Happy birthday, Jim Yong Kim !

Jim Yong Kim will become 52 years old on December 8.

Up until a few days ago, I had no idea who this man was, and I’m willing to bet that you had never heard of him either. I discovered him due to the fact that we live in a “hyper-connected” world, and his name was mentioned (on the same day) by two different people that I’m connected to on a site called Linkedin.

You can read his complete bio at the link below, but I’ll give you a quick summary to save you some time.

who is Jim Kim?

He was born in Seoul, South Korea, but he and his family moved to Iowa when he was five years old. His father taught dentistry at the University of Iowa, and his mother earned her PhD in philosophy. Following in his parents’ footsteps, Mr. Kim became a very accomplished scholar himself. After earning an M.D. from Harvard in 1991, he earned a PhD in anthropology from the same institute in 1993. His wife, Younsook Lim, is a pediatrician at Children’s Hospital in Boston.

In case you’re starting to think that he’s a nerdy college professor, you may be interested in the fact that he plays basketball, volleyball, tennis, and golf, and he also likes rap music.

like looking for a needle in a Haystak

In March of 2009, he became the 17th President of Dartmouth College, the first Asian American to hold that post. In March of 2012, President Obama nominated him as the next President of the World Bank, and on July 1 of 2012, he started working in his new position. He is the first bank leader whose professional background is not in the financial or political sectors, and he is the first to have previous experience in personally tackling health issues in developing countries.

There are those who feel that Mr. Kim’s first act should be to shut down the bank, but that would be EXACTLY the wrong thing to do.

He is uniquely qualifed to lead an organization whose mission has changed significantly since its founding in 1944. His five point plan for fighting disease and poverty will help to not only bring increased prosperity to countries around the globe, but will make the world an increasingly safer place.

He’s also a BIG believer in global warming.

Although regular viewers of FOX News, and certain talk show hosts and politicians have their doubts, there’s absolutely no question that global warming DOES exist, and needs to be dealt with. If you have the time, I’d recommend reviewing the 85 page report (which Dr. Kim signed) that the World Bank released in November of 2012.

In closing, I’d like to wish Dr. Kim a very happy birthday. For the sake of all of us, though, I’d like him to go easy on those birthday candles.

Love cannot be silenced

I graduated from a Catholic grade school named St. Pascal Baylon way back in 1961. Although I wasn’t able to attend, my graduation class held a 50 year reunion on October 8, 2011, which was preceded by another gathering the group had organized in 2007.

Of the sixteen teachers that we had during our tenure, 11 of them were nuns, and our school principals were Sister Alice Gertrude (1959 through 1956) and Sister Sophia (1956-1962).

As I recall, class sizes were usually in the range of 40 to 50 kids, which would horrify most modern educators. Our Pastor, Father John V. Ryan, would personally pass out report cards on “report card day”, which turned out to be a source of great anxiety for some of my fellow students.

If your parents were members of the parish, your school tuition was very minimal. If your parents had a LOT of kids (the Sachi family had 12 kids, and the Chapeau family had 13) tuition was absolutely free.

I still remember that Sister Sophia was a very intimidating principal, and that Sister Resignata was an absolute peach. Their fellow religious instructors were Sister Anthony Therese, Sister Clarilla, Sister Beatrice Ann, Sister Theodora, Sister Joan Mary, Sister Thomasine, Sister Margarita, Sister Camille, Sister Delphine, and Sister Myra.

I was in the group that had Miss Peltier for 6th grade instead of Sister Margarita. I won’t say that she was crazy, but I saw her come “unhinged” a whole lot of times.

The nuns belonged to an order called the Sisters of St. Joseph. Even though I haven’t belonged to a Catholic parish for more than 20 years, I still have fond memories of those old nuns.

The Sisters of St. Joseph were in the news recently, but for a very strange reason. The group had come under criticism by the Vatican for focusing too much on poverty and economic justice, and “keeping silent” on abortion and same sex marriage. If you’re a good student of history, you’re aware of the fact that abortions and same sex unions existed during the time of Christ, who preferred to focus on poverty and economic justice, but you’re not going to find that information in The Baltimore Catechism.

The New York Times article about the order is worth reading in its entirety, but here’s the short version:

Sister Kathy Sherman, of La Grange Park, Illinois, has belonged to the order of the Sisters of St. Joseph of La Grange since 1980, just a few years after graduating from college. Although she always starts her day with prayer, she has a different view of prayer than most people.

“I don’t just pray and go to work. My work is my prayer. They’re not separate. It’s a wholeness. The contemplative life nurtures my ministry, and my ministry nurtures my contemplative life”.

Sister Kathy has been playing the guitar since her college days. Two days after the Vatican issued its condemnation of her order, she wrote another song, which she titled “Love cannot be silenced”. Even if you’re not a Catholic, it’s worth listening to:

Love cannot be silenced.

I’m a firm believer in not criticizing the religion of others, and I’m also adamant about separating religion and politics, as was Barry Goldwater.

Having said that though, there ARE times that it’s appropriate to consider a blending of the two. Like most of us, Sister Kathy became disturbed by the negative tone of the recent Presidential campaign, and she wrote a song about it. It doesn’t matter whether you voted for Romney or Obama, but it DOES matter that we are all Americans, and ALL of us should listen to “This is the America I Believe In”.

Many people aren’t aware that there are Roman Catholic women priests celebrating Mass in this country. If you’d like to know more about that topic, the video titled “Pink Smoke Over the Vatican” is now available.

It’s unlikely that the Vatican will recognize any of them in the near future, but it WILL happen eventually. After all, women served as ministers in the early days of the Catholic church until the 4th century.

If you’re not happy about the Vatican’s recent criticism of the order of St. Joseph, and you belong to a Catholic parish, the solution is simple: write a letter to your bishop. Public opinion can be surprisingly effective in bringing about change, and I’d be willing to bet that some of people pictured below could help bring about that change.

Let them eat .. crow

During the reign of Louis XVI in France, the staple food of the French peasants (who likely made up more than 47% of the population) was bread. Incredibly, the purchase of bread consumed as much as 50% of their income.

When his wife, Marie Antoinette, learned that there was a bread shortage during one of the famines that occurred during her husband’s reign, she has alleged to have said, “let them eat cake”.. Her disdain for the working class ultimately proved to be very costly to her personally, as she became a victim of the guillotine on October 16, 1793.

If you dig a little deeper into the history of Marie Antoinette’s comment, you’ll discover that there’s a bit of “urban legend” in her story, but it makes for a good segue into another topic, the 2012 Presidential election. Since by now we’re all very tired of politics, and glad that the whole thing is over, you’ll be relieved to know that politics will only get a brief mention in this article.

One of the fascinating components of the English language are the idioms that are part of our everyday language. One of those idioms is “eating crow”, and it is defined as suffering humiliation by admitting wrongness after having been proved wrong after taking a strong position. Although the phrase could be used in any number of situations, its application seems to be more common in the areas of sports, investments - and politics.

The phrase came to mind recently when I read an opinion column by a conservative columnist named Wayne Allen Root on November 1, where he predicted that Mitt Romney would win the Presidency by a landslide. You can read his reasons, and watch his video, by clicking on the link below:

Oops!

You’ll also be interested to know that CNBC’s stock analyst Jim Cramer recently predicted that President Obama would win by a landslide. That’s closer to the truth, if you consider the electoral college vote, but way off the mark if you’re looking at Obama’s razor thin popular vote margin of victory.

Since I enjoy “stirring the pot” occasionally, I’m going to have a little fun with these predictions, mainly at the expense of Wayne Allen Root. Thanks to the magic of Google, I was able to find some recipes for cooking crow. I’m sending him a copy of the recipes, along with a copy of his column of November 1.

The most famous political gaffe in the last 100 years was the headline in the November 3, 1948, Chicago Daily Tribune that declared the Dewey had defeated Truman.

Inevitably, there was a modern version of this headline in June of 2012, when both CNN and FOX erroneously declared that the Affordable Care Act had been overturned by the Supreme Court.

Most people would consider Fortune magazine to be a fairly good predictor of investments, but their predictions for the decade of 2000 to 2010 were way off the mark..

The best example of “the experts being wrong” was the investment strategy of the Hunt brothers in the early 1970’s. By the end of the 1970’s, the Hunt brothers (and their Arab partners) owned roughly 50% of the world’s supply of silver. By the time the silver market had collapsed, in 1987, the Hunt brothers wound up losing a very ugly $1 billion.

There are many contenders for the worst sports predictions, but the list posted below is worth considering:

are you sure about that?

If you veer away from politics, investments, and sports, you’ll find that predictions, in ANY AREA, are fraught with peril:

who the hell wants to hear actors talk?

Since we’re only human, ALL of us make mistakes from time to time. Take a few minutes, and reflect on YOUR favorite mistake. When you’re done, I’d recommend watching the video shown below, since it describes

the favorite mistakes - of a Crow.

For the rest of the day, though, be very careful. After all, every day is a winding road.

A Halloween love story

Most of us would consider Halloween to be a fun time of the year - a time for costume parties, trick or treating, and pumpkin carving. I actually know a few people who aren’t in favor of all the festivities that normally occur on October 31, probably because it was originally a PAGAN celebration a long, long, time ago.

The same people would likely be horrified if they knew that the ancient pagan festival known as Saturnalia is the basis for Christmas. Although the exact dates of the celebration varied a little through the centuries, the "Birthday of the Unconquerable Sun" was celebrated in the later Roman Empire on December 25.

The ancient Celts date back as far as 1000 years before the birth of Christ, and possibly even further back than that. One of the most important of their celebrations was Samhain (pronounced Sow-en), which marked the end of the harvest, and the end of summer. The date was also considered to be the start of the Celtic New Year. The Celts believed that this was the day when two worlds (the living and the dead) came together. Because the Celts believed that some of those “other worldly” spirits could cause mischief, they left food for them. They also lit huge bonfires because they believed that the light from the fires would drive the evil spirits away, and they dressed in costumes made of animal hides to fool “the bad guys”. To help the GOOD spirits, they carved lanterns out of vegetables in order to light their way into the world.

After the Romans conquered the Celts, they adopted many of the ancient Celtic celebrations, including Samhain. The Romans modified the celebration to include several other pagan celebrations, and changed the name to All Hallows Day. However, in about 700 A.D., Pope Gregory III changed the date of the celebration from October 31 to November 1, and changed the name to All Saints Day.

(There is an unusual twist to All Saints Day "south of the border", where the dead are commemorated on both November 1 and November 2. In most regions of Mexico, children are commemorated on November 1 in a festival known as Dia de los Inocentes (Day of the Innocents) and adults are commemorated on Dia de los Difuntos (Day of the Dead). Ironically enough, both celebrations can be traced back to the indigenous pagan cultures of Mexico nearly 3000 years ago.)

The day remained a religious holiday for hundreds of years, but by the mid-1800’s, it had evolved into a day that resembled a communal celebration. In the mid 1800’s, the Irish potato famine brought millions of Irish people to America, along with their communal celebration activities. At this point, the celebrations included dressing in costumes, but the medieval practice of going door to door asking for food or money was still dormant.

By the early 1920’s, Halloween pranks and mischief (such as outhouse tipping) had evolved into more sinister occurrences, such as vandalism, property damage, and even physical assaults. Schools and communities developed a concept similar to “trick or treating” to counter “the bad guys”, and the Boy Scouts also got involved in similar projects.

The first recorded community celebration of Halloween occurred in Anoka, Minnesota in 1920, which has caused that city to call itself the “Halloween Capitol of the World”, but the first recorded us of the phrase “trick or treat” was in 1934, when it appeared in a Portland, Oregon newspaper.

Now that you know more about the historical background of Halloween, you’re probably wondering how celebration of the day can turn into a love story.

The best way to answer that question is to let Belfast native Van Morrisson answer it for you:

Happy New Year

Who knows? This could be a magic time for you as well.

Music from beyond the grave

Vincent Price passed away 19 years ago today, at the age of 82.

Although he had a long and storied film career, he will probably be best remembered for his 1982 collaboration with the late Michael Jackson on Jackson’s Thriller album. Although you can watch the original video by clicking here, you’ll be happy to know that you can now watch an UPDATED version by clicking on this spot, even though both Mr. Price and Mr. Jackson are no longer with us.

Since Halloween will arrive in less than a week, you’re probably wondering if I’ll be publishing a story about the origin, or customs, of the modern version of an ancient pagan festival. For now, I’m going to leave you in suspense. However, since we’re less than two weeks ago from another Presidential election , I’ll leave you with a few words of wisdom from Vincent Price himself:

“In art, religion, and politics, the respect must be mutual, no matter how violent the disagreement”.

Little house on the prairie

In January of 1913, the winter weather was particularly harsh in Washington Country, Minnesota.

On one of those nights, 30 year old Martin Stenson and his 27 year old bride, Amelia, huddled together in their little rented farm house, trying to stay warm as the blustery winds from the north howled outside. Sometime during the evening, nature took its course, and on October 23, 1913, the second child of their marriage came into the world. The named her Anna, in honor of Amelia’s mother, Anna, who had died in childbirth.

Martin had been born in Country Sligo, Ireland, on November 24, 1882, but both of his parents died of the plague when he was a small boy. He eventually wound up working in the coal mines in England to support himself, but emigrated to America to be with some of his siblings, who were working on a farm near the town of Hastings, Minnesota. A few years later, he met a young woman named Amelia Karnick, whom we married on May 3, 1911.

After Martin and Amelia got married, they rented a little farm house close to Hastings, Minnesota. The little rented farmhouse eventually fell into disrepair, and was finally burned down by the local fire department as part of one of its training courses. When Martin and his family lived there , they had no electricity or running water, and he had to chop wood for heat. The fact that the young family managed to grow and prosper is a testimony to the remarkable tenacity of the pioneers of this country, and to the peer group of my mother and her siblings, who lived through two world wars and the Great Depression, and eventually became known as “the Greatest Generation”.



Their first child, Grace Magdalene, was born on January 26, 1912. “Amazing Grace” lived to be 95 years old, and is survived by her 7 remaining children, her brother Harold (now 91 years old) and a LOT of grand children and great grand children.

The marriage of Martin and Amelia also produced 4 other children - Edward, Harold, Fern, and Bernard, but I have a special connection to the child called Anna, and for a very good reason.

She was my mother.

For most of her life, she preferred to be called by her middle name, Mae. For that reason, her tombstone at Ft. Snelling cemetery lists her name as Mae Anna Brennan.

If she were still alive today, she would be 99 years old tomorrow, and I usually think about her, at least briefly, on the 23rd of October. I’ll have to admit, though, that her “place of her origin” comes into my thought process a lot less, and that’s a shame.

Martin and Amelia bought a nearby farm from a relative in the fall of 1929, just before the start of the Great Depression, but managed to make mortgage payments even when times were tough. Their son, Harold, still lives there today.

About the time that my mother was born, 41% of the workforce in America was employed on farms, and roughly 25% of our country’s GDP was from agriculture. Today, agriculture produces less than 5% of our GDP, and less than 2% of the population works in agriculture.

We’ve changed a lot in the last 100 years, but one thing is very clear. For a great many people, we wouldn’t be who we are today if it weren’t for a remarkable institution - a little house on the prairie.

That's a bunch of malarkey

Technical Sergeant Donald G. Malarkey, a highly decorated WWII hero, was born on July 31, 1921. He served in the 101st Airborne while in the service, and was later portrayed in the HBO miniseries “Band of Brothers” by Scott Grimes.

He is still living today, in comfortable retirement, in Astoria, Oregon.

Very few people have ever heard of him, but by now, most of the people on the planet have a rough idea what “malarkey” means, thanks to this recent video:

2012 Vice Presidential debate

Like many words, the origin of the word “malarkey” is a little murky, but its first known use was in 1929, 8 years after Sergeant Malarkey came into the world. I actually remember my parents using the word occasionally when I was growing up, since their “Minnesota Nice” background would have made it difficult for them to use anything stronger than that.

Surprisingly, there are NUMEROUS synonyms for the word, which you can find in the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

Applesauce

Balderdash

Baloney

Beans

Bilge

Blah

Blarney

Blather

Blatherskite

Blither

Bosh

Bull

Bunk

Bunkum

Claptrap

Codswallop

Crapola

Crock

Drivel

Drool

Fiddle

Fiddle-faddle

Fiddlesticks

Flannel

Flapdoodle

Folderol

Folly

Foolishness

Fudge

Garbage

Guff

Hogwash

Hokey pokey

Hokkum

Hoodoo

Hooey

Horse feathers

Humbug

Humbuggery

Jazz

Nonsense

Moonshine

Muck

Nerts

Nuts

Piffle

Poppycock

Punk

Rot

Rubbish

Senselessness

Silliness

Slush

Stupidity

Taradiddle

Tommyrot

Tosh

Trash

Trumpery

Twaddle

There are those who feel that the Vice President should have been more respectful to the young whipper-snapper from Wisconsin, and I’ve even seen some Biblical references (Proverbs 29:9) to the debate, but here’s my opinion:

Politics has long been considered to be a nasty sport in this country, all the way back to its early days. In the 1796 campaign between Adams and Jefferson, Adams’ backers called Jefferson a “howling atheist”, and Jefferson’s people charged that Adams was going to rip up the Constitution and make himself king, and his sons princes.

In view of the mean-spirited commentary coming from people like Sean Hannitty and Rush Limbaugh, I found that Joe Biden’s gentle poke at Paul Ryan simply made for good theater, and that’s all that I got to say.

Dadgummit

If you want more wisdom than that, it would be like looking for a needle in a Haystak.