Other Loves

 

💟💟💟 "Love is a many-splendored thing." 💟💟💟  (Songwriter Paul Francis Weber, 1955.)  

                              💟💟💟💟💟 

Love is so much more than romantic love.  This post was initially made for Valentine's Day, and it's good to remember that for Valentine's Day.  Love is something to remember all year. 

There are special times of the year we highlight "love."  Displays of love are wonderful to ponder throughout the year. W & A is highlighting some of the birthday cakes I made, or at least decorated, for some of the people I love.   🎂🎂🎂🎂🎂

This is pretty simplistic stuff, as I'm aware.  Just frosting out of a tube, often without even the tips you can screw on.  (Kind of parallels the amount of photo editing I do on blogs:  just "Paint" & Microsoft photo apps; not trying to fool anyone!) I am offering verbal descriptions next to each photo of a cake.

At 2, this one wanted a cake with both Clifford & Elmo.  At 21, she welcomed the throwback!

Someone else either wanted or was talked into this:  Clifford jumping over the moon.  Taking the old nursery rhyme a new direction.  All the food dye colored everyone's mouths a lot!

A wish for a New Orleans style King Cake, but later in the year for a birthday.  The candles are faux-crayon candles.

He loved (and still loves) red and Cars.   Skipped the frosting for red sugar.  (At the edge is a Baskin-Robbins Thomas the Train ice cream cake.)

The teen wanted a big cookie rather than a traditional cake.  (I'd done them before, but with less personal decorating, so those aren't pictured.)

Resident artist, with favorite colors of red and blue.  There was a bit of hippy chic going on, too.  The family values religious learning, and that has stayed alive through these growing ages.

Monster theme!  Sometimes Walmart and Kroger affiliates (as well as others) have some pretty fun decorations.  The teen asked for these.

Sweet 16 for the one who loves red & blue.  Clouds drifting by in a blue sky to suggest dreaming and daydreaming.  

Eclectic sports preferences.  (UNM is University of New Mexico; LSU is Louisiana Sate.)

The "idea" was basic on this one because the teen didn't have any preferences.   It caught the age, a favorite color, and the high school colors!

The Barbie Movie was a big deal.  Amazon had cute decorations to oblige! 

At 19, this teen still liked The Railway Series.  "Thomas" is derived from this, but the books have so many more good lessons (and higher-level vocabulary) than the various TV series.

Something literary for this young adult.  Amazon was a help, once again, in finding a creative way to decorate.

A couple more for adults.  

However you celebrate with loved ones throughout this year, I hope it's great!   💟  💟  💟

"Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing" song lyrics

Merci Car

"Merci, America."  --Statement painted on the bow of the French freighter Magellan, carrying the Merci train cars to America.

Happy Veteran's Day on November 11th!  

This box car is one of 49 original cars of the 1949 "Merci Train."  

 

After helping out France during WW2, US citizens gathered food and relief supplies for the hungry post-war French.  It was gathered on train cars and shipped over in 1948.

In 1949, grateful French citizens sent back these box cars in the Merci ("Thank you" or "Gratitude") Train.  There was one for each of the lower 48 states, plus one for Hawaii and D.C. to share.  French citizens put in whatever they could think of to show their gratitude: their own military medals, dolls, wedding dresses, and all sorts of things.

Different states kept the boxcars in different states of fitness. Some have disappeared completely.  Many states kept the gifts, however, often at state capitol buildings.

This car is Arizona's, located at the McCormack Stillman Railroad Park in Scottsdale, suburban Phoenix.  A few of the gifts are at a building at this park.  Other artifacts are at the state capitol. 

Some years, this area has hosted Scottsdale's Veterans' Day events.

This interesting park has old train cars, old depot buildings from across the state, and a model train building with many sizes of models. There is also the rare "C" scale train, the largest size considered a model; at this size, the model is rideable!  

Have a wonderful Veteran's Day.

O Scale Merci Car, McCormack Stillman

Mercitrain.org

Merci Train trains.com

Jane Austen Zingers

 

     The "courting season" for Regency England began roughly this time of year, so let's hear it for Jane Austen!  Most of these quips are from Pride & Prejudice.  There is plenty more Austen to explore at other times.

    Jane Austen's work experienced something of a "renaissance" in the 1990s. That trend has not really died down.  In a time when roles were restricted and Austen preserved her own anonymity, her wit still showed through and entertained many.  This is such a contrast to our time, when to be "heard", it seems like you have to give over your whole identity to a public, worldwide electronic platform.  This blog undergoes those very struggles, as it seeks to take weighty information and "distill" it for readers.  Is it authentic enough?  Is the blog writer authoritative enough?  Is the "voice" original enough?  And, yet I feel it's important to reach out through each of my blogs at least monthly.  Certainly, as they are fed through my social media accounts, they have consistent readership that finds value.  My other blog does have higher readership than this, but this one is not inactive nor overlooked.  

     This post, beyond the quotes that anyone can find in Pride and Prejudice, has the addition of the blog author's "digital update" of Austen's only known lifetime portrait with very basic Microsoft tools. Notes on that are at the end.

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” ― Jane Austen, Jane Austen's Letters

 Jane Austen; only known portrait,
a watercolor by sister Cassandra**
edited* 2024 by cmb

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” ― Pride and Prejudice (opening lines)

 “Angry people are not always wise.” ― Pride and Prejudice (describing Miss Bingley's reactions when she could not curry Mr. Darcy's affections) 

 

“I could easily forgive his pride, if he had not mortified mine.” ― Pride and Prejudice; Lizzy describing her reaction to Darcy 

"Is not general incivility the very essence of love?" - Pride and Prejudice; Lizzy being witty about how lovers tune out everyone else 

 "You must learn some of my philosophy. Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure." - Pride and Prejudice; Lizzy encouraging Darcy to forget about his past behaviors towards her (near the end)

“There is, I believe, in every disposition a tendency to some particular evil—a natural defect, which not even the best education can overcome.” - Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Darcy (describing to Elizabeth that his great fault is a difficult in changing his opinion of someone, once they have lost his regard) Also "“My good opinion once lost, is lost forever.” 

“But people themselves alter so much, that there is something new to be observed in them for ever.” - Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Bingley (describing how even a small country neighborhood can keep one interested) 

 "“Follies and nonsense, whims and inconsistencies, do divert me, I own, and I laugh at them whenever I can.” - Pride and Prejudice; Elizabeth (*describing to Mr. Darcy how she amuses herself)

"For what do we live, but to make sport for our neighbours, and laugh at them in our turn?" - Pride and Prejudice; Mr. Bennett to Lizziy (near the end) 

*Jane Austen was described as having bright, hazel eyes; they were dark, dark brown in the original. The mouth on the original was even more "pinched", and Jane was known to have a lively, though private, disposition. 

     The black & white and colorized "engravings" of Austen appearing in her books and on posters are generally "smoothed out" renditions of Cassandra's portrait.

**Both Jane Austen's beloved (and only sister) and their mother were named "Cassandra." Interestingly, though Jane Austen otherwise recycled names for her characters (her own name, "Jane", being a common example), Austen did not have any characters named "Cassandra" in her major, adult works. Oner of her juvenilia works, written around age 12 or 13, was called The Beautifull [sp.] Cassandra.  Perhaps as an anonymous author, Jane felt use of this name would have risked exposing her identity, as the name is not as common as others.  Or, perhaps, it was just too close to her heart to use it as a character's name in a novel.

     "Cassadra", as a name, comes from the Greek for "excels over men."  As a mythological figure, where the name first appears, she is a tragic figure.  The god Apollo fell in love with her and gave her the gift of prophecy. She rejected him, and he changed it to the curse that she would always prophecy accurately, but no one would believe her.  At the end of the Trojan Wars, Agamemnon brought her home as a spoil of war.  His wife, Clytemnestra, was already upset with him for sacrificing their daughter years before in order to get fair winds to sail to Troy.  Clytemnestra had taken up a male lover herself, and they plotted Agamemnon's death. Cassandra prophesied that she and Agamemnon would be killed upon return but, of course, was not believed. And this is what happened in the myth.  This set into course a whole cycle of actions Agamemnon's & Clytemnestra's son and daughter carried out to clear the family of generational guilt before the gods. 

Sunny Days (Personal Reflections)

"Now is the winter of our discontent 

Made glorious summer by this sun of York..." 

Opening lines of William Shakespeare's Richard III, wr. 1592-1594;  spoken by Richard, Duke of Glouster

 

        In this "brave new frontier" of bots crawling our sites and evaluating them, that favor literal interpretations of humans' written language unless specified otherwise, I feel compelled to inform you of what most adult human readers would already realize:  this post is mostly personal reflections, but the blog is not confined to this.  More than that, this post relies heavily on images, pictures of Mexican-style sun face or sun & moon face decorations.  But even though this is a relatively straight forward article about personal observations and possessions, I did get in this little chance to remind us all of an area where we're superior to AI: our critical thinking skills when we hone and use them. And I do not believe, in offering this as an opinion, that I am without standing to make this observation.

     Anyway...   Winter has been dragging on a long time in some places.  Here are some of our terra cotta (and poured concrete) sun (and moon) faces to hopefully cheer you up.

     This poured concrete one is new:  one of my Christmas gifts to my husband.  Some of the turquoise paint was on there, but I made the turquoise eye more noticeable.  The moon part was all turquoise, no accents.  We both thought it would look better with a terra cotta eye, "stars" and other accents, so I added those.

       The terra cotta one below was our out-front stand-by for years.  It was also a past Christmas gift to my husband.  I added the turquoise details for effect.  (Our current house, Mediterranean style, has a terra cotta house number sign.  I painted the numbers turquoise, too.)  The cracks are just the aging of untreated terra cotta, which is like those pots for plants.  The super glue will prevent further cracking, but he's "lost points", too.  He's going on the back wall.  

Rodney Dangerfield dopplegänger?

  

 

        This smaller terra cotta face has mostly been an inside decoration.  He's too small to see well outside.   Turquoise accents also added by me.

     

   This sun/moon was also a gift to my husband.  He painted this one quite brightly years ago.  It is also an indoors decoration.

     And, finally, this coloring sheet, shaded with colored pencil.  It's kind of an impressionistic view and could be a house here in the desert, surrounded by one of the varieties of Eurasian poplar trees that many people plant across the southwest and even midwestern US in rows. 

   

Beyond Dreaming

 

This MLK Day, how about we do something more than dream it?  How about we live it?  --Marie Byars, original quote 

Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Domain
"I Have a Dream Speech"

Euro Christmas Battle

 

Which nativity* is better?

My mom's brightly colored German style?

Or the Italian faux-wood muted style we bought in adulthood?

I may be of German descent, but I like the Italian nativity better!

*Wise Men to come later.  We celebrate their coming on Epiphany, January 6th, so I put them out around New Years.  We've acquired 7 for our Italian set a nice, sacred number. Since the Bible only numbers the gifts and not the men, we put them all out!

     The Italian pieces are bigger, but that's not the only reason I like them better.  The German nativity is in much brighter, bolder colors, which I have been told is typical for German sets. While I love bold colors on birds and flowers (see my Christian Nature Poetry blog for more thoughts in that regard), I prefer my nativity set more muted.  

     Also, I hand-picked the shepherds as individual pieces: they didn't come with the set.  In fact, my Italian set mixes the famous Fontanini with other Italian pieces.  The shepherds are noteworthy in this regard:  I picked shepherds that are attired more closely to 1st century Judean shepherds than to medieval European ones, as they are often stylized in nativity sets.  One has his sheep slung over is shoulder.  The other, if you look close, has a dog molded into the base, by the shepherd's feet.  I love dogs.  I hope one got to go see the Baby Jesus.

     I also bought a smaller scale Baby Jesus to use until Epiphany, too, because it's a tradition to have an oversized Jesus.  I wanted one more to scale.  Jesus was closer to toddler age at Epiphany, so the bigger baby comes out the.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

FRÖHLICHE WEIHNACHTEN!

BUON NATALE!    

Patriot of Another Country

 
    July, of course, celebrates American Independence Day.  Demonstrations of patriotism will abound. There are patriotic posts scattered throughout this blog. 

     This July, the blog is looking at quotes from a German patriot, Chancellor Otto von Bismark of the old German Empire.  I never used to seek out Bismark quotes because I thought his militarism (which united the Germans under the Prussians) was a big factor in the long-term problems Germany created, via starting two world wars.   

     Bismark lived from 1815-1898.  Though he served as Chancellor of the German Empire from 1871-1890, when he began his career, there was no unified Germany.  There was a collection of princedoms and kingdoms that all spoke German dialects.  (The High German standardized initially by Martin Luther's translation of the Bible into German in the 1500s was also known across these principalities.)

     There had been movements to unify Germany in peaceful ways.  These movements had democratic unification in mind.  Most notable were student movements of 1848.  When these failed, many of the more democratic-minded young Germans fled to the US or Canada.

     Eventually, German was forcefully and militarily unified under the German Kaisers, with Otto von Bismark heading these efforts for a time.  Ultimately, Kaiser Wilhelm II's vanity would not allow him to share power nor the public stage with Bismark, who was forced into retirement.  Wilhelm did not rule well without Bismark to guide and restrain him.  Wilhelms decisions and pride led Germany into World War I and the end of the Prussian monarchy.

Caricature of Bismark by William Stolz, d. 1893 (Public Domain)

     In looking at Bismark, however, it turns out there was far more to him than militarism.  Scattered across the internet are interesting quotes attributed to Bismark.  It is very difficult in this case to track down when and in what circumstances he said each.

     As I curated this list, I tried to group them by topic, bridged by attributed quotes that covered the previous and the next topic:

     

• That which is imposing here on earth has always something of the quality of the fallen angel who is beautiful but without peace, great in his conceptions and exertions but without success, proud and lonely. 
• Only a fool learns from his own mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.
•  Fools learn from experience. I prefer to learn from the experience of others.
•  What we learn from History is that no one learns from History.
•  A really great man is known by three signs-generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success.
•  Man cannot control the current of events. he can only float with them and steer.
•  The life of a man is like a game of chess, which he plays according to his art.
•  Life is like being at the dentist. You always think that the worst is still to come, and yet it is over already.
•  A bad plan that is well executed will yield much better results than a good plan that is poorly executed.
•  Love is blind; friendship tries not to notice.
•  Hounds follow those who feed them.
•  I have never lived on principles. When I have had to act, I never first asked myself on what principles I was going to act, but I went at it and did what I thought fit. I have often reproached myself for my want of principle.
•  When you want to fool the world, tell the truth.
•  People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.
•  Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.
•  Anyone who has ever looked into the glazed eyes of a soldier dying on the battlefield will think hard before starting a war. 
• A generation that has taken a beating is always followed by a generation that deals one.
•  A little caution outflanks a large cavalry.
•  Woe to the leader whose arguments at the end of a war are not as plausible as they were at the beginning.
•  Show me an objective worthy of war and I will go along with you.
•  You can do everything with bayonets, but you are not able to sit on them.

       Otto von Bismarck in Retirement, 1881
(Public Domain)

What's Your Path?

 
Some quotes to ponder as you hike this summer... or not 😉.  This blog, in curating quotes, seeks to find dates and where these quotes were made across most of this site.  That data for all these quotes was not easy to find.  However, this is not just from one list in one one place.

"Only those who wonder will find new paths."  --Norwegian Proverb

"Curiosity keeps us heading down new paths." --Walt Disney

"No love, no friendship can cross the path of our destiny without leaving some mark on it forever."  --Francois Mauriac (French novelist of the early 20th century and lifelong Roman Catholic)

"Mountains cannot be surmounted, except by winding paths."  --Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (German poet)

"Difficult roads often have beautiful destinations."  --Zig Ziglar (American motivational speaker)

"In order to get through the hardest journey, we only need to take one step at a time... but we MUST keep on stepping."  --Chinese Proverb

"An interesting journey never follows a straight path."  Marjan van der Belt ([female] New Zealand-American Ecological Economist)

Near Prescott, AZ, with my husband

"Do not go where the path may lead; go instead where there is no path and leave a trail."  --Ralph Waldo Emerson (American 19th philosopher & author; co-founder of the Transcendental Meditation religious movement)

"In life, you either find your own path and lead a authentic life,  or follow others and become part of a herd."  --Paul T.P. Wong (Canadian Psychologist)

"Pursue some path, however narrow and crooked, in which you can walk with love and reverence."  ---Henry David Thoreau (American 19th philosopher & author; co-founder of the Transcendental Meditation religious movement)

"Your Word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path." --King David of Israel, ~1000 B.C. in Psalm 119:105

I enjoyed "roaming" a lot as a child and teen in Gallup, NM.  I also got interested in the works of Henry David Thoreau.  I liked some of his other works better than his best-known Walden.  He even had an essay (growing out of an original talk) called "Walking." The "Walking" essay is referenced elsewhere on this site. 

Changes Prompted by 1918 Flu Pandemic

“The eventuality of a global pandemic was certain, leaving uncertain only the timing and impact.” ― Roger Spitz; Disrupt With Impact: Achieve Business Success in an Unpredictable World, 2024  [later ed.]

      The 1918 global flu pandemic, coming in the wake of WWI, was a travesty.  So many people were shaken by it, and by their responses (sometimes more selfish than they would have thought of themselves), as well as their survivors' guilt, that first-hand accounts of the flu largely disappeared.   

Seattle, Washington; 39th Infantry preparing for deployment to France

     However, the whole tragedy prompted some positive changes that stay with us.  Here is a slide show accounting of some of those changes:

Daily Mail: 10 Major Changes Resulting from the 1918 Flu Pandemic
 
     I was really surprised this event was given so much credit for countering "eugenics."  Eugenics was the study of how to arrange human reproduction to increase the passing down of "desirable" inherited characteristics. That meant so-called less-desirable people were forcibly sterilized (including in the U.S.) There were attempts to promote abortion more heavily among the poor. The 1918 pandemic helped people realize that the conditions of poverty, not personal "defects", allowed diseases to spread more rapidly among the poor.
     Francis Galton, an Englishman, was largely responsible for first developing this line of thinking.  In the U.S., Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, came to believe in eugenics.  (It's not true, however, that she did it for racially motivated reasons.)  In "The Eugenic Vale of Birth Control Propaganda" (1921), she wrote that "the most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective."  Eugenics was finally dealt its death blow after the Nazi's abhorrent use of it.

    Although this is framed as a reaction piece, I believe some of the education I have had gives me a vantage point in evaluating such matters. 

Luckiest Man Alive

 

"Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth."  --from Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man Alive" Speech. 04 July 1939 

 

Major League Baseball just started up.  Normally, I don't give a lot of attention to sports, first-run movies or basically any entertainment that make the rich richer.  I have one exception:  I follow the Yankees somewhat and buy a little of their gear. This is due to how impressed I was with Pride of the Yankees, the Lou Gehrig story, when I was a kid.

Here's a YouTube video with both the real Lou Gehrig with an animated story behind it.  There is not much of the original speech surviving.  In fact, it had to be crafted from various memories.

The speech was first given at a Fourth of July double header in 1939.

The Luckiest Man

Here's a YouTube version that has that short amount of Gehrig footage plus the movie version of his famous speech, starring Gary Cooper:  

Gehrig's 4th of July Farewell Speech

Sports Illustrated: Text of Gehrig's Speech 

Here are some fun photos as an homage.