Bob Hope passed away 11 years ago and some do not even know who he was:
ON TURNING 70
'I still chase women, but only downhill.'
ON TURNING 80
'That's the time of your life when even your birthday suit needs pressing.'
ON TURNING 90
'You know you're getting old when the candles cost more than the cake.'
ON TURNING 100
'I don't feel old. In fact, I don't feel anything until noon. Then it's time for my nap.'
ON GIVING UP HIS EARLY CAREER, BOXING
'I ruined my hands in the ring. The referee kept stepping on them.'
ON NEVER WINNING AN OSCAR
'Welcome to the Academy Awards, or as it's called at my home, 'Passover.'
ON GOLF
Golf is my profession. Show business is just to pay the green fees.'
ON PRESIDENTS
I have performed for 12 presidents but entertained only six.'
ON WHY HE CHOSE SHOWBIZ FOR HIS CAREER
'When I was born, the doctor said to my mother, Congratulations, you have an eight pound ham.'
ON RECEIVING THE CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL
'I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it.'
ON HIS FAMILY'S EARLY POVERTY
'Four of us slept in the one bed. When it got cold, mother threw on another brother.'
ON HIS SIX BROTHERS
That's how I learned to dance. Waiting for the bathroom.'
ON HIS EARLY FAILURES
'I would not have had anything to eat if it wasn't for the stuff the audience threw at me.'
ON GOING TO HEAVEN
'I've done benefits for ALL religions. I'd hate to blow the hereafter on a technicality.'
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This from our son regarding IRMA. Important! (See 1 below.)
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This from Spencer Lawton as a follow up to his LTE, I previously posted. He continues to support views expressed in his LTE but he has misgivings about finding himself in bed with so many who agreed with him. (See 2 below.)
This from a very dear friend and fellow memo reader. (See 2a below.)
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I know I just sent out a memo but I want this one, regarding IRMA, and what my son's friend had to say about it, to get wide distribution. Please feel free to resend it to your own friends and/or your own memo list.
Dick
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1)Hi and welcome home!! A fraternity brother of mine is pretty senior
at NOA. He said right now the strongest model shows Irma cutting west
across Miami and the Keys and turning 180 when it hits the gulf and
cutting across the middle of Florida on its way back out into the
Atlantic.
He said however, if the storm slows as it goes over the Bahama Islands, the
high pressure system in the gulf will have had time to move further
east. That would send the storm north before Florida into the
Jacksonville/ Savannah area.
He said a major high pressure system off the east coast is diminishing
their hopes that it will cut away from the Us and turn north and Head
back out to sea without making landfall.
Are you guys preparing? Need help? Want to board up and head north?
No matter what, he said this storm is at 940mb which is the lowest
pressure (strongest storm conditions) they have ever seen. It is a
monster and is incredibly dangerous.
Please keep in touch. There is always plenty of room here!
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2) Confederate Monuments
2a)Rewriting history according to contemporary views and prejudice.
2) Confederate Monuments
Since my last on this point, there has been much said and written about the absurdity and destructiveness of trying to sanitize history, and about the embarrassing contradictions it can lead to. And I agree with virtually all of it.
One of my favorites is my brother George’s idea, that the ultimate expression of unity, in repudiating the legacy of racism arising out of slavery, would be for the snowflakes to boycott cotton. Polyester, anyone?
Another, going around the internet, is some guy’s offer to collect and properly dispose of all US currency with pictures of former slaveholders. Perhaps to avoid unduly burdening him, sensitive people could just stop using that currency.
Here’s another, more serious:
It’s nice to see this pushback against people who think their own pathological sensitivity and tender vulnerability is a problem for other people. What I don’t much care for is that the Confederate monuments I argued against have become something of an all-purpose stand-in for everything else the puritans want to eliminate or “contextualize.”
As I’ve said, I think the Confederacy is utterly unique. Consider Thomas Jefferson, Christopher Columbus, Woodrow Wilson and the rest: their faults, whatever they may have been, pale to insignificance next to their achievements. Consider the Confederacy: its virtues, whatever they may have been, pale to insignificance next to the evil it sought to preserve. I have yet to learn what positive human good the Confederacy existed to achieve and for which it should be memorialized, or what principle (with the sole exception of a loathing of “appeasement”) would be compromised if those memorials were to disappear. To endorse the Confederacy and its monuments seems to me to underwrite Alexander Stephens’ declaration of purpose and to violate General Lee’s principled admonition.
As for the appeasement argument, I can’t understand the wisdom in a strategy of defeating the enemy by seeking out an indefensible position and digging in.
But enough on that. I promise.
2a)Rewriting history according to contemporary views and prejudice.
This letter is a response to Black Students attending Oxford as Rhodes Scholars wanting to remove the statue of Oxford Benefactor, Cecil Rhodes. It should be read on every campus in the U.S. as well.
Dear Scrotty Students,
Cecil Rhodes’s generous bequest has contributed greatly to the comfort and well being of many generations of Oxford students – a good many of them, dare we say it, better, brighter and more deserving than you.
This does not necessarily mean we approve of everything Rhodes did in his lifetime – but then we don’t have to. Cecil Rhodes died over a century ago. Autres temps, autres moeures.* If you don’t understand what this means – and it would not remotely surprise us if that were the case – then we really think you should ask yourself the question: “Why am I at Oxford?”
Oxford, let us remind you, is the world’s second oldest extant university. Scholars have been studying here since at least the 11th century. We’ve played a major part in the invention of Western civilisation, from the 12th century intellectual renaissance through the Enlightenment and beyond. Our alumni include William of Ockham, Roger Bacon, William Tyndale, John Donne, Sir Walter Raleigh, Erasmus, Sir Christopher Wren, William Penn, Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA), Samuel Johnson, Robert Hooke, William Morris, Oscar Wilde, Emily Davison, Cardinal Newman, Julie Cocks. We’re a big deal. And most of the people privileged to come and study here are conscious of what a big deal we are. Oxford is their alma mater – their dear mother – and they respect and revere her accordingly.
And what were your ancestors doing in that period? Living in mud huts, mainly. Sure we’ll concede you the short lived Southern African civilisation of Great Zimbabwe. But let’s be brutally honest here. The contribution of the Bantu tribes to modern civilisation has been as near as damn it to zilch.
You’ll probably say that’s “racist”. But it’s what we here at Oxford prefer to call “true.” Perhaps the rules are different at other universities. In fact, we know things are different at other universities. We’ve watched with horror at what has been happening across the pond from the University of Missouri to the University of Virginia and even to revered institutions like Harvard and Yale: the “safe spaces”; the #blacklivesmatter; the creeping cultural relativism; the stifling political correctness; what Allan Bloom rightly called “the closing of the American mind”. At Oxford however, we will always prefer facts and free, open debate to petty grievance-mongering, identity politics and empty sloganeering. The day we cease to do so is the day we lose the right to call ourselves the world’s greatest university.
Of course, you are perfectly within your rights to squander your time at Oxford on silly, vexatious, single-issue political campaigns. (Though it does make us wonder how stringent the vetting procedure is these days for Rhodes scholarships and even more so, for Mandela Rhodes scholarships) We are well used to seeing undergraduates – or, in your case – postgraduates, making idiots of themselves. Just don’t expect us to indulge your idiocy, let alone genuflect before it. You may be black – “BME” as the grisly modern terminology has it – but we are colour blind.
We have been educating gifted undergraduates from our former colonies, our Empire, our Commonwealth and beyond for many generations. We do not discriminate over sex, race, colour or creed. We do, however, discriminate according to intellect.
That means, inter alia, that when our undergrads or postgrads come up with fatuous ideas, we don’t pat them on the back, give them a red rosette and say: “Ooh, you’re black and you come from South Africa. What a clever chap you are!” No. We prefer to see the quality of those ideas tested in the crucible of public debate. That’s another key part of the Oxford intellectual tradition you see: you can argue any damn thing you like but you need to be able to justify it with facts and logic – otherwise your idea is worthless.
This ludicrous notion you have that a bronze statue of Cecil Rhodes should be removed from Oriel College, because it’s symbolic of “institutional racism” and “white slavery”. Well even if it is – which we dispute – so bloody what? Any undergraduate so feeble-minded that they can’t pass a bronze statue without having their “safe space” violated really does not deserve to be here. And besides, if we were to remove Rhodes’s statue on the premise that his life wasn’t blemish-free, where would we stop? As one of our alumni Dan Hannan has pointed out, Oriel’s other benefactors include two kings so awful – Edward II and Charles I – that their subjects had them killed. The college opposite – Christ Church – was built by a murderous, thieving bully who bumped off two of his wives. Thomas Jefferson kept slaves: does that invalidate the US Constitution?Winston Churchill had unenlightened views about Muslims and India: was he then the wrong man to lead Britain in the war?”
Actually, we’ll go further than that. Your Rhodes Must Fall campaign is not merely fatuous but ugly, vandalistic and dangerous. We agree with Oxford historian RW Johnson that what you are trying to do here is no different from what ISIS and Al-Qaeda have been doing to artefacts in places like Mali and Syria. You are murdering history.
And who are you, anyway, to be lecturing Oxford University on how it should order its affairs? Your #rhodesmustfall campaign, we understand, originates in South Africa and was initiated by a black activist who told one of his lecturers “whites have to be killed”. One of you – Sizwe Mpofu-Walsh – is the privileged son of a rich politician and a member of a party whose slogan is “Kill the Boer; Kill the Farmer”; another of you, Ntokozo Qwabe, who is only in Oxford as a beneficiary of a Rhodes scholarship, has boasted about the need for “socially conscious black students” to “dominate white universities, and do so ruthlessly and decisively!
Great. That’s just what Oxford University needs. Some cultural enrichment from the land of Winnie Mandela, burning tyre necklaces, an AIDS epidemic almost entirely the result of government indifference and ignorance, one of the world’s highest per capita murder rates, institutionalised corruption, tribal politics, anti-white racism and a collapsing economy. Please name which of the above items you think will enhance the lives of the 22,000 students studying here at Oxford.
And then please explain what it is that makes your attention grabbing campaign to remove a listed statue from an Oxford college more urgent, more deserving than the desire of probably at least 20,000 of those 22,000 students to enjoy their time here unencumbered by the irritation of spoilt, ungrateful little tossers on scholarships they clearly don’t merit using racial politics and cheap guilt-tripping to ruin the life and fabric of our beloved university.
Understand us and understand this clearly: you have everything to learn from us; we have nothing to learn from you.
Yours,
Oriel College, Oxford
*Autres temps, autres moeurs – Other times, other customs: in other eras people behaved differently.
Interestingly, Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), The Chancellor of Oxford University, was on the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4 yesterday on precisely the same topic. The Daily Telegraph headline yesterday was "Oxford will not rewrite history".
Patten commented "Education is not indoctrination. Our history is not a blank page on which we can write our own version of what it should have been according to our contemporary views and prejudice.”
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