but this tree wins the prize for the best bark.
Today is a day where neither of us have anything on our calendar. Always enough to do around the house, but maybe we should go somewhere. For example, we have never been to Planet Word, the no longer very new DC museum devoted to, as I understand it, words. Everyone loves it, it is apparently for adults as well as others, and why haven’t we gone?
Another place we could go is the National Geographic Museum. I used to see every exhibit at the National Geographic Museum, because it was only one block from my office, but then I retired and then they closed the museum to go through a multi-year renovation, and in fact they just opened it a month or two ago, which partly explains why we have never been there. It is getting raves, so maybe that is what we should do this afternoon.
(Okay, keep this quiet, but even though the National African-American History Museum has now been open for ten years, we have never been there, either. That is sort of embarrassing and I would never say this in public. I don’t think that not going is a sign of subliminal racism, although I guess if it’s subliminal, you don’t really know. In part, it’s because I think I know a lot about the African American experience and, like the Holocaust Memorial Museum, how many times to you have to be voluntarily kicked and knocked on your head? In part, it’s because everyone says that the museum is so large and so interesting that you need to devote more than one visit to see it all. In part, because there is no parking, unless you are lucky enough to find a street space. If you look up parking options, you see that they give you directions to parking lots that cost about $20. In part, it’s because getting out to go to a museum is just more difficult than it used to be since, in spite of the title of this blog, I am no longer only 80.)
Of course, if we do go anywhere…..you will be (among) the first to know.
Speaking of age, I did have a mortality dream last night (I do not like them, Art I am), where I was showing someone around (he was a stranger who somehow came to our house for an overnight stay, and he had a girl friend with beautiful translucent gray eyes which perfectly matched her equally gray lips), and we went into a church which seemed to have a concentration on things having to do with death. I ran into my old (make-believe, not real) friend Marc Tennenbaum (somehow I even knew he spelled Marc with a “c”), who told me he was dying and was at the church because if they were right about dying and afterlife, he did not want to be left out. The dream got a bit more complex, but you get the point.
Perhaps it was related to the third lecture that we watched yesterday by Paula Fredrickson, titled something like “From Jesus to Christ” in which she gave her (somewhat evidenced) opinions about the life and death of Jesus, how the earliest writings about him were Pauls, and then through the synoptic gospels and John. She hasn’t yet got to the point where he becomes a divine figure himself, rather than simply a Messiah, and except to say that back then there were many definitions of “mashiach”, she doesn’t pin one definition on Jesus. With all the ambiguity in her lecture, she does make it clear that there is no evidence that Jesus ever thought about anyone who wasn’t Jewish (he never preached to the Gentiles), and that Paul denied that the resurrection of Jesus was bodily, saying it was a spiritual resurrection (not until a generation later with the gospels did the concept of bodily resurrection appear in writings).
The lectures (3 more) are worth watching, but she is less adept at handling the Q and A from her Scottish audience. Of course, some of the questions are not answerable: “What do you think was really on Jesus’ mind when……..?” or “Where were the women in the story; why aren’t there more of them?”
The hi-jacking, if that’s the right term of the Flydubai plane on its way to Ben Gurion Airport was shocking, to be sure. It looks like the co-pilot wanted to make a name for himself posthumously by crashing a plane with 180 Israelis on board. His first act was to stab the pilot and take over controls. Apparently, aware of noise three Israelis went into the cockpit (I guess it wasn’t locked?) and took down the co-pilot, while two others (not Israeli) on board who were deadheading (no pun intended at all) pilots for Flydubai went into the cockpit, took control of the diving, spinning plane, eased it back up and made an emergency landing in Saudi Arabia. Quite an incident. I guess no one was hurt (other than the pilot) and it will make a great movie one day, but not today. It is an example of a tragedy avoided by both skill and chance, and shows how easily things can go wrong.
Finally, speaking of Ben Gurion, let’s move for a second to the university, not the airport. When I was involved with the American supporters of the university, it received a gift of more than $500 million dollars from the Marcus family of southern California, an enormous gift that enabled the university to do many things that would otherwise not have been possible. Some years later, beating the Marcus family, Michael Bloomberg gave Johns Hopkins University (his alma mater) about three times what the Marcuses gave BGU, an extraordinary gift.
But yesterday, topping even the Bloomberg gift, billionaire Ken Griffin (whom I know nothing about – is he a good guy, an okay guy, or an overall villain?) gave Carnegie Mellon University $3,000,000,000. Yes, that is with a “b”, one third of which will go to do things in Pittsburgh at the CM campus, and two thirds of which will be used to establish a brand new, second Carnegie Mellon campus in Miami, which will apparently be devoted to solving today’s societal problems, as well as giving its students an education and a degree.
I don’t know how many billions of dollars Griffin has, or why he has them, but this might be a good way to get rid of part of his holdings. Certainly better than giving $3 billion to the Republican Congressional Campaign committee.
