Sunday, August 7

I heard one of the best attempts at explaining why there is suffering while attending the First United Methodist Church service today with my son in Waxahachie.

Rev. Joseph Nader of the University of Texas at Arlington campus ministry shared his views using Psalm 22 and connecting Genesis’s giving in to temptation and making that famous free will choice to the promise in Revelations that eventually there will once again be no more tears.

In the interim we should take on the suffering of others so as to help and support each other. 

My son and I had a good discussion afterwards about - if God knows everything in advance, did he know Adam and Eve would eat the apple and if he did what the implications of that might be.

Monday, August 8

Shared with my daughter my view that Plochman’s is the best mustard.  It has been made near Chicago since 1852.  It can be a little hard to find.  I get it at Kroger.  A parent should pass along key information.

Saturday, August 6

Dad passed 38 years ago today in 1973.  I was 13.  The Senate Watergate hearings had been going on all summer, starting May 17 and concluding August 7.  I had been glued to our T.V. set in Dearborn Heights, Michigan watching, until it was time to spend a couple weeks with my sister, brother-in-law and brand new nephew in Niles.  It was there we were called and told Dad had been taken to the hospital by ambulance the night before after going out for ice cream with Mom at the Stroh’s ice cream parlor near the local Farmer Jack’s grocers.  We left immediately and drove the four hours or so.  When we arrived at the hospital we were informed, Mom, sister and I that Dad had passed during the night from a burst pancreas.

I think he would have enjoyed watching with me my daughter’s horse riding lesson today.  He could have sat next to me on the bleacher and told me it reminded him of his days back on the farm in Italy where he met Mom and my sisters were born.  At 51 now, the age he was then, I am coming to terms with the DNA he gave me and enjoying the memories of our short time together like a finely aging wine, the kind I watched him make in our basement.

Friday, August 5

In 1977 I came across a cool book while a freshman at the University of Michigan’s Alice Lloyd dorm.  I mention the dorm because if not for their “community courses” offered only to residents, I would not have read The Human Use of Human Beings, Cybernetics and Society - 1950, by Norbert Wiener.  Each month we were assigned a topic to read up on then discuss as a “community.”  Last month I found on Amazon the paperback I remembered reading back then available for one penny plus shipping.  It has a cool cover of a head with various compartments in it that contain cubby hole like items.  It is about the relationship between computer technology and the social sciences.  Professor Wiener taught at MIT and was known for among many things, getting his Ph.D. from  Harvard at age 18.

Thursday, August 4^th

The 34th straight day of 100 degree plus heat.  Today it will reach 109.  We may need periodic “brown outs” as the electrical grid is being strained to the max and Texas is buying power from Mexico and other states.  Some cities have begun water rationing, asking homeowners to water only twice a week.  Additional shelters are being created for the homeless to act as “cool zones” where they can come in from the heat to air conditioning and get water and pass the time watching movies.  My daughter worries for the horses at the ranch she volunteers at.  They try to alternate the horses who can spend the day in the barns and those that can stay out at night once the sun sets.

Wednesday, August 3

My primary areas of interest these days are neuroscience and my relationship with God.  I just read two great books that overlap both these areas.  Incognito, The Secret Lives of the Brain by neuroscientist David Eagleman and God’s Brain, by anthropologist Lionel Tiger and psychiatrist Michael McGuire.  Both books shed even more light on the developments in the understanding of our conscious minds.  The books helped me further speculate on the laws governing the action of all things and forces, especially as reagrds to a collective conscious.

Tuesday, August 2

Debt crisis averted…debt ceiling raised.  Apparently, the United States has in fact actually defaulted in some form or fashion three times in its history. First in 1814, then in the 1930s and in 1971 when President Nixon removed the need for gold to back-up American currency.  I think we should go back to requiring gold to be linked to our currency since it seems our treasury prints money “willy-nilly” now.

Sunday, July 31

            Stayed up until midnight to watch the first hour of MTV as originally aired on August 1, 1981 to commemorate their 30th anniversary.  The first music video was the Buggles doing Video Killed the Radio Star.  For us trivia aficionados, the second one was by Pat Benetar.

Monday, August 1

It has been said that the highest praise of God consists in the denial of Him by the atheist, who finds creation so perfect he can dispense with a creator.

Marcel Proust (1921)