Category: Inspiration

In 1991, a 44-year-old pitcher with a stress fracture in his lower back, a throbbing heel, and a body that felt every one of his 27 major-league seasons stepped to the mound on four days’ rest—because it was Arlington Appreciation Night, and he refused to disappoint the fans who had stuck with him.

Nolan Ryan didn’t expect to finish the game.

He had told his pitching coach, Tom House, and manager Bobby Valentine before the start: “My back hurts, my heel hurts, I’ve been pounding Advil all day. I don’t feel good. I feel old today. Watch me closely.”

Valentine alerted the umpires that an early pitching change was likely. Someone was already warming up in the bullpen.

Then Ryan threw his first pitch.

Ninety-four miles per hour.

The second pitch: ninety-five.

Batters who weren’t even born when Ryan made his major-league debut with the New York Mets in 1966 started swinging helplessly at fastballs they never saw coming. Major leaguers looked like Little Leaguers. By the second inning, his curveball was dropping off the table like a trapdoor opening beneath their feet. He struck out the side on called strikes—pitches so perfect the batters didn’t even bother arguing. They just turned and walked back to the dugout in silent disbelief.

The Texas Rangers infielders jogged off the field, exchanged glances, and grinned. They could feel it. Something special was happening.

By the sixth inning, Arlington Stadium was filling beyond capacity. The official attendance was 33,439, but it felt like 50,000. Word had spread throughout the Dallas-Fort Worth area. People abandoned their Wednesday night plans and rushed to the ballpark. History was unfolding in real time.

Nolan Ryan—the man who could barely stand upright three hours earlier—was throwing a no-hitter against the best-hitting team in baseball.

The ninth inning arrived. Future Hall of Famer Roberto Alomar stepped to the plate. Two decades earlier, Roberto’s father Sandy had been Ryan’s teammate with the California Angels. Little Roberto used to shag fly balls and play catch with Nolan before games.

Now, twenty years later, that same kid stood between Ryan and immortality.

The count went to 2-2. Ryan wound up and fired a fastball.

Alomar swung.

Missed.

Strike three.

Nolan Ryan had just thrown the seventh no-hitter of his career—three more than anyone in baseball history. At 44 years and 90 days old, he became the oldest pitcher ever to accomplish the feat.

The final line: seven innings of hitless baseball, 16 strikeouts, 122 pitches thrown. He did it on four days’ rest, with a stress fracture in his lower back, against a Toronto lineup that would go on to win the AL East.

When reporters crowded around his locker afterward, Ryan didn’t talk about records or statistics. His answer was simple and genuine: “It was the most rewarding no-hitter of them all because it came in front of my fans on Arlington Appreciation Night. My career is complete now. I got one for the fans in Arlington.”

Nolan Ryan pitched for 27 seasons in the major leagues. Seven different presidents occupied the White House during his career. He struck out players from four different decades—everyone from Roger Maris in the 1960s to Mark McGwire in the 1990s.

He retired with 5,714 career strikeouts (a record that still stands), 324 wins, and those seven no-hitters. Twenty-three years later, no one has come remotely close to any of those marks.

Modern baseball is obsessed with pitch counts and load management. Teams monitor every throw with sophisticated tracking technology. Innings are carefully restricted. Young arms are bubble-wrapped and protected.

Nolan Ryan threw nearly 5,000 innings over two decades before that seventh no-hitter.

He never got the memo.

There will never be another Nolan Ryan.

And on that May night in Arlington, when a broken-down 44-year-old refused to accept what his body was telling him, we witnessed something we’ll never see again.

Sometimes the greatest performances come when you have every reason to fail—and choose greatness anyway.

On May 16, 1963, Gordon Cooper was alone in Faith 7, orbiting Earth at 17,500 miles per hour in a capsule so small he could barely turn around.

He had been in space for more than thirty-four hours.

Then the alarms began.

First a faulty sensor falsely indicated the spacecraft was tumbling out of control. Cooper calmly switched it off. Then came the real emergency: a short circuit knocked out the entire automatic attitude-control system—the system that kept the capsule properly oriented for reentry. Without it, the spacecraft could not be aligned for the precise angle needed to survive the plunge back into the atmosphere.

Too shallow, and it would skip off the air like a stone across water, back into orbit. Too steep, and it would burn up like a meteor. The window was narrow. Every computer that was supposed to make that calculation was dead.

On the ground, Mission Control watched the telemetry go dark. They could see the problem. They could not fix it.

Cooper did not panic.

He uncapped a grease pencil and drew reference lines directly on the inside of his window to track the horizon against the stars. He had spent months memorizing star patterns as part of backup navigation training. Now he used them. He aligned the capsule manually by eye, matching the horizon marks to known constellations.

He timed the reentry burn with his wristwatch.

When the moment arrived—calculated in his head, confirmed by the stars—he fired the retrorockets. The capsule shuddered. The sky turned to plasma. For several minutes, radio blackout swallowed him whole. No voice from Earth could reach him. No data came back.

Then the parachutes deployed.

Faith 7 splashed down in the Pacific, four miles from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge—the most accurate splashdown of the entire Mercury program.

A man with a grease pencil, a wristwatch, and starlight had outperformed every automated system NASA had built.

We often speak of technology as the hero of spaceflight. And it frequently is.

But Gordon Cooper’s flight is a reminder that behind every machine, there must still be a human being who can look out the window, think clearly under crushing pressure, and decide what to do when everything else fails.

The final backup was never the software.

It was him.

Avivo Village in Minneapolis is an innovative shelter designed to provide people experiencing homelessness with a safer and more stable place to stay. Instead of large dorm-style spaces typical of many shelters, it offers small, private, lockable rooms inside a warehouse, giving residents greater dignity, security, and personal space.

Beyond providing warmth and safety during harsh winters, the community also connects residents with essential services such as mental health care, addiction treatment, and housing support. By combining shelter with comprehensive assistance, Avivo Village aims to help people move beyond temporary emergency housing and toward long-term stability.

“In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger, something better, pushing right back.” – Albert Camus, Philosopher (1913 – 1960)

Had an interesting dream last Sunday. As a result of which I realised I am a dealer.

Not a drug dealer who sells drugs to overcome emotional of physical pain.

Not an arms dealer who sells weapons to wage war.

I am a Solutions Dealer. I point people to solutions to problems.

You got a communication problem?
I got a course I can recommend to fix that!

You got a relationship problem?
I know a course that will fix that!

Got a friend with a drug problem?
I know a program that will fix that!

Got a child with a study problem?
I have a solution for that too!

Got a moral dilemma, an ethics problem?
Got something for that too!

Lack purpose or direction in life?
Even have a blog post for that one!

Lonely?
Got that one totally taped!

Now I read somewhere that sanity is the ability to create problems and intelligence is the ability to solve them. If you have too few problems you overly fixate on one. I even know how to solve THAT one too!

(I didn’t solve all the problems I know how to solve, I am not the smartest man who ever lived! I just know where to find the solutions.)

But that puts me into a sanity related problem. To stay sane I need to invent some more problems!

So I have decided my problem is how to help as many people as possible live a better life!

You want to improve something in your life? Call me! Your local Solutions Dealer!

When you get upset about something small, this may help you to put things into their proper perspective.

Click to view the video: https://www.flixxy.com/188-seconds-that-will-amaze-you.htm

Uplifting, dream-like and fun, Argentine film-maker Fernando Livschitz transforms footage of everyday scenes into charming and mind-boggling fantasy.

Fernando Livschitz of Black Sheep Films edits everyday footage in order to add a touch of the bizarre to mundane scenes. “I try to put a smile on people’s faces. I believe it’s always possible to show the world and ideas in an alternative way, with magic and surprise. As a director I like to express my point of view through creative thinking.” Music: Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World” covered by Reuben and the Dark.

https://www.bsfilms.me/#new-page-1

“The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge.”

Bertrand Russell – Philosopher (1872 -1970)

Reese Werkhoven and his roommate Lara Russo were sitting on their recently purchased couch one night in April 2014, watching a Harry Potter movie, when the cushions started bothering him enough to do something about it. The couch was lumpy. It had been lumpy since they bought it at a Salvation Army store in New Paltz, New York, a month earlier for twenty dollars. He unzipped one of the cushions to see what was making it uncomfortable and found a small package wrapped in bubble wrap.

He later described his first thought: it might be drugs, it might be money, they were getting scared about it.

It was money.

He and Russo called their third roommate Cally Guasti in, and the three of them started finding more. Envelopes, one after another, tucked inside the cushions and inside the arms of the couch. They piled everything on a bed and counted it. The total was $40,800.

Their neighbours heard the shouting from their apartment and assumed someone had won the lottery.

The three of them spent several days discussing what to do. They had real conversations about the moral question, and they admitted later that they considered keeping it. They were in college or recently graduated. None of them had much money. Forty thousand dollars was a life-changing amount. One of them said later that there were a lot of gray areas to consider.

Then Guasti found a bank deposit slip inside one of the envelopes with a woman’s name on it.

Werkhoven called his mother for advice. She tracked down a phone number and texted it to him. He called the number, heard an elderly woman answer, and hung up. He called back and told her he had found something that he thought might be hers. She told him she had a lot of money in that couch and that she really needed it.

He drove with his roommates to her home the next day.

The woman, who has asked to remain anonymous, was 91 years old.

She was a widow with a recently broken hip. Her family had donated the couch to the Salvation Army while she was in hospital, not knowing what was inside it. The money was decades of savings — including wages from years of work as a florist — that she had been hiding in the couch at the encouragement of her late husband, who had worried about what would happen to her after he was gone. She had slept on that couch for years. When her back problems became serious, her family replaced it with a bed and the couch went to the charity shop.

She cried when the three roommates handed her the money.

She told them that it was her husband looking down on her, and that this was supposed to happen.

She gave them a reward of one thousand dollars. They kept the couch.

The three of them — Werkhoven, Guasti, and Russo — were college students and recent graduates in upstate New York who bought a secondhand piece of furniture because they needed somewhere to sit. What they ended up with was the specific knowledge that when it actually cost them something, they did the right thing.
Werkhoven said simply: it’s not our money. We didn’t have any right to it.

Guasti said, “At the end of the day, it wasn’t ours.”

There is nothing more to add to that.

Share this with someone who needs a reminder today that ordinary people make extraordinary choices all the time, without cameras or applause, because it is simply what you do.

Weird Wonders and Facts