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.
The only way to find the limits of the possible is by going past them into the impossible.
September 30, 2009 - 11:10 p.m.
Welcome to an evening edition of Wise Madness. You know what that means. No way I remember what happened yesterday. This is going to be pure fiction.
So lets start with today. On Monday I discovered that the vast majority of my afternoon Tech Math class had not done their homework. This was particularly bad at the topic was word problems, something most people have trouble with. They need all the practice they can get. I gave them a lecture an collected the homework and counted it as four questions on the quizzes, which all run together as one test. If you did the homework you got a four, if you didn't you got a zero. I think only 5 students out of 30 did it. I then told them that they better have it done for Wednesday. If they didn't I'd count it as a 0 on 20 quiz questions. They had to do every single problem and make a real effort on it. So what happened? About a third of them did nothing and another third made a slap dash effort. They knew the consequences and still didn't do the work. Why? What is going on in their heads? I wanted to go over the homework for those that did make the effort so I told them they had to do the even numbered questions in the section, I had only assigned the odd before and hand them in by Friday. This would count as 40 wrong quiz questions if they didn't do it. That means getting no more than a 20 or 30 on the quizzes which might preclude passing the course. It makes it impossible to get an A. Do you think they'll do it? At the end I relented and told them I'd forget the 20 wrong answers they earned today if they did a good job on the assignment for Friday. That means doing each and every question an making a substantial effort on each one. They can't just look at the question and say, "I can't do it." I taught them a general method that is good on almost every question. They might fall for some traps but they should be able to set it up.
OK enough of a teacher's rant. Now lets roll back the clock to Tuesday. My plan was to see The Lovell Sisters at The Living Room. A little after five I checked to see what time the show was, I figured eight or nine. It was at seven. That meant I had to hurry. I immediately made dinner, ate it and left my apartment at 5:45. That should have meant getting there about 6:45 but there were delays and I didn't arrive to 6:58. I went in and was simultaneously pleased and disappointed to be able to get a seat at my usual table up front. This was a rarity for me, a show at the Living Room where I didn't know anyone. Rebecca said "Hi," to me as she came onstage but I doubt she recognized me from Summerfest on July 4th when I didn't have a beard and I did have ace bandages around my wrist and elbow.
Have any of you My Gentle Readers seen The Lovell Sisters outside of FRFF or NERFA? Why not? They are three classically trained musicians that switched over to bluegrass. They have musical chops and they are fun. See for yourself.
People tell me that they are attractive. Not that I would ever notice something like that.
Jessica
Rebecca
Megan
The Lovell Sisters
After the show I went to buy their new album. When I was told it was one CD for $15 and two for $20 I couldn't resist buying the live album too. I now own their complete oeuvre. I don't know them so I made sure to ask for permission to upload the video. I blatantly disregard the sign that says no video recording at the Living Room but I won't disregard artists' right to control distribution of their work. Rebecca gave me the OK and said that I should send them the link when I uploaded it.
One advantage to not knowing anyone was that I didn't spend time schmoozing after the show so I could go straight home. I was back in my apartment by 9 PM; that's unheard of.
The first thing I did when I got home was upload the video and send it to the Lovells. Perhaps I took a liberty but I also sent them the mp3 of the song I wrote yesterday. Imagine my surprise when soon afterwards Jessica emailed me, thanked me for the video, and told me she loved the song and that they were interested in recording it. She gave me her cell number, I called her back and we decided to discuss it over drinks. So much for getting home early. I hopped back on the subway and headed back into the City. I met Jessica in a bar near their hotel. Now no, I didn't drink alcohol. You should know me better than that. I had my usual diet coke. I'm a good boy. Well so much for not knowing anyone at a Lovell's sisters concert anymore. We talked about the song. As of now it's too short, only 38 seconds. It is really just a chorus. I did work on some verses the day I wrote it. I expanded the poem into a brief history of the destruction of Numenor, the escape of Elendil and his sons, and the founding of the Dunedain kingdoms in exile, Arnor and Gondor (an anagram of Gordon). She liked what I had but it still needs work. We left the bar and I gave her the after hours Gordon tour of New York. Sure most of my places were closed, the East Village and Lower East Side are still fun to walk. Too bad I had to teach today. I ended up bailing at around 1 AM and headed home. We'll see what comes of all this.
And now for the literary portion of this entry. I stopped by the library yesterday and took out Richard Feynman's The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. If I knew nothing about Feynman he would be a hero of mine just from the title. I actually know quite a bit about Feynman, he's a personal hero of mine. He's one of the great physicists of the 20th Century. He won the Nobel Prize for developing the theory of Quantum Electrodynamics. He shared the prize with two others but his work goes beyond theirs. He changed the way physicists did physics. All the modern theories of everything are based on Feynman diagrams. They are actual pictures you draw that appeal to our intuition. Intuition is one of Feynman's hallmarks. The other is cutting through the crap. When the Challenger exploded he was on the panel that investigated it. That is where he became known to the general public. While others were debating endlessly if the cold could have made the O-rings malfunction he simply chilled rings made of the same material and showed that it could. He hated honors. His father was a uniform maker and knew that the general was the same person with the uniform on or off. He was a mischievous imp with no sense of propriety. He was known as a safe cracker when he worked on the Manhattan Project. He played the bongos. He had meetings with important people at strip clubs. He was a nice Jewish boy from New York City. I was thinking that last thought on the train today. To me that means he's like most of the people I grew up in. It is the antithesis of being exotic. He's the boy next door. I don't think the phrase "nice Jewish boy from New York City" has the same associations with most people.
As I was walking back to the subway after school I passed boxes of books on the sidewalk with a sign saying "Free Books" above them. I helped myself to two of them; The Summer Game by Roger Angell and Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger. Angell is one of the great baseball writers and I never read a full book of his. Only articles. Does it surprise you that I never read Catcher in the Rye? it surprises me too.
I better get going now. I'm playing in a regional bridge tournament with Roy tomorrow. I have to leave the same time I leave for school.
Oh one thing. Do you remember that I said that what I wrote about yesterday was "pure fiction?" Well it wasn't pure, parts were true. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out which ones.
My Enthusiasm is Never Curbed - October 05, 2009
Take the WFUV Tour - October 04, 2009
A Tale Told by an Idiot - October 03, 2009
EZ-Pass - October 02, 2009
Bridge but not the Throg's Neck - October 01, 2009
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile September 30, 2009
