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Popular Culture |
5 April 2004
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Goering's Loot Returned to Rightful Owners
Francoise Boucher's "Les Jeunes Amoureux" belonged to Andre Jean Seligmann, a Jewish art dealer in Paris. When the jackboots of the Third Reich tromped down the Champs Elysee, it and 400 other paintings wound up in the hands of Herman Goering, a man whose personal habits and greed made in a more dislikable individual than his sociopathic boss, Adolf Hitler. Last week, Boucher's work went back to the heirs of Mr. Seligmann through luck, persistence and in the end, the kind of simple human decency the Reichsmarshal and his crowd tried so hard to destroy.
America's Sport -- Poker
Historically, the national pastime in the US is baseball. In the last generation, professional football as played in the NFL passed baseball in TV ratings and revenue. Basketball is just called "ball" in the city centers that are blacker than the rest of the nation. Yet, one cannot understand Americans without understanding their national sport -- poker.