I think I can blame my birthday and various media for inspiring this blog.
- A broadcast news item about raising the flag at Iwo Jima (see the Wikipedia piece).
- Bachman Turner Overdrive’s Taking Care of Business coming out of my PC speakers.
OK, get over it, I’m old school, it’s a Dell desktop, and the music is coming out of external speakers my son was nice enough to install, small but with an impressive bass response. Thanks, son!
I won’t name all the songs I was listening to, but there were 3 BTO, 3 Canned Heat, and 3 Chicago tracks, obviously music I like. One of the Canned Heat tracks was Let’s Work Together (Let’s Stick Together). I believe it’s on Disc 2 of Uncanned: The Best of Canned Heat album if you’re interested. Music and images (Iwo Jima) is a segue . . . possibly.
Today was a pretty darn good birthday. Even work was kind of fun – go figure, eh! I got happy birthdays from my Facebook friends, which I was checking out on my lunch break of course. I liked it and got a little buzzed about having 34 people wish me a happy birthday! I should try to move along in this modest literary exercise, tomorrow is another workday. Perhaps you glanced at my 2015 Preview – here are a few snippets to wet your curiosity.
“Who is Peter Finch?” – The title of this upcoming post should be, “Who is Howard Beale?” because he is the character that Peter Finch played. You should at least google it or read the imdb.com summary of the film. Better yet, buy a copy or rent it on Amazon. The movie was highly acclaimed, winning several academy awards that year. But why was he shouting “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore.” Remember it was a “satire”, but you should look up the definition if you aren’t familiar with that word.
An even better question is, “why aren’t we mad as hell and shouting I’m not going to take it anymore”? For now, I will mention just this one more thing, which is a carryover from my college days at a military school. People used to say things like, “Your head is so far up your _ _ _ that you need a glass belt buckle to see where you’re going.” Now as I recall more clearly, that was often what an upperclassman (usually a sophomore) would say to an underclassman (a freshman) when the cadet couldn’t answer a question about some obscure fact related to the college. Do we as Americans have our heads up our _ _ _ _ _ about what’s going on?
Remember my blog post on December 21, 2014, about mindfulness – try this just for fun. The next time you’re in a serious conversation with someone, really listen to what they’re saying and try to respond, rather than, while they’re talking, thinking about your own ideas and what you want to say. More in my next installment about mindfulness.
I’m about done. Two more items to complete the segue from the two bullets above. The Canned Heat songs (titles and music) speak for themselves, as does the Iwo Jima photograph. Think about it. There are six people raising the flag in the famous photograph, five Marines and a Navy Corpsman. Three of the Marines were killed in action over the next few days. Any flag raisers out there? God I hope so!
blazinbernie
Looking for a Rufous 