Virgil

Tomorrow marks the hundredth anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s birth, certainly the greatest president of my life time and as I think over our national history only behind Washington and Lincoln. I was too young to really appreciate him when he was in office. Heck, I was just a stupid college kid. I think the moment it dawn on me just how right he had been happened the moment the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 two years after he left office. He was right after all. Economically (free enterprise ...

About a month ago, just after New Year’s, Matthew had his second pediatrician visit. He is growing nicely. The pediatrician found him a bit taller, a bit heavier, the head circumference a bit larger. He is right along with the growth charts. Actually his weight to length ratio shows him less pudgy for his height, and he was very pudgy three months before, and while we didn’t have accurate numbers from Kazakhstan, I think he was downright fat back then. He is slimming down nicely to a leaner ...

Another of my heroes passed away this week, the original guru of exercise, Jack LaLane. I don’t know if people from outside the US have heard of him, but he was way ahead of his time, at least in the United States, in fitness, health, nutrition, and broadcasting. He started his television program way back in 1951 and was on the air until the mid 1980s. I remember watching his show as a kid, probably pre-teens, which would make it early 1970s. I didn’t realize how old he was at the time; he ...

This blog is very hard for me to write. This story was pointed out to me by a friend on Wednesday morning and I wanted to blog about it almost immediately but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I thought about it that evening, thought about it the next day, and both times my heart couldn’t do it. Here I am late Friday, actually now early Saturday, and pushing myself to do it because it must be done, because maybe, just maybe, one person might read this and have a change of heart. But mind you, ...

This blog is my full response to a subject that came up in qimissung's book review blog on Conrad's Heart of Darkness: http://www.online-literature.com/for...og.php?b=11325. My response got too lengthy as just a comment, so I created my own blog specifically to address Achebe's essay.

You can read Achebe’s essay here: http://kirbyk.net/hod/image.of.africa.html

What a poorly constructed essay. Frankly what a bunch of nonsense. Belief in the noble savage ideal (as ...