Apparently the idea of living in Aspen for a year is spreading, reaching now as far as the Toronto Sun. And why not? Has the time to be a ski bum ever been better?
There's a silence at St. Benedict's that is palpable and a beauty and presence of God that touches people. It makes it easier to pray," says Father Joseph Boyle... Read more in this 9news article.
Nathan in New Castle writes in comment #25, "You can't truly judge whether something is offensive. You can only judge whether something is offending you... I, personally, don't get offended at anything other then not having a voice."
I believe I am part of the liberal center. Those of us here, do not care one iota about whether we are "white" "black" Native American or Asian. We don't care if we pray to "God" via the Torah, various permutations of the Bible, or Koran. If we sing chants to lord Krishna or Buddha, meditate in Taoism or do a Druid dance, or have no God, that is fine too. Speaking other languages gives us an opportunity to learn nuances of language, different from our own whatever that might be where ever that might be. We are accepting, even embracing and we are all able to get along with each other perfectly well.
My friend Sophia’s 28 year old son Ben died last week of complications from Oxycontin abuse. The drug had been prescribed to him for pain after a snowboarding accident in which his foot was severely broken. That was in the Spring of this year. Ben had a history of substance abuse and quickly became addicted to Oxycontin. He managed to get four different doctors prescribing the drug as well as several pharmacies dispensing it to him, despite the fact that he had contraindications. His death was a result of the drug combined with his asthma/allergy/sleep apnea which inhibited his body’s ability to clear fluid from his lungs. In essence, he drowned in his sleep. He was found twenty-four hours later by his brother.
Can’t think of a better news hook than the Dalai Lama’s visit to Aspen to talk about violence in the movies of Quentin Tarantino. Call me crazy and I’ll zip your head off with the sword I just stole from The Bride.
I’m in the genius camp when it comes to Tarantino, the auteur of “Reservoir Dogs,” “Kill Bill,” and even the lessermost “Jackie Brown,” all with their heavy doses of patter and splatter. But I never thought of him as anti-violent until Uma Thurman’s father came on my “Con Games” radio show in Aspen to lead me monkishly down the path of virtue.
It turns out Robert Thurman, the author of “Why The Dalai Lama Matters” is not only a professor of Indo-Tibetan matters at Columbia University but also the very first Tibetan monk to come from America: he was ordained as a mendicant in the mid-1960s before he opted out for the more secular life of a scholar. In the bargain he fathered Uma, the actress most associated with Tarantino’s voluminous “Kill Bill” movies, both Volumes I and II.
The Con Man begins with a dissertation and dissection of Barack Obama's sojourn to the Middle East, then comes back in hour two with an interview with Stanford neurosurgeon Dr. Jim Doty, a Dalai Lama believer making the connection between the mind...and compassion and altruism.
The Con Man's open lines open up for sweet crude and Burlingate, then welcomes the man behind the Aspen Film presentation "Dali Llama Renaissance." Batting cleanup: Barry Schochet in the The Schochet Effect on Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and all things political.
… and the model of Toyota sports car I rented in Palm Springs. I drove through shallow valleys, smokey hillsides, navigated crowded freeways and sudden brake lights. I saw signs to places I’d never heard of, some I had: San Bernadino, Sam Dimas, Pasadena, Glendale, Encino… I turned left off Ventura Boulevard and right when I came to the Pacific Ocean…
When I got to Pepperdine, I stepped out of the sports car and stared out onto the Pacific. A pale gray haze blurred the blue of both the sea and the cloudless sky. It wasn’t merely an absence of Mt. Sopris. Hell, I’d learned to deal with looking at the flatness of West Texas. No, it was a gut feeling. I walked around campus for about twenty minutes and drove away without attending the Law School interview I’d traveled so far for.
Don’t get me wrong, I have no regrets. I’m quite pleased by the life brought on by the choices I made as a younger man. Still, I can’t help but wonder what my life might be like had I made different choices—even the ones that were purely incidental. I can tell you this with certainty: had I made any one of those decisions differently, I would not be writing this tonight...
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If Hubris drives the desire to leave a legacy, humility provides the satisfaction of watching a legacy come to pass without ceremony, celebration, or fanfare, of feeling a life lived well, despite itself…
Aspen Center for Integral Health comes to "Con Games" to talk about their summer speaker series delving into the connection between the mind and the body--and what the brain thinks about all this.
One of the people at the newspaper who hired me when I came to Aspen five years ago told me about “the tractor beam effect.”
That’s a poetic way of saying that once people leave Aspen they always come back, inexorably drawn to the mountains, the valley, the rivers, and certain ineffable things that have no name.
True enough: all of that speaks to why we’re so lucky to be here. But it’s also another way of saying people leave—they leave all the time—and that we’ve experienced this directly and personally. At least three key people, great friends, will no longer live here full-time come 2009.
I have no particular fondness for this chair. It’s comfortable. It’s warm. It’s proven durable. But it’s a freaking chair.
It’s leather, with low back, and an ottoman. It used to be brown, but now it’s more of a beige. It’s got two holes in it, one in the seat and one in the left arm—skier’s left, that is. My wife has wanted to replace this chair for months now. In itself, that is fine with me. What’s troubling is that my wife shared her desire to replace this piece of furniture with my mother.
You know the saying, “two heads are better than one”? This is Balderdash. Hooey. Piffle.
I have been studying separatism as a kind of background exercise in what I regard a troubling association between Senator Barack Obama and Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr.
Separatism is based on an idea that ethnic minorities cannot advance in a society dominated by an ethnic majority.
Separatism is an idea that is not without precedent in the writings of the U.S. founding fathers. Thomas Jefferson, who penned what I regard the central premise of the United States when he wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness” also wrote this:
Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate, than that these people [blacks] are to be free; nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion have drawn indelible lines of distinction between them.
~Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography, 1821
