Musical Wanderer

After the senate majority rejected background checks after yet another massacre this week, the NRA needs to search for a new challenge.  It may seem like a reach, but I have come up with their next seemingly impossible goal: legalization of the sale to the public of all military arms: machine guns, grenades, rocket launchers, tanks, and planes. Folks shopping for the family machine gun or armored car to take the kids to school At first one would say this is absurd, but there are reasonable points that can be made in its favor.  The Second Amendment reads as follows:  "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed."  When the founding fathers wrote the Bill of Rights, the militia was armed with muskets and pistols.  Two hundred years later, the militia is known as the National Guard and it has machine guns, grenades, tanks, and aircraft.  It is...

For over twenty years, I've been earning part of my living as a professional singer in churches, usually as part of the choir but sometimes as a cantor.  Most of the churches I've sung at have been Catholic or Episcopal, where the western classical music tradition is represented in the liturgical music.  Though both churches and their services adhere to the same basic ideas and have many similarities in traditions, there are distinctions between the two that in some ways define each. The most obvious difference is the clergy.  Catholic clergy are all male, frequently foreign born.  In the past many came from the "old country" of Ireland which had abundant resources of young catholic men desperate for work.  The Celtic Miracle absorbed many would be priests into more worldly work, so today many of the clergy are from South America and the Philippines, where the allure of a lifetime career in the church is still a enticing alternative to a life of uncertain po...

Yesterday some crazy person killed three people in Boston.   Yesterday some crazy people killed 55 people in Iraq.   Every front page in America has the first story, with pictures, information on the victims, reflection on what it means.  You have to dig around to find out the second story happened.  It's covered more in non-US publications and news sources.  The same day four or five people (no one knows for sure, no film crews are there, no photographers) were killed by flying drones in Pakistan.   You really have to dig around to find out about the third story.  It would be embarrassing to say crazy people killed the people in Pakistan, because we elected them: our last two presidents, congressmen, senators.  The people that operate the drones could even be neighbors or classmates. Nobody has claimed responsibility for the bombings.  All the killers are anonymous.  In Boston, people assume a foreigner since it was a bomb, although w...

A couple months ago, I bought a toy that's over 70 years old on ebay.  It's a metal toy model of a tank the British army used between the two world wars.  The raised lettering on the bottom reads "Dinky Toys  Made in Britain."  The turret turns around and the tracks made of small chains move, so that you can move the tank on the ground or a table. It definitely looks like something from a different time.  The body of the vehicle has lots of rivets and rigid shapes that recalls the appearance of a steamship.  Which would make sense as the tank was thought of as a land battleship, which would stand at the edge of a battlefield and engage enemy  land battleships while smaller tanks raced around the battlefield.  Its turret resembles that of a battleship, while two guns extending from the sides of the chassis that resemble the secondary guns of a battleship for defending against smaller ships.  It was a familiar vision to Britain after decade...

Osama bin Laden won. Yes, he is dead.  But his attack on the US in 2001 has hurt the United States as much as any attack in our history.  Loss of life, treasure and stature has left the US bereft of young lives interupted by wars, an economy in taters, and the idea of America itself at a low ebb. Yes there have been wars with much greater bloodshed.  Over 400,000 Amricans died in the second world war.   But ten years after the USS Arizona sank beneath the water in Pearl Harbor, Americans were reaching for unheard of opportunities in education, work, and equal rights for all citizens.  The economy  was the unrivaled leader of the world, such that it rebuilt other nations' economies ravaged by war, giving hundreds of millions of people new hope for the future.  Every people looked to the US as the model of freedom, particularly billions of people soon to free themselves of colonial rule.  Can the nation make the same claim ten years after  ...

Today, my email changed forever.  Hotmail was replaced with Outlook, and an old friend was replaced by HAL.  The first time someone sent me a message from hotmail, I thought it was some sort of porn affiliated program from the name.  Wouldn't have believed that it would become part of my identity for countless companies and programs. I first signed up for hotmail when I was traveling around in India and Nepal in 2000.  I had email with compuserve on my computer back in the states that I eventually ditched, but wanted to send notes to folks when I found an internet cafe in Kathmandu.  I can still see the little place, two computers, old monitors, and a backup system for when the power went down, as it always does in that part of the world.  A garage door came down over the shop at night so nobody would steal the priceless computers. I sent descriptions of my travels to friends back home.  Some printed off the descriptions at work and saved them to r...