Re "dying art forms".

I knew there was a reason that I wasn't crazy about Timothée Chalamet. And that was before he caused a stir by making disparaging remarks about opera and ballet.

It turns out I've seen Chalamet in a bunch of movies: Little Women in 2019, the first part of Dune in 2021, the ill-advised (the film itself, not the role for Chalamet) Wonka in 2023, and A Complete Unknown (the Bob Dylan biopic) in 2024. I liked him as Laurie in Little Women. I thought he was okay in Wonka despite the dismal film concept (nobody needed Willy Wonka's origin story). And I didn't like him much as Dylan, although that may have been because I find the real Dylan annoying. As for Dune, Chalamet was decent, but I didn't like the film overall; I thought it moved too slowly and was overly impressed with itself. (I admit I was never a fan of the novels and only watched the first movie for the sandworms, which pissed me off by showing up really late in the proceedings. Haven't seen the second one yet. Might not ever.)

Anyway, in short, Chalamet is a big star. And he has caused a ruckus by claiming in an interview that "no one cares about" opera and ballet. It's not the first time he's dissed the classical arts; back in 2019, he was quoted as calling opera and ballet dying art forms. I'm not linking to his comments because they're easy enough to find with a web search; they've been reported widely, as has the blowback he's received from other famous people.

I am not famous, and I'm not even sure I want to criticize him. Everybody's entitled to an opinion (even if it's wrong, heh). Plus he's only 30. I don't mean to imply that he's too young to know what he's talking about -- he has ballet performers in his family, after all. But this situation puts me in mind of a conversation I overheard probably 30 years ago in which some tweens were dissing the Beatles, saying their music was terrible. I was tempted to explain to them that their favorite music wouldn't exist without the Beatles breaking new ground in the '60s. And I'm somewhat tempted to explain to Chalamet that his own art form wouldn't exist if the classical arts hadn't paved the way.

But those kids wouldn't have cared, and Chalamet wouldn't care. So I'll just say this: I like opera. I even like it well enough to get the t-shirt. 

Left to right: 2023, 2025, and 2021.
Lynne Cantwell 2026

As I have said before, the Santa Fe Opera is here in town, and it seems like it would be a shame to miss seeing world-class performances because some people think opera is a dying art or whatever. I try to see a show every year; this year it'll be The Magic Flute.

I like classical music, too, which I'm sure Chalamet would also have dissed had he thought of it. I went to hear the Assad Brothers, who are Brazilian classical guitarists, when they were at the Lensic here in town a couple of weeks ago. (Scroll down at the link to the video to hear them perform.)

I'm not a huge fan of dance in general, but I appreciate the training and discipline that goes into the art, and I would sit through a ballet without complaining.

But as I said above, everybody's entitled to an opinion. I'm sure some folks would be aghast at me complaining about Dune (fans tend to be gobsmacked when I tell them Frank Herbert struck me as a misogynist*) or saying that I think Bob Dylan is annoying.

The thing is, the classical arts have been reported to be at death's door pretty much all of my adult life. Furthermore, radio was supposed to die when television came in. CDs were going to kill off live music, not to mention vinyl records. COVID endangered the continued existence of movie theaters.

The arts are expensive. But every artistic discipline seems to be amazingly fluid, and their deaths have been, time and again, greatly exaggerated. No matter what Timothée Chalamet says.

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We might discuss A.I. another time.

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* "But what makes you think Frank Herbert was a misogynist, Lynne? What about the Bene Gesserit?" So yeah, about them: They are certainly powerful, and they exert tremendous influence on both politics and society. But they are also manipulative, and they operate in the shadows. Do they wield overt power? No. Are any of them sympathetic characters? Also no. Could one of them become, say, emperor? Not a chance -- the Bene Gesserit's place is behind the throne. 

The first Dune novel appeared in 1965. The Bene Gesserit might have seemed an enlightened view of womanhood back then, but c'mon. You can't continue to argue that today. You couldn't even argue it when I first read Dune in the '80s.

But this is -- all together now -- just my opinion.

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These moments of opinionated blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Time for food stuff and things.

PantherMediaSeller | Deposit Photos

It's the day after the time change here in the US; Americans lost an hour of sleep overnight. Our European friends are being sensible (as they are in so many other ways these days) and waiting until the end of the month, but the US government has seen fit to start this nonsense three weeks earlier than them. (Mama Google says DST always starts on the second Sunday in March here, but I am skeptical. It seems like there used to be only a week between us changing our clocks and folks across the pond doing the same.)

Then again, if Standard Time starts earlier and earlier and ends later and later, maybe eventually it'll just go away entirely, and we'll have Daylight Time all year long. Not that I'm a particular fan of Daylight Time. I just wish we'd pick one.

Anyway, I am muzzy-headed today. And as usual when I'm muzzy-headed, my thoughts turn to food.

*** 

Work has been slow since session ended, so people have been bringing in occasional treats, some of which I've never heard of. One thing a friend made is a Japanese fruit cake. Has anyone ever heard of such a thing? It is not Japanese, nor does it contain much fruit. It is apparently a Southern dessert that folks would make for Christmas: alternating layers of spice cake and yellow cake, with a filling, as opposed to a frosting, containing lemon juice, coconut, and puh-lenty of sugar. Raisins are also involved. It was insanely sweet. The co-worker she made it for proclaimed it was just like her mama used to make. Here's a recipe, although not the one my friend used; try it if you dare.

The other thing that turned up at the office was billed as shrimp cocktail. We were told that the staffer making it was cooking it in the break room. Puzzled, I envisioned her boiling up the shrimp on a hot plate, but no; it turned out to be Mexican shrimp cocktail, which I had never heard of but was delicious. Think gazpacho -- a chilled tomato-based vegetable soup -- with cooked shrimp mixed in. Here's a recipe I found online. I am 100 percent making this myself this summer.

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I did not run across this one at work. Instead, it turned up in the recipe section of Apple News recently. It's called Buttery Irish Cabbage. 

I have never been a cabbage fan, unless it's shredded and mixed with coleslaw dressing. (When I was a kid, I didn't even want the dressing; Mom would grind the cabbage and carrots into tiny shreds for the coleslaw, and I'd eat that plain.) I will also eat cabbage in Chinese food, although there needs to be enough soy sauce and other veggies involved that the cabbage is more or less an afterthought. 

But I have occasionally wondered if my problem isn't that my mother would boil the cabbage 'til it was limp and flavorless. I haven't wondered about it enough to make it some other way. But this recipe that I saw this week intrigued me. I figured that given enough butter and garlic, anything could be made edible -- even cabbage. I made it for supper tonight. Turns out I was right.

I don't know if I love it enough to throw it into a regular rotation. But I'll likely make it again at some point, probably for St. Patrick's Day -- which is, OMG, next week. Where has the year gone?

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The glucose tracking device I mentioned last week came unstuck and fell off my arm last night. I'm not too fussed -- it was due for replacement tomorrow anyway, and a new one is on the way and should be here tomorrow -- but I will try to secure the new one better so it will last the full two weeks. The process is definitely helping me focus on eating low carb.

But now I know the answer to the question that was lurking in the back of my mind about how hard it would be to uninstall the device: Not hard at all!

***

These moments of muzzy-headed blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. 

Epstein fury and some backsliding.

Damn that guy taking up space in the White House anyway. I was all set to write a mea culpa blog post about how working this session screwed up my low-carb eating plan, and then I woke up yesterday morning, as we all did, to the news that Trump's latest gambit to draw headlines away from the Epstein files is to team up with Bibi Netanyahu to bomb Iran -- which country's nuclear capability we supposedly obliterated in June of last year, or so said Trump at the time.

The warmongers in Washington named the attack Operation Epic Fury, but it took no time at all for the memesters to change it to Operation Epstein Fury.

Already some US service members have lost their lives in retaliatory bombing, and Trump has said more are likely to die. Isn't this the same guy who said that if he was re-elected, he wasn't going to start any wars? His supporters believed him. And now, here we are.

I am so tired of this timeline.

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Anyway, I'm not going to let him derail my plans for this post. My original topic is not good news, either, but I'll put in a little palate cleanser at the end. 

***

So yeah, the last week or two of this year's legislative session was hard. I whined about how hard it was here a couple of weeks back. What I didn't mention in that post was how the stress and anxiety, coupled with freely available, carb-heavy food, pinged my bad eating habits of yesteryear. I'd been amping up the snacking anyway, but this session put me back where I was toward the end of my time in DC.

Well, not completely back to those days. This year, I wasn't leaving work in the middle of the afternoon to head over to some shop to stock up on candy and a bag of chips, then polish off all of it at my desk before quitting time. But it was bad.

This past Monday, I had my regular appointment with my endocrinologist. Before session, my A1c was 6.5; on Monday, it was 8.9. Optimal for diabetics is less than 7.0. So yeah -- not good.

She told me to go back to a strict low-carb diet -- protein and veggies only. She outfitted me with a continuous glucose monitor that doesn't require a prescription and had me download an app that would let her see how I was doing. And then she asked me if I wanted to try Ozempic. I sighed and said okay.

Not my pen. This is a stock photo.
Artmim | Deposit Photos

I sighed because it felt like going backwards. When I left DC, I was not only taking Ozempic, I was also on a drug called Invokana that basically filters out all the extra sugar in your blood and sends it out through your kidneys. Neither one was too pricey when I was on the law firm's Cadillac insurance plan, but once I retired, hoo boy. It was those eye-watering prescription prices that made me try low-carbing in the first place. And low carbing worked -- until it didn't.

But it worked far longer than it might otherwise have. A fairly recent study found that most people regain the weight they lost, as well as losing all the other benefits they gained from being on a GLP-1, within two years of stopping the drug. I didn't lose weight when I was on Ozempic before because I was binge eating. But it took me five years to lose the benefits of taking it.

One thing it did help with, I believe, was quieting the food noise in my head. After I moved out here, I remember telling someone that I didn't have a craving for sweets anymore. Now I think that was because of the Ozempic. If it quiets the food noise again, it would be worth the eye-watering prescription price, at least until I can get back on the low-carb track.

I do like the continuous monitor. It's kind of fun, watching the numbers go up and down. I will likely feel different if I backslide again and the graph starts going the wrong way. But I'm pretty sure my numbers will be much better when I see my doctor next. I'll keep y'all posted.

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Okay, here's the palate cleanser. We've had really nice weather here, with highs in the upper 60s. Tigs and I spent some time out on the porch this afternoon, and he alerted me when some birds showed up at the feeder. (I hope you guys can watch this -- I'm never sure about Apple's video format.) 

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These desperate moments of blogginess have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Hang in there.

RIP, the profession of journalism.

The worst part of taking a week off from blogging last weekend is that I had a great topic for a post but no oomph to write it. So I'm gonna write it this week, even though it's old news by now. Then I'll put a little bit of new news at the end.

gunaonedesign | Deposit Photos

The day the news broke early this month that the owner of the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, had sent his minions to decimate the remaining staff, leaving one of the nation's greatest newspapers a hollowed-out shell, I had a conversation online about it with a good friend. It started me thinking about the history of journalism, and specifically how very short a time it has been a respectable profession. Because it was respectable, for a hundred years or so. Now it's devolving into what it was before the muckrakers helped turn it into the Fourth Estate.

When the movie version of All the President's Men was released in the spring of 1976, I was in my freshman year of college. I'd pretty recently (after spending a semester discovering that I did not have what it took to be a professional musician) declared journalism as my major, and the movie sure made it seem like it had been the right decision. Discovering the grain of a big story, pursuing the facts to the truth, bringing down bad actors in the highest of high places -- that was the sort of thing I could see myself doing, or at least the sort of thing I wanted to be associated with. Now, with 50 years of hindsight, it's clear to me that Watergate was pretty much journalism's pinnacle. And it's been coasting downhill ever since. 

My memory of the journalism history course I took that semester is hazy, but I recall that while the press played a role in the Founding Fathers spreading their views throughout the colonies, journalism ethics weren't yet a thing. Benjamin Franklin was a publisher and sorta-kinda reporter, but he wasn't always honest about when he was fictionalizing details; he reported his own famous experiment involving a kite and a key in the third person, as if somebody else had done it. That sort of thing would never fly today (pardon the pun). 

The profession of journalism began to hit its stride in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when muckraking reporters dug into corruption in political and corporate institutions of the time. A couple of famous muckrakers come to mind: Nellie Bly, who had herself committed to an insane asylum in New York City to find out how deplorable the conditions there were; and Upton Sinclair, whose novel The Jungle exposed corruption in the meatpacking industry in Chicago. The work of these and other reporters, though often melodramatic, caused enough of a stir that laws were passed to relieve some of the worst conditions.

Alongside these crusaders ran an attempt to set an informal code of ethics for journalists. Among the standards was that journalists should be objective. Everybody's got an opinion, but a journalist's should not be readily discernible from his or her work; a reporter should be fair to all sides. Also, a reporter should never make the story about him or her (which is why Ben Franklin would have gotten into trouble if he'd been writing 150 years later).

That all worked fine, more or less, until the moneyed classes realized they could buy up the papers (and the radio stations and TV stations) and exert pressure on the journalists who worked there to bury stories that would hurt business. Journalistic independence has been eroding ever since.

In a column in Slate published on February 5th, Alex Kirshner talked about Bezos' gutting of the Post as almost inevitable. He says the cause of the Post's death is "that one of the richest people in human history staged a controlled burn to turn it into ash. Bezos wanted the Post to die, because a vigorous, well-resourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his own bottom line." Kirshner makes the point that the paper's net worth is little more than a rounding error in Bezos' vast wealth, and reporting that angers the Trump administration can have a big impact on Bezos' other companies, particularly when we're talking about federal contracts for Amazon and Blue Origin: "Bezos' external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside."

We can see a similar thing happening at CBS, the former home of famed journalists Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, where the new owner's attempts to placate Trump prompted Anderson Cooper to resign from his 60 Minutes gig just this week.

Journalism has been descending toward infotainment for decades, but real reporting has always coexisted with the fluffy stuff. I assumed it always would. Now I begin to think it won't. 

RIP, the profession of journalism, 1900-2026. It's been a good run. 

***

This weekend, Trump made a cockamamie post on his social media outlet that the US was sending a "hospital boat" to Greenland to provide medical care to Greenlanders. I could not make heads or tails of his rambling until I did a little research. It looks like what set him off was a humanitarian incident in which a sailor aboard a US Navy submarine took ill while the boat was off the coast of Greenland and was airlifted to a hospital in Nuuk for treatment. Greenland reportedly has six hospitals for its population of fewer than 60,000 people and, like the rest of the civilized world, has free, universal healthcare. So the prime minister of Greenland says they don't need our help. Besides, both of our hospital ships, the USNS Mercy and the USNS Comfort, are in drydock for repairs, so neither one of them will be steaming toward Greenland any time soon.

Trump also mentioned the governor of Louisiana, who I guess he promoted to "special envoy" to Greenland back in December to help negotiate whatever Trump thinks he can get out of Greenland's government, which is not going to be ownership of the island. Or a Nobel Peace Prize, either.

The whole thing is a fantasy from Trump's fevered brain. But what pissed me off -- and what every US sailor should also be pissed off about -- is that the commander-in-chief of our military does not know the difference between a ship and a boat. I know the difference because a) I was married to a sailor, and b) I covered the Sixth Fleet when I worked as a reporter in Norfolk, VA. A boat is small enough to fit on a ship. A submarine is a boat; our floating hospitals are ships.

If he's too far gone to understand that, what business does he have running the country?

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These moments of bloggy sadness and disgust have been brought to you, as a public service, by Lynne Cantwell. Of course the "hospital boat" thing is a distraction from the Epstein files. Here's hoping the fallout from that investigation brings the whole facade tumbling down sooner rather than later.