WBTD Comments on WCGB

Time to blog on a comment. I first blogged about the car we called The Bucket here. Then some thugs set it on fire. Will Tuladhar-Douglas read the original Bucket post, and the story of its demise Urban Nightmare: The Bucket Gets Torched. He sent a comment:

Kelly,

You’ll think this daft, but I drove that car too. Alice, its original owner, was my mother, and I remember that car around Berkeley before it (and M) moved back to Pasadena, after which she upshifted to a Volvo estate that could carry more trees, dogs and activists. It has lived a long a good life, and though this is an ignoble end, it has become a metaphor in its own right…Good health and good spirits to all those the car has known.

-WBTD.

Is that amazing, or what? Turns out that Will’s little girl was asking to see pictures of her grandmother, Alice Frost Kennedy (scroll down), so he googled her and found my blog.

Will is quite an impressive fellow. From AsiaMedia:

Dr. Will Tuladhar-Douglas is a History and Religious Studies Lecturer at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. He received his PhD at Oxford and was a Boden Fellow in Sanskrit. Tuladhar-Douglas has published several articles about the history and religions of Nepal and is the author of the book, Remaking Buddhism for Medieval Nepal. He is also the Review Editor for ‘H-Bhuddism,’ The Buddhist Scholars Information Network, an academic exchange listserve.

In addition, he is the director of the Scottish Centre for Himalayan Research. Ah, here’s a better link for SCHR and you can see their cool logo. You can read about the centuries long relationship between the Scots and the Himalayas here.  Scroll down on that last link for a complete biography of the accomplished Tuladhar-Douglas.

More googling led me to this article about the history of Nepal written by WBTD, as well as this article about how the SCHR has joined up with the Icimod–the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development.

So I had to e-mail Will about something very cool that I can take no credit for — back when I worked for The Flintridge Foundation, one of the grants went to the University of Washington to provide financial support for Lhakpa Norbu Sherpa (scroll down for his bio), the first person from the Sherpa community to earn a PhD.

I bet they already know each other. This makes me think they do.

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In honor of William Blake‘s 250th birthday today, a quote:

“Imagination is the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.” (via The Writers’ Almanac)

Let’s make that a shout-out to Miss Havisham and her poetic stylings (there may be sound with that 2nd link).

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A coupla links:

Did you read Steve Lopez’s piece bureaucratic horror story in today’s LA Times about the Glendale couple? (via LA Observed)

Also via LA Observed:

How badly does the school district violate the state requirement for daily physical education for most kids? At South Gate High School, 1,600 students took the state Fitness test and not one passed. Forty LAUSD schools could not report a single physically fit student. WitnessLA.com