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Luke Melia

Disney

Walt’s nephew Roy Disney is furious with Disney CEO Michael Eisner. For the last nine years, Roy said, the company “has lost its focus, its creative energy, and its heritage.”

I’m not sure what Roy’s so upset about. Are they just not killing off the mothers like they used to? (Hat tip to Isabella and our family’s lunch conversation…)

JFK

You probably know the the anniversary of JFK’s assassination was this past weekend. Some rememberances:

“I believe in human dignity as the source of national purpose, human liberty as the source of national action, the human heart as the source of national compassion, and in the human mind as the source of our invention and our ideas.” -JFK

Quote via Anita Roddick.

Salon has a long but interesting piece on Kennedy, Vietnam and Iraq.

MSNBC quantifies the admiration for our fallen hero.

I remember doing a school report on President Kennedy in grade school. I went to our encyclopedia under K, and found the entry for John Fitzgerald Kennedy. To my surprise, it listed nothing about him being president, only a senator. It was this experience, along with the mysterious missing “S” volume, that prompted my mom to buy a new set of encyclopedias to replace the ones she had used as a child.

Sports & Humility

“When you learn a sport, you go through the cycle of humility. You learn about yourself.” – Wesley Clark

The context is Clark considering a late-life career as a teaching golf pro. Funny that this quote should appear today, because I’ve thinking about that. Not the golf, the humility.

I recently started playing sand volleyball with a group of people that play at a higher level than the folks I’d been playing with. I’ve gone from being among the most competitive and capable players to among the least. It’s not unexpected and I made the shift knowing that this was likely to happen. Still, I’ve been struck by the humility necessary in improving at the game.

It’s almost contradictory, but sometimes you have to acknowledge how terrible you are at the skills you are most proud of.

Zoe

I should be packing up my apartment, but instead I’m playing around with Zoe, an open source e-mail archiving/indexing thing. It’s captured my imagination and I’m currently importing 8 years of email into it…

Maybe this is some virtual version of the the common moving problem of going through stuff and revisiting memories and forgotten things and places.

It’s Friday

Dragnet ’88 is the tune that’s playing. Sampled bits of the DragNet theme and dialogue remixed over a techno beat. “My name is Friday. I carry a badge.” “The story is true.” “You got a lot of repressed feelings, don’t you, Friday, d-d-don’t you Friday, don’t you Friday.”

Wired has a good interview with Bill Joy in their December issue. Hope is a Lousy Defense.

Ate at a lovely new-ish place in the East Village last night. Temple has a great vibe, delicious Korean food, a wonderful philosophy.

On my way home from dinner, I happened across the grand opening of a new Guitar Center on 14th St. What a wild scene! Tons of people playing tons of guitars, keyboards and drums…

I set up a wireless network at Jeanhee’s place the other night. It’s pretty cool. I had some trouble getting the Linksys Wireless G router working with her new Powerbook G4. I think it’s because the default SSID. “linksys” was already in use by someone else in the building (who had left their router in default configuration, right down to the password, as I inadvertently discovered…). After changing the SSID and cycling the power on the router twice, it worked like a charm. And it’s pretty cool!

In case you missed the sparse news coverage, politically-minded Brits came out 110,000 strong in the middle of the week to protest against W’s administration and Blair’s alliance with it. That 110,000 is Scotland Yard’s estimate (buried in this NYT article headlined “Bush and Blair Say Bombing Fortify Resolve”) and seems pretty huge for a Thursday in November in London.

Windy City

NY Times: Woman Dies and Thousands Lose Power in High Winds. It was the most intense winds I’ve ever felt here. I was rollerblading to work Thursday and questioned at one point if I’d be able to make any forward progress and at another point if I’d be able to stop. The answer to both was “yes, but with extreme difficulty.”

I walked home for lunch, eating an avocado-cucumber roll as I went. Upon finishing the roll at my corner, I went to toss the container in the trash can. A gust arose soon after I had released the container and lifted it up. I instinctively went to clutch it from the air, but was not quite quick enough. I was left with a fistful of ginger.

Marathon

Here in NYC today, a Brit by the name of Ranulph Fiennes completed his seventh marathon in seven days. The guy is recently recovered from heart surgery and had just flown in from Cairo. Did I mention he’s 59 years old? Amazing. Or nuts. Or both.

In an embarassingly stark contrast, I spent most of today sick in bed with a cold.

LukeMelia.com created 1999. ··· Luke Melia created 1976. ··· Live With Passion!
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