Month: December 2016

Hidden Rochester

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seth-green-drive

Rochester has so many hidden or little known beauty.  This is a great one mile back and forth down and up an incline walk. Well known to fishermen and fisherwomen, but really not known outside that circle.   Plus on a day we had a foot of snow, look how clean the road is.

12/16/16

© words and picture by Dan DeMarle 2016

I have a secret, I regularly travel in time.

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I have a secret. I have magical powers.  I routinely time travel to the past and talk to the people there.  Depending on my mood, I may talk to great scientists, great leaders, or even great mystical and spiritual leaders.  Thanks to my magical powers I have seen Jesus walk to Jerusalem, I have seen the fall of Troy, and I have have spent time in precolonization Africa. Thanks to my time travel powers I have been in Philadelphia for the founding of the United States.

My powers also allow me to travel into the future and to other planets. I have spent considerable time on the surface of Mars.  I have also traveled on ships between the stars. I have been there when Atlantis rose from the depths.  I have also stood on the last rock at the end of time. It was cold.  There was a good restaurant there, however.

I have also seen sad and horrible things….I have seen things that touched my soul, and subtly changed me from who I was to who I am.

I gained my secret time travel powers from the greatest invention man has ever made.  Its called a book.  It can also give you the same power. Open a book and you are time traveling and talking to a person who wrote those words, sometimes months ago, or maybe even more than a century ago.  So pick up a book,  and start your time travel adventure.

 

 

Ken Burns 2016 Stanford Commencement Speech

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I just recently hear of Ken Burns 2016 Stanford Commencement Address. I wish it had burst through to my bubble earlier. If you think that President Elect Trump is awesome, then you might want to miss the middle part. and then turn it back on for the last few minutes.

“Part of the reason this kind of criticism sticks is because we live in an age of social media where we are constantly assured that we are all independent free agents. But that free agency is essentially unconnected to real community, divorced from civic engagement, duped into believing in our own lonely primacy by a sophisticated media culture that requires you – no, desperately needs you – to live in an all-consuming disposable present, wearing the right blue jeans, driving the right car, carrying the right handbag, eating at all the right places, blissfully unaware of the historical tides that have brought us to this moment, blissfully uninterested in where those tides might take us.”

“Look. I am the father of four daughters. If someone tells you they’ve been sexually assaulted, take it effing seriously. And listen to them! Maybe, some day, we will make the survivor’s eloquent statement as important as Dr. King’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail.”

“Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country – they just make our country worth defending.
Believe, as Arthur Miller told me in an interview for my very first film on the Brooklyn Bridge, “believe, that maybe you too could add something that would last and be beautiful.”

 

Here is the transcript of the Speech