A Series of Tubes

Garrison Keillor is a radio personality on NPR that writes and stars in A Prairie Home Companion, who recently wrote something controversial.  For background purposes: He is an episcopalian, and former Lutheran.  His show is “family friendly” in that it does not discuss weighty or controversial topics with any seriousness, and the music featured on his show is usually bluegrass, folk, country, or hymnal.  The image below probably best describes why Keillor is a radio and not a Television personality:

Garrison Keillor recently wrote an opinion article in which he wished everyone a Merry Christmas and got into a bit of trouble for it.  Now why would he be in trouble for wishing people a Merry Christmas you might ask?  Well it was probably because he said Merry Christmas after penning a big F U to Unitarians, Jews, and anyone else that even thinks about participating in the Holidays from a non conservative Christian perspective:

“Unitarians listen to the Inner Voice and so they have no creed that they all stand up and recite in unison, and that’s their perfect right, but it is wrong, wrong, wrong to rewrite “Silent Night.” If you don’t believe Jesus was God, OK, go write your own damn “Silent Night” and leave ours alone. This is spiritual piracy and cultural elitism and we Christians have stood for it long enough. And all those lousy holiday songs by Jewish guys that trash up the malls every year, Rudolph and the chestnuts and the rest of that dreck. Did one of our guys write “Grab your loafers, come along if you wanna, and we’ll blow that shofar for Rosh Hashanah”? No, we didn’t.

Christmas is a Christian holiday — if you’re not in the club, then buzz off.”

The full article can be read here.

Garrison Keillor’s show on NPR is quite popular, and having a popular personality ranting about Jews and Unitarians can have a corrosive effect –specifically it make listeners feel free to express and act upon their own bigotries.  I firmly believe in freedom of speech, so I think everyone should be allowed to spew whatever venomous and irrational fears they have, I just don’t think Garrison Keillor is telling the truth when he ends his article with “Merry Christmas, my dears”.

Read more

With California in financial ruin, and the health care reform bill slowly transforming into the health care status quo bill, it’s hard to not become a pessimist.  Matt Taibibi is not helping.  The link below a video because it apparently auto plays and I didn’t want that when people loaded the main page: Read more

It is important to exercise your mind. That is why I try to engage in tasks that improve my attention, memory, and executive control. To be fair I don’t actively try to quantize my activities that way, but recently found out that one of my favorite activities has this exact side effect. That activity: video games.

Researchers at Beckman Institute, Department of Psychology, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL,  found that “Expert gamers and non-gamers differed on a number of basic cognitive skills: experts could track objects moving at greater speeds, better detected changes to objects stored in visual short-term memory, switched more quickly from one task to another, and mentally rotated objects more efficiently.”  I’m probably not allowed to repost sections of the body of the article, but the abstract sums up the findings nicely.

When I go home I think I’ll have to work on improving my cognitive skills.