Meeting the cousins

A couple weeks ago I wrote about my trip to Florida where I met a number of my cousins for the first time, and I promised I'd write about it some more. Here I make good on my promise.

These cousins are descended from my great grandfather's brother, who emigrated from southern Poland to Argentina a hundred years ago. He had meant to compare notes with my great grandfather, who came to the United States, and then they would both settle in whichever location turned out best. But they never reunited.

Last year I happened to make reference on this website to my cousin Natalia, who I wasn't even sure was my cousin at the time, and she found what I wrote and responded along the lines of: "Who are you, and why do you think we're related?" Her family had moved to Florida in the '90s -- not all that far from where other cousins of mine live.



I was in Florida for my cousin Josh's bar mitzvah. (He's the one in the dark blue T-shirt.) The above picture was taken at a brunch the day after the bar mitzvah, and as the party was winding down, everyone got out their cameras. In some respects this picture isn't the best, but I think it captures the chaos of the situation, where no one could agree on which camera to look at. I'm in the green shirt, looking at Josh's father, probably having just given him some advice on how to work my camera. There are too many people in the picture to gracefully identify them all, and I must admit I can't remember the names of Monica's and Maria's children.

Chess on the lake

I took a bike ride on the lakefront path today and got as far south as the chess pavillion at North Avenue. I watched one of the regulars, playing with the white pieces, beat up on some poor patzer who had wandered in. The loser didn't make any serious blunders, but I could see early on that he had the weaker position, and he lost by about the 25th move. "Where did I go wrong?" he asked as he handed the victor five dollars. His problem was he played too tentatively, never attacking. Whenever a piece was threatened, he would retreat. At the end, he needed to give up some material to prevent white's final mating attack, but his position was unsalvageable by then anyway.

You might think that good chess playing, which requires a sharp mind, would correlate to success in other areas. But a lot of the regulars at the chess pavilion look like they're just barely making it.

Something that resembles music

One of the things I like about my band is that even though it is made up of amateur musicians, we still produce something that resembles music. Not all community bands do.

At our last formal concert, we had Wayne Messmer, public address announcer for the Chicago Cubs, narrate Lincoln Portrait by Aaron Copland. Here is a recording of the performance:

Lincoln Portrait [27 DEC 2006 12:12:00] UPDATE: File removed for lack of storage.

... and the national anthem, also performed at the concert:

The Star Spangled Banner [27 DEC 2006 12:24:00] UPDATE: File removed.

The Star Spangled Banner isn't the kind of thing we would normally play at a formal concert, but with Wayne Messmer there, how could we not?

People with too much money

I just heard that a guy named Ronald Lauder (heir to the Estee Lauder cosmetics fortune) paid $135 million for a Gustav Klimt painting. Now, I think Klimt did some nice work and all, but how on earth can a painting be worth $135 million? I know... supply and demand, whatever the market will bear, etc. But to put this in perspective, right now the federal minimum wage in the U.S. is $5.15. So someone can legally work a 2,000-hour work year and earn $10,300 in gross pay. If you deduct the 6.5% payroll tax plus 3.5% in state and local income tax, you end up with $9,270 in net wages per year. 14,564 of these workers would need to pool their incomes over an entire year in order to amass enough money to buy this Klimt painting.

By the way, Wikipedia has this photograph of Klimt holding a cat. Awww...

All the things I missed last weekend

Don't get me wrong -- I'm not complaining. But it seems like everyone conspired to schedule everything for June 10. It made me sorry I could not go in five different directions and be one traveler, to paraphrase Frost.

There was Markos' convention in Las Vegas. I'm not sure I would have gone all the way out to Vegas just for that, but then again, participants included (to name a few) Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Barbara Boxer, Gen. Wesley Clark, Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, Ambassador Joseph Wilson, and of course, Markos himself. I did manage to catch Markos' appearance on Meet the Press.

Closer to home, there was the Chicago Cares volunteer event on Saturday. Even though I'm somewhat doubtful about how much good the program does, I participated last year (and wrote about it here). But not this year.

Midsommarfest, the Andersonville neighborhood's annual street fair, was this last weekend, but I was out of town. Missed the whole thing. I also missed the local cat shelter's "Stray Cat Strut" walk-a-thon on Saturday morning. It must have been damp and chilly, but the weather wouldn't have deterred me.

These are some of the things I could have done this past weekend, but I'm only one traveler, and where I chose to travel was to the Tampa Bay area for my cousin's Bar Mitzvah. There I met some of my cousins from Argentina for the first time, which was cool. I'll write about the trip some more in a future entry.

National security and the First Amendment

It's been a week since my last entry -- time to write another one.

In Sunday's Chicago Tribune, Steve Chapman had a good column on Alberto Gonzales' recent threats to punish journalists for reporting leaks. I always enjoy Chapman's writing, even though I often disagree with him.

Regarding the New York Times' reporting on the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, Chapman writes:

As a rule, the story has to pose a "clear and present danger" of serious harm [before the government can take action] -- not a speculative or distant possibility of something or other.

To get a conviction, the Justice Department would have to prove the story posed a grave risk, which would be a high hurdle. The Times, after all, didn't alert Al Qaeda confederates to the possibility that they were being wiretapped, which has always been allowed -- only that the government might be listening without a warrant instead of with one. It's hard to imagine what they'd do differently knowing that detail.

...

Even if it could prove serious damage, the government would also have to prove it outweighed the value to the public of knowing the administration was doing something that may be grossly illegal. That's another hurdle Gonzales might fall on his face trying to clear.

Right on, Mr. Chapman.