Buddhism: The Dhammapada: The Mind (Root of Modern Mindfulness!)

The mind is wavering and restless, difficult to guard and restrain let the wise man straighten his mind as a maker of arrows makes his arrows straight.

The mind is fickle and flighty; it flies after fancies wherever it likes; it is difficult to restrain. But it is a great good to control the mind; a mind self controlled is a source of great joy.

Invisible and subtle is the mind and it flies after fancies wherever it likes; but let the wise man guard well his mind, for a mind well guarded is a source of great joy.

The Dhammapada

RKS Australian Wine: Redman 2022 Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon and Multiple Personality Disorder?

Aroma: Dense blueberry and blackberry predominate. Immediate impression of solidity and richness. Secondary notes of dark chocolate and licorice.

Palate: Tannic imprint builds gradually, perhaps better known as “drying tannins”, infused with a bit of pepper. Blackberry, cherry liqueur, cranberry and some brackishness on the long finish. Oh, if it could only show more of its fruit but give it another 2-3 years to start to develop (hopefully) and you’ll have a real Humdinger just like that character on Paw Patrol, Mayor Humdinger!

Personality: Confident and assertive but wet behind the years. Take a risk, as anyone does in cellaring, as wine writers are not Delphic oracles, and give me a couple of years to develop another personality. A wine with multiple personalities is the norm. We change with air temperature, your mood and the food you are eating.

Cellarbility: Take a risk and cellar for three years and take it from there.

Food Match: Fresh field vegetables in many parts of Canada are making their long-awaited appearance. Think a rich eggplant dish like Pasta a la Norma for this wine.

Music Match: Someone left a country music station on in the car as I headed to COSCTO to buy some British Columbia blueberries for jam making. Some poor singer was lamenting the fact he was in a strange city unable to sleep with a glass of wine by his bedside. Poor fellow but wine with country music? What a sin unless it is peach flavored Chardonnay consumed by ladies in shorts and cowboy boots leaning against a Ford F-150! This wine demands jazz!

Price: $23 CDN.

RKS Australian Wine Rating: 91/100 (22July2026). Angus Hughson winepilot.com 94 (august2024).

Redman Coonawarra Cabernet Sauvignon 2022, Coonawarra, South Australia, Redman Wines, Coonawarra, 750 mL, 14%). 

RKS American Literature: Harvard Hippies (Dennis Lehane)

Getting out at Harvard Station, she enters Harvard Square, and it’s as bad as she suspected it would be – fucking hippies are everywhere, the air smells like pot and B.O., every twenty feet or so someone’s playing guitar and crooning  about either love, man, or Richard Nixon, man. Nixon helicoptered off the White House lawn, almost three weeks ago, but he’s still their bogeyman, those pampered, over educated, draft-dodging pussies. She loses count of how many of them are barefoot, tromping around dirty streets in their frayed bell bottoms and their multicolored shirts with their beads and long hair, the girls without bras and their ass cheeks spilling out of their cut-off shorts, filling the air with cigarette smoke and clove cinnamon smoke and pot smoke and everyone of them a fucking embarrassment to their parents who spent an ungodly amount of money to send them to the best school in the world – a school no poor person could get into, that’s for fucking certain – and they return the favor by walking around with dirty feet and singing shitty folk music about love, man, love.

Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023

RKS EURO FILM: “Romería”: A Vast Overwhelming Ocean

Marina (Llúcia Garcia), an 18-year-old orphaned Spanish student, travels from Barcelona to Vigo for “bureaucratic” reasons as she has been awarded a scholarship at a university in Barcelona to study film. But in bureaucratic fashion she must be recognized on her father’s death certificate as his daughter. She ventures to Vigo in the Galician region of Spain attending the civil registry office to obtain a copy of the death certificate but she has not been listed as his daughter and the only manner of correction is to have his parents, Marina’s biological grandparents, attend the registry office and swear that Marina is the daughter of Alfonso, Marina’s father.

Marina is cast on a sea of uncertainty, lies, coverups and familial censorship. Alfonso died of AIDS in 1992 a shameful disease at that point in time. As his brother Iago stated, showing a picture to Marina of his past in the 1980’s, all in the photo, except him, died of AIDS, overdoses or accidents and it was not uncommon to “hide” family members who had contracted AIDS. Marina learns from her cousins (and not from Alfonso’s parents, brothers and sisters) Alfonso was in fact hidden away and her grandmother denied access to him by his friends.

The silence of suppression of the truth places Marina in very choppy seas to navigate, a fitting allegory as there is water and sailboats predominating in the film. The film is replete with a sense of overwhelmingness with so many family members being rapidly introduced not only is Marina overwhelmed but the viewer as well. If this was intentional very clever filmmaking indeed.

Marina’s “bureaucratic mission” rapidly escalates to asserting her true identity through a revised death certificate which she pursues despite an attempted easy “buy off” to protect her grandmother’s emotional state or is it guilt?

Marina’s mother and father were junkies living a destructively decadent lifestyle briefly emulated Marina in a bizarre trippy hallucination where she becomes her mother and her cousin her father.

Brilliant filmmaking, superb casting and a beautifully discordant soundtrack.

Why is such a seemingly joyous ending leaving this reviewer so despondent? Is this how great this film is?

You can watch the trailer here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da3CAnPA_EM

Directed by Carla Simón.

RKS EURO FILM RATING 93/100.

RKS American Literature: Poverty and Luck in the United States (Dennis Lehane)

They aren’t poor because they don’t try hard, don’t work hard, aren’t deserving of better things. Mary Pat can look at almost anyone she’s ever known in Commonwealth in particular, or Southie in general, and find nothing but strivers, ballbusters, people who treat ten-ton burdens like they weigh the same as a golf ball, people who go to work day in and day out, and give their ungrateful-prick bosses ten hours of work every eight-hour day. They aren’t poor because they slack off, that’s for fucking sure.

They’re poor because there’s a limited amount of good luck in this world, and they’ve never been given any. It doesn’t fall from the sky and land on you, doesn’t find you when it wakes up every morning and goes looking for someone to attach itself to, there isn’t a damn thing you can do. There are more people in the world than luck, so you’re either in the right place at the right time at the very second luck shows up, for once and nevermore.

Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023

RKS American Literature: Southie Boston Kids from the Project (Dennis Lahane)

All Southie kids loved the streets but none more than the project kids. Project kids hated staying in the way rich people hated work. Staying in meant smelling your neighbours’ food through the walls, hearing their fights, their fucks, their toilet flushes, what they listened to on their radios and record players, what they watched TV. Sometimes you’d swear you could smell them, their body odor and cigarette breath and swollen-feet stink.

Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023

RKS American Literature: Forty-Two Years Old and Looking Like Crap (Dennis Lahane)

She carries the trash can into the living room and sweeps the beer cans into it. Empties the ashtrays from the coffee table and side table and the one she found on top of the TV. It’s there that she catches her reflection in the tube and sees a creature she can’t reconcile with the image she’s clung to in her mind, an image that bears little resemblance to the sweaty lump of matted hair and droopy chin dressed in a tank top and shorts. Even in the flat grey of the picture tube, she can make out the blue veins in her outer thighs, which somehow don’t seem possible, not yet. She’s only forty-two, which, okay, when she was twelve seemed like one foot into the threshold into God’s waiting room, but now, living it, in an age that makes her feel no different than she always has. She’s twelve she’s twenty-one, she’s thirty-three, she’s all the ages at the same time. But she isn’t ageing. Not in her heart. Not in her mind’s eye.

Dennis Lehane, “Small Mercies”, 2023

United States Postal Service Announces New Patriotic Series of Stamps: “Heroes of the January 6th Storming” will be the Initial Release

(Spoof News Services 21July2026: Washington): The United States Postal Services announced today the issuance of a series of stamps “Heroes of the New America”.

The first series of stamps shall depict the ‘Martyrs of January 6” to commemorate the heroic actions of patriots who stormed Sleepy Joe Hollow to rectify “the stolen election”.

All patriots arrested were pardoned and given a pension for their “patriotic actions”.

The next two stamps in the making will celebrate the annexation of Greenland, Canada, Panama, Venezuela and Iran as the newest states of the United States.

RKS LITERATURE: Beware of Unbridled Success: Letter from Pharoah Amasis to Polycrates Tyrant of Samos (Herodotus)

‘How pleasant it is to learn that a friend, a man who is bound to one by ties of mutual hospitality, is faring so well. Nevertheless, your outstanding good fortune is not a cause of unconfined joy to me – for I well know that the gods are given to envy. What I wish for myself, and for those I care about – if I may put it like this – is a career that blends good fortune with the occasional stumble. Better to go through life experiencing bad as well as good luck than to know nothing but success. I have never yet known nor heard tell of anyone who enjoyed prosperity so total that he did not ultimately come to a bad end and lose everything that had previously sustained him That being so, I would advise you, in the face of your good fortune, to adopt the following policy. Think hard and identify the object that is most precious to you, the one that would cause you the most heartache to lose – and then throw it away, some place where there is no chance of its ever coming back into human hands.’

Herodotus (b 484 BCE-425 BCE), “The Madness of Cambyses”

RKS British Literature: Hatred of the Brabant and Flemish Mercenaries (Henry Gilbert)

The Englishmen hated these foreign invaders with a hatred too deadly for mercy, and as they shot them down they knew their arrows were loaded with vengeance for unutterable deeds of murder and cruelty committed upon defenceless women, little children, and unweaponed men, when these marauding wretches had spread like plague through the land under the banner of King John, bringing ruin, fire, death, and starvation to hundreds of humble homes and peaceful villages.

Henry Gilbert, “Robin Hood”, 1912