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Archive for December, 2011

2011: My Year In Self-Improvement

Posted in Living well, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 30, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I set out to check four things off of my bucket list this year.  One proved too arduous for now, and petered out in March.  I finished the other three. One was seeing every film on AFI’s “100 Years, 100 Movies” list, except the R-rated ones.  Finally finished in July.  More on this next week. Another [...]

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Extreme Sports Clips

Posted in Random on December 30, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

A few of these are obviously fake, but most are real, and all are fun to watch.

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2011: My Year In Books

Posted in Language and Literature, tagged , , on December 29, 2011 | 2 Comments »

I only read 26 books in 2011, but on the plus side, this year had the highest overall quality of any year yet–by far the most perfect tens.  And in my own defense, some of these were pretty long.  Mostly, this makes me realize how little I’ve blogged about my reading this year–I used to write [...]

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2011: My Year In Movies

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , on December 28, 2011 | 1 Comment »

I watched a lot of movies in 2011.  This was the first year that I kept track, and I was surprised just how many there were.  Of course, a lot of these were for my project of seeing all of the non R-rated movies on AFI’s top 100 American films list.  I’ll give more details and [...]

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Batman’s Poison Gas Fetish

Posted in Random, tagged , , , , , , on December 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I just watched Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman and Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins again.  Burton’s film has an irrepressible panache that still makes it terrific fun, and Nolan’s first Batman film shouldn’t be underrated because it stands in the shadow of its even more superior sequel. But I never noticed a plot element they have in common.  In [...]

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Remedial Higher Education in California

Posted in Education, tagged , , , on December 22, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

The California State University system has succumbed to the overwhelming needs of underprepared students: Wracked with frustration over the state’s legions of unprepared high school graduates, the California State University system next summer will force freshmen with remedial needs to brush up on math or English before arriving on campus. But many professors at the [...]

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Fall Finals Freshmen Follies

Posted in Education, tagged , , , on December 20, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

I had some spectacular deja vu two weeks ago as my college classes were studying for finals.  I took them down to the building’s huge main lobby, where I hung butcher paper on the walls, with titles I wrote in the center, based on the major units of the semester.  I broke them into teams, [...]

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Upcoming 200th Anniversaries

Posted in Religion, tagged , , , on December 18, 2011 | 1 Comment »

In 2005, the LDS Church celebrated the 200th anniversary of Joseph Smith’s birth.  As major an event as that was, the next big milestone is far, far more important, and as it’s only a little over eight years away, I wonder if plans are already being made to honor it adequately. The 200th anniversary of [...]

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Political Analogy

Posted in Politics and Society, tagged , , , on December 17, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

Tea Partiers supporting Newt Gingrich would be like Occupy Wall Street supporting…Barack Obama.  

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Ron Paul Dream

Posted in Politics and Society, tagged on December 17, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Last week I had a dream about Ron Paul.  In my dream, I was at some kind of convention or rally, and people got to go up to a table and meet Ron Paul.  When it was my turn, I said something like this: “Like a lot of conservatives, I’ve had misgivings about your foreign [...]

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The Night Before Christmas

Posted in Humor, tagged on December 14, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

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Two Great New Articles About Education Standards

Posted in Education, tagged , , , , on December 13, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

An article just posted in the new City Journal exposes the problem of lowered expectations in No Child Left Behind’s obsession with “proficiency.”  I worry that students now graduate high school thinking that that word denotes some amazing accomplishment, not realizing that it only indicates bare minimum competence.  The law of unintended consequences at work, [...]

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Classic Jazz for a Rainy Monday

Posted in Arts, tagged , , , on December 12, 2011 | Leave a Comment »

There used to be an older black man in my congregation at church, and someone told me that he was a huge jazz fan, and had heard a lot of the classic stuff when it had first come out.  So I asked him one day what he recommended.  He told me about “Yardbird Suite,” as done [...]

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Bless This Day

Posted in Religion, tagged , , on December 11, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Specific prayers bring specific blessings, I’ve heard, and this seems to be most especially true of asking for small spiritual blessings today. Many of us probably pray for peace and insight, patience and charity, but I’ve been astounded by the power of pleading with God to favor me with a noticeable measure of these things [...]

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Diplomatic Dialogue Has To Start Somewhere…

Posted in Politics and Society, tagged , , , on December 10, 2011 | 1 Comment »

Below, libertarian economic expert Peter Schiff talks to Occupy protesters.  Some of these protesters are confused, barely literate brats riding a bandwagon, but a few of them are clearly very serious, mature, intelligent people.  Unfortunately, a video like this has to operate in sound bites, and I wish the forum had been a quiet table [...]

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