Journal of Post-Ralphaelite Thought

It's just after 8 AM on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. Large numbers of my fellow Americans arose in the pre-dawn hours to stand in line for bargains in the unofficial beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Sorry, not me. I prefer to lounge in bed, enjoying a cup of coffee; newspaper and wife at my side. I'll let others shop. In the family room are two sleeping figures: friends of my youngest. We tend to be the place where he and his friends land for their gatherings. In the living room are two more, stretched out on the sleeper couch. At around 2:30 last night I sent a text message to youngest son informing him the party needed to wind down, else I storm out in my boxers and chase everyone out. They are techno-geeks. Unlike older brother, instead of alcohol, this crowd goes for caffeine so they can game and the like all night. Hence the 2:30 shutdown message. This is why I like Thanksgiving. Unlike Christmas, which we've allowed to devolve into...

The spousal companion is splitting time between watching the Macy's Parade and making pumpkin pie . Youngest son, newly reunited for the long weekend, is upstairs asleep. My time in the kitchen will come soon: I'm making purple mashed taters and green bean casserole for the family gathering in a few hours. I've looked over the Black Friday ads and have confirmed there's nothing worth getting up at 4 AM and fighting crazed bargain hunters for. Time to reflect briefly on what I'm thankful for. First and foremost, I'm thankful for my wife and sons, who continue to give meaning to my life.  I'm thankful everyone in my family is healthy, both physically and mentally. I'm thankful my two sons are finding who they are and what makes them happy. I'm thankful I have a roof over my head. I'm thankful I have a job. Despite my occasional grousing, I feel fortunate to be doing what I'm doing. I'm also thankful former colleagues who lost their...

In honor of Texas Christian University (my alma mater) and their number 4 nationally ranked   football team, I will be serving purple mashed potatoes at the family Thanksgiving gathering this year. For those in my family whose loyalty to the Horned Frogs does not overcome their aversion to funny-colored food, I will be making normally colored mashed potatoes as well. It will be interesting to see which go fastest. Go Frogs!

The holidays are upon us. Actually they were upon us sometime before Halloween: Santa now mingles freely with Dracula and Naughty Nurse, and visions of sugar plums are replaced by 20 count bags of mini-Snickers bars. I'm bracing myself for our latest holiday tradition, the bombastic pronouncements about the " War on Christmas ." For the past several years, self-anointed protectors of Christmas  have been creating lists of which retailers are naughty or nice. This seems to boil down to who says "Holiday" in their advertising instead of "Christmas." On the Naughty list have been such Satanic organizations as Sears, Wal-Mart, Target, The Gap, Banana Republic, Home Depot. This year's Naughty and Nice list has been helpfully compiled by the American Family Association of Tupelo, Mississippi. You may recall the American Family Association , led by the Reverand Donald Wildmon, from their previous name, the National Federation for Decency . The...

My dad, a farm boy from East Texas, joined the U.S. Navy in 1945. He had to get his parents' permission to enlist, since he was only 17 at the time. He's now 82. He never did go back to the farm. Instead, like a lot of his generation, he went to college on the G.I. Bill, where he ended up meeting my mother. Of all the things he likes to talks about, his experiences in the Navy are by far his favorite topic. Even though I've heard these tales thousands of times, I'll go on listening as long as he tells them. It's the least I can do. Thanks Dad. I love you.

It's a cool, slightly overcast day and I'm standing in Fort Worth's Trinity Park with a huge, oddly festive crowd. Odd in that it is about brain tumors. But festive in that it celebrates survival. This is the 2009 Brain Tumor Walk. I'm here because my brother-in-law's wife passed away last month, a little over a year after she was diagnosed with the same kind of tumor that killed Teddy Kennedy. The overwhelming message is one of hope. There are survivors of 10 years. Sorry to cut this short -- time to start walking!

I've never been a huge Mac fan, although I have a representative sampling of old machines in my collection o' historic computer junk. Still, I find them interesting. Most of them were either bargains from Goodwill or cast-offs from a local university, running versions of the Mac OS from 6.x to 8.5. I played with them mostly as curiosities. Once finished I'd go back to my Windows or (later) my Linux machines. Being the sometimes artist, I have lots of friends firmly in the Mac world, so I'm familiar with the basics of the cult of the Mac. Because of his interest in the arts, when oldest son got ready to leave for college he chose an iBook laptop (at my suggestion) rather than a PC. He loves it, and later upgraded to a MacBook. His laptop was my first exposure to OS X. A little history The road to OS X from previous Mac operating systems was, to coin a phrase, a maze of twisty little passages, all different (if you're interested in this sort of thing there...