It's a Bag You Grab -- It's a Grab-Bag!

-- Over at Inside Higher Ed, Rose Cameron of Penn State University suggests that one way for university departments to increase their productivity and creativity is to kill committee meetings. I think she is dead wrong, because she does not say that committee meeting should be killed everywhere, not just in the ivy-covered walls of academia.

-- The only good thing about the depressing popularity of Donald Trump's candidacy for the Republican nomination for President is that it seems to have rekindled the fire of creativity in one Berkeley Breathed, the creator of Bloom County. Almost at the same time as Trump's rise in the public's (obviously drunken, bloodshot and nearly blinded by a month-long attempt to diffuse hashish into one's system through corneal tissue) eye, Breathed launched Bloom County 2015 on his own Facebook page. So far the only place to see the new cartoons is as "photos" on Breathed's page. He's obviously zinging Trump, but he's also zinging what passes for political discourse in 2015 by mocking the name-calling Trump both engages in and seems to inspire in his detractors, and he's doing it with wit that hasn't shone this bright since the late '80s. Vaya con frickin' Dios, Jon Stewart -- Prohibition is over and your 3.2 snark-watered political satire is no longer required.

-- At Mere Inkling, Rob Stroud has a quick discussion of the idea of Muses, touching a little on what C.S. Lewis said about the concept as well as a little meditation of his own. The Muses were originally figures from Greek mythology who inspired and guided artists and creative folks. Certain Muses -- and I believe they were all female -- might inspire painters, others sculptors, musicians and so on. There were also Muses for science. Urania guided and inspired astronomers, for example. Stroud then asks his readers what their own Muses might be. He seems to limit them to the classical Greek or Roman ones, which also limits me. There is no muse for general writing; several cover different kinds of poetry. I might think the Muse for my blog is Thalia (comedy) while you, Patient Reader, may think Melpomene (tragedy) is more fitting. I'll go outside the regular pantheon and claim my Muse is Mike Royko, the irascible and brilliant Chicago newspaper columnist. Not because I am all that brilliant, but because when I close one eye, squint and hold my breath until I'm giddy I can think my better pieces are on a level with his for a full five seconds before dissolving into laughter.

-- Isaac Newton developed a theory of gravity, the Laws of Motion and (along with Liebniz) calculus, thus giving students for generations reasons to curse his name. He was obviously brilliant, and interestingly enough, he was also highly religious. He didn't much care for the idea of the Trinity and for a couple of other orthodox Christian beliefs, but he is an excellent example that unflinching probing of the universe around is is not automatically incompatible with religious belief. Several other articles on Newton are also listed at The New Atlantis in its "The Unknown Newton" symposium.