Europe

Several years ago, before the movies and the hype, I somehow stumbled into The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo.  After finishing it, I immediately read the second book in the trilogy, which had just been translated into English, but it ended in a cliff-hanger and wouldn’t be available in English for another 6 months or [...]

Daniel faced a serious problem.  Darius the king had been tricked by his princes into outlawing prayer.  But Daniel felt beholden to pray to his God.  The society in which he lived restricted his personal freedoms more than his religious society did.  In fact, his religious community went underground due to the persecutions and restrictions of the [...]

How Americans voted in this election can be directly correlated to whom they trust more (or whom they distrust more):  business or government.  How did your trust and distrust impact the way you voted? Discuss.

Unable to sleep a few nights ago, I sought mind-deadening through cable TV. I chanced upon a movie I thought would do the job — a murder mystery set in a mountain abbey in 14th Century Italy. I didn’t get what I expected. Instead, the movie, The Name of the Rose, starring Sean Connery and [...]

Last night I had a dream about my wallet.  The external coin purse on my wallet has a zip closure, and in the dream, the zipper was broken in both directions, and I had no way to keep the coins inside.  And there were so many coins.  They were spilling everywhere, and I realized I [...]

“There is but one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power!” — Gandalf to Saruman. Hawkgrrrl recently summarized Jonathan Haidt’s thesis, expressed in The Righteous Mind, of how people develop pronounced liberal or conservative tendencies as a combination of both genetics and experience (see here). I also wrote about Haidt’s ideas about how [...]

Peter Pan was a wonderful story for me as a six-year old when the Broadway show was first televised by NBC to help market the new-fangled color TVs. Even though we didn’t have the money for color TV, seeing pirates and flying children cavort above the stage even in black-and-white made the program then the [...]