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Milwaukee

Baby shower

With family in from Ohio and with all our extended family and friends Maggie and I enjoyed a wonderful baby shower Sunday. Mom, Dad, Grandma and my Aunt Mary arrived Friday for the weekend festivities.
baby cakeNeedless to say this cake was amazing. (The Cake Lady located on Kinnickinnic) We were very careful to drive cautiously on the way to the party.

I was just overwhelmed by the generosity of gifts we received. It was a perfect day: perfect weather, perfect stories and a lot of laughs. Countdown is now minus six weeks.

Technorati Tags: cake lady

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Education

Hello world!

Welcome to my own WordPress site. Decided to move from wordpress.com so I can edit the blog structure and script elements not permitted at the free hosting site. Looking forward to customized this communication tool. Enjoy! Technorati Profile

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Education

David Halberstam RIP

Mr. Halberstam,

Your writing is a true gift. I cannot recall how many times professors would talk about your work and the impact of your writing. The highlight for me was also one of my favorite classes in college: The Vietnam War. This class was taught by one of my favorite professors Dr. Charles Debenedetti. Our class text was Vietnam: A History by Stanley Karnow and Dispatches by Michael Herr. I also read A Bright Shining Lie: John Paul Vann and America in Vietnam by Neil Sheehan.

War in a Time of Peace was an enjoyable read for me and foreshadows the US war in Iraq. For some reason I cannot explain why it took me so long to start The Best and the Brightest. Last night I stopped at page 44 and awoke to hear of your tragic passing. I was stunned and saddened.

Thank you for being a great writer. Writers are heroes.

Tags: , Vietnam, The Best and the Brightest, Charles Debenedetti

Categories
Education Reading

Latest read: Koba the dread

Did you think I forgot all my interest in Russian and Soviet studies? Martin Amis’ 2002 work Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million is another post-USSR look at Stalin’s brutal rule in Russia. “It loves blood, the Russian earth.”

Koba the dread

I received a wonderful birthday gift from my brother Chris. Three books about Stalin, war with Germany and ultimately about sadness.

It is very difficult (again) to acknowledge the use of famine as a method of control. Both executed by Lenin and Stalin was so inhuman, yet effective for Soviet control of the non-Russian regions of the USSR. Was it not horrific enough that Stalin bled Ukraine, the fertile lands that kept his Bolsheviks temporarily alive?

Again, like Solzhenitsyn‘s The Gulag Archipelago: 1918-1956, Amis reveals the true horror of Stalin’s rule. How many people were shot on Stalin’s orders?

Categories
Education Globalization

Copywrong … again

wkrpAs you may know the well known television series WKRP in Cincinnati has been butchered due to copyright. And yes I am old enough to have watched this show growing up in Ohio…which made me feel good about the fact that every television show in America did not have to be about life in New York or LA.  I also remember the 11 kids killed at The Who concert in Cincinnati back in December 1979…and the WKRP episode regarding the tragedy.

All the music played in the background of the show has been replaced by Muzak. Wired ran a story about the individual responsible for making all the changes.

Really shows how copyright limits our culture. This bothers me on many levels. If I did watch an episode and heard a song that struck a cord…I’d buy the damn thing on iTunes.

Technorati Tags: , copyright, music business