A C. T U. A L. L Y

We recently watched The Third Man , a cynical tale of moral relativism filmed entirely in bombed-out Vienna in 1948.   There is a famous line about cuckoo clocks spoken by Orson Wells, the anti-hero Harry Lime: “Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”  Great line; false premise.   According to the Smithsonian Magazine ( Smithsonian Mag ): And though he may have been a genius, Welles was wrong about the history of the cuckoo clock. “When the film came out,” he told Peter Bogdanovich, “the Swiss very nicely pointed out to me that they’ve never made any cuckoo clocks!” Indeed, although often associated with Switzerland, the cuckoo clock was more likely invented in Germany sometime in the...

Today would have been my father’s 99 th birthday, had he not died in 2004.   In his memory, I’m baking fruit cake, despite the fact that everybody says they hate fruit cake.   I’m using my mother’s recipe as an inspiration.   That’s her well-used recipe index card above.   She died in 1995, nine years before my father, leaving several fruitcakes in the freezer.   I inherited one of them, still wrapped in its Christmas wrapping paper shroud, in December 2004.   It came to a sad end in the Tiergarten , well, maybe not sad.   I like to think positively about the fate of that last fruitcake.  But you be the judge. Weeping Willow and Japanese Maples in the Tiergarten As fruitcakes go, mine was very well-traveled.   In early 2005, it was shipped overseas in a container along with furniture, housewares, Christmas ornaments, photographs, other emotionally-charged memorabilia, and odd whatnot's from my parents’ house in New Jersey to ou...