Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
This was originally written for Christmas 2001--right after 9/11 and the anthrax scares--but deals with the whole political and social dynamic of the Middle East, before and after Islam. It's good to think about this after Barack Obama's Cairo speech, and should be a caution to the unbridled idealism that dominates the rhetoric of too …
Continue reading "When the Sheep Have Anthrax: A Reflection on the Politics of the Middle East"
Southern Joy Over the Next Hill (Sounding Board SJ 1020) I suppose a site like this isn't complete without some Southern Gospel, and this is a nice example of that from the mid-1970's. Southern Joy was a gospel group from Greenville, SC. Performed well without too much affectation, with a lively tempo to keep your …
Tom Autry is a Texas Christian performer who put out several very smooth albums in the 1970's and 1980's. Tom Autry (Star Song SSR-0001, 1975) Tom Autry's début album (and evidently that of Star Song Records as well) is a laid back, beautifully performed album that constantly reminds one of its Texas origins. His mellow …
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Recorded 29 August 1975 These are unreleased recordings as opposed to a polished production. But some explanation is necessary. The Answer is Jesus Christ was started by M.B. Flippen (that's right, "Flip" Flippen, the motivational speaker) as a Christian counselling centre in College Station, Texas, in 1972. At the same time it was a coffeehouse …
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The Queen, participant though she was in the original festivities, is not amused at being left out of the D-Day commemoration: Indeed, she is decidedly displeased, angry even, that she was not invited to join President Obama and France’s president, Nicolas Sarkozy, next week at commemorations of the 65th anniversary of the D-Day landings in …
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Our family business' first trip to the then Soviet Union was an interesting experience. Our objective was to sell the Soviets (as they were called then) our offshore pile driving equipment for their offshore oil production work. Their idea was to get us to sell their diesel pile driving equipment and other Soviet technology in …
Ruth Gledhill, in the course of her coverage of the scandal of expenses by British Members of Parliament, observes that journalists are no prize at keeping their expenses down. Her own experience "on another newspaper" (she currently blogs and writes for the Times) runs like this: I remember many, many years ago, and on another …
Continue reading "“Oh but he’s a born-again Christian, he doesn’t count”"
Some of Jeffrey Rosen's comments on Obama's first nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court make me think of that: I haven't read enough of Sotomayor's opinions to have a confident sense of them, nor have I talked to enough of Sotomayor's detractors and supporters, to get a fully balanced picture of her strengths. It's possible …
At one time my old family business, based in Tennessee, opened a fabricating facility in West Palm Beach, Florida. Across the street from our new plant was "U and Me Transfer and Storage," (see photo) which we hired to move a lot of our machinery. We sent one of our supervisors to Florida to help …
This site proclaims itself as "the online perch of an elitist snob."Â Part of that snob's background was in yachting, and this story comes from that experience. We had two dinghies; the smaller of the two was an 8' fibreglass cathedral hull boat referred to as a "dilly boat," depicted with a larger than normal …
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