Louis Roney: Whadda ya know?

• The University of Central Florida is now the largest university in Florida and the second largest university in the nation — a giant! This is quite amazing when one remembers that Florida Technological University, as it was first called, started out in a small office above a drug store on Church Street and Orange Avenue. UCF’s present student body exceeds 60,000, and UCF now has more than 200,000 alumni!

• The phone rang the other day, and when I answered it a female voice launched into what seemed to me to be simply a long repetition of the first person singular pronoun. Yes, I mean “I.” Although we had not spoken in years, her insistence on the repeated use of the first person singular told me immediately who she was. Just as there is no way to combat a man with a gun so effective as facing him with a bigger gun, so yours truly felt himself being drawn into a battle of first person singulars. Perhaps you can imagine the frustration of trying to make do with simply a pronoun, and not a verb in sight. At the end there were plenty of unused “I’s” lying around on my side for future battles of self-consecration.

• It is my observation that siblings often never get to know each other thoroughly, perhaps because they are usually of different historical eras— their friends are those who are their classmates in school, and their playmates after school. Families are often subject to internal envy that can be an incurable personality disease. Competition provides a healthy environment as long as it contributes positive urges to succeed. Such impetus does not require that one’s siblings fail. Teamwork is the ideal that families and football teams use to be winners. A guy I knew in Europe came in my dressing room before a performance one evening and said, “ You’re going to have a great time tonight. The leading soprano this evening is a replacement, and is just barely adequate. You’ll have all the glory to yourself.” Now, that’s not my idea of successful evening. The greatest experience to me is to be part of an excellent ‘show’ where everyone in the cast is in great voice and at the top of his form.

• “Socialism, in general, has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.” — economist Thomas Sowell. Having a president who understands the most fundamental rules of economics is something that we do not enjoy at present. President Obama substitutes raising taxes for reducing spending, and kids himself that he will thus achieve economic benefits for a country that is in a bad way at this time. Through the years I have rued the fact that Thomas Sowell is sitting on the sidelines in California instead of being in the White House. It’s truly scary that the most brilliant thinkers of our nation so seldom are in decision-making positions to better our national lives. Thomas Sowell adds, “The fact that so many successful politicians are such shameless liars is not only a reflection on them, it is also a reflection on us. When people want the impossible, only liars can satisfy them, and only in the short run.”

• The belligerent tone of international intercourse these days is upsetting. When North Korea opens its mouth it seems to have its hand on a trigger, and one wonders what it is that the generous U.S. has done to invite warfare with North Korea. We wonder if they are unwise enough to forget that if they decide to destroy so much as a foot of U.S. territory, their existence on this planet would be short indeed. I am, of course, counting on our president to be a person of courage — am I making a big wrong assumption?