Two new podcasts

I’ve added two new links to podcasts I’ve recently started listening to. The first one is “Backstory with the American History Guys.”  I initially discovered this when I was teaching American History at Chamberlain-Hunt and looking for classroom resources. The podcast didn’t work for that and got put on the back burner at the time. …

Mr. B and the Three Musketeers

When I was a sixteen year old – I had just gotten my driver’s license, so I could drive to the farm – Mr. B hired me, along with another kid (we’ll call him “AD”) one year younger, to work on his farm. One of Mr. B’s sons (“RB”) was my age, and the three …

Bad Television

There were only a couple of things on t.v. tonight. One was a James Coburn movie called "In Like Flint." The other was the State of the Union Address. The one was a parody, and like most parodies, was badly written, unbelievable, and included a lot of really stupid lines copied from other places. The …

M L King Day: The Quintessential American Holiday

[Below is an essay originally published on the JAJ site on ML King Day, 2004. Other than the reference to Jesse Jackson at the end (he has, fortunately, disappeared for the most part, in the last eight years), it still hold's true, so I thought I would republish it this year:] Martin Luther King Jr's …

Poor People’s Food, Peasant Food … and Meatloaf

I’ve never much liked meatloaf. Ditto with meatballs. (After all, they’re simply tiny meatloaves disguised with a sauce.) On the other hand, over the years I’ve had meatloaf and meatballs that were very good. But I knew those experiences were anomalies because I knew I don’t like meatloaf. Somewhere over the years it began to …

Immigration and Liberty

In my previous post I poked a stick at the immigration issue. It’s easy to say what’s wrong (or at least to point out how silly the debate can occasionally get); it’s a bit more challenging to say something constructive about an issue as intractable as immigration. But since I poked a stick at the …

Illegal Aliens

Down in Texas they have a group called "Border Watch"." It's an ad hoc group of citizens doing citizen justice trying to protect the United States from illegal aliens. Today Brenda and I took part in such an effort up here, just south of the Great White North. This part of the U.S. has been …

About those Conservative Defenders of Liberalism

Jerry Salyer, over at Front Porch Republic, has written a great essay about what he calls "the Conservative Defenders of Liberalism." I have been trying to say something intelligent on this topic for some time, especially in my posts categorized under "liberty," but Salyer says it so much better than I can. Here's a taste: …

Phone solicitation

Here's the downside to keeping my old cell phone number (which has a 712 area code, from back in the days when I lived on the Iowa side of the river). I got a computerized call a couple of hours ago encouraging me to attend the Iowa caucus and to make sure and vote for …

On January 3, 2012 By justanotherjimIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

Self-Control

I can’t say that I was rooting for South Carolina, but by the fourth quarter I was glad that Nebraska was going to lose their bowl game, which they certainly didn't deserve to win. The coach has become an embarrassment, and as the coach goes, so goes the team. One cannot ultimately be a winner …