In Honor of Two Great Men

Two of the most influential educators in my life left this mortal coil in 2009. Professor James Gremmels and Dr. Raymond Lammers. My English and Theater professors at the University of Minnesota, Morris, MN.

I took a class my freshman year of college that the two of them co-taught. It was a critical thinking class topically based on Theater and English.

It was one of the most important and transformative experiences of my life. However, it was not just that class that I have to thank them for the gifts of the educators in our life are vast.

Raymond J. Lammers

Dr. Lammers always had faith in me. He pushed me. He challenged me. He made me feel that I could be great. I was encouraged to dream but also to work to make that dream come true. He instilled in me a sense of the discipline it takes to truly make your creative vision come true.

James C. Gremmels

Professor Gremmels was important in a different way. I worked with him at the old time letter press. We would spend hours setting type and printing on an old fashioned printer. His patience during those hours and his guidance taught me that life was not always going to go my way. I had to work with it. His teaching was also very important. His classes were filled with his love and energy of the subject. He breathed all kinds of life into old text and his love of Moby Dick gave me a perspective on the work of Melville that came from a scholar who loved his work.

In honor of all the people that make a difference in your life, I am grateful to both of these great men for the gifts they gave to me. I honor them by remembering them.

Information from the Future

Yesterday I was notified of the passing of Arthur C. Clarke by my Twitter feed.

The link from Twitter sent me to his Wikipedia page.

For me, yesterday was March 18th. According to Wikipedia he had died on March 19th. So from my perspespective he died in the future. The screen shot below is from Wikipedia.

——————————-SCREEN SHOT FROM WIKIPEDIA ON MARCH 18TH, 2008————

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Things are getting wacky.

This Is Only A Toy, I Repeat…..

The Netdisaster is only a TOY.

No Bad Dogs, Just Bad Owners

In a Star Tribune article from last summer new legislation that Rep. John Lesch wants to ban pit bulls, chows, wolf hybrids, Akitas and Rottweilers is outlined.

They want to ban these dogs because of ‘bad things happening’ with these dogs. First off, yes, there are bad people that do bad things. Does this mean you should reach into the rights of everyone in the entire state and exclude their rights & the rights of their animals when they have done nothing wrong?

There are no bad dogs, just bad people. I have no problem with making the owners accountable. I have a big problem with BSL (Breed Specific Legislation). I have a problem with this because it’s a huge infringement of rights AND it doesn’t address the problem of people being attacked by dogs.

If you are interested in more on this topic, visit the A Rotta Love Plus web site breed specific legislation section which is providing many links and information about the activity around the legislation.

Urban Legends ???

A friend sent the tiger piglet story around the other day. It sounds so right and so true. A tigress loses her cubs and to bring her out of depression, the zoo finds babies for her to nurture. As they cannot find any tiger babies, they see how piglets work out.

This story was too touching to not comment about on my blog. So I decided to conduct some further research about the story. Turns out there may be a bit of urban legend in the story. The pictures of the tigress and the piglets getting along are real. The story is just not true.

And as always the truth lies somewhere in the middle. 

Must Be Pretty Bleak In There

“A man’s soul can be judged by the way he treats his dog.” – Charles Doran

An Emotional Response to Ubiquity

It was just there. I drove on it because it was the road. I didn’t even really know it was a bridge. When they said it had fallen, I couldn’t even mentally picture where it was exactly, but I knew I had been on it and so had everyone I know a gazillion times and any of us could’ve been there at that moment. And now it’s gone.  Just not there anymore. It’s really hard to grok. I keep thinking about it. I manage to occury my mind and time with other things but then I drift back. There is so much available on the internet and the impact is so large I don’t think we still quite know what has hit us.

This is Disappointing

I just saw Sicko yesterday. I then found this blog post today. I’m not so sure that the people at Google selling ads to the healthcare industry should be commenting on this at all. It’s a pretty murky water they are wading into here not to mention the unseemly and blatant selling nature of the post. I expect better from Google.

Good news for the poor beleagured health insurance and pharma companies though because, “…companies come to us hoping we can help them better manage their reputations through “Get the Facts” or issue management campaigns. Your brand or corporate site may already have these informational assets, but can users easily find them?”

Gosh, what to do. Instead of fixing the real problem, they can help you, “…place text ads, video ads, and rich media ads in paid search results or in relevant websites within our ever-expanding content network. Whatever the problem, Google can act as a platform for educating the public and promoting your message. We help you connect your company’s assets while helping users find the information they seek.”

As long as people think everything is ok, then it must be, right? Google can help promote your message. (whether it’s true or not)

Not only is the blog a blatant advertisement itself, there is no place to leave a comment telling them politely that I find this tactic unseemly and I thought Google was better than that.

Will the loss of innocence never stop?

I Knew I Hated Crowds for a Reason

The BBC reported this frightening but true story about crowd mentality. A passenger in a car that hit a young girl (at a low speed and did not intentionally or seriously injure her) was killed by the crowd.

Next time you’re in one of those meetings where everyone around the table is nodding their heads, think about the fact that just because everyone agrees and goes in the same direction, it doesn’t mean it’s right.

No Faith In Freedom?

Newt Gingrich has gone done the path of suggesting that we must take away the definition of what it means to be free in America. I think he’s completely wrong. We cannot save America by destroying it.

This is one of the things he said at a speech Gingrich gave at the Nackey S. Loeb First Amendment Award dinner in New Hampshire on Monday.

He suggested that due to the ongoing war on terror, we might need some new rules for our Freedom of Speech right.

“I want to suggest to you that we right now should be impaneling people to look seriously at a level of supervision that we would never dream of, if it were not for the scale of this threat.” That`s one quote. “This is a serious, long-term war,” Gingrich added, “and it will inevitably lead us to want to know what is said in every suspect place in the country. It will lead us to learn how to close down every Web site that is dangerous.”

This has been tried before Mr. Gingrich. It is not patriotic to take away freedom. And the First Ammendment at that. Good luck because suppression is validation. Tell the people no and they will do anything to get around you. It doesn’t matter the quality, it’s the idea that someone has deemed some kind of content as ‘wrong’. Censorship has never worked here.