Random Thoughts

I have a strange, but vivid, memory, of being about seven years old and hearing my friend Kirsten casually refer to one of their cars as "The Acura." I was SO vastly impressed by the professional, knowledgeable air it gave her (we usually just referred to our cars as "the van" and "the bug"; nothing so technical as their manufacturers' names!). I realized that the glamour of it all has lingered so that I still reflexively look at Acuras (I've never owned one) as kind of an impressive car. I'll read the make name on the back of one driving by and think, "ooh! Acura."

I heard a good music story the other day. In musical tradition, for some reason, the usual order for listing the people in a piano trio is pianist-violinist-cellist. The story I heard was about the famous violinist, Jascha Heifetz, who was playing in a trio with Artur Rubenstein and Gregor Piatigorsky. Heifetz complained that his name came second, not first. Rubinstein said, “Look, Jascha, that’s the way it is. If God were the violinist, the trio would be known as ‘Rubinstein-God-Piatigorsky.’”

Listening to Styx the other day with my kids, I was overcome by the memory of a counselor in our student ward's bishopric lip-synching to "Mr. Roboto." Maybe it's gotten better in my memory over the years, but wow. That was a Dance to Remember.

A few recommendations: I recently read these books by Meredith Willson, the man who wrote "The Music Man." They are hilarious and sweetly old-fashioned, in a self-aware sort of way, and full of funny stories. Even if you don't know all the people he's talking about (there's a lot of name-dropping, but it's all before my time, so I haven't heard of most of them) you'll just laugh at how he describes things. And I always have loved "The Music Man."

We've also been using this translation of the bible as we read the New Testament, and it's great. I lost my fear of other translations when Wilford Griggs, my favorite religion teacher, recommended we read from several besides the King James Version. Of course I love the poetic voice and the rhetorical weight of the KJV, but it's easy for me to get lost in the very familiarity of it all. And Paul, especially, can be so hard to follow—I can never figure out the antecedents of his pronouns, and half the time his sentences seem to have morphed onto new subjects halfway through. But I love Paul, so I want to understand! This translation is excellent. We'll often read through a chapter back-to-back with the KJV, and it's amazing how much clarity the NTME provides.

And this article is good support, for any of my fellow free-range-kids advocates out there.

1 comment

  1. I didn't even know cars had brand names until I married my husband...but we did have some awesome names! The Green Bomb and The Rambo Van, to name a couple.

    Also, I found that article very comforting. Thanks for sharing!

    ReplyDelete

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