Today is Fat Thursday (Tłusty Czwartek) in Poland – a day when the population eats the holeless doughnuts called pączki. Why the Poles celebrate the Thursday before Lent, and not the Tuesday, has never been explained to me.
When I taught at the English Language College in Warsaw I would often stop at the little bakery on Mokotowska Street so to have something for the 6 o'clock tea. Pączki were not always in stock, but when they were I’d want a few. Three is one of the most difficult Polish words for me to say – trzy – so I would ask for two (dwa) and then quickly add, “Maybe one more.”
In yesterday’s post about the Rally in Support of Ukraine I didn’t mention that the painting on the Berlin Wall of the photograph of the kiss between Brezhnev and Honecker included the caption: “My God, Help Me to Survive This Deadly Love.”
I also failed to mention the man who was wearing a cap that read: “Make Russia Small Again.” I thought it was very clever but then it occurred to me that Russia was never small.
Hundreds of people gathered yesterday afternoon at the foot of Clematis Street in West Palm Beach for the Rally in Support of Ukraine. Many people were draped in the blue-and-yellow flag of Ukraine; one man wore the tri-color Lithuanian flag.
“I’m from Kaunas,” he told me. “But I want to show that Lithuania supports Ukraine.” His Ukrainian wife stood nearby, with their four-month-old black Lab. They live in downtown Miami but want to go back to Lithuania. “We’re waiting to see what happens,” he said.
The booth of the Ukrainian Association of Florida handed out small Ukrainian flags to everyone. A few women, and even men, were the traditional white blouses embroidered with flowery red designs – a mode of dress that only increased their handsomeness. One young man with a serious expression sported a T-shirt that read: “Be brave like Ukraine.” One woman carried on her shoulder a bag that was made to look like a book: George Orwell’s 1984.
A Russian flag lay on the ground, surrounded by cones holding yellow CAUTION tape.
There were songs and speeches, including one by a rabbi and one by a representative of the mayor’s office. I wondered why Fort Lauderdale hadn’t hosted the rally, as it is more centrally located.
Someone held up a picture of Putin and Trump kissing on the lips. It was a pastiche of the famous photograph of Leonid Brezhnev greeting Erich Honecker (which was later immortalized by a painting on the Berlin Wall). That it was being displayed just a few miles from Mar-a-Lago made its mockery even greater.
Before leaving, I saw a young woman – one of the speakers – draped in a flag of black and red. I asked her what it was. She said it was the flag of the Ukrainian force that fought against the Soviet Union. Also, she said, when the small Ukrainian flag on soldiers’ uniforms gets drenched in blood the colors change to black and red.
She has been here seven years, she told me, but the two young women next to her, draped in Ukrainian flags, had arrived more recently. And now, because of Trump, they weren’t sure that they would be able to stay. I was hit with a feeling of sadness and helplessness. Then the woman, like many of the people I spoke to, warmly thanked me for my support of her country.
To end the rally, everyone stood, with the flashlights on their cellphones lit, under a banner that read: “PUTIN to STAND TRIAL for WAR CRIMES.”
Yesterday evening we attended a talk on AI at the Frost Science Museum in Miami. The three speakers were all from the University of Pennsylvania, which sponsored the event, and two spoke about the aspects of AI that I am most intrigued by: its application to medicine and to writing. I am all for the first and dubious about the second.
The woman who spoke about medicine only reinforced my belief in AI as a force for good, while not ignoring its (current) limitations. But the ability to access vast quantities of information in a short period of time in order to make a correct diagnosis is something that is going to help doctors, and patients, immeasurably.
The man who spoke about writing referred to a study in which students wrote a story by themselves and then one using AI. In the first instance, most of the stories were young adult stories, as those reflected the students’ experiences. When they used AI, there was much more variety: science fiction, fantasy, etc. This was seen as a good thing.
OK, but isn’t that cheating? To me, a writer using AI is like an athlete using steroids. I can envision, in the future, a writer being stripped of her Pulitzer after it’s discovered she wrote her winning novel using AI.
But could an AI-enhanced novel win a Pulitzer? Writing is personal, or at least it should be, and AI is not, at least not yet. And if it ever becomes so, we will have a problem. When I was a travel editor, rejecting lots of freelance stories, I noticed flaws that appeared again and again. And the most common, and frustrating, flaw was the absence of a distinctive voice. In fact, I used to joke that there was a machine somewhere in the country that was mass producing travel stories that all sounded pretty much the same.
And now there is – or at least there can be.
Neil deGrasse Tyson lost last night on Celebrity Jeopardy! Granted, the questions skewed toward pop culture – the Final Jeopardy answer was about the Muppets – but he failed to buzz in on one rare science question (and got good-natured ribbing from his fellow contestants for that). Later, he didn’t seem to know that Mt. Etna is in Sicily. And when shown a picture of President Grant, and told that his first name was the same as the title of a novel by James Joyce, all of which takes place in a single day, he – like the two actors on either side of him – stood clueless. This seemed especially embarrassing, for all of them, as it illuminated an ignorance not just of literature but of history. True, we weren’t all English majors, but we all studied American presidents. And who can forget Ulysses S. Grant?
Two actors and an astrophysicist can.
This week Trump claimed that Ukraine started the war. It was an outrageous statement – like blaming Poland for World War II – and extremely worrisome for Ukraine, and all of Europe.
But it was not surprising. Trump is a man who adores the big and powerful – whether they be countries or people – and he despises the small and vulnerable. This has been clear from his domestic policies – his heartlessness toward immigrants – and now it’s manifest in his foreign policy.