Michael Bates: November 2025 Archives
From the US Naval Academy Navigators resources page, a list of the verses and categories in the Nav's Topical Memory System. There are 2 verses each for 6 topics in 5 sets, for a total of 60 verses. I memorized this set back in college, using the New American Standard Bible.
This page offers MP3s of the Topical Memory System verses being read in various English translations, along with a written commentary on each verse by LeRoy Eims. At the bottom of the page are MP3s of the entire 60-verse set for KJV, RSV, NIV, and NASB. One version has the reader recite each verse once; the other has a repetition of each verse.
'Patel Motel Story' film: How Indian immigrants found their footing in the US hotel industry | CNN
A new documentary on the history of Indian hotel ownership in the USA is making the rounds of film festivals. I was surprised to learn that Gujarati involvement in the hospitality industry goes all the way back to World War II, beginning with Kanji Manchhu Desai, who came to America via Trinidad. Desai was in the country illegally (overstayed his visa) and was asked to run a Sacramento hotel owned by a Japanese-American who was sent to an internment camp. He would advise friends from back home, "If you're a Patel, lease a hotel," and he helped many of his kinsmen get established in the business.
Tulsa has several hotel management companies owned by people named Patel: Pete and Tina Patel of Promise Hotels, Andy and Anish Patel of Anish Hotels, and Robert Patel of Leisure Hospitality Management.
In the 1980s, when I would look for cheap places to stay while traveling, I noticed that most of the tourist courts and park-at-the-door motels, built in the glory days of pre-Interstate road trips, were run by immigrants, mainly Indian, but I had assumed this change had happened in the 1970s as the old highway alignments were bypassed. Around that same time, a Burtek co-worker of Indian descent who grew up in Trinidad told me that his father changed his surname from Patel (pronounced Bur-TEL) to his middle name because he didn't want to be associated with the reputation attached to that name in Trinidad; this must have been in the 1930s or 1940s.
