hbg, I was a traveling auditor for Florsheim Shoe Company during that same period, and we were allowed to stay in any hotel we wished, and we always traveled alone. Boy, did I get spoiled, but eating dinner by myself got old real fast. Used to go out for drinks with the store managers after work, so my lungs are probably paying dearly for all that boozing. c.i.
c.i. : YOU GAVE YOUR SECRET AWAY ! AUDITOR ??? i thought i was the only one in the universe. after i got tired of all the late night calls when i was manager of computer operations, i kind of pushed my way into the position as the company auditor - i had my papers as a certified general accoutant and that did help. never had to do much branch auditing; but enjoyed taking in some of the conventions of the institute of internal auditors(and i took my wife along; so it was always a bit of a vacation. the last one i attended was in 1985 at GROSSINGERS, one of the old jewish resorts in the adirondacks. boy what a life! i don't miss my job, but wouldn't mind attending the odd convention at company expense. gave us the chance to see a bit of america : miami beach, new york city twice, quebec city, philadelphia, atlantic city, malaga/spain.... i'm beginning to drool....better stop). hbg
hamburger- Adirondacks??? Nah! Grossingers was in the CATSKILLS!
phoenix : right you are, of course! i guesswhen you are on the canadian side one thinks it's all the same. should have just said new york state and wouldn't have looked like a fool! hbg ........ grossingers was a wonderful place; a bit down at the heels but classy and great food (herrings for breakfast, what more could i ask for?). ESS, ESS, MEIN KIND !
Ah, eat, eat my child--yes eating is a pleasure which almost never deserts us.
setanta : i still have the SPEISEKARTEN or is that MENU(?) from grossingers and some other good eating places; shows you how much i appreciate good food. you might not have liked it : NO BACON ! the (real) american guests (auditors) were almost going crazy and threatened to bring in bacon sandwiches from the village coffee-shop ! this in turn made the grossinger staff pretty nervous because they were stricktly kosher : separate kitchens and dinnerware for the meat dishes with junior rabbis(they had a special name which i forgot) GUARDING the kitchen entrances to ensure used dishes would not wind up in the wrong kitchen. hbg .. with all this talk of the PURITY of french and other languages in another thread i'm getting all confused ! perhaps i should use the hamburg dialect of the low-german, it has plenty of french in it !
Those of you who haven't been introduced to Elain Pagels ought to be. This is a quite extraordinary piece and makes a number of the points which I earlier tried to make, but didn't do a very good job of it.
Quote:What I'm working on now and what I find I'm passionately thinking about, has to do with the interaction of politics and religion. Certainly it's most relevant in America, as this country was founded, in its beginning at least, with the Puritans and others, who were people who were religiously motivated and saw their migration to this country as a religious act?-as the people of Israel coming to the Promised Land?-and of course to a land which they claimed was theirs by divine right. They were also defying the King of England and his claims to divine right, which had been worked out in a very complicated way.
What fascinates me are the kinds of claims that are made by religious people for political purposes. When I became distressed and upset with the language that President Bush is using to justify war in Iraq, I was saying, as many other liberal Americans were, "Doesn't he understand about separation of religion and politics? Separation of church and state? This is the American tradition."
Later I realized that that kind of liberal outrage doesn't go deep enough, because the interaction of religion and politics?-and President Bush knows this very well, and Saddam Hussein knows this very well, and many other political leaders recognize it?-are inextricably and very deeply interconnected, probably because they come from the same emotional source. That is, patriotism is about patria?- fatherland, father, country, place, our family, our people?-all of those emotions, which are very deep and which are the source which politicians count on for political passion and political conviction?-let alone conviction about war?-which are deeply connected with religious impulses, and so people have always drawn on that.
http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pagels03/pagels_index.html
