Category Archives: Scribbles

Jackie Robinson Day

Posted on April 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Jackie Robinson Day
I never knew much about Robinson until Mr. Boy did a class project on him. They start out teaching civil rights in first grade in Austin. I was surprised to learn he was a star in college football and track as well as baseball. I have yet to figure out which army OCS he attended, or where. But since he was assigned to Fort Hood, and it was a cavalry base, I assume Robinson was commissioned in armor–as I was in 1968. He was courts-martialed at Hood for refusing an order to move to the back of an army bus, but acquitted and eventually given an honorable discharge. This was a time, 1942, when the only thing most black enlistees did in OCS was to clean the floors and latrines for the white candidates. That was something–servants!– we could not have imagined at infantry OCS in 1968.

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Posted in Mr. Boy, Scribbles

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Hypocrisy on a skateboard

Posted on April 15, 2007 | Comments Off on Hypocrisy on a skateboard

I never heard Imus on the radio or anywhere else, and I didn’t vote for Kinky Friedman in his largely joking run for governor of Texas, and this is the last post on the former subject, but the mustached one in the black hat with silver conchos sums it up so well:

"There’s no excusing Imus’ recent ridiculous remark, but there’s something not kosher in America when one guy gets a Grammy and one gets fired for the same line."

It was all about skin color, obviously, the last thing anyone would admit. 

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Condoleezza’s cretin

Posted on April 14, 2007 | Comments Off on Condoleezza’s cretin

Roger L. Simon is appalled that US Secretary of State Rice feels the need to hop on Reverend Al’s latest I-got-you-you-racist bandwagon:

"We live in an increasingly pathetic media culture where pretty soon, like the proverbial sheep, we will all have to think and talk the same way."

Sharpton and the other vultures of the race industry, abetted by their media clones, are pushing for it. As for Rice, it just underscores how pathetically little this woman acually has to do, let alone to think about. 

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Seamanship for love and peace

Posted on April 14, 2007 | Comments Off on Seamanship for love and peace

For those who think the new Army Strong recruiting commercial lacks something, try the dancing, prancing sailors of the Japan Maritime Self Defense Force. Oy vey! Where’s Godzilla when they need him?

Via Blackfive

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Cooperative remembering

Posted on April 12, 2007 | Comments Off on Cooperative remembering

This seems right to me:

"The Internet as the new medium of cultural memory offers us never existing forms of creative and participative remembering, which can be practiced independently of time and place. It allows people all around the world to cooperate with each other."

It’s from a virtual reconstruction of building plans and other records: 

"…to remember more than 2200 synagogues that were closed, desecrated or destroyed in Germany and Austria during the Nazi regime."

Worth a visit. Via this article which I stumbled over looking for something else. Sunday, as it happens, is Holocaust Memorial Day in Israel.

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Posted in Israel, Science/Engineering, Scribbles

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Imus confused

Posted on April 11, 2007 | Comments Off on Imus confused

Imus confused as can be over why the trashmouth shock jock should be fired for saying stuff that’s pretty mild compared to some rap lyrics nobody seems to have mounted any great to-do about.

UPDATE  Akaky of the Passing Parade joins in the perplexity:

"…I am not sure why this week’s particular bit of nastiness from Don Imus set [Rev. Sharpton] off, though; one can hear African-American women called much worse on BET every day of the week…"

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Dick Stanley: Cowboy, Impresario

Posted on April 10, 2007 | Comments Off on Dick Stanley: Cowboy, Impresario

Occasionally I do a Google search on my name to see what’s being picked up, if anything. In which I usually encounter a mathematician and an actor by that name, and this Wyoming cowboy who also ran a Wild West show–the Stanley Bros. Congress of Roughriders–about a hundred years ago, featuring, among other later to be stars, Hoot Gibson. None of these Dick Stanleys are related to me, as far as I know. I rather like the cowboy, a bronc rider who had this postcard (copyrighted) done of his ride on a horse named Steamboat. Should have left it at that. Didn’t. Searched some more on him, and discovered he was really Earl Carl Shobe using a pseudonym because of a murder and post office robbery he’d committed and was trying to evade arrest. Ah, well, back to the mathematician and the actor, I guess.

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