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 POST-HOLIDAY 2013 ISSUE - JANUARY 7, 2014 Skim the table of contents and the brief introductory sections below, then click on what interests you. Here's a fruitcake with
— Chris SPORTS ZEN AND THE ART OF EXTREME EXERTION  Precision bravery, nuanced insanity. Don in his full "kit" for the transcontinental race. "The simplicity of it all is as intoxicatingly glamorous as it is surprisingly relaxing." That's Don Metz reconstructing his grueling, nonstop, six-and-a-half-day biking triumph in the coast-to-coast Race Across America. He tells the story in a new book, More Than a Race (Mill City Press, 2013). In June 2012, Don and three equally-aging relay teammates (average age 70), backed by a crew of 15 in five vehicles and sponsored by United Healthcare, rode nonstop between Oceanside, California and Annapolis, Maryland through 3000 miles of "scorching deserts, punishing winds, bone-jarring pavement, life-threatening traffic, 170,000 feet of climbing, and acute exhaustion." Including crises, plus observations on the terrain and the personalities of the team, the book has drawn 12 five-star reviews on Amazon. Your non-athletic CorSec found it a great read. CLICK HERE FOR AN EXCERPT and notes on how Don wrote the book. There's also his update on the Yale cycling team, formed since we graduated. SPORTS YALE MEN'S HOCKEY KEEPS UP WITH THE BEST But should Yale consider giving football a rest in Division III?  Pucks are better than pigskins. The game-winning goal by Andrew Miller (now graduated and playing in the NHL) in last season's NCAA championship semifinal vs. UMass Lowell. By Mike Kane, besotted fan The Ivy League sports scene has gone into exam and holiday break, so it's an ideal time to hand in my sports report for the fall season. This has seen the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, depending on whether we are talking about hockey or football. Starting modestly with the facts, I attended all of two football games and two hockey games, all in the company of veteran Yale sports scene observer Gus Hedlund. Other classmates with far superior attendance records include hockey connoisseurs Larry Lipsher and Bob Oliver. The Good was the most recent, when I drove to New Haven to see the Yale men's hockey team tie Harvard 2-2 with a thrilling 3d period comeback after being down 2-0 most of the game. Didn't make it down the previous night when Yale (allegedly) put in a doggy performance and lost 4-1 to Dartmouth (the Bad). Yale and Harvard will meet again in Madison Square Garden on January 11, and I have my ticket. For the last several years under Coach Keith Allain, the Yale men's hockey team has been ranked and has competed with the best college hockey programs in the country. ... CLICK HERE FOR THE REST OF MIKE'S REPORT - AND OPINIONS. PERSONAL BUCKET LISTS DON'T KICK THE BUCKET A way to focus on what's really important By Steve Buck 
Having somehow been given the assignment of receiving bucket lists from classmates, I waited. Finally, our CorSec came through. Finding this hardly an overwhelming response, I convinced Chris that it was time to do a R.I.P. note on bucket lists, which we invited classmates to submit some months ago.Then we received a posting from John Stewart that was so interesting that it's below, along with Chris's and one I've felt necessary to do after typing "BUCKet" when I just wanted to type "bucket." Obviously I was getting some sort of message. I, and I assume many of our classmates, resisted doing lists because it seemed lugubrious. What I want to "do" was fine, but "die" brought up a subject I obviously was trying to avoid. Though for this website we're not afraid of, and indeed welcome, reflections and reports on aging and the end of life like those of Louis Audette on the "aging in place" movement, I now see the list as actually positive. Focusing on what I want to do helps me focus on what is really important. And I realize that some of the things on my list I have absolutely no control over. I invite the rest of you to give a list a try and then send me what you come up with. As you will see below, this is a wonderful way of seeing what classmates are doing and how they view our post 50th reunion years. CLICK HERE to read our first bucket lists. To share yours, please send it to Steve Buck. YALE AIN'T WE GREAT? WELL...  HUMOR SPOOFER Skeptical of commercials? Like Mad Magazine? TV and theater producers just keep loving the acting energy of Bill Weeden, and you can catch him right here in an edgy video spoof of drug advertising on YouTube. Another video parodies what Bill calls the "moronic" commercials for zillion-selling novelist James Patterson. Bill runs with big boys. The drug video was produced by Above Average, the company owned by Lorne Michaels, producer of "Saturday Night Live," and the Patterson video by Upright Citizens Brigade, the neo-Second City nightclub operation in New York City that produced a great many top comics including Amy Poehler of SNL and "Parks and Recreation." The director of both is Ryan Hunter; the drug spokeswoman is Jenn Lyon of FX Network's "Justified." To watch the drug spoof, click on the first image below. For the Patterson send-up, click the second one.   Comments on these spoofs? Click here to make them! HUMOR FIRESIGNING If you liked the extra-witty, slightly-stoner humor of the comedy group that Phil Proctor is still part of, The Firesign Theater, you now can catch glimpses of it on Thursday nights at 9 pm Eastern time (6 pm Pacific) by going to http://www.firesigntheatre.com/chat. Members of the troupe are known to be interviewed there via Skype, including, not long ago, Phil, who was celebrating the CD release of his 1978 album (with the late Peter Bergman Y'61) "Give Us A Break." One whiff (or poof), as it were, of their all-encompassing tongue-in-cheekiness came in a recent email notice: "Eat fascist death, flaming media pigs!" Click here to comment! IDEAS OUR OWN EMERSON RIDES AGAIN  Chris Lydon writes: "We're putting the band back together, in a new world. With the peerless producer Mary McGrath, we're bringing Open Source back to our first radio home, WBUR in Boston. Drawing on our roots in Boston and our interest in the wider world, we'll be doing a weekly evening program (Thursday nights at 9, rebroadcast on the weekends), re-launching radio and online conversation as challenging, as engaging, as various, as irresistible as we can make it...." Click here to read the rest of Chris's announcement. TRAVEL FORBIDDEN CUBA  Rusted curtain 149 Cuban flags, massed on Mayday to block views of the US "Special Interest Section" in the Swiss Embassy. All photos in this feature are by Micheal LeVine. Until recently, the US ban on travel to Cuba kept out most US citizens, but these days that rusted Latino iron curtain finally seems to be doomed. Our own Micheal LeVine got past it a few months ago and brought back verbal and photographic glimpses of everything from Chinese oil drilling to these 149 Cuban flags, massed on Mayday to block views of the US "Special Interest Section" in the Swiss Embassy. Micheal says the flag forest was a reaction to "an incident some years ago where the Special Interest Section installed a moving signboard with anti-Cuban propaganda." His report starts below, and you can click for more, including 15 of his telling photos, with links to others. By Micheal LeVine I participated in a visit to Cuba earlier this year under the auspices of Yale Educational Travel, part of AYA. This visit was licensed by the US Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC). To obtain a license a tour must provide an itinerary for OFAC approval, demonstrating educational or cultural activities. The logistics of our visit were handled perfectly by Distant Horizons. There were 35 of us, most with a direct or spousal connection to Yale. The oldest participant was YC '54 and the youngest was our faculty lecturer, YC '99. We were quartered in the Parque Central, a world-class hotel in Havana, where we spent all our time except for two one-day excursions to Matanzas to the east and Vinales to the west, in the heart of tobacco country. Our transportation was an air-conditioned Chinese-made tour bus. Our Cuban guide was very informative; he was our principal source of information, in addition to a Cuban professor of architecture, a Cuban economist, and a briefing at the US Special Interest Section by the Counsel General. Although there was an official itinerary, nobody prevented us from slipping off on our own. There was nothing we were not allowed to see. The US Special Interest Section (the only visible presence of the US government in Havana) was the most carefully guarded location we encountered in Havana. Havana is fascinating. The architectural heritage spans several centuries, but the physical plant is in very sad shape. ...  Lunchtime entertainment in Café Taberna Click here to read the rest of Mike's report, see more photos, and leave comments. TRAVEL BROTHERS, SING ON  YAC-ety yack. L. to r.: Murray Wheeler, John Gerlach, Peter Sipple, John Knutson, Griff Resor, Joe Holmes, Mike Moore, and Dan Koenigsberg By Peter Sipple This past July, the Yale Alumni Chorus celebrated its fifteen-year anniversary during a concert tour of the three small Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, performing in the three capital cities of Tallinn, Riga, and Vilnius. I had been our class's Glee Club president, and had helped get "YAC" underway in the summer of 1998, accompanying co-founder Mark Dollhopf '77 (now head of the AYA) on a pre-tour of China that spring. That summer we two returned with almost 200 cohorts to perform with Chinese orchestras in Beijing, Sion, and Shanghai. Today, YAC continues to attract alumni and alumnae of the Glee Club and other singing organizations at Yale. This summer, Yale Glee Club director Jeffrey Douma met YAC singers twice in the U.S. before we gathered for two days of rehearsal in Tallinn to ready ourselves for the first concert. Once again, the Class of 1962 distinguished itself on this YAC trip by enjoying the largest participation of any Yale class — eight of us. (The photo was taken at the fifteenth anniversary dinner in the 118-room Rundale Palace near Riga, Latvia.) We '62'ers love to make music and travel, and what could be better than rehearsing and singing under one of the university choral scene's most gifted conductors. Now we look forward to entertaining future audiences in even more countries abroad. Please check the website and consider joining us. CLICK HERE to comment and see comments on this item from others. TRAVEL LOUVRE LARKING  Narcissii? Tappy Wilder sent this shot after a sojourn at the Louvre in Paris with Dave Bingham, explaining, "A picture of David and Tappy taking a picture. (The Miracle of the Mirror.)" CLICK HERE to comment and read comments from others. BOOKS WITCHES AND SCIENCE  Witches and the supernatural seem perennially "in," and Henry Childs, or Henry Clay Childs, as he resonantly signs his books, has "kept off the golf course" in recent years by writing about witches and much else. Oblivion, the most recent of his six autobiographically-tinged novels, is crisply set in England, where he has spent time, and sets a fast pace through the worries of an astrophysicist who is concerned that dark matter and Mother Nature are conspiring (the witches seem in on it) to rid the planet of all humanity. Just published by CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform at Amazon, it begins like this:There was so little time. ... You can read the rest of that chapter and learn more about Henry's many other novels by clicking here. BOOKS COULD CHINA INVADE INDIA TO CATCH THE DALAI LAMA? Ken Cascone imagines it could. His latest fiction is a short story based on an act of war dreamed up by an ambitious Chinese general to save his career. You can READ IT HERE. ECONOMICS LIFE WITH GEORGE  "Her husband can make her laugh until she's almost in tears." — Laura Tyson, Berkeley professor That husband is George Akerlof, the economist, who appeared with his fellow economist, Janet Yellen, when in September President Obama announced her nomination, later confirmed by the Senate, to head the Federal Reserve. The Financial Times profile of her, from which that quote comes, provided another view of her life with George, telling how Yellen earned her doctorate at Yale and later became a staff economist at the Fed: "But it did not last long, because she met a visiting research fellow called George Akerlof - later a Nobel Prize winner himself - in the cafeteria. They married and after a spell in London teaching at the London School of Economics, the couple eventually washed up in San Francisco, where Akerlof and Yellen were the names on the top of a long series of academic articles in the 1980s. Colleagues say they complemented each other: the intuitive Mr Akerlof came up with wild ideas. The rigorous Ms Yellen channelled them into careful, logical arguments." ENVIRONMENT FRACKING, THE SEQUEL A Presidential Issue for Andrew Cuomo?
This fall Bill ran again and squeaked to victory by a plurality of four votes. Throughout the state the issue is still very much alive, among other places, in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's possible presidential campaign. Here's Bill's update. By Bill Weber One can certainly disagree with anyone on any topic, but I wonder if a truly educated person can take a stance on an issue, ignore the facts, and then get nasty with those he disagrees with. We certainly see this on the national level, and here in upstate New York, it seems the rule when it comes to gas drilling and its related activities. Let me provide some additional background that has emerged since I wrote for this website. You will recall that I not only spoke of the election and the antis, but also provided a snapshot of gas drilling - using the high volume, horizontal hydraulic fracturing process, aka "fracking." It appears that one of the root causes of anti fracking in New York State originated in Ithaca, NY, via the Park Foundation. Roy Park, the founder of Duncan Hines cake mixes and owner of Park Outdoor Signs, a highway billboard company, set up a well-endowed foundation now run by his daughter... Click here for the rest of Bill's story, and to chime in with your own thoughts. FAME "THE RUMORS OF MY DEATH..."  by Terry Culver Knowing these latter times are with pleasure rife for you all, I recently had something happen to me that everyone should experience: I read of my own death and memorial in a reliable publication. It's not like having had bypass surgery or being rescued off a sinking, stinking cruise ship in shark-infested waters. In those cases there is a feeling of bliss or bonhomie that briefly follows. No, this is closer to what Tom Sawyer gloried in when he returned to town, believed drowned, and walked into his own funeral service just as he was being praised to the heavens. The praise has not arrived yet, but the quarterly publication of the St. Louis zoo suitably noted a donation in my memory from Bob and Liza Streett. It happened this way ... Click here to find out what happened and get Terry's reaction. YALE UP CLOSE WITH YALE IN SINGAPORE  Elihu showed the way Projected dining hall, Yale-NUS College in Singapore. For more computer renderings of the campus now under construction, click here. The original Elihu Yale having been a multicultural citizen of the East (in India), Yale now has a growing presence in Singapore with Yale-National University of Singapore College. Bill Stork, who moved there a year ago and has been helping nurse the growing bulldog, gives his early impressions. By Bill Stork When I was here three years ago, what is now the residential campus, still being built, was a golf course. This is one of the more amazing campuses that I have ever seen. An architectural gem, and beautifully landscaped. Click here for more computer renderings. I have now been on campus several times and have talked to a number of students, administrators, faculty members, and the Dean's Fellows, who are somewhat like the Freshman Counselors we had, but with no course responsibility, only guidance and ... Click here to see more computer renderings and to read the rest of Bill's report. YALE MINI-REUNIONS AHEAD David Honneus has recruited Murray Wheeler, Kirk MacDonald and David Scharff to work with and advise him on possible venues and programs for mini-reunions leading up to our 55th in 2017. Boston is already under discussion. Past reunions took place with great success in Aspen, Hong Kong, New York, and Washington, D.C. Logistics have gotten easier thanks to help from the AYA. If you have ideas or are interested in participating, please contact any of the aforementioned four. Says Dave: "Classmates unite. You have a world of connections to gain!" Click here to add your thoughts to the discussion. YALE OUR ALUMNI NOTES FROM YALE ALUMNI MAGAZINE Read our January/February '14 Alumni Notes from Yale Alumni Magazine online here. News from many of our newsmakers, and live links to their current projects and endeavors. NECROLOGY NEWLY POSTED We are sad to report the deaths of William Gieg, Peter Madden and Jim Pappas. As usual, full obituaries are in progress and will be posted here. Since our last edition full obituaries have been posted here for Dick Fairbanks, Tom Luckey, Don Nichols, Al Ordway and Jim White. NOTIFYING CLASSMATES OF SERVICES If you would like classmates to be notified about your funeral or memorial activities, the Class of 1962 will send information to our email list, providing we get the information in time. Please ask those who will be in charge to send the details to Bob Oliver at oliver@moglaw.com, phone 203-624-5111, and for backup to John Stewart, Co-Corresponding Secretary, at johnhargerstewart@gmail.com, phone 845-789-1407. We will not send information unless someone makes this request. Even if services are not involved, please encourage those involved to send basic information to the above and to the Yale Office of Information Resources at alumni.records@yale.edu or PO Box 208262, New Haven, CT 06520-8616, telephone 203-432-1100. WE WANT YOUR COMMENTS Let us know what we're doing right, what we're doing wrong, and especially, what you'd like to see on our website. We're here for you. Thanks. CLICK HERE TO COMMENT (and see comments from others). |
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