Rich Mintz  

I’m watching a “Rockford Files” episode in which Nazis are about to figure (so it seems) in the plot, and something occurs to me: in 1977 when this episode was made, the Nazi era was precisely as recent as the Jimmy Carter/Ronald Reagan era is now.

To me, Nazis are part of “history,” but I remember Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan perfectly well, not as history but as lived experience from my childhood. In fact, in 1980, I was practically old enough to vote for (er, against) Ronald Reagan, so it doesn’t feel so long ago. But Jim Rockford (and, for that matter, James Garner) in 1977 would remember Nazis not just as childhood experience, but from their (earlier) adulthood.

As a child, I often wondered why so much of our popular culture (TV, movies, etc.) was “about” World War II, and Nazis in particular. Some sliver of this presumably had to do with the fact that the crimes of the Nazis were so extreme, and some part of it presumably had to do with the overrepresentation of Jews in Hollywood. But I realize now that most of it was simply due to the fact that World War II was a big disruptive thing that had recently happened to all the grownups in the world. Even my parents, young as they were, were old enough to have been affected by it — my father was even stationed at Great Lakes Naval Station in Waukegan, Illinois for a time, although the war ended before there was time to deploy him.

Similarly, I wonder whether the young political people I work with are curious about why Ronald Reagan looms so large in the popular consciousness. Part of it is no doubt due to the fact that he was larger than life even in life, and part of it due to his charisma, and part of it due to his ideas; but part of it is simply due to the fact that Ronald Reagan was a big disruptive thing that happened to all of the grownups in the world. Everyone my age and older — that is, basically, everyone old enough to have kids in middle school now, or older — has personal memories of that era.

And if you really want to blow your mind, consider this: when my grandmother was born (and she is still alive and well), the Civil War was as recent an occurrence as the Vietnam War is now, give or take a year or two. And I remember the Vietnam War, or at least the end of it; and I’m not that old. So my grandmother must have interacted with people in her childhood for whom the Civil War was part of their adult lived experience. And the oldest of those people, in their childhoods, would almost certainly have interacted with people who remembered the Revolutionary War from their adult experience. That’s a pretty remarkable formulation of the short duration of American history to date.

My video game of choice for the summer, as you know, has been Civilization IV. But with Civilization V due in less than a month, I’m giving it a rest, and resurrecting two other favorite diversions for the waning days of summer: Scrabble, and Sim City 4.

First, Scrabble. I have to blame the Boon Companion for this; he got me addicted to iPad Scrabble, which we’re still playing at home. But most of my playing is via Lexulous, which is the Facebook game once known as Scrabulous, given a new name and a slightly different board configuration after an encounter with Hasbro’s lawyers. It’s still on Facebook, where you can play both in real time and via the correspondence method (“You have a move to make on Lexulous, Rich”); but I prefer to play on lexulous.com, where there are literally hundreds of Scrabble fanatics sitting in chat rooms 24 hours a day waiting to play with you immediately.

It turns out I’m a moderately good Scrabble player — but I’m an even better timed Lexulous player, and most of the fanatics on the site want to play timed. Timed games fit well with my satisficer personality, which races to find the best move available that can be thought up in the first 30 seconds, i.e., roughly the 85% move on average, and then gets bored and anxious trying to come up with something that’s 5 points better. Typically I play 8 minute games with a 10-second Fischer delay, but as I get better I’m going to inch the time limit down little by little.

(Side note: I saw Bobby Fischer in an elevator when I was going to the pediatrician’s, in Century City in L.A., when I was about eight or nine. This would put it in about 1974 or 1975. I was with my mom, who recognized him; she explained who he was, and I remembered hearing about him on the news — I was kind of a chess kid. I think that was both the most famous and the craziest person I met up to that point, at least until we saw Farrah Fawcett in the grocery store a few years later. Or I think it was Farrah. Anyway, I digress.)

The other game is SimCity 4, with the Rush Hour expansion pack, which I played for months before I started playing Civ IV. I figure it’s time to give it another shot, playing a bit more strategically. I’ll have more to say when I get a city to a more interesting point in development, but here’s the one I’m working now:

I have to confess that in the past I’ve only been able to take the comedian/actor/artiste David Cross in small doses, and have once or twice given voice to the thought. (The Boon Companion can confirm.) I think it may have been after seeing him on Bill Maher’s show, which tends to encourage the kind of pontificating I find hard to take, so I’m not sure Cross is entirely to blame.

But after watching most of Season 2 and part of Season 3 of “Arrested Development” in less than a week, I have to apologize — David Cross’s portrayal of Tobias Fünke is one of the consistently funniest, most creative, most boundary-pushing comedic characterizations I can remember seeing anywhere. And it just goes on and on, episode after episode, and somehow he plays these unlikely situations, delivers these absolutely impossible lines, without busting up laughing.

Here’s a little snippet of Cross on politics:

And here’s an itty bitty snippet of insight into Tobias Fünke:

… and am reminded that, as delicious as they are, they are also fragrant, and my hallway neighbors are probably wondering “what died in the compactor room?” right about now.

Are there any tips that minimize the stench of boiling cabbage and cabbage-like substances that actually work? A beloved member of my family (now deceased), who will remain nameless to protect her reputation, once said that if you put a piece of dry bread in the steamer, it soaks up the fragrance, but to be honest that always sounded like voodoo to me. (Plus, this woman once tried the fad of cooking fish in the dishwasher, but didn’t seal the packets very well — or maybe she added too much detergent, I forget — and ended up with a big mess. So I’m inclined to discount her advice by 40 percent right off the top).

I follow the news from the city I lived in from 1999 to 2007, and a couple of things I’ve read recently, such as this short piece from the Economist’s American politics blog, have got me wondering whether Atlanta — like Phoenix and Las Vegas — may have hit its growth ceiling in the current recession, and whether the Atlanta of, say, 2030 might not be somewhat smaller than today’s.

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.

The NYT informs us that prolific TV writer Jackson Gillis died this month. No, I didn’t know him either, but IMDB informs us that he wrote 24 episodes of “Columbo” (including several memorable classic episodes from the first two seasons), 99 (!) episodes of “Perry Mason,” and scattered episodes of over two dozen more formula TV dramas from the 1960s and 70s.

One of Gillis’s “Columbo” episodes was “Short Fuse,” shot in Palm Springs — including a memorable hand-to-hand fight on the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway (pictured here).

No, it’s not what you think … or is it? (Hat tip: Colin Stewart.)

Bonus “Today on Craigslist” from this weekend’s Glenn Beck rally, via Wonkette (note: subject matter not safe for work): well, I won’t post this one, but if you Google “wonkette tea party craigslist honor” you’ll probably find it…

…you’ve probably sat in David Rowland’s 40/4 Chair, so named because 40 of them can be stacked in a space 4 feet high. (And if you’ve ever set up for youth services or an oneg Shabbat, or broken down afterwards, you’ve probably stacked or unstacked 40 or 400 of them at a time — and, chances are, smashed a finger or two between the frames as you figure out how to get them to stack properly on the dolly. But I digress.)

David Rowland created the 40/4 Chair in his apartment in Upper Manhattan in the 1950s; he died this month in Virginia.

In honor of this iconic designed object of the 20th Century, which has brought functional elegance to the most mundane of public occasions across America and around the world for more than half a century, let us have a moment of silence.

(pause)

And now will everyone please join me in the social hall for the kiddush, supplied this week by Mary and Marv Sheinblatt in honor of their late mother Myrtle, aleha ha-shalom…

Today the end of the World As We Know It came a little nearer, as Google announced that voice calling to telephones is available for free via Gmail.

If you’re an Honorary Old, as I am, I know you’re thinking “what? Don’t I need a microphone and a headset and etc. etc.?” But no. Here’s what you do:

You open your Gmail.

In the Google Chat panel in the left rail, you click “Call phone.”

You enter the phone number.

The party answers and you hear their voice coming out of your computer, and you just, you know, talk, in the general direction of your computer. Your built-in mike is just fine. It’s not pin-drop quality, but it’s, you know, FINE.

I’ve been keeping my landline phone active for two reasons: “what if there’s an emergency and the power goes out,” and “what if I decide I hate the cable company and I need DSL.” But I’ve made a grand total of EIGHT outbound calls in EIGHT MONTHS on the landline, and received ZERO yes ZERO inbound calls. The $38 a month that I’m paying is starting to seem ridiculous. Is it time to give the thing up?

I saw an interesting tactic this week that the Jewish Federation of Greater Houston uses to help educate beneficiaries and the community about the programs they underwrite, which I wrote about here on the BSD Blog.