Living Dangerously
There was a time when I didn’t write about certain subjects because I was concerned that I would lose my blog readership. Now that that’s water under the bridge, if I write to Fragments at all, I put up whatever…
Category Culture
End of the Age: A Splendidly Disturbing Time
We toured the 31 outdoor wooden “sculptures” in a distant Floyd County field with both our imaginations and the creating artist’s names and a brief hint at explanations about each piece staged over a half mile winding trail. The one pictured…
Traveling Hopefully
So I had this notion a month or so back that my experience as teacher, speaker, field trip leader and engaged citizen would mesh nicely before small groups of folks who come to Floyd County lacking any depth to our…
Analyse This: SCiO’s Crowdsourced Database of Matter
Given the phenomenal success of this Kickstarter project (13k backers, $2.76 million pledged towards a goal of $200k) you should be interested in SCiO–a miniature hand-held spectrometer. This, my amigos, changes everything. It will take the guesswork out of buying…
No Topless Bar in Floyd
Might have been almost a year since our gaggle of friends pulled me down the street on Friday night to eat. “Where are we going” I asked in the final stages of blood sugar collapse quite a few hours since…
Feral Children in Public Places
To everything there is a season. A time for bouncing off the walls; a time to sit quietly and listen. Some children have parents who don’t know the difference. Â A rant… I have a low tolerance for children allowed to…
Must Be Monday
It’s not like Monday is the onerous uphill trudge it once was during my so-called “working life.” This isn’t WORKING LIFE? Yah. There’s just no paycheck every two weeks. The list just seems longer–even in these marvelous, carefree “golden years”…
Young Blood and The Thread of Life
Things come in threes and when they do, I start to see shapes in the clouds. Creativity, after all, is putting together what already exists–often in some other person’s work or thoughts or writings–in novel ways to make them your…
Jesus Goes to Georgia
“And if a man smites you on the cheek, I say to do return injury for injury in kind. Not an eye for an eye, but verily repay a slap a tight cluster about the bowels. Stand your ground, ye peacekeepers, ye…
100% Beef-ish: Show Don’t Sell
Wall-e meets Gromit goes grocery shopping. Chipotle scores in this un-commercial info-tainment animated moral tale. We have become the undead among unfoods. There is another way to feed ourselves. â–¶ Slow foods, local foods: buy â–¶ Fast foods, long-distance foods:…
Can We Put the Breaks on The Great Acceleration?
I am a child of the Great Acceleration. This has been the name given the post-war surge in any number of consumption, trade and resource-use patterns that began in 1950 and whose progression (if not purely progress) has lead us…
The Leisure Class is Getting Bored
The trend over my lifetime has been towards reducing the effort it takes to do ____ and you fill in the blank here–from getting across town or the continent to buying or reading a book or making a cake. The…
Explaining Everything
I thought maybe that post title would grab your attention off the interwebs–a place long on information and not so long on synthesis. And yet, from those same web-deeps from time to time comes a thread of woven thought that…
Blog as Selfie
Why blog? I am sure I’m not the only one who asks this question–one that fails to find an answer, even as we fire up the keyboard and fill more white space with words and pixels–about what, for what, towards…