Category: miscellaneous

  • Mahler's 9th

    Had a personal goal to make it back to the symphony this year. So here we are. Date night tonight and back in about a month with the kids for The Eroica.

  • Thought of the day from a stoic

    From Seneca’s 22nd letter (hat tip to Tim Ferriss): Men do not care how nobly they live, but only how long, although it is within the reach of every man to live nobly, but within no man’s power to live long. Sums up what I find so intriguing about stoicism in one sentence. 

  • Pi-Day Birthday

    As of a few hours and a few minutes ago respectively, my two children celebrated their fifteenth and seventeenth trips around the sun.  They are a source of endless fascination.  I hope I have taught them half as much as they have taught me.  They have taught me joy, perseverance, and strength.  Most of all…

  • The morality of voting for the lesser of two evils

    For all of you that don’t understand my position of not voting, read this. (HT to Stephan Kinsella for posting Facebook…only changing media since this ended up being too long and I know no one will actually read it there). This article, written almost 20 years ago by Wendy McElroy, describes exactly my thoughts when I hear…

  • 90 Second Book Review: The Prophet

    I am honestly starting to believe that Half Price Books is connected to some otherworldly dimension that sends books from the realm of forms into my physical reality when its time for me to read them.  The Prophet is the most recent example of this.  From what I can recall, I think I became aware…

  • 90 second book review: Mindfulness

    I’m not sure when I first became aware of the concept of mindfulness (or present moment awareness, living in the “now”), but I think it had to be when I read this quote from C.S. Lewis in the Screwtape Letters: The humans live in time but our Enemy* destines them to eternity.  He therefore, I…

  • Success breeds resistance

    I heard about this essay by famed playwright Tennessee Williams a few weeks back, but finally got around to reading it on a flight yesterday.  An excellent read that connects directly with the War of Art audio book I recently finished and the Neil Gaiman commencement speech I posted a few weeks ago.  In what could be termed…

  • Driving into the future

    I’m in the market for a new car.  I can’t quite figure out if I should try to sell my 10 year old / 288K mile VW Jetta or my wife’s 8 year old / 135K mile Mercedes E320 Bluetec, but as soon as I figure that out, my wife will be getting a new…

  • 90 second book review: Man's search for meaning

    The subject of this book review is yet another Half Price books find: Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning.  Unlike a lot of the books on my recently read pile lately, this one didn’t come from the Tim Ferriss podcast, but rather a recomendation from Bill Buppert over at zerogov from Porcfest a few years…