Andrew's View of the Week

As The Pizza Cooks — Episode 20

Posted on 01/15/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

It’s not Sunday and the pizza cooked yesterday, and here I am with a few minutes before dinner. The shortest day of the year was last month, but the mornings haven’t been getting any brighter. Due to an odd astronomical phenomena, the latest sunrise of the year actually happens in the northern hemisphere around January 8 or so and not on December 21^st like you’d expect. Now sunsets have been getting later and here at my latitude sunset is almost 5 pm, with the sunrise being later each day, until a few days ago. Today sunrise was at 7:18 am and tomorrow it will be at 7:17 am.

Personally, I don’t think we should celebrate the longest day of the year or even recognize the shortest day of the year – it’s the sunrise time that really matters.

It has to do with sleep. I’m the type of person who wakes up with the sun. I’ve always been like that — when the sun is up, I’m awake. No sun and I could sleep a long time. Normally that’s not a problem as I just use an alarm clock when I need to get up before the sun. However, now that I’m retired, I hate that alarm. For decades it went off most mornings around six so I could be to the office by eight – I have bad memories about what the alarm clock got me into. These days I have little that I need to be up that early for.

Except on Mondays. On Mondays at 8:00 am is my Bible study group on zoom. In the summer it’s no problem to be at the computer ready to meet at eight as most likely I’d have woken up around six when the sun is up. When the sun doesn’t rise until 7:19, there’s barely time for a quick shower and a cup of tea before I need to log into the meeting. Today I was five minutes late – mortifying …

Now, I should point out that I’ve been meeting with these guys for about eight years now and while we’re a “study” group and have actually read and discussed the whole Bible (seriously, we took three years to read the whole thing), these days there are sports scores to review, health updates (we’re all old retired guys with interesting medical conditions), vacation reports and discussions of the sad state of our world to do before we get to any studying. For the last couple of years we’ve been watching these half hour lectures on comparative religions hoping it would give us some better insights into stuff.

Yeah, mostly it does, but apparently it’s basketball season so it took awhile to get to the next lecture on Hinduism. Which turns out not to be simple and most of what we thought we knew is wrong. Even the word Hinduism isn’t a good label for what they believe or are (and it’s a western word, not used until colonial times and not by the Hindus) and calling it a religion is likely a stretch. Today’s lecture was on wisdom and the only thing I really learned is that I have a lot more questions than answers.

I should also mention that one reason I didn’t write yesterday is that our daughter was over for dinner and we started watching this NetFlix series, You Are What You Eat, which is a study of identical twins and how diet affects our bodies. One twin is put on a vegan diet while the other is on a healthy omnivore diet and then they measure the results. There’s also a bunch of stuff on how food is produced, health aspects of food, etc. Basically what you think you know about food is wrong and while we’re only half way through watching, I’ve decided to just stop eating – food is bad for you. Okay, maybe just change my diet, a bit, something …

So at the moment the only thing I sure of is that sunrise tomorrow is 7:17 am, at least here where I live. What it is where you live, I don’t know, you’ll have to look it up.

Posted in As The Pizza Cooks | Tagged As The Pizza Cooks, latest sunrise, sunrise, sunset | 32 Comments

Friday Wisdom – Winter

Posted on 01/12/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

Winter has arrived here in the high desert. Last Sunday we got an inch of snow and Wednesday we got another six inches. In some places that’s not much snow, but here it can paralyze the whole city. Luckily for me, my next door neighbour and was looking for places to test it out. He tested it on my driveway and it works just fine. Here a bunch of other stuff I know about winter snow:

I looked out my window and said, “Looks icy out there. Want to go for a spin?”

I knew it was going to snow last night. Yup, I saw it on the winternet.

Did you know that the snowman has parents? Yes, he had a mom and popsicle.

Name a ball that doesn’t bounce? A snowball.

What do you call a penguin in the desert? Lost.

Do you know what we call a snowman in July? Water.

You can prevent a summer cold by catching it in the winter.

Why do they put scarves on snowmen? Are they trying to keep them warm?

I wrote a joke about snow, but it’s a bit flaky.

I went and bought a snow shovel at the hardware store but on the way home I had the heater on in the car and the shovel melted.

Where do you get money in the winter? From a snowbank.

Try this: Put your radio out in the snow … you’ll get cool music.

There’s a lot of worried snowmen around here. They’ve been listening to news reports about global warming.

I defeated a snow monster the other day by just talking to it. Yes, I started a heated argument …

Posted in wisdom | Tagged humor, snow jokes, snowmen, winter, winter jokes, wisdom | 33 Comments

As The Music Plays #7

Posted on 01/07/2024 by Andrew Reynolds

This is a series of posts about the music I play while writing. This time we’re at City of New Orleans. This song was written by Steve Goodman in 1971 and likely the most famous version of the song was sung by Arlo Guthrie in 1972. Many other artists have covered the song including Willie Nelson in 1984. Here’s a Youtube video of my favorite version of this song:

The song is one of those simple yet timeless folk songs. Basically, just a long story of a train ride. It’s a journey through American’s heartland, history, and the fading of a dream. The age of trains brought great change to America and made much of our current nation possible, but like so many things it’s no longer what it was. Even when this song was written, trains had stopped being the major long distance transportation system, having been replaced by cars and airplanes. There is also images or slices of the lives of individual people. It’s the kind of song that brings images to mind. Listen to the lyrics and you can see the old men playing cards, the mother holding her baby, the conductors walking the train and looking out the window you see the farm fields, freight yards, city and the junk yards where cars are sent to rust.

Goodman builds these images as a skilled poet with lines like: “Dealing card games with the old men in the club car / Penny a point ain’t no one keeping score”. In just two lines we get the image of a card game played my old men to just pass the time. Cards dealt, played, but no one caring about the outcome. This is one example of Goodman’s skill of story telling.

I love the story of how Goodman got Guthrie to record the song. According to a few sources the story is that Goodman met Guthrie in a bar in Chicago and asked Guthrie to listen to the song. Guthrie agreed to listen if Goodman would buy him a beer and he’d only listen until he finished the beer. Apparently hearing once was enough and Guthrie asked to record the song and included it his 1972 album, Hobo’s Lullaby. Guthrie’s voice and piano playing turned out to be perfect for the song and landed it in the Billboard’s top 40 list – the only song Guthrie had in the top 40. Guthrie other famous song, Alice’s Restaurant, made the top 100 list. The two songs are likely the most popular of all of Guthrie’s music. Guthrie remained a popular singer, song writer and performer until 2020 when he announced his retirement from touring due to health problems.

Steve Goodman is less known, but in the 1970’s was active folk and country singer-songwriter and had a number of albums out. Goodman also recorded a version of City of New Orleans in 1971, but his recorded was eclipsed by Guthrie’s record. Sadly Goodman died in 1984 at age 36 from leukemia.

This song ends up on my writing play list because of it’s ability to tell many stories with simple lines, clear images and emotions. It reaches a level of story telling that I wish I could bring to my own writing, but always seem to miss. The rhythm, voice and feeling of the song is a nice background when I’m trying to link words together into something like a clear thought.