Not to be missed

I’ve been pretty lazy the last few days and haven’t done much productive. I even got bored and bit depressed by the presidential political process. It’s depressing to see Bill Clinton getting all red in the face and angry attacking Obama. It seems to me that the Clintons are playing the race card in the ugliest way, trying to scare whites and particularly Hispanics by portraying Obama as the “Black” candidate. The Clintons seem to be quite willing to tear apart the Democratic Party and the country in their quest for power.

So instead of watching wall-to-wall talking heads, I watched a half dozen episodes of the HBO series Rome. I’ve been in HBO withdrawal since both Six Feet Under and The Sopranos ended. I didn’t watch Rome when it first came out a couple of years ago, but did catch the first few episodes on On Demand. When I had watched bits and pieces in the past, I couldn’t get into it because I didn’t know the characters and the sub-plots. Watching a few episodes back-to-back got me into the swing of things, and I can now pronounce that Rome is up to HBO’s impossibly high standards. They do a great job of telling the exotic, gritty, sexy and violent story of Rome in the time of Julius Caesar through the eyes of the elite and the not so elite. So now I’ve watched the entire first season. Good stuff, and the second (and last) season awaits at Netflix.

Speaking of the exotic and gritty, I started reading a Lonely Planet travel guide on my next travel destination. On February 21st, in the dead of winter, I’m going to what has been called the Paris of Eastern Europe, aka Bucharest. From what the guide book says, Paris should sue for defamation. Here’s a sampling from the first couple of chapters…

-Nuimber of people bitten by stray dogs in Bucharest in 2005 - 15,000
-About half of Romania's population of around 22,000,000 don’t have flush toilets.
-About half of Europe’s bears, and about a third of Europe’s wolves live in Romania. (I don’t know werewolves are included in the count)
-Beware of the pizza. Some can be quite good, but some can be baloney bits on ketchup
-Here’s a direct quote. Alas, Bucharest has its problems – taxi scams, glue-sniffing beggars, packs of stray dogs, loud traffic – but it has a heart too. Stick around for more than a day – as some visitors flee at first sight – and you start to get it. Bucharest has something going on.
-And here’s a description of the river that runs through it. All in all, it’s not pretty. In fact it’s trashy and murky and stinky. But don’t slag it, the Damrovita just won’t quit.

Sounds like a not-to-be-missed place to me!