When the news is bad....

    When the news is bad, there's sports. For me that means basketball primarily and predominantly women's. Today was a feast, and to keep my blood pressure in check, I didn't even watch the Gopher Women beat Illinois. They are ranked 22 in the nation. Replay is coming. This afternoon I switched between at least six games and a bit of golf and one's playing on the TV now.  Last night I watched the new women's professional basketball league, Unrivaled. Paige Bueckers, who played for Hopkins, a Minneapolis suburb in high school, and UConn in college, was playing. This is a thee on three league so it's heavy on offense. On Paige's team were 6'.4" Cameron Brink and 6'.6" Dominique Malonga, from France. They won easily as Paige had a great night.

    The regular season is over for the Big Ten Conference. The women ended with a record of 22 and 7, and 13 and 5, in the conference The Big Ten Tournament is next and the Gophers will get a good seed, #4, based on their record. They will also be invited to play in the NCAA tournament, for the first time in years. They have an excellent coach in Dawn Plitzuweit, who once coached at the University Of South Dakota. She's a good recruiter but the core of the current team was recruited by Lindsey Whalen when she was the coach, many of the key players are from Minnesota.

Takk for alt,

Al

Coach Plitzuweit

MKV keeps sending me good things!

    This is the latest good forward from MKV.

"There’s a Japanese word with no English equivalent: Omoiyari. It means something like a deep, reflexive consideration for others that permeates at all levels of the culture. That the Japanese would have such a word is not surprising, given that they are probably the most culturally cohesive society in the developed world. But what is interesting is why.  Japan is mountainous. Very little flat land. So their staple crop became rice, which needs far less acreage than wheat. But it demands something wheat doesn’t: the entire village. You can’t grow rice alone. One paddy at a time, everyone works together, negotiating who floods which field and when. So it seems that the reason Japanese have such great manners isn’t so much because of their virtue, but because of environmental necessity. Thomas Talhelm proved this in a 2014 Science study. What he found was that within the same country, China, with the same government, same ethnic group, and same language family, rice-growing regions produced measurably more collectivist people than wheat-growing regions. In the 1950s, the Chinese government assigned people to two state farms just 56 kilometers apart. One grew rice, and one grew wheat. They had the same policies and the same latitude. Within a generation, the rice farmers were significantly more group-oriented.  Or take the Scandinavians. Their ancestors spent centuries in Viking longhouses with fifty people and their livestock, one structure, and brutal winters. There wasn’t much room for personal drama or squeamishness about privacy. A thousand years later, Scandinavians are still laconic, moderate, and remarkably relaxed about nudity. The longhouse is gone but the culture it created isn’t. In the Nineteenth Century, adjusted for inflation, for the price of half a Volkswagen Passat, you could head West and grab yourself a price of land and have everything you needed to set up your own farm and be exporting grain within 18 months. The only deal was, on the farm you were on your own. Hence why American individualism and gun ownership are so highly valued in the US today. Environment shapes reality, which shapes language and culture, which shapes behavior. It’s all connected. One could reasonably deduce that the reason those of us in the Anglosphere don’t have our own word for Omoiyari is because our environment never demanded one. Language is not only a product of culture, but its creator. Korean Air had one of the worst safety records in aviation. The problem wasn’t mechanical. Korean has six speech levels encoding hierarchy, and junior officers couldn’t directly challenge captains during emergencies. The fix was to require all cockpit communication in English. Not because English is better. Because it didn’t carry the hierarchical weight. Their safety record since has been spotless. They didn’t change the people. They changed the language." Gapingvoid Culture Design Group Takk for alt, Al

Dining Memories!

   It's a tenuous connection, but, last night's gourmet dinner reminded me of dining in the Marines. In boot camp I remember little of the food. The emphasis was on eating fast, very fast, and pity those who dawdled. At Camp Pendleton our battalion, something over 500 Marines, were housed in one area. All were fed in one huge dining hall. The food was adequate and necessitated standing in a long line which no one jumped. Cooks at breakast would hold two eggs in each hand breaking them unto the griddle.

   The twenty-eight day ride aboard a liberty ship from San Diego to Okinawa introduced us to Navy food. On other ships and eating in a Navy mess hall in Subic Bay, Philippine Islands, convinced me that Navy food was better than Marine's.

   Once we arrived in Okinawa we were assigned to Camp Sukiran, an Army base. The barracks were designed with a kitchen for each company, 60-70 Marines. These cooks were less experienced and the food suffered. We arrived in July and stayed there until leaving for cold weather training in Japan, about the first of November. Returning from Japan we were stationed at the newly opened Camp Hansen. Like Pendleton we were served in a Battalion dining room.

  Then there were C-Rations...but that's for a later blog.

Takk for alt,

Al

PS The gourmet dinner last night lived up to it's billing.

Last night's entree.

The Gift Of Stability!

      In the 4+ years I've been an inmate of the OFH very few of the professional staff have left. This stability of excellent staff is a great gift. Friends are ina different OFH, in an affluent neighborhood with no bus access, so securing serving staff is very difficult. Consequently, professional staff have to step in, they burnout and leave. 

    Jim, the food services director here is top notch. He retired after a successful career in commercial food service. He wasn't home long before his wife asked "Don't you have be somewhere?"  That inquiry prompted him to take the position here five years ago when the OFH opened.

   About every three months he offers a gourmet meal. Tonight's the night. The menu for tonight's La Belle Notte Gourmet Dinner: Red & White Wine, Shrimp Arancini, Italian Chopped Salad, Beef Tagliata Steak, and Tiramisu. Now for the funny part; it starts at 4:30.😂 When I asked Jim, "Why so early?" He said "That's when everyone shows up." That's proof that this indeed an Old Folks Home!

Takk for alt,

Al

Immigrant Gift!

      She was born in India, raised in Kenya, and now in America. A teacher at the University of Minnesota, and named after a Hindu god, Krishna. She's a goddess in my eyes, she did my dental work this morning. Seldom have I experienced a dentist as communicative as she. My preference is for female dentists, not least for their small hands in my mouth.

   The task was replacing and old crown that had corrosion around its base. Its position in the back of my mouth prohibited repair work with it in place. With the old crown removed and the tooth polished she sat down beside me to design the new one a computer screen. With our active conversation I neglected to ask about the technology constructing the crown, but, I go back next week for work on another crown.

   As we were chatting she said that the dental classroom at the University has the technology she used to design my crown. However, she said the older professors are reluctant to use it. They prefer older methods.

  Given time to talk I asked her if she wanted to hear a dental story. She said yes enthusiastically. So I told about Art, the dentist in Mohall, N.D., when I lived there. Art did some farming. One day when he was in the field, his neighbor Wesley was working in the next field. Stopping to talk across the fence Wes said, I've got a terrible toothache. Art said let me look at it. Then Art said we can fix that, lie down on your back. With his knee on Wes' chest Art pulled the tooth with his plier. Art told me the story.  

   Dr. Krishna symbolizes, for me, the value of immigrants.  

Takk for alt,

Al

A Little Smile For Your Day

 

      In the same vein as Pearls, is this quote I found while cleaning my desk.  I may have used it before but it's worth repeating. (Incidentally, Mouse, in the comic strip, is typically negative.)

 "A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world, everyone you meet is your mirror." Ken Keyes, Jr. 

   The ICE assault locally has scaled down leaving wreckage behind. They were randomly picking up brown and black people, one of whom, was an off duty police officer. Their behavior was a total violation of the 4th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

In other words: "The Fourth Amendment originally enforced the notion that “each man’s home is his castle”, secure from unreasonable searches and seizures of property by the government. It protects against arbitrary arrests, and is the basis of the law regarding search warrants, stop-and-frisk, safety inspections, wiretaps, and other forms of surveillance, as well as being central to many other criminal law topics and to privacy law."  Cornell Law School

Takk for alt,

Al

Rev. Jesse Jackson, 10/8/41-2/17/26 R.I.P.

      MKV forwarded this very interesting bit of Jesse Jackson history. It's a testament to what differentiated non-anxious behavior ca accomplish. Thanks, MKV, not to be confused with my other friend MJV.

Takk for alt,

Al 

During the 1983 Lebanese Civil War, Lieutenant Robert Goodman of the U.S. Navy was acting as Bombardier-Navigator on an A-6E Intruder when his plane was hit by Syrian surface-to-air defenses.

Goodman ejected. After landing, he was captured by Syrian troops. 

Naturally, the United States government wanted him back. But it soon ended up in a diplomatic deadlock. 

If Syria released Goodman, it would look like it yielded to American pressure. If the U.S. raised the pressure, it would look like escalation. With Syria and with the USSR (which was allied with Syria), during one of the tensest moments of the entire Cold War.

There was no path home for Lieutenant Goodman. 

Until Jesse Jackson stepped in.

Jackson offered to mediate. On his own. With no formal authority or license from the U.S. government.

He flew to Damascus personally. 

Syria found him credible because he was not some agent of the government strictly aligned to U.S. power and interests.

The United States found him credible because he was a widely recognized moral leader, not a political operator.

What did he say in the negotiation?

Nothing about interests, precedents, security, deterrence, alliance, escalation, quid-pro-quos, threats, concessions, or anything like that.

Something simpler. Starker. And more powerful.

He talked about the release not as a strategic consideration but as a humanitarian choice.

And because Syria would be giving Goodman up to Jackson, not to the U.S. government, it wouldn’t look like surrender. 

Jackson reframed the decision. By his presence. And by his message.

Instead of a concession to an adversary, it became an act of compassion.

On January 3, 1984, Jackson and Goodman left Syria together and came home. 

Medieval canon law had a name for what Jackson became in that room. Sanctuary.

For centuries, if you could get yourself through the doors of a church, you were untouchable. Kings, armies, it didn't matter. The institution's moral authority was so accumulated, so real, that violating it was simply unthinkable. Nobody created that power during a crisis. It was deposited slowly, over centuries, by people who weren't thinking about crises at all.

Jackson walked into Damascus as a one-man sanctuary. A space both sides could enter without it meaning anything strategically. It worked for exactly the same reason it worked in the 12th century. The authority was real because it had never been manufactured.

Every wise word you say and every principled action you take is a deposit. When the balance gets big enough, it opens doors that don't exist for anyone else.

But reputation is almost beside the point. Why was Jackson the only person who could walk into that room in the first place?

Syria couldn't place him inside their mental model of American power. He didn't fit the game. He wasn't legible to the system, and that illegibility was the whole thing. It was his most valuable asset.’