Random Thinking

Spotted this on This Day in History…

1568: Roman Catholic Church sentences entire population of Netherlands to death for heresy.

I wonder if they ever called it off.

It’s starting to snow here on Long Island in what is supposed to be a blizzard lasting until tomorrow. I really wish we were back in the Florida Keys.

When you are on a trip to the Florida Keys with an English major you must stop at Ernest Hemingway’s house. Hemingway lived there before he took off for Cuba and wrote several of his novels in the work room in the back.
Mikey, Beth, and Michel enjoyed the stroll around the grounds. The grounds are beautiful and full of plants surrounding a walkway.
This saltwater pool was built by Hemingway’s wife while he was away. When he came back and found out how much it cost he pulled a penny out of his pocket and said that she might as well have all he had left. The penny was put into cement at the head of the pool and remains there to this day.
This is the guide for the tour of the house. He was very good at his job and he looked like Poppa Hemingway. What more could you want from a tour guide?
This is the room where Hemingway did his writing. The typewriter on the table is the machine he used. He often complained that the typewriter made too many spelling errors.
This is the outside of the house. Lots of windows and a balcony all around. The windows are very nice especially in the summer since it gets quite hot and humid in Key West.
There are over 40 cats living on the property. Most of the cats are polydactyl. No they aren’t some kind of flying dinosaurs. They have extra toes. They are also very friendly. There were somewhere around 50 cats living at the house when Hemingway lived there. Hemingway loved cats. He said, “A cat has absolute emotional honesty: human beings, for one reason or another, may hide their feelings, but a cat does not.”

Today is the 150th Anniversary of the start of the Civil War. It was 150 years ago today that South Carolina left the United States in order to preserve slavery. This treasonous act cost the lives of more than 620,000 soldiers and uncounted civilians. How anyone can fly a Confederate flag and still call themselves an American is beyond me. To me it is no different than flying a Nazi flag. They both represent enemies of our country and murderers of innocent people.

Back in August we took a trip to Florida. This was the first time that Mikey or Beth had been in a plane and the first time in years that Michel or I had flown. We were a little worried about Mikey because of his occasional tantrums. The last thing we wanted was to be landing in Baltimore because of an uncontrollable child! We gave Mikey a little Valium to keep him relaxed for the flight and he was great. In fact he loved flying. He was good while we waited for takeoff and taxied on the runway and he loved the takeoff. In fact, he signed for more and wanted to takeoff again! We gave him the window seat so he could look out to see the view and his sister could sit next to him and keep Mikey from getting in the aisle and escaping. Mikey watched a DVD for a little while and then both Mikey and his sister fell asleep. The flight down turned out to not be a problem at all.

More about the trip soon.

It has been such a long time since I have posted to my blog! So much has happened in my life and I have simply not had the time nor the inclination to blog. But I think it is time to start again. So here is a little event that happened with Mikey…
Saturday was a nice day for December. The temperature was in the mid 40′s and there was no wind. I took Mikey for a ride and we went on the bridge over the Great South Bay and the water looked like a sheet of glass it was so calm. Since they were no longer charging to park the car, we (Mikey’s aide Michelle was with us) decided to get out and take a look at the ocean and throw some rocks into it. Mikey was thrilled at the idea so we parked and went for a stroll.

We got down to the shore and started throwing clam shells into the water. Mikey was loving it but we had trouble keeping him away from the water’s edge. There were only little waves but the tide was coming in so every once in a while the water would come up towards us chasing us back. There wasn’t much to throw so I turned around to look for some shells when the water decided to come in very quickly. Mikey didn’t notice at first but then he turned to run away and… fell! The water came splashing over him covering him from head to toe. Poor Mikey was wet and covered in sand.

We decided it was time to go since wet from the cold ocean is not a good thing to be on a 45 degree day so we headed back to the car where we brushed the sand off Mikey and popped him into the car. Before he jumped into the car I decided to take his picture (click on it for a larger version). He may look upset but that wasn’t from being wet and cold (he actually didn’t seem to mind that part). He was upset because I was taking his picture!

I haven’t written anything since the trip to Florida mostly because I just haven’t been in the mood. But today I wanted to post this analysis of my blog writing from an AI website. You can go there if you want to check out other sites.

randomthinking.info is probably written by a female somewhere between 66-100 years old. The writing style is personal and upset most of the time.

They were so close especially on the age part. Or maybe that is just how I feel.

It was exactly 80 years ago today that Judge Joseph Crater was last seen walking down W. 45th Street in NYC at around 9 PM and was never seen again. His disappearance earned him the title of “The Missingest Man in New York”.

Judge Crater had been away in Maine with his wife when he took a phone call and told his wife that he had to return to NY “to straighten those fellows out”. For the next several days he went back and forth between NYC and Maine while also spending some time with his mistress in Atlantic City. On the day he disappeared he cashed two checks totaling more than $5,000 (almost $70,000 today) and apparently emptied his safe deposit box (it was found empty after he vanished). That night he had dinner with his lawyer and mistress who described him as being in a good mood. At about 9 PM, the three stepped outside the restaurant and the Judge walked down the street while his friends stepped into a cab. The Judge was never seen again.

His wife started calling her friends on August 10th but no one was alarmed until the 25th when he was supposed to sit for the opening of courts. Even then, no report was made to the police until September 3rd, almost a month after his disappearance. The Judge quickly became front page news across the country. A massive national investigation found nothing but died quickly when it was found that so much money was missing with the judge and that the judge’s mistress, Sally Lou Ritz, disappeared within a month of the judge. The investigators assumed that the judge had taken the money and run off to avoid charges of corruption. Although Judge Crater was suspected of judicial corruption (NYC government was particularly corrupt during the depression) no evidence was ever produced to show that he was actually corrupt.

Judge Crater was declared dead in 1939 and his missing persons file was officially closed in 1979. In 2005, Stella Ferrucci-Good left notes that were found after her death claiming her husband, a NYC police officer, killed Judge Crater and buried him under the boardwalk in Coney Island. However no remains were ever found there.

For years after his disappearance, “to pull a Crater” meant to disappear and comedians routinely used the joke, “Judge Crater call your office.” Eighty years after his disappearance, whether he was murdered (and is perhaps buried with Jimmy Hoffa) or ran off to Mexico with his mistress, it is no doubt safe to say that Judge Crater is no longer with us.

Here is this week’s song. Note that the lyrics are explicit.

Eminem (real name Marshall Bruce Mathers III) is considered the greatest rapper of all time and according to Rolling Stone magazine one of the 100 Greatest Artists of All-Time. According to Billboard, he has sold over 80 million albums and two of his albums are in the top five albums of the 2000′s. He has had nine number one albums and thirteen number one singles. His music has won eleven Grammy awards and one Oscar.

Eminem was raised by his mother in poverty. His father had abandoned the family when he was two years old. Eminem started rapping when he was 14 years old under the name of M&M. He repeated the ninth grade twice of truancy and dropped out of high school when he was 17. Musically, everything came together in 1999 with the release of the album The Slim Shady LP which sold over 250,000 copies its first week out and went to become 4X platinum. But it was his second album, The Marshall Mathers LP, which broke every record selling almost 2 million copies its first week out becoming the fastest selling hip-hop album and the fastest-selling solo album in US history. Eminem has had problems with alcohol, prescription drugs, and the law although he claims that since 2005 he has sobered up. In addition to a daughter with his former wife Kimberly Scott he also adopted the two daughters of Kimberly Scott’s sister and is the legal guardian of his half-brother.

The song Stan is about an obsessed fan of Slim Shady (Eminem’s alter ego in his music). The first three verses of the song is Stan reading the letters he has written to Slim each becoming more obsessed and more angry as he waits from Slim to respond. The third verse is Stan creating a cassette as he drives his car off a bridge with his girlfriend locked in the trunk of his car. The final verse of the song is Slim writing a letter to Stan not realizing that Stan killed himself until the end. The chorus of the song is taken from the song Thank You by Dido, a British musician. When Stan came out, Thank You immediately jumped up the Billboard chart reaching number three in the US becoming Dido’s first US hit and pushing her album sales to over 21 million worldwide.

Note that the language in the song is explicit.

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Beth is a student in the Baccalaureate Honors Program at her university. Students in the program get the opportunity to meet an author at an informal dinner and discuss their book with them. She was recently sent the book The Botany of Desire by Michael Pollan. Beth is reading another book at the moment so I grabbed Mr Pollan’s book and started reading it.

Mr. Pollan’s book is about how plant’s have evolved to satisfy our needs and how by doing that we have satisfied their needs. He starts with the apple tree and soon starts discussing John Chapman, a gentleman that most of us know better as Johnny Appleseed. Johnny was a bit of a nut. For example, he once threw away his shoe to punish his foot for stepping on a worm. But Johnny was much more than just a nut. Johnny used to go to the cider mills in Western Pennsylvania and get the seeds from the part of the apple that was being thrown away. Apple seeds have a little bit of cyanide in them which makes them very bitter so cider mills are careful about always throwing them away. Johnny would then take these seeds to where no one lived but where he thought people would soon be moving. He would plant his seeds and grow apple trees. Five years later when people moved into the area (Johnny was very good at guessing which areas would become popular) he would sell his trees. The law at the time required that anyone claiming land had to grow fifty apple trees to show that they were serious about living on the land. Johnny did so well with his apple tree business that he died a very wealthy man.

But here’s the part that Disney never mentions. Apple trees grown from seeds produce very sour fruit that is almost always inedible. Henry David Thoreau wrote, “[the apples] were sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.” The apples that we get in the store are always grown by grafting. So if Johnny’s apples were inedible what did people do with them? They made them into hard cider. Yep, as Mr. Pollan writes, “Johnny Appleseed was bringing the gift of alcohol to the frontier.” And that is the real story of Johnny Appleseed.