Barry's Life in Napa Blog

I've never studied philosophy but I always thought I should. For someone who paid tuition to make smoke powder blow up in flashpots and learn how ladies' gloves were made from the skins of mice in the Elizabethan age, philosophy seemed like the natural next step in a progression toward an all-encompassing knowledge that was simultaneously quite useless. But just because I never studied it doesn't mean I don't consider myself something of an expert on the topic. After all, I have access to Wikipedia. Duh. Philosophy, then is: the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language.It is distinguished from other ways of addressing fundamental questions (such as mysticism, myth, or the arts) by its critical, generally systematic approach...The word "Philosophy" comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία [philosophia], which literally means "love of wisdom." I do love that wisdom. Watching Jeo...

When I was a kid there were always sweets in the house. Ice cream in the freezer, always. Those great big Hershey bars, the kind about four-by-six inches, stashed in a drawer or "hidden" in an electric fryer that sat unused on top of the fridge. And a cookie jar of some sort, on the kitchen counter, with some low quality and half-stale Fig Newtons or Nilla Wafers or some such. I knew where all the sweets lived because I was both a curious and fat kid. I made it my business to have a basic rolling inventory of everything that was in the cupboards, pantry or refrigerator. I think a "keep it away from the pudge" policy was the reason they were always trying to hide the good stuff. But being a sort of Sherlock Holmes of desserts, I sniffed it all out. That cookie jar, however, was always my last resort. If there was only one sort of crappy, cheap cookie in there, that might do in a pinch. But there was a tendency for two or three kinds of crappy, cheap cookies to end u...