Spice

Your Score: Fennel

You scored 50% intoxication, 50% hotness, 75% complexity, and 0% craziness!

You are Fennel!

You're a cool cat. Crisp, clean, fresh, and extremely complicated. You're like quantum physics or modern jazz. Think Niels Bohr meets Ornette Coleman. You may look normal now, but once you sprout, you look kind of, uh, funny.

Thanks to Tobias.
Take test here

Font Quiz

Just for fun.

Take font quiz here.

thanks to Musashum.

Over at What I Saw in America

Patrick Deneen has been posting some very interesting reflections these days on what is happening with oil prices, food, and the American economy. His latest on the development of monocultures is particularly interesting to me, especially because of his observations about the development of a monoculture in university education. Check it out here.

Soooo Homesick

We moved to Winnipeg in 1969 and I lived there until I went away to grad school. Between degrees and jobs I've gone back to live there and I still try to make holy pilgrimage once a year. Now you can see on line all the reasons to love (and maybe hate) Winnipeg. Check out this great new blog Winnipeg: Love and Hate. The photography is incredible.

Poor Robbie

Meet Moses the usurper of Robbie's bed. Fear not, Robbie has reclaimed it and sleeps in it even as I write this.

Song-writing Story Tellers

Just off the top of my head:

Peter Seeger
Peggy Seeger
Eric Bogle
Tom Paxton
David Essig
Stan Rogers
Grit Laskin

now I have to go give an exam....more as they come to mind

Narrative in music

Tim over at Tale Spin has a really interesting quotation from a folk singer about a lot of contemporary song writing. Essentially the point is that much of contemporary song writing focuses on "the personal landscape" and it gets boring.

I was thinking about this last night when I went to a concert of well known Christian singer-songwriter. I like a number of his songs but realized last night that there are two big differences between singing a couple of them at church and listening to twenty of them in a concert. The first is that in concert you have all the extra keyboard/electric guitar/drums and reverb and frankly that gets old fast (or maybe it is just me getting old fast). The other big difference is that when you get 20 of them in a row you realize that none of them tell a story. They are all about the personal relationship with a mighty God and they don't even tell a story about that relationship. And after a while they all start to sound the same.