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Two Hippos Make an Island: sick in Costa Rica? Go to the Hospital Clínica Bíblica

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

Costa Rica has a public-private dual system of health care. As in most countries that employ this model, you do not want to get caught as a visitor in the public system when you’re ill. Continue Reading »

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Two Hippos Make an Island: paying to pee in Great Britain

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

You heard it here first.

The quiet little secret at the heart of the ‘special relationship’ that binds together the UK and the USA to the consternation of the rest of the world is not what you think. It actually comes down to this: clean bathrooms (a.k.a. ‘loos’). Continue Reading »

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Two Hippos Make an Island: affording Hong Kong

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

The first time you tell your traveling companion that you’ll be staying ‘at the Y in Hong Kong’, you’ll have to defend yourself against the assumption that you’ll be sleeping under a bench in a locker room that smells like someone’s sweat.

Believe me, this is not your father’s YMCA. Continue Reading »

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Two Hippos Make an Island: Sao Paulo, Brazil, American Express lounge in GRU Airport

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

The American Express lounge is a small ray of light in the otherwise death-mongering suffocation that is GRU at night, when you may be unfortunate enough to have your plane arrive. All the more reason for frequent travelers to get that American Express Platinum card or a PriorityPass membership.

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guajiro y carretero: Buena Vista Social Club

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

The best thing about Buena Vista Social Club and its musicians is that they are representative. A large, active Cuban musical tradition, of which BVSC is one example, thrives in the hotels and halls of Havana, Camaguey, Santiago de Cuba, and the like.

What has happened here is a marketing coup that ought to be celebrated rather than derided, for it has brought the richness of Cuban son to our ears. If it had not come in the picturesque and personality-rich form of Ibrahim, Compay, and their pals, it would have happened via some other coterie of sonistas who looked and sounded much like them. They are everywhere. Continue Reading »

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*that* was a hill … ‘: Hamburger Hill (DVD)

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

The most startling aspect of this gripping account of the 101st Airborne’s assault on Hill 937 is that this was not even the bloodiest battle fought by the 101st in Vietnam. That one took place at Dat To and produced more than five times the U.S. casualties, occasioning the throw-away parenthesis of one of Hill’s actors, ‘that was a hill ….’. Continue Reading »

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great expectations: Ephesians 1

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

Were Paul the misanthropic curmudgeon he is often taken for, we would not have lines like this:

In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will, so that we, who were the first to set our hope on Christ, might live for the praise of his glory.

People bogged down in what is wrong—or will be if so-and-so is left to run things—do not make statements like this. These words and the lines that surround them are full to bursting with hope for those whom ‘the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’ has called. Indeed they speak about placing hope in Christ so that Paul and the Ephesians might grow into the rather large stature that it is their vocation to realize. Continue Reading »

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a really good JV team: Great Film Themes (Erich Kunzel, Cincinnati Pops Orchestra)

September 29, 2007 by David Baer

In the mid-1990s, the Times of London flogged a very cool disk-per-week club that was everything eclectic can mean. One of those CDs was entitled Great Film Themes and included music from the likes of Also Sprach Zarathustra, Back to the Future, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Brief Encounters, Chariots of Fire, Goldfinger, Raging Bull, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Jurassic Park, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Doctor Zhivago, and Henry V. Continue Reading »

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jaw dropping: Henryk Mikolaj Gorecki, Beatus Vir, Totus Tuus, Old Polish Music

September 28, 2007 by David Baer

If Maestro John Nelson did not exist, he would have to be invented as a matter of the highest artistic urgency. How else would the rest of us become acquainted with the new or little-known music that is so often recorded under his baton?

Take, for example, the Polish composer Henry Mikolaj Gorecki’s ‘Beatus Vir’, ‘Totus Tuus’, and Old Polish Music. The first of these are newer creations of a very Catholic Poland, redolent of biblical and Roman Catholic piety embedded in the brooding harmonies of Old Poland. Continue Reading »

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hell’s duality: Platoon (DVD)

September 28, 2007 by David Baer

Oliver Stone’s brilliant 1986 film on the grunt’s war in Vietnam had a lot to work with: a controversial subject well placed for dramatic effect, brilliant acting from his three leads (Dafoe, Berenger, and, yes, even Sheen), some stunning visual images (more on this in a moment), and the superb employment of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The result is a movie that must rank in the top three of the 1980s and, to boot, one that is impossible to characterize cleanly as an anti-war movie (No one will suspect it of being pro-war.) Continue Reading »

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