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• 12.25.09
  Happy Holy Days are here again
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  Happy Holy Days, everyone. Or Holidays, or however you spell it.
  
  
• 12.22.09
  Enjoy the game, fella
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  Here's why there should not be a playoff system for college football like there is for basketball. It's a comment from the Live Glog for the MSU-Texas game at CBS Sports. It was made well into the first half, when the teams were neck and neck. Agreed, texas looks great. Both these teams i think are going to go deep in the tournament. So in a well-fought game that is almost becoming a traditional rivalry, instead of enjoying the athleticism of the players and the drama of the contest, people are instead thinking about the tournament. Well, in ...
  
  
• 11.02.09
  Paul Manz
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  At the close of our church service today, I stuck around in the pews instead of going downstairs for coffee, not wanting to let the postlude go to waste. It was a Bach piece, I don't remember what, played by Roxanne, our substitute organist for today and our onetime regular organist. I wasn't the only one who stayed behind just to listen. Later when told her how much I enjoyed it, I joked that it was like Paul Manz coming back. Then she informed me. Paul Manz had died just a few days ago. ...
  
  
• 09.23.09
  Upgrading my life instead of upgrading FeedDemon
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  What a deal! I can upgrade FeedDemon 2.7, which I got for free, to a new version, also for free! The disadvantage: The new free version displays advertisements. The advantages: None that the Newsgator people are telling me about. No new features that they're bragging about. I would be glad to pay $10 and get an ad-free version, except there is no reason to that I'm aware of. I used to synchronize with the Newsgator service so I could use the web product to synchronize my feeds and read them when I was ...
  
  
• 09.06.09
  Not like other conservatives
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  I posted the below as a comment in response to a Conor Friedersdorf article about birtherism at The American Scene: I recall a time in the early 90s on a political e-mail list when I must have said something nice about Bill Clinton or something nasty about Republican positions or something along those lines. The most rabid Clinton supporter on the list said something like, “John, you don’t seem to be like other conservatives I know.” I was somewhat taken aback. I recognized it as an early warning sign that I was about to go down a road where others had gone. ...
  
  
• 08.09.09
  They needed each other
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  Good timing. I didn't read the Little House books as a kid, but I read them to my kids several times when they were young, and we've visited some of the sites, too. This summer I got to thinking about them again. I needed a bicycling destination in southern Minnesota, and picked the Plum Creek site, which Myra and I visited for the first time. So it was fun to find this good article at the New Yorker by Judith Thurman about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose. It seems there was also a ...
  
  
• 06.09.09
  It’s still about us
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  This was the comment I posted in response to the WSJ article, "Boomers to This Year's Grads: We Are Really, Really Sorry" So Mitch Daniels (who is my age) goes to a 2009 commencement and spends much of his time talking, not about the class of 2009, but about his own generation. And he notes that the baby boomers are self-absorbed. Yup.
  
  
• 04.16.09
  This is the dream?
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  This is the comment I posted in response to an article at Front Porch Republic: Your article and that photo remind me: Saint Ronald is my hero but one time I shuddered at what he said. It was when he said he wanted to take Gorbachev on a helicopter ride over the suburbs of Los Angeles to show him all the homes with swimming pools, and tell him those were the homes of the workers. (I don’t have the exact words.) It seemed to me kind of demeaning to our best national aspirations. My favorite newspaper bothered me the same way when ...
  
  
• 04.02.09
  Place. Limits. Liberty.
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  Wow! This may be the best blog discovery of the year: Front Porch Republic. I found it while looking for articles about NCAA basketball and Tom Izzo, of all things. The subheadline of this blog is "Place. Limits. Liberty." Where else do you go to find those three words linked together like that? The "About" page has this paragraph to explain itself: The economic crisis that emerged in late 2008 and the predictable responses it elicited from those in power has served to highlight the extent to which concepts such as human ...
  
  
• 04.01.09
  The NYT on Goran Suton
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  It's good to see that there is still some redeeming social value to the New York Times. Lots of newspapers and lots of bloggers have written lots of words about Goran Suton after he was named the Midwest Regional's Most Outstanding Player in leading the MSU Spartans to the Final Four. Many of them have told how his family came to Lansing from war-torn Bosnia. But none of them except the NYT snagged a photo of Goran and his brother playing basketball outside their home near Sarajevo, and none of them told how their grandfather chased errant ...
  
  

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