Change is a process, not an event.
-Barbara Johnson (American literary critic and translator)
(https://www.economist.com/news/middle-east-and-africa/21718871-women-are-fed-up-being-treated-children-some-saudi-women-are-secretly)
". . . Propelling the flight (out of Saudi Arabia) is the kingdom's wilaya, or guardianship, law. Although it has received less publicity than the world's only sex-specific driving ban, it imposes harsher curbs on female mobility. To travel, work or study abroad, receive hospital treatment or an ID card, or even leave prison once a sentence is served, women need the consent of a male wali, or guardian. From birth to death, they are handed from one wali to the next-father, husband and, if both of those die, the nearest male relative. Sometimes that might be a teenage son or brother, because although boys are treated as adults from puberty, women are treated as minors all their lives. . ."
(from http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/12/1/1455773/-To-Bernie-Sanders-Supporters-From-The-Establishment-DNC)
". . . It has come to our attention that a few of you have been wandering outside of our giant, multicultural, comfortable tent. This comes as a complete surprise to us, because we have done everything imaginable to keep you complacent open our hearts and minds to your concerns and build a corporate funded oligarchy nationwide coalition of status quo responsible Democrats. . . Our success has been bought and paid for, and we’ll change our views faster than a Kama Sutra flipbook in order to keep it that way. . . Senator Obama was right in 2004 when he said there isn’t a Red or Blue America. There’s only a money fucking green America, and we have most of it. At least, on “our” side, we have most of it. . . No one is going to vote for some really, really, really old socialist Jew from a state that doesn’t even have a professional football team. Political revolution by raising awareness and the general collective consciousness of the American people goes over like a fart in church when facing a well-established...erm...establishment. . . While you’re out there working your asses off, we’re still cashing checks and rigging both the media and the terms of the debates. . . And we’re literally banking on Bernie Sanders losing the primary so you’ll become just as jaded as we are. Best Wishes, Hillary Clinton and the DNC . . ."
My latest solo offering, Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak, featuring original, instrumental piano music is now available at - Just More Music by Ray Jozwiak
(To Access all Ray Jozwiak - Gonzo Piano music you can copy-and-paste this URL directly to
your browser: http://http://www.cdbaby.com/Artist/RayJozwiak)
Pam and Harrison are the sports fans in the family and I would venture to say that their two favorite sports are baseball and football (the American one). I can understand the former much better than the latter. I would never go to sleep lulled by the mellifluous tones of the baseball broadcasters by choice but the other night. . . I did. Pam fell asleep as the Orioles and Rays began their extra innings. I slept fitfully but managed to make enough sense of the broadcast each time I awoke to know that it was still undecided. About 2:05 and 18 innings since the game began, I heard the bad news (for Baltimore fans). . . the Os lost.
(from http://www.peterga.com/baseball/quotes/the_game.htm)
Mark Twain
Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.
W.P. Kinsella
It is the same game that Moonlight Graham played in 1905. It is a living part of history, like calico dresses, stone crockery, and threshing crews eating at outdoor tables. It continually reminds us of what was, like an Indian-head penny in a handful of new coins.
Bernard Malamud:
The whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.
John Cheever
The poet or storyteller who feels that he is competing with a superb double play in the World Series is a lost man. One would not want as a reader a man who did not appreciate the finesse of a double play.
Roger Angell, "Agincourt and After," Five Seasons:
It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazard flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.
8 year-old Jewish boy, quoted in "The Children's God", (Psychology Today Dec. 1985)
I don't know if this is what you're asking. But I feel closest to God, like after I'm rounding second base after I hit a double.
James Thurber
The majority of American males put themselves to sleep by striking out the batting order of the New York Yankees.
Norman Cousins
At a Dodger baseball game in Los Angeles, I asked Will Durant if he was ninety-four or ninety-five. "Ninety-four," he said. "You don't think I'd be doing anything as foolish as this if I were ninety-five, do you?"
Call it a 'sixth sense', some kind of other-worldly wisdom, or just plain spooky, I have, numerous times in my life, had an ability to recognize exactly what I wanted. And the only reason I think this is worth mentioning, is that every time I identified such a thing, pursued it and eventually obtained it, I was always content with my decision. I don't mean chocolate candies, expensive toys, expansive mansions or excessive riches. In fact, the 'normal' material things that many of us so often crave, while some select things do appeal to me and certainly on multiple occasions I fleetingly or superficially did (and do) take a fancy to some unobtainable things, do not as a rule, consume or drive me to any great length.
This pragmatism may have been instilled in me during my formative years, being one of three children of minimally educated, blue-collar, progeny of Polish-Catholic immigrants who practiced frugality without depriving their family of necessities and not infrequently providing a number of reasonable luxuries whenever possible. It almost seems to be a combination of the all-too-common rationalization of successive generations to 'satisfice', accepting that their lot in life will be more of the same of that pursued and experienced by their parents and a drive to become upwardly mobile. I wanted to make what I perceived to be an enjoyable life for myself yet I wanted more than a high-school diploma and a labor or retail-centric job for the rest of my life. I did not envision wealth, power, large material objects, boardrooms, fancy cars and world travel for myself. I was a happy kid. I only wanted to become a happy adult and I didn't think a protraction or a continuation of life as I knew it would provide that for me.
And I have not regretted any of the major decisions I have make in my life in matters such as education, marriage, residence and piano. Yes, I said piano.
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