Once, when asked to explain the meaning behind the title of his 1984 mega-hit “Purple Rain,” His Royal Badness replied: “When there’s blood in the sky– red and blue = purple. Purple rain pertains to the end of the world and being with the one you love and letting your faith/god guide you through the…
Read MoreI live in Memphis, so summertime makes me think of heat. Hot heat. Sticky heat. Unrelenting heat. Oppressive heat. The kind of heat that you can’t escape and you can’t recover from, despite the fact that you spend most of your time between May and September mad-dashing from one air-conditioned place to another air-conditioned place….
Read MoreDolly Parton has always been a idol of mine, partly for her gifted-by-God voice and incredible songwriting ability, but more so for her uniquely Tennessean flavor of sass. She was born in the southern end of Appalachia, raised in poverty as one of 12 children, brought up in the Church of God, married only once (to…
Read MoreYou know what I’d rather forget? Donald Trump. I’d like to forget that he currently sits in the Oval Office, guzzling Diet Cokes, downing McDonalds cheeseburgers, drooling over Fox & Friends, and firing off barely-literate tweets. I’d like to forget the circus he manufactured leading up to his 2016 election, and the dumpster fire he’s…
Read MoreFacebook and its enigmatic custodian Mark Zuckerberg suffered their biggest hit to date this week when it was revealed that Cambridge Analytica— which self-describes as a political and commercial service that “uses data to change audience behavior”– pulled the personal data from 50 million Facebook users, without their permission, and used it to advance Donald Trump’s…
Read MoreFor five straight years, from 2011-2016, I dedicated the entire month of June on this blog to the #30DaySongChallenge. Each day, I would select a song in response to a daily prompt, and then post it here along with some (long or short) account of why I chose that song for that day’s prompt. Music…
Read MoreBack in 2015, Christian Brothers University asked some of its faculty (including me) to share some #WordsofWisdom with the graduating class. So, I made a short video (below), which more or less reiterates what any student who has ever taken a class from me will recognize as Rule #1 from the list of “Dr. J’s…
Read MoreZuckerberg totally proved me wrong in his testimony to Congress over the last two days. Contrary to what I anticipated in my blog post yesterday (here), he *DID* attempt to explain to Congress things that they (obviously) did not know or understand, he *DID* offer concrete suggestions for policy/legislative change, he *DID* explicitly oppose the…
Read MoreFor the last couple of semesters, I’ve been trying to introduce my students, in as gentle and nonthreatening a manner as possible, to the idea that they may very well be the last of “humanity” as we know it. This has not been a well-received speculative proposition. In my defense, I really make an effort…
Read MoreOur country’s most enigmatic robot overlord, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is scheduled to appear before Congress today to answer questions about, among other things, Facebook’s complicity with Russian bots, sock-puppets, and fake-news generators as well as the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal. As I’ve said before on this blog, we really ought not underestimate the importance of…
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