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Stop! Don’t Make That New Years Resolution

This New Year’s Eve, Claire and I will dance our fool hearts out to the great swing tunes of sixty years ago, and we’ll dance into the new year.

January first, we will do what we… Read the rest

Milk

My wife, Helen, and I had a friend and Grand Rapids’ neighbor, Dick Stien, as a guest for eight days in our Tucson home early in December. Dick tells people that he is “post gay,” so it didn’t come… Read the rest

The Language Barrier

When my husband retired from the Foreign Service and the United Nations, we decided to visit our children, Jeffrey and Leslie, who were attending the University of Arizona in Tucson, Arizona. It didn’t take long before we fell… Read the rest

Feedback from a reader of JOO

Some days I get dozens of boring, spammy emails, or stupid jokes. I try to run through them and delete everything that I can, reply to what interests me, and ignore the rest.  Every so often I get an… Read the rest

The real gift of Christmas

The gift of Jesus is what Christians celebrate at Christmas, but all too often, they too put the god of consumerism first. I don’t mean to criticize; it’s a cultural thing, and an economic necessity in our system of… Read the rest

The Great Storm of '08

What we first thought to be gunshots continued unabated throughout the day on Sunday. Our home is surrounded by very tall evergreens of every species and stately old oaks – and we soon realized that our own private… Read the rest

Who is Peter Schiff and why didn’t we listen to him?

If you have a circle of Internet friends, you are probably covered up with forwarded opinion pieces every day, as I am. The current financial crisis gives almost everyone a bully pulpit of righteous indignation, and keyboards are smoking.… Read the rest

The God Delusion

“The genie of religious fanaticism is rampant in present-day America, and the Founding Fathers would have been horrified,” so reports Richard Dawkins early on in his best-selling book, The God Delusion.

He also shares the following 1981 quote from… Read the rest

T'was the Week Before Christmas…

Twas the Week Before Christmas…

By Fred Longcoor
(as told to Craig Bieber)

Twas the week before Christmas, when all through the land,
The economy was crumbling… Read the rest

Tightening our belts

Are you tightening your belt? Some Americans are in these challenging times. Not that losing a bit of that fat is such a bad thing. With soaring rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease, America could lose enough belt… Read the rest

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