Of the Double Legged Penguin

The day before we bought the house, I strolled about in  the neighborhood to do a "butcher"*. I saw the "Hawaii Bar" at 999 Dovercourt Rd. a short walk away, seedy enough to be comfortable. Across the street was the Portuguese "Progress Bakery" with very decent espresso, fluffy Kaiser buns, crusty cornbread, and creamy Pastel de Nata all baked there fresh daily. Just a block away was "Rosso's Italian Barbershop and Salon". Signor Rosso was cutting hair from nine to six weekdays and his old friend, semiretired Paolo, helped out Friday afternoons and Saturdays.

For years, every third Wednesday of the month, after work, I went for a trim and to read three-day-old copies of Il Messaggero and La Stampa. There were always a few elderly Italian gentlemen hanging around talking among themselves, respecting the unwritten rule: no politics, no religion. After they saw me coming in regularly for about a year, I became a "vicino", they would greet me with a friendly "buongiorno dottore!" and would switch from their incomprehensible Calabrese to standard Italian to include me i the conversation. There was one thing I didn't like as a life-long Inter fan: Rosso had this huge picture of Juventus prominently on the main wall. Whenever Rosso boasted of how well Juve had done over the weekend, I reminded him of the 2006 season**.

We would watch fascinated the lightning-quick fandango of Rosso's super-sharp, silvery pointy scissors as they danced, dangerously close to the ears and scalp of whoever sat in the chair while he chatted and laughed with us. Rosso was proudly showing off his unbelievable hand-eye coordination achieved in fifty or so years of cutting hair on two continents. 

One Wednesday,  to my surprise, I found Paolo in the shop by himself: "Buongiorno Signor Paolo, dove è Rosso?" he replied: "Brutte notizie, Rosso ha subito un distacco della retina e lo ha fatto l'operazione d'urgenza." To which I could only say "O diomio, merda!" 

The silver scissors have stopped dancing forever. The store is now a dubious dry-cleaning and alteration place. 

I get my hair cut three and a half blocks down, on Ossington, at "Kebede's Men's Barber" which has fresh Toronto Start and Globe and Mail. I speak not one word of Amharic*** and we chat about the province and country being led by liars and crooks, and how he cannot afford to retire. That's OK by me because I cannot get a twenty-dollar haircut anyhow, anywhere within walking distance. 

Almost forgot: if you, gentle readers, wonder what's up with the title and how it is connected to this story, I am not too sure about that myself.

_______________________________

* British, informal "take a look" comes from the Cockney "butcher hook: look."

** FC Juventus Torino was relegated to the second league following a match fixing and financial fraud scandal

*** official language of Ethiopia

Good TV

The limited series "Deeds Done" was not given much of a chance. Still, the compelling story and the main character's unlikely appeal drew an ever-growing fan base (which translated into very respectable ratings). 

The main character is Ras Collins, whom the writers made brooding, of suspect personal hygiene, a monomaniac with strange ideas of justice, right and wrong, and actions and consequences, yet somehow magnetically attractive. Neighbors, acquaintances, his fellow Law School students all think him a weird jerk with a habit of asking question after question, not waiting for answers, entitled to be rude to anybody with impunity.

His sister Dana, a girl of rare beauty, working as a governess, and his mom, Polly, love Ras unconditionally and defend him. 

In the series pilot, Ras kills Alyona, a wealthy usurer, to steal money and valuables she held as collateral. Liz, who witnesses the crime, also becomes a victim. He plans to use the money to help the needy. Ras had earlier published an essay with a distorted idea that special individuals are justified in taking any action, even illegal and violent, to right social injustice. 

Ras returns home weak, feverish, and delirious, torn between guilt and hope. He is nursed by Ramon, a university buddy secretly in love with Dana. 

Detective Petrus, in charge of the investigation, calls in Ras for several discussions and tells him that he has read his article. Ras senses that Petrus knows the truth, and the two embark on a bizarrely choreographed intellectual relationship and mutual understanding.

There are several parallel plots. Dana agrees to an engagement with Luz, a rich lawyer of shady ethics. Zak, whom Ras met at a bar, is a drunk, degenerate gambler who lost all his money, causing his daughter, Sonya, to become a prostitute to support the family. Zak, later,  dies in an accident. Ras realizes that Dana and Sonya make the same sacrifices: they sell themselves in different but similar ways.

In a strange twist, Mike, a casual laborer who saw Ras return to the scene of the crime, confesses to the murder. Petrus is not convinced. Things get complicated when Dana breaks up with Luz to be with Ramon and Sonya, who was a friend of Liz, falls in love with Ras. Ras, in distress and tortured by conscience, decides to confess. At the trial, the prosecution acknowledges the guilty plea and the mental state of the accused and asks for a lenient sentence. Sonya has a few moments with Ras, who first rejects her but then accepts her love and her promise to wait for him. There is no dry eye on the "Fans of Deeds Done" FB group.

The Dewson SWAP

The "Dewson SWAP" presentation was on the agenda of the quarterly meeting of the Associated Vine Growers du Bordeaux at the request of Mademoiselle Allania Dewson. Most members were wine-making families like Allania's. She was a seventh-generation grower going back to Captain Harrison Dewson's arrival from Dublin in the 1760s to buy the South West vineyard and the Chateau Plesque-Binot. They began making Merlot, like everybody in Bordeaux, which they kept calling claret until they got used to French names.

After the admin issues of the meeting were sorted. Monsieur le president LeBlanc gave Allania the floor. She began by saying that she would not talk about: phenolic compounds (phenolic acids, stilbenoids, flavonols, dihydroflavonols, anthocyanins (enocyanin), flavanol monomers (catechins), and flavanol polymers (proanthocyanidins) that give wines taste, aroma, bouquet, color, and mouthfeel. These are important only after making the crucial decision of the season. Allania looked up from her notes and asked the audience: "What is the fundamental decision you make, mes amis?" Audience shuffled their feet, looked at each other, and answered, "Picking the right date and time to harvest." Allania said, "Correct!" She looked at them and said in a firm, confident voice: "I have here a tool that allows you to make this decision with one hundred percent certainty every time." She explaining how her AI-based application analyzes thousands of factors from hundreds of sources to determine the precise optimum harvest date and time for each vineyard. "Your handouts contain all the details. Download from the App Store, create an account, fill out the profile, and then receive notifications, tips, and comments:a detailed dossier for your season. Call me for help or questions," Monsieur d'Arisee asked, "Is this free, and what's with the name?" Allania said that there is a 45 Euro yearly membership fee, and "SWAP" is a typo; it was supposed to be "South West App," now it cannot be changed. d'Arisee continued: "I'm in, I paid the fee, and all worked exactly as you said, looks great but you talked about a very detailed report, and I only got a summary." Everybody in the room followed the dialogue with interest; some of them were working on their phones. Allania asked: "In the query, did you say 'please'?" To which d'Arisee replied that he didn't, because Sam Altman told the press that every 'please' and 'thank you' costs him many Gigabytes and thousands of gallons of cooling water. Allania smiled and said, "That was the previous generation AI, these days they are anthropomorphically sensitized and will respond differently depending on the attitude, and how you ask, they can tell sarcasm from humor and read and interpret your intentions". "Merde!" said Monsieur d'Arisee. 

A Game Similar to Gin Rummy (but More So with Homefield Advantage)

This is Pia Kimh, as I met her the other day at the Toronto Airport, just off the plane returning from Kalimpong via Kolkata and Heathrow. The twenty-two-hour flight didn't do much to calm her rage; on the contrary, she was even more upset than when she left the Great Hall of Rishi Bankim Chandra.

But let me start at the beginning: a week ago, Pia and her three teammates traveled to the Southeast Asian Regional Mah Jongg Tournament, as winners of the North American Open Grand Prix of October last. The name of their team, as entered in the Open, was "My Husband is Pregnant" to show a sense of humor and as a social comment. They were magnificent; their technique, intuition, skills, and knowledge of statistics carried them through qualifiers and finals. They won diplomas, a modest cash prize, a horrific gilded trophy, and tickets for "the Big Show in Kalimpong". They went to "The Duke of Earl" for celebratory pints and googled Kalimpong. 

Once arrived in North Bengal and checked into the Dream Palace Barsana, they went to the Great Hall, registered, attended the draw, signed the disclaimers, paid the fees, and received their badges. The team name was quite puzzling to the organizers, and they asked if there was any other name they could use. Pia told them they were also known as ”Horny Zombie Chicks”.  The registrar said that she doesn't even know what that means, and after hearing Pia's explanations, during which she clutched her pearls tighter and tighter, she said in a low voice that "My Husband is Pregnant" will be on the official list.

Pia & Co. ruthlessly demolished the competition. There was a definite language barrier in the normal interaction among players during breaks, waiting for the next round. The Canadian Laowais didn't get even a nod or a smile as they all qualified for the knock-out round and the final placing first, third, fourth, and fifth in the individual rankings. They won, thus, the team title by a large margin. After the finals, before the award ceremony, the organizing committee called an emergency meeting to deal with a challenge filed by several local teams for contravening rule 2A (behaving in a manner ungracious and discourteous towards opponents). At the conference, Pia was told that some were offended by the flippant gender flipping in the team name. It was claimed that the wording caused discomfort, embarrassment, and mental distress, leading to an inability to focus on the game. The Canadians were accused of having acted deliberately, with forethought and malice, to create an unfair advantage. All individual team members are deducted sufficient points to forfeit the cash prizes, diplomas, and medals for bringing the tournament in disrepute. 

Pia's team stormed out of the building in blind fury, picked up their bags, and drove to  Bagdogra Airport, with the intention of getting roaring drunk waiting for their flight. Alas, the bar does not serve alcohol.

Mary Mack-Black and her Most Diversified Storylines in Song'n'Dance

Mary, in her younger and more vulnerable days, had a friend: a little lamb, the fleece as white as snow. The circumstances in which said lamb was lost are not known, what is known is that the search for the young ovine consumed a legendary amount of time and resources. Later, when Mary grew into an astonishingly beautiful girl (the pride of her home town of Ipanema) she would walk, and she'd  look straight, not at thee. She was dressed  in black, silver buttons all down her back, high hose, tip to toes.

They painted the passports brown, the circus was in town. Mary she asked her mother for fifty cents to see the elephants jump the fence, they jumped so high that they (excuse me while I) kissed the sky and didn't come down until the 4th of July (or first of May, I never knew which and they didn't bother to say).

Mary didn't read and didn't write but she did smoke her father's pipe and she broke her needle and couldn't saw and she combed her hair and broke the comb and she'd get a mighty whooping from momma when she came home from positively 4th Street where she was walking the dog (with Rufus Thomas). When Mother Mack came back with the muffins, she was be thinking on when they received the letter yesterday about the time the doorknob broke, that's when they learned about the calypso singers and the fishermen who hold flowers and little mermaids flow so nobody has to think too much about Desolation Row and pretty little maids all in a row to tell us how their gardens grow: with silver bells and cockle shells, all around the freshly planted trees of nectarines and cash machines yeah!

The Like(s) and the Not Like(s)

Very few have ever heard of Professor Dr. Yaromir Shurduk of the Dnipro Medical Institute of Traditional and Non-Traditional Medicine. His paper on "On The Likes and Non-likes of Everything that Moves"* is remarkable, mesmerizing and so totally revolutionary, turning Darwin's accepted theory on its head. I wrote this piece with the hope that y'all look him up and promote his work. 

Darwin wrote, demonstrated, and tried to convince everybody that (please forgive the over-simplification and crude language) "Y'all want to eat and screw (in this order)". He put it more scientifically, saying it was the "preservation of the individual" (by which he meant catch it, kill it, eat it or, its corollary: run or fight so that you ain't got killed and eaten)  and the "perpetuation of the species", (by which he meant reproduction, survival and adaptation, so the species exists for ever, or as long as possible or so that they get onto the IUCN's endangered list with the Patagonian Opossum). So, way back in 1859, Charlie wrapped it all into the hefty: "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life"**. Many read it, some understood it, few were convinced of its logic and truth, and others again fought it bitterly (not understanding it but still rabidly, fiercely opposing it). Simple as it was, it still took a while to gain the acceptance that it generally has today. 

Professor Shurduk wrote a slim pamphlet of not more than eighteen pages, in simple but convincing language that everybody could relate to, accept and embrace.

Here, I will once again simplify, summarize, reduce, shorten, clarify, and streamline the concept to facilitate absorption into y'all's brain: "before you can eat it or screw it, you must like it", right? Right! So, Shurduk instilled the concept of free-will and subjectivity (very much as night club bouncers let girls in high heels and short dresses enter while short pouchy guys in shabby jackets and old sneakers are stuck at the back of the line***).

There may be exceptions, but they exist just to confirm the rule, or are to be ignored if they do not fit the idea (which is, these days, an accepted extension to the scientific method), right? Right!

__________________________________________________________

* Malkin & Pospichal Press, 2022, 3 Korolenko Str, Dnipro, Ukraine, 49000 - 18 pages, no graphics
** John Murray, 1859, PRINTED BY W. CLOWES and SONS, STAMFORD STREET, and CHARING CROSS, London. 503 pages, One Diagram on pg. 117 (vide supra).  
*** from the professors own field research (Indra Musik Club, St. Pauli, 4th August 2020, 2:00 AM - it was a Wednesday)

Leverkusen and the Kind and Romantic Grand Gesture

Yo, yo, everybody who has ever been to Leverkusen (Coat of Arms below) will agree that it is not much of anything. The city has a decent football club and is where Aspirin was first made, but otherwise, it is totally unremarkable. The prestigious German Crime Series, "Tatort" (first episode aired 1970, and still running today) never made "Tatort Leverkusen" (although they did neighboring Duisburg and Münster). So much bigger was everybody's surprise when Leverkusen became City of the Kind and Romantic Grand  Gesture.

There was a distinct upswing in the city's mood, behavior, and attitude. Flowers in all stores were 50% off (Roses 60%), prices subsidized by City Hall. Longtime feuding neighbors became friends and were asked to dinner. Old friends disconnected for imaginary slights suddenly called up and invited each other to a "weekend by the lake, as in the old times". Parking wardens (especially Lovely Rita, meter maid) would give a twenty minute grace period and after that they would draw a heart on the 28€ ticket. The whipped cream topping on Mocca, normally 1€ extra, was suddenly complimentary everywhere. Jürgen Boberg, seventh grade (class 7B), who used to silently walk home with Bärbel Hoffman, seventh grade (class 7A), and would whisper shyly "Tshüß" at her door, one day, when they turned into Mühlen Straße, asked her if she'd like to for ice-cream at the Eis und Imbiss. He was delighted when her lovely pink and blond face broke into a wide grin and she said "Yes". The city felt differently, violent crime was down 78%, divorce rate was down 56%, Beyer Leverkusen qualified for the quarter finals and everybody was happy-smiley-lovey-dovey. Karl Kurzmüller, mid-level executive for "Grund und Boden", was home late every Wednesdays because the weekly status meeting. His loving wife Ulla waited with his favorite, the delicious Knödelsuppe. Karl, with newly found honesty and ethics, wanted to confess that there was no Wednesday status meeting, and he spent that time in Stefanie's bed (Ulla's beguiling best friend). Karl was also going to say that he knew Ulla didn't make the soup but bought it at Hanselmeier Feinkost, but when he sat down at the dinner table, he just said "looks great, Ulla, as always" ... I guess the Kind and Romantic Grand  Gesture only goes that far, eh?