Category: Shaking My Head
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Post #58: Badminton Scandal!
Last week at the London Olympics there was a kerfuffle over badminton, of all things. Apparently what happened is that four of the top female badminton teams (China among them) lost games on purpose because, oddly, losing a game would prove beneficial in later rounds of the competition, potentially allowing…
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Post #56: Out of Step, Out of Time
By now you’ve no doubt heard that the Boy Scouts of America, after a supposedly exhaustive conversation and study, has decided to uphold its policy of not allowing openly gay youth to serve as Scouts or openly gay adults to be affiliated with Scouting, either in a professional or mentor…
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Post #55: Home Ownership Vs. Braveheart
Last night I was safely ensconced in my air conditioned bedroom, cold beer in hand, recently started epic action on the tube (Braveheart) when the heavy rain started. I cursed it. I’d started the long movie early on purpose so I’d have time to watch it all. The storm began…
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Post #53: Pre-Order Purgatory
I have to vent for a minute about the sudden (or so it seems to me) availability to pre-order forthcoming whatever. Books, music, movies. You can buy anything in advance these days. Let’s say you do some searching to see what’s new out there. Whatever purveyor you’ve searched (iTunes, Amazon,…
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Post #37: Heavy Hearted
Heavy hearted this week. A teacher from St. Johnsbury, Vermont named Melissa Jenkins was lured from her house last Sunday night when the guy who used to snow plow her driveway called her out of the blue and said he and his wife were having car trouble just down the…
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Post #32: Why We Watch (The Jeremy Lin Show)
There’s often good cause to question our culture’s obsession with sports. Large chunks of it are dedicated to discussing, debating, observing, coddling, and paying for games while there are vastly more important issues (you know, like, say, poverty) who receive so much less face time relevant to their actual importance…
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Post #28: Completion Issues
So I used to be the kind of person who labored through whatever he was reading, determined to reach the end. Finishing was important to me then. Cue the cute girl who changed my point of view merely by suggesting an alternative. Cute girls are good at changing lives without…
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Post #26: “IF A GREAT MUSICIAN PLAYS GREAT MUSIC BUT NO ONE HEARS . . . WAS HE REALLY ANY GOOD?”
As someone who’s many times been walking through a subway station, been briefly inspired to pause at the quality of the busking musician I just walked past, wondering, how the hell could someone this good be playing for change?, this article was a revelatory gem. It’s about the violin virtuoso…
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Post #22: So Much Gray
There’s been some interesting debate in the wake of Amazon.com’s strange decision to urge its customers to scan items in brick and mortar stores and then receive a discount from Amazon if they buy said item through the website, rather than in the store, whether it be a Best Buy…
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Post #21: Where My Boys At?
An aspect of my NANOWRIMO experience not yet chronicled here is the amazing group of students at the high school where I teach who also took on the 50,000. A few reached their goal. Many came along for the ride and produced a substantial amount of writing. They thrilled and…
Benjamin Roesch 