All roads lead to 'American Pie.' 'As American as apple pie' was the saying. It was some kind of a big American song that I wanted to write, which would be a conclusion for my show and bring all the songs home, which it still does. I can go anywhere I want with American music and come home to that. And it all makes sense.
When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A.D. 100 than in 1750. But by 1850, and even more obviously today, all of that has changed.
We didn't build the interstate system to connect New York to Los Angeles because the West Coast was a priority. No, we webbed the highways so people can go to multiple places and invent ways of doing things not thought of by the persons building the roads.
This is important: to get to know people, listen, expand the circle of ideas. The world is crisscrossed by roads that come closer together and move apart, but the important thing is that they lead towards the Good.
I have been to the Occupied Palestinian Territory, and I have witnessed the racially segregated roads and housing that reminded me so much of the conditions we experienced in South Africa under the racist system of Apartheid.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been walking over an archaeological site. And you can't see anything on the ground, and pull back hundreds of miles in space, and all of a sudden you can see streets and roads and houses and even pyramids.
Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
Instead of being just a church that welcomes and receives by keeping the doors open, let us try also to be a church that finds new roads, that is able to step outside itself and go to those who do not attend Mass, to those who have quit or are indifferent.
There is the GIS world that is largely managing authoritative data sources, supporting geocentric workflows like fixing roads, making cities more livable through better planning, environmental management, forest management, drilling in the right location for oil, managing assets and utilities.
Smokey and The Bandit was just a lark. All we did was run up and down those Georgia roads wrecking cars and having the time of our life.
Obama might as well be president of Turkey or Brazil; it does not matter. It's the system that is absolutely flawed, where 25 or 35 or 50 people make multi, multi-billions on building Olympic structures while people live in Barbados and have no roads or clean drinking water. There's something pretty inequitable there.
Our decisions about transportation determine much more than where roads or bridges or tunnels or rail lines will be built. They determine the connections and barriers that people will encounter in their daily lives - and thus how hard or easy it will be for people to get where they need and want to go.
It's fascinating to go somewhere where you're away from everything. There are no houses, no buildings, no roads, no people. And for a little less extreme hunting, any place in the West - Colorado, Utah, Montana - that's just beautiful country.
Often, bumpy roads lead to beautiful places.
Beirut turned into a war zone in a matter of hours. We were stuck at home, the roads were blocked.
I've always romanticized the late '40s and '50s - the cars, jazz, the open roads and lack of pollution. Now there are more vehicles, less hitchhikers, more billboards and power lines and stuff. People wrote wonderful long letters that took months to receive, and now everything is email.
In India, it's tough to shoot a period film outdoors. You cannot find mud roads without wires, signage and billboards with ads of mobile phones even in rural areas.
Every voice on the Left bleated about how they feared protests and riots by angry Donald Trump supporters if and when he lost the election, yet it is the Leftists themselves destroying property and blocking roads. Everyone can see where the hate is coming from. Everyone.
We can't afford to go down the dead end roads of Parliamentary Socialism or Fascistic Bolshevism.
I grew up like a lot of country boys and girls do - amongst the pine trees, dirt roads, farms, mules and people who were real.
