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Author | Topic: Tribute Thread for the Recently Passed Greats | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
Please accept my sympathy for your loss, brenna.
My mother and grandmother died within the same month a few years back. I still catch myself thinking, "Wait till I tell Mom about this!"
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
brenna writes: she had her flaws, and a great many, but to me, she was magic. The people who love us make magic. My mother loved silly songs. Along with teaching me to read at age 4 by pointing at each word as she read it, she taught me a huge number of nursery rhyme ditties and folk songs. I especially liked: "She's got a dimple on her but she's nice..." ![]() ...changed, of course, when I was a toddler in my bath to "He's..." while giving my butt a pinch. Makes me giggle still, just to remember it. I'm always too hot when others are too cool, so I developed the absent-minded habit of pulling off one sock to lose body heat while I read: "Diddle diddle dumpling, my son John,One shoe off, one shoe on..." Adapted, of course, to suit. With the gift of reading, she gave me the world. With the gift of humor and song, she gave me one way to console myself with the world. To this day, I have a constant soundtrack running in my head, sometimes simply a tune that matches my mood, sometimes a song that comments on what's going on around me. It's all magic. Real things always push back. -William James Save lives! Click here!Join the World Community Grid with Team EvC! ---------------------------------------
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
I had the pleasure of conversing with Benoit Mandelbrot several times over the past decade.
He was a charming, mischievous man, patient with explanations and impatient with fools. The world is a poorer place for his death.
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
RIP, Jane Russell.
My dad carried you through the WWII Pacific theater and back home again to Indiana, where you curled up inside the lid of his toolbox, where Mom wouldn't see you. What a babe. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? -Shakespeare Real things always push back.-William James
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
Happy trails, Bear.
What a long strange trip it was. Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? -Shakespeare Real things always push back.-William James |
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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In the early 70s I drove a daily circuit from Indianapolis to county court houses throughout Indiana, doing real estate abstracting and tax roll checks for mortgage companies.
Nearly every county court house/capitol was that county's most imposing structure--columns, rotunda, colorful ceramic murals mounted on the brilliant Indiana limestone--and every court house had the glossy red, round-topped Coke machine that served 6.5 oz Cokes for a nickel. You'd pull out a Coke and the entire vertical stack of bottles would move to fill the space. Those little bottles were sturdy--they usually didn't break even when you dropped them. I'd hit a half dozen counties in any given day, and that nickel Coke machine was always a welcome sight. So long ago...it seems that everything good from that time is gone, and all the bad has flourished: the laid-back bigotry, rather than fading, has been replaced with the passionately intense conviction that the bigotry is not only justified, but patriotic. I miss my naive belief that bigotry and hatred were on the run. I wish I had some of those Cokes."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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8 to the bar, baby!
My Mom would have been about her age. She married my father just before sending him off to the Pacific theater in 1942. She adored the Andrews Sisters: she couldn't sing much, but she was a better dancer than the Sisters ![]() Can't you just hear the rock coming, though? "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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CoolBeans writes: Man 92 years old. Wouldnt say that it didnt took me by surprise, though.i Well said. ![]() He was an evil man consumed by his passion to do violence to the truth. Had he not been so hapless, I'd have had to stand over his grave till I was sure he was dead."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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CoolBeans writes: He was dishonest but he atleast had a great delivery. Goebbels liked dogs."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
I don't care much about movies, and less about movie reviews.
But Ebert fought his cancer with considerable courage and grace. He released photos of his disfigured face, telling friends and family who argued he shouldn't, "Why not? This is how I look." After three failed attempts at surgical restoration, he declined a fourth round: "I decided to quit while I was behind.""If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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Great Britain's Ronald Reagan, described by Ronald Reagan as "the best man in Great Britain."
RIP, indeed.
quote: "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
Like most little boys at the time, I adored Annette even when I didn't like girls.
AbE: The secret truth is that I always liked girls. Edited by Omnivorous, : true confession"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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We set out for Woodstock in an old van that didn't make it. We set up camp in a roadside meadow somewhere in Ohio. A nearby college FM station (FM! radically new and subversive) synched their album sides to the artist then performing at Woodstock, so we heard a lot of Richie Havens. Within a day or two, we were joined by other children of god and did our own thing in our own mud, free of the bad brown acid
![]() RIP, Richie. What we wanted then seemed clear: "Seems like so many years since it's been clear..." "If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined: |
Percy writes: I found this paragraph particularly enlightening - it explains a lot of discussions here:
I was struck by how some believers edited the past in order to avoid acknowledging that they had been mistaken. The engineer in his mid-twenties, the one who told me this was a prophecy rather than a prediction, maintained that he had never claimed to be certain about May 21. When I read him the transcript of our previous interview, he seemed genuinely surprised that those words had come out of his mouth. It was as if we were discussing a dream he couldn’t quite remember. Creepy... But it reminds me of my sainted mother, who, when asked if she remembered the time she threw a star-shaped nut dish at me and it slammed into the drywall like a Ninja death star, replied, "Oh, I did not!" Edited by Omnivorous, : What, you thought saints were perfect?"If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads."
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Omnivorous Member (Idle past 189 days) Posts: 4001 From: Adirondackia Joined:
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So I'm crying out, "Oh no, not the blue-footed booby!" over the news, and then I think about this thread.
It's numbers are down by half, no one sure why, although a lack of sardines has been noted in the Galapagos waters as the BFBs stop breeding: the cause of the sardine shortage "remains a mystery." Another fantastic species being pushed to the brink...
quote: So a dozen species a day, easy. We don't even know who they are. Here's to them. Oh, there's the bell."If you can keep your head while those around you are losing theirs, you can collect a lot of heads." |
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