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This is one of our neighbors. He is unfriendly and never says hello. 📷

I’ve always like this house around the corner from ours. 📷

I am not a sentimental man who cries at rainbows and flowers, but when I saw this in the supermarket today I bawled.

The Jungle Prince of Delhi

For 40 years, journalists chronicled the eccentric royal family of Oudh, deposed aristocrats who lived in a ruined palace in the Indian capital. It was a tragic, astonishing story. But was it true?

Ellen Barry unravels the mystery at the New York Times

James Nicoll reviews Isaac Asimov’s 1950s time-travel novel, “The End of Eternity,” and finds it still holds up.

Interestingly, Nicoll notes, the premise of Eternity is similar to the Foundation series — a secret cabal manipulating human history — but this novel takes the story in the opposite direction.

Earlier I said the premise of Foundation is sinister when you think about it: The two forms of government we see are empire and rule by a secret, unaccountable conspiracy of technocrats. Both of these states are presented as utopian, when in reality the first has been shown to be pretty awful, and the second looks a lot like Communism, which has not proven to be swell either.

Nonetheless, I cut Asimov slack. He was a VERY young man when he initially wrote Foundation, reading headlines about the Nazis seemingly unstoppably conquering the world and wanted assurance that everything was going to be OK. Asimov’s fictional science of psychohistory could have provided that assurance, had it existed. That observation is not original to me; Alec Nevala Lee said it in his terrific history of science fiction, “Astounding.”

I think it’s also true that in both the Foundation series and later in End of Eternity, Asimov was exploring the desire to be assured that the grownups are in charge of the world, as presidents and prime ministers and heads of billion-dollar companies and vast government bureaucracies, and that these grownups had matters under control. The 21-year-old Asimov who wrote Foundation had very diffferent ideas about that premise than the 34-year-old who wrote The End of Eternity.

Asimov wrote more Foundation stories in the 1980s. By that time he was in his 60s, written hundreds of books, including bestsellers. He appeared many times on national TV and had been published in the New York Times. He was an American public intellectual, and was himself one of the supposed grownups running the world. He had a different perspective on those issues once again.

Passover was a really big deal when I was a kid

We had the second seder at our house, with upwards of 20 aunts, uncles and cousins swarming over the place. Our cousins Janet and Barry even brought their dog; Mom couldn’t stand dogs but she made an exception for Dusty.

Dusty is still one of my alltime favorite dogs, although I believe Janet and Barry prefer Custer, their next dog. And now that I think of it, Custer is a weird name for a dog.

Jimmy Fallon said in an interview once that when he was growing up, his parents didn’t have friends. They had brothers and sisters and cousins. Says I to myself on hearing that: Holy crap. I thought that was just us. My parents socialized frequently, but it was almost always with people genetically related. Though my Dad did have one or two old friends he grew up with, whom he saw once or twice a year.

Mom was usually not a great cook, but she did a great job with the seder, working for days and putting on the full spread. Mom and Dad seldom drank, but they had a little wine with dinner – Manischewitz and Mogen David, of course! – and laughed a lot. My uncle Nat and Aunt Harriet were the only real drinkers in the family; my parents kept a bottle of vodka in the house for when they came to visit. We told the same jokes every year and never got tired of them.

To this day I am only a social drinker. I like beer and wine and Jameson’s and I went on a martini kick for a few years. But I don’t drink when I’m at home and I can go for weeks and months without having alcohol, and I do not miss it. 🌕

We kept kosher for Passover for the full eight days. The rest of the year we were lax. I like to say that we were pizza-and-chinese-food-on-paper-plates kosher – the foods we kept in the house were kosher, and we kept the proper two sets of plates, one for meat and one for dairy. But we brought in pizza and Chinese food regularly, and when we did, we ate it on paper plates. When I was an adult, it took me some time to get used to eating pizza on regular dishes.

I loved matzoh during Passover, and gobbled it up plain, or with margarine, rendered chicken fat or cream cheese. I never got tired of matzoh during Passover, but I stopped eating it and switched back to bread the moment I could, and never had matzoh, or wanted it, the rest of the year.

Happy Easter!

He is risen!

But do not talk to Him until He has had coffee because seriously he’s just plain grouchy til then.