James' Blog

I decided to walk back to the dorm instead of taking a taxi.

I dropped my car off at the dealership and was waiting for the 7 bus.

I met this guy on facebook. He was a Buddhist, an IBM engineer, and liked late night baseball. He was divorced but he loved spending time with his kids. He died in his sleep at the age of 47.

a great place to find old recordings of met opera performances

https://www.estatesales.net/MN/Rochester/55902/1825050

• Ikiru
• Meet John Doe
• The Big Lebowski
• Nebraska
• Amadeus
• Being There
• Mulholland Drive
• Monty Python and the Holy Grail
• American Splendor
• Goodfellas
• Duck Soup
• Taxi Driver
• Annie Hall
• Stop Making Sense
• Inherit the Wind
• Paths of Glory
• The Grapes of Wrath
• Groundhog Day
• Margin Call
• A Hard Day’s Night
• Seven Up!
• Crimes and Misdeanors
• Stranger than Paradise
• Network
• The Straight Story
• The Fog of War
• The Roaring Twenties
• To Kill a Mockingbird
• Sleepless in Seattle
• The Truman Show
• Apollo 13
• All Quiet on the Western Front
• 12 Angry Men
• 2001 a Space Odessy
• A Clockwork Orange
• A Face in the Crowd
• A Mighty Wind
• A Night at the Opera
• All the King’s Men
• All the Presidents Men
• Apocalypse Now
• Beetlejuice
• Bicycle Thiefs
• Bob Dylan: 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration
• Bob Dylan: No Direction Home
• Born Yesterday
• Bowling for Columbine
• Bringing up Baby
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
• Cabaret
• Casablanca
• Chariots of Fire
• Chinatown
• Citizen Kane
• Concert for George
• Death of a Salesman
• Dick Johnson is Dead
• Double Indemnity
• Driving Miss Daisy
• Eternal Sunshine of the spotless Mind
• Fargo
• Fitzcarraldo
• Gandhi
• Gaslight
• Hannah and Her Sisters
• Harold and Maude
• Heart of a Dog
• Her
• His Girl Friday
• I Am Not Your Negro
• In Cold Blood
• In Jackson Heights
• In the Head of the Night
• In the Mood for Love
• It’s a Wonderful Life
• Judgment at Nuremberg
• Kundun
• Life of Brian
• Lincoln
• Lost in Translation
• Manhattan
• Marty
• Mary Poppins
• Match Point
• Midnight Cowboy
• Miracle on 34th Street
• Modern Times
• Moneyball
• Moonstruck
• Mr Deeds goes to town
• My Dinner with Andre
• My Man Godfrey
• Night of the Living Dead
• No country for Old Men
• Of Gods and Men
• Oliver!
• On the Waterfront
• One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
• Our Nixon
• Our Town
• Paris, Texas
• Pulp Fiction
• Rain Man
• Rashomon
• Requiem for a Dream
• Reversal of Fortune
• Roger and Me
• Room 237
• Schindler’s List
• Shane
• Silver Lining Playbook
• Singing in the Rain
• Spaceballs
• Stalag 17
• Star Wars
• Star Wars: the Empire Strikes Back
• Terminator 2
• The Apartment
• The Beatles: Eight Days a Week
• The Beatles: Get Back
• The Big Short
• The Caine Mutiny
• The Dead
• The Drop
• The Exorcist
• The Exterminating Angel
• The Florida Project
• The Fugitive
• The Glass Menagerie
• The Godfather
• The Graduate
• The Killing Fields
• The King of Comedy
• The Last Waltz
• The Lost Weekend
• The Magic Flute
• The Maltese Falcon
• The Muppet’s Christmas Carol
• The Ox-bow Incident
• The Producer’s
• The Shop Around the Corner
• The Sound of Music
• The Station Agent
• The Summer of Soul
• The Thin Blue Line
• The Thin Man
• The Third Man
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• The Usual Suspects
• The Wizard of Oz
• There Will Be Blood
• Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould
• This is Spinal Tap
• Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri
• Three Days of the Condor
• Tokyo Story
• Uberto D
• Unforgiven
• Vertigo
• Waiting for Guffman
• Waking Life
• West Side Story
• Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf
• Yellow Submarine
• Young Frankenstein

Roy’s office was across the aisle from mine. I wouldn’t say he was a friend, but he would come across the aisle when he was bored and tell me about his life.

https://www.oregonlive.com/news/2009/10/man_shot_by_wallowa_county_dep.html

Roy was a fundamentalist, bible literalist Christian. This led to certain beliefs

The bible did not prohibit fornication. Roy liked to fornicate.

A man from Lyon and a man from Upper Volta …

I lived in a house in Burlington, VT when I was 21. There were two old men: one was an alcoholic ex-math professor who said his career was ruined by the CIA because he was an anti-war activist and the other was an ex-con who had done time for statutory rape.

Ich werde ein paar Posts auf Deutsch schreiben, damit ich lernen kann, mich auf Deutsch auszudrücken. Nachdem ich viele Blogbeiträge auf Deutsch geschrieben habe, werde ich versuchen auf Deutsch zu sprechen.

Ich bin vierundsechzig Jahre alt, im Ruhestand, Mathematiklehrer und Computeringenieur. Ich möchte Deutsch lernen, da ich Oper liebe und viele Opern mit Deutsch libretti geschreiben sind. Ich möchte auch Französich und Italienisch lernen, weil auch Libretti in diessen Sprachen verwendent werden.

By Kurt Vonnegut: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.”- Kurt Vonnegut