Tired Road Warrior

Two nights ago I watched the movie Everybody’s Fine, starring Robert De Niro as father and several other fine actors as his offspring.  In the movie Frank Goode, a widower played by De Niro, travels around the country visiting his adult children.  Learning their secrets leads first to introspection, then to a determination to make things right.  The important point for me was Goode’s desire to patch things up with his “less-than-perfect” kids.  To do this he needed to reconsider his past expectations for them.

(more…)

Traveling around southern Utah and northern Arizona, particularly in isolated areas, I’ve observed a wide variety of hogans (or hooghans), the primary traditional structure of the Navajo people.  When enjoying the Colorado Plateau, the older hogans seem very much a part of the natural landscape. 

(more…)

I occasionally witness or hear of primary and junior-sunday-school lesson horror stories.  Where very young Mormon children are subjected, to what I consider to be, very outrageous discussions of inappropriate topics.  Two notables examples:

• A lengthy and bleak discussion of the tribulations and horrors of the Last Days.
• A very descriptive lesson on the gory nature of the crucifixion of Christ, involving such details as driving nails in the hands and feet.

Kids need to be kids.  Growing up needs to be fun.  There is plenty of time to learn the details of the crucifixion and of the Last Days.  And I’m not sure that studying  the latter is ever necessary.  Learning to be good stewards of the Earth might be a better more positive subject.

In his book Working in the Shadows, Gabriel Thompson describes and analyzes the year he spent working undercover alongside Guatemalans, Mexicans, and others at a variety of extremely low paying jobs.  He quickly determined that the jobs, some of which were very dangerous, failed to provide enough income to survive at even the lowest standard of living.  Gabriel was generally successful at lasting 2 months at each job except two:  (1) his subterfuge is discovered at a chicken plant and he is fired and (2) he hangs up his delivery bike after seven weeks of risking his life in New York City traffic.  According to reviewer Frances Romero (Time Magazine, 8 Feb 2010, p. 16)  “Therein lies perhaps the only blemish on the book’s premise:  Thompson has the luxury to quit.”

(more…)

French artist Jean Francois Millet painted haunting, and sometimes bleak, scenes of ordinary rural life in the 19th century.  His painting The Sowers became the symbol of European liberalism and socialism.  Millet’s work, while popular in his own century and later with French Impressionists, gradually fell out of favor.  Modernism lost interest in images of the rural poor.

(more…)

Former Texas congressman Charlie Wilson, the principal supporter of US involvement with anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan, died on Wednesday of this week (10 Feb 2010).  He was very much the endearing rascal that American voters seem to adore.  His exploits in southcentral Asia were recently chronicled in the underappreciated movie “Charlie Wilson’s War.”

(more…)

The following was written in a review by Mary Pols of the book Devotion by Dani Shapiro:

“Devotion does not provide a template for finding your personal Jesus (or whoever).  It’s a history of Shapiro’s quest to explore her own faithlessness.  She grew up in an Orthodox household but cast aside her Hebrew religious study as a teenager.  As an adult, her sense of God was that if he existed, he was not a micromanager.  (”As far as I knew, he had never gotten me a parking space.”)  She wants to believe in something but doesn’t know what.”

(more…)

I found the following short bio in the book “Strength is What Remains” by Tracy Kidder.  The book is about a Burundian refugee’s horrific experiences in his homeland and in New York.  While the story of Deo is very inspirational, it is the life of one of side characters that really haunts me:

(more…)

While I was on my Mormon mission in the Franco-Belgian area in the 1960s, I found somebody’s list of the 100 most important novels of western civilization.  On the list were two novels by the french writer Albert Camus:  The Stranger (or The Outsider) and the Plague.  I purchased a copy of The Stranger and in short order read it.  I found it very compelling, perhaps in the same way other young people find J. D. Salinger’s “Catcher in the Rye” haunting.

(more…)

“The legacy of (Alan) Turing the mathematician rises above any possible sensationalism.  His contributions were supremely elegant and foundational.  He gifted us with wild leaps of invention, including much mathematical underpinnings of digital computation.  The highest award in computer science, our Nobel Prize, is name for him.

(more…)