Pennywise Frontman to Lead Awareness Demonstration in Front of the Hump
Musician Zoli Teglas will be leading a demonstration this afternoon in Santa Monica to bring attention to the recent revelations concerning the use of whale meat at the city’s famed The Hump restaurant.
The demonstration will be held between 11:30 am and 2 pm in front of The Hump, located at the Santa Monica Airport.
“When we heard that the offense is only a misdemeanor and that operators of The Humpcould at most be fined and serve possible jail time for violating the Marine Mammal Protection Act we realized that we needed to do more to raise awareness and educate the Los Angeles community that this local restaurant is serving endangered Sei whale meat. We encourage people to join us to help put an end to restaurants in the US and Japan selling endangered species as delicacies,” said Teglas, who in addition to being the frontman for the group Pennywise also serves as the volunteer music and outreach coordinator for Sea Shepherd, an international non-profit, marine wildlife conservation organization.
Hungary’s Unlikely Chronicler of Jewish History
The tragic story of the Jews who lived in Bekes County, a mostly poor and rural region in southeastern Hungary, 120 miles from Budapest, was grimly echoed to greater or lesser degrees throughout a large section of Central and Eastern Europe.
A once active and thriving community had been decimated during the Second World War. Most of the Jews who managed to survive the Holocaust immigrated to places far away from the region: Israel, the United States and Australia.
Only a smattering remained in Bekes County following the war and into the country’s Communist era. As the decades past, the number of Holocaust survivors living here dwindled.
Nevertheless, their story, as well as the history of the formerly thriving community, is still being penned, and by the most unlikely of chroniclers.
Istvan Balogh, a 22-year-old university student, hails from a non-Jewish though multi-ethnic Hungarian family. Despite his deceptively young age, he is the author of two books (in Hungarian) about Jewish life in Bekes country.
“Before I was even 10 years old, my grandmother would tell me stories about Jewish life here from the time when she was young girl. She recounted how her best friend, a Jewish girl named Rozsi Leichter, was taken away on a train, only to perish later at a concentration camp,” Balogh said.
“From that point forward, I was drawn to the story of this community that once live here amid my own community, yet was no longer here,” he added.
He started work on his first book, about Jewish life in his hometown of Totkomlos, a small community of 6,600 people, when he was a mere 13 years of age. His passion for the subject remained throughout his adolescence and his volume was subsequently published by the time he was 18.
Balogh’s fascination with the story of the Jews of Bekes County and Judaism as a whole remained so deep in fact that, at the time he had graduated from high school, he enrolled and was accepted at the Hungary’s University of Jewish Studies in Budapest, where he is in his third year.
He has just completed his second book, a painstakingly researched tome, about the Jews from the entire region of Bekes County. In it, Balogh goes into great detail about hundreds of Jewish buildings and landmarks within dozens of communities stretched across Bekes Country. He describes the location and the current status of the landmarks, whether the local councils have made efforts to maintain them or whether they have fallen into disrepair.
“Every weekend I would come home and plot out which city, town or village I would go to. I would ask officials in the settlements where the Jewish landmarks were. If they were in a bad state, I would ask them why the situation was this way,” Balogh said, retelling his experiences meeting with town officials who were often two or three times his age
“I also searched through local registry offices, traced the names on tombstones, spent hours poring over documents in local libraries, anything that he could use to find connections between those people who lived in Bekes county and who could help me make the picture more complete,” he went on to say.
Through these sources, Balogh was able to gather the addresses of Holocaust survivors and relatives of victims and former residents of the region. He wrote numerous letters and tried to establish a correspondence with scores of people who had a connection to Jewish life in Bekes County.
The reaction from those who wrote back to the young, non-Jewish compiler of their history was positive, if not enthusiastic, according to Balogh. From the many responses he received, he was able to piece together a framework of what had once transpired in this area, now mostly devoid of any form of Jewish life.
“The letters which came back to me were not only invaluable in the research I was performing, but they also helped bring in a human element which was mostly missing in my desire to learn more about what had taken place here,” he said.
Some of what Balogh has delved into in his book can also be found on his Web site where he documents the location of dozens of Jewish cemeteries, the number of tombstones situated in each and their present condition.
As for professional ambitions, besides the near certainty that he will produce more books, Balogh hopes to become a professor of Jewish studies.
Give Papa an Asterisk
So much attention has been focused in recent months on a number of athletes who – fearing that their career statistics would only be remembered by a few trivia-crazed fans at a Vegas card convention – decided to elevate the level of their performances by taking various illegitimate substances.
Marion Jones, Floyd Landis, Dana Stubblefield and Barry Bonds are just some of the prominent athletes whose names have been tarnished — to say nothing of the sports in which they participated — by charges of using performance-enhancing substances.
Each has been deservedly berated and lambasted by a sporting public which through the years has developed a “guilty until proven innocent” cynicism towards successful professional and Olympic athletes.
Nevertheless, we would be remiss if we were to limit the scope of our disillusionment solely to those who make their living by throwing a ball or peddling a bicycle and overlook others whose impact on our culture has far more significant repercussions.
Take, for example, some of the great literary talents who have written the works which form the established canon. It is common knowledge, but not so commonly discussed, that William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway all partook wholeheartedly in the use of a myriad of stimulants to assist them in the creative process.
We must now, for the sake of the students, aspiring writers and other devotees of these so-called “great men of literature”, reexamine what has heretofore been considered the pinnacle of creative output.
In the same way it has been determined that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa would have been lucky to have batted 20 homers in a season were it not for steroids, we should also dissect what some literary works would have looked liked had the creative minds behind them not availed themselves of performance-enhancing substances with such gusto.
For example, had it not been for the use of mild-altering substances, then Rene Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” would have been written as “Dude, I, like, just had this wildest idea.”
If Shakespeare had not been under the influence of a pint too many of ale, then high school students around the world would see the beginning of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be, That is the question”, .the most famous line in all of English literature, as “There’s something I have been meaning to ask you, but it escapes me at the moment.”
The last line of the well-known work by poet Dylan Thomas’, a performance-enhancing abuser extraordinaire if ever there was one, “Do Not Go Gently into the Good Night” would no doubt have read something like this: “It’s no problem if you decide to leave the lights on.”
Other giants of modern writing must also be held under the microscope to ascertain whether their masterpieces were not in fact ameliorated by dabbling in drink. Could Mark Twain have reached the outer limits of man’s imagination, as he did in “Huckleberry Finn”, without a bottle of bourbon at the ready.
Would the witticisms of Oscar Wilde have achieved their dagger-like sharpness without the occasional drop of absinthe? Could Hemingway have so masterfully encapsulated the voice of an era had he not imbibed copious quantities of jungle juice?
Naturally, we shouldn’t stop with the printed word. Paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali would in all likelihood be confused with those of Leroy Neiman and Red Skelton were it not for their suspected partaking in multiple substances.
In the oratorical realm, the famous speeches of Winston Churchill would be on a par with those of George W. Bush had the war-time prime minister not kept his stocks of brandy fully stored.
We’ll discuss music another day.
The Land Without Cats
My name is Myklust Srkt. I work as the chief public relations officer for the Ministry of Tourism in Gurgruc, the capital city of Aldovia — which many of you in America have probably studied about in your elementary and secondary schools as “the land without cats.”
This characterization of our people into a stereotypical soundbyte is, in my view, extremely unfair. There are more sides to Aldovia than what is depicted in a typical western education, ie, as a “no cat zone.” For example, we are a country which is proud of its cuisine, most notably our Aldovian turnip stews, our Aldovian turnip casseroles and our famous Aldovian turnip pie (tarte aux navets a la Aldovienne). Aldovia is able to produce such a bountiful crop of turnips each year because we farm them on land which in other countries would be reserved for cat parks, cat grazing and various and sundry other cat-related activities and amusements.
I believe that it is incumbent upon me in my position as the principle publicist for Aldovia to state categorically that we are not a cat-hating nation. In fact, we have diplomatic missions in many countries where cats reside and are admired. Though, as these embassies and consulates are considered the territory of the Republic of Aldovia, cats are not allowed on the property.
The Aldovian language is to most non-native speakers a linguistic enigma, for it bears no resemblance to any other known dialect. Every word was made up on the spot in less than three hours by the great Aldovian polymath Kledmik on June 3, 1132. Unlike the English language in which words are derived from Latin, Greek, French and many other tongues, the Aldovian vocabulary has no roots. Hence, there is no word for cat.
Living in a land that has no common domesticated felines (and no word for the species) has its advantages and disadvantages. On the plus side, the average Aldovian has seen 32,000 fewer cat commercials by the time he or she graduates from high school than the average American. On the downside, having no word for cat leaves 32,000 fewer idioms that an average Aldovian speaker has at his or her disposal.
Needless to say, because of the paucity of cats in Aldovia we are one of the most productive countries on the planet. Aldovian workers spend their entire working lives free from the distractions of online cat videos.
I don’t mean to paint a picture that a society without cats is idyllic. Just because our country is cat-free does not mean we are without our social problems. Late last month, police searching a home in the village of Smkr, about 57 miles east of the capital, found a woman living with 107 marmots.
Still, putting aside my job as Aldovia’s top marketer for a moment, I urge you, in my capacity as a private citizen, to come visit my country. Here you will find none of the cat-related hassles that can mar an otherwise splendid vacation, such as being bothered by aggressive pan-handling cats with preternaturally keen abilities to pick out tourists, trying to book a table at a top restaurant only to find a group of cats has beaten you to it, being seated behind a whining cat on your flight to or from Aldovia, or having cats cut before you in line as you visit one of our world-renowned museums – where of course if you are looking for exhibits about cats you will be very disappointed.
Throughout the centuries, artists have found inspiration and relished their experiences in Aldovia. In a tongue-and-cheek note to his good friend Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron lauded the fineness of Aldovian turnip wine, “I would wish that Thee could be here with me, quaffing a vintage of which the cats cannot nip.”
In a little known essay entitled “Journey to Aldovia”, the great American writer Mark Twain remarked, “The cafes and promenades of Gurgruc are resplendent with the sounds of life – though none of these sounds seem to emanate from cats.”
Ernest Hemingway, though a renowned cat lover, was a frequent visitor to Aldovia. He once said of the country in a letter he penned to Gertrude Stein, “I find here the solace I need to write – free of the constant wailing of cats.”
There are many treasures and pleasant surprises awaiting you on your journey to Aldovia – too many to reveal on this occasion. Besides, as we say here, “I wouldn’t want to let the hedgehog out of the bag.”
Mobileless on Planet Earth
This past Friday, at exactly 4:04 in the afternoon, I officially became the last person on the planet not to have a mobile phone. The news was delivered to me not by any formal ceremony or letter, but by the sound of Cab Calloway’s “Minnie the Moocher” emanating from somewhere on Mrs. Taylor, my 81-year-old neighbor, who I ran into at that time by the front door of our apartment building.
“No, I want you to short 10,000 shares of SXB on the NYSE and I want you to do it now. You call yourself a broker,” she belted into her sparkling new mobile device.
“Excuse me,” she said when she saw me, placing her Nokia back into her coat pocket. “My grandson and his fiancée bought this silly contraption for me last Christmas. I didn’t want to be the last person on the planet to own one, if you know what I mean.”
“Incidentally, why is it I never see you carry a mobile phone?” she asked.
Nowadays it is clear that it is not merely a matter of my being the last human to store a mobile on his or her person at every hour of the day and night. Judging by the news accounts one reads in various segments of the popular press, many an animal has mastered the ability to dial on a digital numerical board to rescue families from hurricanes and fires, as well as book a two-week winter vacation in Hawaii.
It would appear that in the very near future instead of having to rely on fingerprints and retinal scans for identification, it would be far easier for federal agencies to supply all the inhabitants of a country with a personalized, individual ringtone.
I have not always held such antediluvian opinions on the subject of mobile phone. In the mid-1990s, as the first in my circle of friends to possess a cell phone, I held various delusions at the time of being on the cutting edge of a trend, quite an accomplishment for me as I am usually on the edge that doesn’t cut.
Indeed, in the time before cell phones had hit their stride I would frequently be the only person on a bus jabbering away with my distant interlocutor — while having to use both hands to hold the ancient device — in a conversation that usually went something like this: “Hi Bob, can you hear me? I’m on a bus. I’ll call you back when I get off the bus.” Today I am leading the way by being the only person on a bus not talking to some unseen third party about what I had for lunch, what a jerk so-and-so is or intimate details of my private life at a volume audible to all my fellow passengers.
Likewise, I was at the forefront of the ancillary text message craze. Back in 1999, I spent four hours drafting the following SMS to one of my friends: “Out. Back at 5. C U then.” These days I clearly stand out as someone whose fingers can remain relatively stationary for more than ten minutes at a time, refraining from any impulse to text a message to my wife such as “Don’t forget to take the peas out of freezer” – a message which I had already posted on our front door, on the fridge and at 50 other assorted locations in the apartment before I left home in the morning.
While perhaps not the ultimate geek when it comes to numerous other aspects of technology, I hardly consider myself a Luddite. In fact, I have two websites, I am regularly on Facebook and I reveal every minute, trivial detail of my life on Twitter. The difference between unveiling information about myself on these forums is that others can choose whether or not they wish to watch the latest video of my cat playing with a bottle cap, read my recipe for Moldovan dumplings or discover my innermost thoughts about Sarah Boyle.
Whereas with mobile phones, trifling tidbits of the lives of strangers follow me wherever I go: on the aforementioned bus rides to movie theaters, restaurants, at work, baseball games, even while I was recuperating from appendicitis in the hospital. There is no escape. Certainly one cannot find solace from the mobile epidemic abroad where the citizens of most other countries make mobile phone usage by North Americans look tame and tranquil by comparison.
Notwithstanding the anti-social annoyances – which incidentally every mobile user in the world seems to agree are annoying when they are not performing the annoying acts themselves – are the costs of using the darn device, a device that in 99.9 percent of cases serves as nothing more than a spousal GPS system.
Unless the vast majority of the world’s cell phone users have connections I don’t, the money saved by not joining most calling plans would be enough to take Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen out for one night on the town each month. But then again, she probably wouldn’t want to be seen with a guy who doesn’t own a mobile.