Category Archives: Uncategorized
I give up.
I don’t know why they have done this, but WordPress has removed a few more basic formatting options and I can no longer make this blog look the way I want it to. I give up. All future content will be posted exclusively to AbbiesTreeHouse.blogspot.com, and this blog will be abandoned in place.
Happy?
Excerpted from the article “Enjoy!” by Sandy Grant: In our societies, we experience fabricated leisure – a kind of planned ‘free time’ that is sandwiched between typically unpleasant work times. And we are bombarded with advertisements that promise we will have a great time if only we get the latest phone or the latest computer …
Eastern Perspective
If you have a few minutes, this video from the BBC is beautiful and thought provoking: LINK (Blogger let me embed the video easily and for free, WordPress wanted me to buy an expensive upgrade. Bah.)
Thanks, but
And I commanded Joshua at that time, saying, ‘Your eyes have seen all that the Lord your God has done to these two kings; so will the Lord do to all the kingdoms through which you pass. You must not fear them, for the Lord your God Himself fights for you.’ ~Deuteronomy 3:21-22 That’s nice, …
Romantic Friendship
From the article “What Is Romantic Friendship?” by By Sukaina Hirji and Meena Krishnamurthy, in The New Statesman: What, then, were (Iris) Murdoch and (Philippa) Foot to each other? Close friends? Lovers? Murdoch herself grappled with this question. She wrote to Foot, “Sometimes I feel I have to invent a language to talk to you …
Transitory
TheCryptoNaturalist is on Twitter, HERE.
Peter Boyle
He was one of my favorite actors, and it makes me happy to know he was thought of fondly by the people who knew him.
Righteous Indignation™
Dave Chapelle has been “cancelled.” I know this because it’s all over the news. I guess “cancelled” is kind of a misnomer. Even with only a passing interest in pop culture, I can name several people who have been “cancelled.” I know what they were cancelled for, and what their reaction to it is. Ironically, …
Time Time Time
Excerpted from a Forbe’s review of About Time by David Rooney, available online HERE: Ancient Romans were well aware of the coercive effect of clocks on daily life. Shortly after the first sundial was installed at the Forum, writers attacked it, damning “the man who first discovered the hours”. Characteristically for a culture fixated …
Happy?
Nuha Kahn writes of “toxic positivity” for The Walrus: It’s an experience most people can relate to: forcing a smile, holding back tears, saying “I’m fine” when you’re far from it. In a survey by Science of People, over 75 percent of respondents said they had rejected or ignored their emotions in an attempt to …
Prophecies
Excerpted from the article “Fear of Math” by Ashutosh Jogalekar, posted to 3 Quarks Daily: But I don’t want to digress from the bigger lesson that I learnt and which I have tried to communicate to students I have met over the years. This is that being “bad at math” has very little to do with …
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
Mona and I went to see the Aretha Franklin movie, Respect, yesterday. It was unexpectedly boring. Part of the problem is that hers really isn’t a very inspiring story. She was born wealthy and talented, by the age of 25 she had nine albums under her belt and a very lucrative touring career, then she …
WHIP
First Simone Biles said she was overwhelmed by being the center of attention. Next she said that she had inexplicably lost the ability to orient her body in space. Finally she said that she was sad because her aunt died. I don’t know which one is the truth. Maybe all of them, maybe none of …
Wasted Time
Oliver Burkeman has written a book about distraction, Four Thousand Weeks. Below is a very short excerpt dealing specifically with the dangers of social media: What’s far less widely appreciated, though, is how deep the distraction goes, and how radically it undermines our efforts to spend our finite time as we’d like. As you …
Neutrality
In an article posted to TabletMag.com, columnist Blake Smith argues for more neutrality in our lives. Here are a few excerpts: Conflict has all almost all our cultural heritage in its favor, Barthes complained: “the Western tradition is a problem for me in this respect … it makes conflict into a nature and a value.” That …
Portmanteau
Portmanteaus are cool: A portmanteau or portmanteau word (from “portmanteau (luggage)”) is a blend of words in which parts of multiple words are combined into a new word, as in smog, coined by blending smoke and fog, or motel, from motor and hotel. In linguistics, a portmanteau is a single morph that is analyzed as …
It’s The End of the World
From Slashdot: Human society is on track for a collapse in the next two decades if there isn’t a serious shift in global priorities, according to a new reassessment of a 1970s report, Vice reported. In that report — published in the bestselling book “The Limits to Growth” (1972) — a team of MIT scientists argued that industrial civilization was …
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