As B/4, Phil
Phil will be so missed. A legend in his own right, as Pamela J. Crawford said.
When I met him, we were immediate friends. I lived in Lancaster, he lived in York, and when you meet hundreds of miles away, that makes you neighbors. I was on the road at the time, and reading On the Road at the time, and I wrote his name and number inside the back cover.
About 25 years ago he bought a James Dean book from a mall bookstore in York. Unbeknownst to him, the person ringing him up was a friend of mine and she told him she has a friend from Lancaster who was a James Dean fan too. He said, "Yes, I know Ben Kreider."
That's Phil for you... putting himself out there. He was setting himself up to baffle her but he gambled and won, and here I am all these years later recounting one of his throwaway lines.
He went to Millersville in the early 50's and would tell me stories of his stuffy, old professors... they were all the people the current buildings were named after. I'm reminded of the African proverb, "When an old man dies, a library burns down."
I just re-watched an interview I did with him 15 years ago. Immediately on the video I was laughing over some hilarious anecdote he was finishing up. The anecdote is lost to time, but his punchline isn't- so filthy, so perfect, so unfit for public consumption. As he started a new riff the tape inexplicably gets cut just as he was certainly about to top himself. Maddening.
He used to say his aunt was so cheap she'd squeeze a buffalo nickel until it would shit fifteen cents.
Once I was watching a parade with him and he said, "When we would have parades in my small town of West York there were horses and these two old little ladies would go out in the street with their dust pans and fight over the horseshit to put on their roses." That is a gold nugget of an anecdote.
He used to say that a person in one of his stories was so ugly that they could make a four-day clock run six days backwards. (I'm assuming that Phil is the only one who told that joke after the mid-century mark.)
He was not delicate with his words! But he was a good guy. I think about him often when people seem too sensitive about some improper wording. Judging people by their words can miss the point. You only know the real person if you look at their intention.
Of James Dean, he was fond of saying, "We are not to long that he is gone, but to rejoice forever that he was." The same can be said for Phil.
I wish I could have gone to Fairmount for his memorial yesterday. If I ever want to be reminded of him though, I can always look at his Christmas card I had decided to hang on the wall of my room rather than file away. I had liked the significance of how he had signed it- "As B/4, Phil."
Yep, Phil will always be as before.
July 11, 2020
Phil with Gretel in 2016.
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Biden's press conference is proving beyond any doubt that he is better than Trump. There will be clips that make him look like an idiot, no doubt, but he speaks more intelligently, with more substance, and with a world more character than Trump.
It's still not proving that he would be the best one to beat Trump. He ended on a ridiculous note, saying that he wouldn't drop out if it was shown that somebody was more likely to beat Trump. He'd only drop out if it was shown that he could not beat Trump. We need to go with the person most likely to beat Trump.
July 11, 2024
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From Existential Comics:
Søren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher, claimed that if a person behaved perfectly rationally they would be so discordant with civil society that people would deem them mad.
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Walked out of my house this morning and saw some daredevil on one of those electric unicycles. He was riding faster than the speed limit, and weaving back and forth so sharply that he could touch the street. And he was filming himself!
If I could go back 40 years and ask myself what I thought the future might look like, this might be it. If that guy could look 4 days into the future, he'll find out he's not going to exist.
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Hey all, a few weeks ago I asked if anyone wanted me to mail them a post card. Some of you did and I'm mailing them out tomorrow.
If anyone else would like one, just message me your address. It doesn't matter to me if we barely know each other or if we see each other every day. If your fridge is in need of a little dressing, just let me know. (But you must supply your own magnet.)
July 11, 2021
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Back in 1721, George Kreider couldn't have possibly conceived of his great- great- great- great- great- great- great- great- granddaughters having a squirt gun shootout at his grave nearly three hundred years after he died. And I'm sure we can't imagine what our eighth great-grandchildren will be doing in 2321, presuming we even make it there.
July 11, 2021
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Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic now all have 20 grand slams, and will all be ready to compete in the US Open in a month and a half at ages 40, 35 and 34 respectively. Wow!
July 11, 2021
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Excellent breakfast for Wimbledon– chocolate blueberry pancakes, bacon, sausage, peaches, grapefruit, coffee cake, mango juice and coffee in my Wimbledon mug. Somehow this first set made it to a tie-break!
July 11, 2021
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It's been awhile since my phone did something weird in my pocket. It pulled up a picture of my great-uncle and was a click away from posting it with 20 random people tagged. Some of you were very close to being 100% baffled by me.
July 11, 2020
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If Donald Trump were running against Donald Trump Jr. what insulting things would he say about him? It's fun to think about.
July 11, 2017
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I have an important question in honor of palindrome week.
Do geese see God?
July 11, 2017
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We've gone from "no collusion, fake news, sad" to "collusion isn't necessarily a crime" to "collusion is the best."
July 11, 2017
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Emma's eating a swiss cheese, pepperoni, onion, olive, mustard sandwich on toast. About six weeks left before we get a new baby.
July 11, 2015
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I have no idea why I thought my Yoda shirt would attract fewer nerd conversations than my Millennium Falcon shirt...bit I did, and it didn't.
July 11, 2015
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Career Objective from a resume that was just sent to me:
"Hord Wqorking Civil Engineei looking to Work With a Well Known constrution company That Can Allow Me to Provide technical Expertise .to Contribute to Its success."
And it was for a driving job!
July 11, 2015
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Just saw one of those yellow 'support our troops' ribbon magnets. You don't see those much anymore... I wonder if everybody felt a tinge treasonous when they removed them.
July 11, 2010
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For two days, two of my three remote controls only worked when held an inch away from the thing they controlled. They had new batteries and were held at every possible angle. Now they work fine. One controlled the stereo and one controlled the cable. What is going on??? Solar flares?
July 11, 2009
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Essayist E.B. White was born on this day in 1899. This is a letter that he wrote back to a man who wrote to him saying that he had lost hope.
Dear Mr. Nadeau:
As long as there is one upright man, as long as there is one compassionate woman, the contagion may spread and the scene is not desolate. Hope is the thing that is left to us, in a bad time. I shall get up Sunday morning and wind the clock, as a contribution to order and steadfastness.
Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say, the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed, sometimes rather suddenly. It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day.
Sincerely,
E. B. White
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On this day in 1804, former Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton was mortally wounded in a duel with Aaron burr, thus serving for two-plus centuries as a quintessential example of total foolishness.
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Babe Ruth made his major league debut on this day in 1914.
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Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird was first published on this date in 1960.
“The one thing that doesn’t abide by majority rule is a person’s conscience.”
And U.S. presidential elections. Wouldn't it be weird if a person's conscience abided by the electoral college? That would be a much worse system.
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On this day in 1962 in Project Apollo, NASA announced lunar orbit rendezvous as the means to land astronauts on the Moon, and return them to Earth.
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On this day in 1979, America's first space station, Skylab, was destroyed as it re-enters the Earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean.
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John Quincy Adams was born on this day in 1767. He was the first president to be photographed, and if you ask my daughter to tell you one fact about him, she would say that he used to sneak off and swim naked in the Potomac. I'm not sure that would fly today.
He said, "Try and fail, but don't fail to try."
My god, just imagine how much Yoda would hate that guy's guts.
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Lady Bird Johnson left us on this day in 2007. She passed the American Beautification Act, getting rid of majority of billboards. First Eisenhower introduced the interstate highway system, which took all the traffic off Route 66, and then she took away the primary way to advertise for the businesses that were left.
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Tommy Ramone left us on this day in 2014. He was the last of of the original Ramones, each of which left us too early.
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Sorry to hear that Milan Kundera proved his mortality, at 94. From Immortality:
"To be mortal is the most basic human experience, and yet man has never been able to accept it, grasp it, and behave accordingly. Man doesn't know how to be mortal."
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Other notable birthdays- Tab Hunter (1931), George Gershwin (1937)
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When Bertrand Russell was asked how fascism starts, he said, "First they fascinate the fools, then they muzzle the intelligent."
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Howard Suber, The Power of Film- "In all these films the [Social Network, Citizen Kane] you have characters who think they are unloved, when in reality they are incapable of loving other people. They are narcissists.
Joseph Cotten's Jedediah Leland in Citizen Kane- "Love, that's why he did everything. That's why he went into politics. We weren't enough, he wanted all of the voters to love him too. That's all he really wanted out of life was love."
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Robert McNamara : I was on the island of Guam in his [General Curtis LeMays'] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.
Interviewer : Were you aware this was going to happen?
Robert McNamara : Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it. It's almost impossible for our people today to put themselves back into that period. In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! During the Kennedy Administration, they designed a one-hundred Megaton bomb! It was tested in the atmosphere; I remember this.
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The Onion- Woodpecker Having Difficulty Remembering Tree Where He Got The Really Good Bugs That One Time
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Blistering Trump analysis as always, from conservative writer David Frum.
"At every step in this story, the formula I’ve mentioned in previous essays continues to hold: “Many secrets. No mysteries.” Although crucial details remain concealed, the core narrative has been visible from the start. An American private citizen worked with foreign spies to damage one presidential candidate and help the other. That president accepted the help. When caught, the private citizen lied. When the private citizen was punished, the president commuted his sentence."
http://on.theatln.tc/mZ6n6RV
July 11, 2020
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William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying- "I could just remember how my father used to say that the reason for living was to get ready to stay dead a long time."
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Ernest Hemingway- "An intelligent man is sometimes forced to be drunk to spend time with his fools."
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Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses- "What kind of idea are you? Are you the kind that compromises, does deals, accomodates itself to society, aims to find a niche, to survive; or are you the cussed, bloody-minded, ramrod-backed type of damnfool notion that would rather break than sway with the breeze? – The kind that will almost certainly, ninety-nine times out of hundred, be smashed to bits; but, the hundredth time, will change the world."
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Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory- "One is always at home in one's past..."
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