Rembering How to Sing

The difference between a tourist and a traveler is in what they are willing to bring home. Tourists may buy souvenirs, but except to return to an unchanged home. Travelers return with stories that can ...

Fixating on fixing the debt

We are told that Government should be more like business. The average total debt to equity ratio for the S&P 500 is around 0.88. Our national debt to equity ratio is around 0.075. By rational ...

Summertime

We are clever people, we Alaskans. We manage to inject fatalism into even the most glorious of summer days. I was walking the dogs past a quintessential Alaskan lake. You know the one, shared by ...

Alaska…

Last fall, I made a comment about Anchorage being defined by hip-hop in the snow. Walking my dog through Eagle River, the defining soundtrack is seaplanes and bagpipes. I love Alaska.

Light on a modern shrine

My house is like Newgrange in inverse. As we approach summer solstice, the light breaking over the mountains in the farthest north extent of the Alaskan summer sunrise floods through the thin passage made by ...

More on privilege.

As a response to George Will’s column, the hashtag #survivorprivilege was born. It is sobering reading. A trigger warning for sexual abuse survivors, a chance for understanding for the rest of us. You don’t need ...

Privilege

I know a thing or two about privilege. I was born white, male and comfortably middle class with a United States passport. All of these things together puts me well within the 1% by any ...

Colors

The morning and evening daylight is so weird, with all of the forest fires. Old habits die hard. I got out my gel color swatch book to try and determine what color it would take ...

I think, before I move from this house, I need to add a dummy 50 amp breaker to the panel and label it “Flux Capacitor.” That should give the next homeowner something to think about.

To the least of them…

Nobody went into that Sunday expecting miracles. The apostles stayed home while Mary Magdalene, Mary the mother of James and perhaps others went to the tomb with spices. They had intended to provide one last ...

Watching

On this day, I would have been in the crowd, watching the procession. Had I the wisdom to know what was going on, I would not have had the courage to stand in the way. ...

I’ve been gone from the house for 3 hours. My cats, who spend the entire night downloading Youtube videos of wild animal calls and playing Jenga with anvils and wind chimes, have not moved. I’m ...

Eisenhower

I heard a piece on the radio about the Eisenhower memorial. He may be the most under-rated president in modern times. When the Russians launched Sputnik, there were several options we could have taken. We ...

A tip of the country hat.

There are a few people in this world who can brighten the mood of an entire room just by walking in the door. Not by being some overly excited false ray of sunshine, but simply ...

Love is love.

A year ago today, I posted the following; “Valentinus was arrested for performing forbidden weddings for soldiers, who were forbidden to marry. Claudius II feared that husbands could not also be soldiers but love is ...

Pete…

Pete and Toshi were married 6 years before Rodgers and Hammerstein jeopardized the production of “South Pacific” by insisting on including the lyrics “You’ve got to be taught to hate and fear/You’ve got to be ...

New Beginnings

I have never in my life taken the metaphor of a new year as literally as I have this year. I just walked away from one of the best jobs I have ever held. A ...

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 ...

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 ...