SPARKS, Nev.
I can resist no longer; I must join the millions in the Blog-O-Sphere, shaking bits and pieces of memory, opinion and random fact out of my brain and into bytes.
Don’t expect deep thoughts; I grew up on daily-paper deadlines and to-the-point writing. We'll see if I've lost the touch.
Rambling wreck: Despite the eon-ages of work on Interstate 80 around Reno's Spaghetti Bowl, the construction artists missed the wondrous puddle that forms in rain or snow on eastbound I-80 in a low spot at Rock Boulevard.
My 1970 Fireduck loved that puddle: Splash through it and the power steering cut out. Which was OK if I didn’t need to change lanes before Mustang.
For the love of Smokey: A news report about Bear Crossing signs being installed on Lake Tahoe highways led me to ponder TV funnyman Stephen Colbert’s bear fixation. Bears consistently make the Top 5 on the Threatdown list of “The Colbert Report.” (Comedy Central.) Tell the Tahoe Chamber of Commerce to forget inviting him to do a show from the Lake; too many bears.
Colbert refers to TV not-funnyman Bill O’Reilly as “Papa Bear.” If Bear equals Threat and Bill equals Bear, does Threat equal Bill?
Or is Colbert trying to coyly signal something, by pronouncing his name French style: col-bear?
RR Xing: I wish my parents had lived to see the train trench in downtown Reno. When they trekked downtown from the homestead in Sparks, Mom insisted on driving. Dad worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad (30 years) and company rules made all employees stop at all rail crossings, on the job or off. Mom, on the other hand, believed in stopping for nothing, including tornadoes, bears and train tracks. Unicorns, maybe.
Settle down, already: Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are in danger of catching the late-night TV disease that already infects Jay Leno and David Letterman: applause-itis. Main symptom: The in-studio audience hoots, hollers, stamps, swoons and claps, claps, claps. Then there’s the phony standing ovation for Bill Maher.
The audience has been there for hours, with warm-up comedians and other entertainment, getting jazzed. I, however, have had a long day, a headache and heartburn. Start the show … gimme the opiate of the masses.
I miss Ted Koppel. Heck, I miss Linda Ellerbee and her 1970s late-night philosophy: Your body never outgrows its need for another animal story.
Immigration integration: A 2005 book by Russell Shorto, “The Island at the Center of the World — The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America,” contrasts the boisterous live-and-let-live — drinking, whoring, fighting, suing over the fighting — attitude (of the residents, not the governors) with the intolerant zealotry of the Puritans of New England. Whether in New England or New Netherlands, everybody massacred Indians now and again.
I started reading it because my mother’s father’s ancestors arrived from the Dutch Republic in the 1620s courtesy of Peter Minuit. The Van Huycks aren’t in the book, but it’s a good read anyway.
Turns out, people in North America have complained about newcomers since around 1610, when Henry Hudson said howdy to the Delaware Indians. The Dutch built a wall on Manhattan to keep the English out. Didn’t work then; won’t work now, against anyone, anywhere on the continent.
When England took control (at cannon-point) of New Amsterdam in 1664, the townsfolk were from homelands as far afield as Morocco and Poland, and included freed African slaves, Danes, Bavarians, Italians and English. And pirates. And a kosher-deli owner.
Dutch legacies include cabbage salad called koolsla, aka cole slaw; Sinterklaas, aka Saint Nicholas, aka Sanity Klaus; and koeckjes (pronounced cook-yehs), which is why Americans don’t eat biscuits.
Pass the chocolate-chip koeckjes, please.
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