Few would disagree that a really beautiful image of a mother and her newborn child, properly made, is one of the most significant and wonderful pictures in the lives of all involved. My grandfather, Richard Batten, after whom I am named, made such a photograph of my mother and me in the late summer of…
Continue reading →See, I made you look. “Oh, no, not another one of those ‘meaning of life’ blog entries.” I was cruising around WordPress.com the other day, which features a feed on the front page of all the recent entries made by WordPress bloggers. I was hoping to find something interesting, to dispel my growing belief that…
Continue reading →Don’t go bringin’ no agua to no Mexican brown dope dealers. They ain’t your concern.
Continue reading →In tenth grade I had an English teacher named Gil Hernandez, who many of my long-time readers might recognize as the teacher who got me started writing in my journal. Hernandez was big into the transcendental meditation scene in that era, the late 1970s, and the yearbook staff wrote two stories about him and meditation….
Continue reading →From Facebook: Howard XXX: lol. what happens when the right whines too much. (Picture of Barack Obama’s birth certificate) Alyssa XXX: Certificate of live birth is different than a birth certificate. Richard R. Barron: ?>>”Certificate of live birth is different than a birth certificate.”<< I don’t understand statements like that. My birth certificate says, “Standard…
Continue reading →After weeks of dryness and officially being classified in the “D3 – Drought Extreme” category by the U. S. Drought Monitor web site, the rain we have been missing has finally set in. Abby and I took Dorothy, our fe facto mother-in-law, to Kingston, Oklahoma yesterday to have lunch with Dorothy’s son Ralph and his…
Continue reading →Bad news for those of you who enjoy giving your loved ones Valentine’s Day gifts: we have seen the last Valentine’s Day. How could this be? Prophecy. According to the Nikon World calendar, the world will end December 31, 2011. “It’s been long known that this will be the end of it all,” said Lars…
Continue reading →While explaining to my coworkers today that a quarter pound of unicorn rump was on sale for just $5.95 at the local grocery, I decided that I would share these interesting facts about unicorns. Unicorn meat is among the leanest, healthiest meat available today. After eating unicorn meat, many people report farting stars, particularly if…
Continue reading →As an average, healthy adult, I suffer through my share of seasonal upper respiratory infections. We all have our nicknames for it: Mocus, Epizudic, The Crud, The Green Nose Packers, Sneezles, Angela’s Pismo Weekend, and so on. For me in years past, it starts with a sore throat, followed by a day or two of…
Continue reading →Just because I look ridiculous doesn’t mean I am ridiculous. When I die I think I will discover this was all just a really funny joke. Note from notebook from long trip: B B pool boner. I assume this refers to Billy Bell in our pool in tenth grade, telling me he had a boner….
Continue reading →Much of the time the tragedies that occur in our world remain abstractions. Once in a while, though, these events come close to home. A relative is diagnosed with cancer. A friend’s house burns to the ground. A coworker is arrested for a felony. Suddenly these occurrences aren’t news items, but flesh and blood before…
Continue reading →When I started tenth grade, a brilliant English teacher named Gil Hernandez assigned us to write a journal for his class. I always thought it was cool that in his grade book next to my journal grade he wrote “best.” As many of my readers know, my blogs have become an extension of that journal….
Continue reading →I am verging on hiding the news feeds of all my Facebook friends who continue to put hashtags (the pound sign) in their posts. I could rant about it, or I could just copy and paste this excellent, and completely correct, analysis from Maddox: And just an aside: hashtags are pointless, hashtag jokes are stupid…
Continue reading →In thinking about the destination of the Universe and the growing body of evidence that shows we are ever trudging toward The Big Freeze, it becomes inescapable that everything, every single thing that you and I are and know, everything that we do, everything that we see, every monument we erect and poem we compose,…
Continue reading →1. Myth: religion is not a real problem. Fact: religion is a real and serious condition. It is no different than diabetes or heart disease in its ability to impact someone’s life. It can have both emotional and physical symptoms and make life very difficult for those who have it. The medical community has acknowledged…
Continue reading →“Anybody here today who has not accepted Jesus Christ as their savior, I’m telling you, you’re not my brother and you’re not my sister.” -Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley, January 2011
Continue reading →Alternate title: Dogs Preserve Dreams. I got up at 4:30 this morning to feed the dogs. I got back in bed and laid awake for 15 minutes memorizing the following dream: We were in my Grandmother Barron’s back bedroom, the one where Nicole and I used to stay when we were kids, when we noticed…
Continue reading →We have all seen and heard the use of insults as arguments. Instead of actually debating an issue, one of the debaters will retreat to name calling, badgering, and belittling, and often claiming your point of view is just ridiculous without attempting to say why. We hear it a lot on talk radio. The technique…
Continue reading →Update, February 2012: When I first posted this entry, I received some compelling comments, some hostile comments, and two comments which actually threatened me. I didn’t approve the hostile or threatening comments, but I now see that as a mistake, since hostile comments in fact adjudicate my thinking by illustrating how genuinely terrifying this kind…
Continue reading →Like a lot of ordinary, healthy boys, when I was growing up, my friends and I played a lot of war. By “war,” I mean we would choose up sides and pretend, almost exclusively, that it was World War 2. The process started by “calling” our ranks, which works the same way that “calling” shotgun…
Continue reading →Dateline 1977: In those dark days of junior high school, one day I was at my locker in the eighth grade hall. Two lockers down was Jena Owrey’s locker. Jena was beautiful and popular, but unlike a lot of the “proud crowd” (as they were known at my school and in my day), she was…
Continue reading →As the former guardian of a teenage boy, and as an adult family man, I presently look at the world from a maturing perspective. From my point of view, characteristics such as responsibility and honesty trump characteristics like impetuousness, laziness, and rebellion. Every teenager, from my own self those decades ago, to the one who was…
Continue reading →Someone at my office today casually announced that “blogging is passé.” Of course, I beg to differ, in some cases. The truth is that overall, blogging was dead before it started, since it was shallow, annoying, incomplete and uncreative in the first place. So yes, bad blogging is passé. If we are to believe in…
Continue reading →A everyone who reads my lexicon of bloggery knows, Abby and I spend a lot of our recreational time hiking and exploring in the desert southwest, which is home to some very interesting archaeology. The most compelling and intriguing is that of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park in Chaco Canyon, in the lonely high…
Continue reading →Here are a few bullet points from a notepad in my car… Radio ad: “Tell congress to do its job and pass the new wiretapping bill to keep us all safe.” After hearing this ad in favor of continuing to allow warrantless electronic eavesdropping on American citizens, and thinking how much it sounded like the…
Continue reading →Some issues. Discuss. * Dependence on Oil I recognized this problem in 1973 when I was 10. I couldn’t solve it then, and I can’t solve it now, because the American people are too greedy, short-sighted and ultimately stupid to elect leaders who will stand up to global oil and say we’ve had enough, while…
Continue reading →Recently Abby and I were doing chores and piddling, and Abby had the TV on to her favorite network, HGTV. Occasionally I sat down to tell her something or bring her a drink, and listened for a few minutes to the program. Three things came to mind immediately: The “G” in HGTV stood for garden…
Continue reading →In high school and college, I used to have three friends who were the sons of very wealthy families. They were all incredibly arrogant, and all shared a common feeling that they should be, or were, above the law. They all routinely used their fathers’ money to purchase expensive radar detectors, buy their way out…
Continue reading →I found this posted on a forum I frequent: “Why Doesn’t Healthy Food Taste Good? I have a theory on this. Satan works hard every day to deceive us. Infiltrating our food supply with foods swimming in calories, fat, sodium, and sugar is a subtle yet powerful way to get us down. Fruits, vegetables, and…
Continue reading →True Story: in the winter of 2001, a woman I know named “Barbie,” good-looking and successful, is found in the trunk of her car one morning with her eyes and mouth taped and a cord wrapped around her neck. Two weeks earlier she had shown police and coworkers a doll in the same condition that…
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