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Alumni game

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Yesterday we drove to Fredonia, New York and the campus of the State University at Fredonia. Dods Hall was the site of this year’s alumni game which featured many of Fredonia States former basketball stars including our son Devin. The age of the players spanned at least twenty years. It was fun to watch Devin … Read more

Hosea

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I will lead you into the desert, and there I will speak to your heart. Hosea 2:14 Campaign 2008 and the news media in general have driven me into the desert. I’m really blessed because the onslaught of media both print, internet and televised has driven me to silence and contemplation.  It’s been a gradual … Read more

35th Anniversary

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Thirty-five years ago today I graduated from the United States Navy Hospital Corps School at Great Lakes, Illinois. I was a member of Company 7316 as we were officially known. I was eighth in a class of sixty-eight other new Hospital Corpsman that crossed the stage that day. We were mostly draftees who chose to join the Navy rather than take our chances wandering in the jungles of South East Asia. Some of us would later serve with the Fleet Marine Force as HM-8404’s and many would later face peril somewhere else. I often wondered if any of my shipmates were injured in Beirut in the 1980’s.

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Guns not butter

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Tonight’s Olean Times Herald had a front page item that proclaimed that our new federal budget will break Medicare. The Times Herald is a pretty conservative paper. They have been unabashed apologists for much of the Bush agenda. Earlier today I read that for the first time in American history the defense budget has 12 zeros in it. That’s a one-trillion dollar budget for war. We’re not really defending anything except the status quo. The status quo in the United States is the military-industrial complex. We’re not fighting conventional forces yet we continue to fund battleships, aircraft carriers, submarines as if we were still locked head to head with the former Soviet Union.

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Ash Wednesday

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Today is Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent this year. Today many will return from Lenten services with ashes on their heads. I’ve been thinking about what I’m going to do for Lent this year. I’m going to spend more time in contemplative prayer. I’m being drawn more and more to silence and solitude. … Read more

Letterman on Bush

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Dave Letterman has been regularly mocking President Bush with his great moments in presidential history spot each night. He’s going to have to come up with a new spot next year when President Bush leaves office. Will it be John McCain, Hillary or Obama? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cznbaMdZMK4]

No news is good for me

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Life has been very busy and I’ve not had time to record my thoughts here in a number of days. I also missed the second anniversary of my entry into blogging. I’m grateful to all the folks who stop by and read my thoughts and in turn share their own. Blogging and blog reading has become a major pastime for me. I read the RSS feeds of over a dozen blogs each day. I get most of my news from blogs. In the past couple of months I’ve stopped listening to and/or reading daily newspapers and televised news. For the most part I’m more contented. I’ve found their constant hype of Brittany Spears, Election 2008 and other items to be a distraction from the problems faced by real people everywhere on the planet.

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When the teacher is ready

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There’s an old axiom that when the teacher is ready the pupil or pupils will present themselves. Today at work I sat down in our high school library to install software on a new MacBook. A student next to me had an older Dell Inspiron 1100 and I asked him if it was his and how much he’d paid for it. He said he traded an XBox 360 for it. He was running Windows 2000 and was using Microsoft Write to do some word processing. I told him about Software for Starving Students and how I could give him a CD-ROM that had 57 open source programs on it that would help him use a better word processor like Open Office. He seemed somewhat indifferent. Just then some other young boys began to congregate around me and ask questions about the MacBook.

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