...............My daughter had a job interview yesterday. I got to wait in the lobby, opting to sit near a vacant piano. About a half hour into my wait, this nice gentleman shows up, lifts the fallboard, flexes his fingers, sits down, and starts playing. Magic. An hour later, without a sheet of music in sight, he is still playing. I am seriously impressed and a happy witness.
Saturday, January 7, 2017
Serendipity...............................
...............My daughter had a job interview yesterday. I got to wait in the lobby, opting to sit near a vacant piano. About a half hour into my wait, this nice gentleman shows up, lifts the fallboard, flexes his fingers, sits down, and starts playing. Magic. An hour later, without a sheet of music in sight, he is still playing. I am seriously impressed and a happy witness.
Highly recommended..................
Us humans tend to be complicated beings - Bobby Kennedy maybe more than most. Tye's sympathetic treatment of Bobby Kennedy focuses on RFK's growth and evolution as a human soul. Having said that, Tye does not shrink from showing Bobby at his worst. Warts and all are on full display, some of it is not very pretty. The fifteen + years that Bobby Kennedy was front and center in American politics was an impactful era in our history. I know learning of his assassination that early June morning in 1968 had an impact on the sixteen-year-old me. One thing Tye does not do is ask, "What if?" It is a question I have asked myself more than once. If you like politics and history, do read this book.
Ripples..............................
"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."
-Bobby Kennedy, as excerpted from his "Ripples of Hope" speech, delivered at the University of Cape Town in 1966. Full speech is here.
Bounce...........................
Bobby believed in a social safety net - but he envisioned it as a trampoline, helping recipients bounce back to jobs that made them self-reliant rather than fostering dependency.
-Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
The philosophical failings.............
.................of forecasting. Read the whole thing. Excerpts here:
... a wide range of prognosticators -- consultants, economists, investment advisers and others -- have turned the dark arts of foretelling the future into a lucrative profession. They have successfully developed the tools to separate those who badly want to know the unknowable from their money.
Philosophically, most people don’t like to admit the inherently random nature of life. This manifests itself in a variety of ways, but most typically it involves taking credit for successes but placing blame elsewhere for failures. Success, even though the credit for it should be attributed to coincidence or mere luck, is inevitably followed by overconfidence. Too often, what comes next are self-inflicted errors.
Believing in predictions allows people to overlook their own ignorance, discount the role of randomness and generally overestimate their own skills. If you think you (or someone you pay) can divine the future, you create the illusion of control and stability, where often there is none. Order is created out of chaos; it is a comforting illusion.
Fifty years ago.................................
The Esquires.............................................................Get On Up
Friday, January 6, 2017
Gone, but not forgotten.................
George Harrison (& some friends)....While My Guitar Gently Weeps
Fifty years ago........................
The Beatles...............................................................Penny Lane
Results...........................
Few in Congress made better use of their full palette of tactics and strategies - from model programs to the bully pulpit - that the very junior senator from New York. Even so, liberals said he was providing an illusion of dissent, while conservatives worried he was all heart and too subversive. Neither could see at first that he was crafting a new creed - grasping at the bits of FDR and his father's New Deal collectivism that still worked, and borrowing from heroes such as Herbert Hoover and Ralph Waldo Emerson who saw the centrality of self-reliance. He was also hardheaded enough to disdain rebellion without results, which set him apart from most 1960s activists.
-Larry Tye, as excerpted from the chapter Senator Kennedy in Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
Thursday, January 5, 2017
Do not understand me too quickly.......
He was changing in deeper ways, too. Defining his own public identity meant clarifying his own beliefs, as opposed to those that had come from Jack. Few could see those critical differences even when the two were working side by side. Both men were pragmatic, but Bobby was more willing to experiment with radical solutions and spend political capital. Both talked about promoting Negro rights and battling poverty, but Bobby felt injustice on a gut level and lost sleep over it in ways that his imperturbable and cerebral brother never did. Bobby also embraced contradiction in ways neither Jack nor Teddy wanted to or could. His realism butted up against his romanticism even as the existentialist in him looked for ways to coexist with the politician. He was half ice, half fire. How, observers wondered, could someone so shy be so intimidating? Was it possible to love both Albert Camus and roughhouse football? "Robert Kennedy's motto," said the Village Voice's Jack Newfield, "could have been, 'Do not understand me too quickly.' ... His most basic characteristics were simple, intense, and in direct conflict with each other. He was constantly at war with himself."
-Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
Fifty years ago.......................
The Four Tops............................................................Bernadette
And we wonder.......................
.........................................why "college students today can't write":
By 2005, Richard Fulkerson could write of composition, “in point of fact, virtually no one in contemporary composition theory assumes any epistemology other than a vaguely interactionist constructivism. We have rejected quantification and any attempts to reach Truth about our business by scientific means.”
Well, that explains a lot. Full essay from whence the quote was extracted is here. My theory is that college students today can't write (assuming that is true) because public grade schools stopped teaching cursive writing about twenty years ago. What was that about?
Planet Earth...............
.........................................................................is Outside.
"Outside is perspective. Inside is Google and Facebook."
On gaining respect................
....................................................in today's zany world:
"There’s just something about hockey culture that calls to me. I mean, the blue lines on the ice are actually called “blue lines.” That kind of no-nonsense approach commands my respect."
-as culled from this essay about the Columbus Blue Jackets, who currently are enjoying a sixteen game winning streak, and who, since I've now posted that, are most likely jinxed. Sorry.
About chess............................
World affairs to Bobby, were less a global chess game than a latticework of bonds between humans, much as they had been for Ben Franklin two centuries before.
-Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon
Not sure I'm buying what Tye is selling here. Bonds between humans can get difficult at the most inopportune times. For instance, Franklin's experience in front of the Privy Council in 1774. Just for fun, here is a quote attributed to Franklin:
“Chess teaches foresight, by having to plan ahead; vigilance, by having to keep watch over the whole chess board; caution, by having to restrain ourselves from making hasty moves; and finally, we learn from chess the greatest maxim in life - that even when everything seems to be going badly for us we should not lose heart, but always hoping for a change for the better, steadfastly continue searching for the solutions to our problems.”
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