Saturday, December 13, 2003
RE-DATES
One of the best ways to identify the date on which the old TV re-run show you are watching was produced is to learn all you can about automobiles.
If you would rather not be reminded of how long ago that was - the first time it was shown on TV – then, forget
I ever mentioned any of this.
I, myself, like to know. If there's something I remember from, say, thirty-five or forty years ago, then I say “more power to that section of my memory.”
Only a true dyed-in-the-chrome automobile buff can be trusted to do this identification work well, however. They have to know, for sure, what year the so-and so-model off what car had such an such a gizmo on it that other cars did not have and, probably, did not want.
There was time when TV producers used cars or horses to move characters around from one staid setting to another. Maybe you recall, when color TV was just catching on, how producers realized they had an economy device at hand. Our horse-seated hero, on his way to the next scene, wandered though the canyons, past the high waterfalls, across the plains and into the dense forest ... a five minute travel interlude until the action got started again. Urban themes demanded a chase of some sort and the automobiles took over. The written script could be shortened by several pages by watching the car weave in and out of traffic with either the hero or the heavy at the wheel.
Watching TV with an auto nut in the co-pilot's set can be an advantage within itself. They can tell you, almost to the day, when the film was made by the cars used, what extras they had and how they responded to a skillful driver's every whim They know what years cars had high tail fins, when they had low ones, when stabilizers were in or out, what year such-and-such a brand of gasoline, oil or air came in the market and how little they cost then. They know that TV producers, eager to save a few bucks, made trade-out advertising deals with car dealers and distributors to use their models on TV.
You find out, promptly, when your TV re-run was originally filmed, but you also find you have stopped watching and become all wrapped up, instead, in “talking cars.”
Someone ought to tap the car expert's capability of forecasting the future by being so adept at past-casting what has been for so many years. The car expert could be our secret weapon in international plans to out guess everyone else's plan for the future.
A.L.M. December 12, 2003 [c467wds]
Friday, December 12, 2003
GORED
Albert Gore hurt himself and at least three other people recently when he announced he was supporting former Governor Harold Dean of Vermont for the Democratic nomination.
As should be obvious, he lowered his personal ratings by a noticeable notch by utterly and callously ignoring his former running mate without even the courtesy of a telephone call. Leiberman, who, himself, had delayed entering the campaign until he made sure Albert Gore was not going to seek the nomination is a serious person. This thoughtless act must have irked those who felt the Gore-Leiberman ticket should have read the other way around. Lieberman drew a worthy group of voters to Gore's side and this was no way to think him for his loyalty. Certainly this this was a poor way for Gore to say thank you for loyalty by a former running mate. Furthermore, this incident will excite rumors that all was well in the Gore-Leiberman camp during the last election which Gore still still insists was “stolen” - a charge about which we hear nothing voiced by Senator Leiberman.
The harm which might well come to Howard Dean by this close association with the likes of Al Gore are less apparent and my be stayed for a time. Lieberman touched on them when he noted that he was amazed that Gore could support Dean who favors a host of measures Gore campaigned against. Gore, as usual, is getting on the band wagon of the favorite early, perhaps without noticing the exact baggage the wagon was hauling. Such deviations from principles might well appear later. I think Professor Gore can work his pressing educational duties in well enough to keep the Dean campaign going. I do not foresee any real difficulty between the two men until an announcements make known, publicly, that celebrated Vermont Maple syrup was originally created by Al Gore in those years before he invented the Internet.
Yes, I do think the situation might well become that ludicrous in the weeks and months ahead.
In the political arena, “to be gored” is a most unpleasant hazard.
A.L.M. December 11, 2003 [c362wds]
Thursday, December 11, 2003
THE OTHER WHITE MEAT
Annually – usually around budget crunching time - far too many of our elected officials turn chicken on pork
The list of pork barrel projects funding with taxpayer money by our Congress grows longer and meatier year by year.
You will know when the list is first available because that ls the day your local newspaper will devote at least a portion of their editorial page to boxed display of the rather impressive list. I have often wondered what enterprising newspaper editor will feature the list as just another comic feature striped in with the rest of in the funnies in their proper section.
The long list usually presents the cost of the project, the exact location, and few words making it sound unnecessary and usually without additional critical comment. So often the sole editorial comment is in the terse headline: “T'sk, T'sk! Or, some have been known to head it all up with the words: “For shame...”
It all makes good breakfast talk,for a day or so – largely because the local radio and TV shows look forward to the coming of the pork list each year and dwell on it at great length – as it relates to other areas than their own.
A prime concern this year is fifty-million dollars to go to the founding a giant, indoor rain forest in the State of Iowa. It is needed as an educational tool, it reported.
The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, Ohio, will get $200,000 of your money.
The Senate Office Building in D.C. will get a new exhaust fan for their kitchen thanks to your gift of $108.000.
You may never be aware of the fact that when the Luveme, Alabama needed new sidewalks and street furniture you helped out a bit by giving them one hundred thou.
Elsewhere, $6.2 million went to “Wood Utilization Research”. A cool million was spent for a DNA sampling studies of bear in Montana.
These, and many others, are to be found in the annual omnibus spending bill. They are listed every year in hundreds of our nation's newspapers, on radio and TV and nothing whatsoever is ever done to try to prevent others from being added in the future.
A.L.M. December 10, 2003 [c381wds]
Wednesday, December 10, 2003
MUSIC MOMS
We have heard a great deal about “Soccer Moms” in recent years. What about “Music Moms,”, or to be more specific - “Band Moms?”
There are more bands in Middle Schools and High School, I'd say, than soccer teams and a Band Mom is on duty both day and night. The band has strong ties to each of the major sports and does not have a respite interlude in which devotees may rest and recuperate from a football season, a baseball season, track, gymnastics or or whatever.
Only a few of our exalted Halls of Edification take soccer seriously to the extent of fielding and supporting teams, but just about all of them have a band or orchestra of some sort. It is usually an add-on, too, not fully supported by the school authorities and left more or less to members and parents of those who play an instrument. It is not unusual for parents of band members to perform a taxi-bus-van routine with the family vehicle to transport the band and their instruments to scheduled football games. Often it is up to moms to provide the means of getting there and home. Band Moms and ,sometimes, Band Dads urge their musically oriented offspring to develop their talent and they also function as purchasing agents for all sorts of related items: buying reeds and double reeds for woodwind players, buying strings for stringers, slide oil for trombone players; mutes for trumpets; a set of new brushes for the drummer and fancy, electronic tuners for whatever instrument their talented tooter, tweaker, toucher or thwacker may play - or hold.
A great deal of parental care and concern goes into this phase of teen-growing. Their work is not always appreciated.
Parents, while cleaning up the attic many years later will come across an odd shaped case. They will open it and both mother and daughter will open it and laugh. Mom will say: “Well, would you look at this! Here's that long, black, wooden thing you used to blow on an make sqeak so much!”
The daughter will take the old clarinet in hand, jiggle the keys a bit, and somewhat wistfully comment : “It might have worked out better if I had gone out for football instead.”
A.L..M December 9, 2003 [c389wds]
Tuesday, December 09, 2003
NICK NAMES
I happen to live in and area where, for some strange reason, people have long called each other by some of the oddest nick names every created.
Part of the reason for such a tendency might be found in the fact that our community is a bit ingrown in the sense that we have about a score of family names. That is changing rapidly in modern times, and I would be willing to bet the nice naming will change with it. At least, it will change to a more,multi-lingual tone because, in one area town, the Hispanic population now totals 3600 or about nine per cent of the total population.
So the fine art or crafting freaky nicknames may be on the way out . When I first, moved to this Valley area, I was puzzled when people spoke of “Skeeter”, “Wink”, “Snuffy” and “Flim”. There were others, of course, and, in time, I came to know each of them as people rather than as marks setting them apart from others. Some were associated with first names of the individuals such as:: “Bessie”, “Bev”,“Theo,”,”Oz ,” which served well until you found their first names to be some entirely different. There were others who were know by their two initials from the day of their birth until they were pushing up daisies when people learned their real names by reading the inscription on their tombstones.
I knew one family which carried this initials-to new limits. Both the husband and wife disliked the names they had “been saddled with” all their lives so they decreed that each of their children would be given initials at birth with the privilege of choosing their own name, using those letters as the base of their self-chosen name.
Towns in our area have nicknames, too. They are not intended to be so, exactly but they came into being a short form or quick led used to identify the town. I had a bit of trouble finding “The Cave” until I came to realize people were speaking of the town named “Weyers Cave.” Others, who were not going to the Cave were, instead going to “The Draft.” I found I had two choices but the larger – the town of Stuarts Draft in the southeastern side of the county took precedence over “Ramseys Draft” west of the county seat. A third town was called “Gus-Spirnz”. That one took me a while but it finally hit me that people mean they were going to or coming from “Augusta Springs, Virginia”.
Combined with native dialects, nicknames can be a problem at times. When they bother you, think about your own area and the strange names you find there. No place escapes the nick name entirely.
A.L.M. December 8, 2003 [471wds]
Monday, December 08, 2003
US
The British historian Arnold Toynbee once described America as bring "a large, friendly dog in a very small room. Every time it wags its tail, it knock over a chair."
You can't really argue against such a statment, can you? Would you want to do so?
I, for one, do not wish to contest the description because there is so much, good-natured Truths contained there in.
It is so accurate to see the United States - us , that is - "us" - as if we were, indeed, a large, wooly, big-boned, rather akward dog earestly seeking friendship and comradely associations -not only with other dogs, but with do the dogls enemies such as cats et cetera. Most of all the big, happy, tail-wagging dog seeks comfort and alliance with its master or peers and other human beings with whom he comes in contact even casually.
The trouble is often that the big friendly by his expressive eagerness comes on a bit too strong at times children, women and grown men shy away from him or her as being too blustery and far too eager to please. The very size of the critter scares people away.
Certainly that can be said of much of our dealings with other people both here at home and overseas. We often rush in when even the angels are biding time outside other people's lives. We can see the idea in our relations in Iraq at the pressent time. We have undertaken a number of educational and social reforms, many of them probably radically different from Iraqi methods, on the assumption that we knew what is best for them. In eagerly "wagging our friendly tails" we may well have tumbled chairs and tables on which their system has long rested. We have been guilty of doing the same sort of thing here at home: we set up programs to train young girls and older women for jobs which do not exist.
Just down the block from a church I used to attend, a family owned a large dog. It was not a St. Bernard, fluffy and soft; not a sleek Great Dane, but a big, rusty-red, short-haired, slack-jawed and clumsy monster of a dog. He was gentle giant, but stranger did not know that and when he turned up and church socials on church's small lawn, he got everyone's attention. He wagged his tail with unending vigor, went rapidly from one person to another seeking attention. He welcomed every morsel of foodstuff tossed his way and accepted them with bounding shows of gratitude by begging for more. He was just the size that would not fit under the usual card tables used at such lawn socials...so down they would go and chairs next to them, as well. If he liked you, he leaned against you to be scratched. Small children and old persons were literally bowled over at times.
Such a cheerful visitor was not welcome. A phone call tothe famly would bring a member of that family to give one call and a whistle and he was gone...but not forgotten.
Perhaps we should temper our presence in Iraq and elsewhere; try not to fighten the natives by being too friendly and upsetting things they find bring them comfort and confidence it their future.
A.L.M. December 7, 2003 [c-432wds]
Sunday, December 07, 2003
WHY SRI LANKA?
The old name “Ceylon” suited me just fine. Why did they have to change it to “Sri Lanka”?
There has been some talk about conspiracies in recent years and I think one might exist in this field of nation-name-changing. Someone out there be they on the Right. On the left, at the Center or Vertical, for that matter, in politics out to make me and my generation appear to be dumber, we have appeared to have been dumber, on occasion, than we are.
Sri Lanka is a nice name. It is from the Sanskrit language and it means “beautiful land” which is about as trite as you can get in naming a country. Just about all nations must have been called “beautiful” land, place, spot, swamp or hillside at one time or another. Anyone finding a new place in which he might live will think of it as being the most beautiful spot in the entire world, until he moves in and finds out what the tax bill is going to be.
For the old name of “Ceylon” always meant good, high quality tea and fine cinnamon. It was changed to Sri Lanka in 1972, and has had several other names down though the centuries. Among those those names, for a short time, the island about the size of our State of West Virginia, was called “Serendipia”. We get our mysterious word “serendipity” from that name and certainlky this island was a treasure with a topicl setting an d yetwith mountains reaching up as high as 2700 feet in the south central portion..
Serendipity is the art of the act of finding a treasure when you are not looking for it. The small island was indeed a treasure in many ways to early settlers there and worthy of the mysterious term. Very little is known of the remnant of aborigines (Vedda) who inhabited the island prior on the coming of tribal groups from Northern India and, later, the Portuguese, Dutch and British.
independence was won in 1948. For the past two decades the predominant group the Sinhala (74%) has been opposed by y seperatist group in the south called the Tamil Kingdom. In 2001, Norway .
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