Marvin Angelo Mercado Playa del Carmen, Mexico · 2hrs till I marry the love of my life Nicole Marie
Michele Darrow-Sutherland Playa del Carmen, Mexico ·Today
my daughter is marrying her Love !! It has been a wonderful week in
Mexico with many family and friends this should be an awesome day!! Let
the festivities begin!!
Planned a Friday ride with Ray but had to renege on him when I was conscripted to play two consecutive matches that evening in club championships and FND. Had two wins including an upset win -- so felt pretty good about the play.
Hi Patricio.Thanks for the update, and glad you are staying well and fit!. I understand that it is hard to indulge in that sort of Touristy Mexico type of thing
being the seasoned traveller of the country that you are. hopefully you can
have a nice time when you find a nice cenote to bask in as I'm sure you will. I had no idea that there were so many people down there with you!
quite the entourage.
personal training client who is the daughter of another client who lives here but her daughter is attending university in L.A. I picked up Jerry (my work mate on the cruise ships) on the way back home as he was going to do some work for me but neither of us had had breakfast so I touched down at home to pick up Jake and we went to a fantastic greasy spoon called the big six.
before racing home to get Jake to school.
I had a busy day working on this new bobcat that I bought ..I don't know if I
had told you about it but it's a small front end loader thing that I decided to buy to do the numerous landscaping projects I need to do. That may seem to be overkill but I hadn't intended to buy one until I looked on craigslist for prices and availability to rent. Most were in the $65 -$75 per hour range for a machine and operator or $150 / day just to rent the machine.
for a really low price so I inquired. The guy on the other end was a very
interesting character..total redneck who owns a large parcel of land and has
a towing company. He went on and on about all these morons who had phoned
him asking stupid questions or not speaking English as he put it. We had
quite a long chat and he seemed to take a shine to me and offered to bring the unit down to me if I bought it on one of his flat deck tow trucks. I thought about the possibilities of either using it for my own work and then reselling it and or keeping it and renting it out for a return on the investment. All seemed like a good calculated risk so I went for it!
As planned he showed up with the machine and it was everything he described. I let him leave a flat deck trailer in my driveway overnight while he did a
run to the island and I also did a machining job for him so it all worked
out really well. I had started to think about how I might move this thing
around and who's trailer I might borrow etc. I also thought about the fact
that I needed to move machines and stuff back and forth to the cabin and figured maybe I should look for a trailer. As things progressed I thought why just get a regular trailer as the most useful thing would be to have a dump trailer!
I could use it for my own needs and also rent it out! the whole package started to look like a really good thing and potentially a good business revenue source. I could use the trailer to move the machine and then once on site the trailer could be used to take material away then bring stuff in and move it around with the machine. I continued to look at different trailers and then this one comes up last week that is a custom built all aluminum dump trailer only a year old. I went to look at it and was very impressed with the design and the components. The seller and his friend had built it for a plumbing business but wound up hardly ever using it so wanted to sell. I was the first guy to look at it and realizing it was a fantastic find snapped it up !!!
if you know anyone who needs these services be sure to let them and or I
know. I hope the rest of the trip goes really well and we'll look forward to
hearing more! have fun at Alux and give fondest regards to everyone. Cheers, Al
Sir Patrick and Lady Coriander and Chloe Thanks for lovely e-card.Belated Happy Easter.Sorry I had not picked it up. Ihave sent you a newsy postcard which I hope you will receive soon and be able to read as I had much to write in a short space. All well and will communicate at length later.Pat is well and we are in regular touch. Sir James and Lady Patricia.
From The Canon by Natalie Angier. The emptiness of space and the distances between planets and stars:
"To gain a richer sense of cosmic proportions, we can paraphrase William Blake, and see the Earth as a fine grain of sand. The sun, then would be an orange-sized object twenty feet away while Jupiter the biggest planet of the solar system would be a pebble eighty-four feet in the other direction -- almost the length of a basketball court -- and the outermost orbs of the solar system, Neptune and Pluto, would be larger and smaller grains, respectively, found at a distance of two and a quarter blocks from Granule Earth.
"Beyond that, the gaps between scenic vistas become absurd and it's best
to settle in for a nice comfy coma. Assuming our little orrery of a
solar system is tucked into a quiet neighborhood in Newark, New Jersey,
you won't reach the next stars -- the Alpha
Centauri triple star system -- until somewhere just west of Omaha, or
the star after that until the foothills of the Rockies. And in between
astronomical objects is lots and lots of space, silky, sullen,
inky-dinky space, plenty of nothing, nulls within voids.
Just as the dominion of the very small, the interior of the atom is
composed almost entirely of empty space, so, too, is the kingdom of the
heavens. Nature, it seems, adores a vacuum.
The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, Natalie Angier, Mariner Books, 2007
 |
| Sky in the Orion region as seen from Alpha Centauri |
"In early March 1934,
[Army Chief of Staff] Douglas MacArthur and [Secretary of War] George
Dern were shown the proposed cuts in army funding for 1935. Both men
were shocked. They had received no prior notice of the cuts and had not
been consulted on them. Nor had [President Franklin] Roosevelt given
MacArthur any indication of the future budget
plans during their [many] dinners together.
Roosevelt based his
decision on a report from the Bureau of the Budget, which recommended
cuts to the army budget of some 51 percent, a drawdown that,
both MacArthur and Dern believed, could fatally erode military
readiness [at a time of growing military mobilization in Europe's
fascist states]. Dern told MacArthur that he would ask for a meeting
with Roosevelt to present his views, and that MacArthur
should accompany him. MacArthur agreed, hoping that Dern's voice, when
added to his own,
would prove persuasive. One week later, the two met the president in the
Oval Office. In what became a legendary face-off, MacArthur and Roosevelt got involved in a heated exchange that led to a near break between
the two -- one of the worst confrontations between a senior military officer and a president in the country's history.
"The Oval Office
meeting began cordially, with Dern reviewing the threats the United
States faced. Roosevelt listened politely, but as Dern continued to
talk, the president grew irritated. There was something
in Dern's voice that grated on Roosevelt. Suddenly, his irritation got
the best of him -- and he turned on his secretary of war, berating him
and, in MacArthur's words, 'using the biting diction' he usually
reserved for his political enemies. 'Under his lashing
tongue, the Secretary grew white and silent,' MacArthur later
remembered. MacArthur weighed in, hoping to ease the confrontation. The
country's safety was at stake, he told Roosevelt. But the president
turned on him as suddenly as he had turned on Dern. Roosevelt's
face was ashen with contempt. 'He was a scorcher when aroused,'
MacArthur later wrote.
'The tension began to boil over.' It was at this
point, MacArthur later confessed, that he 'spoke recklessly' and 'said
something to the general effect that when we lost
the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy
bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat
out his last curse, I wanted the name not to be MacArthur, but
Roosevelt.' MacArthur's words hung in the air. Roosevelt
could hardly believe what he'd heard. He wheeled on MacArthur and
bellowed his response: 'You must not talk that way to the President!'
"MacArthur, suddenly
realizing what he'd said, backtracked. 'He was, of course, right,' he
later wrote, 'and I knew it almost before the words had left my mouth. I
said that I was sorry and apologized. But
I felt my army career was at an end. I told him he had my resignation
as Chief of Staff.' With that, MacArthur turned to leave the room. But
even before he reached the door, Roosevelt mastered his anger ('his voice came
with that cool detachment which so reflected his extraordinary
control,' MacArthur remembered) and dampened the confrontation. 'Don't
be
foolish, Douglas,' he said, 'you and the budget must get together
on this.' MacArthur left the room quickly, then waited on the White
House porch for Dern to appear. When he did, he was beaming, as if
the confrontation had not occurred. 'You've saved the Army,' Dern said.
But MacArthur felt defeated and, without warning, was suddenly overcome
by nausea. He looked at Dern and then, leaning over, vomited on the
White House steps."
The Most Dangerous Man in America: The Making of Douglas MacArthur
Mark Perry, Basic Books, 2014
In 1501, less than a decade
after Columbus landed on the island of Hispaniola, Queen Isabella of
Spain issued a decree instructing the governor of Hispaniola to ban
Jews, Moors, 'New Christians,' and heretics from
entering the Americas. The queen had just quelled the Morisco rebellion
of Alpujarras (1499-1501), and as Muslims and Jews fled eastward toward
the Ottoman Empire, the Spanish monarchs feared that these religious
outcasts would board ships in Seville and escape
to the Americas.
The last thing Ferdinand and Isabella wanted was for
their centuries-old battle with Islam to continue in the New World. And
they took great measures to ban the importation of Muslims. Several
church decrees,
cedulas, were passed (in 1501, 1532, 1543, 1550, and 1577) to stop the flow of 'white slaves' (esclavos blancos),
as Moors were called, and to deport those who had trickled into the New
World. The Spanish and Portuguese conquistadors saw the
Moors as 'agents of Islam,' 'intractable and rebellious,' and feared
their radicalizing influence over West African slaves.
"But Moorish women did not face the same persecution. In 1512, King Ferdinand issued an order to send
moriscas to the Americas in order to avoid 'carnal relations
between the colonists and native women.' Spanish and Portuguese
officials issued licenses to have these
mujeres publicas ('fallen women') transported from Iberia to
the Americas to serve in brothels. No sooner had they arrived than the
colonists established these
casas publicas throughout the Americas. In 1526, Charles I authorized the establishment of a brothel of
moriscas ('casa de prostitutas blancas') in San Juan,
Puerto Rico, again to avoid mixing between Spaniards and indigenous
women.
The demand for Moorish women actually made the Church decrees
difficult to implement. In 1543, when an order calling
for the deportation of enslaved Moors was issued, settlers in
Hispaniola requested its annulment, 'because slaves and free persons
from this background were few and very useful in a variety of
occupations.' The order was rescinded in 1550. ...
"[In spite of Isabella's proscription], a significant number of the slaves -- 7 to 8 percent by some estimates -- brought to the New World were Muslim. In the last two decades, historians have uncovered texts written by Muslim slaves in Arabic, English, and Portuguese, shedding light on a far-flung population of Muslim Africans enslaved across the Americas.
"[In spite of Isabella's proscription], a significant number of the slaves -- 7 to 8 percent by some estimates -- brought to the New World were Muslim. In the last two decades, historians have uncovered texts written by Muslim slaves in Arabic, English, and Portuguese, shedding light on a far-flung population of Muslim Africans enslaved across the Americas.
Many of these individuals were literate
in Arabic and struggled to maintain their faith, fasting Ramadan,
writing out the Quran from memory, sometimes even
launching jihads against their overlords. Since the late 1980s, most of
the scholarly writing on Muslim slaves has centered on North America;
but in the last decade, scholars of Latin America -- partly inspired by
American academic debates -- are revisiting
their region's early colonial period. Historians point out that in
North America and the English-speaking Caribbean, Muslim slaves were
often given relatively privileged positions on the plantation, whereas
in Latin America, the lives of Muslim slaves were
characterized by 'severe political repression.'
The Iberian colonists,
as mentioned, saw Moorish slaves as particularly intractable and would
shift to importing West African slaves. Yet even the latter were
persecuted when suspected of being Muslim. The French
and English settlers, on the other hand, viewed African Muslims
positively; their encounter with Islam in the Americas was new, and not a
continuation of the Reconquista.
"The fascination with the
African Muslims in the antebellum American South was due to the latter's
literacy in Arabic. Bilali Muhammad, a slave on Sapelo Island, off the
coast of Georgia, made a lasting mark on the
American cultural imagination.
Due to his literacy and leadership
qualities, he would be appointed the manager of his master's plantation,
overseeing approximately five hundred slaves; he gained notoriety after
the War of 1812, during which he and eighty slaves
successfully fought and prevented the British from invading Sapelo. He
is also remembered for an Arabic text that he wrote about Islamic law,
which he had placed in his coffin along with his Quran and his prayer
rug. Bilali's literacy was always a source of
fascination; he would become the subject of children's books, praised
in contemporaries' memoirs, but his learnedness also posed a challenge
to the ideology underpinning the system of bondage that saw Africans as
incapable of reason.
"The experience of Muslim slaves in Latin America was radically different. There was no popular fascination with the writings of Muslim slaves; they were not co-opted upward.
 |
| Bilali Muhammad |
'The Spaniard was accustomed to
the threatening presence of Islam,' writes the Colombian
historian Jaime Borja, describing the persecution of African Muslims in
the country's northern coast. 'But Islam and blackness were truly a
dangerous combination.' Repression, in the name of Catholic purity,
however, only fueled defiance."
Sir Patrick and Lady Coriander and Chloe
Thanks for lovely e-card.Belated Happy Easter.Sorry I had not picked it up. Ihave sent you a newsy postcard which Ihope you will receive soon and be able to read as I had much to write in a short space.All well and will communicate at length later.Pat is well and we are in regular touch. Sir James and Lady Patricia.
"[Mark Twain's] book The Innocents Abroad
bore traces of another influence, closer to his heart: a
twenty-three-year-old girl named Olivia Langdon with whom he had fallen
madly in love.
"In a typically Twainian coincidence, the same trip that produced The Innocents Abroad also led him to 'Livy.' He had met her in late 1867 through her brother Charley, a fellow passenger aboard the Quaker City. By the summer of 1868, he had proposed. It wasn't an obvious match. For one, she didn't share his sense of humor. His wit ricocheted right off her, even when delivered in his rollicking drawl. She was meek where he was manic, pious where he was profane. She came from a rich, respectable family in Elmira, New York, and grew up in a cocoon of Victorian gentility entirely insulated from the frontier society that created Twain. To imagine this graduate of the Elmira Ladies' Seminary having anything more than a passing acquaintance with the whiskey-swilling westerner was about as farfetched as a barroom yarn about giant grasshoppers or jumping frogs.
"In a typically Twainian coincidence, the same trip that produced The Innocents Abroad also led him to 'Livy.' He had met her in late 1867 through her brother Charley, a fellow passenger aboard the Quaker City. By the summer of 1868, he had proposed. It wasn't an obvious match. For one, she didn't share his sense of humor. His wit ricocheted right off her, even when delivered in his rollicking drawl. She was meek where he was manic, pious where he was profane. She came from a rich, respectable family in Elmira, New York, and grew up in a cocoon of Victorian gentility entirely insulated from the frontier society that created Twain. To imagine this graduate of the Elmira Ladies' Seminary having anything more than a passing acquaintance with the whiskey-swilling westerner was about as farfetched as a barroom yarn about giant grasshoppers or jumping frogs.
"Predictably, her answer was no. But he wouldn't give up: he wrote her
some 184 letters over the next seventeen months in which he tried to
sound like the man she might want to marry. He quoted Scripture. He
scrubbed his language of anything western. He presented
himself as a sinner, sorely in need of her civilizing influence, and
disowned the parts of his past she might find unpalatable. 'Don't read a
word in that Jumping Frog book, Livy --
don't,' he wrote. 'I would be glad to know that every copy of it was burned, & gone forever.' "All these saintly noises
sounded a bit strange coming from Twain's pen, but it wasn't as
uncharacteristic as it looked. He loved Livy sincerely, with a passion
that cut past his usual irony and tapped an emotional current of true
intensity. She also belonged
to a world he desperately wanted to join: the upper stratum of American
society.
Over the last several years, he had inched his way up, from
Virginia City to the more sophisticated precincts of San Francisco. Now
he was in the East, about to publish a book
he hoped would be taken seriously by members of Livy's social class. He
wanted the acceptance of America's elites, despite his tendency to
ridicule and bewilder them. Livy offered access to this aristocracy, and
he set about grooming himself for the role of
her suitor.
"Fortunately, it never quite fit. He would never be a proper gentleman, or a credible Christian, or speak sentences uninflected by the drawl that gave his voice its remarkable melody. He couldn't get rid of the West if he tried: it was in his blood, inoculating him against bad, boring writing, inspiring the rhythms that would realign American literature. But he cleaned up enough for Livy, who finally said yes to him in late 1868. 'I am so happy I want to scalp someone,' he roared to a friend. He hadn't gained just a fiancee but a partner in crime, a highly educated companion who could edit his work. As page proofs of The Innocents Abroad began arriving in the spring of 1869, she took it upon herself to revise them -- to 'scratch out all that don't suit her,' in Twain's words. Like Harte, she helped trim the manuscript's rougher bits to create a product that would be agreeable to the reading public of postwar America.
"Fortunately, it never quite fit. He would never be a proper gentleman, or a credible Christian, or speak sentences uninflected by the drawl that gave his voice its remarkable melody. He couldn't get rid of the West if he tried: it was in his blood, inoculating him against bad, boring writing, inspiring the rhythms that would realign American literature. But he cleaned up enough for Livy, who finally said yes to him in late 1868. 'I am so happy I want to scalp someone,' he roared to a friend. He hadn't gained just a fiancee but a partner in crime, a highly educated companion who could edit his work. As page proofs of The Innocents Abroad began arriving in the spring of 1869, she took it upon herself to revise them -- to 'scratch out all that don't suit her,' in Twain's words. Like Harte, she helped trim the manuscript's rougher bits to create a product that would be agreeable to the reading public of postwar America.
"It worked. The Innocents Abroad sold 82,524 copies in its
first eighteen months, earning Twain $16,504 in royalties -- or more
than $217,000 in today's dollars. It would be his biggest best seller by
far, the book that gave him a permanent place in
the culture."
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