Wednesday, August 31

            Mom asked what she could get for my birthday and I said it would be great to order a few items I had been wanting on Amazon.  The first just arrived, Breaking Away, the 1979 film about friends who enter an Indiana bike race.  It won for best screenplay at the Oscars that year.  The main character attempts to “become” Italian since they are often the best bicyclists.  So he listens to opera, speaks Italian to his confused parents and shaves his legs for added speed.  He and his rag tag teammates manage to overcome the better equipped and trained kids from the best part of town.

Tuesday, August 30

            More welcome rain, but much lighter.

            My writing projects to date map out like this:

Trilogy of internal self-actualization novels following Jack Madden’s writing/presidential career:

Stream of Consciousness – available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kindle and Nook;

Beyond the Visible – available on Amazon;

Knowing the Unproven – written and for release on Amazon 1/1/2013;

Trilogy of novellas:

All Things Danish – my take on the detective genre, available on Amazon;

Pink Macaroons – writing my take on the romance genre, for release on Amazon 1/1/2012;

Brasilia – writing my take on sci-fi/utopian genre, for release on Amazon 1/1/2014.

Monday, August 29

            Rain!

            Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet and Nobel laureate (who I met after he gave a lecture at the University of Michigan), opened his collection of essays, Visions from San Francisco Bay, with the line, “I am here.”  I think that is a great way to start anything, establish where you are.  It’s an added bonus if you can understand why you are there and how you got there.  This applies to physical, mental and emotional “here.”

Sunday, August 28

            54 out 59 days of summer over 100 degrees.

Saturday, August 27

            I was sad to read of the suicide of Mike Flanagan, age 59.  May he rest in peace and my prayers for his family.  He won a Cy Young award as a pitcher for the Baltimore Orioles in 1979 and helped them win the World Series in 1983.  I followed those teams since they were the Orioles and had Cal Ripken, Jr. on them.  It reminds me of the Oscar Wilde quote, “no one great or small can be ruined except by his own hand and terrible what the world did to me, more terrible was what I did to myself."

Friday, August 26

            Lunch again today with friends at my favorite local Jewish/Russian New York style deli.  Prune Danish with cream cheese today’s treat.

Thursday, August 25

            We have a great Jewish/Russian deli in the New York delicatessen style nearby where one can get delicious:  pastrami, corned beef sandwiches on marble rye or pumpernickel bread with sauerkraut, Russian dressing and horse radish, plus Swiss or gruyere(nuttier Swiss) cheese; knishes(potato filled pastry); matzo ball soup; blintzes(cheese filled pastry); kishka(meat filled noodle); chopped liver; and of course for breakfast, lox and bagel with capers, red onion and hard boiled egg shavings.  Have it all with a cream soda.  Live a little once in a while.  It reminds me a little of New York's Carnegie deli in terms of portion sizes and atmosphere.

Wednesday, August 24

            In my lifetime so far I have witnessed the fall of apartheid in South Africa, the fall of the Berlin wall and communism in Russia, the fall of dictators in Iran, the Philippines, Panama, Iraq and now this summer the fall of dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya with maybe another in Syria.  How democratic are the governments that replaced the more oppressive regimes has varied or remains to be seen, but there does seem to be a tide towards self-government.  Some with the help of the U.S., some without and some despite.

Tuesday, August 23

            Art has helped point out to me the disparity between the path I walk and the path I hope to walk.  Within each of us is that same entropic state leaning towards chaos and in constant need of self-correction.  An internal battle that mimics the external one between the forces of the universe referenced yesterday.

Monday, August 22

            Man organizes his universe in the great fight against an absence of order or a force contrary to order.  We are currently not able to reconcile or understand this contrast between man’s tendency towards evolution and nature’s tendency to chaos, yet we are nature.

            Only one billionth of a billion particles tipped our existence from anti-matter (1 billion) to matter (1 billion plus one).  That one particle created a world of us versus just radiation waives.

            So in the battle over chaos, we will always win, but just barely and it tends to be ugly.

Sunday, August 21

            Yesterday was the ninth individual temperature record this summer, 107 degrees.

            My wife and daughter see five deer during their time out in the Abilene area.

Saturday, August 20

            The July published Texas unemployment rate of 8.4% (the national average was 9.1%), as recorded by the Texas Workforce Commission was the highest it has been since July, 1987 when the state was gripped by a energy, banking and real estate crash.  I was in my second year of law school at SMU then and had moved to Dallas because of its entrepreneurial climate and go-go business attitude I had felt when visiting during the early eighties.  This is also when SMU’s football program was given the “death penalty” and for two years there was no football, a scandal that reached to then Governor Bill Clements, a SMU alumni and member of the school’s governing board.

Friday, August 19

            Chocolate fondue for the family, served in a 100^th anniversary commemorative Hershey bowl lit with a tea candle from below on a metal frame given to us by friends.  We dipped with thin skewered forks strawberries, marshmallows, walnuts and bananas.  Then we dunked graham crackers, too.  So groovey.  We caught the drippings from bowl to mouth with Hershey kiss shaped plates we held under our forks and chins.

Thursday, August 18

          With the closing of Borders flagship store in Ann Arbor this summer, it made me think that the two best independent, non-chain book stores in the country are Portland’s Powell’s and New York’s Strand.  I hope they can stay strong during the digital waive.

Wednesday, August 17

            A charming tradition at Shakespeare and Company book store in Paris is the writers in residence sleep on beds that during the day act as display areas for the books.  So each morning a writer wakes and makes the bed then piles the books that were on it the day before back on.  Writers literally live in the bookstore.

Tuesday, August 16

In 1919 Sylvia Beach opened an American bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Company on 8 rue Dupuytren. The store functioned as a lending library as well as a bookstore. Beach moved to a larger location at 12 rue de l'Odéon in 1921, where the store remained until 1941. During the following two decades it became a haven for expatriate writers who came to be called the Lost Generation.  They were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas,  and D. H. Lawrence.  When no publisher would print her friend James Joyce's Ulysses, Miss Beach published it, in 1922, under her shop imprint.  The Shakespeare and Company store on rue de l'Odeon was closed in December 1941, due to the occupation of France by the Axis powers during World War II.

In 1951, another English-language bookstore was opened in Paris's Left Bank by an American George Whitman, under the name of Le Mistral. Much like the original Shakespeare and Company, the store served as a focal point for literary culture in Bohemian, Left Bank Paris. Upon Sylvia Beach's death, the store's name was changed to Shakespeare and Company. In the 1950s, the shop served as a base for many of the writers of the Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Whitman's daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, now runs the shop. The store continues to operate at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, near Place St. Michel and steps from the Seine River and Notre Dame. The bookstore is located in a building that served as a monastery in the 16th century.  George Whitman calls the bookstore "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore". The bookstore includes sleeping facilities, with 13 beds for writers to live and work at the shop.  Regular activities that occur in the bookshop are Sunday tea, poetry readings and writers' meetings.

Sunday, August 14

Scored a nice find at the used book store, Euclid’s, Elements, all 13 books complete in one volume.  I used to have the Dover three volume set but recycled them for space then regretted it.  Euclid may have been the most celebrated mathematician of all time.  He lived in Greece during the third or fourth century B.C.E. 

The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay said that, “Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.”  We probably remember him from high school geometry class and all those theorems, proofs and postulates.

Monday, August 15

Euclid received his training in Greece, but worked in Alexandria, home of the great library that would eventually burn in war.

Theorem – A proposition not self-evident but proved by a chain of reasoning.

Saturday, August 13

Rain!

Friday, August 12

No record – we only hit 97 degrees yesterday, two days short of tying the most consecutive days over hundred in North Texas…so the record remains 1980 and the streak of 42.

It was interesting observing how people eventually wanted to break the record once so close and the interplay between physical comfort and the more intrinsic qualities of competition and being able to say, “I survived the hottest summer ever.”

As it stands, it is the driest Texas year ever, our 30 degree latitude doing us no favors.  

Thursday, August 11

Do you ever sometimes get the feeling that what you need or want to know is very close, maybe in the same city as where you live or there is a person you will meet soon that will unlock a door with all kinds of new information?          

I think this is why it is beneficial to keep moving forward and going to new places and meeting new people, as you never know what or who is around the corner that will make something that has been a struggle all fall into place.

Wednesday, August 10

I participate today in a project at The Center for Brain Health regarding a strategic thinking research study being conducted by one of the doctoral students at the University of Texas, Dallas.

Tuesday, August 9

Baseball fans might remember the last pitching staff to have four 20 game winners, the 1971 Orioles with Jim Palmer(20-9), Dave McNally(21-5), Mike Cuellar(20-9) and Pat Dobson(20-8).  In today’s baseball with most teams utilizing a five man rotation and relief specialists, it is unlikely to happen again.  Last night, Matt Harrison joined the four other Texas Rangers’ starters (Wilson, Lewis, Holland, Ogando) with his 10^th win.  Their consistency and health as a staff of five may be as remarkable

Sunday, August 7

I heard one of the best attempts at explaining why there is suffering while attending the First United Methodist Church service today with my son in Waxahachie.

Rev. Joseph Nader of the University of Texas at Arlington campus ministry shared his views using Psalm 22 and connecting Genesis’s giving in to temptation and making that famous free will choice to the promise in Revelations that eventually there will once again be no more tears.

In the interim we should take on the suffering of others so as to help and support each other. 

My son and I had a good discussion afterwards about - if God knows everything in advance, did he know Adam and Eve would eat the apple and if he did what the implications of that might be.

Monday, August 8

Shared with my daughter my view that Plochman’s is the best mustard.  It has been made near Chicago since 1852.  It can be a little hard to find.  I get it at Kroger.  A parent should pass along key information.

Saturday, August 6

Dad passed 38 years ago today in 1973.  I was 13.  The Senate Watergate hearings had been going on all summer, starting May 17 and concluding August 7.  I had been glued to our T.V. set in Dearborn Heights, Michigan watching, until it was time to spend a couple weeks with my sister, brother-in-law and brand new nephew in Niles.  It was there we were called and told Dad had been taken to the hospital by ambulance the night before after going out for ice cream with Mom at the Stroh’s ice cream parlor near the local Farmer Jack’s grocers.  We left immediately and drove the four hours or so.  When we arrived at the hospital we were informed, Mom, sister and I that Dad had passed during the night from a burst pancreas.

I think he would have enjoyed watching with me my daughter’s horse riding lesson today.  He could have sat next to me on the bleacher and told me it reminded him of his days back on the farm in Italy where he met Mom and my sisters were born.  At 51 now, the age he was then, I am coming to terms with the DNA he gave me and enjoying the memories of our short time together like a finely aging wine, the kind I watched him make in our basement.

Friday, August 5

In 1977 I came across a cool book while a freshman at the University of Michigan’s Alice Lloyd dorm.  I mention the dorm because if not for their “community courses” offered only to residents, I would not have read The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society - 1950, by Norbert Wiener.  Each month we were assigned a topic to read up on then discuss as a “community.”  Last month I found on Amazon the paperback I remembered reading back then available for one penny plus shipping.  It has a cool cover of a head with various compartments in it that contain cubby hole like items.  It is about the relationship between computer technology and the social sciences.  Professor Wiener taught at MIT and was known for among many things, getting his Ph.D. from  Harvard at age 18.

Thursday, August 4^th

The 34th straight day of 100 degree plus heat.  Today it will reach 109.  We may need periodic “brown outs” as the electrical grid is being strained to the max and Texas is buying power from Mexico and other states.  Some cities have begun water rationing, asking homeowners to water only twice a week.  Additional shelters are being created for the homeless to act as “cool zones” where they can come in from the heat to air conditioning and get water and pass the time watching movies.  My daughter worries for the horses at the ranch she volunteers at.  They try to alternate the horses who can spend the day in the barns and those that can stay out at night once the sun sets.

Wednesday, August 3

My primary areas of interest these days are neuroscience and my relationship with God.  I just read two great books that overlap both these areas.  Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain by neuroscientist David Eagleman and God’s Brain, by anthropologist Lionel Tiger and psychiatrist Michael McGuire.  Both books shed even more light on the developments in the understanding of our conscious minds.  The books helped me further speculate on the laws governing the action of all things and forces, especially as reagrds to a collective conscious.

Tuesday, August 2

Debt crisis averted…debt ceiling raised.  Apparently, the United States has in fact actually defaulted in some form or fashion three times in its history. First in 1814, then in the 1930s and in 1971 when President Nixon removed the need for gold to back-up American currency.  I think we should go back to requiring gold to be linked to our currency since it seems our treasury prints money “willy-nilly” now.

Sunday, July 31

            Stayed up until midnight to watch the first hour of MTV as originally aired on August 1, 1981 to commemorate their 30th anniversary.  The first music video was the Buggles doing Video Killed the Radio Star.  For us trivia aficionados, the second one was by Pat Benetar.

Monday, August 1

It has been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect he can dispense with a creator.

Marcel Proust (1921)