Midnight has come and gone and though I should be in bed I haven’t yet made it to the point where I am ready for golden slumbers to take me away.
Spent a large chunk of the day in Dallas at Fair Park where I wandered among the booths at the Earth Day festival. On the way back to my side of town I decided to see a movie.
Since it was a spur of the moment decision and it was almost six I decided not to use my new favorite theater and made my way to the Grapevine Mills AMC. It worked nicely because it was a chunk of miles closer than my side of town and more importantly I have some free tickets for the AMC and that always improves a movie.
Anyhoo, I went to see 42.
Based On a True Story
The Dodgers are my favorite baseball team and even if they weren’t it wouldn’t matter because the Jackie Robinson story is too important to ignore. The movie didn’t really provide me with anything I wasn’t aware of but there is a world of difference between reading about a story and seeing it acted out.
It wasn’t the first time I have heard racial epithets used and it probably won’t be the last. In concept you would think that hearing them uttered in person is more difficult than experiencing it as part of a movie where it is just acting.
But I found it difficult and troubling to listen to, perhaps because I just wasn’t raised that way and it is surreal to think that some people can act like that.
Still, I know differently because I have heard these things used towards others and had some names thrown my way. Maybe it is because in my world this has been something that was limited to a small group and for Jackie Robinson and so many others it wasn’t that way at all.
Flash Forward To LeBron James
That is me in the photo above wearing my new favorite cowboy hat and holding my Galaxy Note 2.
It is not uncommon for people to remark about the size of my phone and ask me for my thoughts. I love it and find it exceptionally easy to use in every way.
The size is a bonus and since I have decent size hands I don’t find it difficult to hold or use at all.
However the good folks at Samsung must have had some concerns about this because they hired LeBron James to hawk the phone for them. He certainly is a big celebrity but in this case it is not just popularity we are talking about, but size.
James is almost a foot taller than I am and has hands that are much larger than my own. So when you look at the phone in his hands it doesn’t appear to be as large as it is.
Connecting The Dots
It is interesting to me to think about how far we have come during the past 66 years since Jackie broke into the big leagues. During my parent’s lifetimes we have gone from a time where it was inconceivable to some to think of segregation in pro sports as being anything but the normal way of life to a place which would have made some of those bigots heads spin right off of their shoulders.
P.S. I need to confess that when I began to write this post I didn’t know what I was going to write about. I had a picture from Earth Day of a sign that talked about teaching people how to raise chickens at home and then decided that wasn’t very interesting.
But when I stumbled across the picture above and thought about the movie the connection and writing juices just began to flow.
