Tag: Muhammad Ali

Great Athletes Who Thrilled Us and Enriched Our Lives

Crossposted at Daily Kos

If you’re a sports fan as I am of several sports, have you ever wondered who the greatest athlete ever was.  If so, who among the greatest was your favorite of all time?  

In late 1999, Sports Illustrated magazine held an awards ceremony to honor the ‘Sportsman of the Century.’  Among those honored in their respective sports were Muhammad Ali (Boxing), Jim Brown (Football), Wayne Gretzky (Hockey), Michael Jordan (Basketball), Babe Didrikson Zaharias (Best Female Athlete), Carl Lewis (Olympian), Jack Nicklaus (Golf), and Babe Ruth (Baseball).

“Float Like a Butterfly, Sting Like a Bee”



Muhammad Ali aka “The Louisville Lip” knocks out Sonny Liston in the first round in their rematch fight in May 1965 in Lewiston, Maine to retain his World Heavyweight Boxing Crown (Photograph: Neil Leifer)

George Orwell, Time Travel, and Dinner Companions

Crossposted at Daily Kos

We’ve all, at some point or another in our lives, had this fantasy.  Whether we perceive modern life as too hurried, unsatisfying, devoid of meaning, or we see ourselves as slaves to the demands of technology, some of us yearn for a simpler time when many of the great political, ideological, and literary debates of decades gone by had yet to be settled.  Conflicts or movements of the past in which we picture ourselves an integral part of.  For we are confident that our presence would have resulted in an outcome to our liking.  Great ideas that we wish we’d thought of.  Music that we know we should have recorded.  Inventions we know we were destined to be associated with.  It is the inevitable ‘what if’ question we often think of.  It is the restless explorer in all of us.



RJ Matson, New York Observer, Buy this cartoon

Allow me to indulge in my fantasy below the fold.