Julbord or Christmas Smörgåsbord

I just posted my latest two Reader Weekly articles at my website: Not what I intended and Julbord or Christmas Smörgåsbord. The latter is a quick overview of one American family's adoption of a Swedish tradition.

If you think a smörgåsbord is a pile-it-all-on-your-plate buffet, be sure to read this article.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord. If you read Swedish, see also .http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smörgåsbord.

Why Minnesota has no snow

The wind farms in eastern Colorado and eastern Montana aren't really for generating electricity. They are to blow all the snow back west so that the ski resorts have plenty of snow.

Once you do with less, you can't take more

Irregular Blog
I just went down to the kitchen to fill my water bottle. I took a big swig and spat it out right away. It tasted like swimming pool water! I had forgotten to fill my bottle with filtered water and used water direct from the tap. When one is used to the chlorine taste, it is not so bothersome. Once one gets used to almost no chlorine taste, the chlorine taste can be overwhelming.

Something similar happened to us with salt after living in Europe for six years. Most American cooking, especially restaurant cooking tasted really salty to us. This is still true after over thirty years.

I like to say excess salt belongs on only two "foods" - pretzels and the rims of Margarita glasses.

A church by any other name

Or political correctness raises its head again.

The church I attend is going to have a vote next week on whether "church" should be continue to be part of its name. One member gave an impassioned argument for dropping "church" from the name in favor of "congregation".

Her argument was that there are people who are put off by the word church because of past abuses of Christianity. I wonder if these people would even attend if the name is changed. I also wonder if by trying to be all things to all people an organization becomes nothing to everybody.

She also brought up the old saw about replacing "mankind" in hymnals and elsewhere with "humankind". But the words have essentially the same historic meaning. Various sources attribute "human" as coming from the latin "hominus" - "man". On the other hand, "man" originally meant "person" and came from a word meaning "mind". Does this mean if we don't want to use "mankind" for people in general that they have no minds?

Once the males were called "werman" and the females "weibman". Rather than corrupt other people's writings to make them politically correct, why not revert to calling males "wermen"?

See my article on Bowdler.

Why can't men sing?

Or a better title might by "Why don't men sing?

This seems to be a hard question to answer. There are very few references on the web to either phrase. The only references I could find were to my article of February 2005 and a discussion in England in 2004.

Besides all the other reasons like not a guy thing, changing voices, and lack of encouragement of those who don't do well, I've been pondering another aspect - matching resonance. Men may have a difficult time singing because they have more resonance in their voices than women. When they try to match the resonance of the dominant singers, they tend to try to sing too high and thus are way off pitch.

I tried an experiment with a song I'm trying to learn. I put the melody in my computer using the treble clef. Singing the melody was a big strain. I dropped the melody an octave and did much better. Once I had a feel for the melody, I went back to the higher octave accompaniment. I did much better. Even my severest critic, my experienced soprano wife, said so.

Fruitful or spiteful

Christians, Jews, and Muslims state they are guided by the words of the Old Testament, but many of them often seem to choose the words that tell them to smite their enemies. They seem to prefer "Be spiteful and destroy" rather than "Be fruitful and multiply."

Question for those using violence for political gain

What would be the long-range effect if lots of people started asking those who use violence to achieve political ends, whether they drop 500-lb. bombs on houses, lob mortars indiscriminately, or plant roadside bombs, what they are doing to achieve three important parts of a civil society:

Are you making it safe for children to play outside and to go to school?
Do the children have clean water and effective sewage?
Is electricity available 24 hours a day?

Those who use violence in the name of some idealistic goal should be embarrassed at the harm they are causing to achieve their goals.

True believers

Many true believers are quite willing to accept the artifacts of modern times, but they are unwilling to shed the world view "facts" of long gone times.

But a better analysis than this little sentence is expressed by the man who wrote

...[The true believer is] the mortal enemy of things-as-they-are and he insists on sacrificing himself for a dream that is impossible to attain....He is today everywhere on the march."

The author is Eric Hoffer and the quote is from his 1951 "The True Believer".