As much as I love my New York Football Giants and enjoy NFL Football, I have to concede that this wonderful North American sport is not football, it is something else. Yes, there are punters and kickers in American football, but punts and kicks are secondary to throwing and catching and running the ball, and blocking and tackling your opponent. The vast majority of the players don’t ever touch the ball with their feet. In…
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What is it that really matters to us? Of course the particulars differ from person to person. But I’m inclined to believe we are more alike than different. There are commonalities among all persons, despite the fact we are perpetually at each other’s throats, and despite our diverse upbringings, during which we are forced to swallow cultural, political, and religious lies from Day 1. I have nothing against culture, politics, or religion. I am talking…
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Love the song. Big hit by the American alternative rock band, REM, from their 1991 album, Out of Time. May seem strange coming from a man of faith, this love, someone who lost, then found his religion. I don’t mean “religion,” as in being “religious” in the way assorted self-described “spiritual” folks interpret it (as being a stultifying, perfunctory, impersonal, shallow, superstitious, law-driven, misguided, self-serving, man-made approach to faith), but in the true original sense…
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No, I didn’t come up with that title. Wish I had, though. David Shenk spent three years researching and writing The Genius in All of Us, and under different circumstances he may very well have listed me on his Acknowledgments page. But no… Shenk calculated that his book was composed at the feverish pace of eight words per hour. Shenk is no Kerouac (Jack, whose mercurial writing rendered On the Road in a smattering of…
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One way to make friends with the very rich is to show everyone else that the very rich are victims. The way to accomplish this is by withholding pertinent information and by misleading those that are not very rich. In fiction, withholding necessary information from the reader and misleading him is self-destructive behavior by any author. Such an approach announces to the world that the author is a) grossly incompetent; b) a phony; c) a…
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Ereaders? Where was I when the Areaders, Breaders, Creaders, and Dreaders of the world raised their ugly little heads? I have to admit I’ve become increasingly fond of technology, insofar as it allows me to see, understand, and know more of life and, consequently, how little of it I do see, understand, and know… the realization of which just makes me teeter like a happy drunk before the awesome Mystery and Bigness of Creation. But…
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Lennon and McCartney had an almost effortless ability to create something new and interesting from disparate themes, images and sounds. Their infectious energy and awesome brilliance still make me laugh. And despite Maxwell’s Silver Hammer ineluctably falling down on all our heads one day, the Lads shined a light of wonder that made us like the world and each other and the idea that all you need is love, despite all the incomprehensibilities that separate…
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Who the hell do you think you are? Can’t place it, the moment or location, but hasn’t just about everyone been asked this question in this precise way some time in his life? Maybe it was in Spanish, in my case. Or maybe it was a rhetorical question, directed by a frustrated elder or superior at not just me but those around me as well, the Captive Collective (e.g., classroom, military barracks, locker room, office,…
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My parents couldn’t speak, read or write English when I was a toddler, and being a first-born child and having no other siblings to read books to me or other family or neighbors to read to me, it wasn’t until First Grade that I got hold of my first real book in my nervous little hands and learned to read reading it. I don’t remember the title, or what the cover looked like, but I…
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Until this past Christmas I had never given the innkeeper who offered his stable for the night much thought or what Joseph occupied himself with the days immediately after the birth of Jesus. It stands to reason that Jesus, Mary and Joseph didn’t go anywhere for at least a few days after the birth and Joseph, being a carpenter, may have employed his skills on behalf of the innkeeper to pay for lodging and food….
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