Adindu, Amechi, Alden,
Great to see and talk with you at Alden and Marianne's 50th wedding celebration yesterday. (Here's the Agenda and News - https://worlduniversityandschool.blogspot.com/2018/08/agenda-news-for-world-univ-schs-open.html - from yesterday's open World University and School's Monthly Business Meeting, conducted a bit in the manner of Friends, - if you might be interested).
Warm regards, Scott
https://www.linkedin.com/in/amechi-nwachuku-4a424625/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/alden-briscoe-a915114/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/scottgkmacleod/
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- Scott MacLeod - Founder & President
- http://scottmacleod.com
- World University and School
- http://worlduniversityandschool.org
- CC World University and School - like CC Wikipedia with best STEM-centric CC OpenCourseWare - incorporated as a nonprofit university and school in California, and is a U.S. 501 (c) (3) tax-exempt educational organization.
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Hi Taiwo, Amechi, Marianne and Alden, Adindu, Nenna, and All,
Amechi was talking on the patio at Alden and Marianne's 50th describing how giraffes drink, and using his crutches (after a recent surgery) to illustrate how, since giraffes can't bend their necks, they spread their legs quite wide to kind of 'crane down' their heads on their long necks to drink water - and even as a kind of Yoga, I think you said, Amechi! ... and I was reminded of these Lego animals I just came across on Twitter ...
Activity Alert: Design engineer your favorite animal out of LEGO bricks and make it move! #LEGOlearning#STEMpic.twitter.com/SGBd1LsbLD— LEGO Education (@LEGO_Education) August 9, 2018
https://twitter.com/LEGO_Education/status/1027648706693148672 ...
Let's all explore making a robotic giraffe which can drink and other Lego animals together from Middletown, Connecticut, and Canyon, California, (and perhaps from London and Johannesburg and Burlingame et al) in a Google 10-person group video Hangout PLAY GROUP sometime using WeDo 2.0 Lego robotics' kits for elementary age kids :)
You'll find here -
Moon base robot from WeDo 2.0 (which I just made -see too: https://t.co/u1QPFQt2jT) pic.twitter.com/sxFBJSJfJR— WorldUnivandSch (@WorldUnivAndSch) July 11, 2018
Robotic arm & hand which can grab things (Lego WeDo 2.0) To https://t.co/a53n3kl75l& /Programming /Engineering @WorldUnivAndSch (@WUaSPress) ... See other /Subjects too pic.twitter.com/YKna2iZrE9— WorldUnivandSch (@WorldUnivAndSch) July 14, 2018
Alden and All, do you have your Lego WeDo2 robotics' kits close at hand to begin to make moving giraffes, and other animal robots out of Lego - and together in a Google group video Hangout either :)?
Thanks for your wonderful 50th anniversary celebration, Marianne and Alden!
Warm regards, Scott
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Hi Scott,
Another couple of hot days; pretty relentless, but the late afternoon swim is wonderful.
Church service tonight was provided by a young rabbi. Nice to see that the services are getting a little more diverse.
David Thurston stopped by for a brief visit yesterday. He was only here overnight and doesn’t expect to be back other than to close up the houses later on in the fall. He seems well. Said his tutoring efforts are coming along, although more slowly than he’d hoped.
I was so sorry to miss Alden and Marianne’s 50th ann celebration. If you went, send me some details. I’ll write to them at some point. Hope it was a happy occasion for them
L, M
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Hi M,
Thanks for your email.
Here's the low down on Alden & Marianne's 50th wedding anniversary celebration.
I was glad to have attended their 50th anniversary wedding celebration in Burlingame ... When I got there, people were gathered around possibly 8 tables on the tennis court out back, ~10 people to a table, eating a nice paella and salad. There seemed to be colleagues of Marianne and Alden from Brakeley Briscoe, and family members. Was glad to see Stacy, who gave the most toasts a little later on, as well as Alex and Heather. Also Amechi, and Adindu (two brothers) and his wife Taiwo, were there. The Briscoes and the Nwachukus continue to celebrate Christmas together in Lakeville, I learned - a many decades' long happy occasion, I'd say. There were lots of kids too from many families. Alden and Marianne were at the head of one table, their backs to the Brakeley Briscoe office (which I think they built), and I, having arrived late from a Stanford-informed talk was at the head of the other table closest to the house, with one empty seat next to me (for my partner, the thought crossed my mind - where is she?). A computer slide show near both of our tables showed pictures, and I saw a number of photos of my great aunt Martha, & uncle Jack, Briscoe, which were wonderful to catch glimpses of as they cycled through. Kate Briscoe (John Briscoe's widow) was at my table, with two African Americans who's names I don't know now, among other old friends of theirs. (Alden and John have long had many African American friends of which I'm very appreciative). The Briscoe's relationship with Nwachukus began with John and Adele (who was born in Nigeria, I think), the father, possibly when John was in Peace Corps, or possibly before even. At Kate's request at our table, I spoke a bit about World University and School.
As the evening grew dark - the temperature was comfortable - toasts began. George Brakeley, some friends of Alden from Harvard, (Marianne's brother Nelson may not have spoken), Heather, Alex and I among others all shared recollections of Alden and Marianne. There was a microphone and a little speaker, - and a home made light show was nice to see in the canopy of the main tree above us. Alden and Marianne were married in 1969 in Baltimore, MD, I think, and I spoke about stopping in Lakeville at Silent Meadows' Farm, and at the Lake House, on our MacLeod summer trip on the way from Hamden, Connecticut, and from Bethesda, Maryland, to Cuttyhunk Island, and of (somewhat distant) recollections of Alden and Marianne at both places (Farm House and Lake House) from the 1970s especially, of our family reunions in Chicago at their place (in the 1980s), of my staying with them in Burlingame for a month and half around 1991 when I moved to California from the Walingford / Swarthmore area re Pendle Hill (Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation), in Estes Park, Colorado, in Cannon Beach, Oregon, and seeing them last year at my uncle Ted Brown's memorial at Wisdom Creek Ranch (in northeast Oregon, too, as you know), and of Alden and John's vision (i.e. their great engaged progressive politics, a kind of Peace Corps' vision although Alden didn't do P.C. I think, partly their Quaker vision re George School, as well as their progressive politics coming out the 1960s and '70s, as well as coming out or Jack and Martha's very progressive thinking re Cambridge, MA, her involvement in the League of Women Voters, knowing Eleanor Roosevelt, and where Jack Briscoe was a professor at Harvard in English for a while, and re northwestern Connecticut too). While I didn't mention each and every one of these memories of Alden and Marianne in my toast, I mentioned a number of them (and am recalling some now even as I type - and think it's good as a kind of family history to note them down here as well).
Alex is really good at psychotherapy questions / mental health questions, in my view (and in family settings too interestingly), and I think it was helpful that he was there for this - since his thinking seems to ease some of the strong energies that could potentially emerge in such family occasions. Heather is a professor of medicine at San Francisco General Hospital (which is a county hospital I learned - so I guess they "see it all" - in a SF way, my assumption here). Alex's avocado farm in the Santa Barbara area burned down I heard as well.
Alden and Marianne just just now sent a thank you for attending their party, with a photo from them from around 1977 - with Alden with a big beard, and Marianne wearing somewhat hippy-looking blue jeans, and Stacy looking like a toddler, just beginning to stand - very earthy, and quite different from these days.
thanks to the Hedlund Schneiders for photo
So these are some details about Alden and Marianne's 50th.
Ma, here's another mention of the longest painting in the country at the New Bedford Whaling Museum - https://twitter.com/john_overholt/status/1028635185431146496 - which we both saw.
Glad you saw David Thurston, It would be interesting in increasing diversity in the Cuttyhunk Methodist Church, if someone like Rev. Nick Porter (who grew up on Cuttyhunk in the summers too, the youngest son of Rev Boone and Vi Porter) were to invite a Yale friend, for example, who had become an American Muslim Sheik or Imam (if he has one) to have a conversation with him, Nick, as part of a Sunday evening Cuttyhunk church service some summer too, I'd think. () And when I connect with a friend to begin a family, and if she were to come to Cuttyhunk, I'd enjoy it if we would go to a Cuttyhunk Methodist church service together some summer Sunday evening - which I think she might enjoy, since it's such a pretty church, and would also be a nice way to get to know friends at Cuttyhunk. (But I continue to be ambivalent about religion in general, and on Cuttyhunk as well, - for many decades now, and even with my current interest in non-theist Quakers :).
Music-making on Monday evenings for Scottish Country Dancing in Berkeley begins in a few weeks, I'm glad to say. And it isn't quite so hot today as it has been recently in Canyon in these summer afternoons.
Love, Scott
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Hi M,
It was really nice to see pictures of Aunt Marf, in particular, in the slide presentation behind me at one of the dinner tables at Alden and Marianne's 50th ... her face looked kind of 'gimpy' in a number of the photos - really fluidly intelligent in a nurturing way (I'd call this) - as I remember her ... and in her femininity ... (Jack was also remarkably intelligent as I recall).
Now I have a meeting with Stanford Peace Innovation Institute in Zoom video conferencing on Tuesday in late September ... On the agenda is talking about
A
Peace data tokens / credits
B
potentially re a single cryptocurrency with block chain and distributed via an universal basic income to all 7.5 billion people in all ~200 nation states' official languages (WUaS idea)
...
C
and inquiring about a position at Stanford
(Just found two American Muslim Imams/Chaplains online interestingly - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suhaib_Webb - and Harvard appointed an American Muslim Chaplain in 2017 - https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2017/06/harvard-appoints-a-muslim-chaplain/ - all echoing Aunt Martha and Jack Briscoe's progressive spirit of a kind of affirmative action, I'll call this).
It's cooling here, late summer-wise. How's the weather on Cuttyhunk? Hope to blog - https://scott-macleod.blogspot.com/2018/08/bearberry-kinnickinick-alden-and.html - about Alden and Marianne's 50th including with the interesting of them from around 1977.
L,
Scott
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