This spring, the situation in Gaza triggered a nationwide wave of protests. My alma mater, Oberlin College, was involved in a small way. About 130 students gathered outside the Mudd Library near Wilder Hall to demand an end to Israel's occupation of Palestinian territories and the college's investment in Israel.
The encampment on campus lasted only about one day, but dozens of comments were posted by Class of 1968 alumni on their reunion website. A couple of the more philosophical essays raised Dangerous Questions. For example, Can a democracy elevate the rights of one religion within it over another? Soccer is far from my favorite sport, but I have been tuning in to parts of the FIFA World Cup being played in Brazil. As a TV graphics operator, I like the compact score bug that ESPN has been using.
Theres no need to squeeze in logos or flags, and the viewer can quickly determine which players belong to which team. On most basketball telecasts, depending on the network, we also try to use the team colors on the score bug. But we complicate the issue. Suppose Notre Dame is visiting Pitt. Both teams have blue and gold as their colors. We could use blue for one team and gold for the other, but theres an added problem: the white letters ND and PITT are supposed to appear on top of the team colors, and white letters on a gold background dont show up well. (Nor would black letters on a blue background.) So after some debate, we decide to use blue backgrounds for both schools. It would be better if we could simply use a generic background plus jersey blocks like this: blue for Notre Dame, white for Pitt. In this years World Cup, the United States unexpectedly won their first game, tied the next, and on Thursday lost the third but by only one goal. That stellar 1-1-1 record has entitled the USA to advance. Were in the Round of 16! Hurray, us! You and I had absolutely nothing to do with it, of course, but that doesnt stop you and me from feeling pride in our national accomplishment. Some Americans arent happy, however. They still deride soccer as a communist sport. This is despite the fact that none of the 32 competing nations has a communist government. Russia and Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina may have been communist once, but they arent now, and none of them made it through to the Round of 16. Communist Cuba and China and Vietnam and North Korea arent even in the tournament. For the Americans who dislike soccer, excuses have to be invented. Soccer is socialist, they say, with all the players working together toward a single goal. (Isnt that true of most sports?) Because its low-scoring, the team that loses 1-0 doesnt get its feelings hurt too badly. (Tell that to the losing team, except the USA on Thursday.) Games can end in an unsatisfying tie. (Until recently, all of these arguments could also be applied to the National Hockey League.) The game is somehow for sissies. (Jim Rome was quoted in The Guardian: My son is not playing soccer. I will hand him ice skates and a shimmering sequined blouse before I hand him a soccer ball.) I suspect the disparagement of soccer as a communist sport began around 1948. Then as now in America, the Do-Nothing Congress and the Party of No resisted all changes. After all, America was exceptional. We were already the greatest nation in the world, so nothing new was needed. Certainly we shouldnt import alien ideas from other so-called nations. Here in the United States, the only legitimate football was the violent full-contact version. Also, the blacks knew their place, the gays stayed in the closet, and everybody in town went to the same church. Some people today feel the Real America should still be like this. In Joe McCarthys day, the right wing looked with suspicion on any foreign concepts originating outside this country, including soccer. Congress actually formed a committee to suppress Un-American Activities, labeling the Un-American Activists as communists. Recently C. Edmund Wright ranted, At its heart, soccer is the perfect socialist sport. ...When the World Cup rolls around, that's where the arrogance of soccer folks meets up with the one-world feeling and the can't-we-all-just-get-along crowd and all sorts of international bodies that want to treat the U.S. like just another country like Cuba or Iran. Now I happen to believe that we are one world. I tuned in the USA-Portugal match last Sunday. I was in my car at the time, so I listed on ESPN Radio. With the relative lack of action, soccer on radio was an interesting novelty. The game was described by ESPN Radios lead soccer announcers, JP Dellacamera and Tommy Smyth.
I introduced myself to John Paul. He told me he preferred to be called JP. He suggested that I should do the driving, since he had no idea where Terre Haute was and I had at least been in Indiana before. He also warned me that he had a special requirement, I forget what, something like having to drink some water at least once an hour. During the trip, JP expressed frustration about his professional difficulty of getting assignments to broadcast soccer, his specialty. I guess hes been doing all right over the ensuing decades.
JUNE 25, 2024 BEING GOOD NEIGHBORS Americans receive a multitude of benefits from the government, including highways, education, police protection, defense, health care, and disaster relief. However, when taxes are imposed to fund those benefits, many hard-working taxpayers complain of the perceived unfairness. For example, I don't have any children, so why should I have to pay for that new elementary school?
JUNE 19, 2024 WE WERE NOT THE LEADER Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo) was a history major at Stanford. However, for Juneteenth last year, he ignored what he had learned and tried to make his Christian constituents feel good about themselves. He tweeted,
Wrong, wrote the editorial board of the Kansas City Star. Slavery flourished here for more than two centuries. It is no exaggeration to say that America's economic might was built on a foundation of enslaved labor.
Ron Filipkowski has noted that Slavery was ended in virtually every developed country before the U.S. In particular, Britain's 1833 Slavery Abolition Act outlawed the practice in almost the entire Commonwealth but not here, of course. We were not the leader of a movement to end slavery! We were at the tail end of global emancipation efforts. And other countries were able to ban it without fighting a bloody civil war. Robert J. Elisberg reminds us that the Southern states that defended slavery and seceded in 1861 were led by Democrats, while the Northern states that remained in the Union were led by Abraham Lincoln's Republicans. After the war, some members of the Democratic Party learned from its horrible mistakes and became aggressive defenders of civil rights for Black people. However, conservative Democrats who refused to support this quit the party and became Republicans! In 1948, the Dixiecrats were outraged by a civil rights plank in the Democratic party platform, and many walked out of the convention. In 1964, Mississippi Democrats walked out of that year's convention when a Black slate was going to be admitted. And in 1968, the switchover became pretty much completed when Richard Nixon had his Southern Strategy, going full racist. The South became pretty much Republican and has been so since.
Ohio's
Blake Taylor is a recent North Union High School graduate.
(That was my school, sort of. It used to be called Richwood
High School, but as soon as I graduated it was immediately
consolidated and renamed North Union.) Blake is proud of his
photogenic horse named Blossom.
JUNE
16, 2014
NO
NAVIGATOR'S VOICE NEEDED One gadget my new car doesnt have is a GPS navigation system. I dont use GPS. But its not that Im avoiding computers. I simply prefer to use Google Earth, in order to know in advance where Im going.
Last winter I got a flyer from a new restaurant at 3231 Leechburg Road. Im familiar with that road, but its a couple of miles long. Where exactly is 3231? I fired up Google Earth on my desktop computer and typed in the address. The program immediately showed me where it is: the former Quiznos sandwich shop. Set back from the other buildings and therefore easy to miss, Quiznos is no longer in business at that location. I may or may not decide to go to the new place. When Im assigned to work at, for example, Hometown High School, Im given an address several days in advance. So when I have the opportunity, I ask Google to plot a course to 225 White House Road, 15163. Then I examine the map in detail, paying special attention to the turns. For the tricky parts, I use Street View and memorize the terrain. Okay, Ill come up to a stop sign with a Sunoco station on my left. There's a big blue-and-yellow sign. Ill make a right turn, then immediately get in the left-hand lane to make a left turn at the traffic light, just before the golf course. Ill follow that road for 2.6 miles. Soon after passing Truman Road there should be a green sign on the right Ill turn right onto Eisenhower Road, which is rather narrow. Now when I actually make the trip, Im not driving in unfamiliar terrain. Ive been there, seen that! Virtually, that is.
JUNE 13, 2024 PRODUCE ROCKS IN RICHWOOD In Richwood, Ohio, the village where I grew up, a Farmers Market is held on Thursday evenings. This year it's in Shelter House #1 at the lake, and opening day is today.
Shoppers might notice a brightly-painted stone or two lying under a bench. The explanation is in a story I'm calling Richwood's Grandma Rocks.
JUNE 10, 2024 MEET THE PARENTS Catchy, channel 2.5 in Pittsburgh, replays old situation comedies. It recently acquired the mostly-forgotten 1965 version of Gidget. This series, which aired for only one season, starred the cute and talented Sally Field as a 15½-year-old surfer girl. Gidget and I were in high school about the same time, but we had different experiences: I was studious, she was boy-crazy.
As we walked to the Inn, she playfully asked, Are you nervous about meeting my parents? I reminded her that I had already done so.
JUNE
8, 2014
AND
THEY ALL LOOK JUST THE SAME Its after midnight on a starlit Wednesday night in Las Vegas, Nevada, so the temperature has cooled to 86° on the far northwest side of the city. Youre Victor Thompson, a captain in the local fire department. Youre sleeping peacefully in your modern home in your quiet gated community. Suddenly your wife wakes you. Someone is insistently ringing the doorbell! You get out of bed to find out whats going on. Two young men are banging on the front door. Theyre shouting things like Hey, open up, stupid! Weve got the beer, but this #$% door is locked! Were locked out! Let us in, you #$%! You argue with them, but they become belligerent and wont stop knocking. You fear a home invasion. You take steps to defend your family. You grab the firearm you keep nearby. You shoot through the door. You hit one man in the chest. Ive augmented the story by inventing details and dialogue, but the basic facts are there. According to an article last week in the Las Vegas Review-Journal, the supposed intruders were at the door after confusing the home with another in the neighborhood. They had been celebrating a birthday with another person at a nearby house. They left for a short time and thought they were returning to the same house. They did not understand why they werent being let back in.
How could the Las Vegas men mistake one house for another? Residents who live nearby, the article explained, described the neighborhood as quiet, yet easy to get lost in. Keith Patton, who lives on the street behind where the shooting happened, said he and his mother have confused the houses by driving or walking up to the wrong driveway several times. How confoundingly alike could these little boxes be? On Friday afternoon, I decided to see for myself. I took a quick trip to Las Vegas. Yes, I did! I used my preferred mode of transportation for such exploration, Google Earth. Its much cheaper and faster than an airplane ticket, and I returned with these pictures in half an hour.
I found that the houses are indeed similar and very closely spaced, though theyre hardly identical unless its 2:00 in the morning and youre drunk. Thats Captain Thompsons home on the left, distinguished by a luxurious 300 square feet of grass in the front lawn. And the streets are indeed easy to get lost in. Captain Thompsons community is a compact square only a quarter of a mile on a side. Several such squares have been carved out of the beige flatness of the surrounding desert. One example is the square shown below, ironically named Vista Verde (Green View). Construction has been completed on almost all of the houses.
The area of this square is forty acres. Now you young folks don't remember this, but back in my great-grandfathers day, forty acres was the ideal size for a single-family farm. When Vista Verde is finished, its forty acres will contain not one but 170 single-family homes. (A few of those structures might be for general community use.) Notice the efficient maze of streets, designed to slow speeders. There are only two ways in and out, through the gates in the middle of the north and south sides of the square. In the interior its left, right, right, left, left, right, right, left, left, right; and if you get caught in a dead end, you need to use the cul-de-sac to turn around. Las Vegas is growing by 50,000 new residents a year, and they keep building developments like this. I wouldnt want to live in such a cramped residential area, crawling over the other workers cells to find an exit from the hive. The West boasts its wide-open spaces, but back here in the East there really are green views. It's almost heaven.
JUNE 5, 2024 WHAT'S NEW Apparently most little boys can tilt their heads all the way back to look straight up. Apparently my neck is less flexible. Therefore I learned that I must also lean back from the waist, causing me to almost lose my balance, leading to a lifelong phobia about looking up.
Anyhow,
that's a theory that I added
this month to my 2003 confession about cringing. During the past quarter century (almost), I've written over 700 such articles that are linked from this website's colorful menu. Their contents aren't graven in stone. Sometimes I discover a typo that needs to be fixed, and sometimes I run across new information that needs to be added.
Here
are some other recent updates which I haven't mentioned on this home
page until now.
In April 2024, I reported declining enrollments at the three
Pennsylvania Western University campuses including the former CalU.
In May, I confirmed that an oldtime radio program was not merely the
audio from a TV show.
JUNE 2, 2024 TUK'S THE ANSWER WE NEED A QUESTION Does an ancient Southeast Asian symbol lead to a blah cure? A fictional corporate executive suggests it might. That's because his assignment is Finding a Problem for a Solution.
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