Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning
I reread this poem on New Year’s Day 2013. I believe that I had not read it fully since high school, and it is amazing how different it feels to read it in my late 60’s compared to reading it as a teenager. (more…)
I’d like to say some things about my Mom’s full life; others will likely say things more recent about her (recent, for my Mom’s life, is all relative. That might be things from grandchildren or great-grandchildren that cover only the past few decades or so). (more…)
This morning I stood outside the polls along with the candidates’ representatives, holding my sign “I will not participate in a presidential election run by mega-corporations and wealthy individuals.” Instead, for the Presidential election, I did a write-in stating “This election is bogus.” This is about a particular election and not about the electoral concept. I did vote at the local level.
I request a Clearness Committee meeting to consider the following:
I believe we have an entrenched oligarchy, and I support a peaceful uprising to replace it. We have lost our government, which is no longer “of the people, by the people, for the people.” (more…)
We’re back from Friends Center and a training session for peacekeepers/marshals for the Shale Gas Outrage non-violent rally and march this Thursday. Getting there and back served as an illustration of how our energy system and transportation system (so closely interlocked) have entered a suicidal spiral. It was raining, and at Villanova (one of the richest (more…)
We hear that this country was attacked on 9/11. Correction, this country was never seriously attacked. Bin Laden intentionally (and brilliantly, if we can credit his intelligence and not his morals) attacked a particularly diseased segment of this country (more…)
No, I don’t mean “discipline” during sex. I’m referring to discipline regarding sexual activity, comparable to how we may seek to discipline ourselves in regard to our eating and sleeping behaviors. It may seem strange/incongruous even to consider sexuality in terms of (more…)
One of the greatest capitalist rip-offs of the second half of the 20th century was to convince women that they would be better off and happier being “liberated” to leave their families and to emulate the meaningless hamster-wheel work life (so falsely glamorized) that their mates “enjoyed.” So now we end up with (more…)
At one time I was going to do auditory behavioral research with spiders, and chose tarantulas because they were fairly easy to work with (at least you could observe their reflex behavior readily — crouch to an air blast, and they are not web weavers). I would use classical conditioning to check for frequency discrimination associated with an air blast for similar frequencies pairs. Anyhow, this creepy crawly box arrived while I was on vacation. A graduate assistant was assigned (more…)
War with Japan was not a surprise for most Americans. What was a surprise (more…)
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