Okay, it’s been a year since I returned to the kung fu club and so it’s time for a progress report.  As you may recall, it was a year ago on Memorial Day that I bumped into a guy giving away free karate lessons during a local street fair.  I took him up on the offer because I knew that I needed to get some exercise and practicing a martial art is a lot less boring than lifting weights and running on treadmills. I had practiced kung fu for a good many years before, but an injury has forced me to stop for a time.  I started to focus my attention in other pursuits, such as music and writing,...

For the past few years, my wife, Becky, and I have been very interested in ghosts. Well, Becky is really the one most interested for reasons unknown to me. But I find the subject interesting and so I go along for the ride. So each week, we watch the obligatory episodes of Ghosthunters on the Sci Fi channel. That would be our favorite show. Next in line is Most Haunted on the Travel Channel. There is also a show on the Biography Channel called Ghostly Encounters. And for something very scary, there is the Discovery Channel’s Hauntings. A and E has Paranormal University, but that...

I’m getting a little tired of conservatives calling America a “Christian” nation.  There is nothing Christian about it.  Our nation’s government was not founded by Christians, nor was it founded upon Christian principles.  And although the organized church has long held hands with the government, there is precious little in the practice of the organized Christian church that resembles the teachings of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson said in his autobiography concerning the preamble of the constitution, “Where the preamble declares, that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author...

I’ll tell you a little secret about teaching.  And I’ve been teaching a long time now, over 25 years, so I should know something about it.  I never meant to be a teacher.  It was never in my plans.  I wanted to be a rock star, or an actor.  I saw myself standing on the stage taking my bows to thunderous applause.  I told my high school guidance counselor so. I remember well being called to my counselor’s office back when I was a senior in high school.  I thought I was in trouble.  I couldn’t imagine being in trouble with Mr. Milling.  Mr. Milling looked rather like a tall, thin...

One of the things that drive people crazy about religions in general, and about Christianity in particular, is this perverse need many followers have to suffer. For some reason, these fanatics have equated a letting go of the world with the need to wear barbed wire underwear. In Ireland, every year, thousands of people walk up the craggy slope of a mountain called Croke Patrick in bare feet, in order to suffer. For hundreds of years, monks and nuns, and penitent pilgrims have worn hair shirts and flagellated themselves in order to suffer agony in the idea that somehow all this pain and suffering...

I once had a girl friend, many years before I met my wife, Becky, and I loved her very much. We had, I thought, a good relationship. So I felt as though I had been hit with a sledgehammer in the chest when she confessed to me that she had cheated on me while she was away at school. I didn’t know how to respond. I was angry, sure, and I felt betrayed, but mostly, I felt unloved. She felt terribly guilty. She wept bitterly. She apologized again and again. She had knew that what she had done was inexcusable and didn’t offer any. She told me she couldn’t see how she could continue...

There is an old saying that we all know. You are what you eat. I never understood that statement, not really, until I had some health and nutrition classes in college. And even then it didn’t really hit me. It wasn’t until I started working out a lot that I came to understand that the food we eat is literally what makes our bodies. Our bodies renew themselves on the average of every seven years. In fact, certain tissues renew faster, and others a little slower. But the average is every seven years. That means that the you that exists now is not the same you that existed seven years...

Anybody who has taken economics 101 knows that in the business world you have to have a product to sell. That product can be a service, as well. That product is produced by the worker, who generally receives some sort of benefit out of producing the product in the form of wages or commissions. The product is purchased by the consumer. Theoretically, the more the consumer buys, the more the worker produces, the more money the person providing the capital makes on his or her investment, the more happy everybody is. Worker –> Product –> Consumer = $$$ When we look at...