a thing and five words

Another thing I keep forgetting to write: Cut-My-Own-Throat Dibbler would be entirely at home at any public event here. Sausage onna stick! Fruit onna stick! Anonymous dried things onna stick! Corndogs onna stick! And most of all, Squid onna stick!

Five words from Alma, below. You know the drill – if you want words of your own, holler “Words!” in comments.

Travel
Um, yes. All seven continents – and Alma herself is the only person I know who’s lived in more countries than I have. (Though I think even she didn’t manage / get subjected to three in three years.) I do eventually get travel fatigue and want to go home if I’m in a different place every night for too many days, but as long as I can stay somewhere for a bit and think of it as home base I’m good. Upcoming trips: US East Coast in August (brother’s wedding, about which I’m excited) and World Masters Games in Sydney in October, in which I’ll be competing in a double and a four.

Space
My big regret is that it looks like my travel may be bounded 35000′ up (where jetliners go). I feel robbed, really; growing up it seemed perfectly reasonable that I could expect to get to the moon someday, or further. It’s still possible of course, and it cheers me to see space moving into private industry instead of being closed to everyone but government. Private industry moves a lot faster, in most cases.

And Heinlein’s “Requiem”, the sequel to “The Man Who Sold the Moon” makes me cry every time.

Musicals
It’s a family thing – we all like them. I grew up on a nondenominational combination of Fiddler on the Roof and The Sound of Music I am a musical conservative, though – I love Rogers and Hammerstein, and am not much of a fan of Sondheim or Andrew Lloyd Webber. (Yes, Phantom has some nice songs, but they all sound alike). I have never seen any of the recent musicals. I want to – I know I’d love Spamalot and especially Avenue Q, for instance – but I just haven’t had a chance. I do like where movies have gone recently: I loved both Moulin Rouge and Mamma Mia! for example. But it would be nice to see something more original.

Immigrants
I’m going to cheat and repeat what I said to Deck, because it’s almost all I have to say on the subject (and any specifics I might debate are based entirely on this):

Whenever I point out to those people that I myself am only a couple generations from immigrants (3 of my grandparents came in as small children), they always say, “But your family came here legally”. True, they did – I think that’s largely because it’s fairly difficult to sneak across an ocean. Given that they were fleeing injustice, persecution and dire poverty (i.e. the same reasons today’s illegal imigrants are coming in) I’m fairly sure they’d have come in any way they could get there. And if they hadn’t then, they surely would have as adults, in the face of the looming Holocaust.

Faith
I think there’s Something out there. I find a lot of value in the traditions of my ancestors, most especially the part that says (or that I interpret to say) “read the source material, look at other people’s learned opinions, and make up your own mind”.

Beyond that, Iris Dement speaks for me:

Everybody’s wonderin’ what and where they all came from.
Everybody’s worryin’ ’bout where they’re gonna go when the whole thing’s done.
But no one knows for certain and so it’s all the same to me.
I think I’ll just let the mystery be.

Some say they’re goin’ to a place called Glory and I ain’t saying it ain’t a fact.
But I’ve heard that I’m on the road to purgatory and I don’t like the sound of that.
Well, I believe in love and I live my life accordingly.
But I choose to let the mystery be.