Blowing & Drifting

Around ten on Sunday night, I’d finished watching part of the HBO miniseries The Pacific (spoiler alert: the hero dies). As I waited for the DVD to rewind, I checked Twitter, which was exploding with messages about the imminent announcement by the president that Osama bin Laden was dead. I immediately switched over to NBC, [...]

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I spent the morning serving with three other Northfielders on a panel convened by the area United Way to allocate some of the UW’s 2010 campaign funds. The community campaign was fairly successful, though it didn’t reach its half-million dollar goal. (Full disclosure: each fall, I help run the Carleton campaign, which last year raised [...]

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I dunno what it was about Tax Day, but a lot of GOP-related nuttiness crossed my browser today: First, last Friday, the Democrats in the House nearly tricked the GOP majority into voting for an even more extreme budget than Paul Ryan’s nutto budget. Republicans were caught with their pants down Friday when Democrats pulled [...]

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As we traipsed around the halls of Julia’s elementary school on Thursday, enjoying all the craziness of the “Beyond Words” literacy festival, I was more and more impressed by the quality of the materials that the students had prepared for the festival – from Julia’s poem poster and other written work to woodblock prints and [...]

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I spent the evening at the artists’ talks and opening of “War Work: Artists Engage the Iraq War and Other Wars,” the new show at the Carleton art gallery. The talks were delivered by John Risseeuw, who makes paper objects to decry the epidemic of land mines (and to raise money to help victims of [...]

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With the start of classes just a few weeks away, it must be nearly departure time for the big old crane that’s loomed over Leighton Hall since June. Though I understand that the crane and the reroofing project to which it’s contributing have made it hard to work in Leighton this summer, the crane is [...]

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Perhaps because pretty much every aspect of society is going off the rails, I haven’t paid enough attention to the hearings to confirm Sonia Sotomayor. Judging by the Times’ coverage today and by a zillion tweets from liberal commentators like the guy behind DailyKos, today’s opening session was a chance for the Republican senators on [...]

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I was surprised this morning to discover that a blogger on the Motley Fool personal-finance website quoted me – or rather, an article I wrote a few years back on the US economy during World War II – in an op-ed on the need to move to renewable and green energy. This would be gratifying [...]

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The events in Iran are gripping both as they roil that country and possibly alter the world and as they are reflected in the social media, including especially Twitter. I’m confident that in four weeks – and in four years – we’ll know a lot more about the role of Twitter in facilitating the protests [...]

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I am trying to scan or photograph some of the better drawings I did for my just-concluded class at Carleton, but honestly, it’s tough to scan (or shoot) the drawings at high enough quality to make them look like they when you’re holding them in your hands. Here, though, is a decent shot of an [...]

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Perhaps as a way to distract myself from the colossal meltdowns that occur regularly at our house each evening between, say, 7:30 and 8:30, I’ll here post about two fantastic articles by Michael Lewis – the author of Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and some other good stuff – on the financial meltdown: “The End,” Portfolio, December [...]

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Remember the silly kerfuffle a few days ago when Andy Card, W’s chief of staff, insinuated, on the basis of the already-famous photo of a jacketless Obama working at the Oval Office desk, that our president probably didn’t have the right amount of respect for the presidency? It was stupid for Card to say in [...]

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I think I’m a little bit worn out, after yesterday’s frenzy of texting, Facebook posting, and blogging – just on the production end of things. Today was all about consumption, and here are three things worth your time. I. The new president, working in the Oval Office (from a slideshow by the Chicago Tribune): II. [...]

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Use the interwebs to throw shoes at the president:

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Last year’s resolutions were few but good. Exactly one year later, I can say that I achieved each of them, though I abandoned number 1 – “Eat no potato chips” – on July 1 after proving to myself that I could live without chips but chose not to. (I can quit at any time.) 2008 [...]

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