The Paternity Leave Trend

Last year, I got to take two months off for paid “paternity leave,” per my previous firm’s policy. It was great!

Goethe’s Wandrer’s Nachtlied II (Wayfarer’s Evensong II)

If you have been following our blog for a while, you know we have a thing for Goethe around here. One of my favorite Goethe poems is short and sweet – Wandrer’s Nachtlied II, which I translate as Wayfarer’s Evensong II. I call it an “evensong” to preserve the parallel title with Wandrer’s Nachlied I “Der Du von dem Himmel bist…” even though this one is not as prayer-like as I. Since I have never found a translation I really like, here is my stab at it:

Winds of Change at JRCLS?

Is the JRCLS mobilizing to become a more political force?

Criminal Possession of a . . . Snowball?!?

According to the NY Daily News, four buddies are “facing a year in jail for criminal possession of a weapon – a snowball that hit an off-duty transit cop.” Granted, some of these boys have been in trouble before, and, according to the cop at least, the boys chased him down and pelted him with snowballs. But the boys claim they only hit him with one errant snowball, after which he pulled a gun! I guess it is a lucky thing he did not shoot them. I, for one, am not so sure I want such a jumpy police officer on the street…

I wonder if the Second Amendment includes within the right to bear arms a right to bear snowballs? Supreme Court- get ready to grant certiorari!! 🙂

Blind-Sided By The Blind Side

The grim reality of life portrayed in the movie The Blind Side caught me off guard when I recently watched it with my wife on our weekly date night. The movie is essentially a happy movie about one person who was saved from a life doomed to poverty (and perhaps premature death) by a family who cared. But underlying it is the harsh reality that in our own country, and all over the world to an even larger and more severe extent, there are people just like “Big Mike” who suffer in poverty, homelessness and the resulting drastic reduction in opportunities that those conditions bring with them. The movie, which was a tear-jerker for me personally, left me wondering what more I, personally, could do to help people.

Revisiting the “Temple Worthiness” Requirement for LDS Employees

It is common knowledge that the LDS Church requires its employees, whether they work at the Church Office Building as a professional accountant, as an engineer in the former LDS-owned “Deseret Gym,” or as a custodian* in a temple or LDS chapel, to be temple recommend holding members of the Church. But how attenuated is that requirement in terms of people supplying things to the LDS Church?

Consider as a case in point the email (below the fold) I just got soliciting extras for an LDS Church film about prisoners of war during WWII (and, if you are interested and meet the requirements, by all means apply! 🙂 ):

A Personal Update

I just started reading my blog and realized that I have not contributed a post for two years!! That went by fast! Kudos to John for (kind of) holding down the fort for that time with semi-regular postings.

So, what have I been doing?