In fact, I’ve wandered through time thinking there was a line to the effect of “on this shortest day of the year.”
But in preparing to post this piece, I found an important fact: it is no where in the poem.
Mrs. Rogers
I can distinctly remember Carol Rogers, the strict, strict Junior year English teacher emphasizing this point. I even seem to recall that the page in our English book was printed with a illustration depicting a man in the woods, and there even having been snow on the ground.
Whether the relating to Winter Solstice and the poem is accurate, I’m thankful I had Mrs. Rogers. There were a good number of students who had her at Jefferson Davis High School in Montgomery, Alabama, and I’ll bet most of us will share the same perspective of her. She was strict, but she also made sure we learned something about English and ourselves during our year in her class.
Winter Solstice 2010
So on this night, when Dec. 21, 2010 begins, and shortly thereafter the first Winter Solstice lunar eclipse in the past 456 years, I offer you The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth.
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
In the communications world there’s an old saying, “If you don’t want what you write on the front page on the New York Times, don’t write it.”
With Sunday’s first release of some 251,200 documents the Wikileaks Website, this old saying has new meaning.
There are documents listed as secret, confidential and unclassified now posted on the site. Where they all came from remains unclear, but the content is an extraordinary breach of national security.
Already on Facebook, former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has taken President Obama to the woodshed because the release of the documents happened on his watch. Per Gov. Palin, “However, the latest round of publications of leaked classified U.S. documents through the shady organization called Wikileaks raises serious questions about the Obama administration’s incompetent handling of this whole fiasco.”
Is that really fair?
Well, I talked to a few people and the response to that question was this: “If Bush had been in office when this happened, they’d be bashing him, so it goes with the territory.”
I suppose that’s true.
Palin goes on to question how “it possible that a 22-year-old Private First Class could get unrestricted access to so much highly sensitive information? And how was it possible that he could copy and distribute these files without anyone noticing that security was compromised?”
While I don’t know that age or rank in the military have anything to do with the level of a clearance a person gets, I think it is fair to ask her second question: How did so much information get leaked?
Treason?
NBC nightly news reported tonight that Wikileaks leader Julian Assange was pretty scarce today. I wonder why. He’s probably now a higher priority target of more black ops people than Jason Bourne. As for the military soldier in confinement for his role in allegedly leaking documents to Assange, it seems to be pretty clear what most I’ve talked about this issue with think should be done. The answer: Try him for treason and shoot him.
Now those all seem like reasonable points to me. One has to wonder if the Sunday Cyber denial-of-service attack against Wikileaks wasn’t inspired by one government entity or another. Maybe it was too little, too late. Maybe it was just some kid hackers out for a bit of fun. We may never know.
What’s Most Troubling
What’s hard to comprehend at this point is that over the next few weeks more and more documents are to be released. This weekend’s batch was just the tip of the iceberg. What’s even more troubling is the compromised people around the globe who have provided our government operatives with information they’d prefer their respective governments, terrorists, thugs, etc. not have known they gave up. There’s most likely not any way on earth to scoop them all up and relocate, protect, or defend them from the immediate and likely deadly consequences they’re likely to face.
The Lessons To Learn
Back to my first point. Even in writing government documents it now appears that in our digital age, NOTHING is sacred nor safe. We used to hear all the time about how hackers were trying to get into government servers and databases. I hope no one reading this thinks that has stopped, as surely it hasn’t, again whether it be rogue nations, terrorist organizations, or teens like in the 1980s movie War Games.
And it appears that government operatives need to find new ways to send/convey personal observations of foreign dignitaries, etc.
It was more than 25 years ago today, when The Beatles I began to play.
The Beatles on iTunes, Nov. 6, 2010
I remember Dad washing our car in Merced, California back in 1969 or ’70 and having his old record player outside and playing the two surviving original 45s we have on Swan Records of She Loves You and I’ll Get You. (One of them, even in those days of The Beatles has a strange message on it: Don’t Drop Out.) Of school, the 45 sleeve? I have no idea, but that day in time, whenever it was, is burned into my mind’s eye in a place from which it will not pass until I am no more.
When I got into seventh and eighth grade, (we were back out in California again) I got hit with my Beatles stage.
I wanted to be the sixth Beatle.
One of my life mentors, who I’ve mentioned here before, Marc Bringman, turned me on to The Red Album. Then I got The Blue Album. Then McCartney came out with Back to the Egg. Then Double Fantasy came out. And then as you know, John Lennon got murdered.
I’ll never forget the call from my friend, Derek Kubacki, who called to tell me. I was stunned. Yes, John Lennon was not a great role model as far as the drugs and weirdness went, but the music he made in his lifetime, even affects mine today.
It was not long afterward that I called my late Grandma Joyce Sheptak and asked her to help me get the rest of the collection. I’d bought several more of the albums, but she helped round out the collection and then later sent me a note, “Okay Kid, Mission Accomplished. Enjoy.”
And did I ever. With the National Electric guitar that Marc had sold me that summer from delivering the Merced Sun-Star, I had made enough money to buy the guitar from him. Marc was like that. He’d had a hard go of life but so long as you weren’t weird or “a jerk like Howard Cosell,” he liked you.
The local radio station, Y-92 FM, in Fresno got into it that summer, too, when they did a trivia contest about Beatle songs. The song of the contest was All My Loving, a song Paul wrote or got the inspiration from while shaving.
I learned how to play the correct version of Yesterday on the acoustic. I can still play it. Marc taught me the main riff for I Feel Fine. I got The Complete Beatles Song Book for my birthday or saved up my money, one.
And of course, in those days, I wanted to have Beatle hair, but alas, with my naturally curly hair, it never was going to be straight. Not to say I didn’t try though.
I made scrap books of Beatles clips. We had a rock band that called themselves, “High Street” living next to us and I’d go over there from time-to-time and see if Mike could teach me a chord or riff or two. And his younger brother gave me a couple of bootleg album covers from the Let It Be Sessions. He also gave me some 8mm movies of them, too.
I was all Beatles. And there’s probably not a song today that I couldn’t recite most or all of the lyrics to.
So Monday when Apple put up their message on Apple.com saying that things were going to change, I really expected it to be the OS update for the iPad and iPhone.
My reaction to seeing that The Beatles were on iTunes was kinda like Paul’s about John’s death. Instead of calling it a drag, I said, which is largely true, Apple, I’ve already digitized most of the collection myself.
But I’ve been exploring the pages on iTunes. They have videos and documentary information I’d like to see and hear. And after a few events of this week, I’ve had to download “And Your Bird Can Sing,” “I’m Only Sleeping,” and “She Said She Said” off of Revolver. There are a few more I want to get but I’m trying to be conservative.
So if you’re like me and were thinking that this really wasn’t that big of a deal, it really is in so many ways. Apple working with Apple Records? Who would have guessed? Apparently someone decided for real that We Can Work It Out.
And then there’s the affect it’s having stirring memories of the past, of youth dreams left unfulfilled, of the power that these songs have had on my life.
Thank you Apple and Apple. (And I did guess that in the video compilation that you were going to have to end it with The End.)
I still think you should have embedded the last piano note from A Day In The Life on the Apple.com announcement page. Now that would have been cool.
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