Random Notes from a New Blogger

“LOST MUSKET DIARY” Wednesday October 15, 2014

Sunny w-high clouds 81°F/28°C in Rancho Santa Margarita, CA   

Buongiorno et Bonjour!

                After several years of posting on Facebook, I’ve concluded that it and the other “social media” sites are giant electronic conveyor belts constantly delivering an endless stream of information. Some of which is actually useful. Closing your web browser or turning off your IPhone or laptop is like turning off a garden hose or, better yet, a fire hydrant. What it delivers when the faucet is turned on remains there, just waiting to be turned loose once more the next time you open the valve. Last year I stepped up my own participation in social media when I started posting a chronicle of my extended visit to Italy with my “Rome Diary” on Facebook. Happily for me, I received a fair number of comments and compliments on my unorthodox travel log. Since my return to the US coincided with some major life changes for me including a divorce and a move back to Southern California and a whole new life as an elderly single male, I couldn’t exactly continue posting something called “Rome Diary.” However, the response to my Italian adventure was of such a positive nature that I decided to continue with my writing efforts. The question was, what means do I use for my “bully pulpit.” So, I decided on a blog. It’s just me and my computer, the internet and thou, gentle reader. It’s the perfect outlet for a retired news guy who looks at every event in life’s passing parade as a potential news story and has developed an indelibly ingrained habit of writing a news story on these events and broadcasting them far and wide. And that gentle reader is how http://mikebotula.blogspot.com/ came to be. No assignment editor. No other writer, unless I invite one to chip in. No producer. No news director…..just you and me….and maybe the NSA.

                Several times a week I sit down at my trusty Hewlett-Packard and start writing. As soon as I post the day’s masterpiece on Blogspot, I send it on to Google and Facebook and generate a “Tweet” on Twitter, and other points on the blogosphere. Now, when I “Google” myself, I get a lot of responses, for in just a few short months I seem to have become search engine fodder. I don’t think I’ve “gone viral” yet, but I’m hearing some rumblings in response to my efforts.

                My personal notebook has collected some odds and ends that I’m revisiting with an eye to including in my blog. These are usually false starts on stories that I thought would stand alone as a blog posting but didn’t. Or they are paragraphs that I edited out to make my day’s story more concise. Or maybe they are sub-plots that I included in the draft, but decided to drop and revisit sometime in the future. Occasionally, I will recycle them and include them in a new edition of “MikeBo’s Blog.” Funny you should mention....here’s one now…….

                It’s actually a quote from the legendary attorney Clarence Darrow’s opening statement at the “Scopes Monkey Trial” back in 1925. That’s when the State of Tennessee had outlawed the teaching of evolution in public schools, and brought substitute teacher John Thomas Scopes up on criminal charges. In his opening statement on July 10, 1925, Clarence Darrow said…..

“If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach it in the public school, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools, and the next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers. Soon you may set Catholic against Protestant and Protestant against Protestant, and try to foist your own religion upon the minds of men. If you can do one you can do the other. Ignorance and fanaticism is ever busy and needs feeding. Always it is feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers, tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lectures, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, your honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth century when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind.”

Since we are locked in a similar discussion today, I thought it might make sense to reprise the comments of one of the greatest lawyers in American history.

Now, briefly, here’s a look at some events from “Poor MikeBo’s Almanack.” (Via HistoryOrb.com).

1581 - Commissioned by Catherine De Medici, the 1st ballet "Ballet Comique de la Reine” is staged in Paris.
1815 - Napoleon Bonaparte arrives on island of St Helena to begin his exile.

1948 - 38th US President Gerald Ford (35) weds department store fashion consultant Elizabeth (Betty) Bloomer Warren (30) at Grace Episcopal Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
1951 - Mexican chemist Luis E. Miramontes synthesized the first oral contraceptive.
1969 - Vietnam Moratorium Day; millions nationwide protest the war.
1993 - Nelson Mandela & South Africa president F W de Klerk awarded Nobel Peace Prize.

And, so it goes.

Ciao!

Mike Botula