Isaac Laquedem

The gift of music has some bad side effects

I'll likely never be able to speak to Mrs. Laquedem and the Laquedemitasse again.  I gave them both iPods for Christmas, and they now walk around the house, looking like two Secret Service agents with the earphones in their ears, ignoring whatever I say.  Sometimes when I wave my arms I can get their attention, but otherwise I think I've lost them.

Merry Christmas!

The Laquedem and Farmer families are religiously as diverse as we are unobservant.  At a guess it's been 40 or more years since a Christmas Day church service saw any of the Farmers in attendance, except possibly for Grandmother Farmer, who occasionally taught Sunday School for the Methodists.  (Going to church on Christmas Day has never been a concern of the Laquedems, one of whom was so determined to show that Christmas was just another day on the calendar that she set her wedding date for December 25.  Attendance was light.)

Yet despite our secular thoughts, we group on two days of the year, Thanksgiving and Christmas, for much jollity and conviviality.  (We also gossip mercilessly about those who don't come.)  Best wishes to you and yours for Christmas Day and Chanukah week.

The Laquedemitasse celebrates Chanukah

The Laquedemitasse asked if we could light a menorah this year.  "Sure," said I, "but why do you ask?"  (The L'tasse has no religious education and likely couldn't say what faiths his parents have belonged to or wandered away from.)  "The Good Neighbor Doctor's family has one, so we should get one," he replied brightly. 

Odd, I thought, I didn't know the G.N.D.s were Jewish, so I mentioned this to Mrs. Laquedem, whose eyebrows went up.  "The G.N.D.s are Catholic," she said.  "I'm sure they don't have a menorah."

So I located a menorah and we lit the candles on December 24 (the first night) as we will do for the rest of the week.  The Laquedemitasse took great joy in helping to kindle the tapers.  Whether he wanted a menorah because he thought (wrongly) that he would get another seven nights of presents, or because he wants a week to play with fire, I don't know.  I'm hoping it's the former.

Happy birthday, Uncle Farmer!

Best wishes to Uncle Farmer, who celebrates his 88th birthday today!  (These wishes are actually a little belated, because I wrote this on December 26, but I did call him on the 23rd.)  One of the blessings of my Wodehousian collection of relatives is that almost all of them are optimists, ranging from the exuberant to the phlegmatic.  Uncle Farmer is of the phlegmatic sort, but nevertheless looking forward to the future enough to be planning an addition to his house.  Over the years he's done a lot of work on his house, most of it himself, but this time around he's willing to concede to his advancing age and hire a contractor.

The TSA is in my dreams

I often dreamt that I was flying, but since security increased, now by the time I make it through the checkpoints, it's time to wake up and go to work.

Snowy schadenfreude

I have to confess that I derive an inner happiness when (as I did today) I drive my elderly sedan slowly and steadily through snow and ice without chains or snow tires, and I see four-wheel drive cars and SUVs that have slid off the road and into the ditch.  Possibly their drivers believe that the manufacturers, through clever engineering, have exempted their products from Newton's laws of motion.

Stanley Williams isn't the victim

The 24 years that Stanley Williams, a founder of the Crips gang, spent on California's death row ended early this morning when he was executed for four murders that he committed in 1979.  As interesting as the story of how he changed in those 24 years may be, I'd rather have been able to read what Albert Owens, Yen-I Yang, Tsai-Shai Yang, and Yee-Chen Lin -- the four people he was convicted of killing -- had done since 1979,  four stories Mr. Williams cut short with a shotgun.

Mr. Wiederhorn asks to join the MAC's membership committee

Andrew Wiederhorn followed through on his threat to sue the Multnomah Athletic Club because it expelled him after he was convicted of two federal crimes.  His lawyer (whom he imported from Los Angeles) says that he will ask for the MAC's membership list and run a criminal background check on the 20,000 members to see how many others have convictions in their past.  "If they [other members with convictions] can stay in, I should too," his reasoning seems to go.

Try as I might to come up with a pithy Isaac-like remark to describe this, I can't.  All I can do is say how it amuses me (since I'm not a member of the MAC) to envision Mr. Wiederhorn and his lawyer investigating the members of the MAC to see if they're of good enough character for Mr. Wiederhorn to associate with, and let it go at that.  I am still willing, however, to chip in to the MAC's legal defense fund, if the club promises not to readmit him.

It's not a Hanukkah tree

Two posts by Professor Bogdanski and Lars Larson, dealing with the subject of the use or non-use of  the word "Christmas" in "Christmas tree," got me thinking on the subject.  I found an illuminating history of Christmas trees at The History Channel.  I'll summarize it as follows: 

1.  The tradition of decorating houses in winter with evergreens of some sort predates Christianity.

2.  The Germans put up and decorated small Christmas trees starting in the 1600s.  Colonial Americans deplored the joyous celebration of Christmas, and did not put up and decorate trees.  The Mayflower group would have ostracized, or worse, anyone who decorated a tree to celebrate Christmas.

3.  In the 1840s, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert put up a Christmas tree in London, and English and American society followed their lead.  At about the same time, German immigrants to the United States, whose numbers were increasing, were putting up trees.

4.  (Here I've added to the research of The History Channel with some other work.)  By the 1880s or 1890s, the celebration of Christmas had become commercialized -- for example, F.W. Woolworth was importing glass ornaments for trees -- and the tree had become part of the secular and commercial celebration of Christmas in the United States.  (Commerce really should have taken hold of Hanukkah instead, because it lasts for eight days and could have been an excuse for eight times the shopping that Christmas offers.)

I am not a Christian.  I celebrate Christmas as a secular holiday.  The Christmas tree in the town square doesn't bother me, because it's secular; in America it's not a symbol with religious origins.  (Actually I rather like the idea of putting up a tree in my house to celebrate America's history of commercial enterprise.)  Calling it a "holiday tree" suggests that we aren't really sure which holiday we're celebrating.

Paul Allen's creditors indirectly invite Isaac to visit the Rose Garden

The Laquedemitasse and I went to tonight's Trail Blazer game at the Rose Garden, courtesy of a friend who gave us his seats.  I hadn't been to a Blazer game for at least six years, and I was pleasantly surprised by how it's changed.  The first thing I noticed was that the staff I met were uniformly helpful, friendly, and (as far as I could tell) well-trained.  Two different attendants noticed a small spill and sent for a cleaner, who arrived within two minutes.  The food was good, as stadium food goes, and portions were generous.

I should mention that we were in the "Club Seating," which is run not by the Blazer organization, but by the company hired by the creditors to take over the arena.  The Blazer organization offers most of the arena seats, but the courtside seats, the club seats, and the skyboxes are controlled and offered by the bondholders, through a company called Spectrum that they've hired to manage the arena.  (Mr. Allen had to ask Spectrum to let him keep his courtside seats after he lost control of the arena.)  I suspect my friend, who knows a bargain when he sees one, bought his tickets because Spectrum offered him a really, really good deal to sign up for the season, and I got to benefit tonight.

The Laquedemitasse and his cousin liked the blimp, and though they watched the game with bored indifference when the home team was down by 10, when the Blazers fought back to a tie, they jumped up and shouted "DEE-fense" in their piccolo-like voices, along with the rest of the crowd.

"Crowd" is being charitable, for the arena was about 2/3 full -- maybe 12,000 fans spread around 18,000 seats.  Half the skyboxes were empty and dark.  Several sections of the end zones had fewer than two dozen fans each, and many of the higher-priced seats below the concourse were empty also.   The team's terrible record might have something to do with that, of course.

Let's see:  6,000 empty seats at an average price of $40 each is $240,000 in lost revenue per game, and over 41 home games that makes $9,840,000 of lost revenue, which was (in very round terms) the annual debt service on the Rose Garden debt.  It's something for boosters of major league baseball to keep in mind when pushing for the government to fund a stadium:  Portland may be a one-team town now, but it's given up on supporting that one team, and a second major-league team could end up being a replacement for the Trail Blazers, not a supplement to the basketball team.