The Real Story: Million Dollar Arm

Posted on April 29, 2014 at 8:00 am

It sounds like a movie. No, it sounds like a fairy tale, but it really happened. A sports agent named J.B. Bernstein found two cricket-playing Indian athletes named Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel by staging a reality television show and brought them to the US to play baseball. More than 30,000 men tried out on the show, which was Bernstein’s idea as a way to find a source for possible overlooked players with potential — and for possible new fans for baseball from the world’s second most populous country.

Even though they had never played baseball before, Bernstein found USC trainer Tom House (played by Bill Paxton in the film) to taught them to pitch so well that eight months after arriving in the US they were professional baseball players for the Pittsburgh Pirates. It was inevitable it would become not just a movie but a Disney movie, along the lines of “The Rookie” and “Miracle.”

The upcoming film starring “Mad Men’s” Jon Hamm as Bernstein and Suraj Sharma and Madhur Mittal as Singh and Patel has over the closing credits some photos and video clips of the real players. Here’s a news story about their journey.

Singh finished 2012 with the Class A West Virginia Power of the South Atlantic League, and Patel was released in 2010. He is back in India and still involved in athletics. They met with the filmmakers and the actors who played them on screen and had a chance to relive some of the incredible events by watching the filming.

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Heaven is for Real: The Real Story

Posted on April 15, 2014 at 3:59 pm

“Heaven is for Real” opens tomorrow, with Greg Kinnear as Todd Burpo, a Nebraska pastor whose four-year-old son says that he visited heaven during surgery for a ruptured appendix. It is based on a best-selling book Heaven is for Real: A Little Boy’s Astounding Story of His Trip to Heaven and Back, by Burpo and Lynn Vincent (co-author of Sarah Palin’s book, Going Rogue). Burpo says that his son, Colton

talked about looking down to see the doctor operating and his dad praying in the waiting room. The family didn’t know what to believe but soon the evidence was clear.

In heaven, Colton met his miscarried sister whom no one ever had told him about and his great-grandfather who died 30 years before Colton was born. He shared impossible-to-know details about each. Colton went on to describe the horse that only Jesus could ride, about how “reaaally big” God and his chair are, and how the Holy Spirit “shoots down power” from heaven to help us.

The movie follows the essential elements of the book pretty closely. The Burpos dismiss Colton’s description of heaven at first. But when he describes where they were during the operation, identifies the great-grandfather who died before he was born and the sister his mother miscarried as people he met and spoke to, they are persuaded that he saw something real.

300: Rise of an Empire — The Real Story

Posted on March 6, 2014 at 8:00 am

This week’s release “300: Rise of an Empire” is a highly fictionalized version of a real-life episode in ancient Greek history that included a massive sea battle. It is a “side-quel,” depicting events that occurred around the same time as the famous battle covered in the first “300” movie.

In 480-489 BC, King Xerxes of Persia was determined to conquer Greece. In preparation for the next surge, he had his people bridge the Hellespont, the present-day Dardanelles, with two bridges were supported by ships as pontoons, with a the causeway laid across them. When they were destroyed in a storm, Xerxes ordered the designers of those bridges executed and that the Hellespont itself be given 300 lashes as punishment. Xerxes was making progress when a Greek slave was sent with a message intended to deceive him — he told Xerxes that the Greeks were weak and not able to oppose him. Historynet.com says:

On the morning of September 20, 480 BC, the main body of the Persian armada, about 400 triremes, moved toward the showdown. Xerxes sat on his golden throne high atop the contested area and watched the battle develop.

The Greek fleet was arranged from the Athenians on the left of the line to the Corinthians to the north, covering the Bay of Eleusis, the Pelopponesians on the right and the ships of Megara and Aegina in nearby Ambelaki Bay. The majority of the Greeks’ 300 triremes were hidden from the approaching Persians’ view by St. George’s Island. To draw the enemy well into the shallow water and narrow confined around Salamis, Themistocles ordered the 50-ship Corinthian contingent to hoist its square sails and feign retreat. Once the Persians were drawn in, the Greeks, in ordered line, would surround them. The Persians’ greater numbers would be no advantage in the narrows. Even worse, they would have no room to maneuver.The Greeks began to sing a hymn to the god Apollo as they struck the Persian vanguard in its exposed left flank. When the commanders of the leading Persian ships realized that they were trapped and began to backwater, the caused a tremendous crush of confusion, because those ships coming behind them had nowhere to go. Aeschylus, remembered as the father of literary tragedy, fought both at Marathon and Salamis. He later described the scene as similar to the mass netting and killing of fish on the shores of the Mediterranean: ‘At first the torrent of the Persians’ fleet bore up: but then the press of shipping hammed there in the narrows, none could help another.’

The Greeks kept outside of the tangled Persian mass and struck virtually at will. The Persian ships seemed more suited for action in the open sea-they were larger, sat higher in the water and were loaded with approximately 30 marine infantry or archers, as opposed to 14 aboard each Greek ship. Therefore, the top-heavy vessels fell easy prey to the bronze rams of the Greek triremes in those confining waters.

The Phoenicians in Xerxes’ fleet broke under the relentless Greek pressure and many of them ran their ships aground. Several of those Phoenicians hurried to the great king and said that the Ionians were the cause of their defeat. Xerxes had watched the Ionians perform well and ordered the Phoenicians beheaded for lying about their allies.

The battle continues to be studied by those who care about military history and strategy and it continues to capture our imagination thousands of years later.

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The Real Story: Pompeii

Posted on February 18, 2014 at 8:00 am

In the year 79 AD, the volcano Mount Vesuvius exploded, wiping out the city of Pompeii so quickly that thousands of years later, it still survives as though everything has been frozen in time. Two thousand people were killed.

A witness, Pliny the Younger, wrote:

“The carts that we had ordered brought were moving in opposite directions, though the ground was perfectly flat, and they wouldn’t stay in place even with their wheels blocked by stones. In addition, it seemed as though the sea was being sucked backwards, as if it were being pushed back by the shaking of the land. Certainly the shoreline moved outwards, and many sea creatures were left on dry sand. Behind us were frightening dark clouds, rent by lightning twisted and hurled, opening to reveal huge figures of flame. These were like lightning, but bigger……. It wasn’t long thereafter that the cloud stretched down to the ground and covered the sea. It girdled Capri and made it vanish, it hid Misenum’s promontory. Then my mother began to beg and urge and order me to flee however I might, saying that a young man could make it, that she, weighed down in years and body, would die happy if she escaped being the cause of my death. I replied that I wouldn’t save myself without her, and then I took her hand and made her walk a little faster. She obeyed with difficulty, and blamed herself for delaying me.
Now came the dust, though still thinly. I look back: a dense cloud looms behind us, following us like a flood poured across the land. “Let us turn aside while we can still see, lest we be knocked over in the street and crushed by the crowd of our companions.” We had scarcely sat down when a darkness came that was not like a moonless or cloudy night, but more like the black of closed and unlighted rooms. You could hear women lamenting, children crying, men shouting……………. It grew lighter, though that seemed not a return of day, but a sign that the fire was approaching. The fire itself actually stopped some distance away, but darkness and ashes came again, a great weight of them. We stood up and shook the ash off again and again, otherwise we would have been covered with it and crushed by the weight. I might boast that no groan escaped me in such perils, no cowardly word, but that I believed that I was perishing with the world, and the world with me, which was a great consolation for death. At last the cloud thinned out and dwindled to no more than smoke or fog. Soon there was real daylight. The sun was even shining, though with the lurid glow it has after an eclipse. The sight that met our still terrified eyes was a changed world, buried in ash like snow.”

The city was untouched and almost unknown until the 1500s, and not fully explored for another 150 years after that. But through all that time, the artifacts of Pompeii were preserved by the lack of air and moisture, and because nothing was built over them. Now fortified with plaster, it provides an extraordinarily detailed insight into the life of a city. And the remains of the people who were killed are so vivid and immediate they connect us with the humanity and the loss in a way that no statue or painting or writing can.

Exposure and vandalism have caused the remains to deteriorate, and scholars are working to maintain the site as well as they can. The 2,000-year-old House of the Gladiators collapsed in 2010, probably due to water damage.

This week’s movie, starring Kit Harington of “Game of Thrones,” puts fictional characters in the real-life setting, re-creating the House of the Gladiators and other structures as they were when the volcano exploded.

For more on the history of Pompeii, see Ancient Mysteries – Pompeii: Buried Alive and Pompeii: Doomed City or read The Complete Pompeii and Grafitti and other Sources on Pompeii and Herculaneum.

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Interview: The Real Philomena Lee

Posted on February 7, 2014 at 3:47 pm

Philomena Lee is a retired psychiatric nurse who lived quietly with her family in England until a search for the son taken away from her and adopted by Americans led to a book by journalist Martin Sixsmith (Philomena: A Mother, Her Son, and a Fifty-Year Search) and a movie starring Judi Dench and co-screenwriter Steve Coogan. Since the movie came out, Lee has devoted herself to helping change the laws in the UK so adoptees and their birth mothers can find each other if they want to. When she came to Washington, D.C. with her daughter, I spoke to them about this project and why it was important to her to forgive the nuns who abused her.

Have any of the other women whose babies were taken away found their children?

I wouldn’t know, we honestly wouldn’t know because when I was in the home, you had to lose your identity, you had to forget your own name. I wasn’t Philomena Lee anymore. We were all given what they called a house name and my name was Marsella. So I didn’t even knew then they name of many of them, they were just called by, it could be , Mary , Kate, Annie or something. So I was just known as Marsella and they would have known me as Marsella. They wouldn’t have known me as my home name which is Philomena Lee.

Have you heard from many of the adoptees and mothers who gave up their children for adoption?

People’s enquiry is usually “Did you remember my mother? Did you know my mother?” And of course I didn’t know any of them at all really. And this is why we started the project last week in Ireland, The Adoption Alliance, so that the mums that are trying to find their babies will be given the right do so. At the moment in Ireland, it’s not law , they don’t have to be told anything. So the women are trying to get the right to be able to find out who their mom was, who their dad was.

Philomena’s daughter added: Yes, we’ve heard from hundreds of people, people have come up to us in the cinemas and things like those, have come us to us physically, we’ve had lots and lots of contact, people sending us messages, people have left message on the graves, all sorts of things which is the reason we started The Philomena Project really and the awareness that people who don’t have an automatic right to information and trying to get that changed if we can. It’s to have a place for them to go or a website for them to go so they know how to go about starting that if they want to because many of them won’t know where to look in the first place. And for that reason we would like to change the legislation and that is ultimately what we would like as a result of this.

One of the most powerful moments in the film is when you say to the nun who not only abused you and took your son but thwarted your efforts to find him and his efforts to find you. Why do you think forgiveness is so important?

I was very unforgiving in the very early stages after I eventually left after the adoption, I eventually worked in a boys school in Liverpool from Ireland to England and I was so sad and so hurt and so I was in an unforgiving frame of mind at the time. But then after a couple of years I left Liverpool and went down south to a place in London. I worked in a psychiatric hospital for 30 years and over the years I’ve been working in the psychiatric hospital I can assure you, you can see life as life is more often than not. So I gradually and gradually saw so much sorrow and hurt that was caused through anger. So I was able to release my anger gradually and start forgiving again so that’s how it is.

And I do forgive because I’ve lived to sixty one last year and so it’s a long time to live. My son grew up in a lovely home, had an education ended up happy so I’m happy about that and I’m able to put some closure on this because at last I found him. For my whole life all I ever wanted to do was to find him.

Of course he was looking for me, as well. He went over three times to the home where he was born and they wouldn’t give him any information. They said no one knew of me and I was looking for him and so my brother lived at the same home we lived since I was eight years old. He was only an hour away and they wouldn’t give him the address. When I moved to England several times I sent my new addresses but I never got any answer back so they never took it. They had told him that I abandoned him at two weeks old. But I was in the home for three and a half years and I wrote him and developed a very close bond with him.

You know at three he was a lovely, friendly, intelligent boy and I certainly believe because he looked for me so much straight on he did remember me. I wondered all the time and prayed that I would find him and eventually Martin Sixsmith, who was the correspondent in Washington managed to get all the information. Martin called all of his friends and his partner and his partner gave us so much information and they did have a good amount of time together; 15 years together and they were very happy together and he loved him very much and that put my heart at ease when I knew that he tried to find be because I know that he remembered me.

I always thought it was good to have a close bond. He was really such a lovely little boy; such a loving little boy you know. As they say, at least I found him and he will always be within my own heart. It was very good to know that he had a good life and he was a happy man and he had happy friends and I am happy about that because I knew he was happy, I found out he was happy. He did request when he knew he was dying that one day if anything happens “please bring my ashes back and have me buried where I was born.” And now I can visit his grave.

When I first saw the film, I didn’t know what to think but who would ask for more?

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