observations

Those People Who Always Know When Rain Is Needed

When you live in a place like Minnesota that gets four distinct seasons per year, you tend to be attuned to weather fluctuations, simply because it is always changing. Although, if you’ve lived here long enough, you can get all Buddhist about the weather because of the constant change. You stop paying attention to it and go with the flow. (Yeah, that’s not very mindful, is it? The Buddhist acceptance of constant change is cancelled…

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art observations

Moody Crow

I was going to write a post on how I use Twitter, but the day is escaping me, so here is a photo instead. I saw this crow land on this pole building near my house. Actually, I heard its claws scrape the metal as it landed. This building is in an industrial area with an old business with agricultural structures nearby. I caught the following shots, too.  

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observations thought fodder

Article on Frisson Raises More Questions

I found an article from Smithsonian.com that discusses frisson, that delightful feeling of chills that overcomes you when listening to stirring music. I experience frisson all the time with music. Apparently not everyone does. (Dang, that would stink!) According to the article, “The researchers found that the brains of individuals who occasionally feel a chill while listening to music were wired differently than the control subjects. They had more nerve fibers connecting the auditory cortex, the…

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ideas observations thought fodder

It’s Not a Distraction; It’s a Demonstration of Our Values

In the latest dust-up between President Trump and the NFL, in which the President tweeted that NFL players who took a knee to protest racism during the National Anthem should be fired for being unpatriotic, there are people on social media telling us not to be distracted. They are indicating this is an issue manufactured by the President to sidetrack us from the destruction of the Affordable Care Act and the Russian investigation. Such comments…

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ideas observations thought fodder

Bring on the Purple to Bring Us Together

Donald Trump, who can’t seem to get over the fact that he won the election, retweeted a 2016 election map that shows pretty much the entire country in red, emphasizing the precincts that gave him a majority of their votes. The map purposely attempts to display that “everyone” in vast swaths of the United States voted for him. Unfortunately, this map lacks any nuance. Even in my county, which provided over 70% of its votes…

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