30 Random Things… including Meadowlark Lemon!

1. Gorillas are my favorite animal.

2. I once had an autographed picture of boxer Duane Bobick.

3. My favorite musician is Warren Zevon.

4. In 1978, Olympic swimmer John Naber rushed me off a pay telephone at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.

5. My 1999 Toyota Corolla has over 275,000 miles on its odometer.

6. I know all of the words to the Canadian National Anthem.

7. I’m a card-carrying member of The Three Stooges fan club.

8. I once rolled ten strikes in a row the very first time I used a new custom bowling ball that I bought on eBay. Never came close since.

9. Boiling in hot water is my preferred way of cooking hamburgers.

10. Shoulders are my favorite female body part.

11. I once ran into goaltender Bernie Parent coming out of a convenience store and held the door open for him.

12. I regret not picking up the cork from a champagne bottle celebration after Hulk Hogan beat the Iron Shiek to become wrestling champion.

13. While also working at the Madison Square Garden Network in New York City, I once gave Wayne Gretzky a television set.

14. As a child, I remember throwing up in the dentist’s chair. The dentist had hairy fingers and I gagged on a loose hair.

15. I like redheaded women.

16. Of all the movies that I have ever seen, I think I have watched “Goodfellas” the most.

17. The tip of the middle finger of my right hand needed 14 stitches when it nearly got cut off in the spokes of a bicycle.

18. I always had success fishing using slices of hotdogs as bait.

19. I remember crying when I once missed an annual episode of The Grinch That Stole Christmas. Had to wait 364 days to see it again.

20. Tying a postcard to a helium balloon to see how far it travels is something I always wanted to do.

21. In my youth, I was almost electrocuted playing “Hide The Penny” at a neighbor’s house. He hid it inside a lamp fixture.

22. I unofficially once held the world’s record for snatching a pile of quarters that were first balanced on my extended elbow.

23. Seeing Meadowlark Lemon and the Harlem Globetrotters perform live was a childhood thrill of mine. Immediately following that exhibition, I got to see Billy Cunningham score his 10,000th point as a Philadelphia 76er against the Cincinnati Royals.

24. My blood type is O Positive… universal donor.

25. As a kid, I nearly choked to death on a sour ball piece of candy.

26. “Act your age, not your shoe size” was a common expression. The closet I came was wearing size 12 at age 13.

27. I once won something in a drawing from a local television station but the letter arrived AFTER the deadline to pick up the prize.

28. I stand exactly 6 feet 0 inches tall.

29. I keep currency inside my wallet in ascending order with all Presidents facing the same way.

30. I once accidentally sent my first-born child to school with a can of beer in his lunchbox. Later I had some explaining to do with the school principal.

Jackie Robinson Was A Fighter To The Very End

By joining the Brooklyn Dodgers organization in 1947, Jackie Robinson brought down the color line by becoming the first African-American player in the 20th century to play professional baseball since Cap Anson set that barrier using ugly language back in the 1880’s.

Jackie Robinson not only changed baseball but he helped change the world. He once said “A life is only as important as the impact it has on other lives” and it is truly poetic as being his own personal mission statement.

When one thinks about baseball and the color line, Robinson’s name immediately comes up. One would need to do research to
discover the first black players to enter football (Charles Follis), basketball (Earl Lloyd) or hockey (Willie O’Ree).

I don’t recall if it was teammate Duke Snider or Carl Erskine but someone once claimed that Jackie was a better ballplayer when he was angry. He took out his anger by playing harder and using that aggression to beat his opponents on the playing field.

The problem I see and feel sorry for the most with Jackie is that he never seemed to stop being angry. He understood his role in Branch Rickey’s “great experiment” and carried his race on his back throughout not only his baseball career but throughout his entire life. Some say they think his internal anger helped to kill him at the early age of 53. He suffered from diabetes but I tend to believe that Robinson never learned to take the burden he carried for his people off his shoulders.

After retiring from baseball, Robinson served as vice president of personnel with the coffee company Chock Full O’ Nuts. He tried opening a bank for blacks. He tried selling life insurance to blacks as it was difficult to get coverage. He tried his hand at franchising a Sea Host restaurant which was similar to Arthur Treacher’s Fish and Chips. Nothing he did outside of baseball was ever able to make up for what he did in baseball and, as sportswriter Dick Young pointed out, that was the real tragedy of being Jackie Robinson. He couldn’t give up the fight because that’s all he ever knew how to do.

He stayed quite active in civil rights. He enjoyed politics. He led picket lines. He traveled to the deep South in support of Dr.
Martin Luther King during the turbulent 1960’s. If he had nothing left to fight for, he was lost.

Adjectives that describe Jackie Robinson include courageous, dedicated and trailblazer.

Other words could be stubborn, hot-tempered and narrow-minded.

Any way that you look at it, Jackie Robinson was an original.

LBJ And The Texas-Sized Turkey Shoot

Shortly after John Fitzgerald Kennedy was assassinated in 1963, Vice President Lyndon Baines Johnson was sworn in as his replacement.

On the morning of New Year’s Day that January, Johnson’s long-time mistress Madeleine Duncan Brown recalled LBJ telling her at Austin’s Driskell Hotel that “Texas oil and those f__king renegade bastards in Washington” (meaning the CIA) had murdered Kennedy.

In effect, he was saying that JFK was killed on his behalf. Many skeptics already believed that he had something to do with the shooting either by helping to orchestrate it or had advanced knowledge of it and agreeing to be part of the cover-up.

LBJ had assistance from the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover in obtaining secret information on John F. Kennedy and using that knowledge to force him to be his Democratic running mate in the 1960 Presidential election. Hoover had dirt on almost everybody in Washington D.C.

Johnson was the politician’s politician. He also keep close-knit political ties with Senator Nelson Rockefeller, Trenton Parker of the CIA, oil tycoon H.L. Hunt as well was other high-end land moguls and governmental types.

(Music) “The stars at night/Are big and bright/BANG-BANG-BANG-BANG/Deep in the heart of Dallas!”

Web Sleuths Are Not CSI

Crime Solvers of the Internet. Hardly.

Delutional? Most definitely.

Fantasy or Factual. Fake is more like it.

Tricia Griffith has her own website and twitter feed.

She’s a virtual Charlie Chan. Encyclopedia Brown lives.

All hail Dr. Haledjian from Two-Minute Mysteries.

Operation: Nazi Hunter

Simon Wiesenthal was a jewish holocaust survivor. After WWII, he dedicated his life to finding those individuals responsible for helping to terminate his people in Nazi death camps.

“When history looks back, I want people to know the Nazis weren’t able to kill millions of people and get away with it.” said Wiesenthal.

He was the world’s best-known Nazi hunter and spent his time in a tiny office filled with files, cards and registration records. He had a secretary and a few volunteers. He was on a mission.

He captured the feared Adolph Eichmann in Buenos Aries; he located Karl Silberbauer, the gestapo officer who arrested Anne Frank, in Austria working as a police inspector; he found Hermine Braunsteiner, an SS female who supervised the murder of hundreds of children, living as a housewife in Queens.

He’s been credited for hunting down over 1,100 former Nazis over the years.

For his work, Wiesenthal was honored by many governments for his tireless efforts in bringing war criminals to justice.

Simon Wiesenthal died at his home in Vienna in 2005, aged 96.

Googling Google: It’s One Wealthy Technology Company

Google started in 1998 and has its headquarters in Mountain View, California.

On NASDAQ, it’s trading at over $630 per share.

On Facebook, it has over 188 million ‘likes’.

On Twitter, it has over 12 million followers.

Its subsidiaries include YouTube, Nest Labs, Songza, Feedburner, BufferBox, AdMob and numerous other companies which appear to be extensions of the original Google.

Google is on the Forbes World’s most valuable brands list.

In net worth, Google has around $365 billion dollars in assets.

Not to be confused with Googol which is the number one followed by one hundred zeros.

Now that’s alot of zeros.

Big Brother Is Not Only Watching – It’s Controlling

In corporate-controlled America, people are no longer seen as assets but liabilities. Human resource centers are being reduced to virtual reality portals. The elimination of jobs is purposeful and profitable.

Google has invested $287 million dollars to sponsor the Uber drive-for-hire techno company. Human drivers are being replaced by self-driving automobiles under proclamations in the advance of science. Blasphemy.

Cameras on street corners photograph vehicle license plates so ticket violations can arrive in the mail. Outrageous.

Artificial intelligence is being incrementally introduced into society. Don’t put up with it.

Mind-altering ingredients get placed into the food and water supplies. Stop the madness.

Cable television and internet websites are two-way surveillence systems.

Food store conglomerates use discount cards to monitor and track consumer purchases.

Is the United States a fascist society? Fascism is a political economic structure which serves corporate interests. Hmmmm.

Stand up and fight, America. The future is now. Take back control.

Get mad as hell and refuse to accept it anymore.

The Real Or Imagined Problem Of Global Warming

According to the website of the World Natural Health Organization, global warming is nothing more than a hoax like
Y2K. “Global warming is being used to generate fear and panic. Those behind this movement are using it to control
people’s lives and for financial gain.”

The German news agency “Deutsche Welle” however reports that the polar ice caps have melted faster in the last 20 years
than in the last 10,000. A comprehensive satellite study confirms that the melting ice caps are raising sea levels
at an accelerating rate. The primary cause is pointed at global warming.

Global warming is mainly the result of CO2 (carbon dioxide) levels rising in the earth’s atmosphere. Both atmospheric
CO2 and climate change are accelerating. Climate scientists say we have years, not decades, to stabilize CO2 and other
greenhouse gases.

Marine biologists say global warming causes ocean acidification. The ocean presently takes up one-fourth of the carbon
CO2 emitted to the atmosphere from human activities. As this CO2 dissolves in the surface ocean, it reacts with seawater
to form carbonic acid that increases ocean acidity.

While our understanding of the possible consequences of ocean acidification is still rudimentary, both the scientific
community and the society at large are increasingly concerned about the possible risks associated with ocean
acidification for marine organisms and ecosystems.

To help the world succeed, http://www.CO2Now.org makes it easy to see the most current CO2 level and what it means.
Use this site to keep an eye on CO2.  Invite others to do the same. Then we can do more to send CO2 in the right direction.

The Rise And Fall Of Peter Edward Rose

Like Shoeless Joe Jackson and his 1919 Black Sox teammates, Pete Rose is the ninth man out. His gambling illness made him so delusional to think that he was above it all and was bullet-proof and that rules don’t apply to him.

In his “Prison Without Bars” book, it talks about his two personality disorders. He suffers from both ADHD and something called oppositional-defiant behavior. Like thinking that he is right and the rest of the world is wrong. This attitude of self may have helped him become the player with the most hits in the game, among other records, but it was sadly also his undoing.

Who in their right mind goes to upstate New York every summer to oppose Hall Of Fame festivities and sell autographs? Love of conflict. That’s Pete Rose logic.

Rose is an obsessive, aggressive maniac who once said that he would walk through h_ll in a gasoline suit for baseball. Sparky Anderson was filmed at a table with Pete and they were reminiscing about how Sparky lovingly referred to him as an animal on the playing field once he put on a baseball uniform.

No doubt Rose was a great player and accomplished alot of things in the game. He thought he was Superman and got caught.

Cooperstown will never enshrine him. Ever. And you can bet on that.

A Man Called R. Buckminster Fuller

R. Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was a man who wore many hats: an inventor, an architect, an engineer, a mathematician, a poet and a cosmologist.  He is most famous for designing the triangular-shaped Geodesic Domes, erected at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal and easily recognized at Walt Disney’s Epcot Center in Florida.

He was such a genius that he had trouble relating to things in layman’s terms. His books are a difficult read. One lengthy work babbled on with no use for any punctuation at all. For most of his life, R. Buckminster Fuller was simply known as a crackpot. His thick “coca-cola-bottle” eyeglasses only added to that image. A misnomer indeed.

Fuller was one of the world’s first futurists and global thinkers. His 1927 decision to work always and only for all humanity led him to address the largest global problems of poverty, disease and homelessness.

With universal vision, he considered himself the captain of “Spaceship Earth” and with passionate intent made his goal helping to care for everyone onboard. He committed his entire productivity to the whole planet Earth and its resources; undertaking to protect and advance all life.

He was truly ahead of his time.