This one popped up in my feeds today... I wonder why?... I’ve been watching Ray Delahanty’s CityNerd Youtube channel for some time and while I’m not that much into bikes, I’m a fan of his no-cars mindset for urban living, which, no doubt inspired my Zillow search that eventually led to my recent condo purchase in said featured city. I guess I could take up that mode of transport, but no plans for that at the moment.

Like comedy, humanoid bipedalism is hard. I guess no one really ponders why most actual humans spend the first two years of their lives falling on their asses and then after a lifetime of bipedal mobility, at the end of our journey return to being one-years-old and falling on our asses again. The video above is from a Russian presentation promoting this new Humanoid robot.

These two videos popped up in my feeds. I saw the first one many years ago, and thought that I’d already posted about it, but apparently I didn’t. I wonder if I didn’t post because it was one of those videos that makes you think but one cannot begin to imagine what it might mean or at least one might be cautious to not pontificate on someone else’s art.

Happy Friday, y’all... This one popped up in my feeds and any time early Pat Benatar tunes are analyzed versus a classic Don Henley tune, I’m there, especially tunes from the early 80s. I love these analyses videos. Enjoy your weekend, my friends. JBB Bonus videos: Pat Benatar - Love is a Battlefield (Official Music Video) Don Henley - The Boys of Summer…

Yorgos Lanthimos doesn’t seem to know how to tell a cookie-cutter, happy-ending Hallmark story to save his life and that’s a good thing. I loved his modern fairy-tale take in 2023’s Poor Things, where...

Short films can be like good short stories in that you have to have a good story or engaging characters or hopefully both to pull off something that makes you think without requiring 90- to 180-minute...

baseball bat on rug I woke up thinking about an old rug, it kind of looks like it’s being hung up to be cleaned, and there’s something about its value or price, that it’s expensive or unique and so it expects to be treated better than any other piece of furniture. But, I guess in its old age it forgot that it had an exact twin which was hanging right next to it. The twin wasn’t surprise that the first rug had “forgotten” that it was part of a pair and that both were of equal value, even though the first one had been in the front room and the twin had been in a back room.

It’s taken me over a year to watch and reflect on this 24-episode series  that explores the meaning of Religion, researched and presented in a way that only Crash Course seems to be able to do. As I’ve noted many times before, my own introduction to Religion as an academic study was courtesy the Jesuit scholars at Loyola Marymount University beginning in 1976 and I found that the world and religious scholarship was so much bigger than I could even imagine, such that, despite my own personal faith undergoing tremendous shifts and dilemmas, I never tired of exploring all of the different ways that humans across the centuries have tried to understand themselves and their relationship to the universe using the language of Religion.

I saw that my favorite local theater, The Beverly Theater, was having a single day special showing of the new Spinal Tap II movie with special guests, Blue Man Group. It was so much fun watching the movie with Deb and a theater full of fans. Deb hadn’t seen the original, so I gave her a quick summary and she said that she really enjoyed the movie, even without having seen the original. The movie begins with a comedic series of interviews covering  “what have they been doing” since we last saw them at the end of the last movie.

I wanted to catch this one in theaters, and given how quickly movies come and go, especially smaller stories, I decided to see this one last minute and invited Deb to come see it with me. All I knew about the story was that there was an inter-generational friendship between Eleanor and a young college journalism student and a lie. I also knew that there was a Holocaust survivors group in the mix and that this was Scarlett Johansson’s directorial debut. It was a very New York City story, right down to the stereotype of New Yorkers moving to Florida when they retire.

This series, Crash Course Religions, began by asking what makes a religion a religion, noting the difficulty previous generations of Western scholars had a hard time understanding religions that did not adhere to Western traditions and often promoted an artificial hierarchy of religious traditions, supporting their assumptions that Western Religion, primarily Christianity, was superior to these other religions. Academic Religious Scholars have since learned that if something doesn’t fit their framework, it’s not a sign that that religion is somehow “inferior,” but that there’s a problem with their framework. Unfortunately that also requires that the person investigating or researching another religion must attempt to step out of their own worldview, or religious point of view, and take the other tradition at face value with no “better or worse” value judgments at work.

This 2013 documentary popped up in my feeds and I find that there’s something quaint about the optimism expressed on how this technology is going to change things. As someone who got a BA in Journalism in 1991 and then watch professional journalism and the local newspaper disappear because newspaper owners were stuck in the previous century and anyone with a Twitter account thought that what they were doing was journalism, the fate of writing is not being helped by the continuing escalation of technology and its enablers. The one quote that stands out, early in the documentary, is when someone says how great it is that you can get access to any printed material just by doing a search on your computer and then someone else says that (in 2013) they are printing way more books than they did in the past.

I love how Crash Course Religions just jumps right in on the deep end of a question and doesn’t look away or try to present some weak chicken-shit answer. Thinking about religion in an academic manner is a difficult thing to do, especially for those who only think about Religion in terms of “Mine is Correct” and all others are false. I certainly looked at things that way when I wrote essays in high school about Creation and Evolution or modern philosophy versus Jesus (apologies to my high school teachers). I was at the very beginning of a journey having lived my life believing what the Catholic Church and my mom had been showing me, but suddenly questioning anything that looked like it contradicted the religious experience I had as a 15-year-old.

This one popped up in my podcast feed last weekend. Apologies for a second Terry Gross/Fresh Air story in less than a month. The previous post (click HERE) was much shorter and a bit more about the history of the show, more of a promotion of the show, Fresh Air, and its history. This interview is a much slower walk through Terry Gross’s personal history and the twists and turns that led her to the show and what the show has become. I’ve listened to the 2-hour interview twice and being on my own personal rediscovering project (working through my own journals and essays going back to the 1970s), I enjoyed listening to the various unexpected turning points in her life and career, some horribly personal, that have given us this incredible gift of professional journalism that has been unflinching in it’s gaze at the best of human creativity and struggle and sometimes failure.

Friendships seemed simpler in the past. In the third grade I noticed this blonde kid on the bus ride home who was in the class that I had just joined. When we got off at the same bus stop, we found that we lived a block away from each other. That was the beginning of a life long friendship. In college, my first weeks at a new school, it was pretty much the same. Standing in line at the cafeteria or bookstore, whoever was suffering the same long lines somehow became best friends through the shared experiences.

I think I just wrote on this subject a couple weeks ago (Click HERE for previous article). The Jesus Movement, of which I was a part of, in the 1970s was very much caught up in the notion that Jesus was coming back very soon and that was central to the urgency of the message that everyone needs to be “saved.” The first Christian musicians that I became aware of had songs about the need for all of us to be ready for Jesus’ return and the consequences if we failed.

I don’t know about you, but I could use a musical break with a couple kid-led bands, and old school flash mob and a Kellyoke tune. Life is precious, my friends, it’s a waste of time and energy to spend it on any other than supporting and loving one another and at the end of the day celebrating the effort(s) in song. Have a good weekend and don’t forget to love one another. JBB Sources: The Logical Song - covered by the Greystones posted by The Greystones (2025-05-02), …

They do so much with so little. A little girl, her shoes in one hand and purple plastic bowling pin in the other, is a ballerina or maybe a champion sprinter. The grass in the park is full and healthy and the afternoon breeze glides through the eucalyptus and oak trees. Cars pull up to the sidewalk and Mexican children spill out and sprint for the swings and the slide. I remember something about my mother once telling us to not run around like a bunch of “Wild Indians” (obviously, this was long before it was considered rude to use this term for native or indigenous Americans...).

While the idea of “race” can be understood as a human invention, the need to be able to identify individuals and groups of individuals who are part of ones tribe would seem to be a fundamental survival trait. Even before we understand the idea of individuals, it would seem that we are born with some need to be able to figure out “friend or foe.” That would seem to be a natural survival trait. But that is far different than the idea that European Christians can claim any land not occupied by other European Christians, essentially, that non-Europeans have no rights to the lands that they may be living on.

They nailed it. Having spent my last three years teaching Middle School and a total of six years teaching Middle School of my 28-year career, they get it. Everything is too intense and at the same time everyone is suffering in silent awkwardness. Adults fumbling in their efforts to “relate” to students, kids having no filter between their feelings and thoughts and what comes out of their mouths. At a time when they have no idea who they are, they are completely  addicted to getting a little  👍 or 😀 for a post on social media.

He couldn’t remember the last time he found himself taking a leisurely evening stroll on Ocean Front in Newport. Decades? He thought better than to mention that to the young woman he was walking with. Then he couldn’t exactly recall which was further back in his past, the last time he took a stroll on the beach or the last time he went out on a first date? He didn’t think it would be a good idea to bring that up either. He smiled. Being with this beautiful redhead made him forget how long it had been since he’d drummed up the courage to ask anyone out.

This one popped up in my YouTube feeds and for all I know it might be all A.I. BS (the voice-over is admittedly AI and the family image is “digitally generated”… unlike the image above of me as a 16-y...

Non-western cultures recognized more than two genders... not surprising. That the Talmud, Jewish Rabbinic texts, would describe genders beyond the two is new to me (4:39 in the video). It’s interesting that the “problem” of gender is set against the background of different cultures interacting where one recognized more than two genders and the wanna-be dominant culture was concerned that their officers would be influenced by the other culture and it would result in a “break down of discipline,” etc., etc., etc., so they “outlawed” a non-binary understanding of gender. Interesting.

I stopped looking at movie reviews on YouTube because the algorithm is biased towards the unhelpful negative “10 Upcoming Movies That Are Already Doomed” Headlines. I know that if it’s an Ethan Coen/Tricia Cooke movie it’s going to skew toward violent/dark comedy with some lesbianism thrown in to scare away the “mainstream” audiences.((Generally boomers. It seems that even though my generation, the boomers, claimed to bring about the 1960s sexual revolution, I’ve never quite understood when a couple former girlfriends talked about lesbian sex like it was just non-mutual BDSM. Maybe they were confused, but they made it sound like they thought that lesbians had to physically hurt each other to reach orgasm or something...)) Oh, and the film will feature Margaret Qualley working with a different quirky accent.

I don’t know how early in my podcast listening history I added Terri Gross and Fresh Air to my daily listening routine, but I’m sure that it was a welcomed departure from my usual tech news/tech trends listening choices. When I moved to Florida in 2008 my commute to work shortened which was nice, but it also cut into my podcast listening time which annoyed me. Now that I have no commute at all (except between rooms), you’d think that would effect my podcast listening. Well, I’ve jettisoned a few podcasts (especially the one that drone on for two-hours or more...), but I will not do without my daily dose of Fresh Air and Terri Gross.