Boldface names IV
Here it is, the famous boldface names entry. Enjoy!
This was the first year in a long time I haven’t been able to issue my usual “Declaration of Spring” to my former counterpart Brian Foster at Nationwide in person. However, the digital version will have to do. Therefore, Brian, it is now Spring! (For the uninitiated, I always decide it’s spring ridiculously early, then complain to people that they’re still wearing their coats. This is to compensate for all the weeks where people tease me about what I’m wearing. Even when it gets back down to zero, I steadfastly maintain that spring has arrived. It’s part of my English stubbornness.)
Yesterday I re-watched The Fog of War, the Oscar-winning documentary about Robert McNamara. It’s surprising how much of that movie is applicable to today’s current Iraq conflict. Based on some of the statements, I doubt McNamara would want to be involved in our war. The most salient part, I thought, was when he told the story of meeting the North Vietnamese at a dinner in the 1990′s. McNamara explains that from the American perspective, the Vietnam War was a cold-war conflict we fought as a proxy. But the Vietnamese, he said, just saw us as the substitute for the French colonialists. The man he talked to said, “You have to think about the war from our perspective. We were never going to give up!” McNamara said that was a fundamental problem with US thinking about the war. I don’t need to spell it out for you — do today’s Iraqis think we’re colonizers rather than liberators?
Speaking of Oscars, I’m still trying to figure out what to wear to local celebrity Kevin Wood’s Oscar party this Sunday. We’ve been told to wear something from the movies, and since my mom threw out my tiara in 1996, I cannot go as The Queen. I hate these costume parties. I always was the person going to Halloween as a fifth-grader or “someone who does not celebrate Halloween.”
Finally, no entry would be complete without a shout out to Jim Fields, who gave us his old bread maker as a last resort in the carb wars. We now turn out oddly-shaped loaves of bread every week. Things are so good these days.