Excellence is an art won by training and habituation.
We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence,
but rather we have those because we have acted rightly.
We are what we repeatedly do.
Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.
Aristotle
Whitney Houston Dead at 48: RIP
Heaven Numbers One More Angel In Its Choir...
DONE TOO SOON!
I had written the first entry of my Entertainment Potpourri segment earlier today, suggesting that one of the American Idol contestants consider singing the third Whitney Houston song embedded below; little did I imagine I would now be writing a tribute in Whitney's memory. I still remember as though it was yesterday when I heard for the first time her distinctive magical voice coming through my radio, singing "Saving All My Love For You". And then when I first saw her, an unbelievably gorgeous African-American woman, I was totally blown away: she was like an angel on earth. I'm sure others will remember how Whitney took Dolly Parton's bittersweet tribute in breaking with long-time singing partner Porter Wagoner for a solo career, "I Will Always Love You", and made it totally her own with a gravity-defying vocal explosion.
Whitney Houston scored an amazing 11 #1 pop hits (and 12 other Top 10 hits)--she even managed to take her version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" to #6 on the charts. In fact, my middle two selections below aren't among those top hits.
Whitney Houston has had a well-known substance abuse problem; she has been in rehab multiple times, reportedly as late as last year. No cause of death was given; the early report is no obvious evidence of foul play or drugs at the scene (hopefully no one tampered with evidence); it wasn't even clear who, presumably from her entourage, found Ms. Houston unconscious or dead and contacted hotel staff.
My thoughts and prayers are with Whitney's surviving family, in particular, her daughter Bobbi, and friends.
One of My Favorite Songs of All Time...
"All the Man I Need"
(I used to fantasize my bride one day would sing it to me)
Two of the Greatest Divas of All Time:
A DREAM Duet, A GREAT Song and Performance
"When You Believe" (with Mariah Carey)
One of My Favorite Duets Ever: I LOVE This Song
"If I Said Your Eyes Are Beautiful" (with Jermaine Jackson)
Remember the 1988 Summer Olympics?
(I also liked Four Tops' "Indestructible")
"One Moment in Time"
Romney Wins Maine, CPAC Straw Vote
There had been rumors that Ron Paul, if he was going to steal a state away, would succeed in Maine; in fact, Ron Paul always has a vocal following at CPAC, so the fact that he skipped CPAC to campaign in Maine confirmed those rumors. But Romney held on to beat Paul 39-36. (Note that despite all the talk building up Santorum, we saw, once again, Santorum has problems when social conservatives aren't a major force (like they are in Iowa, Minnesota, and Missouri); Santorum got just 18 percent of the vote. Meanwhile, the high-profile win for Romney at CPAC, the annual conservative pilgrimage, over Santorum 38-31, reaffirmed, despite the protests of certain media conservatives, Romney's acceptability among most conservatives.
I'm getting more impatient with the anti-Romney forces. THIS IS NOT ABOUT IDEOLOGY--THIS IS ABOUT LEADERSHIP. None of the other candidates has any credible public administrative experience; except for Paul, none of the others has any appeal to the moderates and independents. All of the other candidates are existing or former career politicians tied to Washington and an unpopular Congress: tell me, Mark Levin, have you seen Congressional approval ratings lately? What part of your political "street smarts" tells you that nominating a highly polarizing Gingrich at the head of the ticket will not only lose to Obama, but bring GOP candidates down the ticket crashing with him? And as for Santorum, take a look at how well Alan Keyes, a prominent black social conservative, did against Obama in 2004. Santorum lost to "Mr. Charisma" himself, Bob Casey in a landslide, one of the worst I've ever seen for an incumbent senator. What happens when Santorum has to face a much better, charismatic Barack Obama and a $1B campaign war chest?
Read my lips, Mr. Levin: self-styled "conservatives" have been running against Romney solidly for the past year. How hypocritical of you to slam Romney for having the audacity to fight back. For most of the past year, Romney hasn't been focused on the other GOP candidates but running against Obama. On the other hand, Gingrich and Santorum barely registered in the single-place percentages: the only thing they've had going for them was not being Romney.
Whatever you may say about Romney, the fact is that Romney was busy vetoing spending bills by a nearly 90% Democratic Massachusetts legislature, while Rick Santorum was part of the Senate leadership pushing through the biggest spending increases since the LBJ era (well, until 2007 when the Democrats started putting spending on steroids) and he helped push through massive earmarks (while making sure that Pennsylvania got its fair share), including the notorious Bridge to Nowhere. (Technically, when bridge project costs doubled, the Alaskan legislature used the option to spend the hundreds of millions on other projects.)
I have given Romney a fair dose of criticism in this blog, even after I endorsed him. As for saying whatever he thought it would take to get elected statewide in one of the most liberal states in America, including distancing himself from ideologues, I'm not worried about it. The guy spent decades as a venture capitalist, not a community organizer. The idea that a free market venture capitalist needs to be lectured to by Mark Levin about conservative principles is ludicrous.
Looking at current polls, it's fairly clear across the board that Santorum has slipped past Gingrich into second place, roughly 10% behind Romney. Well, except for one oddball PPP poll which puts Santorum 15 points ahead of Romney. I have criticized PPP before; recall, they forecast Romney with a 10 point victory in Colorado.
I'm still amused and annoyed at the hype surrounding Santorum's close win in Colorado, a beauty contest Missouri primary victory (where Gingrich wasn't on the ballot), and the Minnesota caucus. The fact is that Santorum didn't come close in New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida or Nevada. These 3 contests were all but ignored by the media (including the conservative activists) UNTIL Romney lost them.
Entertainment Potpourri
- American Idol Follow-Up. In last Wednesday's post, I criticized AI's handling of 16-year-old Symone Black's fall from the stage as a cliffhanger. I was particularly worried about the possibility of a head or spinal cord injury. It sounds as though she fainted (doctors subsequently confirmed a dehydration problem); she came to with some soda on the scene and managed to get up under her own power. I predict that Symone is America's next sweetheart: sweet, beautiful, upbeat personality, great pipes. She picked one of my all-time favorite songs, Otis Redding's iconic "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay" (there are a handful of songs I've mapped out how I would remake: this is one of them). Taking on an Otis Redding song is like trying to remake a Mariah Carey tune: how can you improve on perfection? How confident are you in having your performance compared to the efforts of a great performer whom made the song his or her own? I think what judge Randy "Yo, Dawg" Jackson is getting to in asking why she picked the song is because the song really doesn't fit her persona. The song has a sound of despair and resignation about it; it's easy to see why Michael Bolton remade it, and it seems to call for a gritty or blue-eyed soul voice, e.g., Joe Cocker, maybe Rod Stewart. Among female performers, I can easily imagine the late Janis Joplin, Tina Turner, Bonnie Tyler or Bonnie Raitt covering the song. What would I have recommended for Symone? Off the top of my head, Nat King Cole's "Too Young", Minnie Riperton's "Loving You", Michael Jackson's "Ben", Jermaine Jackson & Whitney Houston's "If I Said Your Eyes Are Beautiful" (I really LOVE this song...), or Lulu's "To Sir With Love"
- New Fox Series: Touch: Thumbs UP! I can't claim to speak on behalf of every bright person on the planet, but there is a certain level of frustration when you catch onto things, solve a problem or come to a conclusion much faster than most people. You aren't even conscious that you're doing it: it comes natural to you so you think other people can do the same thing. It can be frustrating and test your patience as others struggle to reach the same point. And team meetings can be sheer torture. You can also freak out other family, friends, colleagues, students, etc. I recall I was in an other room and overheard my mom talk about some mystery scenario I had never heard before (I'm not into mystery novels), and I blurted out, "Oh, it's got to be so-and-so." My mom came in with a startled look on her face, "That's right; how did you know that?" I've mentioned other examples in the blog.
I swear to God the following is a real-life experience with an almost verbatim conversation involving a student whom had never visited me before during office hours. He shows up at the door, and without his saying a word, I said something like "4PM tomorrow". He turned white as a sheet. "How did...?" I said, "Weren't you about to ask me when the test data for the assignment would be ready?" He nodded and said, "How did you know that? I never said a word." He was quite convinced I could read his mind.
I also have had an uncanny ability to predict disk and RAID failures (and even alerted Unix system administrators hours before they confirmed through their own diagnostics). There was a case when a junior Unix system administrator at a baking goods distributor essentially pulled the plug on a SAP database server in the middle of the day, corrupting our Veritas mirroring. Not only had I not had any training in Veritas, but I was able to diagnose the mirroring as the cause of our database problems and to estimate almost the exact amount of time to the minute (3.5 hours) it would take for the mirroring to be reestablished allowing us to bring up the database.
A lot of these things are difficult to explain; for example, in the case of the student, it wasn't like I had a stream of students asking me the same question; in the case of the Wisconsin RAID meltdown, I had never seen it happen before, and Oracle's error messages are hardly suggestive of the nature of hardware issues: I just knew from context.
Somehow I'm able to encode things differently than most people--although nowhere quite like this precocious autistic-like boy in the series whom is able to see connections between seemingly completely unrelated (even future) events, predicting things like terrorist attacks. But somehow he is unable to communicate verbally; his frustrated father is able to infer in general terms what his son is trying to say. In the pilot, it starts with a long lottery-winning digit string. The storyline works (at least in the first episode); the show premieres next month. The first episode link is above; I saw it after downloading it free from iTunes (note that quite often free episode offers expire after a week or so). Let's hope that the series writers are creative enough to keep the quality up through the next few months.
- "A Walk to Remember" (2002): Thumbs UP! Yes, I know: a decade-old movie. I probably first saw this movie on cable late one night last year while working on the blog. Shane West plays Landon, the kind of self-centered, irresponsible high school jock no father, never mind a preacher man, wants his daughter to meet, and Mandy Moore plays Jamie, the modestly-attired, sweet, kind, patient, smart, beautiful young lady next door every mother hopes her son will marry one day. Landon dares a friend to do something risky and to reassure his friend, promises to do it with him (which, of course, he doesn't do). The young man has a catastrophic injury, and Landon is in a state of denial with his conscience. Landon is not doing well in his classes, and Jamie agrees to tutor him with the tongue-in-cheek provision that he never falls for her. (Yeah, right: what young man could possibly resist Mandy's soft voice or kissable full lips or not lose himself in her doe eyes? I want to know how much Shane West had to pay the director to play Mandy's love interest...) But Jaime has been hiding a heartbreaking secret from Landon. This is a tragic love story, but also a triumphant tale of personal redemption.
- "Dr Phil", 2/09/12 episode. A powerful UNCF ad when I was growing up reminded us that "a mind is a terrible thing to waste". How did Jenna, a drop-dead gorgeous straight-A student from UC-Berkeley--one of the highest-rated state universities, with stiff admissions standards--get hooked on heroin and meth, having lost an unhealthy amount of weight, living in squalor and feeding her habit by trading sexual favors?
Let me be clear: I do not believe in abusing one's liberty by engaging in self-destructive, indulgent behavior. (My libertarian leanings on the drug issue have more to do with high compliance costs, dysfunctional aspects and unintended consequences of state prohibition (e.g., a disproportionately high prison population); as for me, I don't even like to take an aspirin when I have a headache.)
Usually the Dr. Phil shows dealing with addicts follow a predictable pattern: addicts and/or their enabling family and friends paying half-hearted lip service for the need for rehabilitation but not, as Dr. Phil McGraw would say, "getting real" (as he reminds his guests, they aren't doing him a favor by making necessary changes in their lifestyle): this isn't your New Year's diet resolution that is forgotten by the time you get the Super Bowl munchies. It requires going out of your comfort zone.
I don't usually comment on Dr. Phil shows, which I watch on an occasional basis, but this one had a complementary tragic story that made me extremely angry (I had a suppressed impulse to throw something at my TV set)--angry at parasitic dealers, at self-indulgent, otherwise brilliant young people (the seed corn of our future), and at clueless parents. (These are general comments; Madelyn, in probably one of the most heartbreaking stories I've ever heard below, is clearly a very loving mother whom never suspected a thing.) Let me reedit from a Dr. Phil webpage:
"My son [John, a fellow UC-Berkeley student and former boyfriend of Jenna] was the most amazing kid in high school. He had a 4.67 GPA and managed to do JV basketball, varsity hockey and varsity track. His IQ was tested at Mensa at 187. [Jenna] turned him on to cocaine for the first time. On March 18, [2010] we were called by somebody who told me that my son had an accident. [John] was in cardiac arrest, and they believed it was a cocaine overdose. The MRI showed that the entire top of John’s brain was dead skin, like the calluses on the bottom of your feet, and they said there is no chance of him having any kind of recovery. The neurologist said, ‘You should just unplug him,’ and I looked over at John, and John was crying." Madelyn says that John now lives in a state that borders the end of minimally conscious. "He can’t talk, he can’t walk, he can’t get up and go to the bathroom," she explains. "Since his accident, we have spent more than $450,000 on John’s care."
The show showed a clip of Madelyn very tenderly and lovingly tending to John, his face frozen with a gaping mouth, his eyes following his mom's movements. I don't have unrealistic expectations about bilateral communication from independently-minded teenagers and young adults. I hope that no other parent will ever have to go through what Madelyn is living through every day; I bet a hundred times a day she is thinking 'woulda coulda shoulda'. She is aware that John made his own bad choices and was bright enough to realize that a girlfriend with a drug problem was trouble. As a bachelor with no kids of my own, I can't stand in judgment, but Dr. Phil has a top 5 list of warning signs that I hope any parent will review.
Guess Who member: Burton Cummings, "Stand Tall"
