Blog For Free!
Archives
Home
2005 December
2005 August
2005 July
2005 June
2005 May
My Links
Illusive Life
Uncle Jack
MarketingBytes
Kent Nerburn's Weblog
tBlog
My Profile
Send tMail
My tFriends
My Images
Sponsored
Blog
Being an extremely non-linear account of my struggle to understand just what the hell is actually going on here!
<xBlogxPhilesx>
Who Links Here
|
| Migration is done!! |
| 08.24.05 (9:10 am) [edit] |
I have moved my blog to http://jimbrodhead.typepad.co...
Sorry to have to do it because there were some features here that I really liked. Unfortunatley reliability of the service was not one of them.
Good luck to all here and please adjust your bookmarks if you are so inclined.
|
|
|
| |
| Well that tears it! |
| 08.22.05 (2:27 pm) [edit] |
Everything from my first blog in August of 2004 through the first of this month has, as far as I can tell, disappeared. Nice going Rocky or Bullwinkle or whoever you are.
I am, the hell, out of here as soon as I can get everything moved to my new blog at
HTTP://JIMBRODHEAD.TYPEPAD.COM/
Six Apart costs way more than TBlog but it works.
As long as this character is more interested in raking of $$ from porn blogs and drug sellers this place will be more like a rip off than anything else. Trying to write is challenge enough without having to spend time and energy trying to recover from a continuing string of sloppy screw ups like what goes on here.
I am going to notify Rocky that any effort to renew my site at expiration will result in an immediate filing of a complaint with the California Office of Consume Affairs.
Sorry if I sound pissed but not only have previous complaints from other users fallen on deaf ears but the system continues to malfunction.
If you care to continue to read my stuff check at http://jimbrodhead.typepad.co... in a week or so when I hope to have everything migrated. I'll continue to send out notifications to those on my blog list. If you would like to be added to that list send me a note at paradigms@verizon.net
Thanks for reading so far.
Jim
|
|
|
| |
| Swoosh...just do it! |
| 08.21.05 (6:37 am) [edit] |
April 3, 2005
[image]JimBrodhead_943698 593.jpg[/image]
The sky was jumbled yesterday after the off and on rain that we had since sunrise. Highest were the seemingly immobile white clouds and below that were these tattered grey remnants of the day’s rain clouds crabbing off to the east, seeming to move quickly against the lightly textured white above them. The temperature had dropped and the tatters seemed like a warning that the respite from the unsettled weather would not last forever.
The view from my window is vaguely northeast and so when the sun sets whatever light there is throws itself at the power poles and signs along Route 1 and then seems to bounce up to reflect off the sides of the light tan of the National Bank building. If I look out at just the right time, when the sun is very low but not yet below the horizon, just before sunset, the effect is one of flood lights aimed at those walls. Yesterday the light came in just that way, the air so clear that the new spring grass along the highway was impossibly green. The illusion was of a photograph printed on high gloss paper.
My apartment balcony has a particularly good aspect for viewing rainbows except for all the power lines and buildings in the foreground. Yesterday, a swoosh of rainbow was all there was but it was quite wide at the base. I don’t know if an artist could do a single brush stroke with so many colors but that’s what this one reminded me of…as if God were saying, “Just do it!” If He wears Nike’s he is definitely a power forward or a center.
About two hours later Pope John Paul II died…make of it what you will.
|
|
|
| |
| The Little Frog & Duck Boy in The I.E. Part 8 |
| 08.20.05 (4:54 am) [edit] |
Yesterday, Alain's Zen postage finally worked it's mellow magic and the pictures arrived. Duck Boy will be obvious and the picture of the two derelicts features the Little Frog in the Virginia t-shirt and yours truly...not in the Virginia t-shirt. As you can see, the word "Little" is a vertical qualifier. If it were horizontal then it would apply to both of us: [image]JimBrodhead_132177 5579.jpg[/image] [image]JimBrodhead_126948 1862.jpg[/image]
And now the story of how Daniel became Duck Boy….
If there is anyplace more relaxing to be than in a hot tub with an old friend, I don't know where it would be. The second night I was there Alain, Daniel and I adjourned to his hot tub. We thought about getting in the pool but that seemed like an awful lot of trouble. It was to be Daniel's lot that night to be regaled with songs and TV schtick from our creaky cob web cluttered brains. He was a sport about it despite his tender age. At one point for some reason we began to talk about our favorite Brit-coms from PBS. One of my favorites is a lesser known one called "The Vicar of Dibley". It featured Dawn French as a female Anglican priest in the small rural village of Dibley. As is so often the case with small towns Dibley had its traditions, one of which was an annual village talent show. Traditions imply repetition and such was the case in Dibley with the same talent acts being repeated year after year, one of which was a gentleman farmer of rather 'earthy' character and his famous farting duck. When it came his turn on the program he would stride from the wings to center stage. There heat would stand erect and center stage with his performing duck tucked securely under his arm, business end pointed towards the audience. A hush of anticipation falls over the audience and when the silence suits his performer's sensitivities, he utters in a quiet but dignified voice. "Wait for it". No sooner are the words spoken but surrepticiosly he squeezes his performing partner with his arm and a subtle but unmistakable rattle bursts forth from the business end of the duck in question. Suitable impressed the dreadfully British audience applauds politely as they no doubt mentally compare this year's duck fart to last year's.
Daniel, having the finely honed taste and perception of any normal 8 year old boy found this to be hilarious and for the balance of my visit 'chez Duck Boy' the watchword, the shibboleth was "Wait for it!" Thus Daniel became Duck Boy although the affectionate moniker did not occur to me until I was on the way home. Indeed Alain, told me that one morning, a couple of days later, while he was still in bed and well before he was prepared to drag himself out of the bed he felt that soundless presence of a child near him just before he woke up. He cracked one eye open and was greeted with "Wait for it!"…Duck Boy had struck and we had created a monster of a memory for all three of us.
That is our story of Daniel's metamorphosis into Duck Boy and we are (WAIT FOR IT!!), by God, stickin' to it...
|
|
|
| |
| More blood in the water... |
| 08.18.05 (8:45 am) [edit] |
If you are a Democrat or an Independent or a political cynic like me, you have to love this. Right on the heels of Sanctimonious Super Sunday II in Tennessee where Dr. James “It's Not Really A Comb Over” Dobson compared Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist’s position on embryonic stem cell research to Nazi death camp experiments we have yet another brewing brou-ha-ha. Trent Lott is pissed at Bill Frist because he feels Frist sold him down the river out of ambition to become Senate Majority Leader. Hey, it could even be a new bumper sticker: “Honk if you’re pissed at Frist!” It’s worth printing it just for the onomatopoeia.
The old joke was that the difference between the United States Congress and the Cub Scouts was that the Cub Scouts have adult supervision. Here’s another: What’s the difference between Congress and a 7th grade lunch room? The 7th graders get a fruit cup! Ba-dump-bump.
Call me nuts but I’m seeing the Gipper looking down from up yonder saying “Hey you kids! Don’t make me pull this car over!”
Of course Senator Lott feels used and abused here. Colin Powell didn’t love him anymore and the President spoke sharply about him. He even got dissed by an Independent, Senator Jeffords of Vermont and tossed a couple of political stink bombs towards the Green Mountain State by complaining that Jeffords was constantly trying to get programs approved that would benefit the state of Vermont. Man, if he's racked up about Jeffords, wait until he gets started on the Senators from West Virginia and Alaska.
Senator, get over it! Nobody was holding a gun to your head to make you talk like a racist at Senator Thurmond’s picnic. You could probably have congratulated him for his work with the NAACP and he wouldn’t have known the difference; he might not have even known you were there…or that he was there for that matter.
That’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it….
|
|
|
| |
| Shifting Paradigms |
| 08.18.05 (4:14 am) [edit] |
A play on words for the subject line which means I'm looking at shifting the whole blog to SixApart using TypePad. Does anyone have any experience with SixApart that would be a red flag as far as using them instead of TBlog?
The reason I am looking at making the switch is the total lack of any response whatsoever from Tblog management to concerns registered here by the customers. It's cheap enough here but you get what you pay for. I'm not paying much but then I'm not getting much either for those few dollars I'm paying or more correctly have already paid.
It's not just the system problems or the incredibly slow server but the absolute silence in response to inquiries. If we are paying this guy money we deserve at least a minimal response and so far I haven't see a bloody word.
|
|
|
| |
| There's blood in the water... |
| 08.17.05 (6:30 am) [edit] |
From the commentary coming out of this year’s “Justice Sunday ” held in Tennessee this past weekend it appears that nothing stirs up the Right Wing like a couple of issues that actually require thought.
The President announced a relatively non-controversial nomination for a Supreme Court vacancy and Senator Bill Frist modified his views on stem cell research. Suddenly the Right is schooling like piranhas, ready to begin feasting on their own young. The eminent political scientist James Dobson weighed in on the role of the Supreme Court and compared Frist’s position on embryonic stem cell research to Nazi experimentation on human subjects.
It’s going to be interesting to watch the Right get gored by their own zero sum political ox.
|
|
|
| |
| From the deck and... |
| 08.12.05 (10:26 am) [edit] |
...coffeebar of the Junkanoo Island Cafe on the Outer banks of North Carolina. This could be a decent place to ride out Hurricane Irene if the miserable witch hits here:
[image]JimBrodhead_914832 119.jpg[/image]
[image]JimBrodhead_321538 489.jpg[/image]
Can you tell how hot it is?
|
|
|
| |
| En Garde!!! |
| 08.12.05 (9:10 am) [edit] |
Arrived here on the Outer Banks of North Carolina this morning at about ten. It's hotter than I can ever remember it being here. I tried to do a little coin hunting on the beach but the sun won and I bailed out after about 30 minutes. The water is calm and beautiful though. It's so nice here (except for the heat) that it's hard to believe Hurricane Irene is lurking out there somewhere, waiting perhaps to pounce on the mid-Atlantic coast.
I'm beginning to think this may not have been a great idea though....there are a lot of pot holes on Memory Lane...
That's my story and I'm stickin' to it.....
|
|
|
| |
| Worth reading!!! |
| 08.09.05 (6:18 am) [edit] |
In May, as I struggled with trying to string together two or three coherent thoughts for this blog, a realization bubbled up through my inert male synapses. It had to do with change and the fact that everything I had written about so far or that was festering in my head was about change. That was when I renamed the blog “Paradigms…where shift happens!”
My friend Alain has a wonderful and thought provoking post about change in his blog today. Ostensibly, Alain’s field is marketing, more specifically health care marketing but today’s post goes far beyond that and I think it might be worth your time to read it. If you do, be sure to click the links he has there. They will take you to a really fascinating article from “Fast Company” magazine and you don't even have to put yourself on a mailing list to access it. I won’t embed a link since the third item in the links list to the left will take you directly there.
As you read, for context, remember that the only person who likes change is a wet baby….
(It was such a temptation to use an emoticon here but I resisted...I'm so proud of me!!)
|
|
|
| |
| Iconoclastically speaking! |
| 08.05.05 (5:37 am) [edit] |
O.K. , I confess, I watched a quasi-reality show last night…something about a woman named Kathy Griffin or Griffith or Griffis…all about her life on the celebrity D-list. Apparently she wants pity as she struggles to move up from the Hollywood D list to a higher echelon in the La-La Land pecking order. It seems like a tough sell to me. Her ‘travail du jour’ or 'nuit' last night was that she was trying to re-decorate her house and only had a $100,000 budget. Poor thing, I felt her pain!
All that being said, the show was mildly entertaining and that leads me to the point of this blather. I have discovered a way to fame and fortune and because I am the Prince that I am I’m going to share it with you. All you need is a stupid idea for a reality TV show. The show I saw last night was on the Bravo channel and apparently they will buy anything.
Bravo re-runs West Wing episodes almost every night. The neo-cons hate it because it depicts a liberal Democratic administration, reason enough to like the show in my opinion. Politics notwithstanding though,West Wing is,in my opinion, one of the best written, best produced and best acted shows in the history of television. The Bravo network, being the paragons of taste that they are will pre-empt re-runs of good material in favor of absolute reality drivel.
This poor comedian’s tale of woe that pre-empted West Wing last night was a TV highpoint though compared to another of Bravo’s monumental television creations, “Pet Show Moms and Dads”, the saga of a whole raft of obsessed neurotic dog owners in search of vicarious recognition through chasing their dream of having a champion poodle, Yorkshire terrier, or some other of the 161 breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club. (Hey, before you scoff, I went and actually counted them!) I never watched the show but the previews told the story. If you have seen Christopher Guest’s gem of a movie, “Best In Show” my guess is that you have seen all the crap from “Show Dog Moms & Dads” that a body could possibly stand.
Anyway ladies and gentlemen, there’s your formula for fame and fortune…find a mindless, stupid idea for a reality show and certainly one of the hundreds of cable channels will find a way to slide it in between info-mercials. You’ll be on your way….that’s my story and I’m stickin’ to it.
|
|
|
| |
| The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 7 |
| 08.04.05 (5:35 am) [edit] |
Our shuffle or stumble down memory lane began almost immediately…the catch phrases that we remembered, the bizarre sales experiences, the parties, people we had known all began rushing through our brains. Had it not been for a lot fewer follicles in active production it was just like old times.
Reunion reminiscing can grind to a halt at times and so it is important to keep the machinery lubricated. Preventive maintenance is the key here and Alain had stocked up on some fine New Zealand lubricant. He must have sensed that I might be the weak link in the chain of memory because he immediately put a bottle of New Zealand's finest adult discretionary beverage in my hands. We had joked several times about getting a little outlandish so we felt obligated to begin that immediately.
When old friends reconnect, memories don't bubble up slowly; they are like a geyser, rushing to the surface, pausing perhaps for a few moments then erupting again. Properly connected, two people in the throws of reunion reminiscing don't even need complete sentences to do their mischief….
Someplace in the process the conversation will touch on something that's not so funny and then the stories of harder times begin to unfold. A person doesn't live nearly 60 years without spending at least some of those years in Plan B. Maybe sometimes we are in Plan B and don't even know it. Alain has had his share of time there and so have I.
In some ways, Alain is like one of those children’s blow up punching bag toys. Giving that thing your best shot might rock it back to the floor but it doesn't stay there. To put it in more contemporary terms, “he’s got game.” One of my favorite analogies that I either read or made up is the comparison between how a person looks at life and the operation of an automobile. The windshield is so much larger than the rear view mirror that we should know where our focus needs to be. Alain has one of the smallest rear view mirrors of anyone I have ever known.
As tempting as it is to recount a few of the episodes we re-hashed for you here, I’ll spare you that. You’ve probably all been involved in some sort of a reunion scenario and so you know how it goes. The hilarity of the old days is easily recalled by the participants and absolutely unfathomable to the entrapped observer. There is, however, one exception to the “entrapped observer” phenomenon…more on that the next time when you learn at long last how Daniel became “Duck Boy”.
|
|
|
| |
| The Little Frog and Duck Boy In The I.E. Part 6 |
| 08.02.05 (7:01 am) [edit] |
It's about 70 miles from the Long Beach airport to Murietta, California, home base to the "Little Frog", "Duck Boy" and "She Who Must Be Obeyed" as the L.F. refers to her. As you know by now the "Little Frog" is Alain, my old friend from Fredericksburg. Alain was born in France emigrating to this country when he was 10 years old. He is the sort of person that if his mother had not been ready to come to America, Alain would have come on his own. Ten years in France, another ten years in a French fluent home combined with several years in the Air Force left Alain fluent in French, English and "in a language the clergy do not know."
"Duck Boy" is his 8 year old son, Daniel. It should be self evident how Alain got his nickname but "Duck Boy" is another story, one which I shall inflict upon you in due course. Suffice it to say that Daniel has the same ready smile and devilment in his eye that his father has and they are quite a duo.
"She Who Must Be Obeyed" is Alain's wife, Jeanette, a delightful lady in every respect. I only met Jeanette for a very few minutes during my visit since she was in the hospital recovering from a fairly scary health episode. Knowing Alain as I do I must conclude that "She" is a person of remarkable equanimity. On the other hand I would not want to be the medical provider who told her that she was not yet ready to be released from the hospital when she felt it was time to go. I should note as well that in spite of her health issues, she greeted me as if we had known each other for years. Alain has a way of finding people like that and I think people like that have a way of finding Alain.
After 90 minutes in my very small cobalt blue rented Mitsubishi Something LE (AKA 'my foster car')on California highways, I finally pulled into Alain's driveway, convinced that perhaps there was something worse than flying. At last I was out of the plane and off the road…laissez les bon temps roullez, I had cheated death yet again.
One of the nice things about the 21st Century is that men can hug without feeling totally self conscious. Of course the hug is always punctuated with a hearty rib cracking back slap…just in case anyone is watching. It's best if the back slap is audible as well…just to be sure the hugger and the huggee don't get mistaken for stunt doubles from some show on the Bravo channel.
That's the way Alain and I greeted each other in his driveway that hot southern California afternoon…a fitting punctuation to our nearly 20 year long separation. The hug began two days of random wanderings down Memory Lane…I would not meet Duck Boy until later but damn, it was good to see the Little Frog again.
|
|
|
| |
| Gardens of Stone |
| 08.01.05 (9:19 am) [edit] |
[image]JimBrodhead_962571 187.jpg[/image]
"Gardens of Stone" was Nicholas Proffit’s image of Arlington National Cemetery in his 1983 novel of the same name. In the late July heat, tourists with blank faces just like me snapped picture after digital picture of the Eternal Flame at the Kennedy grave site before they trudged uphill to the Tomb of The Unknown Soldier in this garden of stone.
After Saturday, I wouldn’t quibble over that imagery except that it is only a single dimension of a multi-dimensional experience. The dignity and respect accorded to the men and women who are buried there is clear. Signs reminding the visitor that respectful conduct is appropriate are tastefully displayed and for the most part everyone I saw behaved accordingly. Yet there was, somehow, a cognitive disconnect from the reality behind those 260,000 graves.
One reality was the memory of that frigid November morning in 1963 when two friends and I stood curbside in Washington to witness the funeral procession of a president, a memory light years removed from the flatness of the Kennedy gravesite today, a flatness broken only by the 6 inch high pedestal of the eternal flame.
The ultimate reality though is quite different. The United States has been involved in one armed conflict after another over the 141 years since Arlington was first designated as a military cemetery by Secretary of War William Stanton. With only 260,000 graves there, we seem to have gotten very good at the craft of war.
|
|
|
| |
|
|
