A Brief Biography of God Part Three: The Midlife Crisis

Posted on April 23, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

Somewhere around 9,000 years ago, give or take a few thousand years, humans began to abandon their hunter-gatherer cultures. They started to domesticate livestock and cultivate crops, which meant that they could stop wandering the land and start to build settlements. Fertile flood plains—the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in modern-day Iraq, the Nile River in Egypt, the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers in China, the Indus Valley in India, and the coastal valleys of Norte Chico in Peru—became the ideal places for clans and tribes to settle, providing, as they did, predictable, cyclical seasons for planting and harvesting.

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Photo Essay: Running Rehoboth

Posted on April 21, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

For the third year in a row, I went on vacation while preparing for a race. Two years ago, I was in the middle of Boilermaker training, shredding a perfectly good pair of shoes on the hard cinder railbed of the Danvers Trail and enduring the energy-sapping humidity of early summer in Boston. Last year, I was hobbling down Virginia Dare Trail in Nags Head, trying to get ready for my first Burlington Marathon and paving the way for my Mountain Goat injury the following month.

So when Tessa suggested we get away from the brutal upstate winter for a few days in Rehoboth Beach, DE, I readily agreed, even though it meant finding running routes in an unfamiliar town, which is a challenge I am sure many of my running friends have had to deal with from time to time.

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Review: Sakyong Mipham’s Running with the Mind of Meditation

Posted on April 11, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

Two runners. The same, first marathon. Two injuries. And two totally different outcomes. Continue reading →

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April Training Update

Posted on April 2, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost. Continue reading →

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A Brief Biography of God Part Two: The Awkward Teenage Years

Posted on March 29, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

So God’s biography begins with humans attempting to provide a very basic and primitive explanation of creation. Some ancient societies imagined multiple gods and goddesses responsible for different natural phenomena—the sun, water, the seasons, nature’s bounty were all personified by human-like characters in our ancestors’ anthropomorphic stories. The Judeo-Christian tradition, at some point, went off on its own and insisted that there was only one creator. For our purposes, however, the belief in one or many gods is not relevant, because the human thought process that comes to bear on this next stage of God’s history is the same, whether we conceive of one God or a million gods. Continue reading →

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Days of Future Past: A Conversation with Casey Rae (Part 2) (From the Archives)

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

In the second part of The Guv’nor’s conversation with Casey Rae,Chief Executive Officer of the Future of Music Coalition, Casey takes an in-depth look at the death of the old music business model and the uncertain development of future models. But it’s not all doom and gloom. Casey ends with the optimistic belief that the struggle between competing models may well result in a new elevation of music’s social value.

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Days of Future Past: A Conversation with Casey Rae (Part 1) (From the Archives)

Posted on March 17, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

Few inhabitants of the music world are as well placed to comment on its current state, and to offer a glimpse of its possible future, as Casey Rae. In his position as Chief Executive Officer of the Future of Music Coalition, a Washington DC nonprofit dedicated to empowering musicians through research, educational outreach and advocacy, he has a ringside seat for the current fights being waged in the halls of Congress and the boardrooms of corporations that will determine the fate of musicians in the digital age.

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A Brief Biography of God Part One: The Early Years

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

The image of God, or of a supernatural being or beings somehow controlling the universe, must have entered the human brain very early in our history on this planet. Creationists and evolutionists and everyone in between, I think, can agree on this much: whether we think of primitive ape-like ancestors looking at the sunrise at the dawn of our existence, or Adam watching the sunset at the end of the sixth day of creation, the sense of wonder and awe at the machinations of the universe that humans experienced during the dawn of their existence created an impression on our consciousness that exists to this day.

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Chuck Berry – Roll Over Beethoven

Posted on March 1, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

In 2003, Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven” was selected by the National Recording Preservation Board–the Motion Picture, Broadcasting & Recorded Sound Division of the Library of Congress–to be inducted into the National Registry. Late in 2014, I was asked by Cary O’Dell of the Library of Congress to contribute an essay on the song to the Registry’s website. This is the complete text of the essay, slightly edited from the version that appears on that site, with specially added images, videos and links.

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366 Words About Nothing

Posted on February 22, 2015 by Bruce Pegg

This blog is about nothing.

Well, not exactly. It’s about something. But just as Seinfeld was a show about nothing that somehow managed to fill 180 episodes with something, this blog will try to make something out of the nothing that has been the last four months of running.

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