In the 1970s, Danny Seemiller was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates to play Second Base. He declined to pursue his table tennis career, which may seem ridiculous to some, but he went on to win the US National Title five times, became the head coach of the US Olympic table tennis team, President of the United States Table Tennis Association, and has been inducted into the USA Table Tennis Hall of Fame.
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Many have superseded his work, but it’s important to remember that Craig Venter was the first to sequence the human genome. Not sure what that means? Look it up.
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Dan Hicks played guitar and was the leader for the 70s San Francisco band The Hot Licks and was proficient in both positions. Musically, he produced easy-on-the-ears gypsy-swing-jazz-country, served with a big dollop of wacky humor. What does that mean? Check it out for yourself! Start with the track: “How Can I Leave You if you Won’t Go Away?” https://youtu.be/rW9-FOLG-iA
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For more than 25 years Corey Flintoff worked at National Public Radio, often featured on the daily evening news program All Things Considered. He retired in 2016 after four years as the Moscow Bureau Chief for NPR.
From politicians to heads of state, he interviewed hundreds of individuals with a modicum of impartiality. But in the back of his mind, I wonder if this question was the one he truly wanted to ask.
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“Love is the religion and the universe is the book.” The line is by 13th century mystic poet Rumi, but translated by Coleman Barks, a former literature professor at the University of Georgia who neither speaks nor reads Persian. He rewrites the poems based on other English translations, and, as you can imagine, the resulting translations are controversial. Rumi experts consider Barks works fraudulent, but from bumper stickers to colorful coffee shop volumes, Coleman Barks is the most published translator of the works of Rumi in English.
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Do you want to know why there are 3,000 craft breweries in your town? Well, Charlie Papazian may be partially to blame. His 1984 book The Complete Guide to Home Brewing touched off a wave of home brewing experimenters, and every one of them, it seems went on to establish their own microbrewery. To pile on the hoppy-ness, he also founded the Association of Brewers to register them all, and the Great American Beer Festival to rate them all!
Carl Mitcham is Professor Emeritus of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines (though he has been taught at universities around the world) and his work on the ethics of science, technology, and engineering is fascinating. His first book was Philosophy and Technology: Technology as a Philosophical Problem (1972), and he was a founding member of Society for Philosophy and Technology (1976).
Contemporary Christian Musician. His album Matters of the Heart, was selected as 1982’s Album of the Year, and later ranked it 25th on its list of Best Contemporary Christian albums of all time by Contemporary Christian Music magazine. This postcard from Bob Bennett arrived in the mail out of the blue. Turns out my cousin Loretta was busy on my behalf. Thanks, Loretta!
“Palling around with a terrorist,” was how right-wing pundits described Barack Obama’s friendship with Bill Ayers. They skipped past the part where Ayers apologized for his actions of the late 60s, became a Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, and was named Citizen of the Year in 1997 by the City of Chicago. It’s fair to say that none of this was taught to him in school.
