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 ...

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 ...

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 ...