history music pragmatic historian

Duran Duran – “Keep Moving Into the Future But Acknowledge Your Past”

Over the past week my Twitter feed has been burning up with news of Duran Duran. It’s almost as though they’ve released a new album …. And they have! The album “Future Past” dropped on October 22, 2021, the fifteenth studio album for one of my all-time favorite bands. Whoever is operating Duran Duran’s Twitter account is doing a marvelous job of keeping fans updated on the band’s current media appearances to promote the album.…

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Olio: October 11, 2021

Olio: A miscellaneous collection of things Today is National Coming Out Day and Indigenous Peoples’ Day (with President Joe Biden the first president to officially proclaim it so). Those are great holidays to have as part of my birthday. I’ve had a number of small ideas for blog posts over the past couple of weeks and rather than write each one out separately, I thought I’d share a bunch in one of my Olio posts.…

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Simple Christmas Gifts Make Me Feel Rich

Our family’s Christmas is different this year. Which has got to be the understatement of the year for everyone’s 2020 holiday season. A worldwide pandemic will do that. We thankfully haven’t lost anyone close to us to Covid, but as we approach 330,000 deaths in the United States, there are many people grieving for loved ones who’ve died this year. Plus, having just come through Thanksgiving, we’ve seen a spike in cases of people infected…

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Olio: October 18, 2020

Olio: A miscellaneous collection of things (or, when I was trying to remember the definition of olio, what popped to mind was “random shit”). When I started this blog 6 years ago, I wanted a way to share miscellaneous stuff that I found interesting but with a heading I could use habitually, so I could find this stuff again. Hence, “olio.” My last olio post was in April 2016. Not sure how I lost track…

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Frittering with Scalzi

I have got a backlog of blog posts that need writing, but I haven’t had time to write them. Which isn’t completely true. After working all day, doing the heavy mental lifting of writing and budgeting for a federal grant this past week, my brain has been so fried in the evening that I fritter away my time on Twitter, getting caught up in the day’s news. Now that I’ve got some time to blog,…

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