The Mercedes-Benz W115 is a series of executive sedans introduced in 1968 by Mercedes-Benz, along with the similar W114, to replace the earlier W110 series.
They were manufactured until model year 1976, when the W123 was released.
W115 models featured four-cylinder engines and were marketed with the model numbers 200, 220, 230 and 240, some of which may have a "D" appended to indicate the use of a diesel engine instead of a petrol engine.
The series was designed by Paul Bracq, featuring a three-box design.
At the time, Mercedes retailed sedans in two size classes, with the W114 and the W115 positioned below the Mercedes-Benz S-Class.
This picture shows a 1973 Mercedes-Benz W115 220D, photographed in 2015 near Gorczenica, Poland.
Photograph credit: 1bumer
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Commentary
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Today we’ll invite a guest commentary.
One of our favorite people, Kali L shares so intimate feelings with us.
Kali:
What is the purpose of life?
To just be.
At the crisp age of 33 I have spent a great deal of time wrestling, hemming, and hawing at what the purpose of my life is. This question has been an elusive mystery to me much of my life; it still is a great mystery. My teachers used to write home to my parents that I worried too much and too often about the future and what I’d become. I guess we are who we are. The thought of what the purpose of my life is has been nagging at me lately like a dog gnawing on a bone. Is it like that corny quote? To live well, laugh often, love much? Is it to not ask questions and simply to just be or be like the Beatles and 'Let It Be'?
I know that we all suffer and because of how much suffering I have experienced in my own life I know now to not judge. I try to practice this in every interaction I have. I have come to think to myself "I do not know that I'd handle that news that well either. Or similarly, "I do not know if I'd have the grace that person had when receiving news like that."
So wise ones, what is the purpose of life? I think my purpose is to bring joy to others and to be present and maybe to stop asking what the purpose of life is. It stirs the pot too much.
Web Meister Responds:
My own thoughts are that we must develop the talents we were born with and use them to spread joy. By our actions we bring meaning into our lives and others’.
And here’s a third view:
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, one of Post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin's most famous paintings.
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Announcements
Thursday, June 6, 2019
So we solved the glitch with Mail Chimp. They will be delivering from now on.
This will end the double-mailing many of us have been receiving.
I will continue to run the solicitation for participation in the blog.
So far we’ve harvested two new volunteers, they working from home.
But the blog is daily and we have on average nine segments a day, or 7x9 pieces a week.
We’re very happy to put others to work as well, from writing to mailing list enrichment to research, something fun for someone looking for a hobby related to the written word.
If interested, contact Dom: domcapossela@hotmail.com
We are in a surge of nice weather.
For the next week.
Spring at last.
Let’s make sure we enjoy each day coming.
The hours are ticking away and if we don’t make the most of our time another day will soon click past.
Unnoticed.
Unappreciated.
Tick Tock.
In clock language:
Enjoy today.
Enjoy the week.
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Postings Count, Weather Brief, and Dinner
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Our 426th consecutive posting, committed to 5,000.
After 426 posts we’re at the 8.52 percentile of our commitment, the commitment a different way of marking the passage of time.
Time is 4.01am.
On Thursday, Boston’s temperature will reach a high of 75* with a feels-like of 86*, sunny with a risk of thundershowers.
Dinner Tuesday was leftover steak, potatoes, and broccoli rabe.
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Question of the Day
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Sally Chetwynd, any “I Remember Mama” memories of grammar school that you’ll share with us?
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Chuckle of the Day:
Thursday, June 6, 2019
After nine days in a coma, the wife woke to find her husband by her bedside.
After taking a drink of water she motioned for him to come closer.
“You’ve been with me through all the bad times: when I got fired, when my business folded, When I fell off the ladder, when I got pneumonia, always, you were always by my side.”
“My darling, you can always count on me.”
She looked at him, “And here you are again. By my bed for who knows how long.”
“Always, my dear.”
She thought a moment.
“You know, as I think about it, I’m realizing you bring me bad luck!"
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Answer to the Question of the Day:
Thursday, June 6, 2019
Sally Chetwynd, any “I Remember Mama” memories of grammar school that you’ll share with us?
And Sally C responds:
READIN’, WRITIN’, AND ‘RITHMETIC
Sally M. Chetwynd
June 2019
“When I was your age, I had to walk two miles through a blizzard to school, uphill both ways, and whack a polar bear over the head with my notebook.”
Nuns in different parts of the world
Willy Leenders - zelfgemaakte fot in de abdij van Rieunette nabij Carcassonne in Frankrijk
How many of us have heard such declarations from an old fogey? What an illustration of every older generation’s pride of endurance, tenacity, and discipline, of educational rites of passage! This suspicion permeates view of the senior set (of which I am now one) that today’s younger set (perceived as coddled) cannot comprehend hard work, much less achieve it. We often bemoan the waning of the values of our world and the waxing of theirs.
This generalization is both true and false. Every day we see astonishing examples of the exceptional capabilities, talent, and discipline of our youth. Therefore, the premise may well be baseless. But for this little story, I beg your indulgence, as I tell of the mighty whacking of bears in one small rural New England town fifty-plus years ago.
From kindergarten through the 5th grade, I attended a Catholic elementary school run by a handful of nuns in the tiny town of South Berwick, Maine. These devout women possessed little more in material goods than their habits and wimples, but their teaching skills far outshone their physical resources.
The nuns taught the common curricula of the day with the common methods of the day. This was the age of phonics and rote, in the late 1950s and early 1960s. I well remember multiplication tables and sentence diagramming, geography and penmanship, French and catechism, spelling and illustrated book reports.
The sisters’ command of their classrooms was remarkable. Many teachers today plead for assistants to help them manage twenty students. The classrooms of my school had three times that. Each grade averaged thirty students, and the eight grades plus kindergarten were distributed among six classrooms. First and second grades doubled up in one room, third and fourth in the next, and fifth and sixth in the next, with only one nun to a room. Each sister was masterful, assigning quiet study to the thirty-odd children of one grade on one side of the room while she worked with the other thirty-odd children of the other grade on the other side of the room, swapping back and forth in forty-five minute intervals, teaching the full curricula over the course of the school day.
The town was so small that the school district had only two buses. Parochial or public mattered not, for the same buses picked up all students and transported them to the public school. From the drop-off zone next to the Central School playground, we Catholic kids walked to the front of the building, then down the walkway, and crossed Main Street to St. Michael’s School.
The two buses had to make three circuits, morning and afternoon, to gather us all, starting early enough so that those on the third run were delivered in time for the opening bells in both schools. Sometimes my brothers and I were assigned to the first run, sometimes the second, sometimes the third. We played in either school yard while waiting. We didn’t know that this was different from larger towns. It worked.
The kindergarten bus, which took the morning session home at noon and picked up the afternoon session, was special. It was half-size and it was blue! No kindergartener wanted to advance to first grade and be relegated to riding ordinary yellow buses. (Kindergarten was also called sub-primary, which we pronounced “s’primary.”)
Back to the nuns and their resources, or lack thereof. Our text books were much used, often beat-up and broken-spined. Their content, however, never wore out. At the beginning of each schoolyear, we diligently made book covers from sturdy brown paper shopping bags and drew on them bright pictures and designs.
The nuns were so poor that the scrap paper they issued for us to work out arithmetic problems was the backs of unused receipts from businesses that had gone out of business. These blank receipts came in pastel layers (carbon paper intended to be inserted between layers), accordion-folded at their perforations. An economical providence, no doubt, but we children did not consider the paper a hardship – it was colored! Receiving the stuff for free – oh, my! What riches!
When I was ten, we moved twelve miles to an even smaller town in New Hampshire. My brothers and I then attended public school within a school district made up of Durham, Lee, and Madbury (our new home town). The proximity of UNH promised a quality education, offering both college preparatory and vocational-technical programs. Once I survived junior high (a mostly dreadful experience for me – culture shock, the onset of normal adolescent hormone disorder, and other factors), I throve in high school, enjoying English, geometry and algebra, art and music, and science. (Civics and history? Eh, not so much.)
I rarely thought about the nuns, but not long after college, the stability of the foundation they built in me – engendering a love for learning – yearly grew more evident as my vocational and avocational path broadened. Early experience influences one’s response to life’s challenges, and it becomes part of one’s internal furniture, so subtle that it becomes invisible. Then something happens that makes one sit up and take notice.
Bringing meaning to life
This happenstance occurred four years ago, when I took a class at Emerson College, a certificate program in professional copyediting. (Yes, I’m one of those weirdos who scorns advertisements that tout a product as “new and improved” – if it’s new, then it hasn’t existed before to be improved; if it’s improved, then it’s not new.) With a lifelong interest in word craft, I saw copyediting as a good occupation for my eventual retirement from the 9-to-5 commuting world. What better way to build credibility than to take tuitioned courses? (As well as hands-on work to build expertise with experience.)
I believed I had retained the teaching of the nuns fairly accurately over the fifty intervening years. I could wax eloquent over the misplaced modifier, the dangling participle. The Emerson program proved that I did pay attention to the nuns. My memory of their teaching was not just fairly accurate, but quite accurate. Everything the two instructors introduced in the classes was intimately familiar. I had forgotten some of the terminology, but the structures and concepts were as fresh in my mind as when I first met them. Every one of the thirteen workshops that comprise the copyediting program was great fun.
I remembered those nuns then. Now, I bless them every day. Is there a lesson to be learned here? Maybe it’s like the old round we used to sing: “Make new friends but keep the old: one is silver and the other’s gold.” Maybe young and old alike should embrace new education, while keeping the old alive. Both have much to offer to every generation. Heaven forbid any of us should become a fogey!
A list of nuns who taught me.
I left a couple of names off.
I didn’t like them.
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Good Morning on this Thursday, the sixth day of June, 2019
We posted a photo of a Mercedes.
We featured Kali L as a guest columnist.
We added the Boston weather report and the ticking calendar, and tracked the number of our postings.
Our techie quickly resolved the glitch with Mail Chimp: we failed to change the URL when we started a new month.
Don’t ask.
What it means is that
today we’re working with Linked In to establish a site for subscribers to participate in a dialog among themselves.
We posted another chuckle.
And we were treated to a Sally C ‘I Remember Mama’ memory.
And now? Gotta go.
Che vuoi? Le pocketbook?
See you soon.
Your love.