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Holiday Greetings
Until a few years ago, my daughter and grandson lived around the corner from a small park and playground on Tenth Avenue in Manhattan. The plaque on its gate announced that it was named in honor of Clement Clarke Moore, who had he not written the following poem, no one would ever have heard of … 'Twas
the night before Christmas, when all through the house
Not a
creature was stirring, not even a mouse;
The
stockings were hung by the chimney with care,
In
hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The
children were nestled all snug in their beds;
While
visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads;
And
mamma in her 'kerchief, and I in my cap,
Had
just settled our brains for a long winter's nap,
When
out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,
I
sprang from my bed to see what was the matter.
Away to
the window I flew like a flash,
Tore
open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The
moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow,
Gave a
lustre of midday to objects below,
When
what to my wondering eyes did appear,
But a
miniature sleigh and eight tiny rein-deer,
With a
little old driver so lively and quick,
I knew
in a moment he must be St. Nick.
More
rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he
whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
"Now, Dasher!
now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen!
To the
top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now
dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
As
leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When
they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up
to the housetop the coursers they flew
With
the sleigh full of toys, and St. Nicholas too—
And
then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof
The
prancing and pawing of each little hoof.
As I
drew in my head, and was turning around,
Down
the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was
dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot,
And his
clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot;
A
bundle of toys he had flung on his back,
And he
looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His
eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples, how merry!
His
cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry!
His
droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow,
And the
beard on his chin was as white as the snow;
The
stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth,
And the
smoke, it encircled his head like a wreath;
He had
a broad face and a little round belly
That
shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly.
He was
chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf,
And I
laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself;
A wink
of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon
gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He
spoke not a word, but went straight to his work,
And
filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk,
And
laying his finger aside of his nose,
And
giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He
sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And
away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I
heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight—
“Happy
Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
Let this be Jackpotpourri’s
Holiday message to you all!
JL
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Preserving Representative Democracy
When people living in a representative democracy don’t like the way things are going for them from an economic or cultural standpoint, they look to place the blame on the government they themselves put into power. This may result in their using their right to vote, nationally or in the State in which they live, to reject the democratically elected government they put into power, and vote to replace it with a more efficient, usually authoritarian, form of government. Representative democracy permits them to do this, in effect allowing it to commit suicide.
This has happened in democracies
such as Germany and Italy between the two World Wars of the last century. It has happened in individual States in this
country such as Texas and Florida that have elected governors and legislatures
with authoritarian agendas. Right now,
Hungary and Poland are leaning in that direction.
When dissatisfied with democratically elected government, voters should look more carefully at the agenda of candidates for office. Some offer reasonable solutions to whatever problems exist and others blame those problems on democracy itself and look no further than asking for extensive powers to fix things themselves. ‘Trust me,’ they say. ‘I can fix things.’ That’s a very bad idea. We must never throw out the baby with the bath water.
(That expression started in medieval times, when a family might take a single bath once every few weeks, all using the same bathtub filled with water, one after another, starting with the parents and continuing through the children, with the infants being bathed last. By then the water in the tub was so dirty that there was a chance of spilling out the baby as well when it was emptied.)
JL
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Bret Stephens Column: ‘Why I Can’t Stop Writing About Oct. 7’
Don’t miss this New York Times
opinion column linking together Hamas, antisemitism, and the mood in America
today. Copy and paste https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/opinion/october-7-jews-hamas.html on your browser line or just
CLICK HERE . It's Stephens' last column for 2023.
JL
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A Revolutionary Football Game
A few comments
about the recent ‘Boca Bowl’ football game are in order.
First of all,
calling it the ‘Roof Claim’ bowl game is too reminiscent of the occasionally
shady, if not criminal, operations of some roofers, insurance companies,
adjusters, and law firms, involved in submitting homeowners’ insurance claims
for roof damage, a good deal of which occurred in Palm Beach County, site of
the Boca Bowl. That’s one of the reasons
homeowners’ insurance remains in a permanent state of crisis in Florida. (For
your information, the game was played in Florida Atlantic University’s stadium
in Boca Raton.) The sponsor of
this bowl game might be entirely legitimate, but still the naming of the bowl game
seems unsavory.
Otherwise, the
University of South Florida’s 45-0 victory over Syracuse University was
remarkable in two ways.
During a college
football game, there is a 40 second period between plays during which the offensive
team must run a play without being penalized for ‘delay of game.’ This gives the officials plenty of time to
place the ball on the ground ready for the next play, and for the team with the
ball to run that next play. USF led the nation’s college football teams in
the quickness it getting off those next plays, usually taking no more than
twelve or thirteen seconds, once the ball was placed on the line of scrimmage.
And that was the
case in the Boca Bowl. South Florida never bothered with a seconds-consuming
‘huddle’ and their players were always quick to take their positions for the
next play, probably
orally called by the quarterback, regardless
of whether or not the clock had been stopped, even for a variety of reasons such as penalties, an injured player on the
field, reviews of a referee’s decisions, a ‘time out, the direction of a
runner’s momentum going out of bounds, or a first down during the last two
minutes of a game’s second and fourth periods.
As a result,
USF’s offense was rapid-fire, rarely giving the Syracuse defense time to
recover from the previous play and get ready for the next one. This is why Syracuse, not a bad team, lost 45
to 0. (This season, the teams they had defeated included
Wake Forest, Pitt, Army, and Purdue.) But against USF’s rapid-fire offense, Syracuse’s
defensive line was in a permanent state of exhaustion and their secondary
usually not in the right places to defend against passing, neither having
enough time to recover and reset itself.
The other effect
of this manner of play by USF was upon the TV presentation of the game. Quick TV replays of the action, commentary by
the telecasters, and ‘squeezed-in’ commercials, features of most football
telecasts, were drastically reduced. The telecast even missed USF’s first
touchdown because it was busy dissecting the prior play, about a dozen seconds
earlier, which hadn’t succeeded. They
had to show the touchdown as a replay.
If other teams
copy USF’s style of play, which breaks no rules of the game, there will be a
revolution in the way football telecasts are managed.
JL
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Housekeeping on Jackspotpourri
Email Alerts: If you are NOT receiving emails from me alerting you each time there is a new posting on Jackspotpourri, just send me your email address and we’ll see that you do. And if you are forwarding a posting to someone, you might suggest that they do the same, so they will be similarly alerted. You can pass those email addresses to me by email at jacklippman18@gmail.com.
Forwarding Postings: Please forward this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it. Friends, relatives, enemies, etc.
If you want to send someone the
blog, exactly as you are now seeing it, with all of its bells
and whistles, you can just tell folks to check it out by visiting https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com or
by providing a link to that address in your email to them. I
think this is the best method of forwarding Jackspotpourri.
There’s another, perhaps easier,
method of forwarding it though! Google Blogspot, the platform
on which Jackspotpourri is prepared, makes that possible. If you click on
the tiny envelope with the arrow at the bottom of every posting, you will
have the opportunity to list up to ten email addresses to which that blog
posting will be forwarded, along with a comment from you. Each
will receive a link to the textual portion only of the blog that
you are now reading, but without the illustrations,
colors, variations in typography, or the 'sidebar' features such as access to
the blog's archives.
Either way will work, sending
them the link to https://jackspotpourri.blogspot.com, or
clicking on the envelope at the bottom of this posting, but I
recommend sending them the link.
Again, I urge you to forward
this posting to anyone you think might benefit from reading it.
JL
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