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Showing posts from 2012

Loose Ends for 2012

Here is a rundown on a bunch of stuff I am following as we enter 2013.  It is all rather random, but it gives you a snapshot of my various interests; a diverse grouping to be sure. The United States population will surpass 315.1 million people in January 2013.  I like maps of all kinds.  Here is one with a dot for every person in the US , showing the dense pockets of people throughout the fruited plain. A woman died recently from being brutally gang-raped in India .  Apparently, one of the rapists was the woman's would-be husband.  How twisted is that?  This is a national tragedy for that country.  There are many cultural reasons why women are so abused in India .  I recall frequent stories of wife burning and other horrific acts against Indian women almost daily when I lived in India in the mid-1980's . Stock markets in the US are heavily leveraged and in a fragile condition.  The situation is similar to that which existed in 2008 before the Great Recession .  A recent

"It's a Major Award"

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My Year of Reading The Wall Street Journal

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Select sections from my year-long subscription to The Wall Street Journal .  I will hang on to this pile of papers for awhile, being a collector of sorts.  Does this make me a hoarder?  Should I seek treatment? I recently let my year-long subscription to The Wall Street Journal expire. They were running a very special rate last year that put the historic daily newspaper in the same class with a subscription to The Economist .  I was also very much into following WSJ reporter Kelly Evans at the time and wanted to read her daily columns.  So, I spent the bucks in order to have an aesthetic experience that is fading fast in our digital age. To sit in my reading chair and peruse a quality newspaper, opening it up with arms wide, head cocked back slightly, or while lounging on the floor, the paper unfolded like a small rug, crawling around reading various sections.  I wanted to experience folding the paper into un-neat quarters and reading a particular article of interest.  The smell

Talking Guns in McGee Mississippi

Last Friday I was nearing the end of a three-day business trip to southern Mississippi. A big corporate meeting was scheduled for 1:30 that afternoon. I was traveling with our corporate accounts manager. We had called on several prospects the day before, working our way from Meridian to Hattiesburg then over to the thriving metropolis of McGee. We spent the night there on Thursday and enjoyed a wonderful all-you-can-eat catfish buffet, only it featured much more than catfish. I feasted on quail, a rare meat to find on any menu. It is also my favorite meat on which to dine. I was fully satiated afterwards. All you do on the road is drive, talk on the cell, and eat. Now and then you stop and talk to people, but those moments of punctuation are usually very brief if you are cold calling and don’t have an appointment. At any rate, we met up with two of the partners of the company that employs me for lunch before the corporate meeting. That morning I had read about the tragic shooting a

Surviving Ulysses

After several attempts through the years, I finished Ulysses last weekend. It took me several months to meander through the novel , considered one of the greatest in Western literature. Previous attempts had gotten me about 300 pages into it before I gave up. I have on previous occasions scanned the latter sections of the novel for the controversial and supposedly "obscene" parts (like a little kid looking for dirty words), but never managed to read it all the way through. So, now that I made the compete journey I can honestly say I found James Joyce's masterwork to be clever and interesting in parts, especially when one considers it was written between 1918-1920. The bountiful parodies on religion, culture, famous writers of the past, and the often funny play on words is interesting but the narrative itself remains unappealing to me. I doubt I will make the effort again. I know being a person who enjoys classic literature I am supposed to find Ulysses brilliant.

Watching Lincoln

I took my In-Laws to see Steven Spielberg's Lincoln Sunday afternoon. The film is extremely well acted.  Daniel Day-Lewis , my favorite living actor, gives another strong performance as Abraham Lincoln , conveying an astonishing degree of compassion, folk sensitivity, intelligence, humor, and political iron will that is probably the best and most historically accurate portrayal of the American icon ever presented on the big screen.  Day-Lewis manages to produce one powerful performance right after another in his superb career and he will undoubtedly receive an Academy Award nomination and is the front-runner of Best Actor. Like the character he portrays did for the entire nation, Day-Lewis carries the weight of the entire film on his shoulders with noteworthy support from Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln and Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens .  Other performances of note from minor characters include Jared Harris as Ulysses S. Grant and Jackie Earle Haley as Alexander Step

Comparing Psychedelic Pills

Last night, Jennifer and I had the house to ourselves.  Our daughter was out with a bunch of friends to watch a big local high school game.  Earlier in the week I got a shipment from Amazon containing Jennifer's dad's Christmas gift.  At the time I ordered it I also ordered the Blu-ray presentation of Neil Young and Crazy Horse's Psychedelic Pill .  I listened to the Blu-ray on my Bose headset upstairs and it sounded really good. But, only on Friday did I have time and available space (I would torture my daughter making her listen to Neil cranked up to about 36 on my hefty Pioneer amp, which the only way to really experience this great neo-classic rock music.) to let the Blu-ray loose in my house.  I was very curious if there really would be a noticeable difference in that sound and the original CD that I bought earlier.  The Blu-ray was released about three weeks after the CD and I didn't want to wait that long to hear the new music.  So, now I have the album in two

Two Tickets to Mars, Baby!

Jennifer and I have decided that the world is way too complicated, one big burden after another.  So we are going to leave it all behind.  We are leaving our elderly parents, our daughter, the rest of our families, our land and gardens, our dogs, our citizenship, and, best of all, our difficult and overly demanding careers. Good-bye to all that.  Good-bye global warming, good-bye wars, good-bye fiscal cliff, we are going to be independent and blissfully ever-parted from the lot of you problems.  Good-bye most especially to evangelical Christians and Islamic jihadists.  They won't be going with us because the act itself is immoral before God. Very good-bye to all that. Instead, Jennifer and I will live out the rest of our lives on Mars.  We each paid $500,000 out of our retirement savings for a one-way ticket on a "Phase Three" launch deployment.  We will leave Earth sometime between 2019 - 2023, either from a launch facility in the United States or from one currently unde

My iPad Is Changing My Reading Habits

It occurs to me that I read fewer books in 2012 than in previous years. I have been aware of this since I picked up Ulysses months ago and started to stumble through it again.  More on that in a future post. The point here is that it is not that I am reading less nor is it that, for whatever reasons, I decided to tackle some “weighty” novels in 2012 ( The Magus and Dhalgren in addition to Joyce's work). The issue is that I am in fact reading more than ever before. It is just that most of my reading - probably a couple of hours a day on average - is on my iPad. A sidebar: I purchased an iPad4 (or whatever the hell Apple decided to call this rendition of Steve Jobs' brilliant design – maybe the Newer New iPad) just before Thanksgiving. The screen resolution is noticeably more vivid and sharp, the processor is much faster, and the RAM (or whatever they call memory in Apple lingo) is about double the iPad2. I gave my iPad2 to my daughter as a surprise Thanksgiving Day. She w

Y'all Got A Problem

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John A. Elder's classic painting The Battle of the Crater Some folks just can’t let it go.  They nag.  Nagging is one of the least productive human behaviors and it is even more irritating when exhibited in an entire cultural style.  That is the case with many of my fellow progressively minded naggers. Mitt Romney’s performance in the southern states, contextualized with the historical success of conservatism throughout the South , has been the subject of critique in the inevitable post-election hubris.  Progressives ponder why they preform so badly in the South . If you read this blog regularly you know I never supported Romney , not even back in 2008.  I voted for Obama then . You also know I share many progressive ideas on issues like human rights, environmental protection, and a liberal supreme court.  Nevertheless, being southern born and bred, I maintain a healthy interest in southern culture in general, in its customs, arts, and literature, and in particular the histor