{"id":683,"date":"2004-07-13T19:02:00","date_gmt":"2004-07-14T02:02:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=683"},"modified":"2004-07-13T19:02:00","modified_gmt":"2004-07-14T02:02:00","slug":"meeting-of-minds","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/?p=683","title":{"rendered":"Meeting of Minds"},"content":{"rendered":"

Today, in a discussion with a coworker (ellipticcurve<\/a>), I was mentioning Pirke Avot V:18<\/i>, because she was remarking how I seem to know something about everything. For those that don’t recall, Pirke Avot V:18 says:<\/p>\n

\n

There are four types of those that sit in the presence of sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and the sieve. The sponge absorbs all; the funnel receives at one end and spills out at the other; the strainer lets the wine through and retains the dregs; and the sieve lets out the flour dust and retains the fine flour.<\/i><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I’ve always viewed myself as a strainer, and this got me thinking to Steve Allen, and one of my favorite shows of childhood, Meeting of Minds. Steve Allen was a sieve, and he produced (at KCET in Los Angeles) a remarkable program, Meeting of Minds<\/i>. This program, aired in the late 1970s, had a unique premise. Bring together famous historical figures (portrayed by actors, of course) for an intellectual discussion. In its four seasons, the following pairings occurred: <\/p>\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Season One<\/b><\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Pres. Theodore Roosevelt
Queen Cleopatra
Father Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Paine<\/td>\n		Pres. Ulysses S. Grant
Queen Marie Antoineet
Sir Thomas More
Dr. Karl Marx<\/td>\n		Charles Darwin
Emily Dickinson
Galileo Galilei
Attila the Hun<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Season Two<\/b><\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Frederick Douglass
Empress Tz’u-hsi
Marchese di Bonesana Cesare Beccaria
Marquis Donatien Alphonse François de Sade<\/td>\n		Martin Luther
Voltaire
Plato
Florence Nightingale<\/td>\n		Sir Francis Bacon
Socrates
Emiliano Zapata
Susan B. Anthony<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Season Three<\/b><\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
St. Augustine of Hippo
Empress Theodora of the Byz. Empire
Thomas Jefferson
Bertrand Russell<\/td>\n		Aristotle
Niccolo Machiavelli
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Sun Yat-Sen<\/td>\n		William Shakespeare and others:
Woman, Hamlet, Romeo,
Ghost of Hamlet’s Father, Othello, Iago<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Season Four<\/b><\/center><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Margaret Sanger
Mohandas (Mahatma) Gandhi
Adam Smith<\/td>\n		Niccolo Paganini
William Blake
Leonardo da Vinci<\/td>\n		Daniel O’Connell
Oliver Cromwell
Catherine the Great<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n

<\/center><\/p>\n

For those that haven’t seen it, just imagine the discussions! Alas, this series has not been released on DVD, although it appears to be available on Videotape or Audio Cassette. Vol. I and II of the scripts are available through Amazon; the entire four volume set is available through Prometheus Books<\/a>. I have a copy of the scripts, and I was looking at them whilst eating dinner. I had forgotten how good they were. Boy, I wish they would re-air this program—it was a real classic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today, in a discussion with a coworker (ellipticcurve), I was mentioning Pirke Avot V:18, because she was remarking how I seem to know something about everything. For those that don’t recall, Pirke Avot V:18 says: There are four types of those that sit in the presence of sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer, and Read More …<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69,1],"tags":[200],"class_list":["post-683","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-television","category-lj-xfer","tag-meeting-of-minds"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=683"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/683\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=683"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=683"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cahighways.org\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=683"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}