Goertz Thoughts

 It's been 8 years since my last Halloween post , so I guess it's time to update my complaint. To sum up: trick-or-treating is for children. If you're not a child, buy your own candy. To be clear, I'm not anti-fun and I'm not anti costume. Case in point: What I am against is co-opting something that is meant for children and taking it for adults/teens (Disney adults is a gray area. It's okay to like Disney, but taking up all the space in the lines at the parks is rude). For the record, I am also against: Adults sitting in costumed Santa laps Adult Easter egg hunts Adults playing on playgrounds during the day while children wait for their turn on the swings with tears in their eyes (most of these scenarios involve crying children in my imagination). I think Halloween is a great time for celebration. It's the nature of the celebrations that change. For my 40th birthday, did I rent a bounce house? No, I rented a movie theater and we watched Stardust. Is Christm...

You may have seen several students with enameled character pins on their blazers or backpacks. They may be from Brandon Sanderson's Dragonsteel website . Today, I'd like to convince you to read everything written by my favorite author, Brandon Sanderson. Here are 5 reasons. (Formatting is a little off. I don't know why) The print that I have was given to me by my friend Jesse Sky . You won't soon run out of things to read. While some authors make their fans wait years ( decades? ) for new books, Brandon cannot stop writing. During Covid, he secretly wrote 5 novels! Below is a sampling of some of his works. Cosmere - his main series of interconnected novels. They take place on different planets, but many characters cross over. Stormlight Archive - 5 novels, 2 novellas Mistborn - 7 novels, 3 novellas Elantris - 1 novel, 2 novellas 8 other assorted novels/novellas Here's my suggested reading order (to avoid spoilers). If you pick up a random book, you will be confuse...

This post is inspired by a listicle about 50 movies you should see before you die. I don't know who wrote the list, but every other movie was a "psychological thriller". No one needs  to see "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind". This is my list. I really do think that you should see these movies (hopefully you already have). Some because they are just really enjoyable. Some because there are a lot of references that people will make in college/life that you might miss (the same reason we read Shakespeare ). I don't watch movies that are too sad, so you won't see many of those on this list. I am not a cinephile, so these won't necessarily be the "best" movies. A few notes: I found it impossible to rank these, so they're in alphabetical order. There are many movies that you should be aware  of, even if you don't see them. I suggest taking a look at AFI's list . This article started out 2 years ago as "25 Movies You Should ...

Nowadays, it's so easy to find music. You can just google any song (although it's probably better to use Spotify, YouTube Music, or another service. It can avoid some tricky copyright issues). However, it was not always so. Spotify didn't come to the US until 2011. Let me share with you some of the ways that I listened to music throughout my life. Older media: Vinyl records are making a comeback recently. I listened to them because they were cheap (I don't care about audio fidelity; I can't hear a difference). We also had some old 8 tracks laying around. Lots of John Denver and Peter, Paul, and Mary . My mom was a little young to be a hippie, but she liked their music. Tapes: Tapes were great: cheap (you would sometimes get them for free in Happy Meals), lightweight, portable, and most cars had a tape deck that you could play them in. You could also listen to them while exercising, thanks to Walkman . One cool feature was the ability to make mixtapes. Using a tape...

When I was growing up, Sunday Mass was different. Not necessarily wrong (except in some instances), but definitely not what you are used to. I'm not talking about pre-conciliar Latin Mass (I'm not that old). I grew up in the 80s and 90s. During that time, the church in the US was still experimenting with new forms of liturgy. Architecture I went to St. William growing up. It's not the St. William that you know. For one thing, it was about a half mile further down McNeil Road. For another, it didn't look like a Catholic Church. It was built in 1981, if I remember correctly Inside, it was also weird. Here's a series of pictures from Christmas/Easter over several years. See if you can spot what's missing. Nice hat, mom! Did you (not) see it? There's no crucifix! I guess that was "too depressing"? (There was usually a cross, off to the side, but no corpus) Life Teen Mass These days, a Life Teen mass usually just means a Sunday evening Mass with rock mu...

 I love maps. I think that I always have.  Here are some of my favorites. Birdseye maps like this one of Austin used to be popular in the late 1800s. The Gallery of Maps in the Vatican Museums is one of my favorite spots. And of course, Middle Earth But the maps that you are used to (like the ones on Google), those are relatively new inventions. When I was growing up, everyone used to have huge road atlases in the trunks of their cars for road trips. Maybe some of you still have them, but I removed mine almost 20 years ago. Major cities had zoomed in insets to show local roads. You would have to plan out trips ahead of time and hope that there wasn't bad traffic. If there was, you could pull over, get the atlas out of your trunk, and plan a new route. I remember doing this in Tennessee once when moving Mrs. Goertz's sister down to Texas for college. A step up from atlases was GPS devices (they weren't always in phones). GPS was originally developed for military purposes a...