Posts

Reminiscing on a Spring Day

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  Right between the Ides of March and St Patty's day - perfect! Our MENSA Club celebrating a very different spring day - Apr, 6 yrs ago (True masters of the Y chromosome as you'll see later . . .) I was looking for something  different  and  light this month, appropriate for a spring day.  I have several pages of ideas for blog posts and/or commentaries for the newspaper  but everything seems too   heavy or philosophical, just not right for the occasion. So I say to myself, "Come on Dear Leader, it’s spring (and has been for quite a while this marvelous winter) so lighten up." Then it dawned on me: I have a deep catalogue of posts going back almost 20 years. Surely, I wasn’t a pedantic bore in ALL of them.  Yahoo, I wasn’t! (Pedantic, that is.) I found several from some years ago that I think fill the bill with a combo of  science,  humor and brilliant insights into human nature that I hope you find entertaining. (Or at least not too boring.)  Note: I have taken some

Home Schooling for Everyone?

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  An Old Guy’s View of the School Controversy    One parents' view As the Florence Nightingale of Bryn Mawr  I go about my duties quietly and without complaint, slaving night and day to make Mrs DL comfortable after her surgery. In fact, I actually made a meal the other day with three different ingredients that did NOT include water, wieners and beans! That said, I feel I can take a break from my caregiving to share some deep thoughts (from a shallow mind?) about the current state of education in the US. There was an article in the Star and Sickle back on 1/21 regarding the Anoka-Hennepin school board and their difficulty in selecting a president due to conflicting views of the board members. If you haven't been paying attention, this is just the latest example of a phenomenon not just here in Minnesota but across the country. Ostensibly it is about how much input parents should have to their kid’s curricula. While that is certainly part of it, I believe it is also a proxy for

Beware the Ides of January

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    And a Bored Dear Leader    Why, you ask? Because I am stuck at home in the cold staring at this                                (Rhetorically speaking this year . . .) Ah, the joys of winter - &%$##!                               . . .   Rather than this Walking on the beach in Charleston SC (and wasting good money on golf .)   Yup, we're still here. Mrs DL selfishly wanted to go there with two good knees - can you believe it?! So she will be having surgery this month with a devoted Dear Leader by her side. (Well, not by her side during the surgery but, you know, later.) Anyway, if one has to be stuck here better this year than last. So as I look outside with my nose pressed up against the window it occurs to me that this is the perfect time to clean up some loose ends i.e. ideas that I thought I would write about but kept getting interrupted by myself with other things that seemed more important at the time. Since we're all bundled up and have nothing better to do, l

Special Winter Solstice Story 2023

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  A Solstice Epiphany Say, the sun comes up in same place every year on the Solstice - huh (A pale version of this story will allegedly be in the Star Tribune commentaries this week (18-24) sometime - best guess is Thur 21st. This version is much better!) As perhaps my last solstice story I want this one to be different. I would also like to share a deep (by Dear Leader standards) thought that came to me while writing it.  Part of this epiphany is a result of my  ( self-described)  wildly popular   Equinox post a few months ago.  For many years I have been writing about – and taken credit for – the return of the sun on the winter solstice, hopefully in a semi-humorous way. Had I taken the time and effort to do the same deep dive about the solstice as I did on the equinox I would have discovered that I have unknowingly had a lot of help from many others around the world in my efforts. (Of course those posts would not have been nearly as entertaining.) Anyway, I want to do - no, I owe yo