. It would certainly have represented a safety and security issue that needed to be dealt with. But it would not have been a national emergency, nor a national-security crisis. It would have been nothing more than a single plane knocked out of the sky, something that happens from time to time without the intervention of terrorists.

And yet here's the strange thing: thanks to what didn't happen on Flight 253, the media essentially went mad, 24/7. Newspaper coverage of the failed plot and its ramifications actually grew for two full weeks after the incident until it had achieved something like full-spectrum dominance, according to the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism. In the days after Christmas, more than half the news links in blogs related to Flight 253. At the same time, the Republican criticism machine (and the media universe that goes with it) ramped up on the subject of the Obama administration's terror wimpiness; the global air transport system plunked down millions of dollars on new technology which will not find underwear bombs; the homeland security-industrial-complex had a field day; and fear, that adrenaline rush from hell, was further embedded in the American way of life.

Under the circumstances, you would never know that Americans living in the United States were in vanishingly little danger from terrorism, but in significant danger driving to the mall; or that alcohol, tobacco, E. coli bacteria, fire, domestic abuse, murder, and the weather present the sort of potentially fatal problems that might be worth worrying about, or even changing your behavior over, or perhaps investing some money in. Terrorism, not so much.

The few Americans who, since 2001, have died from anything that could be called a terror attack in the U.S. -- whether the 13 killed at Fort Hood or the soldier murdered outside an army recruiting office in Little Rock, Arkansas -- were far outnumbered by the 32 dead in a 2007 mass killing at Virginia Tech University, not to speak of the relatively regular moments when workers or former workers "go postal." Since September 11th, terror in the U.S. has rated above fatalities from shark attacks and not much else. Since the economic meltdown of 2008, it has, in fact, been left in the shade by violent deaths that stem from reactions to job loss, foreclosure, inability to pay the rent, and so on.

This is seldom highlighted in a country perversely convulsed by, and that can't seem to get enough of, fantasies about being besieged by terrorists.

Institutionalizing Fear Inc.

The attacks of September 11, 2001, which had the look of the apocalyptic, brought the fear of terrorism into the American bedroom via the TV screen. That fear was used with remarkable effectiveness by the Bush administration, which color-coded terror for its own ends. A domestic version of shock-and-awe -- Americans were indeed shocked and awed by 9/11 -- helped drive the country into two disastrous wars and occupations, each still ongoing, and into George W. Bush's Global War on Terror, a term now persona non grata in Washington, even if the "war " itself goes on and on.

Today, any possible or actual terror attack, any threat no matter how far-fetched, amateurish, poorly executed, or ineffective, raises a national alarm, always seeming to add to the power of the imperial presidency and threatening to open new "fronts" in the now-unnamed global war. The latest is, of course, in Yemen, thanks in part to that young Nigerian who was evidently armed with explosives by a home-grown organization of a few hundred men that goes by the name al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The fear of terrorism has, by now, been institutionalized in our society -- quite literally so -- even if the thing we're afraid of has, on the scale of human problems, something of the will o' the wisp about it. For those who remember their Cold War fiction, it's more specter than SPECTRE.

That fear has been embedded in what once was an un-American word, more easily associated with Soviet Russia or Nazi Germany: "homeland." It has replaced "country," "land," and "nation" in the language of the terror-mongers. "The homeland" is the place which terrorism, and nothing but terrorism, can violate. In 2002, that terror-embedded word got its own official government agency: the Department of Homeland Security, our second "defense" department, which has a 2010 budget of $39.4 billion (while overall "homeland security" spending in the 2010 budget reached $70.2 billion). Around it has grown up a little-attended-to homeland-security complex with its own interests, businesses, associations, and lobbyists (including jostling crowds of ex-politicians and ex-government bureaucrats).

As a result, more than eight years after 9/11, an amorphous state of mind has manifested itself in the actual state as a kind of Fear Inc. A number of factors have clearly gone into the creation of Fear Inc. and now insure that fear is the drug constantly shot into the American body politic. These would include:

The imperial presidency: The Bush administration used fear not only to promote its wars and its Global War on Terror, but also to unchain the commander-in-chief of an already imperial presidency from a host of restraints. The dangers of terror and of al-Qaeda, which became the global bogeyman, and the various proposed responses to it, including kidnapping ("extraordinary rendition"), secret imprisonment, and torture, turned out to be the royal road to the American unconscious and so to a presidency determined, as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and others liked to say, to take the gloves off. It remains so and, as a result, under Barack Obama, the imperial presidency only seems to gain ground. Recently, for instance, we learned that, under the pressure of the Flight 253 incident, the Obama administration has adopted the Bush administration position that a president, under certain circumstances, has the authority to order the assassination of an American citizen abroad. (In this case, New Mexico-born Islamic cleric Anwar Aulaqi, who has been linked to the 9/11 plotters, the Fort Hood killer, and Abdulmutallab.) The Bush administration opened the door to this possibility and now, it seems, a Democratic president may be stepping through.

The 24/7 media moment: 24/7 blitz coverage was once reserved for the deaths of presidents (as in the assassination of John F. Kennedy) and public events of agreed-upon import. In 1994, however, it became the coin of the media realm for any event bizarre enough, sensational enough, celebrity-based enough to glue eyeballs. That June, O.J. Simpson engaged in his infamous low-speed car "chase" through Orange County followed by more than 20 news helicopters while 95 million viewers tuned in and thousands more gathered at highway overpasses to watch. No one's ever looked back. Of course, in a traditional media world that's shedding foreign and domestic bureaus and axing hordes of reporters, radically downsizing news rooms and shrinking papers to next to nothing, the advantages of focusing reportorial energies on just one thing at a time are obvious. Those 24/7 energies are now regularly focused on the fear of terrorism and events which contribute to it, like the plot to down Flight 253.

The Republican criticism machine and the media that go with it: Once upon a time, even successful Republican administrations didn't have their own megaphone. That's why, in the Vietnam era, the Nixon administration battled the New York Times so fiercely (and -- my own guess -- that played a part in forcing the creation of the first "op-ed" page in 1970, which allowed administration figures like Vice President Spiro Agnew and ex-Nixon speechwriter William Safire to gain a voice at the paper). By the George W. Bush era, the struggle had abated. The Times and papers like it only had to be pacified or cut out of the loop, since from TV to talk radio, publishing to publicity, the Republicans had their own megaphone ready at hand. This is, by now, a machine chock-a-block full of politicians and ex-politicians, publishers, pundits, military "experts," journalists, shock-jocks, and the like (categories that have a tendency to blend into each other). It adds up to a seamless web of promotion, publicity, and din. It's capable of gearing up on no notice and going on until a subject -- none more popular than terrorism and Democratic spinelessness in the face of it -- is temporarily flogged to death. It ensures that any failed terror attack, no matter how hopeless or pathetic, will be in the headlines and in public consciousness. It circulates constant fantasies about possible future apocalyptic terror attacks with atomic weaponry or other weapons of mass destruction. (And in all of the above, of course, it is helped by a host of tagalong pundits and experts, news shows and news reports from the more liberal side of the aisle.)

The Democrats who don't dare: It's remarkable that the sharpest president we've had in a while didn't dare get up in front of the American people after Flight 253 landed and tell everyone to calm down. He didn't, in fact, have a single intelligent thing to say about the event. He certainly didn't remind Americans that, whatever happened to Flight 253, they stood in far more danger heading out of their driveways behind the wheel or pulling into a bar on the way home for a beer or two. Instead, the Obama administration essentially abjectly apologized, insisted it would focus yet more effort and money on making America safe from air terrorism, widened a new front in the Global War on Terror in Yemen (speeding extra money and U.S. advisors that way), and when the din from its critics didn't end, "pushed back," as Peter Baker of the New York Times wrote, by claiming "that they were handling terror suspects much as the previous administration did." It's striking when a Democratic administration finds safety in the claim that it's acting like a Republican one, that it's following the path to the imperial presidency already cleared by George W. Bush. Fear does that to you, and the fear of terror has been institutionalized at the top as well as the bottom of society.

9/11 Never Ends

Fear has a way of re-ordering human worlds. That only a relatively small number of determined fanatics with extraordinarily limited access to American soil keep Fear Inc. afloat should, by now, be obvious. What the fear machine produces is the dark underside of the charming Saul Steinberg New Yorker cover, "A View of the World from 9th Avenue," in which Manhattan looms vast as the rest of the planet fades into near nothingness.

When you see the world "from 9th Avenue," or from an all-al-Qaeda-all-the-time "news" channel, you see it phantasmagorically. It's out of all realistic shape and proportion, which means you naturally make stupid decisions. You become incapable of sorting out what matters and what doesn't, what's primary and what's secondary. You become, in short, manipulable.

This is our situation today.

People always wonder: What would the impact of a second 9/11-style attack be on this country? Seldom noticed, however, is that all the pin-prick terror events blown up to apocalyptic proportions add up to a second, third, fourth, fifth 9/11 when it comes to American consciousness.

So the next time a Flight 253 occurs and the Republicans go postal, the media morphs into its 24/7 national-security-disaster mode, the pundits register red on the terror-news scale, the president defends himself by reaffirming that he is doing just what the Bush administration would have done, the homeland security lobbyists begin calling for yet more funds for yet more machinery, and nothing much happens, remember those drunken drivers, arsonists, and tobacco merchants, even that single dust devil and say:

Hold onto your underpants, this is not a national emergency.

Checklsit for weekend in Lugano

Escape cold of Geneva CHECK Lugano was 6 degrees warmer and sunny
*Enjoy scenery from Train CHECK, snow covered fields and mountains
Eat in dining Car CHECK yum
Explore city CHECK
Take boat ride CHECK
Check out Last Supper by DiVinci pupil in old church CHECK
Watch Olympics CHECK (and to see Garou sing CHECK CHECK CHECK)
Eat Risotto CHECK
DO NOT TURN ON A COMPUTER CHECK
Come back mega content CHECK



*thank goodness I am back where train, buses etc make cars optional.

The raclette/chestnut solution

My daughter who has been house bound by record snowfalls in her Vienna VA flat since the weekend, would scoff at our paltry couple of inches of snow cover, but with the temperature plummeting to -6° centigrade it is cold. With the bise it turns the temperature to (OH MY GAWD!!!)

Still layered, I ventured out today to meet up with a writer friend over a chai latte and a blueberry muffin and the conversation was worth every shiver. Then there were errands to run leaving me bone cold.

Solution? Hot roasted chestnuts. They warm the hands and tummy. Then tonight it is perfect weather for raclette...

Cold weather does have its good side.

DL

Garou ahhhhhhh

I am far too old to be a crazed teenager screaming for a star. I never did it. I didn't scream for Elvis or the Beatles. Not that I didn't like them. The term bobby socker (teenagers who screamed for singers or actors in the 40s and 50s) is long gone, but there are two men I would like to sit down and talk with. One is George Clooney and I do mean talk here.

The other is Garou, whom I have adored since he lumbered across the stage as Quasimodo in Notre Dame de Paris. Videos of his singing "Belle" and the other songs from the musical are all on youtube.

For Christmas I was given his new CD Gentleman Cambrioleur (gentleman robber). Gone is much of the Joe Crooker gravel and in its place is almost a piano bar singer. He would stand up to the late Bobby Short http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=bobby+short&search_type=&aq=f, Sandler ahttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAGrItMPC2ond Young http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wtl-we32QOw&feature=related or Bernadette Peters
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gl40NIfA_I&feature=PlayList&p=1112C8FE8E61FCBD&index=0&playnext=1

A combination of songs and interview is at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LljQM5fK6G8&feature=PlayList&p=90DC4DBEADDEB6C0&playnext=1&playnext_from=PL&index=34

Maybe I could manage a little scream, but definitely a long ahhhhhhhh when I listen.

Loading teh DVD for fun

Everwood, the latest series of choice for my housemate and me. We settle in with goodies (shrimp, veggies, dip, me in my snuggie, she in her flanket. Munchkin, the cat selects her lap, which is good because I am knitting my afghan which should be ready by next winter.

The disc finishes, and my housemate uses the remote to open the DVD.

Aha!!! Munchkin jumps down and looks.

For the fun of it my housemate closes it.

Fascinating Munchkin thinks.

For several minutes, the cat is more entertained at the opening and closing of the DVD door than we were in the series itself.

triple whammy

In my beloved apartment at 394 The Riverway in Boston I did not have an electric blanket but an electric undersheet that turned on before bed time in winter took snuggling under the covers to an Olympic gold medal high.

I never even thought to look for such a thing in Switzerland.

Coming back to Switzerland imagine my delight to discover that my housemate had not only found them, but had purchased one for each of our beds. But it offers two more joys.

Put PJs flat under the duvet and over the sheet and turn on the heating mat. Not only is the bed toasty, but when you change in the cool air of the house, the warming both physical and psychological starts immediately.

When my back hurts (yes Mighty Mom the exercises do help and I do them regularly), it acts as a heating pad.

It's triple whammy...