Top posts
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Nevada Smith and The Unforgiven
Westerns! What a blessing they are if you're into that kind of thing. "Nevada Smith" starred a young Steve McQueen as a vengeful son in search of the 3 desperados who butchered his father and mother, shooting the head off the dad and skinning his Indian...
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Angelou, Baldwin and the Pentacostal Church
Lately, I've read (thanks to Pat and Sue Parr's book clubs) James Baldwin's "Go Tell It on the Mountain" and Maya Angelou's "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings." With all the reading, writing and discussion groups I've been in lately, I feel like I'm back...
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Hold On, Holden!
Holden Caulfield! What a guy! He's the main character of J.D. Salinger's novel of the late 1950's The Catcher in the Rye , and in fact, the narrator and only character of real substance. Holden, age 16, has just gotten himself thrown out of Number ? prep...
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Revolution
Hannah Arendt has written a book titled "On Revolution" somewhere in the mid-1950's. Her contention is that the French Revolution, which has been the pattern for many subsequent revolts, failed because it sought to satisfy the wants of the poor over seeking...
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Lunch with Harold... or PROGRESSIVISM
Just had lunch with friend Harold, you might remember him from blog around June titled "Breakfast with Harold." This time he paid... maybe I should have lunch with him more often! Anyway, besides promising to subscribe to this magnificent blog, he suggested...
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Swatties... and more Swatties
While at my alma mater, Swarthmore, this past weekend, I met a few old acquaintances and many new faces. (Swatties, of course, are Swarthmore grads or current students!) I want to name, list and say a few words about each of them as I want to remember...
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Hell or High Water
The above movie was touted as a second-rate, low-budget sleeper. I thought it was engrossing. It held my attention the whole time. It even had some humor! Starring the aging (aren't we all?) Jeff Bridges, the flic also sported several other good, relatively...
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Sex, Sex, and More SEX
Now that I have one or two people's attention (that may read this blog), I'm going to discuss...... well, sex. But it won't be Sex in the City, Sex in the Workplace, Sex in the Bedroom. It will be Sex in the White House, which is fast becoming our latest...
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What IS Greatness??
I just heard an NPR reporter on the radio, talking about supposedly the best pitcher now in baseball. He said something like: to show you how great this guy is, he makes $35 million a year! I said, that's not greatness, that's GREED. Since when is the...
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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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Peggy Noonan
Peggy Noonan is a regular, conservative, Republican columnist contributing to the Wall Street Journal. I usually don't agree with her ideas, but I often read significant portions of her columns. She is an intelligent woman and an astute commentator on...
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Assorted Ramblings, Musings and Rants!
Today I want to talk about several and various things... One is about why I meditate. There appeared recently an article in the Wall Street Journal (which for some reason I have been receiving free for the past 3-4 months, including an extra copy that...
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Manchurian Candidate
Watched this 1962 movie for the second time yesterday. It stars a young and dashing Frank Sinatra in an army major's uniform. Why is Sinatra in army uniform in the movie? He's just come back, along with around ten fellow soldiers, from the Korean War...
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My Blue Heaven
Title of an older comedy starring Steve Martin is the above. If you want to laugh - WATCH IT! Steve does a great job portraying a low-level Sicilian mobster transplanted to Obscuresville, California under the government's witness protection plan, in return...
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Terrible Terrorism
"Terrorists" are blowing up everything now, even in our country. But are these perpetrators connected to any organization or are they just jumping on the bombing bandwagon? We've had it good here for a long time - others in the world, many who have it...
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Daddy, Won't You Take Me to Muhlenburg County...
O Daddy, won't you take me to Muhlenburg County, Down the Green River where paradise lay. I'm sorry, my son, but you're too late in askin', Mr. Peabody's coal train just hauled it a-way. Darrell Scott and Tim O'Brien sang these words recently in KBCO's...
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A Spanish Entry - Una Pagina en Espanol
I'm going to write this blog entry in Spanish, just for the infierno (hell) of it. See if anyone notices!! :))) Bueno, pues esta publicacion aparece en espanol en realidad a ver si alguien que tiene acesso a mi blog puede leer espanol! (En este momento,...
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Fascism, or It Can't Happen Here
Sinclair Lewis' 1935 book It Can't Happen Here refutes the idea that a dictatorship could never happen in America. His verbose and drawn out novel gives a scenario of how it could. Thank God it hasn't happened so far. The Depression of the 1930's probably...
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Nature and Intellect
One final word on Swarthmore... I had to get out the book all incoming students got in the fall of 1970 with everyone's pictures inside, just to reminisce a little more when I got home. I was surprised to find a quote in the front of the booklet which...
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WILD, WILD HORSES... COULDN'T DRAG ME AWAY
From my true love, you ask?? NO! From U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) actual wild horses of which according to a recent Wall Street Journal article, there are some 55,000 herding and roaming and eating their way around the current Wild West! The...
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The Quiet Crisis
Stewart Udall's Quiet Crisis, published in the early 1960's, was quite a different book from what I'd expected. I got it some 30 or more years ago, knowing it was a classic in the conservation genre along with The Silent Spring. I expected it to be an...
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Birth of a Nation - Part One
The original movie "Birth of a Nation" was a DW Griffith production in about 1916 or so. It was a highly racist semi-historical film about the U.S. early history, including the Civil War, Reconstruction and the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. I mentioned that...
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Telluride
Telluride is nestled in beautiful surroundings - mountains all around. It is a tourist trap. It is not my idea of a vacation place to visit, but my brother wants to see "Colorado" so here we are. This, of course, is not Colorado, in fact it could be anywhere......
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Trivial Trivia
Most Monday evenings at the Sie Theater in Denver, they host a trivia contest for music and movie fans. Last night I went for the first time. I actually got some right answers! For example, they showed a still frame of John Wayne standing in a doorway...
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The Trials of Honest Abe
Joshua Shenk in 2002 wrote an amazing book called Lincoln's Melancholy. The subtitle is something like: how depression fueled and energized a president. Shenk looks at Lincoln – intimately. Scouring countless letters of the former president to others...