Brent Nyitray
Fairlington Blade
Let the mutherfuker burn!
jnc4p
Kevin S. Willis
Michigoose
lmsinca
markinaustin
Arcanaut
novahockey
quarterback
ScottC
yellojktAugust 13 is an incredibly boring day in history. Only a couple of things worthy of note.
1982 – Cameron Crowe’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High opens in theaters across the nation. Based on Crowe’s book of the same name chronicling his undercover experiences in a San Diego high school, the film features a slew of soon-to-be household names, including Nicholas Cage, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Forest Whitaker, Phoebe Cates, Anthony Edwards, Judge Rheinhold, and most famously Sean Penn as the stoner Jeff Spicoli.
1925 – Cuban strongman Fidel Castro is born in the eastern Cuban province of Oriente. Castro will successfully lead the overthrow of the Batista government in 1959, and will survive as the dictator of Cuba until he steps down, passing power to his brother, in 2008.
1899 – Legendary film director Alfred Hitchcock is born in London. Hitchcock is best known for his suspense-thrillers as well as for his unique use of camera angles and editing techniques in order to build tension. Hitchcock also makes quick cameo appearances in all of his films, making for an interesting game of trying to find where he appears in each film. See if you can find Alfred in the opening credits of North by Northwest.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xBxjwurp_04
1521 – After a 3 month siege, Hernan Cortes and his Spanish conquistadors finally capture the capitol of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan. The fall of the city effectively marks the end of the Aztec Empire, which lasted just under 100 years.
Filed under: This Day in History |
All Things in Moderation 
Phoebe Cates was an important person in the development of boys my age. There are some images you can never forget.
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yello:
Phoebe Cates was an important person in the development of boys my age.
I toyed with putting up that scene instead of the Spicoli scene, but didn’t want to be accused of misogyny for celebrating the notion of women as mere sex objects.
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Obama’s approach to laws he finds inconvenient is apparently catching on.
Mayor Richard Berry says it isn’t up to him to enforce the voter-approved ordinance increasing the minimum wage in Albuquerque.
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misogyny for celebrating the notion of women as mere sex objects.
What makes the scene so iconic is that it is immediately followed by the humiliation of Judge Reinhold being caught masturbating. Other teen films not direct by women (take Porky’s for instance) had prurient sex scenes which were of lesser artistic value because they were unvarnished male fantasy without any mitigating connection to the reality of teen sexuality. Fast Times also included [SPOILER ALERT] an incident of premature ejaculation resulting in an unplanned pregnancy and a subsequent abortion. But it is universally remembered as a light-hearted teen sex farce.
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He missed the bus. I loved Alfred Hitchcock’s movies and his television series growing up. That, Perry Mason and The Twilight Zone.
Anyone else see the movie Hitchcock this past year?
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lms:
Anyone else see the movie Hitchcock this past year?
No. Was it worth seeing?
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BTW, lms, I too love Hitchcock movies. I watched Rope the other day with my daughter…great movie. I think there are only 2 or 3 scene cuts in the whole thing. It runs like a play.
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“yellojkt, on August 13, 2013 at 10:49 am said:
Phoebe Cates was an important person in the development of boys my age. There are some images you can never forget.”
The iconic 1980’s Heather Locklear and Heather Thomas posters from Spencer’s come to mind.
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I loved “Rope”. The movie (Hitchcock) was mostly about “Psycho” and really interesting I thought.. My parents took my sister and I to the drive-in and we were supposed to sleep through “Psycho” but I watched the whole thing. I think I was about 10 and I had nightmares for weeks after that. My sister and I used to watch all the scary movies and then come home and scare each other.
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Anyone else see the movie Hitchcock this past year?
Rosanne and I did. We liked it. Lead actors were superb.
Why don’t Scott and George think Murrow was truthful? I remember him as careful and accurate. Someone who did his own investigating. Not a talking head.
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mark:
Why don’t Scott and George think Murrow was truthful?
To be honest I mainly had Cronkite in mind. I am too young to remember Murrow or have a strong personal opinion of him. But as a rule I don’t trust any journalist, particularly political journalists, any more than I trust politicians. I think people who think they are getting (or ever got) the unvarnished, objective truth from a journalist (beyond the most basic facts – a fire took place here at this time – and sometimes not even then) are being naive. Even if, and perhaps especially if, the journalist is legendary among journalists themselves.
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Wendy Davis ramps up her campaign to be governor of Texas.
Texans are ready for change — and for a leader that represents all of us.
Kind of an odd way for her to be promoted given that on her signature issue, in fact the only reason anyone has ever even heard of her, she vociferously opposes what 62% of Texans support. A leader that represents all of us, indeed.
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I’ve been in communication with our daughter, via facebook, who is back in their hotel in Arusha tonight after the three day safari. This is what she said about our niece’s ashes. I know this is probably too much information for all of you but she was so important to me, and I’m so happy our daughter was able to do this for all of us, that I’m compelled to share with you.
In fact, I spread Maggie in a wide open space in the Ngorongoro Conservation Area between two areas where we spotted lions. Just after the ashes were spread a lion that was hidden in a drainage came running towards us. It was unbelievable. I don’t think there would have been a better place to leave her.
I’m so glad I got to do it. It’s an amazing and special place. Maggie would have loved it.
She just made Aug. 13 a special day for me. It’s so weird because I know there’s absolutely nothing of my sweet girl left among those ashes and yet I’m still happy knowing she finally made it to Africa………………really feeling sappy about the whole thing……………..sheesh.
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” I know this is probably too much information for all of you ”
No it’s not. It’s actually pretty cool.
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That’s a nice story, lulu. Until recently I had no idea how many places cremains ended up.
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Good NY Times piece on Greenwald.
Related:
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Brian is now at several of our favorite hiking trailheads here in Utah as well as our favorite dive spot (yes, you can scuba dive in UT but it’s not generally a lot of fun). He’s also on the VA grounds and the two houses where we lived here.
If I ever get back to WA state there are some places I’d like to take some of his ashes to there, also.
And now you’ve made me all sappy, Lulu! I’m so glad it worked out so perfectly.
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Norte Dame has a problem with people trying to spread ashes on the football field.
thanks for sharing, LMS
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Michi, for a second I thought you meant Brian from PL.
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Thanks everyone.
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jnc: LOL!
There are times when I’d like to strangle him, but no. . .
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NoVA: UM specifically lets people scatter ~1 Tbs of ashes in the end zones. Uncle Ted and my dad are there.
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Question for you Easterners:
I’m going to be taking I-70 across to Baltimore and in a couple of places it’s a toll road. How does one pay a toll (I don’t think I’ve even seen one since I was a kid)? Just throw some money in a basket?
Out here in the West where real ‘Murricans live we drive on any road we damn well please and don’t pay nobody. ‘Cause we built them, dammit!
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Just make sure to have some small bills on you and keep the change for the next toll. Once you get to Maryland, get an EZ-Pass which is a reloadable transponder. Virginia just started offering a version with a switch so you don’t have to pay the toll on some roads if you have two people in the car. They ding you for about a buck a month but the first road trip to NYC will pay for itself in saved line waiting.
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BTW…the EZ pass will work throughout the midwest, too, not just on the east coast. I think they call it I-pass in Illinois/Indiana, but it is the same thing. I used my EZ pass on all toll roads when I drove out to Beaver Creek a few years ago. Definitely worth the cost/effort to get one.
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Cool chart showing the change in the age distribution of the population over time, in 5 year increments starting in 1900.
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As an FYI Michi, EZ-Pass also has it’s own dedicated toll lanes with no mechanical gates so you just slow down rather than stop.
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“Michigoose, on August 13, 2013 at 2:30 pm said:
Out here in the West where real ‘Murricans live we drive on any road we damn well please and don’t pay nobody. ‘Cause we built them, dammit!”
Whatever you do, don’t get on the NJ Turnpike. You’ll have a meltdown over the tolls.
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Thanks, gentlemen!
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This is a great commentary on Obama’s NSA analogy.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/08/13/1230756/-Obama-s-dirty-dishes
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This is a great commentary on Obama’s NSA analogy.
Watch it with those links or Troll will call you a racist.
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Read the comments. A good 50% of the Daily Kos readers interpreted the cartoon as racist.
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Good preview of the FY2014 sequester.
http://bipartisanpolicy.org/blog/2013/06/guide-2014-sequester
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A good 50% of the Daily Kos readers interpreted the cartoon as racist.
Meh. It’s perhaps a bit sexist but since it’s an unfunny cartoon based on Obama’s own clunky metaphor you have to run with it.
As for some perceived stereotype of Michelle as a domineering beyotch, my wife doesn’t trust me to load the dishwasher correctly, let alone hand-wash them.
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Good primer on Murrow.
http://m.weeklystandard.com/Content/Protected/Articles/000/000/007/424jlqna.asp?page=1
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Regards news media, never, ever forget this.
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you
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Tweet of the day from Iowahawk.
@iowahawkblog: Key issues of the American left
2007: war, deficits, civil liberties
2013: impertinent rodeo clowns
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Oh FFS!
http://m.washingtontimes.com/news/2013/aug/13/rodeo-clowns-asked-take-sensitivity-training/
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Check out this test given to 8th graders in 1912 in order to get into high school. I’m not even going to try.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/08/13/you-will-fail-this-8th-grade-test-from-1912-video/
I got to swim in an olympic size pool this afternoon and I was so excited I think I over did it………………..couch time. See y’all manana.
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The eighth grade test:
OK – I know I am old – but I passed this easily. Got some stuff wrong. Am sure one of the words presented for spelling was itself misspelled. Thought a cord was 64 cu ft. and looked it up to find out it was 128 cu. ft. and then remembered when ordering firewood in TX one usually orders 1/2 a cord. Haven’t burnt a fire in a fireplace since 1977 so I can be forgiven that error. The arithmetic was trivial. The geography and history were mainly easy.
Don’t know if my parsing was correct.
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Uh, ok John.
http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/john-kerry-little-thing-called-internet-makes-it-much-harder-govern
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George, thanks for the article on Murrow. I still think he did his own investigations with his own staff and presented truthfully. But I do see that the dramatizations from London, which my parents loved and which at some point before I was 12 they knew were dramatizations, are the same sort of enhancement we might call dishonest on a TV news show today. It would be like using unlabeled stock footage of a wildfire each time a fire was reported upon.
My own impressions of Murrow come from watching “See it Now” regularly. As a rule, I did not watch “Person to Person”, but my grandmother did and I saw it a few times. It was pretty cheesy.
I have never thought there was a “Golden Age”. Most journalists most of the time don’t do heavy lifting, and that is no different than it was. OTOH, Dana Priest gets my undivided attention in the WaPo because I think she really does an exemplary investigative report. I think “Front Line” has done some sharp investigations that have been both revealing and accurate. My distrust of HRC stems from a FL called “Once Upon a Time in Arkansas”. It details a story about her as a lawyer that anyone practicing in the southwest in 1986-1994 would recognize but which apparently did not cast much light for anyone else. It followed Petraeus in Kurdish Iraq early in the war and anyone who saw those stories would have supported anything he wanted to do when he became theater commander [I still think that was accurate despite the later “fall” of DP]. It has repeatedly delved into what AQ is up to and what the West was/is faced with and what it has done. It has run Dana Priest’s WaPo investigations a couple of times.
I liked Cronkite, but he just read the news, although he did rewrite the script to suit his delivery. He was not an investigative reporter. I never got the notion that he investigated anything at all, although he did go to Vietnam once and had a strong opinion about that when he came back. Bernard Fall was a great investigative reporter on ‘Nam but he was never published in a newspaper and never appeared on TV. He wrote books, rapidly. He stayed in ‘Nam for long periods. He was killed in ‘Nam. He started in ‘Nam in 1954. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_B._Fall
Cronkite was not Murrow, and certainly Murrow was no Fall. Murrow was not even a Dana Priest. But he was a truthful investigative journalist on TV. At least, I think he was.
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Read the comments. A good 50% of the Daily Kos readers interpreted the cartoon as racist.
I didn’t think it was either racist or sexist. I also didn’t think it was particularly funny.
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There are some uncomfortable issues raised in this piece on GenXers by a GenXer. You guys need to get your shit together before it’s too late. 😉
Similarly, Xers have continued a post-1970s abandonment of politics and the public sphere. It could trace back to the fact that many of our fathers – traditional symbols of rule-making and the state — left home early on. It may have something to do with watching Nixon’s spellbinding wave goodbye while we were still fiddling with our loose baby teeth. This was leadership? This was disgrace.
If you were taking in some of your first lessons about American history as Reagan was running his “morning in America” ad, if you misinterpreted Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic clarion call, if your adolescent sense of self was aligning to the right — as Sarah Palin, Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan’s were – becoming a politician might have seemed possible. That is, as long as your sense of politics was built around hating politics. Is there anything possible besides their cartoonish mix of Reagan and Ayn Rand?
Where are the thoughtful Gen X politicians? Obama – born in the generational borderland of 1961 — campaigned on getting beyond boomer conflicts. But that hasn’t quite happened. Now the Republicans are figuring out how to keep from imploding and Democrats are trying to choose between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden.
Anthropologist Fonarow sees her generation as “tremendously out of step. Where are our voices?” Xers, she says, just think differently about their place in the world.
[snip]
And one thing that’s clear: No one else is going to care that we’re moving into red-Ferrari territory. Sure we’ve been screwed. And there may be no Ellsberg in our bunch, but we drank plenty of American Dream Kool-Aid: the idea of real estate being a good investment, the platitude about working hard and getting a good education to secure a solid footing, and the assurance that you need to follow your dreams and not compromise. We are now the most educated American generation – and the first one not doing better than its parents.
There is a chance that being repeatedly burned by the marketplace may actually help us; our natural skepticism may be something American society needs to hear. Most of our trouble – from the Bush 1 recession to the dot-com bust and the more recent economic pit of despair – has stemmed from unchecked optimism. The Xers have paid for that trickle-down optimism repeatedly.
If we’re going to make the country a better place, more suited to our values, we need to do it ourselves. Middle age is, if nothing else, time to shift out of second gear. If we can’t take a break from the urban farms, put down the knitting and home brewing equipment, and step into politics, business and other kinds of leadership, we’ll deserve our reputation as the generation that never quite showed up.
http://www.salon.com/2013/08/11/generation_x_gets_really_old_how_do_slackers_have_a_midlife_crisis/
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Lulu, I am suspicious of generational labels, aren’t you? I do think there are regional differences and differences even within regions. I know there are differences within families and between families. When an Xer like my friend David H’s stepdaughter acts like an entitled 40 YO child after having been a success in college but 15 years later losing her high paying job in DC and moving to David’s home in Round Rock [Austin’s biggest suburb] it becomes easy to blame a generation. But when Donnie and I have 43 YO sons who were awful in HS but who are big earners in the tech industry and steady providers for their families that is individual achievement, we think.
I think there are bound to be cultural differences between me and my children because the culture has been affected by mass media more now than ever before. But these differences simply are not that great. Hell, two of my daughters listen to “This American Life”. So it’s a podcast now. But how is that different from listening to “Hear it Now” on the radio? “this American Life” is broader in range and more interesting, I think.
Public Schools in many places don’t teach anything remotely connected to civics in elementary school, I think in part to squeeze more reading, writng, and ‘rithmetic in and in part for fear of being labeled “partisan” by the far left or the far right. Public schools don’t have the school banking or savings bonds programs any more, AFAIK. Learning about the township council and the county commissioners and three branches of the federal government in 4th, 5th and 6th grades and saving for defense bonds when the Korean War started and sending Care packages to Europe both from our classrooms and from our homes [and I suspect from some churches, I don’t remember that part] made me feel a part of something bigger. My parents gave blood for Korean War blood drives. We all really did worry about nuclear attack. Really. A lot. So maybe the price of comfort is complacency, but that is a national issue, not a generational one, even if it affects children in some years more than in others.
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Public Schools in many places don’t teach anything remotely connected to civics in elementary school,
In the school district my wife works in, the fifth grade is all about civics. The students spend weeks preparing and rehearsing for a mock congress where they have to give speeches and vote on bills. For the big day, each school brings in local volunteers and politicians to judge them. It’s a little mind-boggling how intensive it is.
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Show off Mark……………..I was too tired to try last night. I did notice the spelling error though. I thought the math looked easy but have forgotten some of the geography and history since I was in school. I guess if I don’t use it, I lose it. I’m sure I would have gotten into high school though back in the day……..even though I was only a girl.
This is an interesting interview with Wendell Potter (remember him) about ALEC and how they’re thwarting the implementation of the ACA by working with the states.
Feeney: ALEC has been actively involved in behind-the-scenes efforts to undermine the Affordable Care Act (also known as the ACA or “Obamacare”). The organization produced a document called The State Legislators Guide to Repealing Obamacare. Can you tell us about it?
Potter: It’s a step-by-step guide that ALEC put together to tell friendly lawmakers what they can do to try to derail the ACA. Efforts to repeal it have failed, so this is an effort to try to thwart the implementation, and it’s certainly something that lawmakers in various states have used or been inspired by.
Feeney: Have they been successful? Can you give us some examples?
Potter: One of the most far-reaching successes has been lawmakers in many states blocking the expansion of the Medicaid program, which was one of the most important aspects of the ACA, one of the chief ways covering more people. The Supreme Court ruling on the ACA allowed states to opt out of Medicaid expansion. ALEC led lawmakers to believe Medicaid expansion under the ACA would create a financial burden on the states, which is of course not true. In the initial years, the federal government will pay 100 percent of the cost of the expansion, so refusing the expansion means leaving federal dollars on the table. By insuring more people, the expansion also removes the cost of treating uninsured patients, which taxpayers currently end up paying for. Nonetheless, ALEC is largely an ideological organization and they were able to persuade a lot of lawmakers. Many states that are controlled by either a Republican governor or Republican lawmakers (or both) have said that they do not plan to expand the Medicaid program, costing untold millions of Americans benefits that they otherwise would have.
Feeney: Some of the most extreme attempts to thwart the ACA have been in Missouri.
Potter: Yes, one of the most egregious is that the state passed legislation that prohibits any state worker from doing anything to help implement the Affordable Care Act in any way. The state also passed a bill that restricts consumer groups from helping people to understand the law and to make decisions on the best insurance options for them. This pertains to the Navigator Program, part of the ACA that provides funding for identifying and training people to help advise others on their options. Missouri established very stringent licensing requirements which make it almost impossible for anyone other than an insurance agent or broker to serve as a navigator, which is of course contrary to the intent of the law. But it protects the profits and the incomes of agents and brokers, which is what is really behind it.
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2013/08/14/health-care-expert-turned-whistleblower-wendell-potter-on-alecs-attempts-to-thwart-obamacare/
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“Virginia just started offering a version with a switch so you don’t have to pay the toll on some roads if you have two people in the car.”
Actually, it’s 3 or more for the free HOV in the HOT lanes.
you don’t have to be a VA resident to get one. [edit: i’m not sure] It might be worth having if you want to ever use the HOT lanes in VA. I had an MD ezpass for the longest time as a VA resident. made the swtich a few years back.https://www.ezpassva.com/EZPages/EZPassFlex.aspx
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Looks like it’s going to be Hillary in 2016…………………yikes. Another election I’ll throw my vote away on a third party candidate. Maybe I’ll just give up politics altogether.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/08/14/hillary-clinton-starts-new-speech-tour-are-you-ready-for-clinton-2016/
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I’m always a little suspicious of these old-fashioned tests that float around the internet as many seem apocryphal. This one is at least more straight forward than most in that it could plausibly be given to an eighth grader of a hundred years ago.
I couldn’t pass it because much of it wasn’t taught to me. I went to school in the 70s when grammar was out of fashion. I have never diagrammed a sentence in my life.
On the other hand, there is much a modern middle schooler is taught that is way beyond the scope of this test. I remember my son having to make and bake a cake that looked like a cell and label all the parts such as the nucleus and the mitochondria.
I truly doubt kids were smarter a hundred years ago. They just knew different things.
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Thanks for the info, NoVA. At the moment I can’t envision having two other people in the car with me regularly, but I’ll keep it in mind!
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I love he underlying premise of the Obamacare story, that everyone *knows* it’s an unquestionable good and any attempts to subvert are done from a misanthropic standpoint.
What is not forbidden is mandatory.
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“Other generations say that we lucked out because there was no major war that took legions overseas, no presidential assassinations, no civil rights battles rocking our home turf. Not true, says Gregory Thomas. “Our war was at home and it was divorce. They were some of the worst divorces in American history.””
from LMS Xer link. I’m rare among my friends in this regard. my parents are still married. majority of others aren’t.
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“Our war was at home and it was divorce. They were some of the worst divorces in American history.”
I think that’s specious at worst and a latching onto an east coast phenomenon of coincidence as correlation at best. Divorce laws were easy in most of the west but tough in the RC influenced northeast in 1960. The northeast caught up with the west in the 70s. It never made sense to force bad marriages to continue. Gave rise to the old criminal defense lawyer’s notion that a spouse got one free killing.
More serious is the rise of isolated single mothers with no extended family support and no parenting skill. The best pro-abortion argument i can think of.
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“Our war was at home and it was divorce. They were some of the worst divorces in American history.”
If ever a statement revealed the self-involvement of Gen-Xers that would come close.
Marriage seems to have stabilized at a 50% success rate. In my father’s generation, he and one of his sisters have long stable marriages. His two other siblings are both divorced, one remarried.
Among my generation, my brother and I are still married. My sister had a very ugly divorce. My wife has a sister in a long marriage but her brother just got divorced.
I call the modern arrangements with all variations of single parents (divorced and never-married), blended step families, and ‘traditional’ 50’s sitcom families the post-nuclear family set up. All the pieces have been bombarded and some split and bounce of other atoms and sometimes recombine.
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It turns out that Al Gore is actually hilarious. This is the extended version of his appearance on Not My Job on Wait Wait. I loved his reaction to the “gay Al Gore” bit.
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I’m rare among my friends in this regard. my parents are still married. majority of others aren’t.
As a Tail Boomer who married a Gen X-er we were almost unique among our friends in that both of our sets of parents were still married.
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“Howe agrees: It’s about time, he says, for Xers to acknowledge limits and step up to the plate. “These Xers spending their lives with this sardonic view, never taking anything that’s happening in public at face value, but always to find the failing, that expresses a bigger problem with X — they are always outsiders,” he says. “These boomer CEOs say that they are maturing to the extent that they should be heading into leadership roles, but they simply don’t want to accept responsibility to the bigger community.“”
This line kind of hit home. I don’t want to be a CEO or leader. My wife just made VP at a trade association. I don’t’ think she wants to go much higher either.
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Mark, I think there are exceptions to every “generational generalization”. I thought the piece was somewhat interesting because we happened to have been discussing the differences between generations yesterday. I think we’re all more alike than different and yet still a product of our time and education.
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I’ll see if I can find it again, but was reaching an essay on education that was about the goals of the system (and what they should be). there’s overlap, but that’s the core of the struggle. why teach civics if it’s about workforce, etc.
1. creating republicans (little r) to be prepared to
2. preparing students to enter the workforce as a social good.
3. a commodity designed to allow the student to best compete for the best slots
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And here’s another controversial piece from Thom Hartmann.
Up until 1980, Republicans said you waited for the market to absorb the surplus of workers, while Democrats said you proactively used the powers of government to put Americans back to work.
But then Ronald Reagan came to Washington, and everything changed.
When Reagan stepped foot in the White House, he said the job of the government was not just to ignore a surplus of workers, but to figure out ways to make a buck off of them. Reagan lived by the notion that profit was king. If America’s businesspeople always and only did whatever made them the most money, that would magically cure all ills with supply-side fairy dust.
He fundamentally changed the way that we deal with surplus workers. Instead of ignoring them, or having the government put them to work, there was now a third option.
Make a profit off of them.
There are a variety of ways capitalists make a profit off of poor and unemployed people, from payday lenders, to “rent to own” furniture stores, to the most radical of them all: Turn them into prisoners.
That latter is the most radical, and has turned out to be the most profitable for America’s capitalists.
http://www.alternet.org/corporate-accountability-and-workplace/thom-hartmann-what-do-you-do-when-you-no-longer-need-your?page=0%2C0
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“If ever a statement revealed the self-involvement of Gen-Xers that would come close”
I don’t follow.
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I don’t follow.
False equivalency. The conflating of the divorce epidemic which is a myriad of small personal tragedies with the effects of a large disruptive national crisis such as WWII or the Vietnam War. It just seems like a navel-gazing comparison. But my parents never divorced so I don’t have the same perspective.
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I don’t know. I think small personal tragedies shape you way more than those other events.
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