Sailing the Last Voyage with Newton and Pascal
Tom Dugan of Chattanooga's mass transit authority thinks so: CARTA Executive director Tom Dugan told authority members Thursday that up to one-fifth of the people working at the new Volkswagen plant may opt to ride buses to work, rather than driving their own vehicles. That's because the parking lot for the new plant is huge, …
Continue reading "Does It Really Take Half an Hour to Walk Half a Mile?"
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"
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”"
Originally written in 2005. Dear Graduate, (name withheld because the Internet is a crazy place) My wife and I were well pleased with your achievement of valedictorian. She was hoping that you, her former piano student, would achieve this. But the piece in the paper (sorry, surfers, paid subscription required) was a surprise. I'll get …
One of the running "legends" in American life and art (yes, snobs, I know that "American art" is held by the cognoscenti to be an oxymoron) is that of what I'd call the "rube moving to town," or better the big city. He or she leaves the farm or other small places and goes through …
Continue reading "Book Review: Todd Starnes’ They Popped My Hood And Found Gravy On the Dipstick"
Tull fans may remember this line from A Passion Play: We pray for souls in Kentish Town. Evidently someone's prayers along these lines got answered, as the former well-known sceptic A.N. Wilson attests: A week ago, there were Palm Sunday processions all over the world. Near my house in North London is a parish with …
Continue reading "Special to Jethro Tull Fans: When Prayers for Souls in Kentish Town Get Answered"
One of the most popular features of this site are the More Than Dreams videos, from the Muslim world. We now offer them in Flash format, the same technology that YouTube uses. Unfortunately, YouTube limits the video length to ten minutes, and these are considerably longer than that. Check them out.
I find myself frequently have read one book and coming to the realisation that I need to read another. For example, my trudging through St. Thomas Aquinas’s Disputed Questions on Truth and Summa Theologiae convinced me that I needed to read the Bible through from cover to cover, which I forthwith did (and have repeated …
I'll bet ACORN never thought of this (until now): These events (Indonesian elections) are also the venues where the terms and conditions of traditional vote-buying are laid out by campaigners. Election monitors in the past have noted that while accepting money to vote for a particular candidate is commonplace, vote-buying has had little impact on …
I'm reposting this today primarily because the incident at Galatoire's (a very well known restaurant in the French Quarter of New Orleans) took place on an Ash Wednesday which is, IMHO, the best day to eat out in the Crescent City. But I also think that the comments on prosperity teaching needs reiteration. Orignally posted …
