Today is the third of three Ember Days for this season of the year. And the XXIII Olympic Winter Games will continue in Pyeongchang, South Korea.
Today is the third of three Ember Days for this season of the year. Ember days (a corruption from the Latin Quatuor Tempora, four times) are the days at the beginning of the seasons ordered by the Church as days of fast and abstinence. They were definitely arranged and prescribed for the entire Church by Pope Gregory VII (1073 – 1085) for the consecutive Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday after December 13th (the feast of Saint Lucy), after Ash Wednesday, after Whitsunday (Pentecost), and after September 14th (Exaltation of the Cross). The purpose of their introduction, besides the general one intended by all prayer and fasting, was to thank God for the gifts of nature, to teach men to make use of them in moderation, and to assist the needy. And the XXIII Olympic Winter Games will continue in Pyeongchang, South Korea; there will be Events in Bobsleigh and Ice Hockey, and Finals in Alpine Skiing, Cross Country Skiing, Curling, Snowboarding, and Speed Skating.
Last night our #22 LSU Tigers won their College Baseball game with the Texas Longhorns by the score of 13 to 4. And our New Orleans Pelicans won their NBA game with the Miami Heat in Overtime by the score of 124 to 123.
On waking up to get ready for work I did my Book Devotional Reading, and on our way to work I did my Internet Devotional Reading.. At the Pre-Shift Meeting I won a Golden Ticket, and it was decided that our next Graveyard Shift Pot Luck Dinner will be in two weeks, on March 10th. My co-worker Michelle brought me my Thin Mint Girl Scout Cookies, which I stashed in my locker. When we went out onto the floor, Richard was the Relief Dealer for Mini Baccarat, Pai Gow, and a Blackjack table. I was at first the Relief Dealer for the Sit-Down Blackjack table, a Blackjack table, and Three Card Blackjack. I was then moved to the second Three Card Poker table, closed that table, and dealt on the regular Three Card Poker table for the rest of the shift.
After work we went over to the Clinic/ I went to the Pharmacy and picked up the OTC stuff I needed for my Sigmoidoscopy Prep on Wednesday (I just need Gatorade, which I will get on Tuesday) while Richard, with other able-bodied male coworkers, helped our co-worker Patrick load up his inoperative car onto a trailer hitched to his pickup truck. When we got home from work, I set up my medications for next week (I have one prescription to renew on Monday) and ate my lunch salad while reading the morning paper while Richard paid the bills. I then came to the computer to plug the bills Richard had paid into my Checkbook Pro app, while Richard went out to mail the bills (our mail had already arrived at the house, with my contact lenses) and to deposit the in-town bill payments. I am now doing today’s Daily Update, and when I am finished I will be going to bed for the duration. Our LSU Tigers (16-11, 7-8) are playing an Away SEC College Basketball game with the Georgia Bulldogs (15-11, 6-8), our #7 LSU Lady Tigers (13-0, 0-0) will be playing an Away College Softball game with the Fresno State Lady Bulldogs (7-4, 0-0) , our #22 LSU Tigers will play the second game of their Home College Baseball series with the Texas Longhorns, and our #7 LSU Lady Tigers will be playing an Away College Softball game with the #3 UCLA Lady Bruins.
Tomorrow is the Second Sunday in Lent. And the XXIII Olympic Winter Games will conclude in Pyeongchang, South Korea; there will be no Events, Finals in Bobsleigh, Cross Country Skiing, Curling, and Ice Hockey, a Figure Skating Gala, and the Closing Ceremonies. Richard and I will be working our eight hours at the casino. After lunch I will be doing my Daily Update, and then going to bed for the duration. Our #7 LSU Lady Tigers will be playing an Away College Softball game with the #5 Oregon Lady Ducks, our #22 LSU Tigers will play the third and last game of their Home College Baseball series with the Texas Longhorns, our #24 LSU Lady Tigers (18-8, 10-5) will be playing a Home College Basketball game with the Alabama Lady Crimson Tide (17-11, 7-8), and our New Orleans Pelicans (32-26, 4-4) will be playing an Away NBA game with the Milwaukee Bucks (33-25, 5-6).
Our Parting Quote on this Saturday afternoon comes to us from Harold Ramis, American actor, director, and writer. Born in 1944 in Chicago, Illinois, his parents were shopkeepers on the city’s far North Side, and he had a Jewish upbringing. After high school he attended Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, from which he graduated in 1966. He had begun writing satirical plays in college; he worked in a mental institution in St. Louis for seven months (which he said well prepared him for working with actors), and avoided the draft by taking methamphetamine before his draft physical. Following his work in St. Louis, Ramis returned to Chicago, where by 1968, he was a substitute teacher at the inner-city Robert Taylor Homes. He also became associated with the guerrilla television collective TVTV, headed by his college friend Michael Shamberg, and wrote freelance for the Chicago Daily News. Additionally, he had begun studying and performing with Chicago’s Second City improvisational comedy troupe. Ramis’s newspaper writing led to his becoming joke editor at Playboy. After leaving Second City for a time and returning in 1972, having been replaced in the main cast by John Belushi, Ramis worked his way back as Belushi’s deadpan foil. In 1974 Belushi brought Ramis and other Second City performers, including Ramis’s frequent future collaborator, Bill Murray, to New York City to work together on the radio program The National Lampoon Radio Hour (which ran November 1973 to December 1974). During this time Ramis, Belushi, Murray, Joe Flaherty, Christopher Guest, and Gilda Radner starred in the revue The National Lampoon Show, the successor to National Lampoon’s Lemmings. Later, Ramis became a performer on, and head writer of, the late-night sketch-comedy television series SCTV during its first three years (1976–1979). Characterizations by Ramis on SCTV included corrupt Dialing for Dollars host/SCTV station manager Maurice “Moe” Green, amiable cop Officer Friendly, exercise guru Swami Bananananda, board chairman Allan “Crazy Legs” Hirschman, and home dentist Mort Finkel. His celebrity impressions on SCTV included Kenneth Clark and Leonard Nimoy. Ramis left SCTV to pursue a film career and wrote a script with National Lampoon magazine’s Douglas Kenney which would eventually become National Lampoon’s Animal House. They were later joined by a third collaborator on the script, Chris Miller. The 1978 film followed the struggle between a rowdy college fraternity house and the college dean, and the film’s humor was raunchy for its time. Animal House “broke all box-office records for comedies” and earned $141 million. Ramis next co-wrote the comedy Meatballs, starring Bill Murray. The movie was a commercial success and became the first of six film collaborations between Murray and Ramis. His third film and his directorial debut was Caddyshack, which he wrote with Kenney and Brian Doyle-Murray. The film starred Chevy Chase, Rodney Dangerfield, Ted Knight, and Bill Murray. Like Ramis’s previous two films, Caddyshack was also a commercial success. In 1982 Ramis was attached to direct the film adaptation of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole. The film was to star John Belushi and Richard Pryor, but the project was aborted. In 1984 Ramis collaborated with Dan Aykroyd on the screenplay for Ghostbusters, which became one of the biggest comedy hits of the summer, in which he also starred as Dr. Egon Spengler, a role he reprised for the 1989 sequel, Ghostbusters II (which he also co-wrote with Aykroyd). His later film Groundhog Day (1993), which he co-wrote with Danny Rubin, has been called “Ramis’ masterpiece”. His films were noted for attacking “the smugness of institutional life … with an impish good [will] that is unmistakably American”. They were also noted for “Ramis’s signature tongue-in-cheek pep talks”. Sloppiness and improvisation were also important aspects of his work. Ramis frequently depicted the qualities of “anger, curiosity, laziness, and woolly idealism” in “a hyper-articulate voice”. He had a role in the 1997 film As Good As It Gets as Helen Hunt’s son’s doctor. Through the 1990s he took the Ghostbusters franchise to television, and during the 2000s he took the franchise into video games. In an interview in the documentary American Storytellers in 2003, Ramis said he hoped to make a film about Emma Goldman (even pitching Disney with the idea of having Bette Midler star) but that none of the movie studios were interested and that it would have been difficult to raise the funding. In 2004 he turned down the opportunity to direct the Bernie Mac – Ashton Kutcher film Guess Who, then under the working title of The Dinner Party, because he considered it to be poorly written. That same year Ramis began filming the low-budget film The Ice Harvest, “his first attempt to make a comic film noir”. Ramis spent six weeks trying to get the film greenlit because he had difficulty reaching an agreement about stars John Cusack and Billy Bob Thornton’s salaries. The film received a mixed reaction. His typical directing fee, as of 2004, was five million dollars. In 2004 Ramis was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame, and in 2005 was the recipient of the Austin Film Festival’s Distinguished Screenwriter Award. He had a daughter by his first wife (her godfather is Bill Murray), and two sons by his second wife. A Chicago Cubs fan, he attended home games every year to conduct the seventh-inning stretch at Wrigley Field. In May 2010 Ramis contracted an infection that resulted in complications from the autoimmune disease vasculitis. He lost the ability to walk, but after relearning to do so, he suffered a relapse of the disease in late 2011 (died 2014) ”It’s hard for winners to do comedy. Comedy is inherently subversive. We represent the underdog as comedy usually speaks for the lower classes. We attack the winners.”
From The Recamier 