With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
2002-07-07 - 11:14 a.m.
I read the papers late yesterday so I didn't know that Ted Williams had died when I wrote my update. Ted was one of my baseball heroes. He said that; "All I ever wanted was to walk down the street and for people to say, 'There goes the greatest hitter that ever lived.'" He came pretty damn close. His only competition is Babe Ruth. Take a look at his statistics. Look how many times he lead the league in so many important categories. You'll notice that he seems to have missed all or a lot of many seasons. Some were from injuries but most were for military service. He volunteered for Navy in WWII and became a fighter pilot. The same skills, 20-10 vision and lightning reflexes that made him a great hitter also made him a great pilot. He didn't see combat, he served as an instructor. All the great players of that era served in the military during WWII. Only Ted was recalled to active service during the Korean War. He flew in combat during the Korean War. He was the wingman on about half his missions for another pilot you might have heard of, John Glenn.
I always love Ted as a player, not as a person, from all accounts he somewhat hard to deal with. He was very thinned skinned. When he was booed by at home in Boston in his second season he took it to heart. He never tipped his hat to the crowd again. The Boston sports writers were unduly harsh on him. I believe it was in 1947 when he won his second triple crown (leading the league in batting average, home runs, and rbis) one Boston writer totally left him off the MVP ballot. He didn't help things by spitting towards the press box after he hit his 400th career homerun. His politics were extremely conservative, which did not endear him to me. There was one exception that was perhaps his finest hour. When he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1965, he said that it wasn't right that Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson weren't there. They were the two greatest players in the Negro Leagues. Before 1947 Blacks were not allowed in the major leagues so they formed their own. They came far closer to the ideal of "separate but equal" than the segregated school systems ever did. The great Negro League players weren't in the Hall of Fame because through no fault of their own they hadn't played ten years in the Major Leagues. This injustice was finally corrected in the mid seventies. Back in 1965 Ted Williams once again saw things more clearly than others.
Now for something completely different.
That absurd looking duo is Uncle Floyd and Oogie. I discovered them when I was in college. The Uncle Floyd Show was on a hard to get for me UHF station from New Jersey. It looked to all the world like a children's show, which is how it started. You might notice that something was different when her read "today's birthdays." You'd hear, "Timmy is nine, Jessica is 11, Bruno is 35, and Cheryl is 50." He and is cast of crazies would do wonderful absurdist bits. He'd have great guests like Peter Tork, and Michael Palin. Rock stars would perform on the show. The reason I'm writing about him now is that Bowie has a song, Slip Away about him and Oogie on his new album.
Slip Away by David Bowie (Heathen CD, June 11,2002)
Oogie waits for just another day
Drags his bones to see the Yankees play
Bones Boy talks and flickers gray
Oh, they slip away
Once a time they nearly might have been
Bones and Oogie on a silver screen
No one knew what they could do
Except for me and you
They slip away
They slip away
(Chorus)
Don't forget to keep your head warm
Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd
Watching all the world and war torn
How I wonder where you are
Sailing over Coney Island
Twinkle twinkle Uncle Floyd
We were dumb but you were fun, boy
How I wonder where you are
Oogie knew there's never ever time
Some of us will always stay behind
Down in space it's always 1982
The joke we always knew
Oo-oo
What'sa matter with you
C'mon, let's go
Slip
Vin Scelsa played the song then a great interview he did a couple of years ago with Floyd and Oogie. Oogie wanted to quit working with Floyd and become Vin's sidekick. Poor Floyd was so hurt. He cried and had to leave the room. It was hysterical. Uncle Floyd's act is pure Trainwreck with Clowns.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile 2002-07-07
