I’ve written this blog, every day, for so many years, it has to be getting old for many of you by now. I have certainly repeated myself over the years, recounting dates in history, or scientific facts. I’ve blown out more candles on dead people’s birthday cakes than I’d like to admit.
Today is a great example. When I woke this morning and got to my early work of the day, I saw that it was Bela Lugosi’s birthday (b. 1882). I jumped for joy because I love the actor, Mr. Lugosi, and I could hardly wait to write about his vampirish ways. I wanted to tell you that he was born Bela Blasko, in a town named Lugos in Hungary. He changed his name later, using the name of that town.
I was going to give you all the little details of his vampire-acting life, including his three divorces, and end the story when he died of a heart attack on the bed of his apartment in California when he was 73. He was buried in one of his Dracula capes, by the way, out there in Culver City, California.
But I am sure, somewhere along the line in the past eleven years, I’ve told that story before, because I thought he was one of the best scary men in all the history of film.
Instead, though, I might have told you about a story from 1847. It happened in England, when a twelve-year-old boy named William Nelman poisoned his grandfather with arsenic, killing him. Yes, the kid put a load of arsenic in the sugar bowl, and that old grandpa had a sweet tooth. It all came about because the two of them often argued about William’s “honesty.” And one day, the grandfather struck him. It knocked William off his feet, causing him to injure his head. And that’s when the rat poison hit the pancakes. It would become a famous court case, apparently, saying the boy suffered from immoral insanity. The jury found William guilty.
Somedays, the topics are plentiful. Other days, they are scarce. Today, I might have passed on the poison bit, and instead talked about the history of the baseball. Not the sport, but the ball. On this date in 1910, the baseball was slightly different for the World Series games. It had a cork center, for the first time ever.
When baseball started out, the balls were a little ambiguous. Back then, they were made by cobblers who used rubber remnants of old shoes. They would wrap those rubber cores with yarn and then put a leather covering on it, with stitching. In some regions, sturgeon eyes — yes, fish eyes — were used instead of melted shoe rubber.
In the 1850s, there was no rhyme or reason to it. Pitchers often just made their own balls. And when there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen, you get a lot of different soup. The balls were not consistent, varying in size and weight. Eventually, though, they made it more regulated, and in 1910, those balls got a cork center.
Yet, I know a lot of my readers aren’t so interested in sports, so I might have passed on that one. I could have written an account about this date in 1813 when the Kingdom of Westphalia was abolished. Which is confusing to me, as it appears that Westphalia is alive and well in Germany today. Perhaps it was a temporary abolishment. I don’t know.
But my point is this. There is a lot going on in the world around us. And I can only see the things I see through my own eyes. For that reason, it is important that I am constantly checking myself, to make sure that my core values remain strong and constant. It reminds me that we have to do the inside work, before anything on the outside can be done. Like those cork baseballs, we need a good center.
=========
“Tell me what you pay attention to and I will tell you who you are.”
― José Ortega y Gasset
=========
“Your time is way too valuable to be wasting on people that can’t accept who you are.”
― Turcois Ominek
==========
“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”
― Roy Disney
===========
The story behind the story, in front of the story, story, story.
