28 Saturday Feb 2015
Posted in Go Sox
Tags
"20 Best Basebll Books Ever Written", 2015 Millerstime Baseball Contests, baseball, Baseball Contests, MLB
Contest # 1: Pick your favorite MLB team and predict what their regular season record will be in 2015. Tie-Breaker: Will they make the playoffs, and how far will they go if they do?
Prize: Two great seats/tickets to a Nationals’ game in 2016.
26 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
"An Unquiet Mind", "Darkness Visible", "He Wanted the Moon", bipolar disease, Dr. Abigail Zuger, Dr. Perry Baird, Eve Claxton, Kay Redfield Jamison, Mimi Baird, NYTimes, William Styron
He Wanted the Moon: The Madness and Medical Genius of Dr. Perry Baird, and His Daughter’s Quest to Know Him. By Mimi Baird, with Eve Claxton. Crown. 272 pages.
The book is autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down.
from NYTimes review by Abigail Zuger, M.D.
If you’ve read William Styron’s small masterpiece Darkness Visible, you’ve ‘heard’ from a wonderful writer what “madness” is and what it feels like.
If you’ve read Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind, you know, from both a personal and a scientific perspective, what it is to experience bipolar disease today (manic depression).
Now comes a just released book, He Wanted the Moon, to add to those two wonderful insights into what it is like to experience mental illness. Or in the case of this book, what it was like to experience bipolar disease before we understood it or had any treatment for it.
This one has many of the strengths of the two previous books, and more. I indeed agree with the review quoted above that it is “autobiography, biography, science, history and literature all in one, as instructive as any textbook and utterly impossible to put down.” And, I would add, it is told in such a manner that you haven’t read anything quite like it before.
At least I haven’t.
24 Tuesday Feb 2015
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
"Ghost Boy", "Wonder", Books Most Enjoyed by MillersTime Readers in 2014, Martin Pistorius, Megan Lloyd Davies, NPR, R.J. Palacio, Raquel Jaramillo
I’ve read two books recently that I think will have interest for some MillersTime readers, especially for those of you who have had some involvement with children, adolescents, and/or adults with some form of disability, either in your teaching or counseling, in your own family or with someone you know. Both books have been ‘out’ for a while but are new to me. Both books are quick reads. One is nonfiction; the other is fiction. They address somewhat similar issues, and both are positive books that have much to teach all of us.
22 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in Family and Friends
Usually, by the time there’s a third grandchild, particularly if all three are siblings, there aren’t many pictures of the ‘last’ one.
So that’s our excuse for posting these of Ryan, age 20 months, as ‘captured’ at a recent play date at our house. Photos come courtesy of Ellen Miller, known as “Nonna” to the three grandkids.
20 Friday Feb 2015
Posted in Articles & Books of Interest, Go Sox
Tags
" J.R. Moehringer, "Open", "The Final Walk Off", "The Tender Bar", A-Rod, Alex Rodriquez, Derek Jeter, ESPN The Magazine, Pulitzer Prize Winning author
PEOPLE HATE HIM. Boy, wow, do they hate him. At first they loved him, and then they were confused by him, and then they were irritated by him, and now they straight-up loathe.
More often than not, the mention of Alex Rodriguez in polite company triggers one of a spectrum of deeply conditioned responses. Pained ugh. Guttural groan. Exaggerated eye roll. Hundreds of baseball players have been caught using steroids, including some of the game’s best-known and most beloved names, but somehow Alex Rodriguez has become the steroid era’s Lord Voldemort. Ryan Braun? Won an MVP, got busted for steroids, twice, called the tester an anti-Semite, lied his testes off, made chumps of his best friends, including Aaron Rodgers, and still doesn’t inspire a scintilla of the ill will that follows Rodriguez around like a nuclear cloud.
from The Education of Alex Rodriquez by J.R. Moehringer
If you don’t know the name or writing of J.R. Moehringer, you’re in for a treat. He won a Pulitzer Prize for feature newspaper writing in 2000 and at least two of his books over the past few years have been among my favorite reads of the year(s): The Tender Bar, a wonderful memoir of Moehringer’s own growing up and Open, the most honest and most informative sports memoir (about Andre Agassi) I’ve ever read. (Agassi’s name is on the cover of the book, but Moehringer wrote it). He also wrote what I think was the best tribute to Derek Jeter in his ESPN article The Final Walk Off.
If you do know of him, then know that he has once again produced an article that goes beyond what all other writers have produced about a current story in the news – A-Rod’s return to baseball after his 162 game suspension.
19 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Articles & Books of Interest
I just happened across an essay written today by Oliver Sacks in which he announces that he has an incurable cancer and is facing death. He tells us how he hopes to face his remaining time alive.
Sacks has long been one of the men I’ve greatly admired.
His essay, My Own Life, is eloquent and affecting.
18 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted in Articles & Books of Interest, The Outer Loop
I was quite surprised when I was led to a NY Times article yesterday by a particularly astute (and younger) former colleague of Ellen’s (thanx Matt Stoller) that basically said what most people think is the case about the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer is not the case.
At least not since 2007.
The article tells us that even though income inequality is high historically, “The income of the top 1 percent – both the level and the share of overall income – still hasn’t returned to its 2007 peak. Their average income is about 20 per cent below that peak.”
While this may be more of a statement about who lost more in the period between 2007 – 2010, there is much in this article that is worthy of consideration.
Take a look at the article for yourselves:
Inequality Has Actually Not Risen Since the Financial Crisis, by David Leonhardt, NY Times, Feb. 17, 2014, p.3.
18 Wednesday Feb 2015
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
"Ahu", "Moai", "Pukai", Ahu Akivi, Ahu Tongariki, Anakena, Easter Island, Elllen Miller, Explora Lodge, Orongo, Rano Raraku, Rapa Nui, Tahai
As I wrote earlier (see The Trip: Easter Island & Antarctica), the time we spent on Easter Island was a revelation to us. Tho it was an ‘add on’ to our Antarctica trip, it turned out to be a fascinating few days.
I’m posting here a few of Ellen’s photos from that part of the trip and then linking below to her full slide show of Easter Island (Rapa Nui).
A bit of explanation might help as you look at the photos. The island is small and the moai (pronounced mo-eye – statues representing ancestors) and their ahu (platforms) are spread over the 64 square mile island. While there are remnants of as many as 887 statues spread throughout the island**, only about 100 are ‘standing’. There are only about 5 or 6 principle sites where they have been restored to their ‘original’ positions. There are also other historic sites on the island which relate to how the Rapa Nui people lived. The Explora Lodge, where we stayed, arranged guided hikes which often took in visits to several sites on the same day. (We couldn’t always arrange these at the optimal time from a photographic point of view, but Ellen has made the best of what she had to work with.)
15 Sunday Feb 2015
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
A dozen or so to start you off.
These, and those in Ellen Miller’s Antarctica slide show (see instructions below), come from Ushuaia & the Beagle Channel, the Drake Passage, the South Shetland Islands, the Lemaire Channel, Booth & Petermann Islands, the Antarctic Circle, Port Lockroy and Paradise Bay.
12 Thursday Feb 2015
Posted in Escapes and Pleasures
Tags
"Ahu", "Moai", Anarctica Peninsula, Antarctica, Drake Passage, Easter Island, Icebergs, Lindblad Expeditions, National Geographic, Rapa Nui, The Explorer, Ushuaia
Usually, I’m not at a loss for words.
But we have just returned from a three-week trip, first to one of the smallest, most isolated and most fascinating islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and then on to the most remote, virtually uninhabited and most picturesque continent on our planet, and I’m having trouble trying to capture what we experienced.
Nothing I can write will match the photos that my wife Ellen has taken and that I’ll post on this site when she has sorted through her 1600 saved pictures.
In the meantime, however, here are two iPhone photos I took and an attempt at relating some of the impact these two very different places had on me.