Archive for ‘Opinion’

  • Small World: Too big to succeed

      By Henry Precht BN Columnist This title is the subject of our discussion for today. Normally, its opposite meaning (“too big to fail”) is applied to the giant banks of New York. It means that their failure would have such widespread consequences that if they collapsed the damage would be too great to tolerate. […]

  • Uppermost House: Of entropy and shrimp curry

      A bunch of centuries ago, guys like C. Columbus got the bright idea of finding The East by heading west from Spain. My wife and I used the same logic last weekend to install a new washing machine, although we traveled east. Our family is living proof of the second law of thermodynamics, entropy […]

  • Small World: Who is to blame?

      By Henry Precht BN Columnist As I write, people in Colorado Springs are probably still trying to understand the shootings that took place on the day after Thanksgiving. The press reports that a 57-year-old man used an AK-47 assault rifle to kill three people, including one police officer, and wounded nine others in an […]

  • Small World: Our second war on terrorism

      By Henry Precht BN Columnist Terrorism is the topic of the day. That is one proposition that all can agree on. Beyond that, the floor is held by politics, ideologies, ethnicities, religions and the cacophony of voices that fill our public arenas. The range of solutions proposed stretches wide: unrelenting military force on one […]

  • Uppermost House: Standard, anchor and light

      By S. Peter Lewis BN Columnist Un can be an awful prefix. As in unrecognizable, unconscionable, unbalanced, unglued, unhinged. Hard to watch those things happen to a person. Harder when it’s someone you love. Hardest when it’s someone you love so much it’s almost unbelievable. Can’t believe that it could happen. Can’t believe that […]

  • It Dawned on Me: Nine lives and counting upward

      By Dawn De Busk BN Columnist Only its fur moved as the summer-time traffic passed by. The black cat lay on the pavement of Route 11, near the road that takes me home. Is that my cat, I said aloud. Wasn’t my cat alive and alert only 20 minutes ago? So, how could that […]

  • Small World: The larger threat of the Syrian conflict

      By Henry Precht BN Columnist I’ve visited Syria twice, the last time in 2000. Both times were two-week “study tours;” the first as a member, the second, ten years later, as a leader. Two strong impressions remain with me: First and most obvious, the country was a very tightly run police state. Hafez al […]

  • Small World: Resolving the debate riddle

      By Henry Precht BN Columnist Many of you have probably read about the dustup following the last Republican presidential debate. The candidates and the Republican National Committee (RNC) were up in arms over the supposedly biased questioning from CNBC moderators; the Republicans threatened suspension of the scheduled February debate. Cooler heads to the rescue! I […]

  • Uppermost House: The faucet games

      By S. Peter Lewis BN Columnist  There aren’t many things that make me want to shove cloves of garlic under my eyelids or stuff live hornets in my ear muffs, but somewhere in the world there is an engineer who sits behind an array of fancy computers loaded with the latest CAD software and […]

  • Small World: The national pastime passes on

    By Henry Precht BN Columnist Mordecai, “Three-finger,” Brown. Those words sum up my life with baseball. As I see it, there are three categories that a fan of the national pastime can fit into: scholar, spectator and sandlot player. I sampled them all, but did best as a scholar and not bad early on as […]