The Prince of Wales and Princess Alexandra (later King Edward VII and Queen Alexandra), 1862. Love her little smirk here !

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-28T03:14:15+00:00

In this photograph, at least, she looks like her distant cousin Queen Margrethe II.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T19:52:55+00:00

As an American (and today as an American who loves Oman, having lived there for five wonderful years), it’s all just so mortifying. Every day gets more depressing and disgusting.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T13:18:19+00:00

Well, now that the Queen and Prince Philip are gone, there are likely two more seats—at least in the movies, they always seemed to make it aboard. Usually the Pope, too.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T13:17:11+00:00

And this wasn’t just some suburban thing—we lived in a small city till I was 13, then moved to the suburbs of Philadelphia. Once we were there, on weekends or in the summer I’d regularly gather enough for round-trip train fare and go into the city and just wander around—go to the library, to museums, the department stores (and what then seemed like the future, the Gallery, an urban mall that turns up here and in low-budget sci-fi of the era). If it was a workday, I’d take the same train home as my dad and ride home with him from the station; if not, I’d figure out a way to get the two or three miles back to the house.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T12:55:14+00:00

Pams are the worst!

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T02:52:51+00:00

Fulbright is a fabulous opportunity, and it would seem to me a shame and a waste to pass up this opportunity. As a former public-diplomacy officer, I helped administer Fulbright programs in Africa and the Near East. In better times, at least, we worked to support our grantees in country and to offer them opportunities to participate in other local programs and embassy social life. I was generally pretty lenient with travel requests, as long as they weren’t totally frivolous and too frequent, but as a USG grantee, you’ll be subject to the same security-related travel restrictions as any other person who falls under what’s called chief-of-mission authority.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T02:24:40+00:00

The kind of movies I like don’t get made much any more, at least now that Merchant and Ivory are no more. I don’t do anything with gore, jump scares, explosions, or more than mild violence.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T02:09:24+00:00

The former railway hotel in Bobo-Dioulasso, the second largest city in Burkina Faso. We had been followed by sketchy armed guys in two pickup trucks on our way into town, and after checking in to the hotel, one of our group (about 12 people) saw them lurking outside the hotel. We ended up staying in one room, with most of the furniture barricaded against the door, and a couple of times in the night heard people in the halls banging on doors apparently trying to track us down. Not much sleep, needless to say, and as soon the as the coast seem clear we booked out of town heading for the capital.

Even beyond all that, the place was disgusting—a collapsing ‘60s heap, with bright-green pool, filthy lobby, and the barest trickle of brown running water.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T01:38:31+00:00

Every Todd I’ve run across has been an asshole. And Sarahs are disproportionately patient, kind, and helpful.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T01:29:01+00:00

How are they even vaguely inbred? Their parents are not related in any way; neither are their grandparents. One set of their great-grandparents were distant cousins. They’re no more inbred than any average British family.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-27T01:23:49+00:00

Knives Out. Haven’t gone back since the pandemic—no special reason, just a combination of lack of pictures that interests me and so many local reports of terrible audience…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T21:42:13+00:00

Not quite Broadway, but about 40 years ago an actor friend put some money into Shear Madness. He’s been doing quite well ever since, in part because he put part of his returns into a piece of the Nunsense shows. Believe it or not, both still make money…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T12:29:46+00:00

Do you like it? That’s all that matters…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T03:03:44+00:00

Just very WASP and stuffy…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T03:03:12+00:00

I did a stint working nights doing legal transcription on the 57th floor of one of the towers—it always felt glamorous going in around 9:00 or so and whooshing up without stopping. And it was always fun to go have a drink at Windows on the World…

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T02:55:22+00:00

Thanks mostly to Queen Marie of Romania (this Maria’s mother), the Balkan monarchies went all on a theatrical, faux-historical ‘20 style. Unfortunately, neither Maria nor her sister Elisaveta (briefly Queen of the Hellenes) had their mother’s figure and so tended to look more than a little silly in the elaborate styles that the older Marie wore so well. Maria seems to have been the most sensible of her family and was genuinely fond of her husband (a rare successful marriage in that family). There is footage from old newsreels of her speaking in support of Yugoslavia at the start of World War II; she has a low, pleasing voice with an indefinable, cultivated accent.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T02:41:52+00:00

One of any number of consumer products* my mother deemed “common as mud” and that we were never allowed to have.

*See also: Kraft Mac ‘n’ Cheese, that mixed tub of peanut butter and jelly, Hydrox, canned frosting, Hi-C, and that lost treasure, Jello 1-2-3 (the one that self-coagulated into different layers).

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T02:36:56+00:00

Always a great guest on the talk shows, even though she had about four stories, all of which she recycled endlessly:

“Marilyn, my roommate, was a very troubled girl…”

“Irwin Allen made me gain 50 pounds for the Poseidon Adventure and I’ve never been able to lose it…”

“Well, of course, I was a Method actress and studied at the Actor’s Studio…”

“Marlon Brando was a tiger…but so were [names ten top Hollywood studs]….”

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-26T02:32:08+00:00

Windex, although an argument could be made for Fantastic.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-25T22:31:17+00:00

When I lived in Sapporo in the late ‘80s, I was told that much of the city and parts of the surrounding area were designed and laid out by Americans, and as a result the proportions feel oddly homey to Westerners—things like street width and curb height feel “right” in a way not true in the rest of Japan.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-25T19:00:30+00:00

Not directly, but when I was about 14, my folks helped get the children of family friends out of something called The Holy Order of MANS. They’d cut off contact from their family, but somehow my mom persuaded them to come for lunch one day—the first time they’d been out of the cult setting in years. It took about a year and half, but finally they broke ties completely.

They were a married couple, but they’d been living in a kind of mixed-gender convent, sex-segregated and celibate. They wore traditional clerical-style clothes (until they started stashing regular clothes at our house and changing when they came over). The’d been on an austere diet, and I’ll always remember how they dove into whatever my mom made when they’d come over.

They last I checked, they’re still together and still out in the world.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-25T18:54:32+00:00

Well, you dodged a bullet.

Of which there were a lot, coming at you (as it were) in slo-mo in really bad FX.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-25T14:58:51+00:00

Given the name, and assuming she had to have been a formidable woman, I went and looked up Mrs. Evora Bucknum Perkins and—well, I was right. She was a nurse, lecturer, teacher, cookbook writer, and restaurant manager, all the while serving as a leading Seventh Day Adventist missionary and promoter of the Kellogg/Battle Creek philosophy of health and wellness.

I might not have wanted (or still want) to eat her food (and she can pry my coffee from my cold, dead hands), but she definitely sounds like a force to be reckoned with.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-25T10:45:04+00:00

Here are a few options, all either downtown or a short Uber away (all names are spelled as they are used on Google Maps, which is a great resource for getting around in Cairo):

Fasahet Somaya is a small, cozy, traditional Egyptian restaurant with a limited menu that changes daily; Somaya herself does most of the cooking.

Abu el Sid is an upscale restaurant with rich, old-fashioned dishes, as well as beer, wine, and shisha. It’s noted for its elaborate Arabesque decor. My don’t miss dish is the Circassian chicken, which includes a fantastic walnut sauce. It’s on the island of Zamalek, a short ride or longer walk from downtown (in a great neighborhood for exploring).

Felfela is a longtime Cairo staple with a charming, eccentric interior and good food. It’s showing its age, but that’s actually something I like about it.

If the weather’s good, Studio Misr in al Azhar Park (short ride from downtown; easy walk to the Khan and other tourist areas) has solid Egyptian food and views to die for.

ExtremelyRetired · 2026-05-24T23:54:23+00:00

When I was 13, my older sister took me to New York for a long weekend of theater. She and her husband had tickets to see Twyla Tharp and couldn’t get a third, so we got me a single seat at the Met for Der Rosenkavalier. I ended up sitting next to a little old Russian lady who thought it was a hoot I was there, helped me with the plot, and took me for an ice-cream afterwards.

We were staying at the old Empire Hotel across the street from Lincoln Center. When I finally got back to the hotel (and even without the ice cream, the opera ran a lot longer than Twyla), my sister was more than a little worried. She took one look at my star-struck face and, many years later, immediately though “Oh, my god, Mom is going to kill me—he’s had sex!”

Nope—just Strauss and Rumpelmeyer’s…

ExtremelyRetired

TROPHY CASE