A holiday combo post (My lists go to 11)

First, my Christmas wish list:
1) No more news about Tiger Woods, the White House party crashers, or Sarah Palin.
2) The Bengals make it to the playoffs.
3) Google Chrome working better with extensions so I can start using it again.
4) People to stop getting bent out of shape over the use of the word “Christmas.”  Do [...]

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The season of giving.

I normally don’t make New Year’s resolutions.  But in the past few weeks I’ve already been working on a resolution of sorts:  get rid of lots of stuff.  Call it a spiritual quest or just an organizational one.  There’s a bit of each motivating me.
Either way, my wife and I decided long ago that we [...]

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Forgotten words.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.

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Thought of the day, courtesy of Primus

In keeping with the season:
What if Christmas didn’t come this yearAnd no one paid for Christmas cheer? Who would cry the biggest tear,The child or the store?

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Merry Christmas from LucasFilm(TM)

 
The website Slashfilm has posted a nice compilation of Christmas Cards handed out by Lucasfilm over the years. 

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Christmas with Washington Irving

This time of year everyone digs out their CDs of Christmas music and their DVDs of their favorite Christmas films.  I also dig out my favorite Christmas books.  Of course A Christmas Carol by Dickens is a yearly staple, but I also reach for a classic that few relate to Christmas:  Washington Irving’s The Sketch [...]

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Part of the solution or the problem?

During times of crisis you learn a lot about yourself and those around you.  When you’re the one in charge of handling the crisis you get to know which of those around you will support you and which will simply get in the way, or worse, add to your problems.
People in the latter group are [...]

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Pessimistic or realistic?

Last night over dinner my wife was telling me about a doctor she saw on t.v. who was talking about how to lead a healthier lifestyle.  She said “Seeing things like that makes me motivated to eat better and get more exercise.”
I replied “The distance between motivation and action can be vast.” 
She gave [...]

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Movie soundtracks revisited.

Not that I hold Vanity Fair magazine in high esteem or anything, but their editors have recently named Purple Rain as the greatest film soundtrack of all time.  They say Prince’s opus is "a flawless combination of ‘funk, R&B, pop, metal, and even psychedelia into a sound that defined the ’80s.’"  Amen, brothers and sisters.
See?  [...]

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Home at last.

It took three planes and fourteen hours to get home from Orlando thanks to a canceled flight (the plane broke), but I finally made it. It’s good to be home.
Here’s one more picture from my trip, this one taken while kicking back in a hammock and enjoying the beautiful evening — my last in [...]

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