Monthly Archives: January 2012

He was my hero. I was an odd kid. Your average suburban kid idolizes football players or pitchers or rock stars or maybe even movie actors. But not me. My hero was an elderly (by the time I elevated him) … Continue reading →

Modern-day teaching theories are all well and good. Well, at least some of them are. There's a lot of poppycock and snake oil out there masquerading as teaching advice, most of it written in polysyllabic gobbledegook and bristling with phrases … Continue reading →

Teachers of Buddhadharma are quick to point out that the teachings—whether spoken or written or however communicated—are the finger pointing at the moon, and not the moon itself. The Tao Te Ching puts it just as succinctly: That which can … Continue reading →

America has worse problems than offputting, soulless, cold, inhuman and inhumane retail establishments. Suffering through the degradation of BestBuy or Walgreen's is hardly the stuff of tragedy. Nonetheless there's no excuse for it. A store need not be dehumanizing. Stores … Continue reading →

"I loathe chicken pot pies!" said my friend, "those disgusting little green peas, that gloppy yellow snot, the salty and greasy pastry. Disgusting things, chicken pot pies. They make me want to puke." A bit of of gentle cross-examination revealed … Continue reading →

How nice it would be if people who created attractive things were equally attractive themselves. Alas, that's not necessarily the case. Composers, poets, writers, painters, sculptors, playwrights—a lot of them were well-spoken, well-behaved folks who lived blameless lives and left … Continue reading →

At this very moment my digital music library weighs in at 1.57 terabytes of stuff. That's 1607 gigabytes, 1,646, 264 megabytes. I store my audio in Apple Lossless Format, which stores the average CD (700 megabytes) in about half the … Continue reading →