I have a hard time taking Brad Pitt seriously. I'm sure that means there's something lacking in me, that I've committed some sort of sin against the contemporary world. I'm just not sure what other response I can have to a man who says things like this: The Second World…
A list of birds I heard but did not see while weeding the garden: Belted Kingfisher Cedar Waxwing Hummingbird Pileated Woodpecker American Goldfinch Blue Jay Eastern Kingbird Osprey…
The web is infatuated with what is new. You want an example, do you? How about this. When I got to Hacker News, I land on http://news.ycombinator.com/news. At the top of the page, beside the obligatory "link back to the front page" is this…
I've been reflecting on the verb to call for the past two weeks. It started (and continues) with my reading of Heidegger's lecture series, What is called thinking? and was brought up again in a conversation with Luke last night, and in a series of blog posts he made. Luke…
I sent an email to three friends the other day, and asked them to join me in an experiment. It was something of a risk, and I wasn't sure whether they would agree. The theme of my email was blogging. I take blogging very seriously. My blog is one of…
Today as I exercised, a song by Madonna called Celebration came on, and I was struck by one of the lyrics: And if it makes you feel good then I say do it The lyric is one of the best, most compact examples of the Mimetic Theory I have ever…
While we were at the cottage, my mom was relating to me a story about the last time she and my dad had seen a Moose. As they drove along a highway, they passed a logging road, running perpendicular to them. She looked down the road, and saw the silhouette…
Today our children jumped on me in bed, wanting to know "what will we do today?" My wife had left hours earlier to take a relative to an appointment, so I was on my own. As we entered the kitchen, I saw it: a bowl heaped to overflowing…
I really like Twitter. I didn't think I'd ever write that, but it's true. I find it to be somewhere between irc and my blog, replacing neither, adding a useful third channel. But since they got hacked the other day, it's totally and completely broken for me. I have tried…
I spent much of the day mowing grass. Across the lane from where I worked, in a field of clover, wild flowers, and tree saplings, my progress was watched. First, it was a deer, which stood between two rows of trees, and watched me go back and forth for at…