Top Ten of 2008!

Everyone cool (or, at least, everyone cool at RMC) does a top ten albums, books, or movies list at the end of the year. Since I desperately seek acceptance by higher strata of society, I have been thinking about doing one too. Then I realized that I only bought four albums this year, only read books published before 1990, and only saw a few new movies, mostly at the dollar theatre. So, I've revised the theme of these lists to "Patrick's favorites this year, regardless of year of publication." Please contact me for ISBNs and SKUs.

Top four albums I bought this year!
1. Astral Weeks, by Van Morrison (published 1968). I mean, it's a mystical document.
There you go
Starin' with a look of avarice
Talking to Huddie Leadbetter
Showin' pictures on the walls
And whisperin' in the halls
And pointin' a finger at me

2. The Triceratops vs. the K-T Boundary, by the Triceratops (2007). I picked this one up late. The Triceratops and other bands have been really doing creative work in the Birmingham music scene.

3. The Garden EP by Handwritten Letters (2008). I really like this Birmingham folk band. They use a lot of flute, and as anyone who has seen me dance to Jethro Tull will acknowledge, I like flute. Unfortunately, the album doesn't sound nearly as good as their live show.

4. We Have Cause to Be Uneasy, by Wild Sweet Orange (2008). Not a bad album, but I was turned off by the way they screamed all of their songs at the concert.

Top 3 Old Books I read this year!
1. City Economics, by Jane Jacobs. Jane explains how cities are the source of all economic growth and how complex, diverse cities produce the most economic development work.
2. Community and the Politics of Place, by Daniel Kemmis. Kemmis encourages us to live public lives, cooperating with our fellow citizens.
3. The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. I started these last year, but I finished them this year. What makes these books outstanding is the depth of the mythology Tolkein creates as background for the story. It may seem superfluous, but I think it gives us better context for understanding the characters and the plot. Reading these books encourages me to see more mythology in my own life, to see the history and context of the people and places I experience everyday.

Top 2 Movies I saw this year!
1. 2001: A Space Odyssey. I'm glad I live in a world where movies as significant as this are made. It's a cultural document.
2. WALL-E. Also cool. Also about space.

Top 1 Poems I read this year!
1. Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, by Walt Whitman.
I loved well those cities;
I loved well the stately and rapid river;
The men and women I saw were all near to me;
Others the same—others who look back on me, because I look’d forward to them;
(The time will come, though I stop here to-day and to-night.)

What is it, then, between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?

Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not.

The count of years is a 153, but Whitman still manages to humanize even the most mundane aspect of city life. And certainly I can relate to this:

It is not upon you alone the dark patches fall,
The dark threw patches down upon me also;

This year has had its share of dark patches. But these dark patches have provided fodder for the mythology of our lives. In the dark patches we find a faith which orients us toward the end God has prepared for us.

We are developing a robust community only because we have collectively experienced dark patches. This doesn't justify our mistakes, but these mistakes and difficulties give us a shared experience which is the root of the mythology we need.

To 2009, to robust communities, to our mythology.

boring bit of business...

hey friends,
merry christmas! i hope you are all enjoying the holiday season! life is good here in jackson, no news to report really. but i need to bug you all to update your info on the group contact list; i'm being a dorky wife (and loving it!) and sending out christmas cards, so i need some correct addresses! will weir, you have no address. get on the ball! love and miss you all-

Reason to serve hot cocoa and wassail at holiday gatherings!

Sorry my posts on here are never too personal. I like to post stuff that I think you guys will find interesting. But, just so you know, I think  you all are wonderful and you make me feel all warm and fuzzy. Life is good, with possibly an exciting thing or two on the horizon. I'll let you know. I'm currently reading The Hidden Art of Homemaking by Edith Schaffer and Perelandra. Now, on to the interesting stuff. (from the NYTimes.com, a really cool piece great ideas from this year.)
Cold-Shoulder Science
By MATTHEW HUTSON
The warm welcome and the cold shoulder, it turns out, are more than mere metaphors. This year, two sets of studies revealed that feelings of social connection and sensory experience are related on a deep psychological level: getting the cold shoulder literally gives you the chills, and actual warmth can melt a figuratively frosty heart.

Research published in the journal Psychological Science by Chen-Bo Zhong and Geoffrey Leonardelli at the University of Toronto found that subjects who were asked to recall anexperience of social exclusion and then asked to estimate the lab’s ambient temperature gave estimates that were more than four degrees colder than those given by subjects who’d been asked to recall an experience of inclusion. And subjects ignored during a ball-tossing game in the lab had a larger postgame appetite for hot coffee and hot soup than did players who’d seen more action.

In another experiment, published in the journal Science by the psychologists Lawrence Williams, now at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and John Bargh, of Yale, subjects were asked to hold a cup of either hot coffee or iced coffee for a moment on the way to the lab. Then they were asked to evaluate the personality of someone based on a written description. Those who held a hot drink found the individual more caring and generous than did the other subjects. In a companion experiment, holding a hot therapeutic pad induced subjects to act more generously.

Viewing cognition as responsive to physical cues, Williams explains, “takes into account the fact that we are physical beings” and that bodily and environmental factors “impact the ways our thoughts are structured.” The researchers studying the phenomenon argue that we probably learned to associate affection with warmth from childhood experiences of being held by a caregiver.

With the new data in hand, it’s tempting to suspect that the current economic climate is leaving investors out in the cold in more ways than one. On Sept. 29, when the Dow suffered its largest point-drop in history, only one stock among the Standard & Poor’s 500 rose: the Campbell Soup Company.

I ate too much salad

I can't wait for new year's you guys are awesome.

Ooooh Pretty...

This is fun. Happy Monday. Express yourself. Love, Elaine. (a website where you can create your own Jackson Pollockesque "paintings.")