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.")

In response to Kara"s question about whether or not it would be akward to facebook friend my girlfriend

Anyone who wants to friend my girlfriend on facebook (Rachel Ogle-Mc Millan) is welcome to.

i'm at the airport waiting on my flight home for thanksgiving, and i found this video as part of a YouTube quagmire i started after will sent me a link.



and one more for good measure...



in summary: muppets + science = fairly accurate representation of a day in the lab

w00t.

Life in the Magic City

Mayor Larry Langford, VisionLand's visionary, at his sackcloth & ashes extravanganza in April.

Langford said that Birmingham’s crime problem “pails” (sic) in comparison to the biblical City of Nineveh. In his proclamation of the day, he tells the Bible story of Jonah and the city of Nineveh: “Whereas Chapter 3, verse 5 & 6, of the Book of Jonah, Old Testament states, that the people of Nineveh believe God and proclaimed a fast and put on sackcloth from the greatest of them even to the least of them." He bought 2,000 sackcloth robes for the event.

For those of you out-of-towners or those some still unaware of how terrifically awful (and tragically funny) our mayor is... this one's for you. The Birmingham Weekly recently released "Leapin' Larry's Year in Review." Some of it is almost too ludicrous to be true...

A handful of highlights:

*Oct 2007- Mayor-elect Langford announces his choice for Public Works director, Rickey Kennedy, a city landscape supervisor. Langford met Kennedy when Kennedy was cutting the grass in Linn Park. The new job came with a $100,000 pay increase and put Kennedy in charge of the $54.7 million Public Works budget. The Public Works department is the second largest department in the city. Later the Jefferson County Personnel Board declared Kennedy unqualified for the job and ordered the mayor to make a new appointment. To date Langford has defied that order.

*Nov 2007- Langford is sworn in as Birmingham mayor. In his inauguration speech, he promises to build a domed stadium, lambasts parents for buying children designer clothes and once again declares that what children need most is corporal punishment.

• Langford says he is in talks with Mall of America to build a new shopping center in Birmingham. The mall would be adjacent to a new aquarium. “If Atlanta can have Beluga whales, we can too,” Langford says.

*Dec 2007- Langford also claims that Legion Field, which he also wants to demolish, was named after a demon in the Bible. In fact, it was named in honor of the American Legion.

• With its attention span exhausted by the Boutwell debate, the council approves nearly $30,000 for renovations to City Hall. Councilor Roderick Royal questions the expenditure, but his colleagues gripe about his curiosity. Later it turns out that at least $12,000 of that money paid for a new deck outside the mayor’s office where Langford could smoke without having to walk a short distance to the existing deck down the hall.

- In his second interview with Securities and Exchange Commission lawyers in Miami, Langford refuses to answer most questions on the basis of unspecified constitutional rights. In a back-and-forth with investigators, Langford refuses to actually plead the Fifth Amendment. Later, Montgomery investment banker Bill Blount invokes the same unspecified constitutional rights (Matt's side note: He's being nailed by the SEC for accepting $156,000 in illegal cash & benefits. The same day he was indicted, our beloved Jefferson Co. Senators approved a $40,000 raise for him. Huzzah).

• In one of his few major staffing changes, Langford replaces finance director Michael Johnson with former Jefferson County finance director Steve Sayler. At the county, Sayler helped direct billions in disastrous interest rate swaps and left the county’s financial records in such shambles that to date the county has not been able to produce an audited financial statement.

All this before 2008 even hit... I didn't have time to dig into the $70,000 he spent (of loaned money) on clothes, the "top secret" plans he brought in with two officers armed with semi-automatics, his plan to bring the Olympics to the Magic City, the Kids Getting Laptops disaster (his partnership with a man who just received a 98-count indictment) the disappearance of legally-required monthly financial updates... Long-lost friends, if you make any plans to visit us in Birmingham, I suggest you do it soon... before our beloved city is a crater.

word of the day

word of the day: monorchic
as in Hitler was monorchic
that is all because I am at work

Snapshots of the Weekend at Cheaha