La veritable histoire des trois petits cochons by Erik Blegrad, Book 39 of 2022

 

La veritable histoire des trois petits cochons

The tale of the three little pigs is the 1843 original version, en francais.  The French is simple and the illustrations are lovely.  

In this rather bloodthirsty telling of the tale, the wolf (le loup--he is not called the "Big Bad Wolf" or le grand mechant loup) eats the first two pigs.  The second is shown in a pan with an apple in his mouth fresh from the oven.  

The tale has the third little pig outsmarting the wolf several times before finally getting the wolf so angry he jumps down the chimney into a pot of boiling water. The last illustration is the third little pig eating the wolf doe his supper--at the table with a napkin, silverware and a candle.

The most lovely line in the book is the wolf's repeated threat to the little pigs:

Eh bien! Je soufflerai, et je gronderai, et j'ecraserai ta maison.

Well! I'll blow and I'll roar and I'll crush your house.  

It worked two out of three--then the wolf was dinner......

First 38 books of 2022:

The Iliad or the Poem of Force by Simone Weil

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

The Iliad or The Poem of Force by Simone Weil, Book 38 of 2022

This brief book was written shortly after France was defeated by the Nazis in 1940. Within three years, the author, Simone Weil, would be dead. She would die in the effort to free her country from the Nazis.

The Iliad or the Poem of Force begins: 

The true hero, the true subject at the center of the Iliad is force. Force employed by man, force that enslaves man, force before which man's flesh shrinks away.

She goes on to show how every character in the Iliad is crushed by force.  Every character eventually is afraid and dies by irresistible force. Throughout Weil makes her case that force is the hero at the center of the drama of the fall of Troy.  

The essay is more sad and beautiful than I can easily convey. If you have read Homer, read this essay and weep again with the heroes before the walls of Troy.

First 37 books of 2022:

Game of Thrones, Book 5 by George R.R. Martin

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Game of Thrones, Book 5, A Dance with Dragons, Book 37 of 2022

 

I just finished book 5 of the Game of Thrones:  A Dance with Dragons. Before I started reading the series at the beginning of the pandemic, I watched the entire HBO series.  Although the series runs eight seasons and 73 episodes, the more I read, the more the video series seemed schematic.  So many details that did not or could not make it into the vast video production.  

Of course, a video adaptation is simply a different artistic work than a book.  The trajectory of the difference is predictable. If the novel and the video series were main branches of a tree, the longer they grow, the farther apart they get. That was how it felt to read the books after seeing the video series.  

Season 1 and Book 1 are very similar.  Book 2 and Season 2 started to diverge. By then of Book 5, I felt I was in a different story, or a version of a different story. At the end of Book 5, every major character was dead, near death, threatened with death, or just miserable.  

Nothing that happened in the last two seasons of HBO series seemed to be the likely path of the characters at the end of Book 5.  

George R.R. Martin said Book six will be published in November of 2023.  I am so looking forward to it. I want to see what the story is like after 11 years of hiatus. Martin has to be influenced by what the HBO crew finally produced, so we will never know what Book 6 would have been without the HBO series.  

I loved the books. The further I went through the books, the more I loved them. 

First 36 books of 2022:

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreutz

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

Colonel Myles B. Caggins III Retires After 26 Years of Service

 

Major Myles B. Caggins, 1st Armored Division, Camp Adder, Iraq, 2009

On Veteran's Day weekend, 2022, Colonel Myles B. Caggins III retired after 26 years of service.  The ceremony was in Chantilly, Virginia, in front of family, friends, comrades and with full military customs and courtesies, plus some twists. The National Anthem was a saxophone solo by Eddie Baccus Jr. It was a first for me, and it was awesome.

Saxophone Solo National Anthem

by Eddie Baccus Jr.

General Vincent K. Brooks, Retired. presided at the retirement ceremony

Presiding at the retirement ceremony was General Vincent K. Brooks, a 1980 graduate of West Point. He retired in 2019 after 39 years, 17 of those years as a general officer. Brooks was a lot of fun. He said Myles served in the White House in the Bush and Obama administrations, but that the peak of his on-air career was his appearance on Jeopardy! Brooks had the audience laughing again and again describing that Jeopardy! performance.

Major Collin Richards, emcee, and Colonel Myles B. Caggins III, Retired, after the ceremony

In my civilian career, I met a lot of people who were leaders and innovators in science including several Nobel laureates. I heard them accept awards. Those speeches could be divided in two types. The first kind of speech is about just how amazing the speaker is. In the second type, the awardee says Thank You to their family, their teachers, their co-workers, everyone! It was a delight to hear all of the he thanks, some with laughter, there were tears for comrades no longer with us, honor to mentors, and a poem for his Mom. 

Myles thanking his daughter Tiffany Champion

Harry and Tiffany Champion

We met at Camp Adder, Iraq, when he was the Public Affairs Officer for 1st Armored Division. I wrote about Myles in Iraq here. We were able to work together several times on stories about soldiers.  When we were together in Iraq, it was his second combat deployment. In 2003 as a Captain, Myles led a support company during the invasion of Iraq. 

Myles on the day of his promotion to Colonel in 2017

We kept in touch in the dozen years since we both returned from deployment in 2010.  I saw Myles get promoted to Colonel in 2017. That story is here.  Following his promotion, Myles deployed for another full-year combat tour in Iraq and Syria in 2019 and 2020. 

Myles first civilian job will be a continuation of his last active duty assignment working in geopolitics.

Don’t Fly TAP – Air Portugal. Nice flight crews, unreliable planes, terrible app

Don't Fly TAP (Air Portugal).

But if you do fly TAP -- Pay attention to their App. 

It took four flights for me to get from Paris to New York on Veterans Day. That was not the day I planned to travel. And I did not book a terrible four-segment super-discount flight. 

Only two of the four flights flights actually took off—though I spent more time on the ground on the runway in Lisbon than the flight to get to Lisbon from Paris. 

I was supposed to fly from Paris to Newark changing planes in Lisbon on November 10. Two days before the flight, I got an email saying the flight was cancelled and I would be flying from Paris to Lisbon at 8am on November 11. At 12:10pm I would be flying to Newark. No options. Take it or leave it.

On November 11, I woke up at 5am. The flight from Paris to Lisbon was uneventful. We boarded the flight to America by 12:30pm then sat on the runway for more than 2 hours until we left the plane at 3pm for the long bus ride back to the terminal. In the terminal they herded all of us to a gate where three nice people from TAP processed two or three people in the first half hour. At this rate it would be Thanksgiving before we all got flights.

While waiting in line to get rebooked, I started talking to the couple in front of me: Iris and Jim. I was telling them that some of the angrier people were, like me, people who had a flight cancelled yesterday. We started talking about how other flights handle cancellations. 

If this were a United flight, our phones would have lit up before we reached the terminal with rebook options. TAP does not do that. I told them that when TAP cancelled my flight the day before, they rebooked me to an 8am departure the next day—they did not offer options. And with TAP, when you check in early, you can’t change anything until, as the agent on the phone told me, they release the reservation from their system. 

To show Iris and Jim what I meant, I hit the My Trips button in the TAP app. When I did, the app said I had been rebooked to JFK and I was leaving in one hour from Gate 41. 

“Oh Shit! I have a flight!” I said loudly. 

I checked. No TAP emails. No TAP messages. If I had not hit My Trips in the app, I would not have known and missed the flight. Iris and Jim did not have the phone app. They went to the TAP website. Nothing. 

Iris and Jim said, "Go to the gate!" I did. And made the flight. Which means the three gate agents who had us standing in Gate 46 for more than an hour had no idea their system was rebooking people. Again, no options. 

Flying into JFK at night instead of Newark means there is no way I can get home. By the time I landed and cleared customs at JFK and took the train to Penn Station New York, the last train from Philadelphia to Lancaster was already gone. 

So, I took NJ Transit to Princeton Junction to the cheapest hotel between NYC and Philadelphia and started catching up on all the sleep I lost getting home. 

I worked for a dot.com twenty years ago before apps existed and when e-commerce was new. In the late 90s and early 2000s, companies that did not have fully integrated systems sometimes had to take data from one system and enter it in another—let’s say communications and reservation management had separate systems. Connecting the two was called a “Sneaker Net.” People walked printouts from one part of the office to another. 

I signed up for every notification I could on the TAP app. I got one email and one text per flight. And the fact that their gate agents had no idea that automatic rebookings were happening says they really don’t understand their own system. United hits you up with options so fast that the angry crowd at the gate never forms. 

If I have not given you enough reasons to fly any other airline but TAP, consider the aircraft themselves. Both of the cancelled flights and the flight I eventually took to America were on Airbus A321 aircraft. They are narrow-body jets with 6-across seating and the only aisle in the middle. The 150 economy-class passengers share 3 toilets. The 200 economy passengers in an A330 (the more common transatlantic aircraft) share 6 toilets with two aisles and twice as many aisle seats. 

You could still choose TAP based on price, but in the sleepless world of transatlantic travel, I will tap a different airline.

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreuz, Book 36 of 2022

 

Irony and Sarcasm by Roger Kreuz is the fourth book I have read in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series--69 books about technology and the philosophy of technology.  The books examine a difficult and controversial topic from as many angles as possible in less than 200 pages.  

In Irony and Sarcasm Kreuz covers the history of his topic beginning with Socratic Irony--arguably the smartest man who ever lived declaring he was ignorant. In the introduction, Kreuz makes clear why he wrote "a biography of two troublesome words" instead of just one:  "Irony isn't a loner; it spends a lot of time in the company of a shady relative with a checkered reputation."

Kreuz carefully separates irony from sarcasm, and also from coincidence, paradox, satire and parody--all topics that are (ironically) confused with irony.  In the first chapter, "Preliminaries," Kreuz begins with non-literal language:

If people only employed literal language,, communication would be devoid of nuance, innuendo, humor, and poetic turns of phrase.

Kreuz begins to define irony with Socrates and the rhetorical tactic that has come to be known as Socratic irony.  The rest of the continues with examples of irony then moves to the death of irony (with an ironic smile I can almost see).  Irony died after 9-11. Irony died with blizzard of lies from Trump and his many wannabes.  It seems irony has died for centuries and never goes away.

No one ever predicts the death of sarcasm.  To say "Irony is dead!" is almost always a sarcasm-tinged comment.  

If you are nerdy about language, you (sincerely) will enjoy this book.

First 35 books of 2022:

Essential Elements by Matt Tweed

Les horloges marines de M. Berthoud 

The Red Wheelbarrow and Other Poems by William Carlos Williams

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Cochrane by David Cordingly 

QED by Richard Feynman

Spirits in Bondage by C.S. Lewis

Reflections on the Psalms by  C.S. Lewis

The Pope at War: The Secret History of Pius XII, Mussolini, and Hitler by David I. Kertzer

The Last Interview and Other Conversations by Hannah Arendt

Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut

The Echo of Greece by Edith Hamilton

If This Isn't Nice, What Is? by Kurt Vonnegut

The War That Made the Roman Empire: Antony, Cleopatra, and Octavian at Actium by Barry S. Strauss. 

Civil Rights Baby by Nita Wiggins

Lecture's on Kant's Political Philosophy by Hannah Arendt

Le grec ancien facile par Marie-Dominique Poree

The Netanyahus by Joshua Cohen

Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay

First Principles by Thomas Ricks

Political Tribes by Amy Chua 

Book of Mercy by Leonard Cohen

A Brief History of Earth: Four Billion Years in Eight Chapters by Andrew Knoll

Prisoners of Geography by Tim Marshall

Understanding Beliefs by Nils Nilsson

1776 by David McCullough

The Life of the Mind by Hannah Arendt

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

How to Fight Anti-Semitism by Bari Weiss

Unflattening by Nick Sousanis

Marie Curie  by Agnieszka Biskup (en francais)

The Next Civil War by Stephen Marche

Fritz Haber, Volume 1 by David Vandermeulen

A Long Path of Immigration from Japan to Paris

 

Alexi runs a small Japanese restaurant on a narrow street with ten Asian restaurants just off Boulevard Saint-Michel near Luxembourg Gardens in Paris.  Although Alexi is ethnically Japanese, he does not speak Japanese. He is a native speaker of Russian who also speaks French and English.  

He came to Paris from Moscow twenty years ago with his mother when he was fifteen years old. He finished high school in Paris and went to university. He studied finance and worked in banking for a decade. Then several years ago, he decided to leave banking and open a restaurant. I have had Ramen, Donburi, and Curry at his restaurant. He is a really good cook. 

Soviet Flag, 1917-1923

In 1920, Alexi's great-grandparents left Japan and settled in Vladivostok. In the 1930s, they were sent from Vladivostok to Kazakstan. They were, in effect, pioneers. They had to build their own home and the town they lived in. Alexi's grandparents were born in Kazakstan. In the 1960s they moved to Moscow where Alexi's parents met and married.  

Soviet Flag 1930s to 1991

Alexi is about the same age as my daughters and his parents are both in their early 60s.  His mother still lives in Paris. His father still lives in Moscow. 

Russian Federation Flag

Alexi is worried for his father and about the war, but his father has no plans to leave.  

The path people take in life through different cultures at different times fascinates me.  Four generations of Alexi's family emigrated to very different cultures and set up a new life. Their path from Japan though Russia, Kazakstan, back to Russia and now to France is a saga of overcoming difficulties. 

-----

[Although I have lived in three countries outside of the US, it was with the Army on active duty in West Germany, Iraq and Kuwait. Even within the US, I have lived in seven states, but only in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as a civilian. I lived in Colorado, Utah, Oklahoma, Texas, and Kentucky on active duty with the military.]