share something funny

[belindamooody]

i dont know the origin of this.. who yogi is .. if he is real.. just passing it on because it made me smile. and also because i know you, like myself, are on a search for understanding and explanation about spang spang alang jazz.
.. here 'tis
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It seems that baseball's Yogi Berra, who gave us many classic quotes such as "baseball is 90% mental, the other half is physical",  "it's like deja vu all over again", and the immortal sports cliché "it ain't over till it's over", has focused his singular verbal prowess on the mystery of jazz performance.

Read, learn, enjoy. After all, as Yogi always said, "you can observe a lot just by watching", so I guess we can hear a lot just by listening...


Interviewer: Can you explain jazz?

Yogi: "I can't, but I will. 90% of all jazz is half improvisation. The other half is the part people play while others are playing something they never played with anyone who played that part. So if you play the wrong part, it's right. If you play the right part, it might be right if you play it wrong enough. But if you play it too right, it's wrong."

Interviewer: "I don't understand."

Yogi: "Anyone who understands jazz knows that you can't understand it. It's too complicated. That's what's so simple about it."

Interviewer: "Do you understand it?"

Yogi: "No. That's why I can explain it. If I understood it, I wouldn't know anything about it."

Interviewer: "Are there any great jazz players alive today?"

Yogi: "No. All the great jazz players alive today are dead. Except for the ones that are still alive. But so many of them are dead, that the ones that are still alive are dying to be like the ones that are dead. Some would kill for it."

Interviewer: "What is syncopation?"

Yogi: "That's when the note that you should hear now happens either before or after you hear it. In jazz, you don't hear notes when they happen because that would be some other type of music. Other types of music can be jazz, but only if they're the same as something different from those other kinds."

Interviewer: "Now I really don't understand."

Yogi: "I haven't taught you enough for you to not understand jazz that well."

[vickihb2]

That is so funny, oh my goodness, Belinda more of this PLEASE - Bev and I laughing out loud - this one's as good as Shooby. Thank you Ms Moody.

[belindablahblahblah]

In the interests of not creating another thread (and possibly calling it 'share something long and inspirational') ((wont the boys have a field day with that thought)).... i wanted to post something long and inspirational..and off the beaten- thread- track here.
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You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says. This is the text of the
Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar
Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.  I am honored to be
with you today at your commencement from one of the finest
universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be
told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big
deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then
stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really
quit. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My
biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she
decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I
should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for
me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I
popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a
girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the
middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you
want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out
that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had
never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final
adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents
promised that I would someday go to college. And 17 years later I did
go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as
expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings
were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't
see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life
and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I
was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life.
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It
was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best
decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking
the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on
the ones that looked interesting. It wasn't all romantic. I didn't
have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I
returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I
would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good
meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I
stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be
priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy
instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every
label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I
had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided
to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about
serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter
combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was
beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't
capture, and I found it fascinating.  None of this had even a hope of
any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we
were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never
dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never
had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since
Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer
would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never
dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not
have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was
impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college.
But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only
connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots
will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something -
your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let
me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky ? I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I
started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and
in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a
$2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our
finest creation - the Macintosh - a year earlier, and I had just
turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as
Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the
company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But
then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had
a falling out.  When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So
at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was
gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had
let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped
the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and
Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a
very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the
valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me ? I still loved what I did. The turn of
events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but
I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple
was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness
of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner
again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the
most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another
company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would
become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer
animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful
animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple
bought NeXT, I retuned
to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of
Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family
together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been
fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the
patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick.
Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going
was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And
that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is
going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly
satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to
do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet,
keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll
know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets
better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find
it. Don't settle.

My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live
each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be
right."
It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I
have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today
were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do
today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a
row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've
ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because
almost everything ? all external expectations, all pride, all fear of
embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of
death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are
going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you
have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not
to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in
the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't
even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost
certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect
to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go
home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means
to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10
years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure
everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for
your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a
biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my
stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got
a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there,
told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors
started crying
because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that
is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the
closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can
now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a
useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want
to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No
one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is
very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change
agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the
new is you, but someday not
too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared
away.  Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.
Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other
people's thinking.
Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice.
And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and
intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.
Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole
Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was
created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo
Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the
late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it
was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like
Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was
idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth
Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final
issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of
their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road,
the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so
adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."
It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay
Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you
graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

[God]

but I just ate a big bowl of ice cream, was that foolish coz now I'm not hungry anymore

[belindablah]

perfectly foolish i think! you'd be hungry by now ..unless you downed all the donuts too. thankyou for bringing this thread back to its' beaten path.