May 19, 2026 Busy weekend! We said goodbye to a visiting friend from Oklahoma on Friday, and by Sunday we were at the Detroit Masonic Temple for “Candlelight: 90s Hip-Hop on Strings,” which was wonderfully fun and intimate in the smaller auditorium. The musicians were the Kalkaska String Quartet, based here in Michigan. Joe Jackson…
“One of the biggest roles of science fiction is to prepare people to accept the future without pain and to encourage a flexibility of the mind. Politicians should read science fiction, not westerns and detective stories.” – Arthur C. Clarke Translation: Greetings from the Land of the Anishinaabe, who are comprised of the Ojibwe (Chippewa), Odawa (Ottawa),…
August 4, 2025 Recently, I penned an opinion piece in the Tulsa World on the ways in which America is throwing away one of its most cost-effective methods of persuasion on the world stage: soft power. The Tulsa World version (limited to 600 words) is here. This came from a discussion I had with my…
September 24, 2024 “The New World forgets everything The Old World forgets nothing.” I FINALLY finished my summer reading project. Whew. “The Rediscovery of America” by Yale professor Ned Blackhawk, is not a light, summer beach read. It’s a large, textbook-sized tome (with 100 pages of notes!) that presents an in-depth picture of what happened…
The Persistence of Memory September 4, 2023 Do you ever read something, maybe while searching for something else, and you find it sticks with you? You may not fully remember it, or where you read it, but you find it resonates with you and keeps coming back? Here’s what I read and recalled: “The Mayor…
Shortly after the midterm elections this year, I wrote the following opinion piece for the Tulsa World. I always tell Editor Ginnie Netherton-Graham that I’m at least good for one piece per year… Column: Don’t believe the hype, recognize propaganda when you see it (tulsaworld.com) After enduring another election season filled with lies and half-truths,…
The CEO (and CIO, and VP of IT) have resigned. The board president/former CEO has come back from retirement, to quell any potential stockholder revolt. In the last month, stock prices have fallen 30%. A Mid-level IT Operations Director has been thrust into an interim VP of IT role, to stabilize a big, years-overdue project…
1/8/2021: Now that the 2020 Presidential Election is behind us (HA!), I’m coming back to this post I started back in November… Samuel L. Jackson. James Earl Jones, Charlie Sheen. Jack Welch. Winston Churchill. Joe Biden. Me. During the runup to the November election, much was made about Joe Biden’s verbal gaffes. People were concerned…
One of the hallmarks of civilization is specialization and the cooperation that comes with it. Between 1.8 Million and 12,000 years ago, we were all hunter-gatherers. Initially, there was no specialization. If you were presented with a tree full of nuts, you went for the nuts. “Sorry; I can’t gather those; I’m a berry-gatherer.” Same…
I had no idea earlier this year I would have read so much about virology. One tidbit: virologists have learned that viruses are something less than alive: they contain genetic information but cannot reproduce. They require a host that they can take over and make do their bidding. Once a bug is inside us, its’…