Independence Day 2013


Let's all thank Thomas Jefferson for donating his text messages to the Library of Congress. (Click the pic to see it full-size.)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thoughts While Not Shaving

Image
Cleaning out my work emails recently, I came across one I'd been saving for years. It was a mass email from some guy off in middle-management somewhere who was a big fan of a weekly email quasi-blog called "Thoughts While Shaving."  The author, Len Fuchs, compiled his emails into a book called " Thoughts While Shaving: Common Sense Leadership Principles ." The concept is pretty clever - you picture the guy standing in front of the bathroom mirror, raking the stubble off his chin and experiencing daily epiphanies about leadership and management ("Leaders are influential, even when they are not the number one person in the organization"), and even about thought itself ("Ideas that initially appear to get in the way often lead you to someplace new and better"). Then he jots down these epiphanies in the form of a quasi-random list of principles (#170 - "Leaders know that success is not random"), and starts cashing the royalty checks....
Read more

Oh, Say, Can You Boom-Crash

September 5, 2016  Weather permitting, my beloved Florida State University Marching Chiefs will rehearse this afternoon at Oak Ridge High School in Orlando before heading to Generic Corporate Overlord Stadium for the Seminoles' season opener against Ole Miss at 8 pm.  My first band directing job out of FSU was at Oak Ridge. And our band’s first performance, on September 11, 1987, was one for the ages, thanks to my intrepid students and their unflappable drum major, Amy Booth—and a pants-wettingly fabulous cameo from Mother Nature. Oak Ridge opened its football season at home against Dr. Phillips High School, which had just opened its doors and was instantly Oak Ridge’s biggest rival, since many former ORHS Pioneers were now newly minted DPHS Panthers. The skies had been overcast all day, but the rain had held off … until the Pioneer Marching Band took the field for pregame. Just as Amy started the National Anthem, the rain came. By the second line, “Whose ...
Read more

Those Noisy, Pesky, Horny Cicadas

Image
May 2013  I’m sitting in my sunroom on a warm afternoon, looking out across my newly green backyard and the ravine that cuts through our neighborhood. I’m awaiting, with a creeping sense of dread and resignation, a benign but loud invasion.  The 17-year periodical cicadas (Brood II) are due to crawl up from underground around these parts, as soon as the ground temperature hits and maintains 64 degrees.  Soon.  A few precocious cicadas emerged in the past couple of summers, much to the evil delight of our cats, who regarded them as toys to be brought inside and batted about.  I know many people look forward to the cicadas. And I know they’re essentially harmless. ( Even delicious , some say.)  I certainly don’t regard them the same way I regard, say, roaches or spiders or ants.  But that doesn’t mean I have to like them.  Cicadas are often mistakenly called  locusts   –  but really, they’re not even c...
Read more