bierkergaard

Welcome back to another installment of "Fluffy Fridays" where I drop all my deep musings like a bad habit and go goofy. It is actually Saturday when I am posting this as I got onto other things yesterday. So it is "Snowy Silly Saturday" in Blogdom de Bierkergaard. This year, with me being on Sabbatical from my school counselor position, I have escaped the clockwork precision and regimentation of the school day, where everything is controlled by the bell. For many years, I have eaten at 12:30. While working, once I hear the bell for lunch, like a Pavlovian dog, I trot down to the cafeteria, salivating and slobbering all the way down. Since I do my doctoral work from home, time gets chewed up, a mastication of the minutes, a digestion of the days, all the while I miss eating lunch. This year, lunch can be any time, and more often than not, I don't eat until 3 or later. I still eat breakfast first thing in the morning. But once that meal is concluded, who knows whe...

On Sunday night, a good friend and a new friend (Dave Squared), and I went up to the Midtown Scholar in Harrisburg for a charity concert to raise money for Haiti Earthquake Relief. The band "In Wilderness" was fantastic. The venue is awesome...kind of a hip urban storefront with an interior bucolic barn-like structure for books and a "Scholars Underground" (beneath the first floor) which makes scholarship seem subversive and clandestine...which it is these days with mass media vapidity and "sound bite" attention appetites. Catacombs, as it were, for the persecuted faithful of the book. The location of the bookstore changed within the last year from a house to this spot, and it is sweet. Bookstores, if they are to survive as actual bookstores, have to offer more than just books these days. And, bringing in bands and speakers, for a reasonable price, and throwing in some good coffee and healthy snacks, might just prosper the institution through the 21st ce...

I had read one time that Bill Watterson, the creator of the comic strip "Calvin and Hobbes," had named his characters after the theologian John Calvin and political theorist Thomas Hobbes. It does not seem likely that there was any defining characteristic shared between the noted historical characters and the comic strip boy and tiger. Both John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, at least in their writings, were not known for their humor. Their take on the topics of theology and politics were quite serious and somber. I think it is safe to say that neither men would have been nominated for the "Class Clown" recognition in their respective high schools' yearbooks. Although John Calvin might have been voted "Most Scholarly" as he was nicknamed by fellow Reformer Philip Melancthon "The Theologian." Thomas Hobbes is best known for his work Leviathan and quote within this work "The life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Based o...

I was mentioning to Lina, after consuming the Sunday comics, how comics these days seem to be funny and cynical, or simplistic and silly. Or downright unfunny. Here is my take My selection from best to worst, in the Lancaster Sunday News Comics: Cynical yet Hilarious: Get Fuzzy, Dilbert. Some may dispute, as Lina did, that "Get Fuzzy" is cynical. C'mon, the dog is always getting abused, either verbally or physically, by that whacked wordsmith S & M cat. Funny and Familial: (Zits, Grand Avenue, Baby Blues, For Better or Worse, Jump Start, Blondie, Dennis the Menace, Rose is Rose, Born Loser, Family Tree, Sally Forth). This is probably the strongest genre in the comics. I just like Dagwood. Some might put Blondie in the Lame section. The guy who does Jump Start is from Philly so he gets a push into this category. Sally Forth can be weak at times... Lame: (Garfield, Ziggy, Marmaduke, Family Circle, Hagar the Horrible, Marvin, Beetle Bailey). A lot of these strips cease...

Joel 1:19 "O LORD, to thee will I cry: for the fire hath devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath burned all the trees of the field. " We have been in a bit of a cold snap here in Pa. OK, more than a snap; how about a slap? On Saturday, Lina and I decided to stay inside and not venture out of the domicile. I thought that it would be an ideal day for a fire. Back in the Fall of 2008 I bought a cord of wood, not sure of how much I needed for a winter, figuring it would be better to have more wood than not enough. Well, after stacking the wood (and restacking due to wife's requests and other factors), we now have wood on our brick porch (fifty feet from the house, to keep the termites from establishing a base for a home-eating offensive), wood in a plastic storage structure taller than me, and about a half-ton of wood in the wood shed at the back of our property. I even have an auxiliary pile for my neighbor, on the right side, for him to access when he wa...

It has been interesting to experience that as my blog gets more attention, there has been correspondingly (and logically) more scrutiny to what I write. This falls into the "Duh File" of mental notes. I include in this scrutiny Facebook, as the same dynamic applies. When I was writing for two years, and few people were reading, it follows that my words were going uncontested. Probably one of the intrinsic dangers of writing for one's own reasons, besides a larger audience. Although, if one merely wishes to have an on-line diary, it would be better to make it private. Sometimes it is shocking to read what people reveal about themselves on-line. Now, particularly in the last several weeks, I have been getting much more comments. And, although some of the feedback has been very affirming, a good part of it has been corrective and sometimes even somewhat critique-oriented. I guess everyone wants an audience until someone in the audience starts to boo. The feedback has unifor...

I have been a little too serious recently in my blog posts, so I am writing another "Fluffy Friday" piece. I hate shopping. When I was a bachelor, not married until 43 years old, I shopped about once a month. I would get up real early on a Saturday morning and head to the grocery store Redner's. Like a mole, my goal would be to get back home before the light. Even though I could eat two meals a day at school, breakfast and lunch, I still needed food at night and over the weekends, plus other stuff. Ironically, I had a fetish for buying furniture polish but I never dusted. By the time I moved out of the townhouse into our married home, I had amassed 15 or so cans of Pledge. In cleaning out the townhouse, and its years of dust (literally), I used almost every can. So, it all came out even in the end. I think the dust reminded me of a serene snowfall. With grocery shopping, if I waited until later, I inevitably got stuck behind a leisurely cart pusher and a gaggle of screami...