Why I Love Christmas, Jesus and All

It's all a metaphor for the innocence and ignorance of youth. It's one big festival of Isn't it Pretty to Think So.

In fact, as Wordsworth showed, it can be very pretty to think so.


There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,

The earth, and every common sight,

To me did seem

Apparelled in celestial light,

The glory and the freshness of a dream.

It is not now as it hath been of yore;—

Turn wheresoe'er I may,

By night or day,

The things which I have seen I now can see no more.


II


The Rainbow comes and goes,

And lovely is the Rose,

The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,

Waters on a starry night

Are beautiful and fair;

The sunshine is a glorious birth;

But yet I know, where'er I go,

That there hath past away a glory from the earth.

Bullet Points

My word. I calculate it's been months -- nay, years -- since I went six days without posting. Certainly many a week I've filled the air with many a "faux" post -- a link, a jape, a picture of a cat -- but like the shark I *have* kept moving, and thus the blog kept breathing. (It's alive. It's alive.) So I have let you down, Friends of the Blog.

I rather think my lack of posts means the world has been too much with me, so my silence is symptom. (Say that three times fast.) Let's reverse engineer this puppy: I'll post as if all were well, and the semblance may become the thing.

A bulleted week:

* Big doin's at the U. The administration has announced that our habitual Monday-Wednesday/Tuesday-Thursday teaching sked will now become TR/MWF. The idea is eliminating underuse of classrooms on Friday. I don't think the new scheduling works for a lot of reasons, and we don't like it for a lot of reasons -- though the two sets of reasons are not necessarily the same. More to come, dear reader.

* I have a cold. Like Frank Sinatra.

* E. misses her mom.

* I went biking by the bay (try to say that... oh never mind) with Big Pat Daugherty on a brisk fine day, weather crisp enough to fool you into thinking the next day would be crisper still and the next crisper still, until: winter cold. But that's not what happens here. Just a whisper of winter but, like Godot, it never comes.

* I had a nice visit with Eric Mar's legislative analyst Cassandra Costello (a former student) and Daniel Homsey, who works for SF getting neighborhoods tanned, fit and ready to solve their own problems. He had some great ideas about getting USF journalism students out in the neighborhoods around us. A light bulb flashes in my head: hyperlocal news.

* And why don't you welcome me back as a potent poster by watching the episode of Lou Grant I've linked to below. I've asked the journalism ethics class to watch it as prep for Monday discussion of Ethical Dilemmas!!