March 2, 2008...10:44 pm
Been busy doing and busy thinking
It’s been busy and I’ve not been able to post things as I’d like.
I had a couple of good ideas… well, almost ideas. But those passed me by.
The chainsaw has been busy. As have the table and mitre saws. Things are being taken down and other things are being built up. It’s that time of year.
Trying to familiarize myself with more of the native plants of this area and spending more time figuring out the local geology. No spelunking for me; I am just not that batty.
One of my New Year’s Resolutions was to finish (finally) my first go-thru on Steven Jay Gould’s The Structure of Evolutionary Theory. It’s not the 1300+ pages that makes the reading take so long, but the teeny tiny words therein and the complicated principles he discusses. I suspect it will take at least 3, maybe 4, more go-thru’s to get half a handle on the contents. It’s quite a bit more difficult to read and understand than the last Harry Potter book - and that too me nearly 6 hours of uninterrupted reading to complete.
I also intend to complete reading David Blackbourn’s The Conquest of Nature. In between Gould and Blackbourn, in those shorter windows, I like to take in snipetts from the “best of series,” focusing for the moment on The Best American Essays of 2007. I still need to complete at least 3 of the 2006 series that include science and nature writings.
Snaggled a copy of the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader: Plunges into History. Silly me thought this was like one of those 101 things you can do with your… errr… cat. It’s actually well-formed and accurate. Unlike the Devotional Intellectual which I thought lucky to get at $4 on the discount rack at Borders. Didn’t take all that long to discover why a hardcover published in 2007 was on that rack.
Any history PhD who posits that John Quincy Adams died in 1825 - just one year after being elected to the presidency - ought to give his cap and gown back to whomever gave it to him. JQA’s federal political career might have essentially ended at about that time, but he did not leave that office until 3 years later. But that was not the only mistake I discoverd in just the first 50 pages. What a waste of $4.
Yesterday, I drove up to State College to watch the high school indoor state track & field championships. Not a bad drive up, but the return down along the Juniata River is so much more picturesque than the trip north.
Most of the performances were so-so. The boys 200m was exciting, with 1 + 2 going nose-to-nose right to the finish with some of the top times indoors this year. A girl went over 13 feet in the pole vault. She made it look so easy. And that is sooooo far up to be slung by a fibreglass stick.
They held an induction for the PA High School T&F Hall of Fame during a break in the action. 11 people got in, only 2 of whom were women and for at least 3 who have been long dead. I saw the list of all inductees. A really impressive group. It was announced that over 400 athletes and 100 coaches remain in consideration. Must be a once-nominated-always-considered process.
But the 60 or so who are in were top-notch not only in pennsyltucky high schools but also later on the national scene during college and beyond. Leroy Burrel. Tony Darden. Rocket Ismail. Brian Milne. Paul Vandegrift. Hyleas Fountain. Kim Gallagher. Amy Rudolph. Elaine Sobansky. Dawn Sowell. Lauryn Williams. Candy Young.
Fountain and Williams may well be on this year’s Olympic team.
I was disappointed to see so few kids from central PA at the meet. It could well have been just another invitational from Philadelphia. Except that smellidelphia has no hydraulic track like that at Penn State.
And so I now will try to read an essay that starts with this line:
“I realize that in attempting to write on the subject of personal holiness, I encounter interference in my mind between my own sense of the life of the soul and understandings that are now pervasive and very little questioned.”
by Marilynne Robinson from The American Scholar.
Learned last night that one of my buddies from the teenage years may be a head honcho in a Baltimore-area cult. Oh, the thoughts about that.
2 Comments
March 4, 2008 at 9:44 pm
I have little time for free reading except this week. I had more problem with “Freedom Evolves” than with “The Structure of Evolutionary Theory” but that is just me.
What cult would that be?
March 5, 2008 at 11:08 am
The cult which started in Maine as The Bible Speaks. Their leader, Carl Stevens, moved them out of Maine after the authorities started looking at them due to financial inproprieties and allegations of cult-type activities.
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