Watching The Ten Commandments in Gafsa, Tunisia, in the sixtes
Back in the 60s, the cinema in Gafsa showed The Ten Commandments. About a half dozen of my girl students recruited me to chaperone them.
Afterwards, I kept asking my best student, Elgia, who lived in a palm-front hut in the oasis, what she thought of the movie. She seemed embarassed and wouldn’t say anything definite. Finally I persuaded her to tell me, and she said how shocked they had been when Moses (Charleton Heston) had kissed his wife on the mouth!
I, of course, had taken that as perfectly normal. Definitely a cultural difference.
I remember hearing or reading some form of this story long ago. I associated it with John C Bogle, the man who enabled Iris and me to retire in comfort, but apparently the money quote was said by Joseph Heller:
At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel Catch 22 over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . Enough.”
BTW, I have enough for us but if I had more, there are a lot of people and organizations that I wish I could help out financially.
This is our first rough selection of photos from our trip to Japan. There are few comments at this point. We have been kept busy. In fact, I’m editing this in the bar of our hotel while Andrew and Chié and Lily-Iris visit a fish market.
Ben & Jerry used their platform to encourage everyone to mark their money with a rubber stamp:
This is a terrible idea! Can you just imagine what a modern Constitutional Convention would be like?
Maybe if we could do it without a convention? They tried to do that with the Equal Rights Amendment, which came so close to passing. If we tried, how would we explain Hunter Biden?
