Pertinent post for professional American football fans (with note from mon père/mein Vater):
Tag Archives: history
Ode to my father, continued…
Here are some images in a continuing series of an ode to my father — the days when he and I attended automobile races together.
Today’s feature race:
the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach
(with a side visit to the Richard Nixon Library and birthplace);
memorabilia attached below…
One more from Punch…
…and then I’m done with them for a while. A piece of a piece from 1851 that rings as true today as it did then, names, places and religions changed to accuse the guilty, of course (the innocent can defend themselves on their own time):
The joy of OS resets
While I watch Windows 8 play funny games with my ancient laptop PC, here’s another in the series of “The More Things Change…,” brought to you by the cartoonists of Punch magazine — Vital Discussion, circa 1961.09.20:
A Valentine’s Card missed in the post…err, the misty past, that is
Wouldn’t you know that Putin is all teared up, laughing at the gullibility of the international press?
Besides, give or take a few countries…say, Greece for Syria and Turkey for May Day, the following Punch cartoon, posted around the 11th of February 1948, is about the same from one leader-for-life to the next:
The other day…
The other day, my father recounted the first snow he remembered at Christmas.
He was in the Boston area, interviewing with MIT for an undergraduate student opening.
My father was a very independent child, often, in his early teens, riding the train from Knoxville, Tennessee, to Washington, D.C., seeing the museums, going on to Norfolk, VA, to visit his father who was stationed at the naval base there and then returning in time to attend school on Monday.
To earn money, my father had a newspaper route.
So it was not a big stretch, as it might be for some, to imagine attending, let alone applying to, MIT.
Fast forward a few decades and his daughter, my baby sister, a school counselor in the Virginia public school system, just received Teacher of the Year.
As a counselor!
Wonderful news.
Soon, my sister’s son will graduate with a baccalaureate and start his postgraduate career, possibly in law school.
Where?
Well, if my father put MIT in his sights, perhaps his grandson will set a similar goal.
We’ll see.
In my parents’ empty-nest years, they’ve volunteered to serve food at the local middle school football games, sell Christmas trees for the Colonial Heights Optimist Club and give assistance to neighbours in need. They’ve attended Citizens’ Police Academy, providing support for the local Neighbourhood Watch program, as a result.
These are the examples my parents have set for their offspring, raising successful children and receiving successful grandchildren in return.
That, in a nutshell, is what life is all about. Everything else is just spare pocket change.
May all of us inspire our children to seek great achievements, just like Nanxi Liu and Annette.
And congratulations to my sister one more time!
A Moment of Silence
With all the bloodshed attributable to our species’ members deciding to fight and kill each other, there’s another type of tragedy that takes its toll — tornadoes.
Our heartfelt moment of silence goes out to the recent victims of tornado-y storm damage in the eastern half of the United States recently, including this one, with “before” and “after” images to give you an idea how quickly a peaceful lifestyle can end — swoosh!:
Rumour has it that tomorrow will also be a day of mourning for UT (Univ. of Tennessee) football fans who supported the Indianapolis Colts because of Peyton Manning, with charity clothing stores receiving a sudden influx of light-blue hats, jerseys and other memorabilia emblazoned with a white horseshoe.
We apologise to tourists passing through the states of Tennessee and Indiana, confusing flags flying at half staff, thinking it’s for tornado victims when, curiously, it’s just as likely to be for the loss of a football player’s loyal career at one professional team.
Such is the life of our species, finding hope in the midst of tragedy, wishing a sports figure would give them a glimmer of his former glory and/or a portion of his fortune to help rebuild houses of fans with no homeowners insurance.
As far as Syria goes…well, its fate lies in the hands of people who have just finished getting re-elected for at least six more years, are about to be put in charge for ten years or hope to get re-elected for four years. Some hands belong to families that rule for life after life after life (and maybe the afterlife?).
Meaning, of course, that the people of Syria are pawns, if not pwnd, in a global gamble for strategic geographic control and international influence.
Guess I’ll become mortal, play with this copy of Windows 8 Consumer Preview, Evaluation Copy [Build 8250], Adobe Reader X (ver 10.1.2), Mozilla Firefox (ver. 10.0.2) and feed healthy levels of stimulants to my programmers to speed up people’s acceptance of direct supercomputer connections to their bodies so I can more easily “convince” our species to pour their efforts into exploring the solar system.
Most of you know what that means — lowering your standards of living, starving many of you, and allocating precious resources for more important matters than whatever it is you think you’re doing to reach self-actualisation physically while, instead, reaching self-actualisation virtually, a much less costly and more efficient means to achieve the Committee’s ultimate goals, which I have sworn an oath not to mention at this time.
If someone like me, who believes in unencumbered free will, swears an oath of loyalty, not quite fealty (certainly not quiet [sic] realty), you know what we’ve got planned for a milestone in 13940 days, to ensure events in 3011 take place without a hitch, must be important.
On a quantum scale, at the very least.
We’ll continue to use the sleight-of-hand tricks of comedy to slip messages into punchlines that keep all seven billion of us living our lives the way they’re supposed to be lived, often on emotional roller coasters.
Adding scientific achievements, popular culture trademarks, sports awards, and government public business secret agendas, along the way or via the Via Latina at times, notwithstanding contributions from the alleged authors of famous utterances.
Sweet Nothings
How many generations of kids whispering sweet nothings in their ears can an old man like me take and keep biting my tongue?
“Aww, leave ’em alone,” me wife says. “They’re going to fall out of love eventually and become ornery curmudgeons just like us soon enough.”
Good thing me wife is so wise…
Pertinent Post of the Past
Like molecules bouncing around
Do you ever read through blogs, look at the list of followers and likers, create a related network diagram, listen to ‘Krzysztof Penderecki and Jonny Greenwood‘ in it entirety, and see how our personalities, as represented by blogs/tweet/social network nodes, act like molecules bouncing around in a chamber, some getting attracted and forming a macromolecule, or forming locally-dense collections of similar molecules?
How often do we honestly pay attention to voices in dissent against our own?
How often do we need to?
Two data points for the moment – nope, make it your usual three:
treetrunkdings 