The Blaisdell Blog

Church today was a sea of red.   It is Reformation Sunday and red is the traditional color.   Of course, if you are not a Lutheran, Reformation Day may not mean quite as much.   To the general public, Martin Luther is often depicted as a brooding, personally troubled man.   The pictures of him show a square-jawed German with a grim mouth and a furrowed brow.   Growing up in a Lutheran home, I was sure he had been a brave but angry man, nailing his 95 Thesis on the door of the church in Wittenberg and starting a religious revolution.   Even his decision to enter the priesthood, a vow to St. Anne if she would deliver him from the fury of a sudden storm, seemed to be born of fire.                Luther, who was not a simple monk, but a highly educated theologian, is a frequently misunderstood revolutionary.   He profited from being the right man at the right moment.   Luther’s ideas came a...

This week my husband and I were having some repair work done on our motor home in San Antonio .   We could not be in the Monaco while it was, “in the shop” so we had to take our meals out.   As a result, we had both breakfast and lunch at two separate diners.   Nothing fancy, just food.   In both cases we ended up sitting at a booth next to a young mother, her toddler and two older women who could have been siblings or friends.   One child was a boy, the other a girl.   Both were clean and well cared for.   Both were about the same age, and both were Hispanic.   In both cases, we were eating in blue collar neighborhoods.   Money was not missing, but dear.               As both meals progressed, it became evident that the two children were surrounded by two entirely different types of parents.   The baby girl (at breakfast) was talked to and played with by the women with her. ...

When my husband and I visited New Hampshire for the first time I couldn’t wait to visit Dixville Notch, where the nation’s first Presidential vote is cast at one minute past midnight every four years.               Being a political creature I have heard of Dixville Notch my entire voting life.   This is the situation.   In New Hampshire , if every eligible voter in a precinct has voted, the precinct may close.    Dixville is a community of about 75 people, and in 1960 it took advantage of this situation by assembling the sum total of the voters in one room, opening its polls at midnight, and closing them a few minutes later after everyone had voted.   It then reported its results, becoming the, “…first in the nation” to vote.   It has done so ever since and my goodness how New Hampshire likes that distinction.   Now here is the part that few people know.   For as long as I can remembe...

When my husband and I visited New Hampshire for the first time I couldn’t wait to visit Dixville Notch, where the nation’s first Presidential vote is cast at one minute past midnight every four years.               Being a political creature I have heard of Dixville Notch my entire voting life.   This is the situation.   In New Hampshire , if every eligible voter in a precinct has voted, the precinct may close.    Dixville is a community of about 75 people, and in 1960 it took advantage of this situation by assembling the sum total of the voters in one room, opening its polls at midnight, and closing them a few minutes later after everyone had voted.   It then reported its results, becoming the, “…first in the nation” to vote.   It has done so ever since and my goodness how New Hampshire likes that distinction.   Now here is the part that few people know.   For as long as I can remembe...

At 6:52 p.m. on the evening of November 1, 1955 United Airlines Flight 629 took off from Stapleton Airfield in Denver , Colorado .   Eleven minutes later the Douglas DC 6B disintegrated in the air and plunged into a sugar beet field near Longmont , CO .   All 44 people on board died.               A bomb, 17 pounds of dynamite with a timer, had exploded in passenger Daisie King’s luggage.   It had been placed there by her son, John Gilbert “Jack” Graham.   At check-in Mrs. King paid a $27 fine because the bags were overweight.    She asked her son if she really needed all that much in her luggage.   Cold as ice he had said, “Yes, mother, I’m sure you will need it.”   Jack Gilbert had then turned to his wife, given her some money and told her to buy three life insurance policies on his mother’s flight.               There was ...

Last night I, a St. Louis girl since 1964, watched my team clinch the division title and head for the World Series for the 18 th time in franchise history.   The Cardinals, at one time 10 ½ games out of first place, won 30 of their last 43 games.   They earned the wildcard position on the last day of the season.   Their first post-season task was to beat the Philadelphia Phillies, who had been leading the league for most of the season.   They did.   Then they managed to beat Milwaukee in six games.   On Wednesday the Cards will play the Texas Rangers in St. Louis . How did they do it?   Well, it was a wonderful combination of team work, fundamentals, discipline and hard work.   The stars were both the superstars, Pujols, Carpenter, and Molina and some fresh, new faces, like David Freese and Jason Motte.    This team played the game well and played by the rules.   They earned their way to the series and, while I hope they win—eve...

Readers of this column know that I consistently say I am not a member of the Tea Party and have some problems with them.   It took the Occupy Wall Street rabble to make me realize just how normal the Tea Party is.   Comparing the Tea Party to the OWS is like comparing some long suffering parents to their out-of-control teen-agers.   What are the top ten differences between the Tea Party Movement and the Occupy Wall Street Crowd?   Let’s compare the two. Tea Party                                                          Occupy Wall Street 1.          People who work for a living.              ...

Paul Romer is a genius.   He was a nominee for the 2011 Nobel Prize for economics.    Here is a man who looks continuously at the human condition and tries to make it better by making it more understandable.   He does it with numbers, cosmic thinking and tenacious research.   He embodies what I love about economics. Romer is the son of former Colorado Governor, Roy Romer.   He has an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in economics.   He and I are probably not hitting for the same political team, but that doesn’t matter.   He is intelligent, hard working and plays by the rules.   That is all I ask from anyone.   This man speaks my language. Since Romer started as a physicist he probably has heard that no one could explain Albert Einstein’s theories better than Einstein himself.   Likewise, no one explains Romer’s economics better than Romer.   He talks about how societies can increase production and economic growt...

You can not grow up in St. Louis without loving baseball.   It is steeped into the very ground we walk on.   The Cardinals are a team of fundamentals: good fielding, hitting, speed and smart ball play.   Regardless of where we go from here (and make no mistake, I want this to end with a World Series ring on Yadier Molina’s finger), Friday night’s game was pure gold.   Pure Cardinals.               Would that life were a baseball game.   When we consider all that has been going on with Wall Street and the protesters we see a game not being played by the rules.   Faithful readers know that I am not in sympathy with the protesters.   Their time would be much better spent trying to find a job or change laws they think are disadvantageous to them.   These protests do nothing but provide a pseudo-dramatic format for people who like complaining more than solving problems.   The fact that ...

My teeth are starting to itch; there must be the usual bunch of idiots around.   Yup, there they are, being given featured space on television quasi-news.   The, “ Occupy Wall Street ” losers are running around trying to make their minimally useful lives more relevant by protesting en masse.   Moveon.org is encouraging college students to boycott classes and join the disruption.   Yup, ignorance is a sure cure for everything!   To that point, CNN tried to interview someone named Patrick.   He was supposed to be a sympathetic character because he had recently graduated from college and couldn’t fine a job.   While this fool mumbled and bumbled his way through several incoherent sentences, I couldn’t help thinking, “Son, I know why you can’t find a job!”   I have no idea what school he went to or what degree he got, but I am pretty sure NASA is not missing a rocket scientist.              ...

In the February, 1970 issue of Playboy magazine (yes, the one with Linda Forsythe as the Playmate of the Month) a sociologist wrote an article about the psychological impact of technological innovation and rapid change.   He introduced the term, “information overload” and told us that too much change over too short a period of time led to stress and wide-spread social discord.   The article was so well received that the author went on to expand the think piece into a book.   It was a best seller.   The author was Alvin Toffler and the title of both the article and the book was Future Shock .    Ten years earlier, economist, John F. Muth first proposed a neo-classical theory of economics called Rational Expectations.   This theory, later developed by Robert E. Lucas, would eventually win Lucas the 1995 Nobel Prize in Economics.   While Toffler was certain that the overload of information in a technologically rich world would confound and overcome ...