122nd Tournament Of Roses Parade

When hearing an advertisement for the 122nd Tournament of Roses Parade it made me begin to wonder as I did the math. This distinguished event goes all the way back to 1890? My curiosity got the better of me as I went time traveling to a day and age when something that started out so simple became this grand event known as America's New Years Celebration. Take the trip with me.

It was a time of the alliterative Mansions of the Midwestern Magnates. Much of what we enjoy today is the result of the spirited vision of titans and kings of industry who brought their science and ingenuity with them when they put down roots here in California. The Tournament House itself is the refurbished Wrigley Mansion, of chewing gum fame. This stately Italian Renaissance-style mansion alone is enough to stop and want to divert the tour but we'll save it for now as a footnote, we'll plan a trip down "Millionaires' Row" for another day.

We continue our time travel to the private Pasadena Valley Hunt Club where in the winter of 1890, the idea was born to try to bring attention to sunny Southern California, a "Mediterranean of the West" presented for the purpose of inviting former east coast neighbors to a respite from the cold. This visual was romantic to me; horse and carriage and street cars, putting on games such as chariot races and jousting, foot races, polo, and tug-of-war all enjoyed under the warm California sun.

Bloom where you are planted was more than a motto for the trademark blossoms that gave birth to the notion that Professor Charles F. Holder announced in the effort to convince, "In New York, people are buried in snow. Here our flowers are blooming and our oranges are about to bear. Let's hold a festival to tell the world about our paradise."

Well, there was the Wrigley Mansion to serve as the barn, the abundance of fresh flowers to showcase Pasadena's charm as the cast; why not put on a parade where the carriages can be decorated with those blooms as the show to precede the games...and the tournament was born!

In just five years the Tournament of Roses Association was established. By 1890, only ten years from it's beginnings the games expanded to include ostrich races, bronco busting demonstrations and a race between a camel and a triumphant elephant. Knowing you can't keep a good social event down, the festival continued to expand to include marching bands and motorized floats. Stands were erected along the parade route and soon it was a media event which had grown too large for the Valley Hunt Club to handle.

The town lot famous for being the site of the first Rose Bowl Game in 1902 had officially been renamed Tournament Park the year before. A private park maintained by the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, it served as the venue for Caltech's football team with a capacity of 43,000.

The very first
Rose Bowl Game




As we traverse the years and return to the present day, 2011 marks the 122nd Rose Parade and 97th Rose Bowl Game. The Pasadena Tournament Of Roses Association founded by the efforts of Charles Frederick Holder and Francis F. Rowland, is a non-profit organization comprised of nearly 1,000 community volunteers. These members all live or work within 15 miles of Pasadena City Hall and range in age from 21 to 64. According to the Association, they must have "a reputation for integrity, reliability, dependability, commitment and dedication." This labor of love's combined 80,000 man-power hours to stage the event is a testament to this type of social bonding and is what produces "a festival of flowers, music and equestrians and sports unequaled anywhere in the world."

The Tournament of Roses has come a long way since those early days. From what the times have available for us to play with, the Rose Parade’s submissions start with a simple sketch and develop in the magical place of imagination and the high-tech computerization of animation. I wonder what the folks of bygone days would think of today's elaborate floats going beyond the roses and including exotic natural materials from around the world.

Festivities in Tournament
Park, 1893.
Courtesy of the
Los Angeles Public Library.









The advancement of science and technology have most of the floats being built by professional float building companies these days and take as much as a year to construct while there are still a few floats built exclusively by volunteers from their sponsoring communities. Either way, the effort has become world renowned and culminates with millions of viewers tuning in on New Year's morning to enjoy this simple celebration of blossoms and bounty identifying a sunny land with the communal spirit of social gathering known as the Tournament of Roses Parade.

Happy New Year!

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Only Two Motivations in Life

     It could be disputed ad nauseam what are the true motivations in life. In trying to reduce the complexities, it could be separated by Jungian v. Freudian concepts. It could be limited to male v. female responses to life, in general. It could be expanded to define the myriad complexities developed in theory to define the particular neuroses that afflict one's mental constitution, and then, perhaps, taking a lifetime to work out. 

     Or, it could be simplified. There are only two driving motivations in life that govern our behaviors. They are either Love or Fear. Simply stated. One or the other. Now you know. 

Oprah just let us know the most googled word on the internet. Know what it is? 

Love. 

     It is no surprise to me that this word captured our most earnest desire to know its meaning. In finding love, we find acceptance. In that acceptance, we feel at peace. It doesn't matter the source, although nearly all can be traced to either mom or dad. In a broader sense, where anyone is struggling with accepting the relationship, it could go so far as the idea of being accepted by God. At any rate, if we sense that we are loved, it follows that we experience acceptance and are, therefore, at peace. Makes me think of the expression, God is in His heaven and all is right with the world.

     One of my favorite quotes comes from Rita Rudner: Neurotics build castles in the air, psychotics live in them. My mother cleans them....

     Upon first hearing this, I laughed heartily. But this observation has stayed with me over the years developing more significance as the years have passed. Being quite the neurotic myself, I could associate with my castle in the air. Very often the psychotic living in it was the same person cleaning it as I watched the maniacal behavior in my imaginary split-level head. 

     I have had my share of fun with the diversions of mental complexities that drive my behaviors, not the least of which borders on paranoia. But I now know that can all be encompassed in fear. Fear has been defined as the acronym that represents False Evidence Appearing Real. While I like that reduction, it hardly serves a purpose when I find myself in the throws of terrifying fear. Yet, recently immersing myself in this latest phase of terror going on in my life, I realize that my fear is the result of a lack of the supporting love that would go a long way to allow me to feel an integral part of my own existence. Cue the music, "...where is love? Does it fall from skies above? Is it underneath the willow tree, that I've been dreaming of? "

     Having once been an identical twin, now living without my other half has left me to unwind that bond that has had me wrapped a little too tight. When I look at what makes me ME these days, I am profoundly aware that I long to gravitate toward a loving life. Yet there is much on a daily basis that can pull me from those gentle and loving feelings toward my fellow person.  Especially when I have been done wrong by my fellow person. I certainly can identify their behaviors in the immediate; generally, all fear based. Example: just recently being fired by a rather tasteless corporation that allows its most fundamental controls to be handled by imbeciles in the field, despite the company's lofty ideas of integrity.

      It is clear to me that this economy has been a ripe opportunity to couch attrition under the guise of a downturn. A hiring freeze followed by a systematic elimination of personnel is a most convenient means to reduce the first and most easily controlled controllable. I have joined the elite team known as The Expendables. I have had to contend with the reality that I am no less the grand and wonderful person I was performing to the best of my abilities for this monolith. Just because they have chosen to become opportunistic does not diminish my expertise, in spite of how this experience has put a dent in my own sense of loftiness. 

     While I am worried, in fact, terrified by the lack of prospects, I have had to contend with the fact that I choose not to become a less loving soul as a result of the ills of this particularly unsavory corporation. It is merely a microcosm of what the entire world is undergoing right now to varying degrees and blatant transgressions. Why? Well, I surmise that fearing the volatile uncertainties of the incumbent, universally economic mood-swing, we once again have an area of rampant abuses that cannot be recorded because of their emotional characteristics. There is no metric for this. Just the remnants of those left out of the loop climbing toward 10%.

     I am put in mind of another humorous, yet no less salient point made by none other than Groucho Marx himself: I refuse to join any club that would have me as a member.

     This is my default premise as I reconstruct my approach to surviving on this planet. The last thing I would want to do is make the same mistake and go work for a company that has such poor respect for its workforce as to subject them to the systematic elimination of their fiscal headaches. Human resources, me eye! Why I oughta'....
      I should have quit much earlier but I chose to trust that there was love at the root of their motivations. In this situation, I discovered the depth of their collective fears. Well, after all, there are  only humans running the day-to-day operations and most recently one of their own training facilitators openly admitted they were real good at one thing: managing out their valuable human resources. As part of their managing team, I prided myself on the fact that I would not reduce myself to such tactics. It had not occurred to me that they would pull this on me. 

     So as I embark on this next chapter in the midst of a fearful planet and a very questionable future, I vow to keep my heart open. If it is my aim to operate from love; I must not put up any walls around my heart that would keep me from receiving the robust gifts that come from love. As I walk forward I am in mind of yet another author, Emmet Fox and his poem about Love:

There is no difficulty that enough love will not conquer;

No disease that enough love will not heal;

No door that enough love will not open;

No gulf that enough love will not bridge;

No wall that enough love will not throw down;

No sin that enough love will not redeem...

It makes no difference how deeply seated may be the trouble,

How hopeless the outlook,

How muddled the tangle,

How great the mistake -- 

A sufficient realization of love will dissolve it all...

If only you could love enough, you would be the happiest and most powerful being in the world.

     

Is Your Dog Psychic?

     Most recently, I was enchanted by studies revealing how the dogs we love so much love us. For me, I was surprised the first time I experienced the uniquely intrinsic sense of response dogs have to humans. It is not something you can define; it is something you can only know and understand once you have experienced it. And once you have experienced it, you continually ask yourself, "Can my dog read my mind? Is my dog psychic?"

     It was revealed through scientific studies that among animals, dogs  are the only creatures that visually read our facial movements much the way we humans read each others' faces. It is known that body language does much to predetermine our responses to each other.  Intrinsically, we respond more to the visual "read" of facial expressions and far less to the words being spoken. Would it surprise you to know that dogs do the same thing we do when reading our faces?

     Through eye tracking technology, dogs viewed a variety of faces on a screen, including other animal faces. It was conclusively determined that dogs reacted to human faces the same way that we do, first looking to the left focusing on the right side of the human faces that were displayed. Our naturally attained sixth sense facial expressions are not done symmetrically.

     As humans, we look to the left, or the right side of the face. I have always been aware of this as I am self-conscious of the fact that I seem compelled to look predominately at a person's right eye, often wondering if this is obvious to the other person. While I have not been as much aware of our facial micro-movements, I have put it down to addressing the left brain, the "non-emotional" side of the human being.

      The conclusion from the study here is that the dog is performing much as we do when  picking up on the sub-conscious ticks and twitches which occur in the face, some of them almost undetectable, yet with their keen eyesight, the dog satisfies the myriad understanding of our moods in this process. In so doing, dogs understand us in a way that humans cannot. I speculate that language does not get in the way of their keen perception. It does not escape me that there is the intrinsic awareness of potential reward in the dog's ultra keen perception.

     For us, as humans, in a certain mindset we can almost understand what dogs are thinking. Can we understand the barks of dogs? Tests performed where dogs were provoked to bark in a variety of situations and the testers recorded the barks proved that simply listening to the sounds of their barking, people were able to discern what the dogs were experiencing, or communicating  through their barking. The results were remarkably accurate. 

     It has always been assumed that dogs descended from wolves. Interestingly enough, wolves only bark as a warning whereas dogs have developed their barks as a means to communicate quite well with us. Some scientists believe that our instruction has a biochemical signature that acts as a bond much like that of mother and baby. Their is a chemical release of oxytocin,  the polypeptide hormone, produced by the posterior lobe of the pituitary gland, that stimulates contraction of the smooth muscle of the uterus. 

     It has been determined that this chemical release plays a role between dogs and their owners. Blood samples taken prior to and during interactions revealed a burst of oxytocin released naturally. It has a powerful physical effect. Owning a dog can even extend your life, lower your blood pressure and heart rate.

     Following the premise of ancestry, scientists have compared mitochondrial DNA markers in domestic dogs to discover that they are most closely related to wolves and that every single one of them was identical. Dogs are most certainly descended from wolves. The timescale for domestication is 100,000 years or more. It is clear to see that our relationship with dogs goes back farther than with any other pets. 

     And it makes sense that as scavengers, dogs would place themselves within our perimeters as we would leave the carcasses of dead animals where they could nourish from the remains and bone marrow, thus setting themselves up for interaction with humans. This would naturally lead to a fundamental change in our development. 

     When comparing the skulls of wolves to domestic dogs significant differences made it clear that the domestic dog's skull had a more raised forehead with a much shorter snout .  The larger skull denotes a bigger brain over time. Further cognitive studies have proved that dogs think more like us than even our closest animal ancestor, the chimp.  Through exercises between humans and chimps and humans and dogs, the dogs  were able to make the visual leap of faith to look in the direction of the outstretched arm and grasp the understanding of what is intended by the all-too human gesture of pointing. 

     In every attempt made with the chimps to get them to understand that the human pointing to the treat hidden under the cup was giving away the answer, they seemed completely disinterested in this free information., whereas the dog was not only tuned into this communication, they knew there was a reward at the end of the pointing finger continuing off into empty space and in the direction indicated. Dogs following pointing is very natural for them, just as picking up on something as subtle as a gaze, a skill dogs only use with us; they don't even do it with each other. Thus, dogs are bilingual, in a sense. 

     New research has revealed that their abilities go beyond what anybody thought. It is not too far fetched to believe that Timmy could, indeed, second guess what Lassie was telling him, as we have learned that dogs are capable of abstract thinking. Children can determine that a drawing can represent a three dimensional object. So can dogs. Dogs are more intelligent than we ever thought possible.

     Further investigating the origin of such behaviors, the question arose, how did dogs come to be these docile, obedient and doting creatures in the first place? Is the wolf, after all, the true ancestor of the domestic dog deriving in appearance, somewhat,  and slightly removed from function, while general character from an earlier form has certainly taken on a dramatic change.  If they are 99.8 % genetically identical to wolves then is it, perhaps, the way that we have raised them? 

     That's what took us to Budapest where five day old wolf cubs are being raised in the home to establish intense bonding early in their development.  At eight weeks differences start to show up. The wolves apparently had their own interests divorced of human interaction. There was very little eye contact and they behaved much as they would if they were still in the wild. They became increasingly aggressive and by the second month, battles worsened and they wanted to destroy everything. It is impossible to turn a wolf into a dog.

     We next looked to a Siberian experiment where a Soviet scientist set up  a breeding program to domesticate silver foxes. In this program, 1% of  foxes being introduced to humans were non-aggressive and therefor selected to breed with other non-aggressive foxes. After only three generations, these aggressive behaviors were completely bred out. Cross fostering to deliver mothering behaviors had no influence on the cubs. The difference is almost entirely genetic. Tamer foxes produce lower adrenaline. Interestingly, as the foxes were continually bred, their physical features began to change. They were beginning to look more like dogs. In this, selective breeding has gone from roles to appearance.

     It is further easy to understand with continued cross breeding as has been typically done to accentuate features or maintain a tiny stature, etc., it is clear that this process over time has delivered the animal that most closely resembles human characteristics. What an amazing creature hath been made. I still think there is significant weight to the idea that dogs are intrinsically aware of the treat factor and I know they are keenly aware of how much we can do for them in this department. It reminds me of the studies done to prove telepathic communication as to where the treats are kept. But I'll save that for another blog.