A C. T U. A L. L Y

Outgoing President Trump is obsessed with numbers—and especially with fixing them.   At the moment, his primary fixation is the number of Electoral College votes and how he can recompile them in his favor to win reelection. Before he became president, he undervalued his real estate holdings to lower his property taxes and he overvalued those holdings to increase his loan amounts and insurance valuations.    We’ve seen this obsession on numerous (pun intended) occasions since his inauguration.   He enlisted members of his administration to lie about the size of his inauguration crowds.   We saw him use numbers last April as a reason to initially refuse the Grand Princess to dock on American shores, explaining, I like the numbers where they are.   I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship. And we saw him mask (no pun intended) the connection between Coronavirus testing and cases on innumerable occasions, including when he told CBS News, ...

You do something to me Something that simply mystifies me Tell me, why should it be? You have the pow'r to hypnotize me Let me live 'neath your spell Do do that voodoo that you do so well For you do something to me That nobody else can do! Cole Porter, 1931   Holy crap!  This thing actually works! Thank you to our German upstairs neighbors, H & M, for the Donald Trump Anger Management Squeeze Ball, and to my dearly departed grandmother and mother for the dressmaker’s pins.   The Gestaltung is mine.   Thank you again to H & M for the Solar-Powered Donald Trump Swears to Tell the Truth With Fingers Crossed Behind His Back Bobble Head Doll.  It just can't stand still!   And a final note of thanks to H & M for A Child’s First Book of Trump .   Because it’s important to know your adversary.     Keep it real!   And wear your damn mask! Marilyn  

My daily “walk in the park” takes me through an urban landscape that yields just beyond the elevated U-2 metro railway tracks to an award-winning, 64-acre green space known as Park am Gleisdreieck .   The name belies the park’s origins:   a Gleisdreieck is a triangle-shaped connection of tracks consisting of three switches and three rails, which enables a train to directly transition or turn from one direction to another without a turntable or similar equipment.   Park am Gleisdrieck was realized between 2011-2014 from the massive, overgrown rail yard junction that served freight traffic originating south of Berlin before WWII.   During the war, the tracks and related facilities were heavily damaged and eventually abandoned.   Nature was the first to reclaim its space.   A team of landscape architects, citizens, and Berlin politicians came later.   To be in Park am Gleisdrieck is to feel alive.   The park is animated by three overhead metro...