17 April 2012 • 01:12 0
Why can’t find a woman like this? I’ve been waiting for a girl like you, to come into my life.
I do have to admit that she reminds me of this girl a little too much, down to hair color, looks, and the sound of her voice:
but in a good way.
Filed under: tribute
10 September 2011 • 22:59 0
The modern Bauhaus box of Gropius and van der Rohe and the banal cement pourings of Le Courbusier are lost on me. If you want to know what really grabs my interest, it is a place that has actual design. I don’t know how I got to it, but somewhere I came across La Confiteria Ideal in Argentina. Look at the photos of this restaurant’s main hall and tell me it does not floor you:
Now look at this building that used to stand in the center of Pittsburgh (Wabash Station):
that I got from the Shorpy archive. My God does that give me a thrill. I thought my favorite pie wedge shaped building in the world was the Flatiron Building (of which I have a poster dominating my dining room), but its continued existence is all that keeps this long lost gem from winning my heart. Gems like Ebbets Field and League Park have long since been destroyed, but at least Wrigley Field is still with us.
Filed under: observations, tribute
3 April 2011 • 22:40 0
I’m a history buff, and just tonight through the wonderful Explorator was I able to read the story behind the actual unraveling of slavery that happened during the course of the Civil War.
It wasn’t a result of the war, as many people still believe, but it happened because of the war. It didn’t happen from the top, but as the result of a horse ride conducted under the white flag of truce. It all sprang from the conversation between the Union general, who was a wily and skilled lawyer back home in Massachusetts, and the Confederate colonel, who was Southern gentry. In the end, the general came up with a well accepted wartime rule that worked as well as balancing angels on the head of a pin, so that the peculiar institution which many didn’t want abolished, even in the North, with the many who were uncomfortable with its existence and its abolition equally, and even with the emancipators, could find a way to accept and live with the results. It wasn’t Fort Sumter, and it wasn’t the Emancipation Proclamation, but it was an in-between incident which should’ve never become a forgotten part of Civil War history. But if you read it and pass it on, it will not be.
Filed under: fact nugget, tribute
13 March 2011 • 20:02 0
The story of a dog sitting loyally by its dead owner’s grave after the major floods in Brazil last month has turned out to be false, but it nonetheless sheds light on true stories of dogs who have been so faithful, even beyond death. Greyfriar’s Bobby is an example from 1800′s Scotland of a terrier who lay by his master’s grave for the last 14 years of his own life, true to the end. In 1930′s Japan, there was Hachiko, who went every day to the train station to wait for the deceased owner who would no longer come.
But here are happier stories of dogs who get to greet their owners returning from war. This veteran came home after a 15 month tour in Iraq:
And this one of a returning Afghanistan soldier:
And here’s a double team of love:
The loyalty of the dog is also noted in Homer’s Odyssey: when Odysseus returns home, blind and in rags, but his old dog Argos recognizes him right away, and runs to be with him and dies at his feet. A dog will never up and leave you for someone with more money, it will never talk bad about you when you’re not around. All it wants out of life are the bare necessities of survival, and in return you get its commitment for life.
Update: loyalty to one’s injured friend, from the Japan tragedy:
Filed under: tribute
6 March 2011 • 22:17 0
The first war pilots were a brave and crazy bunch, and had a certain panache with their exploits. The Red Baron, for instance, painted his plane fire engine red as if waving his arms and screaming “come and get me if you can” when everyone else was into the new camouflage idea.
Then there was the Belgian air ace Willy Coppens. Popping surveillance balloons was his specialty, when that was the hardest thing to do at the time, and a true trick to pull off. Now the Germans decided to make a balloon specially for Mr. Coppens himself. They fitted a balloon with all of the explosives they could get into it. Of course when you do something like that, someone has to brag, and word gets around.
The Germans were so proud of their little plot that word of the scheme eventually got back to Coppens himself, who decided that after they went to all that expense and effort, it would be rude not to go have a look at this balloon. When he got there, he discovered that the Germans had really made a day of it, with dozens of soldiers and staff officers standing around to watch the fireworks. The balloon itself was still being winched up and was, crucially, only at half its intended height. The resulting explosion sent his plane rocking through the sky like a kangaroo on a pogo stick, yet it remained intact. If the low height had saved Coppens, it proved disastrous for those below, with the resulting fireball killing and maiming dozens of the watchers on the ground.
Hahahahaha. Now c’mon, the whole mental image of this episode of Jackass has to get you laughing, too. A bunch of rear detachment guys dying of boredom when their brothers were dying of bullets and disease on the front, who had nothing better to do than to stand idly by to watch a crazy Belgian blow himself up with their idea of a joke, getting bettered by him. The balloon that was designed to blow up everything within 500 feet got 250 feet into the air when the Belgian plane comes over the horizon. Oh, s***. First you say it, then you do it. Now who’s the idiot?
Filed under: fact nugget, tribute
6 September 2010 • 12:38 0
Of course it’s from a British site. Those people have a way with succinct, yet excellent quips right off the tops of their heads, as if on reflex. It’s in response (the first comment, most likely typed on the fly by the author right after he read the article) to the death of ELO’s founder, killed by a cylindrical hay bale which rolled down a hill onto the roof of the van he was driving down the road at the precise moment that said bale took its leap:
Filed under: tribute
31 May 2010 • 08:48 0
To the dead, yes, and also to the wounded, visibly or not, who unlike the killed in action have to live with the wounds and disabilities for years and decades. And for the families to whom Johnny will never come marching home. In memorial and in tribute.
Filed under: tribute
29 January 2010 • 19:21 0
I’m hearing all of those tributes to J.D. Salinger on his passing. Catcher in the Rye was a good read, but other than getting into the head of some depressed guy who got suspended from a fancy rich boy’s prep school and is kicking around NYC, what was the point? What great thing did it impart? Yeah, Salinger tapped the telegraph wires for the internal conversation of the teenager and let us in for a listen, and did a good job of fleshing out a stack of characters that look like people we know so we can identify to a certain extent, but once you were done, you were in the same place you started.
In high school, we had quite a good required reading list, and I lost the drudgery of reading that I developed in grade school. I loved the quest in Beowulf, had a blast reading the very raunchy Canterbury Tales (which made me ask what the big deal about Howard Stern and Steve Dahl was after reading the Reeve’s and Miller’s Tales), enjoyed the endless cliff hanger endings to each chapter of Great Expectations, and got lost in the court scene in To Kill a Mockingbird. Something about burning the midnight oil reading homework for enjoyment never did sit right.
I got Catcher in the Rye right when it became infamous due to its influence on Mark Chapman and John Hinckley. Here, this forbidden fruit became a class assignment! I loved all the highjinks: the guy farting in lecture hall, the hotel full of freaks, Holden awkwardly getting a hooker sent to his room, among the features. It was what Porky’s and Fast Times at Ridgemont High became to me later: having a good laugh at people involved in silly shenanigans and foolish highjinks. I never saw the draw people had to the book being a benchmark in their lives, giving them the meaning to live, carrying it around at all times like their secular bible, etc. To me, it was a fun book that went all maudlin and morose and lost my interest before I got to the end.
I came across Summer Crossing as an adult, but I’m sure my 16 year old self would have the same book review. If you want a book that has a normal guy narrating his coming of age, and the experiences he and the people around him have that shape his becoming a man in the year after his graduation, it would be this book. Steve Tesich was the only author who I ever had the notion to write and let him know how much the book affected me. Maybe it was his similar Region Rat “son of D.P. parents” heritage, like Alex Karras and Karl Malden, maybe it was the book being set down the street in East Chicago, but maybe it was the weight of the book itself without all this familiarity. After all, I never felt like dropping Jean Shepherd, or Karras or Malden, a line. But when I tried to look him up and discovered he died years ago from a heart attack, I actually got mad at him for dying before I could write, as stupid as that seems.
Catcher in the Rye? An overrated book by an author who hung it all up after his big hit. The guy who should get credit for pulling off “lightning in a bottle” once in his life, like L. Frank Baum did, but not a great author like Charles Dickens or Ernest Hemingway, who cranked out the product on a running basis. Summer Crossing? The definitive coming of age book by the screenwriter of Breaking Away and Four Friends, which unfairly sits on the dusty shelf, instead of being celebrated for the great book that it is.
If you ever want a good read, buy this book. If it doesn’t grab at your heart and your mind, I’ll refund your purchase. You can buy them all day long for under $5 from Amazon or Half.com, so we’re not talking real money.
Filed under: tribute
4 December 2009 • 20:47 1
I was just listening to I Still Believe by Tim Cappello, more for the lyrics than the tune, but still the sax solo jumps out and grabs you. And it got me to thinking of other great sax pop hits. Hoosierboy has his musical lists, and from time to time, so do I. Here’s some of the top ones, according to the allmighty blog owner:
A very close second is Baker Street by Gerry Rafferty:
Then there’s Glen Frey’s contribution to Miami Vice:
And Huey Lewis’ contribution to the 80′s:
Who hasn’t held a girl in his arms, swaying to the sound of this one:
Then you have Ace of Base’s hit:
But one obscure one by Morphine is also one of my favorites:
Enjoy the videos, and have a good sax life!
Filed under: tribute
9 November 2009 • 19:47 0
A woman on the radio talked about revolution
when it’s already passed her by
Bob Dylan didn’t have this to sing about you
you know it feels good to be alive
I was stationed in West Germany at the time, and even though the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was imminent, there was no great trepidation or heightened threat-com, other than stay away from the celebrations and let the Germans have their moment without everyone else tailgating onto it. Trabis scattered along the road shoulders had been a common sight, and everyone knew the jig was up, and were just waiting for it to happen.
I was alive and I waited, waited
I was alive and I waited for this
Right here, right now
there is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now
watching the world wake up from history
It was surreal to see, on the AFN broadcast of American national news, events that were playing out just a couple hundred miles away from base. The storming of the Stasi headquarters and the raiding/destruction of the personal files. The nightly demonstrations in East Germany and Czechoslovakia. The anticipation, the waiting for it, the final countdown, and not one of dread, but one of hope, life, and freedom.
I saw the decade in, when it seemed
the world could change at the blink of an eye
And if anything
then there’s your sign… of the times
The 1980′s began with the age old fear of nuclear winter, mutually assured destruction, brinksmanship. We had a cold enemy ready to dish it out in droves, and who was on the advance throughout the world. But the staunch stand of the West, led by the great three, Reagan, Thatcher, and John Paul II, found a way to stop, then undermine and subvert, this evil.
And I was lucky enough to be over there at the time when we defeated yet another world threat, this time without a massive loss of life but for Romania. People forget what residents of the East went through. Getting shot trying to go over the wall, traveling 100′s of miles to soft spots in the border around Austria, hiding under cars going back to West Berlin. Registering their typewriters in case any dangerous pamphlets came up that could be forensically traced to the thumb print of their machines. Getting reported on by their neighbors and family.
Right here, right now
there is no other place I want to be
Right here, right now
watching the world wake up from history
In italics, the song Right Here Right Now by Jesus Jones, about this night and all that went with it.
Filed under: tribute
