Category Archives: Thoughts

Family Feud, Google Style

This morning, sitting around the breakfast table sucking down homemade blueberry-strawberry-banana-cranberry all fruit smoothies (is there anything better?) my family discovered a fun new pastime. It is a version of family feud, reincarnated as a lens into contemporary culture and its uses of search engines. Most web browsers come with a built-in search bar that defaults [...]
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More Metaphors, Creativity, and thank goodness for Einstein's Honesty

I’m fairly certain that any valuable artistic work or insightful idea I’ve ever come up with is the result of understanding one thing—sometimes naively, sometimes intentionally—in terms of another. It is as if conceptual metaphors are the basis of (all?) creativity (if creativity is defined as being the construction of original ideas that are of [...]
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Similes are Simple but Metaphors are Masterful

I’m fascinated with, and entirely dependent on, understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. (A big thanks goes out to Lakoff and Johnson for the insight required to generate this rather concise and potent definition). We tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of and ultimately improvise and live with [...]
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Sticking it to the “Old” Man OR Classical Revolution: The Status of “Art” Music in Contemporary Culture

In 1897 a man by the name of Ransom E. Olds embraced the concept of the horseless carriage, and decided to invest a substantial amount of his funds into founding a company that he decided would proudly bear his name: Old Motor Works General Motors purchased the company in 1908 and after taking a branding [...]
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Memorial to November 5th

On Guy Fawkes day, we had no furniture To burn. Nothing but an old piano That we found beneath the old rock church. We lifted it, the four of us, groaning From the mildewed weight, and placed it in The parking lot. Bill went for papers. I trumped upon the keys. He was four Tones flat in all, with some so bad, The [...]
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Big Bubbles: An Unstoppable Obsession

This summer I fully gave in to what was an inevitable obsession: the creation of big soap bubbles. When I was young my family had a Bubble Thing. Where and why we got it, I don’t know, but considering the relative lack of humidity in the Salt Lake City atmosphere, the days when we could actually [...]
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Nobility and Narrative

With each passing day I find myself increasingly convinced that storytelling will save the world.
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A Three-year-old's blow to the autonomous artwork

“In Reading and Understanding, Roger Schank tells us [a] story: John loved Mary but she didn’t want to marry him. One day, a dragon stole Mary from the castle. John got on top of his horse and killed the dragon. Mary agreed to marry him. They lived happily ever after. In this book Schank is concerned with [...]
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More Poetry . . . Nature and Love

Sunset on the Hill Slowly, slowly, the sunset, still, Casts long, long shadows, deep blue, silent, Casts moving shadows behind the hill Where we sit, still, and watch. Cool Clouds, streaked with hot red rays, Slide in the silent autumn sky. Cool clouds are cast as shadows of our days. They slide together, red and gray. Slowly, slowly, the sunset, quiet, Lingers as we lock [...]
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Love and Nature: Poetry in My Veins

Beach rocks jutting up from liquid churn        pebbles in the sea Cheek bones beneath my lover’s face        What are they to me? Hard things shape and hold in place        The softness of the earth. Bones and stones support the shape        That rends all beauty’s birth. —John H. Richards I’ve been reading through a collection of my father’s poetry lately in search of text to [...]
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