June Rambling: Hal Holbrook; Marimba Queens

pinned on Pinterest by Roger Green (not me)

My denomination, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A) voted for marriage equality at its General Assembly this month. “Ministers will be allowed to marry same-sex couples in states where it is legal.”

On the other hand, Freedom and Faith Coalition’s Road to Majority conference had an Obama figurine in the urinal.

CBS News Sunday Morning did a piece, Born this way: Stories of young transgender children. The ever-interesting Dustbury on Gender Confirmation Surgery.

Writer Jay Lake worked closely with Lynne Thomas, an Illinois-based librarian… to ensure that all his blog posts and essays would be saved for posterity. “Though this is a relatively uncomplicated task for his blog content, which he unambiguously owned, it gets problematic when you wade into the legal rights of preserving your social media presence. ‘You can’t just download Facebook content into an archive.’”

A cartoon from 2008, and still apt: A Concise History Of Black-White Relations In The United States.

Mark Evanier on O.J. Simpson trial nostalgia.

The Law of Diminishing Returns

One of the things I most remember from my freshman year of college is Law of Diminishing Returns. It was a concept in my Economics 101 course, and suggests that more is not necessarily better. The illustration that sticks in my mind is this: One ice cream cone tastes delicious. Subsequent cones do not provide the same amount of pleasure as that first dessert; in fact, that third or fourth cone may be less than tasty and, indeed, more tummy-ache-inducing.

That’s how I feel about raking leaves. That first pass generates a sensation of good feeling. But subsequent sweeps over the same area, when fewer leaves are being moved, are far less satisfying.

My wife is fond, if not the raking itself, then the results of raking, talking about how much nicer the lawn will be in the spring. This is not exactly an incentive for me