Christmas
When the song of the angel is stilled, When the star in the sky is gone, When the Kings and Princes are home, When the shepherds are back with their flocks The real work of ...
Year: 2013
Cheap grace of a diffrent guise.
Get Your Fake Conscience Objections Off My Lawn | Lee’s Bookshelf The Green Family, owners of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, has asked the US Supreme Court to grant them ‘conscience protection,’ exempting ...
Fixing the market
I was thinking about the long-term effects of the ACA (Obamacare), and there is one thing that strikes me as potentially very big, but I have not read much about it. One of the advantages ...
Lou Reed
When I was in college, a group of us were looking at influences on the music that influenced us. Velvet Underground kept on appearing over and over. The joke became that they were the most ...
Relearning old songs
Sometimes you hear something about the creative process that completely changes your relationship to, and understanding of, a piece of art. Doc. Pomus wrote an amazing number of songs. You know some of them, even ...
Shannon sent me to Costco with a shopping list today. She knows me well. Her list included landmarks that I could not help but find. “Head towards the light with the bad ballast. From there, ...
Conservation
This story is an interesting example of how the government in asking citizens to do something may have inadvertently triggered an opposite response. 1) Water main breaks. The city has 12 hours of clean water ...
The colors of life
There’s a remarkable thing that happens in the change of the seasons. We have a window of brilliant, in-your-face color that is fall. Then, a wind-storm comes by, and it’s all gone. But then the ...
The Government and the Market
Here is a perfect example of the externalities of Federal spending. The State of Utah is going to pay $1.67 million to the federal government to have federal parks within the state open for a ...
Tonight’s random lesson learned from putting the iPod on shuffle. The baseline for Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” is essentially the same as the baseline for Loreena McKennitt’s “Lady of Shallot.” This probably explains why both ...
There is one ridge of trees between the rest of the woods and my neighborhood. Whether it’s because the trees are sheltered in some way by the wind, or their roots spent the summer under ...
Pirate Pub Crawl
2 vignettes came from the walk from work to my car through the Pirate Pub Crawl. 1) A busker singing “Folsom Prison Blues” in an over-the-top Disney “Pirates of the Caribbean” accent (“I stabbed a ...
Lighting the Sky
We are getting to the magical time of year. Ice crystals form in the air, and create effects with lights that I understand rationally, but can’t grasp on any other level. Last night there was ...
The sounds we hear
20 years ago this fall my family was in Albania. “The place to be in ’93” was the tag from VOA Europe, the radio station which helpfully provided a soundtrack to our visit. You could ...