I’m not a political candidate but I approve this flashback message that you could be Dodge material, just in time for a female Air Force officer to take charge of basic training.
Tag Archives: television
When 102000+ people were gathered to recite the Lord’s Prayer
So, the world now has proof that the most violent religion is Islam, if global protest headlines speak louder than words, and cult followers don’t have a sense of humour/irony, willing to kill others and die because a few actors were conned into making fun of a religious leader and his god in a video?
Meanwhile, our covert operatives, assigned to no country, used the noise and chaos to slip into place, as always, ready to assassinate at the first word from the Committee, keeping this 3D chess game moving forward into new areas of the protestors’ territory. If a protestor or a person who incited a protestor dies off-camera in a horrible traffic smashup or accidental fall/food poisoning at home, who’s going to pay attention?
Yes, you’re right again, of course. “Assassinate” is such a strong word. Should I have said remove the chess pieces from the playing board, instead?
However, when using the globe as our playing field, we do what we must to accomplish a goal greater than a species or nation ever outlives, changing the anthropomorphic state of sets of states of energy as the need arises.
Unfortunately, the Obama administration will forever be tied to the use of cowardly strategic murderous drone strikes, instead of putting himself and his drone option last, when he should say our military personnel, both those directly employed by our government and those indirectly employed as contractors/mercenaries, are, in person, used to carry out secret death sentences or actively engage in the legal right to proactively defend themselves during war.
In place of a HOPE poster, there will inevitably be found on the side streets of the Internet a picture of Obama looking like BIG BROTHER in “1984” with his finger pointed at you, saying, “Remote-controlled killing is love. A dead citizen is a happy citizen. Coercion is freedom.” All in the name of feeding this storyline, which appears to question the old storyline that stated the latest enemy is Islam, but only in the strictest radical sense, whatever that means in selling headlines more succinctly, a tradition of every country that divides killing into bins: socially-unacceptable murder or organisationally-acceptable restructuring.
Then, on an opposite street will be Romney, smiling, saying, “I do not kill unarmed Muslims without open due process. I love all people, regardless of religious affiliation, bad comic timing or alleged criminal guilt. Only my God can judge you, whose teachings I follow to the letter of the writings I read most often with more conviction than my opponent.”
Would it make more sense if public trials were held for defendants in absentia, who are given time to appear, even via the Internet, to face their accusers before being convicted of murder and sentenced to death by any means necessary, as long as it was not cruel and inhumane, including instant death by drone strike?
Are drones becoming too politically risky, creating the wrong kind of unintended consequences, scaring people and reinforcing rather than changing their subcultural beliefs?
This weekend, I stood in the midst of a group of 102000+ people gathered to celebrate their right to peaceably assemble and watch the three-ring circus we call a modern college football game, none of us expecting to be hit by a drone strike but willing to be filmed with no monetary compensation by dirigible-, crane-, guidewire-, hand- and helicopter-mounted cameras.
At the beginning of the game, on a public/state-sponsored university campus, a man spoke over the public address system to say a prayer before the players started tossing themselves at each other. This week, the speaker happened to lead us in a rendition of Christian text called the Lord’s Prayer.
We also watched the uniform number of Johnny Majors, a college classmate of my parents, retired from active use by the university football team, which brought a tear to my eye knowing one of my parents could not be there in person to join the festivities.
During the break between the two halves of the game, called the halftime show, for some strange reason, the university “Pride of the Southland” marching band included a Scottish pipes and drum ensemble which played both “Scotland the Brave” and “Amazing Grace,” as well as the inevitable “Rocky Top.”
And today, as we left Knoxville, we saw dozens of old muscle/classic cars/trucks leaving east Tennessee, as well as a few stragglers from a large motorcycle gathering heading north from a Trail of Tears ride.
Can I extract trends from these last few data points, wondering where, anywhere and everywhere on this planet, people were reinforcing their beliefs due to recent news headlines?
Me, I’m happy to see people do what they want, as long as they don’t physically harm others.
Then again, I enjoyed the football game, even if my alltime favourite college football team, the University of Tennessee Volunteers, was unable to post the higher score by the time the game ended, when many a player could easily show evidence of physical harm.
So, I’ve got a basic belief of mine to reconsider: freedom to be in the act of “first, do no [physical] harm.”
If nothing else in my beliefs this weekend, there is a sense of poetic justice, where, on the same weekend my team lost its game against a formidable opponent, a team now coached by a man who claimed to love the Vols but left us high-and-dry — Lane Kiffin — also lost. I can’t remember and maybe you can help me…which players with questionable ethics attended the same school? Was it O.J. Simpson and Reggie Bush?
I know our new coach, Derek Dooley, instills a real winning attitude of moral and ethical beliefs in his players as they reach successful goals in their career paths, in and out of the physically-harmful sport of American football.
While straying into sports, I keep having fun with this comical tirade on behalf of a political election campaign, seriously yet cynically satirical (or is that cynically yet satirically serious?), when I need to go on down the trail this storyline was going to take after the last blog entry but I’ve let myself get caught up in eddies and swirls of news headlines again, haven’t I, either way?
Old age, I guess.
Well, I’ve got to help my wife clear space in our space (“our space” is a house, in this case) to make room before we move her mother’s furniture from her sister in-law’s house, the furniture having worn out its welcome, as all guests are prone to do, including family.
Tomorrow, I’ll thank folks for their help this weekend, including Cassie at Bel Air Grill and Silvia at the Airport Hilton, my cousin Cindy and her husband Ron, and more…
Thank goodness I do not live in the ultra-regulated city-state of Singapore, because it considers illegal the flash mob performance of a haka that was as fun to watch as a spontaneous Scottish Highlands bagpipe concert.
District 12
From my nephew, Jonathan, via email:
Check out this Kickstarter for a power monitoring device that straps on your existing power meter: http://t.co/Aykdtkab via @kickstarter
My wife and I bit the bullet, so to speak, buying smartphones tonight. She got the Apple iPhone 4S and I got the Samsung Galaxy SIII.
Her iPhone sits in her purse while she plays games on her iPad 1 this evening and I sit here in the study typing on an old Compaq C501NR laptop computer while the Samsung phone is on the computer desk in the living room where my wife is also watching the TV show, “Leverage.”
Maybe tomorrow I’ll run some throughput speed tests of the AT&T 4G LTE network and later the WiFi hotspot capability using my iPad 2 and a Sylvania Android tablet as test subjects.
One never rests from one’s thought sets developed in previous occupational habits such as test engineer.
When I stopped looking at the rise and fall and rise and fall of daily readership levels, I found freedom in writing blog entries for the sake of a storyline rather than for the sake of making myself popular/likable by people I know only by their favouring my blog with a view and a like or two.
Ernest Hemingway died before I was born — his influence upon me is historical rather than living. Same for Dorothy Parker. Which leads to another disjointed thought…
Sadly, I must give this storyline a new direction, one which requires a day or two of concentration on esoteric subjects I know little about.
Talk to you soon…
A nod to Roy and Megan at Walmart; the team at Buenavista; Renee and others at Beauregard’s; Joe and Jenn at KCDC; Phillip, Jordan, Steven and Cedric at AT&T; the usual and new smiling faces at Publix; Theresa at Mapco; Allison at Raffaele’s (note: my mother taught one of the owner’s sons, a student of hers when she was a first grade teacher many years ago, to improve his English by encouraging the family to spend less time speaking Italian at home).
With so many teachers out of work across the country, is now a good time to perform a giant experiment in Chicago, getting rid of the old system and trying a new one? After all, if the students’ performance is as bad as they say, would it hurt to throw out the broken system and start anew, bringing in a whole slew of nonunion teachers teaching/coaching an immersive education program that provides low pay but high bonuses for teachers whose students become more curious and make continuous improvement an ingrained way of thinking rather than a “must do” chore to survive one’s childhood years before getting out of the system and becoming whatever unmotivated/dropout students tend to become?
Oh well, that’s not where this storyline is going but I had to put it out there.
Why Best Buy lost a sale – abbreviated version
My mother ended up getting an Emerson 39-inch LCD TV from Walmart — now waiting for friends/neighbours to install it.
Let’s back up — my mother’s email on Friday:
Rick, Thanks for your e-mail. I went to best buy today to check on the Insigna TV there. It was nice set, but the young man who helped me didn’t seem very knowledgeable about TV. It had closed caption, but he said their TV’s were not hooked up to cable, so he could not tell me about it. That price was $279.99. I checked back at Walmart. They have Vizio that has a 37″ screen with 1080 p for $348.They have a product care plan for 3 yrs. for $39 and Best Buy has a plan for 4 yrs. for $49.
I know there is a difference of price between the two, but I just don’t know what to do right now. Any ideas? Dad and I used to make decisions like this together. I guess I just don’t feel as comfortable as I should about things like this. I do know Dad did not have much confidence in Best Buy.
I shopped at Walmart this afternoon with my wife and saw that, in addition to the 37″ Vizio, there was a 39″ Emerson for $328 with three font sizes for closed captioning. The employees in the electronics department, Dan and Karen, were very helpful.
I told my mother about the Emerson TV after she had emailed me her concerns.
She drove to her hometown Walmart and closed the deal.
She finally emailed, “The sales-person said if it didn’t fit, I could bring it back within 90 days for a full return.”
Could Best Buy top that, or do they still charge a restocking fee?
What I went through with my mother in-law in 1997…
…I go through with my mother in 2012.
My mother in-law was 80 years of age when her husband died. My mother was 78 when her husband died.
In both cases, as in any longterm relationship between two people, the survivor learns new forms of daily decisionmaking.
My mother in-law depended on her now-deceased son and living daughter (my wife) to help her make decisions after their father died.
My mother depends on my sister and me to help her make decisions after our father died.
When my father in-law died, my wife was almost 35.
When my father died, I was 50.
In between: fifteen years of wisdom gathered through life experiences, some shared between us, some accumulated individually.
Fifteen years of social changes/progress, including new technology (think about how much the Internet has changed in 15 years), new businesses, failed businesses, climate change, fashion cycles, pop music tastes, entertainment choices, medical science advances, etc.
Are we more or less tolerant of Iranian atheists/humanists? Liberal Quakers? Non-heterosexual relationships? Physical/mental challenges? The unemployed? Cute cat videos?
Is there room in your life for a late night TV talk show host with a robotic skeleton and cloth-horse costumed actor(s)?
Would there have been such a creature 15 years ago? Could he have been a reformed Scottish alcoholic comedian? Do such creatures exist in real life today?
I learned a new phrase today: conformity to tomorrow (from book, “Without Apology: The Heroes, the Heritage, and the Hope of Liberal Quakerism” by Chuck Fager [which I read, quickly, in the book section of Unclaimed Baggage Center]):
“Conformity to tomorrow: …consists in a moderate opposition to the existing political power, together with the espousal of the ideas and doctrines of the most sensitive, the most visionary, the most appealing trend in society. This is a trend which, from the sociological point of view, is already dominant, and is the one which should normally be expected to win out….In this way, the political stand has the appearance of being independent, whereas in reality it is the expression of an avant-garde conformism.” (Jacques Ellul, a French Reformed theologian and sociologist, 1972A, p. 123.)
I would toss musical acts like Rage Against The Machine, political groups like the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, and economic movements like the EU handling of the PIIGS into the realm of avant-garde conformism, as well as most official social protest groups not included in terrorist lists for “wanted: dead or alive” drone attacks.
We always have to have enemies toward whom we formally direct our confusion/fear-based hatred.
But, as usual, I digress.
Earlier today, at a roadside restaurant called Carlile’s in Scottsboro, Alabama, a town where a plentiful plethora of people met for camaraderie and shopping bargains, my wife and I held a wonderful discussion with Autumn, mother of three boys aged 7, 6 and 2, the first taking the role of the responsible eldest (“Mom told you not to do that”), the second a quiet child who puts up with the physical shenanigans of his two brothers, and the youngest, the rowdiest one of the bunch.
Autumn, raised by her grandparents, lost them both nine months apart five years ago. The emptiness inside is slowly, very slowly, wrapped up in new friendships and new experiences we call the passage of time.
When she wants to turn to her grandparents for guidance, they are not there and she feels an instant pang of pain.
Although she has a beautiful tattoo of a heart on her arm where every one of her three boys first rested and for whom she tattooed their names, she would never tattoo the names of her grandparents or the name of her husband on her body because the reminder of their losses, in plain ink visible under skin, would be too much to bear (beauty is not the only thing that’s skin-deep).
She, like all parents, believes deep down that her kids will outlive her, their futures bright.
To those who’ve lost their children to congenital conditions, I give you my sympathy. No one wants to survive the death of offspring with a promising future.
My wife outlived her parents and her only sibling.
I have outlived my father but not my mother and my only sibling.
As this storyline grows more complicated, my life and the lives of my family members are intricately intertwined.
Not a loss, not a gain nor a zero-sum game is life.
The sets of states of energy are constantly in flux.
Every waking moment is an opportunity to learn.
Is new technology an enabler of your relatively expensive entertainment addictions or an avenue of opportunity for increased wealth? Does it increase the credit or debit side of your account ledger? In other words, do you go into debt to play games and watch videos?
These and other questions lead us to thought trails about the costs and benefits of a globally-connected economy, where plenty of leisure is available to the masses.
If this laptop computer and these blog entries are using up CPU cycles for the sole purpose of entertaining myself, is that okay?
What about the urgency to act, the desire to change our society significantly so that spare CPU cycles are used to ensure survival of Earth-based lifeforms here and elsewhere as long as potential energy states are available to support them in this part of the universe?
Does it matter if the majority of our species believes in self-centered activities?
What are a few decades compared to 1000 years?
What is 1000 years compared to 200 million?
Can we really know the future, no matter how much we bunch together to conform to one vision knowingly, unknowingly, voluntarily and/or coercively?
All for the sake of family, whatever that means to you/me/us?
Mashup of the day
When Apple has the patent on robotic mechanical breathing devices, will your newborn baby have to pay royalties for taking its first breath?
Domestic quarrels
Domestically, how many entertainers whose salaries put them in a category called the 1% wrap themselves up in “Occupy Wall Street” symbology, bashing others for proudly showing and protecting their wealth, when the entertainers themselves have financial advisors and accountants setting up tax shelters and foundations to protect the entertainers’ wealth?
I watched a few minutes of…
Wait a minute. I was about to comment about an entertainer whose whole purpose in life is to get rich riling up people as they watch his show on TV.
If I mention his name and what he said (making fun of another person’s body weight, one of the weakest attack methods in debating), then I promoted him and his show.
Instead, let me practice the method of “water on a duck’s back” and return to storytelling of my own, a time 1000 years from now when all of this, though entertaining to me in the moment, is forgotten.
…while watching my neighbours rush up and down our quiet suburban street in their motor vehicles like they’re running from a pack of rabid dogs.
Not all my heroes were cowboys…
A few weeks ago, while driving back from north Virginia, where my niece, Maggie, officially graduated from secondary school, I took my mother to dinner at the Martha Washington Inn in Abingdon.
We stopped in the quiet town to reminisce about my father’s days there as an extension agent and assistant professor for Virginia Tech.
His office was located at the Inn.
A block or so down the street is Barter Theatre, a venue for the performing arts.
I can remember more than one but less than a dozen times I took a date to see a play or musical at Barter Theatre, driving up from northeast Tennessee to show my female companions a bit of culture common to most cultures (but rarely, agar plate cultures).
As president of the Drama Club in our secondary school (for two years!), I felt it was my duty to support the arts.
The Barter Theatre presented mainly light entertainment such as, if my memory serves me well in this moment, I Do! I Do!, a musical that features the song, “My Cup Runneth Over.”
Right now, I cannot remember the names of the performers.
However, we were taught that more than one famous performer cut their teeth on the stage of Barter Theatre:
Patricia Neal, Ned Beatty and to tie this blog entry to a recent death, Ernest Borgnine.
The world is small.
On television, I watched Ernest Borgnine and his crazy cast of characters turn the U.S. Navy into a farcical front for jokes about bureaucratic nonsense, humour during wartime and the general state of the American sitcom exhibited in “McHale’s Navy.”
We all start somewhere.
If an ugly mug like Borgnine’s can become a nationally-recognized figure, anyone can.
We celebrate beauty in women with “Miss [name your region]” contests all the time.
How often could a woman proudly say she made the Ten Ugliest Faces of Hollywood list?
Borgnine did, along with Karl Malden and many others.
When they did, it made me smile and think, “Well, if they don’t care about their looks, why should I?”
You don’t have to be a cowboy or handsome to be successful.
Persistence is the key.
That, and an outstanding personality.
I have both.
That’s why I’m here, remembering my mother, my father, Barter Theatre and the actor who went from Abingdon to Hollywood decades ago, Ernest Borgnine, who became one of my heroes, both local and national, along the way.
My father was my first hero and will be my last. Borgnine was one of many important ones in-between.
May we laugh with our last breath or die trying!
Mayberry RFD, the next generation
So, word on the street in Hollywood is a remake of the Andy Griffith Show, with Opie returning to his hometown, OR…
A live version of the Archie comic series, because…
we’ve already re/made these:
So many more to read at my leisure before digging gold in Canada.
Did somebody mention the Gold Diggers?
Looking Back
A reposted blog entry referencing Andy Griffith (from here):
02 February 2009
What’s a groundhog got to do with it?
2 February 2009, 11:32 a.m. – Two nights in a row with no sleep…am I supposed to see my shadow today? At my age, I know my moods, my body ailments, and my set of reactions to the familiar world around me. Once, I would attack the world like Don Quixote, jousting at monsters with relish, exhilarated in the extreme during the thrust and plunged into depression when the dragons of the world defeated me with laughter. The highs and lows have mellowed somewhat with age. I, I, I…it’s not all about me. I have to keep telling myself that, reminding and repeating myself often, because as a selfish person I tend not to care about others. I just said this to myself and heard echoes in my thoughts of repeating even these set of words. The next thing I know I’ll say is, “Yet, because I was raised to worry about what the neighbors think, a selfish person like me still doesn’t exceed a limit of social decency that I wish did not exist.”
I look at the words, phrases, and sentences I’ve written and exasperate myself with my attitude of “good enough” (as in “good enough for government work”), not taking the time to perfect my use of the rules and suggestions of the English language. Thus, I’ll use too many commas or place a word with a similar but not quite precise meaning (e.g., “I see” versus “I comprehend”).
I write for an unknown reader. Well, I write for myself first but myself as a person with a group of colleagues (including some imagined ones, such as other writers who had brains superior in calculation capability than mine but whose inspiration gives me hope for the value of my work), well-read colleagues who may not exist except in my imagination. Colleagues who enjoy reading dictionaries, plant identification books, philosophy, cartoons, economic analysis reports, sports headlines, milk cartons, random blogs, user manuals, billboards, handwritten letters from friends, LP liner notes, fortune cookie slips and literary fiction.
On a flight from one forgotten destination to another a few years ago, I read a book highly recommended to me titled, “Eats, Shoots & Leaves.” The friend who suggested the book to me majored in English in college and had more than a passing interest in the correct use of punctuation, even though her career had moved into computer equipment sales. I suppose our lives crossed paths for a reason (a reason, mind you, not a purpose). I reason that I wanted to major in language studies or literature but my upbringing pointed in the direction of the hard sciences such as chemistry, engineering or computer software design, thus my vocation would always clash with my avocation of reading and writing literature (literature in the form of poetry, short stories, novellas, skits, plays and novels; I hesitate adding the word “essays” to the list because the blogging world has taken over the world of the formal essay, where even a haiku becomes both blog and essay; I might add “graphic novel” one day should my artwork interest hold my attention for longer than a day of drawing). So literature becomes a joke about a panda that serves as a book title which mixes my life and my friend’s life well.
You know the joke, don’t you? A panda walks into a bar, sits on a stool, munches on some peanuts, kills the person sitting next to him with a gun and then calmly walks out of the bar. A patron turns to the bartender and asks, “What was that all about?” The bartender responds, “Don’t you know that’s a panda?” The bartender hands a poorly written children’s alphabet animal book to the patron, who turns to the letter P and reads the definition of panda: “an animal, native to China, that eats, shoots, and leaves.”
Today, literature as solely a written art form almost has no meaning. The Internet has invaded our thoughts and actions so pervasively and persuasively that we’ve become both creator and audience at once. The visual arts, including rap and hip-hop songs, take literature from the static written page into the three-dimensional realm from whence it originated. Our storytelling ancestors sitting in caves would understand us and our need to carry around Internet devices in the form of cell phones and other UMPCs.
Yesterday afternoon, my wife and I watched the movie, “Inkheart,” at a local theater. If you haven’t seen the movie and plan to, then you should stop reading here because I’ll soon discuss spoilers. As in right now. LOL Toward the end of the movie, the character played by Jim Broadbent (one of my favorite actors, by the way), the writer of “Inkheart,” expressed his wish to move out of the regular, lonely world of writing and into the exciting world he created with his writing. I don’t know how the third act of the movie jibed with the “Inkheart” book series on which the movie’s based, but I was happy to see the writer character get his wish granted.
The night before, I slept in a fit of delirium. I tossed and turned, fighting the enemy who has stalked my dreams and wishes like the shadow from “Inkheart.” I suppose all of us have seen such an enemy as mine, who works night and day to drain me of my true desire, waiting for the moment to suck the life blood out of me and turn me into a zombie, with which the shadow can play like pieces on a chess board or marionettes on a puppet stage, reducing me to the role of an automaton working in an office full of fellow robots. In the dreamlike state, I defeated the enemy because I surrounded myself with the love and support of those who believe with me that my creative talent is worth calling myself a writer. Or more than that, really…I’ll take a deep breath here, look around me to make sure no one is looking, feel my heart beat in my throat before I speak and finally say, “I am an author.”
After watching the movie, my wife and I returned home to watch the spectacle known as the Super Bowl. With a superlative like “super,” we can automatically assume the bowl is anything but. However, I have accepted the conditioning of my society to cheer for or against the participants of the main event, grown men running around chasing an inflated bag of sewn pigskin (and if you ever want a humorous view of football, listen to Andy Griffith‘s comedy sketch “What It Was, Was Football,” – even if you’re not a fan of “The Andy Griffith Show,” the skit is funny), whilst with bated breath we gaze at the screen for gleeful exposure to commercial advertising.
As the NFL game progressed, I glanced at the clock, mentally counting down the hours until the countdown ended for the opening of submission of works of fiction for the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award at www.createspace.com/abna. When the game ended after 9 p.m. Central, I grabbed another bottle of Yuengling Black & Tan and headed to my study, where I could sit and listen to jazz on old vinyl LP albums and watch the countdown clock on a webpage. Tick. Tock. Or so my brain thought because the silent digital display simply showed the word, “Tonight,” underneath was which a counter of hours, minutes and seconds. My blood pressure leapt when the numbers dropped from 01:00:00 to 00:59:59. Had I made any glaring mistakes in the work of fiction itself, much less the other text I had to submit for the contest, including an excerpt of less than 5,000 words, a pitch statement of less than 300 words, an anecdote, a biography and a description to be used for the novel should the contest judges deem my novel worthy of posting on amazon.com as a semifinalist in March?
Finally, as the hour shrank to ten minutes, I resigned myself to the fact that no matter how well my novel succeeded in capturing the attention of the editor(s) who reviewed first the pitch statement (to reduce the 10,000 entries down to 2,000) to create a reasonable set of good entries and then read my novel excerpt (to drop the entries down to 500, I believe), I had written an opus, though not perfect, which represented me, complete with poor punctuation – with ill-advised comma placement, or omission – and lack of precise word usage.
A groundhog does not determine the next six weeks of weather any more than a randomly selected judge determines the worth of my writing. At 23:11 (11:11 p.m. Central, or 12:11 Eastern time on 2nd February 2009), I clicked the Submit button and received confirmation that my novel submission was completed and accepted for the 2009 ABNA contest.
HAPPY GROUNDHOG’S DAY, EVERYONE!
Posted by TreeTrunkRick at 1:12 PM
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HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!! Thanks to Megan, Pat, Gail, Derek, Andrew, Heather, Roy, Cassandra, Shirley, Stephanie (a/k/a Athens pie)
treetrunkdings 