Thinking West

Greetings from lovely White Plains, New York.

I’ve been up here a few days, having flown up to New York City on Monday for a series of meetings.

No sooner had I accompanied my colleague down to baggage claim at JFK than I saw the first reports emerging about the bombings in Boston.

Not long after we heard about the ricin letters.

And then this morning I woke up to the news about the fertilizer plant explosion in West, Texas.

It made me sick to my stomach, and my heart goes out to the folks in West.

I drove through there just last weekend on my to Lake Whitney just west of West to play some golf with my father.

Many of the people who live there are of Czech descent, and are known for both their hospitality to travelers and for their scrumptious kolaches.

So I wanted to pass along this “Things You Need to Know About West” list, for I and my colleagues are feeling a little homesick at the moment being up here in the Northeast while all this is going on back on our doorstep in central Texas.

Thankfully, I’ll be heading back home later this afternoon, which means I’ll likely be in a JFK queue instead of reporting on IBM earnings, as I’m normally wont to do on earnings day.

I’ll be sure to do an earnings post when I get back to Texas.

Aurora

When I woke up today, remembering this is the week of The Open Championship in the U.K., what I expected to see when I turned on the TV were golf scores.

Instead, it was the horror of another mass shooting — eerily, only 20 minutes away from the tragedy that occurred at Columbine High School in 1999 — and this time, in the midst of a midnight screening of the new Batman movie.

A dark night rises, indeed.

Never mind the irony of having the excitement and thrills of turning out at midnight to see Hollywood’s latest from the “Dark Knight” oeuvre, where Batman/Bruce Wayne struggle with their role in fighting crime (or not) in Gotham City, quickly evolving into a very real horror unveiling itself in front of your very eyes.

This was real life, and once again, an extremely tragic, seemingly senseless shooting occurs and there seems to be no explaining it.

It appears thus far that this was the work of a “lone gunman,” and a 24 year-old suspect, James Holmes, is in custody.

Perhaps the only goodness that can come from this horror is that the perpetrator is still among us, and at least an attempt can be made to try and understand what was going through his twisted mind that he would resort to such massive violence for such meaningless and horrific ends.

But I suspect, as is the case with any such mass shooting, whatever explanation there is will never be enough to satisfy those surviving family members whose loved ones were taken from them so tragically.

As President Obama said this morning when speaking about the shooting, “Life is short and fragile,” and suggested that the good that can come out of such a situation is to reflect on how we treat one another and love one another.

“What we will remember is those we loved, and how we treated them,” said the president from Ft. Myers, Florida.

I’ll simply say “Amen” to that, and send out my utmost sympathies and condolences to the people of Colorado.

The end of a very dark night will likely lead to some even longer and darker days to come as we collectively reflect on what brings us such senseless and purposeless violence.

You are in my thoughts and prayers, Colorado.

Whitney

The older I become, the more people I know and love who seem go off and die on me.

That’s just a part of growing older, I know, but the the past couple of years the pace seems to have picked up a bit.  I’ve lost three good friends and a dear uncle to cancer-related illnesses and an accident in the past year alone, and all of them well before their years.

So when I heard the news about Whitney Houston over the weekend, like so many others, I was stunned.  We hadn’t heard much from her in recent years, and when we did, it was often initiated in tabloids.

But back in her heyday, when we heard from her regularly, it was from that whopping, stunning, belting angelic voice — it was like she could reach out and sing to the whole wide world.

Judging from the outpouring of love, sadness, sympathy and fond remembrance in the social realm this weekend after the news was out, she did reach the whole wide world. I never knew there were so many Whitney Houston fans out there.  Yesterday afternoon, Facebook was literally a living memorial to the singer.

I also immediately felt bad for the Grammys producers.  To receive such momentous and tragic news the night before the Grammys broadcast, and then to have to try and figure out how to both remember Whitney and continue to fete the year in music??!

Not an easy balance to strike.

In 1998, I had occasion to work with the Grammys team when IBM sponsored and produced the official Webcast. That year, the Dixie Chicks broke out, Monica was celebrated, and Will Smith won for best rap album. But what I always remembered was how professional and capable were the people behind the scenes at the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

So I was hardly surprised when this year’s excellent Grammys emcee, LL Cool J, walked onstage after Bruce Springteen’s opening act and addressed Whitney’s passing head on and with a prayer, explaining “This night is about something truly universal and healing. This night is about music.”

Or when several of the other artists tipped their hat to Whitney in some way during their own respective performances.

Or, of course, during Jennifer Hudson’s haunting performance of the song Whitney made famous, “I Will Always Love You.”  I’m not sure how Hudson got through that song without breaking down onstage herself.

However carefully orchestrated the tribute was, it was tastefully executed and left me thinking this was one of the most exciting Grammy’s broadcasts in years.

I hadn’t planned on watching the Grammys this year, but curiosity got the better of me — not only because of Whitney’s passing, but also because I knew I’d likely see a lot of music I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.

Like Adele.  I missed Adele on the first go around at the Grammys, and though I have heard a couple of her songs, I never put the name and the face together.  She was just a name I kept hearing.

And before you suggest I live under a rock, the fact is, I don’t listen much to the radio anymore, and I certainly don’t live on iTunes (you’ll more likely find me on Pandora). So for me, the Grammys is as good as a place as any to find out about new music — and to find out who Adele is.

Well, after seeing Adele interviewed by Anderson Cooper before the broadcast, and after watching her rendition last night of “Rolling in the Deep” during the broadcast, I became another instant in her otherwise millions of fans around the world.

Adele seems like she’s got a good head on her shoulders. She doesn’t seem to take all this fame and fortune stuff too seriously — but then she walks out on that stage before a few hundred million people and delivers that powerful singing punch like nobody’s business.

I hope she keeps it that way.  Too many of our other great artists were taken too soon because of a combustible mixture of drugs and alcohol that are always, quite literally, a recipe for disaster.

We ask so much of them sometimes, our celebrities.  We want to know everything about them.  We want them to be perfect.  We want them to be always on.

Instead of letting them just be human like the rest of us.

Elvis Presley.  Marilyn Monroe.  Jimi Hendrix.  Janis Joplin.  Michael Jackson.  Amy Winehouse.  And now, it seems, Whitney Houston.

I don’t know about you, but that list is enough tragedy to last me a lifetime.

So, I suggest we let Adele take her six Grammys and disappear back into the English countryside and that we leave her the hell alone until she’s ready to leave her compound and go back on tour.

Let her enjoy her gramophone trophies and hanging out with her new love — we’ve all got our own lives to get on about.

As for Whitney Houston, may she rest in peace. I, like so many others, will choose to remember her when she belted them out like in the video below, where she took the U.S. national anthem to a whole other level.

Whitney, you will be missed.

Tough Start in Vancouver

Greetings from the Austin airport.

Whoa, I had a sense of serious deja vu there for the moment.  I can’t imagine why!

Moi?  At an airport?  What up with that??

I’m off on a 12-day journey, first for some meetings in Stuttgart, Madrid, and Milan, and then from there straight back to Viva Las Vegas for this year’s IBM Pulse 2010, where I’ll be joining some of my Tivoli and greater IBM colleagues to help cover the event via this blog and the Twittersphere.

Since I’ll be out on the road, I’ll unfortunately miss out on much of the Winter Olympics coverage from beautiful Vancouver.

If you’ve never visited the area, you really should put it on your list.  It’s breathtakingly beautiful.

And in spite of yesterday’s admittedly horrific start to the games with the tragic death of Georgian luger Nodar Kumaritashvili, I thought the opening ceremony last night in Vancouver was stunning.

It was uniquely Canadian, celebrating that country’s great diversity and majesty, and it struck an elegant and delicate balance between being respectful of the circumstances while having the “show” go on.  The floor light show was something I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve ever seen before and it was magical.

IBM having once been a longtime sponsor of the Olympic games, I think I can safely speak for many of my colleagues when I extend our condolences and good wishes to the Olympics family and the country of Georgia and its brave athletes, who laid aside their grief and put their game faces on to honor the memory of Mr. Kumaritashvili.

That can’t have been easy for anyone, and I think they did it, respectfully and with appropriate acknowledgement to the tragedy.  Obviously, nobody wanted the games to start with such a sad beginning.

As I get ready to leave the U.S.A., know that I’ll very much look forward to following the action from overseas next week and I wish our own athletes the best of luck in their various competitions — especially our own “Flying Tomato,” Shawn White.

Dude, I can’t wait to see you taking some majestic air!