The Best Christmas Ever

“Doesn’t anyone know what Christmas is all about?”

With those words, Charlie Brown displayed his dismay at the way the Christmas pageant was turning out. But it was the recitation by Linus of the account of the birth of Christ from Luke that changed the hearts of the rest of the gang as they then gathered around that pathetic little tree Charlie had bought.

Two Years After

I had scheduled to take today off. It is the second anniversary of my Mom’s death and at this point I still can use it as a valid reason to stop for reflection.

Unfortunately, things have been very slow at work, and when there was an urgent cry for help on an out-of-town client project, I couldn’t say no. However, this first day has been full of waiting for information so that I can really get working, so I still have some time to stop and think.

Tolerance, The New Intolerance

I just read a little on the subject of tolerance and was immediately reminded of the recent way for identifying new trends by calling the new something a “new” version of the old trend. For example, “red is the new mauve” if red is now the chic color and it used to be mauve. It starts sounding really dumb when it’s something like “black, the new white.” If black is the new white, then where are the contrasts?

But what I read said more clearly what I had been thinking for some time. Tolerance is now seen as a form of bigotry because it presumes that your underlying values are contrary to those that you are willing to tolerate. In other words, if you can’t simply agree with them, then you are a bigot even if you can live with them.

Contact, Carl Sagan, and Bad Fruit

Contact, Carl Sagan, and Bad Fruit


Just watched the 1997 movie Contact again. Hadn’t thought of it for years, but someone suggested looking at it to see what kind of world-view it portrayed. In some ways, it was exactly what you would expect given that the author of the book upon which it was based was Carl Sagan.

But there were signs that either his “science is everything” armor was chinking, or there was a glimmer of uncertainty always lurking inside. Why? Look at Ellie Arroway. She is the ultimate experimental scientist, yet, there is a clear emotional aspect to her search. As the movie (and I presume the book) progresses, we begin to see the desire to find something that makes her significant — not in the sense of importance to others, but in terms of the ultimate significance of man.

One of the most profound statements was when she finally saw the Vegan landscape and sky, her first reaction was to say that they should have sent a poet. Not a likely statement for someone who is all about her science. And her comments at the government inquiry, while not religious, point more to belief in experience and the unprovable than to anything about science. As a scientist she even reassesses her experience, admitting that if she were the inquisitor she would doubt. But she cannot because “everything that I know as a human being, everything that I am tells me that it was real!”