Archive for the ‘All’ Category
The Mini Santa-Creche
Knowing my predilection for small but wonderfully tacky nativity scenes, our friend George gave me the item shown in the photo at right.* This little Santa is a shade under 3-inches high, and about 1.5 inches in diameter. The surface texture is slightly fuzzy, in a lightly flocked sort of way. Where, you might be […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Personal Notebook
Sanchez on Warren
This is a portion of what Mary Sanchez wrote in the The Kansas City Star ("Rick Warren needs to evolve", 29 December 2008): [Rick Warren] rejects the theory of evolution, and he believes that to be homosexual is to have embraced a life of sin. Are those mainstream views? If so, there must be two […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity, Speaking of Science
Yumm! Peppermint!
This weekend Isaac and I did a bit of after-Christmas shopping. We didn't find much but we did see a few things. One of the more extraordinary was on the mark-down shelf at Target. Now, while I understood what the product was and what it was used for, I was caught off guard by the […]
In: All, Faaabulosity, Food Stuff, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Beard of the Week LXIV: Time Marches On
In acknowledgment of the season, this week's beard belongs to Father Time, beautifully sculpted in this high relief bronze medallion by Steven Adams, owner and proprietor of SGA Sculpting and Engraving.* For good allegorical reasons Father Time, who represents the ending of the year, is an old man with a long beard (so we know […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Personal Notebook
Chocolate Bacon
I thought I'd mention that I'm sitting here right now, at the end of my light supper, enjoying a treat of chocolate-covered bacon. By that I mean, of course, actual bacon that's been dipped in chocolate. Our friend George decided to make some at Isaac's birthday party as a special experiment and we still had […]
In: All, Curious Stuff, Food Stuff
Perhaps Not This Year
What Obama and his folks maybe didn't realize is that this is not the year to antagonize gay people. [Mario Ruiz, "The Wind Is Out of My Sails", Huffington Post, 24 December 2008.]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Faaabulosity
Beard of the Week LXIII: Beard Clubs
This week's beard belongs, by proxy, to Santa Claus. The proxies in this instance are members of the Amalgamated Order of Real Bearded Santas.* (Photo source: David Haldane, "Bearded Santas let their hair down at lunch", Los Angeles Times, 21 January 2008). Surprisingly, this is a group I'd not heard of before. I say surprisingly […]
That Warren+Obama Thing
Since the news broke that president-elect Obama asked evangelical Rick Warren, notorious for various anti-gay remarks he has made in very public ways, not to mention his vocal support for the anti-marriage-equality proposition 8 in California, to give the invocation at Obama's inauguration, I've been on the side of the incensed gays and pro-choice and […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Protecting Marriage
So, here's the deal. There are some 36,000 people married (in pairs) in California since this past summer whose marriages some religious fanatics would like to annul* in the name of "protecting marriage". Unfortunately, these people tend to have no sense of irony at all. (Keep in mind that it's generally the same crowd who […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
Technical Announcement & Flower
Having discovered today that my blog had been hacked by the industrious "anyresults.net" or "spam redirect" hacker, I was alarmed, felt violated (my second assault!), and spent a good part of the day uncovering, understanding, verifying, fixing, and upgrading my version of WordPress. For troubleshooting and help fixing the problem, this page and this video […]
Viking Gardening
To most of you, I realize that this will look pretty much like one of those pictures everyone takes at least once of a squirrel, in which there's a dot in the middle (if one's lucky) that gets pointed out as the subject. But, what I want you to see is, indeed, the expanse of […]
Beard of the Week LXII: Saint Isaac
As some of you will already have recognized, this week's beard belongs to Isaac, my beloved partner of (so far) 16 years. For obvious reasons this photograph is known around our house as "St. Isaac", certainly among my top-five favorites.* Whether it is obvious or not, he also deserves the appellation "saint" for putting up […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Personal Notebook
Chu on Cars: Consider the Refrigerator
For automobile manufacturers, a small parable told by energy-secretary-designate Steven Chu: This past summer, Steven Chu, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who currently heads Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory—and who has been tapped to be the next Secretary of Energy—delivered a talk on climate change and how to combat it. Consider, Chu said, the refrigerator. Refrigerators consume […]
In: All, Common-Place Book, Current Events
Messiaen's Centenary
I knew it but the day, 10 December, 2008, ended yesterday before I got around to mention that it was the centenary of the birth of Olivier Messiaen, the French composer like whom there is no other. People who write or talk about Messiaen always look for unusual words to talk about him and his […]
Separate is Never Equal
This morning the New Jersey Civil Union Review Commission published its final report, in which they recommend that New Jersey move expeditiously towards creating law that grants the right to marry to same-sex couples. The report (available here) makes compelling reading; it's also refreshingly concise for a government report! Nevertheless, I marked out some quotations […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity
The Thrill of Museums
If you add up the attendance for every major-league baseball, basketball, football and hockey game this year, the combined total will come to about 140 million people. That's a big number, but it's barely a fraction of the number of people who will visit American museums this year. Museums are big business, attracting billions of […]
In: All, Music & Art, Raised Eyebrows Dept.
Mine! Mine! Mine!
In case your eyes are as old as mine, the caption reads: "Territoriality: Peeing on it doesn't make it yours." The sentiment is useful, the idea behind it is illuminating. This comes from the article "Territoriality: Peeing on It Doesn't Make it Yours — Staking Out Territory by Appropriating Cultural, Political Institutions", by Austin Cline […]
In: All, Current Events, Faaabulosity, Feeling Peevish
Beard of the Week LXI: Some Guys and Some Dolls
This week's beard* belongs to Clay Boyce, artistic director, chair, and founder of Park Players, a group in Birmingham, Alabama, that performs live outdoor theatre. For example, next year is a big Shakespeare year with "As You Like It" and "Taming of the Shrew" on the playbill. In addition to his chairing and directing, Mr. […]
In: All, Beard of the Week, Music & Art
Look! Up in the Sky!
All sorts of stuff has been going on up in the sky lately. There's just so much to look at. For instance, NASA sent word today (SpaceWeather for 6 December 2008) that the SOHO spacecraft, the orbiting solar observatory,* has only hours ago taken this picture (like this one, which I've cropped quite a bit; […]
In: All, It's Only Rocket Science
Fundamentalist Innumeracy II
Now, a very brief follow-up to yesterday's bit ("Leaving the Lifestyle, Baby!") about innumeracy among fundamentalist christians. As Pam Spaulding tells the story ("Daddy D's hissy fit over WaPo conservative columnist Kathleen Parker"), James Dobson, of the so-called "Focus on the Family" organization, was upset when Ms. Parker wrote in the Washington Post that the […]
In: All, Faaabulosity, Laughing Matters