Tag: Paris

August 8, 2024 – Are You Enjoying the Olympics?

August 8, 2024 /

The Olympics are almost over for another four years. If there is any silver lining in being cooped up in a hotel/hospital room is that there is not that much to do. I would never sit down and watch hours on hours of TV especially not day after day. But yet here I am with the TV on most days. Sometimes it is background but sometimes I watch glued to the TV.

It should come as no surprise that I am a fan of the Olympics. I wrote about it as I was traveling in 2022. That was another occasion where I didn’t have much to do except flip the TV on at the hotel. This goes all the way back to my first exposure in 1984. While I didn’t see much of it for various reasons it sowed the seeds for a lifetime of fandom.

Here is what I have seen so far. It appears to me that the United States has lost its complete dominance of the summer games. If you go back a few years ago to the golden era of Micheal Phelps who won everything that he entered, it seemed like the US could not lose. These games, I am watching gold medal favorites land Broze medals.

The media likes to skew the overall results by posting the US having the most medals of any country. When you look at the breakdown of medals, the US does not have the the most golds, They have triple the bronze to gold (side note: I am writing this a week before it posts). I see a much more equitable distribution of talent than I have ever have in the past.

Of course I am always going to root for the US first. But, part of what I love about the Olympics is the human interest aspect. There was a story about some divers from Mexico that paid their own way to get there and promised to auction any medals as proceeds to repay debt on the trip. Fortunately, somebody stepped up on their behalf but this is the will and the drive to sacrifice everything for a chance.

I have already watched so much that I have seen events I have never seen before. I caught fencing for the first time. I watched equestrian riding, triathlon, water polo and rugby for the first time. My son played rugby one year. I told my wife that I have forgotten more about rugby that I currently know. I won’t say that I get it totally know but seeing teams that know what they are doing kind of make sense now. It always seemed like sort of senseless melee when middle schoolers were playing.

I don’t know if I have a favorite event. Like a lot of things in my life, I admire people that are passionate about what they do. At this point, I am more than double the age of most of the people that have dedicated their lives to a specific pursuit. That means that I have been out of shape longer than they have been alive. But, perception is reality and to them, this is everything.

I used to have infinite will power. I could set my mind and sacrifice until the end of the earth. Some of that is still buried in my somewhere but unfortunately for me, I have never been much of an athlete no matter how much I willed and sacrificed for it. What that process taught me was that anything reasonably achievable could be accomplished with a plan and work. That part I still have. I just had to go after the right goals that fit my abilities.

As the Olympics wrap up, it seems like our banishment to Portland is going to end as well. The trends and motions that the doctors are making leads me to believe that we are a few days from going home. It may not feel as good as winning a gold medal but I am feeling like a million bucks in anticipation of this experience being over. I will take this change in perspective that is watching the Olympics to pass time to really enjoying it while it lasts.

End Your Programming Routine: I am actually surprised that my wife has had the Olympics on nearly continuously. It certainly is something different than binge watching all the shows that she normally watches. We haven’t talked about it, but I think that we kind of feel the same way about the human interest. We are not 100% different, but pretty close. Finally something that we can agree on.

April 2, 2024 – A Moveable Feast

April 2, 2024 /

A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemmingway is the March Left Coast Culinary Book Club selection. By an unfortunate series of events, I had to cancel the actual moveable feast as my wife was having a procedure done in preparation for Chemotherapy. The plan was to go crabbing and then have a seafood boil afterwards.

I was introduced to the seafood boil in South Carolina, named the ‘low country boil’. It is sausage, corn on the cob, small boiling potatoes and some kind of regional seafood. We were planning on catching a couple local Dungeness crabs and feasting out. I have come to learn that there are many different versions using crawdads or lobsters or soft shelled crabs depending on what is available regionally.

A Moveable Feast was published posthumously and featured Hemingway’s years in Paris and some of France. It is really a series of writings that he made while he was there and tucked away in his belongings to be discovered after he died. As a result, it is kind of a incongruous set of chapters with different interactions of the period.

Hemingway served in World War I and kind of fell in love with Europe. He spent roughly 1921-1927 living in Paris as a result. While he was there, he tended to rub shoulders with all of the expatriates that were also there. The chapters were some of those interactions with people like Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound and F. Scott Fitzgerald. By proximity and scene, he also befriended people like Pablo Picasso as well.

Hemingway was an interesting dichotomy. On one hand, he was an artist. He had passion, partied hard and loved hard. On the other hand, he was a man’s man interested in hunting and fishing and bull fighting. Clearly, he was worldly choosing Paris and Cuba for a lot of his life, but ending it in Idaho (literally).

I wouldn’t call myself a Hemingway fan per se but I definitely prefer him to many and most of the contemporary classic writers. I think about The Old Man and the Sea or The Sun Also Rises and remember not hating it like some of the others we read. But, I have to say that this book felt like a money grab. There was no real story, just anecdotes of his run ins with cronies. And not really interesting at that.

I believe that it is called Moveable Feast because nearly all of the chapters center around Ernest at a cafe and talking about writing or talking with other artists. They seemed to have a bit here, then move somewhere else all kind of dreaming and scheming about the work.

This isn’t a culinary book but there is plenty of food and drink in it. Beer, wine, cocktails and coffee flow freely as well. I proposed that if the book offended the senses of the hard-core cookbook readers of the group, they could also check out the PBS series of the same name. That I could get behind. I love Americana and people passionate about what they do.

End Your Programming Routine: My recommendation on this one is skip. If you are extremely interested in the life of Hemingway, then maybe this is your cup of tea. I simply did not find enough value in the book to recommend. I still want to have the seafood boil, but that will likely have to wait until after all of this cancer stuff. For now, I can keep on reading while I play the support role.