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Showing posts from 2018

Loose Ends 2018

For me, 2018 was the year of television.  I sort of picked up where I left off last year with knocking out Breaking Bad .  I have been critical of television as a medium in the past and still am.  I’d rank TV distantly behind books, music, and movies as a form of entertainment and certainly as an art form.  But, for whatever reason, I found myself watching a lot of it this year.  I started out watching The Terror and Season 11 of The X-Files .  As always, one thing led to another and I spent many hours taking in programming mostly on my iPad. Recently, I watched the Netflix original series, Maniac .  I enjoy these 10-episode type seasons.  It is fairly easy to make it through them as long as the show justifies the effort.  Maniac  defies simple description, I've never seen anything quite like it on TV before.  You just have to try it for yourself. I re-watched the excellent first season of True Detective .  That is my fourth time to watch it and it still holds up very well.  I

We Have All Been Here Before

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Prepping for Proust

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The modest Proust collection of my library minus a scattered book or two.  Notice the spines on the boxed set in the middle form a gentleman's detachable, stiff collar that was in style at the time Proust's novel was written.   Aiming nebulously, my primary New Year’s Resolution is to reread Marcel Proust’s long novel, In Search of Lost Time .  I last read it back when I started this blog so my previous experiences with the novel can be found in an earlier post .  After many years attempting it, when I finally managed to start and actually finish Proust the first time I became fascinated with the author in my usual obsessive way.  I collected several biographies of Proust, various philosophical and critical studies of his novel, guidebooks, along with Proust’s earlier unfinished novel, Jean Santeuil , all of his short stories, and a few other related books.  I came to know the man and his work very well. It’s been nine years since I last read the novel.  It’s high time I

How ‘Bout Them Dawgs!

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Jake Fromm on the field after yesterday's loss to Alabama. It is an uncommon tragedy in college football for a team to be beaten by the same team twice in a year.  Yet, that is what happened to my Georgia Bulldogs in 2018.  I didn’t have the voice back in January to blog about our National Championship defeat to the storied Alabama Crimson Tide, the best team in college football over the past decade or so.  I couldn’t find the right words for Jake Fromm’s terrific freshman season, or for the running attack of Nick Chubb and Sony Michel , both now NFL running backs. Yesterday, the Dawgs faced the Tide again in the SEC Championship.  It was #4 in the nation versus #1 respectively, definitely a National Champion caliber game even if it was only for winning the best conference in college football.  The Dawgs soared as high as #2 earlier in the season, but they played poorly on the road against the LSU Tigers and fell to #8 or so.  To their credit, however, Georgia got their moj

Reading 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Yuval Noah Harari has written a thought-provoking and insightful book about the postmodern, post-truth human condition and the considerations we must make as a species if we are to survive and even thrive in the coming decades.  21 Lessons for the 21st Century is filled with erudite, innovative thinking that, to me, seems essential if we are to prepare ourselves for what is coming next. First of all, let’s be clear about the “lessons.”  Harari , a distinguished history professor, does not fill this work with self-help (actually more like global-help) how-to suggestions, although he does offer a few along the way.  The lessons, rather, are like lectures, each chapter simply discussing the aspects and ramifications of humanity’s more pressing challenges along with our fantastic potential.  The result is an accessible, rational, realistic appraisal of where we are going and what we need to be doing to avoid near-future hazards and maximize human possibility. Each chapter is a lesson

Thoughts on the Post-midterm Election Narrative

As I blogged earlier, my take on the 2018 election is that the Democrats did not have the ‘blue wave” they hoped for, Trump remains undiminished, and the Dems need to moderate their narrative if they hope to beat Trump in 2020.  Of course, that is by no means the common narrative as we now look back on the events of November 6.  In this blog post I will look at six articles that represent various perspectives on the mid-term election.   My primary sources here are The New York Times , The Washington Post , National Review , Vox and FiveThirtyEight .   First let’s look at two op-ed pieces with differing views from The Washington Post .  The first article is entitled “ The midterms prove it: Progressive ideas are now mainstream .”  Clearly, this is not my perspective but there are some interesting facts presented here.  “65 percent of the incoming House freshman class embraced some version of Medicare-for-all or expanding Social Security benefits. Almost 80 percent embraced lowering p