We’re 12 days away from being rid of Bugout Joe Biden and his technocratic though dimwitted minions. As the coming months unfold and more and more institutions come to realize that backing the Biden organized crime family was not the smart play, we are likely to give thanks that Biden and his monkeys, well, bidened everything up. Their incompetence has been the country’s salvation.
Meta’s decision to roll back its Big Brother approach to censoring speech will help the battle against misinformation far more than its more Orwellian efforts ever could. Counterintuitively as it may seem, this is the way to cultivate a culture of truth.
There are things we can know about 2025 within a minuscule margin of error, and it’s worthwhile to know at least some of them ahead of time, for planning purposes. Many of them are things humans cannot change. Others are things that humans could change but probably won’t, for good or bad reasons.
It’s New Year’s Day. As a kid, I noted it as the day Christmas ended. The music cut off on the radio, the lights went off around the neighborhood and, curiously, the snowmen came down all over, too.
In Austria, 206 years ago this Christmas Eve, one of the most enduring religious (as opposed to secular retail) Christmas songs was sung for the first time. In Athens, Ohio, 10 years ago, I did what I used to do every year after Christmas Eve midnight Mass (no longer held at midnight, I’m sad to say). Savoring, yes, the silence of the night, I would take a long walk through town, breathing it all in and thinking of a place now all buttoned up for (as Clement Moore put it in a poem published five years after the introduction of “Silent Night”) “a long winter’s nap.” Students mostly gone home, residents in their houses enjoying their own Christmas traditions, there were quiet and peace.
Does joy end when the clock strikes midnight, closing out Christmas Day? Tim Butler’s new twelve days of Christmas devotional booklet the Joys of Christmas, which is our Christmas gift to you, invites us to embark on a journey to “store up” Christmas joy well beyond December 25. Following the Medieval meditative list known as the Joys of Mary, often encountered through the carol of the same name, we will explore a total of thirteen “joys” that all of us can experience from the life of Jesus.
In my elementary school, we weren’t given grades of A B C D F as was the standard before and since. Instead, New Haven R-II school employed a different set of letters that meant the same thing. They were E S M I F. I have no idea how this came to pass, but I hope it was because some person seeking a doctorate in education realized that his dissertation was due tomorrow and he had nothing. Frankly, I could get behind that kind of education theory. Beats modern pedagogy, anyway.
Last week, I reviewed the Unicomp New Model M, the torchbearer for a line of keyboards that elicits reverent voices and knowing nods from those who have used one. Cross over to the fruity side of things and there was a similarly admired board, the Apple Extended Keyboard, and a modern continuation, Matias’s Tactile Pro.
It’s important, I think, to begin by saying that I’m writing this on my television, as I sit on the couch 10 feet away and use a wireless keyboard.
Yes, it is a stunt, but one in service of point. In that respect, it’s a little bit like the old television ads that began, “We’ve replaced the coffee in this fine restaurant with Folger’s Crystals to prove a point.” In this case, though, the point is not that even if you have enough money to dine above your station, your tastes are still probably those of a field hand.