Quotations 
Quotation: A case for Ron Santo
“During his career Ron Santo was a nine-time All-Star. He finished in the top ten in MVP voting four times. He had the fifth highest RBI total of all major league players during the 1960s (topped only by Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Harmon Killebrew and Frank Robinson). During that period no player in the National […]
Quotation: Assuming too much
“I act as though tomorrow is guaranteed, completely unconcerned with every contraction of my heart, expansion of my lungs, flow of oxygenated blood to my brain. I don’t even consider the possibility that a random accident or illness could irrevocable change my life. It obviously goes without saying that I will have shelter, be able […]
Quotation: Starbucks, the gateway drug
“Starbucks was the gateway drug to specialty coffee. Customers tried it there first and then graduated to the often-superior products sold by indie shops. Even Duane Sorensen, owner of the proudly anti-corporate Stumptown Coffee in Portland, Oregon, concedes that Starbucks raised standards in the industry. Ward Barbee, publisher of the coffee publication Fresh Cup, is […]
Quotation: The Hallelujah Factor
“It seems that Leonard Cohen’s strange and beautiful song, which he spent a year wrestling with and was never entirely sure about, has – thanks to over-exposure and endless cover versions – not only entered the mainstream (making Simon Cowell yet more money along the way) but become all-purpose musical shorthand for any kind of […]
Quotation: Advent
Advent isn’t waiting for joy to arrive. It’s joy already here, waiting to be brought forth. It asks us to be still enough to feel the joy kicking and moving inside, to be aware of what’s growing within and care for it so that it might be born. -Mary Marrocco, The Catholic Register (Hat Tip: […]
Fatherless families
American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn’t declining, it’s increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was […]
Quotation: The Facebook trade-off
In exchange for making our social lives more convenient, Facebook seizes the right to transform our sociality into commercially useful information, turn our relationships into market research and use that data to anticipate and shape our future selves with the ads it calculates that we should be presented with. It manages our friendships and then […]
Nickelback’s stripper song
Nickelback has always seemed to me to be emblematic of everything that is wrong with mainstream rock: trite, monotonous, cliched–a least common denominator for people who still listen to hair metal stations on satellite radio. I was unfortunate enough to live through the 80’s, and even have to admit to seeing Motley Crue, Cinderella, Bon […]