Notes from the Road

You want something dark? I'll give you something dark. Later this week.

• You know the world has turned upside down when conservatives want (checks notes) Boy George to perform at the next Super Bowl halftime show. (That’s if we can’t get the NFL to have Weird Al Yankovic, which is the halftime show America wants and deserves.)

I didn’t know Boy George was still alive, but in case you haven’t kept up, turns out that Boy George is pro-Israel, and the anti-semitic left is not happy about it! They want to send him to the same re-education camp as J.K. Rowling. He’s done a new song all about October 7, and doesn’t mince lyrics about who the bad guys are. I never cared much for his music, but everyone should know about this tune, even if it is done in an odd reggae beat.

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• Okay, I can’t help it. Seeing him surface again just now reminds me of a really bad joke from the 1980s—I think perhaps by Robin Williams, but I’m not sure—that went as follows:

“Hey—did you hear Boy George went in for a physical? They found Michael Jackson’s other glove.”

Or, if you like a cleaner joke about the one-glove wonder boy, back when the LA Dodgers were leading the National League in errors, someone quipped:

“What do the Los Angeles Dodgers and Michael Jackson have in common? They both wear a glove on one hand for no apparent reason.”

I’ll show myself out. . . (Though I think this might have been a Carson or Leno joke on the Tonight Show.)

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• So I’m on the road again over in Europe, for the third time this summer, this time to northern Spain. I know very little Spanish, but I note the Spanish TV news is giving lavish coverage to the invasion of its odd Moroccan inholding of Cueta. While the U.S. media has lost interest already and seems to think the surge of migrants has abated, it doesn’t seem so from what I can see.

Denmark has recently joined Switzerland in expanding its ban on burkas and other full-face coverings in public places (Switzerland by popular referendum, Denmark by parliamentary legislation). So it was with some interest that I took note of the large number of Middle Easterners during my recent stay in Interlaken, Switzerland. I suspect all of the Middle Easterners I saw were highly prosperous, as they all looked well-heeled and well-dressed, though in several cases I got the distinct impression that the knots of four Muslims I kept seeing (one man and three women) were not a traditional family, but a dude with his three wives.

But I also noticed what I think might be the radical Muslim version of a civil rights protest. Lunching at an outdoor cafe in a busy square, I saw an Arab man trailed by four women and a child—the women looked to be fully mature adults—walking down the street, but the women, wearing head coverings and the usual robes, were also wearing Covid-style medical masks and sunglasses—making the whole getup the functional equivalent of a Burka. (The man of the clan was not wearing a mask.) How can you deny someone who needs to wear a Covid mask for medical reasons?? Are you a bigot or something?

They stopped in front of a bakery that was closed to the day, turned, and stood silently looking across the street at the square.

Could they be waiting for an Uber, or to meet someone? Seems not: After about 10 minutes, the man turned, and then led his harem back down the street where they had come from. Hmmm.

File this data point away for future reference.

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• So what’s up this week? Let’s go to the Wayback machine, to 2017, when I took in and produced the YouTube video below of the total solar eclipse that year, from a location near Bend, Oregon. Now, if you’ve never seen a total solar eclipse for real, it is very much worth making the supreme effort. This year’s eclipse swings through Basque country in northern Spain, and that was all the excuse I needed. And it has given me a great excuse to re-read Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia on the airplane over, as well as dipping into the great Stanley Payne’s work on 20th century Spanish politics—especially the Spanish Civil War and Franco.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite Franco “jokes.” It’s about the American visitor in the 1960s (or whenever) who asks his Spanish taxi driver what he thinks of Franco, then still very much in charge.

The driver looks nervously at his passenger, and turns off the highway onto a small road leading out into the country. Then on to a dirt road that led further out into the remote woods. Then finally to a lake, where a two-person rowboat was sitting. The taxi driver beckoned his passenger into the boat, and rowed out to the middle of the lake. Looking nervously around to make sure no one was watching, finally says to his inquisitive passenger in a whisper:

“I kinda like Franco.”

About what it’s like to be a Trump supporter on a college campus. Or a mainstream media newsroom.

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• Anyway, here’s my eclipse video report from 2017. I’ll try to do a better one this year: