“With Motown Records celebrating its 50th anniversary, the Free Press went for the gold. Our staff traveled literally coast to coast uncovering stories that demonstrate the label’s continued relevance.”
I watched just the first three of the 50 videos (3-6 minutes each) and found them fascinating.
First mistake: Eating Bing cherries while using the laptop.
Second mistake: Letting a sloppy cherry pit fall onto the laptop keyboard.
Third mistake: Setting the laptop on the floor.
Fourth mistake. Forgetting that ants can find anything anywhere.
What does one do with a slightly ant-infested laptop?
“President Obama says he wants a health care bill on his desk by October. So I sent him the one for my kid’s appendectomy.”
Todd Long
Watch the video by clicking on the right-facing triangle. Then quickly enlarge it to full screen (click on the far right button). 30 seconds. Just watch.
Five kids were in the black Ford, ages 14-21 and driven by a 19-year-old who’s license was suspended the day before for poor driving.
All five were killed — this near Detroit on Thursday.
In fact, this decision comes after much consideration, and finally polling the most important people in my life – my alternate personalities (where the count was unanimous… well, in response to asking: “Want me to make a positive difference and fight for ALL our future from OUTSIDE this blog?” It was four “yes’s” and one “hell yeah!” The “hell yeah” sealed it – and someday I’ll talk about the details of that…
Or maybe I’ll just take the rest of the day off and float downstream.
Jake LaMotta, the boxer portrayed by Robert De Niro in Raging Bull, is 88 today.
Alice Munro is 78.
She has written 11 books of short stories, and a new collection, Too Much Happiness, which comes out later this year. In May, Alice Munro won the Man Booker International Prize.
She said: “It’s not possible to advise a young writer because every young writer is so different. You might say, ‘Read,’ but a writer can read too much and be paralyzed. Or, ‘Don’t read, don’t think, just write,’ and the result could be a mountain of drivel. If you’re going to be a writer you’ll probably take a lot of wrong turns and then one day just end up writing something you have to write, then getting it better and better just because you want it to be better, and even when you get old and think ‘There must be something else people do,’ you won’t quite be able to quit.”
Lolita, the actress Sue Lyon, is 63 today.
Arlo Guthrie is 62.
Bela Fleck is 51.
Adrian Grenier is 33 today.
Jessica Simpson is 29.
Arthur Ashe, the first black man to win a major tennis championship, was born on this date in 1943. Ashe won Wimbledon, the U.S. and Australian Opens. He died from pneumonia, a complication of AIDS, in 1993. He contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during surgery (not altogether uncommon before the disease was understood).
Marcel Proust was born on July 10th in 1871. His fame is based on the novel The Remembrance of Things Past — À la recherche du temps perdu is actually better translated In Search of Lost Time and that has become in recent years the more common title. Jane Smiley belongs to that tiny group that has read the entire 3,000-page work — she wrote about her experience for Salon in 2005. A brief excerpt from her story:
[I]t is time for you to begin, because reading all of Proust is not hard.
First, you buy all seven volumes in a uniform edition — mine came in a six-book set — and you arrange them in a row next to your bed, the bathtub or your favorite chair, wherever you are most comfortable reading. For a few days, let’s say no longer than a week, you glance at them from time to time and pick them up and look at the covers. You can even flip the pages — but don’t read anything. You are familiarizing yourself with this new acquaintance. You are coming to recognize his appeal. You are letting him impose upon you, because for the next 70 days or so, you are going to organize your free time around him.
My mother’s uncle, and her guardian, was born in Conlogue, Illinois, on this date in 1888. I knew him as Grandpa, usually written as G’pa.
A salesman through most of his career, after tough times during the Depression he established a successful insurance agency in Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite his success, his office was in the dining room, then in the second bedroom of a small apartment — a great place for a little boy to play “office”.
G’pa was a conservative, staid almost austere man. His favorite activity — other than work — was telling “stories” (jokes we would call them), none of which were ever off color and a few I can still remember hearing. He was good at the telling and no doubt that was part of his success in sales. Ironically though, it didn’t seem to serve him well in the Army, a time of his life he particularly disliked — but then he was a 29-year-old draftee.
Lee Cook sold the insurance agency when he was in his early 70s, but couldn’t retire. He continued trying to sell this or that, without much success. It was sad to see him so frustrated. (I learned then that I should have a blog when I retired to keep me busy.)
Grandpa’s been gone more than 35 years now, but I still miss him.
… Death Valley.
On this date in 1913, the hottest temperature ever reported in North America was recorded at the Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California. 134º (56.7ºC) … in the shade.