The Anschluss The hills are alive with The Sound of Music. They are also alive with the sound of jackboots. The German word Anschluss means union and it is generally referred to Anschluss Oesterreichische of the unification of the Germanic language countries of Germany and Austria that occurred, not by referendum, but by force when the Wehrmacht marched into Austria unopposed in March of 1938. We all know from the portrayals of Christopher Plummer and…
The Disinformation Age In preparing my lecture for my upcoming course I have an early slide called Modern Economy. It depicts the ages of mankind from Hunter/Gatherer to Agrarian to the Industrial Age to the Information Era to what has been called the Connection Economy (which is euphemism for social media). I am watching the documentary called The Social Dilemma and it describes a state of development in social engineering through online social media manipulation…
Bearing Witness Tonight my niece’s husband and two children came over for dinner. We haven’t seen them all year thanks to concerns about their kids’ and our COVID vulnerability (their kids have CF and we have old age). It all came off without any hitches and their daughter Mila was able to test out our new Moonstruck Madness games area. She pretty much played all the available games; mini-golf, bocce, disc golf, horseshoes and cornhole.…
On Art and Effort My friend Steve just posted a piece he titled In Praise of Talent, and it was about his experiences and reactions to the arts of writing and photography, particularly as they relate to the journalistic endeavors he has pursued through his life. He expressed annoyance at attribution to the tools of the trade (particularly in photography, since I doubt anyone would ever accuse a writer of having used his pencil, pen,…
My Aching Back About ten days ago I was going into my hot tub in the middle of the afternoon. That was when the weather was particularly hot and I was using the spa to cool off. Heat is such a relative thing. In the middle of winter, ninety degrees in a hot tub feels almost cold and you need to crank it up to 100 to be soothed. But in the summer, ninety degrees…
The Bridge Over Troubled Water The year was 1970. The world had just lived through a difficult transitional decade of the 60’s. Students at Kent State had died on the campus. A cow pasture in Bethel, New York had been trampled by more than 400,000 young people seeking love and harmony and the best rock and folk music of the day. Both Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Ted Kennedy was busy…
Red Sky in Morning – EXTRA This morning, for the second day in a row, we have awoken before 6am. I am in the habit of looking first at my CPAP machine to see how long I have slept. I do this before I look at the clock to check the time. This morning it said 7 hours and 12 minutes, which is good, but then the clock said 5:41am, which seems suboptimal. I would…
Goal! In working out my new games area it became clear that Handy Brad would need help. Mostly he needed help with the heavy lifting involved in moving artificial turf around. The 15×60 main piece, prior to installation weighed about 350 pounds, which is 300 more than I prefer to lift. There is also the old turf that has about 750 pounds of sand on it, so that weighed perhaps 1200 pounds and was in…
Power Play I am watching Rachel Maddow interview Michael Cohen, who is now on house arrest and out of the federal penitentiary where he has been spending his time. While I think highly of Rachel, I find this interview beneath her. As an avid anti-Trump person, I suppose I should like anything that Michael Cohen says in his book or on cable news that is harmful to Trump. And no one is more scorned by…
Tree People It is the morning of Labor Day 2020 and I am sitting in my office in my underwear (one of the luxuries of life on the hilltop where I am out of view of all prying eyes). I have just spent fifteen minutes figuring out how to fix a documentation gremlin that has plagued me. I have to send a signed grant award contract to an agency in Scotland. The first version I…