January 2011
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Well, I got back on Monday night from one of my whirlwind 36-hour trips to visit family in north Alabama, and after coping with domestic issues such as the little fuzzy-haired dog being covered, yet again, with cypress needles and cypress cones that ooze a glue-like resin, sat down and half-wrote my half-composed Sunday Night…
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I'm going to be offline for a couple of days. See you Monday.
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Weekend Music Just finished watching a documentary on the master, Nick Drake: Under Review. Anyone at all interested in Nick Drake will find it worthwhile. I think it calls for a song, and let's make it one that doesn't encourage the depressed martyr-poet image. Personally I will always doubt the verdict of suicide. I…
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I'm not sure how many people who read this blog are interested in this, but I am, so…. For a month or so now there has been a great furor at eMusic.com, an online music store that sells mp3 files, about an acquisition of some major-label music that seems to be encoded at a slightly…
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Bravo, Mr. President.
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I don't talk much here about current events, but I want to register my objection to the hideous attempt to exploit the killings in Arizona for political gain. It's hard to tell how much of this is just partisan hysteria and blindness, and how much is calculated, and it doesn't really matter: it's repulsive. I could…
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Sunday Night Journal — January 11, 2011 Until I was sixteen or so, and began working for my uncle on the family farm, my summers were very idle and isolated. We didn’t live within walking distance of any of my school friends, so they only other young people around were my siblings and cousins, and…
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Weekend Music I have fallen into the habit of reading an item in the local paper which lists notable events that happened on this day in history. I find myself paying particular attention to the birthdays of famous people who are around my age; for some reason I find it interesting that, for instance, David…
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The once-unconventional idea that the Church placed Christmas near the winter solstice in order to substitute it for a pagan festival has long since become conventional wisdom, a way of belittling Christianity, at least, if not attacking it head-on. Well, it seems to be another bit of conventional wisdom that probably isn't true, according to…
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Sunday Night Journal — January 2, 2011 Here I am, writing on the second day of a year which would once have seemed impossibly far in the future to me, and which I would have expected to be a very different place, more “futuristic” in what is now itself an antique sense of that word.…
Light On Dark Water 