brainrow

Something tells me George W. Bush is finally trying to complete his Air National Guard obligation.

On the Daily Show, Jon Stewart made the case for George W. Bush’s determined leadership in the Iraq war:

He drove us into a wall, but he didn’t blink.

There’s a first-hand account of the liberation of Paris 60 years ago today in the Washington Post:

I was a 17-year-old Jewish girl who had been hiding under an assumed name with forged identity papers in the Pigalle district of Paris. I’d been waiting since 1940, when France fell, since 1941, when the Germans came for my father, since 1943, when my 13-year-old sister and I — sole survivors of our family — had to abandon our home and go into hiding. I was marking time, focused on one great expectation: deliverance.

Paul Simon can be spooky, sometimes. There Goes Rhymin’ Simon came out in 1973. One song, titled Learn How to Fall, includes this lyric:

Oh and it’s the same old story
Ever since the world began
Everybody got the runs for glory
Nobody stop and scrutinize the plan

On the same album, the song American Tune has these lines:

Still, when I think of the road we’re traveling on
I wonder what’s gone wrong
I can’t help it, I wonder what’s gone wrong

Don’t we all.

Several years ago, I decided to scratch out a few words and make use of some of the web space that came with my internet service.

It was more than a little embarrassing to lay my massive ego out there for all to see, and more than a little discouraging that almost nobody came to see it. Inexplicably, I didn’t receive a single offer of fame and/or fortune as a professional writer.

So my little corner of the world wide web languished. The most recent update was made on April 14, 2000, which qualifies my pathetic pages as a true “cobweb” site. Are there any government grants available for preserving historical relics like that?

I recently retired after working thirty years at the Ohio State University. Suddenly, I’m reading the newspaper every day, watching movies, and listening to music. For the first time in fifteen years, I’m reading books for pleasure. I find that I want to grab total strangers and tell them all about some of the wonderful things I’m discovering. And I find that most total strangers aren’t terrifically enthusiastic about that method of discourse. So, the pathetic old website may get some updates again.

This weblog will be the new “news” page for my site. Short comments will exist only in the weblog. If I write anything longer, it will be added to the main website and noted in an entry in the blog.

I had to work on New Year’s Eve, 1999. I work with computers. Like many other people where I work, I was expected to be on-site in case of Y2K problems.

We had done extensive testing and preparation in advance, and nobody was very worried about any significant problems cropping up. So we had a sort of party, up in a conference room. We ate, and drank soft drinks, and flipped the channels on a small TV, watching the major networks’ coverage of the long-awaited dawning of the year 2000.

Someone expressed a wish for cable TV, so we could watch something other than this boring New Year’s Eve stuff. We told him it would be the same thing on all 200 cable channels.

“Oh? What about Cartoon Network?” he said.

“Even Cartoon Network. They’ll be running a Jetsons marathon — live!”

If you don’t believe we’re living in the amazing world of the future, consider this: today is Louise Brown’s 25th birthday.

Simon and Garfunkel may be touring again soon.

What a team! Together and separately, they’ve made a lot of wonderful music. They’re still making it.

Twenty years ago today, I saw Simon and Garfunkel in concert at the Akron Rubber Bowl. It was a long show, with three encores. Each of the singers had several solo turns, performing songs from their independent careers. As the evening drew on, almost every song was received with a sense of warm familiarity, and a growing astonishment at just how much those two fellas had up their sleeves.

Twenty years ago. It was a nostalgia show, even then. Akron was the first stop in the duo’s first U. S. concert tour since 1970. There was an energy and an innocence to some of the earlier songs that was exhilarating and embarrassing at the same time. Feeling groovy?

Someone threw love beads onto the stage. Art Garfunkel picked them up and said, “What is this, the Sixties?”

There was a tinge of sadness, too, for everything lost in the years since the previous tour. Paul Simon’s solo song, The Late Great Johnny Ace, was all about loss — particularly the death of John Lennon, still sharp in everyone’s memory twenty years ago.

There was a new verse for The Boxer, too:

Now the years are rolling by me,
They are rocking evenly.
I am older than I once was,
Younger than I’ll be,
That’s not unusual.
No, it isn’t strange,
After changes upon changes,
We are more or less the same.

After changes we are more or less the same.

Twenty years ago. Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.