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congressional gold medal


klee251

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I have sent a request to my US congressman to have Mr. Williams presented with a Congressional Gold Medal as was done for Irving Berlin, John Wayne and others.  He has been very helpful and amenable, but they require constituents of 300 congress people to request one to consider the action.  Mr. Williams is not getting any younger, he absolutely deserves it, and it appears you guys are my best hope of making that happen.

So please get on the computer to your congressional representative and request a medal for the pre-eminent musician of an era.
Thanks.

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Are we sure it's not a bot? The post just reads real strange, is all. Think about it: some guy who professes to be a JW fan shows up on a JW forum out of the blue and his first message to us is a demand to write our Congresspeople for a CGM? Of all the possible times to bring this up, he picks the week of this particular presidential election? He's fucking kidding, right? Over two dozen House seats yet to be called, plus several more that flipped, and then there's the Senate races--two of which, in Georgia, are heading to runoffs... and that's not to mention that probably half or more of this forum's regular users live outside the U.S. and have no say.

 

If you're going to get two-thirds of our present-era senate to agree on something, I can think of plenty of things more useful to the American public to ask for than this.

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Sorry.  First of all I am a woman and I really had this site pegged wrong.  I have been there many times and did not show up out of the blue but I don't usually post to it.   I think the man should receive all the music awards that are available to get.  I don't like congress any better than anyone else, but where else would you geniuses go?  Oh, I can tell you where to go, but I won't.  I can't begin to tell you how disappointed I am.

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To Mr. Marshall.  I'm surprised to see the climate accord remark or to see that Nancy Pelosi is likely your rep.  The issue is not how much the medal costs or even whether he wants one. The issue is that he be recognized by the government of his country for his achievements.

 If your interested, I think "will the climate change" is a dumb question.  It has changed many time since the planet's inception, and will do so again.  The question and the effort has to be on how we live or die with it.  It is unintelligent to believe mankind can stop it.

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So this is what bot-writing looks like. It almost reads like an actual human wrote the words, but you can still parse out areas with weird or unnatural phrasing where the AI is trying to fill in words based on what was said to it. 
 

It may be humorous now, but give it enough time and bot-speak will become indistinguishable from actual people talking. 😟

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I am a retired computer programmer and analyst. For my 45 year career I had to write proposals, cost/benefits analyses, programming specifications for the programmers, user guides and other things that others had to be able to read and understand. I have a mission right now - the CGM - and this is just one venue I am using for help. For some reason, I thought there would be true fans of JW here who would want to help me. That's the story in a nutshell. I am flattered that you think I write so well that I am a robot - but its just years or writing stuff. I hope that makes you feel better and I can't tell you how sorry I am to have bothered all of you. Kathy

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9 minutes ago, Jay said:

 

 

And Bruce you know politics isn’t allowed on this forum so why would make a stupid post like that.

She wants the CONGRESS - a body of elected politicians- to give JW a medal.

My simple, Non- political point is they have larger priorities at this time. Like saving the planet.

Peace.

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This is the most surreal thread I've ever seen. "Kathy," for someone who spent 45 years writing things, you missed the obvious fact I was not paying you a compliment (although I'll admit the quality of your writing noticeably improved over the course of 3 hours, so that you now sound like a real person).

 

If you've spent as much time on these boards as you say you have, you'll have surely seen that we've been attacked by bots in recent days. That you would come at us with this request at this specific time is just weird... and that you'd automatically dismiss the entire board as unhelpful when it was clearly just me making the biggest fuss is weirder still, especially coming from someone who's read this board a lot and who's simply old enough to know better how to respond to situations like this.

 

In any case, I'm dropping the whole thing. I wasn't looking to make trouble. Good luck tilting at this particular windmill.

 

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On 11/6/2020 at 3:25 PM, klee251 said:

I have sent a request to my US congressman to have Mr. Williams presented with a Congressional Gold Medal as was done for Irving Berlin, John Wayne and others.  He has been very helpful and amenable, but they require constituents of 300 congress people to request one to consider the action.  Mr. Williams is not getting any younger, he absolutely deserves it, and it appears you guys are my best hope of making that happen.

So please get on the computer to your congressional representative and request a medal for the pre-eminent musician of an era.
Thanks.

Having John recognized like this would be great.  Perhaps making a Twitter page for the purpose to raise awareness or whatnot might be a good idea.  Probably best to wait a couple of months time for certain unmentionable things to blow over.  

 

Although the best thing would be for him to win the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

He deserves to be able to wear this getup!: PMOFwD1.jpg

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Our lawmakers have more important things to do than give out participation trophies to a really old, rich white man who has made millions of dollars writing silly music. 

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Why are you here if you find him a rich old white man who wrote silly music? The picture you have posted tells me everything.

So I've decided to take your words for what they really are and change from being upset to being amused. 

 

 

Beyesian - Why are you so mean?  I have been here many times, but not in the recent last couple of months, if you must know.  So no, I do not know about the bot issue.  Try to chill a little - you'll give yourself ulcers or something.

Personally I have others I rely on to judge my writing and I don't care what you think about it.

 

 

 

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47 minutes ago, ricsim88 said:

I need to put certain users on my ignore list....where’s that option?

Click on your username in the top right, then the Ignored Users menu. It's a very very useful feature.

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On 11/6/2020 at 4:25 PM, klee251 said:

I have sent a request to my US congressman to have Mr. Williams presented with a Congressional Gold Medal as was done for Irving Berlin, John Wayne and others.  He has been very helpful and amenable, but they require constituents of 300 congress people to request one to consider the action.  Mr. Williams is not getting any younger, he absolutely deserves it, and it appears you guys are my best hope of making that happen.

So please get on the computer to your congressional representative and request a medal for the pre-eminent musician of an era.
Thanks.

 

This is your first post. You create an account for the sole purpose of creating what to many of us looks like a demand. Yes, you write please and thanks and you're reasonably polite, but you are an anonymous username with no avatar, no introduction, no explanation of who you are or what you really want. We get plenty of single use accounts created here to peddle stuff and otherwise promote spam. Without any credentials or even a friendly post in another thread, we instantly get suspicious. And hostile. And nasty. 

 

 

On 11/6/2020 at 4:36 PM, Jay said:

Not a bot

 

See, that kind of response is funny when it's Janet saying "not a girl" to Jason in The Good Place, but if you wanted us to be nicer to this bot, you owed us a better explanation. Because we didn't believe her and we certainly don't believe you. 

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I recently broke 2 front teeth off of my upper denture chewing ice and my avatar from facebook is older than dirt and doesn't look like me anymore.  I told you I am on a mission and The medal of Freedom may be the most prestigious award because my understanding of it is that it comes from the people.  And I know that he won that.  Since the congress of his country has given the Gold Medal to others in the "entertainment" industry I feel that JW deserves this additional honor.  The rules for being considered for this award are tough and I'll go anywhere I have to in order to find others who are interested.  But the reason is clear.  He has done a masterful job of promoting the best of American culture to the world.

I didn't know about the "bot" issue before I came on here so I guess it is a hopeless cause.  No talk of him or his music.  Just instant assumptions and hostility.

 

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@who cares gets it. 

 

I planned to drop out of this thread but we need to dial down the temperature and, to my chagrin, I appear to be have been a big part of the reason it blew up. So allow me to try, because I’d like to avoid being painted as a villain by users whose content I truly enjoy (e.g., @Arpy).
 

I’m still not convinced klee251 is a real person—or at least is a retired white collar female who spent her career writing technical documents, as she professes to be. Too little adds up—the unnatural phrasing and spelling in klee’s posts from the get-go, the weirdly blunt request, the instant and repeated passive-aggressive, petulant reaction against the entire forum after her request met with suspicion from two people... it all sounded to me more likely to come from some weird AI programming than an actual human. To that, I’ll add that something really seems off about the things she responded to—my problem with Congress was not that I didn’t “like” it, but that too many races were up in the air, so why ask us to write to people who might no longer be seated in January? Or that she was being “facetious”—regarding what, exactly? Did she mean to use that word? A professional writer would know. 

 

Having said all that, the way I came at her was too forceful. I dove too deep into explaining my suspicions—if I’d just left it at “are we sure it’s not a bot?”, we might have had a different thread trajectory and learned the truth faster. Instead, the focus turned onto my harsh reaction. And for that, I apologize.
 

Klee, don’t abandon this forum, you’ve already got a bunch of folks on your side, and you did it over the course of a single weekend. That’s pretty darn good in anyone’s book—and much faster than it took me 😅. And a CGM would be a lovely recognition for JW, no matter when or how he was to receive it. So thank you for putting the idea into our heads. 

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Thank you Bruce and Bayesian.  I don't know how to change the way I write.  My point was simply that it is probably a fact that my writing is mechanical.  But I'm old and don't change easily.

Composer of the decade is nice, but for me, it is composer of an era.  My other favorite is Rachmaninoff, maybe because my mother was a pianist.  Don't hate me saying that.  No underlying issue is there.

When  I get onto one of these issues it takes me over.  When a county park ranger told me I couldn't take the handful of about 5 leaves that  my daughter and I had picked up off the ground for a Biology project she had, I wrote a letter to the editor.  The editor liked my letter and the theme and he wrote an editorial on the subject.  A local radio station talk show had it as their topic that evening.  There are 7 county parks, the biggest one is where the boss is.  They have a sign on their door that you can collect leaves for school projects, just register at the desk and don't ask the Park Ranger to identify them.  Mission accomplished.

A local TV show honors a high school athlete on Friday night news and sports.  One week they honored a young man for his tennis skills.  This was the same young man who was a high school pianist and played the "real" not "simplified" Rhapsody in Blue at the school concert.  I was livid and wrote a letter to the tv news people suggesting they have an "artist of the week" award.  One day at work I got a telephone call from the station manager who said he wanted to talk to the person who wrote such a great letter and to personally tell me that they don't honor the artist because they can't find a sponsor for it.  Mission failed.

There are other things, but the point is - I latch onto it like a pit bull and I won't let go.

In my work with computers we had a saying "never assume - it makes and 'ass' out of 'u' and  'me' ".

And as soon as I get my denture fixed I will take a selfie and post an avatar.

 

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