Our Africa trip journal - one year ago today: Botswana
We arrived at Kasane Airport, a small airport outside Chobe National Park in Botswana, yesterday, and when we stepped outside the airport that is when our trip really began. A driver from the resort met us, a dark-skinned black woman wearing a navy medium weight coat and wool beanie hat despite 80-plus degree heat. We loaded aboard our vehicle, which was not the shuttle bus I’d expected, but rather a flatbed truck with high sides and padded bench seats. She drove us about 40 minutes, almost entirely on the park’s rutted dirt roads, to our home for the next three nights, the Chobe Game Lodge inside the park, which is a vast nature preserve on the Chobe River. We had a few minutes to settle in and then we had tea and snacks, then a game cruise on the river, on a flat pontoon boat with about a dozen people. This small group and our guide, a dark-skinned black woman named RB, would be with us the three days of our stay. RB is also the boat pilot, sole deckhand, and bartender.
I’m currently enjoying jet lag at 4:34 am. Wake up call for river cruise in 25 minutes! An hour or two ago I heard an animal roar or growl or trumpet outside the lodge. It sounded big and possibly carnivorous and not a bit anti-Semitic in its food preferences.
Note from 2020: Up until the point we got in that open-air tour bus, the trip to Africa had been very ordinary, just like flying between any two major metropolitan airports anywhere in the world. But when we got on that tour bus, it was a different world. We stopped on the side of the road and looked and wildlife, including elephants. Elephants! Right there on the side of the road! We saw a lot of that over the next few weeks, but it never felt ordinary.
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African safari journal: One year ago today, Julie and I arrived in Africa
From my travel journal, lightly edited for typoes:
We’ve been in transit nearly 2 days now. And we are almost there.
We left the house at 8 AM on Monday. Our flight was more than four hours from San Diego to Atlanta. I barely remember it now so I guess it was fine. We had a 90 minute connection to Johannesburg. Julie was having a little bit of difficulty with baggage, so we grabbed one of those golf cart things and were chauffeured around the airport in style, coming apparently close to bowling over pedestrians a couple of times, which made the drive more enjoyable. We decided to check our big bags at the gate. We have literally 5 to 10 flights on this trip – I’ve lost count – which makes me worry about checking bags. On the other hand carrying all the bags with us does not seem entirely practical. I’ll worry about this problem when it comes up.
The flight from Atlanta to Johannesburg was about 16 hours. It is a long flight. A very long flight. A very very very long flight. No, it is even longer than that. The longest duration nonstop flight in the world is Los Angeles to Singapore, and that is only 18 hours.
I was not interested in any of the movies on the plane. My brain quickly tired from reading. Prior to the flight, I downloaded every season of The Good Place, and watched more than a dozen episodes. I did not like the first 9 episodes but after that I got into it. I don’t know if I will ever say that about a TV show again, until my next long-haul international flight at least. [Update from 2020: I ended up watching the first three seasons and enjoying them. I’ll catch up with the final season one day.]
I watched “The Dark Knight,” which I’ve never seen before, and is one of those movies that makes me feel like I’m culturally ignorant for having missed. Heath Ledger’s performance was reputed to be brilliant, and it really was. He chewed the scenery admirably. I guess subtle acting is a higher skill, but scenery chewing is a good skill too, and Ledger was great at it. A couple of online articles talked about him having studied various sources, and worked hard to get the Joker’s speech intonation and laugh. None of these articles noted that Ledger was copying the laugh wholeheartedly from Caesar Romero’s Joker in the Batman TV series from the 1960s, Hoo hoo ha ha! Nothing wrong with him doing that, but I’m surprise nobody picked up on it in the articles about the movie.
Other than Heath Ledger, The Dark Knight was dumb.The theme is a very old and ugly one in American pop culture – going back to The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and beyond – that law and order and the Constitution are all fine but some threats are so terrible that only a strong man can save us, by operating outside the law. Breaking the law in order to save it. You know, like Donald Trump saving us from illegal immigration. Or every President from Nixon to Reagan saving us from drugs. Or every President from Truman to Reagan saving us from Communism. And the Nazis and Japanese before that. And Communists and gangsters before that. So basically we’ve been in a permanent state of emergency the past century.
So yeah The Dark Knight was dumb. And disturbing if you think about it. As was Batman Begins before that. And yet I want to see The Dark Knight Returns. Because I’m crushing on Anne Hathaway, since The Devil Wore Prada. [Update from 2020: I might have enjoyed the movie more if I was not watching it on a screen barely larger than my hand, on a 16-hour flight.]
We got up and walked around the plane a couple of times, thus missing the entertainment value of deep vein thrombosis.
We arrived in Johannesburg at about 5:30 PM, and were greeted at the gate by a porter with a name card, as arranged by our travel agency. His name was Phumani, and he talked with a couple of the people that we passed him in a non-English language. I asked him what it was and he said it was Zulu, which seemed passably exotic to me.
We checked in overnight at the CityLodge hotel, which is connected to the airport. If you’ve stayed at any airport hotel in the US, this was pretty much the same. And that’s fine.
This morning I was up a bit before six, Julie a few minutes later. I went out to the airport in search of some things I’d forgotten to pack: Toothbrush, razor, TSA lock, USB-A port. [Update from 2020: I have no idea what I mean by “port” here. A hub?] Got everything but the port. The airport had a large and diverse array of shops, including a Woolworth that includes a whole small grocery store.
And then we went to the gates for our final short flight to Kasane. [Update from 2020: That’s Botswana, adjacent to South Africa] We’re waiting at the gate now. After the flight we have a 45 minute shuttle bus to the Chobe Lodge [In Chobe, also Botswana] and that is the beginning of the main part of our trip, about 47 hours after leaving home. The thing about travel to distant locations is that they are very far away.
Lotta people at the airport with their hand out. I am not sure who were supposed to tip and we aren’t so I’ve basically been giving out money to random strangers. Men’s room attendants are a thing here now. They greet you with a big grin and say welcome to my office. The first time I heard it I thought it was clever. The second time I realize it is clever but it is also what they say. A man helped us with the airline checkin, operating the self-check-in kiosk for us. Yes, I know, self check-in but those things can be confusing. He asked for $20 at the end and said he would split it with another guy who also helped us. Then we went to baggage check counter and the second guy tracked us down there and also asked for $20, and became agitated when I said no we already paid the other guy. These guys were not mentioned in any of the tipping guides I’ve read, leading me to believe we may have been scammed. So it goes.
Later, we arrived at Chobe and had ox-tongue dinner.
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Who is Alan Tarica and why does he say I’m an idiot?
I fell down an Internet rabbit hole this morning. I received an email from someone signing himself as “Alan Tarica.” It read:
“How do you have nothing to say? Idiots like you need to be exposed for having no critical thinking or meta cognition and no integrity.”
I had no idea what this was about. I thought it might be related to one of my political posts, but experience tells me that it could be about _anything._I’ve been active on social media, blogs and other Internet discussion services for many years, and have received worse insults like that for expressing options about Doctor Who, Star Trek, Apple, and any number of things you’d be surprised that people get worked up about.
I scrolled down a bit and found Mr. Tarica was apparently following up an email he sent me in January 2017 — yes, more than three years ago! — that I never replied to. I don’t even remember receiving the initial email. The initial email contained several links to articles about Shakespeare.
That is the full extent of my correspondence with Tarica. Two emails, both sent by him, unsolicited, with no response from me. Or maybe just one email; I have no record of ever receiving the initial 2017 message from Mr. Tarica
I am not a Shakesepeare scholar and I don’t have anything more than a casual interest in Shakespeare. I struggled through his plays in high school and college. I loved the movie “Shakespeare in Love.” Julie and I have seen a couple of Shakespeare productions over our years together; we loved one, liked one or two more and I vaguely remember another that we disliked although I couldn’t tell you where we saw it, which play it was, or why we didn’t like it (though I vaguely remember it having to do with the production rather than the plays themselves).
I googled “Alan Tarica” this morning and found this article:
The Shakespeare Wars: 150 years of vicious conflict www.jameshartleybooks.com/shakespea…
From which I learn that Tarica is a middle-aged software developer in Bethesda, Md., who believes that the works attributed to William Shakespeare were, in fact, written by the Earl of Oxford, and that a conspiracy of academics is burying the truth. This is actually a somewhat common theory, dating back nearly 150 years; believers have included Sigmund Freud, Orson Welles, John Gielgud, Charlies Chaplin, Charles Dickens and the actor Derek Jacobi.
The conspiracy theorists are known as “Oxfordians,” while people who believe Shakespeare wrote the works attributed to him are “Stratfordians.”
I also found this thread, which started in 2013 groups.google.com/forum/
Alan Tarica apparently likes to send insulting emails to Shakespeare scholars, and people who have even casually mentioned Shakespeare, to get attention.
Alan Tarica is on Twitter as well, where he likes to insult people.
Perhaps he will take notice of me as well?
I find the whole thing charming, reminiscent of an older, more innocent age on the Internet, when the worst thing Internet trolls could do to you was send nasty message. Nowadays, the Internet trolls and conspiracy theorists literally have access to nuclear weapons. For example:
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Pluralistic: Ferguson's first black mayor, why do protests become violent and more
On Cory Doctorow’s Pluralistic pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…
Ella Jones is Ferguson’s first black mayor.
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Why do protests become violent?
…police escalation leads to violence. Sending police to protests in riot gear begets riots. Tear-gas begets violence. These are the findings of scholars and blue-ribbon panels alike.
They are roundly ignored by police.
There’s a feedback loop: violent suppression of protest leads to militancy among protesters; this is the pretence for more violent suppression. We know this, we just don’t act on it.
Instead, “We live in a world where trained cops can panic and act on impulse, but untrained civilians must remain calm with a gun in their face.”
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“Dressing up cops like they’re on patrol in Mosul isn’t just a bad policing, it’s also incredibly expensive.” Dressing a cop in military gear costs “more than enough to outfit 55 front-line health-care workers in top-of-the-range PPE.”
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Zoom wants to help the FBI spy on you.
pluralistic.net/2020/06/0…#more-920
📚Reading "The Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic."
I finished reading “Storm Before the Storm: The Beginning of the End of the Roman Republic,” by Mike Duncan www.publicaffairsbooks.com/titles/mi…
Duncan, who is the voice of the History of Rome and Revolutions podcasts, traces the decline of the Roman Republic from the mid-2d Century to the mid 1st Century BCE — from around the time of the Gracchi brothers to the death of Sulla.
The Republic was straining as the middle class and poor struggled against domination by a small, wealthy elite. The nation was shocked to find that the normal ways of doing things in government were just customs, easily swept aside by ruthless, ambitious men. The nation faced an onslaught of outsiders seeking citizenship. Citizens and plebs were rioting in the streets. And the nation was in a constant state of war against enemies abroad.
In other words: Rome was nothing like the US today. This was just light reading.
“Storm Before the Storm” was enjoyable and informative, but I can’t say that I learned any lessons that could be applicable today. The book was a lesson in the saying attributed to Mark Twain: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.
QAnon: 'Where We Go One'
QAnon believers, united in a battle against what they see as dark forces of the world, reveal where the internet is headed.
The Qanon community is united in the belief that they can use the Internet to make the world better, and build personal connections and friendships
I do not believe the fundamental tenets of Qanon, which are as I understand it that Hillary Clinton, Obama and their allies are part of a conspiracy dating back at least 50 years, which includes a child sex ring operating out of a pizza restaurant.
And I certainly do not believe that Donald Trump is a hero and anointed by our military to save us. Trump isn’t the cure for the disease, he’s the disease’s most prominent symptom.
But real world conspiracies are not that different from what Qanon believes. Pizzagate is bullshit but Jeffrey Epstein was real.
And my own political beliefs today would have seemed completely bonkers and paranoid to myself 25 or so years ago.
10 things Democrats could do right now - if they actually wanted to stop Trump’s power grab
Democrats control the House, many state Houses, governors’ offices, and the City Halls of major cities. There’s a lot they can do — right now, if they have the will.
1 - Stop giving Trump more police power. Stop working with Republicans to revive the Patriot Act.
How ‘antifa’ became a Trump catch-all www.politico.com/news/2020…
Antifa isn’t an organized group and there’s no evidence they’re responsible for rioting but you do you, Republicans.
RIP Irene Triplett, the last living person to receive a US Civil War pension
Triplett’s father, Mose, fought for the Confederacy and then joined the North and fought as a private. After the war, he had “a reputation for orneriness.”
[He] kept pet rattlesnakes at his home near Elk Creek, N.C. He often sat on his front porch with a pistol on his lap.
“A lot of people were afraid of him,” his grandson, Charlie Triplett, told the [Wall Street] Journal.
Pvt. Triplett married Elida Hall in 1924. She was 34 when Irene was born in 1930; he was 83. Such an age difference wasn’t rare, especially later, during the Great Depression, when Civil War veterans found themselves with both a pension and a growing need for care.
Irene Triplett received a monthly pension of $73.13 from the Department of Veterans Affairs.
She died Sunday from complications following surgery for injuries from a fall, according to the Wilkesboro, N.C., nursing home where she lived.
She was mentally disabled, and lived in the poorhouse with her mother, and later in a series of care homes.
She saw little of her relatives. But a pair of Civil War buffs visited and sent her money to spend on Dr Pepper and chewing tobacco, a habit she picked up in the first grade.
75 Things White People Can Do for Racial Justice medium.com/equality-…
The systems that protect bad police. www.nytimes.com/2020/06/0…
Conspiracy theories have been fundamental to American history since the Revolution. www.npr.org/2020/05/1…
George Will: ‘There is no such thing as rock bottom for Trump. Assume the worst is yet to come.’
Those who think our unhinged president’s recent mania about a murder two decades ago that never happened represents his moral nadir have missed the lesson of his life: There is no such thing as rock bottom. So, assume that the worst is yet to come. Which implicates national security: Abroad, anti-Americanism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all, and it is wide-awake as decent people judge our nation’s health by the character of those to whom power is entrusted. Watching, too, are indecent people in Beijing and Moscow.
www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/…
John Gruber at Daring Fireball notes this was published just hours before Trump ordered his goons to use tear gas and flash bang to disperse peaceful protesters for a photo opp at a church. “Trump proved Will’s prediction within mere hours.” daringfireball.net/linked/20…
Minutes before the photo opp, Trump proclaimed himself a friend to peaceful protesters. Even as he was doing that, you could hear his goons attacking peaceful protester’s in the background.
KC Short, the Army veteran who organized Saturday’s protests in La Mesa, CA, the San Diego suburb where I live, said he does not condone the looting and rioting that escalated after the peaceful movement he planned. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…
Fans rally around Crazy Fred’s, a comic book store in the San Diego suburb La Mesa (where I live), which was looted in riots this weekend. www.nbcsandiego.com/news/loca…
I shop in the Von’s supermarket in the same shopping center as Crazy Fred’s. I had forgotten the comic store was there.
Protesting is important, but it's not the hard thing, or the most important thing
To be honest, it’s not that hard to protest. It’s not that hard to go someplace. And it doesn’t mean that it’s not important. It doesn’t mean that it’s not critical. But that’s not the hard thing we need from people who care about these issues. We need people to vote, we need people to engage in policy reform and political reform, we need people to not tolerate the rhetoric of fear and anger that so many of our elected officials use to sustain power.
"It's enough to break a true patriot's heart"
I’m trying to understand why wearing a mask — which is meant only to protect the most vulnerable among us and slow the spread of the virus to everyone else — has become the political equivalent of wearing a bumper sticker on your face. It makes me weep to think about it: Our one ready-to-hand tool for getting this country back to normal as quickly and as safely as possible has become yet another symbol of the seemingly insurmountable schism between Americans. It’s enough to break a true patriot’s heart.