Being an old country boy I have not been exposed to too much graffiti in my life but we did visit some areas in our recent NYC trip where it was plentiful. Some of it was very lavish and sophisticated, some of it quite crude. That got me to thinking that isn’t graffiti just modern-day folk art? Maybe we should be preserving it instead of painting it over? I kind of think of graffiti as some young men’s (and I’m sure women’s) creative outlet. The big art studios and such won’t hire them because they don’t have a “proper” education … Continue reading Its Not Graffiti, Its Folk Art…

I have always been fascinated by science generated computer art. I hope to be able to do something similar to this one day. Continue reading Physics Is Beautiful

Happy New Years…. May this year bring you peace and enjoyment and fulfill all your expectations.   Continue reading Happy New Year…

  Out With The Old, In With The New May you get a little fruit of the Spirit in 2015     Continue reading Wishing you a Happy New Years….

This is terrorism’s sick genius. Terrorists invite us — seduce us — to share their Manichaean worldview, to respond to savagery with savagery, to join them in madness. “Make us safe!” Americans demanded. And so our elected leaders launched two wars, saw WMD where there were none, launched surveillance programs with virtually no limits, and embraced “enhanced interrogation.” As justification, the White House and the CIA joined Machiavelli, Marx, and Stalin in insisting that the end justifies the means. Lots of individuals bear responsibility for the horrors detailed in the Senate committee’s torture report. But if we are honest, that … Continue reading How we went to the Dark Side…

I don’t think I am the only one who notices all those new superheroes TV shows starting to flood the airways. I must admit that I am currently watching a couple of them. Gotham and Flash are now on my regular view list. It is nice to be able to escape reality once in a while.  It is also nice that these new shows are replacing the “reality” shows that have dominated so many networks. It didn’t take much for me to be filled up with that genre. They were anything but reality to me. Yeah they were cheap to … Continue reading About Those Super Heroes…

I am going to put my vanity aside here and post a selfie. This was taken in January of 1999 right before we visited the Windows to the World restaurant atop the World Trade Center for the last time. It was taken at Battery Park on a chilly afternoon. This is one of the photos of myself I kind of like. It makes me look like a real author that I always dreamed of being.  Thanks to the Internet I have at least at a minimal level accomplished that dream.  :) Continue reading A Selfie…

One of the solutions to those tanking profits? Shrinking menu sizes. “Our intent is to have a cleaner menu board that is easier for customers to absorb,” spokeswoman Lisa McComb said in a statement to The Huffington Post. To do so, McComb said McDonald’s will be “simplifying our current menu.” SOURCE:  McDonald’s Set To Phase Out Some Of Your Favorite Items. Wean Yourselves Now.. I know I will probably hear from some of you about my eating at McDonald’s but that is what I do sometimes when I am in a hurry. I am just a person who generally eats to … Continue reading McDonald’s Set To Phase Out Some….

  Continue reading May He Give You His Peace….

On this particular morning, I was faced with a photo of a food stamp with a note to “those on welfare” who “don’t work” and “milk the system.” The post was calling for “accountability.” I just shook my head in disappointment. While most political comments don’t hit me very hard (we all have a right to our opinion), I have a difficult time with those that group any set of people into a section and blame and berate them… You may not agree with me and that’s okay; we don’t have to. But I will still show you respect, not … Continue reading How It Feels to Be a Kid on Welfare

The 78-year-old screen legend has been bankrupted by a string of poor business decisions…. The 78-year old actor was one of Hollywood’s greatest stars in the 1970s, but a string of poor business decisions have bankrupted him and already forced him to sell several of his homes… SOURCE: Burt Reynolds Is Auctioning His Belongings to Tackle Financial Woes | TIME. Burt Reynolds was not one of my favorite actors but some of his movies were entertaining at least at a gut level. Burt was a “guy’s guy” so his level of acting didn’t really matter much. Kind of like Schwarzenegger even John Wayne. … Continue reading It Is Never Enough….

 Philadelphia public schools are in trouble. Not enough money. Overflowing classrooms. And the unkindest cut of all, more than one-third of its students, 70,000, are in charter schools, which Philadelphia has to pay for, but doesn’t control…. individuals are choosing away from us, simply because they don’t think that our schools are meeting the needs of our children…. So what we want to do is to become a part of that choice. Our survival depends on our ability to innovate, to think differently about how children are educated…. Some teachers might have given a lecture on brain development, but that’s not … Continue reading The Least Common Denominator…. And the Charter Schools….

All that lovely wealth isn’t trickling down. The country’s median income hit a high of $56,080 in 1999, went into slow decline, dropped to $53,644 after the 2008 economic meltdown — and five years later, was lower still, at $52,100. Raises remain tiny. Many newly created jobs pay a pittance. For tens of millions of people, the economic recovery is an illusion. The voters are right: Wage stagnation — and the resulting erosion of the middle class — is this country’s biggest problem. When hard work no longer produces upward mobility for workers who lack elite skills, America’s implicit promise … Continue reading America’s broken promise

The above title seems very American in its character. We Americans, me included, just don’t like others telling us what to do or especially what to think. To some extent we are all rebel rousers in that regard. Some take this to an extreme by there “don’t confuse me with the facts”. We just don’t like being told what to do. Prohibitionist tried to mandate what we do. We let a small handful of extremists convince us that drinking beer and such was the root cause of all our problems. If only we kept people from drinking we could shut … Continue reading "Who Are You To Tell Me How To Live??"

U.S. stocks fell sharply on Friday, leaving the benchmark S&P 500 with its worst weekly performance since May 2012, as investors pulled back from the markets in response to oil’s free-fall and more weak data out of China. SOURCE: Oil slump leads Wall Street to worst week in 2-1/2 years – Yahoo Finance. I am by no means an economist who espouses to understand all this stock market stuff but it seems to me that whatever is good for the common guy economists think is bad for the stock market. Declining oil prices will put billions of bucks back into the … Continue reading Oil slump leads Wall Street to worst week in 2-1/2 years..

The coming season is a very important one for my Asian friends. Many travel great distances to be with family. Many also take this season as a time to contemplate their life and its purpose. They ask searching questions of themselves to be sure they are living their life as they want to instead of just letting it happen. Many change jobs and occupations during this season. I kind of wish I had  learned that lesson from them. I kind of wish I done likewise during my years on this earth. Instead I, like many Americans, just seem to let … Continue reading Contemplating Life….

I can remember the first business trip I took to the NYC area in 1970. We had dinner at the famous Bahrs Restaurant. It was a lavish place that looked out on a bay of the ocean. Being from the Midwest I was astonished by the seafood available on the menu. Of course since then the nation is now filled with franchise fast food restaurants to gobble up so much of the eating-out dollar. I still go to Bahrs when I am in the area… Continue reading Eating Out…

I remember the details of the Vietnam war still today. While my hearing impairment kept me out of it I did lose several good friends to that totally unnecessary war.  One thing I remember is the daily body counts from the DOD of Viet Kong killed. It was acknowledged later that these numbers were grossly over counted.  It seems that the military establishment thought they could get unlimited funds if they show us that the “enemy” was much stronger than it really was. I think that mentality still reigns today inside that pentagon shaped monolith in Washington DC. The news today is … Continue reading ISIS has Advanced Surface-to-air Missiles!!