Outwardliness As A Virtue

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A strange feeling is in the air. My neighbors have gone to India on a good will tour sponsored by Rotary International in the name of doing what can be done to stamp out polio for good. The neighbors in question happen to be my youngest brother and his wife.

My brother told me that there are only a couple of places in the world where polio still exists and the place in India they're going to help give nasal vaccinations to the children in that area is one of the last. I don't remember where he said the other area was.

It amazes me that the World Health Organization can make the claim that only two places in the world still have active polio cases there. The US government can't find Bin Laden, but WHO claims to know where invisible diseases are located.

I sure don't know the facts about polio, and despite my sarcasm, WHO just might know. I continuously admit I don't know what truth is except in the specious present. By the ti-me I write it down it's no longer what it was that made it "the truth".

I just watched a 2008 Harvard graduation speech by a J.K. Rowling. She wrote the Harry Potter books. The speech got listed by the TEDtalks people despite the fact that it wasn't the regular TEDtalks format:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jk_rowling_the_fringe_benefits_of_failure.html

This woman seems very sincere and gave a powerful speech that revealed the depths she can reach for to create her novels. I've never read any of them. I have seen parts and pieces of a couple of the movies they were made into after they came out on TV. She looks a lot like the American actress Meryl Streep, but with a British accent.

The curiosity that drove me to watch the speech she gave was because she is a writer. She went to college to learn to be a writer. Part of what she talked about in regard to writing was how she had a struggle with her parents to be an English major instead of studying something more practical like accounting. Neither of her parents went to college.

Part of me watched being fully aware she was rich as Midas, and through her creativity earned every cent of it. No blame. She also stated that anybody was voluntarily poor is a fool, and I agreed with her there. I am is.

I really, really don't get off on regular television. They got nothing to surprise me with anymore. I've lived too long to be easily tricked, but if I watch at all, and I do watch some television about everyday, I'll usually watch some documentary on PBS, the old people's station.

The North Carolina stations are all the same stuff. What PBS stations in other places show on the air I don't know. Here, they've begun using one of their channels and call it "the Explorer Channel". There are a lotta travel shows that show tours of places all over the world. There are lots of cooking shows about different cultures. I like this agenda, but they have lots of reruns and then reruns on top of reruns.

It's interesting to me that I've visited quite a few of the locations the videos are about. There are lots of places I haven't been, and that just makes it more interesting. There are four or five companies that make these travel shows. Each with their own host. Rick Steves seems very popular. I like his shows too. He doesn't get bogged down but skips through the tulips and roses and marmalade too.

I like some of the photography shows that go on location because they seem to specialize in the flora and fauna from an artistic perspective. That's never come easy for me, but when it's pointed out in specific photographs accompanied by a little explanatory palaver even I get the point of what they're seeing.

The best thing about this new Explorer Channel is that they show these documentaries when the umpteenth version of the local news is on. They're showing the migration of the Monarch butterflies when the cop and lawyer and doctor shows are on the network channels. Even reruns of some of the travel shows and nature shows are more interesting than sitcoms and survivor shows to me, but your milage may vary.

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