Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

Raw fish has had cultural significance in Japan. I highly recommend the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi, but sushi dreams have now spread. Little League World Series players were recently asked questions about their favorite athlete or their dream job. (Retirement was the best answer.) When favorite food was the topic, a surprising number from all over the world replied sushi. That certainly would not have been my answer when I was twelve. Recently I went to a Japanese-named restaurant touted for its sushi, and it was, indeed, very good. The sushi master (do you say sushi chef? Surely not sushi cook.) was named Jesus Hernandez. He hailed from a Mexican town famed for its traditional mole. Go figure.

In Death Comes for the Fat Man by Reginald Hill a character whose family emigrated to the UK after World War II says, “I am glad my family ended here, not the States. They have no rules over there, just laws.”

I am ahead of my time. For decades I have walked around with my shirt tucked in the front for about eight inches with the rest of garment flapping about me on the sides and back. Of course, this was just sloppiness. But I must have been attractive because now I see this look on models and high school and college kids. I am taking credit for the new fashion trend.

Sports seasons often overlap. At this moment, the football season is beginning while baseball still has a long way to go before the World Series. I am reminded of an overlap between the two sports that I encountered on an unusual trip. Phil and I had gone to grade and high school together and played on the same sports teams. In his thirties, Phil went to theological school and became ordained. When he became the minister of a church in the outer reaches of Queens in New York City, he called me. We invited him for Thanksgiving dinner a few times, and he and I got together several other times, but as he became settled in the church and got to know more people there, we drifted apart. Then one day he called and said that he had won a contest. The prize was a trip for two to travel to ballparks around the East Coast. He asked if I would go with him. The invitation was not particularly flattering. He didn’t want to ask anyone from his church because the contest’s sponsor was a beer company, and his (Dutch) Reformed Church frowned on alcohol. Phil continued that he had two brothers, and he did not want to choose between them. And, thus, the invitation descended to me. I accepted. Phil and I were together with about a dozen others from around the country and Canada for five or six days going to major league ballparks. It was great fun. One of our stops was to what then was called Jacobs Field in Cleveland. During the game we chatted with some young guys who were, shall we say, heavily into beer. They insisted again and again without too much slurring that we go to a bar with them near the stadium after the game. We went. I was surprised that upon entrance I saw a picture of Max McGee. And then I saw pictures of Bart Starr, Jerry Kramer, Willie Wood, and Ray Nitschke, all Green Bay Packer players from my youth. Packer memorabilia, mostly jerseys but also some cleats, covered the walls. I saw nothing about the hometown Cleveland Browns, who also had great teams, or any other. I was puzzled and asked one of our new friends about this. He looked at me as if he wanted to say, Duh, and then did say, “This is a Packers bar.” Apparently, that explained everything.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

An NFL playoff game was played in cold—very cold—weather this weekend. But although minus five degrees with wind chills in the minus thirties is admittedly a bit nippy, I was somehow pleased that it was not so cold as to become the coldest playoff game. That record is still held by what became known as the Ice Bowl where the Packers met the Dallas Cowboys for the NFL championship on the last day of 1967. On that morning, the father got a call at our home fifty miles from Lambeau Stadium from an acquaintance and was asked whether he wanted to go. Showing wisdom I did not always give him credit for, he declined and said that we would watch the game from the comfort of home. It was not that we were not experienced with cold. The average high for the three winter months in Sheboygan was in the mid-twenties with the average low fifteen degrees colder. Whenever there was a cold snap, we would wake up to below-zero days, and I can regale you, as I have the son and the spouse many times, about how I walked to school in that cold, although I lied if I ever said that I had to do it without shoes. We knew cold, but we also had an understanding of cold, and December 31, 1967, was extraordinary. The temperature at kickoff was minus fifteen, but, of course, there was a wind, which plunged the wind chills into the minus forties. I can go on about that game, but you can read about in the pioneering book by Jerry Kramer, who made the key block, and Dick Schaap, Instant Reply, but I don’t think that book contains this nugget: In those long-ago days, spectators could carry beer into the stadium. I was told that those who did found their six-packs frozen before the first quarter ended. For Wisconsinites, that brought on real suffering.

Snow is beautiful if you are watching someone else shovel it.

I look at many news sources every day. I, of course, know that there is an opioid crisis in this country made even more frightening by fentanyl. I did not know, however, that an anti-fentanyl bill has passed in the Senate but languishes in the House. I only learned about this because one of the cable networks had clips from the testimony of Jelly Roll, the unlikely but enormously popular entertainer whom I did not know. I still don’t know what is in the bill and why it is not moving through the House, but I thank Mr. Jelly Roll for his testimony that gave the situation some publicity. However, I wish that cable news would resist presenting erroneous news that the fentanyl crisis is primarily caused by a porous border that allows illegal aliens into the country to spread the drug. Credible sources show that the fentanyl crossing the southern border comes at the legal crossings, over eighty percent of those convicted for transporting or distributing the product in this country are Americans, and those who die from it — none of whom have been forced by an undocumented person to take the drug — are U.S. citizens. Perhaps news sources could tell us more about what is in the anti-fentanyl bill and why it has not been moving forward.

We are attacking the positions of the Iran-backed Houthis in the Mideast. We are also concerned about the activities of the Iran-backed Hezbollah. Learning this, I think back to my trip to Israel two decades ago. Funded by a conservative organization, it allowed me and others to study terrorism and anti-terrorism from an Israeli perspective. We met several men (they were all men), who were recently retired Israeli intelligence operatives. They were mystified by our invasion of Iraq. One said that the state sponsor of terrorism in the region was not Iraq but Iran, who would only be strengthened by our actions. He, of course, was right. We were led into that senseless Iraq war by conservatives. Some prominent Democrats who had presidential aspirations voted to authorize the invasion, but the majority of Democrats in Congress voted against it. Now conservatives seem shocked, shocked I say, that Iran has such influence in the Mideast when they helped create it.

The orthodox Jewish cardiologist has sometimes felt uncomfortable since October 7 by the looks many have given him. He thought that he would feel safer if he replaced his yarmulke with a baseball cap. That makes sense if it was a Mets hat. Everyone wants to stay clear of Mets fans.