Imagine a Thanksgiving dinner where the dish that received the most attention was the cranberry sauce. It’s funny how we set priorities. We all know the turkey is the main dish, but the other side dishes are important too. But we spend all our time before Thanksgiving telling turkey jokes and reading turkey cartoons. Nobody much tells cranberry jokes. That’s just attaching too much importance to something that isn’t that central to the event. As a matter of fact, I don’t even like cranberries, so I don’t even eat the damn stuff. We do focus on some weird things in...

I remember once, when one of my sons was just about ten (I won’t say which one).  He was over at my apartment complaining about his mom. She had borrowed ten bucks from him from his birthday money and had promised to pay him back by that Saturday. Unfortunately, she hadn’t been able to make good on that promise, and he was pissed. “She owes ten dollars!” he angrily shouted. And at the time, this struck me as funny. And I said to him, “Let me get this straight. The woman who gave you life, the woman who provides a roof over your head, food for your belly, the clothes...

I have to confess that I took a certain amount of pleasure in watching the downfall of the evangelical preacher Ted Haggard. I have serious problems with people who try to tell other people how to live from the beginning, but the fact that he has been such an outspoken opponent of gay rights, and the fact that he was nailed for engaging in gay sex with a male prostitute just makes everything so much better. There was a reason that Jesus told us not to judge one another. It always comes back to bite you in the ass. Jesus was always after the priests and scribes of his days for being hypocrites....

Faith is a fine invention For gentlemen who see; But Microscopes are prudent In an emergency.—Emily Dickinson This is how most of us see faith.  We want to believe, but we want to have proof.  I guess that’s why so many of us can relate to the story of Doubting Thomas, the disciple who refused to believe in the risen Christ until he could feel the crucifixion wounds on Christ’s body.  It’s hard to believe when everything you know and everything you see tells you otherwise.  It must be very hard for blind people to believe in anything, don’t you think? I mean, assuming that I am blind,...

People complain when they see folks playing God.  Some folks just don’t like it when others practice birth control, or consider euthanasia, or even take medicine for that matter, depending on the religion.  They don’t want us to mess with stem cells.  They say we shouldn’t play God. At the same time, those same people have no problem playing God when it comes to sitting in judgement over others.  Playing God  never comes up when they talk about capital punishment, or blowing up abortion clinics.  But in fact, we play God all the time. Doctors and nurses play God every day.  Certainly,...

After people got a chance to see Bruce Lee way back in the 70s, everybody wanted to learn kung fu.  Kung fu schools started to sprout up everywhere.  That’s when our kung fu school started.  Back then, we were located in a large space in Venice, California.  Every class had more than twenty students.   The place was packed.  Today, we’re lucky to have five or six people there.  There are two reasons for this. For one thing, martial arts seem to go in fads.  In the 60s, it was all karate, thanks to Ed Parker and the Green Hornet (well, actually Kato, played by Bruce Lee, on the Hornet). ...

There is this really wonderful story about a mother teaching her daughter how to cook a roast beef.  The mother patiently shows the daughter how to tenderize the meat and how to prepare it for roasting.  She shows her to take the roast and cut off the two ends before putting it in the roasting pan.  The daughter asked her mother why the two ends of the roast should be cut off.  Mother answered that she didn’t know, but that was how HER mother had taught her to do it. Sometime later, at a family gathering, the daughter, still curious, asked her grandmother, “Grandma, why do you cut off the...

Let me tell you something about music.  There are rules to music.  At least, there are rules to the kind of music we play in our culture.  There are no real rules to music; play anything you want.  But, if you want the notes to sound like Western Euro-centric music, you have to follow certain rules, such as using that eight note octave scale.  Start using a different scale, and your music sounds like it came from somewhere else, from some other culture. We grew up with our music, whether it was Bach or the Beatles, we got used to it.  It has become a part of us.  And it has an effect on...

It’s been very interesting to hear some people complaining about the idea of paying for the health care costs of illegal aliens, and even of legal aliens, for that matter.  I guess it doesn’t occur to those folks that it might not be a good idea to have millions of sick people walking around passing their illnesses onto us.  Or that we’ll still end up paying for them when they end of up having to go to the emergency room for treatment, which bogs down the trauma centers and makes health care more expensive for all of us.  You can only judge a society by how it treats its weakest members. ...

“What do you want to run a marathon for?” I would hear when I told people I was going to run twenty-six point two miles. “You must be nuts!” “The psychiatric department is upstairs,” my doctor said, after I asked him to certify that I was in good enough health to go through the training. “You’re going to ruin your knees,” my kung fu teacher warned me. But I was determined.  My wife, Becky, and I had run countless five and ten kilometer races.  We had run a ten mile race up in Santa Barbara (or down, depending upon your orientation).  We found the thought of completing a race...