Top posts
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Rocky Balboa Was a Wuss
Actually, of course, he wasn't. I just wanted to get your attention. He probably could have knocked my block off with both hands tied behind his back! Go ahead and read my latest entry below about boxing movies, inspired by Southpaw, Rocky, Cinderella...
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Ernesto Che Guevara
Fidel Castro just passed away this month; Che Guevara was his loyal friend and fellow revolutionary. Che, an Argentinian, became a medical doctor, but after travelling through Latin America and seeing the dire poverty and blatant political oppression,...
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Double or Nothing
Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote a short novel called The Double about a Russian clerk who is convinced there's a double of him that is trying to ruin his reputation. The clerk, a Mr. Golyadkin, leads a rather mousy, hum-drum existence working in a drab government...
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Waterton Canyon... Again!!
I just did about a 9 mile round trip hike along Waterton Canyon a few days ago. The weather was cool, 40's dropping to the 30's as night fell. But as it was a weekday in late November, the road was pretty deserted; a few work vehicles from up the Canyon...
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Fascism - American Style
Many on the Left are accusing Donald Trump and his associates of being fascists. What is fascism, and how has it manifested itself in America, if it even has? Fascism historically has been characterized by repressive and oppressive rule, usually by an...
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Wildlife
I am blessed to live in Colorado, close to the mountains as I do. I moved to Colorado to be near the mountains. I live in Denver so I can work and be around folks but still be a short drive from beauty, peace and solitude. Lately I've hiked near Lost...
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Donde Esta el Bano???
The above words in Spanish, of course mean: where is the bathroom? While it's good to know how to say that in any language used in a country you're visiting, it's gaining new meaning in our country of America, especially in North Carolina. I've never...
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Fire, What Fire???
James Baldwin in his book, The Fire Next Time, gives an answer to the above question. He begins citing in the bible where God puts a rainbow in the sky as a promise that He'll never destroy everything again by a 40-day rainstorm and flood. Instead, Baldwin...
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Independence Pass, Colorado
Yesterday, (today I'm back home in Denver - finally!) we were atop Independence Pass at 12,095 feet above sea level. It was windy and very, very cool at noon. Independence Pass is on the road from Buena Vista to Aspen, just past Twin Lakes. The area is...
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It's a Headache!!
What's a headache, you ask? Sometimes, just about everything! I think my headaches come from pain and problems with my neck, just plain stress and tension, sinus troubles (due in part of course to our poluted air) and maybe just getting older and not...
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Violence and Non-Violence
Is our country, and world, becoming more violent? I think it's in the 2nd Letter to the Thessalonians where Paul says the Holy Spirit has been holding back the anti-Christ, the Man of Lawlessness, but that come the end-times, He will no longer do so....
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What a Dog
The coyote – it’s an interesting animal. I recently read an article on the coyote that was informative, but not real flattering. I want to give some info on this beast as well as relate an experience I had with them. But first, I think it’s unfortunately...
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What is a... Question?
So many times I look for answers. But I've been learning that questions are much more important than answers. Scientists know this. So do philosophers. "Question Authority" is a bumper sticker you used to see on cars. Answers are easy to come up with....
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Let's Drop the BOMB!!!
Donald Trump has said he would consider dropping a nuclear bomb on Isis. He may be megalomaniac enough to do it. Most people born after the 60's, I believe, are pretty unfamiliar with the devastation that nuclear weapons can create. From what I've heard,...
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For Pete's Sake...
I listened to a program today on KGNU on Pete Seeger, folk singer and banjo player extrordinaire. Pete died about a year ago; he was born in 1919. What's so extra ordinary about Pete? Many things: he had been a student at Harvard; his dad Charles S. had...
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Monkeys on Trial
I am reading the play Inherit the Wind loosely based on the Scopes Monkey Trial of 1925 in Tennessee. A high School teacher breaks the law by teaching Evolution in his classroom and is place on trial... before the whole world. In real life, Clarence Darrow...
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Candy... for the Eye
I just watched another John Candy movie: Only the Lonely. It was vintage J. Candy, fitting hilarity for a great comic actor - who knew how to make us laugh... and cry, too. I once heard that that was the mark of a good book or show - that it makes you...
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2 Bro.'s
I watched the movie La Bamba again, the first time since I saw it when it came out in the 1970's. Ostensibly, it's the story of rock and roller Ritchie Valens in 1957 up to the time when the plane he was in with The Big Bopper and Buddy Holly crashed...
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So. Africa, So What?
I just finished reading JM Coetzee's novel Disgrace, set in the country of South Africa. Ostensibly, it's about a 52-year old Romantic Literature professor at a university in Cape Town and his relationships, or lack and failure thereof, with others in...
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Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff?
Edward Albee's play Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff , came out in the late 1950's or early 1960's on Broadway. Richard Burton as George and Elizabeth Taylor as Martha (a fitting pair!) I believe starred first on stage then in a movie version. Both were...
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Strange Fruit
Bessie Smith, born in Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1894, was an understudy of Ma Rainey, so-called "Mother of the Blues". She sang of what she saw in the deep south as an unenfranchised black woman and of what she experienced against her people. Smith came...
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The Bishop's Wife
The Bishop's Wife is a way older movie, 1940's or so, starring Cary Grant, Loretta Young and David Niven. Set at Christmas time in New York City probably, it's the story of an angel, Grant, who rescues Young's and Niven's marriage which is on the rocks...
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The Eternal Husband
Dostoevsky's short novel, The Eternal Husband , appears in a bound book I have along with 2 other shorts: Notes from the Underground and The Double. Most of his other works were quite a bit longer; these are some 100 to 150 pages long. The Brothers Karamozov...
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Springsteen... as in Bruce
My first exposure to Bruce Springsteen came in the spring of 1974 while I was a senior at Swarthmore College on the west side of Philadelphia. He gave a concert in our outdoor amphitheater. That wasn't so unusual given the fact that he lived, and still...
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"The Public"
I just watched the above movie directed in 2017 by Emilio Estevez and starring him and Alec Baldwin... as well as a cast of well-casted "homeless folks". The fictional movie tells of an "Occupy" of the Cincinnati public library by some 100 homeless men...