Trivia

 4:30 pm here and I am finally getting out of the house, not that I've been trying very hard to do so up to this point. One difficulty was that I kept falling asleep, although why I felt so profoundly tired I do not know. I mean, I feel okay otherwise. I just keep falling asleep is all. 

Perhaps it was the heavy rain that struck this morning, causing me to feel generally waterlogged, psychologically anyway. 

And then there was the hour or so that I spent trying to explain some of the basic tenets of Christianity to a curious Muslim friend. This is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. Take this question, for instance: Siapa yang disebut Tuhan dalam ajaran Kristen (who is called God in Christianity)? Try explaining the idea of the Trinity, right? I doubt whether my attempts were very successful. 

Went back to sleep for a while, then woke up and watched a news special from 1964, a 20 year anniversary piece on D-Day featuring Walter Cronkite and Dwight D. Eisenhower. It just popped up on my YouTube feed for some reason. I couldn't help but wonder whether my dad had watched the broadcast at that time. I certainly didn't--or at least had no recollection of it--and so it struck me as quite interesting, these 56 years later.

And this reminded me of something else. Like all boys in that time period, my brother and I, and our friends, enjoyed playing army and there was all kinds of neat army stuff one could still buy at the Army Surplus store down on Union Avenue--cartridge belts and canteens and helmets and so on. We all had these helmets back then, and I remember one day wondering how they could possibly stop a bullet, for they we made of plastic. Well, we eventually discovered that what we were wearing were helmet liners, and that the actual helmets were made of metal. So of course we bought the metal helmets, inserted our liners, and found the things, at 10 and 12 years of age, terrifically heavy. There's an old photograph somewhere of three of us on the trail to Gibson Lake burdened beneath these ponderous helmets. Needless to say, we soon decided that our plastic liners were sufficient for our military purposes. 

So I'll spend some time here with my coffee and then head on home, and then, heck, maybe there'll be something else from 1964 on the Tube.