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yeah I know you did not ask!
Google knows me much too well. Of course, these voice recognition programs have a hard time with my Okie accent also. I’m driving to Tulsa the other day, and I want to find a western store. So I used the voice dictation function to enter into a Google search the following phrase: “western store Tulsa Oklahoma”. It changed that into “porn store Tulsa Oklahoma”. It must have been the personalization feature of Google.
I was born in the fifties, grew up in the 60s, and attended college in the early 70s. The soundtrack of my youth is in many ways the Motown playbook. Whenever I hear any number of those songs, I “Dr. Who” it back to that era when the song was new.
We saw Motown: The Musical Saturday night at The Fabulous Fox Theatre in St. Louis. It was a short three hours of wonderful music and dancing. So many of the performers did the songs so well, it felt like the original artist was there in front of us. Robin thought it was the best show she had seen at the Fox. I would not go that far, but it was definitely up there.
As a bit of background, St. Louis has been on edge for several weeks due the situation in Ferguson with the Michael Brown shooting. A white policeman shot a young black man several times resulting in his death. There were demonstrations and some minor rioting afterwards. The shooting was the evening of August 9, 2014. Here it is Nov 22, 2014 and the grand jury is still out without a decision, although one is expected any day. The typical crowd at a Broadway musical presented at the Fox is older Continue reading “Motown: The Musical”
To The Best of Our Knowledge is interviewing Steven Spiro, a Buddhist Chaplain, on mindful dying. He has five things to say at the end of life.
Not bad things to say at any point of life.
I spend way too much time commuting which allows me time to observe the idiocy of the motoring public. And yes I know from time to time while driving I fall under the rubric of idiot. My primary rule when I am
driving is to consider everyone on the road an idiot except myself, and do not be too sure about myself.
I was thinking driving home today with all the push for testing and evaluating for competence in schools perhaps we should do the same for drivers. Some method could be devised to evaluate overall driving skills. This would then be tied into everyone’s driving records. If you fell in the bottom 20% you would have to have a red flashing light on your car. If you fell into the next quintile an orange light, then yellow and so forth. That way you quickly recognize the total idiots and give them a wider berth. Of course, you would have to retest annually as skills change. And I can see some folks sandbagging to get the red light so folks would stay away, but if you tied it to their insurance rates…
This book was published in 1872. Transpacific and transatlantic steamships had come into to being, but many still used paddle wheels and supplemented steam power with wind power. The Transcontinental Railroad, a 6 year project, had just been completed in the United States in 1869. What had been a many months journey from coast to coast of the United States had been transformed into a journey of a week. The concept of being able to go around the world quickly was just being realized. Verne took this new excitement and created the novel we know as Around the World in 80 Days.
Like many of Verne’s novels the bench of characters is not deep. Nor is there a great deal of character development. They remain throughout the book relatively unchanged.
The protagonist, if you will, of this book is Phileas Fogg, a wealthy man whose wealth was acquired by means unknown. To call this man regular of habit and punctual is to call the sky blue. Continue reading “Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne”
I won’t say I was totally terrified, but I had started to become more than a little concerned. There were so many dust bunnies under the bed that I was afraid they were going to coalesce into a giant, fuzzy blob. The idea of waking up in the middle of the night clawing at this nebulous mass of detritus was giving me the heebie-jeebies. I did the only thing humanly possible. I broke out the vacuum cleaner.
As I took the machine from the hall closet I heard Robin say, “Do you know how to operate that?”
I replied, “Leave me alone I am on a critical mission. Our combined safety is at stake. I will figure this contraption out.”
I am proud to say I have met the dust bunnies, and they are conquered.
Semper fi.
Overheard at a party.
First young man says, “I am friends with Joe So-and-so.”
Second young man asks, “Real friends or Facebook friends?”
yeah I know you did not ask!
I wonder what it would be like to live a life that was not scored in minor chords.
This book was not quite what I expected. What little I knew about this story was from seeing bits and pieces of the various movies based on this book. The movies emphasize the adventure aspect of book. Perhaps the best way to describe the book would a travelogue for 20,000 leagues most of which was under the sea.
Towards the end of the book Professor Aronnax is reviewing his time aboard the Nautilus. He does so in a short paragraph:
“My nerves were somewhat calmer, but in my excited brain I saw over again all my existence on board the Nautilus; every incident, either happy or unfortunate, which had happened since my disappearance from the Abraham Lincoln—the submarine hunt, the Torres Straits, the savages of Papua, the running ashore, the coral cemetery, the passage of Suez, the Island of Santorin, the Cretan diver, Vigo Bay, Atlantis, the iceberg, the South Pole, the imprisonment in the ice, the fight among the poulps, the storm in the Gulf Stream, the Avenger, and the horrible scene of the vessel sunk with all her crew. All these events passed before my eyes like scenes in a drama.
It is these events that Hollywood has sucked out of the book to make movies. Continue reading “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne”
