The Big Burn
Timothy Egan’s “The Big Burn” is another in his collection of smartly written books about important times in our history.
All posts filed under: Random DJB Thoughts
This is where I put anything that is not easily categorized…
Summer Saturdays are the Best
The joyful photograph at the top of the post – which comes from the wonderful photo/blog Real People Eat Local (check it out for their delicious pictures) – is a perfect encapsulation of our day. Summer Saturdays really are the best! Today started relatively early (by Saturday standards) as Andrew had to be at the Cathedral for a choral practice at 8 a.m. Our car is in the shop this weekend waiting for a leaky fuel pump to be repaired (one never wants to smell gasoline in your home garage), so Candice, Andrew and I had to juggle our schedules around the availability of Zipcars – the wonderful car sharing service we swear by. Because we have some 25 Zipcars within about 3 blocks of our house, we picked one up (a little Honda) and were on our way by 7:30. Urban living is great! Swim team meets the past six weeks have their own charm, but they have disrupted the Saturday morning ritual Candice and I established this year. So we were pleased to …
Divisionals
How hot can it be? Shortly after 8 a.m. this morning the sun topped the trees and began to bake our group of swim team parents who had camped out poolside to cheer for the Gators in the annual Divisionals swim meet. We were competing in Division E this year, which was a stretch for our ladies and gentlemen. But the team gave it their best and ended up 4th out of the six-team division. We had some amazing efforts by our swimmers, including a new pool record set by one of Claire’s best friends in 15-18 girls breaststroke. And they did it with temperatures nearing 100 and the heat index going to 105 degrees and higher. How hot can it be? It was brutal. Andrew made divisionals this year in two races, the 15-18 boys 200 meter medley relay (swimming backstroke) and the 100 meter breaststroke. The relay boys were up against some tough competition, but knocked time off their personal best. But it was in the breaststroke where Andrew had his best race …
A Crooked Road
One of Nashville’s best songwriters begins his newest album with the following words: “I walk a crooked road to get to where I’m going, to get to where I’m going I walk a crooked road and only when I’m looking back I see the straight & narrow I see the straight & narrow when I walk a crooked road.“ Darrell Scott has written great tunes for the Dixie Chicks (Long Time Gone), Patty Loveless (You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive) and dozens more. His last album, a gem entitled Modern Hymns, showcased “Songs and artists/songwriters whose music shook me as a kid (with ears nearly as big as my heart). They guided the way to my own path as a singer-songwriter . . . These songs speak to the human condition . . . in all of our aching and beautiful glory . . . These songs are the truth . . .“ Scott has a wonderful gravelly voice and is a masterful musician. I love his work. So I eagerly snapped up the album when …
A Takoma Park July 4th Celebration
Yes, that’s a “precision drill team” made up of environmentally friendly reel mowers you see in the picture. (See my update at the end of the post) Welcome to the Takoma Park July 4th Parade. Folks who live in the Washington area have a wide range of Independence Day festivities to choose from. You can have your fireworks on the National Mall, as far as I’m concerned. My favorite thing is to hop on the Metro, take a short ride to the next station, and then head into downtown Takoma Park, MD, for the annual 4th of July parade. We’ve done it for years, and it takes some major event to pull us away from this family tradition. Takoma Park is known – to put it mildly – for its political activism and progressive outlook. For instance, it is the only “nuclear free zone” in the DC metropolitan area. Takoma Park also has a well-deserved reputation as being a bit quirky. Many of our friends from the pool and the twins’ schools live in the …
Happy 60th, Helen and Tom
Today – June 30, 2010 – is the 60th anniversary of the wedding of my mother and father: Helen and Tom Brown. Mom passed away on January 1, 1998, but my father is getting ready to celebrate his 85th birthday next Monday, July 5th. I spent a day with him last Sunday and was reminded again of how much Mom and Daddy (I am from the South) loved each other and how that has affected my view of the world. My Mom was generally considered to be a saint, and dying at a relatively young age from cancer only cemented that view in all our minds. I wrote her birthday greetings on what would have been her 78th birthday a couple of years ago, and that pretty much sums up how we all feel about her. My father is a bit more complicated…which also makes him very interesting. Mother once described my father as having a mouth “always turned up in a perpetual smile” but apparently it wasn’t always so. Several years ago Daddy sent …
Playing Favorites
I picked up Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player during the Politics & Prose sale a couple of weeks ago. Only a handful of the writers were familiar and the inclusion of Michael Jordan (yes, that MJ) and the fictional Crash Davis in the list of favorites indicated this anthology was going to take a different tack from the typical list of baseball’s greatest hits. Top of the Order is, at best, uneven. I couldn’t wait to get through some of the self-indulgent essays (see Pat Jordan on Tom Seaver) which were more about the author than I cared to read. At their best, some of the essays captured the special nature of fandom (see the obsessive Darin Strauss on Mariano Rivera) where you didn’t mind the intrusion of the writer. Steve Almond leads off with a strong piece on Rickey Henderson that hooks the reader into this quirky collection. Neal Pollack writes a terrific essay on Greg Maddux that demonstrates how dominant Mad Dog was through so many years …
Economic meltdown, transitions, and roots music: Recent books on the nightstand
My last post said More to Come… was going on sabbatical, but in cleaning up the nightstand today I realized I’d been holding four recent books that I planned to review on the blog. These represent my eclectic interests (which is what More to Come… is all about) as well as priorities in my life at the moment. So in the hope that I can now hold to my promise to take the blog on sabbatical, I’ll pass along thumbnail reviews of the four and put them in my mental “checked off” category. The first is Michael Lewis’ terrific (as in well-written) and sobering (as in scary) The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. This is, by far, the best known of the four and much has been written about the story of three small hedge fund managers and a bond salesman who knew what was coming before the economic meltdown of 2008. I don’t need to elaborate because Steven Pearlstein said it all in a Washington Post review I highly recommend. As Pearlstein writes, …
Twenty Dollars Per Gallon
The pace has picked up with my day job, so More to Come…the DJB Blog will go on sabbatical while I focus on other priorities. But before that happens, I want to share with you the work of Chris Steiner, an engineer-turned-journalist who has been writing about society’s relationship to energy. I had the opportunity to spend time with Chris recently while he was speaking at the National Main Streets Conference. A writer for Forbes and The Steiner Post, Chris is the author of a thoughtful book entitled $20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better. This 2009 work takes the “inevitable rise” in oil prices over time and imagines how each $2 increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline will change our lives. Perhaps counter-intuitively, he sees the change as largely positive. The rise is inevitable because oil is a finite resource and demand worldwide is escalating at an unsustainable pace. For instance if China – which now has 4 …
Lena Horne, RIP
One of my father’s favorite singers, Lena Horne, passed away yesterday at age 92. My father can’t carry a tune in a bucket and he can play only two songs on the piano – St. Louis Blues and Teddy Wilson’s Body and Soul – but my father had a great collection of 78s from the pre-war era and he knows his jazz singers. TB was so right about Lena Horne. As the web site The Music’s Over but the Songs Live On noted, Lena Horne was a popular and influential jazz vocalist and actress who broke many color barriers over a career that spanned nearly seven decades, and her 1943 recording of “Stormy Weather” is arguably the most recognized song of its era. Horne was not only a multi-Grammy award-winning singer, she was also an award-winning star of stage, screen and television. She was also an activist during the Civil Rights era, which is where I encountered her after the introduction by my father. The New York Times obituary recalled the difficulties she faced as …
