When I Went To Santa Clarita...

...which, btw, wasn't this last week. (I know some of you are wondering what happened to the blog - I was posting at least once a day from early June and then suddenly, poof, no posts. For some of of you, it was like your local Starbucks refused to put caffeine in your coffee.)

Anyway, when I went to Santa Clarita (in January of 2007, I think), I took the train - and, as often happens on the route south out of Fresno, we got shuttled to a siding as a bigger train went by.

That's roughly what happened to the blog this last week - my mom & dad & sister all came to visit, which was wonderful but not conducive to blogging. At the same time, we were finishing up our Vacation Bible School here at NewLife, which is also wonderful (lots of kids expressing an interest in knowing more about being followers of Christ) but also a giant time sink.

So, the blog has been on a siding. I realize that I need to play "catch-up" on the Kid Games 100 (my intention was to be to #70 by the end of June) and there's been some great questions in the comments (Jeff & Jon, I'm talking about you) regarding the Framing The Conversation series that need meaningful answers... plus family is giving me a hard time about not putting up more pictures of the boys.

So, I'll work over the next few days to get off my virtual duff & put my nose to the grindstone (aka fingers to the keyboard). Meanwhile, a quote about postmodernism from a book about physics & social scientists I've been reading:

Nowhere is this more evident than in the perversely influential "postmodernist" school of thought, which insists that there isn't actually a real world "out there" with objective properties that we can try to understand. Instead, truth is completely arbitrary and "constructed" in a social manner by tacit agreement. Another common assertion is that because our thinking & communication are so intimately linked with language, everything can be viewed as a text, and social theory becomes more or less equivalent with literary criticism. Nothing that anyone has ever written has a fixed or true meaning; readers make up the meaning as they go.

The British historian Geoffrey Elton referred to the postmodernist trend as "the intellectual equivalent of crack" for its seductive, anything-goes style of theorizing that essentially frees the author from any responsibility to think coherently. (Mark Buchanan, The Social Atom: Why the Rich Get Richer, Cheaters Get Caught, and Your Neighbor Usually Looks Like You)