Happy birthday to my grandfather, Tadeusz, who would have been 100 years old today, had he not exited this veil of tears back in the 80s, when I was a little boy.

I loved going to stay with him, in his little flat by the motorway, and I remember him fondly, chain-smoking cigarettes and thinking of the past, sometimes pausing to sit me on his lap, where'd he'd take delight in excitedly slapping my cheeks with both hands until they were red.

Here he is with his great grandson Hercules, who he never met, and lives on through.

"I'm so glad he's my ancestor," Hercules told me, excitedly, after listening to tales of his great grandfather's adventures.

Born in Poland, he lived "a good and happy life," until World War II broke out, and his home was invaded by the Soviets, and he was taken from his family, never to see them again. He was later taken to a forced labor camp in Germany, then escaped, or was liberated, no one's quite sure... after that he found himself in France, then joined the Polish ...

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Kurt Vonnegut is not new to the Meaningave Universe - one of the earliest Meaningwave releases was a musical version of an audio book of his deeply prescient dystopian warning on the horrors of enforced equality, Harrison Bergeron (https://fanlink.to/harrisonbergeron). I have long been an enjoyer of his works, and consider Cat’s Cradle one of my favourite books to this day.

I first read of his “If This Isn’t Nice I Don’t Know What Is” philosophy in a collection of short stories, the name of which currently escapes me, that currently resides with most of the things I collected in my first three decades on earth, back in a storage facility in north Wales somewhere, which I look forward to getting back someday. A simple and radically powerful philosophy, gifted to Kurt by his uncle Alex - when you notice something nice, you make a point of pointing it ...