What This Blog is All About

This blog is an outgrowth of 44 years observing the human condition, as a clinical psychologist, a former college teacher, and a serious amateur photographer—and by the way, as one of those rare liberal birds in the fairly conservative service club known as Rotary. Rotary, if you don’t all ready know, is an organization which does a lot of good, but many believe we tend to lack humor, and are a bit stuffy. This is absolutely untrue. I will say more about that later.

I have also conducted years of research on trying to understand what makes people angry, and have developed a theory of juvenile delinquency, known as the Belt Theory. Since the Belt Theory is really not very funny, I will write about it later, too, but I hope to sensitize the reader to how much anger depends on child rearing, and its dramatic effect on our lives—especially when a physically abused and repeatedly humiliated child grows up to be a politician, suicide bomber or both.

As a photographer, I love to find humorous material to photograph. Humans are fun, animals more fun, and plants are fun too. I will also show you how I came to that conclusion.

Finally, I am fascinated with all of those folks out there who see images of Jesus in potato chips, smoke billowing from the falling Trade Center towers, and on mud splattered walls. Several years ago I started to wonder just how common these images are. I will show the reader they are extremely common, indeed. In response to one of my images found on a tree trunk, my son told me, “Hey, that’s one of the best images of all. Cut the sucker (tree) down, and sell the log on Ebay.” Of course I didn’t. The tree was on the property of a rather nasty neighbor, and I am a coward at heart.

My Rotarian material is an outgrowth of my editorship of The Spoke, the official newsletter of the Danbury, Connecticut Rotary Club. I am constantly looking for odd ball moments in the club, and use a column called “Thought for the Day,” to convey some message or thoughts that are both humorous and educational. The latter is very important to me. My children claim that Education is my god, and that’s why I am capitalizing it here.

I do not like to offend people, but my Rotarian colleagues have learned to duck when I pull out my camera. The Spoke, I might add, is now more carefully read by the membership and many in the Rotary District, and has been judged to be the best newsletter among our 62 clubs the last 2 years. I owe it all to Randy, the previous editor, who set up the format, and edited half of the newsletters that resulted in our first District award. We are both proud of that honor, and expect it to continue. Oops. Sounds like a Babe Ruth challenge. I didn’t mean it that way. Well, on second thought, maybe I did.

Since this is a blog in progress, being started December 17th, the first article is a note I wrote to my siblings (all of whom were raised in the Mormon faith as I was) on what I think Mitt Romney should have said in his “Faith” speech. I think it is a good start. RSW, PhD