What Would Jimmy Do?

I’ve often heard that there is a difference between being smart and being wise. Well, since the weather’s hot and and I’ve already cut the grass this week, I thought I’d just exercise my brain in the air conditioning and think about that…. 

I remember, when our kinds were in school, at most parents’ get-togethers, some would invariably tell us how smart their kids were — we used to hear it all the time. But I can’t say that I remember any of them saying their kids were “wise.” I remember when I was in school, the “smart” kids pretty much had the key to success — the teachers seemed to like them better and they got a lot of opportunities that other students didn’t. It was just a given that they were going to be successful. (Not that I am, but I don’t remember any of the “smart” kids in my class being any more “successful” then me.)
But again, I’m getting a little off the subject — I started out wondering what’s the difference — if any — between being smart and wise?

Smart and wise are both positive words that describe a person’s intelligence and judgement. Someone doesn’t have to have a lot of experience or information to be smart. Wise is usually used when referring to someone that is older and more experienced. And wise isn’t meant to be a one-time compliment — it’s meant to acknowledge a person’s general intellect. If a person is considered wise, it almost always means that they not only possess wisdom, but also have experience. 

So “smart” is a word that stresses intelligence — “wise” is a word that describes someone with a lot of experience, along with knowledge and sound judgement. And smart can be used to describe people of all ages, but wise is usually associated with people who are older and more experienced. A smart person doesn’t necessarily have experience and knowledge, but a wise person almost always does.

Smartness refers to a person’s capability and their ability to learn, but wisdom requires more than just that. Wisdom comes from understanding the real world, and all it’s complexities — not just a limited environment, like school. 
I think that (some/many) smart people tend to process information in a strictly logical way, but wise people also process the emotional, spiritual, and other subtleties along with the logic. 

But it’s good to be smart — maybe even better to be wise…. and maybe if you’re smart, it’s easer to become wise. 
My dad (who I considered to be a very wise person) once told me that a smart person knows what to say, but a wise person knows whether to say it.
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A few weeks ago, this blog was about the guillotine that came into prominence during the French Revolution. Today is July 14th, and a day for celebration. Why do we celebrate a good beheading or an angry mob? Back on July 14, 1789, the commoners in France were none too pleased and their actions created the original Bastille Day.

So what was this Bastille anyway? The Bastille was a state prison on the east side of Paris — built in the 1300s during the Hundred Years’ War against the English. It was built to protect the eastern entrance to the city of Paris.

By 1789, it had become a symbol of the monarchy’s dictatorial rule and when it was attacked by an angry and aggressive mob, the event became one of the defining moments in the Revolution that followed. 

On July 14, 1789, the revolutionaries decided to make a huge statement and storm the Bastille, where political prisoners of the regime were being held. It turns out that on that day, there were only 7 prisoners in the Bastille — 4 counterfeiters, 2 mentally ill people, and 1 count who was sent to prison by his own family. So much for liberating political prisoners.
So was the attack on the Bastille worth it? Actually, the attack was symbolic, but there was a practical reason for the invasion, too. The revolutionaries had managed to loot and steal thousands of firearms, including some cannons. But those things were useless without gunpowder. and guess where a lot of gunpowder was stored? Yep — in the Bastille. 

Before the attack, the Bastille Was actually scheduled to be torn down and replaced by a public square — today only a few stone foundations from the original structure exist. But Marquis de LaFayette, a commander of the French national guard ,and a good buddy of George Washington, sent the the key to the Bastille to Washington — it is on display at Mount Vernon.

So the storming of the Bastille symbolically marked the beginning of the French Revolution — the monarchy was overthrown and a republic set up… based on the ideas of liberty, equality and brotherhood.

After the revolution, in 1880, France’s senate decided that their country should have a national holiday. July 14th was highly contentious — conservatives considered the storming of the Bastille to be too violent and bloody of a day to commemorate. Other possible choices included August 4th, the day the country’s feudal system was finally abolished, September 21st, the anniversary of the first French republic and February 24th, the start of the second republic. But July 14th won out — it not only marked the storming of the Bastille, but also the Fête de la Fédération, which the country celebrated one year later, on July 14, 1790. That day a huge celebration was held on the site that the Eiffel Tower now stands. The day represented the changes that France had seen in the past year — rather than divisiveness and political turmoil, the country was now relatively calm. 

When the law declaring July 14th a national holiday was passed, the law was deliberately ambiguous. It didn’t say which 14 July was being celebrated. Of course, today everyone just thinks of it as Bastille Day.
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Yesterday when I was doing some checking on the validity of something I saw on Facebook, I ran across some interesting facts about both Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant. Both men had a lot of similarities — and — differences. For years, Lee got more respect than Grant — both as a military leader and as a personality. But recently, historians have demoted Lee and promoted Grant on both counts. 

Comparing the two is an interesting endeavor, if you’re so inclined. It’s far too large a subject for the length of these blogs — but I ran across something that I found particularly interesting…..
Robert E. Lee was older than Grant by sixteen years, but both Lee and Grant died at the age of 63. Lee died on the campus of Washington College in Lexington, Virginia, where he served aa president. He died from pneumonia two weeks after suffering a stroke.
Grant died at a vacation cottage in Mr. McGregor, Ny, just outside Saratoga, after a months-long battle with throat cancer — probably connected to his habit of smoking cigars.

Seems like both Lee and Grant were good guys — it’s unfortunate that the Civil War hurled the two against each other in battle. They were both skilled commanders in military science, and also political science.
Some of their quotes indicate they were basically peace loving and opposed to war…..
“Never do a wrong thing to make a friend or to keep one” ~ Robert E. Lee
“I have never advocated war except as a means of peace” ~ Ulysses S. Grant
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Maybe I’m just getting old, but the Internet (and even the local and national news) seems to be full of “factual” accounts and stories that are in fact, not true. This morning, I did something that I almost never do — I looked at Facebook. Actually, it was a mistake — I intended to open something else, but my finger must have activated Facebook on my iPad. I started to immediately close it, but something caught my eye — one of my “friends,” who I have no idea who he/she is, had posted in big, bold letters —“Robert E. Lee owned no slaves, but Ulysses S. Grant did own slaves during the Civil War.”
Well….. there was no source mentioned as where this information came from, or even why it was posted. 

I closed Facebook and went on to what I originally started to do — but, as the day went on, I got to thinking about that statement — it just didn’t seem right. Pretty much everyone owned slaves around the time of the civil war, so it didn’t make sense that Lee wouldn’t.  So a bit of quick extensive research put this statement in the false, or not true, category. I’d guess if it was in the news, the Washington Post would give it four Pinocchios.

Lee personally owned slaves that he inherited upon the death of his mother, Ann Lee. Following the death of his father-in-law, he assumed command of 189 enslaved people. I didn’t dig much more — that was enough to convince me that the statement was false.

When fake information is repeated, it becomes difficult for people to discern what’s real. Unfortunately, we seem to have gotten to the point that when we agree, it’s the truth — when we differ, it’s fake.
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A few blogs back, we talked about ”Friends of Bill W.” Bill Wilson, or “Bill W.” was a Wall Street banker who drank away his career and his marriage, eventually having to spend several stints in a hospital due to alcoholism. 

AA began in 1935 in Akron, Ohio, as the result of a meeting between Bill W., a New York stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith. an Akron surgeon. Both had been hopeless alcoholics. 

Both Bill and Bob had each been in contact with the Oxford Group — a mostly nonalcoholic fellowship group that emphasized universal spiritual values in daily living. Under the influence of this group and an old friend, Bill had gotten sober. He maintained his recovery by working with other alcoholics, but before meeting Dr. Bob, none of the other alcoholics had actually recovered. 
At the same time, Dr. Bob’s Oxford Group membership, in Akron, hadn’t helped him enough to achieve sobriety. When Dr. Bob and Bill finally met, Dr. Bob found himself face-to-face with a fellow sufferer that was succeeding. Even thought he was a physician, Dr. Bob didn’t know that alcoholism was a disease. He responded to Bill’s convincing ideas and soon got sober (apparently never to drink again.) This sparked the founding of AA.

Both Bill and Dr. Bob set to work with alcoholics at Akron’s City Hospital. One patient quickly achieved complete sobriety. These three men make up the nucleus of the first AA group — although the name Alcoholics Anonymous was not yet used.
In the fall of 1935, a second group of alcoholics began to take shape in New York, and in 1939 a third group was started in Cleveland. Early in 1939, the Fellowship published its basic textbook — Alcoholics Anonymous. The text was written by Bill and reviewed by many of the early members. The book explained AA’s philosophy and methods — the core of the book is now well-known as the Twelve Steps of Recovery. The book also included case histories of thirty recovered members. 

By 1950, there were an estimated 100,000 recovered alcoholics, worldwide. Also in 1950, AA held its first International Convention in Cleveland. Dr. Bob was a speaker and spoke, in what would be his final talk, of the need to keep AA simple. He saw the Twelve Steps enthusiastically adopted for the permanent use by AA throughout the world. Dr. Bob died on November 16, 1950.
Today, in almost every city in America, there’s likely to be an AA meeting happening. 
I’m not sure who said it, but it seems appropriate for everyone — not just alcoholics: “I have found that the process of discovering who I really am begins with knowing who I really don’t want to be.”
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I suppose I should be writing this around Halloween, but it’s July and we were at a party a few days ago and the subject of ghosts came up. Actually the conversation wasn’t particularly interesting — that’s too bad, because I think ghosts are interesting. I’ve had a few personal experiences related to “ghosts” and maybe I’ll put them on my list of things to blog about.
But I thought today, I’d just talk about ghosts in general….

Scientist say there is no evidence that ghosts really exist, but there are plenty of people that think they are real. 
There are different types or forms of ghosts — I’m sure there are some/many that I don’t know about but I know there are (supposedly) ghosts that appear as floating balls of light — they’re called Orbs. Poltergeists are noisy ghosts that can touch (and often break) objects in the physical world — they like to make noise and mischief. Some ghosts appear as mist or fog and ghosts known as funnel ghosts show up as blurry spots in photographs. Casper cartoons show ghosts that look like bedsheets with eye holes — I’ve never heard of a bedsheets ghost, but who knows?
The word ghost comes from the Old Germanic word gaistaz — meaning soul or spirit. It also shares a root with the word gasp. Maybe that’s why some people gasp when they see a ghost.

Arguably, the place with the most ghosts anywhere is the Tower of London. The place is nearly a thousand years old, so I guess there’s been plenty of time for ghosts to take up residence. Some of its ghosts include the wife of Henry VIII, Lady Jane Grey (the nine days queen,) and even a bear. The tower used to have a zoo, so that probably explains the bear.

When the ancient Romans wanted revenge on someone they didn’t like, they believed they could get a ghost to do it for them. They could do that by writing a curse on something called a curse tablet and putting it into a grave.

 Ghost hunters and paranormal scholars agree that ghosts prefer to haunt at night because there is less commotion and electronic disturbances. The witching hour is the time during the night where supernatural and paranormal happenings are more likely to happen. Ghosts and demons are said to be at their most powerful during the witching hour. I’m not sure exactly when the witching hour is.

The official term for the fear of ghosts is phasmophobia — a phobia that is also linked with the fear of the dark. It’s one of the most common fears for both children and adults.

There are lots and lots of ghost stories — probably one of the most famous is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by ghosts of the Christmas past, present and future. But the first ghost story appears to have been written in the first century AD, by the Roman author Pliny the Younger. He described a ghost he saw in his house in Athens, Greece. The ghost was an old bearded man fully shackled in chains.

So — maybe you believe in ghosts or you don’t… maybe people who say ghosts don’t exist are just afraid to admit that they do. Or maybe Stephen King had it right when he wrote “Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
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Sometime last month there was a news article that every living person who has served as President of the United States is descended from ancestors who owned slave. I discussed this in a blog entry — if you’re interested in reading it, you can the check the archives for June.

But that got me to thinking about our presidents…. I know a fair number of them have been lawyers — I wondered just how many. I figured a bit of my extensive research could come up with the number pretty quick. 
But — like a lot of things the answer isn’t as simple or straightforward as I though it would be. It appears that more than half of all United States Presidents were lawyers before becoming president. 

But — some of the earlier presidents like Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln were lawyers, but never attended law school or received a law degree. I should note that many of the first “lawyer presidents” participated in apprenticeships to become lawyers because at the time there was no such thing as law school.
Former presidents who did receive law degrees include Rutherford B. Hayes, William Howard Taft, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. It turns out that two other presidents, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt were awarded law degrees by the Columbia Law School in 2008 — more than 100 years after they attended the school.

So my extensive research concluded that 26 of the Presidents have actually worked as lawyers.
I’ve heard it said that lawyers are the foot soldiers of our Constitution — I’ll just let you ponder that along with me….
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Well, I guess yesterday was kind of a slow day for news — apparently there weren’t enough mass shootings to be worth more than just a mention in the news, so one of the stories was about the Barbie Movie. Yea, that’t right — the Barbie Movie.
Our daughter and our granddaughters were/are into Barbie dolls at least to some extent, but I never figured that would lead to a real movie. Maybe someone figures that enough girls have played with Barbie dolls over the years that they’d all pack the theaters…. but for whatever reason it seems that Barbie is shaping up to be one of the biggest movies this summer. 

But — the fact that it is a movie about a doll wasn’t what got it a spot on the news. The movie was set to premier in Vietnam on July 21, but apparently Vietnamese officials saw a trailer or preview of the movie and banned the film. 
According to the news story, The National Film Evaluation Council in Vietnam found a scene in the preview to be controversial. The scene shows a map of the world on the wall behind Barbie — what’s controversial about the map is that it appears to include the highly-disputed “nine-dash line.” According to the newscaster, the line is only eight dashes and extends from a poorly drawn map of Asia. But according to Vietnamese officials, it is a representation of the nine-dash-line. 

The nine-dash-line first showed up on Chinese maps in the late 1940s and, it seems to represent China’s and Taiwan’s claims to the South China Sea. Since it first appeared, China has never explicitly stated what it means. One argument is that the line is a representation of China’s sovereign rights over fishing and natural resources of the area — which is within the parameters of the United Nations Conventions on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS.)  But — other Asian nations in the region are concerned that it is China’s attempt to claim total maritime control of the area. 
China’s maritime claims cause concern because of the economic and geographical importance of the area marked by the nine-dash-line —it links the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. Vietnam has long challenged China’s claim to the area inside the nine-dash-line. So has the Philippines, that had an international tribunal of arbitrators rule in its favor in 2016 and declare that China had no legal or historical rights to the area within the nine-dash line.

Vietnam’s Film Council announced that the Barbie movie would be banned in the country due the image of the nine-dash-line. The Philippines also threatened to ban the film for the same reason, but said they might change their stance if the controversial scene is edited out. 

Over the years, many countries have made it clear that they believe the line is illegal, invalid, and potentially dangerous, and won’t tolerate Hollywood acknowledging or validating China’s claims in any manner.
So this line depicting China’s claim to own the South China Sea has been around for almost 80 years but it took Barbie to get it on the nightly news…..
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A few nights ago, Claire said she didn’t sleep well — she woke up and couldn’t get back to sleep. I said something like maybe she should count sheep. I hadn’t said that in a long time and in fact I hadn’t even heard the expression for a very long time. Seems like a number of years ago, people said it all the time. I guess that was before we had all the modern electronic gadgets to help us do everything, including sleep, like white noise machines and beds that heat, cool, vibrate, etc. 
But anyhow, I got to wondering why people ever thought counting sheep would help them fall asleep….

Even when I was younger, I often wondered why count sheep? why not count cats, or cows, or dogs? Why sheep? Actually, from what I can tell, no one really knows for sure. But one interesting theory is that counting sheep started in a 12th century book of fables. One of the fables in the book was about a king that demanded stories from his personal storyteller one night when he could’t fall asleep. But the storyteller himself wanted to go to sleep and decided to tell him a tale about a farmer who went to a market and bought 2,000 sheep. These 2,000 sheep had to be transported across a flooded river, but there was only a small boat on shore that could only carry two sheep at a time. So the farmer would have to complete the crossing a thousand times, over and over…. and as the storyteller began to tell this part of the story, he fell asleep. This annoyed the king a lot, and the storyteller was immediately woken up to continue. The story was so repetitive and mundane that it successfully lulled the king to sleep. 

But the most popular theory as to the phrase’s origin is that (many) shepherds in medieval Britain used communal grazing land and they were obligated to keep a headcount of their sheep each night. So before they went to sleep, they counted their sheep to ensure that they were all accounted for.

Like most things, there’s at least two schools of thought about ways to fall asleep. Some think counting helps, others think it makes the problem worse. But today, sheep seem a little outdated — if people count something, it’s probably not sheep…. when politicians have problems sleeping, they probably count voters.
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Some friends of ours are currently on a cruise — actually, a couple of cruises, I think. That reminded me of a conversation I had with another friend not too long ago, after he and his wife had returned from their first cruise. We were talking about his experience and he mentioned that there was a “Friends of Bill W.” meeting listed for every day of their cruise. My friend didn’t know who Bill W. was…. he was curious as to who he was (and he probably wondered how he had made so many friends.)

We’ve been on a number of cruises on a number of cruise lines. On every ship, there are always meeting announcements in the ship’s daily schedule for various groups, e.g., the Jones family reunion, bridge clubs, maybe some educational courses, etc. One meeting that was always on the schedule was “Friends of Bill W.”

William “Bill W.” Wilson is the co-founder of of Alcoholics anonymous (AA) — along with Dr. Bob Smith. Apparently when AA members started approaching cruise directors about holding meetings during the sailing and publicizing it in the ship’s announcements, the cruise lines were hesitant. The cruise companies were afraid that blatantly announcing an AA meeting might upset some of the passengers. That’s when the euphemism “Friends of Bill W.” began to be used. We haven’t been on a cruise for a few years, but apparently these “insider announcements” have expanded to include “Friends of Jimmy K.” and “Friends of Dorothy.”
“Jimmy K.” refers to James Kinnon who founded Narcotics Anonymous. NA is patterned after AA, including the same principle of anonymity reflecting that no addict is above any other.

Friends of Dorothy was completely new to me — my extensive research determined that it was originally for gay men, but now encompasses the entire LGBT community. There doesn’t seem to be a clear answer to who “Dorothy” is or why that name was chosen. It seems that the phrase “friends of Dorothy” dates back to at least WWII as a way of discussing sexual orientation without outsiders knowing. It’s interesting that in Britain, the term was “friends of Mr. King” — i.e., a “Queen.”
One theory is that the phrase refers to Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz. Dorothy was accepting of others who were “different” such as the Cowardly Lion who was forced to hide his real identity and live a lie. The lion had a line in the movie declaring “We’re friends of Dorothy.”

But for whatever reason, these “friends” meetings are popular on cruise ships. Most cruise lines provide meeting space as a service members. 
The use of “friends” by all these support groups is probably no accident — after all, “that’s what friends are for.” 
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