On Facebook and even email, this picture meets me at every turn, looming, vaguely Inquisitorial. You want to explain to us why you *need* birth control, young lady? Depressed by the image and its context — and by work and other First World Problems, despite even-more-stellar-than-usual moments of conversation with students — I turned to […]
Read moreA couple of posts ago, you read about my new experiment in home vermicomposting. But since then I’ve learned there’s definitely a right way and a wrong way to go about it. Basically, I now wish I’d started with one of these pictured here — a Worm Factory 360 — from the beginning rather than […]
Read moreNear the end of Flannery O’Connor’s classic short story “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” an old woman gets drawn into bargaining for her life with a killer. The Misfit, as he’s known, is escaped from prison and rampaging, wounded, through the world. In his own mind, he’s been wounded by God: he can’t […]
Read moreIf you liked my Annie-the-cat post, you will appreciate this cartoon from a friend’s Facebook wall, by New Yorker cartoonist Charles Barsotti. Of course the dog would recognize his little boy.
Read moreThe kitchen of your mama’s house in Alabama is not the best place to announce to your family – all human and animal doctors whose lives are full of horses, cattle, and dogs — that you are about to embark on home vermiculture. Especially if you phrase it, casually, “Hey, y’all, when I get back […]
Read more“Southern or not, we all live somewhere on a continuum between Tofurky and Terducken.” — Bob Rini Today the news broke that Paula Deen has Type 2 diabetes. <Pause for Inner Moral Battle that probably ends with Guilty, Helpless Succumbing to Pithy/Catty Line about Oh, The Irony.> Me, I immediately flashed on the recent MLA […]
Read moreEvery year, fresh from days away at my family home where there are friendly differences about — shall we say — organizing styles, I return to my own little house and see the place with fresh eyes. Somehow, as good as I usually am about filing and purging, the place just looks full. The line […]
Read more“I’ve been a pastor for more than 15 years, and I am still amazed at folks in nursing homes, many unable to remember the majority of their own lives, who will begin to sing and nod and clap when they hear Christmas carols. O the power of music, on them and on me.” – Amy […]
Read moreToday, just before Christmas, finishing up my grading and trying to cut down on the caffeine that’s one of the many things spiking my blood pressure this month, I picked up a can of Coke from the cooler in our student union. Those who knew me in grad school, when I drank about a case […]
Read moreThe ghostly, homely faces of these beasts floated into my mind earlier last week when I misread a New York Times headline at the top of my webmail page. “Physicists will have to wait a little longer for Higgs Boson,” the tagline read. Of course, I read it first as “Higgs Bison.” But considering what […]
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