San Juan Weekly #88

787-743-3346 / 787-743-6537

June 9 - 15, 2011

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The

Tourism Strategies Try to Recoup Lost Market SRI to Manage Arecibo Observatory

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Acrobat Recreates Fatal Highwire Act

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Vida Silvestre Museum, San Juan

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The San Juan Weekly available on internet at www.sanjuanweeklypr.com

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June 9 - 15, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

The Case for Laugh Lines

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The Last Playboy:

PorďŹ rio Rubirosa Enigmatic 18

3-D Fizzles, Hollywood Frets

Cellphone Radiation Causes a Rare Cancer, Glioma

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36 Hours in Niagara Falls

Can Turkey Unify the Arabs?

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The Bilingual Advantage

Housing Index Hits New Price Low

Education P13 Business P27 San Juan Weekly Star has exclusive New Times English News service in Puerto Rico

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June 9 - 15, 2011

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Puerto Rico Attempts to Rebuild Tourism

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ewly-released figures from the Puerto Rico Tourism Company (PRTC) have revealed a steady increase in the number of visitors to the Caribbean destination, effectively demonstrating the success a new marketing campaign.

First quarter 2011 hotel occupancy rates show a four percent increase over 2010 depressed levels, and Puerto Rico tourism officials anticipate a three-to-four percent rise in total tourism visits this year.

If confirmed, this would represent the first increase in five years.

Mario González Lafuente, executive director of the PRTC, attributes the lift in large part to the new Just Think, Puerto Rico marketing cam-

paign and efforts by tourism industry partners including hotels, airlines and travel agents to showcase the Island’s varied and unique offerings.

The advertising campaign consists of print and television and launched in November 2010 at an event in New York City attended by González Lafuente and Puerto Rico’s lieutenant governor, Kenneth McClintock.

“This year we launched the campaign earlier than we had in ten years, using multiple channels to reach specific niche markets,” explained González Lafuente.

“As a result, we saw a strong and early push in sales and reservations.

“We are well on our way to

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accomplishing our growth expectations for the year, with a diversified offer and a variety of attractions.”

Following the global recession of 2009, Puerto Rico began an aggressive effort to form stronger relationships with travel partners to increase tourism to the island.

Air access to Puerto Rico has recouped many of the American Airlines cancelled flights with nine airlines

currently providing 63 non-stop daily flights from 20 US cities.

British Airways recently began a new twice-weekly flight to the Island from London, and a new Puerto Rican charter, IDEO, began serving Spain in April.

Puerto Rico has also seen growth in cruise tourism to the island since 2009 depressed levels. Last year, homeport visitors from cruise ships rebounded 34 per cent.

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The San Juan Weekly

SRI to Manage Arecibo Observatory “

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his is an excellent collaborative effort and will represent expanded opportunities for research and graduate studies in astronomy and atmospheric sciences at UPR,” said UPR President, Dr. Miguel Munoz.

“We are committed to our role in managing the astronomy and planetary studies programs, and to the entire team effort of building a great future for the observatory, in both research and education,” said USRA President, Dr. Fred Tarantino.

“I look forward to a new, bright and expanding future building on past scientific successes and the skill, expertise and dedication of the observatory staff,” said SRI’s Director Designate of the Arecibo Observatory, Dr. Robert Kerr. “Our vision and broad reach-back to Puerto Rican, mainland and international university communities will bring forward new ideas and new science, assuring the observatory’s leading position for many years into the future.”

SRI’s GeoSpace Studies Projects for the NSF SRI’s Center for GeoSpace Studies (CGS) specializes in the study of the fundamental processes governing the nature

of the upper atmosphere and space environment. These studies involve experiments using incoherent scatter radar, satellite and optical instruments, radiowave diagnostics, and basic physics research in ionospheric and magnetospheric physics, middle atmosphere and lower thermosphere, and stratosphere and troposphere.

Currently, the CGS operates, manages, and conducts research at the Sondrestrom Research Facility in Greenland, at Poker Flat in Alaska, and at Resolute Bay in northern Canada, through various NSF co-operative agreements. CGS is constructing additional high-power radars at Resolute Bay, in Argentina, and in other locations.

Acrobat Recreates Fatal Highwire Act

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high-wire acrobat has commemorated his grandfather by successfully completing the same stunt that killed family patriarch Karl Wallenda.

Nik Wallenda walked across a 300-foot-long (91-meter-long) wire suspended 100 feet (31 meters) in the air between two towers of the Conrad San Juan Condado Plaza Hotel.

Onlookers who watched from balconies gasped as he knelt and steadied himself just feet (meters) before he completed Saturday’s walk.

German-born Karl Wallenda tried to perform the same feat in 1978 but fell to his death at age 73. He was the founder of the “The Flying Wallendas” high-wire act.

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June 9 - 15, 2011

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June 9 - 15, 2011

Ballets de San Juan at its Best

By Max González

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ike the old days, Ballets de San Juan offered the original juxtaposed act of classic ballet and Spanish dancing. The company in the present is not as large as it used to be. It Attained a solid group of over fifty members. At the present, twelve members are capable of continuing that quality of finesse and charm that now stands out as a trade-mark under the director’s surveillance Nahir Medina.

Eloy Ortiz, a former member of the company, turned out to be a better choreographer than dancer. Eyerí y Marú is the title he gave to the first work that opened the program last Sunday evening. To the repetitious percussion music, Bárbara Hernández and Omar Nieves (guest dancer), carry on the intensity of this display of gymnastics so much indulged by many choreographers with the effortless showmanship of inspiration. In a similar pat-

tern, the second pas-de-deux, Reflejo, choreography by Jesús Miranda, had Omar Nieves partnering with Lyulma Rivera, enhancing the erotic sensuality of a mutual rapport supported by the floor level. Nieves sure is growing more and more into his reliable partnering. Rivera flows along his position as principal role with accurate response. The closing work of the neo-classic motivation of the first act corresponds to a master piece inspired by Faurés music, (Cello Concerto), done by Ricardo Meléndez. The Balanchinian reminiscent trend by the six dancers in shinning costumes

by Jaime Suárez, brings out an integrated composition of angles designed to project a neo-classical line of purity. Bárbara Hernández, partnered with Andy Machín as principals, were supported by L. Rivera, S. Vega, K. Sánchez, K. Santos, P. Puccio, M. Rosado, A. Jiménez, M. Alamo, N. Candelario. El Amor Brujo, (The Witch Love), was commissioned to Manuel de Falla, by the

legendary empresario S. Diaghilef in 1914 where his company, Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo took refuge in Spain at the outbreak of the first World War. The Choreography

by Pastora Imperio became the alter-ego of the famous “La Argentina”, Spanish dancer. We have been lucky to keep Rosario Galán in the Island for quite many years.

Transplanted from Sevilla to San Juan, she has started the revival of the flamenco to the point of producing Puerto Rican “bailadoras”. Her version of El Amor Brujo is indeed a remarkable achievement. Candelas, (Bárbara Hernández), is trying to chase away the ghost of her dead suitor, so she can marry her present lover, Carmelo, (Andy Machín), the ghost (José), played by Stephan Vega, are two principals of B.S.J. getting ahead in personality and interpretation. The Ritual Fire Dance, which brings the turning point of the plot, brought the house down done by the whole ensemble.

Rosario Galán casted herself as the sorce-

ress, the image of the “faraona” as well as ever. The atmosphere created from the original of Manolo Galán, sets the animated presence of gypsies, children and townspeople into a memorable production.

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

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The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

In Shift, Justice Department is Hiring Lawyers With Civil Rights Backgrounds

By CHARLIE SAVAGE

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nder the Obama administration, the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division has reversed a pattern of systematically hiring conservative lawyers with little experience in civil rights, the practice that caused a scandal over politicization during the Bush administration.

The lawyers hired over the past two years at the division have been far more likely to have civil rights backgrounds — and to have ties to traditional civil rights organizations with liberal reputations, like the American Civil Liberties Union or the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. The Justice Department’s inspector general found that the Bush administration — which changed hiring rules to give its political appointees at the Civil Rights Division greater control over civil service hiring starting in 2003 — had violated hiring rules by screening out liberals and by actively seeking to fill civil service vacancies with conservatives, referred to privately by one Bush offi-

cial as “real Americans” and “right-thinking Americans.”

“During this administration, the department has restored the career-driven, transparent hiring process that will produce the most qualified attorneys for the job,” said Xochitl Hinojosa, a Justice Department spokeswoman.

The New York Times analyzed the résumés — obtained via the Freedom of Information Act — of successful applicants to the division’s voting rights, employment discrimination, and appellate sections. The documents showed that the Obama-era hires were more likely to have had experience in civil rights, and they graduated from more selective law schools, than those hired over the final six years of the Bush administration.

About 90 percent of the Obama-era hires listed civil rights backgrounds on their résumés, up from about 38 percent of the Bush group hires.

Moreover, the Obama-era hires graduated from law schools that had an average ranking of 28, according to U.S. News &

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World Report. The Bush group had a lower average ranking, 42.

There was a change in the political leanings of organizations listed on the résumés, where discernible. Nearly a quarter of the hires of the Bush group had conservative credentials like membership in the Federalist Society or the Republican National Lawyers Association, while only 7 percent had liberal ones.

During the first two Obama years, none of the new hires listed conservative organizations, while more than 60 percent had

liberal credentials. They consisted overwhelmingly of prior employment or internships with a traditional civil rights group, like the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

The National Law Journal, which analyzed the résumés of 120 career lawyers hired since 2009 across the entire division.

At least 60 had worked for traditional civil rights organizations.

“Career and nonpartisan are not the same thing if you worked with the A.C.L.U. or NAACP you end up with liberals.”

9/11 Defendants Charged at Guantánamo With Terrorism and Murder

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ilitary prosecutors have refiled terrorism and murder charges against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other men in the Sept. 11 attacks, using a revamped trial process at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, the Pentagon said Tuesday.

The charges allege that the men were responsible for planning the attacks that sent hijacked commercial airliners slamming into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in Pennsylvania, killing nearly 3,000 people.

Prosecutors have recommended that the trial be a capital case, which could bring the death penalty.

The five men, all being held at Guantánamo, were charged previously in connection with the attacks, but those charges were dropped in 2009 when the Obama administration hoped to close the American detention facility at Guantánamo and do away with Bush-era military commissions for trying terror suspects.

The four alleged co-conspirators are Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, a Yemeni accused of running a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan and researching flight simulators and timetables; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a Yemeni who allegedly helped find flight schools for the hijackers; Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali, accused of helping nine of the hijackers travel to the

United States and sending them $120,000 for expenses and flight training; and Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi, a Saudi accused of helping the hijackers with money, Western clothing, traveler’s checks and credit cards.

All five men were charged with conspiracy, murder in violation of the law of war, attacking civilians, attacking civilian objects, intentionally causing serious bodily injury, destruction of property in violation of the law of war, hijacking aircraft and terrorism.

The men were initially charged with the same offenses in February 2008, but that plan stalled in 2009 as President Obama ordered a review of the military commission system.

That November, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced that the five would face trial in a civilian court in New York City.

That plan, however, was widely opposed by Republicans in Congress, as well as some New York Democrats, and Congress passed legislation prohibiting any move to bring Guantánamo detainees to the United States.

About two months ago, the Obama administration bowed to political pressure and said it would instead prosecute the men before a military commission. The chief prosecutor in the office of military commissions, Capt. John Murphy, said he would recommend a joint trial at Guantánamo for all five.

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From left, Walid Muhammad Salih bin Attash, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Mustafa Ahmad al-Hawsawi and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, along with Ali Abdul-Aziz Ali, face charges in a military court.

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

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Cellphone Radiation May Cause Cancer

By TARA PARKER-POPE

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World Health Organization panel has concluded cellphones are “possibly carcinogenic,’’ putting the popular devices in the same category as certain dry cleaning chemicals and pesticides, as a potential threat to human health.

The finding, from the agency’s International Agency for Research on Cancer, adds to concerns among experts about the health effects of low levels of radiation emitted by cellphones. The panel, consisted of 31 scientists from 14 countries.

The group didn’t conduct new research but reviewed existing studies focused on the health effects of radio frequency magnetic fields, which are emitted by cellphones.

The panel’s decision to classify cellphones as “possibly carcinogenic” was based on epidemiological data showing an increased risk among heavy cellphone users of a rare type of brain tumor called a glioma.

Last year, a 13-country study called Interphone, the largest and longest study of the link between cellphone use and brain

tumors, found no overall increased risk, but reported that participants with the highest level of cellphone use had a 40 percent higher risk of glioma. (Even if the elevated risk is confirmed, gliomas are relatively rare and thus individual risk remains minimal.)

Most major medical groups, including the American Cancer Society and the National Cancer Institute, have said the existing data on cellphones and health has been reassuring. For years, concerns about the health effects of cellphones have been largely dismissed because the radio frequency waves emitted from the devices are believed to be benign. Cellphones emit nonionizing radiation, waves of energy too weak to break chemical bonds or to set off the DNA damage known to cause cancers. Scientists said that there is no known biological mechanism to explain how nonionizing radiation might lead to cancer or other health problems.

The W.H.O. panel ruled only that cellphones be classified as Category 2B, meaning possibly carcinogenic to humans, a designation the panel has given to 240 other agents, including the pesticide DDT, engine exhaust,

lead and various industrial chemicals. Also on the list are two familiar foods, pickled vegetables and coffee, which the cellphone industry was quick to point out.

“This classification does not mean cellphones cause cancer,’’ John Walls, for The Wireless Association noted Federal Communications Commission and the Food and Drug Administration have concluded the weight of evidence does not link cellphones with cancer.

The Journal of the American Medical Association reported on research from the National Institutes of Health, which found less than an hour of cellphone use can speed up brain activity in the area closest to the phone antenna. The study was the first and largest to document the weak radio frequency signals from cellphones have a measurable effect on the brain. The research also offers a potential, albeit hypothetical, explanation for how low levels of nonionizing radiation could cause harm without breaking chemical bonds, by triggering formation of free radicals or inflammatory response in the brain.

Although the panel did not make specific recommendations to consumers, a representative did note that using a hands-free headset during a conversation or communicating via text message would be options for lowering radio frequency exposure.

Louis Slesin, editor of Microwave News, a newsletter that focuses on nonionizing radiation, said the fact that the W.H.O.’s cancer panel had expressed concern had the potential to change the debate about the health risks of cellphones. “It’s a wake-up call for the telecom industry and for the U.S. government to take cellphone radiation seriously,” he said. “The first step should be limiting the use of cellphones by children.”

“The debate will go on, except this is the first statement from the W.H.O. saying we should be careful with exposure to this kind of radiation’’. Dr. Lai added that the solution to concerns about cellphone risks is relatively simple. “A precautionary approach is the best policy,” he said. “If people use cellphones, they should consider using an earpiece. Just keep the phone away from the head.”

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The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

Give Birds a Break. Lock Up the Cat.

By NATALIE ANGIER

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he other day I looked out the window and saw a strange black cat sauntering through our yard. It was a beautiful animal, with bright penny eyes and fur that gleamed like a newly polished shoe, but still the sight turned me ghoulish. So I ran outside, hollered, stamped my feet and finally managed to chase the little witch’s sidekick away.

I am not superstitious. I have always been a cat lover. Yet if there is one thing I don’t want crossing my path right now, it’s another bored, carnivorous tourist, another recreational hunter on the prowl. Our yard is already a magnet for half a dozen neighborhood cats, all of whom I know to be pets with perfectly good homes of their own. But they are free to roam, while we, between our burbling bird fountain out front and our well-stocked bird feeders in back, just happen to look like a felid Six Flags — now more than usual with the busy fall migrations under way.

I would like to complain to the cats’ owners, demand that they come claw their property from mine, but I don’t. I’m a coward, complaining is unneighborly, and I’m all too aware that I could be accused of hypocrisy, of the pot calling the kitty black. Until she died two autumns ago, our cat Cleo was a notorious free ranger, yowling outside neighbors’ windows, climbing on top of their roofs. We tried to make her a housecat, but when she retaliated by using our living room as a giant cat box, we cravenly sighed and flung open the door.

Had I known then what I know now, I would have held my ground, plugged my nose, and kept Cleo inside. Experts disagree sharply these days over how to manage our multitudes of stray and feral cats, with some

saying off to the pound, others preaching a policy of catch, neuter and release, and everybody wishing there were other options to click. Yet when it comes to pet policy, and the question of whether it’s O.K. to let your beloved Cleo, Zydeco or Cocoa wander at will and have their Hobbesian fun, the authorities on both sides of the alley emphatically say, No. There are enough full-time strays; don’t add in your chipper. It is not fair to the songbirds and other animals that domestic cats kill by the billions each year. New research shows that neighborhoods like mine are particularly treacherous, Bermuda Triangles for baby birds.

Peter P. Marra, a research scientist at the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo, pointed out that cats were the only domesticated animal permitted to roam.

“Pigs have to stay in pens, chickens have to stay in pens,” he said. “Why are cats allowed to run around and do what their instincts tell them to do, which is rampage?”

It isn’t fair to the cat. Regular stints outdoors are estimated to knock three or more years off a pet cat’s life. “No parent would let a toddler outside the house to run free in traffic,” said Darin Schroeder, vice president for conservation advocacy at the American Bird Conservancy in Washington. “A responsible owner shouldn’t do it with a pet.”

In the view of many wildlife researchers, a pet cat on a lap may be a piece of self-cleaning perfection, but a pet cat on the loose is like a snakefish or English ivy: an invasive species. Although domestic cats have been in this country since the colonial era, they are thought to be the descendants of a Middle Eastern species of wild cat, and there is nothing quite like them native to North

America. As a result, many local prey species are poorly equipped to parry a domestic cat’s stealth approach. “People fool themselves into believing that by simply putting a bell on a cat they could prevent mortality to birds,” Mr. Schroeder said. “But a bell ringing means nothing to a bird.”

Moreover, free-ranging domestic cats are considered subsidized predators. They eat cat food at home, and then hunt just for sport, a strategy that allows them to exist at densities far greater than carnivores achieve in nature. “It’s estimated that there are 117 million to 150 million free-ranging cats” in the United States, Dr. Marra said. “They’re the most abundant carnivore in North America today.”

Yet for all their indefatigable stalking, cats will rarely take on the most cursed vermin in our midst. “The myth has been propagated that urban roaming cats do a lot to control the rat population,” Mr. Schroeder said. “But science has shown that cats don’t predate on rats, especially not the rather large variety seen in our cities.”

Cats’ toll on birds is a less mythical matter. In one famous study reported in the journal Nature, Kevin R. Crooks of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Michael E. Soulé of the Wildlands Project in Colorado looked at the population dynamics among cats, coyotes and scrub birds in 28 “urban habitat fragments” of Southern California.

In the developments to which coyotes had access, free-ranging cats were rare and avian diversity high. The coyotes ate cats but rarely bothered with birds. Where coyotes were excluded, cats ranged free and bird diversity dropped.

Very likely, the cats got the young. As

it happens, many temperate-zone birds go through a dangerous time early in life, when they are too big for the nest but still poor at flying. The fledglings spend their time on the ground, hiding in bushes and waiting for their parents to come feed them. People come upon the baby birds and think, poor dear, it’s fallen from its nest, but no, this is the system. “They’re incredibly vulnerable,” Dr. Marra said, “and in high-cat densities, the fledglings get nailed.”

In a newly completed study, Dr. Marra and his students used radio transmitters to track fledgling survival in two Washington suburbs: Bethesda and my own Takoma Park. The towns are similar socioeconomically and demographically, but while much of Takoma Park is crawling with outdoor cats, many streetscapes in Bethesda are, for reasons that remain unclear, largely cat-free. At least partly as a result of this discrepancy, Dr. Marra said, fledgling survivorship among Bethesda birds is about 55 percent, similar to what you would see in a natural population.

But for birds that happen to be born in my tree-lined paradisiacal hamlet, only 10 percent last long enough to take wing.

There are ways to keep a cat happy inside. Becky Robinson, the founder and president of Alley Cat Allies, who has taken in five strays, recommends any number of the increasingly popular “exclosures,” plastic pods that you pop into your window for the cat to enter and watch the world, or snaky mesh cages that you can even take camping.

I’m relieved to report that our new cat, Manny Jr., is content with our screened-in porch and the many hunting opportunities our home affords. Sorry, but the crickets are fair game.

Pets on Planes Pose Danger, Doctors Say

By RONI CARYN RABIN

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irst peanuts. Now pets.

Air passengers with peanut allergies often have to make special arrangements before flying, but as airlines have started allowing pets in the passenger cabin, many more travelers are being exposed to unnecessary health risks, several Canadian doctors maintain.

In an editorial last week in The Canadian Medical Association Journal, the physicians called for banning pets from airplane passenger cabins, warning that exposure to animals can set off discomfort, asthma attacks or even life-threatening reactions. ‘’Pets can be accommodated comfortably and safely in airplane cargo holds, which is where they belong,’’ the doctors

wrote.

One in 10 people have allergies to animals, and for some, exposure to dogs and cats can set off an asthma attack or a lifethreatening reaction like anaphylaxis, said Dr. Matthew B. Stanbrook, the journal’s deputy scientific editor and an asthma specialist.

The editorial was in response to Air Canada’s decision last summer to start allowing small pets, including cats, dogs and birds, to travel in the passenger cabin.

Many United States airlines have similar policies. ‘’The thing about allergies is they’re unpredictable,’’ Dr. Stanbrook said. ‘’You can have mild reactions for a long time and then have a severe one -- it’s hard to predict.’’

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

36 Hours in

By BARBARA IRELAND

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T Niagara Falls, Falls the United States is the poor relation and Canada is king. Nature gave Canada the wide-angle view of the majestic waterfall that straddles the border between the two countries, and the Canadians’ commercial bet on tourism landed most of the visitor comforts on their side of the Niagara River. American reliance on industry, however, ended in Rust Belt ruin. Yet the story isn’t so simple. Casinos, highrise hotels and hucksterish come-ons have so proliferated in Niagara Falls, Ontario, that it risks feeling like a tired amusement park. Meanwhile, in Niagara Falls, New York, the visitor who ventures inside the shabby, underfinanced state park is surprised to discover vestiges of something like a natural landscape. The party is in Canada. The real feel of the river, in all its awesome power, is more accessible in the United States. Hop back and forth to get the best of both Niagaras and see for yourself.

Friday 5 p.m.

1) FEET ACROSS THE BORDER Cars sometimes line up for hours to cross the international border at the Rainbow Bridge, a few hundred yards downriver from the falls. But on the walkway it’s a breeze — a 10-minute stroll for two quarters, American or Canadian (niagarafallsbridges.com).

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Niagara Falls

Customs agents at each end are pedestrian-friendly, though you must have your passport. If you’re staying on the American side, make your first crossing now. If your hotel is in Canada, wait until tomorrow. Either way, this is one of the most scenic saunters you will ever take.

6 p.m.

2) BRINKMANSHIP Push into the crowds on the riverfront walkway in Canada and see the whole geological spectacle at once.

The imposing cascade on the left, 850 feet wide, is the American Falls. The supercharged one on the right, nearly half a mile wide, is the Horseshoe, often called the Canadian Falls although it touches both countries. Stop at the Horseshoe brink and wait your turn to be doused at the rail by spray from thousands of tons of water plunging down every second. Impressed? This thundering mass is only half of the river’s natural flow. The other 50 percent (75 percent in the off-season) is channeled underground to hydroelectric plants.

7 p.m.

3) WINE AND BACON From the terrace at Edgewaters Tap & Grill (6342 Niagara Parkway; 905-356-2217; niagaraparks.com/dining), the tourist hordes below seem far away. Relax and sample one of the Niagara Region wines, like the Inniskillin Riesling (35 Canadian dollars a bottle, about the same in U.S. dollars). For a casual dinner, try the hearty Great Canadian Sandwich “EH” (14.49 dollars), made with the meaty and flavorful Canadian bacon hard to find south of the border. Afterward, explore the surrounding shady Queen Victoria Park, where gracious landscaping reflects the English style.

9 p.m.

4) OVER THE TOP You want to hate Clifton Hill, a garish strip of fun houses, glow-inthe-dark miniature-golf palaces, 4-D theaters, wax museums and noisy bars. But tackiness on this level cries out to be experienced. So watch a multinational crowd shovel tickets into blinking game machines at the Great Canadian Midway. Observe the storyhigh monster chomping a hamburger atop the House of Frankenstein. Shop

for maple candy and a moose puppet. And pay 9.99 Canadian dollars at the SkyWheel Ferris wheel (4960 Clifton Hill; 905-358-3676; cliftonhill. com) for five vertiginous revolutions and a wide-angle view of the colored lights projected nightly on the falls.

(Oh right, there are waterfalls here.

Remember?)

Saturday 10 a.m.

5) THE CENTRAL PARK Frederick Law Olmsted and Frederic Church were among the 19thcentury champions of a radical idea: public parks at Niagara Falls that would erase a clutter of factories and tourist traps (at some locations, visitors paid to see the falls through a peephole in a fence). The Free Niagara movement succeeded in both Canada and the United States, and on the American side Olmsted designed landscapes at the crest of both waterfalls and on Goat Island, which separates them.

Explore the woods and walkways of the resulting Niagara Falls State Park (716-278-1796; niagarafallsstatepark. com) to find what remains of the original Niagara, breathtakingly close to the river’s edge and with commercialism pushed back. For an enticing mix of quiet glades and furious rapids, venture out over charming pedestrian bridges to the tiny Three Sisters Islands above the thunderous Horseshoe.

1 p.m.

6) WINGS OPTIONAL Buffalo chicken wings were invented just 20 miles away in the city of Buffalo, and the menu at the Top of the Falls restaurant (in the state park;

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The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

716-278-0340; spicy wings $11.50) won’t let you forget it. Partake or not; alternatives include salads, burgers and wraps.

2 p.m.

7) WHY THE WATERFALL? You’ll hunt in vain on both sides of the river for a straightforward geological explanation of Niagara Falls. At the Niagara Gorge Discovery Center in the park on the New York side ($3), look selectively at the displays and ask questions to tease out the basic facts. What’s falling is the water of the Great Lakes. The falls are on the move upriver, receding as much as six feet a year. There’s a giant whirlpool where they took a sharp turn 40 centuries ago. A Canadian attempt at explaining Niagara, a film called “Niagara’s Fury” (niagarasfury.com), which is shown in a building near the Horseshoe’s crest, is entertaining for children but not especially informative, mixing cartoon stereotypes with snippets of textbook language. Outside the Discovery Center, a trail heads toward the Niagara Gorge, where hikers get within a few feet of the largest standing, river-rapids waves in North America. Don’t bring the kayak: these rapids are Class 6.

3 p.m.

8) THE CLOSE-UP Many of the contrived attractions at Niagara Falls are overhyped and disappointing. But the Maid of the Mist tour boats ($13.50 from the American side; 16.50 dollars from the Canadian; maidofthemist.com) have been satisfying customers since 1846. Chug out to the base of the Horseshoe on one of these sturdy craft, struggle to look up

170 feet to the top through the splashing torrents, and you’ll grasp the power of what brought you here. Go from the American dock. Not only is the wait likely to be shorter, but at the end of the ride, you can hang on to your flimsy slicker (included in the fee) and take a wet but exhilarating hike to the base of the American Falls.

7 p.m.

9) CULINARY CANADA AG, the soothing, upscale restaurant in the Sterling Inn & Spa (5195 Magdalen Street, Niagara Falls, Ontario; 289-292-0000; sterlingniagara.com) serves imaginative dishes using seasonal Canadian ingredients, paired with local wines. One summer menu included basil-and-potato-encrusted Lake Huron trout and pork tenderloin stuffed with macerated Niagara orchard fruits (each 28 Canadian dollars). The desserts are good, but if you’re not up for one, you can get by on the eye candy of the red, white and crystal dining room.

Sunday 10 a.m.

10) VINEYARDS HAVEN Leave the falls behind and drive north in Canada on the lovely Niagara Parkway. Beyond placid Queenston,

where an American attack was turned back in the War of 1812, the Niagara River turns relatively tame, and wineries, peach orchards, manorlike houses and an inviting bicycle path line the road.

The tasting rooms pour chardonnays, pinot noirs and the regional specialty, ice wine. At Inniskillin ( 1499 Line 3, Niagara Parkway; 905-468-2187; inniskillin.com) tours and signboards explain grape-friendly local conditions; Reif Estate (15608 Niagara Parkway; 905-468-9463; reifwinery.com) has a gimmicky but pleasant Wine Sensory Garden. Peller Estates (290 John Street East; peller.com) pairs its vintages with an elegant restaurant. At Kurtz Orchards Gourmet Marketplace (16006 Niagara Parkway; 905-468-2937; kurtzorchards.com), you can munch enough free samples of breads, tapenades, jams, cheeses and nut butters to take you all the way to dinner.

IF YOU GO Sterling Inn & Spa (5195 Magdalen Street, Niagara Falls, Ontario; 877-783-7772; sterlingniagara.com), a former dairy building transformed into a boutique hotel, is an oasis of quiet and style at the edge of the tourist maelstrom. Its 41 spacious rooms start at around 200 Canadian dollars, about the same in U.S. dollars.

Doubletree Fallsview Resort & Spa (6039 Fallsview Boulevard, Niagara Falls, Ontario; 905-358-3817; niagarafallsdoubletree.com), an attractive six-year-old hotel on a hill overlooking the falls, has 224 rooms starting at 199 dollars.

The Giacomo (222 First Street, Niagara Falls, N.Y.; 716-299-0200; thegiacomo.com), in a renovated Art Deco office building near the Niagara Falls State Park, has butler service and 38 rooms starting at $199.

The San Juan Weeekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

13 EDUCATION

The Bilingual Advantage

By CLAUDIA DREIFUS

Q

. How did you begin studying bilingualism?

A. You know, I didn’t start trying to find out whether bilingualism was bad or good. I did my doctorate in psychology: on how children acquire language. When I finished graduate school, in 1976, there was a job shortage in Canada for Ph.D.’s. The only position I found was with a research project studying second language acquisition in school children. It wasn’t my area.

But it was close enough.

As a psychologist, I brought neuroscience questions to the study, like “How does the acquisition of a second language change thought?” It was these types of questions that naturally led to the bilingualism research.

The way research works is, it takes you down a road. You then follow that road.

Q. So what exactly did you find on this unexpected road?

A. As we did our research, you could see there was a big difference in the way monolingual and bilingual children processed language. We found that if you gave 5- and 6-year-olds language problems to solve, monolingual and bilingual children knew, pretty much, the same amount of language.

But on one question, there was a difference. We asked all the children if a certain illogical sentence was grammatically correct: “Apples grow on noses.” The monolingual children couldn’t answer. They’d say, “That’s silly” and they’d stall. But the bilingual children would say, in their own words, “It’s silly, but it’s grammatically correct.” The bilinguals, we found, manifested a cognitive system with the ability to attend to important information and ignore the less important.

Q. How does this work — do you understand it?

A. Yes. There’s a system in your brain, the executive control system. It’s a general manager. Its job is to keep you focused on what is relevant, while ignoring distractions.

It’s what makes it possible for you to hold two different things in your mind at one time and switch between them.

If you have two languages and you use them regularly, the way the brain’s networks work is that every time you speak, both languages pop up and the executive control system has to sort through everything and attend to what’s relevant in the moment. Therefore the bilinguals use that system more, and it’s that regular use that makes that system more efficient.

Q. One of your most startling recent findings is that bilingualism helps forestall the symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease. How did you come to learn this?

A. We did two kinds of studies. In the first, published in 2004, we found that nor-

mally aging bilinguals had better cognitive functioning than normally aging monolinguals. Bilingual older adults performed better than monolingual older adults on executive control tasks. That was very impressive because it didn’t have to be that way. It could have turned out that everybody just lost function equally as they got older.

That evidence made us look at people who didn’t have normal cognitive function.

In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer’s patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer’s symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn’t mean that the bilinguals didn’t have Alzheimer’s. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer.

Q. So high school French is useful for something other than ordering a special meal in a restaurant?

A. Sorry, no. You have to use both languages all the time. You won’t get the bilingual benefit from occasional use.

Q. One would think bilingualism might help with multitasking — does it?

A. Yes, multitasking is one of the things the executive control system handles. We wondered, “Are bilinguals better at multitasking?” So we put monolinguals and bilinguals into a driving simulator. Through headphones, we gave them extra tasks to do — as if they were driving and talking on cellphones. We then measured how much worse their driving got. Now, everybody’s driving got worse. But the bilinguals, their driving didn’t drop as much. Because adding on another task while trying to concentrate on a driving problem, that’s what bilingualism gives you — though I wouldn’t advise doing this.

Q. Has the development of new neuroimaging technologies changed your work?

A. Tremendously. It used to be that we could only see what parts of the brain lit up when our subjects performed different tasks.

Now, with the new technologies, we can see how all the brain structures work in accord with each other.

In terms of monolinguals and bilin-

guals, the big thing that we have found is that the connections are different. So we have monolinguals solving a problem, and they use X systems, but when bilinguals solve the same problem, they use others. One of the things we’ve seen is that on certain kinds of even nonverbal tests, bilingual people are faster. Why? Well, when we look in their brains through neuroimaging, it appears like they’re using a different kind of a network that might include language centers to solve a completely nonverbal problem. Their whole brain appears to rewire because of bilingualism.

Q. Bilingualism used to be considered a negative thing — at least in the United States.

Is it still?

A. Until about the 1960s, the conventional wisdom was that bilingualism was a disadvantage. Some of this was xenophobia.

Thanks to science, we now know that the opposite is true.

Q. Many immigrants choose not to tea-

ch their children their native language. Is this a good thing?

A. I’m asked about this all the time.

People e-mail me and say, “I’m getting married to someone from another culture, what should we do with the children?” I always say, “You’re sitting on a potential gift.”

There are two major reasons people should pass their heritage language onto children. First, it connects children to their ancestors. The second is my research: Bilingualism is good for you. It makes brains stronger. It is brain exercise.

Q. Are you bilingual?

A. Well, I have fully bilingual grandchildren because my daughter married a Frenchman. When my daughter announced her engagement to her French boyfriend, we were a little surprised. It’s always astonishing when your child announces she’s getting married. She said, “But Mom, it’ll be fine, our children will be bilingual!”

14

The San Juan Weeekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

LETTERS PR Police: Gestapo of Gardening A generation ago New York City cops had to be at least six feet tall, but Mayor Lindsay lowered that to accommodate Puerto Rican applicants, New Yorkers weren’t pleased.

But now penepeísta police are seven feet huge and make gorrillas on National Geographic look effete, not that apes are violent creatures. Was it a covert breeding initiative or the anabolics or both? All over a generation.

And what are such doltish incarnations good for? If anything.

At 84 my mother-in-law is an outspoken gringa. In the United States it’s a birthright to talk back to any authority. “It’s in the Constitution,” she’ll tell you.

But in Puerto Rico that’s disrespect for authority, goes back to all the tyrannical governors we had under the Spaniard Crown, was downplayed by the populares, but the NPP fascist atavism means it’s back with a vengeance. If you’re young and a denizen of Llorens of Canales, expect a slap in the face, worse if you’re uppity. Otherwise they roll their eyes and throw the book at you. Laws are enacted here in a form that the bureaucrats can always crush you, one way or the other, neither fundamental fairness nor a balance of rights or interests is countenanced. The name of the game is intimidation, to compel absolute and immediate obedience.

In tropical settings like Brazil, Colombia Polynesia and Hawaii people relish veritable jungles of green and flowers bedecking homes and country clubs and all over parks. Eye the homes of the honchos in the Colombian soaps. In the sultry Pacific flowery vines called maile totally fill out anything they can grow onto, you don’t even plant them, they just show up.

On the continental United States vegetation is predominantly meagre and sparse because a temperate clime just doesn’t muster the rainfall. And in any event, everything just freezes away in January. So Americans have gotten used to lawn-and-flowerpot gardening. But in Puerto Rico the mainland paradign is almost a given.

And an obsession for the penepeístas. Like Kenneth McClintock wants Daylight Saving Time here and Common Law inheritance, even while all you get out of the former in this latitude is confusion and needless paperwork and the Justinian/Napoleon Civil Code is the Löwenbräu of law.

My mom-in-law lived the better of two decades in rural Hawaii. Till Hubby passed in the early 90s, she’s been here ever since. Her Guaynabo home was surrounded by lush flowery bushes---no, no grass---every variety of amapola, she loves them, maile all over the rejas and a couple of Amazonian-looking trees and two palms. Exuberant, primeval if you will, the last whim of an old lady.

One late morning the incridible Hulk showed, wearing a fearsome black Municipal Police uniform and on a gigantic Harley-Davidson, that would’ve been the envy of Hell’s Angels, plastered with assurances of PROTECCION and SEGURIDAD and clanged at the gate, but my mother-in-law’s hard of hearing and Joy Brown was on

the radio. Then the threats, as the neighbor later reported, if she didn’t open up, he’d be back with “una orden del Tribunal.” Curiously, he just lingered there, in due course she went to the marquesina to switch the laundry to the drier.

As she focused on his large incongruent silhouette against the bright morning clouds, he ranted in redundant bureaucratese that, “the premises of her property” were unkept and that she had ten days to hand the job over to a gardener or he’d be back. Then he got back on his Harley and roared away, it was surreal.

In the afternoon she found what looked like a parking ticket in two copies illegibly scribbled over. She came close to throwing in out, but instead left it in the pantry.

In the evening she took another look at it, the readable printed side. The heading said Municipal Government, but no address or phone or name of anybody even.

It went on that---her name was the only legible handwriting---she had ten days to do whatever and after that she’d get fined $200 every day for ten days running and then jailed for a month to six months if she didn’t pay the up to $2,000 fine and then the Court would take over her home. All this for gardening?

Well, it is a crazy island. Six of the eleven Barrio Pájaros Massacre indicted were I heard let free and a guy got a twelve-year sentence for dragging a horse more that manslaughter or murder two would’ve gotten him and the senators are locking each other up, like it’s a little civil war, but surely haven’t figured that at that rate by 2012 won’t be much of a Senate left.

What was so wrong with the gardening anyway? It was all flowers and green and trees, like back in Hawaii.

Not a Spartan lawn like the neighbors with their few zinnias and their paved-over back yard.

So she bent with the breeze and had the gardener trim everything somewhat. The week went by, deadline was Friday and Saturday Hulk didn’t show, she put the affair behind her. Only Monday she found $600 in fines tucked into the lock of her rejas.

My husband and I rushed over, but whom to phone or call on? After a rummaging through the phone book and treading the computer answerings, we finally made it to the Municipal Police Officer of Public and Community Matters, yes the inevitable pompous title. Are you running all this? we asked the pregnant lady. No, it’s the police officer, Hulk, he has the last word. What qualified him as an authority on gardening? He’s been working at that many months now. Whom may we appeal judgement to? Nobody, his supervisor won’t even talk to you.

You may appeal the fine though. But doesn’t a citizen have a right to challenge a determination before getting pushined for not abiding by it. Must you risk a $2,000 fine for a gardening crime. Non-aggravated assault fetches you a $200 fine, a tenth, overgrown foliage is ten times worse that beating a human being. Hulk would “orient” my mom-in-law Tuesday, we were assured.

At noon Hulk showed up, revving the Harley to announce his presence. The gardener was already there, my husband instructed the latter to do whatever the former dictated. We were aghast that Hulk demanded everything be razed to the ground.

Everything, my mother-in-law’s lush ferns, all

the bushes with the different vivid colors of amapolas, tha canarias, even the imported maile all over the rejas, everything. She looked like she’d have a heart attack, we had to take her inside. The two trees on the property could stay in place, Hulk voiced with mock magnanimity. Then he wrote out another $200 fine and would every day till his instructions were completely obeyed. Than, in a cocky stance, conceded the $2,000 in fines would “be filed” upon full complaince.

I stayed the night with her, she was so distraught, angry, anyone would be, and the garden is so much of an older person’s life.

Next morning early another policeman arrived, wielding a fresh $200 fine. He came in a car with a second cop who stayed in it. Compared to gargantuan Hulk he looked like a rodent. But it seemed it was possible to talk to this fellow without enraging him.

Mom-in-law asked Mouse what was wrong with her garden, that full and lush means more flowers, more green, less greenhouse effect than trim lawns and potted plants. He answered that a cop isn’t a gardening authority, so they keep it simple, when there’s overgrowth you just order it all down and let the chips fall where they may, that criminals hide in bushes, as do vermin.

And how, on an island where three citizens are butchered every day, a dozen vehicles stolen or carjacked, half a dozen women raped, and so on, is the expense of such tenacious---and ridiculous---gardening policing justified.

Mouse responded that many unattended outdoors turn out pushers’ lairs and that crime, drugs and gangsters specially, is intractable, you can’t really make a dent in it, but gardening, making sure urbanizations appear looked after, is where law enforcement can make a difference. All this with a straight face. The fellow than pointed out that the two trees were being left because a new law requires a premit to saw down any tree, that before the trees weren’t spared either. That Hulk had told him it’s best to be ruthless because if there’s nothing left, you don’t have to worry about it for a year or so.

The gardener left the premises a bleak moonscape, as instructed. Hulk was happy, he even congratulated the gardener and Mom-in-law for a job well done. She close to snarled at him.

Because bare terrain like that soon transmogrifies into a weed inferno, for Mother’s Day we spent $300 on a new lawn for her. But she’s not hosing it morning and late afternoon, as instructed. She hates lawns. .

Guillaumette Tyle, Puerta de Tierra

The San Juan Weekly Send your opinions and ideas to: The San Juan Weeekly PO BOX 6537 Caguas PR 00726 Or e-mail us at:

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San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

15

FASHION & BEAUTY

The Case for Laugh Lines

By DOMINIQUE BROWNING

T

HANK goodness it was drilled into me to greet people with the words, “How do you do?” Because these days, the question that springs more frequently to mind is, “Who are you?” Not because my memory is going, but because many of my acquaintances are erasing the traces of identity, if not life, from their faces.

Now, before anyone starts turning defensive, let me turn defensive. This is not an essay about why I am categorically against cosmetic surgeries. I am as supportive as the next gal if a certain someone feels so bad about her neck that she won’t leave home, or if another is so heavy-lidded that every time he blinks he misses half the picture. Plastic surgeons have done wondrous things.

As for the proliferation of smaller cosmetic procedures? The ones your dentist offers to do while he’s in the vicinity of your mouth anyway? The injections of fillers to plump up lips, smooth wrinkles, pad out laugh lines?

At this point, it’s a wonder that the salesclerk at Barneys isn’t offering to shoot up your face while you’re trying on hats.

Again, I’m not against it. Well, maybe Botox. I’m the one to call for a rant when my friends are teetering at the brink of succumbing to the needle. I mean, who wants to inject a poison so lethal that it paralyzes nerves, sending tiny muscles to atrophy?

I’m not categorically against a helping hand, so long as it has finesse. My current rule of thumb, when confronted with an enhanced face, is that if I find myself vaguely wondering whether there was work, the alteration was well done. But these days, I’m wondering why — why did you do it?

We’ve gone too far. I’m becoming very, very scared.

We’ve reached a stage where cosmetic surgery is so readily available that in certain circles it is expected of women and men to avail themselves of these age-deniers. (You cannot call them youth-enhancers when you are no longer young.) If you choose not to partake of the benefits of needle and knife, you are judged to be making a statement. You are taking a position against the current standards of beauty.

We have triggered a weird, collective, late-onset body dysmorphia. What’s worse is that our anxieties about aging have trickled into our children’s generation, so that the mantra about cosmetic procedures even among some 30-year-olds is “intervention early and often.”

I began to worry about all this a year ago, when I was on a book tour. I love to read aloud and watch people’s faces as they listen. Within weeks, I was profoundly in touch with my inner ham. Sometimes, I found my-

self straining for a response. I would look out at the audience, hearing laughter and murmurs, but seeing only stern masks. Yet afterward, those same faces would be telling me how much they had loved my presentation. It took awhile to realize that people were having trouble expressing emotion in their features.

This is also when I began to develop the “who are you?” problem.

Too many people have had procedures that have gone awry. They look strange, and tragic. Is this inevitable? You do one thing, the effects begin to fade, you do another, and so on. You get puffy. You get rigid. Or you slide. And I wonder. Has no one said “stop”?

Has no one, particularly the one wielding the needle, gently advised against further work?

It used to be an unusual sight to spot cosmetic surgery addicts, but it has become astonishingly common.

We are now in the position of watching politicians and newscasters talk about disturbing issues — like, say, the state of our education system, or environmental degradation — yet they cannot muster signals of concern, much less dismay.

One evening, I catch a segment on television about nuclear disarmament. A celebrity spokesperson makes a case for the laying down of arms, and part of my brain clicks into gear: she’s smart and passionate. But another part of me is distracted, because the visuals don’t match the message. Her forehead isn’t wrinkling with concern; her cheeks aren’t crinkling with smiles; her eyes aren’t narrowing in suspicion at trick questions. In fact, no matter what she says, her face is frozen in place. It is grotesquely fascinating — and undermining. Before I know it, the interview is over. The medium overtook the message.

This is counterproductive. Humans are hard-wired to read facial expressions. Those smiles, frowns, grimaces and gazes are

rts as important as words in touching hearts rs and minds. Politicians and newscasters ut cannot look wide-eyed and startled about everything; soon, they just look comical.

Photographers (and the editors whoo publish them) have created an entirelyy new class of gotcha! moments, capitali-zing on our collective shock at surgical distortions. Entire Web sites are devoted to knife-spotting. Actresses, once beautiful or adorable, have so ruined their faces that I wince when I see them onscreen.

Celebrities are a small part of the problem, except that they have a pesky way of influencing regular people.

Extreme, but commonplace, alterations now raise a welter of tricky issues around personal interaction, not the und least of which is that one cannot go around asking “who are you?” to people one has spent hours with at dinner parties, or colleagues one has bumped into for years in company hallways.

Bigger problems are surfacing. How do you say to a friend, who secretly disappeared to have her face lifted, that she has made a mistake? You don’t, of course. It is too late.

And what about the friend who started with a discreet tuck, or a few lines of filler, and then crossed over into the danger zone?

You are watching a slow-motion wreck, but how do you warn her without offense? If her friends don’t, who will?

The best I’ve come up with is something along the lines of gently, pointedly, telling her she is beautiful, beloved and needs no further improvement.

Funny how this is a tougher subject to broach than almost any other. We find ourselves recalibrating the intimacy of friendships.

While once we may have been close enough to share personal tales of broken hearts or fears of going broke, we are unable to visit the issue of the broken self-image.

And that’s what this must be about. We ga in the mirror, and we loathe the evidengaze ce of aging. It is, surely, a change. It is even fri frightening.

Mortality heaves into view. So do unemployment — for women. There does se seems to be a double standard about aging an leadership. and Of course, vanity is an equal-opportunity predator; more and more men are turning to co cosmetic surgery. Still, most men can let themsel go naturally into their mature years as selves wi elders. But women who don’t adjust their wise fac are letting themselves go, naturally. faces Many people assume that in saying no to knife and needle, you are making a feminis statement; such is the lackluster aura that nist ha hangs over that label. Feminism has nothing to do with it. Feminists worry why women sti make only 77 cents to every dollar a man still m makes, not whether women are going broke

Botox on Botox.

This is about the birth of yet another “ism” among boomers: ageism. We’ve crossed a line; we are angry that we’re growing old. We’re angry at people who remind us what aging looks like. We are colluding in an elaborate social compact to convince ourselves that we don’t have to go there. And no one wants to say that the Emperor and Empress look better with naked faces.

Several years ago, I stumbled on a book

by Diana Vreeland. She was a terrible, hilarious snob, and a great believer in inauthenticity. Her memos to her staff at Vogue in the 1960s are legendary. She lamented the state of women with “broken hair, no hairdresser, no money, no vitality — and the will to live is gone.” In 1967, she wrote: “In my opinion in the year 2001 so many physical problems will have been surmounted that a woman’s beauty will be a dream that will be completely obtainable ... the various feminine rhythms ... will have been removed ... the future holds a golden world.”

The woman who did more to set in gear the feminine rhythms of the fashion industry did not live to see how far appearances could be manipulated: beyond her wildest dreams.

But she would have been dismayed by the messy reality.

I get it: some people simply don’t want to go quietly into the years. It is too much to ask that we embrace our changing faces — that we celebrate our mother’s beauty in our own graying hair, that we remember the joy that created those laugh lines, that we recognize our father’s forehead in the way ours wrinkles when we are perplexed, or we catch a glimpse of our aunt’s eyes when our own crinkle with delight.

But could we just ignore the signs of aging? I’m a big believer in denial. It gets a bad rap, but it is often a healthy response.

In this, as in so many matters, we could just keep calm and carry on. And if the will to live flags? Hey, make mine an old-fashioned with rye whiskey, please.

Kitchen

16

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

Puttanesca Sauce Dressed for Spring

By MELISSA CLARK

P

UTTANESCA is a sauce that plies its trade all year round, heedless of the season. The ingredients — pantry staples including canned tomatoes, capers, anchovies, garlic, red pepper flakes and olives — are at the ready whenever the desire strikes.

But I wanted a puttanesca dressed for spring, with the spicy pungency that makes the dish seductive freshened up with something lively, green and biting.

Green garlic, which was just beginning to hit the farmers’ markets, would do just that.

Harvested when immature and sold with its edible scallion-like stalks attached, it’s brighter, tangier and grassier than regular garlic (which ripens fully and is then cured) but also sweeter and more mild, lacking the musky intensity of mature cloves.

Canned tomatoes would squelch its delicacy. So I banned them from the pan, and played up the green factor with the most verdant thing I could think of at that moment: spinach.

Spinach and garlic are such a classic combination. Spinach is a practical addition, too, turning a pasta dish into a one-pot meal, no need for a separate vegetable.

In a perfect world, I would have used the crinkly, sandy, sturdy spinach leaves from the farmers’ market. These have a richer, fuller, more mineral flavor than baby spinach from the supermarket. But the bagged baby spinach that I had worked perfectly. And since it did not need rinsing in three changes of water like the farmers’ market kind, it took 10 seconds from bag to pan.

Pushing the green envelope, I used green Cerignola olives in place of the puttanesca black, and added basil and scallions.

Herbal and bracing, it had a fresh, earthy taste and a pleasing, slippery texture from the supple spinach. And unlike the racy tartness of the traditional puttanesca, this one had a gentle sweetness from the green garlic, which caramelized and melted into the body of the sauce: a puttanesca perfect for spring.

Pasta With Green Puttanesca Time: 20 minutes Kosher salt, to taste 1 pound spaghettini or spaghetti 1/2 cup extra-virgin olive oil 10 anchovy fillets 1/4 cup drained capers 1 cup pitted and sliced green Cerignola or Picholine olives 10 fat green garlic cloves, peeled, sliced 1/4-inch thick (or use 8 regular garlic cloves) 1/3 cup chopped scallions including

greens 1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes 12 cups baby spinach leaves (11 ounces) 1/2 cup torn basil leaves.

1. Bring a large pot of heavily salted water to a boil. Add the pasta and cook until it is not quite al dente, 5 to 8 minutes.

Reserve a cup of cooking water, then drain the pasta.

2. While the pasta is cooking, warm 1/4 cup of oil in a large Dutch oven over medium-high heat. Add the anchovies and

Tilapia Puttanesca 1 lb. fresh or frozen skinless tilapia fillets 1/8 tsp. salt 1/2 medium red onion, cut in wedges 1 Tbsp. olive oil 2 cloves garlic, minced 1 14.5-oz. can diced tomatoes 2 tsp. dried oregano, crushed 1/4 tsp. crushed red pepper 1/4 cup pitted kalamata olives 1 Tbsp. capers, drained (optional) 2 Tbsp. coarsely chopped fresh Italian (flat-leaf) parsley 1. Thaw fish, if frozen. Rinse; pat dry with paper towels. Sprinkle

with salt. Set aside.

2. In large skillet, cook onion in olive oil over medium heat 8 minutes or until tender; stirring occasionally. Stir in garlic, undrained tomatoes, oregano, and crushed red pepper. Bring to boiling; reduce heat. Simmer, uncovered, 5 minutes.

3. Add olives and capers to sauce. Top with tilapia fillets. Return sauce to boiling; reduce heat. Cook, covered, 6 to 10 minutes or until fish flakes when tested with fork. Remove fish. Simmer sauce, uncovered, 1 to 2 minutes more to thicken. To serve, spoon sauce over fish. Sprinkle with parsley. Makes 4 servings

capers. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the capers start to brown, about 3 minutes.

Add the remaining 1/4 cup oil, olives, garlic, scallions and red pepper flakes; increase heat to high if using green garlic (leave it at medium high for regular garlic) and cook until garlic is golden, 3 to 5 minutes.

Add the spinach and cook until wilted, 1 to 2 minutes. Add the pasta and toss for 1 minute. Add a splash of pasta cooking water if the pasta seems dry. Season with salt, if necessary. Toss in the basil leaves.

Yield: 4 to 6 servings.

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

17

Kitchen

Cornmeal and Flax-Crusted Cod or Snapper

By MARTHA ROSE SHULMAN

F

ish will not absorb much of the oil in which it is fried if the oil is properly heated. These crisp fillets are a great way to work flaxseeds, toasted or not, into a main dish.

1 1/2 pounds snapper or cod fillets Salt and freshly ground pepper 1/4 cup fine cornmeal (if you have only polenta or coarse cornmeal, you can grind it to a fine powder in a spice mill) 1/4 cup flaxseeds, untoasted or toasted, coarsely ground 1/4 cup all-purpose flour or rice flour 2 eggs, beaten 1/2 teaspoon freshly ground pepper 2 to 4 tablespoons canola oil Lemon wedges for serving 1. Heat a large, heavy cast-iron

skillet over medium-high heat (unless you’re planning to cook the fish later).

2. Pat the fish fillets dry, and season with salt and pepper. In a wide bowl, mix together the cornmeal, flaxseeds, and salt and pepper to taste.

3. Place the flour on a plate or in a baking dish. Beat the eggs in a wide bowl. Dredge the fillets first in the flour -- tap them to remove excess flour -- then in the egg, then in the cornmeal-flax mixture. If not cooking right away, place the fish on a baking sheet, uncovered, in the refrigerator.

4. Add 2 tablespoons canola oil to the hot pan. When it is rippling, carefully add as many fillets as will fit your pan. Cook four to five minutes on each side (depending on the thickness of the fillets) or until nicely browned. Remove from the pan, and keep warm in a low oven while you repeat with the remaining fish and oil, as necessary.

Serve hot, with lemon wedges.

Yield: Serves four.

Advance preparation: You can prepare this through Step 3 several hours before cooking the fish.

Nutritional information per serving (based on 2 tablespoons oil):

364 calories; 2 grams saturated fat; 4 grams polyunsaturated fat; 7 grams monounsaturated fat; 153 milligrams cholesterol; 16 grams carbohydrates; 3 grams dietary fiber; 138 milligrams sodium (does not include salt to taste); 39 grams protein

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The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

The Last Playboy: The High Life of Porfirio Rubirosa

By William Grimes

T

he cad, the bounder, the roué and the lothario. Where are they now, those male predators of yesteryear? Gone the way of the dodo.

Already an endangered species when the Charleston came into vogue, they vanished with the arrival of the playboy, a sleek, fast-moving animal perfectly adapted to the modern era of jet travel, nightclubs, film stars and gossip columns.

Porfirio Rubirosa - Rubi to his countless conquests and to grateful headline writers across the globe - stood head and shoulders above the rest of this international pleasure pack. A tireless presence at chic nightspots and watering holes, a relentless pursuer of women with huge bank accounts, he went on a lifelong tear that ended, fittingly, with a spectacular car crash in 1965 after a night of heavy drinking at a Paris club. Even his 28-year old wife - his fifth - agreed that Rubi would have wanted it that way.

As Shawn Levy amply documents in “The Last Playboy,” his bubbly, breathless and appropriately inconsequential biography, Rubirosa worked hard at having fun.

He found his vocation early. While attending school in Paris, he took every opportunity to haunt the nightclubs of Montmartre. “The only things that interested me were sports, girls, adventures, celebrities - in short, life,” he wrote in his memoirs. That version of life requires money, and Rubirosa, despite his polished manners and undeniable charm, had none. That changed when he caught the eye of the Dominican Republic’s new strongman, Rafael Trujillo, who saw in Rubirosa a potential ally who could win over the country’s golden youth to his regime.

For the next 30 years, Rubirosa profited by the connection, sometimes serving in di-

plomatic posts and, just as often, playing the unofficial role of goodwill ambassador and high-level fixer.

Rubirosa’s first audacious move was to marry Trujillo’s daughter, a potentially career-ending, or even life-ending, bit of chutzpah. In time, he would capture even bigger prizes. Danielle Darrieux, one of France’s biggest female film stars, became his second wife.

When, after the war, the couple were interviewed by Doris Duke, heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco fortune and one

of the richest women in the world, Rubirosa suddenly decided that the American version of the woman could be rather appealing, too. Marriage No. 3 took place in 1947, followed quickly by divorce and, in 1953, by marriage No. 4, to Barbara Hutton, another fabulously wealthy American heiress. All the while, Rubirosa pursued his side interests with zeal. “One woman is not enough for him,” Darrieux complained to the press. “A man like him needs a harem.”

What was the appeal? Levy, the author of “Rat Pack Confidential” and the film critic for The Portland Oregonian, makes a fairly convincing case that the Rubi magic came down to a combination

of charm, mystique and, quite possibly, ch physical attributes, not limited to Rubi’s phy darkly dark handsome features. (Levy writes that cheeky waiters referred to the largest ges pepper-mill in the house as “the Rubirosa.”)

Rubirosa spoke five languages, bir three thr of them fluently. His dress and his manners were impeccable. ma Rubirosa’s marriage to Hutton lasted 75 days da and netted the happy husband cash and property worth $3.5 million, enough to finance his polo ponies, tailored suits and lavish partiers for years to come. And Rubirosa, a superbly conditioned nightlife athlete, had lots left in him. Eartha Kitt, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, the Empress Soraya of Iran - there was scarcely an actress or princess alive whose name was not

linked with Rubirosa’s at some point in the 1950s and even the 1960s, when he began to slow down just a bit.

There’s some poetic justice in Rubirosa’s increasingly desperate attempts to keep up with his fifth wife, the French actress Odile Rodin. A ferocious nightclubber, she would frequently skip off to Paris, and the arms of her many male admirers, while Rubi stayed home in the suburbs, tending the garden and playing with his Chihuahua. He came to enjoy the simple pleasures, but then again, for Rubirosa, everything in life was simple. “Women like to be gay,” he once explained to a radio interviewer. “I like to be gay. They want to be happy. I try to make them happy.” That’s all there was to it.

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

19

3-D Starts to Fizzle, and Hollywood Frets something aspiring to be more than it is, they catch on very quickly.”

Muddying the picture is a contrast between the performance of 3-D movies in North America and overseas. If results are troubling domestically, they are the exact opposite internationally, where the genre is a far newer phenomenon.

Indeed, 3-D screenings powered “Stranger Tides” to about $256 million on its first weekend abroad; Disney trumpeted

By BROOKS BARNES and MICHAEL CIEPLY

H

as the 3-D boom already gone bust? It’s starting to look that way — at least for American moviegoers — even as Hollywood prepares to release a glut of the gimmicky pictures.

Ripples of fear spread across Hollywood last week after “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides,” which cost Walt Disney Studios an estimated $400 million to make and market, did poor 3-D business in North America. While event movies have typically done 60 percent of their business in 3-D, “Stranger Tides” sold just 47 percent in 3-D. “The American consumer is rejecting 3-D,” Richard Greenfield, an analyst at the financial services company BTIG, wrote of the “Stranger Tides” results.

One movie does not make a trend, but the Memorial Day weekend did not give studio chiefs much comfort in the 3-D department. “Kung Fu Panda 2,” a Paramount Pictures release of a DreamWorks Animation film, sold $53.8 million in tickets from Thursday to Sunday, a soft total, and 3-D was 45 percent of the business, according to Paramount.

Consumer rebellion over high 3-D ticket prices plays a role, and the novelty of putting on the funny glasses is wearing off, analysts say. But there is also a deeper problem: 3-D has provided an enormous boost to the strongest films, including “Avatar” and “Alice in Wonderland,” but has actually undercut middling movies that are trying to milk the format for extra dollars.

“Audiences are very smart,” said Greg Foster, the president of Imax Filmed Entertainment. “When they smell

the figure as the biggest international debut of all time.

With results like that at a time when movies make 70 percent of their total box office income outside North America, do tastes at home even matter?

After a disappointing first half of the year, Hollywood is counting on a parade of 3-D films to dig itself out of a hole.

From May to September, the typical summer season, studios will unleash 16 movies in the format, more than double the number last year. Among the most anticipated releases are “Transformers: Dark of the Moon,” due from Paramount on July 1, and Part 2 of Part 7 of the “Harry Potter” series, arriving two weeks later from Warner Brothers.

The need is urgent. The box-office performance in the first six months of 2011 was soft — revenue fell about 9 percent compared with last year, while attendance was down 10 percent — and that comes amid decay in home-entertainment sales. In all formats, including paid streaming and

DVDs, home entertainment revenue fell almost 10 percent, according to the Digital Entertainment Group.

The first part of the year held a near collapse in video store rentals, which fell 36 percent to about $440 million, offsetting gains from cut-price rental kiosks and subscriptions.

In addition, the sale of packaged discs fell about 20 percent, to about $2.2 billion, while video-on-demand, though growing, delivered total sales of less than a quarter of that amount.

At the box office, animated films, which have recently been Hollywood’s most reliable genre, have fallen into a deep trough, as the category’s top three performers combined — “Rio,” from Fox; “Rango,” from Paramount; and “Hop,” from Universal — have had fewer ticket buyers than did “Shrek the Third,” from DreamWorks Animation, after its release in mid-May four years ago.

“Kung Fu Panda 2” appears poised to become the biggest animated hit of the year so far; but it would have to stretch well past its own predecessor to beat “Shrek Forever After,” another May release, which took in $238.7 million last year.

For the weekend, “The Hangover: Part II” sold $118 million from Thursday to Sunday, easily enough for No. 1.

“Kung Fu Panda 2” was second. Disney’s “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” was third with $39.3 million for a new total of $152.9 million. “Bridesmaids” (Universal Pictures) was fourth with $16.4 million for a new total of about $85 million. “Thor” (Marvel Studios) rounded out the top five with $9.4 million for a new total of $160 million.

Studio chiefs acknowledge that the industry needs to sort out its 3-D strategy. Despite the soft results for “Kung Fu Panda 2,” animated releases have continued to perform well in the format, overcoming early problems with glasses that didn’t fit little faces. But general-audience movies like “Stranger Tides” may be better off the old-fashioned way.

“With a blockbuster-filled holiday weekend skewing heavily toward 2-D, and 3-D ticket sales dramatically underperforming relative to screen allocation, major studios will hopefully begin to rethink their 3-D rollout plans for the rest of the year and 2012,” Mr. Greenfield said on Friday.

Lady Gaga Album Zooms to Megahit Status

By BEN SISARIO

L

ittle Monsters, rejoice: Lady Gaga’s new album “Born This Way” is the fastest-selling album in six years.

“Born This Way” (Interscope), released on May 23, sold 1.108 million copies in the United States, Billboard reported on Tuesday evening, citing data from Nielsen SoundScan. That is the biggest take any album has had since 50 Cent sold 1.141 million copies of “The Massacre” in March 2005.

For Lady Gaga, the figures are both

slightly less and a lot more than had been predicted. Going into the week of release, industry projections were for about 700,000 records sold, but once Amazon put the album on sale for 99 cents — a surprise to Lady Gaga’s record label and management, in addition to her fans — expectations shot past one million. If the album had scanned 1.15 million copies, as Billboard predicted it might, “Born This Way” would have been the best-selling release since Eminem’s album “The Eminem Show” nine years ago.

Sales of “Born This Way” were also helped by a blitz of marketing through big-

box retailers, traditional media outlets like HBO and lots of new media partnerships, and by a strategy of stocking the album at thousands of nontraditional retail outlets, like Hudson News, Walgreens and CVS. The idea was to make the album available everywhere, Troy Carter, Lady Gaga’s manager, said in an interview on Tuesday.

“To purchase a CD now, there aren’tt a lot of places you can go,” Mr. Carter said..

“It’s Best Buy, it’s Target, it’s Wal-Mart. So our thing was, with Gaga being such a household name, being able to put her in places

where people shop. To be on an endcap at Whole Foods, if you see a Gaga CD, you might be familiar with her as an artist, and you might give it a chance.”

HEALTH & SCIENCE

20

U.S. Orders Review of Risks of Some Birth Control Pills

By BLOOMBERG NEWS

B

ayer’s birth control pills will be reviewed by regulators after some studies suggested they may cause more blood clots than competing medicines.

Two recent reports in the British Medical Journal found a twofold to threefold greater risk of blood clots in women taking pills like Bayer’s Yaz, the Food and Drug Administration said in a statement.

European regulators said last week that they were revising the products’ prescribing information to include the new safety findings.

While all birth control pills pose a risk of blood clots, the

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

F.D.A. review focuses on the hormone drospirenone, found in Bayer’s Yaz, Yasmin, Beyaz and Safyral. The agency expects to have results later this summer of an 800,000-person study it commissioned to examine the risks.

In the meantime, regulators said doctors and patients should watch for symptoms of blood clots, including leg or chest pain.

The Yaz family of products generated $1.47 billion in sales last year for Bayer, or 3.3 percent of the company’s revenue.

“Patient safety is Bayer’s top priority,” the company said in an e-mail. “Bayer’s analysis of the overall body of available scientific evidence continues to support its current assessment about the safety of its oral contraceptives.”

Fossil Extends Life Span of a Marine Predator

By SINDYA N. BHANOO

T

he largest animal species of the Cambrian period, a marine predator with a segmented body and a pair of grasping appendages, lived much longer than previously thought and grew to sizes much larger than previously known.

The animals, known as anomalocaridids, were thought to have gone extinct after the Cambrian period, 540 million to 500 million years ago. Now a newly discovered specimen indicates they lived 30 million years longer, into the Early Ordovician period.

The new specimen measures more than three feet in length; the biggest specimen previously known was about two feet long.

Derek Briggs, a paleontologist at Yale, and

Peter Van Roy, a paleontologist at Ghent University in Belgium, discovered it in southeastern Morocco and described their findings in the journal Nature. The pair also found more than 1,500 fossils of other soft-bodied marine animals, including sponges, horseshoe crabs and tube-dwelling worms, at the site.

Generally, soft-bodied animals do not preserve well, making intact fossils a rare find. The find in Morocco was unique because the fossils were trapped in sediment clouds that preserved the bodies extremely well, Dr. Briggs said.

When anomalocaridids were first described, in the late 1800s, their scaly appendages, found in isolation, were thought to be the legs of a shrimp species. The animal’s disclike head was also found in isolation, and some believed it might be a jellyfish.

A century later, in 1985, Dr. Briggs published a paper that correctly described the whole animal for the first time.

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

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HEALTH & SCIENCE

Space Shuttle Endeavor Returns to Earth

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

S

pace shuttle Endeavour and its six astronauts returned to Earth, closing out the next-to-last mission in NASA’s 30-year program with a safe middle-of-the-night landing.

Endeavour glided down onto the runway one final time under the cover of darkness, just as Atlantis, the last shuttle bound for space, arrived at the launch pad for the grand finale in five weeks.

Commander Mark Kelly — whose wife, wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, remained behind at her rehab center in Houston — brought Endeavour to a stop before hundreds of onlookers that included the four Atlantis astronauts who will take flight in July. He waited hours before calling her, so he wouldn’t wake her up.

Endeavour, the youngest of the shuttles with 123 million miles over 25 flights, is now bound for a museum in California, shipping out early next year.

“Your landing ends a vibrant legacy for this amazing vehicle that will long be remembered,” Mission Control told Kelly and his crewmates, who wrapped up U.S. construction at the International Space Station during the mission.

“It’s sad to see her land for the last time,” Kelly replied, “but she really has a great legacy.”

Thousands jammed Kennedy Space Center a few hours earlier to see Atlantis make its way to the launch pad, the last such trek ever by a shuttle.

Employees and their families lined the route Tuesday night as Atlantis crept out of the Vehicle Assembly Building a little after sunset, bathed in xenon lights.

“The show pretty much tells itself,” Atlantis’ commander, Christopher Ferguson, said as he waved toward his ship. “We’re going to look upon this final mission as a celebration of all that the space shuttle has accomplished over its 30-year life span.”

Bright lights also illuminated the landing strip for Kelly, who made the 25th night landing out of a total of 134 shuttle flights.

The Endeavour astronauts — all

experienced spacemen — departed the 220-mile-high orbiting outpost over the weekend. They installed a $2 billion cosmic ray detector, an extension beam and a platform full of spare parts, enough to keep the station operating in the shuttle-less decade ahead.

Their flight lasted 16 days and completed NASA’s role in the space station construction effort that began more than 12 years ago.

The official tally for Endeavour, after 19 years of flight, was 170 crew members, 299 days in space, 4,671 orbits of Earth and 122,883,151 miles.

Kelly was the last astronaut to exit Endeavour. He and his crew posed for pictures and signed autographs on the runway. Astronaut Gregory Chamitoff was so wobbly from weightlessness that he had to be supported by two colleagues, but he was determined to join in the event.

As Kelly thanked his crewmates live on NASA TV for their flawless performance, co-pilot Gregory Johnson leaned over to shout into the mike, “And our commander, we want to thank him, too.” Johnson and the rest of the crew were openly supportive, over the months, about Kelly’s decision to stick with the flight, despite his wife’s serious injury.

Giffords was shot in the head during a mass shooting in Tucson, Ariz., in January, but made a remarkable recovery and was able to attend the May 16 launch. The congresswoman did not travel to Florida for the landing because of the inconvenient hour, but Kelly’s two teenage daughters were on hand, along with his twin brother, Scott, also an astronaut.

Six hours after the 2:35 a.m. touchdown, Kelly had yet to call Giffords.

He didn’t want to wake her in her hospital room. He told his mother-in-law in a post-landing e-mail that he’d call the congresswoman following the morning news conference.

“What I’m going to say to her?” he said in response to a reporter’s question. “Really miss her and can’t wait to get back there tomorrow to see her.”

The astronauts will return to Houston on Thursday for a big welcome-home ceremony.

Endeavour, the second space

shuttle to be retired, will head to the California Science Center in Los Angeles after months of decommissioning.

Built to replace the destroyed Challenger, Endeavour first soared in 1992 on a satellite-rescue mission that saw a record-setting three spacewalkers grab the wayward craft. Other highlights for the baby of the shuttle fleet: the first repair mission to the Hubble Space Telescope in 1993, to fix its blurred vision, and NASA’s first flight to assemble the space station in 1998.

Its final journey featured four spacewalks, the last ones to be conducted by a shuttle crew. One of the spacewalking astronauts, Mike Fincke, set a U.S. career record of 382 days in space.

The flight also marked the first departure of a Russian Soyuz capsule during a shuttle visit to the space station, and the first call to space by a pope. Two Italians were aboard the shuttle-station complex when Pope Benedict XVI phoned from the Vatican on May 21.

Launch managers marveled Wednesday over how good Endeavour still looks.

“It looks like it’s ready to go do another mission,” Kelly noted. He said he’d fly the space shuttle every couple months if he could — heck, every week if possible. “But it’s 30 years old ... and we’ve got to grow and adapt and build new things.”

Atlantis will remain at Kennedy Space Center as a tourist stop, following one last supply run to the space station.

Liftoff is set for July 8.

Discovery, the fleet leader, retur-

ned from its final voyage in March. Its next stop is a Smithsonian Institution hangar outside Washington.

Moving Atlantis to the launch pad as Endeavour landed helped temper the sadness so many are feeling with one mission remaining, officials said.

Thousands of more layoffs loom once the shuttle program ends.

“It’s been a heck of a month in the last four hours,” observed launch manager Mike Moses, “and I think we’ve used up our overtime budget for the entire month.”

NASA is leaving the Earth-to-orbit business behind to focus on expeditions to asteroids and Mars. Private companies hope to pick up the slack for cargo and crew hauls to the space station.

But it will be a while following Atlantis’ upcoming flight — at least three years by one business’ estimate, five to seven years by Kelly’s — before astronauts ride on American rockets again.

Until then, Americans will continue hitching rides aboard Russian Soyuz capsules at the cost of tens of millions of dollars a seat.

“We’re in the process of transition now, and it’s going to be awkward,” Atlantis astronaut Rex Walheim said.

“But we’ll get to the other side and we’ll have new vehicles.

“I really do have to say, though, it’s going to be really hard to beat a vehicle that is so beautiful and majestic as that one is,” he said as Atlantis rolled to the pad behind him. “I mean, how can you beat that? An airplane sitting on the side of a rocket. It’s absolutely stunning.”

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The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

Can Turkey Unify the Arabs?

By ANTHONY SHADID

L

ESS than a mile from the Syrian frontier, in the land of Kemal Ataturk, Ahmed Sheikh Said defies the identities that borders inspire.

Mr. Said was born in the Syrian town of Azaz and raised across a line on the map in Kilis, Turkey. A grocer, he speaks Turkish like a native to his customers, while holding an ear open to the Arabic telecasts of Al Jazeera playing in his store. His wife and his mother are Turkish, but Arab blood runs through his veins, he says, “till the end of time.”

“The bread of Azaz comes from Kilis, and the bread of Kilis comes from Azaz,” said Mr. Said, whose shop sits just off a road that once carried the business of the far-flung Ottoman Empire and now marks Turkey’s limits. “We’re the same. We’re brothers. What really divides us?”

As the Arab world beyond the border struggles with the inspirations and traumas of its revolution — a new notion of citizenship colliding with the smaller claims of piety, sect and clan — something else is percolating along the old routes of that empire, which spanned three continents and lasted six centuries before Ataturk brought it to an end in 1923 with selfconscious revolutionary zeal.

It is probably too early to define identities emerging in those locales. But something bigger than its parts is at work along imperial connections that were bent but never broken by decades of colonialism and the cold war. The links are the stuff of land, culture, history, architecture, memory and imagination that remains the realm of scholarship and daily lives but often eludes the notice of a journalism marching to the cadence of conflict.

Even amid the din of the upheaval in the Arab world, that new sense of belonging represents a more pacific and perhaps more powerful undertow pulling in directions that call into question more parochial notions. The undertow intersects with the Arab revolution’s search for a new sense of self; it also builds on economic forces now reconnecting an older imperium, as well as on Turkey’s new dynamism and on efforts to bring reality to what has long been nostalgia.

Its echoes are heard in the borderlands like Gaziantep, near Mr. Said’s shop, where businessman can haggle in a patois of English, Turkish, Arabic and even Kurdish. It is seen in the blurring of arbitrary lines where the Semitic script of

Arabic and Kurdish tangles with the Latin script of Turkish across the borders with Syria and Iraq. It is noticed along the frontiers where Arab and Turkish nationalism, pan-Islamism and a host of secular ideologies never seemed to quite capture the ambitions or demarcate the environments of the diverse peoples who live there.

“The normalization of history,” proclaims the Turkish foreign minister, Ahmet Davutoglu, whose government has tried to reintegrate the region by lifting visa requirements and promoting a Middle Eastern trade zone, as it deploys its businessmen along the old routes and exports Turkey’s pop culture to an eager audience.

“None of the borders of Turkey are natural,” he went on. “Almost all of them are artificial. Of course we have to respect them as nation-states, but at the same time we have to understand that there are natural continuities. That’s the way it’s been for centuries.”

There is admittedly a hint of romanticism in it all. The Arab world may in fact be bracing for years of sectarian and internecine strife in places like Yemen, Bahrain, Libya and Syria. And in seeking to be a more prominent, and steadying, influence, Turkey’s ambitions may well be greater than its means. Still, economic realities are already restoring old trajectories that joined the Kurdish regions of Turkey and Iraq, tied Batumi in Georgia to Trabzon in Turkey, and knit Aleppo into an axis of cities — Mosul, Diyarbakir, Gaziantep and Iskenderun — in which Damascus, the leading but distant Arab metropole, was an afterthought.

THE DRAWING OF 20TH-CENTURY BORDERS rendered traumas large and small. Sectarian and ethnic cleansing after World War I rid Turkey and Greece of much of their diversity. The horrors of nationalism and the Holocaust made Salonica, a celebrated melting pot, unrecognizable in its modern incarnation. Even history’s footnotes were rewritten.

One example is Marjayoun, my family’s ancestral hometown in Lebanon, nestled near the Israeli and Syrian borders in the heart of the old Ottoman realm, and little more than an afterthought on maps these days.

No one in Marjayoun would necessarily pine for the days of the Ottoman rulers. Massacres occurred, and Jews and Christians faced discrimination in taxes and commerce. There was no such thing as equality. To this day, the darkest moments of Marjayoun’s history remain those last

breaths of the empire — the seferberlik. It was the Ottoman name for the draft, but it came to represent the famine, starvation and death that World War I brought to the town, when the famished searched the manure of animals to find an undigested morsel of grain.

Yet more than a few in Marjayoun today might express a nostalgia for the time and place the Ottoman Empire represented, when Marjayoun’s traders ventured to Arish on the coast of the Sinai Peninsula and down the Nile to Sudan, by way of Palestine. The town was a way station on the route from the breadbasket of the Houran in southern Syria to Acre, the Levant’s greatest port on the coast of Palestine.

Beirut was an afterthought. Marjayoun’s traders plied the steppe of the Houran, its gentry owned land in the Hula Valley, and its educated ventured to Haifa and Jerusalem to make their reputations.

World War I and the borders that followed augured the demise of this style of life, and not just in Marjayoun. The ideologies that gained prevalence in the town then were about contesting those frontiers — Arab nationalism, pan-Syrian nationalism and Communism, which itself was imagining a broader community. These movements failed as more borders were drawn in wars with Israel in 1948 and 1967. And with those lines on the map came a smaller sense of self. By the time Lebanon’s 15-year civil war began in 1975, ideologies had given way to identities, and most people in Marjayoun identified themselves simply as Christian, or perhaps Greek Orthodox, too unique to survive as a community.

A town of thousands is today a town of hundreds, strewn with the abandoned villas of another age. Hajar bala bashar, a friend once told me. “Stones without people.”

“A RECREATION OF THE HISTORIC AND NATURAL ENVIRONMENT” is how Mr. Davutoglu describes his vision for the region. And indeed, that vision, which is effectively government policy,

has touched in a nerve in Turkey, a country with its own unresolved questions of identity.

Just as Arab nationalism still runs run deep, with the fate of Palestine its axis, so does Turkish nationalism, which includes a sense that the country deserves a role in the region, and beyond that at least echoes of its Ottoman age. The more sophisticated Turks dismiss charges of a new rationale for Turkish imperialism and call the goal instead a peaceful partnership that might look like the free-trade zone that presaged the European Union after World War II. “It’s been almost 100 years that we’ve been separated by superficial borders, superficial cultural and religious borders, and now with the lifting of visas to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, we’re lifting national boundaries,” said Yusuf Yerkel, a young academic on Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan’s staff. “Turkey is challenging the traditional understanding of policy in the Middle East in place since the 20th century.”

More than the talk of a salon, the vision comes at an obvious turning point in the Middle East. Though dealt setbacks by the Arab revolution — investments have been lost in Libya and the prospect of chaos stalks Syria — Turkey has stuck to its vision of an integrated region. A railway line linking Turkey, Syria and Iraq reopened last year; a fast train is to operate between Gaziantep and Aleppo. The resources of northern Iraq are strategic for Turkey’s plans to diversify its energy sources and to feed a pipeline from Turkey to central Europe. A common free-trade area has already been agreed upon by Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

Turkish television series are dubbed into Syrian Arabic, and its stars’ posters sell by the tens of thousands in Iraq. In Baghdad, portraits of one famous actor are digitally altered to show him in traditional Kurdish or Arab dress.

Across the region, the Arab revolution has inspired a rethinking of identity,

The San Juan Weekly even as older notions of self hang like a specter over the revolts’ success. In its most pristine, the revolution feels transnational, as demands of justice, freedom and dignity are expressed in a technology-driven globalism. It echoes even in Turkey, where religious and national divides are increasingly blurred. Selcuk Sirin, a professor at New York University who has done extensive polling in Turkey, especially among youth, calls this the emergence of “hybrid identities.”

“Young people don’t buy into this idea of a clash, and they don’t buy into this idea of fixed identity,” he said. “They know how to negotiate these so-called polar opposites, and they’re looking for so-

June 9 - 15, 2011

mething new.”

THERE WAS A MOVIE more than a decade ago in Turkey called “Propaganda,” a dark comedy about the border drawn between Syria and Turkey, dividing family from family. It was inspired by the reality of relatives heading to the fence there on Muslim holidays — Bayram in Turkish, Id in Arabic — and throwing gifts to the other side.

These days, with the border effectively open, Syrians fill the hotels on weekends in Gaziantep, which is famous for its pistachios. Some merchants here talk about their trade growing tenfold since visa requirements were lifted. Debates rage over whether the

23

kebab of Gaziantep is better than the kibbe in Aleppo.

Turks may still call a mess “Arab hair.” But they also judge a gift by the standards of “apricots in Damascus.” And the old notions of Ottoman tyranny (from the Arab point of view) and Arab betrayal in World War I (as Turks see it) have given way somewhat to the promise of profit in a market still booming even amid the uprising across the border.

Hakan Cinkilic, foreign trade manager of a plastics company called Sun Pet, is reaping the benefits. Nearly 80 percent of its products go to Iraq, and the company set up a factory in Jordan last year.

Its exports have more than doubled since

2008. This year he has already traveled to Libya, the United States, Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

As he spoke, his cellphone rang. It was a customer in Kirkuk, Iraq, who spoke to him in Turkish. A few minutes later, a businessman called from the West Bank.

The conversation unfolded in English, punctuated by Arabic expressions inflected by the vowels of his native tongue. You wouldn’t call him neo-Ottoman, given the term’s suggestion of a resurgent imperialism. He’s not really Levantine, an identity whose borders hug the Mediterranean coast. He seemed post-Ottoman, reinterpreting the past.

“It’s natural,” he said simply.

Yemen Forces Battle Tribal Rivals for Key Sites in Capital

By NASSER ARRABYEE and J. DAVID GOODMAN

Y

emen appeared to tip closer to all out civil war on as government troops and opposition tribesmen battled to control key positions in the capital and foreign diplomats boarded planes to flee including the wounded president.

But a powerful general who defected to the opposition in March has continued to keep his troops on the sidelines, leaving open the question of whether the heavy fighting would be contained to areas of the capital, Sana, and several other cities, or whether it could engulf the country.

With no immediate renewal of mediation efforts, Yemen’s security forces have moved with force to contain multiple groups of opponents — not only tribal fighters, but also militant Islamists and nonviolent antigovernment protesters — that have distinct and sometimes conflicting agendas.

Around the heavily fortified headquarters of Yemen’s state-run television station in Sana, government forces fired shells at tribal fighters loyal to the family of Hamid al-Ahmar, the strongest tribal rival of President Ali Abdullah Saleh, who clings to power in the face of months of protests and days of mounting chaos.

Fierce battles between Ahmar tribesmen and government forces began early last week after Mr. Saleh refused for a third time to follow through on a promise to sign an agreement — the result of weeks of mediation efforts by the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council — that would lead to his resignation.

With tanks and armored vehicles rolling into Sana from the south on Wednesday, Mr. Saleh appeared to be aiming to crush the Ahmar family and consolidate his power in the capital, analysts said. But that strategy carries enormous risks. Other tribes could well become involved, as could powerful army commanders who support the opposition but have not been part of the fighting.

The continuing violence threatens to unleash a humanitarian catastrophe, as Yemen — already the poorest country in the Arab world — runs increasingly short of

gasoline, cooking oil, and other basic supplies. The economic collapse could become another threat to Mr. Saleh, who has spent untold sums of money to maintain the loyalty of his followers since the uprising began in January.

In recent days there have been signs that his currency reserves are running short.

Kuwait, a Gulf council member, recalled its diplomats from the country’s embassy in Sana because of the “deteriorated security situation in Yemen,” Kuwait’s state-run KUNA news agency reported. A day earlier, Italy said it had temporarily shut its embassy and withdrawn its staff. The United States Embassy remains open, but last week advised all American civilians to leave the country.

Violence flared again overnight in the Hasaba neighborhood of Sana, the scene of the most intense fighting between Ahmar forces and government troops, who renewed their pitched clashes after a brief cease-fire broke down late Monday. Tribesmen controlled large portions of the neighborhood on Wednesday, including many of the ministries and other government buildings there, though the government disputed claims that the Interior Ministry had been overrun.

Heavy casualties were reported in the capital, with estimates ranging as high as 41 killed from both government forces and Ahmar tribesmen. A spokesman for the Ahmar family put the tribal casualties at 10 dead and 31 wounded.

The government was “randomly” shelling the Hasa-

ba area “from military camps at the mountains around the capital,” the spokesman, Abdul Qawi al-Qaisi, said.

The violence has driven many protesters to leave the continuous demonstration in the capital, which is protected by Maj. Gen. Ali Mohsin al-Ahmar, the country’s most powerful military leader, who defected to the opposition in March. While thousands are still camping out in nonviolent opposition to Mr. Saleh, others have decided to join the fight. “For me and many others like me here in the square, we are convinced that peaceful means would not work since they did not work over the last four months,” said Ahmed Obadi, a young protester and teacher.

A missile struck the headquarters of General Ahmar, who has so far remained on the sidelines during the recent violence (he is not in the immediate family of Hamid al-Ahmar). The Defense Ministry denied firing the missile, and the general issued a statement confirming an attack by “land-to-land” missile without speculating on who might have fired it.

The missile attack came as state-run media reported that some of the general’s troops stormed the general prosecutor’s office, three miles west of Hasaba, looting documents. State media said that the troops had been joined by militants from Al Eman University, which has ties to Islamic radicals.

South of the capital, the city of Taiz remained in a state of lockdown with security forces and Republican Guards moving swiftly to disperse even the smallest gatherings in the streets, residents said.

The city had been the site of Yemen’s largest antigovernment sit-in until a deadly crackdown early this week by government forces and plainclothes gunmen cleared protesters from the square they had occupied since February. The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights said it had received reports that as many as 50 people died.

Traffic returned to the square on Wednesday. The owner of nearby gas station said it was the first time in months he was able to sell gas.

In the southern coastal city of Zinjibar, bodies lay in the streets, witness said, as Yemeni troops fought with Islamic militants who took control over the weekend.

24 June 9 - 15, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Vida Silvestre Museum, San Juan

T

he new Museo de Vida Silvestre (or Wildlife Museum) in San Juan allows people to see all sorts of wild animals from around the world. It is filled with a variety of mounted animals in displays that depict their natural origin and behavioral habits. It is a great way to learn about animals from far and wide without ever leaving the metro area. This museum gives more people the opportunity to become educated about the planet, its animals, and why we need to cherish and protect it. The museum itself is not that large, but it is well done and presented. The ground floor has its main feature — a 2-story Tree of Life display featuring a huge

Baobab tree, along with the many animals that depend on the tree for water and food. All sorts of wonderful animals are set there. The second floor is divided into the 12 biomes (environments) that are found throughout the world. As you walked from biome to biome, the dioramas of animals and plant life changed. It was really good.

The artificial snow and water used in the displays was really lifelike. There were educational placards at the start of each biome. And they had some handson stuff for the kids to play on and learn about animals and their special adaptations. You

can walk around on your own, reading the information and really looking at the dioramas. There are English/Spanish bilingual signs at each display describing the animals and their habitat. But do not miss the guided tour. They have 6 educators on staff, and they are able to offer tours in Spanish, English and 3 additional languages. They start by explaining taxidermy and how the animal mounts were made. Then, the guide takes you

around to each exhibit and discusses each biome and the animals that live there. They supplied lots of good information that was not on the signs. And they really involved the children along the tour. There is a short (7 minute) movie about the undersea world of Puerto Rico. It was very pretty and enjoyable.

The guides made it a point to explain why we need to protect the environments. They put an emphasis on those biomes that we have here in Puerto Rico, which is good and much-needed education for people on the island. This museum is still in its infancy. They have big plans for it and expansion, including animals from Puerto Rico, a Sensory Safari for blind visitors, additional movies and a nice restaurant. About 90% of the animals on display in the museum are “real” (taxidermic specimens) and more are coming to replace the plastic “placeholder” animal representations.

San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

25

modern love

What Is Carved in Stone

By DAVID MARK SIMPSON

T

HREE years ago, when I was a sophomore at Northeastern, I typed a text to my then-girlfriend, Sarah, telling her I was leaving college for a year. The thought entered my brain and, as usual, I let her know immediately. I’m not sure I had even fully made up my mind, but I had made it up long enough to hit “send,” and so it became real. She sent back several sad but supportive texts, woven together with ellipses.

A few days later we were discussing the details in person. I would join AmeriCorps, a roving volunteer organization. I would be stationed in Denver but moving around. She would visit at Thanksgiving. I’d return to Boston during winter break.

Then I said, “I’m not bringing my laptop,” and her lip turned over and she started to cry. I realized later that she saw my rejection of technology as an assault on the very core of our relationship.

We had gone to the same high school in New Jersey, and when we both ended up at colleges in Boston I fell in love with her familiar face. Together we nursed our dying childhoods, going to the circus and calling each other pet names.

I would call her as I walked to class, alternating my phone hand when it turned pink from the cold, and she would text me during lectures. We’d video chat from our dorm rooms, half-talking while surfing the Internet, calling out occasionally to make sure the other was still there.

This was after communication had become nearly limitless but before people thought much about boundaries. Taking advantage, we fell in love like addicts. All day long the contents of my heart would slide down my arm, past my sleeve and into my phone. When we were together I chafed from overexposure, but when we were apart I would lose my sense of identity and grab my phone.

Our ultimate break-up was confusing and explosive. I landed in Denver around the time the housing market crashed. Deep in heartache, I called my friends while pacing outside my new dorm. Sometimes I called Sarah, until we agreed to stop talking.

During the monthlong orientation I explored and grieved and went to bed early.

New friends would invite me to the Mexican bar across the street, but I was dedicated to my loneliness.

I met Patti in an airport van full of idealistic AmeriCorps members. I liked her eyes, which looked like those of the Afghan girl from that famous National Geographic cover. While everyone was discussing the best ways to save the world, she was taking in the passing public art. Forced to weigh in on the

conversation, she expressed a bold realism that I found refreshing. Back at the dorms, I watched as she crossed the parking lot and sailed off into the sunset in her boxy 20-yearold Crown Victoria.

Soon I was inventing reasons to hang out with her. She was quiet, pausing for several seconds before answering questions. I would talk until I exhausted myself, fearing that her silence meant she didn’t understand.

Then, like Muhammad Ali coming out of the rope-a-dope, she would say something astoundingly true. Knocked out, I couldn’t repress my smile.

We started sitting together during the AmeriCorps meetings. Still, I was resistant to love, fearing a repeat of my past relationship.

I opted to join a wildfire-fighting team, assuring that I would spend a majority of the year in isolated mountain towns and away from Patti.

Upon separating she suggested we write letters. A few weeks later I addressed an envelope to Texas, where she was living in a tent city and working for FEMA. At first I poured thoughts onto the page like I was sending a long text message. By the time I finished, the words at the beginning seemed untrue or melodramatic. I crafted and reworked. Sometimes I would rip the letter up and start over.

Her letters were often entirely visual, scattered magazine collages. I would hold an unopened letter for a while, delaying gratification. After reading them, her intimate stories wouldn’t fall to the bottom of my in-box and disappear, but stay with me, under my bed, waiting to be reread.

We started to call each other at night.

She told me about her love for the sprawl and beaches in our home state, New Jersey. She told me that, despite her tall, slender frame, she hated sports. I was falling in love, but Patti hesitated, wanting time to allow her feelings to settle. I struggled to accept the uncertainty.

One morning my teammates and I left our cabin in the mountains for the desert canyons of southeast Colorado near the border of Oklahoma. As our truck rolled into the desert, I realized we were losing cell service.

Our new bunkhouse, low-roofed with nine beds for 10 people, lay centered in a flat desert valley. In our first days we vented our frustrations: rationed food, undrinkable tap water, coyotes, hours from a hospital.

Perhaps most daunting was the task of removing invasive tamarisk with chainsaws.

The thin branches whipped my face so hard I cried. But my greatest objection was to the isolation: no Internet, mail or phone service.

Without Patti to validate my feelings, they seemed not to exist, and our blossoming relationship began to feel increasingly fragile.

With no line to the outside world, I turned inward, hiking in silence with a teammate, Jonah. While searching for the famous Picketwire Canyonlands dinosaur tracks, we came upon the remains of a campfire. I thought about the young vaqueros sitting under the stars, feeling lonely — perhaps longing for someone — and slowly becoming men.

Our foreman told us about petroglyphs carved in the walls up on the mesas, so after work we set off to find them. From the rocky slopes, our bunkhouse looked like a raft floating upon a deep orange sea. As we scaled an unavoidable rock face, I was deep in thought.

Had I ever stopped to question my relationship with Sarah? It seemed now like a buzz of forward progress. Did I really want to get into another relationship? I worked through this on the rock face.

Jonah pushed up over the top ridge as if he were getting out of a pool, and I followed.

We stood in front of the Zookeeper, a rock mural depicting a lone human surrounded by dozens of snakes, goats, horses and other creatures. A single wandering line connected all of the beasts and the human.

I had read that ancient people carved out the brown stone 3,000 years ago. When my chainsaw hit the same type of rock, it left vague scratch marks.

I imagined the petroglyph as a letter from the artist to his girlfriend, the work of a young man etching away in solitude, working through his feelings, brave and patient enough to create something lasting.

Everything I ever wrote felt cheap. I had sent probably 10,000 love-related text messages.

They had been so easy: quick “I love you” texts without even thinking. Most had been trivial, and they were all gone now.

We hiked along the canyon’s ridge for hours. On a high plateau we stopped to rest

in the stringy tall grass. Off in the distance I noticed a blinking red light atop a tower.

Jonah had noticed it, too, and was already standing on his toes, reaching his hand in the air. In his straining hand, his cellphone began to buzz.

I threw down my pack, pulled out my phone, held it up, and soon it, too, was filling with messages, messages from Patti, sweet messages. Jonah and I were like lost explorers stumbling upon a watering hole, our hands shaking as we filled our canteens, these mute phones brought along each day just in case.

Patti said she missed me. She couldn’t wait to talk again.

SOON Jonah had constructed a rock tower several feet high from which we were able to get two bars of service. I called Patti, and she answered. Her team had moved to Arizona and she told me about their near mutiny. I could hear her smiling and it made me smile. As we talked, I thought about the dedicated rock artist, and it seemed indulgent to be talking to Patti, to have found a communication loophole in the desert solitude.

But I also thought about the wandering line he had drawn connecting all creatures, and how that connectedness, too, was a beautiful thing.

Jonah and I stayed out on the plateau until the sun started to fall. When we reached the bunkhouse, the sky was black. I could hear coyotes playing in the desert as we pulled cactus needles from our legs with tweezers.

Every day for the next two weeks, we scraped our way up the cliffs of our two-bar plateau. It may not have been the same as carving a petroglyph, but the three-hour journey required a kind of resoluteness. It was exhausting and dangerous. And it left ample time to ponder if the climb was worth making.

ARCHITECTURE 26

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

Architects in World War II: Construction Amid Destruction

By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF

T

he history of architecture during World War II is barely talked about. We all know Albert Speer, the man who slavishly carried out Hitler’s megalomaniacal architectural fantasies; some know about Mies van der Rohe’s exile in Chicago.

The rest seems to have quietly — and in some cases conveniently — faded from view.

“Architecture in Uniform: Designing and Building for the Second World War,” an engrossing, often unsettling new show at the Canadian Center for Architecture here, is a major and belated step in coming to terms with this awkward chapter in modern architectural history. Simply put, it’s one of the most important architecture exhibitions I’ve seen in years.

Organized by Jean-Louis Cohen, the show covers a dizzying range of projects conceived from 1937 to 1945, many of them not well known. Some are expressions of idealism, others of incredible cynicism and savagery. By the end I found myself rethinking not only the role that architects played during one of the most murderous and destructive periods in human history, but also almost everything that came immediately after it, from the cold war conviction that technology could deliver a better way of life to the causes of suburban sprawl. The exhibition opens with two images — one depicting the half-crumbled ruins of Guernica after the April 1937 Nazi terror bombings, the other showing two women wandering across the wasteland of Hiroshima, umbrellas in hand, on a wet day sometime after the dropping of the atom bomb in August 1945 .

From there you are funneled into a small, cylindrical room decorated with the portraits of 34 architects, from Speer to Le Corbusier, who spent much of the war unsuccessfully lobbying the Vichy government for work, and including victims like Szymon Syrkus, a prisoner at Auschwitz who was recruited by the SS to design greenhouses for a section of the camp devoted to agriculture.

This juxtaposition — of images of total devastation and innocent-

looking head shots — sets up the framework for the show. The war, Mr. Cohen wants us to remember, was about destruction, not creation; at the same time, not all architects waited it out in American universities. How did the many who continued designing and building invest their creative intelligence?

The answers are not all dispiriting. The Tecton Group’s 1939 proposal for an air-raid shelter in Finsbury , in London, is an impressive work of architecture: a wide concrete cylinder, buried in the earth, with a ramp spiraling down its interior wall, big enough to hold 7,600 people. (If you go to the London zoo, you’ll see a foreshadowing of the design in the spiraling ramps of the Penguin Pool, built by the same firm a few years earlier.)

Less spectacular but more relevant to today are some of the low-cost workers’ housing projects that were built to serve the booming militaryindustrial complex, especially in America. Richard Neutra’s 1940s Channel Heights Defense Housing in San Pedro, Calif. — a complex of simple prefabricated houses arranged around a gently sloping park to take advantage of the waterfront views — is a fine example of how to build housing that is cheap, affordable and humane.

In suburban Pennsylvania, Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer’s “Aluminum City Housing,” a complex of simple modern wood-clad houses joined by covered galleries, could serve as a pretty good model for low-cost housing today.

These imaginative triumphs, however, are overshadowed by something else: the way the grinding machinery of war increasingly demanded a regimented and dehumanized society, for which a large number of architects were happy to provide the physical framework.

One of the many chilling examples of this is Ernst Neufert’s 1943 proposal for a Hausbaumaschine (or house-building machine), an enormous industrial shed that would have moved along rails, stopping every few hundred feet so that workers could pour the next segment in an endless row of identical concrete housing

units. The project, never built, is a particularly sinister expression of a world where life is stripped of individual identity, and where human beings are treated as interchangeable parts in a gigantic machine.

Neufert’s vision is just one of the most extreme examples of a more pervasive mentality. During the war entire new factory cities were organized and built with the straightforward efficiency of assembly lines. Oak Ridge, the super-secret site of the Manhattan Project in rural Tennessee, was a model of functionalist planning, with shopping malls flanked by repetitive blocks of prefabricated housing. (The housing was segregated according to race and class, with high-level military officials and scientists living in single-family homes, white laborers in apartment blocks and blacks in encampments of shacks.)

Peenemünde, home of the sprawling German airplane plant on the Baltic Sea where the V-2 rocket was developed, was a work camp laid out in a similar (if slightly more traditional) axial plan, with concrete-frame, brickinfill structures. In 1943, after Peenemünde was bombarded by Allied forces, German architects began work on an even more extreme version of rational planning: a network of underground factories in central Germany.

The most architecturally significant of these, Eberhard Kuen’s Messerschmitt aircraft factory in southeastern Germany, built by slave labor, had an assembly line on rails integrated into its concrete structure and connected to the local train system.

This model of large-scale standardized planning reached its most sadistic level, of course, in the death camps, which were often designed with as

much care as the factory complexes.

Every square foot at Auschwitz was carefully calculated and measured, and the three square feet allotted to each prisoner — one-tenth of a typical barrack at the time — could be read as a sickening perversion of the Bauhaus idea of existenzminimum, an effort to calculate the exact amount of space needed to live a simple yet decent life.

(In the insightful catalog that accompanies the exhibition Mr. Cohen tells us that the architects of Auschwitz were trained at the best German schools, and one of the many surprises of the show is the variety of activities that were taking place at the complex, which included a chemical plant and greenhouses as well as the death camps. The greenhouses, still in operation, are used to grow chrysanthemums that are shipped across Europe.)

What haunts you about the show is not just how much creative energy was devoted to building the infrastructure for evil, but how the mentality of war eventually seeped into every corner of society, and remained there long after the war was over. The drive toward standardization was echoed in the conformity of cold war-era planning strategies. And the “decentralization” of cities proposed by planners worried that they were easy targets for bombers continued, on a much larger scale, as suburban sprawl.

It wasn’t until the 1960s, and the publication of books like Robert Venturi’s “Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture,” that the profession began to purge these tendencies and begin to find a new way forward.

In some ways we are still wrestling with the same problems.

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

27

Housing Index Show New Low in Prices

By DAVID STREITFELD

T

he desire to own your own home, long a bedrock of the American Dream, is fast becoming a casualty of the worst housing downturn since the Great Depression.

Even as the economy began to fitfully recover in the last year, the percentage of homeowners dropped sharply, to 66.4 percent, from a peak of 69.2 percent in 2004. The ownership rate is now back to the level of 1998, and some housing experts say it could decline to the level of the 1980s or even earlier.

Disenchantment with real estate is bound to swell further the most widely watched housing index show prices of existing homes sank in March below the lows reached two years ago — until now the bottom of the housing crash. In February, the Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller index of 20 large cities slumped for the seventh month in a row.

Housing is locked in a downward spiral, not only because so many people are blocked from the market — being unemployed, in foreclosure or trapped in homes that are worth less than the mortgage — but because

even those who are solvent are opting out.

Tim Hebb, a Los Angeles systems engineer, expertly called the real estate bubble. He sold his bungalow in August 2006, then leased it back for a year. Since then, the 61-year-old single father has rented a succession of apartments.

Housing is overpriced and when it stops declining it will stumble along there is time to get back in if he should ever want to.

The market signaled trouble when the April index of pending deals was released by the National Association of Realtors.

Analysts had predicted the index, which anticipates sales that will be completed in the next two months, would be down 1 percent from March. Instead, it plunged 11.6 percent.

The business of building and selling houses believe the disaffection with real estate will pass. After every boom comes the hangover, but deep-rooted desire for a castle of one’s own quickly reasserts itself.

The market’s persistent weakness, runs the risk of feeding on itself. Buyers are staying away despite the lowest interest rates and the highest affordability levels, which in turn prompts others to hesitate.

The sharp decline in prices since 2006 has meant a lost decade for many owners.

But what may prove even more discouraging to potential buyers is academic research showing that the financial rewards of ownership were uncertain even before the crash.

A senior economist at the Federal Reserve Bank found the notion homeownership builds more wealth than investing was true only about half the time.

“For many households in many years, renting and investing the saved cash flow has built more wealth than homeownership,” the economist, Jordan Rappaport, concluded.

Economics affects potential owners in other ways. A house is a long-term commitment that many are loath to make in uncertain times like these.

“We have more of what we call ‘renters by choice’ than I’ve seen in the 40 years I’ve been in the apartment business”.

For decades, the company has asked former tenants why they were moving out.

During the housing boom, as many as a quarter of those moving on said they were buying a house. In 2009, the percentage of new owners fell in the first quarter to 13.7 percent,

the lowest ever.

Last year, as the economy improved, the number rebounded. This year, it fell back again, to 14 percent.

Builders clearly believe that the future includes many more renters. So far this year, construction of multiunit buildings is up 21 percent compared with 2010, while single family-homes are down 22 percent. Sales of new single-family homes are lower than at any time since the data was first kept in 1963.

Susan Lindsey, a San Diego software programmer, was once eagerly waiting for the housing market to crash. She said she would have no guilt about swooping in on some foreclosed owner who had bought a place he could not afford.

With prices now down by a third, however, she is content to stay in her $2,500-amonth rented house. She prefers to invest in gold, which she has been buying since 2003.

“I could afford a median-priced house, no problem,” said Ms. Lindsey, 48, as she headed off for a holiday weekend in Las Vegas. “But I would be paying more to live in a place I like less.”

Games

28

June 9 - 15, 2011

The San Juan Weekly

Sudoku How to Play: Fill in the empty fields with the numbers from 1 through 9 Click the “check sudoku” button to check your sudoku inputs Click the “new sudoku” button and select difficulty to play a new game

Sudoku Rules: Every row must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every column must contain the numbers from 1 through 9 Every 3x3 square must contain the numbers from 1 through 9

Crossword

Wordsearch

Answers on page 29

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 -15, 2011

HOROSCOPE Aries

(Mar 21-April 20)

Libra

(Sep 24-Oct 23)

Don’t monitor the activities of others too closely.

It’s time to do your own thing. Do as you would be done by and most scenarios will be sorted. This Biblical sentiment covers a multitude of sins. There is no point in following through on a revenge plan.

The consequences won’t suit you. The genuine touch has to come from deep within.

Make preparations for what you need to do next, by all means. For the moment use nifty moves to keep the world guessing, and concentrate on what you need to be getting on with. You need to be astute and wise in all your dealings for the next while. Be aware you will have your work cut out to maintain any illusion you have created.

Taurus

Scorpio

(April 21-May 21)

Find the route to authentic behaviour and get real about what is going down. Don’t act out a part any longer. You may have to be gracious amidst defeat. Be assured however that a fresh start will blow your mind away. Use key days to make pertinent points. Act when it counts, listen when challenged and generally get busy.

Gemini

(May 22-June 21)

(Oct 24-Nov 22)

Perhaps it is face your shadow’ time? What you are facing is nothing you cannot deal with. It is all good and you will triumph, if you adopt the right attitude. The hand you play will bounce back to you; it’s non-negotiable! Bat straight and true! You may experience your fair share of bitchiness. Use your humour to win out.

Sagittarius

(Nov 23-Dec 21)

Preserve your territory and decamp to where it feels safe. Love will light the way into the future; wonderfully, clearly, at last. You may well feel short-changed waiting in the wings, but it IS your best option. Your patience will be rewarded and the pay-off is good. So don’t kick up and cause a commotion. The stakes are admittedly high.

This will be a productive time for you, so make good choices and see where you get to. There is plenty of fun to be had when you relax, but you need to know where you are headed first!

Communicate clearly and speak the truth AT ALL TIMES. Be sure anything less will creep up behind you and bite, when you least expect it.

Cancer

Capricorn

(June 22-July 23)

(Dec 22-Jan 20)

Drawing attention to your good self is not the best way to get recognition. It’s just one of life’s little ironies. Ditch the trumpet, until others are all set to blow it for you! It is all very well catching someone out- but what then? Grant loved ones a chance to live up to their best possible potential. The best presents come in small packages.

You may love to claim ownership of ideas, people or items. However, loosen your grip.

Stop expecting the worst and project good vibes into the ether. Balance is the energy that will ensure a safe landing. Expect to come to shore triumphantly, so hold your own. There will be plenty of compliments winging your way before too long.

Leo

Aquarius

(July 24-Aug 23)

Give that small gesture from someone special the benefit of the doubt. Display your wares and strut your stuff to attract a mate. It is worth making an extra effort in a complex scenario. Aim to win at all times. Someone may express a controversial opinion. Smile sweetly and say ‘whatever’. The truth will out at the right time and no sooner.

Virgo

(Aug 24-Sep 23)

Do not be tempted to force things along. Wait for the optimum moment and then make your move.

Maximum impact is guaranteed. The pressure is mounting but you must remain as cool as the proverbial cucumber. Keep the right people on side; but do your research well and find out who they are first. Premature action is inadvisable.

(Jan 21-Feb 19)

The best anti-ageing treatment is an inner resolve to remain youthful from the inside out.

And it’s FREE! Lighten up and smile a bit.

Laughter lines are more attractive and will bring you what you want. That frown is preventing things. The happy approach will reel in the good stuff. Take some things seriously, obviously, but don’t go too far.

Pisces

(Feb 20-Mar 20)

It is only a matter of time before the big turnaround. So prepare for what you have been focusing on. If you are determined enough it will come about. Persistence holds the key to your success. There is no point giving up now. Don’t lose heart and carry on with that positive vibe. You’re emanating the good stuff. Keep it right.

29 Answers to the Zudoku and Crossword on page 28

30

June 9 - 15, 2011

Herman

Speed Bump

Frank & Ernest

BC

Scary Gary

Wizard of Id

Two Cows And A Chicken

Cartoons

The San Juan Weekly

Ziggi

The San Juan Weekly

June 9 - 15, 2011

31

Sports

Room Has a View at Roland Garros

By JOHN BRANCH

The tracing of the hands began a few years ago. Children write or sign their names in the palm. On the fingers, one letter per finger, they name their position on the court — filet are those who work the net, and fond are those who work the back courts.

Last year’s group, handprints arranged by team inside a circle, showed that Vivien Pilotto worked the finals in 2008, 2009 and

F

or millions of television viewers and fans in the stadium, it was another lull in another match, nothing more than Rafael Nadal wiping his face with a towel and getting balls for the next point.

From this angle, though, Nadal was not so much the world’s top-ranked tennis player, but a pair of sweaty, hair-covered legs and clay-dusted shoes. He was almost close enough to touch as he held out his racket, like a frying pan, toward a ball boy who could only be seen from the waist down, too.

“Deux,” Nadal said softly between hard breaths. The ball boys and ball girls think it is wonderful that Nadal, a Spaniard, speaks to them in French at Roland Garros.

One piece of prime real estate at the French Open provides an unusually private, close-up perspective of the top matches. Its location at clay level is hardly a secret; it can be seen during every point on the worldwide coverage from Court Philippe Chatrier.

During the back-and-forth action, television viewers can see the back wall behind the player at the top of the screen, just behind the three line judges. That wall, below the corporate logos, has three dark, square openings. Sometimes balls bounce in and disappear, as in Skee-Ball.

It is a photographers’ pit, but it is rarely used for that. Instead, this garden-level concrete bunker is a sort of clubhouse for the best of the French Open ball boys and girls, all between the ages of 12 and 16, chosen to work the premier court.

They watch matches from here, sitting on old chairs set precariously atop wooden tables so that their faces occasionally poke out a window. They rest and snack. They nap on blankets piled in the corner. They discreetly hand the balls that carom inside to a ball boy or girl working the match.

As per tradition, the chosen 18 who work the women’s final and the men’s final traced the outline of their hands on the wall with black ink and sign them. It is a graffiti wall that serves as a hall of fame for les ramasseurs de balles, the gatherers of the balls.

On each of the French Open’s 15 days, 18 ball boys and girls — three teams of six — are assigned to Chatrier for the day. They work every match, rotating every 30 minutes or so, covering a schedule that usually begins at 11 a.m. and ends at 9 p.m.

So while one team is on the court, the team that just finished the last shift can usually be found in a back room under the bleachers where the players’ coaches and families and other dignitaries sit.

Photographers’ pits at the end of the courts, at or below court level, are not common. Most photographers at major tourna-

ments are relegated to the side of the court or to raised spots on the ends.

Roland Garros has three courts with pits. Suzanne Lenglen, the second show court, has them on both ends. Court 1, ranked third in the court hierarchy, has a pit.

Yet the one on the north end of Chatrier is the only pit where photographers are not welcomed, reserved almost solely for the ball boys and girls. They make it their own.

The space is reached from a back hallway, past a room where all the tournament’s balls are stored. Down nine stairs is a space — as long as the court is wide, and about eight feet across. The ceiling is angled, about seven feet in the front, near the windows that look onto the court, rising to about 10 feet, angled like the bleachers above.

There are three windows. The one in the middle is used by a television technician who holds a dish that fills the window and collects sound. He is usually the only adult in the room.

The other two windows, basically just openings in the thick plastic tarp used as a court backdrop, are for the children. Some are not as tall as the bottom of the opening, so they have moved well-worn tables in front of them. Mismatched chairs sit on top. It is one of the great seats in tennis.

The far window appears to be the prime spot. Looking out from the dank, dusty space provides a magnified Technicolor view of the action. A line judge’s chair is immediately next to the window. The children could tug on the judge’s pants.

That chair usually holds a player’s towel. When Nadal needed to wipe off sweat, he walked toward the towel, and the nearby ball boy raced to hand it to him. The meeting took place a foot or two outside the window.

Sometimes Nadal or others catch the eye of the children peeking out. Players can look down into the bunker and probably notice someone sleeping on the floor.

On the ceiling, someone years ago wrote 10 rules for ball boys and girls. Be the best, the first says in French. Show solidarity, be in good health, do not play in this space and stay quiet are among the others. No. 8 says the worst roll by a ball boy or girl (balls are rolled, not thrown) must buy dessert for the others. And No. 10 dictates only those who work the final can sign their names on the wall. It is a privilege.

2010, and last year she had the “record catch” of a serve registered at 218 kilometers per hour, or just over 135 miles per hour.

From here, everything was magnified — the size of Nadal’s arms, the glisten of his sweat, the caked clay dust on his socks, the sound of his grunts. For a moment, you could see only his lower body, until he walked away and shrank back into the frame.

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June 9 - 15, 2011

The San Juan Weekly