Busy week so far, but here are pictures from some early morning walks this week:

Can you spot the rabbit?

Here it is!

Mom and I have been looking at photographs from my childhood days and every year there were pictures of big Christmas trees. It was one splurge we made on a regular basis. I think that’s what led mom to say that it would be nice to have a big tree this year; we haven’t had a full size one in a long time.

These days there are lots of artificial ones to choose from and here’s the one that we brought home:

The lights were pre-strung and the tree looked quite good when they were on but a little bare when they were off. I happened to have a few sheets of holiday themed paper and some heavy card stock, so I made very simple flowers with a silver bauble in the center and some bind wire:

99 flowers later, here’s the tree, both lit and unlit:

Daisy is the “grandparent” I know the least about. She is almost a total enigma: I don’t even know her birth or death dates. Although she was a major factor in raising my dad and my brother and I, I know almost nothing about her life or interests.

Daisy was adamant that no one know her age. So much so that while she was still in the Maryland area and needed gall bladder surgery, she traveled to California to have it done, and in the first decades of the 1900s that was not an insignificant trip! She did this because she didn’t want to be a patient in the hospital she worked at: she was afraid her coworkers might find out how old she was.

Mom remembers she and dad taking Daisy up to visit relatives on the Maryland/Pennsylvania border in the 1940s. She had a sister named Myrna that lived with Nana and Daisy for a while when they were in California and another sister who married and moved out to California as well. There was also a brother somewhere.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, Daisy moved in with my dad’s mother to help out after Nana got divorced. They lived together from that point on. After Nana died, Daisy seemed to slip out of my life as she was taken care of by her sister’s relatives. I don’t know for sure, but I think she died while I was still at college.

My brother and I always felt that Daisy was a bit of a “sour puss” and not near as much fun as the other grandparents. It was only long after she was gone that I found out from my mother that the reason Daisy never smiled was that she was ashamed of her teeth. That was one reason she never liked having her picture taken, so, of course, my dad made sure to snap as many shots as he could.

Daisy was very conservative in her religion: I remember she didn’t like the fact that as a kid I played solitaire with a regular deck of cards; she called them the “devil’s cards”. And woe betide we kids if we put another book on top of a Bible, or worse, put the Bible on the floor beside us!

Yet, weirdly, I can’t remember either she or Nana going to church. I just asked my mom about it and she has no memory of them doing so either. And yet Daisy was definitely a Seventh-day Adventist.

The only story I ever heard about Daisy’s youth was that she was at a county fair and Charles Lindenbergh was there. This woman who I always knew as conventional and reserved actually went up in a plane with him! If I had been told this as a child, I would have found it inconceivable.

I wish I had had a chance to know this woman after I grew up. I feel I really missed out by not getting to know her.

This is my latest bouquet: charm peonies and wisteria. They are both made from frosted paper. While I did make the wisteria leaves, I was not ambitious enough to make the rest of the greenery. I find that making leaves is just not as fulfilling as making flowers!

Brindy hopes that whatever country you’re in, you can give thanks for the good things in your life. Here she is displaying her four “Big Blue” toys that she is thankful for!

Some visitors on the way to lunch:

While thinking about my last post, I wondered if I wasn’t being a bit hypocritical about being a celebrity. After all, here I am posting about myself on a blog that, currently at least, is open to the public and that I hope to reach at least a few people with. Who am I to point a finger at people playing to their “adoring public”? It made me focus in on what bothers me about the issue and it’s much more the fan issue I don’t understand, not the wanting to be a celebrity issue.

Most of us want to be “known” in some way. We want to feel that our existence matters to a least a few people. I originally started this blog so that friends and family could see what was going on in my mom’s and my life and decided to make it a catch-all for whatever ideas and thoughts came my way. Would I like it if more people read and enjoyed it? Sure, but I’m not planning on doing anything to try to make myself an internet sensation.

It’s the “fan” side of the equation that I don’t understand. Why does a person’s talent in one area lead to them being idolized? Why would the fact I enjoy someone’s singing mean I want to know what they have for breakfast?

This was really brought home to me yesterday while reading my local paper. It announced that an auction was going to be held to sell a gold crown taken from the mouth of Elvis Presley when he was having some dental work done. I believe the bidding was expected to start at $2500.

What, for goodness sake, would anyone do with a thing like this? Mount it on a pedestal in the living room for all to see? It would certainly have to come with a plaque to explain why such an object was being displayed. Keep it lovingly wrapped in silk in a drawer to be taken out and admired every once in a while?

When my dad was cremated the funeral director asked mom if she wanted the steel rods from his forearm or his plastic knee replacement. “No thank you”, she said and I can’t imagine any other answer. It’s not like having the finger bones of some saint around that have supposedly magic powers. Or maybe that is what some fans feel having the gold crown would be like.

Years ago I read a number of interesting studies and experiments about “contagion bias”. Here’s a quick intro to the idea from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057740816300791:

One explanation is that consumers believe that some part of the celebrity, such as their soul or essence, has been imbued into the objects they have used (Newman, Diesendruck, & Bloom, 2011). Much of this has to do with the law of contagion.

The law of contagion explains why people tend to value objects that admired celebrities have come into physical contact with more so than objects that they have owned but never touched (Newman & Bloom, 2014). In particular, it has been theorized that people behave as though the essence of an object’s previous owner is inherent in the object itself (Gelman, 2003, Newman et al., 2011). This is consistent with the finding that people are willing to pay more for George Clooney’s sweater as long as it has not since been dry-cleaned (Newman et al., 2011). It is as if the “Clooney Cooties,” as Bloom (2011) put it, could be sterilized away. Critically, this was not the only finding of note from Newman et al. (2011). A lesser discussed observation was that people were also willing to pay less for George Clooney’s sweater if they were forbidden from telling anyone that Clooney had previously worn it (Bloom, 2011). This highlights how the law of contagion may play a role in conspicuous consumption.

I guess you can’t get an object that has much more “physical contact” than a dental crown!

BTW, the most famous example of contagion bias that I know of is the experiment called “Hitler’s sweater”; you can find an explanation here: https://thinksucceedbehappy.wordpress.com/2020/08/23/would-you-wear-hitlers-sweater/

At any rate, if you enjoy my blog, I’m happy, but please don’t plan on bidding for the titanium screws from my foot when I’m gone!

I watched the Adele special on TV Sunday night. I have been a “fan” of her voice since I first heard her sing and have bought all of her albums as they came out. I very much enjoyed watching and listening to her, but could have done without most of the interview portions with Oprah. I just don’t have much interest in a celebrity’s personal life and have never understood the imperative that leads people to join fan clubs, for instance.

There are a lot of people whose body of work I admire, but why would I want to meet them? What is there to say other than “I enjoy your work, hope you keep on”? I know, for example, that any movie with Meryl Streep in it is probably going to be worth watching, if only for her performance. But why would I ever want to meet her? I don’t know her; she doesn’t know me. It would be like walking up to some total stranger and expecting there to be some kind of connection between us.

I know for adolescent fans there is often a fantasy sexual component to the adoration of some celebrity or group, but why does this interest in every detail of the celebrity’s life go on into adulthood? I assume that celebrities and their actions provide society with some kind of morality plays, but, again, how does this translate into wanting to meet the star in person?

I can only think of one “notable” person that I could meet and actually envision having a conversation with: John Scalzi, a well-regraded science-fiction writer. But we wouldn’t be having a conversation because of his books. He has had a blog (https://whatever.scalzi.com/) up for years and I have been reading it for almost as long as he’s been writing it. This means that I “know” the public John Scalzi and would be able to talk to him about his favorite tortilla brand and what his dog has been up to lately.

When it comes to most celebrities, I have no such connections. Meeting Adele would be like meeting my gardener or the owner of my favorite local diner outside of their jobs. One provides great service for my car; one serves terrific sandwiches and waffles, and one sings great songs. What would we have to say to each other?

The main difference that I see is that one provider reaches millions of people, while the others reach only a few thousand, at most. But I can’t see how that makes any difference to me as far as my interest in their personal life goes. Is part of the draw being in a club with others with the same preoccupation? Is it because their celebrity puts their personal life in the public realm and therefore readily available?

I was musing about this because the other day I saw a headline about “What your favorite star’s children are doing now!” This struck me as very, very odd. I don’t care what the “star” is up to; why in the world would I care what their children are doing? And what a rotten thing to do to the kids who probably aren’t looking for that kind of attention.

All in all, I just want publicly talented people to offer me whatever their public talent is and then we both go off and enjoy our separate private lives. Of course some people these days are only known because they make their private lives public, but those people don’t seem very interesting to me.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I only saw my dad’s father once in my life. I believe my brother saw him twice. We did get a few stories about him, though.

My mom’s parents weren’t too sure about having their daughter marry that “Greek boy”. My mom says Grandma didn’t learn to spell the last name until they had been married five years and it appeared the marriage would last. Grandma’s idea was that Grandfather pushed a fruit cart down the street for his living. In actuality, he was chancellor of the Greek embassy in Washington, DC.

Although our last name is unusual in the US it is fairly well known in Greece, although it is not common there either. Back around the beginning of the 20th century one of my greats was President of Greece during a brief democratic period. The family also had a famous admiral who fought against the Turks. There is even a family museum on the island of Hydra. The family was very influential in the shipping business.

The family story is that after WWII, Grandfather used that influence and also a tidy sum of money to help Aristotle Onassis get started in his shipping business. Years later when my Grandfather reminded him of this “handshake” loan, Aristotle professed to have no memory of such a transaction.

My Grandfather retired to the Greek community of Tarpon Springs, Florida. He was born in 1887 and died in 1967, so he was the first of all my grandparents to pass; one of the reasons I only saw him that once.

Here he is in Tarpon Springs with his second wife:

And here are Grandfather, my dad and my aunts, and my brother and I during his only visit to California in 1961: