SmokeSound

In an earlier post, I reacted to Dennis Kucinich's lawsuit against a congressional restaurant, when he bit down on an olive pit. He discovered that it had split his tooth.  He sued the restaurant for $150,000.  As I said then, "Some tooth!" What I had been thinking of was what anyone I had known, while growing up, would have done.  They would have yelped, and probably had the tooth pulled.  Put their tongue in the space where there used to be a tooth.  For a while. I like a lot of things about Dennis Kucinich.  I do not like him as much as I used to.  Why?  Because we saw what his is like when he lashed out, almost instinctively, as Carl Sagan might have explained, when the lizard part of his brain responded; that is to say, when his emotions got the better of him. Had he thought about it, he would have known, immediately, that suing the restaurant for the accidental--not deliberate-- fact that an olive pit somehow showed up in a salad that probably con

Jan. 30:  Cloudy, Snow Flurries Jan. 31:  Light Snow, Icy Feb. 1:  Snow tapers to flurries Feb. 2:   Numbing sunlight, Parka weather Feb. 3:  Sun gives way to more clouds Feb. 5:  Mostly cloudy, Average again Feb. 6:  Flurries, Risk of a thaw

I found the note on my coat, beneath the bench in the hallway at the Mall of America. I walk at the Mall, early in the morning, before any stores open.  Many of us walk at the Mall, especially in winter.  It is warm, there are three rectangular floors with walkways that go all the way around, each about a kilometer long. There seem to be work crews in the Mall all night long, remodeling, repainting, changing decor, repairing the escalators, and doing everything best done when the public is not there.  There are, also, security guards, especially since 9/11/2001. In winter, it is very cold outside the Mall, so one either takes off one's winter coat and leaves it in the car, or takes it in, where there are rental lockers or, increasingly, a number of us who leave our jackets--usually chosen for their ratty, not-worth-stealing look, on a bench or on the floor.  I found the note on my coat, on the floor. The note looked improvised.  I turned it over. The security guard obviou

(Overheard) ". . . and if you're still pissed off at me tomorrow, call me and I'll talk you out of it."

 Once upon a retreating ice age, 10,000 years ago, Minnehaha Falls and St. Anthony Falls were together, not far from where Minnehaha Falls is today in South Minneapolis. Erosion backed St. Anthony Falls ten miles up the Mississippi River to downtown Minneapolis, even carving a new way for the river to go.  Minnehaha Falls worried its way westward, not far up its creek. In summer, Minnehaha Creek wanders through town, from Lake Minnetonka, to slip under the footbridge in a park, and heave itself down almost to river level, half a mile away.  There is a chain under the footbridge; insurance for the lazy canoist who does not know that there is a fifty foot drop right there! In winter, there isn't, but there ought to be a sign that says canoeing is not allowed unless led by a fully licensed Sherpa.  Summer or winter, riding the falls is a hard lesson. "Isn't this a beautiful day?", she asked me today.  "A little new snow every day just to keep things clean!&

Oh, I'm tired!", Mari says, back from work.  "Want to watch some T.V.?" "Sure!", I answer.  "Hang on!"  I pour myself a drink, and settle down. We watch . . . oh, something.  Anything.  It is early evening. A nice time of day.  Mari home.  The cats have been waiting. Mari loves TIVO.  We skip the commercials. We watch . . . maybe . . . "Chopped!".  It is a relaxing time. I finish my drink.  My glass is dry, and so am I. I need a bathroom break, and some way to avoid dehydration. I make a double break, for the bathroom, and for another drink.  I am good at that.  I have experience. Before I get to the second stage of my break, Mari has TIVO'd the commercial breaks away. Joel gave her thumb-flip lessons.  "Tick, tick, there!" So I miss out on all the best chefs. I miss the critical clues in those British dramas. The third quarter of the basketball game is gone. I return, relieved, replenished, and Mari as

St. Joseph's Hospital in Phoenix is affiliated with the Catholic Church. A lot of hospitals have had their beginnings with church groups. I was born in a St. Joseph's hospital, in Tacoma.  In Chicago, a doctor at Augustana Hospital remodeled my ulcerous stomach. (He did a good, Lutheran job!)  There is a Methodist's at Mayo. A woman, who already had four children, came to St. Joseph's with a fifth, very dangerous pregnancy, about eleven weeks along. Her doctors said that she would die if something was not done. The ethics board of the hospital, among whom was Sister Margaret McBride, agreed that without aborting the fetus, the mother would die. The Bishop, Thomas Olmstead, said Sister Margaret had been automatically excommunicated.  He further demanded that the hospital never again perform an abortion to save the life of the mother.  The hospital said they would not fire Sister Margaret, and they said they fully intended to try to save mother's lives

Dennis Kucinich went to lunch, a'riding on his pony. He stuck a sandwich in his mouth and split a tooth.   It was a very valuable tooth. He is suing the Congressional cafeteria for $150,000. The sandwich wrap, Dennis says,  contained a very dangerous substance-- an olive pit. That is some pit!   Some tooth! Some dental bill!   Members of Congress probably have very delicate teeth. And short fuses.

It should not surprise you that I have a parka:  I live in Minnesota. It has nothing to do with the weather.  It is Our Belle, Michele. She--Michele Bachmann--is the Wicked Witch of the Upper Midwest; the one with all that eyeshadow whom God Annointed to give the Tea Party response to Obama's State of the Union Address. Ouch!  Ouch!  Ouch! That might not have been eyeshadow. Those might be tea bags, or black eyes. She may have gotten those black eyes Fighting Tirelessly with our Founding Fathers whom she said Fought Tirelessly to end slavery. You know, the slaves who did not count as free men, who grudgingly, later, were counted as 3/5ths of a real human being for purposes of allocating how many Genuine White Men States like Virginia, for instance, could elect, and could receive tax compensation for. Those tirelessly freed slaves! Well, maybe the Fathers did not fight tirelessly to free slaves, but they fought harder than they did to allow women to vote. Wo

Nonsense!  Such nonsense!  Nonsense all around! A little honesty and common sense would help a lot. We do have a big debt.  How did we get it? We got it, partly, by going to war in Iraq. George W. said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  He didn't. What George the Second really had in mind was to establish a western-friendly government in Iraq (Saddam Hussein did not have nuclear weapons, but he certainly did not like the U.S.A.) George II thought having a western-type democracy right in the middle of the Arab, oil-producing world would be dandy. Whatever made him think going to war with Iraq would turn them into friendly, next-door-half-a-world-away, partners who would do their best to supply us with cheap oil?  Ignorance, maybe? That whole war was never put into our budgetary process! George W. knew that if he did that, the budget would look awful! But simply not showing the cost of the war in a budget did not mean that we had not borrowed the money, nor sp

When I was a mere pup--you know: clueless -- my father did his best to make me into a genuine dog by giving me a job on a halibut boat. I was a dog, all right!  I couldn't even splice a line. Somewhere between Seattle and Prince Rupert I learned how to gange hooks, too.  God, I was incompetent! It lasted for years, all the way through graduate school and well into retirement, now--thankfully--well behind me.  I am now teachable now, although half a century past my prime.  I cook and shovel snow. Eventually, during those halibut fishing days in Alaska-- although not before I decided it was best not to work on Dad's boats, I got the job of working at the roller, almost all the time.  The "roller" was actually something like a rolling pin on the rail, where the long line, dangling short lines with barbed hooks intended to catch halibut, came up.  Lots of things came up, some of them halibut; some cod, octopi, sharks, or wolf fish. The job at the roll

THOUGHT 1:  In a previous incarnation (when I was a clergyman), one of my duties was to speak to the congregation:  a sermon.  I had to think about the relationship of the spoken to the written word.  I did not wing my sermons:  I prepared them carefully.  Somewhere, I have a boxful of sermon manuscripts. We speak casually, incompletely, slangily.  I have, a couple of times, transcribed precisely what someone said into manuscript form.  It is almost hilarious:  a sloppy porridge of uhs, ahs, incomplete phrases, unfinished sentences, endless sentences, bad grammar and syntax, you knows, and other state-of-the-art jargon. On the other hand, sometimes when we write, we torture our readers with silly formal styles, and use words we never say in articulate conversation. I consciously tried to keep both oral and written habits in mind, not to deny either of them, but to allow me to say what I had written in such a way that maintained the integrity of each. THOUGHT 2:  Public radio ha

Minneapolis has been hosting a Pond Hockey tournament every winter. Teams come from any place where it is possible to buy hockey skates  to go out onto Lake Nokomis and play hockey the way God intended it to be played:  in freezing weather, on a lake, with the snow shoveled back, not a Zamboni in sight, and with cases of good cold beer somewhere out there to warm and gladden the heart when the fingers are gone.   To hold the number of casualties to an acceptable proportion, the city puts up a temporary warming shed, not so much for its warmth as for its relief from the northwest wind.  Pond hockey is not so much a sport as it is a chance to go through puberty once again, and to pretend, once again, that had the pucks been dealt differently, had the ice on the lake cracked fairly, one might be playing for the Red Wings. I calculated, two or three years ago, that I had walked at least 3,000 miles around Lake Nokomis, mostly in the morning dark just as it is bracing itself for

"Love is all around!  They found it on the ground." At 3:00 AM, that struck me as a rather nice song. I had been dreaming.  I just had to tell Mari. "That young girl," someone told me, "just sang for a wedding." That is what she sang:  "Love is all around!  They found it on the ground." "I would sing it for you," I told Mari, "but I don't know the tune." It was just as well.  I only knew a few of the lyrics, anyway. I looked up the lyrics on Google, and discovered that "Love is all around!  They found it on the ground" is not a song generally known to the music world; in fact, might not be known at all.  It will probably remain that way. Here I am, with a composer's gift for wedding music-- a gift generally accessible only when I am sleeping-- and I do not have the gumption to copyright the lyrics. Is that not the story of our lives; most of us? Even when we have the talent for writing gre

"These," I remember thinking, "are of a different race." They wore unisex uniforms:  dark blue, white shirts and blouses, highly polished shoes, even in bad weather, and they talked together about $30,000. high school tuition, and getting into an Ivy League school, and about the commute.  They were officially warm and gracious, and I wondered if they ever farted. They were of a different race; denizens of  The Beltway. They made me feel seedy.  A hick with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, somewhere out west.  I had an urge to talk to Lyle Cary, in his machine shop in Decorah, Iowa. I am not suggesting that people who work for the government are awful human beings.  To the contrary!  Most of them, most of all of us, are genuinely good people, and government itself is both necessary and generally helpful. But listen to Eric Cantor, or Mitch McConnell, or John Boehner, and a lamentable number of other long-term career politicians! They talk

Police are trained in the use of firearms, not just in how to shoot, but when and when not to shoot. Trained, as they are, most of the shots fired by the police miss their targets.  Shootouts with criminals sends a lot of lead flying around. Now even members of Congress want to carry firearms. Some of them may have been trained to shoot a gun, but it is a good bet that almost none of them has been trained when and when not to shoot. We may be quite sure that members of Congress will not be as accurate, under fire, as the police are, and most of the shots fired by the police miss their targets. The bullets come out of the guns, and the lead goes flying around but, most of the time, misses the target. How would you like to attend a rally for your favorite politician knowing that if some madman with a gun starts firing that the politician up there, and his staff, are going to start firing back, in your general direction? When I was a kid, I had a stack of Zane Gray

In polite company, it is best not to venture into the realms of religion and politics.  For that reason, our discussions at the Coffee Shop always venture into the realms of religion and politics. We are not particularly interested in religion, but it is impossible, here, where our Constitution expressly states that there shall be no religious requirement for participation in politics, here, where our Constitution expressly states that Congress shall neither establish a religion nor forbid people from freely participating in religion, it is impossible to speak of politics without continuing on to speak of religion. As a dog-eared veteran of a combined religion and philosophy department, who spent years teaching interdisciplinary courses, many of which had to do with biology and physics, whose own personal odyssey has been a kind of voyage of a beagle, I have friends who continue to spend their years trying to justify the ways of god to man. It is impossible.  Everythin

Maybe it is because this is one of those days when I am paying bills. It is one of those days when I realize that I have missed my calling: I should have been a juggler.  I did not miss it:  I am a juggler! Steve Jobs--the Apple of the I-Phone--had not even been born when I graduated from college.  He is 55, and he has cancer. At coffee this morning, I said that every once in a while I think it would have been nice to get to my age and have a bank account but that, right now, I would not trade places with Steve Jobs. "Getting old is the pits!", someone just wrote; someone just a few years older than Steve Jobs. No, getting old is not the pits.  Having cancer is the pits, but not getting old.  Getting old is better than almost every alternative.  Getting old and wearing out is not without cost, but it is a lot more fun than being twenty again; being young and virile and full of piss and vinegar and hormones; being insecure, and unaware, and anxious about be

I have been trying to think through what the points of view are that divide us politically and socially, especially since our political rhetoric so easily confounds the issues.  In earlier posts, I suggested that one of the differences was between those of us who are basically conservative, who are reluctant to change, and those who are more progressive, willing to try something new. Another difference is between a desire to regulate human behavior, and a desire to allow as much human freedom as possible: liberals. Oddly, the same people who want to regulate human behavior seem to think economic activity should not  be regulated. I have also been thinking about what it means to call ourselves "American"; that is to say, what it is we understand we have in common that makes us a people, and not just a collection. The "Birther" movement makes it clear that something is at stake. It is not just the claim that Barack Obama was actually born in Kenya.  T

This is how the lottery works: Let us suppose that 1,000,000 of us put in a dollar each every week. Then, every week, one of us wins the lottery and gets a million dollars. If we do that long enough, the odds are that every one of us will win the lottery once every 20,000 years.  With a little good luck, you might win more often, and with a little bad luck, you might never win, but if we play long enough, it will even out:  once every 20,000 years! We won't actually win the whole million.  Someone will figure the present value, and the future value, and make us an offer, and keep the rest for overhead and expenses:  that sort of thing. But let us not quibble.  Fifty of us will win every year.  Nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and fifty will not. We will be a buck poorer every week, but with a little luck, the odds are that we will have our turn to win:  once every 20,000 years. It is a marvelous system!  It gives us hope!  If we win, we will quit

There is a sign alongside of the Crosstown Freeway in south Minneapolis that says that the very best heart care should be the closest health care.  "Which one of us," I wondered, should it be closest to?  You, or me, or her?" It cannot be closest to everyone.  So who gets it? There is an intense scorn for government. Taxes are called theft.  Regulations, even regulations of the quality of our food, or access to health care, are considered to be "unwarranted government intrusions", a meddling of politicians into our freedoms. Even the most determined of Libertarians is willing to tolerate some  government:  our military, police protection, perhaps, probably sewers, but not necessarily public schools, social security, laws about discrimination, or mandatory health care.  If you want fire protection, sign up for it! If you want Mayo medical care, pony up for it. If you want the very best heart care, and can afford it, good for you!  "But w

It was a memorial service in a gymnasium.  It began oddly. After a Native American prayer, a series of politicians read Biblical passages.  They sounded like preachers. The people inside the basketball arena sounded like basketball fans, cheering something.  It was unusual. After a bit, it became evident that Tucsonans, and Arizonans, had shown up in numbers double what the gym would hold-- half of them sat in the football stadium, watching a screen-- not simply to show their respect, and to mourn, but because they were shaken by what had happened in their city and state. They needed to hear that there was human decency. They cheered at the affirmation of their own decency, badly shaken. Then Barack Obama spoke, and what had been an earnest, but lame, attempt to capture the moment and its needs became a chance to look deep into ourselves. He told the story.  He told who they were who had been killed and wounded.  He told who they were who had come to meet Gabrielle

When you have a tape measure, everything needs to be measured. I have spent most of my life in a classroom:  up before dawn, falling asleep in a chair with a book in my lap, going to bed so that I could get up before dawn and go to class to talk about what I did not know enough about, yet.  There was always more. I loved the summers for two reasons:  first, because I could get outside and, second, because I could earn a little extra money doing carpentry to help make ends meet.  I cannot remember who called being a professor "the life of genteel poverty".  (I was not a high-powered scholar.  I was just a guy who was curious about too many things.) I think that I have given a tape measure to each of my kids; homemade kids, step-kids, adopted kids, grand-kids. Many of them have also gotten tool boxes with a few essentials, if you think being able to fix a few things is essential. It might have been just a way of hoping they did not spend all of their time in a

Language, like everything else, is both our glory, and our betrayal. Without language, life would be something like birds that cannot sing, perhaps even a meadow of flowers, but nothing as fascinating and fulfilling as language.  "This is what I am thinking. . . ."! At the same time, we do have charlatans, and manipulators, Ponzi promisers, and politicians, and other snakes in the Garden. Sometimes it is just that usage changes, and clarity falters, and then we start to say things that get us all tangled up. Consider, for instance, our political discourse!  Once upon a time, a conservative was a person who was reluctant to try something new, possibly because change was uncertain, or because what already is in place serves the conservative quite well:  why change? There were, and always are, people who think we can do better. They want to give something new a try, maybe because it looks promising, or maybe because what already is in place is painful. Just sa

Jackie Headapohl reports that political ideology might be hard-wired into our brains.  That is to say, some of our political differences might be due to differences in our brains. " A   study out of the University College London   suggests that the brains of those who hold right-wing views are structured differently than their liberal colleagues." "Researchers studied the brains of 92 people and found that those who were conservative in their ideology has "larger amygdalas, almond shaped areas in the center of the brain often associated with anxiety and emotion, and smaller anterior cingulates, an area at the front of the brain associated with courage and looking on the bright side of life." Don't blame me for feeling a little anxious!  Blame my enlarged amygdala!  And maybe my sunnier attitude toward life is because I have a larger anterior cingulate! Try that argument out on your Tea Party neighbor; the one with the modified Constitution and Second

You know something is wrong when your furnace and your stove are your best friends.  Mine are. They, or the escape from them and a run to someone who has them, are the only reasons why we, who live north, survive. "I love living in a place that has seasons!" I think I will hurt the next person who says that. People who live in places like this say that because they do not live in warmer places. People who do not have nerve endings are urged to go ice fishing--that is to say, to bore holes through the ice on the lakes and offer treacherous food to the stiff fish below-- because the ice and snow will kill them, anyway. Some ice is OK.  Some snow is all right, too. But too much of both suffocates them, anyway. We are a hardy folk, we who live in the proximity of ice and snow and Michele Bachmann, but too much frozen ideology is life-threatening. I have bought four more shear pins for the snow blower. I have switched from Regular to Extraordinary

Why do critters, such as us, who have a history of evolution that is millions of years long, who so plainly now are what we had never been before, so attracted to absolutes? Nothing is what it used to be!  Certainly not we! When, as our stories used to suggest, we could think that the whole universe was perhaps only 6,000 years old, it might have been possible to pretend that everything was pretty much what it had always been.  We know now that modern humans have been around for a couple of hundred thousand years, and modern human behavior is about 50,000 years old.  That sounds like a long time, but fifty thousand is scarcely a measurable fraction of the age of the universe, which is something like 14,000,000,000 years. Does 5/1,400,000 mean anything to you? A lot happens in 6,000. years. A lot more happens in 14,000,000,000 years. It is safe to say that nothing is the same. Even so, as creatures of endless change, we pretend that some things are absolutely true.

We drove south through snow, not to the South south, but to Iowa where we met with friends and family for talk and Christmas time. The Strauss Family Robinson, pausing between Mexico and Austria, met us for dinner, and the Weis Guys and Boomerang (new puppy of Australian descent) let us share time with them. When the earth warms, the ice melts where it has mostly been, and scoots around to where it can fall next, either as rain (on the coasts and in Australia, for example), or as snow and ice, when it meets Arctic cold air (right here, for example, and in Iowa, too). Our drive was evidence for moisture needing a place to fall, and freeze, and slow frenzy to a standstill.  Earth is standing still along Highway 52, between here and Northeast Iowa, as it is is great parts of earth.  Winter still.  Winter resting.  Pausing.

"Is there," I asked myself rhetorically, "anything that is more fun than preparing food for the two of us?" The thick-cut pork chops are on the counter, dry, adjusting themselves to the salt and pepper.  The sherry and sherry vinegar are measured out, waiting to deglaze the pan when the time comes, and the veal and barbecue sauce is sitting in line, for last-minute gravy. Honestly, there are other things! We have just come back from a fine trip to see two sons; four nights in Portland, and four in Tucson.  And please do not tell them, because it has nothing to do with them, but we do love to come home, see that technology and our neighbors have kept the house warm and dry, calling for the cats to let them know we are back, building a fire in the stove, and pouring ourselves a drink. We are homebodies!  Why not admit and enjoy it? We are growing old together, Mari and I, and we enjoy that, too; not the ways in which our bodies have gotten stiff