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Victor Garber – more tomorrowROG

I had so much fun with the one quiz that I thought I’d try a few more:

32%

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I was on the bus this week when I saw a woman standing ahead of me. She had just sat down her two children, and someone complimented the children. The mother said, “Do you want ’em? Take ’em! They’re 5 and 2.” Later, she smacked the older one because he wasn’t all the way back on the bus seat. I was trying to compose a positive message to say to this woman. Unfortunately, all I could think of was something along the lines of “What kind of idiot ARE you?” Fortunately, she and her charges got off the bus before I did.

At this website weblog-delux.de you will find a lot of parenting tips and recommendation for this journey of being a parent.

So, on this day smack dab between Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, it’s in that context that I ask you:

1) Under what circumstances would you get involved, from speaking to the person to calling the police, in the actions of a parent dealing with (presumably) their children?

2) When, if ever do you give unsolicited advice to a parent? There’s a friend of mine, not a parent, who’s always giving her opinion about how relatives are raising their children, in terms of punishment, potty training and bedtime.

3) Have you ever heard this song?

Be kind to your parents
Though they don’t deserve it.
Remember that grown ups
Is a difficult stage of life
They’re apt to be nervous
And over excited
Confused by their daily storm and strife.
So keep in mind though it seems hard I know.
Parents were children long ago. Incredible!!
So treat them with patience and kind understanding.
Despite of all the foolish things they do.
Some day you might wake up and find you’re a parent too.
(Be kind to your parents Composed by: Pete Seeger, Published by: Sanga Music.)

I’d only heard the Seeger version (55 seconds!) recently. But when I was much younger, we had this red vinyl record, a 45, probably on Peter Pan Records, that my sister Leslie and I played SO much that we could, to this day, break out and sing this song.

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Sad news.
ROG

When I was growing up, it seemed that everyone knew who Miss America and the heavyweight champion were; I couldn’t tell you either/any of the current ones at this moment. As a kid, I became mildly obsessed with memorizing the heavyweights, starting with John L. Sullivan. In my lifetime, Rocky Marciano was the first (and retired undefeated) heavyweight champ, but I don’t remember him directly, followed by Floyd Patterson. I vaguely recall Patterson losing to Ingemar Johansson in 1959, but recall with clarity Patterson defeating Johansson in the 1960 rematch. A couple years later, it was a bear of a man named Sonny Liston who had the crown.

In late 1963/early 1964, I kept seeing this guy, nicknamed by the press The Mouth or the Louisville Lip, named Cassius Clay, who would be taking on Liston for the title. I don’t think that anyone took him too seriously as a contender, even though he’d won a gold medal in the 1960 Olympics in Rome as a light heavyweight. But he beat Liston and became the heavyweight champion.

Then he changed his name to Muhammad Ali. This seemed peculiar, foreign to most Americans, black and white. Indeed, many fighters, including Liston and Patterson, as I recall, kept referring to him as Clay, as much as a taunt as anything. (I always gave props to the late ABC Sports commentator Howard Cosell, for during their sometimes contentious relationship, he always referred to the boxer by the new name he had chosen.)

I was intrigued by this new champion, who hung out with the Beatles:

although John Lennon indicated that he preferred Liston.

What REALLY caught my attention, though, was when, after being reclassified 1-A, Ali, for religious and personal reasons, refused military induction. As a result, he was unable to box in the United States, and was stripped of his title for three years, starting in 1967. This seemed to me at the time hugely unfair of the boxing commission. But it was him daring to challenge the US government (and ultimately winning), thus challenging the conventional wisdom of naturally going to fight in an American war, that radically changed my whole mindset about war, and led to my pacifist leanings. I was also affected by Martin Luther King’s eloquent opposition to the Vietnam war in 1967, that famous “betrayal” of Lyndon Johnson.

Ali would regain the title against George Foreman in 1974, but by 1978, boxing had become an alphabet soup of competing boxing commissions, and I stopped paying that much attention. Still, I was thrilled, and startled, to see Ali light the flame at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, and I truly enjoyed the piece the late Ed Bradley did on him for “60 Minutes”, when Ali feigned narcolepsy, during which he jabbed at the reporter. When the joke was revealed, Bradley laughed heartedly, and Ali had an infectious grin.

Happy birthday, Muhammad Ali.

It occurred to me that I got a lot of stuff for Christmas, much of which I asked for. Seeing it piled up on a chair behind me, for the purpose of this post, leaves me feeling a bit guilty, actually.
CLOTHES:
mostly pants and T-shirts
FOOD:
various stuff
MUSIC:
LOVE-the Beatles
Phillips 66-John Phillips
Songs from the Labyrinth-Sting
When Carol returns that James Taylor Christmas album, I get to pick the replacement
plus some mixes from KY and elsewhere
BOOKS:
Library: An Uneasy History by Matthew Battles, which I have started reading
Leonard Maltin’s 2007 Movie Guide
Television without Pity by Ariano and Bunting
The All Music Book of Rock, which I use as part of my weight training
And of course, the 2007 World Almanac. Since it’s really a book about the events from mid-October 2005 to mid-October 2006, except for the November elections, it always misses those end of the year bombshells, such as the deaths of JB, Prez Ford and Saddam.
For some reason, I always look up the weather from two years ago: The high temperature in Albany for 2005 was 94F on June 26, lowest for that year was -16F on January 28. One of the local meteorologists said last week that there were no days in 2006 when the temperature went below zero.

And yet, with all of that, I almost always end up buying for myself the CDs I didn’t get. There was only one I REALLY wanted, and that was Highway Companion by Tom Petty, recommended by both Lefty and Nik. However, I SO hate paying postage on Amazon packages, so I also ordered Corinne Bailey Rae’s debut album, based on a couple co-workers’ recommendations, and Other People’s Lives by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, based entirely on Lefty’s recommendation. If/when I get to Borders with that JT return, I’ll get whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. I’ve listened to Petty and Rae once each, and at work, not always the most conducive venue, and Davies will shed the shrink wrap today.

Not so incidentally, I was more than mildly disturbed by the Wikipedia write-up on Rae (linked above), because of the racial taunting she had to endure when she was younger. I suspect she’ll show up in my blog in June.