“Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the control of fear, mastery of fear.”
–
Mark Twain
I didn’t know until now that Mark Twain and I share a birthday. Cool!
Very Fine Shoes
2.5″ x 3.5″ Watercolor ATC
I spent so much time on my
Banty, that I didn’t get to paint anything else over the weekend. I guess we’ll tip toe through the shoe pile this week and see what else is hiding in there. When I look at some of these shoes, it amazes me that I put so much detail in that itty bitty little space. Fun!!!
Last night, I made it to my flight lesson in McAlester, ready to go up with the remnants of my cold. I did the pre-flight, the run-up, and taxied onto runway 02, announcing my intentions on the radio. All is well. I begin the takeoff roll, when I notice the
airspeed indicator is not working. I pulled the throttle all the way back and slowly brought the plane to a stop. No airspeed indicator, no takeoff. So…. I taxied back to the hangar and we stowed the plane.
Even though it was sad that I didn’t get to fly, it was a great lesson. It’s not often that a student gets to experience equipment failure in real-time. We read about it and we are taught about it, but when it really happens, it is burned into our brain cells. If I hadn’t noticed the airspeed indicator (yeah… like that would happen!), my instructor was going to let me take off and then we’d learn about how to handle the failure in the air and get the plane safely back. Maybe next time we can pretend.
Mark Twain
Name at birth: Samuel Langhorne Clemens
Mark Twain is on nearly everyone’s list of all-time great American authors. Twain was raised in
Hannibal, Missouri and as a young man held a series of jobs which included work as a printer’s apprentice, a Mississippi riverboat pilot, and a newspaperman in Nevada and San Francisco. He moved gradually from journalism to travel writing and then to fiction, aided by the success of his 1869 travel memoir
The Innocents Abroad. His humorous tales of human nature, especially
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and
Huckleberry Finn (1885), remain standard texts in high school and college literature classes. In his own day Twain was a tremendously popular figure and a celebrated public speaker who toured widely. Other Twain classics include
Life on the Mississippi (1883) and
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) and the
short story The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County (1867).
Twain was born and died in years in which
Halley’s Comet passed by Earth: 1835 and 1910… His pseudonym, Mark Twain, was taken from Mississippi riverboat terminology; it’s a measure of depth… Twain married the former Olivia Langdon in 1870; she died in 1904, and the melancholy tone of Twain’s later writings is often attributed to his depression over her death.
Richard Carlson, Ph.D. (5-16-61 to 12-13-06) was considered to be one of the foremost experts on happiness and stress reduction in the United States and around the world. As the author of thirty popular books including the runaway bestseller, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff…and it’s all Small Stuff, he showed millions of people how not to let the small things in life get the best of them.
Born in Joplin, Missouri, James Langston Hughes was a member of an abolitionist family. He was the great-great-grandson of Charles Henry Langston, brother of John Mercer Langston, who was the first Black American to be elected to public office, in 1855. Hughes attended Central High School in Cleveland, Ohio, but began writing poetry in the eighth grade, and was selected as Class Poet. His father didn’t think he would be able to make a living at writing, and encouraged him to pursue a more practical career. He paid his son’s tuition to Columbia University on the grounds he study engineering. After a short time, Langston dropped out of the program with a B+ average; all the while he continued writing poetry. His first published poem was also one of his most famous, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, and it appeared in Brownie’s Book. Later, his poems, short plays, essays and short stories appeared in the NAACP publication Crisis Magazine and in Opportunity Magazine and other publications. Read more…
