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My last choir tour. You can see my brother in one of these shots.
These were shot on one of those little cameras that produced the tiny little negatives. I forget what they were called — it's been a while since I used one. (It's been awhile since I shot film.)
These are about the only photographs that I have from junior high or high school. Or any time while living at my parents before I got my own cheapo camera. I won a regional award for my sports photography in high school (got a lucky shot during a basketball game of a future NBA star dunking while our players look on in full disbelief) but I never got my own camera until I was in college. I don't recall being poorly off but I don't remember ever being able to have money. Even when I earned it. Which explains my fierce determination to succeed in high school.
Your name is finally current again, Yule.
We went down to my mother-in-law's house for the holiday. I'm still working but that's okay. Mostly. But our traditional bad luck has returned.
I'm trying out MarsEdit from Red Sweater Software. It's an offline blogging tool for Mac OS X. (I'm tired of losing posts when my Firefox decides to freeze up.)
MacUpdate's Promo site had its massive second bundle, and it got me both buying and looking at different Mac apps. There is a good deal of decent shareware for Mac. I suppose that this is also true of Windows. But I really had moved to Linux, and the Linux community really isn't interested in supporting shareware. They like freeware, which is problematical since no one has an interest in creating something for a market, only for themselves.
I have to admit, MarsEdit is already wining my heart and mind. It lets me create links easier than my MT interface in Firefox. In fact, the MT GUI in FF is more or less broken. I wonder why I have put up with it for this long. Maybe I should upgrade over the holiday — not that I have any time off.
(On a related note: I always worry about giving value for the money paid. I've stopped worrying about that: I have to get some consulting for a project I'm currently on, and I'll burn through my monthly rate in less than three days with them. Actually, less than two.)
Because Savage Steve Holland is a genius....
From Eek! The Cat, Sharky the Shark Dog offers a solution to these "hurting" people.
I was sitting in my mother-in-law's house, after our first flight with little "Stinky", who did fine. I was going through her TV channels, something we don't have, when I came upon someone showing an old, circa 1969 Billy Graham "crusade" from Lubbock, Texas.
And Billy Graham blew me away.
Somehow, I had gotten the popular press's opinion that Dr. Graham was a country boob. The press are wont to report his response to Pres. Nixon's "secret tapes" was "Richard! Such language!" rather than anything about coverups or other things that all of us were interested in.
The Billy Graham I just saw was no idiot. Or country boob. This was one of the finest orators and rhetoricians that I have ever seen. Graham was intelligent. And extraordinarily skillful in his oration. He was masterful. I mean, this was probably the best delivery I've ever seen.
This was a man who was vital, forceful, potent. It's not a thing that people mention about Graham. He had power. I can see why he had the rule that he would never be alone in a room or car with a woman other than his wife. Or perhaps he never would even be in a car with a woman. He had one of the others always come into his hotel room first, because there have been journalists who would try and trap him with a naked woman in his arms.
I used to laugh at this. What would a woman want with Billy Graham? I had only seen later Billy Graham, when he had gotten older and was tired. (Developing Parkinsons? Something, if I recall, late in life.) This guy, this charismatic man, was someone who would be extraordinarily attractive. Nobody ever mentioned this. Dr. Graham was manly, and he had to have been extremely attractive to women. He is much more impressive than any other TV celebrity I've seen, and how many of them had but one wife, much less but one woman? The amazing thing isn't that Billy Graham became famous (he had the chops) but that he maintained a by all accounts spotless record with the opposite sex.
Think of the many other powerful men who have not. What was it about Graham that he had something different? Maybe he really believed in what he said, really believed that he had encountered the very living Increate in Jesus.
Or maybe he really did encounter it.
Whatever you believe about Graham, he was nobody's fool, and no country bumpkin, or some weak-kneed pansy. This was a man's man, a powerful man, powerfully committed to his God.
Terrence W. Deacon, 1997, The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain. W. W. Norton & Company.
Deacon believes that language is not just communication. Bees and dogs communicate but they do not use language. The argument is large but can be reduced to this: symbolic reference, where a "word" represents something other than the concrete thing there, is only a human thing. You can teach some primates simple language with a great deal of effort and not a lot of success. You do not see it arising naturally in primates in the wild.
Simple animal communication is different. Animals have developed very complex communication schemes but none of them, except for humans, have developed language.
Humans developed (evolved, really) language because of a simple thing: reproduction. And it has to do with needing to have humans live in tight social group where males and females pair in such a way to provide them with assurance that the children are theirs (for males) and that they will be supported (for females). "Marriage" arose, which is a symbolic thing. It is different from mating, some type of commitment. While other species have permanent pair bonding, humans have it when it is difficult to keep males and females on the porch, so to speak. Because they had to hunt for meat (and meat is a major part of the human evolution, my vegetarian friends) they had to do it packs. Which required groups. Groups make it more difficult for a male to know that the child is his. Males need this knowledge to put in the reproductively costly time and effort to support it. Chimps males don't have this paternity assurance, for example, and the males aren't all that supportive of particular chimp babies.