11.18.2023 – those whom God wishes

those whom God wishes
to destroy, he first deprives
of reason, makes proud

Readers of this blog with know that 1) I am a fan of the University of Michigan Football team and 2) I have been tracking the accumulated wins of the football program to 1000 wins for some years.

I predicted this win would come in 2023 but along came Covid.

No matter, I figured nothing could stop the wins from piling up until Michigan was the first team ever in organized american football to win 1000 games.

Never did I imagine that HOW they won those games would be called into question.

Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat.

The saying is Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.

Literally from the Latin it can be translated as Those whom God wishes to destroy, he first deprives of reason.

Boy howdy but does that seem to fit the bill.

The Coaching staff at Michigan had to have lost their minds and all reason to embrace and allow such a nutzo-dumbo scheme for stealing signs from other teams as is being documented in the newspapers daily.

I keep asking why?

Then I remember how Tom Clancy adapted the phrase.

He wrote, “Those whom God wishes to destroy … he first makes proud.“

There it is.

Caught with no alibi and no explanation.

Proud.

Pride.

So dumb.

I have been waiting for this day for years and it’s dead sea fruit that turns to ashes in my mouth.

At one point in my life we lived across the street from Dr. Julius Franks who was the first All American Football player at Michigan who happened to be black.

I was despondent after a game that Michigan lost one weekend and he looked at me and said, “None of that. No time for that. Got to get back up. Got a game next week. No time for that.”

As a side note, Dr. Franks once took me and my sons to a Western Michigan Football game (where he was a Regent (ex-officio) and on the drive we talked about everything under the sun.

Without warning, I changed the subject and asked, “How did your team do against Notre Dame?”

Remember this was on a long drive on a fall afternoon and we had been talking about everything under the sun.

“Beat them!“, Dr. Franks responded without hestitation, “We went down there and Beat them!”

It had been more than 40 years ago.

So Michigan has won 1000 games.

It isn’t the way I planned to feel.

It isn’t the way I wanted it to happen.

But no time for that.

Nope, none of that.

So for me and the boys of 811 Packard in Ann Arbor.

And for the years of living with 4 guys in a 2 person apartment.

For all the blue books and papers.

And all the memories of what has gone on before.

And all the memories of what has gone on since.

Michigan has won 1000 football games.

I have been lucky to be a part of it.

Go Blue!

11.17.2023 – nothing but the truth

nothing but the truth
the whole truth, truer, more true
can’t handle the truth?

I was writing up a report for work that discussed the google’s analytics and web site performance data.

I had just written the statement that recent changes by the Google to their tracking codes and tags, called GA4, that reports on web traffic would be truer than before.

I stopped and rewrote the line to say ‘more true’.

And that didn’t sound right either.

But it got me thinking.

You start with true.

You start with truth.

That’s kind of ground zero.

Down to the nub.

The basic.

Truth.

As defined, the quality or state of being true, that which is true or in accordance with fact or reality, or a fact or belief that is accepted as true.

Can there really be degrees of being true?

More true?

Truer?

Truest?

Mr. Aristotle is credited with saying, “To say of what is that it is, or of what is not that it is not, is true.”

Boy Howdy but that helps a whole lot don’t it?

I guess it comes down to, what do you choose to believe?

Back to my web stats report.

BTW I usually start to work on these web stats reports by asking my boss, “What do you want the web stats to be?|

The Moth and the Star

A young and impressionable moth once set his heart on a certain star. He told his mother about this and she counseled him to set his heart on a bridge lamp instead. “Stars aren’t the thing to hang around,” she said; “lamps are the thing to hang around.” “You get somewhere that way,” said the moth’s father. “You don’t get anywhere chasing stars.” But the moth would not heed the words of either parent. Every evening at dusk when the star came out he would start flying toward it and every morning at dawn he would crawl back home worn out with his vain endeavor. One day his father said to him, “You haven’t burned a wing in months, boy, and it looks to me as if you were never going to. All your brothers have been badly burned flying around street lamps and all your sisters have been terribly singed flying around house lamps. Come on, now, get out of here and get yourself scorched! A big strapping moth like you without a mark on him!”

The moth left his father’s house, but he would not fly around street lamps and he would not fly around house lamps. He went right on trying to reach the star, which was four and one-third light years, or twenty-five trillion miles, away. The moth thought it was just caught in the top branches of an elm. He never did reach the star, but he went right on trying, night after night, and when he was a very, very old moth he began to think that he really had reached the star and he went around saying so. This gave him a deep and lasting pleasure, and he lived to a great old age. His parents and his brothers and his sisters had all been burned to death when they were quite young.

Moral: Who flies afar from the sphere of our sorrow is here today and here tomorrow.

11.16.2023 – nuances spoken

nuances spoken
delicate change – cloud and blue
and flimmering sun

On a tip, the wife and I visited Sands Beach at Port Royal, South Carolina.

As the crow flies, its 13 miles from where we live.

To drive there, around the swamps and marches of the low country of South Carolina, its a 40 minute, 27 mile drive.

It is located at the southern tip of Port Royal Island where Battery Creek breaks off from the Beaufort River a few miles above Port Royal Sound.

The beach has a walkway along Battery Creek and a 4 story observation tower.

The view from the top of this tower helps you understand the meaning of ‘the low country.’

The day we were there, the water was still and blue and the surface reflected the sky and clouds in a way that defeated use of any words in the my dictionary.

I was reminded of the writing of Jenny Lawson who in her book, Furiously Happy, used the word, Concoctulary, which she footnoted, saying ” … a word that I just made up for words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist.”

Ms. Lawson doesn’t just invent words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist, she made a word for the words that you have to invent because they didn’t yet exist.

Concoctulary.

As Ms. Lawson writes, “… It’s a portmanteau of “concocted” and “vocabulary.” I was going to call it an “imaginary” (as a portmanteau of “imagined” and “dictionary”) but turns out that the word “imaginary” was already concoctularied, which is actually fine because “concoctulary” sounds sort of unintentionally dirty and is also great fun to say. Try it for yourself. Con-COC-chew-lary. It sings.”

So I needed a word for the way the clouds reflected in the blue still water of Batter Creek off of Sands Beach in Port Royal and I found flimmering.

Try it for yourself.

It sings.

No surprise to say that I didn’t invent it though.

Carl Sandburg did.

In his poem, Dream Girl, in the section Other Days of the book, Chicago Poems as reprinted in the Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg, Mr. Sandburg wrote:

You will come one day in a waver of love,
Tender as dew, impetuous as rain,
The tan of the sun will be on your skin,
The purr of the breeze in your murmuring speech,
You will pose with a hill-flower grace.

You will come, with your slim, expressive arms,
A poise of the head no sculptor has caught
And nuances spoken with shoulder and neck,
Your face in pass-and-repass of moods
As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.

Yet,
You may not come, O girl of a dream,
We may but pass as the world goes by
And take from a look of eyes into eyes,
A film of hope and a memoried day.

Flimmering.

As many as skies in delicate change
Of cloud and blue and flimmering sun.

It sings.

So does the view.

11.15.2023 – present hard enough

present hard enough
to deal with – couldn’t handle
notion of future

The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort. The more central struggle in life was between water and beer. Too much beer, he knew from many years of experience, tended to be hard on the system.

Once again another quote from The Brown Dog Novellas by Jim Harrison, New York, Grove Press, 2013.

The Brown Dog Novellas is an anthology that contains all five of the Brown Dog stories and as those read this will be aware, it is the book I am listening to as I drive to work.

Since the first thing I do once I get to work, after I make sure my computer and all the other tech stuff I need for day is up and running, is to think about writing this.

Mr. Harrison’s words are fresh on my mind.

I am in an office on the knife edge of America.

A couple of blocks from me is the Atlantic Ocean.

As Mr. Thoreau said I have the rest of the country behind me.

A couple of blocks from me is the Atlantic Ocean and sitting at my desk, looking at a computer screen, I could be anywhere else in the world.

And the words of Mr. Harrison are fresh on my mind.

I read all the Brown Dog stories when they were first published and I must have read then all dozens of times.

It was reading the first Brown Dog in Woman Lit by Fireflies and the passage where Brown Dog is driving the ice truck down the hill in Grand Marais, aiming to make it into Lake Superior, that I knew Mr. Harrison and I would be get along.

The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future. He had noticed that it arrived in daily increments without any effort.

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time is a quote somehow connected to former Secretary of State Dean Acheson but I have not been able to trace this to an actual citation.

There is a ‘Somewhere over the Rainbow’ quality to both statements.

The present was hard enough to deal with so that you couldn’t very well handle the notion of the future.

The best thing about the future is that it comes only one day at a time.

Someday I’ll wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds are far behind me.

I guess it is good to remember that there is no place like home.

11.14.2023 – it’s OK unless

it’s OK unless
overly convoluted
entirely stupid

David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer, in his article, College football Week 11 highlights: Top plays, games, takeaways, commented on the the University of Michigan and sign-gate writing:

It’s a story that will be adjudicated — by the Big Ten, by fans, by media, by courts, by Connor Stalions’ vacuum company investors — with only a passing nod to due process, objective truth or reasoned context.

After all, it’s OK to discern the opponent’s signs from TV copy, or the all-22, or to call up former graduate assistants to dish on their old team, but it’s not OK to buy a ticket, sit in the stands and watch. Whether that makes sense might be a worthy question, but the only issue at hand is whether Michigan broke a rule — a literal written rule and, perhaps, the unwritten rule in which gamesmanship is OK unless it’s overly convoluted, entirely stupid and executed by a guy with a hilarious name.

Whether any of this makes sense might be a worthy question.

I am reminded of something my brother Jack once said.

Jack went to Michigan in late 1960’s as was as close to being a hippie as any one in our family.

Not sure how much, but I do think he took part in the anti-war protests that made Ann Arbor and Port Huron famous.

All I know for sure is that there is a story of Jack talking with one of his Ann Arbor buddies, both of them now respected lawyers, and the buddy said my bother, with some relief, ‘aren’t you happy that Ann Arbor Police announced they had just cleaned house and threw out all those records from when we were in school?’

I also remember a summer afternoon where Jack fell in the lake with his wallet in his back pocket.

Like you do in those moments, he emptied his wallet of everything and spread it out to dry and wonder of wonder, there was his 15 year old draft card.

He looked at if for a minute.

Then he got some matches and lit it on fire and watched as his draft card burned up.

“I thought it would feel like more,” he said.

But I digress.

Jack would watch Michigan football games with us as a family and he was such a fan, he made notes of almost every play on a yellow pad as he watched.

I asked him once what he did with his notes and said “nothing, he just took notes to keep from falling asleep.

So about 20 years, in a marketing effort, the University of Michigan made these cutouts, twenty five feet high, out of steel panels from the words of the Michigan fight song.

These panels were fastened to the outside of the stadium is what became known as the ‘Halo’.

It lasted two years as the the fans and alumni went nutz.

How ugly.

How crass.

How stupid.

How dumb.

Awful.

Didn’t seem to be particularly well executed.

Ugliest.

I I asked Jack what he thought.

He was silent then he said, “Entirely Appropriate!”

Wading through sign-gate, I know exactly what he means.