Okay, not Conan, but his creator Robert E. Howard, was born on this day in 1906. Conan the Barbarian has become a literary character whose cultural influence at least approaches such icons as Sherlock Holmes and Tarzan. Although something possibly even more important comes with the 1927 short story “the Shadow Kingdom.” Where Howard took the “weird tale” genre developed by writers like Edgar Allan Poe and H. P. Lovecraft, and as the Wikipedia article puts it “mixing elements of... Read more

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Last night Jan & I went to the Long Beach City Council where they were among other things going to vote on whether to raise the minimum wage in steps up to fifteen dollars an hour. Jan put on her Standing on the Side of Love t-shirt and I put on the clerical version. While as far as the clerical shirt goes I admit I’m not the biggest fan of the color. On the other hand I only wear it... Read more

And wishing Edgar a happy birthday… Read more

Dolly turns 70? Doesn’t seem possible. Of course a little surgery here and there hasn’t hurt in that “I can’t believe it” department. But, the delightful personality that has captured so many over the years, that’s all hers. Always has been. Me, I like the little factoids that speak to the person beyond the persona. Like the fact she’s been able to remain married to the same guy for, what, fifty years, now? Or, that she raised five of her... Read more

Robert Anton Wilson was born on this day in 1932. Not my favorite author, but certainly an interesting one. What I did like was his “model-agnosticism” or “Maybe Logic” which Wikipedia quotes him as explaining “consists of never regarding any model or map of the universe with total 100% belief or total 100% denial. Following Korzybski, I put things in probabilities, not absolutes… My only originality lies in applying this zetetic attitude outside the hardest of the hard sciences, physics,... Read more

MARTIN’S DREAM & OURS A Liberal Religious Response to the Horrors of Our Times James Ishmael Ford 17 January 2016 Pacific Unitarian Church Rancho Palos Verdes, California The Reverend Rosemary Bray McNatt is president of Starr King School, our seminary in Berkeley, California. However, a million years before that she was a writer. In fact she took writing gigs as a way to pay the bills right through seminary. And it was while in seminary that her agent called with... Read more

It was on this day in 1605 that El ingenious hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha was first published. As one wag summarized the plot, “Guy attacks windmills. Also, he’s mad.” Miguel de Cervantes claimed the novel was not a novel but a document he stumbled upon largely translated from an Arabic account of Quixote, driven mad by reading stories of chivalry, and who decides to become a knight-errant. He quickly recruits the farmer Sancho Panza as his squire. And... Read more

Now it is a bit of an overstatement that the Episcopal Church has been suspended from the Anglican Communion for the next three years. But it’s close enough to accurate for general purposes to say that the American branch of the Anglican communion has been suspended from full participation in the gatherings of primates, the national heads of the communion, with a charge to take this time to set their house in order. The disorder they are called to put... Read more

I find it nearly incompressible that it was forty-nine years ago that the Human Be-In was held in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco. My generation had been born into a period of unprecedented wealth and wealth more broadly spread than ever before, and with that access to education and information generally. And, at the same time in the same place there was terrible poverty, and racism, and homophobia, and full on sexism, and symbolic of so much, a bloody... Read more