Memories of Historic Past Iran Conflict "Color" My View of the Present

 There's nothing like getting up a couple of hours before sunrise and getting started on the day.  Brewing a nice pot of flavored coffee works well with a ten-minute session of running-in-place on the living room rug floor.  My reading and studies seem to be morphing into more passive, visual and mental undertakings, and my little habit changes are becoming more directed toward the more manageable, less supremely ambitious sort.  Today is Monday, March 9.  Were I going to the 9th grade at Nova, I'd get my homework worked and gathered at the dining room table, setting the final morning alarm to give me a reasonable amount of time to clean and dress for school. As it actually is at this moment in time, I can sip my cup d K-cup flavored and brewed coffee and move over to watch a little YouTube TV.  And after a brief bathroom visit I can return to Jim Rohn's stoic personal development podcasts. Then it's back to bed for a while.  I'm getting sick and tired of the war news going on, with Trump trying to constantly insert himself in the press meetings.  

This Iran thing brings to memory when I was first going to college in the mid-to-late 1970s when the two campuses I attended became loaded with Persian overseas students.  To me they seemed to enjoy a promising, privileged existence (although none wanted to talk with me) and the idea that their home country was an autocratic police state that imprisoned and/or tortured dissidents seemed far-fetched...why, the Shah was our buddy, wasn't he? It wouldn't be until the violent rioting in 1978 eventually  kicked Shapour Bakhtiar out and brought in Khomeini for his long brutal, murderous reign.  And then came the hostage crisis.  After Khomeini began to crack down on the nation's socialists, I got a knock on my apartment door from a couple of Iranians who wanted me to sign on with their cause.  What's that, you go to town loudly running down me and my country to the world, and now we're all suddenly friendsy-pindsy because we think we might have a common enemy? In politics, trust is a difficult thing to build and only too easy to destroy...never again, Iran and Russia.  I honestly don't understand how most of our so-called allies can trust us to any degree after our current president's behavior toward them, espcially Ukraine and Denmark with its prized Greenland that Trump wants to add to his personal map of territorial conquests..  Now let's see...I look ahead right now for the next several hours, noting the potential for a a nice wide-open time span devoted to modest personal projects...A little attempt at walking endurance looks like a good option...  

About the Possibility of Writing and Posting Retro-Blog Articles

I've been working on this blog of mine since April of 2007, which is well over eighteen years ago...a long time.  Yet I wonder about whether earlier daily journaling, preserved up to the present day, would have been a preferable writing habit.  My memory is still pretty good, albeit with some gaps regarding specific, detailed information.  There are times in my past when I built up some vivid memories of the then-ongoing events and how I handled them.  Times in high school, college, and at theme parks or the post office are all worth documenting, along with my takes on them.  If you access this blog and see the "first" entry going all the way back to March, 1973, you might conclude that I'm suffering from temporal delusions...I just don't write "today I ran the two-mile race relatively fast but finished dead last" in November, 2025 while posting the comment back to the date I experienced it all.  Still, just for the fun of it, I think this just might be worth the effort...

Looked at "New Student Edition" Florida Alligator

About a week ago I picked up a copy of the free local paper titled The Independent Florida Alligator, and opened it up to look for anything of use to me.  This issue's called "new student edition", so since I'm pretty damned old in the grand scheme of things I guess they're not all that concerned about me...but that's all right.  The contents were full of upbeat, encouraging articles aimed at helping students avoid burnout while offering suggestions on where they can hang out, eat, exercise, and so on.  I enjoyed reading the opening article describing the recent politicized crap surrounding who gets to be University of Florida's president ever since our excuse for a governor, Ron Desantis, appointed Nebraska senator Ben Sasse to the post, only for him to suddenly resign one day, leaving many angry people in his wake.  Then they brought back Kent Fuchs, who had served at the post for eight years, as interim president until they completed their search and confirmed a new one.  University of Michigan president Santa Ono was picked, resigned his old post...and was ultimately rejected by the politically obsessed Florida Board of Governors, leaving Fuchs still in charge.  He's retired now, and maybe UF doesn't really need a president anyway...what a pathetic joke this once-respected office has been degraded to.  I enjoy the creative writing in the Alligator, and it tends to have a personal edge to it that I can relate to...kind of like blog articles.  And of course I enjoy their little puzzle section toward the back, especially the "spot six differences" one.  But would I ever shell out any money for the Alligator? No way...