Author: Marc Alan Di Martino

Holland and Australia Boycott Durban 2

According to today’s Jerusalem Post, Holland and Australia have announced that they will boycott Durban 2:

Hours after the US said it would boycott a UN conference on racism starting Monday in Geneva over objectionable language in the meeting’s final document that could single out Israel for criticism, Australia and Holland followed suit on Sunday morning, saying they were concerned the conference would be derailed by some countries to issues other than human rights.

So let’s see,  that makes the US, Israel, Canada, Italy, Holland and Australia the only countries officially willing to admit that tomorow’s conference actually has nothing to do with racism or human rights? Where is the EU? According to JPost,

The European Union was still weighing its own participation.

Well, they still a few hours left to save themselves from embarrassment.

Waiting to Exhale

It began with YouTube, and a video called “How To Irrigate Your Nasal Passages”. A hirsute, Allen Ginsberg stunt-double prepares a small ceramic pot with salt water, upends it and—voila’—begins to pour the water in one nostril and out the other. Feat accomplished, he repeats the exercise with black coffee, and then with single barrel bourbon, all against a trancelike chorus of “I like to hear the rain come down.” Until the whiskey comes splashing out of his nose like water from a blowhole, and despite the incongruous facial expressions suggesting pain, it seems like a pleasant experience.

April is the cruelest month…T.S. Eliot must’ve been suffering from hay fever when he wrote that line.  Like many Americans, I’ve been suffering allergies and all-around sinus blockage for most of my life. I’ve even had surgery to straighten a severely deviated septum, which did nothing but drain my mother’s bank account. I’ve struggled with pseudoephedrine, nasal sprays of every kind, breathing strips, Claritin…all to no avail. Every year I become more desperate. Every year I become more convinced that no solution exists except another attempt at surgery (an opinion backed up by the last doctor to stare up my nose with a flashlight), which is understandably out of the question.

Leaving New York was the first step. I really believed that not living in Metropolis would have been good for my sinuses, but I discounted the small matter that Roman air quality is not much better than that of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Rome, it’s true, has many parks which pump oxygen into the air and make the city liveable—to a degree. But it’s not as if the blanket of green were spread evenly across town. If you live near one of Rome’s huge villas (Pamphili, Ada, Borghese) you’re in luck. If you live along the Via Casilina, however, you’re more likely to see Central Park in June than any of Rome’s green wonderlands year-round.

Even so, spring time is pollen time, and pollen is in many ways more bothersome than car exhaust. In tandem, however, they are deadly. Sleeping has become almost impossible, despite a comfortable new mattress. I’m desperate for a short-term solution.

I don’t believe in miracles. Nor do I waste many words praying for them to occur. But desperation has a way of stoking the irrational in all of us. So I went to the local health food store and asked for a white ceramic pot—called a neti pot— like the one in the YouTube video. Online research had been overwhelmingly favorable, so I decided to give it a shot.

The neti pot blew into town out of nowhere a few years ago after an appearance on “Oprah.” Naturally, I braced myself for a Secret-style sham, albeit an inexpensive one (about €15). The neti has a long pedigree, however, having been used for millennia by yoga practitioners in India. After the Oprah debut, America went neti crazy, skyrocketing the little vessel from yoga-fringe obscurity to Walmart in about a week. The New York Times wrote it up, and hundreds of people uploaded themselves on YouTube with a conspicuous white nozzle stuck up their noses. I felt I’d missed some cultural watershed, like The Twist or Pokemon.

The whole thing works by creating a “subtle vacuum” for “suitable flow pressure,” in the words of Jalanetipot.com. Your head must be tilted at roughly a 45 degree angle. The water then shoots up one nostril, swishes up into your sinuses, and pours generously out the other. Often the it is followed by gobs of colored mucus, ostensibly washing away various toxins and irritants. The water must be saline, or slightly salted. Some people recommend adding baking soda, or even mouthwash.

The first time I nettied, if you will, was disastrous. Water splashed all over the bathroom mirror and dribbled down my chest. Half an hour later a second stream came oozing out of my right nostril onto my shirt.

It takes a while to get the hang of it. There is the sensation of drowning for about a second. Salty water comes trickling down your throat and out your mouth. When it’s over, there is a feeling of having loosed a tide of phlegm. Maybe you feel cleaner in your schnoz, but that’s about it.

When I began experimenting with the neti pot, I also began to broadcast the results (and lack of them) to my friends and family. I became obsessed with solving my sinus war. Suddenly, it seemed everyone I knew had a neti pot, or had used one. Some people swore by it. Friends were giving and receiving them as gifts. Almost everyone had a story: “It helps when you feel a cold coming on. It relieves allergies. It saved my life.”

I continue to neti daily. I still want to be persuaded by the majority of fellow sufferers who have found relief in this little ceramic wonderpot.  In short, I want to believe in a miracle. But three weeks after I thought I had found my own personal fountain of youth, I remain a skeptic. The neti pot has not made me sleep better. It has not unblocked my sinuses. It has not saved my life. And that’s nothing to write home about.

Published in The American

Earthquake in Rome?

Well, most people I know told me their apartments shook during the night. We felt nothing. One colleague said his stuffed animals all fell of the shelf. He thought it was the cat, up to mischief again. Then he felt the tremors in his seventh-floor abode.

This morning’s death toll in Abruzzo is 179, according to Corriere della Sera.

Things will probably get worse before they get better.

p.s. For those who wish to know all there is to know (so far), with about a gazillion links to choose from, Cricket Diane is obsessively tracking the action.

Prophecy Derailed

Ron Rosenbaum has an interesting reflection on the 2012 cult, which I’ve never heard of before (but then again, I don’t really follow these things). It’s typical pseudo-prophetic mishaguss. And many people lap it up.

Here’s Rosenbaum:

“Why am I so fascinated with unmitigated full bloom looniness? Shouldn’t we just laugh it off? Unfortunately nonsense like this has led to millions of dead from religious wars over just such clashing idiocies. I think it reminds us that this kind of baseless belief is at the heart of all religions and that man has suffered immeasurably since the beginning of civilization from it and that, it’s looking more likely that it will cause the death of enlightment civilization, just a brief candle in the vast darkness of ignorance.”

I, too, am fascinated by unmitigated, full bloom looniness. Recall The Secret? We all should be so fascinated, because we live in a world full of apocalyptic death cults and nuclear weapons. Also, we should be slightly worried for the future of our planet and our civilization.

Today’s nutjobs might be tomorrows deathmobs. The point is worth making.

No Illusions: Obama’s Prague Speech

Me: Wow, he’s a really great orator. And we have every reason to believe he means what he says.

Martha: Let’s hope someone doesn’t assassinate him.

Pessimistic? Nah, just Italian.

p.s. Did you notice, at about midway through the speech, the Italians apologizing for Berlusconi?

Better Than Porn

A few days ago I had never heard of the Neti pot. Now I feel like I missed the latest cultural boom: nettypotting.

Now for the money shot:

Of Righteousness and Demonology

Jerusalem Talmud
Jerusalem Talmud

I’m no talmudist, and I’m not even capable of reading Aramaic. But from time to time I like to pry open my copy of Abraham Cohen’s Everyman’s Talmud and troll for wisdom. It’s a distillation–one of the first in English–of the oceanic collection of post-biblical Jewish folklore, wisdom, law and other treats (I know this is a poor summary, but I’m rushing through this) which form the underpinnings of  modern Jewish culture. I’m assuming there are still people out there who’ve either never heard of it, or have an extremely vague working definition of what the Talmud is. Of course, this is entirely understandable, as it is one of the most maligned books in the history of the world. And one of the most overpraised.

Anyway, what drove me to this post was the skeptical tone of one (anonymous?) rabbi’s remark about charity–one of the great themes of talmudic moral hairsplitting. Should you give to the poor? Of course! It’s a mitzve to give, but a shanda to receive. But I never would’ve anticipated a remark like this:

“We must give credit to the imposters among the poor; were it not for them, if a man were asked for alms and did not give them at once he would be incurring punishment.”

In essence: since a good portion of beggars are misfits and crooks, there is nothing especially evil about casting an incredulous eye when the seemingly downtrodden ask you for change. Like most other things in life, it’s a question of individual judgement.

p.s. There are no links in the post because there is too much to wade through–both good and bad–on the internet. Just type “talmud” into any major search engine and see what I mean.

A Little Matter of Stupidity

Deborah Lipstadt brought this to my attention, but I recently had a dream about Ward Churchill. No shit.

He’s on the Chomskyite fringes of public discourse and, like other acolytes of the Dean, has come into hard times for saying really stupid things in public.

He doesn’t matter much, on the whole. He’s not worth getting upset about, even. He’s not well-spoken, like Noam, nor does he have any big achievements under his belt. He doesn’t get invited to speak on Al-Manar or Al-Jazeera–just at my alma mater, VCU. No shit.

So just sit back and dig his style. Straight up, no chaser.

Spring Fever

This could be me. It’s that time of year again.

And to show I’m not joking, here’s the lowdown on nasal irrigation.