Early in this video, you will see a Burghboy say nice things about Ohio. That is Unusual In The Extreme. That is because there is a somewhat friendly rivalry between people from Pittsburgh and the state of Ohio. There are decades old rivalries in professional sports and just the natural antagonisms of living close together.
However, there are truths that cannot be denied. Ohio had some very important people, Grant and Sherman, Wilbur and Orville would be just a few and Pittsburgh has a football team that can win Super Bowls.
Early in my life, I became interested in the way humans always give names to everything. When I talk to one of my doctors and they ask me about prescriptions, I am always impressed by their ability to remember the names.
I have decided to name an upcoming, bike ride with my friends The Quest. In the immediately preceding post, I gave you the story that is the partial inspiration for that name.
We call the series of rides we have been doing for more than a decade the Tour De Nbo. This is a clever play on words our riding pal, Ed Quigley, came up with based on the Tour De France and the nickname they all call me, Denbo.
I may have blogged about how I acquired that name, but I will now provide a refresher. When I was a gradeschooler, my dad would take my brother, Jim, and me to visit his parents, Pap and Gram. Jim was always a more gregarious kid than I was and as we walked into the big room where Pap was always sitting in his lounge chair, doing crossword puzzles and spitting tobacco juice in his spitoon, Jim would always give him a big, cheerful hello. Pap would return the enthusiasm with a big, "Hey Jimbo". There was much less enthusiasm in my exchange with Pap. I was just a shy kid. This happened several times and finally, one time I guess Pap must have seen the look on my face and broken the code that I was just not as outgoing as Jim and was disappointed in not having a nickname. Pap always came up with the family nicknames. He said, "Hey Denbo".
Years later, as I was sitting in an office, just off the showroom floor of the car dealership, where I worked as a salesman, I was engaged in a discussion about nicknames. The discussion was with one of my favorite people of all time, Eddy Link. Eddy liked to give people nicknames also. He had named the parts manager Towhead, because he had blonde hair. He asked me if I had a nickname and I said a good friend had always called me Denny The Weasel. Ed didn't like that one, so I related the story about Jimbo and Pap. He liked that and started calling me Denbo on a regular basis.
Several more years later, I was having a similar discussion about nicknames with good friend and another of my favorite people, Lloyd, who was called The Lloydster. (I always call him the guy with the redundant L). He liked Denbo also and that is what he called me on our many hiking and camping trips in western mountains. One of those trips was our first hike to the summit of Mount Whitney and we were joined by a fellow UPS pilot who had been a fighter pilot and as you may know, they all have call signs, which is what they call nicknames. This guy's call sign was Snake. Snake began calling me Denbo also. Snake and I are both active on a chat room that our union of UPS pilots established called the Bar And Grill. He always referred to me as Denbo on the BnG and it caught on there. Snake joined us on one of our Tour De Nbo rides, referring to me as Denbo, so it caught on there. Sorry, I tried to make that as short as I could.
Whew! Then I began naming each ride. Smell The Roses, Zest For Life, Toxic Masculinity and The Phoenix are examples. I am calling our next one The Quest. The name was inspired by the story in the preceding post and the fact that I will be 80 years old on this ride. It will be 9 days of riding from Washington DC to Pittsburgh on the Chesapeake And Ohio Canal Towpath and the Great Allegheny Passage (GAP), 335 trail miles. The Quest will be to see if I can ride 40 miles a day, sleep on the ground and get up and do it again and again...
I have my new Category I ebike to provide an assist and I rode it 250 miles on the Katy Trail in Missouri last October, but I slept in a bed every night.
Hang around me long enough and you will hear me say, there is a thin line between genius and insanity. I don't know if that is true, but I like to say it, because many of the really smart people I have known or observed are a little nutty.
The discussion in the video above is about the Wright Brothers and their signature accomplishment, First Flight. I think it is ironic, that these 2 guys, who did not go to college, solved the mystery of human flight. It was accomplished because they were both very smart, but more so because they were persistent and did not allow setbacks to discourage them.
Silent Cal is not considered one of our Rushmore worthy presidents, but I think he hit the accomplishment nail on the head with the above quote. In an earlier blog post, titled Psycho Babble, I discussed a book, by Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Psycho Cybernetics. This book makes the case that we succeed by making mistakes, learning and then pressing on.
