New weblog, sort of

At the encouragement of a musician friend, I have created a new weblog and copied over all the music-related posts that I’ve made in the past eight years, both here and on the Simpler Living website. Although I won’t delete those posts from their original locations, I think that all future posts about music will [...]

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Talent contest: Prairie Home Companion

I’m at liberty now to say that the talent contest mentioned in this earlier post is the annual Prairie Home Companion competition. This year their theme is “Battle of the Bands,” where the aim of the music is to get people up and dancing. Here’s a link to the contest guidelines. And, again, here’s the [...]

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Knowing where to tap

I love jokes that encapsulate an important bit of knowledge. My family is all too aware of this, since it means that I bore them repeatedly by making a point with some anecdote they’ve heard many times before. But they’re kind enough to put up with it. This morning I was reminded that a given [...]

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Talent contest entry

With the help of our friend Kevin Amburgey on mandolin, Chris and I recorded a song that we hope to submit for a talent contest which is billed as a Battle of the Bands, where a “band” has at least three members and the music is designed to get people up and dancing. It’s a [...]

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Testifying through our actions

Here are two striking examples of how patterns of living can be clear and direct testimonies: In 1562 a certain Caspar Zacher of Waiblingen in Wurttemberg was accused of being an Anabaptist, but the court record reports that since he was an envious man who could not get along with others, and who often started [...]

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No golden ages

I’m skimming through Stephanie Coontz’s book Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy, or How Love Conquered Marriage. I never intended to read the whole thing, because I mostly wanted to know how marriage was among pre-modern Christians, and Coontz is much more comprehensive, providing a broad anthropological survey in the beginning, and spending the [...]

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The burden of defined benefit pension plans

So many different elements of the modern economy are on the brink of failing that it is worth pondering which one might end up dealing a fatal blow. Mish Shedlock has long maintained that the next major shock will be a quick tumble into insolvency by city, county, and state governments, and that one of [...]

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Google Reader now watches websites for changes

There are a number of websites I check periodically to see if new information has been added. If they provided an RSS feed of changes, I would just set Google Reader to watch the feed for me, but like many websites there is no feed. Well, Google Reader just added a feature where, if the [...]

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ReverbNation

I’m a strong believer that anyone who has a business card (or ought to) should also have a website, for exactly the same reason: so people who are interested in your services can easily put their hands on vital information about you. Of course websites can be much more elaborate than a business card, and [...]

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Free books on intellectual property issues

I’m finally starting to poke around for useful readings about intellectual property. One of the highest profile writers about intellectual property in the digital age is Lawrence Lessig, a Stanford law professor (recently moved to Harvard) and founder of Creative Commons. Lessig believes strongly enough in the free exchange of information that he has made [...]

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