Here’s my latest post at The Cincinnati Man.
The 5 Manliest 20th Century American Poets
“Poetry” and “manly” don’t often go together in contemporary imagination, but maybe that’s about to change, since manly men Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman have just teamed up to make a movie named after a poem.
Read the rest and find out my top 5.
Thanks to Tim Stafford for pointing me to this great New York Magazine profile of Tim Keller. From the opening:
Keller is a 59-year-old bald, large-framed man, dressed today in a blue blazer and gray slacks. For those expecting hellfire and brimstone, the first surprise is the voice. Keller doesn’t speak in theatrical, over-the-top tones but in a soft, conversational manner, as if he’s sharing a confidence with a friend. For today’s sermon on a passage from the Old Testament Book of Habakkuk, in which a minor Jewish prophet rails about the misery brought on by the Babylonians in the seventh century B.C., Keller jumps to the recession and what he sees as shameful finger-pointing by both liberals and conservatives. “The Bible doesn’t let you do that,†Keller intones from the pulpit. “The Bible is nowhere near as simplistic, dare I say it, as either the New York Times’ or The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. You can write that down. Put it on your blog, I don’t care.â€
I prefer to show rather than tell when it comes to my work with the Emerging Scholars Network, to point to examples like C. S. Lewis or Fritz Schaefer as role models for thinking Christians. Tim Keller is another of those great examples.
The Enquirer is reporting that the Boone County Greenways plan has been scrapped. This was the work of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party. Here’s their statement:
“This goes against all three pillars of the Northern Kentucky Tea Party, which are fiscal responsibility, limited government and free markets,” said Willie Schadler, the organization’s president. “It is fiscally irresponsible to continue with this study.”
Fiscal responsibility? Boone County is one of the fastest growing counties in Kentucky. It’s responsible to plan for parks and recreation now, rather than waiting until property values make it cost-prohibitive. Could New York City build Central Park today? It would be impossible: the land is worth billions on the open market.
Photo by hubertk via Flickr
Your Tax Dollars at Work: Idlewild Park
Limited government? How about good government? As Boone County grows, families will need places to walk and play. Too much of Northern Kentucky is already plagued with sprawl, poor planning, and traffic congestion. Right now, Boone County’s residential areas are islands separated from one another. We have great parks, the county fairgrounds, historic buildings, all within a mile or two of my home, and I can’t walk with my children to any of them. Our roads were built for farmland: narrow, two-lane highways with deep ditches and no shoulders. Those roads make no sense in residential areas.
Free markets? Free markets require structure. We couldn’t have private property rights without property laws, county records of deeds, or government maps and surveys. None of our county roads were built by free markets. Boone County has zoning laws in many parts of the county limiting how the property can be used. Heck, we have laws that tell certain types of criminals where they can and cannot live. The question is whether we have “free markets.” The question is how do the common interests of the people intersect with the private interests of individuals.
Here’s why greenways are so important.
Paula Brehm-Heeger, who has lived in Hebron since 2002, applauded county leaders for trying to plan for the future.
“When we planned to move, we looked at Loveland (Ohio), which has the great bike trails, the Miami Whitewater area and Boone County,” Brehm-Heeger said. “Those were all communities that were looking forward and we wanted that.”
She said a recently installed sidewalk near her home was teeming with activity almost as soon as it was completed.
I have no idea what the Northern Kentucky Tea Party is so angry about in this case. Greenways are a no-brainer: a low-cost way to dramatically improve the quality of life for our community and our children. This is an investment for the future.
So, we’re getting a casino downtown, across the street from the jail and just a few blocks from the “most dangerous neighborhood in America.” Um, couldn’t we try this out in a simulator or something, before running this experiment with real lives?
I maintain several WordPress-based websites, all of which are, well, important to me, including this one, and it would seriously stink if something happened to any of them. Jason Tarasi posted a great how-to at ProBlogger.net with easy instructions for backing up a WordPress blog using the uber-simple WP-DB-Backup plug-in. I installed the plug-in, and my WordPress installations started emailing me daily copies of their databases. Awesome.
But what to do with these backup copies? Well, I have a Dropbox account (that’s my referral link) that I can use for safekeeping. Dropbox is a great app that lets you synch files and folders on your hard drive with an online file-sharing service, even keeping files synched across multiple computers if you want. You can share files and folders with others, so, for example, your wife and you could use it to work on your Christmas letter. Each time one of you made a change, it would be synched across all computers. It’s great for larger documents or things that are more complicated than Google Docs can handle.
So I have a place to store my WordPress backups, but I don’t really want to manually save the new backups every time they arrive. How could I make this process automatic and invisible?
After several failed attempts, here’s the process I created. Continue reading
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