A graduate of Penn State, I related well to the scenes from the Deer Hunter, set in an industrial town of Pennsylvanian.
Smokestacks on the slope, familiar faces and friends and the “Welcome Home” sign for returning soldiers from a distant war.
But unlike other wars before and since, this one was controversial. It showed when the main character, portrayed by DeNiro, ducked behind a taxi driver and asked to be driven pass his own Welcoming party.
Out of three “deer hunters”, one came back without injury to the mind or the body. Am I thy brothers’ keeper?
In CBS Vietnam‘s documentaries, soldiers were shown sitting in the shade, smoking and listening to transistor radio which was playing “Oh, I don’t want to die” (Reflections of my life).
Yet decades later, land mines still exploded claiming many more limps and lives.
The late Princess Diana was advocating the elimination of land mines.
At long last, the largest nuclear bomb in TX is being disassembled (the article said engineers have since died off, so it’s hard to locate the blue prints).
Farewell to arms.
Hemingway, go home.
All we need is love.
Faith in humanity. Speaking of humanity. We saw quake in Turkey and flood in Thailand.
The heavy rain and flood forced Thailand to close its airport and evacuate parts of its capital (the toll: 506 deaths).
When it rains it pours there in South East Asia.
I was in Vietnam last year. All of a sudden, it poured really hard.
From a sidewalk cafe, I saw a middle-age lady in cone hat tried to push a scrap metal cart whose wheels were half buried in water-covered pot holes.
Now, the UN is advocating Environmental sustainability, with 7 Billion people sharing Earth’s limited resources, foremost is clean water.
China was quick to beef up R&D in solar and desalinated water.
We can not pretend we live in complete isolation. Debris from Fukushima quake drifted to California.
Flood in Thailand slow down server production, which pushes companies to the Cloud.
First wave: Main Frame, second wave: personal computer and third wave: cloud, which brings us in full circle.
Talking about automation, and unemployment. Stats shows high unemployment among returning veterans of the two wars. It’s time for that Welcome-Home sign again.
Hope they find a job and not wait too long for to receive those benefits.
Hope they won’t have to duck behind the taxi driver.
Farewell to arms, to guilt and to self-recrimination.
All we need is love and a little faith in humanity. Princess Diana would have been proud to see a female film Director received an Oscar for Hurt Locker. The subject: land mine.
Thang Nguyen 555 