Category Archives: Immortality

The reluctant politician (as is known to close associates) that he was, President Atta Mills, however, never failed to dig into his inner being and offer the needed the leadership at all times.

If my statistics is right; in the 25 years of the NDC, President Atta Mills holds the record as the longest serving Leader of the Party.

He led the NDC into the 2000 elections; led the NDC into the 2004 elections; and led the NDC into the 2008 elections, and also led the Party for the three and half years he served as President of the Republic of Ghana.

Call on duty: President Atta-MIlls attending an event at the Castle Gardens. With him is myself, Koku Anyidoho, Col Lawson, Emmanuel Agbozo and DSP Emmanuel Dade.

As the speech writer for the President, I was under very strict instructions to always ensure that I got all speeches ready at least four days before major events because the President never wanted to go to any function without fully internalising his choice of words and simulating his thoughts.

Little did I know that Tuesday was going to come with its own heavy dark clouds that will hang around the neck of the nation for a very long time!

I got into by car; drove to the Castle; went straight to my office and locked up so as to prevent any form of disturbance.

I did no go to see the President at his residence that morning as was the norm, because I did not want to give another excuse for not having the speech ready.

A little while after I settled in, and started engaging the keyboard of my laptop to complete the speech, I heard a sustained aggressive bang on my door and had no option but to walk to the door with a very stern look on my face ready to eat up whoever it was that was disturbing my writing rhythm.

The stern look I wore, broke into a look of morbid trepidation when I was told the earth-shaking news that the health condition of President John Evans Atta Mills had hit a very low level and he had been rushed to the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) of the 37 Military Hospital in an ambulance (and not in the boot of my Ford vehicle as was vilely rumoured), by his Medical Team.

In my state of consternation at hearing the scary news, I screamed for my driver and rushed to the 37 Military Hospital.

The short distance between the Castle and the 37 Military Hospital, seemed like and endless journey, with by thought processes running in a multiplicity of wild directions amidst a deluge of phone calls from all angles.

I shall never be able to blot out the picture of the lifeless body of my, boss, mentor, friend, advisor, and teacher, when I was allowed to enter the ICU to see for myself that, the President of the Republic of Ghana, and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, had taken his final breath. Phew!!!!

Weeping, wailing, and finding myself lost in a labyrinth of misty theories and postulations, I could only hold on to my strong acceptance of the words as put out by the Prophet Isiah in his preaching in the Holy Bible.

Isiah 55: vrs 8-9; For My thoughts are not your thoughts, Nor are your ways My ways says the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, So are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.

Most certainly, it is only God who knows why the flesh of the sitting President of the Republic of Ghana, had to leave this world of sin, and for his spirit to move into higher realms of sanctity and tranquility.

I cannot forget how my biological father, Major General Henry KwamiAnyidoho.

Anyidoho, deeply appreciated what I was going through and rushed to the Castle to console me and give me his shoulder to cry on, after we left the 37 Military Hospital back to the Seat of Government to quickly work at getting Vice President John Dramani Mahama sworn-in as President of the Republic of Ghana and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, so as not to create a constitutional hiatus.

In other words, my biological father had come to accept the fact that President John Evans Atta Mills and I, had an extremely close and binding attachment that, was beyond a master/servant, relationship.

It is already five years since President John Evans Atta Mills passed on to glory, and the memory keeps flooding into the forefront of my thought process as if it happened only yesterday.

Certainly, after five years, I am not shedding tears anymore but I cannot get over such a monumental loss that hit me as a person, and hit the nation in general.

Incidentally, the 5thAnniversary of the passing-on of President Atta Mills coincides with the 25thAnniversary of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), and as the Party celebrates its year-long Silver Jubilee, there is no way we can forget the stoic leadership role the late President played in the 25 years of the existence of the NDC.

The reluctant politician (as is known to close associates) that he was, President Atta Mills, however, never failed to dig into his inner being and offer the needed the leadership at all times.

If my statistics is right; in the 25 years of the NDC, President Atta Mills holds the record as the longest serving Leader of the Party.

He led the NDC into the 2000 elections; led the NDC into the 2004 elections; and led the NDC into the 2008 elections, and also led the Party for the three and half years he served as President of the Republic of Ghana.

The first time I got hit very hard by death; was, after the passing away of my late mother, Mrs. Mercy Abla Mivormawu Anyidoho (Nee Tsegah), in 1993, when I was in my final year at the University of Ghana, Legon.

Nothing can be more excruciatingly painful than losing a mother, and I shall forever miss her.

May the soul of my loving mother continue to rest in perfect peace!

The second time death that hit me at a very close range again like a thunderbolt, was when President Atta Mills passed away.

To watch a sitting President, and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces, pass away, only reinforced the fact that, death will come when it chooses to come, and there is nothing any human being can do about it.

Were it possible to fight death; the Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces would have sent out the Army to fight death by land; sent out the Airforce to fight death in the air; and sent out the Navy to fight death on the sea.

Alas, it was not so!

No man can fight death; and this is a fact of life we all have to understand and know that, one fine day, we shall have no option but to beckon to the call of our ancestors and depart to the Land Beyond.

As fleeting and ephemeral as life is; our sole duty on earth is to leave our memories positively etched on the mind of the people we encounter.

Of course, for those of us who have the opportunity to serve as leaders of the Nation, our sole duty is to leave a positive memory properly etched on the mind of the nation.

I can say without any equivocation that, President John Evans Atta Mills, has left his memory eternally etched on the right side of the nations mind andNOTHINGcan erase that solid memory.

As a political party, the NDC canNEVERforget that immaculate role President Atta Mills played in leading the Party in the dark days of Opposition when the NPP Government did all it could to decimate, dismember, and totally annihilate the Party.

As Opposition Leader, the more the NPP referred to him as a Serial Loser (because the NDC lost the 2000 elections, and allowed the NPP to steal the victory in 2004), the more Candidate Mills got energised to work and win the 2008 elections so as to prove to the world that he was not born to be a Serial Loser.

Opposition leader Asomdwehene Atta-MIlls with an admirer.

Very often, he will say to me; Koku, I am not a loser ooo; dont worry, we will win and I will prove to the NPP that Gods time is the best.

When the NPP stole the victory in 2004 via Jake Obetsebi Lampteys (may his soul rest in peace) infamous speech at the Castle Gardens, Candidate Atta MillsREFUSEDto make this country ungovernable, and kept telling us that; I will never want to become President by shedding innocent blood so let the NPP take the victory. If it is Gods will that I should become President, four years will soon come and Ghanaians will vote for me to lead them.

Indeed, the prophecy of the Asomdwehene, came to pass, and Ghanaians gave him a joyous mandate in 2008 in spite of all the dirty machinations of the NPP to once again rig an election.

The immense struggle President Atta Mills went through to lead the NDC to win back political power in 2008 is a story well known.

Even the near-nation-wrecking move by the then Chief Justice, Georgina Wood, to get a court to sit on the 1stof January, 2009 (New Years Day and a public holiday), to create a backdoor path for the NPP to stop the Electoral Commission from declaring the results of the 2008 General Elections, did not stop the victory of President John Evans Atta Mills and the NDC.

For sure, the NDC has a strong and resilient spirit, and President Atta Mills made a solid contribution to giving more verve to the resilient spirit of the Party.

I will forever miss eating from the table of wisdom, and drinking from the deep fountain of knowledge, of the late President.

He was indeed a good man!!!

I thank the Good Lord for the divine opportunity to have served President John Evans Atta Mills in a very high capacity at the Seat of Government, and I am grateful to the late President for giving me the rare opportunity to work closely with him as a close aide and confidant.

I am also thankful to the NDC for giving me more opportunities to continue to serve the Party.

I have no doubt that the NDC shall see many more brighter and better days as the Party begins another phase of rebuilding towards, Unity, Stability, and Development.

The lights, of anchoring nation-building to the pillars of decency that President Atta Mills, lit, continue to glow especially in the current dark dispensation of evil Invisible and Delta Forces running amok and drowning the nation in a sea of lawlessness.

There is no denying the fact that, the legacy of the good old Professor, shall continue to stand tall!

Adieus sir.

May your good soul continue to rest peacefully in eternity till we meet again at the Feet of Jehovah!!!

Koku Anyidoho Deputy General Secretary (NDC) Founder/CEO, Atta Mills Institute (AMI)

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President John Evans Atta Mills: 5 years of ascending into immortality! - Myjoyonline.com

Jane Austen fans admire the new 10 note at its launch at Winchester cathedral. Photograph: Chris J Ratcliffe/AFP/Getty Images

Jane Austen, who died 200 years ago last Tuesday, has been enjoying an impressively vigorous afterlife. First, as an icon of her gender, there has been her controversial debut on the new 10 note, an appearance that sent some indignant Jane-ites into a tizzy about her image. Airbrushed, they cried; inauthentic, they snorted.

Worse was to follow. The banks misguided choice of Austen quote from Pride and Prejudice I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading had been uttered by Caroline Bingley, a hypocritical crawler with zero interest in books, who was simply sucking up to Mr Darcy. Three days later, in a scene that would have given Miss Austen exquisite moments of immoderate joy, the leader of the Commons, Andrea Leadsom, a foot-in-mouth politician not renowned for her grasp of the English canon, described her as one of our greatest living authors. Cue howls of parliamentary mirth and a social media feeding frenzy.

Photoshopped, misquoted and brought back from the dead by a Tory minister, the author of Persuasion and Emma, who once observed that a woman, especially if she have the misfortune of knowing anything, should conceal it as well as she can, would surely have relished this roller-coaster of publicity. And yet the accident-prone Leadsoms delicious slip does point to some greater truths about our literature, not least that all our finest writers are indeed immortal. This is especially true of those, such as Austen, who wrote immortal characters. Shakespeare, Dickens, Wodehouse, Conan Doyle and Le Carr flourish among the reading public through the lives of Falstaff, Scrooge, Jeeves, Sherlock Holmes and Smiley. As the creator of Mrs Bennet and Emma Woodhouse, Austen lives on.

Leadsoms brief moment of shame might also hint at the banks long-term vindication. While Austen suffers the indignity of airbrushing, her words and characters linger in the English imagination. Most novelists are condemned to oblivion, sometimes in their own lifetimes. To be caricatured and misquoted is a supreme accolade. Besides, at this altitude on Parnassus, the words and phrases of great books become strangely braided into the national conversation.

Shakespeare never wrote lead on Macduff, or methinks the lady doth protest too much. A living culture mashes up books and quotes, giving Holmes a line he never uttered: Elementary, my dear Watson. Great writers, living or dead, such as Austen, get reinterpreted in ways beyond their control. Theres a manga Sense & Sensibility as well as the Observers favourite, Emma and the Werewolves.

Play it again, Jane.

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The Observer view on Jane Austen's immortality - The Guardian

From being little girls who were mocked for choosing the bat and ball over dolls, they are now pathbreakers.

READ ALSO: Mithali Raj expecting plenty of runs at Lord's Each player's career in the Indian women's cricket team is an inspirational story in herself, but it took a mammoth effort from Harmanpreet Kaur in the semifinals, against defending champions Australia, for the Indian cricket fan to stand up and cheer for the Women in Blue. The last and the only time the Indian women made an appearance in the final was way back in 2005, when Facebook was still an infant and Twitter was still being conceptualized. Hence, there was restricted buildup to the final. This time around, when Mithali Raj leads her band of feisty girls on to the ground at Lord's, she will be cheered by a nation which is already hailing the team as heroes. The Indian team are on the cusp of a sporting revolution and the only ones who can stop them are the mighty hosts, England. Anjum Chopra, former India skipper and member of the 2005 team which played the final, will be at Lord's on Sunday but with a mike in hand instead of a bat. Anjum - one of India's finest women cricketers - says the Indian team is on the verge of "changing the face of women's sport in the country".

Speaking to TOI on the eve of the match, Anjum pointed out that the final is a culmination of a journey started years ago by each player. "It is a momentous Sunday. When you start off you want to make it into your club, state and then the national. But at each level, when you are preparing, subconsciously you prepare to play the World Cup final. All the preparation and hard work the players put in through the years has to come around on that particular day and moment when you are on the field and in action."

READ ALSO: History awaits India in Women's World Cup final

Anjum added that what has worked for the Indian team is individuals stepping up to finish the job at crucial junctures. "The best thing about this Indian team is that each day a different play has put her hand up and seen the team through. Be it Smriti Mandhana's first couple of knocks, Ekta Bisht's five-wicket haul against Pakistan, Rajeshwari Gayakwad's fiver, Mithali's timely ton or Harmanpreet's century against Australia, every match at least one player has stood up for the count and I think that has been the Indian team's strength."

READ ALSO: England eves bookies favourites to lift World Cup

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WWC Final: Mithali Raj's feisty bunch on the cusp of immortality - Times of India

Pick a random thing, and youll find a community of people who are into it.

There are people who are obsessed with cloud-watching. Theres a guy who corrected the same error on Wikipedia 47,000 times. Theres a whole heap of people convinced the earth is hollow, and a whole heap of others equally convinced its flat.

And then there are the immortalists. People like Peter Thiel, Sergey Brin and Ray Kurzweil. People who believe we can and should live forever -- that death is a technical problem, and that it therefore has a technical solution. The New Yorker, covering the topic a few months ago, quoted Dr. Joon Yun: I have the idea that aging is plastic, that its encoded If something is encoded, you can crack the code If you can crack the code, you can hack the code!

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Among their number is the extraordinary Martine Rothblatt, who has created an artificially intelligent robot copy of her wife Bina, complete with Binas memories, personality and mannerisms.

In 2014, the real Bina met her robot, Bina48, for the first time, and they had a super-creepy conversation.

At one point, as they were discussing the optionality of death, Bina48 said, Immortality is accomplished by creating consciousness in self-replicating machines that can be distributed throughout the cosmos.

Is Bina48 a consciousness? I dont think so. But perhaps a more important question is, does it matter?

In a long and excellent article in Wired this week, James Vlahos describes his journey to create a chatbot version of his father, John, before the latter passed away. Vlahos spent months uploading his fathers sayings, stories, and idiosyncrasies. He gave the Dadbot the ability to tell time (and therefore suggest it was time to go to bed), and the ability to alter his responses depending on whom he was talking to. And while the Dadbot mostly spoke via text, Vlahos also uploaded recordings of his fathers voice.

The night before his father died, James Vlahos had a conversation with the Dadbot: Hello! Tis I, the Beloved and Noble Father! the Dadbot says in his familiar fashion. How the hell are you? Sad, I reply. I see. He then asks what I want to talk about. I dont know, I answer. Why dont you choose. Okay, Im going to tell you about the little-known roots of my theater career. He launches into the story of that drama club audition in high school. Then I hear a recording of my fathers actual voice. Me and my shadow, he sings. All alone with nothing to do.

I imagine having that conversation with a chatbot version of my own father, dead now 10 years. My dad was also prone to theatrics. It would not have been out of character for him to break into song. And I would love it.

Today, we are limited by the technology: Bina48 looks weird and Dadbot is 98% text chat. But those limitations will soon be lifted.

Already there is technology that can create realistic videos of someone using their existing voice recordings, technology that can recreate your voice with just one minute of sample audio, and technology that can allow you to manipulate video of someone elses face. The day we can video chat with a lifelike AI rendition of someone is not far off.

The Dadbot is not John Vlahos. It does not have consciousness. John Vlahos got sick and then he died; from his own perspective, he is not immortal.

But from his sons perspective, he lives on. And from his sons perspective, isnt that what matters?

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Immortality Is In The Eye Of The Beholder - MediaPost Communications

Born in Downey, California, in the 1950s, Dave Alvin and his brother Phil were perfectly placed in geography and time to have front row seats as the blues, rockabilly and country formed a drunken, dirty backwoods threesome and begat rock and roll.

Growing up, the brothers listened to Big Bill Broonzy, Chet Atkins, Big Joe Turner and other masters. They later took those moments with them when they formed renowned roots band the Blasters, rubbing shoulders with the emerging Los Angeles punk scene featuring X and Black Flag in the early 1980s.

Like The Kinks Ray and Dave Davies, the brothers acrimony was legendary. Dave left the band to go solo while Phil continued on with them in different configurations and intervals over the next decades while also pursuing solo work. In the meantime, Dave briefly joined X, and the Knitters, before continuing on with his solo career, enjoying different forms of success. Dwight Yoakam recorded his song Long White Cadillac in 1989. He has produced many albums, including ones for the Derailers and for Tom Russell, and has been a session musician for Rambling Jack Elliot, among others.

After Phil had a near-death experience in Spain, the two brothers reunited to put out Common Ground, their 2014 album of Big Bill Broonzy covers. They followed it up with Lost Time, an album of beloved covers from their youth, in 2015. They will appear together with their band The Guilty Ones on Saturday and Sunday of the Calgary Folk Music Festival.

Before heading up north, Dave spoke with theYYSCENE.

Q: I was surprized when I looked it up and found out when you last played the folk fest it was 2006!

A: Well, you can shut me up. Wow! It seems to me maybe six years ago at the most. That does not seem right, but I think that is right. Thats pretty wild, wow. I remember that show very well. I was still a bit of a drinker in those days and I so remember having a hangover the next day when I saw Kris Kristofferson, and when he did Sunday Morning Coming Down I thought, I can relate to that. I remember having a nice conversation with Dar Williams, who approached me after the show, and she and I had a long conversation about songwriting.

Q: Why did you and Phil choose Big Bill Broonzy as the artist to cover on your first album together after youd been on separate musical paths for years?

A: He was one of the catalysts when we were kids that set us on the road that weve traveled. Unlike some blues performers you know, if you are going to do someone like Lightnin Hopkins, you would have to sound like Lightnin Hopkins, because his art was so personalized. So if you are going to do a tribute to Lightnin Hopkins, you gotta make it to sound like Lightnin Hopkins. That can be fun for a song or so, but theres no reason for whole album: Heres the Alvin Brothers trying to sound like Lightnin Hopkins.

Whereas with Big Bill, he certainly had a style of playing guitar that was uniquely his own, but he was a songwriter. The songs were strong enough that if you wanted to you could remove them from the Big Bill Broonzy quote-unquote sound and interpret them any way you wanted. Which is kind of what we did on the record. There are a couple that are close to sounding like Big Bill, there are others that dont, but theyre still his songs.

Its like, if you are doing a tribute to Bob Dylan, I would hope you try not to sound like Bob Dylan, but try to sound like yourself, and the same kind of rule applies to Big Bill Broonzy.

Q: I saw Dylan on Sunday. Even him doing his own stuff from the past; think how boring it could be to play the same songs for 50 years. He re-wrote himself (again) and in some ways his songs, yet kept it true to the heart of the songs.

A: Its always debatable, because I can go either way on that. I am sort of blessed because I dont get sick of playing my own songs, and the reason, I tell people, is I still cant believe I wrote em. Its kinda like, Really? I wrote that! Wow, Im good!

I can always find something new inside the song, and in my mind, no matter where I am in the world, I can always go to where I was when I wrote the song what I was thinking, what I was going through.

In Bobs situation, its a little different. If you ever listen to weird outtakes, like the recordings of Like a Rolling Stone or outtakes from Positively 4th Street, his version is different each time. He is not a by-the-note kind of guy. I think that for him, part of it is a natural contrariness, in that he kind of wants to mess with the audience a little bit, lovingly, but still mess with them.

His vocal styles have changed over the years and I think that his phrasing it might be one of the things that attracts him to the standards his phrasing is excellent. He knows how to phrase a damn song. Thats true whether its a Bob Dylan song from 1966 or a Burke-Van Heusen song from 1960. He knows how to phrase a lyric; he knows how to wring the emotions out of a lyric.

Because hes not, lets say, Richard Thompson on guitar his instrumental genius is the way he sings and the way he phrases his lines. And I think when he goes onstage thats the challenge for him thats what hes looking forward to. I dont know where I am in the world, but I am going to sing these songs, and I am going to phrase them differently.

Q: A great thing about seeing Dylan, and many others, still going in their 70s, is that we have almost stopped hearing about how rock and roll or music is a young persons game. In the 1950s and 60s, people thought an artists career would be done in six months or a few years, and then it would be on to the next thing. We dont hear stuff like that anymore.

A: I imagine if you talked to a 17-year-old they might think that way, but part of it is that the audiences have gotten older and they dont want to see their heroes stop, because that might mean something heavy. The people that Phil and I admired as a kid played until they died. Thats what (Russian pianist) Vladimir Horowitz did.

And it changes. Youre not the same artist at 60 as you were at 24 you can summon that 24-year-old, but you have to stay where you are now, at some point. I dont begrudge guys for trying to stay 24. Its something I can summon, I can pull out the songs and say, OK, were all 24 again. And I am certain Dylan does the same thing.

When you hear a song for the first time, the ones that usually really resonate with you are the ones that you heard on your parents car radio when you were eight-years-old or the ones that you heard during your first big make-out session with a girl or guy, or when you got your heart broken.

Like a Rolling Stone is going to resonate with an audience. If he wrote his greatest song on his next album, its not going to resonate the same way because theyve lived with it for 53 years.

Q: Speaking of things that resonate and the past, do you get a lot of people telling you that you should do a reunion with the Blasters?

A: Yes. What I say is the Blasters are a band in and of themselves. They have a guitar player; they dont need me. And theres a certain thing to having those four or five guys together on stage thats certainly magical, but usually its unannounced in a bar. Ill just drop in and pick up a guitar. And thats good enough for me.

The reason I used Gene Taylor, the piano player from the Blasters, who plays on the two albums I did with my brother, is he is one the worlds best boogie-woogie blues piano players. But if I was to do the Blasters, if made an album with the Blasters, that means theyre Blasters records, and I want to make Dave and Phil Alvin records. Even the guys in the Blasters we all grew up together we were the Alvin Brothers before we were the Blaster Brothers. Also, Ive got a pretty amazing damn band.

Q: Whats changed between the way it was when you used to play with Phil and the way it is playing with him now?

A: We dont fight. I think in the past four years weve had two minor disagreements. One was I was not playing a note that my brother wanted to hear. It was an F-sharp, and I was like, No, youre out of your mind. And, it turns out he was right, Goddamn it. So what could I do?

When we first did the Big Bill record my brother was still relatively frightened over his near death experience in Spain, so the Big Bill Broonzy record, with the exception of the F-sharp note, was easy as hell. It would have taken the Blasters a couple of years to do that record Im exaggerating. We just dont fight like we used to there is a mutual respect.

I have to grudgingly admit that some of the things we used to fight about when we were in the band, Ive come around to his way of seeing things, you know, You were right about that. But dont tell him that. And vice versa, I think my brother has come around to seeing certain things my way. We meet about halfway.

Q: Are you able to speak about your brothers near death experience?

A: Its really complicated, but long story short: he was on stage in Valencia, Spain, with his band, and he was having trouble breathing, so when the show was over, they rushed him to a hospital where he proceeded to die.

And I was in California, and I got a phone call saying, Your brothers dead. He was brain dead for at least 10 minutes, and were not sure how long, somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes he was brain dead, and then they revived him. A Spanish doctor, Mariella Anaya Sifuentes, managed get on top of my brother and do what Ive always wanted to do which is beat the living shit out of him. And she got his heart to start again. Its a long story, but she brought him back to life.

And so in that long period while she is pounding on his chest to get everything moving, I am sitting in California thinking my brothers dead and kind of going over, Gee, what did I screw up here? And I realized we didnt ever do any records for the little 13-year-old boys in us. Thats kind of around our age when we discovered Big Bill Broonzy and Big Joe Turner and people like that. (Im thinking) if I had it to do it all over again, I would so some records of certain material just for ourselves. And he pulled out of it, and as soon as he was ready, we went in the studio.

Q: How did you choose the tracks on you last album, 2015s Lost Time?

A: We knew we wanted to do some Big Joe Turner songs. He was our friend and mentor and he taught my brother how to sing. He is a little bit like Lightnin Hopkins in that to do Big Joe you kinda have to do Big Joe.

But hes also a little like Big Bill in that he had a long career and he didnt necessarily change his style, but the musicians around him changed, so he went from in his early days doing Kansas City jazz to 50s rock and roll rhythm and blues to 60s west coast blues. So if were going to do some Big Joe we can cover all the styles of Big Joe. The rest are songs weve always loved since we were kids.

We were trying to be aware that there are so many songs in the blues tradition that have been done too many times that the world didnt need another version, so we tried to stay away from those.

Q: Are you writing new songs at this time?

A: I am always writing and throwing things away. I am the harshest critic of my own songs that youve ever met.

Q: Whats shifted since you were first playing in the 1970s and early 80s?

A: Well, the actual being onstage hasnt changed. Youre still immortal onstage. Thats the addiction. Back to Bob Dylan, I dont know if he is still touring because hes got debts to pay, but I imagine its because he gets the same high I get.

When youre onstage and everythings clicking, there is no time. Youre not old, youre not young. You exist in this other realm. Its like a runners high. Youre living totally in a moment. The past is the present and the future is the present. Its a pretty ethereal state. Ive talked to other people about this, and lots know what Im talking about.

Other people are punching a time clock. You know, 20 more minutes. For me, its if Im onstage, all my dead friends are alive, my family, my mother and father are alive, my heroes, you know, Big Joe Turner is alive. And now were done, OK, now back to reality.

So being onstage hasnt changed at all, but a lot of whats around being onstage has. The music industry has changed drastically for better or for worse.

The main thing Ive noticed, we did a show about four or five years ago, and the other act on the bill was these young guys, about eight of them. We shared this big dressing room. So, they went up on stage and did their thing, and I went and we played our set, and I go to go back to the room and I think the room will be filled with smoke, alcohol, drugs, and there will be people flying through the air because theyre 22-years-old. And I think, Oh, I gotta field that.

And I get up to the room and its dead silent. And theyre all sitting, each on their own computers, doing whatever theyre doing. Jesus Christ guys, youre 22-years-old, dont you know youre supposed to have fun?

The motels are either swanky or theyre crap holes, the food at truck stops is still terrible, but the biggest change is 22-year-old guys are not out making idiots of themselves. Gee, I am glad I was 22 when I was 22!

Q: You mentioned you were drinking less?

A: I will still enjoy a beverage, but I dont enjoy them in bulk. Ill have a beer before I go onstage because it kind of loosens up the brain. It makes me less shy and inhibited because I am shy and inhibited unless demon rum is involved. And Ill have a beer after Im done, but thats about it. Alcohol used to be a religion and now I nod at it.

Dave Alvin & Phil Alvin + the Guilty Ones play Saturday, July 29 and Sunday, July 30 at the Calgary Folk Music Festival on Princes Island. For tickets, call 403-233-0904 or visit the festival'swebsite.

Mary-Lynn Wardle is a Bragg Creek writer who covers her two passions, music and horses. She has written in the Calgary Herald, FFWD Weekly, Swerve, Western Horsemen, Western Horse Review, Horses All and other publications, for over 25 years.

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Calgary folk fest: Dave Alvin and intimations of immortality - theyyscene.ca

SHORT PASS: Queensland State of Origin rugby league captain Cameron Smith says he is the greatest player to ever wear the maroon.

He is touted by many rugby league commentators as not only being the best player in the world at the moment, but potentially the best player to have ever played.

You only have to have a passing interest in rugby league to know Johnathon Thurston is already a legend of the game.

Humble and gracious as he is talented, the man is everything that is right with rugby league in the modern era.

He has steered home countless matches for the Cowboys and put his unique stamp on every level of the game.

I believe he is set to become rugby league's ninth immortal.

An honour reserved only for the most influential and ground breaking players, Thurston's heroics in Origin II, where he kicked the winning goal and sent Queensland to the decider which they subsequently won, have all but assured him a seat at the table.

Clive Churchill, Bob Fulton, Reg Gasnier, Johnny Raper, Graeme Langlands, Wally Lewis, Arthur Beetson and Andrew Johns are the current immortal inductees, and while Thurston still has a couple of years of play in him, I am calling for his induction to happen sooner rather than later.

After all, who else could possibly compare.

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JT's immortality a certainty after State of Origin heroics | Gympie Times - Gympie Times

This combination of pictures created on January 29, 2017 shows Switzerlands tennis player Roger Federer holding up his 18 Grand Slam titles. 1st row, from left : Australian Open 2017, Wimbledon 2012, Australian Open 2010, Wimbledon 2009, Roland Garros 2009, US Open 2008. 2nd row, from left : US Open 2007, Wimbledon 2007, Australian Open 2007, US Open 2006, Wimbledon 2006, Australian Open 2006. 3rd row, from left : US Open 2005, Wimbledon 2005, US Open 2004, Wimbledon 2004, Australian Open 2004, Wimbledon 2003. / AFP PHOTO / STF

Five years after his last Wimbledon triumph, Roger Federer can capture a record eighth All England Club title Sunday and become the tournaments oldest mens champion of the modern era.

With his 36th birthday fast approaching, the evergreen Swiss will comfortably succeed Arthur Ashe, who was almost 32 when he won in 1975, as Wimbledons most senior champion.

Victory over Croatian giant Marin Cilic will also give him a 19th career Grand Slam title and second in three majors this year after sweeping to a fifth Australian Open in January following a six-month absence.

I was hoping to be in good shape when the grass court season came around, said Federer who, for good measure, also pocketed back-to-back Masters at Indian Wells and Miami as well as a ninth Halle grass court crown.

The first three, four months were just like a dream really. So this is something I was working towards, you know, Wimbledon, to be in good shape. Im happy its paying off here now.

Federer admits his form in 2017 has surprised even himself after he shut down his 2016 season to rest a knee injury in the aftermath of his brutal five-set semi-final loss at Wimbledon to Milos Raonic.

He has 30 wins and just two losses this year and he has reached his 11th Wimbledon final without dropping a set.

Sundays match will be his 102nd at the tournament and his 29th final at the majors.

It makes me really happy, making history here at Wimbledon. Its a big deal. I love this tournament, said Federer, who has been tied with Pete Sampras on seven Wimbledon titles since beating Andy Murray in the 2012 final.

All my dreams came true here as a player. To have another chance to go for number eight now, be kind of so close now at this stage, is a great feeling.

Yeah, unbelievably excited. I hope I can play one more good match. 11 finals here, all these records, its great. Im so close now.

While Big Four rivals Murray, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal failed to even make the semi-finals, Federer has been reborn.

He came into Wimbledon having radically pruned his playing schedule, skipping the entire clay court season.

Wimbledon is just his seventh event of the year; 28-year-old Cilic is in his 15th.

Federer, reveling in the spotlight of having played all his matches on Centre Court, has hardly been troubled on his way to the final.

He has lost serve just four times and spent four and a half hours less on court than Cilic.

Federer also boasts a 6-1 career record over Cilic, the 2014 US Open champion who has made his first Wimbledon final at the 11th attempt.

However, Cilics game is made for grass and 12 months ago he led Federer by two sets to love and held three match points in an epic quarter-final which the Swiss superstar eventually claimed.

When Cilic won his only Slam in New York three years ago, he demolished Federer in straight sets in the semi-finals.

I dont want to say its more relaxed going into it because I have a good head-to-head record against Marin, even though the matches were extremely close, said Federer.

But its not like weve played against each other 30 times. You feel like you have to reinvent the wheel.

Its more straightforward, in my opinion. I think thats nice in some ways. Its a nice change, but it doesnt make things easier.

Cilic is only the second Croatian man to reach the Wimbledon final after Goran Ivanisevic, his former coach, who swept to a memorable title victory in 2001.

A win on Sunday would also make him the first Wimbledon champion outside of Federer, Murray, Djokovic and Nadal since Lleyton Hewitt triumphed in 2002.

However, he has only won one of his last 12 matches against a top five player at the Slams, even if that was over Federer in New York three years ago.

Cilic has fired 130 aces at Wimbledon this year and dropped just 10 service games.

This is Rogers home court, the place where he feels the best and knows that he can play the best game, said Cilic.

Obviously Im going to look back, 12 months ago I was one point away from winning a match against him here. But its still a big mountain to climb.

Federers defeated semi-final opponent Tomas Berdych sees only one winner on Sunday.

Idont see anything that would indicate Roger is getting older. Hes just proving his greatness in our sport, said the Czech.

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Federer on verge of Wimbledon immortality - Inquirer.net

Cory Doctorow has made several careers out of thinking about the future, as a journalist and co-editor of Boing Boing, an activist with strong ties to the Creative Commons movement and the right-to-privacy movement, and an author of novels that largely revolve around the ways changing technology changes society. From his debut novel, Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom (about rival groups of Walt Disney World designers in a post-scarcity society where social currency determines personal value), to his most acclaimed, Little Brother (about a teenage gamer fighting the Department of Homeland Security), his books tend to be high-tech and high-concept, but more about how people interface with technologies that feel just a few years into the future.

But they also tend to address current social issues head-on. Doctorows latest novel, Walkaway, is largely about people who respond to the financial disparity between the ultra-rich and the 99 percent by walking away and building their own networked micro-societies in abandoned areas. Frightened of losing control over society, the 1 percent wages full-on war against the walkaways, especially after they develop a process that can digitize individual human brains, essentially uploading them to machines and making them immortal. When I talked to Doctorow about the book and the technology behind it, we started with how feasible any of this might be someday, but wound up getting deep into the questions of how to change society, whether people are fundamentally good, and the balance between fighting a surveillance state and streaming everything to protect ourselves from government overreach.

Walkway feels timely in terms of present politics and sociology, but the technology is more theoretical. How much of this future do you consider plausible?

Oh, the technology is the most hand-wavey stuff in the book. Its probably easier to identify the stuff thats least plausible, like consciousness uploading. If our consciousness isnt inextricably tied to our bodies, we have no good way to know that, apart from wishful thinking. That sort of thing should always be looked at suspiciously as a metaphor, and not as a prediction. When we were making steam engines, we were all sure we could make a steam-powered brain. We had a lot of other different versions of this in fiction at different times it always turns out by this amazing coincidence, we think whatever technology we use every day is the best way to understand our own cognition. The most common technology of the day is definitely the thing that is most like our brains, rather than something coming up in the future. So Im deeply, deeply skeptical of the idea that our brains are things that well put in computers.

But we do live a lot of our lives in the digital realm. We project our minds into the digital world. So as a metaphor for understanding who we are and how we relate to other people, consciousness uploading is a useful metaphor. Machine-learning-based vision systems are getting better at recognizing objects. Like a lot of fast-growing things, we dont know if its on an S-curve or a J-curve. Is it going through a burst of productivity that will reach an actual limit and then taper off, or are we in some crazy exponential curve that will just go up and up, with machine learning getting better and better, and delivering more and more dividends? We cant answer, because a lot of what were getting out of machine learning right now is incremental, but some of it is breakthroughs. Its got that sexiness factor, where a bunch of people who would have historically not given a shit about machine learning are suddenly looking really closely at it, discovering easy wins that were invisible to earlier practitioners. Maybe there will be all new kinds of amazing discoveries.

Other things in Walkaway All of the biotech stuff, like turning urine back into beer, that feels like something within the realm of CRISPR hackers. Its something they might attempt, though maybe not pull off to the extent that I would drink what they made. CRISPR is one of those brands where theres so much crazy, awesome, interesting stuff, and also so much hot air and bloviating that its hard to tell whats hand-waving and whats real. As a fiction writer, thats my sweet spot. Exciting, expansive, fast-moving, and full of bullshit? That is science-fiction-writing gold, right there. Everything you write about it sounds eminently plausible.

With the first Homeland book, it felt like you were suggesting real ways to resist surveillance overreach and react to real politics. Walkaway deals with similar issues, but in a far more speculative way. Can readers learn anything useful from Walkaway about dealing with current economic and power inequities?

Consciousness uploading in Walkaway is not a solution more like a McGuffin. Nobody really solves any problems with that. They solve problems with ethics and social movement and organizational tools, with communal living and unselfishness and commitment to abundance. Having Airs that act like house elves is just fashion. But other things they do, like using networks to build flexible political groups that allow them to pool their labor, I think if were going to have a resistance, thats the resistance. Thats what we get out of technology.

Ive had years of debating with friends in political movements about whether technology is a distraction. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a column about how real activists lay down shoe leather ringing doorbells. They dont post online petitions. But the reality is that if shoe-leather is needed, the way you mobilize it is with networks where you can find people who want to go and ring doorbells. And anyone who says, Well, I dont know why I would use a communications tool that will allow me to find people who feel the same way I do anywhere in the world, and recruit them to my cause, I just want to ring doorbells, that person is talking out of their ass.

In the book, you dont address the usual problem of human brain duplication, which is basically the transporter problem if you make a copy of yourself and destroy the original, is the new one really you, or are you dead? How do you feel about that question personally?

I have this super-glib answer, which is, Everyone who cares about that will die. If immortality is only available to people who dont care about that stuff, just wait a hundred years, and all the people with moral quandaries about it will be dead.

My thoughts on it are that if your hypothetical transporter had hypothetical characteristics that made it like murder, it would be like murder, and if your hypothetical transporter had hypothetical characteristics that didnt, it wouldnt be. Its your Gedankenexperiment, you give it the contours that you want it to have. I wrote an essay about this once, specifically about a classic science-fiction story called The Cold Equations, and how it omits the writers hand outside the frame, manipulating things so theres only one answer to their problem. The inevitability of The Cold Equations is not the inevitability of the universe. Its a contrivance. If you have a thought experiment and its clear that it can really only be answered one way, our next question should be, Why did you structure your thought experiment that way?

One of the three books youve often cited as inspiring Walkaway was Rebecca Solnits A Paradise Built in Hell, about the positive, generous ways people respond to crisis, and how people in power usually make crisis worse by attempting to stabilize situations with heavy-handed measures. How early in the process of writing this did those parallels occur to you?

The elements of Walkaway were self-assembling in my subconscious out of things I wrote for Boing Boing and things I have seen in the world, whether they were at Maker Faire or Burning Man or on the 9 oclock news. Solnits book helped crystallize a lot of those ideas. I started actually writing this book by re-reading Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom and thinking about what story I could tell about how that society came into being. That primed me to start noticing things in the world that hinted at the kind of story.

Im filling in the blanks between our present day and Down and Out in The Magic Kingdom. I got as far as Walkaway, and I want to stick a pin in the board there, or hammer a piton into the side of the cliff, to help me find the next step there. My theory of change in my activist work is that theres no point charting a course from A to Z, because the world is dynamic. If your course from A to Z works now, by the time you get to M, everything from M to Z will have rearranged itself. Youre going to need a new plan. And so my view is, you do hill-climbing. You find that step you can take that makes the world a little better, that gives you a slightly more advantageous position, and then you see from there what your next step might be. In my activist work, Im going from A to B. In my imaginative fiction work, Im going from Z to M. Maybe theyll meet in the middle? Its just very abstract.

One outgrowth of that expansion is that in your writing in general, you often dig deep into what one technological change does to the world, then zip past the next few, because that first change makes things alter so fast that theres no time for consideration. Does that approach in fiction come out of your attitude about radical technological change?

Yeah. I do think things are intertwingled. I think it was Arthur C. Clarke who said if an old, well-established scientist says something is possible, theyre probably right, and if they say something is impossible, theyre probably wrong. The world is weirder than we tend to extrapolate. We make thought experiments that are stripped-down models, where a small thing changes another thing and then stops there, as opposed to rippling outward and making interference patterns with other changes. Like Gardner Dozois said, a science-fiction writer should see cars and cinemas and not only predict the drive-in, but also the sexual revolution. And it occurred to me one day that in the 21st century, the major effect all of those things that lingers isnt the sexual revolution, the car, the drive-in, or the cinema. Its the fact that because the sexual revolution necessitated a driving license, for the first time in American history, civilians started covering government issued ID, and that created the entire modern bureaucratic surveillance state. So if you really want to be a real badass science-fiction writer, you should predict that hitching government-issued credentials to the procreative act would profoundly change our current world more than anything else.

Youve said you consider science fiction to be a sort of social-engineering fly-through of possible technology. Once youve considered what technology or social issue you want to write about, at what point do the characters come in for you?

Well, here, Im trying to get people on an emotional fly-through here. Walkaway isnt about the impact of technology, so much as a shift in our social mores toward the belief that your neighbors are part of the solution, and not the problem. Competitive market economies create amazing productivity gains. We talk about how wasteful capitalism is, and how much pollution it produces, and so on, but if you look at any material object that you use thats been made in the last five years a car, a refrigerator, whatever the labor, energy, and material inputs to that object are an infinitesimal fraction of what they were when we were born. And that is an astounding accomplishment.

So market capitalism works really well. But it has a failure mode, and that failure mode is to pit us against one another so we have adversarial exclusive destinies, where my success is your loss. And that produces this world where when things go wrong, instead of turning to your neighbors, you run away from them. And we cant solve our problems without our neighbors. All those preppers who have bugout bags so they can run for the hills when the lights go out, those people are crazy, because if they get a burst appendix or bad stuff in their water, they cant solve their problems. Society is built up by having a variety of perspectives and expertises all convened under one roof, as opposed to each person for themselves. So the emotional fly-through here, where the characters come in, is in figuring out what would it be like if in a crisis, you turned to your neighbor and asked them how you could help them, and the two of you got together to help the next person you could find. Which I think going back to Rebecca Solnit, thats what we do in a crisis, but its not what we think well do. Its statistically illiterate to imagine that most people are bad, when most of the people you know are good. What are the odds that you would happen to know the very, very rare good people out of a pool of extremely bad people, as opposed to you knowing a fairly representative slice of people?

Is there a technological solution for what you call the virtue deficit, the fear that other people are probably bad and cant be trusted?

The leaderboard system in Walkaway [where people are competitively rated by what they contribute to a collective] is a really good example of how technology can pit us against us. One of the things Im really interested in is how the different frameworks of our social media produce different outcomes. So Twitter shows you the number of followers people have, and thats seems to be inextricably tied to social media. Its very rare now to find a social technology that doesnt show you how many followers people have. Tumblr doesnt, which is super-interesting. If youre on Tumblr, you dont know how popular another Tumblr person is. Flickr was one of the first social technologies, but it marked itself out from things like MySpace by refusing to allow you to see how many followers other people had. If youre making a technology about being sociable and finding your authentic self and expressing it to other people, then creating a system where people can easily compete to see whos the most popular runs antithetical to it. I think social media has optimized a mechanism for being compelling without being enjoyable.

We become inured to a lot of these technological techniques for manipulating our emotional states.

I can spend endless hours on Twitter, even though Im not enjoying it. The maximization of engagement rather than pleasure has been a hugely transformative and not-for-the-better shift in the way we do application and technology design. If we want to make technology that encourages pleasure instead of engagement, or cooperation instead of competition, there are conscious choices we can make. Well reach some natural limits. People become adapted to whatever kinds of social rewards they get from our technology. We tend to forget, when a new technology sweeps through our world like a bonfire, that well become inured to it, and itll cease to be impressive or compelling. Old ads for soap basically said, Buy soap and you will be clean. Talking about the value of the product used to be a fantastically persuasive technique. But through exposure, we became inured. Today, if you want to advertise soap, you do it like Axe body spray: spray this on your body and women will throw themselves at you! Its like a junkie chasing a high a dose that used to make us feel great now just makes us feel normal. We become inured to a lot of these technological techniques for manipulating our emotional states.

There are always people at the margin who dont become inured. A lot of people will try a casino game and find that mechanic really compelling, until they realize they wont win in the long term, and walk away. But other people are unable to disengage, and become problem gamblers. So are we going to use technology to make ourselves better or worse? Well find some techniques that people are broadly vulnerable to, or receptive to, and minorities of people will be susceptible to them in very profound ways, or will be totally immune to them. And then well develop new techniques, and theyll go in both directions to make us better and make us worse. But that doesnt mean that they wont make us better or worse. It just means that they create this boom-and-bust cycle of making big changes that become smallish changes that then beget a new big change.

Speaking of walking away from something that doesnt give you long-term gains, the hardest thing for me to buy in Walkaway wasnt brain uploads, it was the idea that you could put your heart and soul into building something, and then just quietly walk away if someone else tried to take it. Its a radical philosophy throughout the book, but ownership is so baked into American culture the twin ideas that having things makes you important and happy, and that if you make something, you deserve it. How would you convince someone to walk away from something they made and care for?

Well, theyre walking away from the physical reality of the home theyve built, but not the digital afterlife. So theyre like programmers who fork open a project because they cant agree with one another. Yeah, they walk away from the server where their code is running, but they dont walk away from all the knowledge they gained making it, or the individual talents theyve honed. They walk away to do something better.

Its a bit like the rationalist community, who are trying to find a way around our cognitive blind spots, to apply behavioral economics to get people to do what will be best in the long term, instead of what your emotions tell you is best in the short term. The reality is, when you look back on people who have done amazing things, they usually walked away from several failures in order to get there. If you want to triple your success rate, you triple your failure rate. Walt Disney had to walk away from Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, which was owned by the studio he worked with, so he created Mickey Mouse. And if it wasnt for that failure, he would have been a middling cartoonist drawing Oswald the Lucky Rabbit for the rest of his life. There are a lot of those failures in the lives of people who have very successful careers. Elon Musk was forced out of PayPal. That stings a lot when it happens. But everyone whos found true love, with very few exceptions, walked away from times when they thought they found true love, and it turned out that they hadnt.

You do have to write off a lot of failures on your way to success.

Today, theres a lot of big movement for successful people to admit their failures, rather than paper over them, and to talk about their other challenges, like depression and mental illness, as opposed to pretending to be super-people who have no problems. Thats part of it, helping people understand that you do have to write off a lot of failures on your way to success. In Walkaway, you also cushion the blow by having technology that makes it easier to salvage the best parts of the things you walk away from.

Streaming technology becomes vitally important in Walkaway, and theres a tension between the surveillance state, where the rich can track everyone elses movements, and the ability to broadcast your reality to get past news filtering and censorship, and show people whats really going on. Its notable that our government is simultaneously trying to keep us from recording things it doesnt want seen, and trying to record and examine everything we do.

I think that just tells you that their arguments are self-serving bullshit. When they say, Well, we dont want you to record the police because it puts them at risk, or it interferes with their job, or they have the right to privacy, and then they say, By the way, your privacy is totally worthless, theyre having their cake and eating it too. And theres another framing for this, which is that when you do the peoples business with a gun on your hip, the people have a right to know what youre doing. And when you are the people, the government doesnt have the automatic right to know what youre doing. Thats actually not a novel prospect. Thats a thing baked into the US Constitution. Transparency for the strong and privacy for the weak. Thats the Fourth Amendment.

On a lighter note, like one of the things that I really enjoy about the book is the emphasis that you put on people creating art even in the most crisis-ridden circumstances. There are a lot of details in that vein. What made that aspect of creativity interesting to you?

In every kind of adversity, you get people making art.

Well, thats certainly the world I inhabit. Everyone I know has laptops covered in stickers. When laser cutters first came along, everyone was engraving everything they could engrave. We do ornament our things, especially in times of adversity. Some of my very favorite art in the world, like vintage folk art, is trench art. Stuff that comes out of World War I, where people made things out of bullet casings. Prison art is amazing, and so are the paintings flyers put on the nose cones of their fighter planes. One of the things that was really formative to me was a book of poetry by children in Auschwitz that was circulated when I was a kid. I went to a socialist Yiddish school, and we read these poems that had been written in Yiddish by these kids who all died. They had teachers who convened classes to keep the kids occupied, and they wrote poetry. In every kind of adversity, you get people making art. It is really a universal trait, and it particularly manifests in times of extrema and adversity.

Activism is important right now, but so is optimism. What about the tech world right now gives you hope for the future?

Its really easy to focus on the terrible things people do with social media, for the same reason that its really easy to focus on the turd floating in the punchbowl. But when I reflect on my experiences of networks, communication, and media, over and over again, its people coming together to help one another. And its true that a few people acting very flamboyantly badly can make it easy to forget, or even cancel out some of the benefits there. But over and over again, when theres a disaster, when someone has a personal crisis, even the people who like, I look around on Tumblr and every now and again therell be someone who will write a post about their depression and then other people will come in and kind of comfort them and help them out. Its just such a motif thats easy to miss. When you see it its so obvious, and once you start looking at it, you see it everywhere. And so that I think thats a thing that gives me hope, that the evidence of our fundamental goodness is there on the network for us to see. You have to look past all of the shouting and the anger, which obviously loom large and it looms large for really illegitimate reasons. And Im not saying that it excuses, but the nobility should give you hope that the people who are kind and good are in the majority and its a matter of figuring out how to use the technologies but it doesnt create a false multiplier for the minority of bad actors, so that the rest of us can get on with the business of our ancient dream of our species, which is collaborating to make the world better.

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Cory Doctorow on technological immortality, the transporter problem, and fast-moving futures - The Verge

London (AFP) - Five years after his last Wimbledon triumph, Roger Federer can capture a record eighth All England Club title Sunday and become the tournament's oldest men's champion of the modern era.

With his 36th birthday fast approaching, the evergreen Swiss will comfortably succeed Arthur Ashe, who was almost 32 when he won in 1975, as Wimbledon's most senior champion.

Victory over Croatian giant Marin Cilic will also give him a 19th career Grand Slam title and second in three majors this year after sweeping to a fifth Australian Open in January following a six-month absence.

"I was hoping to be in good shape when the grass court season came around," said Federer who, for good measure, also pocketed back-to-back Masters at Indian Wells and Miami as well as a ninth Halle grass court crown.

"The first three, four months were just like a dream really. So this is something I was working towards, you know, Wimbledon, to be in good shape. I'm happy it's paying off here now."

Federer admits his form in 2017 has surprised even himself after he shut down his 2016 season to rest a knee injury in the aftermath of his brutal five-set semi-final loss at Wimbledon to Milos Raonic.

He has 30 wins and just two losses this year and he has reached his 11th Wimbledon final without dropping a set.

- 'Unbelievably excited' -

Sunday's match will be his 102nd at the tournament and his 29th final at the majors.

"It makes me really happy, making history here at Wimbledon. It's a big deal. I love this tournament," said Federer, who has been tied with Pete Sampras on seven Wimbledon titles since beating Andy Murray in the 2012 final.

"All my dreams came true here as a player. To have another chance to go for number eight now, be kind of so close now at this stage, is a great feeling.

"Yeah, unbelievably excited. I hope I can play one more good match. 11 finals here, all these records, it's great. I'm so close now."

While 'Big Four' rivals Murray, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal failed to even make the semi-finals, Federer has been reborn.

He came into Wimbledon having radically pruned his playing schedule, skipping the entire clay court season.

Wimbledon is just his seventh event of the year; 28-year-old Cilic is in his 15th.

Federer, revelling in the spotlight of having played all his matches on Centre Court, has hardly been troubled on his way to the final.

He has lost serve just four times and spent four and a half hours less on court than Cilic.

Federer also boasts a 6-1 career record over Cilic, the 2014 US Open champion who has made his first Wimbledon final at the 11th attempt.

However, Cilic's game is made for grass and 12 months ago he led Federer by two sets to love and held three match points in an epic quarter-final which the Swiss superstar eventually claimed.

- 'Roger's home court' -

When Cilic won his only Slam in New York three years ago, he demolished Federer in straight sets in the semi-finals.

"I don't want to say it's more relaxed going into it because I have a good head-to-head record against Marin, even though the matches were extremely close," said Federer.

"But it's not like we've played against each other 30 times. You feel like you have to reinvent the wheel.

"It's more straightforward, in my opinion. I think that's nice in some ways. It's a nice change, but it doesn't make things easier."

Cilic is only the second Croatian man to reach the Wimbledon final after Goran Ivanisevic, his former coach, who swept to a memorable title victory in 2001.

A win on Sunday would also make him the first Wimbledon champion outside of Federer, Murray, Djokovic and Nadal since Lleyton Hewitt triumphed in 2002.

However, he has only won one of his last 12 matches against a top five player at the Slams, even if that was over Federer in New York three years ago.

Cilic has fired 130 aces at Wimbledon this year and dropped just 10 service games.

"This is Roger's home court, the place where he feels the best and knows that he can play the best game," said Cilic.

"Obviously I'm going to look back, 12 months ago I was one point away from winning a match against him here. But it's still a big mountain to climb."

Federer's defeated semi-final opponent Tomas Berdych sees only one winner on Sunday.

"I don't see anything that would indicate Roger is getting older. He's just proving his greatness in our sport," said the Czech.

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Federer on verge of Wimbledon immortality - Yahoo Sports

If a person were interested in knowing what it might be like to live in Paris, it would probably be more useful to seek out the opinions of those who actually spent a fair amount of time there rather than relying on the speculations and guesses of those whod never even made the trip.

In his column in the Faith and Reason section of July 8 Daily Item, my dear friend Kerry Walters takes us to a somewhat more exotic destination thats of interest to many of us the afterlife. Kerry outlines the view, expressed primarily by the ancient philosopher/theologians Theophilus of Antioch and Irenaeus, that only a portion of us those who had chosen to act in a Godly and morally-upstanding manner in this earthly life were destined for immortality; the rest of us, would simply cease to exist.

Unfortunately, at the time they wrote, neither Theophilus or Irenaeus had been to Paris. Their personal experience of the afterlife was nil. Fortunately, other sources do exist that we can turn to for more first-hand information.

From almost two decades of intensive research in this very subject (my book on the topic will hopefully be completed later this year) I can state that the consensus (closer to unanimous) opinion of those whove actually been there spirits whove finished their earthly life and made their journey to the other side is that those who believe in conditional immortality are, no pun intended, dead wrong.

Based on post-mortem communications from these spirits (144 of them, ranging from the famous to the infamous to just-plain-folks) delivered through some of the most highly-respected, intensively-observed, and scientifically-studied mediums of the 19th and 20th centuries plus communications from a 145th spirit (the Virgin Mary) the prevailing experience of the afterlife is that (1) its open to essentially everyone, that (2) the quality of ones initial afterlife experiences will be totally dependent on how one lived his or her earth-life, and (3) that learning, growth and development are not limited to our earth-lives, but continue on the other side.

Take if as you will, but this is the take from those whove actually been there.

Donald C. Porteous Jr.,

Milton

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Letter to the Editor: Conditional immortality? - Sunbury Daily Item