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A few years ago, a small mob of us had converged on Greenwood’s on Green Street in Roswell for a Thursday evening dinner. It’s a down-home place, noted for being the home of (among other things) an infamously rich chocolate pie. Normally, dinner at Greenwood’s involved a considerable wait, but with the economy being what it was at the time we had no trouble getting a table for our party of twelve.

It was after dinner, as we waddled with leaden bellies back to our car, that I noticed a powerful flowery scent, a scent that enveloped us like a cloud. Honeysuckle!

We, the people of the United States of America, as represented by the Department of Health and Human Services, have been issued a patent for Cannabinoids as antioxidants and neuroprotectants. According to the abstract:

Cannabinoids have been found to have antioxidant properties, unrelated to NMDA receptor antagonism. This new found property makes cannabinoids useful in the treatment and prophylaxis of wide variety of oxidation associated diseases, such as ischemic, age-related, inflammatory and autoimmune diseases…

Discussions with an instructor over a class I recently took on Darwin have led me to again wonder about “religious” matters and the role they continue to play out in our lives. Amongst other places, my wanderings took me back to the writings of Robert Pirsig, the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and his equally good book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.

What forced the issue was a final sentence in the descriptive summary of the class: “The course will touch on ‘evolutionary Christianity,’ one approach to making peace between science and faith.”

It’s like 2011 all over again.

It was two years ago that, after Republicans claimed big gains in state legislatures across the South and country in the 2010 mid-terms, lawmakers made a national push for changes to voting laws, with one of the most controversial being restrictive bills requiring voters to show photo ID at the polls.

Now, with the 2012 elections behind them, state GOP leaders have again pledged to make voter photo ID a priority this year. But has the debate — and public sentiment about voter restrictions — changed this time?

The perception that modern day crooks, in addition to having figured out how to manipulate the law to their advantage, are ostentatious came to me overnight. I suppose it’s a consequence of tracing how and by whom some of our so-called “gated communities” were acquired and developed to hide what are surely ill-gotten gains.

Perhaps it is unfair to suggest that medical doctors, when they are lured into purchasing building lots on the edges of marshes and meandering streams, nature’s nurseries for crustaceans and fish, are investing ill-gotten gains.

Lake Waters Bury An Unparalleled Political Record

Growing up I watched old cowboy movies about ghost towns out West and even went to Ghost Town in the Sky up in Maggie Valley, North Carolina. Tumbleweeds rolling through Dodge City kept me glued to the television. Well, I was a clueless lad. Little did I know that if you grew up in Lincoln County you lived in an area with ghost towns nearby and they were real, and what politics and history once lived there.

Way back in the late 80s my late wife Lilian got a good chuckle over a quip she heard when she was studying psychology with the goal of becoming a marriage counselor. It went like this…

“Marriage is like the cat: those who are in, want out; those who are out, want in.”

Over all these years I’ve never forgotten that clever little simile as I’ve watched the passing parade of friends, young and old, single or widowed, married for a long time, or newly weds. I’ve also watched myself, especially during the years when I was a widower, tempted a few times to go down a path I know I would have regretted.