UPDATE June 1, 2012: I posted the below on Tuesday May 29, and there are quite a number of comments at the end. This is an election with far more than routine long-term implications, far beyond “right” vs “left”, “conservative” vs “liberal” or “union” vs “right to work”. This one, with “divide and conquer” to […]
SEVERAL UPDATES, INCLUDING PHOTOS at end of this post. I’m at the age where death is an increasingly regular visitor to my circles. This Memorial Day three deaths come to mind. The first came when I was 1 1/2 years old, when my Uncle Frank Peter Bernard went down on the USS Arizona at Pearl […]
Last Friday I took a four day one thousand mile trip related to family matters in North Dakota. The trip included a visit to an Aunt and Uncle and a drive to a family funeral near the Canadian border. Over half of the trip was by myself, which always makes a trip seem longer, at […]
Monday my wife and I were enroute “between here and there” and I suggested we stop in at Maplewood Toyota as we might be in the market for another car. The stop was a logical one: we’ve purchased four cars there, the most recent one 7 years ago, all from the same salesman who’s very […]
A couple of weeks ago I attended the memorial service for a former colleague of mine. He was 78 when he died, and the memorial service was in a small city outside the twin cities area. John had been my colleague for 24 years. I didn’t know him well, as we were among about 40 […]
Happy Mother’s Day. This phrase, (link) “A woman’s work is never done”, keeps rattling through my brain. (The link is an interesting compilation about “woman’s work”.) There are infinite variations to the theme, “Mother’s Day”. For us, one event will be the always fascinating May Day Parade in south Minneapolis (this years version was postponed […]
A friend just wrote an excellent book, and in it a town was mentioned, Montrose SD, just 20 miles from Sioux Falls. Since I was going to Sioux Falls anyway, I decided to pop in on Montrose, just to see what it was like. It was a bit like going back to the old days. […]
… the United States will wake up to the residue of the 2012 election. There will be campaign offices in disarray, activists everywhere with hangovers, either the euphoria of victory or the depression of defeat, victors, vanquished. Election 2012, America’s biennial Civil War, will be over…for a few hours, then election 2014 will begin. We […]
Today is National Teacher Day, a day with a long tradition. Since 1985 the first Tuesday in May has been the specific day, but the tradition goes back to an idea of a teacher in the 1940s. More so than in any recent years, Teacher Appreciation Day is an essential one this year. Especially since […]
I had a dream overnight – this is literally true – of living in what seemed to be a somewhat primitive society somewhere where people, whether ordinary or high and mighty, had identical rights to have good ideas and actually possessed the possibility of having these ideas considered without threat of ridicule or worse. The […]