George Gervin Biography and Interesting Facts

George “The Ice Man” Gervin was one of the greatest scoring machines that the NBA has ever seen. He was nicknamed “Ice Man” because of his poise on the court and the way that he had a knack of hitting the “big shot” with the game on the line.

Gervin was an ABA legend well before making his mark in the NBA with the San Antonio Spurs. He could hit open jumpers as if he was a machine. However, his claim to fame was when he could twist in the air hitting fade away jump shot and the no look reverse layups that nobody could defend. When the “Ice Man” got hot, nobody could cool him down.

Gervin was so good on the court, even his opponents were some of his fans. Back in the 1978 Eastern Conference semifinals, he drove to the hoop against the infamous Elvin Hayes. The “Ice Man” drove to the basket and hit a miraculous off balance one handed bank shot from a seemingly impossible angle. Those were just two of his 46 points that night. The awestruck Elvin Hayes reached out and gave Gervin a “high five”.

During George Gervin’s basketball career, his shooting hand rarely went cold. In 9 of 10 NBA seasons he averaged over 20 points per game in the NBA. His points per game didn’t wasn’t even the most exciting part of his game. When Gervin would step on the court, everyone knew that the game was about to heat up.

Toward the latter part of Gervin’s career, he developed a drug habit. In 1989 he overdosed on cocaine and and he checked himself into a Houston rehabilitation clinic when he realized the seriousness of his problem. Following successful drug treatment, Gervin turned to basketball to help him through the rehabilitation process. That winter, he played with the Continental Basketball Association (CBA) Quad City Thunder. At 37 years old, George averaged over 20 points per game.

Interesting Facts About George Gervin:

• George Gervin was a struggling bench player on his10th grade high school team. He was only 5′ “8 at the time. After summer break he came back and his coach was amazed when he showed up at 6′ 3”. He no longer struggled and became the starter after that.
• He had a brother named Derrick who played with the New Jersey Nets in 1989 to 1991.
• He played in 12 consecutive All Star Games.
• Gervin once went 407 straight game from November 23, 1978 to December 16, 1983 in which he scored 10 points or more.

When was the last time you stop being curious?

Do you remember wondering, pondering and…?

Walt Disney quoted…when you’re curious, you find lots of interesting things to do…we keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths!

Spring cleaning…time to empty out things that have not been used or read for a while and either put it away in the garage, donate or sell. We have all these Curious George books and memories began to flood in. There is no way these books are going for a dime in the garage sale. We are keeping them for the next generation.

We have learned so much from George. George was our buddy when the kids were little. We had George’s posters, lunch boxes, DVD, books and toys. Through George, we learn:

1. Adventure. Life is an adventure. Everything is worth a try in our big world. George travels the world with his friend and he is never shy about trying new things. Everything fascinates the explorer in him, the familiar and the unfamiliar. George even tried going on the Hot Air Balloon by himself. It is through trying that George learned his lessons.

2. Hands-on experiment and discoveries. George takes things apart; he studies them and tries to put them back together. George understands how things work after taking them apart.

3. Fun and enjoyment of learning. George knows where to look for fun. He has no reservation in wanting to do things. He went on a visit to a Chocolate Factory and tried chocolate of all shapes, sizes and flavors. When offered more, George had enough.

4. Helping hands. George is ready to rescue and help. He helped rescue a toy train for a young boy at the train tracks. The boy could have been killed and the toy trained destroyed had it not been for George’s help.

5. Kind and non-judgmental. George is friendly to everyone. He seems to contribute trouble but at the end of the day, he is the one who save the day!

George shares his life with The Man with the yellow hat. This man exemplifies a best friend, mentor, comforter, teacher and provider. He is always there for him, during bad times and good times. He teaches George life lessons after every incident and never yells or judges. He is the parent that we can model.

Every child needs a mentor like The Man with the yellow hat is George’s mentor. What do you think?

Along with his mentor, George has Hundley the unadventurous dog and it’s owner, the friendly doorman who always has a suggestion for George. There is Chef Pisghetti, the owner of an Italian Restaurant that the Man in the yellow hat loves to dine in. Professor Wiseman, a good friend of The Man in the yellow hat and one who loves to hear about George’s adventure. She is another great encourager to George.

Through George’s community of friends we learn the importance of diversified friendship. George has friends that do not condemn his curiosity. He has friends that do not share his passion but they still enjoy each others company because of mutual respect. How about your children? Do they have friends that respect them and do they respect their friends?

In our world of traditional schooling, students of all personalities and learning habits are put in the same class to learn and memorize facts and figures each and every day.

Do you think this form of learning has dampened the curiosity and creativity of our students as years passed them by? By the time, they graduated from high schools; most students lose their Curious George learning habits. They are conditioned to memorize and regurgitate whatever they have and not knowing exactly what they learned?

Where are the hands-on and how-to of learning? For example, how to balance your check book can be a skill but not which of the following was the most industrialized country during the nineteen century?

While the marketplace is producing endless amount of children’s books through the years, Margret and H.A. Rey’s Curious George books are still holding strong after 70 years.

For the fun of it we are going to watch little kids show tonight. We got a DVD from the library called Curious George takes a vacation and discovers new things. We discover sometimes simple children stories are able to teach us the basic life lessons and a great reminder to live a curious, adventurous, risky lifestyle.

Like the majority of people, you may be also thinking of the sunlit beach, with the gentle wind blowing, lightly stirring the serene life around the island. You look beyond the horizon, and you notice the sunset spraying its yellow light, bountifully. You feel that calmness and repose that you have been searching anywhere, and you finally found it here. You are about to taste a serene life in the island for a while. Life is somehow easy here.
Many people consider island vacations to be the best kind of a holiday getaway. There are plenty of things to do in St. George Island. Even more exciting is the prospect that you are spending this time with important people in your life-your family, your loved one or your friends.

Imagine deep sea fishing. To sail the waters is an undeniably fantastic activity. You can absolutely lose yourself in the pursuit of catching your own favorite specie. Rent some charter vessel into the spot where you most likely can snag that fish of your choice. There are also guides you can refer to when you don’t know what gears to use in fishing.

The nights can be solemn and peaceful. While you are in a St. George Island vacation rental home, you can hear the waves reaching the shore. If you are a true nature lover, you will find this is a soothing sound that will calm your nerves as you listen to the repeated lashing of waves on the shore.

Families who come to St. George Island in groups can take vacation homes that can house as much as 15 people. There are also other accommodations near the beach, or you can choose the plantation homes, where you can get a good view of the Gulf. But anything you choose will provide you a comfortable place to stay while on vacation. At night, you can visit bars and entertainment places to mingle with other guests and locals as well.

Food is also superb, because there’s a stream of fresh catch everyday, the bounty of the sea harvested on a daily basis. And never forget, you should not leave the island without tasting the oysters, if you are not allergic to them. Ask for the Chef’s favorite when you order seafood in any restaurant.
St. George Island is a place for people who dream of simplifying their life. Come and visit the island today!

I have wasted countless hours of my life watching TV, and the idea that television is “an opiate of the masses” is probably not far from the truth. That being said, I’m no snob and get hooked into shows just like anyone else. Of all of the shows I’ve watched in my life Seinfeld was truly the one that got me through some dark hours in my life, and the show continues to be a big part of my life years later in syndication.

I bring this up because I want to call attention to one particular episode called “The Opposite.” For people unfamiliar with this episode, it is the one where George Costanza decided that, because his every instinct in life has produced an undesirable result, that therefore doing the opposite of what his instincts told him must therefore be right. When George implements this idea into his life all of a sudden wonderful things begin to happen to him. What George had unwittingly stumbled onto was a concept known as Paradoxical Intention.

The term Paradoxical Intention was originally coined by an amazing man named Victor Frankl who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning webwinds.com/frankl/frankl.htm

about his experiences in a concentration camp and subsequent life as a psychiatrist where he conceived his unique philosophy known as Logotherapy. One of the key treatments Frankl used was Paradoxical Intention, in a nutshell “suggesting to the patient, with expression of appropriate humor, that they do, or expose themselves to, that which they fear.” One example would be telling someone who keeps struggling with dieting that you want them, for the next week to eat absolutely as much as they can. This kind of advice often disturbs a person’s cognitions, and often the pure absurdity of the suggestions helps people to better understand their original self-defeating ways of thinking.

Related to the concept of Paradoxical Intention is the idea of acting “as if.” This gives a person permission to act in ways contrary to their usual ways of dealing with the world. In other words a shy and isolated person could act “as if” their life was full of joy and laughter for a couple of weeks to see if this creates any changes in their life during this time, and you know what? It usually always does!! This is the power of emotional choice. This was especially true in the life of Victor Frankl, who, during his darkest days in a concentration camp was able to think about his love for his wife and experience happiness, even as the threat of continued torture and imminent death hung over his head. I try to tell myself that if a man can chose happiness under those circumstances, than I can certainly do so when some little thing in life doesn’t go my way. This is the power of mindfulness and taking stock, often, of how good we often really have things.

On the subject of mindfulness and Eastern Religion, it is also interesting to consider an idea in Tibetan Buddhism called “Crazy Wisdom” or yeshe chölwa, which translates literally to wisdom gone wild. This was popularized by the erratic yet brilliant Tibetan philosopher ChogyamTrungpa Rinpoche, who, although thought to be a deity much like the Dalia Lama in his native Tibet, moved to America and opened up a number of centers for spiritual enlightenment with people such as Allen Ginsburg and William Burroughs as instructors.

Purveyors of Crazy Wisdom such as Trungpa were called Siddhas who “expressed the unconditional freedom of enlightenment through divinely inspired foolishness… vastly preferring to celebrate the inherent freedom and sacredness of authentic being, rather than clinging to external religious forms and moral systems. Through their playful eccentricity, these rambunctious spiritual tricksters served to free others from delusion, social inhibitions, specious morality, complacence — in short, all variety of mind-forged manacles.”

These spiritual fools had what was called a “cosmic sense of humor” that saw through the illusions of society’s conventions towards a greater interconnectedness of being. Although this is certainly getting into the area of metaphysics, these teachers in a nutshell, were fools because they understood we are a universe of fools, who became foolishly attached to our possessions and our conventions, while failing to see how these attachments lead to suffering.

So do our attachments lead to suffering? Absolutely. We often cling to our own ideas and the seriousness of our little private universes, when in the grander scheme the things we worry about are actually quite silly. We waste so much of our precious time here on earth worrying about things that never come to fruition. Meanwhile we continue to hurdle through space on a little blue ball that cares nothing for our unpaid electric bills, unmowed lawns, and unfair bosses. The Siddhas understood this absurdity, and in their world these silly fools were considered the wisest of the wise. Perhaps there is a lesson here about not taking ourselves to seriously, as it is often the silly and the foolish who ultimately may be the wisest.

George Steinbrenner is famously known the world over as the owner of the New York Yankees but very few people realize that in the 1950s George Steinbrenner actually served as an assistant coach under legendary Buckeye icon Woody Hayes at Ohio State University (OSU for short). In fact, George was even part of the 1954 Ohio State national championship team that went undefeated.

The New York Yankees organization that Steinbrenner has owned for decades has been valued by Forbes magazine as a $1.5 billion organization which makes it one of the five most valuable sports teams in the world across all sports. Before making his fortune in the family shipping business he lived a somewhat pedestrian life that included college, a stint in the Air Force, marriage, and a brief spell as an assistant football coach at Ohio State. In some regards George Steinbrenner has had an almost Forest Gump type life that has involved playing on his college football team, joining the armed forces, falling in love, making a fortune, numerous chance encounters with historically iconic figures, and a variety of unique business ventures.

Born in Rocky River, Ohio on the northern edge of the state the area that is now an affluent suburb of Cleveland is the area where George grew up before attending a military school in northern Indiana. After graduating from Williams College in Massachusetts in 1952 and spending a couple of years in the Air Force based in Columbus, Ohio at Lockbourne Air Force Base the Ohio native decided to stay in the area following his honorable discharge in 1954. Over the next two years Steinbrenner earned a master’s degree in physical education from nearby Ohio State University.

While doing graduate work at Ohio State George Steinbrenner signed on to help the football team as a graduate assistant where he happened to coach under legendary college football coach Woody Hayes. During the one season that George was with the Buckeyes the team went undefeated with a perfect 10-0 record that included a 20-7 Rose Bowl victory over the University of Southern California (USC) on January 1, 1955.

By capping off a perfect season with a sound Rose Bowl victory Woody Hayes, George Steinbrenner, and the rest of the Ohio State Buckeyes edged out number two ranked UCLA to capture the second football national championship for the Buckeyes ever. In addition to the seven World Series victories (1977, 1978, 1996, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2009) that George Steinbrenner has been a part of as an owner of the New York Yankees since January 3, 1973 the man who was born back on July 4, 1930 can also claim a college football national championship from the 1954 season with iconic College Football Hall of Fame coach Woody Hayes.

Tourists and history buffs alike love George Washington Bridge interesting facts. There are certainly no lack of fun facts about the George Washington Bridge. Here are five of the most unusual.

1. Radio Fans Save Jumper

Howard Stern fans were called into action on December 7, 1994. A young man called Stern’s radio show and announced that he was about to jump from the George Washington Bridge. Westbound listeners stopped their cars and tried to dissuade him. A Port Authority police officer, who also happened to be listening to Stern, rescued the man, then used the would-be jumper’s cell phone to tell Stern and his listeners that the man was safe.

2. Deviations From Flight Plans

Christmas Day of 1965 shocked motorists on the George Washington Bridge as a small plane sputtered down over the westbound lanes. A young pilot had skimped on his pre-flight and left the fuel cap off. An old pilots’ adage is, “A good landing is one you walk away from. A great landing is one where you can use the plane again.” This was a good landing, since the pilot and his passenger walked away with only minor injuries. It fell short of a great landing, though, since the plane was demolished. It also clipped a truck, whose driver must have had fun explaining to his dispatcher why he was late and his rig was damaged. Motorists got another aviation surprise on January 15, 2009, when US Airways Flight 1549 came bearing down on them. Pilot Chesley Sullenberger managed to clear the bridge by a mere 900 feet before ditching in the Hudson.

3. What’s in a Name?

Local newspapers called for a more inventive name than the original Hudson River Bridge. Among their suggestions were Bistate and Mother’s Bridge, Bridge of Prosperity, Gate of Paradise, and Pride of the Nation. It was the children of the New York City schools, however, that managed to lobby for a rechristening in honor of George Washington. The name is particularly apt, since the Manhattan end of the bridge is near Fort Washington, whence Washington once withdrew his forces to Fort Lee – near the New Jersey end of the bridge.

4. World’s Heaviest Traffic

The day the George Washington Bridge was opened, it hosted over 55,000 vehicles, 33,000 pedestrians, and one equestrian on a horse named Rubio. Now the bridge carries roughly 106 million vehicles annually – an average of nearly 300,000 a day, the most of any motor vehicle bridge in the world. Pedestrians, as well as roller skaters and cyclists, still traverse the upper deck.

5. Unintended Dumping Ground

With all that traffic, mishaps are inevitable. Occasionally trucks have overturned and spilled their cargo. Among the unscheduled deliveries were beer, frozen chicken parts, and watermelons. One truck liberated a herd of goats that trotted off down the lanes. Another truck treated motorists and bridge employees to free fertilizer when it failed to contain its load of manure.

Sorry, but these lamps really have little to do with George and Martha Washington except for their fashion of clothing and dress.

Most George and Martha Washington lamps were made of porcelain circa 1940. They were commonly made with real 22 K gold trim. Try as much as you like but you can never duplicate the gold color trim used in these beautiful porcelain lamps unless you use real gold.

Although commonly called George and Martha Washington lamps, the decorative figures adorning these porcelain lamps actually represent wealthy members of the court of French King Louis XV around 1765.

The decorative figures are usually in various states of romance, picnics,dancing, poetry, singing, etc. The original paintings on many of these lamps were originally from the French artist Jean- Honoré Fragonard (1732-1806). Fragonard was well known for his very lewd and hedonistic art that was highly sought after by wealthy art patrons of Louis XV’s morally loose and fun loving court. George and Martha lamp decorations represent Fragonard’s much more reserved paintings.

George and Martha Washington lamps are no longer being produced and the value of these vintage lamps continue to rise.

George Washington lived from 1732- 1799 so he was alive when the original designs were created for these beautiful lamps in France.

In 1775, the Continental Congress appointed Washington commander-in-chief of the American revolutionary forces. He was later elected president in 1789 but George and Martha Washington had nothing to do with these lamps except they both had a similar fashion of dressing which was also common in France during that period.

– Jim Hoyle