robert altman

Robert Altman, director of such influential films as M*A*S*H,
McCabe and Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Prêt-à-Porter, and Gosford Park,
on his view of life. Before beginning his life in film, Altman was in the U.S. Army
Air Force and piloted B-24s in fifty bombing missions in the Pacific theater during
World War II:
"I was the eldest child in my family. Born in 1925. Had I been
born in 1935 instead of 1925, my life would be totally different. I
would be a totally different person. Same if I had been born in 1915.
"It all depends on when you're placed into the river, and where that
river takes you - it couldn't happen the same way a week earlier or a
week later. You're in your time and space in the river. Now, you can
swim over toward the bank where the current isn't as fast, but basically
from that point you're going down the river. You can swim upstream.
But just for a little bit. If you swim up against the current a lot, by the
time you die you have only covered a short distance along the bank. If
you go over to the edge and go with the mainstream, you cover a lot
more territory, but you're not exercising. I don't think you ever have
the energy to beat the river. The river is always going faster than you
can swim against it. The reason I think you fight against something is
simply because it's there to fight against.
"I think I go upstream because it's the easiest place for me to go. But
I'm over at the edge, not in the center of it. In other words, I'm not out
there making the long-distance swim across the channel. I take the easiest path
upstream. ...
"I don't think anybody remembers the truth, the facts. You remember impressions."
Mitchell Zuckoff, Robert Altman, Knopf, Copyright 2009 by the Estate of Robert Altman
and Mitchell Zuckoff, pp. ix, 20.

latin words

A.Word.A.Day

with Anu Garg

According to a story, probably apocryphal, former US Vice President Dan Quayle once said, "I was recently on a tour of Latin America, and the only regret I have is that I didn't study Latin harder in school so I could converse with those people."

Latin is a dead language. No people speak it as their everyday language. The area south of the US is called Latin America because most of the people down there speak Spanish, Portuguese, or French, all derived from Latin.

Latin took its name from Latium, a region in ancient Italy. Various dialects of Latin eventually blossomed into the Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish, while Latin itself faded away.

Fortunately, you don't have to travel to Latin America to use this week's terms from Latin. They have been borrowed into English and are now part of the language.

locum

PRONUNCIATION:

(LOH-kuhm)

MEANING:

noun: A person filling in for another, especially for a doctor or clergyman.

ETYMOLOGY:

From Latin locum tenens (holding the place), from locus (place) + tenere (to hold). The full form locum tenens is also used in English.

quotes

The entire economy of the Western world is built on things that cause cancer.
           -- From the 1985 movie "Bliss"
Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock.
           -- Will Rogers

Music with dinner is an insult both to the cook and the violinist.
           -- G. K. Chesterton
Bureaucrats write memoranda both because they appear to be busy when they are writing and because the memos, once written, immediately become proof that they were busy.
           -- Charles Peters
Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
           -- Raymond Chandler

In archaeology you uncover the unknown. In diplomacy you cover the known.
           -- Thomas Pickering

The more original a discovery, the more obvious it seems afterwards.
           -- Arthur Koestler
There are many who dare not kill themselves for fear of what the neighbors will say.
           -- Cyril Connolly

The squeaking wheel doesn't always get the grease. Sometimes it gets replaced.
           -- Vic Gold

The time not to become a father is eighteen years before a war.
           -- E. B. White




The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one.
           -- Albert Einstein

Nothing is more conducive to peace of mind than not having any opinions at all.
           -- Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

A true friend is the greatest of all blessings, and that which we take the least care of all to acquire.
           -- Francois de La Rochefoucauld

Drive-in banks were established so most of the cars today could see their real owners.
           -- E. Joseph Cossman

quotes

Any fool can tell the truth, but it requires a man of some sense to know how to lie well.
           -- Samuel Butler
There is no doubt that the first requirement for a composer is to be dead.
           -- Arthur Honegger
About the time we think we can make ends meet, somebody moves the ends.
           -- Herbert Hoover

Money can't buy happiness, but neither can poverty.
           -- Leo Rosten
The very first law in advertising is to avoid the concrete promise and cultivate the delightfully vague.
           -- Bill Cosby

Great part of being a grownup, you never have to do anything.
           -- Peter Blake, House M.D., Safe, 2006
The reason there are so few female politicians is that it is too much trouble to put makeup on two faces.
           -- Maureen Murphy

All you need in this life is ignorance and confidence; then success is sure.
           -- Mark Twain, Letter to Mrs Foote, Dec. 2, 1887

There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.
           -- George Santayana, Soliloquies in England, 1922, "War Shrines"

Thirty-five is a very attractive age. London society is full of women of the very highest birth who have, of their own free choice, remained thirty-five for years.
           -- Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest, Act 3

The only thing that overcomes hard luck is hard work.
           -- Harry Golden
Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally.
           -- Abraham Lincoln

It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers.
           -- James Thurber
If winning isn't everything, why do they keep score?
           -- Vince Lombardi

Laughing at our mistakes can lengthen our own life. Laughing at someone else's can shorten it.
           -- Cullen Hightower

I look to the future because that's where I'm going to spend the rest of my life.
           -- George Burns

check this out

http://www.1goodreason.com/blog/2010/01/27/brilliant-thought-provoking-video/

stock market

In today's excerpt - George Soros, one of the
world's wealthiest and most successful
investors, made his early fortune by betting
on the stock market's irrationality in a
world that had long believed in a rational
and efficient market. Investors fell in love
with conglomerates such as LTV Corporation in
the 1960s, and that love translated into
unwarranted high valuations for these
companies and soaring stock prices. For
Soros, that was a golden opportunity:



"Soros's practical experience as a broker and
research analyst convinced him that the
normal market state was, in fact, disequilibrium.
As an investor, however,
he finds it more useful than an assumption of
market rationality,
because it is a better pointer to profit
opportunities. [One] of his
early investment successes [was] crucial to
the evolution of his
thinking.



"[It] was related to the conglomerate
movement in the second half of the 1960s. The
flurry of company takeovers, Soros
saw, merely exploited investors' tendency to
rate companies by
trends in earnings per share (EPS). Start
with modestly sized Company A, and engineer a
debt-financed acquisition of B, a much
larger, stodgy company with stagnant
revenues, a modest EPS,
and a low market price. Merge B into A, and
retire B's stock, and
the resulting combined A/B will have a much
higher debt load,
but a much smaller stock base. So long as B's
earnings more than
cover the new debt service, the combined A/B
will show a huge
Jump in per-share revenues and earnings.
Uncritical investors then
push up A/B's stock price, which helps
finance new acquisitions.
Jim Ling was one of the early exploiters of
the strategy, parlaying
a modest Dallas electronics company into a
sprawling giant (LTV) with
dozens of companies, spanning everything from
steel to avionics,
meatpacking, and golf balls.



"Business schools justified the scam by
theorizing that conglomerates deserved higher
share prices because their diversified business
mix would deliver smoother and steadier
earnings. It was the kind
of dumb idea that underscores the disconnect
between business
schools and real business. If shareholders
want earnings diversification, of course,
they can quickly and easily diversify stock
portfolios in the market. Big conglomerates,
in fact, probably warrant
lower stock prices. They're hard to manage,
are often run by financial operators, and
usually carry outsized debt loads.



"Soros understood that the conglomerate game made no sense,but he also recognized its strong following
among market professionals. 'I respect the herd,' he told me, not because it's right, but
because 'it's like the ocean.' Even the
stupidest idea may warrant
investment, in other words, if it has a grip
on the market's imagination. So Soros
invested heavily in conglomerates, riding up the
stock curve until he sensed it was nearing a
top. Then he took his
winnings and switched to the short side,
enjoying a second huge
payday on the way down."



Charles R. Morris, The Sages, Public
Affairs, Copyright 2009 by Charles R. Morris,
pp. 10-11.

the nicest things

Too Busy for a Friend.....

One day a teacher asked her students to list the names of the other students in the room on two sheets of paper, leaving a space between each name. 

Then she told them to think of the nicest thing they could say about each of their classmates and write it down.
It took the remainder of the class period to finish their assignment, and as the students left the room, each one handed in the papers.
That Saturday, the teacher wrote down the name of each student on a separate sheet of paper, and listed what everyone else had said about that individual. 
On Monday she gave each student his or her list. Before long, the entire class was smiling. 'Really?' she heard whispered. 'I never knew that I meant anything to anyone!' and, 'I didn't know others liked me so much,' were most of the comments.
 No one ever mentioned those papers in class again. She never knew if they discussed them after class or with their parents, but it didn't matter. The exercise had accomplished its purpose. The students were happy with themselves and one another. That group of students moved on.
 Several years later, one of the students was killed in
 Vietnam and his teacher attended the funeral of that special student. She had never seen a serviceman in a military coffin before. He looked so handsome, so mature. 

the church was packed with his friends. One by one those who loved him took a last walk by the coffin. The teacher was the last one to bless the coffin. 

As she stood there, one of the soldiers who acted as pallbearer came up to her. 'Were you Mark's math teacher?' he asked. She nodded: 'yes.' Then he said: 'Mark talked about you a lot.'

After the funeral, most of Mark's former classmates went together to a luncheon. Mark's mother and father were there, obviously waiting to speak with his teacher. 

'We want to show you something,' his father said, taking a wallet out of his pocket 'They found this on Mark when he was killed. We thought you might recognize it.' 

Opening the billfold, he carefully removed two worn pieces of notebook paper that had obviously been taped, folded and refolded many times. The teacher knew without looking that the papers were the ones on which she had listed all the good things each of Mark's classmates had said about him.

'Thank you so much for doing that,' Mark's mother said. 'As you can see, Mark treasured it.'
 All of Mark's former classmates started to gather around. Charlie smiled rather sheepishly and said, 'I still have my list. It's in the top drawer of my desk at home.'
Chuck's wife said, 'Chuck asked me to put his in our wedding album.'
'I have mine too,' Marilyn said. 'It's in my diary'

Then Vicki, another classmate, reached into her pocketbook, took out her wallet and showed her worn and frazzled list to the group. 'I carry this with me at all times,' Vicki said and without batting an eyelash, she continued: 'I think we all saved our lists' 

That's when the teacher finally sat down and cried. She cried for Mark and for all his friends who would never see him again.
The density of people in society is so thick that we forget that life will end one day. And we don't know when that one day will be.
So please, tell the people you love and care for, that they are special and important. Tell them, before it is too late.

a long word

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis

 

pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis (NOO-muh-noh-UL-truh-MY-kruh-SKOP-ik-SIL -i-koh-vol-KAY-no-KOH-nee-O-sis, nyoo-) noun 
A lung disease caused by inhaling fine particles of silica.

the first internet message

In today's excerpt - the first internet message, sent in
1969, was "lo." The meaning and efficacy of
messages sent via the internet has been declining
ever since:


"On October 29, 1969, the message 'lo' became the
first ever to travel between two computers connected
via the ARPANET, the computer network that would
become the Internet.The truncated transmission
traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between
the University of California, Los Angeles, and the
Stanford Research Institute.The electronic dispatch
was supposed to be the word "login," but only the first
two letters were successfully sent before the system
crashed. ...


"Created by the U.S. Department of Defense's
Advanced Research Projects Agency, the original
ARPANET was a network of just four computer
terminals installed at universities and research
institutions in California and Utah. With its truncated
missive 40 years ago today, ARPANET became the
world's first operational packet-switching network.



" 'Packet-switching was the original transmission
mechanism [for our network] in 1969 and is still the
underlying technology of the Internet today,' said
Leonard Kleinrock, a UCLA computer engineer who
was involved in ARPANET's creation. In a packet-
switched connection, a message from one computer
is broken down into chunks, or packets, of data and
sent through multiple routes to another computer.
Once all the packets arrive at their destination, they
are pasted back together into the original message.



" 'It's as if a long letter were written on a series of
small postcards, and each postcard was mailed
separately,' Kleinrock said. Packet-switching replaced
a less efficient and less flexible transmission
technology used by early telephone companies called
circuit-switching, which relied on dedicated
connections between two parties. 'When you and I talk
over a circuit-switched connection, that connection is
totally dedicated to our conversation,' Kleinrock
explained. 'Even if we pause to take a coffee break,
the connection is still ours and sits by idly while we
are silent.'


"By contrast, data packets in a packet-switched
transmission have multiple routes open to them and
will hop on to the one with the least amount of traffic.
In this way, no route is idle for long. In the years
following ARPANET's deployment, other packet-
switching networks were created, but they were
internal networks that had only limited access to one
other. It wasn't until the mid-1970s that engineers
developed a way to merge networks to create the
Internet. In 1984 the domain system that
includes .com, .gov, and .edu was established. A
decade after that, the first commercial web browser,
Netscape, became available. "



Ker Than, "The Internet Turns Forty," National
Geographic News, October 29, 2009

quotes

More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
           -- Woody Allen, My Speech to the Graduates

I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place.
           -- Steven Wright

Happiness is nothing more than good health and a bad memory.
           -- Albert Schweitzer

By the time a man realizes that maybe his father was right, he usually has a son who thinks he's wrong.
           -- Charles Wadsworth

The world's as ugly as sin, and almost as delightful
           -- Frederick Locker-Lampson

Where a calculator on the ENIAC is equipped with 18,000 vacuum tubes and weighs 30 tons, computers in the future may have only 1,000 vaccuum tubes and perhaps weigh 1.5 tons.
           -- unknown, Popular Mechanics, March 1949

When you think of the long and gloomy history of man, you will find more hideous crimes have been committed in the name of obedience than have ever been committed in the name of rebellion.
           -- C. P. Snow

Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.
           -- Evelyn Waugh, Diaries of Evelyn Waugh (1976)

Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better.
           -- Andre Gide

People who have no weaknesses are terrible; there is no way of taking advantage of them.
           -- Anatole France, The Crime of Sylvestre Bonnard

But in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.
           -- Benjamin Franklin, Letter to Jean Baptiste Le Roy (1789)

I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it.
           -- Voltaire

Both the cockroach and the bird would get along very well without us, although the cockroach would miss us most.
           -- Joseph Wood Krutch

There is only one thing a philosopher can be relied upon to do, and that is to contradict other philosophers.
           -- William James

Confusion is always the most honest response.
           -- Marty Indik

effect of birth date on athletics

In today's excerpt - the effect of birthdate

on athletic performance:

"If you visit the locker room of a

world-class soccer

team early in the calendar year, you are more

likely to interrupt a

birthday celebration than if you arrive later

in the year. A recent tally of

the British national youth leagues, for

instance, shows that fully half of

the players were born between January and

March, with the other half

spread out over the nine remaining months.

On a similar German

team, 52 elite players were born between

January and March, with just

4 players born between October and December.

"Why such a severe birthdate bulge?

Most elite athletes begin playing their

sports when they are quite

young. Since youth sports are organized by

age, the leagues naturally

impose a cutoff birthdate. The youth soccer

leagues in Europe, like

many such leagues, use December 31 as the

cutoff date.

"Imagine now that you coach in a league for

seven-year-old boys and are assessing two

players. The first one (his name is Jan) was

born on

January 1, while the second one (his name is

Tomas) was born 364

days later, on December 31. So even though

they are both technically

seven-year-olds, Jan is a year older than

Tomas - which, at this tender

age, confers substantial advantages. Jan is

likely to be bigger, faster,

and more mature than Tomas.

"So while you may be seeing maturity rather

than raw ability, it

doesn't much matter if your goal is to pick

the best players for your

team. It probably isn't in a coach's interest

to play the scrawny younger

kid who, if he only had another year of

development, might be a star.

"And thus the cycle begins. Year after year,

the bigger boys like Jan

are selected, encouraged, and given feedback

and playing time, while

boys like Tomas eventually fall away. This

'relative-age effect,' as it has

come to be known, is so strong in many sports

that its advantages last

all the way through to the professional

ranks.

"K. Anders Ericsson, an enthusiastic,

bearded, and burly Swede, is the

ringleader of a merry band of relative-age

scholars scattered across the

globe. He is now a professor of psychology at

Florida State University,

where he uses empirical research to learn

what share of talent is 'natural'

and how the rest of it is acquired. His

conclusion: the trait we commonly

call 'raw talent' is vastly overrated. 'A

lot of people believe there are

some inherent limits they were born with,' he

says. 'But there is surprisingly little hard

evidence that anyone could attain any kind of

exceptional performance without spending a

lot of time perfecting it.' Or, put

another way, expert performers - whether in

soccer or piano playing,

surgery or computer programming - are nearly

always made, not born."

Steven D. Levitt & Stephen J. Dubner,

Superfreakonomics, William Morrow,

Copyright 2009 by Steven D. Levitt & Stephen

J. Dubner, pp. 59-61.

quotes

I've known what it is to be hungry, but I always went right to a restaurant.
           -- Ring Lardner

If you can find something everyone agrees on, it's wrong.
           -- Mo Udall

Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
           -- Aldous Huxley, Vedanta for the Western World, 1945

What you do speaks so loud that I cannot hear what you say.
           -- Ralph Waldo Emerson

How can you govern a country which has 246 varieties of cheese?
           -- Charles De Gaulle, in "Les Mots du General", 1962

Everyone is entitled to be stupid, but some abuse the privilege.
           -- Unknown

In this business you either sink or swim or you don't.
           -- David Smith

Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
           -- Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.
           -- Hodding Carter

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.
           -- John Kenneth Galbraith

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
           -- Sir Winston Churchill

A kleptomaniac is a person who helps himself because he can't help himself.
           -- Henry Morgan

My doctor gave me two weeks to live. I hope they're in August.
           -- Ronnie Shakes

These days an income is something you can't live without--or within.
           -- Tom Wilson, "Ziggy" (comic)

Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
           -- R. Buckminster Fuller, Interview, April 30, 1978

accepting imperfection

"When I was a little girl, my mom liked to make breakfast food for dinner every now and then. And I remember one night in particular when she had made breakfast after a long, hard day at work. On that evening not so long ago, my mom placed a plate of eggs, sausage, and extremely burned toast in front of my dad. I remember waiting to see if anyone noticed! Yet all my dad did was reach for his toast, smile at my mom, and ask me how my day was at school. I don't remember what I told him that night, but I do remember Watching him smear butter and jelly on that toast and eat every bite!

When I got Up from the table that evening, I remember hearing my mom apologize to my dad For burning the toast. And I'll never forget what he said: 'Baby, I love burned toast.'  

Later that night, I went to kiss Daddy good night and I asked him if He really liked his toast burned. He wrapped me in his arms and said, 'Debbie, your Momma put in a hard day at work today and she's real tired. And besides-a little burnt toast never hurt anyone!' You know, life is full of imperfect things......and imperfect people. I'm not the best housekeeper or cook.  

What I've learned over the years is that learning to accept each other's faults - and choosing to celebrate each other's differences - is the one of the most important keys to creating a healthy, growing, and lasting relationship.  

And that's my prayer for you today. That you will learn to take the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of your life and lay them at the feet of GOD. Because in the end, He's the only One who will be able to give you a relationship where burnt toast isn't a deal-breaker! We could extend this to any relationship in fact - as understanding is the base of any relationship, be it a husband-wife or parent-child or friendship!! "  

"Don't put the key to your happiness in someone else's pocket but into your own." 

George Carlin

Isn't it amazing that George Carlin - comedian of the 70's and 80's -

could write something so very eloquent...and so very appropriate.
A Message by George Carlin:

The paradox of our time in history is that we have taller buildings but shorter tempers, wider Freeways , but narrower viewpoints.. We spend more, but have less, we buy more, but enjoy less. We have bigger houses and smaller families, more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees but less sense, more knowledge, but less judgment, more experts, yet more problems, more medicine, but less wellness.

We drink too much, smoke too much, spend too recklessly, laugh too little, drive too fast, get too angry, stay up too late, get up too tired, read too little, watch TV too much, and pray too seldom.

We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values. We talk too much, love too seldom, and hate too often.

We've learned how to make a living, but not a life. We've added years to life not life to years. We've been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet a new neighbor. We conquered outer space but not inner space. We've done larger things, but not better things.

We've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul. We've conquered the atom, but not our prejudice. We write more, but learn less. We plan more, but accomplish less. We've learned to rush, but not to wait. We build more computers to hold more information, to produce more copies than ever, but we communicate less and less.

These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion, big men and small character, steep profits and shallow relationships. These are the days of two incomes but more divorce, fancier houses, but broken homes. These are days of quick trips, disposable diapers, throwaway morality, one night stands, overweight bodies, and pills that do everything from cheer, to quiet, to kill. It is a time when there is much in the showroom window and nothing in the stockroom. A time when technology can bring this letter to you, and a time when you can choose either to share this insight, or to just hit delete...

Remember; spend some time with your loved ones, because they are not going to be around forever.

Remember, say a kind word to someone who looks up to you in awe, because that little person soon will grow up and leave your side.

Remember, to give a warm hug to the one next to you, because that is the only treasure you can give with your heart and it doesn't cost a cent.

Remember, to say, 'I love you' to your partner and your loved ones, but most of all mean it. An embrace will mend hurt when it comes from deep inside of you.

Remember to hold hands and cherish the moment for someday that person will not be there again.

Give time to love, give time to speak! And give time to share the precious thoughts in your mind.


George Carlin

white slaves in early america

In today's encore excerpt - early
British colonizers of America in the 1600s
and 1700s needed laborers for their new
colonies:



"They needed a compliant, subservient,
preferably free labour force and since the
indigenous peoples of America were difficult
to enslave they turned to their own homeland
to provide. They imported Britons deemed to
be 'surplus' people - the rootless, the
unemployed, the criminal and the dissident -
and held them in the Americas in various
forms of bondage for anything from three
years to life. ... In the early decades, half
of them died in bondage.



"Among the first to be sent were children.
Some were dispatched by impoverished parents
seeking a better life for them. But others
were forcibly deported. In 1618, the
authorities in London began to sweep up
hundreds of troublesome urchins from the
slums and, ignoring protests from the
children and their families, shipped them to
Virginia. ... It was presented as an act of
charity: the 'starving children' were to be
given a new start as apprentices in America.
In fact, they were sold to planters to work
in the fields and half of them were dead
within a year. Shipments of children
continued from England and then from Ireland
for decades. Many of these migrants were
little more than toddlers. In 1661, the wife
of a man who imported four 'Irish boys' into
Maryland as servants wondered why her husband
had not brought 'some cradles to have rocked
them in' as they were 'so little.'



"A second group of forced migrants from the
mother country were those, such as vagrants
and petty criminals, whom England's rulers
wished to be rid of. The legal ground was
prepared for their relocation by a highwayman
turned Lord Chief Justice ,who argued for
England's jails to be emptied in America.
Thanks to men like him, 50,000 to 70,000
convicts (or maybe more) were transported to
Virginia, Maryland, Barbados and England's
other American possessions before 1776.
...



"A third group were the Irish. ... Under
Oliver Cromwell's ethnic-cleansing policy in
Ireland, unknown numbers of Catholic men,
women and children were forcibly transported
to the colonies. And it did not end with
Cromwell; for at least another hundred years,
forced transportation continued as a fact of
life in Ireland. ...



"The other unwilling participants in the
colonial labour force were the kidnapped.
Astounding numbers are reported to have been
snatched from the streets and countryside by
gangs of kidnappers or 'spirits' working to
satisfy the colonial hunger for labour. Based
at every sizeable port in the British Isles,
spirits conned or coerced the unwary onto
ships bound for America. ... According to a
contemporary who campaigned against the black
slave trade, kidnappers were snatching an
average of around 10,000 whites a
year - doubtless an exaggeration but one that
indicates a problem serious enough to create
its own grip on the popular mind.' "



Don Jordan and Michael Walsh, White
Cargo, New York University Press,
Copyright 2007 by Don Jordan and Michael
Walsh, pp. 12-14.

unselfishness

In today's excerpt - the world champion 1989
Detroit Pistons (along with their predecessor
champions the Boston Celtics and the Los
Angeles Lakers) demonstrated yet again that
talent alone was almost never enough to bring
a championship - that unselfishness was
almost always an indispensable ingredient
too. To make the 1989 season work, the
Pistons traded a highly talented but selfish
player for a less talented player who was
willing to be unselfish:

"After coming so close to the NBA
Championship for two straight postseasons,
the chemistry for the '89 Detroit Pistons was
off for reasons that had nothing to do with
talent. Chuck Daly needed to give Dennis
Rodman more playing time, only the Teacher
(Adrian Dantley's nickname, in an ironic
twist) wasn't willing to accommodate him. And
that was a problem. Rodman could play any
style and defend every type of player; he
gave the Pistons a uniquely special
flexibility, much like John Havlicek's
ability to play guard or forward drove Bill
Russell's last few championship Boston
Celtics teams. There was also a precedent in
place from when Piston players John Salley
and Joe Dumars came into their own in
previous seasons; [Piston starters] Isiah
Thomas and Vinnie Johnson gave up minutes for
Dumars, and Rick Mahorn gave up minutes for
Salley. But when Rodman started stealing
crunch-time minutes from Dantley, the Teacher
started sulking and even complained to a
local writer.

"You couldn't call it a betrayal, but Dantley
had undermined an altruistic dynamic -
constructed carefully over the past four
seasons, almost like a stack of Jenga blocks
- that hinged on players forfeiting numbers
for the overall good of the team. The Pistons
couldn't risk having Dantley knock that Jenga
stack down. They quickly swapped him for the
enigmatic Mark Aguirre, an unconventional
low-post scorer who caused similar mismatch
problems but wouldn't start trouble because
Isiah (a childhood chum from Chicago) would
never allow it. Maybe Dantley was a better
player than Aguirre, but Aguirre was a better
fit for the 1989 Pistons. If they didn't make
that deal, they wouldn't have won the
championship. It was a people trade, not a
basketball trade.

"And that's what [players] learned while
following those championship Lakers and
Celtics teams around: it wasn't about
basketball.

"Those teams were loaded with talented
players, yes, but that's not the only reason
they won. They won because they liked each
other, knew their roles, ignored statistics,
and valued winning over everything else. They
won because their best players sacrificed to
make everyone else happy. They won as long as
everyone remained on the same page. By that
same token, they lost if any of those three
factors weren't in place. The '75 [San
Francisco/Golden State] Warriors
self-combusted a year later because of Rick
Barry's grating personality and two young
stars (Jamal Wilkes and Gus Williams) needing
better numbers to boost their free agent
stock. The '77 Blazers fell apart because of
Bill Walton's feet, but also because Lionel
Hollins and Maurice Lucas brooded about being
underpaid. The '79 Sonics fell apart when
their talented backcourt (Dennis Johnson and
Gus Williams) became embroiled in a petty
battle over salaries and crunch-time shots.
... Year after year, at least one contender
fell short for reasons that had little or
nothing to do with basketball. And year after
year, the championship team prevailed because
it got along and everyone committed
themselves to their roles. That's what
Detroit needed to do, and that's why Dantley
had to go."

Bill Simmons, The Book of Basketball,
Ballantine, Copyright 2009 by Bill Simmons,
pp. 39-41.

quotes

There's a fine line between genius and insanity. I have erased this line.
           -- Oscar Levant

The conception of two people living together for twenty-five years without having a cross word suggests a lack of spirit only to be admired in sheep.
           -- Alan Patrick Herbert

I loathe the expression "What makes him tick." It is the American mind, looking for simple and singular solution, that uses the foolish expression. A person not only ticks, he also chimes and strikes the hour, falls and breaks and has to be put together again, and sometimes stops like an electric clock in a thunderstorm.
           -- James Thurber

The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution.
           -- Hannah Arendt

Ninety-eight percent of the adults in this country are decent, hard-working, honest Americans. It's the other lousy two percent that get all the publicity. But then--we elected them.
           -- Lily Tomli

After the last of 16 mounting screws has been removed from an access cover, it will be discovered that the wrong access cover has been removed.
           -- De La Lastra's Law

Those who welcome death have only tried it from the ears up.
           -- Wilson Mizner

In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is.
           -- Chuck Reid

Charm is the quality in others that makes us more satisfied with ourselves.
           -- Henri-Frédéric Amiel

Actions lie louder than words.
           -- Carolyn Wells

Always get married early in the morning. That way, if it doesn't work out, you haven't wasted a whole day.
           -- Mickey Rooney

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.
           -- Albert Camus

I have long been of the opinion that if work were such a splendid thing the rich would have kept more of it for themselves.
           -- Bruce Grocott

Humor can be dissected as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.
           -- E. B. White, Some Remarks on Humor, introduction

Nothing fixes a thing so intensely in the memory as the wish to forget it.
           -- Michel de Montaigne

A desk is a dangerous place from which to watch the world.
           -- John le Carre

A girl phoned me the other day and said "Come on over, there's nobody home." I went over. Nobody was home.
           -- Rodney Dangerfield

My fellow Americans, I am pleased to tell you I just signed legislation which outlaws Russia forever. The bombing begins in five minutes.
           -- Ronald Reagan, Said during a radio microphone test, 1984

I have never met a man so ignorant that I couldn't learn something from him.
           -- Galileo Galilei

I have given two cousins to war and I stand ready to sacrifice my wife's brother.
           -- Artemus Ward

No wise man ever wished to be younger.
           -- Jonathan Swift

a charlie brown christmas

In today's encore excerpt - in
December 1965 came A Charlie Brown
Christmas, the most successful special in
television history. In a simple story from
Peanuts' creator Charles Schulz where Charlie
Brown looks for genuine meaning in Christmas
while Snoopy and Lucy revel in its glitter,
the show defied convention by using real
kids' voices, no laugh track, sophisticated
original music and uncluttered graphics:

"No one was more ready than Charles Schulz to
write a parable about commercialism when [his
agent] Lee Mendelson telephoned one Wednesday
in May 1965 to announce that he had just sold
a Christmas show to Coca-Cola. ... He brought
in Bill Melendez, the Disney animator who had
earned Schulz's respect by not Disneyfying
the Peanuts gang ... [by] changing their
essential qualities, either as 'flat'
characters or as his cartoon characters.
...
"[Schulz left] Lee and Bill to audition some
forty-five kids, ages six to nine, then train
the cast of seven principles, some of them
too young to read ... [to deliver] their
lines with startling clarity and feeling.
...
"Schulz loathed the hyena hilarity of canned
merriment and rightly judged that an audience
would not have to be told when and where to
laugh; Mendelson countered that all comedy
shows used such tracks. 'Well, this one
won't,' said [Schulz] firmly. 'Let the people
at home enjoy the show at their own speed, in
their own way.' Then he rose and walked out,
closing the door behind him. ...

"On the subject of scoring and music,
however, Schulz put aside his own tastes ...
[and his producer hired] Grammy Award-winning
composer Vince Guaraldi. The catchy rhythm of
'Linus and Lucy' ... became the centerpiece
of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and
eventually a pop music standard. But it was
the slower, mixed-mood, improvisational
pieces in Guaraldi's jazz suite, especially
'Christmas Time is Here,' that elicited the
unarticulated emotions lying below the
holiday's joyful surface. ...

"Lee and his wife had read Hans Christian
Andersen's 'The Fir Tree' to their children
the previous year, and when he suggested that
the show somehow involve a comparable motif,
[Schulz] seized upon the idea: 'We need a
Charlie-Brown-like tree.' ... [And Schulz]
insisted that the season's true meaning could
be found in the Gospel according to St. Luke,
and they agreed that the show would somehow
work in the Nativity story. ... When the
script was finished in June 1965, Lee
Mendelson made a stand against Linus's
recitation of the Nativity story, insisting
that religion and entertainment did not mix
on television. '[Schulz] just smiled,'
Mendelson later wrote, 'patted me on the
head, and left the room.' ...

"In a screening room at network headquarters
in New York, two CBS vice presidents watched
the show in silence. 'Neither of them laughed
once,' Mendelson recalled. When the lights
came on, the executives shook their heads and
shrugged. 'Well,' said one, 'you gave it a
good try.' 'It seems a little flat,' said the
other. 'Too slow,' said the first, 'and the
script is too innocent.' 'The Bible thing
scares us,' said the other. The animation was
crude - couldn't it be jazzed up a bit? The
voice talent was unprofessional - they should
have used adults. The music didn't fit - who
ever heard of a jazz score on an animated
special? And where were the laughs?"



David Michaelis, Schulz and Peanuts,
Harper Collins, Copyright 2007 by David
Michaelis, pp. 346- 358.