Had a classmate drop in for a couple hours today just to visit. John O'Brien. Forgot to take his picture. Oh well. Next time.
My sciatica contines to make me unhappy. Have to keep at those exercises and hope for the best. Granddaughter Catie was telling me about the Christmas party she was in charge of running at work. I asked her to send me an email describing it all so I could blog about it. Sounded so cool. She's office manager for thriftbooks.com and wrote...
We had our company holiday party on January 22nd. With COVID
and quarantine still going strong, my Party Planning Committee ((PPC) and I had
to come up with a way to get folks together and engaged virtually. We settled
on having four events from which attendees could choose, all through using the
Zoom meeting platform.
The first event was a 90-minute painting class through a
company called Painting with a Twist. I gathered sign-ups, and sent an address
list to the vendor two weeks from the event. The vendor sent kits to everyone
that signed up that included canvas, brushes, paints and a small pallet. They
had fancier kits that included an easel, but I decided the "lite" kit
had everything needed and was much better priced. We also picked a picture
ahead of time for the instructor to teach the attendees:
The Grimm Escape:
Teams got together and scoured the internet jumping from one
clue to the next to solve the puzzles. I popped in a couple times while folks
were doing this and it looked like a lot of fun
Our final event was just a general hangout room where we
played Jackbox games. Jackbox is pretty cool as it is a collection of several
games where 6-8 people can actively participate, but it has an audience
function that lets people vote for their favorite participants throughout the
games. After the other three events were over, everyone met in this room,
mingled, and heard announcements.
I was pretty stressed getting up to the point of the party,
but I think everyone who participated had a good time. Leadership was pleased,
so I certainly consider it a success. While even more stressful to plan, I do
hope our 2022 holiday party can be done in person.
Read on my Quora website about two guys I like so I thought I would cut and paste it here.
There were once two little boys who grew up in the ‘mean
streets’ of New York, born one year and a few blocks apart. They weren’t from
the poorest families but they were far from rich. One of the boys was fully
Italian, the other had an Italian father, and an Irish mother. Growing up, they
saw ‘wiseguys’ and made men and gangsters in the street. They saw the gangs,
even had friends who joined them... their early childhood was Goodfellas.
One of the friends was the son of an actress-turned-seamstress.
The other the son of a painter who had left his wife because he was homosexual
— his mother had been an artist. Not surprisingly, both kids inherited the
‘artistic gene’ from their parents, and, from their fathers’ humble immigrant
origins, a strong drive to make it in the world.
The two boys grew into men and went their separate ways.
They met again in their twenties. The half-Irish one, the tallest and
handsomest of the two, had gone to acting school and was now an actor known as
Robert De Niro. His friend, a creative fellow but too short for leading man
status, was Martin Scorsese. Scorsese wanted to recreate the world they had
grown up in, make it come to life for a young audience largely unfamiliar with
it. Mean Streets. Taxi Driver. Raging Bull. The King of Comedy. And my own
all-time favorite, Goodfellas. These men have truly enriched cinema, and indeed
the world, through their art.
Scorsese directed movies. De Niro acted in them. As it
turned out, Scorsese was a damned fine director, and script writer. De Niro was
a damn fine actor. They would come to define cinema in many ways, and put their
mark on the genre of mafia films and organized crime drama like no one else
before them, and no one else after.
The two men grew older. Their fortunes increased and their
careers took off in ways they never could have imagined when they were young.
Now De Niro is 77 and Scorsese is 78. They are fathers, grandfathers. Still
thick as thieves, still the best of friends, and still working together from
time to time, both on-screen and behind the scenes. Easily one of Hollywood’s
most iconic friendships and one that produced some of the best movies of all
time. Truly they are living legends.
When it comes to friends who made it big in Hollywood,
before Affleck and Damon, there was Scorsese and De Niro. Seventy years since
they first met and fifty years since they began to work together
professionally, they are still the best of friends and they still produce
amazing movies together.
What is the greatest sentence ever made?
One by Tommy Lee Jones.
There are two sentences he has spoken which are worthy of consideration. One, while playing the Agent K in the film Men in Black, responds to Will Smith’s suggestion that people are smart enough to understand the truth about aliens with the line:
“A person is smart, people are stupid”.
This challenges the assumption of the ‘Wisdom of the
Crowd’ and perfectly encapsulates how in great enough number, people make truly
stupid decisions… as we can most definitely attest to in the modern era.
There’s a surprising amount of philosophy and political theory buried in such a
simple, throwaway sentence.
But this isn’t the line I am proposing. Instead, I am submitting forth a line he spoke as himself. In a restaurant.
Jones was sitting alone at a table enjoying a meal in 1994. Into the restaurant walked Jim Carrey, with whom he was working alongside on the film Batman Forever. Jones really, realllllllly didn’t like Carrey. Either he just couldn’t cope with the younger man’s high-energy, frenetic, whirlwind personality - or - the cynic would say, Jones was jealous of fact that he (an Oscar-winning actor) was suddenly being overshadowed in Hollywood by this fly-by-night comedian. Carrey walked across to the table and said Hello. Jones’ mood suddenly darkened and he (fairly bluntly) told Carrey he didn’t like him. Carrey attempted to straighten things out, to which Jones suddenly cut him off with:
“I cannot sanction your buffoonery.”
Everything about this sentence is perfection. And one can imagine it being delivered with an emotionless gruffness, which makes it all the more cutting as an insult. As a Brit, it has a special resonance. As a nation of people, this sentence sums up our entire attitude towards life. It really should be our national motto and should be written on a large sign at the arrivals gate at Heathrow Airport. Whoever you are, we simply cannot sanction your buffoonery.
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