Thang Nguyen 555

Cultures on Collision Course

Author: Thang Nguyen 555

  • Hope – among other things

    Hope first. Or else. What’s the point! Hope, my first thought. There at the moment I bathed in maternal-ward fluorescent light and friendly faces. “Wow, she was 40 something yet while pregnant with child , she still juggled in between a class – 57 students – to push through nine-months of carrying”. Flanked by love,…

  • Decade w/out Dad

    1975-1985 For context and contrast, he was just as tall as McNamara without the glasses yet with trench coat and slick-back hair. We did not go deep-sea fishing for father-son outing. He only spent Sunday mornings with me. Our routine. His afternoons were for the other, his second wife and child. So I grew up,…

  • The things I carried

    Among them, besides two set of clothes, was my birthday’s gift: a Collegiate Dictionary. For the love of words and of a world that has yet to be discovered. It’s as it is today, slightly cool and conducive to sleeping-in. Yet I needed to show up for a rendezvous: my fateful trip to State College.…

  • Laboring together

    It’s the fact of life: people need to feed and eat, by laboring together to achieve that which is not possible otherwise. Let me hold that for you. It’s a wrap (we hear that on the film production set). I love the showing of film credits, from costume to casting, from screenplay to directing. Sydney…

  • Technology and Theology

    Divinity and DNA, eternality and here/now, the spiritual and the material. Push and pull, past and future. Are we nearer to Singularity? AI or we who are asleep at the wheel! I always appreciate a good story, like the one about a chapel of New College in Oxford whose beams finally gave, but with foresight…

  • Irony of our Age

    Let’s cut to the chase. It’s machine, invented by man, that shows us human, how to behave consistently, efficiently and even humanly. “I am sorry, I don’t understand” (human wouldn’t be that honest!). From flight runway to fashion runway, AI is now here to stay. It has done away with middle men e.g. printing, book…

  • NOC, LOC, CROCS

    Yesterday I was talking to a colleague of mine. During the course of the conversation, we mentioned NOC (Teleglobe days) Network Operating Center based in Toronto, CANADA. My kid and her friends taught me about CROCS, their favorite footwear. Then this morning, I learned a new, scarry acronym: LOC (Loss Of Crew). It brought to…

  • Sudden sadness

    In the news today, we read about stock market ups and downs, a VP pick and the need to floss often (TIME). Then, though rarely, I clicked on Google News, Vietnam-related items, among which, this. https://thebrunswicknews.com/news/local_news/column-perspective-the-death-of-the-best-known-vietnam-veteran/article_55a8efa2-533a-11ef-b514-d751e9f45001.html It was about My Lai, and the atrocity that took place there. I guess at the time, “Mad Dog”…

  • On being authentic

    I am a product of rote learning, of nudging, bending, pressuring, conforming, imitating, group thinking, “the apple cannot fall far from the tree”, social engineering, IBM clones etc… No wonder. After a while, I came to believe, as Patty Hearst once did, that the Stockholm Syndrome is the Law of the Land, like physics and…

  • Paris je t’aime

    The Olympics reinforce healthy competition: win/lose by the rules. It’s been said that our happiness depends largely on our relationship to one another e.g. Tennis Champions McEnroe later picked his rival as Best Man. In life, it’s who we associate with at clubs (analog) on LinkedIn (digital) that matters. I was fortunate for having a…