_______________________________
Tucker’s March 1, 2026 cover
# 1753
A stained glass window at St Non's Chapel, St David's
Llywelyn2000 - Own work
Bae non - Chapel of Our Lady and St Non S of Tyddewi (St David's), Sir Benfro, Wales
St David (Welsh: Dewi Sant), born around the early 6th century near St Bride’s Bay in Pembrokeshire, is the patron saint of Wales and one of its most enduring spiritual figures. Tradition holds that he was the son of Non and the grandson of Ceredig ap Cunedda, a regional king. He was educated at Henfynyw and became renowned as a teacher, preacher, and monastic founder, establishing communities across Wales, Dumnonia, and Brittany.
David played a central role in opposing Pelagianism, speaking at the Synod of Brefi and later presiding over the Synod of Victory at Caerleon. His most famous miracle describes the ground rising beneath him as he preached, with a dove settling on his shoulder.
A strict ascetic, he lived on a simple diet and demanded hard manual labor from his monks. He died around 589–600, and his shrine at St David’s Cathedral became a major pilgrimage site.
Dom philosophizing from porch
_____________________________________
Thoughts from Dom’s Porch: Aging
I recently wrote about a new, unwelcome tremble in my hands.
Now another aging sign has joined the list: breath loss.
For years I’ve taken the same two‑ or three‑mile walk.
Lately, after the first mile, I feel my breath deepen and quicken.
I still finish the route, but I’m more aware now — of the shift, of the body’s quiet recalibrations, of what aging chooses to reveal and when.
More to come, I’m afraid.
Rembrandt, Self Portrait at the Age of 63. National Gallery. Oil on canvas. 86 x 70.5 cm. NG221. Not on display
Rembrandt’s Self‑Portrait at the Age of 63 is less a likeness than a final reckoning. Painted in the last year of his life, it shows a man who has outlived fortune, fame, his wife, and three of his children. The brushwork is loose yet unflinching: the sagging jowls, the mottled skin, the watery eyes that still hold a stubborn ember of alertness. His clothing is simple, almost monastic, a stark contrast to the rich attire of his earlier self‑portraits. What’s striking is the steadiness of his gaze — not defiant, not resigned, but deeply present. The light falls gently across his face, revealing every ridge and fold without cruelty. Rembrandt paints aging as a form of truth-telling: the body softens, the world narrows, but the self becomes more distilled. It is a portrait of dignity earned, not bestowed.
Wikipedia
_____________________________________
More Thoughts from Dom’s Porch
Our friend, incomparable movie critic, cultural guru took a day off with his wife, Ladonna and shares their exploits.
A curtain rod does a great job doubling as a drying rack.
Flying in a small plane was incredible. You don’t realize how much you’re missing on a commercial flight.
Learning the purpose of every dial and monitor was dizzying but incredibly interesting.
My wife and I feeling pretty cool
______________________
Kat’s Gen Z Corner
Tomorrow late I’ll arrive in Goa to relax and have more time to reflect.
Rhythm seems to be oscillating between education and rest. It’s beautiful
________________________
Tucker’s Corner
Mel Brooks: The 99-Year Old Man!
Mel Brooks can really tell a story. That, admittedly, will come off as a painfully obvious observation to anyone who is even remotely aware of him. But one of the charms of Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!—and there are good amount of them in this two-part HBO documentary from directors Judd Apatow and Michael Bonfiglio—is watching the guy do just that over years, whether it’s on Johnny Carson’s couch in the ’60s, at his home across from Apatow today as he nears triple digits, on a black-and-white TV panel show, or on stages across the States in front of live audiences as they laugh along to jokes he’s probably landed at countless smoke-filled cocktail parties (and they’ve likely heard or read before too).
This move—splicing together footage from across the decades as our storyteller tells the same tale and nails a particular beat, sometimes with more youth and motor-mouthed gusto than others but always with an enviably energy, sharpness, and clear, simple, glint-in-the-eye want to entertain—becomes a signature in The 99 Year Old Man early on. And it helps drive home not just how long Brooks has been around and in the game, but how much that game has changed while the multi-hyphenate continuously figured out a way to carve a space in it. He’s a living link to the dawn of television as a medium, having first been hired as a comedy writer back in the 1940s by Sid Caesar after serving in World War II—and, soberingly, he’s outlived so much of the budding talent he encouraged. (David Lynch tells a wonderful anecdote Brooks, who would go on to produce the The Elephant Man [and took his name off the credits to not confuse his fanbase], coming out of a screening of Eraserhead: “The doors blew open, and Mel came running toward me. He embraced me and said, ‘You’re a madman; I love you; you’re in.'”)
In the opening minutes of the documentary, Apatow lays out Brooks’ breadth of work and unique career plainly: “You’re on TV. You’re funny in the interviews. You’re doing the 2000 Year Old Man. You’re kind of doing stand-up. You’re directing the movies, you’re acting in the movies, you’re writing the movies. To a lot of people who went into comedy, they thought, That seems like the best job in the world, the Mel Brooks job.” (Brooks’ reply: “I’m glad nobody took it.”)
But the documentary, and Brooks himself, does a nice job of selling that his rare position wasn’t without its struggles and, despite his hits (Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein were the second and third highest-grossing films of 1974, respectively), he hardly felt on solid ground. While working on the Caesar-starring Your Show Of Shows, the young writer started experiencing panic attacks, would vomit between parked cars during breaks from the stress, and experienced debilitating self-doubt. “I had a dream about being at the wheel of the car and the car was out of control,” Brooks recalls. “I’m not a genius. I’m not smart. I’m not funny. I don’t deserve this. They’re gonna find me out and fire me.”
After the famous 2000 Year Old Man bit with Carl Reiner, Brooks still struggled financially and stayed surprisingly anonymous, with his second marriage getting the headline “Anne Bancroft Weds Writer” in the paper. And even years removed from that aforementioned one-two box-office punch and becoming a household name here and abroad, he’d worry about whether he had to juice to get another movie made and was consistently bummed out by negative reviews of, say, 1981’s History Of The World, Part I and 1991’s Life Stinks. (Of the former, Pauline Kael wrote, admiringly, “It’s an all-out assault on taste and taboo, and it made me laugh a lot.”)
Outside of his career, too, the future filmmaker had to grapple with a lot, losing his dad to tuberculosis when he was a two-year-old in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, dealing with antisemitism in the army before fighting in France and Belgium, and suffering bouts of depression near the end of his first marriage. And as the documentary presses on, it becomes not just an appreciation but a story of resilience, where each bad stretch for the comedian is followed by an unlikely success, like The Producers nabbing the most Tony wins to date in the early aughts.
The many talking heads here—Ben Stiller, Sarah Silverman, Dave Chappelle, Adam Sandler, Jerry Seinfeld, Amy Schumer, Conan O’Brien, Nick Kroll, Tracey Ullman, and Patton Oswalt, to name a few—form a chorus of appreciation and make some explicit ties between Brooks’ output and character work and the likes of Zoolander and Oh, Hello on Broadway. But less explicitly, the documentary also shows how much Brooks touched not just American filmmaking but culture. And for a certain set of viewers, a lot of fun can be had in connecting the career dots of someone who wrote with everyone from Richard Pryor to Neil Simon. (A good one: Brooks co-created Get Smart with Buck Henry, who would go on to adapt The Graduate, which starred Bancroft and Dustin Hoffman…who took that life-changing role and had to drop out of The Producers.)
In that respect, the wide scope and weight of history makes this feel more in the vein of Apatow and Bonfiglio’s George Carlin doc than the former’s solo effort on Garry Shandling. Which isn’t to suggest that this isn’t an intimate sketch. It very much is, and it’s hard not to be moved as Brooks revisits scenes of him dancing with Bancroft in his 1983 war comedy, or, when they were both widowers, he and longtime pal Reiner chat in front of TV trays during their nightly ritual. Even if you aren’t a huge fan of his films’ humor, there is so much to appreciate here. And the fact the guy’s final message at the three-and-a-half-hour mark, after so much personal heartbreak and joy and so many career ups and downs have been chronicled, is essentially “be kind to each other” speaks volumes—and can’t help but make his legacy feel far bigger than comedy.
__________________________
Chuckles and Thoughts
__________________________
Lisa’s Neck of the Woods
European Food Markets: The Heartbeat of a City
When we planned our European journey, visiting indoor food markets in each city wasn’t on my itinerary. I had some many other “more important” sites to visit, and we weren’t planning on doing much cooking until our longer term stay in Sardinia. So why go to the Mercado/Mercato/Medina if you’re not buying groceries to take home? The answer is that the local market is a window into the culture and heart of a city. It is a “tell” in the sense that you can see what products are in abundance locally, what the people value and highlight in their stalls, gauge pricing so that you know what restaurants are paying for fish and meat and will have a better understanding of why meals are priced accordingly. If your heart and mind and stomach are open, you can blend with the locals and find yourself buying stuff you really hadn’t intended, but everything was so enticing and the vendors are so alluring that we can’t help yourself! To say nothing of the fact that if you don’t want to sit in a restaurant for hours but fill your belly on the cheap, a food market is where it’s at. I realize that in the USA we have Eataly and Time Out Market, and some other indoor markets but they are mostly targeted for an elite shopper who is willing to pay top dollar for quality food that here in Europe is available to every Joe Schmoo who likes eating.
The first taste of an indoor market was in Portugal when we stayed with Chris and Paul. We would walk to the village and every day there was a small indoor market with a few vendors who sold fruit and vegetables, fish, and sometimes meat. In the corner, we found a small stand where the owners had a large pot of soup cooking and would serve locals a lunch of bread and soup with drink for 6E. We were hooked from that point on.
Geese hanging:
Fair is fowl and fowl is fair in Medina
When we visited Porto (what a city!) there is a famous indoor market called Bolhao. It’s in a historic building that is lovely, and it’s a total high to walk through the place and see the flower vendors, fruit, cheese, cured meats, etc. What was unique about this market was a vendor devoted to all things mushroom! You can imagine my delight at recognizing many of the mushroom varieties that we forage back home in the US. A highlight for David and I were the fish stalls, because most of them offered tastings of fresh seafood for 1-3E. We sampled many different clams and shrimps, as well as samples of cured meat that were sold in convenient cups to taste. There was everything you could want in food and desserts. The TimeOut Market was nearby and we went there as well, but it’s a homogenized mall type food court and has no authenticity to it.
Faro Portugal had a fairly good size Mercado Municipal that was nearby to where we stayed. We went for lunch there and as luck would have it, there was a small restaurant located near the entrance that had a menu do dio which consisted of their famous Bifana sandwich with soup and a drink for 7E. The Bifana is a sliced and marinated pork sandwich. It was packed but the waitress grabbed a table from outside, shoved it near the door and told us to sit. Who are we to argue? We reveled in the comraderie of the locals.
Next market we were able to visit was in Cadiz Spain, a seaside town on the Southern coast that may be the oldest city in Western Europe. Christopher Columbus sailed from Cadiz on his 2nd and 4th voyages. It’s a mix of old and new and we liked the vibe there. We didn’t have much time to stay there, so we prioritized and hit the Mercado Central for some food! This market was different than the others as it focused more on prepared food and drink and was packed with casual diners sampling paella (the first sighting of this Andalusian dish), eating chicharrones (the Spanish version of pork rinds), cheese and olives on toothpicks, empanadas, and tapas. Most items were 2-5E. We ate as much as we could and drank a beer for 1E and a Sangria for 4E. What a treat!
Paella as far as the eye can see at Valencia market
When we visited Tangier, of course we walked through the Medina, which doesn’t quite count as it is mostly outdoors. But the theme is similar, with rows and rows of vendors selling olives, spices, dates, nuts, and some really unusual poultry like pigeons, which were freshly killed and hanging with their feathers still attached.
I saved the best one for last, and that is the Mercat Central Valencia. What a building! This market is absolutely exquisite in its architecture! It blew us away with its colorful stained glass dome and Art Nouveau style. Of course, it was filled with stalls selling similar meats and cheeses as other Spanish and Portuguese markets. But here the Valencian hometown Paella is king. There was every kind of paella sold here and for 6E, you could taste whichever one you desired. As the readers know, we had authentic paella at a top notch restaurant nearby, but we had a chance to sample paella negro, which is technically not a paella, but still referred as one here in Valencia. The black is from squid ink and it has a distinctively fishy taste. We also treated ourselves to a horchata, a sweetened tiger nut drink (delicious) and some churros con chocolate at a cafe just outside the market.
We’re in Sardinia now and the famous San Benedetto market is closed for renovations so we are heartbroken but there is a temporary location where we already had homemade Sardinian cone shaped arancini for 4E.
Some people are hooked on phonics,
we’re hooked on food markets!
David and I enjoying the sun in Cadiz!
___________________
Six Word Stories
Empty cradle. Silent house. Hope gone.
The author is sketching the emotional landscape of loss, specifically the loss of a child or the loss of the future that child symbolized. Each phrase tightens the circle:
Empty cradle — the physical absence, the object that should hold life but doesn’t.
Silent house — the emotional echo, a space that should be filled with sound but isn’t.
Hope gone — the internal collapse, the way grief hollows out the future.
It’s a micro‑portrait of someone standing inside a life that suddenly has no center. Not melodramatic — just brutally honest about the way absence can swallow a room.
Painting during Picasso's Blue Period.
Pablo Picasso (Life time: 1973) - Original publication: Painted in 1903 Immediate source: [1]
La Vie (The Life) was painted in Barcelona in May 1903. It is 196.5 by 129.2 centimetres (6.45 ft × 4.24 ft) and portrays two pairs of people, a naked couple confronting a mother bearing a child in her arms. In the background of the room, apparently a studio, there are two paintings within the painting, the upper one showing a crouching and embracing nude couple, the lower one showing a lonesome crouching nude person very similar to Sorrow by Vincent van Gogh.
____________
In the Mail
This from dear friend, Colleen, writer, proselytizer for writers, and mother as in the K-drama: Under the Queen’s umbrella:
Hey Dom,
Happy (?:) Ash Wednesday . . . riffing off the comment about your book and looking into your daughter's spiritual quest . . . my three daughters went to noon mass for Ash Wednesday, while I was in town with Charles for an MRI of his knees (unfortunately he takes after me in that dept, but fear not--we will go to 3pm mass), and the girls said that the parking lot at St. Pat's was full to the brim--even people parked on the ramp to the lot--and they've never seen it so full. Well, perhaps your daughter isn't the only one in search of more spirituality in her life. And--that's a good thing. Perhaps that's the best things I've heard in these aimless, greedy, thoughtless times we're living through.
We've done something right if our daughters (and hopefully sons) feel there is something more powerful and worth making time for in their lives--than themselves.
Cheers to that!
Colleen:)
And this from the Publisher of “Do You Believe in Magic”, Victor P:
Great ezine! To Kat, Tucker and Lisa. Che bella vita. And to mein Freund, Dom. Schlaf gesund! 😊
Victor
__________________
Last Comment
The blizzard has finally sputtered out.
Mother Nature, once again, felt the need to remind humanity who’s in charge.
I like to think of myself as sturdy, wiry, indomitable — the sort of person who can stare down a nor’easter without blinking.
But a single sharp gust from her saying, “Rest up, honey,” convinced me otherwise.
So, I stayed home while she threw her little tantrum.
I didn’t mind, mind you, but neither did I applaud her tantrum.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
