I have enjoyed and purchased his music, but knew nothing of the biolgraphy of Abdullah Ibrahim. He and Ahmad Jamal gone within a very few years of each other.
RIP
With a little help from my digital “friend,” I migrated more than 2100 old journal entries from text and markdown, as old as 1993, to DayOne. This runs contrary to my “plain text” bias, but, well, I love DayOne.
Now I’m gradually retracing my steps in the late 90s from Calvinism to Orthodoxy.
Pew has a new political taxonomy with a test to see where you fit. I guessed correctly where I would fit, but man, did I ever hate about half the questions. I’m too aware of trade-offs.
The machine appeared
In the distance, singing to itself
Of money. Its song was the web
They were caught in, men and women
Together. The villages were as flies
To be sucked empty.
God secreted
A tear. Enough, enough,
He commanded, but the machine
Looked at him and went on singing.
R.S. Thomas, Other
(Thomas also has a poem titled “The Other.” This one I found in a Tweet, concluding that The Other couldn’t be, in context, what my muse was referring to.)
Reading Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. 📚 One of those extremely influential books that many allude to (i.e., “Protestant work ethic”) but few, I think, have read.
Also finished Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Akroyd – my first Agatha Christie. #BucketList?
With all the UFO/UAP stuff flooding popular media lately, it was time to update my vaccination.
So I poked around in Fermi Paradox and the physics of interstellar transport. Added metadata and then went to file it digitally.
I had no apt folder, but settled on “Travel.”
Power came back after 20 1/2 hours. I should have bought enough generator to power the air conditioner.
Internet was down over much of the city as well. It seems that Metronet has a virtual monopoly on Internet in my fair city. They got that back up before we got power.
A reminder of fragility.
We have been without power for almost 16 hours now (we have a household generator that powers the basic necessities) and also without Internet. (That brief storm did a heck of a lot of damage.) So I will be watching things here even less than usual.
The Department of Defense de-Christianizing the LDS Church was clumsy, but they were working in an area where it’s hard to be sufficiently agile. The Legal Spirits podcast explains (and the explanation is mercifully short).
Granted, I’m a fan of Apple, but I draw the line at sitting through the WWDC. A I need to know I’ll learn from news reports and changes to the product lineup at their website.
Xi Jinping arrived in North Korea on Monday for a state visit. The Chinese president’s first overseas trip this year will showcase China as a global power capable of friendly relations even with troublemakers.
Economist World in Brief.
Ummmm, like China and North Korea share a border, right?
Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, formally known as the Secretary of Defense, warned on June 6 that Europe faced what he called an invasion of dangerous ideologies arriving by sea, linking immigration to the legacy of the D-Day landings in remarks in Normandy.
Ummmm. Like, Normandy is in Europe, right?
Indiana and Tennessee Declare June as Nuclear Family Month.
Not Invented Here: The late Patriarch Ilya of Georgia declared a Day of Family Purity and Respect for Parents, which ended up, and may have begun, opposite an International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia and Biphobia.
If your right-hemisphere doesn’t recoil instinctively from the Arc de Trump, I’m not sure these left-hemisphere arguments will sway you.
Michael Jochum, The Lounge Act at the end of the Empire.
Mark your calendar for yesterday. Rod Dreher is back in the USA, and is surprised to be so giddy about it.
How giddy? An entire post where not once was the sky about to fall! That’s how giddy.
There sure are a lot of enthusiastic people watching Arsenal vs. Paris Saint Germain live. Who knew?
I’m a boomer from the subset that, at age 77, can sit in front of the computer, catching up on paperwork and reading, with Crosby, Stills, Nash (and sometimes Young) playing, fairly loud, but it’s background music to my ears. I know I can because that’s what I’m currently doing.
I will never presume to write another word about UFC on the White House Lawn, because I’ll never top Kevin D. Williamson.
My hard-working slacker grandson graduates HS Sunday. He turned off his alarm and went back to sleep this morning, and would have missed a job interview at Loews had my son not noticed. He wants to become an F1 mechanic.
Peggy Noonan, Becoming Who You Are Ain’t for Sissies, was a balm for me.
If I were worried about grocery bills (and I suspect that some on MB are worried), I would print and pore over How to Eat Well on the Cheap - The Dispatch (gift link).
Ohmigosh! I’ve known of Christian Wiman as a poet for many years now, but (1) I’m not sure I’ve really sampled him and (2) his poems collected in the volume Christian Poetry in America Since 1940 has really whetted my appetite. For instance:
ALL MY FRIENDS ARE FINDING NEW BELIEFS
All my friends are finding new beliefs.
This one converts to Catholicism and this one to trees.
In a highly literary and hitherto religiously-indifferent Jew
God whomps on like a genetic generator.
Paleo, Keto, Zone, South Beach, Bourbon.
Exercise regimens so extreme she merges with machine.
One man marries a woman twenty years younger
and twice in one brunch uses the word verdant;
another’s brick-fisted belligerence gentles
into dementia, and one, after a decade of finical feints and teases
like a sandpiper at the edge of the sea,
decides to die.
Priesthoods and beasthoods, sombers and glees,
high-styled renunciations and avocations of dirt,
sobrieties, satieties, pilgrimages to the very bowels of being…
All my friends are finding new beliefs
and I am finding it harder and harder to keep track
of the new gods and the new loves,
and the old gods and the old loves,
and the days have daggers, and the mirrors motives,
and the planet’s turning faster and faster in the blackness,
and my nights, and my doubts, and my friends,
my beautiful, credible friends.