Life at Full Gallop: Sunday musings…10/26/2025
1) Lego. While pursuing my interest in Healthspan, the combination of not only a longer life but a longer span of health, I stumbled upon a magazine in an airport shop featuring some newer takes on the topic. Particularly intriguing was an article on spurring continued mental acuity by learning things outside those that have already taken up residence in your greying matter.
This one touted complex Lego models.
Being the Papi to two Lego-obsessed boys it made all the sense in the world to give this a try. I picked up one of the Lego Botanicals collection, the Japanese Red Maple Bonsai, and planned to give it a go. When my Mancub saw the box he offered to help. This, of course, started off as us doing it together with Landon giving Papi instructions. Which led to us physically taking turns adding pieces. And ended up with “OK Papi, turn to the next page” of the instructions as he flew through the construction.
Unlike “gym as third space”, training your brain muscle looks like it needs to happen without a “personal trainer”.
2) Arquette. Patricia Arquette is interviewed in both the WSJ weekend edition and the Sunday NYT. Seems she is in a new mini-series (do we even call them that anymore?) about a rather tawdry, years-long family tragedy in the Low Country of South Carolina. One my SIL Ryan was mildly obsessed with a few years ago as it reached its climax. It’s likely to be a rather interesting thing to watch; Ms. Arquette is by all accounts pretty good as the doomed wife.
Still, for all of the falderal about the massive gulf that exists between the political poles of mainstream media represented by these two august publications, don’t you find it a bit strange that they can’t find two people to highlight on any given Sunday? I mean, she’s not exactly new to the circuit, and this particular story has stained newspapers and squandered airtime for more than a decade. It brings to mind the seamless coordination that surely exists between the editors of each newspapers eponymous monthly magazines when it comes to fashion.
Scandal, brought to you through the eyes of the same actress, like so much that is au courant on the white boards of designers who would never be caught dead in their own creations, yet appear back to back and standing left and right, every thirty days.
3) Uniform. In other news, a fashion columnist is kvetching in todays NYT about the lack of imagination shown by those who clothe female politicians in television and movie fiction. Particularly those actors who portray the necessarily fictional female presidents and almost entirely fictional VP’s ( I will resist all temptation beyond that little tiny barb). Seems they are all too conservative. Too masculine, whatever that means. Too many pantsuits (why aren’t they just called suits?). Not enough color.
Sorry. Calling BS. This is just a made up issue which barely survives investigation below the dust, let alone the topsoil.
Every job has a uniform. The more gravitas associated with the job, with or without justification, the less imagination one sees, regardless of sex. One need only recall the bipartisan ridicule that befell President Obama when he had the misfortune to follow the fashion mores of the non-elected, especially non-elected presidents of anything other than the United States, and wore a tan suit in the summer. An impeccably tailored and likely high four-figure tan suit at that. And yet, I’d wager that pictures of him so-clad probably still show up on the “no-fly” fashion lists.
FWIW I think the paper-clip holding the zipper on the pants together scene in The Diplomat makes the character more compelling and likely more electable than any color dress today’s NYT commentator would have chosen for her to wear.
4) Douthat. While I’m about the task of possibly painting yet another bulls-eye on my tee shirt, how is it that I’ve not really made the acquaintance of the weekend columnist Russ Douthat? There’s an underlying current today that addresses taste and the intersection between propriety and taste. Douthat dives into the larger than the issue debate about tearing down the least interesting part of the White House to create what he proposes is a long-overdo event space for the official programming of the President’s position of Entertainer in Chief. He compares the objective aspects of that project with similar activity surrounding former President Obama’s presidential library now under construction in Chicago.
One project, Douthat chooses the White House, is likely to be rather uninspiring given its utilitarian roots. The other, Obama’s Library, has garnered rather strong reviews that, on balance, seem to skew rather negative. One could, of course, argue that by definition presidential libraries are 1) not really libraries at all, and 2) unnecessary. I mean, other than to store all of those paintings that George W. Bush has been churning out in his retirement. (Note to self: build a library to hold all of my adult Lego projects). One could make a case that we should have called it a day after Monticello ran out of closet space and Jefferson founded UVA.
I predict the construction of a new East Wing ballroom cum event center will fade into the mist that engulfs all such banal, functional edifices, the strum und drang of the times notwithstanding. Mr. Obama’s obelisk? Well, let’s just say I’m betting it continues to make its way onto the editorial pages and into those monthly magazines purportedly catering to both sides of the street long after nobody remembers who built the East Wing v1.0 (Teddy Roosevelt) or v2.0 (FDR).
5) Living. “Dying is no big deal. The least of us will manage that. Living is the trick.” Red Smith, eulogizing a lost friend.
As we approach Halloween and Dia de los Muertos, it bears remembering that it is not in the dying that we should remember, but in the living. Red Smith, arguably one of the 3 or 4 greatest sports columnist to ever live, was noted for the eloquence with which he eulogized both sports figures and friends. Lives lived large or small, he said time and again that it was the living that mattered. We are confronted by the ghosts of the dead who demand to be heard on Halloween, and prompted to remember the names and the lives of our loved ones on Dia de los Muertos lest their ghosts cease to exist at all.
Both days exhort us to remember not the departures but the journeys that transpired on the way to that final exit ramp.
And so, at the risk of being accused of being a sentimental, and worse, preachy old man (guilty, of course, on both accounts), allow me to remind one and all that it is the living that counts. The living that we are about, each and every day. Today is not simply a day that we are not dying, a day that we did not die. Nope. Today is another day that we are alive. Another day that we are living. Today there are no obituaries to be written, no eulogies to be given. No caissons to be pulled. The horses in the stables are there for us. Saddle up.
Today we ride, again. Still. Let them remember how it was when we galloped.
I’ll see you next week…
This entry was posted on Sunday, October 26th, 2025 at 2:25 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.