Miscellaneous Essays

This is the head page for the Misceallaneous Essays section of my web site. There is a navigation bar and an e-mail link to me at the bottom of the page. This section has essays that didn't fit anywhere else. They are in reverse chronological order, for lack of a better scheme.

Circle Dinners
Our church has a sociall program called "Circle Dinners", in which eight people meet for a potluck dinner once a month for four months. (Then we form new circles.) These are some of the more memorable ones.
(Posted August 2010)

Mission Statements
Our church is in the process of composing a new and exciting Mission Statement. In my opinion anyone who needs to read a mission statement to know what a church does also needs labels on his fork, so he knows which end to hold and which to stick into his food.
(Posted July 2010)

The Library Tax
Our county has a special eighth of a cent sales tax to support the library. Every time the tax comes up for renewal someone suggests a library fee instead.
(Posted March 2010)

BCHC Daydream
I'm the webmaster for a local unit of the Backcountry Horsemen of California. Our site has a counter. Someone from Massachusetts spent 57 minutes on our site and looked at 45 pages in January 2010. The visit inspired this daydream.
(Written January 2010)

The V-8 Engine of Progress.
The United States is the most innovative nation in the world, pumping out the cotton gin, interchangeable musket parts, the vaccine for Yellow fever, the incandescent light bulb, the assembly line - and My God! In the V-8 engine of progress, we're only firing on four cylinders!
(Written December 2008)

Quilt Codes and the Underground Railroad.
This was the oddest experience I've had as web master for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. While the talk itself is about the myth of quilt codes, the introduction has a joke about a cow pie.
(Written February 2007)

Adventures of a UU Web Master.
I maintain the web site for the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Stanislaus County. Our minister speaks three Sundays a month; we have church members and community speakers speak on the other Sunday(s). My talk has more underwear jokes than most sermons.
(Written November 2003)

Y2K Bug.
I'm one of the 100,000 COBOL programmers who caused the Y2K bug. This one isn't as topical as it was in 1999.
(Written July 1999)

Barn Swallows
A short essay on the pleasures of barn swallows, who used to nest on our front porch. Links to a factual article about barn swallows, a page about the care and feeding of baby birds and stories about barn swallows by Alert Readers.
(Written July 1988)

Cloyne Court.
Cloyne, the Monarch of the Co-ops, is a large, rambling, comfortably shabby building on the north side of the campus in Berkeley, California. It started life as an elegant residence hotel in 1904. It has been owned by students since 1946. I lived there for four years while I attended the University of California. One of the main themes of this web site, be it in the Biography questions or the Web Design hints, is "What was it like?" These three pages try to tell what is was like to go to Cal and live at Cloyne during the late 1960's.
(Written in the 1980's)