Daily Archives: April 17, 2008

General

I’m Not Sure I’m a Unitarian-Universalist. I Suppose That Removes All Doubt.

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43 bar steady 30.01 0mph NE dewpoint 36  Spring

             Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

At last.  A night where I was not the biggest loser at sheepshead.  Bill Schmidt and I tied for high for the evening.  I had great cards and some good luck, plus I’ve had a long lesson in sheepshead from masters.  It was fun to do well at last.  We’ll see if I’ve actually learned something as the games continue.

Kate and I watched Mission to Mars, most of it.  A surprising, hopeful Mars film.  Many films about Mars end with everybody dying, but this one offered an improbable, but not impossible conceit about how life came to earth.  What?  You’ll have to catch it to find out.

Tomorrow I have two tours, a Weber and a Concerning the Spiritual in Art, focused on non-Western religions.

The presentation for Groveland took an odd, but interesting turn today as I got ready to get started.  I had decided to face head on the question of UU identity by talking about identity development from a psycho-religious perspective.  The idea was to offer resources Groveland could use to develop a UU identity.   When I began to write, I started with a couple of U-U jokes.  Then I remembered an old anthroplogy lesson about joking behavior.  Our jokes define the boundaries of our group; they are an important device through which we can know who is in our group and who is not.  I’ll explain this a bit more later, but the presentation should be a lot of fun.

Due to various things I didn’t exercise from Saturday through Tuesday.  My back began to spasm and remind me one of the good reasons for all this time I spend with weights and flexibility work.  So, I got back to it yesterday.  Yesterday and today I did a particular series of movement exercises which go a long way toward a more limber me.  They worked.  All better now.

Art and Culture, Our Land and Home

A Failure of American Education

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46  bar rises 30.08 0mph N dewpoint 32 Spring

            Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

“There is no cure for birth and death save to enjoy the interval.” – George Santayana

Santayana liked football, but only practice.  While at Harvard, he attended practice faithfully, but never went to a game.  His philosophical wisdom has a firm place in American letters though he retained his Spanish citizenship until his death.  Here’s a sample of his poetry:                    

I give back to the earth what the earth gave,
All to the furrow, nothing to the grave.
The candle’s out, the spirit’s vigil spent;
Sight may not follow where the vision went.             

As Americans we too often forget our own poets, philosophers and people of letters.  We scan back over the literary and artistic output of Western civilization to find exemplars.  If we’re truly catholic, we might even include Asia, but how many among us know Santayana?  Dewey?  James?  Emerson?  Thoreau?  How many have read, say, Moby Dick?  Whitman?  Emily Dickinson?  Even Frost and Sandburg beyond their iconic poems?  Willa Cather?  Have we heard of Charles Hartshorne?  How about Ambrose Bierce?  Wallace Stevens?  John Dos Passos? Sherwood Anderson? American has produced great artists like Pollock, the Hudson River School painters, John Singer-Sargent and Whistler, but again who knows them?  Only a few.

This is a failure of American education and of our willingness to learn our own heritage.  This is not trivial.  A people who do not know where they come from, as Santayana famously said, are doomed to repeat the same mistakes. 

I will add a brief bio here from time to time of more American persons of belles lettres.  Our future depends upon us becoming more than casually acquainted with them.

Family, Garden, Travel, Weather +Climate

Compounding Pharmacies

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44  bar rises 30.06  2mph N dewpoint 31 Spring

              Waxing Gibbous Moon of Growing

A gray, cool start after a shirt sleeve day yesterday.  We’re still in the hurry up and wait phase of gardening.  It’s a bit too early for clean up, certainly too early for planting anything but cold weather crops.  We don’t tend to do those, at least not so far, so the hydroponics are our primary entry in this years vegetable garden.  The lettuce seedlings and tomato plant I put under the light first have grown rapidly.  Not ready for harvest anytime soon, but on the way.

Kate made me aware of compounding pharmacies, a vestigial remnant of that which all pharmacies used to be, independent pharmaceutical manufactories.  There are six in Minnesota including one in St. Paul, St. Peter and Wayzata.  The Wayzata pharmacy has a glitzy name, RxArtisans.  I knew a few of those when I was in college.  The growth and reach of pharmaceutical companies has reduced the average pharmacy to nothing more than a retail distributor of already compounded drugs.  This results, of course, in a matching of patients to available drugs and their available dosages, whereas the compounding pharmacy matched drugs to patients both in dosage and delivery vehicle. 

The Delta buyout of Northwest, not a merger, will not be certain for some time to come.  The pilots association of Northwest and the other unions flight attendants, ground crews and mechanics are about to become part of a larger, non-unionized pool.  This creates probable labor and culture conflicts from day one.  Also, congress and the regulators still have to approve, as does Wall Street.  Both companies share price dropped the day after the announcement, an unusual event.  Also, both airlines have an aging fleet of planes and debt hangover from their respective bankruptcies.  The State of Minnesota wants its incentives back since Northwest, with the merger, violates the remain in Minnesota provision.  All this reflects the turbulent nature of an industry who excels in nothing quite so much as an uncomfortable experience delivered for hundreds of dollars.