"All warfare is based on deception."
The Art of War, by Sun Tzu, the oldest military treatise, of course, it's Chinese.

As Memorial Day approaches, I'd like to acknowledge, welcome and thank the visitors from Baghdad that have come to Crackpot Chronicles and to assert my support for the troops and all you've sacrificed--even though I think of this war with dread and remorse.

At the Women in Military Service for America Memorial at the end of Memorial Drive near the main entrance to Arlington National Cemetery is an exhibit of portraits, Faces of the Fallen, commemorating the men and women who lost their lives between Oct. 10, 2001, and Nov. 11, 2004 in Iraq and Afghanistan.


My heart goes out to the families and loved ones of these soldiers who face Memorial Day with loss, sorrow and pride. And I want to remember with honor, my uncles Marcus Widmann and Irving Schnee, who came safely home from war, both doctors, now deceased, who distinguished themselves in World War II,.

From USA Today:

Art, blogs bare souls of yet another fighting generation

Military bloggers are recording their experiences, reactions, hard realities and raw emotions. Operation Homecoming, a project sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), is encouraging soldiers to tell their stories now, rather than wait for years for a great novelist or poet. Two dozen writers - including novelist Tom Clancy and Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down - are crisscrossing the country, teaching workshops and encouraging poetry, memoirs or any kind of writing that records the experiences. An anthology of the best is planned.

And, coincidentally, I learned that in Berlin, at The Judaicum Center in Berlin's New Synagogue "Art in Auschwitz 1940-1945," an exhibition of some 170 works by 44 concentration camp inmates entitled is set to open.

Story here

Art, War, Art of War. They are inevitable facts of pain and redemption in life. I don't claim to understand it, but I am still learning to live with it. Happy Memorial Day. Remember the fallen with compassion and respect.

I have always been intrigued by the way colors seem to change depending on what they’re next to and the symbolism of mutability. Today, the weather is overcast in the aftermath of gentle Beijing showers. The red roses blush neon in the moist urban grey, a piercing luminosity amidst the subdued surrounding greenery.

My mom is far away in the compact New York apartment she loves, overlooking Second Avenue in Turtle Bay. She’s lived there on her own for a long time and has become somewhat of a celebrity in her princely domain. The doormen look after her as if she were their own mother.

The feisty incomparable 96-year-old whose birthday we just went home to celebrate last month had what doctors are calling a mild heart attack last week and since being released from the hospital, has had some bad nights. She won’t let on that she’s frightened because she doesn’t want to frighten us. After not being able to keep any food down for a few days, a couple of days ago she woke up with color back in her cheeks, demanded pizza for lunch and ate it with no consequences. Since then, it’s been nip and tuck. When I spoke to her this morning, she said “If I’m gonna die, let’s get it over with!” That’s her, Faye Sander, an inspiration to everyone she knows. But her voice was weak and she couldn’t talk for long.

I call every Saturday morning because it’s Friday evening in New York; I call to say Shabbat Shalom. It’s a habit I got into in the 90s after decades of not getting along with her. With little overt fence-mending or explanation (that never worked for us anyway), after a couple of months, it healed our relationship completely.

At first she was suspicious, wondering if I was trying to chide her for not being a particularly observant Jewess. I don’t know where the right words came from—surely the right words had been failing me miserably for years—I managed to say “I just think Shabbat Shalom means to acknowledge Erev Shabbat and see what comes up for you.” “I can deal with that,” she replied, and things have been wonderful between us since, occasional bilateral snappishness aside—we’re still us, after all. Now she’ll answer the phone “Shabbat Shalom” on a Friday evening when she knows it’s my call and she refers to me proudly as her “Shabbat Shalom daughter.”

Shabbat Shalom is what Jews say to one another on Friday evening. (The Jewish Sabbath is on Saturday and all Jewish observances begin at sundown the night before.) It means “peace on the Sabbath.” And for this mother and daughter, it’s worked a miracle.

Though mom has been almost blind from macular degeneration for the last 20 some odd years, she sees a lot so when she tells me I look beautiful it fills me with cheer. I love when she calls my husband and I, “you kids.”

I don’t know what to wish for at this moment. Joseph said yesterday “I would have laid money that she’d live to 100.” My brother, sister and son look in on her daily, she has help coming in frequently and someone always spends the night with her since she’s home from the hospital. I’m back in Beijing, not helping. We don’t want to lose her but we know she doesn’t want to languish and we don’t want her to suffer, either.

The sun is coming out now and the sky is blue with feathery clouds. The red roses have reverted to their cerise impertinence, winking a little with their vanishing raindrops. And I’m feeling grateful and apprehensive as my near-tears intensify the evanescent hues of mortality.

UPDATE: May 25, 8:50 PM NEW YORK TIME:
I just spoke to her. Her voice is brighter, ditto her spirits and she sounded like her "old self." She really seems to be recovering. What a gal! One of her home care workers answered and I can tell she really cares about my mom.

I just recorded a chapter of a book Joseph and I are writing about American Culture for English learners in China. The chapter is about immigration and a section of it is on Ellis Island and in it I wrote about my mom's arrival in 1920 and her return trip in 2002 to record her story for the Ellis Island Oral History project. I told her I'd be sending her a tape of me recording the chapter and that when the book was published, many distance learning students in China would know her story and see her picture. "Something to live for," she said.

I feel more alive today, myself. Thanks for all the messages, y'all.

Oh, man. Don't you hate what we've become..

Lake disappears, baffling villagers

Thu May 19, 1:15 PM ET

MOSCOW (Reuters) - A Russian village was left baffled Thursday after its lake disappeared overnight.

NTV television showed pictures of a giant muddy hole bathed in summer sun, while fishermen from the village of Bolotnikovo looked on disconsolately.

"It is very dangerous. If a person had been in this disaster, he would have had almost no chance of survival. The trees flew downwards, under the ground," said Dmitry Zaitsev, a local Emergencies Ministry official interviewed by the channel.

Officials in Nizhegorodskaya region, on the Volga river east of Moscow, said water in the lake might have been sucked down into an underground water-course or cave system, but some villagers had more sinister explanations.

"I am thinking, well, America has finally got to us," said one old woman, as she sat on the ground outside her house. link to story

But not today...

From Deutsche Welle

Silenced GDR Writers Finally Given a Voice

Sixteen years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a new canon of outlawed East German writers is about to be published for the first time.

German literature is poised to welcome some 20 prodigal sons and daughters into its fold, under the aegis of a foundation dedicated to researching the causes and impact of the East German dictatorship.

German scholars Ines Geipel and Joachim Walther in 2001 began compiling an archive of work by oppressed East German writers, silenced by persecution.

"We wanted to give young people in particular an image of East Germany that goes beyond those ghastly nostalgia shows," said Geipel in an interview with German public broadcaster NDR.

Edeltraud Eckert, Radjo Monk, Heidemarie Härtl and Peter Voss might not be household names, but once their work is published by Edition Büchergilde within its "Silent Library" series that might finally change.

Tragic fate
Penned while she was serving time in the women's Hoheneck prison for political activism, Eckert's poetry, collected in a volume entitled "Year Without Spring" is the first to hit the press. She died after a horrific accident in the prison workroom in 1955, aged just 25.

Over the next five years, Büchergilde will be publishing another 19 unknown writers whose talents were curbed by state socialism and who failed to reach a more sympathetic readership in the west.

more here

And if you're curious about the horrific accident in which Edeltraud Eckert lost her life, Spiegel Online has the story here

I thought this story was a hoax, an urban legend or a belated April Fool's joke:

From The Australian

Toads go out with a bang

Roger Boyes, Berlin

AN outbreak of exploding toads is perplexing residents of Hamburg. The creatures appear to behave quite normally, croaking and snapping up flies. Suddenly, after nightfall, they start to balloon to more than three times their normal size and can barely crawl. They then explode. The toad's entrails are often thrown up to a metre away by the explosion. Thousands of the green amphibians have died this way.

And then I saw the story in the Christian Science Monitor

Over the last few weeks, some thousand toads have come to an explosive end in one particular pond in Hamburg, now known as "the pond of death." And while it seems like tabloid-fodder (the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail did indeed cover it), the story of the bursting batrachians has caught the attention of serious newspapers like the Sunday Telegraph too.

Other stories on BBC , CNN, and a story on MSNBC with a possible explanation.

Crackpot Chronicles has published stories on exploding cell phones, an exploding sauna in Inner Mongolia--but this one takes the cuisses de grenouille!

Apparently, Italians categoricaly hate car seatbelts and have taken to wearing seat belt T-Shirts to fool the police, according to this article on Popgadget prasing handbags made of seatbelts. Popgadget is website of Personal Tech for Women.

Female Japanese commuters are fed up with gropers and have convinced Tokyo railroad operators to provide women-only train cars. According to Reuters, Japanese men are complaining.

TOKYO (Reuters) - A stepped-up campaign by Tokyo train operators to protect women from gropers by increasing the number of women-only carriages is angering some male commuters.

Several of the Japanese capital's railway companies introduced the single-sex carriages on Monday as part of a city effort to tackle the problem of men who take advantage of overcrowding to grope female passengers.

full story

Well, gee, greenguys, we're just trying to improve things, spread fairness, democracy, our favorite religions and foster trade whatever it takes. How did things get so screwed up?

How to handle China? The best guide is to listen to what French President Jacques Chirac says, and do the opposite.

Forgive the out of context quotation of a much more far-ranging Newsweek story (via MSNBC), Does the Future Belong to China? in the May 9, 2005 issue where China's Century is the cover story.

Very shortly after we arrived in China in 2002, my husband Joseph Bosco observed "the 21st century will be defined by China." At that time, most people, even the Chinese, blinked in puzzlement.