{"id":12888,"date":"2016-04-30T16:12:28","date_gmt":"2016-04-30T20:12:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/?p=12888"},"modified":"2022-08-01T07:43:01","modified_gmt":"2022-08-01T11:43:01","slug":"thoughts-at-large-32","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/2016\/04\/thoughts-at-large-32\/","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts at Large: 32"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Country music star Merle Haggard passed away on April 6.\u00a0 Pop music star Prince died on April 21.\u00a0 Between those days, 2,275,000 other people died<\/a>.\u00a0 It’s been a sad April.<\/p>\n

\u2022 True confessions: my social memory is like a dry sponge.\u00a0 If I remember a personal detail about you, it’s only because you told me three or four times and somehow put up with my inability to soak it up the first and second times.\u00a0 I seem to be able to store one important item about a person per encounter.\u00a0 I hang onto your years-old emails to remind myself of the names of your children and what your interests and concerns are.\u00a0 If only I were so loosely tethered to my own concerns.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Humanity is about being humane.\u00a0 What is the corresponding term for other members of the animal kingdom?\u00a0 Do dogs have wagacity?\u00a0 Do pigs have baconity?<\/p>\n

\u2022 Last night, I dreamed I was a staff member at the United Nations, and they told me to draw a map of the messy<\/em> parts of the world.\u00a0 My first impulse was to get out my crayons and color the whole thing mud brown, but then I figured that some gradation of tone was in order.\u00a0 So I started to think about things that make life messy.\u00a0 Like poor sanitation.\u00a0 Disease.\u00a0 Wars.\u00a0 Abusive relations.\u00a0 Feeling like you don’t belong.\u00a0 Were there some places in the world free of all that?\u00a0 I just went ahead and colored the whole map mud brown.\u00a0 How nice, for me, that this was just a dream.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Earlier this week, former Navy SEAL Kristin Beck<\/a> lost her primary bid for a Maryland congressional seat.\u00a0 She ran as a Democrat, but her positions sounded very Republican.\u00a0 She probably lost the vegetarian vote when she said this: “The IRS is above all law. They have their own laws, their own courts and they meat out punishment for both economic and political reasons.”\u00a0 And how do I know this?\u00a0 Because her website is one of the handful of results one gets when searching for the term meat out punishment.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u2022 I have this thing about reciprocity: if other people invite me to care about them, maybe they might also care about me.\u00a0 This has landed me in (horrors!) social-media purgatory.\u00a0 Recently, one of my Facebook friends shared a post by Sen. Elizabeth Warren discussing her husband’s birthday and his skating lessons.\u00a0 Now, I favor Ms. Warren’s progressive stances, but she is not a cult figure to me as she is to others, and her relationship with her spouse is not my concern, just as ours is of no interest to her.\u00a0 She is a political figure, not a personal friend.\u00a0 I decided to add a comment to that effect on her Facebook post.\u00a0 One of her fans promptly responded: “If you don’t like it, stop reading.”\u00a0 Okay.<\/p>\n

\u2022 I don’t really understand the appeal of Trader Joe’s.\u00a0 Especially its wine, supposedly one of the best deals in the store.\u00a0 Based on a online review<\/a>, I decided to try the “Velvet Moon” Cabernet Sauvignon.\u00a0 I was, to put it tactfully, vastly unimpressed.\u00a0 It is priced about the same as Jacob’s Creek (usually on sale for $5.99 in our supermarket) but it is thinner and more juice-like, which makes it a great communion wine for pass-the-chalice Unitarians.<\/p>\n

\u2022 Speaking of religion, or lack thereof: I find it interesting that it takes a foxhole to convert an atheist, but it only takes a mixed-religion betrothal or that new church down the street to convert the faithful.\u00a0 Even then, it’s more like flipping a pancake.<\/p>\n

\u2022 If I have insulted anyone, then those I did not insult just wasted their time reading this conditional clause.\u00a0 The non-insulted should have stopped at the comma.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2022 Country music star Merle Haggard passed away on April 6.\u00a0 Pop music star Prince died on April 21.\u00a0 Between those days, 2,275,000 other people died.\u00a0 It’s been a sad April. \u2022 True confessions: my social memory is like a … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12888","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-thoughts-at-large"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12888","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12888"}],"version-history":[{"count":44,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12888\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28276,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12888\/revisions\/28276"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12888"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12888"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chcollins.com\/100Billion\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12888"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}