Mark Knows It All

My New Year’s resolutions for 2011: I resolve to lose fifty pounds. I resolve to work out at least three times per week. I resolve not to swear. I resolve to get things done when they are supposed to be done. I resolve to be nice to ALL of my relatives. I resolve to clean out my drawers and my closet. I resolve to save money and not use my credit cards. I resolve not to drink so much on Friday nights. And if you believe that, let me talk to you about some land I own in Las Vegas. Are we nuts or what? On the list of holidays, Thanksgiving, Easter and Christmas are my top three. The bottom three on my list are the Fourth of July, New Year’s, New Year’s, and New Year’s again. I know that is four, but I must have forgotten to resolve last year to learn how to count. As you can tell, I dislike New Year’s as a holiday intensely. They don’t come much more depressing. All of those glittering Christmas decorations all of a sudden look sad and shabby. The hoopla of the holiday season is over as ...

I have been writing my blog since June, 2005. Every Christmas I have been fortunate enough to have some transcendent experience that has given some insight or meaning to the holiday to me in a personal way. Those experiences, in turn, became the subject of my Christmas blog and some of my most read essays. Everybody loves Christmas. So this year, I anxiously awaited my transcendent experience. I looked for it in the snow events we have had the past couple of weeks. I have searched in my choral activities, both in my church choir and Seraphim. I have looked for a meaningful Christmas movie or television program. I have listened to untold hours of Christmas music, even breaking my proverbial rule of “no dead people” Christmas recordings. (It really is time to bury Perry Como and Bing Crosby!!!) But this year, I got nothin’. No revelations. No warm and cuddly feelings. No inspiration. No life epiphanies. Plain and simple, I got Christmas bupkis. I haven’t bought myself my Christmas presen...

And the winner of the most fascinating story of the decade goes to Julian Assange and his WikiLeaks leaks!! You couldn’t make this story up if you tried. So Mr. Assange is an avowed leftist with support from socialists and libertarians…an interesting combination if there ever was one. At any rate, his goal is to destroy the security of the United States by leaking hundreds of thousands of classified documents to the public allegedly provided to him by one Private First Class Bradley Manning who downloaded the stuff on a laptop in the middle of the Iraq desert. The peachy faced Bradley Manning is now in jail, which hasn't prevented the City Council in Berkley from honoring him as a great American. Assange releases the first group of classified documents, and the Obama administration ignores him. Then he releases the second group of classified documents, and the Obama administration ignores him again; but this time there is trouble. This group wasn’t mundane and listed a whole bunch ...