November 2023
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See this article in the Catholic Herald. I don't, obviously, try to follow the news here. I didn't even write about the October 7th invasion/massacre in Israel, or anything that's followed it, but I have certainly given it a lot of my attention. But this seems significant in a way not very far distant from…
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This one actually appeared on the 15th, so is more than ten days old. But it didn't get any less ridiculous. Government Can't Solve the Loneliness Crisis It appeared in National Review, and, as you might suppose, it's a government-skeptical response to an outlandish idea for a new government project. I just can't think of…
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When I was twenty-ish, and probably for some years afterward, I assumed that the music of my generation would be received by my children and those who came after in the way my generation received the popular music of our parents' generation–Glenn Miller, Frank Sinatra, and all the other music of the '30s and '40s…
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They want us all to participate in a structured "discernment" process guided by facilitators. Perhaps, being progressives with a bureaucratic-administrative sort of mindset–i.e. the sort of people who like this sort of thing–they don't realize that for many or most others it's partly to be ridiculed and partly to be feared. It's frequently manipulative, aimed…
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Starbucks Reveals Holday [sic] 2023 Menu and Cups Last week I had to choose between this one and the one about racist birds. Unlike that one, this one is merely ridiculous. Or maybe not. The position of Starbucks in American culture is creepy to say the least. And I really don't like the thing we…
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As I think I mentioned not too long ago, I've been going through old notebooks containing odds and ends of writing, with the aim of getting rid of the notebooks, as part of a bigger de-cluttering process. Some of the material is drafts of blog posts or essays which were eventually published. Much is only…
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Say Goodbye to America’s Racist Birds The headline is ridiculous, and the news it links to is not only ridiculous but much more: crazy, sick, arguably wicked. You may have seen other news stories about this: the American Ornithological Society has decided that many bird names "have associations with the past that continue to be…
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Here are two albums I've been listening to recently: Under the Milkyway…Who Cares? by Seasurfer, and everything is alive by Slowdive. (I'm following the typography used by both bands.) The first can fairly be classified as "shoegaze;" one recognizes the basic sound immediately. I think of the other as "not-shoegaze" because Slowdive helped to define the style,…
Light On Dark Water 