Miss Daisy
Took 20 years, but I finally understand my friend DeLaun's objection to the movie
Medal of Freedom
Today, August 12, 2009, President Obama awarded 16 people with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Here are the recipients:
• Nancy Goodman Brinker: The death of her sister from breast cancer prompted Brinker to found Susan G. Komen for the Cure, which has grown to become the world's leading breast cancer grass-roots organization.
• Pedro José Greer Jr.: Among the many hats Greer wears, he is the founder of Camillus Health Concern, an agency that provides medical care to more than 10,000 homeless patients every year in Miami, Florida.
• Stephen Hawking: The internationally recognized theoretical physicist has spent his career making complex scientific concepts accessible to the layman, including penning the best-selling book "A Brief History of Time" and its updated version, "A Briefer History of Time."
• Jack Kemp: The quarterback-turned-politician was honored posthumously for the years he spent, leading up to his death in May, raising awareness of and encouraging development in underserved communities.
• Sen. Edward Kennedy: During his 46 years as a lawmaker, Kennedy has called health care reform the "cause of his life," championing nearly every health care bill enacted by Congress in the past five decades.
• Billie Jean King: With her victory over Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match in 1973, and in the years since, King has champion gender equality not only in sports but in all areas of public life.
• The Rev. Joseph Lowery: With the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the civil rights icon co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a leading civil rights organization, and has continued to highlight the cause worldwide, including speaking out forcefully against apartheid in South Africa until its end in 1994.
• Joe Medicine Crow-High Bird: The last living Plains Indian war chief and author of seminal works in Native American history is also the last person alive to have received direct oral testimony from a participant in the Battle of the Little Bighorn: his grandfather, a scout for Gen. George Custer.
• Harvey Milk: The first openly gay person elected into office in a major U.S. city, Milk is revered as a pioneer of the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transgender civil rights movement.
• Sandra Day O'Connor: At a time when women rarely entered the legal profession, O'Connor graduated Stanford Law School third in her class and went on to become the first woman ever to sit on the U.S. Supreme Court.
• Sidney Poitier: The first African-American to win a Best Actor Academy Award, Poitier also broke ground by insisting that the crew in one of his films be at least 50 percent African-American and by starring in the first mainstream movie portraying interracial marriage as acceptable.
• Chita Rivera: The winner of two Tony Awards, Rivera was also the first Hispanic to receive the Kennedy Center Honor, awarded annually for exemplary lifetime achievement in the performing arts.
• Mary Robinson: Since ending her term as the first female president of Ireland, Robinson has headed Realizing Rights, an initiative that ensures that human rights is not forgotten as nations chart a course toward globalization.
• Janet Davison Rowley: Her work on chromosome abnormalities in human leukemia and lymphoma has led to dramatically improved survival rates for previously incurable cancers.
• Desmond Tutu: An Anglican archbishop and a leading anti-apartheid activist, Tutu is widely regarded as "South Africa's moral conscience" and chaired the country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission when it was created in 1995 to discover and reveal past wrongdoing.
• Muhammad Yunus: A Bangladeshi economist and winner of the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize, Yunus pioneered the use of micro-loans to provide credit to the poor without collateral, a successful model that has been emulated worldwide.
First off, WHY on earth is it deemed right, necessary, or appropriate to award this type of an honor to a POLITICIAN!?!?!
Politicians are scum, so I immediately assume this whole award is complete political grandstanding. However, that doesn't mean some of these folks didn't deserve some recognition. Let see my list of recipients!
Nancy Goodman Brinker I tend to have no respect for or interest in any organization whose primary goals include the words: "Raise Awareness". So, this organization gets a pass from me; and since they are the largest source of nonprofit funds dedicated to the fight against breast cancer in the world, I fully support this woman's award.
Pedro José Greer Admirable works, very admirable. However, they are also LOCAL works. Sorry, Pedro, no medal for you. Serve the entire country, then I will deem a national award appropriate. Until then, a key to the city or maybe even a gubernatorial award is more fitting.
Stephen Hawking So the reason we are bestowing this award is....what? Just for being brilliant? For specific scientific achievements? For making theoretical physics accessible? If the first, then what exact IQ must be achieved to get this award? NO? then the second must be it...wait, aren't their already GLOBAL awards for this sort of thing which Hawking has already won? Thought so. So then he must be recieving this for making things easy for us plebes to understand. Sorry Stephen, you are in fact my Most Trusted Public Figure(™ Me), but I don't see how you should be getting this medal.
The next two are senators, and deserving of my loathing and ridicule, not my mention.
Billie Jean King What exactly has she supposedly accomplished for women's rights? beating a 50-something doofus in tennis doesn't seem to me to be equivalent to ACTUALLY doing something. I reserve judgment until i can get results from Google that aren't about the stupid tennis match.
The Rev. Joseph Lowery Do we hand out awards for an MLK association? No? Then I guess it is the fact that his speechifying against apartheid singlehandedly ended that nasty system of government. If this is so, then here's your medal.
Joe Medicine Crow-High Bird His grandfather was a scout for Custer, and told him about it. He wrote about that. Um, no.
Sandra Day O'Connor Being the first anything is not necessarily deserving of a medal. Doing it with grace is (see: Jackie Robinson). Sandra can keep her medal.
Sidney Poitier His listed accomplishments are, in order: An award he had ALREADY won, an example of racism, and a testament to a screenwriter and a casting director. I can't see how giving awards to ACTORS is anything less than redundant. Sorry, Sidney, I love your work, but it doesn't entitle you to a medal.
Chita Rivera See previous comments about actors.
Mary Robinson Show me RESULTS, O organization you have founded. Not high goals. Oh, wait.....results don't matter, only what GREAT INTENTIONS we had.....
Janet Davison Rowle BING! Our first easy winner.
Desmond Tutu His Nobel Prize didn't expire after 25 years, so we really don't need to find a new one to give him.
Muhammad Yunus Our second no-brainer. This guy is my personal favorite on the list.
So, here I am, having wasted 30 minutes of my life arguing with a politician about what are all inevitably political awards. Please, quit trying to honor politicians...it's like giving drugs to an addict.
Metablogging
Blogging is a tough gig. I started doing it back in 2003 or so, and continued for about four years, give or take, with varying degrees of production. The reason I stopped was that I didn't have anything to say any more...or maybe I just didn't want to say what I was thinking. Regardless, I quit for a while. Coming back is daunting, because blogging is NOT a casual exercise. It may seem to the average user that it's just Facebook writ large, but that's a gross oversimplification.
Writing is easy. Writing WELL is hard. It takes inspiration, continuity, a small bit of literacy, and the will to put the ENTIRE thought down without getting tired of it and just bailing in the third paragraph. Yes, I did that a lot in the past.
I think part of the reason I quit was not so much the lack of critical acclaim, because I really didn't expect that, but more the fact that the view from my spot in the blogosphere was being at the bottom looking up, and I really could never expect any great change in that status. If you ever spent any significant time reading real blogs, you'll know what I mean: the top writers are prolific, insightful, and relevant; I usually strove for ONE of the three.
The point of this post about posts is that I am giving writing a shot again, not as a career move but simply a gesture of defiance to the side of me which never thought I could rise in stature. So occasionally this space might include serious thoughts presented in a hopefully provocative manner, to break up the stream of faux-Dave Barry posts which will comprise the vast majority of content here.
So, I am glad you are here. Please come back sometime!
I’m Back!
Reading my old blog posts has inspired me to try to find the creativity I once possessed. Here's hopin!
News of the day: I'm headed back to Cali to celebrate Mom's 70th!
That is all. Sorry to disappoint you.